Peter Boehringer, March 19, 2020, European Central Bank and Corona Crisis

Peter Boehringer

European Central Bank and Corona Crisis

AfD Kompakt, March 19, 2020

[Peter Boehringer is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Bavaria and is chairman of the Bundestag budget committee.]

It is true that extraordinary times like the present Corona crisis require extraordinary action. Yet is is also to be noted that the ECB [European Central Bank] is figuring on expanding the loans purchasing program which in the past was highly controversial and to which the Federal Constitutional Court has not to this day given the green light. The renewed monetization of loans is, in addition, counter to the mandate, although in the time of the Corona pandemic is at least understandable. Yet there is a price to be paid for the more than five years that the ECB has abused its mandate – since 2015, the presently employed, instrumental accounts have been abusively plundered.    

Tragically, the ECB, absent an existential crisis in past years, has for the most part fired its powder, so that the purchase program foreseeably will calm the capital markets only for a short period. Today’s new “Whatever it takes” will, by repetition, lose its effect; the euro will further weaken because it is increasingly distrusted by men and by capital markets.

The exceptional and emergency measures presently employed would be more effective if the ECB had at its disposal more room to lower interest rates, and if, shortly before the Corona crisis, the ECB had not effected loan purchases of over 3 trillion euros! The present measures, along with the crisis, can only soon become inflationary – this time also for consumer goods prices. People with particularly weak incomes will then suffer under these measures.

The AfD Bundestag delegation therefore demands that:

1. These measures, being the clear economic policy of the ECB (though far from its mandate), be strictly limited to the time of overcoming the Corona crisis.

2. They ought not to be limited to loan purchases, since only banks and large firms are generally capable of emitting loans.

3. There must be some way (perhaps through non-bureaucratic, state securities) with this ECB money of saving the independent and small and mid-sized firms, instead of yet again the banks and the big businesses.

4. The buoyant billions must be apportioned through the regular credit-granting process of the commercial banks to the people and thus not through the direct loans of the ECB, contrary to the well-founded mandate.

5. It is unfair to enforce, concealed under the shelter of the Corona crisis, additional bailouts of banks and as well as of states insolvent long before Corona. That money, to a great extent collateralized by German credit, ought to be for the good of, among others, the distressed German people and businesses, and not simply for the euro bail-out and the EU banks.  

It is a matter of great concern that, according to media reports, the Federal Minister for Finance, along with the ECB, wishes to first of all “support EUropa” and then, secondly, to save the Germans.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Alice Weidel, March 4, 2020, Coronavirus

Alice Weidel

Coronavirus

German Bundestag, March 4, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/148, pp. 18440-18441

[Alice Weidel is a chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland delegation in the German Bundestag as well as AfD chairman in the western German state of Baden-Württemberg. Charité is a large hospital in Berlin. Jens Spahn is German Minister for Health.]

Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

The situation is serious. Worldwide, the Coronavirus has seized 76 countries and produced over 3,200 deaths. 93,000 are presently registered as infected. Meanwhile, in Germany the number of confirmed infections has risen to 258.

No one knows exactly how many people actually carry the virus and spread it further. The leader of virology at Charité warns: Up to 70 percent of the German population could be infected. Nevertheless, there is as of today no well-designed Corona testing organization with clear lines of responsibility. He who arrives from an at-risk area, and will allow himself to be tested, is often sent from Pontius to Pilate – no one feels himself to be competent. This chaos and this competence confusion are not a doom from out of the blue; it is the consequence of a substantial political failure and amounts to a negligent gamble with the lives and health of our citizens.

From what we generally know, there is with this virus a higher danger of infection and greater risk of fatality than with the common flu. A recognition which you, Herr Spahn, were still disavowing on January 24. You said that the Corona infection develops more mildly. That was not your only false statement. On January 27, you asserted that we are well prepared. You are still doing it.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): For you, it has to be bad!

Four weeks later, on February 26, you admitted: We find ourselves at the beginning of a Corona epidemic. Nothing happened is these decisive weeks.

            Andrew Ullmann (SPD): That is not correct.

Christian Aschenberg-Dugnus (FDP): You certainly know nothing about it!

You are of the opinion that time must be gained for the necessary preventative measures. In the past weeks, you should have long since accomplished that. Instead of employing your own competence, you hide behind cost-benefit analyses which are like water in a sieve for overcoming the crisis.

            Claudia Roth (Greens – Augsburg): Mein Gott!

Even now, there is presently no crisis center to plan for the securing of care by preparing preventative supplies. This ought to have been done weeks ago.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Must you make political capital out of everything?

Now it comes home to the fact that, during your time in office, the last antibiotic production facility in Germany had to be closed. The supply situation of the corresponding medicines visibly worsens.

The people’s unrest would doubtless be much less if this government could have made a more competent and serious impression and if the citizens could have had confidence that their government concerned itself with its core duties; in fact, the defense of the citizen and crisis prevention, which you for weeks have culpably neglected.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): You have today once again disqualified yourself!

Time is short. Therefore the consequences of the changes and communications failures are not to be retrieved. Instead of rhetorical pablum, substantial, immediate measures are now required. We must comprehensively employ and ceaselessly expand the available treatment capacities so as to arm them against a sudden increase in the cases of illness. How many intensive care beds can be made ready in the short term, how many isolation stations are available?

            Karin Maag (CDU/CSU): We know that, Frau Weidel. Only you don’t.

How many will be required? That must be coordinated. We need comprehensive and obligatory tests for persons at risk as well as for the people suffering from the flu or a bad cold.

            Andrew Ullmann (FDP): There are no screening tests.

A separate testing infrastructure is required, instead of leaving it to the practicing doctors and the hospitals with their research and care-giving. To expect that house doctors and primary care practitioners can render aid without the necessary support borders on a negligent act of bodily harm.

The urgently lacking preventative supplies for doctors and medical personnel should be made ready. Otherwise, the failure last Sunday at Charité will be repeated, in which an entire emergency room shift had to be put in quarantine after a suspected case had tested strongly positive, and that after the patient had been sent home. Also needed are temperature controls in the airports, as is being done in China.

            Sabine Dittmar (SPD): What a waste!

The voluntarily completed questionnaires which the Federal government composes are, unfortunately, ineffective. We require a systematic entry control at the border which the Federal government unfortunately rejects. Austria can stop trains, the Italians can put migrant ships in quarantine, but Germany leaves the borders uncontrolled.

            (Noise from the Greens: Ah!)

We know you find that funny.

The unresolved migration crisis is now dramatically intensifying. With particular intensity, the virus rages in the Near and Middle East. And now Turkey puts an estimated tens of thousands of migrants on the way to Europe.

            Florian Post (SPD): Should we close the borders?

Nevertheless, the Federal government proclaims the dogma of open borders. This obstinacy aggravates the danger of infection and can cost lives.

Anton Hofreiter (Greens): You must be happy that you are allowed over the Swiss border!

The usual lobbyists – Herr Hofreiter, you are screeching again – accordingly cry for the controlled incorporation of all [alle kontrolliert aufzunehmen]. That is not only naïve, that is hair-raisingly irresponsible.

            Kersten Steinke (Linke): That is humane!

For the especially endangered parts of the population, old people, people with multiple illnesses, substantive protective measures must be taken. Also, they must feel that they can and must contribute. Due to the striking neglect of the timely identification of those persons unfortunately already infected, there can now occur a sudden increase in the number of cases of illness.

Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, this theme is very personal for me.

            Britta Haßelmann (Greens): Obviously.

We are dealing with an authentic crisis. Naïve podcasts by the Chancellor, soothing sermons, measured and moderate, or “We are well prepared” cannot talk that away. Where is the strategy? I see none at all! Wake up! Please be professional. Apply yourselves to the real problems, and conduct yourselves as befits the interest of this country and its citizens! That is what you were elected for and we stand ready to support you.

Many thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

           

           

Lothar Maier, March 5, 2020, Raw Materials Supply

Lothar Maier

Raw Materials Supply

German Bundestag, March 5, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/149, pp. 18643-18644

[Lothar Maier is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the western German state of Baden-Württemberg. He is a retired economics professor. He here presents an AfD motion (Drucksache 19/17525) concerning German raw materials supply.]

Right honorable Herr President. Ladies and gentlemen.

In this debate, we are speaking of German industry’s mid and long term supply of raw materials, and specifically of those which we must import from non-European countries. Raw materials supply generally becoming a greater problem was not foreseen ten years ago. The economy was accustomed to be able to purchase any necessary material in sufficient quantity on the world market. Not even one raw material was actually scarce.

Today we must acknowledge that ever more important raw materials are ever more difficult to procure. Rare earths, diverse metals, minerals, sources of energy and even certain agricultural raw materials. The reason is not the exhaustion of raw material reserves but the centralization of the market. Large consumers, primarily China, but also the USA, France and Great Britain, have secured monopolistic hold on important sources of minerals and determine the price. Worthy colleagues, ja, with raw materials, power politics is being pursued. Who would have thought it?

Late, but not too late, the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie has pointed to the threatening dangers in its Berlin raw materials declaration and admonished the Federal government to take resolute action. Sadly, this alarm was unable to waken the Federal government from its deep slumber. There, one appears to continue to believe that the market will regulate all. It does that, but with consequences other than those dreamt of by this government.

There is no coherent German raw materials policy to speak of. China has secured for itself not only raw material reserves in Africa, South America and Asia, in which not only the deposits are brought under control but to which is also delivered the necessary infrastructure like streets, railroads, harbors and airports for complete transportation and processing. German investments in this sector remain at best selective and uncoordinated. They will not be supported diplomatically by the Federal government and adjusted to a development concept for the target country, nor will the possibilities of technical cooperation be employed for supportive measures, primarily in the area of infrastructure but also for the training requirements for qualified skilled labor. TZ [Technical Cooperation] and private investments run along unrelated to one another and often the TZ pursues goals which seem to originate from another world.   

The Development Ministry’s budget of 10 billion euros allows it to finance the infrastructure and training projects of many significant private investments in the target countries which could economically advance those countries. Instead, a large portion of the TZ budget for small and micro projects is squandered by a highly dubious setting of goals, meaningless for development policy. As an example, I name here 170,000 euros for gender-sensitive, male employment in Nicaragua, 67,000 euros for the improvement of the sexual and reproductive health of youth in Bolivia’s District 8 –

            Uwe Kekeritz (Greens): Describe the case for once! What is the background?

– 234,000 euros for the integral and gender-based promotion of organized, small farm families in Uganda, etc., etc. If such projects help anyone at all, it is the employees of these German NGOs who implement them.       

What needs doing in foreign economic and development policy are the three measures we are presenting which correspond equally to German interests as well as to those of the target countries.

First: The coordination of German raw materials and development policy by the creation of an office of Federal commissioner for raw materials policy, its duties consisting of the bundling and linking of national initiatives for the securing of raw materials supply.

Second: The founding of a German raw materials company from an association of private firms which organizes the production and stock-piling of strategically important raw materials and which guides its work. There must be no, or only a very limited, public financial participation.

And third: A new orientation of the Technical Cooperation to the writing not of donated investments which fail as soon as the foreign sponsor has stopped financing the goal, but investments in mutual interests with a long term perspective. The goal of such a cooperation cannot alone consist only of the production and export of simple raw materials, but should also include the organized guidance of the initial processing stages in the target land and supportive measures for the German economy’s substantial investment in the partner countries.

Let’s do something unusual! Let’s do something useful for all!

Thank you.

[Translated by Todd Martin]