Archive for January 2012
Euro Apocalypse: The Rape of Greece
Greece is fighting for her sovereignty against attacks from Germany, the EU and the IMF
Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi by Eugène Delacroix.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has signalled that Greece will have to give up autonomy over its budget if it is to receive the full backing of the international community for its second €130bn (£109bn) bail-out.
—IMF tells Greece it will lose control of budget in return for bail-out
See Also:
A Tale of Two Acts
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 was signed into United States law on December 31, 2011 by President Barack Obama.
The Act authorizes $662 million in funding, among other things “for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad.” In a signing statement, President Obama described the Act as addressing national security programs, Department of Defense health care costs, counter-terrorism within the U.S. and abroad, and military modernization. The Act also imposes new economic sanctions against Iran (section 1045), commissions reviews of the military capabilities of countries such as Iran, China, and Russia, and refocuses the strategic goals of NATO towards energy security.
The most controversial provisions to receive wide attention are contained in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism.” In particular, sub-sections 1021 and 1022, which deal with detention of persons the government suspects of involvement in terrorism, have generated controversy as to their legal meaning and their potential implications for abuse of Presidential authority. Although the White House and Senate sponsors maintain that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) already grants presidential authority for indefinite detention, the Act states that Congress “affirms” this authority and makes specific provisions as to the exercise of that authority.
—National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 [my emphasis]
Although there was a lot of people who raised their voices against this Act (see Wikipedia for some examples) the Act was passed on the last day of the year—when most people were getting ready for New Year’s eve party. This Act will be seen in ten or twenty years as the first step to an authoritarian system, not so different from the one currently ruling Syria. In a more immediate affect it could start a war with Iran.
This Act affects people as individuals, but soon after there was another Act that mainly had an affect on corporations:
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States (bill) proposed by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (Republican) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court-orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers (ISP) to block access to the sites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include streaming of copyright material, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
—Stop Online Piracy Act [my emphasis]
Opposition to this bill was led by multi-billion dollar corporations (Google is both an advertising network and a search engine):
Opponents include Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, Roblox, Reddit, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, in addition to human rights organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch.
The less worrying of the two was shelved (for now), while the more serious was signed into law. I guess corporations are people, while people are sheep.
Euro Apocalypse: The Maximum Fails Again
The last third of the Edict, divided into 32 sections, imposed a price ceiling–a maxima–for over a thousand products. These products included various food items (beef, grain, wine, beer, sausages, etc), clothing (shoes, cloaks, etc), freight charges for sea travel, and weekly wages. The highest limit was on one pound of purple-dyed silk, which was set at 150,000 denarii (the price of a lion was set at the same price).
The Edict did not solve all of the problems in the economy. Diocletian’s mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low.
Merchants either stopped producing goods, sold their goods illegally, or used barter. The Edict tended to disrupt trade and commerce, especially among merchants. It is safe to assume that a gray market economy evolved out of the edict at least between merchants.
Sometimes entire towns could no longer afford to produce trade goods. Because the Edict also set limits on wages, those who had fixed salaries (especially soldiers) found that their money was increasingly worthless as the artificial prices did not reflect actual costs.
The long term impact for Western European economics has been that price decrees are viewed as only being effective for less than one generation. Most price decrees since AD 1000 have been issued with the understanding that the fixed prices would only last for 5 or 10 years. Since the 1930s (with the exception of WWII), price decrees have only been issued for durations of typically less than a year.
—Edict on Maximum Prices, Wikipedia
Whenever you hear ‘price controls’ or fixed prices of any kind remember the Maximum and remember that it always fails: it failed in Roman times, during the French Revolution, during the Russian Revolution, it failed in China:
Chinese power plants have plunged into the red since 2010 as they struggled with rising coal prices and capped power tariffs. Frustrated over heavy losses, some plants in Shanxi province which have the lowest grid feed-in prices, have cut generation rates by half.
it failed in the UAE:
Gulf News has learnt that UAE oil retailers are losing an estimated Dh16.5 million per day on petrol sales as the gap between state-set petrol prices and the cost of imports has widened in recent months, “The petrol grade which sells at Dh1.72 a litre in the UAE, needs to be sold at Dh3.16 a litre to reflect its true market price,” a well-placed source at one of the country’s oil retailing companies told Gulf News.
and it will fail wherever and whenever it is used.
As the three examples above clearly show, price control is a levy on wealth holders to finance consumption. A one-time war or emergency related levy is usually accepted by farmers, traders and manufactures, but a permanent price control is mathematically unsustainable. Most price controls are set by military men (Diocletian) or authoritarian governments (Communist Party of China), but what might work in a besieged city does not work on a country-wide scale.
Subsidised prices are another form of price controls and although different than the Maximum they too always end badly. Governments that let prices float face civil unrest (like in Nigeria), those that impose price controls jump from the frying-pan to the fire. Now when the semi-democratic government of Greece imposes price controls, to the expected result, then one wonders how long it will take for the government to turn authoritarian?
Pharmacists are struggling to stock their shelves as the Greek government, which sets the prices for drugs, keeps them artificially low. This means that firms are turning to sell the drugs outside of the country for a higher price—leading to stock depletion for Greeks.
Read: Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation (PDF format, 13.2 MB) or a short review of the book.
See also:
Euro Apocalypse: Meet the Technocrats
Mario Monti
He served as a European Commissioner from 1995 to 2004, with responsibility for the Internal Market, Services, Customs and Taxation from 1995 to 1999 and then for Competition from 1999 to 2004. Monti has also been Rector and President of Bocconi University in Milan. On 12 November 2011, in the midst of a financial crisis, he was invited by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to form a new technocratic government in Italy following the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi. Monti was sworn in as Prime Minister on 16 November 2011, just a week after having been appointed a Senator for Life.
…
Monti actively participates in several major think tanks. He is a member of the Presiderium of the Friends of Europe. He was the founding chairman of Bruegel, another European think tank, which was formed in 2005. He is also the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a think tank founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller.
Monti is a leading member of the exclusive Bilderberg Group. He has also been an international advisor to Goldman Sachs and The Coca-Cola Company.
—Mario Monti, Wikipedia
- Age: 68 years.
- European Commissioner: unelected.
- Rector and President of an Italian University: unelected.
- Senator for life: unelected.
- Prime Minister: unelected.
- Major think tanks.
- Friends of Europe.
- Bruegel.
- Trilateral Commission.
- Bilderberg Group: “an annual, unofficial, invitation-only conference of approximately 120 to 140 guests from North America and Western Europe, most of whom are people of influence” (from Wikipedia).
- International Advisor to multinational corporations.
Lucas Papademos
Previously, he was Governor of the Bank of Greece from 1994 to 2002 and Vice President of the European Central Bank from 2002 to 2010. He was also a visiting professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Financial Studies at the University of Frankfurt.
…
In 1975, he worked with Franco Modigliani on the NAIRU concept, introduced under the term NIRU (non-inflationary rate of unemployment). He taught economics at Columbia University from 1975 until 1984, and then at the University of Athens from 1988 to 1993.
He has served as Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1980. He joined the Bank of Greece in 1985 as Chief Economist, rising to Deputy Governor in 1993 and Governor in 1994. During his time as Governor of the national bank, Papademos was involved in Greece’s transition from the drachma to the euro as its national currency.
After leaving the Bank of Greece in 2002, Papademos became the Vice President to Wim Duisenberg (and then Jean-Claude Trichet) at the European Central Bank from 2002 to 2010. In 2010 he left that position to serve as an advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou.
He has been a member of the Trilateral Commission since 1998.
—Lucas Papademos, Wikipedia
- Age: 64 years.
- Professor of Economic: unelected.
- Senior economist at the Federal Reserve: unelected.
- Chief economist at the Bank of Greece: unelected.
- Involved in Greece’s transition from a national currency to a non-national currency.
- Vice president at the ECB: unelected.
- Advisor to a failed prime minister: unelected.
- Trilateral Commission.
Usury: A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View
I discovered on the exceedingly excellent website of Project Gutenberg a book, that although written 110 years ago, speaks to the heart of our modern economy problems. The book is called Usury: A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View by Calvin Elliott. I was surprised by how much my own writings about usury follows his arguments. Of course no book about usury could bypass Francis Bacon’s attempt at legitimizing it:
The dictum of Bacon that “Usury gathers the wealth of the realm into few hands” is readily proven and fully verified in the experience of these times. The tendency to centralization under a system of usury or interest-taking is so strong, and the modern result so apparent that the statement only is necessary.
Usury not only enslaves the borrower and oppresses the poor who are innocent of all debt, but it also affects the rich by gathering the wealth of the wealthy into fewer and fewer hands. There is a centralizing draft that threatens and then finally absorbs the smaller fortunes into one colossal financial power. It is as futile to resist this as to resist fate. Wealth cannot be so fortified and guarded as to successfully resist the attack of superior wealth when the practice of usury is permitted. The smaller and weaker fortune, using the same weapon as the larger and stronger, must inevitably be defeated and overcome, and ultimately absorbed.
Rates of interest do not affect the ultimate result. Under a high rate the gathering is rapid, under a low rate the accretions are slower, but the gathering into few hands is none the less sure. Rates of interest only place the convergent center at a nearer or more remote period.
I advise all readers to study this book (do not be put off by the religious chapters at the start and continue to the purely economic arguments in the later chapter).
See Also:
Euro Apocalypse: Demographic Genocide
From the start of the 1960′s to 1978 the population of Italy was growing at a rate of 0.65% per year. This is not a high rate of growth, but it was reasonable in a developed industrial country. As long as the GDP (as an indicator for the economy) grew by more than that rate then the GDP per capita would be positive.
Italy population 1961-2005—showing the difference between actual population and a 0.65% growth line
In 1978 something happened to drastically cut the population growth of Italy. It was neither war, famine nor plague; it was an energy crisis, i.e. a drastic increase in the price of oil (see Energy crisis at Wikipedia for historical perspective). The difference between the actual population in 2005 and the linear extrapolation of the 0.65% growth line is about nine million person, that is 18 times the number of Italians lost in the second world war, including civilian deaths due to military action. If the same analysis was done on the whole of Europe I would not be surprised if the number of missing population reached fifty million, almost the total casualties of the second world war.
Nowadays there is an insidious theory contradicting more than 10,000 years of human culture that unfortunately has overtaken the minds of the world’s scientists and politicians :
Roughly speaking, nations or subpopulations with higher GDP per capita are observed to have fewer children, even though a richer population can support more children.
—Demographic-economic paradox, Wikipedia
Of course this innocent statistic is used by death-mongers to preach the falsehood of “fewer children” equals “better life”—Millions of dollars have been spent to prevent the poor from having children in the name of economic development. To understand the paradox one has to look at it dynamically and not statically, i.e. how did economic change effects population and how did population change effects economic.
Italy GDP, GDP-per-capita and population (percentage change from 1960 to 1999).
The above graph is from the increasingly excellent website of the St. Louis Federal Reserve website. Now let us carefully inspect the graph and see what happened over time, i.e. dynamically: in the mid seventies GDP and GDP-per-capita growth was above 5% percent. This was down from the fifties and sixties, but that was a post-war boom that was destined to end. We can see the effect of the dollar devaluation on Italy: in 1978 GDP and GDP-per-capita plunged to negative territories unseen since the end of the second world war. From that point of time onward the population practically stops growing and the line of GDP-per-capita growth starts to match that of GDP growth, nothing is ‘wasted’ on reproduction all resources are consumed.
The Italian GDP-per-capita was boosted by holding the population constant for a generation. Many other measures improve when the population is constant: people’s spending power improve when they do not have to feed and clothe several dependents for example. The static paradox only exist as the peak of a long-term economic cycle: as growth declines the last generation does not reproduce to maintain the living standards of their parents, or even fail to reproduce; many Italians in their twenties still live with their parents out of necessity. This false economic improvement is interpreted as increased prosperity by mad men of science and politics.
Let us keep moving and see what happens when a society stops having children: economic prosperity or terminal decline? The decline of population is a universal phenomenon in Europe, population growth in Western Europe is due mainly to immigration and their offspring. This map shows that from Germany eastward the population is declining (from Wikipedia):
Population Growth in Europe 2009.
Some mad people praise this decline as beneficial to humanity, but even if we should agree that less population is a positive fact, this decline in the face of economic prosperity is due to a plunge in birth rates below the replacement rate and not due to any kind of cleansing natural phenomenon that culls the weak and leaves the strong. The result of cutting off new supply of people is an ageing society as this map from Wikipedia shows:
Percentage of population over 65 in 2010
Europeans smile when they hear that Africans or Asians have many children to support them in old age and think they can have the benefit of both worlds: few children that do not put a pressure on them while they work and a pension system that supports them when they stop working. This logic is of course impeccable when argued by a single person, it is a pension time-bomb when followed by everyone, this graph (from ZeorHedge) shows the ratio of workers to pensioners in selected countries:
Workers per Retiree (with future projections)
No need for projections into the far future as the future of Europe has already happened in Russia and it goes like this: population decline, economic decline, capital flight, brain drain, collapse of the countryside, hyperinflation, crime, decline of research and development, loss of sovereignty and war. All these factors come with a nasty positive feedback mechanism.
Of course life is not a mechanical clock it is full of cross-currents and mighty winds; Russia for example enjoined eight years of boom (2000-2008) despite the capital flight and the depopulation of the countryside that was going on. When Georgia tried to play with Russia’s national security it was crushed in three days. Despite all that the main trend for Russia has been since 1914 and still is downwards.
The outlook for Europe is bleak, but the path is unknown and it might even go up at certain points. What I am sure of is that there must be a price paid for the benefits enjoyed from committing demographic genocide. I repeat what I once wrote: Societies that cannot reproduce themselves are dead.
See Also:
Euro Apocalypse: The Life and Times of Angela Merkel
Five hundred years ago the stone age world that existed in the Americas ended and a new age of European dominance started. Now after five hundred years of European dominance that world, in turn, is coming to an end. I will be charting the revelation of this ending in a series of posts. As I explained elsewhere this ending is not physical but rather historical.
Nothing strikes me as perplexing and at the same time expected as the leadership of Europe by Angela Merkel. I will start with expected: reading history one finds always the least suited leaders at the end when crises comes to a high point and the times require a venerable Cincinnatus. Perplexing for the same reason: she is the least suited person to be the leader of Europe at this time of acute crises.
I will not review, in this post, the historical law of unsuited leaders coinciding with historical decline. I will identify the odd points in the life of Merkel. In times of social strength and historical rise a person’s background is of the most importance; Meritocracy is based on the fallacy of Individualism. This of course either persist beyond historical usefulness resulting in unqualified people in the high ranks (Europe circa 1914) or weakens considerably resulting in people like Merkel coming to the forefront of society.
let us see what Wikipedia has to say about Merkel’s background:
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in Hamburg, West Germany, the daughter of Horst Kasner (1926–2011), a Lutheran pastor and a native of Berlin, and his wife, Herlind (born 1928 in Danzig, as Herlind Jentzsch), a teacher of English and Latin. Her mother was once a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Her grandparents on her mother’s side, one of them being Masurian, lived in Elbing/Elbląg in East Prussia. Merkel stated that she is one quarter Polish in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2000.
—Angela Merkel, Wikipedia.
- She was born in WEST Germany at the time when millions where emigrating from East to West Europe.
- Her parents grew under Nazi rule and witnessed very difficult times for Germany.
- Her mother was born in Danzig in 1928. The Free City of Danzig does not exist anymore, the majority German population driven out and replaced with Polish residents.
- It seems that her mother was once an SPD district councilor (the Google translate of the article cited in Wikipedia is unclear). The time frame of this is not stated; it could have been in West Germany after 1945 or after unification.
- Her grandparents were not only Polish but Masurians! Protestant Poles: probably seen as sub-human Slavs by Germans and heretic devils by Poles.
By 1954 Merkel’s parents were in Hamburg in West Germany, this is very important as we shall see next. Growing under Nazi rule is not a problem in itself, neither growing during the Depression or World War II; any leader’s parents would have lived in the same time as Merkel’s parents. The point is that most people who came out of those times abandoned all kinds of beliefs and concentrated on material life, unlike Merkel’s father who became a Pastor. Religion is fine by me—I even think it is a prerequiste of greatness—but joining a religious institution is point in need of an answer; as a native of Berlin it could not have been conservative rural upbringing for example. Any biography of Merkel that does not answer this question is a waste of time.
Merkel is one quarter dislocated; the Masurian connection is very important as they are half way between German and Polish and have been physically dislocated from their homeland after 1945. Merkel’s parentage is not similar to most Germans.
Merkel’s father studied theology in Heidelberg and, afterwards, in Hamburg. In 1954 her father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow (near Perleberg in Brandenburg), which then was in East Germany, and the family moved to Templin. Thus Merkel grew up in the countryside 80 km (50 mi) north of Berlin. Gerd Langguth, a former senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, states in his book that the family’s ability to travel freely from East to West Germany during the following years, as well as their possession of two automobiles, leads to the conclusion that Merkel’s father had a “sympathetic” relationship with the communist regime, since such freedom and perquisites for a Christian pastor and his family would have been otherwise impossible in East Germany.
—Angela Merkel, Wikipedia.
- Her family moved to East Germany as millions were leaving (see above).
- Her parents are clearly from urban background but Merkel grew up in the countryside.
- I did not read Langguth’s book and whether he confirmed or denied the view of “sympathetic relationship”. The Wikipedia article does not resolve the point. The fact remains that Merkel’s family lived differently to most East Germans.
Like most pupils, Merkel was a member of the official, Socialist-led youth movement Free German Youth (FDJ). However, she did not take part in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, which was common in East Germany, and was confirmed instead. Later, at the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of the FDJ district board and secretary for “Agitprop” (Agitation and Propaganda). Merkel herself claimed that she was secretary for culture. When Merkel’s onetime FDJ district chairman contradicted her, she insisted that: “According to my memory, I was secretary for culture. But what do I know? I believe I won’t know anything when I’m 80.” Merkel’s progress in the compulsory Marxism-Leninism course was graded only genügend (sufficient, passing grade) in 1983 and 1986.
Merkel was educated in Templin and at the University of Leipzig, where she studied physics from 1973 to 1978. While a student, she participated in the reconstruction of the ruin of the Moritzbastei, a project students initiated to create their own club and recreation facility on campus. Such an initiative was unprecedented in the GDR of that period, and initially resisted by the University of Leipzig. However, with backing of the local leadership of the SED party, the project was allowed to proceed. Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990. She learned to speak Russian fluently, and earned a statewide prize for her proficiency. After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry, she worked as a researcher and published several papers.
—Angela Merkel, Wikipedia.
- I am sure the Jugendweihe ceremony was nonsensical and at least confirmation was part of German cultural history, the point is that Merkel did not participate in the social event of her age.
- She did not study at the University of Leipzig, but at the Karl-Marx-University, Leipzig. The name change is not just superficial change, it is important to separate between a German university and an Eastern block university. Leningrad is not the same city as St. Petersburg and Apple Computer is not the same company as Apple Inc.
- At university she participated in an unprecedented initiative of that period, again Merkel’s life is different than most people.
- Backing by the local governing party is at best questionable.
- After university she worked in the most important research institution of East Germany, an institute founded by Soviet Military Administration. The academy was named ‘Academy of Sciences of the GDR’ at the time when Merkel worked there.
- She became a member of the FDJ district board, even though she did not participate in the Jugendweihe. Clearly she is the kind of person who might join an institution without really believing in its ideology.
Merkel’s youth is atypical of East Germans. Clearly her life differed from the lives of West and East Germans. Her political activity at university is questionable at best. Her 12 years working for the scientific arm of a totalitarian state is never mentioned. Her lame denial of her role (and not what she actually did) is a small note on the fact that she was a member of FDJ district board and was secretary (of a committee I presume) for either culture or propaganda.
Whether she was or was not secretary of propaganda is not as important as her denial. Is it plausible that a research scientist would not have documentation of her work in the FDJ district board that could definitely resolve this point without resorting to claims of early-age dementia? In 1990 the academy was disbanded due to its role in the GDR. Merkel, a former FDJ district board member, did not suffer from the association with the academy.
I am not sure about East Germany but scientists in the Soviet Union had a room of freedom more than the average citizen. The least we know is that the academy had two dozen West German members.
In 1989, Merkel got involved in the growing democracy movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joining the new party Democratic Awakening. Following the first (and only) democratic election of the East German state, she became the deputy spokesperson of the new pre-unification caretaker government under Lothar de Maizière.
At the first post-reunification general election in December 1990, she was elected to the Bundestag from the constituency Stralsund – Nordvorpommern – Rügen, which is coextensive with the district of Vorpommern-Rügen. This has remained her electoral district until today. Her party merged with the west German CDU and she became Minister for Women and Youth in Helmut Kohl’s 3rd cabinet. In 1994, she was made Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, which gave her greater political visibility and a platform on which to build her political career. As one of Kohl’s protégées and his youngest cabinet minister, she was referred to by Kohl as “mein Mädchen” (“my girl”).
—Angela Merkel, Wikipedia.
- Going from the ivory tower of research to politics is not so strange, giving Merkel’s history (membership in an FDJ district board) and the surge of public into politics since 1989. Becoming a member of the caretaker government is a big step, to say the least.
- Elected to parliament on the 2nd of December 1990, exactly two months after unification on the 3rd of October 1990. She has been a member of parliament for the last 19 years.
- On the 17th of January 1991 she entered the government as a minister.
- Kohl called her “mein Mädchen”, later she would be called “Mutti” a kind of an over-bearing mother.
Merkel was elected to represent Vorpommern-Rügen a district on the Baltic Sea. It is not clear whether she had any connection with this area before the elections. The Minister for Women and Youth actually has no children of her own.
When the Kohl government was defeated in the 1998 general election, Merkel was named Secretary-General of the CDU. In this position, Merkel oversaw a string of Christian Democrat election victories in six out of seven state elections in 1999 alone, breaking the SPD-Green coalition’s hold on the Bundesrat, the legislative body representing the states. Following a party financing scandal, which compromised many leading figures of the CDU (most notably Kohl himself, who refused to reveal the donor of DM 2,000,000 claiming he had given his word of honour and the then party chairman Wolfgang Schäuble, Kohl’s hand-picked successor, who wasn’t cooperative either), Merkel criticized her former mentor, Kohl, and advocated a fresh start for the party without him. She was elected to replace Schäuble, becoming the first female chair of her party, on 10 April 2000. Her election surprised many observers, as her personality offered a contrast to the party she had been chosen to lead; Merkel is a Protestant, originating from predominantly Protestant northern Germany, while the CDU is a male-dominated, socially conservative party with strongholds in western and southern Germany, and the Bavarian sister party, the CSU, has deep Catholic roots.
—Angela Merkel, Wikipedia.
- Eight short years after joining the party—after joining the country for that matter—Merkel becomes the Secretary-General; two years later she became the leader.
- Merkel did not hesitate in criticizing her former mentor, leader, political father and a giant of the party and political class of Germany.
- Her personality might have been in contrast to the party, but her background was surely in contrast to the whole population: neither a typical West nor East German background.
From taking over the party Merkel was on fast path to ruling Germany.
I find it perplexing that the fate of Europe hinges on a woman who went from the ivory tower of scientific research to the bubble of federal government bypassing normal life altogether. The fate of Europe is in the hands if this childless Mutti who has never managed a business or worked in the private sector in any capacity, a woman who has never experienced the average life of a citizen in a liberal capitalistic society. The sovereignty of Germany is the hands of woman who gladly saw (and voted for) her country annexed by another to her direct benefit; would she surrender the sovereignty of Germany if she could be the president of Europe?
See Also:
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,000 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.
