Lessons from Europe’s Winners and Losers
Berlin had perfect weather last week, and there was no better place to watch the world go to pieces than Dressler’s open-air terrace on Unter den Linden. Berlin famously is one of the world’s coolest cities, an edgy outlet for young artists. But it is also the face of the economic future. German unemployment is down from 11% in 2006 to 6.8% this April, with barely a bump during the Great Recession of 2008. Back in 2006, by contrast, Spain’s unemployment rate was just 8%. Now it’s at 25%. Spain is likely to go bankrupt, right after Greece, and the Germans don’t really care. All of Germany’s export growth in the past ten years has gone to the east, not the south.
One really can’t talk about a European economy when key indicators are moving in opposite directions in different countries.
UNEMPLOYMENT IN SPAIN VS. GERMANY
Germany will emerge from the European crisis intact. So far, Germany hasn’t even noticed that there is a crisis. Berlin real estate prices are soaring, I’m told, as Greeks and Italians turn up with suitcases full of cash to invest in one of the few property markets that showed no price appreciation during the bubble years. More important: the smartest Greeks and Spaniards are looking for work in Germany. Germany’s workforce has begun to shrink rapidly, but it will assimilate skilled workers and professionals from the feckless European south.
“Familial amoralism” is, I believe, a phrase from Edward Banfield’s “The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society. The book is a classic which deserves a much wider audience. As I recall, Banfield describes people in a Southern Italian village and their unwillingness to cooperate with people outside of their immediate family – sometimes not even with them – and their willingness to sabotage other people out of envy or a weird sense of fairness. The Italian government is ineffective in overcoming this cultural perversity. Banfield contrasts this with voluntary social organization in the US. The modern American reader should worry most that the federal government seems to be actively disrupting and displacing American voluntary organization. -PB
their willingness to sabotage other people out of envy or a weird sense of fairness.
My wife is a Filipina. At Filipino gatherings, I’ve heard them discuss the “crab theory.” According to the theory, when you put a lot of crabs in a pot of hot water and one of them tries to escape, the others will reach up and pull the escapee back into the pot. Better they all go down than one get away. Our friends say this envy or jealosy is why it’s hard for a Filipino business to succeed. They know the business owner has to make a profit to survive but hate it when they don’t get a special discount. It sounds like what you’re describing in Italy.
Mexicans tell a variation of that story.
Reminds me of a rusian joke. two peasants find a bottle and open it. A genie pops out and grants them each one wish. the first one wishes for a cow. the second one says I wish his cow would die.
It’s not the same for all parts of Italy. Please note that the characters of us Italians are as different as the geography can suggest. Go tell someone from Bolzano or Aosta that they behave the same as someone from Palermo!
So, you can’t infer anything about a “national attitude” towards familism, but it can still be applied, unfortunately, to some parts of our country.
Just to colour this, and for once not crunching numbers, a small anecdote: as of now, whole classes of psychology and pedagogy students are packing their things to go help the population of the zone hit by the earthquake (basically Modena and Ferrara provinces) to recover form their fears. Voluntarily, and helped by their teachers.
More proof Socialism FAILES
One thing we are witnessing in Europe is the emergence of a market for governance. Naturally this privileges the northern countries versus the south.
The political classes in the southern countries have nothing to gain from standing aside, so this pattern is likely to persist: the northern economies will continue to act as magnets for both human and financial capital.
Europe’s political elites set up the EU so as to entrench their positions, but we can now see that what they did was to open the door through which their revenue sources are able to ‘vote with their feet’.
Your comments remind me of a recent column by Tom Sowell, recapping the history of Detroit. When supposedly enlightened social engineering by local government led to blacks’ rioting in the 1960s, whites fled to the suburbs. What was once the richest American city quickly became a hell-hole. But the social engineers could not have cared less, because the dependent voters who could not afford to flee became the majority, and have continued to vote for the fools and knaves who ruined the city ever since. The worse it gets, the more rewards for the evil geniuses behind the collapse.
I haven’t read the Sowell piece, but it’s also true that American automakers became dumb and complacent and let overseas manufacturers eat their lunch. That had a lot to do with the collapse of Detroit.
That is only partially true. Foreign manufacturers have been allowed to bring their autos to sell in the US with no constraints. US manufacturers had their products prohibitively taxed in other countries so that they could not compete in those countries. Those countries also aided their auto manufacturers by providing the employee health care, thus reducing the labor costs of those autos.
None of which explains why cars manufactured in the USA by companies such as Toyota still cost a couple thousand less to build than cars from US manufacturers.
US manufacturers caved to the unions thinking that the US consumer would pay the price. US consumers told GM and Chrysler to take a hike and purchased better cars for the same price or less.
One certainly sees this being played out in China, where GM now sells most of its cars, and makes them there too. GM had to establish “partnerships” with Chinese entities, and “share” their engineering technology. No such burdens would be placed on Chinese firms trying to set up shop in the US.
As to why Toyota, et.al. are able to sell for less and still make money manufacturing in the US, they set up “green field” sites and hired their pick of workers without the outstanding pension and health care burdens born by their Big Three US competitors. There’s a reason GM was once described as a health care company with a side business making cars.
The rest of the developed world is smarter than the USA when it comes to health care. Here in the US health insurance is generally provided by employers who have to cover the cost (highest in the world) by raising prices or paying lower wages. This is also why the US auto makers assemble a lot of their cars in Canada where the cost of health care is spread out between business and the general population. Note too however that medical providers in Canada earn less than their American counterparts. On the other hand they have to deal only with one standard insurance system where everyone has the same coverage, whereas here in the USA there are hundreds of private insurance plans, all of which vary in coverage and co-pay. Then there is Medicare and Medicaid which add to the confusion. Along with the world’s most costly medical malpractice which also adds to medical costs here in the USA. If our health care costs were comparable to those of the rest of the developed world, we’d be paying $900 billion dollars “less” a year than what we are paying. Of course we’d no longer have the world’s highest paid doctors, the world’s most expensive hospitals, the world’s most expensive drugs either…
Bill – I’m sorry, but the unions in Detroit managed to kill the golden goose by failing to react with anything except selfish interest when it became obvious, as it rapidly did, that Detroit couldn’t compete. I bought Anerican for many many years until the products became so shoddy, unreliable, and unappealing that I had not alternative.
Mick
In a rare moment of disagreement with you, I ask that you compare Detroit to Pittsburgh, who lost their backbone, the steel industry. Yet Pittsburgh adapted, transformed itself and is doing well, and was recently voted one of the most liveable cities in America.
Oe thing I noticed first hand was the automakers moving their plants to the midwest to non-union states. The families that could afford to go – went.
First thing tha started happening in the midwest was crack-labs springing up all over the place. The midwest was absolutely unprepared for this. Houses blew up all over the place from these things. Violent crimes sprung up immediately. The police were overwhelmed.
Talk about exporting crime. The midwest was decidely NOT thankful for the new autoplants. It just wasn’t worth the price they had to pay.
As someone who was born in Detroit and lived there from 1952-1977, and who has a brother who lives in Tennessee, perhaps I can shed a little light. Goldman is right about the auto industry. Obviously, if Detroit is an automobile manufacturer, it makes sense for a foreign automaker to locate there if for no other reason than an existing, experienced work force. So why build a factory in Spartanburg, SC? Because it’s a right-to-work state.
The fleeing of the middle class – white, initially, but with an increasing proportion of blacks as they, too, joined the middle class – was indeed a factor, but another one, regarding that initial “white flight,” never seems to get mentioned: The election, in 1974, of a racist and corrupt nmayor, Coleman Young, who then became, for all practical purposes, Mayor for Life and did much, during his two-decade reign (and “reign” very much is the correct word describe his administration) to drive Detroit down.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman_Young
Would it be possible to shrink the size of the graphs? They overlap the margin by quite a bit and are much larger than the eye is used to.
Yes, Germany will survive. As a condition of German reunification the French required the Germans to dump the German Mark and join the Euro. So, the Germans are united and their trade is expanding to the east as the southern tier goes bankrupt, why stay with the Euro? Germany didn’t want to join the Euro to begin with and the French dreams of a future European fiscal and political union isn’t going to happen.
Knock off the historical revisionism.
Germany was reunited because they ( Kohl Co. ) had their back covered by America.
Britain and France stood by — entirely — and watched as unification happen — because America wanted it.
The USSR threw in the towel.
One of her provisions was that NATO would not station troops in East Germany, after unification.
That held up — as long as the USSR.
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The desire of Germany for a super-stable currency goes quite a ways back. Not only did Germany suffer hyperinflation during the 20s — she also was currency-crippled from ’45 through’48.
By 1974 the brainiacs had devised the ECU. Originally intended to lock in margins for cross border trade in heavy industry ( The EU started as a steel, iron and coal trade agreement, 1955 )
It was from the ECU that the Euro rose. During its heyday, the ECU was a unit of contractual amount: like dollarizing, but without the dollar, it permitted currency neutralized settlements for big long term contracts.
Subsequently, the brainiacs decided that the same advantages should be spread wide. The ECU was renominated the Euro-mark, Euro-franc, etc. — set to exchange at 1:1, rigidly — and ultimately marketed to the man in the street as simply the EURO.
Not withstanding all of the B.S. about it being ONE CURRENCY — all of the players maintained their central banks and kept on issuing fiat currency. The ONLY significant differences being that these new fiats trade at 1:1 across all markets and mostly LOOK the same.
The give away: each issuer keeps track of their own — and use a letter designator for their specific issues.
X = Germany
Y = Greece
U = France
Oh, and of course, they MINT their own coins: each nation is still cranking out their own coins. They all show where they were minted — by their OBVERSE sides.
BTW, the Europeans don’t even follow, even nominally, their own coinage scheme, per their own style sheets. (!)
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The idea that the Euro is a unified currency is a hoax.
Let’s take the Drachma. It was super ceded by the Euro-Drachma, nee Euro, as one fiat replaced the other. A clear example of new lies for old.
Perfect.
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It still had/ has ONLY the backing of Athens. After all, that’s the rub right now.
Greek sovereign debt is NOT Euro debt.
Since ALL of the coins and notes issued by Athens are unique to her — WHEN she lets slip her commitment to the rigid exchange rate ( inevitable ) all that’s going to happen is that everyone holding Y terminating serial numbered notes is going to take a haircut.
I expect at this very moment, every non-Greek European is culling through their wallet/ purse to find these losers.
Next, they’re taking them to their bank and cashing them in as ‘in country’ deposits — before their exchange value plummets.
The bank, in turn, is remitting these duds back to Athens by the plane load. This is the source of the Athens banking crisis.
Naturally, it’s NOT making the news shows. The bank run is bad enough already.
Greek coins are also being rejected all across Europe.
No German, French or Dutch banker is stupid enough to force Greek currency back out onto the local street. Their goal is to get ALL of that junk back to Athens, ASAP.
This is the prelude to the Greek exodus.
Cue the chorus.
That explains M1, printed currency and coins, but what about demand deposits (M2) and the broader money supply, M3?
Are those much larger and more significant money types also kept keyed to national origin?
In a word: yes.
Read the treaty.
In it the various central banks pledge to follow the ECB lead — and to only issue so much new money, per annum, along with a whole string of budgetary commitments. ( All of which Athens has only paid lip service to, of course — hence the crisis when the others realized that Athens was a sovereign embezzler. )
These contractual pledges REQUIRE the various central banks to keep on keeping on: behind the curtain the ECB still wants all of those statistics. It was when Athens was audited by Berlin and Paris that the cat was let out of the bag: Athens wasn’t even close to fudging her numbers. They were astronomically far off — and had been from day zero.
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In modern economic practice most money is created in normal times as an adjunct to commercial money lending.
When Greek commercial lenders credit an Athenian’s account as a result of their loan/ credit line — new money has been created. That new money is, of course, Euro-Drachmas — nee Euros with a Y.
Transactions between central banks do keep track of who owes whom. If it’s a ‘push’ then when the exchange rate breaks down there is no issue. If Paris is net lending to Athens — you can bet they want Euro-Francs in return. When Athens cuts loose, they can pay up in Euro-Francs or stiff Paris with Euro-Drachmas — or something in between.
Right now, the French are unloading their exposure onto the ECB as best they can. It sounds like the new President is going to be willing to eat the Greek exposure; for that is what ‘pro-growth’ policy must entail.
OK, I’ll bite, you’re saying the German Euro will be the last Euro currency standing–a sort of German Mark in Euro drag to go along with the Krona, Pound, and Swiss Franc, and mainly to keep the sensitive French happy with the revision?
the pound, the krone and the Swiss franc never wanted to be of the club, if the euro goes kaput, there will be no left euro DM too !
I expect the market to force the flakey nations to step-wise bail out of the 1:1 exchange rate.
I expect the strong nations to carry on with the Euro at 1:1 exchange rate. At this time Germany, Finland, Holland and Austria figure to be sure bets.
I’d also expect France to stay in — except for the economic policies of their new president. If given his head, France will be, ultimately, forced to revalue down and out of the 1:1 exchange rate. This would permit him the good grace of inflating big labor wages within his export industries.
Europe generally, and France in particular, is going to have to reverse the flow of impoverished muslims flowing north.
With the eventual rise of fracking in Europe, the politics of energy is going to change profoundly. The muslim door will be swung shut.
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The statistics out of Denmark are terrifying: no matter what the state did it could not bring up educational achievement among muslim, second generation immigrants. Their tested IQs are so low it’s a Thought Crime to mention them: in the low 80s.
In contrast, native Danes norm around 102-103 ish.
This means that Denmark can’t keep muslims in the same grades with their peers. A norm of 81 means that a slew of kids ranked 73 is in the mix. Modern Europe has no economic role for people so disadvantaged.
This burden is everywhere.
Not surprisingly, this underclass turns to crime — for they want what everyone wants — but can’t earn their way.
This is compounded by islamic rationalizations, such as the faithful are owed by the infidels.
So Danish prisons are now turning muslim. And Denmark is about as liberal as you can get.
The rest of Europe is financially bleeding this way.
Which then feeds back into this ‘currency crisis.’
It’s not a currency crisis per se — it’s their rotten economic engine.
Europe is always in danger of breaking loose into an alien-hating social dynamic. I can’t count how many times it has happened in the last millenia. I pray that the pressure is removed before a social explosion.
That crack-pot in Athens can light the match.
I predicted the Arab Spring — even before Spengler. ( Belmont Club )
I don’t want to be right this time, either.
But, Europe is sitting on a powder keg. Big Government and Utopianism is ruining us — pretty much everywhere at once, these days.
Germany was full in the euro gambling, since the beginning it was in the EU project, Delors was working on the euro creation with the Bundesbank scutinity even before that the Berlin wall was fallen.If the Germans had relly rejected the euro, they would have vetoed it at the Bundestag and at the Karlsruhe court, like they do for any EU decison that they don’t want to endorse.
check, Kohl was the great Guru of the euro
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/euro-struggles-can-be-traced-to-origins-of-common-currency-a-831842.html
Yet, it’s true that Thatcher and Mitterrand had some worries on the german reunification, hey, each time Germany recovered its full Bismarck territory, that ment war for the neighbours, today it’s not a war with troops, but with finances, and Germany did achieve tht she wasn’t able to make before…
but the crash is at the horizon again !
The French demanded the Germans join the EU? That’s hilarious. That’s no more true than the British demanding the US join/form NATO.
Poor example:
Britain DID urge America to create NATO — and was a founding member.
It’s first generals were Ike and Monty.
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The Euro arose from the ECU ( created 1974 ) which was ginned up by BOTH France and Germany — so that France would no longer have to DOLLARIZE her long term contracts across the border with Germany.
( Dollarizing — until recently — was pandemic in all soft currency markets. It refers to the use of boiler plate in commercial contracts that stipulates that the crossing price is really in US Dollars. This method stops either party from playing currency games ( devaluations ) that would harm their counter-party — since the trading price of US Dollars is the single most impossible market to move — unless you’re the Federal Reserve. )
Now that Ben is printing like a Weimar idiot — dollarizing contracts has been severely curtailed. ( Red China and Russia have eliminated it over the last few years. Now, even Japan is jumping ship, and trading directly with Red China, ex-dollars )
Of the two powers, it was the French that most desired to kick the US Dollar out of the equation.
So, it’s back to back incorrect assumptions for you.
Sorry.
The Euro scheme is nothing but an expanded ECU — rebranded.
Whereas Dollarizing stopped any specific European power from having gaming advantages — the 1:1 rigid exchange rate scheme of the Euro-fiats achieves exactly the same result.
It works perfectly — until it doesn’t. ( c.f. Greece, et. al. )
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The collapse of rigid exchange rate schemes and gold standard currencies is as old as the hills.
EVERY TIME all and every are told, “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
The reality is that the damage is greatly confined to financial houses and cross-border trade. It’s not trivial — but life will go on.
( Massive spending contractions are, of course, all part of the adjustment. Since much of such spending is ‘mad-money’ or ‘pin-money’ its loss is always over rated. )
“They haven’t done anything well since the Spanish Empire outsourced its manufacturing to Flanders in the 16th century.”
Spain had no manufacturing and not much other than sheep and thugs at the end of the 15th Century. The horrible Isabella of Castile and her spouse the odious Ferdinand of Aragon united their kingdoms at the end of that century and inaugurated a reign of terror with the edicts of expulsion and the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition under her confessor Tomás de Torquemada (may the Holy One of Israel erase his name) and her royal police the ironically named “Holy Brotherhood”.
The thugs became the conquistadors, but Spain became a side show.
Flanders belonged to the House of Burgundy, which had been taken over by the Hapsburgs when Charles the [excessively] Bold’s daughter, and sole heir Mary, married Maximilian who became Emperor and who vested the lowlands in their son Phillip the Fair. Phil married the child of Ferd and Bella, Juana La Loca, and ruled Spain as her husband (after locking her up in the attic) very briefly.
The son of Philip and Juana was Carlos I of Spain and Emperor Charles V. His son Phillip II ruled Spain and struggled to hang on to Flanders, where the United Provinces revolted against Spanish rule. (Charles gave the Eastern lands to his brother, who became the emperor.) The final resolution of that revolt was the Peace of Westphalia which ended a lot of things including Spain’s presence in the low countries.
2 takeaways:
1. Spain’s inability to get with the modern world is rooted in the obscurantist terrorism of its “Catholic Kings”.
2. Spain’s connection with Flanders and the low countries was brief, violent, and ended badly for Spain.
Well into the 20th century Spain had the attitude of striving to make money, except through “raping” overseas possessions, was dirty. As you mention the productive people of Spain were expelled and all aspects of the Spanish economy were subordinated to the sheep raising oligarch La Mesta.
Religious obscurantism and terror, clannishness, distaste for honest work, rapacity toward conquered inferiors … remind you of anyone?
I know that Spain had an ostensible “reconquista,” but one wonders if nearly 800 years of Muslim rule left a permanent mark on the Spanish character. Catholic nation or no, doesn’t it strike you that most of the self-destructive Spanish traits described here & above point to a national temperament that has been largely “Arabized”?
The Reconquista Effect
How about the Sicilian Reconquest by the Normans?
-The Norman Crusade started in 999.
-After decades of fighting muslims in Italy, Normans learned how muslims slave any non-muslim people.
-The Normans ruled the Anglo-Saxons like muslims would rule a sultanate.
-Sicily is liberated but the ‘mob’ mentality never goes away.
I’ll kinda give Ferd and Izzy a break since they went nuts expeling islam after 300 years rule – whcih made them expel ANYONE that wasn’t Catholic.
Phil number 2 made the unwise mistake of taking his entire armada against a woman in England – Liz the 1st. Phil was annoyed at Liz because she basically operated a pirate kingdom at the time and looted all his ships. English ships and English weather kicked the stuffing out of Phil’s armada.
They never really recovered after that.
Do you roll on Shabbos?
I think I just ruined my keyboard. How do you get a mouthful of coffee out of it? I’m still laughing.
“Germany will emerge from the European crisis intact” says Spengler. Obviously Germany will be in better shape than the PIGS of Europe, but that doesn’t mean that all will be well in Deutschland. As soon as Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal… collapse, Germany’s export-driven economy will grind to a halt, as their biggest customers will no longer have the money to buy German exports.
BTW, the German hegemony in Europe (i.e. dominating the EU) is coming to an end. What you saw in the elections in France & Greece is just the beginning. Just as Sarkozy was booted, Merkel will soon follow. She will be replaced by a nationalist or a socialist/communist.
The left is saying: We want our pensions restored, our public employees rehired. If our leaders need more money, take it from the rich, take it from the banks, take it from the big corporations.
The right is saying: We want our countries and culture back. We want our borders closed. We want no more immigration from the rest or Europe or the rest of the world.
The ruling elites in Europe will be toppled like dominoes, and will be replaced by the far-right and radical leftists.
“If we don’t eject the most anti-business president in American history, we will look not like Europe, but like Spain” concludes Spengler. Even if Romney wins the election “we will not look like … Spain” but like Yugoslavia. By 2050 or sooner, America will become a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural conglomerate—a Balkanized 438 million, a Tower of Babel, a replica of the Roman Empire after the Goths and Vandals invaded.
As soon as Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal… collapse, Germany’s export-driven economy will grind to a halt, as their biggest customers will no longer have the money to buy German exports.
“Primary exports partners: France (10.2 percent of total exports), US (6.7 percent), Netherlands (6.7 percent), UK (6.6 percent), Italy (6.3 percent), Austria (6 percent), China (4.5 percent). ”
And exports will not grind to a complete halt despite the meltdown. Just what will France and Italy do without machinery, vehicles, chemicals, metals, manufactures, foodstuffs, textiles (primary exports)? Revert back to the 18th century?
Germany will feel some pain but, as David so aptly describes, excellent products will find customers while dependent whiners will just find painful adjustment.
There’s also the issue of value-added in exports. Coal, steel, and chemicals are entirely integrated, but high-end machine tools can be shipped to Shanghai as easily as to France.
“American automakers became dumb and complacent and let overseas manufacturers eat their lunch”
Mr. Goldman makes a good point that I should have addressed in my preceding post. Again, I was born and grew up in Detroit. I remember very well the sudden spike in gas prices when the Saudi-led cartel jacked up the price of oil. Overnight, mileage became important as it never had been before and the Japanese were in the right spot, at the right time, with their small cars. The U.S. automakers, however, continued, stubbornly, to make large gas-guzzlers. I wonder if I’m the only one on this thread who remembers the first “Chrysler bankruptcy.”
Not only do I remember the first Chrysler bankruptcy, I remember that one rationale given for the Feds to bail them out was that they manufacrured tank engines and were a vital part of our national defense.
Have we outsourced that part of our industrial capacity now, also ?
What about the german banks? They’ll have to kiss goodbye to all their loans to Greece, Spain,…
Nobody’s going to come out entirely happy.
- Spanish food exports to northern Europe are massive. There are thousands of vegetable and fruit laden trucks streaming north every day with license plates from the entire EU.
- Spain has some niche industries, one I know of offhand is tile making. Roca is well known.
- German and Northern European tourism to the Costa’s is not an “export industry” per se, but it does bring in loads of foreign exchange.
Is Schreckensbeispiel analogous to Schadenfreude in the sense that it conveys something much deeper than merely a horrible example?
Nope. It just sounds a bit more horrible in German.
Warum sagen Sie das? Die deutsche Sprache is sehr schön, sag’ ich Ihnen! SCHÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖN! Und hübsch!
He didn’t say German was ugly, just that that word sounds foreboding
Nu, you couldn’t find maybe something in Yiddish?
actually the correct german term is “Schreckgespenst” (~bogeyman or boogaboo)
“Schreckensbeispiel” wird aber doch hauefig verwendet, z.B. hier:
Schreckensbeispiel USA? Politikvermittlung und Politische Bildung in der Mediendemokratie
Peter Filzmaier
Apologies. You are right. Your german is much better than mine.
To my defense I can only say that I came here crosslinked – looking for some amusing dirty antics by Henryk Broder. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Broder)
…which I didn´t find here.
There is a difference between “Schreckgespenst” and “Schreckensbeispiel” – “Schreckgespenst” is more something that will haunt you, that will terrify you, that make you fear something – and something can be painted as a “Schreckgespenst”. “Schreckensbeispiel” is more like a deterring example, you show it as something you better do not want to repeat. It’s perfectly fitting for Goldman.
There are actually several world-class Spanish manufacturing brands. Spain produces some of the world’s nicest fine side-by-side shotguns. For the price, they produce the nicest. The Brits are even buying them.
But… And I suspect this matters… The companies that make them are small, just like their counterparts in Italy and elsewhere, and they are located in the Basque Autonomous Community. For trade purposes, they’re “Made in Spain”, but they come from a people and place that stand apart from the rest of the place, in many ways.
My bad. I use a Beretta over-and-under — never understood why anyone would still use side-by-side except on a movie set. And you are quite right about the Basques. They’ve been inventors and entrepreneurs since they fed Europe with salt cod.
For fast birds over dogs, a side-by-side offers extremely quick and natural pointing characteristics. Many old American-made guns were not so great, but something like an AyA, in the right context, can make the objective reasons for using a SxS in 2012 clear. There are some. See McIntosh, Michael.
That said, I also like Beretta O/Us, both for hunting and Sporting Clays.
I don’t hunt (except varmints) — game isn’t kosher, by definition. I use the O/U for clays.
And, it will work on Zombies.
Too bad they don’t have a “hunting season” – say, 3:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m., every day – in the NYC subway system.
The Spaniards still make (arguably) the world’s best gut-string (ie classical and flamenco) guitars, too.
But again, we’re talking what amounts to relatively small numbers of artisinal products, not mass manufactured instruments.
The best of the mass-market guitars, curiously, are probably still made in the USA, then South Korea, with the low-end brands are being increasingly manufactured in China and Indonesia.
knives, swords, sabers in Toledo, bought by the Japanese for their martial sports
Deutschland Erwache!
One suspects we’ll be hearing this more and more in the next few years.
Clearly, the European Union is untenable – it can last a decade or so longer if the Germans agree to bail everyone else out, but that will only convince the wastrels they won’t run out of other people’s money and make the ultimate collapse that much worse.
Germany has the opportunity itself to become something of the US of Europe if it lets in — but insists on acculturation — the talented from the rest of Europe as they Europeans fail.
The deep question is “can the Prussian example of the late 17th century be repeated?” We’ll see.
“Germany has the opportunity itself to become something of the US of Europe if it lets in — but insists on acculturation — the talented from the rest of Europe as they Europeans fail.”
Good luck with the acculturation! Although Merkel has asserted that the non-Germans are not assimilating despite the German’s best efforts to be supportive of multiculturalism, I have yet to see much in the way of specific cultural policy changes to increase assimilation/acculturation of the non-German minorities into Germany.
Merkel faces a national election soon and is eager to win but pundits are not optimistic. She frequently panders to the left in the hope that she will get re-elected, although in her heart she seems to know it is wrong. For instance, after the Japanese earthquake, she committed Germany to phasing out all of its nuclear power over the next 10 years or so, which clearly panders to the Greens in Germany. This makes Germany even more dependent on natural gas from Russia and makes it yet more vulnerable to fuel blackmail should Putin wish to do so.
It’s hard to picture her establishing policies that really do encourage assimilation/acculturation when the Left will surely screen from the rooftops about racism and cultural insensivity should she try.
It is indeed a problem: the Germans are very tribal and don’t let non-Germans “in” unless they’ve got some German ethnicity or are exceptionally culturally assimilated (and even they you’re never quite ‘in’) and at least “look German” (sort of like “passing” for white in the US in a bygone era, one supposes). When I lived in Germany several decades ago, my German was good enough, and I was historically and culturally literate enough, I was taken for a German most of the time. It may be better now, but that’s why I spoke acculturation rather than assimilation: I can’t see the Germans assimilating non-ethnic Germans until there is strong cultural adherence and enough Mischlingen who seem thoroughly German.
I didn’t say the Germans were going to like it. But they’ll get used to immigrants because they need it.
I hope you’re correct. I think they’ll let immigrants in, but the deeper question is the degree to which these immigrants can be integrated into German society the way the late 17th and early 18th century immigrants were in Prussia. The example with the Turks from the ’60s on has not been promising.
Their best bet would probably be from the Eastern European countries they historically had ties with.
From Eastern (or rather Eastern Central) Europe? Actually, they are trying this on a large scale-I mean, seriously, do the Poles,Hungarians,Slovaks really need all those engineers,doctors,nurses,electricians who were educated for the money of this respective nations? Fortunately, these professions earns enough at home-thank God,otherwise poorer countries would be paying for professionals who would work for German wealth only.Thats probably why the was so angry at the Hungarian government having the audacity to demand from students who are receiving a government grant to pay it back or to work for several years in Hungary.I am sorry to be so cynical, but read some German newspapers and You will noticed how we are viewed by the Germans-as cheap,easily assimilable work-force,nothing more.
The Germans are being arrogant? I’m shocked. Shocked. No-one said they were warm and cuddly. Hungary’s biggest problem is that the non-Roma fertility rate is the lowest in the world — lower than 0.9, according to my sources in the Hungarian government.
Actually it is Switzerland that is being overrun by Germans escaping the socialism, high taxes, and EU enslavement that is reality in today’s Germany. Some mothers with children in kindergarten in northern Switzerland are upset because high-german is more common than Schwiizer-Duutsche.
Foreigners in Germany not allowed to adopt German names
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/257672/pinoyabroad/worldfeatures/foreigners-in-germany-not-allowed-to-adopt-german-names
In the spirit of fairness: you omit both Picasso and Salvador Dali from the great names list.
And brandwise: a good Rioja can be really good.
And there’s my favorite director of the 20th century, Luis Bunuel. And my favorite soprano, Victoria de los Angeles. Rioja is sometimes good value for money, but the Portuguese have utterly clobbered the Spanish in the wine business. Duero wines from Spain, btw, are as a class better value than the Riojas.
The main problem is, imo, that they all have the same stuff: olives, olive oil, vinegar, wine, cheese, salami. And if you classify it you get the following qualities: Best: From Italy (also France). Second best with a large gap behind Italy and France: Spain and Portugal. At the end: Greece. Same thing with designer clothes. Same thing with hotels. This would be okay, if they had the drachma, escudo and peseta back, because then they could compete with cheaper products, cheaper vacations. Vacationing in Greece, Spain and Portugal has become too expensive. So it’s the EURO, and only the EURO. We can’t offer olives, fine olive oil, great salami, excellent cheese and brillant red wine in Germany, not to mention our bad wheather and very few beaches. And we don’t have this sunny vacation mentality. So, imo, they have s.th. to offer, but need another currency. Besides, some of our discounters in Germany are selling agricultural products, also German milk and butter, grossely underprized, disastrous for farmers. Food should be more expensive.
uh, the French, the Itzlians don’t make only clothes, or cheezes and salami, there’s also ships, helicopters, planes, trains, aerospace in Guyanne, nuclear reactors, chimicals, tanks, cars, constructions…
Portugeses wines are but acid, except for a few, Portugal is more famous for Porto
and Vinho Verde.
Vinho Verde is disgusting. Try some of the newer whites from the Duoro. There’s one called “Guru” which is to die for.
http://winesleuth.wordpress.com/category/portuguese-wine/
David,
A Vinho Verde—-A Brazilian, Portuguese, & my husband will certainly disagree with you. It’s a fun quaffing wine, certainly not in the same league of recognized fine wines.
Jealous!
France still produces the world’s greatest wines, but even moderately prosperous career criminals like myself can’t afford them. The Portuguese have been producing spectacular wines during the past twenty years at reasonable prices. If I recall, the great Duoro white, “Guru,” was about 70 Euros at a restaurant in the Barrio Alto. A comparable Burgundy would have gone for 300 Euros.
I’ll check out the Duoro white either at my local wine store or at my favorite Portuguese seafood restaurant in the Ironbound section in Newark, NJ that I cross 2 states to visit. A 70 euro Duoro white ought to be real special compared to a $7.99 Vinho Verde.
french wine are expensive because of the euro, though it seems that the chinese millionnairecan afford them now, last year the wines exportations to China increased by 20%
Isn’t it interesting that all of the “Great names” from Spain are singular artists. Not a single engineer, scientist or industrialist among them.
The Spanish are fantasists — have been since the 15th century. The last Spanish scientist of world-class importance probably was Miguel Servedo (Servetus) who discovered the circulatory system. His work was suppressed and only discovered later; he was exiled from Spain as a heretic. Calvin had him burned at the stake in Geneva.
Ramón y Cajal!
bff, what does that prove?
that your knowledge of the Spanish come from your library, not on facts
The Jesuits and the Scholastics.
But lets not be too critical of the various attempts to de-Islamize the country…which was very beneficial….even if overzealous at times.
Mr. Goldman, do you have a view on how the Spanish culture translates to the New World’s various hispanic cultures. Is there some regional influence from the mother country that got translated in pockets. Living in California and Florida, especially, there are massive subgroups. Some hispanics are the hardest working, best educated, most business savvy people on earth. Others are crooks. And some never seem to press forward. Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans are very, very different. As much as Italians, Greeks and French.
I find it comical when the MSM or democrat politicians lump them all together. To put a fine point on it, offering school choice is a huge potential winner for Romney. Most middle class and aspiring immigrants from some parts of Latin America are more upset with the state of public education than whites. Blacks are upset but in the tank for Obama overpowered by a racial psychosis.
Yes, Latin America has different cultures. Some countries have multiple cultures: a Spanish elite culture and various indigenous cultures.
With a significant amount of african culture in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. 20% of middle infielders in MLB hail from the Dominican Republic. Brazil beasts Argentina in futbol for a reason.
Some time ago I called on Canadian mining companies based in Vancouver, BC; these firms engineered and/or managed and/or owned – partly or in full – many mines in S. America and they typically had engineering offices in Chile. One of the Canadian engineers told me what it was like having to manage engineers from Chile, Argentina and other S. American nations who all worked in the same office in Chile. He said it was like trying to keep control of a kindergarten because of the constant bickering and back stabbing amongst the engineers of the various S. American nations; they simply did not want to work together and they were very nationalistic.
Also, on another note, never, in all innocence ask a Cuban or Argentine or Chilean, “are you Puerto Rican?” They will be totally insulted.
The Spaniards came to the new world to plunder – that is it; unlike the English who came to the new world to establish trading venues and, literally, ‘new england” societies that sought to mirror English society, though with a lesser degree of class distinction (they had to make it attractive for folks to come to the new world).
The end result is Canada, the USA (and, though not in the “new world”, Australia and NZ) . Contrast these nations with those settled by the Spaniards and Portugese and note that Canada and the USA were settled more or less at the same time as much of Latin America.
Boy howdy, are you correct about the heirarchy of the South/Central Americans (including all the lands colonized by Spain). Apparently, Mexico is dead last on the whose who scale. You want to insult these people? Call them a Mexican!
I can back that up. During Katrina we had many Mexicans come up from south Texas for refuge. I had a small newspaper at the time and I went with my mother (a Colombian) to talk to the refugees and the churches where they had sought a place to stay. A Peruvian woman happened to come by from some local agency.
And together they talked disdainfully about the Mexicans. And then, when the Peruvian lady had gone, mother said to me, “I don’t know what she’s so proud of. Everyone knows Peru is the poorest country in South America.”
The chauvinism on display was hilariously unapologetic.
Mr. Goldman, do you have a view on how the Spanish culture translates to the New World’s various hispanic cultures.
Which leads us into the fictive reality of Hispanics, whatever that is. It’s ok to talk about most gene pools: for some reason it’s cool and even expected to about Caucasians, Mandarin & Han, Arabs, Japanese and black African peoples, but for some strange reason (which I think I know) when you talk about meso-Americans it must be this amorphous fiction called Hispanics. Why the lack of pride from the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, Caribes and others?
This is why I feel eel when Sen. Marco Rubio blathers on camera about the Hispanics. Such a craven southwest European he is.
A Republican Revolution in Kentucky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emx_IlPDHUU
I’ve long moaned that our country has got to such dire straits cuz of the lack of an opposition party. Can there be a majority of Masseys to save the nation, to rescue the freedom we claim to have? It was a happy two minutes listening to that YouTube video, ’76.
Well, all I can say is that when I was in Barcelona it sure seemed like a place filled with industrious people who were thriving. And enjoying life, too. That has to count for something.
Ricpic:
Barcelona isn’t Spain…it’s Catalonia.
And yes, Ricardo, there is a difference.
Ah, yes, the Catalans. They think they are too good to be Spanish (they aren’t). I’ve always wondered why these minor Iberian tribes refuse to learn proper Castilian.
Same reason we Southerners like to talk VERY slowly when giving you directions.
LOLOL!!! You don’t, you know! I’m from California and my mother’s family is from Mississippi. Getting directions from you people IS an adventure!!! As in, “Going down the road a piece,” is usually about 25 miles! “Ya’ll” NEVER give road names – just landmarks! But I DO have to say (BY GOLLY!!!) if you are patient enough to actually follow your instructions, you DO get to where you need to be!
you will be amused to hear that as far back as 1984 when i traveled through Andalusia i heard many a pejorative comments regarding Catalonia, like “cabeza cuadrada”. When i asked for more explanations, i was told, “Well, Catalonians are like… Germans!” These things go back a long way…
You saw Ctalonia’s Potekimkin village for naive Americans. Catalonia is no longer Spain’s power house: it is heoplessly broken and has been having slow growth for decades due to cronysm, parasitism (billion dollars are spent on “embassies” or on nationalist MSM all while Madrid’s region used them for infrastructure), a business hostile environment and hostility to everyone spaeking Spanish even tourists who sometimes are abused for not speaking catalan. Now you are an American company wanting to have a subsidiary in Spain, you want to to have an American in charge at least at the beginning and several potentail candidates speak Spanish. Everything being equal are you going to implement it in Catalonia or in Madrid’s region? Well result has been that Catalonia that in times of Franco was significantly richer than Madrid’s region despite far higher subsidies from central goverment (independentist blackmail pays) has now the same GNP despite having a population 20% higher (that means 20% less revenue per capita) and most of Spain’s high tech is in Madrid not in Barcelona.
Also you saw Barcelona but that is the least catalan of Catalonia’s cities: half of its population came from other regions of Spain. You didn’t see the butternut “provincias” of Gerona and Lerida, you didn’t see the “okupas”: perpetual squatters inspired by communism the regional governement lets illegally ocuppy houses, you din’t enter regional governemnt offices to see see the anti-system people, you didn’t enter its basketcase universities, you didn’t enter regional government offices to see the paraite class of lazy and incompetent civil servants hired on the all-important criteria of being fluent in Catalan ahead of people far better than them on professional ground (Spanish-speaking physician,s have been purged from Catalonia’s public hospitals) were fluent in Catalan, you didn’t see the people getting millions for “studies” about the behavoioural difference between the European and japanese quail or for the “Gay and Lesbian sport club” (both are real examples), you didn’t see the corruption, the highest in Spain besides Andalusia. You only saw what you wanted seeing. And I repeat it: nowada+s Spain’s most dynamic and business friendly region is Madrid’s (by Madrid I mean the region, state in American terms, not the city). It is no longer Catalonia
Glad to hear it. I’ve never like Barcelona — had to go there for years on business because Credit Suisse held its annual credit conferences there during my tenure at the bank. Madrid is much better. Even better is Seville.
Sevilla is a nice city. Nicer to live in it than Madrid (except in summer wehn 40 Celsius is not uncommon even if proper housing, clothing, living habits and eating local not American or international cuisine, same for beverages, do wonders for making it bearable) but it is not precisely the Spanish city whose people work the hardest. Discaimer: I a neither a lobbyist for Madrid nor an unahbitant of it.
you didn’t see the corruption, the highest in Spain besides Andalusia. You only saw what you wanted seeing.
When I think Andalusia, I think Moslem. When I think Moslem, I think corruption. Among other things. Does this make me a religious bigot, a psychobabbologically negatronic guy, or just a twice burned fellow with a finger on the goings on of the world about us?
Amen to that last paragraph. I keep sounding the clarion call that the implementation criteria for the Race to the Top and Common Core national standards has states and districts blindly committing to adopt the UN’s Education for All and Millenium Development Goals. A bureaucratic scheme to limit all American students to the basic skills of literacy and numeracy plus an ability to problem solve and communicate and then vocational life skills is economic suicide for the developed world.
This is an extraordinarily expensive scam to use education as a means for blindly implementing political theories that could never make it in through the voting box. Or past our military. “We know there’s no support for this tragic collectivist theory so we will call it a learning theory and use our monoploy powers over education to bring it on in to an unwitting US.”
With its 82 million people, Germany has a cumulative total of 1,618 Olympic medals. Spain has 50 million people, but only 115 medals. On a per capita basis, that’s one eighth as many. Spaniards don’t wake up in the morning with the desire to go out and be the best in the world at something.
Motorsports, tennis, and the only sport that really matters to most of Europe, football. (They are current World Cup and European champions).
The only international Spanish company I ever notice in Europe is Santander (bank). I think Repsol also do a fair bit of international business – recently burned in Argentina.
German was a minority language in the Berlin of Frederick the Great, and it will probably be a minority language again in twenty years.
In Berlin a few months ago I met a number of people – British, Irish, Polish, even American – who were all working there without knowing any German. They said it hadn’t been a problem so far. I was surprised by that because it’s not like that in other big German cities. Other than Amsterdam there can’t be too many large exciting cities (that rules out Brussels) where you can not only make a good living not knowing the local language but also live right in the city itself, as opposed to commuting from some dreary distant suburb.
That is because English is everybody’s second language – the language of Empire. The language of business.
I noticed it in Russia several years ago. Even at the airport the signs were all in Cyrillic and English. If a Russian man wanted to speak with a Japanese man they would speak English.
David you might like to try the wines of Priorat, the region just west of Barcelona. They produce some beautiful reds.
“The Spanish don’t do anything well. They haven’t done anything well since the Spanish Empire outsourced its manufacturing to Flanders in the 16th century. Germany has a score of marquee manufacturing brands, as well as hundreds of lesser-known quality manufacturers, of which my favorite is Howaldtswerke, a ThyssenKrupp subsidiary that makes the Dolphin class submarines for Israel. Name one world-class Spanish manufacturing brand. There aren’t any.”
That just isn’t true. I know you badly want to dump on Spain, but Spain builds some of the best and most moder warships in the western world. They just comopleted the Juan Carlos I (L61), a modern LHD amphibious assault ship that can also double as a VSTOL aircraft carrier. They have also recently built the Álvaro de Bazán class frigates which are some of the best offensive warships in the world. And Spain’s Buque de Acción Marítima (BAM) offshore patrol vessels are some of the best in the world as well. They are ultra modern and in many ways are better than our own Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) that the US Navy are building right now. Spain also has an aircraft carrier, the Principe de Asturias, something the Germans could only dream of having.
Spain may have many flaws, but building bad warships is NOT one of them. The German Dolphin class submarine is a good ship, but it’s not the only ship made in Europe. As for the German Navy, it’s rapidly turning into a bad joke, shrinking right before our eyes. They have made major cuts in their fleet since 2006 and now they only have a handful of warships on active duty. So being an economic powerhouse is easy when you don’t have to spend much on your own defense and when you have the United States picking up the tab for almost all of the defense costs in NATO.
Germans are cheap people, but smart people. For roughly 70 years they were able to grow their economy while sticking America with the bill, spending roughly 1% of their GDP on their military. Imagine how well the United States would be doing right now if we didn’t have to protect the free world, be a global superpower, and only had to spend 1% of our GDP on defense. Undoubtedly, the Germans probably have a better work ethic than the southern Europeans. But when the southern Europeans put their minds to it, countries like Spain have some great manufacturing capabilities, especially in shipbuilding.
It’s true that the Germans stuck us with the bill for their own defense, but there’s another side to the story. In an actual war, the Germans would never know who won. They would all be vaporized in the first minutes. We know from Soviet documents that the Soviet order of battle was nuke first, invade second. It took some incentives (e.g., blackmail with WWII dossiers) to keep the Germans on message during the Cold War. As for the Spanish ships — I’ll concede your point. I simply don’t know enough about it. But I doubt it makes a macroeconomic impact.
David–
I posted a request for you to direct me to where I can get more info
on the Soviet order of battle and the blackmail you mentioned. It
did not, as yet get posted on the comments.
I’m a military history freak and reading about those items would be
interesting reading.
Thanks
Pete Brittain
About what a Soviet onslaught against Western Europe would have looked like circa 1979, documents published by Poles disclose much.
Check e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/26/russia.poland
“A series of red mushroom clouds over western Europe show that Soviet nuclear weapons strikes would have been launched at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium if Nato had struck first. Red clouds are drawn over the then German capital, Bonn, and other key German cities such as the financial centre of Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and the strategically important northern port of Hamburg. Brussels, the political headquarters of Nato, is also targeted.
(…)
The exercise, entitled Seven Days to the River Rhine, indicated Warsaw Pact forces aimed to reach the Franco-German border within a week of a Nato attack.
Standing next to the fading map in Warsaw yesterday, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, said: “The objective of the exercise on this map is to take over most of western Europe – all of Germany, Belgium and Denmark.”
The Russians had good motivation to anhilate the Germans
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
though the cold war was a drama aimed at justifying the Arms corporations productions, The Soviets would not have destroyed the west, unlike the West was threatening them, they were but happy to trade goods that they couldn’t manufacture for themselves
Not to mention the millions of prisoners marched to death without food or drink, the locals shot when they tried to succour them, the crimes against the russian civilians or the fact that rape of Russian women was allowed in the Wehrmacht. What is atonishing is that the Russins “only” did what they did once they entered Germany.
The region of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, is the wealthiest and hardest working part of Spain. Their industrial concerns are not household names, but they are competitive within Europe. It’s like a little slice of Germany or Holland plopped down on the border between Spain and France.
Interestingly, it is also one of the most hospitable places in Europe to communists, anarchists, and Old Left socialists. They are deeply opposed to the monarchy and routinely vote for politicians that would be on the fringe in many other parts of Europe.
Like the Basque country, and to a lesser extent Galicia, they look down their noses at the rest of Spain. People from Andalucia and Extremadura are regarded as gypsies, thieves, and Arabs, much like the northern Italians view southerners.
If Spain falls apart, I would expect to see a strong push for complete independence by the Catalonians and Basques– perhaps even a second civil war if Madrid tries to force them to stay in the realm.
Spain’s industrial production index as at 82 (2005 = 100). I’m not sure what “competitive within Europe” means.
We were talking about Catalonia in particular, not Spain as a whole. Here’s a site showing the industrial production index for Catalonia as a region:
http://www.idescat.cat/cat/economia/conjuntura/ippi/
Note that for consumer goods and energy the index appreciably exceeds 100%, and the general index is 91%.
My original comment was a reply to ricpic, above. Not sure why it got posted down here.
Hm. Contra Spengler, maybe they ARE too good to be Spanish.
I work for HP, and our key engineering arm for all of our cutting edge large-format Designjet and Latex printers comes from Barcelona. I can vouch for their talent and industriousness; in many ways they exceed the Israeli engineering teams that they compete with. I find that Barcelona as a whole is quite prosperous and technology rich, aside from the crazy left-wing politics.
As I said, there’s no shortage of smart Spaniards. The best of them will be working for foreign companies who set a standard for excellence.
Soory to disapoint you but that was true in times of Franco. It is no longer. Today Madrid is significantly richer and the gap is increasing. In another comment to this text I give some of the reasons for Catalonia’s stagnation.
David–
Can you direct me to where I can get more information on the Soviet order
of Battle and the blackmail you mentioned in an earlier post?
I’m a military history freak and this data would be interesting reading.
Thanks.
Pete
The original report was in Neue Zuercher Zeitung, by Hans and Michael Ruehl.
Good points in your article David about Spain and manufacturing. They indeed did expel their most productive populations starting with the Jews in 1492 and ending with the Moriscos in the early 1600′s. Add to that the incessant wars and their inability to manufacture gunpowder, they had to buy a lot of it from the French, and most of the immense treasure from America was lost.
The Germans and population?? I don’t know what will happen there but there seems to be a wellspring of population production that flows from time to time amongst the Germanic groups and has from early times. It could be that the spring has run dry.
Right for the Jews, wrong for the Moriscos: the agricultural regions supposedly ruined by their expulsion quickly recovered and were quite rich in Francio times. Also, there was the little detail of several bloody revolts with niceties like mass rape of nuns and masscres of Cristians, not to mention they routinely assisted the Barbareque and Turkish pirates when they raided the coasts of Spain and that despite Lepanto there was a distinct possibility for a landing of a Turkish army assisted by a Morisco revolt.
Spanish industry also has a favorable reputation in the nuclear power business. They have one of only two facilities to fabricate reactor pressure vessels. I’ve worked closely with engineers from Spanish companies and they’ve done excellent work, fully world-standard. I will acknowledge that this business is not that significant in macro-economic scope or scale.
I find it more than a coincidence that the steep decline of the Spanish economy seems to date from their election of a socialist government. That election was strongly influenced by the al Quida bombing of Madrid commuter trains.
I agree
Mr. Goodman is wrong on a point:
slashing the wages of the workers will do nothing to improve the economy in Italy and in the south of Europe. It is not a question of wages, it is a question of taxes and taxes and regulations. The need is to slash these and slash the costs of the government.
For example, Italy have the higher cost for worker (paid by the employer) and the lower wages (received by the employee) of Europe. The rising cost of labor is practically only taxes.
Germany is in trouble. There are repeated Salafist protests (over cartoons again) that are not going away. Meanwhile Thilo Sarrazin’s book (his new one) blasting the Euro induces the vapors in writers for the Atlantic but finds resonance among Germans.
Germany DOES create wealth, but that wealth merely attracts like a magnet all the poor and young and hungry Third World, most of it Muslim, which seeks in turn to impose on Germans Muslim rule. You can’t have Turks, Algerians, and the like in Germany and not have the battle to determine Islam or post-Christianity to rule the land. So Germany will have its own battles.
As will ports of entry, Spain, Italy, and France. Not to mention Greece. These are not as attractive, but are weak semi-states without the ability to defend their borders effectively and with attractive land and things that can be taken. Mr. Goldman forgets there is a third way to success in life and among nations: CONQUEST.
Places like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are filled with young men who will be nothing and can do nothing, save Conquest. Conquest is the one proven way to wealth, power, and success for Muslim societies. No one goes to say, Dubai or Riyadh for the latest bio-tech, or software engineering, or materials development, or the best medical care.
Wealthy, first World societies as a by-product of their wealth are essentially defenseless: lacking the nationalism, social will, and cohesion to create and use military power to deter attacks by weak but hungry failed societies. The first world lacks even the ability to defend its borders, or argue that say, the French should stay in France, and not rule Africans, and likewise Africans should stay in Africa, and not rule the French.
EVEN Israel is awash in hand-wringing and hard-left agitation over 60,000 Africans threatening to become 6 million, and forming an existential threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state (or anything but Mogadishu on the Med). That’s with a nation that has a daily reminder that 95% of their neighbors really want to kill them. Creating wealth = being defenseless. Because it erodes any will to self defense or even valuing one’s own nation, culture, ethnicity, and language.
whiskey you dream, France, Spain are doing quite a good job at stopping illegals, it’s rather Greece that is a colander, and since the Greeks are demonized by the northeners they don’ have the will nor the means to stop illegals
What is the common thread tying the sickly southern European economies with the eternal corruption of the Latin American countries? Catholicism.
I don’t know if that is a root cause of the vast difference between northern and southern Euroe and the US/Canada and Latin America but it’s worth exploring. Something about the vaunted Protestant work ethic that seems to be absent from the Catholic countries.
Germany is 50% Catholic. German Catholics do just as well as German Protestants.
Actually Germany is only about 30-35% Catholic. Regardless, i would argue that the reason for their diligence, as well as that of the rest of northern Europe and the UK, is due to the nationalizing of the Protestant work ethic.
Registered Catholics are about 33% of the total, roughly the same as Protestants. If you are registered, you have to pay Church tax, so many delist themselves, leaving the percentage of Christians in Germany at 64%. Roughly half of Germans are Catholic or of Catholic cultural heritage, if not practicing.
Registered Catholics are about 33% of the total, roughly the same as Protestants. If you are registered, you have to pay Church tax, so many delist themselves, leaving the percentage of Christians in Germany at 64%. Roughly half of Germans are Catholic or of Catholic cultural heritage, if not practicing.
That is correct David. I’m an American expat, catholic, but for tax reasons I’m not registerd to avoid the church tax. Many Germans are in the same boat. From what I understand this old law is left over from the unpleasant times (cough) to get the churches on board, but for some reason was that was never struck from the books. From what I understand though is that only the registered Protestants and Catholics are taxed, not the other faiths.
I have heard Germans referring to the Church Tax as a remnant of the “Hitler Days”. Obviously it is not a representative sample, but every German who ever showed me an ID card had “Atheist” in the block for religion.
In other reading I got the impression the the Church Tax and religious registration was an artifact of Bismark’s 19th century unification of the dozens of German political entities, each of which had an established religion which everybody living there had to pay taxes to. The change that allowed individuals to choose which church would receive their Church Tax was a liberalizing move.
I would be curious if anybody knows the true history of the German Church Tax.
no, it ‘s the habit to have been thrown into the “Arbeit macht frei” behaviour, and this for quite while, let’s say since Bismarck 1879 recession, when unmployment raised, and of course in the twenties, in the thirties…German preferred a work to non work, it ment that they could buy a “Pumpernickel” (black bread worth of a coin. Of course the Nazis used this docile temperament for their agenda !
Flirting with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy there. It won’t do to dismiss a contrary example by essentially saying, well, they must not be really CATHOLIC Catholics, then.
Catholics Italy (North plus Tuscany) invented the capitalism ( aka “protestant ethics” for protestants) long before Calvin and Luther.
Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan and all the Commons in Italy were practicing capitalism just in XII century “for God and Profit”.
Sure, but is that accidental, or imperative?
Actually Germany’s most dynamic regions are.. Baviera and Swabia. Both catholic.
Well, Bavaria is a majority catholic state, but Swabia (Baden-Wurttemberg) is at least 50% Lutheran/culturally Lutheran.
“All of Germany’s export growth in the past ten years has gone to the east, not the south.”
yeah in your Lied but
how do you explain that german surpluses are made in
EZ for 55%, and for 80% in he whole Europe?
http://euro-crise.over-blog.com/article-le-commerce-exterieur-allemand-en-2010-la-zone-euro-represente-55-de-l-excedent-commercial-et-l-europe-80-71076111.html
and from the official german source
https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/NationalEconomyEnvironment/ForeignTrade/TradingPartners/TradingPartners.html
“Germany will emerge from the European crisis intact. So far, Germany hasn’t even noticed that there is a crisis”
do you believe that the German banks will not get the hit? they who are the most leveraged in the EZ debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-23/merkel-should-know-her-country-has-been-bailed-out-too.html
“It’s a winner-take-all world. Countries that do well have to do a few things extremely well. Germany makes the world’s best machine tools,”
yes but the Chinese will soon make them at much affordable prices
hmm Spain make ships, autos, they are partners in Airbus
“Spanish companies lead fields like renewable energy (Iberdrola is the world’s largest renewable energy operator[52]), technology companies like Telefónica, Abengoa, Movistar, Hisdesat, Gamesa, Indra, train manufacturers like CAF, Talgo, petroleum companies like Repsol and infrastructure, with six of the ten biggest international construction firms specialising in transport being Spanish, like Ferrovial, Acciona, ACS, OHL and FCC.”
“Apart from its domestic brand SEAT, which is the major contributor to the automotive sector of the country, and Santana Motor, many suppliers and foreign car and truck makers – like Volkswagen, Nissan, Daimler Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Renault, GM/Opel, PSA Peugeot/Citroën, Iveco,… etc. – have facilities and plants in Spain today developing and producing vehicles and components, not only for the domestic market but also for export,[61] with the contribution of the automobile industry in 2008 rising up to the second place with 17,6% out of the country’s total exports”
Spain won the soccer world contest, their tennis men are in the top 10, Spanish won car races, tour de France…
German win lesser medals since drugs controls are more effective
“Don’t believe the reports that a new Lehman-style financial crash is in the offing. What’s going to happen is much less dramatic. In 2008 no-one knew how to value Wall Street’s liabilities (for example, AIG’s famous guarantees on subprime securities). Now the full extent of the problem is known to everyone. It’s just a negotiation now over who gets knackered. And the answer, by one means or another, is the southern Europeans.”
That’s funny most of the experts are saying that this will be Lehman style, but x 4
” other European banks (mainly French) will get hung out to dry just like the Spanish banks. Their subordinated debt will vaporize, and the French will lose a large part of their savings.”
really ? check who are in:
the Brits, the Dutch, the germans, and the french
http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4de7a71c49e2aed24d290000/chart.jpg
“The trouble with the southern Europeans is that they insist on combining familial amoralism with state dependency:”
who are you to juge their amoralism? the southern famiies are more moral than the northeners’, they who still know what is a family and solidarity
BTW Spain national debt before the euro crisis was less than 60% while Germany’s was 83%, so which country has a state dependency?
One thing is sure is that you’re kein economist, but a propagnadist for Deutschland über Alles, and besides of that you suffer of Alzheimer.
Including required support for Spanish banks, the debt to GDP ratio is more like 100%. Andererweise befuerworte ich keineswegs “Deutschland ueber Alles” (ein ausgepraegt dummes Gedicht von Hoffman von Fallersleben), aber anerkenne was erfolgreich ist, oder nicht.
The debt to GDP ratio is about the most meaningless one I can imagine. Please, do you remeber your debt to yearly revenue ratio when you bought a house? It was probably superior to 300%? Did you bankrupt? No. Because payment were low enough you were abel to pay without problems: if you have a hundred years loan with a 0% interest amounting two times your yearly revenue you will berely notice the drain set by its payments. If you have a loan amounting to 20% of your monthly revenue but must refund it in a month then you are in serious trouble.
BTW: Did you notice GDP is a yearly thing and that makes it an arbitrary indicator when comparing it to an absolute one like volume of debt? Apples and oranges. Did you notice you could make it far less scary by basing, say on the Plutonian year? That is 248 of our years so Spain’s revenue would be multiplied by 248 and its debt to GDP ratio would be just 0.4% Hey, I have just saved Spain from bankruptcy and the worls from another recession!!!
why is the gedicht dumb? it makes perfect sense in the context of then-germany’s splintered mini-states and essentially advocates something very similar to e pluribus unum.
And I should add (once again!) that the Portuguese work hard, on the books, and pay their taxes; if they can’t find work at home, they emigrate. Spain’s misery has nothing to do with being Iberian, let alone southern.
The Portugese don’t work more than the Spanish, though they are more servile and hypocrit, did you seee how the Portugese Finance Minister is sucking into Schaeuble to get a medeal for good behaviour?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDBzJRQLZN8&feature=share
“f they can’t find work at home, they emigrate”
that was decades ago, during Salazar government, and before their access to EU, todaythey’ll find difficult to find a job anywhere, if they aren’t the top ingeneers in aerospace, or the top surgeons…
Spain misery came from the german and british banks that invested hugely into the housing bubbles for roasting like sausages on spanish sea sides, the french invested more in infrastructures, supermarkets, car manufactures…
The Spanish will throw the Germans out, they don’t care of th euro, they’ll return to the peseta, and build customs barriers to the german goods
Anyway, Spanish banks will definitly make the euro kaput, and the Germans will get their pay check with them
The latin club, Spain, Italy,France is more powerful than the northern club, we have the inhabitants, the armies, the knowledge, the manufactures… the German euro was just strangling our competitivty on the dollar value markets, while Germans found good to have a $1,50 = €1, it ruined our exportations, a currency which is €1 = $1 is OK, the latin club could make a boom in Africa, Europe, Asia, America
“It’s a winner-take-all world.”
You certainly know your economics from the ground up, Mr. G.
Isn’t it odd that the world flies apart when impulses of a higher order drive humankind’s actions?
Germany is dying & being overrun Muslims, particularly Turkish Muslims. The aging, shrinking, dying Germans are being replaced by the invading Turks. Germany will cease to exist in a few decades. By midcentury, Germany will be an Islamic state.
Germany won’t be alone in death. Most of Western Europe is in its deathbed with eager Muslims standing ready to takeover when the time is right. The sad thing is that there are a lot of Western Leftists in Europe, Canada, and the US who are eager for the day it happens. When the West dies the world will go up in flames.
Europe is dying. And so is America. America is in its death throes. America won’t be around in a few decades. America is being conquered by the Third World — primarily Mexico & Central America. The Euro-Christian American is fast vanishing, and will soon be irrelevant.
Most Children Younger Than Age 1 are Minorities, Census Bureau Reports
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/cb12-90.html
Don’t worry, all people are created equal and it’s impolite to say they aren’t. Mayan Indians will be making improvements on nuclear subs and Latin Americans obsessed with the concept of the greater good will never advocate by race.
Perhaps I forgot to put on my Sorting Hat, but there’s an unpleasant, strutting tone to this whole piece, and it’s badly overstated. You’ll have a hard time finding engineers in the U.S., Japan, S. Korea or other advanced industrial countries who quail in the face of German competition, of any kind. And you’ll easily find customers who agree.
The cheerleading, widely encountered throughout the EU until very recently, about German ‘export prowess’ is often a defensive ploy to bluster about the illusory might of the ‘EU experiment’ — in effect trying to co-opt Germany as a kind of exo-skeleton, much as Sigourney Weaver powered-up in that mining suit in Aliens. All the idle chatter — spineless, gassy assertions, no more — has evaporated in recent weeks. Either the author’s breathing ancient fumes, or something uglier is at work.
To write about Spain with the tone of contempt that comes through is instructive but not flattering — about the author. Particularly since, as he says, One really can’t talk about a European economy when key indicators are moving in opposite directions in different countries.
Well, duh. That’s nearly whole argument right there, and why the euro is doomed. E-zone states need to regain control over their exchange rates via competitive devaluation. The productivity playing field will level out fast, in a matter of months, and the imbalances will disappear. It’s got little to do with the author’s stereotypes and temper tantrums.
As for: Now the full extent of the problem is known to everyone.
Like hell it is. We don’t even know how many maps we need.
Aw, snap. There are lots of ways to get the same effect as a devaluation, e.g., wiping out oodles of private wealth.
Austerity will achieve that
There are lots of ways to get the same effect as a devaluation, e.g., wiping out oodles of private wealth.
Eh, howzat? The ‘best’ ways are: 1/ a knock on the door at midnight and lots of broken glass; 2/ inflation; 3/ hyperinflation. Germany’s tried all three. Which do you prefer?
Meanwhile, for the haters, it might help to recall that for most of the 20th century Spain struggled as a civil-war-ravaged, agrarian economy dominated by poverty and illiteracy, its glory days of the 15th and 16th centuries long gone; that it went from zero to sixty after the death of Franco in 1975 and is now the world’s 12th largest economy; that, unlike Germany and France, it was largely excluded from the Marshall plan (and completely excluded during the three years of the fastest growth in European history, from 1948 to 1951); that Ford, Nissan and Toyota are voting with their wallets and constructing major plant as we speak; that Banco Santander, BBVA, Iberdrola and Repsol are all world class companies in their sectors; that Spanish alternate energy companies are dominant in their respective niches (–how many bio-mass facilities in Germany? –who has a dominant presence in the solarfication of the Mojave desert: –why does Wall Street refer to the ‘nuevos conquistadores’ of Spain and there ain’t no German equivalent?).
Easy to add to the above, but it’s enough to set alongside schoolboy errors about population (try 41 to 44 million, depending on ‘guestworkers’, not 50 million) and braindead platitudes about Olympic Games medals (set ‘em alongside Berlin 1936, Leni Riefenstahl and the grizzly E German sports/eugenics programs that endured until reunification, oh, and don’t forget today’s football, tennis, cycling, basketball; if you still feel the need to sneer, then give us a comparison between, say, Scotland and Israel).
Spain’s great error was the misallocation of capital to real estate. But in that it is in good company (r/e bubbles in the US, UK, Australia, Japan and misallocations of all kinds in China and other BRICS). The quantification of the damage still isn’t complete, but it’s evident that Spain will not just survive but thrive, especially if it gives up on flaccid socialist fantasies about the euro, returns to the peseta and directs its economy at the Americas (both N and S). The variables are many, and there are other structural problems — mainly socialist in origin, regulations, labor reform, over-mighty public sector (those damn teachers again), state/federal division of power (sound familiar?) — so the timing is elusive. But the result is not in doubt.
Meanwhile, speaking of misallocation, the ‘vaunted German export machine’ is unhealthily dependent on sales to the EU generally and the ezone in particular. Your solution sounds drearily familiar — the ‘drang nach osten’ has been tried often enough, backed up by the demand for lebensraum, with …er… mixed results. Meanwhile, Lidl has cut back expansion plans and Aldi is closing stores in Spain. So much for cheap, shiny German plastic and metal.
Good luck. But this article sucked.
that it went from zero to sixty after the death of Franco in 1975 and is now the world’s 12th largest economy
Could you look at some statiistics please? Spain’s economic take off took place under Franco: growth was near 10% per year during the sixties From the oil-induced 1973 downturn (ie two years before Franco’s death) to 1982 there was slow growth and unemployment rose sharply. Inn 198é a socialist was elected and it only got worse (much worse for unemployment) despite Spain getting funds from the UE (then ECU). In 1996 center right Aznar was elected and lowered defcits thus allowing Spain to enter the Euro. Cheap credits, thanks to the Euro, led to a boom in the construction sector, leading to immigration (for buolding those houses and buildings) so more housing was needed not to mention locals and foreign tourists who thank it woule be a graet investment. Some “Comunidades Autonomas” (States in US terms) used the additional money fotr infrastructures who would attract businesses. By the time Zapatero was elected most experts agtreed the construction-based growth model was exhausted. But Zapatero just doubled down and when, well before the beginng of the world recession, Spain’s economy took a plunge, he initiated a massive stimulus. End result has been dozens of jet-capable airports who get just one or two landings a month and several high-speed train railway stations who get less than ten passengers a day. Compond it with Zapatero’s policy of massively deployinggreen energy who has led Spain to having soome of the higher prices for electricity in Europe not to mention a huge bill for the tax payer becuse green eletricty had to be subsidized.
By the way Zapatero boasted of having learned Economics in just two afternoons with a friend. Now, he is giving economy classes in, I think, Venezuela.
I’m tired of hearing conservatives complain about austerity in Europe. Forget austerity: this is impoverishment on a mass scale. The Spanish economy is a giant real estate scam. There’s no way to avoid a massive reduction of nominal wealth. As a rough index of how bad things are: the construction sector in Spain is as big as the manufacturing sector. In the United States, construction is about a quarter of manufacturing (at the peak of the 2007 real estate bubble, it was a third of manufacturing). In Germany and Italy, construction is a fifth the size of manufacturing. Too much of the Spanish economy was based on the real estate bubble to avoid extreme pain.
Spain claims that home prices are down 20% since the bubble peaked in 2008. That’s nonsense. As Bloomberg News reported yesterday, Spanish banks are lending to “zombie developers” to prevent unsold homes from coming on the market. Total loans outstanding from Spanish banks have risen sevenfold since 2007, a curious number given that overall bank lending in the European Community has been flat. Spanish banks reportedly have 184 billion Euros of bad real estate debts (that’s three times the face value of their subordinated debt). The actual number could be twice as high. There’s no avoiding a massive erasure of Spanish wealth. And it doesn’t help that Spanish unit labor costs have risen by 35% since 2000, and Spanish labor law makes it hard for Spanish firms to fire anyone (unless, of course, they go bankrupt).
Actually Spain’s labor laws have been changed a couple months ago. Unions appetmpt of initiating massive protests was an abject failure. BTW, those same unions used that legsilation to get rid of excess personel…
Yes, you’re correct, el franquismo is a period far more complex than the MSM pretends and nobody threw a ‘prosperity switch’ in 1975 — I was trying to keep it simple. I also have a clear childhood memory of a drive across Spain around 1970, from the Algarve in Portugal to San Sebastian and on to Biarritz — lots of tracks, donkeys, carts and grinding poverty, little blacktop. Last year I drove through the supposedly still backward and primitive Extremadura; the autovias are now a match for the best in Germany and Switzerland, likely to the horror of all Top Gear-like folks who worship at the Nordschleife at Nürburgring.
Many Americans, you will know, have a soft spot for Aznar — he alone among European leaders had the balls to stand out up front and alone in early support of Desert Storm. He can’t run again under the constitution, but his wife is a heavy-duty politician in her own right, and both are committed to supporting Rajoy. Zapatero will be remembered, IMO, as an amiable dolt. Rubalcaba seems to have learned all he knows about economic activity in the real world from Zapatero. Quite. The PSOE is out of its depth but the PP is not; it shows.
As for bridges and runways to nowhere, we’re in no position to brag (Alaska); ditto many other places (China above all).
True. In rural areas in backwards districts they still used donkeys: urbanization was still in progress thus fields were small and people used either donkeys or cultivators. Roads were poor and for trains, there was a joke about Renfe being an abbraviation: “Plesa, pusgour out of order train”. But had you entered yje houses I fif you would have noticed most of them had a TV and that in big cities there were traffic jams and parking was difficult (taht means many working class people had cars). I have memories both of cities and rural areas who go fgar beyond merly crossing them. Nowadays european subsidies have allowed bulding those autovias who impresed building those autovias that impressed you. .
But Spain’s takeoff , the transformation from a rural to urban copuntry tooak place under franquism, the building of dams for power generation took plece under it and democracy depite having access to europens subsidies who had been denied to franquists never had the similar rfates of growth (partly because the “cath-up effect no longer applied, partly because of a context of high oil prices).
71% of German exports are shipped to European countries. 59% of all German exports are delivered to the member states of the European Union.
Soon the PIGS will blow up Europe & Germany’s biggest customers won’t be able to afford “made in Germany”. When Europe implodes Germany’s export-driven economy will grind to a halt, and they will be in serious trouble.
Germany is rapidly aging & dying … They don’t appear to have a future … They will be replaced by the (Muslim) immigrants (from the Third World) who are pouring into their country.
John Stewart put it best: Who knew that the key to German dominance would be an international banking conspiracy? I guess that incident with the Jews was just about eliminating the competition.
Great point about the Turks. As they become more Islamist, the country will experience a further brain drain. All the young engineers from Turkish universities (there are plenty) will go to Germany, which is ready to absorb them since German is spoken relatively widely in Turkey.
Interesting post and comments. However, Germany is finished! Hyperbole? No/ They are currently closing steel mills to ship to China and S. America. The reason is electricity. You cannot run a rolling mill with intermitent power. Stopping the rollers for a second can cost millions. The shuttering of their nukes and coal fired power plants will leave them at the mercy of wind and solar. The grid does not exist and the cost is prohibitive. No electricity means no industry.
Which suggests that Poland ought to contract with Electricitie d’France to build a nuclear power plant every mile along their western border to deliver reliable electric power to Germany as they fall deeper into their Green delusion.
Banks will be looking for a safer place to invest their money as the southern European economies and nuclear power plants in Poland seems like a pretty good bet. If the Greens somehow block importation of electricity generated in nuclear plants, the Germans can relocate their manufacturing plants to Poland so it seems like the Poles should come out OK no matter what.
Would the fall be cushioned if the Greeks immediately were able to exchange 1 Euro for 4 Drachma or something similar. What would this do?
Question. Upon what will the American MSM blame the collapse of the European economy? Lord knows that they will never want for the American voter to connect the dots between our present fiscal irresponsibility under Obama and that of the EU which led to their failure just as it will ours. Surely, they will not want anyone to get the wild idea that decades of the welfare state led to failure! Anyone care to offer a prediction?
it’s not welfare that is the problem but the euro !
Money does not spend itself.
The American MSM will blame the collapse on whatever the Democratic Party talking points tell them to blame it on. My guess is they will blame it on George W.Bush like they blame every other economic problem.
The European MSM will blame the joooooos.
“It’s not only in manufacturing. With its 82 million people, Germany has a cumulative total of 1,618 Olympic medals.”
Yes, Germany had a very sophisticated biotech sector in the 20th century. Steroids and the ugly roots of that research would ruin the fake Olympic glow that Cold War Europe needed to cling to. Only a grown adult can pretend to be innocent here.
Yeah, you know what Germany also did right? 1. did not really pay for all the damage caused,people murdered,orphaned,violated,valuable things robbed (in Poland, we are still waiting for the return of more or less 500 000 pieces of art,worth 9 bil. dollar) ect.
2. Got the Marschall Plan and,very important-
3. was situated in the perfect spot (being a “wall against communism”) during the Cold War (meaning, it had to receive American support,otherwise it could fall to the Soviets)
Greece,Spain and Italy should learn from this lesson!
Let me assure You-Germans and French work little,especially when compared to f.e Poles,Czechs ect.They just dont have the same high-tech machinery and earn less.It does not mean they are lazy.
More important: the smartest Greeks and Spaniards are looking for work in Germany. Germany’s workforce has begun to shrink rapidly, but it will assimilate skilled workers and professionals from the feckless European south.
Fortunately,they are not.For many reasons-one being the language.Why fortunately? Because, after the Euro has ruined Spains economy (because there were no Pesetas to devaluate) it would be shere irony if Germany,after having benefited immensely through higher exports, would take away the last Chance these countries have,their people (whose educations,btw, they have paid for)
But these people that Germany want to dragg from spain and or Greece must have a good university curriculum, because the made in Germany only counts for 10%, most of the industry pieces are manufactured in eastern republics and in Asia. Germany is hosting the ingeneering offices and the Assemblage unities, or for the average educated, the left positions are services in hospitals, hotels restaurants…
Spain is the world’s largest exporter of olive oil. They also have beautiful weather and tourism. I live in Spain and would rather live here than in dreary London or Berlin any day. I think their current problems are the result of more recent history not the effects of muslim domination or Ferdinand and Isabella- they had 40 years of dictatorship and the boom that followed got out of hand as often happens (eg internet stocks good but tech bubble NASDAQ 5000 out of hand.) Sure Spain has it’s problems but I don’t think they are a lost cause. And I’m not sure how much of it was their fault. They were able to get cheap money, they built apartments, they sold apartments and they did this until they couldn’t. No different from Nevada. And I would say they have more structural labor problems than a laziness problem. For example, grocery stores still close on Sunday here, why?, they just always have. Stores close for 2 and a half hours in the afternoon, why?, always have. Eliminating those two little things would create jobs, but how do you do that in the middle of a depression? The stores want to cut jobs not add them right now so they’re stuck.
Well, it’s labelled as “olive oil.”
Actually if you read the fine print on a lot of “Italian” olive oil, it comes from Spain.
Actually Franco’s major crime against Spain was clinging to powerr. It allowed the PSOE and PCE make people believe Spain’s Second Republic was a democracy, the Popular Front a legitimate government (itr won through ballot stuffing and death threatys on authorities), people like Margarita Nelken (who well before for a “revolution not klike in Russia but one who would taint the oceans of the whiole world in blood”) as democrats and Stalin-era Communists as “Freedom fighters”. Had he abdicated during the sixties when Spain was having near 10% growth (Spain was in an economic crisis when democracy was established) and many people remembered first hand how the Scond Republic was (I have known many left-oriented people who hated Franco but weren’t precisely fond of the Second Republic) those two parties would have played only a minor role. Had he abdicated in the sxities he could have had a proper Constitution drafted. Instead after his death unelected people wrote a two hundred pages horror who set a political system who is killing, has killed would be more exact, Spain.
Regarding the Spaniards’ ability to make products that foreigners will buy, it is of note that Spain’s exports year 2011 totaled circa 210 billion euro, which given imports circa 260 billion means :
>>> Spain’s coverage rate of imports by exports was about 80%
As a comparison, the US year 2011 exported circa 1500 billion dollar, which given imports in excess of 2200 billion means :
>>> US coverage rate of imports by exports was about 68%
Now can one help the poor non-native English speaker that I am: what was this English saying about people living in glass houses
…
“With its 82 million people, Germany has a cumulative total of 1,618 Olympic medals. Spain has 50 million people, but only 115 medals. On a per capita basis, that’s one eighth as many. ”
-Spengler 2012
“No worse mental preparation for the real world can be devised than team sports, which proceed from fixed rules. ”
-Spengler 2005
Did Spengler learn to like sports? When did that happen?
I don’t like team sports, but excellence is excellence in whatever field of application. There are plenty of things that demand excellence –e.g. chess — which are poor preparations for the real world.
“No worse mental preparation for the real world can be devised than team sports, which proceed from fixed rules. ”
You should debate that one with Wellington.
Spain’s fiananacil cris is the lesser of its problems
It has far bigger ones:
1) A broken political system who made national parties dependent on the votes of a few nationalists in Catalonia and Basque regions who became the power brokers. In return the nationalists asked for a) Subsidies and b) control of medias and education. They used it for building hate and contempt towards the rest of Spain through rewritiong history and falsifying news. A corollary of their policies has been forced use of the reional language and teaching egneral subjects (eg math) in it. That made working in these regions increasingly difficlut fir non-natives and that includes persolnels from foreign companies. This lead to economic stagnation. But at the ssame time independentist blackmail brought lmarge subsidies to those regions so votyers believe that independentism “works”. Today those few independentits are no longer few, they are increasingly agressive and heibnous while more and more “non Ctalmano-Basuques” wwant to expel Catalnoa and Vascongadas from Spain. Spain is in the brink of implosion.
2) An absurd political system. 2d part. 18 autonom regions. 18 duplications of everything. 18 kinglets with little kingdoms with their kings aiming to increase their power, personal wealth and power. Those kinglets havze noticed Catalonia’ and Basque Country’s formula for getting subsidies and keeping State’s financial controllers away have funded independentist parties (still small) and efforts to recreate regional languages who had been dead long before America’s discovery.
3) An educational system who is at the same time one of the more lavishly funded and of the worst in world.
4) But the bigger problem is demographic. Instead of the 2.1 children women should have for long term population stability they are having 1.47. But this number includdes children of migrants, “real” numbers are much lower and in many places it is less than 1. That means Spain is on the way to become a thanatorium all while the Socialist Party, out of a perverse nihilism not only made one of the most legislations for abortion but created a culture where a woman who hasn’t had a few abortions is seen as an anomaly and a fascist. Alos Spain faces at least a decade of high undemployment menaning people are not going to decide having more chikldren anytime soon.
Thanks for providing this background. I agree with most of your points (it still annoys me that the minor Iberian tribes refuse to speak proper Castilian). But I would add another important element, namely the Civil War, during and after which hundreds of thousands died by firing squad. I am not particularly anti-Franco (he save 40,000 Jews during World War II as an act of Christian charity, twice as many as Roosevelt!). But the utter viciously of both sides during the Guerra Civil left a residue of bitterness that still poisons Spanish politics, regional as well as ideological.
The Civil War in turn has deep roots; I wrote about these here:
http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FF22Aa01.html
Oops my reply to you text ended as a reply to 40. Sorry about that.
for #3- if you mean for grades K-12, I can’t argue with you. But if you also include the university system I do take exception to at least 1 school, University of Navarra. It has a reputation in Europe of what Harvard use to be many yrs ago, an excellent education in any major it offers.
I was thinkiing in K-12 but also in the Complutense (who elected as chairmand the son of the author of the spanish Katyn) and similar universities where main disciplines are dead end carreers, politics and applied sexology
Spain has some very good businesses schools like ESADE. I know little about its ingeneer schools but I have heard they are, or were, fine.
Regionalising is encouraged by the Brussels Elite, that doen’t want nation/states, which are likely to contest Brussels power. Regions gets funds investments from Brussels
If you think about Jean Monnet and similar “Fatehers of Europe” in the immediate after war it takes very special man to lend a hand to people who in addition of having invaded France had Zyklon B on their hands.
Jean Monnet was Roosevelt a close adviser (he had a successful career in the US as banker) for WW2 war funds towards Britain and France, and the EU was the original design of Churchill and Roosevelt, that wanted to eradicate war velleitties between the usual enemies, France and Germany, though at the beginning it concerned only the administration of our both mines regions, whereas iron was in France and coal in Germany, administration which would became independent of our both governments, managed by bankers and industrials.
It had such a succes that the politians (Schumann, Monnet, Adenauer) of the era wanted to extend it to a larger program, innaugurated by Adenauer and de Gaulle in the Elysée treaty of 1963, in parallels, the ECC was developping with the 6 major western europe economies, though de Gaulle had not much sympathy for this “Machin” managed by technocrats.
-http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_de_l%27%C3%89lys%C3%A9e
http://tinyurl.com/347vpqx
You are at it again. I was talking of Jean Monnet not Roosevelt, when Roosevelt (BTW he died before the end of the war did you know?) who had not been occupied and haad not had any relative killed and raped also I have read Churchill’s war memeories and there is zero, zilch, nada, nitchevo about any project of Europens Union. You shoudl stop reading l’Humanité. Or read the Pravda: it is cheaper because it is untranslated.
Also about europeists I read Pierre Closterman’s (the French fighter ace) book. For Americans it is hate on siht. For British in four years he doen’t mention any British friend, not even having a drink with one of them. The only time he mentios them is when his (French) wingman sleeps not with any married British woman but with the wife of a serviceman who had been sent to the front. What is interesting is that nobody forced him to tell about it in his book so he must have condiered it an action of merit. Now when anytime German pilot is captured or, at the end of the war, surrenders he invites him to share his apaprtments and talks of him having been friend after the war and being the goodfather of one of his children. And every ten pages he is lamenting “this european civil war”. I summarize: had not the Germans he would have gladly fought alongside them against the American and Russian untermenschen. For Auzchwitz and the Ostplan these were merely insignificant details for him.
I don’t know or care about Roosevelt’s designs: the Europeans who amde the UE dremed of an “imperial Europe” enemy of America who would “avenge” WWI and WWII. It is clear in Closterman, it is clear in Jung, it is clear in everyone whose position was low enough for him speaking his mind.
JFM is entirely correct. The EC always was envisioned as a counterweight to the United States and an alternative to the other Brussels-based organization, NATO.
JFM, I dunno from where you took your roman from:
but there are objective articles for what I said, and not from communist sources, but from conservative sources:
Churchill Discourse 1946 at Zurich University
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oUyFS556s
about Monnet Roosevelt Relations:
“Jean Monnet: A Pro-Industrialist Banker
This is the history of the “Victory Program,” and of a small man, who was one of the great men of the past century, Jean Monnet. Monnet was, first, about the only Frenchman who understood something about American affairs, and second, about the only European banker who was pro-industrialist in his worldview. He liked and admired the “physical power of American industry,” and the relative absence of social prejudice in the American lifestyle. He had a very good sense of the difference between the United States and England, and immediately understood, in 1940, that the fate of Europe depended upon American policies. In exile after France’s occupation by the Nazis, he jumped, through his various connections, into the middle of American and British government circles, calling for some other policy than just extrapolating from the usual schemes. F.D.R. immediately understood the role that Monnet could play, and used him as an “inspirer,” a rabble-rouser in the American state bureaucracies. Roosevelt and Monnet both clearly understood that in exceptional periods, men who operate according to business-as-usual, are a terrible problem, and that problems must be short-circuited, and things organized to make the machine work.”
-http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_97-01/002-3_monnet.html#top
“August 11, 1952
The ECSC begins work with Jean Monnet at its head. The United States was the first country to recognize the European Coal and Steel Community. On his first day on the job as President of the Community’s High Authority, the forerunner to the European Commission, Monnet received a diplomatic dispatch from Secretary of State Dean Acheson on behalf of President Truman – the first formal diplomatic note addressed by a foreign government to a European institution.
Excerpt: “It is the intention of the United States to give the Coal and Steel Community the strong support that its importance to the political and economic unification of Europe warrants. As appropriate under the Treaty, the United States will now deal with the Community on coal and steel matters. All Americans will join me in welcoming this new institution and in expressing the expectation that it will develop as its founders intended, and that it will realize the hopes so many have placed in it. The six-nation Coal and Steel Community represents the first major step toward the unification of Europe.”
-http://germany.usembassy.de/eu_presidency/milestones.htm
“DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.”
-http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html
if you like the drama, I can provide you some other links that say that the Nazis programmed a IV Reich, and the “who’s who” of the funding fathers of the EU, all related with their past as Nazy and or as collaborators
The US financed EVERY non-Communist outlet in Europe, including the Social Democrats, some of whom turned out to be our best friends (e.g., when Craxi installed the Pershing missiles in 1982).
“Also about europeists I read Pierre Closterman’s (the French fighter ace) book. For Americans it is hate on siht. For British in four years he doen’t mention any British friend, not even having a drink with one of them. The only time he mentios them is when his (French) wingman sleeps not with any married British woman but with the wife of a serviceman who had been sent to the front. What is interesting is that nobody forced him to tell about it in his book so he must have condiered it an action of merit. Now when anytime German pilot is captured or, at the end of the war, surrenders he invites him to share his apaprtments and talks of him having been friend after the war and being the goodfather of one of his children. And every ten pages he is lamenting “this european civil war”. I summarize: had not the Germans he would have gladly fought alongside them against the American and Russian untermenschen. For Auzchwitz and the Ostplan these were merely insignificant details for him.”
I read Closterman’s book when I was a teen, I don’t remember that he was relating such facts, but more on how he was involved with fighting enemy pilots in air combats.
Though I can imagine that he would admire rather the german pilots than the Brits, he who was in contact with them more than with the Brits in Air combats, besides his company was called “Alsace”, therefore there weren’t Brit pilots in it, but French,
there’s a video that might explain why he became friend with a german pilot, he is telling that a german pilot spared his life when his plane was hit and that he had to promptly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDGzT-0zSZA
Also, Antoine de Saint-Exupery was well known through his books in Germany before the war, and some german pilots said that they became pilots because of his books, so there was a mutual admiration among the pilots that crosses the enemity state, you can still see that spirit with the NATO pilots that make the “Tiger” contest too today, and the Brits aren’t left apart, it’s not a nationality that determinates who you should admire, but what prowesses such people could achieve
“The EC always was envisioned as a counterweight to the United States and an alternative to the other Brussels-based organization, NATO”
As I can understand that NATO and the UE were parallel organisation, I don’t think that the EU was ment to counterweight the US, but to be a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Though you can hear (or read) some voices that would see the EU to compete with the US, mainly from the German side
“The US financed EVERY non-Communist outlet in Europe”
yes, and also the “Gladio” cells
JFM
there’s the movie that was made from Closterman’s book
“Le Grand Cirque”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlwWKZMtRUA&feature=related
dear friends,
come to Germany and make my country a little bit more multinational and full
of wonderful ideas,
also need a wife for my younger son, would like some grandchildren too,
don´t like religious fanaticism,
kind regards, frank
Why would anyonze be so mad to go to Germany where it is cold, there is littkle food, it is overcrowed, play soccer instead of football and people speak a funny language when they could go to America instead?
don´t be jealous, i see it only as a regional center
you got nice looking Turkish girls, why don’t you pick one? you know that some would like to escape from their family abusive traditions
being in the north east, pomerania, near the polish border, there are not many turks until now, islam is also a problem, the turkish girls (at least in Istanbul) i really like because they look spectacular good in general and
i was kidding a bit … can´t find a wife for my son, he has to do …
I probably missed it, but did anyone note that both Greece and Spain suffered a long period of Muslim rule?
If you look at current Muslim societies, they are oppressive and give out a lot of largesse to the in crowd.
for Spain you can count 4 centuries and a half when the last Muslims were fired out of spain, for Greece, fast 2 centuries, and you know they didn’t interbred between 2 different religious communities
I would caution on the German unemployment rates. My recollection is that the German population has been declining since 2004 and is on its way down to 69 million, from 82 million today, by 2050. The absolute number of working age Germans declines significantly, long before 2050, since people generally retire 15-20 years before they die. A declining and aging population should result in low German unemployment rates for decades to come. However it also raises the question of who will bailout Europe. Would you buy a 40 year Eurobond to be paid off by Germans who die in 20 years?
To the point: Spaniards and Greeks and Turks working in Germany and paying German taxes will pay off your Eurobond.
i really love this comments because they give me some hope i didn´t reckon with
It doesn’t seems that that is what Erdogan is telling to the Turkish population in Germany, and I didn’t hear Spanish praising the german’s way, while I was in Spain last winter
Erdogan’s the reason a lot of Turks want to work in Germany. As for the Spanish: they’ll hate life in Germany, but they’ll go. Who said they’ll be happy?
I’m tired of hearing conservatives complain
Spanish housing is more complex than it looks — the mess is mitigated by the volume of under-occupied housing stock in the family pueblos, still central to Spanish life. Many still see the pueblo as home (how’s that for social stability?); the properties they own are often solidly built, cheap-to-keep and have plenty of room for chickens and veggies. And are debt free. Doesn’t that merely increase supply and make things worse? No, it provides a convenient refuge/bolt-hole in hard times — especially important in a country where all morgages are ‘with recourse’ (typical EU law). Spaniards of a certain age know all about hard times.
As for the foggy thoughts about unbalanced economies, aside from housing, Spain is a well-diversified economy with a respectable industrial base – its export:GDP ratio is about 27%, similar to the UK, France and Italy, and much less vulnerable than the over-hyped German economy. The country supplies much of Europe with food and fish. Big-Ag is as visible in Spain as in Kansas or the San Joaquin Valley, and the Spanish fishing fleet effectively wiped out the UK fleet on its own doorstep (helped by British incompetence).
Spain holds a much stronger hand than realized; I believe they know how to play it. Smart foreign investors are already looking for re-entry points. We are condemned to live in interesting times, right?
there will be light at the end of the tunnel,
but when it goes down it goes down; now we have that momentum in Spain,…;
in Europe it is generally difficult to see the driving force;
at the moment Germany sits in the drivers seat as G. Soros says,
but in 10 years who knows
Germans are dying out & being conquered by (Turkish) Muslims. The invading Muslim Turks are replacing the aging, shrinking, dying Germans. Germany, as we know it, will cease to exist in a few decades. By midcentury, Germany will be an Islamic state.
The birth rate among Turkish immigrants in Germany is 2.4, nearly double that of the native German population (which at 1.38 is far below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple).
According to projections by the German Federal Statistics Office, Germany’s current population of 82 million, the largest in the European Union, is set to decline by as much as 20%, to 65 million, over the next five decades. At the same time, 34% of the population will be older than 65 and 14% will be 80 or more by 2060, up from 20% and 5% respectively in 2009.
The number of pensioners that will have to be supported by working-age people could almost double by 2060, according to the Federal Statistics Office. While 100 people of working age between 20 and 65 had to provide the pensions for 34 retired people in 2009, they will have to generate income for between 63 and 67 pensioners in 2060.
Germany is dying & the Islamic invaders are stepping to fill the void.
Excuse my little english!
Wow! And in this construst get the richest 1 % every year more and more money?
The normal worker get the same like the 70th? I´ts a perfect world for an easy brain. Every nation compedet about the wages? And every nation generate a cash overflow? ROFL? Thats vodoonomics!
What you all know about Germany. Very nice. But there is one thing you should always have in the Hinterkopf, as we say here. In the back of your head. Obama said it shortly after his election in a speech he gave in Germany for American soldiers: “Germany is an occupied country. And it will stay that way”. Have you ever heard of the “Atlantik-Brücke”, the organization that bridges USG with Germany? Google them. See how far you come. Every party including the Greens has politicians in strategic positions with a membership in the Atlantik-Brücke. First this problem has to be solved. America as Empire has to solve this problem itself, by its homemade demise. After that, when we are not an occupied country anymore we will immediately declare war on Marie Claude und ihre welsche Brut.
Anyway, since 2000 years, all kinds of people came through our lands. And everyone who staid, we made German. We have a long experience with that. And even with our plastic generation of today, our Turks are different from the Paki problem in England or the Blacks and Arabs in France. When the house of debt finally collapses and with it all the welfare that makes us so popular most of the invaders will not like our more harsh climate anymore and go away and the rest of the Turks and Blacks we will make German.
Made everybody German? That’s a bit exaggerated. Germany had the opportunity to make the Jews into Germans — no-one ever wanted to be German more than the German Jews — but drove them out or killed them. That’s a real tragedy, because there’s now way you could have lost the Second World War, if only you had had the Jews on your side.
The German Jews had been already made German. They were German(s). To deprive them from their Germaneness was an act against German citizens and in this way treason against the German nation. Get it?
That’s a fair point of view, but when a German government with majority popular support commits an act of “treason against the German nation,” we have a unique sort of problem: the German nation in effect committed treason against itself.
Wolgang, tody you have a army of Beer Trinkers, that would be difficult for them to move their *sses far from the bar.
And anyway, we have the nuclear power, as soon as some of your troops would be dicerned as moving towards our borders, Berlin would be vitrified !
I know a bit of this Atlantic alliance, Hollande is said to be a member too
http://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/gouvernement-hollande-formation-plus-atlantiste-qu-on-pourrait-croire-benjamin-dormann-366638.html
True, it is a tragedy. And we had to find out the hard way that the Fuehrer could n´t care less about Germany and the Germans. The Germans are always strong believers. Nowadays they believe in windmills, solar energy, peace and democracy. It is still a long way to go before the Germans will realize that only Christ is worth it. Like it was in the very old days.
Benedict XVI is one of my favorite people in the world, as I’ve made clear in print over many years, and I pray for his health and well-being. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the true heroes of the 20th century. What worries me is Heinrich Heine’s observation that the Germans remained (and, as you imply still remain) loyal to their old paganism under the veneer of Christianity. Schreckensbeispiel: Ildefons Herwegen.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ildefons_Herwegen
Interesting link. But I do not believe in this paganism connection. Like the hellenism it is a concept of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung). Something new under the disguise of something old. I think there is a direct line from gnosticism, Christian heresies born out of the fount of gnosis, Protestantism (Kirchenspaltung – remember, the support for the fuehrer came overwhelmingly from protestant areas), Auflärung (Enlightenment) and the french revolution which made national socialism possible. Then there is the case of Prussia. I do not think that it was law of nature that out of Prussia came something like Nazi Germany. But without Prussia, its foundation in the enlightenment and Bismarks “Kulturkampf” against the Catholics the victory of national socialism would also not be possible. It was because of Prussia that some venerable german traits got twisted. Strange things indeed.
nazi germany for me it was a kind of terrible accident;
it was also a figth against bolschewism and may be the last european figth for world power and last but not least i feel sorry for the terrible suffering of Jews under german rule;
Hitler came to rule first in Bavaria not in Prussia;
to believe in Christianity is sympathetic to me, also logical but difficult
“It was because of Prussia that some venerable german traits got twisted. Strange things indeed”
yes, it is ! it’s not strange if you know history of Prussia, they never were openminded, but zum Befehl people !
Also isn’t it funny that the nowadays EU (and EZ) is made after the german model “zollverein” (initiated by frederich List) of the 19th century, that Bismarck implemented by war on to the recalcitrant Landern, today, the Germans will have hard time to force all the Europeans to adopt their austerity measures, yet though the ECB rules (which they direct), they can make some big wounds !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zollverein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_List
I’ll take the Prussians over the Bavarians any time — puh-leeze. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, the Humboldt brothers and Moses Mendelssohn.
it’s not a surprise, you would also have sided Hitler, in spite of him being a Austrian and antisemit, just that his warmongering is appealing to you, there were such people in WS too that supported Hitler
“The Churches’ advocacy of a “Christian culture” led to a “sacralization of cultural identity” (as the theologian Miroslav Volf puts it), in which dominant, positive values were seen as “Christian” ones, while developments viewed negatively (such as secularism and Marxism) were attributed to “Jewish” influences. Moreover, particularly in the German Evangelical Church (the largest Protestant Church in Germany), the allegiance to the concept of Christendom was linked to a strong nationalism, symbolized by German Protestantism’s “Throne and Altar” alliance with state authority. The third factor was the Churches’ understanding of their institutional role. While most Christian religious leaders in Germany welcomed the end of the Weimar Republic and the resurgence of nationalism, they became increasingly uneasy about their institutions’ future in what was clearly becoming a totalitarian state. (Moreover, many of the leading Nazis were overtly anti-Christian.) The Churches in Nazi Germany, while wanting to retain their prominent place in society, opposed any state control of their affairs. The Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches sought to maintain some degree of independence by entering into certain arrangements with the Nazi regime. The 1933 concordat, signed by representatives of the Nazi regime and the Vatican, ostensibly secured independence for Catholic schools and other Catholic institutions in Nazi Germany. The Protestant Churches, which were divided regionally, behaved cautiously — avoiding public confrontation and negotiating privately with Nazi authorities — in the hope that this would ensure institutional independence from direct Nazi control. Throughout Hitler’s Germany, bishops and other Christian religious leaders deliberately avoided antagonizing Nazi officials. When Christian clergymen and Christian women deplored Nazi policies, they often felt constrained to oppose those policies in a muted fashion. Even in the Protestant Confessing Church (the Church group in Germany that was most critical of Nazism), there was little support for official public criticism of the Nazi regime, particularly when it came to such central and risky issues as the persecution of Jews.”
http://www.adl.org/braun/dim_14_1_role_church.asp
“remember, the support for the fuehrer came overwhelmingly from protestant areas), Auflärung (Enlightenment) and the french revolution which made national socialism possible. ”
Was it rather Social Darwinism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
Tour de force, David. thanks.
This has been an amusing thread, much better informed than typical at PJM, other than Wretchard’s threads (where Senor Equis has been mysteriously banned, what am I, Whiskey? Maybe my nickname should be Vodka).
1) As an American of German descent who’s witnessed some of the legendary Teutonic stubborness up front, I can empathize with Marie Claude’s vigorous defense of what’s left of French manufacturing and technical prowess which is often standing in Germany’s shadow. I also appreciated the commenters who noted that compared to what the Germans did to Russia during Barbarossa the Germans got off relatively easy — not to excuse the rapes in Berlin and East Prussia, but these atrocities were overwhelmingly committed by second-line rear echelon troops of the Red Army mostly after the fighting was done.
2) Whiskey while sticking to his usual hobby horses of race and female hypergamy is nonetheless right in this case. The Atlantic magazine article attacking the new German bestseller about how Germany is better off without the whole Euro is indeed pro-Establishment garbage. Naturally the Washington-New York-London bankster/central banker axis assumes it’s Germany’s job to allow the ECB to print as much money as necessary, Weimar lessons be damned, to bail out their neighbors. The possibility that even after the collapse of a third of its export partners Germany could do ok, because the big bucks are in Der Ost (Russia, China) as Spengler points out here, is not be brooked. All that matters is saving the Unlimited Fiat Status Quo. The Atlantic’s editorial staff knows damn well where their bread is buttered — TBTFs — hence the Bernanke ‘the hero’ cover and other nauseating central bank cartel worship.
3) I do not know much about German efforts to ‘Germanize’ immigrants, but I do know that Germany has very strict citizenship laws that prohibit German nationals from having a second passport. This becomes an obvious hindrance if a Greek or Pole were wanting to settle permanently in Germany but not give up his Greek or even let’s say U.S. or Canadian passport. Russia by contrast would have no problem giving residency if not citizenship to a Greek and letting him keep his old passport. Thus, for many Greeks or other talented but jobless southern Europeans who will find Germany too picky, Moscow and St. Petersburg beckon — particularly as German companies increasingly outsource their work (even Volkswagen!) to Russia as its cheaper than Hungary or the Czech Republic.
4) Lastly in an item related to number 3, Russia has noticeably stepped up its efforts to Russianize foreigners or at least give expats more opportunities to learn Russian cheaply. Intensive summer Russian programs for working professionals who can afford a three-to-four month sabbatical are $6,000 in the U.S., but you can get a fulltime Russian degree from MGU (the Lomonosov Moscow State University) for about $8,000 and toss in an executive MBA in Moscow for another three to four grand. Plus there’s always evening or Saturday classes for Russian. MGU in my personal experience is overrun with Chinese students these days which makes Ian Bremmer’s digs at Russia not deserving to be in the BRICs all the more hack-worthy, particularly from someone like Bremmer who’s actually spent time in Moscow recently as opposed to the gaggle of old fart Cold Warriors who’ve never set foot there since Perestroika. If China is so much more awesomer than Russia, why do so many Chinese students prefer to study at MGU (ranked 80th or so among the top 100 global universities in one recent ranking) than to Beijing or Shanghai’s extensive universities?
The French are very resistant, considering the remenent anglo-saxon medias cabals against them, some say that we are romantic resistants, yet, it’s because we master litterature, while some other bravado euphemism
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/05/29/how-can-obamas-middle-east-policy-possibly-get-worse-answer-look-at-syria/2/
Off topic comment, but all I can say is wow — some PJM columnists are starting to admit much of Syrian opposition is Muslim Brotherhood in bed with Saudis, Qataris and those nasty Erdogan-Islamicizing Turks. Well gee whiz how long do they expect said opposition (which seems to be mostly tweeting from London, Paris and D.C. these days) to last if Assad does fall? Did they learn anything from their experience with Ahmed Chalabi and co? Of course not.
Either Obama’s supposed to invade Syria, or run guns to the opposition and let the U.S. intelligence community sort out who’s who (isn’t that already being done?). The possibility that there are no good solutions in Syria is not to be brooked, except perhaps by Thomas P.M. Barnett who admits that if the U.S. invaded there would be more, not less killing.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/barnett-on-syria-speed-the-killing-because-we-can/
http://thomaspmbarnett.com/globlogization/2012/5/30/times-battleland-syria-when-military-intervention-makes-sens.html
Anyway maybe the Obama Admin’s been reading Senor Equis’ suggestion that Assad be encouraged by the Russians to step aside and retire to Belarus far from the clutches of the International Criminal Court (but only temporarily). Allawites are still gonna be killing foreign-funded Sunnis and vice versa.
exactly, these are posturing discourses even from Hollande, though I read on a french military site, that no NATO strikes are forecasted, because the Amerricans wouldn’t want to get involved, nor China, Russia and all the Briks would allow it at the UN, also because removeing Assad wouldn’t be so easy as the Libyan campain, theySyrians are better armed, their anti aerian arms are x by 5, their planes too, and they can fly, also, because the evident manifestations today, aren’t of the impulsive mobs during the Arab Spring, but organised and armed islamist rebels that look for a clash with Assad forces, no matter how many deads in their ranks, they are aiming at moving the western plebe to give them a hand !
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http://www.onthenatureofthings.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=798&p=19992#p19992
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