ALLIANCE FO§ DEMOCRACY

Elections in Lower Saxony – between promises and ‘slips of the tongue’

On Sunday 20th January 2013, the polling stations will open in nearly 90 Lower Saxony constituencies. Worse even than in a closing-down sale, the parties have been vying for the votes of the high-income earners, the better-off, the pensioners, young people, recipients of social benefits, single mothers and fathers, workers, academics and all the people of Lower Saxony.

The election programme promises almost everything on earth and in heaven; in view of the current developments in Germany and Euro-Europe however, little progress can really be expected.

So that no voter ultimately goes to the polling station simply to put his cross somewhere, and goes away with the feeling that nothing will be changed, the Alliance for Democracy offers an alternative.
We call on voters to:
Go to the voting booth, but spoil your ballot paper.
The procedure is quite simple. Write on your ballot paper that you could not decide on any of the candidates, or that none of the candidates appeal to you in any way. Then place the paper in the ballot box and have the good feeling of not having given your vote to anyone due to the agony of choice.
Take advantage of your opportunity and spoil your ballot paper, so that your vote will not go to a party which you do not really want to support.

We call on pensioners and young people in particular to cast an invalid vote, because both these groups will be hit most severely by the politics of failure.

Remember the following points before you go to vote:

How the business of state is conducted by means of loans, e.g. the ESM and the Fiscal Pact.

Germany bears the brunt of the now almost routine attempts at a Euro rescue. In order to circumvent stability limits (including the Fiscal Pact) and the national debt (including the debt brake), liabilities, which are ultimately also loans, have not been included in the national budget. The supporting countries, such as Germany, in this way settle the loans for countries that have become insolvent (Greece, Portugal etc.). What this policy is eager to conceal is that if such support were discontinued, then the supported country would go bankrupt. By means of liabilities, guarantees and rescue packages, debt is again and again combated by more debt. An approach that runs counter to every principle of economics.
So that the ESM/Fiscal Pact could pass the Bundestag, and above all the Bundesrat, (here the state government of Lower Saxony could have spoken out clearly and demanded an immediate stop to this policy), it has been agreed that German taxpayers can go on paying for this Euro-rescue madness until the system collapses in creeping devaluation or the crash.
This being the case, it is reprehensible that politics and the press again and again conceal that even Germany has long since been bankrupt. None of the aids or rescue attempts that have been proposed or implemented by politics have helped the Euro countries, including Germany, to escape this misery. Instead, democracy is withering away and breaches of the law are piling up .

Whether you, as a voter, accept lies, underhand dealing, the sell-out of your values, is of course in your hands, but fundamentally it cannot be acceptable, either in the case of national or state budgets, that politics deals with the people who it is supposed to represent only in the form of lies, obfuscation, deception and cover-ups in such a criminal way. This cannot constitute representation of interests for the benefit of the people.
It must also be stated expressly that both the Black-Yellow coalition, and the SPD and the Greens, gave the majority of their votes to these mendacious budgets; gave the majority of their votes to prohibited state funding for the ESM and the Fiscal Pact, which enable nothing more than the delaying of the already quasi-extant bankruptcy situation of Germany at the expense of the people of the country. When speaking of the European debt union, the mendacious political parties of Germany must also be viewed as a community which will act contrary to their oaths of office and their election promises, and indeed have to do so, since there is no other recourse. Nor by the purchase by the ECB of junk government bonds by the simple expedient of printing money, to compensate for political failures by means of prohibited state funding (on the model of the FED / USA – also undemocratic!).

How government bonds/junk government bonds of other EMU countries and their buy-backs should be valued

Germany is bankrupt. In other words: the state is bankrupt, although the economy still functions. Still! The country’s debt has risen enormously in recent years. The reason for this has been faulty political decisions, such as big business, banks and politics dreaming of economic growth, in which they imagined growth rates of the future based on growth rates of the past, instead of a mixed rate made up of zero growth forecasts for the future (extremely carefully calculated zero growth) and the average growth rates of the past. In this way the largest part of the debt was incurred through the issue of government bonds, which makes it appear attractive to bankrupt states above all to continue dealing in money, although their mountain of debt is actually already high enough. This is supported in erroneous politics by the belief that debts cab repaid by further borrowing. But this is unfortunately not the case. And it is extremely questionable why politics, business and banks continue to adhere to this false belief, instead of reacting and making the necessary changes. This can only mean that politics, business and banks want to take the road towards dedemocratization, because this brings them benefits, although this is all directed against the people of Germany and Europe. Added to this is the fact that the German Government has also already stated that it is prepared to incur more debt in addition to the already existing German national debt in order to support other Euro countries.
In order to conceal these mistakes and misguided decisions, and in order to save face this is concealed by the German Government, so that we must also assume that the German Government is in agreement with the ECB when it releases for buy-back bonds issued by ailing countries such as Greece, and in which Germany holds a 27% share (of the liability).

Instead of making it possible for the Greeks to make an orderly exit, and to ensure that their currency recovers to a reasonable competitive level on the international currency market, the Euro rescuers decided to support the Greeks with further loans. Greece is therefore currently buying back junk bonds with a face value of € 30 billion at a rate o f only 30%, i.e. € 10 billion. This corresponds to the tactics of the co-called Euro rescuers (and the Alliance for Democracy has also spoken out vehemently against this rescue!), of wanting to repay debts by means of more debts, and it also means: Greece, which wanted to get rid of its debts by transferring them to the bond creditors, made this offer (probably by agreement with the triumvirate of the EU Commission, IMF and ECB), thereby actually obtaining € 10 billion through loans from liabilities. The investors, whether the ECB, private banks or private persons, in this way became € 20 billion richer (losses). This is just as crazy as it sounds, because the market speculates not on profits, it speculates on losses, which are borne by the investors. And investment departments give their advice e accordingly, making reference to ratings that really exist only in dreamland. And it is therefore nothing but a farce when the Finance Ministers of the Euro countries decided that Greece should be granted another two years for such actions; it is therefore nothing but a farce when the American rating agency Standard & Poor’s, following the reduction and buy-back of debt, which will involve billions in emergency loans by the Euro countries, now upgrades Greece’s credit rating by six stages (Fitch agency in March 2012 from “catastrophic” to “very bad” – from partial default, “SD”, to “B-”). This is compounded by the assessment of the agency, which speaks of a “stable outlook”, even though the investment must still be regarded as speculative.

Even the upgrade in March showed little effect (the interest rates usually fall when a rating is upgraded), and the current one will also have hardly any effect, at least not on the overall level of debt. They will however affect the capital investments, which were once considered as gilt-edged and protected against insolvency, but are now leading to rate decreases with the private life insurers and falls in private pensions. And this also applies for Germany. It also applies to all private investors and small investors, who for example hold German Government bonds, which were regarded as ‘safe’, although they never actually were.
Anyone who still wants to be involved as an investor must be informed of the risk. A court ruling against the rating classification becomes interesting in this respect, in the same way as recently happened to Lehman Brothers. Investors demanded compensation for damages from the bankrupt Lehman Brothers on the grounds of excessively favourable ratings, which had misled them into buying shares in the company.

At the end of the day it must be clear to every investor: he finances and is responsible for the juggling exercises of high finance and pays for the failures of politics, and this to a steadily increasing extent. Decisions and actions such as those against Lehman will remain exceptions.

How the so-called bank rescue and Financial Market Stabilisation Act and Fund work (or not)

As part of the so-called Euro rescue, which is based solely at the cost of the steadily declining purchasing power of the Euro, there is also the so-called bank rescue. Bank rescue means: Losses which are the responsibility of high finance, and which should be settled by the bank, are simply transferred to the people of the country. The state takes over these costs and gets them back again via tax payments. The state gave itself permission to do this by means of the invention and passing of the Financial Market Stabilisation Act and Fund . To this extent it is worth it for companies to allow themselves to be mismanaged. Although this contradicts all applicable principles, the state even supports companies in this process.
And this act of nonsense also took place with the approval of all parties (except the Left). The Social Democrats and the Greens gave the votes that were needed for the adoption of the law. To now go into battle under the banner of “social justice" is ridiculous, even if this takes place at national level.

For a such bank rescue as described, and which has sadly become reality, the Germans have so far paid (measured in terms of their shares in cash injections to bank made by the ECB and the internal German bank subsidies) € 500 billion. This is more than one-and-a-half times the national budget. And this will only become more, not less. And this is happening with the agreement of all parties, and with the agreement of high court jurisdiction.

How things stand regarding the so-called independence of bank institutions and high court jurisdiction

The independence of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the legislature of the Federal Republic of Germany have been abandoned against the democratic Constitution in favour of a Euro dictatorship. The blame lies at the door of the two major popular parties and their coalition partners with their majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat. The state politics of Lower Saxony have also been instrumental in turning the legitimate state of Germany more and more into an illegitimate state. A major role is also being played by the politicisation of the supreme German courts, who allow enshrined law to be followed by political injustice, and by filling the benches with politically acceptable judges guarantee the continued existence of this political clan, while still maintaining their alleged independence. This independence of the above institutions, including all the supreme courts of the Federal Republic of Germany – not only the Federal Constitutional Court, but also all Federal courts – must be urgently reviewed and revised, otherwise it will be impossible to speak much longer of a legitimate state.

When it can also be assumed that instructional authority of the State and the Federal Government exists with regard to public prosecutors (and even instructional duty), then it is clear that political stratagems are possible between all ranks via backroom deals. This too is unworthy of a democracy and a social state, as Germany still likes to call itself. Perhaps such political machinations are also one of the reasons why Germany has not yet ratified the Convention against Corruption, which has been ratified by 162 other countries, and which after all is still a UN Convention. This places Germany on the same level as illegitimate states such as North Korea.
Corruption also over after all the draft laws of the parties against corruption, for example in the form of still not criminally relevant purchase of votes by members of the German Bundestag, allows the statement by the observer that what we are dealing with here is corruption, and that the main rejection of all applications by parties for change comes from the ranks of the Conservatives. The Alliance for Democracy believes that this is tantamount to a black eye for the parties who display a “C” in their logo as a reference to Christian values.

How the European financial markets also manipulate Lower Saxony

The influencing of the people through financial markets and their steering by politics and central banks find mainly take the form of
- Interest rate manipulation in concert between politics and central banks (financial oppression),
- Money price manipulation, for example by loans of money in huge quantities in and between all Euro countries and
- The printing of money and the blatant purchase of junk Government bonds on the primary and secondary markets by the ECB.
The shares markets (and the Euro exchange rate) are being inflated by non-market-conform measures against a free, self-regulating market, and document a hypocritical situation, which in actual fact does not exist – the price of gold is also being kept artificially low, in order to counteract the mistrust of investors (an increased gold price reflects the mistrust of people in politics).

The blame again lies at the door of all major popular parties and their efforts to maintain face, although this has already long since been lost – only with the FDP is this dilemma already obvious! Nevertheless, all parties still contribute to huge state losses, which are now also being borne proportionally by Lower Saxony in the form of Target-2 claims. It is therefore questionable how the state coffers, which are already empty, can recover in this way.

How the occupation of important posts in the country is manipulated so that state interests are enforced even if they lack any basis

The hounded-out Federal President Christian Wulff was not thrown to the dogs because he took advantage of his position, but because with his statements against the ESM/Fiscal Pact he crossed the interests of Mrs. Merkel.
The Wulff case shows clear signs of manipulation and control, although Wulff was the only politician in a decisive position, who in accordance with his free decision under the Constitution did not want to approve the ESM and Fiscal Pact, which both not only violated morals and decency, but also contain violations of law, in other words injustice. Mr. Wulff was the only one who would have kept Germany and Lower Saxony from the perverse declaration of bankruptcy to the detriment of his countrymen. Apart from ridiculousness of his offense – intervention by a call from the BILD newspaper and various alleged cases of taking undue advantage, which however came to no concrete result or public prosecution investigation proceedings, reveals this attempt at control and also the instructional authority of the relevant ministers of the Federal Government. The unknown initiators, who intervened according to instructions, are objectively regarded the really evil of the country!

How this policy harms above all pensioners, Hartz-4 recipients and young people

All income levels are subject to changes. The strange thing is: Amongst low- and minimum wage-earners, hourly rates are rising only hesitatingly and all so-called popular parties are dithering over this vexatious topic. The developments are contradictory, not in the interests of the population in general, and therefore constitute no suitable representation of interests. It may be overlooked that politics apparently continues to serve only itself, struggling to make decisions, but it cannot be overlooked that politics has made it possible that the developments in Europe will lead to enormous losses in Germany. This will be felt most of all by pensioners, young people and recipients of social benefits, because they too will have to foot the bill for their ‘share’ of government bonds and Euro rescue measures. In other words:
there will be no increases.

Pay freezes, excuses, laborious negotiations, even though the Federal Constitutional Court itself has called for the adjustment of Hartz-IV rates , little has happened or even nothing . So far, the decision-making struggle still goes on in this area, but it will not help, the country’s coffers are empty, there can be no increases. Nor can this happen with pensions, despite the proclaimed gifts handed out for the sake of the 2013 Bundestag elections.
Pensions are still not safe. Who can and will preserve pensions, and when if at all, must remain questionable, and will determine the loss in value of the Euro, which is getting worse with every day of the Euro rescue.

It would look even worse if Euro-bonds were actually and officially introduced (although they already exist economically), because this would result in immediate national bankruptcy. After the subsequent currency reform, pensions and all payments to benefit recipients (currently 20 million pensioners, 7-8 million benefit recipients) would have to be reduced drastically, and not only by the proportion which is currently financed by Federal grants (around 40 %), but by a larger proportion. This is exactly what is prohibited by the ESM and Fiscal Pact wording as a means of delaying insolvency, and above all its concealment via another company or private person under legal insolvency regulations for the protection of creditors. This does not however so far apply to countries, and it is therefore the citizens who have to stand surety and are not protected if the state gables away its finances.

It therefore remains up to you to decide how to evaluate such failures and make them the subject of your voting decision. The pensions and support of the retired population are heavily under threat, which is only being delayed by over-burdening of the working population (and in particular the following generation), although it is exactly this generation problem which should urgently be addressed. This intention has now been turned on its head because of political failure; the problem is not being overcome, but is becoming immensely greater.

Political tactics are now devoted to deceiving over 27 million people about this lapse, in order to surmount the hurdles of the 2013 state and Bundestag elections, instead of working out possible solutions which actually help both young and old.

And now a last word: Do not believe any longer that the state or the parties will solve this problem, at the state or national level. This is not at all the case . With the ratification of the ESM/Fiscal Pact, Germany has surrendered its budgetary sovereignty. In future it will be European interests which decide on how the money of German taxpayers is used for the benefit and preservation of the debt union. Yet things are still going well for Mrs. Merkel and her government. This may surprise you, but it is all simply part of Mrs. Merkel’s plan to be re-elected in September 2013 at any and all cost – and therefore any means is permissible, even the surrender of economic steering authority in the currency union for the main contributor Germany (27%) in favour of the ECB.
You must assume that the press has also been influenced accordingly and has long since ceased to be the third power in the state – it is bound by the behests of big business, and politics which hangs on its shirt-tails, whether at state or national level.
Consider whether you wish to follow the absolutist efforts of the current Government and politics or whether you want to contribute to Germany remaining a democratic country. Use your vote carefully at the election in Lower Saxony.