This article appears in the April 7, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Green Dictates Defeated in The Netherlands and Berlin
[Print version of this article]
March 29—Ninety years have passed since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and once again, untrammeled financial speculation has rendered the financial system insolvent. The panic-stricken oligarchs who dominate that system are reacting much as they did then, by trying to preserve their position through a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, using the mechanism of radical austerity. The challenge for them is to find a new way to sell this idea to their intended victims, and this time around, their preferred sales pitch is to insist that any relief from poverty is harmful to Mother Nature. Any form of economic development generates CO2, which is alleged to be causing harmful climate change; therefore, we are told, we must curtail our energy use, our intake of food, and according to National Public Radio, even our access to health care. However, recent developments in Europe suggest that this will not be an easy sell.
The Vote in The Netherlands
On March 15 in The Netherlands, the ruling party lost control of the Senate, as the population voted with and for the farmers, against the “green” dictates, in particular on nitrogen emissions. Nitrogen, another purported villain in the climate narrative, is a significant byproduct of farming and livestock, and the Dutch ruling party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (Dutch: Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie, VVD), had demanded huge reductions in agriculture in order to suppress nitrogen output [see accompanying article by Dr. Jaap Hanekamp on the nitrogen scare.]
The farm community mobilized to defend itself with an organization called the Farmers Defense Force (FDF). On March 11, the FDF organized a 25,000-plus demonstration by farmers, fishermen and others. During the organizing for the rally, the two FDF leaders, Sieta van Keimpema and Mark van den Oever, made it clear that they have the general welfare of all the people at heart, and worked diligently to build for the event. “We are not just sticking to farm issues,” said van den Oever. The organization took a stand on broader issues such as the “children’s allowance affair,” a government-designed algorithm, without a shade of justification, which accused thousands of families—many of them migrants—of fraud related to children’s aid, terrorizing them with heavy fines and threats, resulting in family break-ups and at least one suicide.
The Farmers Defense Force rose to the defense of other constituencies. Fishermen, especially shrimp fishermen, are being targeted as well by the new “green” restrictions on nitrogen emissions, and they have joined the farmers in protest actions such as the blocking of the port at Harlingen. All citizens are affected by the monstrous increase of the price of natural gas, which has more than quadrupled since 2019 due to the EU dictatorship and the war policy, and has already bankrupted a large number of family-run bakeries. There are a large number of collapsing houses in the province of Groningen, allegedly caused by gas drilling. The government has failed to reimburse households who suffered massive water damage from heavy rains in 2021 in the province of Limburg—averaging €50,000 per household. “These people will be on the podium with us, to be heard,” said van den Oever.
The government of VVD Prime Minister Mark Rutte decreed that if farmers brought tractors to The Hague for their protest on March 11, he would call out the military. He allowed only two symbolic tractors, but the demonstration, along with other activism, nonetheless had a significant impact. A huge sign was displayed on a highway overpass: “When the People Say No! The Nitrogen Policy’s Got To Go.” Four days later, the public voted Rutte’s party down in the elections in a stunning defeat for the Dutch establishment, and for Rutte, who has been Prime Minister for over a decade.
The victor in the March 15 elections was the recently formed BoerBurgerBeweging party (BBB—Farmer Citizen Alliance). The irony in the victory is that BBB has not been in the forefront of the farmer movement for science and food production, but has been the beneficiary of the recent wave of protest, being the only party with “farmer” (Boer) in its name. Until the recent vote, the BBB has had only one MP, Caroline Van der Plas, who has acted in partnership with the Rutte government. She is a former journalist, and heads the BBB, which has temporized with the green mandates, and is a darling of the controlled major media. Van der Plas and the BBB refused to even attend the huge March 11 farm protest demonstration at The Hague, with a bogus excuse about her concern for security. She did not send greetings to the rally.
On election eve, as the party debate took place, the Farmers Defense Force was present outside with 100 tractors to make their point. They showed a light display on the side of the building, “No to the Government.”
The question now is, will the BBB and van der Plas continue to be soft on the green austerity demands of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, or will they listen to the voices of Sieta van Keimpema and Mark van den Oever, along with farmers, the fishermen, and their families and the ordinary citizens?
The Berlin Referendum
The German capital of Berlin has also seen a dramatic upsurge in political activism. In February, 50,000 demonstrated against the war in Ukraine. During the week of March 20 to 24, there were farmer protests in Germany against government green mandates. Then on March 26, the “Climate Neutral 2030” referendum was resoundingly defeated.
The referendum, which aimed to impose “climate neutrality” in 2030 instead of 2045, would have been legally binding for the Berlin Senate, in contrast to earlier referenda on other topics. The Berlin Climate Protection and Energy Transition Act would have been changed from the mandate to achieve climate neutrality as a “goal,” to achieving climate neutrality as an “obligation,” although specifying no concrete measures to do so. These would have been left to the Senate, which mandate would amount to executing the final dissolution of Berlin, establishing a direct financial dictatorship, and imposing a deindustrialization comparable to that proposed in the notorious post-World War II Morgenthau Plan.
With an estimated cost of around €113 billion, the costs of the “climate neutrality” proposed by the referendum would have surpassed Berlin’s total budget (currently around €38 billion a year) three times over. But the far greater, and ongoing, cost to humanity would be the deindustrialization—effectively pastoralization—just mentioned.
The Funding Network Behind the Referendum
A handful of wealthy U.S. investment funds and bankers had designed the referendum as a pilot project for big cities internationally. The occasion of the referendum marked the first time that institutional research was conducted and publicized about the financial drive behind such “green” initiatives. €1.2 million were spent, including massive financing from U.S. “philanthropic” sources.
An article detailing this phenomenon was published by the public broadcasting organization Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) which, surprisingly, called attention to the fact that, as is so often the case with wealthy philanthropists, some of the donors might reasonably expect to be handsomely rewarded for their largesse, because they are major investors in “interruptible” energy technologies such as solar. The rbb revelations were then covered by popular daily papers such as Bild (“U.S. Multis Pump Money Into German Climate Election”) and Tagesspiegel.
Christian Social Union (CSU) politician Andrea Lindholz told Bild, “Almost three quarters of the donations to finance the Berlin 2030 referendum come from the U.S. With several hundred thousand euros, there is apparently an attempt to exert massive influence on politics in Germany from afar.” This is highly problematic, she said, because donations to parties from non-EU countries are “forbidden in principle.” “We do not want any outside influence on our democracy. A fundamental ban on foreign donations should therefore also apply to the organization of referendums.” [See accompanying statement of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party, or BüSo, in Berlin.]
The Significance of the Vote
The “Climate Neutral” referendum did not reach the required quorum of “yes” votes to pass, which would have been around 25% of all eligible voters in Berlin, or some 607,518 votes. Instead, the “yes” vote reached only 442,210, over 165,000 votes shy of the required total.
Particularly striking—and unexpected—was the high number of 423,418 “no” votes against a narrow majority of 442,210 yes votes, to the dismay of the Green financial sponsors and their media propagandists such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Many “experts” had expected that the opponents of the referendum would rather stay at home than go to the polling stations. But in six of Berlin’s twelve districts, the “no” votes even had a clear majority.
The dominant SPD, CDU and FDP parties opposed the referendum, on grounds of it being “too radical.” However, they did not campaign against it, and equivocated by promising to continue to stay on the “climate course.”
The failure of the Berlin climate referendum is in line with the national trend, that excessive green ideology projects no longer find a majority in the German population. Nor does the Greens’ drive for war against Russia have majority backing. A new opinion poll done in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg—the location of an oligarchical pilot project to have the Greens run the state government since 2017—shows a drastic loss of support for them among the state’s voters: From their 32.6% in the last election in 2021, the Greens have dropped more than 8% to 26%; whereas the Christian Democrats, previously far behind the Greens with only 24.1%, are now up to 27%. If there were elections now, the CDU would be able to take over the state’s government.
The European Union was conceived by its designers as a project to not only supplant the sovereignty of the individual European nations, but also to replace republican forms of government with technocratic rule by a combination of public and private financial institutions. But the Eurocrats have not yet succeeded in extirpating the ability of the citizenry to intervene with their votes, and the wave of political activism which is presently sweeping the continent may soon take Europe in a new and unexpected direction.
