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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Global Protests, Riots, Violence as Economies Unravel

In Hyperinflation First, Then Global War I first presented the theory that global economic instability will lead to the sudden unraveling of even advanced ethnic assimilation and that internal ethnic unrest is likely to rapidly escalate into full-scale external conflict between nation states.

In Global Violence, Gold: But Not Yet I got more specific:

"Protests are popping up all over the world now. They’re small and they’re being ‘managed’. However, the global economy will continue to deteriorate and somewhere some governments will fail under the stress. If the governments that fall are in an ethnically homogenous country, any transition will be fairly uneventful. If the governments that fall are in an ethnically diverse country, expect trouble."

The people of Iceland took to the streets and the government fell. As predicted, the transition was indeed uneventful. Why? The population of Iceland for all intents and purposes consists only of two ethnic groups: 93% Icelandic, 7% OTHER. The population is ethnically homogenous.

Ho-mo-ge-ne-ous:
1. composed of parts or elements that are all of the same kind; not heterogeneous: a homogeneous population.
2. of the same kind or nature; essentially alike.

What happens in a SLIGHTLY less homogeneous country?

Skinheads, Neo-Nazis Draw Fury at Dresden 1945 ‘Mourning March’: "German anti-immigrant, skinhead and neo-Nazi groups in the eastern city of Dresden staged one of their biggest demonstrations since German reunification in 1990 today, as 6,000 extremists marched through the streets, police said.

Groups tied to the National Democratic Party used the 64th anniversary of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden to hold a “mourning march” through the capital of the state of Saxony. Two counter-demonstrations, led by unions and political activists, drew almost 10,000, police spokesman Marko Laske said.

Black-clad youths gathered at the city’s main train station, waving black and black-white-and-red German nationalist flags as hundreds of police wearing body armor separated them from angry protesters, many of them screaming “Nazis out!”

“There’s nothing in Germany that could compare to the scale of this Nazi march,” said Robert Kusche, an activist with Kulturbuero Sachsen, which organized one of the counter- demonstrations.

For 10 years, anti-immigrant and skinhead groups have marked the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in Allied air raids, which took place Feb. 13-15, 1945, at the end of World War II. Their aims have been bolstered since the NPD entered the Saxony state assembly in 2004."

These protests are the single largest since 1990... the last time ECONOMIC INSTABILITY hit the local population hard.

Obviously some 6000 protestors is not yet alarming... but the TREND sure is. Also, the number of protestors completely under estimates true local sentiment. Election results are far more accurate and reliable. The National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP), a far-right, pan-German nationalist and white nationalist political party, has been making continued political progress winning 7.3% of the popular vote in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election in 2006 (For context, that is twice the 3.4% received by The Greens, the German environmental party.)

German Demographics are recipe for disaster:

"As of December 2004, about seven million foreign citizens were registered in Germany, and 19% of the country's residents were of foreign or partially foreign descent. The young are more likely to be of foreign descent than the old. 30% of Germans aged 15 years and younger have at least one parent born abroad. In the big cities 60% of children aged 5 years and younger have at least one parent born abroad.

The largest group (2.7 million) is from Turkey, and a majority of the rest are from European states such as Italy, Serbia, Greece, Poland, and Croatia. The United Nations Population Fund lists Germany as host to the third-highest number of international migrants worldwide, about 5% or 10 million of all 191 million migrants, or about 12% of the population of Germany. As a consequence of restrictions to Germany's formerly rather unrestricted laws on asylum and immigration, the number of immigrants seeking asylum or claiming German ethnicity (mostly from the former Soviet Union) has been declining steadily since 2000."

Unrest and violence is rather noticeably spreading...

Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide: "From lawyers in Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the globe.

Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.

High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

Last month, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.

Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism."

Sudden double digit unemployment tends to enrage the locals and they immediately start casting about for a scapegoat. Anybody DIFFERENT of course is the juiciest target of all.

This economic turmoil is the catalyst for the ascent of nationalist parties. Anti-immigrant and protectionist policies will become compelling arguments for the unemployed masses.



(The French protest all the time.)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope you're gonna tell us when you think it is time for gold...and I hope we haven't missed it!

Ben Bittrolff said...

It might be time for gold. I'm getting nervous about GBP and the Euro. The financial system is coming apart faster than I thought. I'll do an update on gold tonight.

Don't worry, you haven't missed it.

Anonymous said...

There's a lot of buzz on Denninger's and Mish's board about an FX dislocation event that is going to rock the markets. The PMs are rocketing. Is now a good time to go ultrashort now?

Vijay said...

Ben, is this what your trading station looks like?

:)

ps the Commercial Real-estate pigs are getting ready for the slaughter. So is your Goldman pig

Ben Bittrolff said...

Vijay,

You won't believe it, but I've seen that exact setup personally. It was in a hotel room in Toronto. It was a scam of a hedge fund that claimed to use neural nets... turns out they were organized crime...

Not even kidding.

Anonymous said...

Ben,
the paragraph about Germany is a little misleading. (I lived in Western Germany for most of my life.)
19% immigrants sounds impressive, but Switzerland has 22% (and guesstimated >40% in Zurich). While Germany has a serious demographic problem, it is the fertility rate being below 1.4 for the last 35 years, und subsequently the pension system collapsing within the next 10 years!
A few Nazi idiots are good for some headlines, but if anything Germany is likely to turn communist...

just my 2 cents

Anonymous said...

Communists are not exactly renowned for their brilliant human-rights track record either!

I think all the whining about the nazis and the commies misses the point entirely; They are spent forces now.

Some New form of totalitarian force will arise from the failure of the multi-cultural experiment of Europe and the US.

I.M.O. Vladimir Putin's rise to power in Russia represents one of the new forms of totalitarianism; which is why Putin is so interesting.

I am sure that there are many more waiting to emerge - although the EU is doing its very best also with its unelected board of cronies, the legislation that is so verbose and vaguely formulated that any meaning can be attributed to it (and is!), the fake referendums that must be repeated until the desired result is returned.

But, with luck, the EU will fall with the EURO!