International
Why Germany is Doing Great and the U.S. is Floundering
Oct 18, 2010 16:13
Facts are sometimes hard to admit, especially when they refute some of our most dearly-held beliefs about how the country should be run.
Fact: German workers work less that Americans—by an enormous margin—but are more productive, and their economy is in great shape, with a favorable balance of payments and a banking system that is in excellent condition.
Fact: They are doing it with a real social safety net, including a form of national health insurance, generous pensions, livable wages, and a standard of living that uses half the energy that Americans use.
Fact: Americans have been consistently lied to by the media (and not just Fox, although they are by far the worst) about how productive and how well-treated German and other European workers are. By enacting policies and programs we have been told are “socialistic” they are more democratic, more secure, and their economy is in far better condition that ours.
Here’s a worthwhile interview with Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down the Drain.
Geoghegan points out that Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, and free nursing care. They really take care of their people and at the same time have built an economic powerhouse that is the envy of the rest of the world, excepting perhaps the U.S., where we are told that, being “socialism,” it is crumbling at this very moment. I heard the same prevarications 30 years ago in the respectable media. It was untrue then and it is untrue now.
The secret, dear reader, is that Germany actually manufactures things, like autos, chemicals, electronics and other products that they can sell to other nations, like the U.S. and China. We, on the other hand, manufacture pieces of paper that are quickly becoming radioactive among investors and central bankers the world over. This obviously cannot continue. Our legal and tax structure, Geoghegan points out, is biased towards finance, not manufacturing. For the past 30 years, our brightest graduates have gone into the paper business, because the system made financial manipulation far more profitable than manufacturing. Without something tangible to sell, however, those pieces of paper (bonds, other debit instruments and exotic derivatives) will eventually decline to junk status and we will be unable to swap them for the tangible things that China and Germany have to offer. At that point, we will be forced to rely on our own hideously shrunken manufacturing sector to supply us with our needs, and the moment of truth will be upon us.
To illustrate the dilemma we are in: The Mississippi Manufacturers Association, the political lobbying organization for business owners, makes it a custom to present a small gift to each legislator at the beginning of the new legislature. The gift is traditionally a product manufactured in Mississippi that reminds the legislators of the importance of manufacturing to the state. This year, the association had a hard time finding such a gift, due to the departure of so many manufacturers from Mississippi to Mexico and the far East. Clearly, a Nissan was out of the question. A frozen chicken lacks class. The association eventually found a product from a factory that had gone out of business and was purchased by a buyer who moved into the state from elsewhere.
Why has all this happened? The answer will not suit most Mississippians. Too many people in high places (and their followers in low places) accepted and acted upon the conservative claptrap that the Republican Party and others have been excreting since the middle 1970s. Even some Democrats drank the Kool-Aid. We have consequently created a system in which inequality has grown to levels last seen in the ‘20s and the golden age that preceded WWI, and which can accurately be described as a series of increasingly dangerous asset bubbles whose main purpose is to transfer money and property from the middle class to large banks and corporations and the outrageously wealthy persons who own and run them.
We let ourselves be fooled into thinking that the elites were on our side. At one time, I thought Mississippians would see through it all. I was mistaken.
That’s why we are where we are. It’s not a pretty picture. And we brought much of this upon ourselves.
Fact: German workers work less that Americans—by an enormous margin—but are more productive, and their economy is in great shape, with a favorable balance of payments and a banking system that is in excellent condition.
Fact: They are doing it with a real social safety net, including a form of national health insurance, generous pensions, livable wages, and a standard of living that uses half the energy that Americans use.
Fact: Americans have been consistently lied to by the media (and not just Fox, although they are by far the worst) about how productive and how well-treated German and other European workers are. By enacting policies and programs we have been told are “socialistic” they are more democratic, more secure, and their economy is in far better condition that ours.
Here’s a worthwhile interview with Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down the Drain.
Geoghegan points out that Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, and free nursing care. They really take care of their people and at the same time have built an economic powerhouse that is the envy of the rest of the world, excepting perhaps the U.S., where we are told that, being “socialism,” it is crumbling at this very moment. I heard the same prevarications 30 years ago in the respectable media. It was untrue then and it is untrue now.
The secret, dear reader, is that Germany actually manufactures things, like autos, chemicals, electronics and other products that they can sell to other nations, like the U.S. and China. We, on the other hand, manufacture pieces of paper that are quickly becoming radioactive among investors and central bankers the world over. This obviously cannot continue. Our legal and tax structure, Geoghegan points out, is biased towards finance, not manufacturing. For the past 30 years, our brightest graduates have gone into the paper business, because the system made financial manipulation far more profitable than manufacturing. Without something tangible to sell, however, those pieces of paper (bonds, other debit instruments and exotic derivatives) will eventually decline to junk status and we will be unable to swap them for the tangible things that China and Germany have to offer. At that point, we will be forced to rely on our own hideously shrunken manufacturing sector to supply us with our needs, and the moment of truth will be upon us.
To illustrate the dilemma we are in: The Mississippi Manufacturers Association, the political lobbying organization for business owners, makes it a custom to present a small gift to each legislator at the beginning of the new legislature. The gift is traditionally a product manufactured in Mississippi that reminds the legislators of the importance of manufacturing to the state. This year, the association had a hard time finding such a gift, due to the departure of so many manufacturers from Mississippi to Mexico and the far East. Clearly, a Nissan was out of the question. A frozen chicken lacks class. The association eventually found a product from a factory that had gone out of business and was purchased by a buyer who moved into the state from elsewhere.
Why has all this happened? The answer will not suit most Mississippians. Too many people in high places (and their followers in low places) accepted and acted upon the conservative claptrap that the Republican Party and others have been excreting since the middle 1970s. Even some Democrats drank the Kool-Aid. We have consequently created a system in which inequality has grown to levels last seen in the ‘20s and the golden age that preceded WWI, and which can accurately be described as a series of increasingly dangerous asset bubbles whose main purpose is to transfer money and property from the middle class to large banks and corporations and the outrageously wealthy persons who own and run them.
We let ourselves be fooled into thinking that the elites were on our side. At one time, I thought Mississippians would see through it all. I was mistaken.
That’s why we are where we are. It’s not a pretty picture. And we brought much of this upon ourselves.
Comments
Why There Will be More Attempted Bombings
Dec 30, 2009 21:35
The administration can call the fight with Islamic guerrillas a war if it likes, but it's more like the drug war than what we usually mean by the term "war." Typically, wars are fought by large military forces against the military forces of other nations. With an enemy that is small, dispersed, highly mobile, and virtually worldwide, traditional military doctrine is irrelevant, and mostly counter-productive. It's not a war in any traditional sense of the word and to treat it like a war is as big a mistake as treating the problem of substance abuse as a war. Not only that, it's a losing strategy, just like the war on drugs.
To start out, we need to address the question that the political class and the media have consistently avoided: why are these people trying to terrorize us? What is driving them to this pathological extremism?
The profound ignorance of the American people regarding Islam and the Middle East has made it easy to avoid serious discussion of how the great European empires (and now the American Empire) have interacted with Islam and the Middle East over the past 800 years to bring us to this point.
We forget easily; the people of the Middle East don't.
Worse—and it is a serious defect in the American character that will someday do us in—Americans don't believe that history matters. We believe that we are an exception and that the rules don't apply to us. History is bunk, as Henry Ford reportedly said.
Thus knowledgeable scholars and historians who could enlighten us but whose opinions differ from the official line are ignored by the media and the government and no one is the wiser.
Unless we learn some Middle Eastern history--especially the history of the last 150 years--and become willing to seriously discuss how we got to this point, there is little we can do to stop terrorists from trying to hurt us. We can search them out and destroy them, but others will rise to take their place if we don't exercise more intelligence and wisdom in formulating our domestic and foreign policies.
None of us wants to hear this, but the actions of this nation clearly had something to do with our problem with terrorism. It didn't arise out of nothing. A circle of Islamic fundamentalists weren't just sitting around drinking tea when they decided out of the blue to hijack some airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center. They had to be provoked in a big sort of way. Has the American public ever been informed of how they were provoked? I've done some studying, and although I make no claims whatever to any expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, I have learned enough to know that the terrorists have ongoing legitimate grievances that the U. S. Government is not addressing and probably never will address because it would have to make major changes in our foreign and domestic policies that would cost some big American corporations some big money.
In short, I am pessimistic. I expect us to be subjected to more and more petty humiliations and more restrictions of civil liberties when traveling—in the name of making us safer—but the threats will continue as terrorists think up new and more ingenious methods of blowing up aircraft, simply because their grievances never have and probably never will be addressed. They will occasionally succeed in their grisly business, and in addition to the tragic loss of life, I predict that the disasters will be used by the authorities as an excuse to further shred the protections of the Bill of Rights, all in the name of protecting us.
And we, who are as ignorant of our constitutional rights as we are of Islam and the Middle East, will meekly submit to all of it, believing that it is being done in our best interest.
To start out, we need to address the question that the political class and the media have consistently avoided: why are these people trying to terrorize us? What is driving them to this pathological extremism?
The profound ignorance of the American people regarding Islam and the Middle East has made it easy to avoid serious discussion of how the great European empires (and now the American Empire) have interacted with Islam and the Middle East over the past 800 years to bring us to this point.
We forget easily; the people of the Middle East don't.
Worse—and it is a serious defect in the American character that will someday do us in—Americans don't believe that history matters. We believe that we are an exception and that the rules don't apply to us. History is bunk, as Henry Ford reportedly said.
Thus knowledgeable scholars and historians who could enlighten us but whose opinions differ from the official line are ignored by the media and the government and no one is the wiser.
Unless we learn some Middle Eastern history--especially the history of the last 150 years--and become willing to seriously discuss how we got to this point, there is little we can do to stop terrorists from trying to hurt us. We can search them out and destroy them, but others will rise to take their place if we don't exercise more intelligence and wisdom in formulating our domestic and foreign policies.
None of us wants to hear this, but the actions of this nation clearly had something to do with our problem with terrorism. It didn't arise out of nothing. A circle of Islamic fundamentalists weren't just sitting around drinking tea when they decided out of the blue to hijack some airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center. They had to be provoked in a big sort of way. Has the American public ever been informed of how they were provoked? I've done some studying, and although I make no claims whatever to any expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, I have learned enough to know that the terrorists have ongoing legitimate grievances that the U. S. Government is not addressing and probably never will address because it would have to make major changes in our foreign and domestic policies that would cost some big American corporations some big money.
In short, I am pessimistic. I expect us to be subjected to more and more petty humiliations and more restrictions of civil liberties when traveling—in the name of making us safer—but the threats will continue as terrorists think up new and more ingenious methods of blowing up aircraft, simply because their grievances never have and probably never will be addressed. They will occasionally succeed in their grisly business, and in addition to the tragic loss of life, I predict that the disasters will be used by the authorities as an excuse to further shred the protections of the Bill of Rights, all in the name of protecting us.
And we, who are as ignorant of our constitutional rights as we are of Islam and the Middle East, will meekly submit to all of it, believing that it is being done in our best interest.
Iraq: The Surge Scam
Sep 27, 2008 21:46
It pained me last night that Obama was quoted as saying that the surge has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. That’s the message of the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the mainstream media who haven’t bothered to investigate.
Project Censored has helped to pull back the curtain on the awful truth about the invasion and occupation by listing as the Number One censored storie for 2009: Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation:
As a result, the flow of refugees has not abated. Iraq is a hellhole:
Eventually the truth will rise up and hit us in the face. That time is coming.
Project Censored has helped to pull back the curtain on the awful truth about the invasion and occupation by listing as the Number One censored storie for 2009: Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation:
Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.
As a result, the flow of refugees has not abated. Iraq is a hellhole:
Iraqis’ attempts to escape the violence have resulted in a refugee crisis of mammoth proportion. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, in 2007 almost 5 million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country, the vast majority of which had fled since 2003. Over 2.4 million vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq, up to 1.5 million were living in Syria, and over 1 million refugees were inhabiting Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and Gulf States. Iraq’s refugees, increasing by an average of almost 100,000 every month, have no legal work options in most host states and provinces and are increasingly desperate.
Yet more Iraqis continue to flee their homes than the numbers returning, despite official claims to the contrary. Thousands fleeing say security is as bad as ever, and that to return would be to accept death. Most of those who return are subsequently displaced again.
Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail quote an Iraqi engineer now working at a restaurant in Damascus, “Return to Iraq? There is no Iraq to return to, my friend. Iraq only exists in our dreams and memories.”
Eventually the truth will rise up and hit us in the face. That time is coming.
Georgia on my Mind
Aug 16, 2008 23:33
It appears that the Bush administration has encouraged strongman Saakashvili of Georgia to invade South Ossetia, perhaps even promising support in the event of a Russian military pushback. If so, it was another betrayal in a long list of Bush family betrayals, and the Georgians were fools to believe for one second that the U.S. would come to their aid. Georgia is not worth a nuclear war, or even the risk of one, however slight.
If one assumes, however, that Bush had a purpose in bringing this disaster upon Georgia, it is likely that he has done it with the intent to poison U.S. relations with the Russians, and thus present President Obama next January 20 with the gift of a new Cold War that he will find extremely difficult to abate.
It’s a variation of the scorched earth policy.
If one assumes, however, that Bush had a purpose in bringing this disaster upon Georgia, it is likely that he has done it with the intent to poison U.S. relations with the Russians, and thus present President Obama next January 20 with the gift of a new Cold War that he will find extremely difficult to abate.
It’s a variation of the scorched earth policy.