The following will not be an original remark: the world runs on money like the automobile runs on fuel. We may follow the decisions of politicians and even engage ourselves in campaigning and voting for some of them, and not be aware that they all have strings attached and either consciously or unconsciously do what needs to be done. Nothing can be done without money. It is those who control its creation and circulation who exert an influence on decision making.

Gefira #47 seeks to analyze the money matters, focusing its attention on the Bank of International Settlements and the Vatican City Bank. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are rather familiar to anyone who is more or less interested in world affairs. The two topical banks are much less known. We present the reader with their history, financial machinations and under-the-counter activities. The analysis that we present – eye-opening though it is – is merely the tip of the iceberg of the pecuniary dimensions of our existence which is inaccessible to the man in the street.

 

Super Mario Draghi is gone, Chrisitne in Wonderland Lagarde is about to change our reality completely.

During her conference on 12 October, Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, said that bankers in Frankfurt am Main were considering whether to introduce a digital euro. The reason for introducing the intangible currency should be the pandemic, which has supposedly brought about structural changes in the way we “work, trade and pay.”Lagarde asserts that confidence in digital payments has increased during the pandemic. While she assures that “the digital euro will never replace cash”, do not be fooled: The ECB is aiming for a cash ban, but wants to enforce it in small steps. The Corona crisis is being used as an excuse to speed up the process of switching to digital money. The virus is suspect precisely for this reason. The pandemic has achieved various political objectives and the masks on our faces are like muzzles put on us by our masters. The protests of the Yellow Vests have been paralysed. The demonstrations that would have taken place during the elections in various states have not taken place. Look at Belarus, where there was no lockdown. There are demonstrations. And look: In the countries where cash was king, especially in Germany and Italy, there were significantly more cashless payments.

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What does it mean if one state erects a memorial to the leader of another state whose people would not even consider honouring him with a street name?

In Dessau, a town located in the former east German Democratic Republic, on the occasion of the 30 anniversary of the reunification of Germany (3 October 1990), a monument to Mikhail Gorbachev was unveiled. The municipality’s mayor held a speech as did some other guests in an open-air ceremony. A letter from the former first and last president of the Soviet Union was read out loud, and an orchestra made musical intervals, playing Dimitr Shostakovitch’s most famous Second Waltz, the German National Anthem and The Winds of Change by the German rock group Scorpions, a hit that at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall did the rounds across Europe. The event was attended by a representative of the Russian embassy.

In his speech, Hans-Georg Otto, Dessau’s mayor, gave a brief historical account of the events that led to the reunification of Germany and placed special emphasis on the role played by Mikhail Gorbachev, without whose commitment – as he stressed – we would still have two German states. The mayor reminded the audience of the long-standing friendship that tied Germans and Russians throughout history.

Source: YouTube.

It is not the first time that Germany owes gratitude to Russians.

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It is as official as official can be: Europe is to undergo a big resettlement programme. Those who warned of it years ago, pointing to Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s infamous Praktischer Idealismus, where future Europeans are described as people of racially mixed carnation and appearance, cannot any longer be accused of following conspiracy theories.Lo and behold on September 23, 2020, the European Commission issued its recommendation on legal pathways promoting resettlement (also referred to as humanitarian admission – the commissioners just love such high-brow tags!) to the EU.It is made plain and clear: what we have been witnessing recently are not extraordinary, chance events but a large-scale action whose aim it is to move huge numbers of Third World people to the Old Continent.

The cited document calls on the Member States to:
[1] participate in and promote international resettlement by offering legal pathways and safe channels to the Union,
[2] submit annual resettlement pledges (i.e. number of people that can be admitted),
[3] encourage and mobilize more actors for this purpose and these include private sponsors, groups of private individuals or non-profit organizations,
[4] create welcoming and inclusive societies,
[5] design dedicated and effective integration and social programmes for resettled persons,
[6] promote family reunification (i.e. automatically multiply the number of resettled people by an order of magnitude), and
[7] ensure continuity and renewed growth of resettlement operations, expand the number of admission places, and guarantee the rapid arrival.

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On 26 March 2019 the European Parliament issued a resolution on Fundamental Rights of People of African Descent in Europein which it boldly diagnosed Europeans with deep-seated racism who are without rhyme or reason xenophobic and prejudiced, and who – conversely – should ingratiate themselves with the peoples of Africa with gratitude for their significant and vast contributions to the development of the Old Continent; they should also redress the past and present injustices inflicted on them by present and past Europeans by offering public apology, returning stolen artefacts and inviting more Africans through the preparation of “safe and legal avenues for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to enter the EU”, who in turn should be well represented in all spheres of life, beginning with school to employment to policy making. All this ought to be crowned with the celebration of holidays devoted to the people of Africa and these include:
1 the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,
2 Black History Months, and
3 the UN-sponsored International Decade for People of African Descent.

The document states that Europe is inhabited by at least 15 million people from Africa and calls on the EU Member States to prepare safe routes for many more. This action should be accompanied by a wide range of measures for making the life of blacks in Europe easier in every dimension and for suppressing the resistance that such measures and the resettlement procedures might spark on the part of the indigenous people. To this end a new term has been coined: Afrophobia, probably modelled on homophobia, yet another mortal sin in the Church of Political Correctness.

This is how injustices are to be redressed. Paapa Essiedu stars as Hamlet in the 2016 RSC production. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

The document is also prescriptive. It says that people resettled from Africa are to be referred to as people of African descent – as if it were not genes but the geographical longi- and latitude that determines the human races – or Afro-Europeans (modelled on the term Afro-Americans) or Black Europeans. The last two are especially misleading because properly speaking Afro-Europeans can only denote miscegenated individuals whereas there is no such thing as a black European unless, again, race is not determined by biology but geography or – better still – arbitrary documents of personal identity where a civil servant may enter any label he is told to.

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COVID and ethnic differentiation in American society or why the prosperity era in the USA will come to an abrupt end.

The real economy of America and the Wall Street indexes are diverging ever more sharply. In January, we warned our readers about the possible clash and we were right: in the middle of the COVID crisis, share prices were on a downward slide. Well, nobody who analyses economic data would have expected to see the S&P 500, Dow Jones and Nasdaq back at their all-time highs within a few months. We have pointed out before that small, mostly inexperienced investors are responsible for the optimism on the US markets. The big investors like Buffet are sitting on cash and insiders are selling their shares at a level we last saw in 2012.

What makes this rally even more dangerous is the fact that most of the money is actually invested in high-tech; this one-sidedness is evidence that investors wear blinkers and blindly follow the trend in which the big, powerful players in the financial world no longer participate. The trend is not just for the USA, it is global. The belief in IT, the power of Silicon Valley and the whole West Coast of the USA has become absurd, while California’s infrastructure is increasingly endangered year after year with previously unseen fires, while some ethnic groups across the USA are slowly but surely digging a pit of the economy into which they themselves will fall.

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In the eastern Mediterranean it smells of powder. Fighter jets from various countries fly over the Levantine Basin and frigates are on a collision course. These are not exercises. It is a crisis reminiscent of the conflict between Ankara and Athens in the 1970s or even the beginning of the First World War. This time it is not just about the ambitions of Greece or Turkey, small islands or a dead prince, but about the struggle for energy. In the Levantine Basin, ever larger deposits of natural gas are being discovered and there are many who would like a piece of the cake.

Back in 2010, the American company Noble Energy and its Israeli exploration partner Derrick Drilling discovered the largest gas field only 130 km from Haifa. A year later, French Total confirmed another deposit with a volume of 127 billion m3. The researchers suspect a total of 3.5 trillion cubic metres of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil deep in the rock beneath the seabed. How much is that actually? Certainly enough to fill the coffers of the states bordering the Mediterranean and make a solid contribution to Western Europe’s energy supply. By way of comparison, the total natural gas consumption in the European Union in 2019 was around 470 billion cubic metres. No wonder, then, that the areas between Cyprus, Turkey, the Greek islands, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt and Libya became the scene of a conflict that could well turn into a war. It would not be a local war because the conflict and possible gains also involve other actors whose interests could be disrupted by the gas from the eastern Mediterranean, even though their geopolitical interests appear to lie elsewhere.

The natural gas alliances in the Eastern Mediterranean or who with whom against whom?

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Gefira 46 diverts the reader’s attention to the Middle East, or – to be precise – to Iran and Saudi Arabia, the countries that were once dubbed by the United States the two (stabilizing) pillars of the region. Riyadh and Tehran, which used to be capitals of monarchies, initially friendly to each other, since the 1979 Islamic revolution, have gone their separate ways and have been vying for the preponderance in the Muslim world. The rivalry is enhanced by the fact that Iran’s population is predominantly Shiite, while that of Saudi Arabia – Sunni. The differences do not stop there. Riyadh is pro-American and pro-Israeli while Tehran is unwaveringly campaigning for the Arab cause. Iran and Saudi Arabia are waging a war by proxy by supporting opposite sides to the conflict in Syria or Yemen; they also rely on political partners that are rivals in their own right. Riyadh is almost dependent on Washington, Tehran swerves towards Moscow and Beijing.

Though Iran has been for the most part economically and politically isolated for many years and weakened by the protracted war with Iraq, it has astonishingly preserved its position, has been challenging local and world powers and persevered on its course. The country’s population is multi-ethnic, which can be exploited by Iran’s enemies, but its Persian majority, rebellious though it can be from time to time, seems to remain loyal to the current political establishment, which the well-attended funeral of General Qasem Soleimani, surreptitiously assassinated by the Americans, confirms.