Germany: Still Nazis After All These Years

The only way to save Europe is to forgive every penny of Greece's debt and throw Germany out of the European Union before it accomplishes by lethal austerity what Hitler couldn't do with armies.

Being part German I can say this:  Germans have always been Nazis, are Nazis today, always will be Nazis.

Also: deadbeats who still owe WWI and WWII reparations to Greece, and motherfucking liars about it. 

Digby: 

Krugman:

Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro. 

Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for. 

Can anything pull Europe back from the brink? Word is that Mario Draghi is trying to reintroduce some sanity, that Hollande is finally showing a bit of the pushback against German morality-play economics that he so signally failed to supply in the past. But much of the damage has already been done. Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this? 

In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line. This has no bearing at all on the underlying economics of austerity. It’s as true as ever that imposing harsh austerity without debt relief is a doomed policy no matter how willing the country is to accept suffering. And this in turn means that even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end. 

Can Greece pull off a successful exit? Will Germany try to block a recovery? (Sorry, but that’s the kind of thing we must now ask.) 

The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it.

It appears that Europe (especially the Germans and the Dutch) will accept nothing but Greeks immolating themselves and them jumping off a cliff en masse to atone for the temerity of failing to be proper working drones. Hopefully this will also prepare all unions and left leaning political parties to follow suit.  They have been very bad, especially the public employees who will be required to flagellate themselves prior to the immolation as lesson to anyone who thinks government employees deserve to live like other human beings. (If you want to live like a human being get rich or STFU.)

Margaret Thatcher is laughing in hell. Along with some other memorable historical figures.

Steve M. points out that it's not just the Germans, but (rich, white, conservative) elites of Northern Europe: 

Yes, conservatives in Europe and America favor economic policies that comfort the comfortable. But, in both cases, the specific means of doing that is afflicting the afflicted -- and the way you get popular buy-in on that is to define the afflicted as people who deserve all the affliction they're already suffering, and more, because they're so shiftless and lazy.

The underdogs are supposed to do all the sacrificing, because the world is divided into the deserving and the undeserving, and the deserving shouldn't really sacrifice at all. The deserving are morally superior. (Middle-class and even lower-class supporters of conservatives, at least here in America, identify with society's winners, even if they don't share in the spoils.)

We're expected to think that the overdogs want to find solutions to economic crises, but, in fact, they don't want to do what's necessary if what's necessary involves serious sacrifice on their part. They think of themselves as the ones who have a genuine work ethic and who are willing to delay gratification, but in reality they insist that their gratification must proceed uninterrupted, because they deserve that. The underdogs don't deserve any gratification, ever, because they don't -- and that's true even if lifting up the underdogs would help bring the economy back to general health. That doesn't matter. What matters is that the underdogs must be punished.

The Economy That "Socialism" Produces

The funny - or tragic - part is that Germany's economy can best be described as non-totalitarian capitalism.  We've just gotten so used to the lords-n-serfs corporatism of the last 30 years in the U.S. that we think anything that comes within a light-year of recognizing workers as human beings must be socialism, if not outright communism.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Germans are much happier with their lot than Americans, writes Harold Meyerson. Satisfaction tracks more closely with a country's economy than its style of government, according to a recent Pew survey of the world's economies. Nine out of ten people in countries with "advanced" economies were dissatisfied with theirs, and eight felt their economies were "bad." Except Germany.

A strong, manufacturing-driven export economy (with the Euro a factor) and a weaker financial sector sets Germany apart from the United States. Whereas 58 percent in the U.S. feel the economy is bad, 85 percent of Germans felt things in Germany were going well. Why?

Many of Germany’s most successful companies are privately owned and not subject to investor pressure to reward large shareholders through practices prevalent in the United States, such as slashing wages, cutting back on worker training and research and development and buying back stock.

Publicly traded German companies still retain their earnings to invest in expansions, a practice that was the U.S. norm until the doctrine of rewarding shareholders with nearly all of a company’s profits took hold during the past quarter-century.

In the United States, major shareholders and the top executives whose pay increasingly is linked to stock price control the corporate boards that approve these kinds of distributions of their companies’ earnings. In Germany, however, the profits that companies rack up are shared more broadly because shareholders don’t dominate corporate boards. By law, any sizable German company must divide the seats on its board equally between management- and worker-selected representatives. Any company with more than 50 employees must have managers meet regularly with workers’ councils to discuss and negotiate issues of working conditions (but not pay).

These arrangements have largely ensured that the funding is there for the world’s best worker-training programs and that the most highly skilled and compensated jobs of such globalized German firms as Daimler and Siemens remain in Germany. They have ensured that prosperity is widely shared in Germany — not concentrated at the top, as it is in the United States.

Damned socialists. No ... wait.

Some friends observed that tax and economic policy changes in this country over the last thirty years have shifted the business model from one that encouraged, long, slow growth sustained by good schools, sound infrastructure, and reinvestment -- more like the German model -- to one that encourages financialization and get-rich-quick schemes. Make your money fast and cash out. If that's not your business model, said one from experience, American venture capitalists are uninterested in your better mousetrap.

Says Meyerson, since the 1980s U.S. business and government leaned on Germany "to get with the Wall Street program." The Germans declined. Their economy did not. Overall, Germans seem rather satisfied with the results.