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On the floor of Germany’s parliament, Left Party MP Sevim Dağdelen called for the c. 38,000 US soldiers in her country to leave, and to take their nuclear weapons with them. She lamented that Washington “doesn’t actually want allies, just loyal vassals”
a politician in Germany delivered a powerful speech on the floor of the parliament known as the bundestag condemning the U.S military occupation of her country the U.S has had thousands of troops occupying Germany since the end of World War II in 1945 and they've never left still today the U.S has more than 38 000 troops in Germany and a member of the left party a socialist Anti-Imperialist politician named sevim dagdalin gave a very powerful speech condemning the U.S military for undermining the sovereignty of Germany she said that the United States treats its so-called allies as vassals and she says that countries in Europe need to and she also called for the United States to withdraw its nuclear weapons in addition to having dozens of military bases and military installations in Germany the U.S has has nuclear weapons which of course threatened Germany because if there's a nuclear war between for example NATO and Russia Germany also pointed out that in the U.S military bases in German territory the German Constitution does not apply these are this is effectively occupied territory in which U.S law applies despite the fact that it's physically in Germany and German bases like the Ramstein Air Base are used to launch air attacks including the U.S drone War I published an article about this over at geopoliticaleconomy.com which includes the text of Doug Dylan's speech and I will link to that in the description below now this leftist German politician sabeem dogdalin is one of the very few politicians in Europe who has been speaking out against the NATO proxy war in Ukraine she has said very clearly that the war in Ukraine is a NATO proxy war against Russia seeking the overthrow of the Russian government here a geopolitical economy report we did an interview with savim and she condemned the this proxy war and he called for peace negotiations to end it so we need Germany actually be emancipated at last and Europe finally on Central well without a sense uh economical work and launching a European diplomatic initiative to end the war in Ukraine this would be the start to emancipate themselves from the U.S Administration and not being a vessel state of the United States anymore in the description below I will link to the interview that we did with sabeem dogdalin about the proxy war in Ukraine now in this latest speech that Sabine dogdalene gave on the floor of the bundish dog which was on March 31st she also condemned the destruction of the nordstream pipelines these are the gas pipelines that connected Russia to Germany and let's not forget that these these are often referred to in the western media as Russian pipelines but the Russian state-owned gas giant gazprom was one of the main investors in this project but there were also companies in Germany and France and Switzerland and other parts of Europe and they lost their billions of dollars of investment in this massive infrastructure project that was essentially an attack on Europe itself and in Her speech sabeem dogderlin referred to this as an act of terrorism and said why are our so-called allies committing terrorism against us yes the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hirsch one of the world's most renowned investigative reporters he exposed that the U.S government destroyed the Nordstrom pipelines it was overseen by the Joe Biden Administration and it was carried out by the U.S military with the support of NATO member Norway so when this German politicians of him Douglas says that Terror attacks among friends cannot be tolerated she's clearly referring to the United States carrying out this terror attack now in the same speech sabeem doglin also called out the hypocrisy of the German not only has it refused to investigate the destruction of the Nordstrom pipelines but she also called out the German government for not calling for the release of the journalist Julian Assange the world's most famous journalist of WikiLeaks who has been suffering in a British Maximum Security Prison and the U.S is trying to extradite him and throw him in prison for the rest of his life for the so-called crime of publishing truthful information and saving called this out of course as an Anti-Imperialist as an anti-fascist as a socialist she is very much against the genocidal murderous Nazi regime and in Her speech she made it clear that Germany the people of Germany were grateful for the U.S military support in fighting against the Nazi regime however she pointed out that the Soviet Union did the vast majority of the work in defeating Hitler in the United States was an ally it did help but the Soviet Union sacrificed more than 26 million people in the fight against the Third Reich in fact more than three-quarters of all Nazi casualties were on the Eastern front in the fight against the Soviet Union and the United States and Britain each lost around 400 000 people compared to more than 26 million people in the Soviet Union which shows that it was the Soviet Union that defeated Nazism not the U.S and Britain they helped but they they did not defeat the Nazis and and in Her speech dog Dylan acknowledged that now it's often not mentioned enough but it's an extremely important detail to keep in mind that the United States has in 2022 the U.S military News website Stars and Stripes reported that that the U.S has 100 000 troops in Europe for the and that was at the peak of the war in Afghanistan in the war in Iraq and specifically Germany has the most U.S troops in all of Europe and as of 2022 the U.S had 38 500 troops in Germany the U.S also has 12 000 troops in Italy Poland and Britain have 10 000 U.S troops Romania has 2 400 U.S troops and Spain has 2 500 U.S troops and the U.S also has 2 500 troops in the Baltic states which is Lithuania Latvia and Estonia and 1 500 more U.S troops in Slovakia this is ironic because we have heard a lot of propaganda from the United States about the former Soviet Union accusing the Soviet Union of supposedly treating East Germany the German Democratic Republic the socialist government that ceased to exist with German reunification in 1990 the U.S frequently portrayed that government as a puppet regime of the Soviet Union despite the fact that it was not part of the Soviet Union it was part of the Warsaw Pact which was the Soviet version of NATO which was created after NATO by the way NATO was created first and the Warsaw Pact was created in response to defend the Soviet Union and other allies socialist allies in Eastern Europe against NATO Wars and NATO regime change operations and coups and such and the Soviet Union ironically had asked to join NATO but NATO said no and Germany was West Germany was then then capitalist West Germany was added to Nato in 1955 and in response to that the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact and East Germany joined the Warsaw Pact we should never forget that history because it helps us understand today and the fact that the constant NATO encirclement of Russia the expansion of so after the reunification of Germany in 1990 right up to Russia's borders that was not new NATO was always an aggressive force and that was aimed at destabilizing Moscow from its very Creation in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact was not created until 1955 after West Germany joined NATO and we have a lot of evidence showing that the U.S Britain and France promised the Soviet Union in 1990 that if it allowed German reunification then they would not expand Nato one inch East and they lied exclusively to the east over a dozen times or adding a dozen more than a dozen new members since then so the reason I mention all of that is because at the end of World War II in 1945 the Allied Powers occupied Germany and that was supposed to end in 1949 and yet the United States really never ended its military occupation of Germany the Soviet Union withdrew from East Germany in 1948 and yet the U.S troops never left there still are more than 38 000 troops today in Germany they've been there since 1945. that is why this German leftist politician sabeem douglan is calling for an end to the U.S military presence and nuclear weapon now a key detail that Doug Dillon mentioned in Her speech in the bundish dog was that in 2010 the German Parliament bundestag voted to withdraw the U.S nuclear weapons from the country and here we are in 2023 13 years later and the U.S never withdrew those nuclear weapons this was admitted by the German State media Outlet DW DW wrote quote in March 2010 Germany's Parliament the bundeshdog passed a cross-party urging the government to emphatically work toward getting its American Allies to withdraw all nuclear weapons from Germany a decade on that goal seems ever more elusive now rather than working toward the bomb's withdrawal the U.S military is set to modernize and upgrade them so when the this leftist-driven politician Doug Dylan portrayed the U.S military presence as a kind of neocolonial occupy station it's not hyperbolic the German Parliament elected by the German people voted for the withdraw of U.S nuclear weapons 13 years ago and Washington refused to do it instead the U.S military is spending more than one trillion dollars expanding its nuclear weapons program modernizing its nuclear weapons this is a report from Columbia University Center for nuclear studies and it notes that it they analyzed the data that was published by the U.S congressional budget office and found that the the plan for modernizing nuclear weapons is 1.2 trillion dollars and by the way that was just 2017 if you update it according to inflation today and look at what the cost would be in 2023 dollars we're talking about 1.49 so about one and a half trillion dollars according to the U.S congressional budget office office's own estimates of what the U.S is spending to modernize its nuclear weapons and that is probably a very conservative estimate honestly now I want to conclude this analysis with one other final detail it's very important and that is that when saving dog Dylan gave this speech on the floor of the bundish dog on March 31st she was speaking at an event that was about the 75th anniversary of the Marshall Plan and the way that this is often taught in public schools in the United States the way I learned about it is this this was a benevolent plan in which the U.S which is helping rebuild Europe after World War II in reality it was not benevolent first of all Europe had to pay back the United States it's not just all free aid but furthermore even more importantly for the United States the Marshall Plan was a way to maintain U.S economic hegemony it was also to prevent Europe Western Europe from going socialist and it was a way for the United States to maintain a Mac a huge market for U.S Goods because at the end of World War II the U.S was responsible for over half of global Industrial fuel production and the U.S had all of this production that it had built up during the war and it needed markets for those products and instead of just raising the living standards and wages of U.S workers which would cut into the profits of the corporations instead the U.S looked for new markets in Europe and by giving these loans to Europe in dollars it was a way of incentivizing Europe to recycle those dollars back in the U.S economy by buying products from U.S companies this is admitted even if you look for instance at the national World War II museum which is a U.S government-backed U.S Congress recognized Museum and it admitted that in 1945 the United States was manufacturing more than half of the produced Goods in the world U.S exports made up more than one-third of the total Global exports and the United States held roughly two-thirds of the available gold reserves so one of the ways that the U.S still maintained its economic hegemony was through the Marshall Plan named after the U.S Secretary of State George Marshall and it acknowledges that this was a way of helping to bolster the economic strength and international prominence of the United States so it's not about helping Europe it's about maintaining U.S economic hegemony and I would add it's about keeping Europe economically subordinated to the United States which is exactly what we see today with more and more subordination of Europe to Washington and this the World War II museum the US government backed Museum acknowledges that it was about protecting markets for American about massive markets in Europe for U.S Goods and they added that the United States invested in the Marshall Plan in rebuilding economic markets in Europe to promote its own goods and also the Marshall Plan served as a conduit for the spread of capitalism across Western Europe hindering the global power and influence of the Soviet Union so it was about geopolitics and economic hegemony and imperialism and capitalism it was not about helping Europe we see how the U.S is helping Europe today by you know blowing up pipelines and imposing sanctions on Russia which blow back on the European working class who have to pay more and more for their energy they have high rates of inflation so the European working class is suffering The Economic Consequences of this the proxy war of the U.S fundamentally is leading against Russia just as you know the Marshall Plan was not a benevolent plan so we see you know how little history has changed now finally I'm going to conclude here looking at a brief passage from the book super imperialism the origins and fundamentals of U.S World dominance by The Economist Michael Hudson friend of the show genius and he spelled out very clearly what the goal of the Marshall Plan was in his chapter monetary imperialism about the U.S monetary imperialism and he noted that apart from the moral appeal of a more open world economy the United States provided martial plan Aid to war-torn Europe and offered foreign aid loans to cover the trade deficits anticipated to result from an international economy that everyone recognized would be dominated by U.S exporters and investors so it was a way of giving loans again not free money loans to Europe in dollars so Europe could use those dollars to import U.S products so there was a massive balance of payments uh problem here where Europe was importing a lot from the United States and the U.S was a surplus exporter it had a massive export Surplus a current account Surplus because it was exporting all these products as a major industrial power and in order to buy those products Europe needed dollars and they got the dollars through loans from the Marshall Plan and Michael Hudson continued saying that this U.S lending was designed to make the post-war system palatable enough for Europe and other regions to adopt relatively free trade and open their doors to U.S investors as currencies were made freely convertible and Nations agreed not to use devaluation to bolster their International payments at U.S expense what he's acknowledging there is that they had an agreement that was made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 in which the U.S dollar was made the global Reserve currency and the US dollar was pegged to gold at a fixed dollars for each troy ounce of gold but the these other Allied nations of the U.S agreed not to devalue their currency which would make their exports much more competitive because if a foreign company is going to import your products if they're paying in your currency and the currency of your of your country is devalued it's less powerful but the cost of the product is the same that means that your exports are cheaper which makes you more competitive but these countries agreed not to devalue their currency because that would hurt the competitiveness of U.S exports so that was a way for the U.S to maintain its massive Surplus that it had at this time and Michael Hudson has pointed out that the U.S had a trade surplus until the Korean War and then the Vietnam War when the U.S started running a massive current account deficit and that deficit came because of military spending to fund the U.S Empire and the hundreds of military bases around the world now as in addition to maintaining a market in Europe for U.S Goods the United States insisted as a condition for this Aid to Europe that it be given veto power in the international monetary fund the IMF and the World Bank and still today the United States is the only country that has veto power in these institutions that were created in the brentwoods conference in 1944 and it's one of the ways that the U.S has maintained its economic hegemony over much of the world largely the global South but also Europe so all this is to show that the system that the U.S created at the end of World War II was a system that subordinated Western Europe to U.S imperialism and still today that explains why there are 100 000 U.S troops in Europe there are 38 000 troops in Germany there are dozens of U.S military bases across Europe the U.S uses those bases to wage war around the world and it basically has its own uh you know fiefdoms where local law does not apply in those bases in those U.S military installations unfortunately there are not many politicians in Europe who have been speaking out against this but one of the few who is is the German leftist politicians of the left party dilinka and I in the description below I have links to the article that has her speech that she gave in the bundish dog on March 31st and I also in the description below will link to the other interview that I did with savim dogdalin talking about the proxy war in Ukraine and her activism trying to bring a peaceful resolution to that war I'm going to wrap up here I'm Ben Norton this is geopolitical economy report if you like the work that we do here please consider geopoliticaleconomy.com support or you can become a patron over at patreon.com geopolitical economy we have no institutional support we're completely independent in Grassroots so any support you 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