Talk in Altona mit Klaus Wowereit
=================================

Wednesday 16 September 2009 23:12

It took some cycling around in Altona to find the
Fabrik, until a bunch of people with firearms made
clear where it was going down. They were hanging
around the artists' entrance and on the corner a
bit further down the street was the main entrance
of the Fabrik. Fabrik is like an industrial version
of Paradiso, but smaller. I arrived around seven,
and it was already pretty full.

If you're not SPD, you weren't supposed to be
there. If Scholz looks into the audience and then
concludes he can see there is nobody there who will
benefit from the FDP tax plans, he seems confident
nobody would be insulted by that. How wrong he is.
But while walking out of there in the first five
minutes would be a nice statement, I doubt someone
there would have the intelligence to get the
message.

Wowereit's talk was in that same annoying style
Steinmeier has. That style is OK if you're suddenly
standing outside on a tank in the rain trying to
motivate some people to fight the revolution, but
inside with a professional audio setup there are
more captivating ways to tell a story. And the
style projecting this whole urge to finally do
something is a bit misplaced if you're representing
a political party that is currently part of the
crew running the country.

A party that ignores a petition with over 130k
supporters and then talks about campaigning based
on arguments is hardly believable. The audience and
it's reactions make clear the SPD can still rely on
plenty of ignorant followers who are not interested
in arguments. They are more like "Show me the
money!"

Scholz mentioned like a cheap populist that
according to the FDP tax plan Dr. Josef Ackermann
would get a tax break of over a million euros. Some
lefties pulled that same stunt in The Netherlands.
Trying to tax some rich guys to get some extra
money, but then those rich guys quickly moved
abroad and are no longer paying any taxes in The
Netherlands. In the end that lost the country about
ten times the amount they wanted to tax them. So
how much are those applauding in the audience
willing to pay to try to deny Ackermann an extra
million?

What's totally missing in the SPD way of seeing
things is where the reach of the German government
ends. They are all happy planning their socialist
state and fail to see that if they push to hard the
money disappears over the border or into the
underground economy. But deep down they probably
remember the DDR where the reach of the government
didn't end, and that's what they'll probably
stumble into with all their good intentions. They
are going all provincial about jobs, more concerned
about shifting them between parts of Germany than
being aware those jobs could end up in Russia or
China.

Because the Berlin subway was going to be
privatized the operators postponed maintenance to
cut costs and pretend to be more profitable, and
thus of a faked higher value, and that lead to
shutting down large parts of the service when the
authorities found out the trains failed to comply
with safety standards because of that. Scholz then
doesn't conclude there is someone in charge of the
government owned subway that has fucked this up,
but manages to blame ethics in private enterprises
for it. And he looked like he believed it himself.

SPD fails to notice how their good intentions will
be abused. The easiest way to make a load of money
is to have socialists give tax-payers' money to
you. The current financial crisis was triggered by
democrats in the states that wanted something like
to force the value of loans to be the same and not
depending on the social background of the person
getting the loan. Those intentions are good, but if
in the real world for example the chance of a black
person losing his job could be just a bit higher
than a white person losing his job, and that will
be reflected in the risk involving the loan, and
influence it's value. I'm not saying it's a good
thing those differences exist in the first place,
but if political correctness forces the economy to
ignore them while everybody knows in the real world
they are there, sooner or later there will be a
very nasty correction, and some people will get
very rich leveraging that situation. And it's clear
the SPD is full of good intentions to make a lot of
social laws, but they don't have the competence to
see how those same laws give people smarter than
them an opportunity to screw over the people they
are trying to help. Whether it's the Hartz-Ⅳ mother
who has to give the money back her daughter has
earned to buy a guitar, or the people constructing
general agreements to artificially set minimum
wages to € 3.80, wasn't anyone involved in creating
those laws smart enough to figure out how that was
bound to happen?

And trying to ban the NPD, does a competing
political party really need to go into that dirty
business to attract voters? How hard is it to see
that like the existence of € 3.80 wages, the
existence of a popular NPD is a symptom of a
problem that needs to be taken care of and trying
to just erase the symptoms doesn't solve anything?

Almost everything Scholz and Wowereit said had
these kinds of flawed logic and limited context,
but it seemed to be sufficient for most of the
audience to vote SPD anyway. Maybe a lot of the
smarter ones in the area were at the other meeting
tonight.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2009/09/16/talk-in-altona-mit-klaus-wowereit/