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.

 

Every state tries to make as many profits as possible. These come for the most part from taxes along with customs duties which remain an important source of income. The Obama administration serving the neo-liberal US elites forged a plan to encircle China in the Asia-Pacific region called TPP. The Transpacific Partnership was designed to get China to open its market completely, to waive customs duties and to align its law with that of the US. The TPP has been denounced by many of its critics, oddly enough mainly in Europe and in the United States, and not in China. Julian Assange’s statement is perhaps best known: “If the treaty is adopted, the TPP’s trademark regime will trample on human and civil rights.”The TPP was in fact created to give US corporations a head start in Asia by limiting the sovereignty of participating countries. Trump, realizing that Democrats were on very thin ice with the project, cancelled the contract and began his trade war with… tariffs, which brought considerable gains to the US budget. Both governments – Obama’s and Trump’s – realized and still pursue the same strategy by different means: America must countervail China’s superpower. The strategy fails.

China’s New Silk Road plan opposes American attempts to reduce Beijing’s role in world trade. The TPP works even without the USA and China is surrounded by the participating countries in the Pacific. Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore form a semicircle around the South China Sea, a sea that plays a key role for China in trade with the rest of the world. This is why the Chinese decided to shift trade to the railway. A bold, huge and risky project. Let’s take a closer look at it.

The main difference between the New Silk Road and TPP is that it does not force the countries of Asia and Europe to change their policies or laws. The roads and railway lines to be built as part of the major Chinese project will benefit not only China but also the countries where they will be constructed. Even so, the Chinese can use the same method that Western countries are using everywhere in underdeveloped countries: Beijing might, too, make countries dependent on Chinese companies (e.g. those that will maintain new infrastructure) through loans and dependence on them. On the one hand, this will boost growth in the countries along the New Silk Road, while on the other, they could easily fall into Beijing’s debt trap. By the way, Beijing has already taken over a large port in Sri Lankaand is slowly buying up Pakistan Pakistan
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A good thing – product or service – spreads like wildfire without much talk about it, without much advertising, let alone enforcement. That was the case with automobiles, the radio or television, DVD or CD players, personal computers or cell/mobile phones. A good thing is appreciated by people and demand for it is natural and growing. Advertising only concerns brands but not the thing itself. Have there been a worldwide action undertaken to enforce personal computers? Hardly. The attractiveness of the product, its usefulness in terms of entertainment, business or education could not be overrated. The same was true of mobile cell/phones. Everybody wanted to have one, appreciating the advantages that the device provided its owner with. What does it look like with electric vehicles?

For years we have all been exposed to an intense propaganda; governments have been promising extra money for buyers of electric cars, and people are made to feel guilty if they want to continue to use vehicles running on petrol, oil or gas because they allegedly wreak havoc with the environment. The electric means of transport is said the be the future of communication with no alternative whatsoever. What can be said about this hectic and frantic activity on the part of those who push electric vehicles?

Source: Wharton University of Pennsylvania.

The automotive industry is one of the mainsprings of economy. For all practical purposes it is concentrated in but very few countries – Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden – and it provides those countries with enormous income, giving employment to millions of their residents. The industry had been developing for decades until it reached a saturation point: in the Western world, in the eighties everybody who wanted had an automobile while families often had two. The industry was nearing the dead end. Under such circumstances the dismantling of the Soviet bloc was a godsend, a windfall, a blessing. All of a sudden – from one day to another – the car market enlarged by the whole of Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Asian republics. If you are old enough, you will have remembered: one of the first visible changes that took place in the former socialist countries was the rapid disappearance of Ladas, Trabants, Wartburgs, Skodas, Dacias, Moskvitches, Zaporozhetses and, and, and. They were all scrapped while a string of Western automotive brands flooded East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. On the one hand the West rid itself of its stock of old cars (at that time it was mainly second-hand vehicles that were purchased east of the Elbe), on the other it began setting up chains of car showrooms for East European customers who at the long last could fulfil their dream of possessing a Renault, Peugeot, Citroen, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, Nissan or Mazda. Was it not a heyday for the Western automotive industry? Continue reading →