Vladimir Putin’s missiles are powerful, but a crime

After seven and a half months of war without success, Putin is reducing internal pressure from hardliners and announcing even tougher action. Belarus, drilled under ruler Alexander Lukashenko, has a wildly determined war partner at their side. The Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov is suddenly “100 percent satisfied with the implementation of the military special operation” – perhaps also because the hardened army general Sergei Surovikin (“General Armageddon”) has taken command.

The USA, NATO and the EU, in turn, announce aid to Kyiv – and Chancellor Olaf Scholz promises Selenski Germany’s solidarity over the phone. It’s not about “regeneration through violence”, as discussed in the cultural milieu, but about “survival against violence” – about the plight of a sovereign state that doesn’t want to simply disappear from the map like Austria did in 1938.

The Russian economy isn’t agreeing with the din of war, economist Sergey Guriyev warns. Despite high gas and energy prices, the country is stuck in a recession, according to the professor at the Paris elite university Sciences Po. The gross domestic product will not grow by three percent in 2022, as announced, but will shrink by six percent. Guriev sees an “enormous decline in the Russian economy”. Imports have collapsed, new soldiers for the Ukraine war cost a lot of money. The West should continue to ensure that sanctions are not tricked. Conclusion: Otto von Bismarck’s classic applies: “Never lies as much as before the election, during the war and after the hunt.”

EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson has a noble goal: to eliminate child sexual abuse on the Internet. But it may also take care of the freedom of the citizens at the same time by overturning encryption and mass surveillance. That’s what many MPs feared yesterday in a specialist committee of the EU Parliament. Johansson defended himself with the Teflon strategy: everything rolls off. And she praised companies like Meta, Google and Microsoft, which have been checking their chats for depictions of sexual violence for the past decade.

In any case, Matthias Pfau, head of the encrypted e-mail service Tutanota, warns that according to the EU plans “every chat message, every e-mail that we have ever sent should be secretly monitored – all the time. And once a law forces communications providers to introduce scanning to customers, the tool in question could “theoretically look for anything.”

Where France, Italy or Spain capped the gas price ad hoc months ago, in Germany a commission of experts is making the effort to come up with a somewhat more complicated proposal that is supposed to be considered quality work, but still ends up in the “watering can” category. Rich and poor, villa owners and social housing tenants, energy savers and environmental polluters, everyone gets something. Calculated, the plan means, according to the comparison portal Verivox, that the annual gas bill for a family with a consumption of 20,000 kilowatt hours amounts to 2742 instead of 4108 euros. Two stages are planned.

• A monthly advance payment is to be reimbursed in December. Volume: five billion euros.
• The gas price brake is to take effect from March: 80 percent of the consumption of each gas customer will then be subsidized by the state to twelve cents per kilowatt hour, beyond that the market price will apply. Volume: 66 billion euros.
• At 25,000 industrial companies with their special gas tariff, 70 percent of consumption is to be subsidized (only seven cents per kilowatt hour). Volume: 25 billion euros.

Trade unionist and Commissioner Michael Vassiliadis admits criticism of the Opus: “It’s not that we as a Commission didn’t prefer a fairer solution. But here speed has priority over accuracy and individual justice.” Germany is particularly dependent on natural gas. And one last warning: “It doesn’t go together to want fracking gas from the USA and to rule out fracking in Germany as a matter of principle.”

On the day after the Lower Saxony elections, moods arose in many parties, such as those of the chief controllers of companies after unsuccessful discount campaigns. FDP leader Christian Lindner, who had to declare a forced exodus from parliament in Hanover, discovered naked realism. The losses of the SPD and FDP were greater than the green gains in votes: “The traffic light has lost its legitimacy.”

That’s what the calculating finance minister says in the middle of the cheering crowd of all those who consider Stephan Weil to be a savior of the recently shaken social democracy. One can also see the matter in such a way that due to the drop in voter turnout from 63.1 to 60.3 percent and the dwindling SPD percentage, significantly fewer people in Lower Saxony than in the past have elected their impeccable prime minister. Ultra-conservatives – disappointed by the CDU and FDP – were drawn to the right by the AfD, left-wing critics of capitalism to the Greens.

Lindner now wants to put “position lights” better – economic reason – against ecological conversion (Greens) and social balance (SPD). First, he openly announces that the continued operation of only two nuclear power plants planned by the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck is not sufficient: “Further steps are necessary.” And so there is still no green light for Habeck’s project, the nuclear power plant Isar II and Neckarwestheim to be left in operation as an operational reserve for the time being. It is possible that the strategy of particular egoism makes the whole red-green-yellow construct appear lazy, like an apple in which the worm feels comfortable.

Is FDP boss Lindner right? Do the Liberals need to reconsider their role in the traffic light coalition? Does it need new minds and topics? Write us your opinion in five sentences [email protected] We will publish selected articles with attribution on Thursday in print and online.

In the search for someone to blame for the lack of success of the CDU in his era, party leader Friedrich Merz, 66, found what he was looking for in the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus. He replaces the federal managing director Stefan Hennewig, who was appointed in 2019, with Christoph Hoppe, most recently Germany head of the armaments and aviation group Thales. 30 years ago, the man had worked in the Union parliamentary group and in the chancellery for Helmut Kohl.

In the future, the strategic communication of the CDU will be the responsibility of the previous management consultant Kathrin Degmair (Boston Consulting Group), who previously worked for Bayerischer Rundfunk. The fact that Merz is an unfortunate figure at the head of the CDU and looked like a social tourist in the Lower Saxony election campaign was not officially discussed in the party committees yesterday.

And then there’s former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Together with two other American economists, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for a completely outdated theory of money. Bernanke & Co. assume that banks accept money from depositors and pass it on to borrowers.

But this approach of “loanable funds” contrasts sharply with a reality in which financial institutions grant excessive loans far in excess of the deposits. “The savers cannot create credit bubbles that would cause too much money to circulate,” says former economics expert and Würzburg professor Peter Bofinger. The award to the trio is something like “honoring Ptolemy with the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the sun orbits the earth.”

I wish you a happy day with lots of sunshine.

It greets you cordially

Her

Hans Jürgen Jakobs

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