Turmoil in Germany

[onawah]

How a small Chinese company tricked the German state | DW Investigation
DW Planet A
679K subscribers
Dec 10, 2024

"DW uncovered that dozens of Chinese climate projects, certified by the German authorities as carbon credits under the upstream emission reduction scheme, failed to deliver on promises to save millions of tons of carbon emissions. A joint investigation by DW and ZDF reveals how Germany was deceived – and exposes the shadowy company Beijing Karbon behind the alleged fraud."

Read more:

Background information about the carbon credit scheme from the Federal Environment Agency:
https://www.dehst.de/EN/Topics/Climat...

Background on the prosecutor’s investigation (press release):
https://www.berlin.de/generalstaatsan...

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:50 Investigating projects in China
03:10 Upstream Emission Reduction (UER): A new scheme in Germany
04:05 Lack of control by the German authorities
07:13 The Chinese company behind the alleged fraud
10:44 The buyers
12:25 Were the auditors complicit?
14:30 The Consequences

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aU_S97Ae1eg

[grapevine]

16 Candidates have died from the beginning of the electoral process

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d2Qd_wIgbBk

Statistically impossoible . . .

[Jaak]

[Raskolnikov]

this has got to end...

[Vicus]

German police raid a libertarian's home for the crime of calling civil servants "parasites," advise him to "Think carefully about what you post in future" - Nov.14.2025



A new insane German speech crime investigation just dropped.

On 29 September of this year, a German man of libertarian persuasion known only by the pseudonym Damian N. tweeted the following:

" No, anyone who is financed by the state pays no net taxes; they live off taxes: Every civil servant, every politician, every employee in a state-owned enterprise, everyone who is subsidized and financed by the state. Not a single parasite pays any net taxes."

You can find the tweet here; as I write this, it has a grand total of 402 views and ten likes.



No matter: Yesterday morning, police acting on behalf of the Ulm public prosecutor’s office raided Damian’s home. He is suspected of the crime of inciting hatred (in violation of Section 130 of the German Criminal Code) for his rough remark about government “parasites.”

Apollo news report:

https://apollo-news.net/ueberlegen-s...n-nach-x-post/

The identification procedures – roughly comparable to a police booking in the United States – were likely illegal in this case. Damian N. further claims that the police produced no search warrant and provided no receipt for his confiscated phone, which would represent a further violation of the law. Before leaving, an officer instructed our suspected speech criminal to “Think carefully about what you post in future,” because “You must realise that you are now under observation.”

This has all the hallmarks of another NGO-driven speech investigation. We have a low-visibility post containing a suggestive vocabulary item (“Parasit”) that was likely uncovered via keyword search, a lazy attempt to find a distantly relevant criminal statute and then maximum police harassment and intimidation because as in all these cases the process is most of the punishment. They really, really like the 6am morning raids, and they also really like to confiscate phones. As the Lower Saxon prosecutor (and “online hate task force” leader) Frank-Michael Laue told American reporters earlier this year, “It’s a kind of punishment if you lose your smartphone, it’s even worse than the fine you have to pay.”

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/german-p...a-libertarians

[Vicus]

The Censorship Industrial Complex's Power Grip in Germany

New liber-net report maps an expansive network of government and private censors across Germany



Many organizations and federal agencies involved in censoring Americans under the guise of mis/disinformation have shut down in the last couple years. Racket’s Twitter Files exposed the level of censorship slime oozing from organizations such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Project, and the Virality Project. On the government side of things, there was the Global Engagement Center, the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which still exists but is no longer involved in mis/disnfo work.

That’s not to say Amerika is perfect when it comes to free speech, but as Sen. Rand Paul said in September, “throughout government, the censorship apparatus that Biden had put in place is gone.”

However, if you look to Germany, the strongest economic power in the European Union, it’s easy to see where America was going. It has about 330 organizations working with federal and state levels of government to suppress speech and about 425 grants — mostly from the government — that fund this work, according to research from liber-net, a free speech group that tracks censorship.

The most high-profile cases of German censorship, at least in America, have been raids of people who authorities determined had engaged in “digital violence” for offenses that include insulting someone. These raids were the subject of a high-Zprofile “60 Minutes” segment last February. Prosecutors and police largely depend on a system of government-certified and government-funded “flaggers.”

While these incidents understandably get the most attention, the censorship apparatus is much more deeply ingrained in German society, says Andrew Lowenthal, the CEO of liber-net.

“Germany is the most important country doing this type of content controls work in the entirety of the EU and I would argue has a significant influence on the EU. There’s not really any light between civil society and the government.”

As a result, there’s a constant “atmosphere of intimidation,” says Thomas Geisel, a former mayor of Dusseldorf and now a member of the European Parliament.

“People are afraid to speak their mind. That people always have to find some sort of way of expressing their mind in a politically correct way has created a narrower space for discourse, and I think that is really threatening our democracy.”

Liber-net’s report includes a searchable database of organizations involved in content control and the grants that fund their work, categorized from 1-5 flags, with five being the worst for its censorship advocacy.

continue: https://www.racket.news/p/the-censor...trial-complexs

[Vicus]

New Berlin law allows police to install spyware in homes



Berlin police will be allowed to secretly enter private homes to install spyware, after the German House of Representatives approved sweeping changes to the city's police law.

Backed by the governing CDU-SPD coalition and opposition AfD, the law gives police broad new powers over both physical and digital surveillance.

The new law allows the authorities to secretly enter a suspect's home to install spyware if remote access isn't possible.

Berlin police can now legally conduct physical break-ins for digital surveillance. The updated rules also allow phones and computers to be hacked to monitor communication. Police can also turn on their bodycams inside private homes if they believe someone is in serious danger.

Passed on Thursday, the law also expands surveillance in public areas. The authorities can now collect phone data from everyone in a location, scan license plates, and counter drones. They can use facial and voice recognition to identify people from surveillance images. Real police data can also be used to train AI. Critics say this risks misuse and intrudes on private life.

Interior Senator Iris Spranger of the SPD party has defended the move:

"With the biggest reform of the Berlin Police Law in decades, we are creating a significant plus for the protection of Berliners. We are giving law enforcement better tools to fight terrorism and organized crime."

Berlin has seen a rise in crime. In 2024, police recorded over 539,000 offenses - more than the year before. Violent crimes such as assault and domestic violence also increased. Officials say there is a growing problem with crimes involving young people and migrants, especially in large cities. More than half of all crimes go unsolved.

Opposition to the law has grown since its passage. During the debate, Green Party MP Vasili Franco said the law feels like a wish list for a state with excessive control over its citizens. Civil rights groups call the expanded use of AI and facial recognition "a massive attack on civil liberties."

The NoASOG campaign alliance also strongly criticized the reform, saying: "What is being sold as security policy is in reality the establishment of an authoritarian surveillance state."

https://www.sott.net/article/503384-...yware-in-homes

[Vicus]

Alice Weidel gives Volodymyr Zelensky a very public spanking



Alice Weidel, Co-Leader of Germany’s No 1 party the AfD, made a public statement from the parliament rostrum.

She said: Weidel: ‘Zelenskyy, you are a pathetic clown and a beggar. How dare you demand anything again?’

Demand from us, the Germans. We are trying with all our might to save our country from collapse. You have contributed to this catastrophe with your endless demands and irresponsible policies.

‘You come to us with an outstretched hand like a beggar from a train station.

‘At the same time, you behave like a capricious, arrogant dictator who imagines himself the center of the universe, around which all the planets must revolve
‘You have turned your country into a bottomless pit. Our money, our energy, and our future are draining away in it.

And yet you still dare to lecture us about how to live?

‘Don’t make me laugh, Mr. comedian, who still hasn’t stepped out of his role.
‘You talk about freedom and democracy. But you are the one who banned all opposition parties and shut down television channels. ‘You silenced all dissenters, leaving only your own lying propaganda mouthpiece. You are the one who fears your own people more than any external enemy.

‘Your approval rating has long since plummeted, and you know it perfectly well. That’s why you’re clinging to power with a death grip, using the war as a fig leaf.

‘You are a usurper. You are a dictator who fears even the shadow of your own people. Yet, you are not afraid to send them to certain death.

Your freedom allows you and your gang to plunder the country. Meanwhile, ordinary Ukrainians die for your palaces, yachts, and offshore accounts.
‘Your face, Mr Zelenskyy, has become synonymous with hypocrisy.

continue: https://michaelwalshwriter.com/2026/...blic-spanking/

[Vicus]

"No longer a democracy": Germans on the repression of anti-war activists in Germany



German readers of the right-wing conservative portal Apollo News commented on the arrest of a 20-year-old woman during a Munich demonstration against the new compulsory military service, carrying an anti-government and anti-war poster calling on current Chancellor Friedrich Merz to "go to the Eastern Front."

According to police, she was briefly detained for identification. This decision allegedly led to unrest when other participants rushed to her aid, forcing police to "use force." The identities of the young people are currently being established.

In several cities, young people, primarily leftists, called on students to take strikes and protests. According to security officials, approximately 600 people took part in the Munich demonstration. In Berlin, police reported approximately 1200 participants, and in Hamburg, 2300.

In Wuppertal (North Rhine-Westphalia), police threatened criminal charges for displaying similar posters.

The protests were sparked by a new military service law that came into effect at the beginning of the year. Among other things, it requires young men to complete a questionnaire provided by the German Armed Forces.

Men born after January 1, 2008 are also subject to mandatory military medical examination.

Comments are selective. The opinions expressed are those of their authors at Apollo News.

continue: https://en.topcor.ru/71306-bolshe-ne...tov-v-frg.html

[Bill Ryan]

https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/186094

Thousands descended on Berlin's Brandenburg Gate today demanding the immediate resignation of the German government, under the banner of "Project M1llion."

Demonstrators — many carrying German flags — rallied behind an 11-point plan calling for direct democracy, a halt to current migration policy, abolition of public broadcaster fees, and the introduction of strict political accountability.

The protest is far from isolated. Germany's main trade union federation DGB is separately planning a major demonstration on June 27 — timed deliberately ahead of the government's pension reform proposals and a key coalition summit.

This comes as Merz hits a new historic low — 77% of Germans dissatisfied with his performance. The government is facing pressure from the street, from the unions, and from its own collapsing approval ratings simultaneously.

[Vicus]

Germany and the end of Europe's old political order
by
Fyodor Lukyanov
RT


The far-right AfD has won 45% in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its 2021 result and crushing the CDU by 27 points in elections, September 6, 2026

The AfD's Saxony-Anhalt landslide crushed the CDU, weakened the chancellor, and exposed the widening gulf between Germany's rulers and voters

September could prove decisive for Germany's political future, with elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. If the ruling Christian Democratic Union suffers serious defeats across the board, which is by no means certain, the federal government itself could come under pressure and for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the consequences may be more immediate.

A CDU defeat in Saxony-Anhalt had been expected, but the scale is nevertheless notable. Whether Alternative for Germany ultimately secures an absolute majority and can form a government on its own is almost secondary, because the message to Germany's political establishment could hardly be clearer. The warning light is flashing red

Merz himself has become part of the problem. Judging by this campaign, he has reached the unenviable political stage at which his interventions appear to produce the opposite of their intended effect, so the more passionately he urges voters in one direction, the more determinedly some seem to move in another.

There is something almost late-Soviet about it, like when an official appeared on television to insist upon something and a significant part of the population instinctively concluded that the truth probably lay elsewhere.

Attempts in the final days of the campaign to portray the AfD as Nazis and Putin's puppets plainly failed to stop its advance in this eastern state and they may even have helped it by irritating voters already tired of such accusations. Nor did the murky drone incident in Leipzig, which was used to heighten tensions with Russia, noticeably alter the political mood.

What happens next in Saxony-Anhalt will depend on the final distribution of seats, but almost every available option presents Germany's establishment with difficulties of its own making.

Suppose an AfD government is formed in Magdeburg, then the temptation elsewhere in the federal system will be to obstruct it and there's already discussion of limiting cooperation with AfD-led authorities, including in sensitive areas such as security and intelligence.

That would be an extraordinary path to take, given Germany's federal system has traditionally functioned effectively precisely because the Länder (states) and federal government cooperate despite political differences. To start withholding information or obstructing a legitimately constituted state government would risk damaging the system in an effort to contain one political party. It would be the sanctions mentality, so familiar from international affairs, brought home and deployed against part of Germany itself.

The alternative may be an unwieldy coalition of virtually everyone else, assembled primarily to prevent the largest party from governing, which may be constitutionally possible, but repeating it indefinitely carries an obvious political cost and voters eventually notice when electoral victories don't translate into political power.

The more intelligent approach might be to accept the result, allow the AfD to govern where it wins, and gradually draw the party into the political establishment. Government has a habit of disciplining insurgent movements and responsibility exposes contradictions that opposition can conceal, while administrative reality is often more effective than denunciation at diminishing radical parties.

But such a strategy requires political subtlety, something Germany's federal leadership currently possesses in limited supply. At decisive moments, German politics has a tendency to substitute moral certainty for flexibility, which is why the mainstream spent years constructing a cordon sanitaire around the AfD. Having turned the party into something with which cooperation is deemed morally impossible, it's now difficult to reverse course without admitting that the original strategy has failed.

The German problem is part of something larger as across Western Europe, political transformation appears to be entering a new phase, with the gap between what established parties offer and what substantial sections of their populations demand widening. Those who govern and those who are governed increasingly seem to inhabit parallel political worlds.

The origins of this divergence lie partly in the high period of globalization 25 or 30 years ago. As economies became more interconnected, more decisions migrated from the national to the supranational level, but this wasn't simply an ideological project as in an integrated world, many problems genuinely could no longer be managed effectively by individual states.

For a time, the arrangement worked because it delivered tangible benefits. The increasingly cosmopolitan political and economic order could point to prosperity and rising living standards and while people might have felt that decision-making was becoming more remote, the system compensated them materially.

But that bargain has weakened as globalization no longer functions as its architects expected. Economic integration remains dense enough that governments can't simply retreat behind national borders, yet it no longer produces the political confidence and economic dynamism that once legitimized it and as a result, established elites find themselves trapped between structures inherited from the previous era and electorates demanding greater national control.

The result is the rise of protest movements across Europe. They share certain characteristics, particularly an emphasis on sovereignty and hostility towards established institutions, but they aren't interchangeable because French, German, and British nationalists won't necessarily become natural allies simply to spite a Brussels which dislikes all of them. Nationalism by definition reflects different histories and interests.

What matters is that the old political system is beginning to wobble, even though its institutions remain powerful and retain many mechanisms for containing insurgent forces through coalition-building and institutional barriers. But the question is how long such methods can work if the underlying electoral trend continues.

Saxony-Anhalt therefore matters beyond Saxony-Anhalt and the treatment of the AfD after its electoral breakthrough will provide a useful indication of how far Germany's establishment is prepared to go to preserve the existing political architecture, and what consequences follow when it does.

None of this means that the Western Europe emerging from the present transformation will necessarily be more congenial to Russia, and Moscow should harbor no illusions on that score. A Europe of resurgent nationalism and competing interests has historically been quite capable of producing instability of its own, and Russia has rarely escaped the consequences.

But political systems don't remain fixed indefinitely and the European order created during the age of triumphant globalization is entering a period of profound adjustment. Germany may simply be where that transformation is becoming impossible to ignore.

https://www.sott.net/article/508292-...olitical-order

Vicus comment:

Bizarro world, AFD was always tilde as Nazis...but the official government support from day 1 Neo Nazis and sill does in Ukraine...well, from my perspective it seems there are "flavors" from Nazism...
and the actual Germany government is just another flavor "light"...prove me wrong .

[shaberon]

Posted by Vicus (here)
Bizarro world, AFD was always tilde as Nazis...but the official government support from day 1 Neo Nazis and sill does in Ukraine...well, from my perspective it seems there are "flavors" from Nazism...
and the actual Germany government is just another flavor "light"...prove me wrong .

Nazism didn't go anywhere, it just changed flavors from Anti-Semitic to Zionist.

Germany paid quite heavily for that for some seventy years of "great globalization".

The main thing still standing in it is Rheinmetall, which manufactured both world wars. Normal stuff like car companies and the food supply is going under.

Besides, Bavaria has been a US protectorate like Hong Kong making sure that there is no real growth, that the apparent population increase is due to immigration, and that you can only make approved choices.

Those are along the lines of the Constitution of Germany, that says that a German is a subject of the European Central Bank, and all strategies boil down to price stability.

Is unification that good of an idea? Should Frankfurt really be under the same government as Hamburg just because it's the same language?

I find it bothersome because that just makes it a British -- American tool against Russia, probably one of the most unfortunate situations ever forced on anyone. As in checkers, we have taken your Nazis and kinged them. Buy our gas.

Or, possibly, it could stay as one country and help end NATO. Could we have an agreement not to have an alliance? That would be spiffy. Are they afraid of that?