Anyone with eyes and internet access has seen more offensive cartoon depictions of Donald Trump than him holding up the decapitated head of a statue, but Germany’s Springer Verlag – represented by Bild and Die Welt – was so desperately outraged this weekend that they wondered whether Der Spiegel was “allowed” to run such a provocative image. The answer is obviously yes. As if those cunts of fake sanctimony have never thought of the idea of putting something deliberately polarizing on their front cover. (Indeed, on the same day as the Spiegel cover came out, Bild ran a headline speculating that the current US President was “incurably mentally ill”). Also, it’s a bit fucking rich coming from a publishing house whose CEO Mathias Döpfner wrote a passionate defence of Jan Böhmermann over the Erdogan goat-fucking poem.
But behind the fart of fake bluster over this cover in the media, Germany is quietly pulling its usual two-card trick when it comes to dealing with foreign dictators: while the politicians condemn the inhumanity, the businesses invest the German money in all their actions.
Trump’s trade guru Peter Navarro might not be happy with the way Germany is exploiting the “grossly undervalued” euro, but it didn’t do his boss any harm when he borrowed 300 million of them to build a golf course and his Washington hotel. In fact, the Fanta-faced fascist has been one of Deutsche Bank’s best customers over the past decades, borrowing some $2.5 billion from the biggest German bank since 1998. This could work well for the bank, because DB’s favourite client also got to pick the new US attorney general the other day, and he has inherited an investigation into Deutsche Bank’s failure to notice “systemic money-laundering” coming from – erm – Russia. One way or another, Germany always makes money.
Which is why it’s not surprising that Bavaria’s state bank – BayernLB – is one of the 17 financial institutions investing in the Dakota Access Pipeline, contributing $120 million to the $2.5 billion cost. Thanks to activist pressure some of those banks have since promised to “re-consider” their involvement in a massively destructive project that Trump re-activated – but not BayernLB (there’s a petition here). Given that this is one of the banks that Germany bailed out during that financial crisis a few years ago, this all seems a bit fucking mendacious to me.
