Dirk Spaniel, November 14, 2019, Employment in the Automobile Industry

Dirk Spaniel

Employment in the Automobile Industry

German Bundestag, November 14, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/127, pp. 15872-15873

[Dirk Spaniel is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg and is an automotive engineer. Cem Özdemir, a leader of the Green party, is also from Baden-Württemberg.]

Right honorable Herr president. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

There are presently going about the country announcements of mass layoffs in the automobile industry. People are right to be anxious and many ask: How can this be? Is our industry no longer competitive? These mass layoffs are of political origin and indeed are from an EU regulation. The automobile industry is being politically compelled to convert to electo-mobility. Herr Ozdemir, you quite clearly know that.

Many celebrate yesterday’s apparent decision of Tesla –

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): What’s with the “apparent”?

 – to settle a new plant in the vicinity of Berlin and to create a maximum of 6,000 jobs. You however do not say that this plant will be principally built here in Germany because inconceivable sums in subventions will flow to this production site –

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): So how much?

– and electro-mobility will be irresponsibly subsidized.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Diesel would not be subsidized, or what?

We see now that you are repeating the failed promotion of the solar industry, and the burning of the hard-earned money of working people, for your ideological games.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Diesel was not promoted?

You also do not say that there is generally no market for the electric automobile in its present state of technical development. The people do not want electric cars.

            Matthias Gastel (Greens): Norway!

This market – even in Norway – will only be created artificially by your bans on competitive technologies and subventions of electric motors. Last year in the transport and environmental committee, experts and union representatives – yes, from IG Metall – had predicted precisely this crisis to you. Such points as: This could be the end of the German automobile industry…

You were warned and it was clear to you what was coming. You knew it. You of the Greens even still wanted a tightening of consumption regulations. You of the government willingly made allowances.

On March 23 of last year, the AfD requested this house to lodge a protest against this EU regulation so as to get around it. That is the root of all evil.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): You are the root of all evil!

We wanted to discuss publicly which consequences of this regulation threaten our industry.

            Alexander Ulrich (Left): Is there climate change or is there not climate change?

All of you, including the FDP, removed a public debate thereon from the orders of business. You did not want the people of this country to learn what was coming to them as a result of your policy.

            Oliver Luksic (FDP): You can say that all day long. 

            Christian Jung (FDP): Have you again drunk too much conspiracy elixir?

A transportation transformation here fantasized or the dancing of deluded people in the street will not in any case feed the families of the hundreds of thousands effected in the automobile industry. The emotional crusade against the automobile which you here are conducting, incited by those of the Greens and the Left, is especially irresponsible in a modern, industrial society.

            Katharina Dröge (Greens): You are talking nonsense!

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): You are irresponsible for a modern, industrial society!

Bureaucrats and lawyers in Berlin and Brussels, with the definition of a emissions-free vehicle as you find it in the EU regulation, are generally hindering the ability of engineers to find unbiased, technical solutions. Because bureaucracy and politics hinder these solutions, Herr Ozdemir, is precisely why the auto industry today must decide what to do.

You of the FDP – it certainly amazes me that at one time you wanted to be for synthetic fuels or at least said so here –

Michael Theurer (FDP): For ten years, we’ve been for synthetic fuels. You lie! You lie shamelessly!  

– have in committee rejected our motion on synthetic fuels, just like all the other parties here. Since you have rejected it, what you are doing here is hypocrisy.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): You know about hypocrisy!

In reality, all of that does not interest you. You are only attempting to make a good impression upon the public. You have rejected our motion on synthetic fuels and more competition so as to fulfill this regulation. That is a fact. That anyone can look up in the protocol.

           

Michael Theurer (FDP): We were for synthetic fuels. You can’t deny it!

And know it will come again in plenary session. And if you are now for it –

            Oliver Luksic (FDP): Here speaks the Pinocchio politician!

– then you can vote yes for this motion. We will move for a vote.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Great!

Yes, exactly.

            Jens Zimmermann (SPD): Tell that to your people, those who are still there!

The people of this country will be able to see who among you sitting here in the blue seats are responsible for the loss of their jobs. I hope that the people will then recall that at the next election.

            Michael Theurer (FDP): We do not need the AfD to come to the point.

We stand for the automobile and for the German automobile industry. You all have forsaken these jobs.

Many thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

           

           

Joana Cotar, November 14, 2019, Internet Governance Forum

Joana Cotar

Internet Governance Forum

German Bundestag, November 14, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/127, pp. 15939-15940

[Joana Cotar is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the central German state of Hessen. She is the AfD’s Bundestag spokesman for digital policy. Duden is the name of a German dictionary. Johann Nestroy is a 19th Century Austrian playwright and actor.]

Right honorable Frau President. Worthy colleagues.

At the end of November, the Internet Governance Forum will be held in Berlin. Internet experts from around the world will together discuss political, legal and technical questions of the internet – a fine thing actively attended to by the Digital Agenda Committee.

The CDU/CSU and the SPD now use this event for a motion entitled: “…Internet Governance Forum for an open and free global internet.” You will forgive that I must laugh at this title, worthy colleagues of the coalition. It just so happens that you, the party that in past years has wantonly driven forward the attack on internet freedom, now demand a free and global internet. That’s a lot of chutzpah! It happens that you, the originator of the NetzDG and the expediter of the upload filter say you want to maintain the free internet. How impudent can one actually be? You present here a show window motion which sounds nice and which shall deceive the citizens: “Look, we pay attention to you, we fight for freedom” and in reality you do the exact opposite.

            Kirsten Tackmann (Linke): You know about that!

For example, the Internet Enforcement Law [NetzDG]: A mostly unconstitutional law which like no other reduces internet freedom of opinion. So as not to risk being blocked, or the dissolution of their own profiles, many people no longer write what they think.

            Tankred Schipanski (CSU/CSU): Ridiculous, Frau colleague.

Recent studies indicate that the majority of Germans feel that the freedom of opinion is narrowed, that concerning specific issues one must calculate what one says. Never in my life would I have thought that in a free and democratic country like Germany that once again things could go so far.

We have in recent weeks celebrated the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. Instead of learning from history, there is celebrated in Germany the regime of denunciation and the resurrection of censorship.

But know that some employ your marvelous law as a model: authoritarian regimes like Venezuela, Vietnam, Belarus, Russia or Honduras, which have copied the NetzDG and use it as a disguise for the censorship and suppression of their own citizens. “Hearty congratulations” one can only say! We have a new export contender. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.

We of the AfD already in December 2017 presented a draft law for the abrogation of the NetzDG. It was now for the fifth time stricken from the committee’s orders of business after it was already in 2018 set aside umpteen times. You do not wish to occupy yourselves with that because for you the current curtailment of freedom of opinion does not go far enough. You are already working on an intensification of the NetzDG. Gobbledygook shall provide the required leeway so that disfavored expressions of opinion may be persecuted.

Do you know when I first encountered the term Hetze [agitation]? My father, during the rule of Ceausescu in Romania, was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment – because he allegedly agitated against the state. Do you notice something, ladies and gentlemen? Do you notice what happens when politics determines what Hetze is?

The NetzDG again emerges in the new UN report of the commissioners for freedom of opinion – as a negative example. It was vaguely formulated and leads to over-blocking. The associated business pressure leads automatically to the employment of upload filters, technologies that block content even before it is loaded on a platform.

And thus we are at the second theme: upload filter. Before the vote at the EU level, internet pioneers like the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, publicly appealed to the members of the EU. Upload filters would be used as “a tool for the automatic surveillance and control of the user.” Platforms would be forced to embed an “infrastructure for surveillance and censorship deep in their networks.” You took no interest in that. The principle proponent of the upload filter was Axel Voss, a member of the CDU. Katharina Barley of the SPD voted for it. And you now actually complain in your motion that the open and free internet is under world-wide threat – right, from you, dear representatives of the government parties. So you ought not to point a finger at Russia and China; three fingers are pointing back at you.  

Your present motion provokes in me utter scorn. That the government parties now demand from the government – that is, from their own people, a rapid construction of the internet – in addition to 24 further demands – because the government, thus their own people, for years did not do their homework on digitization matters, for me, rounds out the absurdity.

The FDP motion on the contrary goes in the right direction: maintenance of freedom of opinion, end-to-end encoding, not terminal encoding, for internet protocols, no backdoors or zero-day-exploits. The AfD already in May of this year demanded that in its motion “Freedom on the Internet – Strengthen Citizens’ Rights.”

            Manuel Höferlin (FDP): Us too! Long ago!

That’s nice that we agree on that, dear colleagues. The coalition on the other hand should once again look up in Duden the term “freedom.” Perhaps a quote from Nestroy may help them:

Censorship is the active admission of the mighty that they are capable of governing only stupefied slaves…but not a free people.

Many thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Peter Boehringer, October 24, 2019, Greece, Euro

Peter Boehringer

Greece, Euro

German Bundestag, October 24, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/21, p. 15045.

[Peter Boehringer is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the southern German state of Bavaria and is chairman of the Bundestag budget committee. He here presents an AfD motion calling on the federal government and the European Central Bank to end the present euro rescue regime and return Greece to the capital markets. Bettina Hagedorn (SPD) is parliamentary state secretary for the Federal Ministry of Finance.]

Frau President. Honored colleagues.

Greece desires the discharge of the relatively expensive IMF credits but not the more favorable ones of the EU. From the Greek viewpoint that is understandable; from the German viewpoint, not. One must recall here why actually in 2010 and 2102 the euro rescue institutions of the EFSF [European Financial Stabilization Facility] and the ESM [Euro Stabilization mechanism] were created.

Greece was ostensibly incapable of participating in the capital markets. That is in truth economically untenable – every country is always capable of capital market participation; that is exclusively a question of interest rates. Greece then however did not want to pay 8 or more percent. Therefore the Finance Ministry simply required only a good, old 1 percent, saving Greece and thereby yet again the euro and, before all, their own jobs.

Since then, the mini-interest credit gifts of that time have actually become expensive credits in the context of the ECB [European Central Bank]’s voodoo economics of negative interest  rates. In the meantime, Greece, thanks to the ECB, has again meaningful access to the capital market, even to the truly dream condition of the present yearly interest of approximately 0.7 percent – 0.7!

There is therefore, first, the economic question of why Greece is refinancing its repayments to the IMF at a relatively high interest rate of 3.1 percent. Second, there is before all the question of a parallel repayment of credits entirely other than that presented by the Federal Ministry of Finance. Excuse me, Frau Hagedorn, it is a great difference whether one is talking about re-financing  possibilities with a rate level at the height of 3.1 percent or of 0.7 percent. That is the decisive difference here.

Greece would be in position to accomplish two things in the regular capital market: the repayment of the IMF tranche, as desired, and in parallel with repayment to the ESM and the EFSF. Germany would thereby cancel a heap of toxic credits, indeed to the sum of 10 billion euros. The AfD would naturally participate in this procedure.

Why then does not one, God willing, simply receive the gift consequent of the ECB’s interest rate manipulation? Greece again has capital market access. And besides, thereby is removed the only basis upon which the rescue institutions of 2010 and 2012 after all had been founded.

The advantages alleged by the ESM of a renunciation of parallel repayments are not convincing. The ostensibly attenuated risk profile is marginal and completely negligible and the reduced exchange rate risk of euro special drawing rights is a conceit. Here one must more likely ask why euro rescue treaties are not allowed to operate the same as the euro.

The result: Greece with debt conversion would even save money. Simply take the gift of the capital markets. The ECB still pays the piper! With a two year loan, Greece in the meantime achieves almost complete freedom from interest. There are besides the developments of the last three months – the Federal Ministry of Finance could also now take a look at it: three months ago it was otherwise but today it is so. How many more entries into the capital market has one yet to expect? Credit for little effort – that is the dream of every bankrupt! Simply take it and remove Germany from the risk of a deficit. It works; the ECB makes the miracle possible.

Remove the German taxpayer from the liability. Vote for the resolution motion of the AfD!

Hearty thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]