Why Germany Will Undergo Radical Change This Year

[Purveyor]

Not long ago, the world was looking upon our nation with admiration. During the soccer World Cup in 2006, Germany seemed like a cheerful university dorm; a place that welcomes strangers, where everybody can party exuberantly. In the following years, Germany even turned into a role model. While our European neighbors slid into recession, jobs were created here. Young people from all over the world came, because the future looked brighter here.
But then came the summer of 2015.

Suddenly Molotov cocktails were flying into asylum-seekers' hostels. Within the first six months of this year, there have been around 200 attacks on refugee hostels. In July and August alone, the Federal Criminal Police Office reported 131 similar attacks by right-wing extremists. Additionally, verbal and physical attacks against foreigners in subways are increasing, and in one especially gross reported case, Nazis publicly urinated on the kids of a refugee family. Hundreds of them demonstrate in front of refugee shelters like in Heidenau, Saxony, even yelling at Angela Merkel during her visit to one of the shelters, calling her a "traitor to her people," an especially vile term of Nazi propaganda.

It is shocking that something like this should happen in Germany. Because it has nothing to do with the nation that many of us are experiencing daily. It doesn't fit the cosmopolitan atmosphere of bigger cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Munich.

This open, increasingly loud hatred against foreigners is mostly a small town phenomenon -- places with high unemployment, limited opportunities and a dangerous right-wing scene, in which the attackers are protected by others. One suspect in a recent attack, in which a refugee shelter was torched, is a fire fighter. A little later he helped to extinguish the fire.

For years, media and politics have overlooked and underestimated how powerful the right-wing movement has become in some parts of Germany. They have ignored the fact that small towns in the East German states are "culturally controlled almost entirely by right-wing extremists": with murals in the style of the Nazi period, references to Hitler's birthplace, and an atmosphere of fear exaggerated by the far right extremists. In these towns, the right-wing culture dominates everything from high school to the carpenter's shop.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sebastian-matthes/germany-refugee-crisis_b_8071114.html

[DetlefK]

1. The title is a typical Huffington Post click-bait-lie.

Germany will change!
The Nazis are coming back!
But it looks like the Nazis aren't coming back at all because they are a minority without political leverage and most Germans want to help the immigrants!

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. Absolutely right, the last part, but from the figures, it looks like Germany now

Last edited Wed Sep 2, 2015, 08:51 AM - Edit history (1)

has a real problem. They are still role models for the rest of the Western world, perhaps the entire globe. But they need to crack down on these scum real hard.

Simultaneously, it would be good if Germany could lead the way in prioritizing employment, as Pope Francis is urging, in furtherance of the Catholic Church's best-kept secret': its social policy - making capital serve man, instead of man serving and eventually becoming enslaved to capital.

Our leaders in the UK have always been far too comfortable with the parasitism inherited from the days of empire, (now, perforce, more exclusively focused on the country's own 'lower' classes), so that Britain has actually been in decline industrially, since the mid-nineteenth century; while, with the exception of the terrible lacuna of the first half of the twentieth century, Germany has been a manufacturing power-house. Maybe, fairly soon, manufacture itself will cease to be the priority it has been, but in the meantime, top marks to the Germans.

It seems noteworthy that, instead of gilded youths from Eton, paragons of the stock-holding sector, running the country, the Germans have a nuclear physicist, who very expeditiously shut down all the nuclear plants, after a certain accident in the Far East. And guess what? Most of it has been replaced by renewable energy sources. Nor have they stopped building on that by any means.

J Edwards Demming who converted the Japanese from a people who believed they could only copy Western products into top-flight industrial manufacturers, supplying better products than the UK or US. But guess what (again)? Demming said the idea of workers cooperating instead of competing wouldn't be acceptable in the US. Well, I think things may have changed in that regard.

But part of the reason they were able to do so well, is that MacArthur ruled that the CEO of any company could only earn a multiple of, I think, 12 times the income of the entry-level worker. Imagine how much money could be reinvested n the company and paid in corporation tax! Of course, with the noxious tentacles of western capitalism subverting their model set-up, that multiple rocketed long ago.

[DetlefK]

3. Germany will never go for british capitalism.

There were some manufacturing companies, e.g. Porsche, who tried to move from manufacturing to investment out of pure greed. The recession showed them the ways of their folly.

Same problem in the US: They are importing products from China because their economy is focused on shuffling virtual investment-tools back-and-forth instead of producing something tangible. There is many times more money circulating the planet as investment-tools than the combined global economic output of mankind.

Same with Fort Knox: Germany wanted its gold back but the US didn't even let them take a look at the gold! Why? Here's my speculation: There is no gold left at Fort Knox because the US used other people's gold as collateral for investments. Germany could have protested, demanded an inquiry and demanded its gold back. But it didn't. Why? Because Germany has done exactly the same with its gold-reserves: They used them as collateral for investments, secure in the knowledge that they would never need that monetary value back in the form of gold.




The economic culture is simply different in Germany where manufacturing is more important than the glossy world of stocks and investment. Oh, Germany has such banks and companies as well (possibly including the german central bank), but they are an aberration caused by, what else, the greed for making lots of money and doing so quick.

The german model of capitalism expressly includes regulation and a responsibility towards society, preventing the worst abuses. You will never see the predatory class-war capitalism of the US in Germany.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Yes. I learnt a lot about that in a book by Will Hutton of the Guardian.

I believe it was called, The State We're In, though there are a few with similar names he has written. Fascinating information.

Also, Michael Lewis' brilliant books.