Let’s start today for a change with Berlin, which is not only the capital, but also a breakdown city. You live there with a Willy Brandt airport, which does Brandt no credit and is guaranteed to drive Munich residents to Deutsche Bahn. Unfortunately, you can’t just make BER new, that’s only possible with elections. On September 26, 2021, Berlin had not even done the least that a democracy needs: that every vote counts and everyone can cast their vote.
Yesterday, the President of the Berlin Constitutional Court spoke for several minutes about a chronicle of mistakes made on that day. Because ballots were missing, polling stations were closed for 83 hours during election time. All the polling stations were still open 350 hours after the actual voting close at 6 p.m. The judge dismissed politics with a spectacular sentence: “A complete invalidity of the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives and for the twelve district assemblies is possible.”
If there were to be a completely new election, Franziska Giffey’s time as Governing Mayor could already be over. Because according to the latest polls, their SPD in Berlin only comes to 18 percent, the CDU and Greens are each at 21 percent. Andreas Geisel (SPD), who was once responsible for the crap election as interior senator, could soon lose his current post as building senator.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
But on that ominous September 26, the Bundestag was also elected: According to a report in the “Tagesspiegel”, Olaf Scholz’s traffic light coalition is examining whether the Bundestag elections in Berlin have to be repeated on a larger scale than previously planned. It is quite possible that the election examination committee will not stick to the previous idea of doing this in only around 400 of the 2,300 constituencies. If it came to the complete repetition demanded by the CDU, the Left Party could even be expelled from the Bundestag – it had won two of its three direct mandates in Berlin. Then you would no longer have to argue internally as to whether Sahra Wagenknecht was allowed to speak.
The alleged attack on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines has led to heated political debates. There are two levels of damage limitation, as far as this is still possible after the disaster in the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm.
Ecologically: According to the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), the leaks release 300,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere – that would correspond to one percent of Germany’s annual CO2 emissions. The German Environmental Aid is calling on the operators of the pipelines and the supervisory authorities to pump out the remaining gas immediately.
Security policy: If marine gas pipes can be made useless forever, many other measures to destabilize democracies are also conceivable. “We have to prepare for scenarios that were hardly conceivable until recently,” explains Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD): “The protection of our critical infrastructure has top priority,” the security authorities are very vigilant. Apparently, the federal police are increasingly securing the seas.
The originators of the gas leaks are still unknown, but many points to Moscow. The work of the Russian government now looks like gang crime. Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, tells us: “Russia is now going over to hybrid warfare, that’s a new dimension.”
And so the concern about attacks on the infrastructure in Europe is spreading. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announces that the EU will “take further steps to increase the resilience of our energy security”. And Norway is stepping up security at its oil facilities – after all, oil companies had recently spotted drones near their platforms in Norwegian waters.
A wall, like the one used in the GDR, would be an obvious suggestion for the Kremlin to stop the exodus of tens of thousands of young Russians. They don’t want to serve as cannon fodder in the Ukraine war. But Russia has more than 20,000 kilometers of national borders, so the state doesn’t have that many bricklayers to be able to walk in Walter Ulbricht’s footsteps. And so Moscow is content with no longer issuing passports to citizens who are drafted into military service in the “partial mobilization” campaign. The government announced on its website that they would be “denied a passport”.
Since citizens with dual citizenship are not protected from conscription, the US Embassy in Moscow and the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin are calling on affected American and German citizens to leave Russia as soon as possible. The Russian republic of North Ossetia in the Caucasus, which borders Georgia, in turn imposes entry restrictions. The passage of cars from other Russian regions in the direction of Georgia will be made more difficult.
US states are currently vehemently courting German companies – mainly with the argument of cheaper energy costs. A negative factor for investors willing to settle here is that due to the country-wide shortage of workers, their own people quickly move on when higher wages are tempting elsewhere. One of the underlying conditions is that the number of unionized workers is growing rapidly. In the first half of 2022, 641 new unions formed in the United States, an increase of 80 percent.
The trend leads to internal distortions in large corporations with oligopoly status. For example, Starbucks only wants to increase hourly wages in those branches whose employees do not form a union. Amazon has not recognized the creation of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) for months. And in the US state of Maryland, Apple employees made a first – there an Apple store is the first in the empire with a unionized workforce. The activists stick to the company motto: “Think different”.
Thomas Wüstefeld, previously CFO and interim boss at second division soccer team Hamburger SV, had no friends among Hamburg’s politicians. He could not explain why the club did not put the 23.5 million euros donated by the city for the stadium area into the renovation of the arena, as agreed, but rather compensated for the loss of revenue from Corona. There were also doubts about Wüstefeld’s doctorate, serious allegations against his company and the constant stress with HSV investor Klaus-Michael Kühne.
Now, after a special meeting of the Supervisory Board, Wüstefeld is giving up. As the sole director, sports director Jonas Boldt will initially be in charge of the operational business. It is unclear what will become of Wüstefeld’s share of a good five percent in HSV Fußball AG. In terms of sport, that much is certain, things are going much better for the club at the moment than in management, which looks like a sure candidate for relegation.
(Photo: IMAGO/PA Images)
And then there are US investor-controlled English clubs Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea looking to become football conglomerates – the latest trend in the business. The actors themselves speak of a “multi-club network”. One of the models is the City Football Group of the state of Abu Dhabi around Manchester City, which now has eleven clubs, including three from Europe (Girona in Spain, Troyes in France and Lommel from Belgium). And on the other hand, the group builders have the network of Red Bull co-owner Dietrich Mateschitz in mind, with Leipzig and Salzburg as Champions League participants.
In particular, Todd Boehly, new Chelsea shareholder, is targeting club acquisitions in Belgium and Portugal. Liverpool’s shareholder Fenway Sport Group, on the other hand, is looking for proximity to Milan and Toulouse. They belong to the finance firm Red Bird Capital, which has taken a stake in Liverpool. It is hoped that young talent will be able to develop better in the resulting alliances.
Somehow Albert Schweitzer comes to mind: “Enthusiasm is good fuel, but unfortunately it burns up too quickly.”
I wish you a healthy day.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
PS: Would you like to know which companies are developing solutions for a healthier society? We will show you this on Thursday, September 29th, from 8 p.m. when we present the finalists of the German Digital Prize The Spark in a live stream. Sign up here.
You can subscribe to the Morning Briefing here: