Jörn König, July 4, 2024, Digital Euro

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/181, pp. 23585-23586. 

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable colleagues. Dear savers. 

I affirm that the FDP and the Union have taken over our slogan from the first reading, “Cash is Printed Freedom” – very nice! 

            Enrico Komning (AfD): Excellent! Well done!

Our goal is namely to maintain cash as the only legal means of payment, and bind the introduction of the digital euro to a referendum vote according to Article 20, paragraph 2 of the Basic Law. 

The Union cannot do that; since the AfD is the only party which wants to introduce the popular referendum at the Federal level. The Union is thus restricted in its possibilities and thus “only” demands that the German Bundestag needs to agree to the introduction of a digital euro. More, the Union cannot do. 

The Ampel coalition is still much worse: They want to allow introduction of the digital euro by the ECB without any parliamentary control. 

Currencies – this, the German Currency Union of 1 July 1990 has shown – need to be a matter of the entire people, 

            Enrico Komning (AfD): That is true democracy! 

            Marianne Schieder (SPD): Of that, you have no idea! 

            Enrico Komning (AfD): Yes, direct democracy!

and plainly not the decision of technocrats. Yet the ECB consists only of technocrats, and presently Germany as the largest nation in the ECB Council does not have a vote. 

            Frank Schäffler (FDP): No, we have a vote!

For many months, no vote; the voting rights rotate every four months. 

In the U.S.A. also the risks are recognized and the central bank by law is forbidden three points, among others: First, to issue a digital dollar without express approval of the Congress; second, to issue the digital dollar direct to an individual person; and third, to give up control over the digital currency policy to unelected technocrats. If indeed our hegemon U.S.A. warns of the surveillance by means of digital currencies, then there must be something to it. 

The digital euro is from our viewpoint a further step in the direction of the virtualization of money – away from the human haptic 

            (The speaker holds up a piece of paper)

to a virtual abstraction. 

Jens Zimmermann (SPD): Yet you think it is not too big! What then is done with 200 euro bills?

Together with the EU-ID, a possible programming ability and a social credit system, some horror visions could become true. 

            Frank Schäffler (FDP): Your friends in China do it!

The authorities could limit where, when and what one may be paid, they could observe any transaction and take note. 

            Johannes Steiniger (CDU/CSU): Nonsense! 

            Armand Zorn (SPD): Simply just nonsense!

The state could connect the account with the CO₂ exhaust and the social credit score. 

            Johannes Steiniger (CDU/CSU): Are you still reciting correctly?

Yet the ultimate horror would be that account could be completely frozen. We do not want all of that, since freedom is the only thing that counts! 

            Jens Zimmermann (SPD): Do the people in the Ukraine also think that?

For all who think that the euro is a success story: The euro since its existence has lost 80 percent of its value. An 80 percent loss of value, that is a catastrophe for the saver. The measurement of value in euros is as absurd 

            Vice-president Katrin Göring-Eckardt: Herr König.

as if one wants to measure length with a rubber band. 

            Vice-president Katrin Göring-Eckardt: Come to an end. 

We are thus in favor of the measurement of value by money with a fixed, defined connection

Vice-president Katrin Göring-Eckardt: Your speaking time is up.

to natural resources. 

            Vice-president Katrin Göring-Eckardt: Your speaking time, Herr König, is up.

Many thanks for your attention. 

 

[trans: tem]

Albrecht Glaser, September 30, 2022, The Germans’ Atom Bomb

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/58, p. 6461.

 Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

The EU states are indebted far beyond the Maastricht criteria. This was in the year 2019, well before Corona. The numbers: Over 10 trillion euros, which corresponds to a debt ratio of 84 percent, instead of the required 60 percent consistent with the treaty.

In 1997, the stability and growth pact was decided on in the EU. Parallel to this, the manipulation of Greece’s debts situation, which was to make the country capable of accession, was known. The corresponding dossier on this manipulation still lies under lock and key at the ECB, although complaints were made; that has come out. The contradiction between treaty obligations on one side and the action of governments and states on the other side is since then the red thread of debts policy, and this benevolent consideration which we have just heard is an irony.

The 2008 financial crisis in the EU was principally a state debts crisis. Thus in 2012 a fiscal pact was concluded which obligated all treaty partners to create domestic regulations to prevent overflowing debts. Since then, the legal framework of debts policy is screwed around with until it is past recognition.

The consequences of that: France has debts of 113 percent, Spain of 118 percent, Portugal of 127 percent, Italy of 150 percent and Greece of 193 percent of gross domestic product. Wise heads in the Center for European Policy and at the Bundesbank state: Many members have never made the debts rule their own. Hundreds of violations have been committed by the states. That is around half of all possible treaty violations. The organs of the EU have imposed not one sanction – in regards this number of violations, ladies and gentlemen.

The CDU motion describes in numeral 1, letter a, a correct goal and it names many correct specific requirements, possibly in letters b to f. Yet it will surely find no majority in this house; it does not concern us. If it were found, it would not be enforceable in the EU. If it were enforceable in the EU, a majority of the member states would not adhere to it. That is your problem.

France, Italy and their retinue in southern Europe, which have a broad majority in all organs of the EU, from the Commission through the ECB to the EuGH [European High Court], because for example Cyprus and Malta have the same vote weight as Germany and the Netherlands, want the opposite of what the CDU motion wants. All of the “Club Med” states want the debts union and we are thereby at the crux of the matter.

At the beginning of the 90s, Mitterand spoke of the D-Mark as the Germans’ atom bomb. He said to Margaret Thatcher, I cite: Without a common currency, we are all, you and I, subject to the will of the Germans. – Therefore were Lagarde, who was a French minister prior to her ECB office, and Trichet, who previously was counselor to Giscard d’Estaing, sent into the running – we have left our candidates standing in the rain – and Draghi manages a limitless and illegal state financing of Italy by means of the ECB. That is the neutrality of the ECB for which you of the Union strongly stand, as you to this day write.   

We thus have in Germany not only a migration policy, a foreign and defense policy, an energy policy and a debts policy bankruptcy but also a euro policy one. That is the result of the years-long policy of all parties in this house. We therefore require a new one.

 

[trans: tem] 

Peter Boehringer, August 3, 2022, ECB Loan Purchases

AfD Kompakt, August 3, 2022.

After just a few weeks is shown that the ECB’s new loan purchase program, in the view of the AfD clearly counter to treaty and thus unlawful, proceeds entirely at the cost of the Germans. The Germans, who are primarily liable for the permanent rescue of the euro, now immediately receive with the evidently permanent asymmetric purchases of the ECB the worst of all worlds: High inflation as a result of the incessant printing of money in the eurozone’s “inflation community”, and also at the same time, climbing interest rates for credit for German individuals, businesses and even for the German state – while the Italian and Spanish indebtedness remains much too favorable or even becomes more favorable. The fathers of the Maastricht Treaty wanted to prevent exactly this state financing by the ECB as well as this liability and transfer community for excessive (southern) European debt-makers. Yet the corresponding Articles 123 and 125 of today’s EU Treaty will be ever more shamelessly ignored by the ECB.

Besides, the purchases, heedless of the ECB capital ratios and in the view of the Federal Constitutional Court actually illegal, nevertheless will not in the long term save the failed currency experiment of the euro because it deals with a faulty construction which besides harms all participants. Meanwhile, only the AfD has from the beginning stated these fully obvious facts.

Since now the ECB with its new programs even permanently institutionalizes the treaty violation, the long term decline of euro crisis and money devaluation is to be ended only by means of an exit of Germany from the euro’s permanently law-breaking “community of fate”. If we do not do this in good time, the entire cost of the southern European over-indebtedness is to be borne by the ultimately liable Germany, and thereby remains hanging over the German taxpayer, or – more likely – by all people through high rates of inflation, or in the form of a euro becoming ever weaker and ultimately by means of a “currency reform”. The volume of weak loans which will accumulate ever more dramatically in the ECB balance with many trillions of euros will ultimately exceed the entire financial assets of all Germans!

 

[trans: tem]

 

Peter Boehringer, July 12, 2022, Euro Devaluation

AfD Kompakt, July 12, 2022.

The euro’s weakness is no accident. It is the logical consequence of the failed economics and unchecked monetary policy of past decades. With its inflation policy, the ECB has in fact managed in a milieu of weak currencies to bring forth the weakest of all currencies and even to devalue the euro against the currency of the U.S.A., the world’s debts champion. Despite the record high inflation, the ECB avoids an appropriate change of interest rate and continually purchases state debts solely to maintain the euro’s southern countries’ ability to pay. The result of this state of affairs, contrary to treaty, is the devaluation of the euro.

In addition, the euro’s exchange rate is closely connected with the state of the German economy. Its downfall is the result of its real economic manipulation [Gängelung] by the Federal government and the EU: Over-regulation, CO₂ planned economy, subventions and cohesion policy, transfer payments, sanctions policy, debates laden with ideology are the crippling poison which undermines the economic power of the entire EU and this leads to the devaluation of the euro.

This devaluation to parity at the same time contradicts the myth according to which the severe price increases are in the first instance to be traced back to the war in the Ukraine. It is much more evident that the euro loses value on a broad front – the higher import prices thereby intensify the problem of inflation.

If the ECB does not immediately begin the change in interest rate, the capital flight out of the euro zone will be accelerated, purchasing power further weaken and the entire euro zone drawn into stagflation. Yet since here a reversal in the monetary policy will foreseeably fail due to resistance of Italy, France and other countries, can ultimately only an exit of Germany from the euro zone and a return to the D-mark stop the devaluation and with it the asoziale inflation.

 

[trans: tem]