Expensive general secretary

Imagine that the French government has a mega-mission to give away and one of the candidate companies for that mission is of French origin. Other contenders come from the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. How likely do you think it is that the contract will be awarded to the French candidate?

We made a 10-year commitment to provide military support to Ukraine, defense industry cooperation, cyber-attack assistance and reconstruction. Our prime minister traveled to Kiev for this purpose to go and personally tell Zelensky the good news. Is it up to a caretaker government, which has obviously lost its mandate in the House of Representatives, to commit our country for such a long time to commitments whose financial impact we do not know?

Treatment Inequality and Trade Restrictions

There is substantially better treatment of refugees from Ukraine compared to refugees from other countries. That's what the latter group of refugees, lying on the lawn next to the Ter Apel reception site, is wondering aloud. In the media I consume, I read little about it. I did see an action pass by Mona Keizer of BBB, in which she advocates that Ukrainians lose their allowances the moment they get a paying job. Ms. Piri of the GroenLinks-PvdA knows exactly why that is right. I cannot reconstruct it here; that reasoning is too mathematical for me. I also don't think that the average voter thinks that double payment for Ukrainians is justified.

ASML is not allowed by the US to supply machines with new technology to China. I would have liked to have printed this sentence in bold. Don't we assertive Dutch get very angry when a foreign nation starts interfering in our businesses? No way, The Hague carries out what Washington wants and puts ASML on the hook. At NVIDIA, an American company that is the world leader in chip sales, the billions are sloshing against the skirting boards. Its founder, Jen-Hsun Huang, was born in Taiwan. How was it again with the relationship between Taiwan and China?

Our pension money is being deployed

Our outgoing government is asking pension funds to invest in defense companies. The last measurement I have seen of the size of our pension capital is as much as 1,000 billion euros. Under pressure from NGOs and pensioners, the investment policies of pension funds have been increasingly adapted to, let's say, new social views on environmental, climate and social issues. No investments in, for example, polluting industries, in oil, in tobacco and in the arms industry. These social views apparently suddenly change when there is fighting on our continent. Then we have to start rapidly investing in weaponry and even our pension money has to be used. Coincidentally, it is mostly American companies that earn billions from our fear.

I cannot separate it all from Mark Rutte's ambition to become Secretary General of NATO. He has been on Washington's leash for 12 years. It looks like he is trying to make some final arrangements in his final stages to secure his appointment. The Hague will probably explain that it is very important for our little country to have a Dutchman in such an important post. I think it is a very expensive investment and doubt the future return.