Right-Wing Security Risk and "Game Over"

RIGHT-WING POLITICS AS A HIGH SECURITY RISK


Lack of perspectives and a rigorous law-and-order politics drive alarmed men literally into the arms of Islamic preachers


By Ingar Solty


[This article published pm 12/13/2018 in neues-deutschland.de is translated from the German on the Internet.]

While the French working class cares a national uprising in France, Cherif Chekatt, a 29-year old Frenchman with Algerian roots shot himself at the Christmas fair in Strasburg after shouting “Allah akbar” (“God is great”). This Islamist terrorist attack is wretched and disgusting. How cowardly must one be to indiscriminately shoot unarmed innocent persons shopping for sausages, punch, hot cocoa and luggage?

Chekatt had the characteristics of a running amok like so many Islamic attacks calls to mind a crucial connection. Murderous deeds must be prevented in the future. These attacks can never be completely prevented. The most dramatic extinguishing of rights of freedom and the crassest militarization of public space will never entirely prevent such acts…

One must understand how such perpetrators tick. “In jail, the assassin Cherif Chekatt (29) became an Islamist. Growing up in his parents’ house in Strasburg with five brothers and sisters, Chekatt “had no vocational training and “was known to authorities as a habitual offender.” “On account of theft and acts of violence, he was sentenced 27 times in France, Germany and Switzerland. He was sentenced to nearly three years prison by the Singen district court. According to district attorney Weitz, he became a “radical Islamist” and was deported to France after his imprisonment. In France, the authorities monitored him and put him on a danger list with the 25,000 presumed Islamists of which 10,000 are labeled “ready-to-use violence.


The past findings point to the connection between lack of economic perspectives and marginalization, petty-offences (zero-tolerance), prison sentences and conversions in prison with which petty criminals try to give a meaning to their lives and – paradoxically – award themselves a new virtuousness beyond the past aimlessness… Authoritarian conservatives often lack understanding about psychological processes and have limited imagination.


The problem goes deeper. The right-wing politics of punishment and exclusion aggravate the problem. Western prisons produce further injustices like “racial profiling” and a social climate of fear and mistrust dividing society again. This encourages what the right-wing claims to criticize: the estrangement of parts of Muslim Germans from the local society. The “Islamic state” has long understood this and recruited its followers with Donald Trump’s election campaign speeches. The authoritarian right-wing and authoritarian Islam fundamentalists are similar to each other and for one another like economic programs because they get each other worked up. That makes both of them such a fire risk.

Conservatives and the right-wing are often awarded competence in matters of inner security because they rumble or clatter in an authoritarian way, constantly speak of “security” and emphasize this theme. Therefore “security” is their favorite theme because they can divert the masses from the fact that their economic- and social policy is directed against their material interests. This policy creates the lack of perspectives from which criminality arises that the right pretends to fight. For all these reasons, conservative and right-wing security policy is the opposite of competent. It is a high security risk.

GLOBAL FINANCIAL CASINO; THE MESSAGE AT THE END OF THE YEAR IS “GAME OVER”

By Ernst Wolff


[This article published on December 10, 2018 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.activism.org.]


The financial world has reached a turning point at the end of 2018. For nearly ten years, the central banks kept the global financial system artificially alive by creating trillions of dollars, euros, British pounds, Japanese yen and Swiss franks out of nothing and awarding credits at low interest rates.

With that, they initiated a development that no one could foresee. The financial markets have gone from one record to the next over a period of 115 months. The whole also had a shady side because the measures meant

• less and less money flowed into the real economy compared to the financial markets,

• the tax revenue cannot keep up with the money development on account of tax avoidance practiced intensively in the financial sector,

• fewer and fewer public investments are undertaken,

• the infrastructure crumbles worldwide,

• conservative investors like insurances and pension funds were forced to speculate and take disproportionately high risks,

• old age provisions were aggravated through savings and preparing the way for a future increase of old age poverty,

• private households, businesses, and states were increasingly heavily indebted,

• more and more investors enter the markets with borrowed money,

• the greatest bubbles of all time arose on the financial markets,

• and social inequality exploded worldwide.

Since this development of the global financial system threatened to explode existentially, the central banks led by the FED have been replacing their “slack” monetary policy with a “stricter” monetary policy. This means, they reduce the money flow and raise the interests.

In several cautious steps, the FED has raised its key interest to 2.25% and corrected its balance with $50 billion a month. This has grown to more than $4.5 trillion. This summer the European Central Bank limited its bond purchases begun in March 2016 and will abandon them entirely in the beginning of 2019.


This reversal in monetary policy acts on the financial markets like a drug withdrawal on an addict and therefore leads to a dangerous instability. But that is not all. It strikes the system at a time when the system is confronted with an accumulation of problems: the trade war staged by the US, the Italian bank crisis, the national uprising in France, the sanctions against Iran, the capital flight from the threshold countries, the escalating derivative sector menacingly in the background and a developing global recession.

A more unfavorable collision of black swans (possible trigger for a system collapse) can hardly be imagined. If the central banks hold fast to their rigid monetary policy, the development on the financial markets can be divided in three steps:

1st Stage (in which we find ourselves): Through the withdrawal of money, less is speculated and prices begin falling. The first investors who entered the markets with borrowed money withdraw and the prices drop. Conservative investors forced into speculation become nervous, sell and the prices fall again.

2nd Stage: The high debt state of many market actors comes to light more clearly; mistrust grows and leads to increasingly more hesitant awarding of credits. Since serving their debts was harder and harder for debtors, they had to sell more and more securities which led to a further decline of stock prices and sales.

3rd Stage: The exchange losses expand because of the continuing downward movement on the exchanges. The first creditors demanded their money back from the debtors. Individual insolvencies occurred followed by larger insolvencies. This makes more creditors skeptical and leads to the dreaded “margin call” – a nationwide demand for debt repayment. Higher payments become due in the derivative sector which even strains the big banks. Calculating exchange professionals fall into a panic and a downward spiral begins that cannot be stopped anymore.


The whole process is comparable to an avalanche that starts slowly, picks up speed, explodes and drags everything in its fury.


We are now in the first stage of this process. This does not mean the crash will come soon. No one can predict the speed at which things happen. But one thing is clear. When the central banks out of fear of collapse thrown their rigid monetary policy overboard and pump new money at lower interest rates into the markets (in the negative realm in the case of the European Central Bank), they will only fire a limited flash-in-the-pan but cannot prevent the definite collapse.

The message of the global financial sector at the turn of the year 2018/2019 is clear. The casino closes its doors. The game is over.