That would probably set the robber barons back a few decades certainly.

Posted by: Colman | May 5 2005 18:31 utc | 4

My opinion of Germany just went up 100%. Give em hell. WE Americans of European origin will probably be begging to get back in to Europe in a few years.
I saw an interview the other day with one of the guys who helped tear down the wall, he sounded disappointed with capitalism.

Posted by: la | May 5 2005 18:47 utc | 6

Tipping point

Posted by: citizen k | May 5 2005 20:31 utc | 8

Nation States (typically in the EU) still have some cohesion and a National Gvmt. that regulates some large part of what goes on.
However, other organisations or groupings today have a good dollop of economic and ideological power:
1) Corporations, who sneakily manipulate and play the tune without evident takeovers, as such a move would not be in their interests. They count on Gvmt. support, even if half-hearted, as it provides a cover and some legitimacy for them. They prefer to deal with Nation states, and dumbo elected pols. rather than to throw them over. Keeps people quiet.
2) Religious groups. They have found their bread and butter in the loss of values and community and the co-opting weak Gvmts. have indulged in. In some instances, the powers that be have appealed to religious and community values to destroy what they see as opposing forces. Dismal strategy as these movements may come back and bite them in the ass, but there you are.
3) Minority and splinter political groups who position themselves solidly in democracies and go for votes. These are positioned on the extremes – right or left. Their aim is on the face, respectable. Their ultimate intentions are not. They use free speech and free politics to drive their agenda – for the moment, knowing it is just a start.
4) Underground groups who perceive the present chaos as offering opportunity. They are biding their time.

Posted by: Blackie | May 6 2005 18:56 utc | 10

A must read (if you want to know a bit about Germany today) is Günter Grass in todays NYT opinion page:
Günter Grass, the author of “The Tin Drum” and, most recently, “Crabwalk,” won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.
The Gravest Generation

…
THE question today, then, is have we dealt carefully with the freedom that we did not win, but was given to us? Have the citizens of West Germany properly compensated the citizens of the former Democratic Republic, who, after all, had to bear the main burden of the war begun and lost by all Germans? And a further question: is our parliamentary democracy still sufficiently sovereign as a guarantor of freedom of action to act on the problems facing us in the 21st century?
Fifteen years after signing the treaty on unification, we can no longer conceal that despite the financial achievements, German unity has essentially been a failure. Petty calculation prevented the government of the time from submitting to the citizens of both states a new constitution relevant to the endeavors of Germany as a whole. It is therefore hardly surprising that people in the former East Germany should regard themselves as second-class Germans.
…
Now, I believe that our freely elected members of Parliament are no longer free to decide. The customary party pressures are not particularly present in Germany; it is, rather, the ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests that constricts and influences the Federal Parliament and its democratically elected members, placing them under pressure and forcing them into disharmony, even when framing and deciding the content of laws. Consequently, Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It is steered by the banks and multinational corporations – which are not subject to any democratic control.
What’s needed is a democratic desire to protect Parliament against the pressures of the lobbyists by making it inviolable. But are our parliamentarians still sufficiently free to make a decision that would bring radical democratic constraint? Or is our freedom now no more than a stock market profit?
We all are witnesses to the fact that production is being demolished worldwide, that so-called hostile and friendly takeovers are destroying thousands of jobs, that the mere announcement of measures like the dismissal of workers and employees makes share prices rise, and this is regarded unthinkingly as the price to be paid for “living in freedom.”
The consequences of this development disguised as globalization are clearly coming to light and can be read from the statistics. With the consistently high number of jobless, which in Germany has now reached five million, and the equally constant refusal of industry to create jobs, despite demonstrably higher earnings, especially from exports, the hope of full employment has evaporated.
…
All this is now accepted as if divinely ordained, accompanied at most by the customary national grumbles. Worse, those who point to this state of affairs and to the people forced into social oblivion are at best ridiculed by slick young journalists as “social romantics,” but usually vilified as “do-gooders.” Questions about the reasons for the growing gap between rich and poor are dismissed as “the politics of envy.” The desire for justice is ridiculed as utopian. The concept of “solidarity” is relegated to the dictionary’s list of foreign words.
…
With so much toil and profit-chasing, however, the past was in danger of being forgotten. Only in the 60’s did we meet the second challenge, when writers and then the student protest movement began to ask questions about everything that the war generation would sooner forget. The protest movement strove for revolution but was paid off with reform; without it, we would still be living in the claustrophobic fog of the postwar years under Adenauer.
The third challenge arose when the Berlin Wall fell. The two German states had existed for four decades more against than beside each other. As there was no willingness on the Western side to offer equal rights to the East, the unity of the country has so far existed only on paper. It was all done too hastily and without an understanding of what far-reaching consequences this haste would have.
Since then, the expanded country has stagnated. Neither the Kohl government nor the Schröder government succeeded in correcting the initial errors. Lately, perhaps too late, we have come to recognize that the threat to the state, or what should be regarded as Public Enemy No. 1, comes not from right-wing radicalism but rather, from the impotence of politics, which leaves citizens exposed and unprotected from the dictates of the economy. What is being destroyed, then, is not the state, which survives, but democracy.
When the German Reich unconditionally surrendered 60 years ago, a system of power and terror was thereby defeated. This system, which had caused fear throughout Europe for 12 years, still casts its shadow today. We Germans have repeatedly faced up to this inherited shame and have been forced to do so if we hesitated. The memory of the suffering that we caused others and ourselves has been kept alive through the generations. Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere – I’m thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers – we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as a challenge.
We can only hope we will be able to cope with today’s risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world’s last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every year.

Posted by: b | May 7 2005 8:55 utc | 12

Bernhardt,
I hope schroeder is jumping on a bandwagon.
I think the sea-change may have happened seven weeks ago in Brussells, when some 50,000 trades unionists kicked up a stink about the planned Services Directive. Borkelstein.
In the next few days the EU summit was all about Borkelstein. But it had never been on the planned agenda. Chirac had intended to say nothing. But all that noise in Brussells forced his hand.
I suspect a lot of people in Europe had the same reaction as myself to all this: “What the fuck is Borkelstein?” And on finding out, screaming “WHAT? You must be joking!” No wonder they dropped it like a red hot poker.
Here’s what they were trying to sneak through. Under Borkelstein any service provider would be allowed to set up operations in another community country, operating under the same laws as pertain to its domestic operations. Think about that.
The terminally smug Anglo-Saxon press characterised European hostility as being due to the fear of low wage plunbers from the East invading Western Europe. But that’s ridiculous.
Borkelstein would allow British/American bankers, and lawyers, and the rest of the vultures, to operate in France under the same laws as apply in Britain
There is NO WRITTEN BRITISH CONSTITUTION for the simple reason that the people are not allowed to know by which laws they are governed. For the rest of you Europeans, you need to know about the law they are keeping secret. The Treason Felony Act of 1848 (see end of post). For had the workers not marched on Brussells, and had Chirac’s hand not been forced, this law would now be well on the way to become the law of YOUR land.
The Treason Felony Act is not used to prosecute transgressors. Rather it is used to control the whole apparatus of the state.
Let me give you a contemporaneous example.
British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith gave his formal legal opinion on 7 March 2003. On 17 March a statement was issued by the attorney, who later that day read out the same statement in the Lords. It was lawful to attack Iraq.
We now know that the advice changed out of all recognition over those 10 days. It turns out that on 13 March Lord Goldsmith attended a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Lord “Charlie” Falconer and Baroness “Sally” Morgan. Both are cronies of Blair, but more important, both have been vested with Royal Prerogative powers by the Queen. It also turns out that Falconer and Morgan, not Goldsmith, were responsible for drafting the statement of 17 March by which Blair conned Parliament.
So these three great people sat down together. Goldsmith is told his opinion displeases Her Majesty, to the extent that he is guilty of “putting a constraint upon her”. Goldsmith accepts this legal position, but cannot in good conscience produce a different opinion. Falconer and Morgan draft Her Majesty’s wishes, and send it over to the Attorney General’s department for issue. Goldsmith cannot intervene. The revised “opinion” is issued under the name of the AG on the morning of 17 March. Later that day Goldsmith is called on to make a statement in the Lords. He has no alternative but to adopt the Falconer/Morgan position as his own.
The point isthat Parliament was indeed deceived on this, but not by Blair. Parliament was dwceived by Queen Elizabeth herself.
AND SHE?S COMING AFTER YOU FAT’N LAZY EUROPEANS!
John
3. Offences herein mentioned declared to be felonies
…If any person whatsoever shall, within the United Kingdom or without, compass, imagine, invent, devise or to deprive or depose our Most Gracious Lady the Queen, …from the style, honour, or royal name of the imperial crown of the United Kingdom, or of any other of her Majesty’s dominions and countries, or to levy war against her Majesty, …within any part of the United Kingdom, in order by force or constraint to compel her… to change her… measures of counsels, or in order to put any force or constraint upon her or in order to intimidate or overawe both Houses or either House of Parliament, or to move or stir any foreigner or stranger with force to invade the United Kingdom or any other of her Majesty’s dominions or countries under the obeisance of her Majesty… and such compassings, imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions, or any of them, shall express, utter, or declare, by publishing any printing or writing, …or by any overt act or deed, every person so offending shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, …to be transported beyond the seas for the term of his or her natural life.
his law was passed as emergency legislation in the face of what was going on in Europe (revolution everywhere) and Ireland (starvation in a food exporting nation). But it has NEVER BEEN REPEALED. Indeed early in the life of the Blair regime section 2 of the act was repealled. When questioned about section 3 Lord Rooker replied “HM Government has no plans to repeal section 3.”
This law has been the power behind the British royal family for more than 150 years. This law is the power behind Scottish Rite Freemasonry (I shall cite examples later on). This law is the power behind the BFEE – what I maintain should be called the WFEE. Agents of MI6.

Posted by: John | May 7 2005 15:48 utc | 14