Quote of the Day ANS

This is a little short one from Brad Hicks; a quote from an author he recommended, and I am currently reading.  I included the comments: if you read any at all, read the first comment from Brad himself (it's the second comment).
Find it here:  http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/444433.html 
--Kim

Quote of the Day (One More from Geoghegan)

• Sep. 28th, 2010 at 2:13 AM

"At the SPD headquarters, I met people on the left, the best and the brightest, who can at least think in this framework. They grasp what their job is: to protect the way of life of a largely high school-educated middle class. That way of life is what constitutes the crown jewels. The protection of the crown jewels is a fiduciary responsibility. I hate to say so, but Democrats and Kennedy School-types (with honorable exceptions) -- certainly Democratic politicians -- really do not think seriously about how, in a practical way, to raise the standard of living of non-college grad population, who happen to be, well, 73 percent of the adult population. Look, I like Larry Summers in some ways: at least he is wiling to blush about the shameful number of people we have locked up in prison. But he would never be in the SPD. He could never relate to the striking kids under twenty-seven rapping in German on YouTube. If I ask most Democrats and their think-tank minions how to help the middle class, they have no real answer except to tell them to go to college. But for most Americans that's no answer, so essentially we Democrats are telling them to pound sand. If they didn't go to college, their lives are over. ¶ And it is symptomatic that, when they look at Germany, everything that holds up the German middle-class way of life, the U.S. Democrats would tear down."

Thomas Geoghegan, Were You Born on the Wrong Content? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life. New York: The New Press, 2010. From chapter 6: "After the Krise"

• Mood: good

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Comments

( 5 comments ­ Leave a comment )

penguin_attie wrote:
Sep. 28th, 2010 07:06 pm (UTC)
Wow, either he went to Germany while we still had Kohl, or the US must be fucked up beyond belief; in any case it's weird to see someone praise the party that has earned the nickname "traitor party" for consistently making things worse than the conservatives already had when they got in power. Some of their brilliant "solutions" include a welfare reform that removed all provisions for unexpected hardships (if your washing machine broke down while you were unemployed, you could apply for help towards a new one) in favor of a barely-enough-for-survival fixed sum ("too little to live and too much to die", anything else "would be unfair" towards the working poor who barely make enough to eat) and "resocialisation measures" for longterm unemployed where they are forced (on pain of losing all assistance) to work for salaries that makes them competitive with china (seriously, manufacturing that had been outsourced has moved back thanks to those "socialist" reforms!) while the state pays all ancillary costs like health/retirement insurance. Basically the whole government is continually occupied in a game of unemployment statistics tampering to disguise the fact that we are effectively at almost 15% unemployment and that this isn't going to change anytime soon. Now that the socialists have been voted out again they are suddenly incensed that the recent 5€ hike in welfare by the (fiscally-)liberal-conservative government is far too little, when the previous rate had been their own doing!

Really, they are just as bad as Obama at actually passing socialist measures, Germany just started from a better initial situation than the US, so they haven't managed to remove everything yet (not for lack of trying!)
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bradhicks wrote:
Sep. 30th, 2010 07:37 am (UTC)
His argument is that the Social Democrats didn't get credit for the things that they did do, got blamed for things they couldn't stop the Christian Democrats from doing, and that the German voters perversely punished them for it by making the Christian Democrats even stronger.

Granted, as he argues in several places in the book, the most right-wing member of the CDU is to the left of Barack Obama. His real point, in the passage above, is that even the most left-wing of the Democrats, even guys like Kucinich, are stupid on the subject of what's good for the actual working class in the United States, compared to the SPD.

He doesn't go so far as to put it this way, but I will: in America, if you prefer that corporate subsidies and subsidies for the wealthy be restricted to the less brutal among them, and insist on some minor conditions on that welfare for the rich, this makes you a liberal. If you care even a little bit about the concerns of the professional class, of the upper-middle class, this makes you a far-left liberal in America. If you care at all about the needs of the middle class, the working class, or the poor then you are unserious, beyond the pale, radical, to the point of being considered laughable at best and at worst, insane for suggesting that the life of anybody who didn't finish college can or even should be in any way anything other than nasty, brutish, and short.

Edited at 2010-09-30 07:39 am (UTC)
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penguin_attie wrote:
Sep. 30th, 2010 10:03 am (UTC)
While I agree that it was pretty ridiculous to go vote CDU (or FDP) after being disappointed by the SPD, I think they deserve a lot of the blame they got. You'll notice that most of the things I blamed them for were 100% Schröder and the Red/Green government's brainchildren. And even during the great coalition, I think they had a lot more room for blocking the more contested legislations, but they always voted for it en bloc.

But, while slightly more extreme, that still doesn't sound that different from Germany. Here, the "radical extremist left" has a party and 15-20% of the vote, but the other parties manage pretty well to keep them perceived as some lunatics it's impossible to form a government with, all with just one word: SED successor.
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bradhicks wrote:
Sep. 30th, 2010 07:41 am (UTC)
And, oh, he doesn't deny that there are some people in the Christian Democrats who would like to make Germany a whole lot more like America, or at least a whole lot more like Britain. He suggests that one of the reasons why they haven't succeeded is that America acts as a safety valve, that eventually all of the plutocratic assholes in Germany give up and move to America.
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cumawing wrote:
Oct. 6th, 2010 10:05 am (UTC)
Lol,? AWESOME video! Is it a bit sad that I got all of the MoM in jokes?
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