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https://theduran.com/americas-enormous-success-with-its-anti-russia-sanctions/

America’s Enormous Success With Its Anti-Russia Sanctions

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

As is documented by the figures from the U.S. Government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis — documented by those figures which are linked-to at the end of this article — the U.S. GDP for the fiscal year October 1 through September 30 throughout the time-span from the start of FY 2017 to the end of FY 2024, was anemic, generally around 2.5% annual increase in GDP, except for a -31.7% in Q2 2020 and a +33.4% in Q3 2020 — those two successive quarters representing respectively the covid-19 collapse as Trump was exiting the White House, and the Biden economic stimulus that started Biden’s Presidency and that added trillions to the federal debt. 

How many trillions were added? As Brendan Rascius of McClatchy News Service pointed out on 5 October 2022, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated in October 2022 that the Biden Administration had enacted policies through legislation and executive actions, which would add more than $4.8 trillion to federal deficits between 2021 and 2031, or nearly $2.5 trillion when excluding the projected positive effects of Biden’s American Rescue Plan; and, in comparison, the federal debt had risen by around $7.8 trillion under then-President Trump throughout his entire four years in office, and $8.6 trillion under President Barack Obama throughout his entire eight years in office. Obama, of course, had entered office in 2009 during George W. Bush’s U.S. financial crash, and much of that $8.6T of added federal debt was in order to borrow the funding to get out of it. If America will have another crash of that magnitude, there won’t be any capability left for the U.S. federal Government to borrow enough funds to resuscitate the U.S. economy (not, that is, given the fact that there’s now this soaring federal debt, which is already past the $33T mark), which will then become a corpse, producing, yet again, a global economic collapse, and probably the biggest one in all of history (bringing down the entire U.S. empire). (For this reason, many Governments are now net sellers of U.S. Treasury bonds. This already includes the world’s largest economy, China. It also already includes India. And Russia. And Indonesia. And Saudi Arabia. But not yet Germany. Nor Japan.)

Biden’s plan to avoid such a collapse of the United States has been to extract from America’s colonies whatever wealth will be needed in order to prevent such a collapse. America’s biggest colony is Germany, and here is how this has been done there:

On 9 March 2024, Bloomberg headlined “Germany’s Backbone of Family-Owned Firms Is Up for Sale”, and reported:

Steffen Cyris, the owner and chief executive of Schrutka-Peukert, a Bavarian manufacturer of refrigerated deli counters and dry-age beef rooms, boasted at last year’s Christmas party about the company’s packed order books, brushing off Germany’s broader economic woes and telling employees to prepare for some extra work this year.

But within a matter of weeks, that optimism was gone. Butchers and bakeries canceled their orders, pointing to subsidies Germany stopped at the beginning of January. Now, with the country sliding deeper into recession, Cyris is increasingly concerned about the long-term prospects of his business.

“The situation is so tense that I’m not sure I’d decline an offer from an investor should I get one,” he said.

Read More: Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End

Cyris’s unease reflects growing frustration among Germany’s roughly three million family-held companies — still the backbone of the country’s economy — which find themselves approaching a breaking point. With stiff economic headwinds, elevated borrowing costs and a proliferation of red tape, owners increasingly see critical investments in new technologies as unfeasible or not worth the trouble and are looking to bow out.

“The number of small and mid-sized German companies coming up for sale has been piling up for years,” said Jens Krane, head of mergers and acquisitions at Commerzbank AG, which specializes in the country’s Mittelstand, or family-owned businesses. … 

Germany’s Mittelstand has built a reputation globally for many highly specialized companies that are spread across the country and often dubbed as hidden champions. Traditionally owners preferred to pass on their companies within the family and only considered a sale if they had to.

Burc Hesse, a corporate partner at law firm Latham Watkins, said companies are now more open to offers from investors such as private equity funds.

“What we keep hearing from German founders and owners is that the complexities of running a business are greater than ever before,” Hesse said. “Price is becoming less relevant when selling your company.”

Read More: Rising Distress in Germany Signals A Lot More Troubles Ahead

Conditions have become even more challenging after Germany’s constitutional court last year ordered the ruling coalition to stop excessive off-budget funding. The government had to curb spending, which also limited some funds for businesses that were already struggling with higher energy costs. …

In one of the most prominent examples, the Frankfurt-based Viessman family sold its namesake heat-pump manufacturer to US firm Carrier Global Corp. last year in a cash-share deal valued at €12 billion ($13.1 billion). The sale caused an outcry within Germany’s corporate community, but the move was needed “to build a global, future-proof climate champion with more industrial size and scale,” CEO Max Viessmann told Bloomberg News in a statement.

As part of the deal, the company’s heir became one of the largest shareholders of Carrier Global and joined the board of directors of the Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, company. Viessmann is using part of his proceeds to get into investing, and has plans to expand his family-office activities. …

Cyris has begun moving part of his business to the US under the brand The Aging Room. He’s now selling dry-age beef rooms to fine dining restaurants and butchers in states including California and Florida, and is exploring options for getting an investor on board.

“Invented in Germany, made in the US, might be our way forward,” Cyris said.

Back on 28 September 2022, I headlined “How America Is Crushing Europe” and reported on and described the initial indications that America’s anti-Russian sanctions and blowing up of the Nord Stream energy pipelines from Russia were forcing German firms to relocate their manufacturing to America — and that Biden had instituted special inducements for them to relocate here. Then on 24 June 2023, I headlined “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline” and reported that the massive 20-year commitment of Germany to buy LNG (liquefied natural gas) compressed, canned and cross-Atlantic shipped, from the U.S. to Germany, to replace Russia’s prior super-cheap pipelined-in natural gas to Germany, will doom the German economy. The German Government’s response to this reality was to institute Government subsidies to consumers so as to hide the impact of what America was doing to Germany at least long enough to avoid getting voted out of office; but, as things have since turned out, that political tactic is already failing and already the German public are mad as hell about what’s happening to the German economy.

On 4 March 2024, I headlined “Statistical Comparisons U.S. v. Russia (etc.)” and presented and linked-to the past 25 years’ GDP data from the World Bank, and concluded by saying:

China and Russia were the most successful economies during the 25 years (inclusive) 1998-2022, especially for investors in those countries, but also for consumers and workers there. China was the top, then Russia. India was close behind Russia. South Korea was a little better than the global average. U.S., EU, and especially Japan, performed considerably worse than the global average.

So: we’re clearly at an inflection-point now in which the period from 1945 to at least 2022 has seen America growing its empire and exploiting its colonies, almost all of which have been underperforming the world’s economy; but, now, America’s extractions from its colonies are accelerating to such an extent that ever since America’s forcing Russia to invade Ukraine in 2022 and then imposing against Russia primary economic sanctions plus increasingly enforcing those sanctions by means of secondary economic sanctions against any firm or nation — including against any colony — that violates them, is increasing the rate of economic decline of the economies that are the most dependent upon the U.S. regime, which are America’s colonies.

Especially interesting is the fact that the German firms which are being squeezed by this U.S. operation are the Mittelstand, not the German giants, Germany’s mega-corporations, which are controlled by Germany’s and foreign billionaires and are far less vulnerable, because they already have lots of manufacturing done abroad. That’s the way things normally are in any empire: the imperial nation’s billionaires and the billionaires in their colonies, are the beneficiaries, but everyone else are losers from it. Imperialism, by its very nature, accentuates and causes to be extreme the inequality of wealth — both within and between countries.

Here are the data regarding:

Quarterly Annual Growth-Rate in U.S. GDP During 2017-2023

https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product

https://web.archive.org/web/20240308220620/https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product   March 8, 2023

https://web.archive.org/web/20230308073307/https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product   March 8, 2022

https://web.archive.org/web/20220308141833/https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product   March 8, 2021

https://web.archive.org/web/20210308193457/https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product   March 8, 2020 (showing also that at least for every quarter during 2017, 2018, and 2019, the quarterly annual growth-rate was consistently under 4% and averaged around 2.5% throughout that 3-year period).

https://web.archive.org/web/20200308174801/https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product   March 8, 2019 (showing for each of the last two quarters of 2019 a 2.1% annual growth-rate). So: ever since at least 2019, America’s economy has been performing at around a 2.5% annual growth-rate. These data are consistent with the World Bank’s figures that show that ever since at least the start of 1998, America’s GDP has increased 2.8 times what it was in 1998, whereas the world’s GDP has increased 3.7 times what it was then. So: there can be little doubt that America is a declining power and is increasingly taking this out against (is consuming) its own colonies so as to reduce and hide from the American public the regime’s failure.

Though the U.S. economic sanctions against Russia have done little if any net harm to that country, and in many ways have even helped it, these sanctions have unquestionably helped to postpone America’s economic crash — sort of like siphoning out from employees’ cars enough gasoline into your own car in order to keep your car running at least until the next election (or until you can retire into a compound paid-for by your mega-donors, and which will be guarded by government security forces).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.