Shahid Bolsen explains the destabilisation campaign against Europe

We have built a garden. Everything works. It's the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion. The rest of the world most of the rest of the world is a jungle.

So it's been a while since we checked in on the progress of the destabilization campaign being waged against Europe by the owners and controllers of global financialized capital primarily through the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia. So let's see how it's going. Okay. So it's noisy, but let's look at some of the things that might be going on behind the noise. First, let's look at Germany because deindustrializing and subjugating Germany is really the linchpin of this whole destabilization campaign.

Well, over just the past three months, at least 23 major companies in Germany have shut down many or all of their operations in the country, impacting approximately 34,000 workers and their families. There have also been at least half a dozen bankruptcies of significant companies in Germany just this month. The youngest company of which was around 60 years old and the oldest was over 300 years old. There have been nearly 15,000 corporate bankruptcies in Germany since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia. BASF, Alliance, SAP, and Siemens are all relocating their headquarters outside of Germany impacting at least 18,000 employees and their families.

Inflation in Germany is at 7.2% which is the highest it's been since the nineteen eighties. Food inflation, the cost of groceries is at 21% which is the highest that's been since the nineteen seventies. And household debt in Germany has increased by around 4.2% this year and now totals around $2,000,000,000,000. Household utility bills in Germany have increased by around 20% over just the past two months. Germany is of course paying more for natural gas now which has a severe effect on manufacturing.

Prices for natural gas have increased by 50% since just the beginning of this year. Now additionally, Germany is also grappling with a shortage of diesel fuel, is disruptive to transportation, to shipping, and to manufacturing and just contributes even further to higher prices and disruptions in supply chains. There are several significant companies that loom large in the German economy that have had to initiate production cuts just since March. Here's a list of companies in Germany that have announced layoffs over the past three months. That's 37,000 people and their families and all of the companies and all of the businesses where they used to spend their money.

Unemployment in Germany is at its highest level since the pandemic. 40% of Germans are living paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, just 10% of the households in Germany own half of all private property in the country, while the bottom 50% own just around 10%. The richest 1% of the population owns 35% of the wealth in Germany, and the top 10% owns 70% of the wealth. 50% of Germans, half the population only own around 11% of total wealth in Germany.

The wealth of just 55 German billionaires is equivalent to 10% of the total GDP of the country. Now given all of these conditions, unsurprisingly, there have been over 1,000 protests in Germany attended by hundreds of thousands of people just since April. The approval rating for the government in Germany is half what it was in December, and 70% of Germans have an unfavorable view of the European Union. A quarter of Germans support the idea of Germany exiting the European Union. I would expect that that number will rise to half of the population within the next three to five years.

Now, of course, we can also talk about France and the ongoing nationwide protests there against the Macron government, and we could also talk about The Netherlands and the protests there by farmers who are being forced by the government to sell their land and to never farm again anywhere in Europe. Or we can talk about The UK, for example, where money that had been sorted for infrastructure projects has been redirected to the Ukraine without any vote, without any referendum, without any discussion. Or we can talk about how protesters who were opposed to the opulent ceremony for the coronation of King Charles were immediately arrested on the street under new stricter, harsher, anti speech, anti demonstration, anti public gathering laws in The UK. But all of these protests, whether they articulated this way or not, all of these protests are expressions by the public against the neoliberal subjugation of their countries and against the collaboration by their governments with the OCGFC, the owners and controllers of global financialized capital against the interests of the population. So I don't know if it's really necessary to go into all of the various details of all of the various protests that have been going on throughout Europe for the last three, four months because they're all an expression of the same thing, which is that the population understands and can feel that their economies, that their governments, that their state, that their society is being subjugated, and they're not wrong.

But I think it's enough at least for this video for us to just talk about Germany because Germany anyway is emblematic of what's going on in Europe. So let's look at the reality of Germany's situation from the perspective of the owners and controllers of global financialized capital so that we can understand why the OCGFC have lost interest in maintaining the prosperity and the security of Europe. So look, around 15% of the workers in Germany are set to retire within the next five years. Within the next ten years, 20%. By 2028, there will be twice as many retirees as there are new workers, And this ratio just gets worse year upon year the further we project into the future.

Twenty years ago, in the year 2000, there were roughly 70,000,000 people of working age in Germany. Twenty years from now, there will be half that many. The tax base in Germany is shrinking faster than in any other country in Europe. By 2050, consumer spending in Germany will be roughly the same as what consumer spending is right now in Italy. And that of course is assuming that the program of economic destabilization and social deterioration does not accelerate, which of course there's no reason to believe that it won't.

In Germany and across Europe, the population is simply failing to replace itself and Europe is gonna shrink demographically so that by 2050 there's gonna be 100,000,000 fewer people in Europe unless they seriously ramp up immigration. And this demographic collapse, as you can see, means fewer workers, a smaller tax base, and lower consumer spending. In other words, European prosperity is quickly becoming a thing of the past. The continent can no longer sufficiently serve any function for the owners and controllers of global financialized capital except to be feudal serfs and to turn their continent into a conflict zone so that they can at least channel money through that conflict or because of that conflict, channel money into the defense and security sectors. In a system of financialized capital, investment in the real economy is less important.

Workers are less important. Actual real productive output is less important, and the standard of living for the general population is less important. This is why people care about disparity and the wealth gap because the people who are at the top of that pyramid, that 1% or that 10% that I was talking about who own most of the property in Germany and who own most of the wealth, 70% of the wealth in Germany, those people are not generally attached to any real productive activity. They're making that money through financialization, so they don't really care what's going on in the society. They don't really care what's going on in the real economy, so they can let it burn.

But of course, as it burns, as the standard of living drops, the public's anger, frustration, despair, and desperation has to be channeled somewhere. So I would expect to see in Germany and in Europe a rise in nationalism, a rise in ethnic and nationalistic hostilities, a rise in political radicalization, a rise in crime, and a rise in drug addiction. And of course, as has been perfected in The United States, you will also see a rise in all sorts of diversionary, fake, ideological, and cultural battles, and feuds and whatnot. All to accelerate the deterioration and to increase the insecurity, to undermine class cohesion and worker solidarity, and to keep the population afraid, distracted, and misdirected until Europeans eventually adapt to occupying a lower status on the global stage. At which point, maybe a century from now, they'll start having babies again.

Look, the West created this system. They created these parasitic nihilistic elites who were born under the flags of Dutch and French and British imperialism, but who have now outgrown flags and they have no loyalty to any nation. So I mean if, for example, if white nationalists thought that western civilization was some sort of sacred pact between all Caucasian people, They have a hard lesson coming. Their civilization gave birth to a patricidal litter of psychopaths who do not see the logic in only applying neoliberal disaster capitalism to non western nations when it can be profitably applied to western nations when those nations display or exhibit signs of vulnerability or weakness. I think this is important to understand and this is why I keep emphasizing it.

Real existing power has transcended political institutions and national governments. Government focused political activism only strengthens the system of private sector power. I've talked about this for years and I literally wrote thousands of pages about this when I was trying to advise the opposition in Egypt. We must develop methods of resistance, of opposition, of activism that directly address the private sector. We have to influence, we have to hold accountable, and we have to democratize how the owners and controllers of global financialized capital use their power in society and in the world.

But again, the West created this system. They created this problem, and they never heeded any of the alarm bells when they went off in the process of it growing, when they still had a chance to actually address the problem through traditional political mechanisms. They didn't do that. They allowed it to continue. They allowed it to grow.

They allowed it to metastasize and spread until all of their political institutions were completely subsumed. So, no, I don't expect any solutions to come from the West. It's late in the day for that. Joseph Borel's garden is comprised of carnivorous plants and everyone in that garden is prey trapped in the thorny vines that they themselves watched grow around their necks. So if as he said, the rest of the world is a jungle, well, the jungle operates according to a more natural and more balanced order.

And those of us in the global South can begin to solve the problem of artificial western models of economic and political control by rejecting them and by adopting models that are indigenous to our environment.