President Donald Trump: even with majority in both houses, it is not going to be an easy ride

 

It the run towards the elections was not an easy ride, the first half of President Donald Trump is not going to be an easy ride either.

Having a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives is no guarantee of support when new projects reach both houses and full support will be needed to implement any piece of legislation.

Commentators of all political colours make all sorts of forecasts about the direction of travel of the new administration. Every statement made leads to speculation.

The reality is that from day one it is going to be a one day at a time business. Few could predict that COVID would be so fundamental in both national and international politics.

No one has the crystal ball to foresee what new crise will be in the horizon. At this point in time the one war that will lead to the big war could start anywhere. Political crisis in both Germany and France are just beginning and these are two major European players. It remains to be determined what will be the impact of massive political changes in both Germany and France. Bans could be the trigger of major events. Attempts to incarcerate Marine Le Pen in France could badly backfire. Attempts to ban AfD in Germany could literally destroy democracy in Germany. So who will be the players? Soonafter President Donald Trump is officially inaugurated as American President, there will be Federal Elections in Germany.

Car manufacturing is vital for the German economy and right now there are not just news about closures in Germany, but also closures in Europe when AUDI moves its operations to Brazil. Scania, Volkswagen and in the near future also AUDI will be based in Brazil. This will be of course good news for Brasilian workers, but not very good news for EU workers - at a time when Germany represents more than 24 per cent of the European Union economy. 

Environmental gatherings: Saving the planet?

Environmental summits are no more than grandiose talking shops for picture opportunities and empty promises and am sure that mass media loved them because they give them something to write about without much effort and surely there is a crowd worldwide eager to swallow every fib that comes out of magnificent wastes of time.

Headlines like 'tens of billions needed to save the planet' might sound impressive - am sure they sound impressive - but they are as impressive as meaningless as no country in the world will ever consider spending such amounts of money that will surely come from additional borrowing that would lead them to implement austerity policies that no one likes to implement because they usually land those who try to implement into deep water. 

Questions that are seldom asked include 'who is going to get such amount of money and what they would be suposed to do with it?'. The 'what for', 'how' and issues of accountability are non existing. As soons the the mass media circus is over, it will be business as usual until the next mass media circus. 

After the mass media circus, the real issues of everyday life will once again be on the table. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an energy crisis. Germany is said to be in talks with United Kingdom to seek gas supplies - Germany does not have enough storage capacity for liquidified gas and even if Germany had enough storage capacity the amount of energy obtained from liquidified gas is quickly reduced by the same process of turning liquified gas into usable gas. This putting aside issues involving transportation of liquified gas done with a lot of fossil fuels. All those ships that carry liquified gas use fossil fuels and this has a cost. The cost of maritime transport has gone up considerably to the point that bringing in goods from faraway places has become extremely onerous reducing commercial margins generated by low production costs abroad. Perhaps the German move to transfer production to China was inspired by the fact that bringing factories closer to raw materials will allow them to reduce production cost a lot more. Scania made a similar move years ago when much of the operation was transferred to Brazil. Brazil needed trucks and it was easier and cheaper to produce trucks in Brazil that incidentally was going to be a major market for Swedish trucks.

The other issue that lies around is fracking. For all the talk about fracking producing earthquakes, you would need specially sensitive equipment to detect such 'earthquakes', and obviously ordinary people who don't have such equipment will hardly ever know about the said 'earthquakes'. Mass media have been very active creating an artificial monster out of gullible minds that are very willing to believe whatever horror story they are told. Although fracking will not provide immediate results in terms of increasing energy supplies, it is something to take into consideration when energy supplies are going down. Nuclear energy is a certain possibility but it takes decades for a nuclear plant to be built to produce the energy that we desperately need. We need energy now. This is one of the subjects Germany will be discussing with Britain to avoid what now look like unavoidable blackouts in the biggest manufacturing country in Europe.