Yes, it’s SuperTuesday today, the day when the world at large is sure to gain some clarity as to who are likely to be both the Republican and Democratic 2016 candidates for president. Time for a quick review of which cohorts of special citizens stand behind which candidates.

Granted, this review comes from a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, not from an American one. On the one hand, the FAZ is truly one of Germany’s most-respected newspapers, certainly in the top three. On the other hand, can you really accept an evaluation of US political conditions from someone named Winand von Petersdorff? (Plus, as I look at the FAZ website just now, the headline article is a report on an interview Syrian dictator Assad just gave to German television, in which among other things he “praises Germany for its refugee policies”(!). Groan . . .)

Let’s proceed anyway. The first thing to keep in mind is Marco Rubio’s unique policy proposal to completely abolish taxes on interest, dividends or capital gains income from stocks. This naturally means that most hedge-fund managers are wildly in favor of seeing him occupy the Oval Office come next January.

Supposedly Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, is also included within Rubio supporters. Otherwise, what can loosely be called Silicon Valley has some very nebulous and split allegiances. Anyone who pays attention now knows that Meg Whitman – formerly CEO of eBay, now of HP – did support Chris Christie, right up until he endorsed Donald Trump. Who she supports now? No clue. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are similarly cloudy as to their preferences – although, for different reasons, Herr Von Petersdorff is sure it’s a Democrat for both. Noted Libertarian Peter Thiel (PayPal) supported Rand Paul, as one would expect, and is now is said to favor Ted Cruz. As for current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – well, how about some clues: He’s an Indian immigrant, and he satteth at the right hand of Michele Obama at the last State of the Union speech. This means Hillary.

Hollywood is also for Hillary: Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation, and noted director Steven Spielberg. Maria Barra, CEO of General Motors, is also for Hillary – ’cause Obama saved her company’s bacon (and that of Chrysler, though the CEO there is Italian) a few years back.

Note that there is no such current American VIP who Von Petersdorff was able to find who supports Donald Trump. Neither can The Donald expect support from big Republican donors such as the Koch brothers, Harold Hamm (“King of the Frackers”) or Sheldon Adelson. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was clearly the candidate in the Koch Brothers’ pocket, but he withdrew from the Republican race quite a while ago. Now it’s said they are going for Rubio – makes sense. Same for Sheldon Adelson, and this we know because that Las Vegas paper, the Review-Journal, that Adelson bought a few months ago to be his mouthpiece (and tried to keep the purchase secret) has endorsed Rubio.

Of course, it’s easy to imagine there are certain supporters any candidate would not want, or at least would not be glad to have the support publicly known. That’s probably the case for those big Republican-supporting money-men just mentioned. Also, the degree of Wall Street support for Hillary is a very sensitive subject. The past record would seem to indicate both Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon are definitely friends-of-Hillary, but Von Petersdorff reports they have kept mum about their presidential preferences for quite some time now.

If you’re still intrigued about the Continental perspective on SuperTuesday – and can handle the German – the FAZ will have a live-blog today.

Here’s some news that I have not seen reported elsewhere, and I really don’t know why:

That’s 12.1 billion, as in euros: it is a surplus, and it is the bottom-line result of the German Federal Government’s budget over 2015. Further:

The reasons for this are the good economic conditions and high level of tax-receipts. For Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) this surplus turned out to be double as much as was expected in November.

No wonder we see Schäuble there leaning on his hands with such a smug look on his face: for him, it’s job well done!

Actually, good economic conditions pretty much automatically mean high tax-receipts, at least for any government which has its act together in the tax-collecting department, which Germany certainly does. But where did those good economic conditions come from? Well, the Germans do what they do well, as everybody knows; among other things, that means a healthy Mittelstand or layer of mid-sized companies (usually privately owned) making all sorts of capital equipment held in such regard by the rest of the world that demand for it is largely price-inelastic (that is, that demand takes little or no hit even if prices rise, e.g. due to currency fluctuations). The result is Germany’s long-standing status as the world’s #1 exporter, these days contested only with China.

So there is all that, a set of character traits contrasting sharply with others said to be more typical of other areas of Europe (mainly to the South) now experiencing quite worse economic conditions. Germany also implemented its so-called “Harz Reforms” around ten years ago, consisting of a series of changes to labor market regulation which made it easier to hire and to fire workers, and which resulted in a suppression of German labor costs which made the prices for native manufactures even more competitive internationally. And finally there is the effect of the euro: No matter how much it might be derided there (e.g. as the teuro, from the German word for “expensive”), one thing that is clear is that, by taking away Southern European nations’ ability to devalue their currencies when their own products became too uncompetitive, the euro locked in a high degree of export superiority for goods from the North, and thus flows of money there – and so relative prosperity, and high tax-receipts. (This also can mean – to some extent – that the economic troubles afflicting Europe’s periphery are not these countries’ fault.)

So Where to Spend the Bounty?

That big pot of money is there – billions of euros, twice as big as had been expected – so the question naturally arises: What to do with it? Ideally, having accumulated in German Federal coffers, the money would be spent in such a way to recycle it back to the other EU states from which it largely came, in such a way to share the wealth and the prosperity a bit more broadly around the European continent. This could be something as simple as an accelerated raising of German workers’ wages, so that they spend more and some of that more they spend are goods and/or services from elsewhere in the EU.

That’s not what is going to happen, though. Rather, according to this piece, much of the money will go to the obvious need: Wir schaffen das!, i.e. “We can do it!” That is, it will be devoted to dealing with the flood of Third World asylum-seekers of which more than 1 million have shown up on Germany’s doorstep through 2015 (with many more expected still to come). The German government largely attends to this problem by sending money to the lower-level Bundesstaat and local governments that actually have to deal with the incoming refugees on the ground. So these elements will get more money. (Not that that will solve the problem; it has become clear recently that considerable political and inter-cultural obstacles also need to be addressed, with solutions that largely cannot only rely upon money.)

There is also another consideration. Successful governing in Germany necessarily means keeping in the back of one’s mind the Biblical tale of Joseph in Egypt, of the seven fat years followed by the seven lean years. German official have to be especially careful with their budgets, considering that an amendment they passed to their Constitution in the recent past mandates that the federal budget deficit be no more than 0.35% of GDP – and that provision comes into effect starting now, in 2016. That means any surplus – no matter how unexpected it may be – to some degree must be husbanded with a view for any bad times ahead (although that same amendment permits greater deficits than 0.35% of GDP in case of national emergencies, whether economic or natural-disaster in nature).

This mandated caution looks even more reasonable in light of some additional news:

Germany’s economic growth for 2015 is expected to come in at 1.7%. What is more, more-or-less the same rate is expected for calendar 2016. Many would see that as low – especially in comparison to economic growth in developing countries, especially China. It’s pretty much also low in comparison with rates that the US is starting to hit again.

Then again, compared to European standards, 1.7% is pretty good, due to Europe’s (and especially Germany’s) continued graying and population loss, over-regulation and other factors. Further, as this FAZ piece adds, “comparatively few currently have to worry about their jobs: The situation on the labor market is at a historically favorable level.”

Still, in absolute terms you could say 1.7% is low. As we see, Germany has been able to extract from that a very nice federal government budget-surplus. But one must still be cautious.

A heads-up for whoever is going to be in Cologne tomorrow, things could get interesting.

You might recall how we wrote on these pages about a month ago about German President Joachim Gauck’s visit to Turkey a month ago, and the waves he made there. Well, what goes around, comes around: the Turkish Premier Erdogan is due in Cologne on Saturday:

“Cologne visit by Turkish PM: Merkel calls for restraint from Erdogan.” Now, this is no sort of state visit, neither Merkel nor Gauck will be anywhere near him, but rather the sort of sojourn Erdogan likes to make from time to time to go shore up his support among the many citizens of Turkish nationality living in Germany.

Unfortunately, the political situation back in the Motherland has been steadily deteriorating, hurried along by the deaths of 301 workers in the recent Soma mine disaster there and the public’s angry reaction to that. In a newspaper interview earlier in the week, Merkel said Erdogan was of course welcome to come give his speech, but “I insist that he does this on Saturday with a sense of responsibility and sensitivity.”

Sensitivity, however, has rarely proven to be PM Erdogan’s strong suit. Indeed, his people seem not to be approaching the event in a very constructive manner:

“Turkey fears a trap for Erdogan in Cologne.” But why? Because the German authorities also approved no less than eight counter-demonstrations in the city on the same day. No wonder the Turks are suspicious: they would simply forbid any such counter-demonstrations, and no doubt were ready to do so during President Gauck’s visit there last month – if anyone had actually applied to hold any.

Cologne streets could turn into quite a scrum on Saturday, but the latter Rheinische Post article at least has published the following almost military-looking map to help you make your way. FYI, the stadium-event where Erdogan will actually be speaking is the one the furthest to the right that says Veranstaltung UETD.

(For those asking, the title to this post was inspired by the Beatles, who even back in the early 1960s could sing remarkably presciently about world affairs.)

The current sojourn by German President Joachim Gauck in Turkey has turned out to be far from your garden-variety Head-of-State visit (quite apart from the strange paranoia against mobile telephones exhibited by security services there that I tweeted about earlier). These sorts of occasions tend to be scheduled quite far in advance, but in this case you wonder just how far ahead – before the Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan started to see videos pop up on YouTube implicating him and those around him in corruption, before he started to get all sorts of nasty back-talk on Twitter, for example? Before he went so far as to ban – or to try to ban – both YouTube and Twitter in Turkey, for example?

Yes, before all those developments, you’d have to think. But the show must go on, and Gauck is a trooper for Germany. Let me hasten to add: not THAT kind of trooper for Germany, not at all, really rather a trooper for Truth and Justice. I am serious, he was a civil rights activitist in the former East Germany, which is one of the most unpleasant, pain-inducing job-descriptions you can come up with. But this also means that, although Gauck easily agreed to fulfill his previously-scheduled duty to visit Turkey, he did not intend to shut up about what he found there.

And so we have this:

“Erdogan rejects Gauck’s criticism.” Mind you, this is while Gauck is still in Turkey.
And the situation is rendered even more awkward by the fact that Prime Minister Erdogan is just one of a pair of Gauck’s official hosts for his visit, the other one of course being Turkish President Abdullah Gül, once almost as politically close to Erdogan as a brother, but now clearly worried about the anti-democratic direction his prime minister is taking the country. (And in addition, completely dismissive of Erdogan’s attempted Twitter-ban – an attitude he communicated via a tweet from his presidential account.) (more…)

A brief word on Austrian politics – it’s getting slightly weird there:

Österreichs Öko-Partei: Grüne Welle (von Stephan Löwenstein, Wien) http://t.co/7RuOGcMFU2

May 15, 2013 6:42 am via FAZ.NETReplyRetweetFavorite

@FAZ_Politik

FAZ Politik

Grüne Welle: there is a new “Green Wave” in Austria, for the Green Party is doing quite well, as Stephan Löwenstein of Germany’s paper-of-record, the FAZ, lets us know. So far in 2013 there have been elections in four states – like Germany, Austria is divided into nine federal states – and the Austrian Greens made advances in each of them, spectacularly so in the state of Salzburg, where a Green party politician might even become state governor.

Maybe this isn’t so strange, you might say: the Greens have been very successful in Germany as well, just not lately. Famously, they formed a government at the national level with the Socialist SPD party of Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005 (winning re-election nationally in 2002), with party head Joschka Fischer serving as Deputy Chancellor and Foreign Minister. But Green Party success in Austria really is notable, since the political scene there is very different: basically, ever since emerging again as an independent state in 1955, Austria has been totally dominated by two parties, the socialist Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the right-wing People’s Party (ÖVP).

Yes, around 1999 you saw the rise of the right-wing xenophobic Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Jörg Haider, but intrusions into this cosy two-party arrangement of Austrian politics – for decades the basis of insider patronage for government and business positions up and down the societal spectrum – have ordinarily been very rare. Granted, the rise of the Greens is frequently manifesting itself in that party entering three-way coalitions with the established SPÖ and ÖVP parties: this is in place already in Corinthia, might happen in Salzburg, and could even happen at federal level.

Now, why does this matter? Who is interested in Austrian politics, anyway? – maybe even not many Austrians themselves! Well, it’s interesting to see the stranglehold two traditional parties have had on Austria broken up this way. This is also a step forward – if small – for those trying to do something about the worldwide threat of global warming (hey, we’re now over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – not that there is any direct evidence that that subject is at all responsible for the Greens’ recent electoral successes).

As for more immediate concerns, Austria is firmly in the camp of northern EU “creditor” countries, in fairly good fiscal and economic shape themselves, whose attitude and generosity towards those Eurozone members struggling in the South and on the periphery (i.e. Ireland) will be decisive towards determining how – if at all – the EU can eventually emerge from its current sovereign debt crisis.

If you examine the phenomenon closely, there’s a curious aspect to the current European economic crisis, whose most outstanding (but not sole) manifestation is the sovereign debt crisis. I mean looking beyond the threat to the common European currency, to where you see a marked imbalance in economic fortunes. Things are bad – very bad – in Spain, especially in Greece, but in Southern Europe (and Ireland) in general, but then things are rather good in Germany and its own ring of associated economies, the Dutch and the Austrian, but also the Polish (and Slovak) and to a lesser degree the Czech.

Why is that? Hermann Simon is a German, and also Chairman of the Board at the consulting firm Simon Kucher & Partners, and he put forth his ideas in a substantial article that appeared in Germany’s newspaper-of-record, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a few weeks ago. Actually, his piece is but an hors-d’oeuvre to the ideas he sets out in his new book – in German only.

The one-phrase summary for Germany’s success – and that book’s title – is “Hidden Champions.” Germany is overwhelming dependent, not on its domestic demand, but on its exports. The business establishment there is very good at that game. But it’s not large firms which are responsible – Simon mentions that even France has more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than Germany – but rather the smaller firms (famously known as the Mittelstand) that do killer export business even though most people have never heard of them – the Hidden Champions. Of the 2,734 names on the list Simon compiles of them, fully 1,307 are German (and many of the rest are Austrian or Swiss).

How do they do it? Simon conveniently (unluckily?) lists thirteen reasons: (more…)

As you will be well aware, the current debate engaging the Continent is that between austerity on the one side and fiscal expansionism on the other. What with the recent election results in France and in Greece (together with German state election returns from North Rhine-Westphalia), there seems to be a rising tide of popular opinion in favor of the former. The austerity party of the EU’s Northern European core, headed by Germany*, has been thrown on the defensive.

And so we have this, from the FAZ, Germany’s paper of record, specifically from that newpaper’s “Sunday economist” blogger Patrick Bernau, warning that Too much debt makes you poor. The lede:

There is a magic boundary: From 90 percent indebtedness it becomes dangerous for States. It is becoming clear: States then often get into decades-long problems.

His authority? That is mainly a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Carmen and Vincent Reinhart together with Kenneth S. Rogoff, entitled “Debt Overhangs: Past and Present.”

There you go, then: get yourself in debt in excess of 90% of your GDP, and you as a government are asking for trouble. That will show those who seem to just want to borrow-and-spend their way out of current economic difficulties.

In reality, of course, things are not quite so simple. To be fair, Bernau recognizes this. For one thing, that Reinhart^2-Rogoff study has to do with the sorows of States which exceed that 90% limit for five years in a row – a crucial distinction. There’s also the issue of exactly how punishment is delivered to those governments that stray over the line. Supposedly, the interest rates they pay for that debt start to skyrocket but, as Bernau readily concedes, that is hardly the case uniformly in the present world, particularly for governments which in sole charge of their own currency.

What we seem to have here is yet another case of a disconnect between an author’s fair-and-balanced article and those other people who are charged with writing the headline (and, often, the lede). Still, you get the feeling that Bernau does believe in that 90% thesis, even if he doesn’t manage to show in any definitive way why it should be true – and he definitely is worried for his own Germany, whose own government indebtedness is now at 81% of GDP and approaching that “magic boundary” fast.

*But also including the UK, which has been glad both to impose fiscal austerity on itself and live with the inevitably disappointing consequences.

“All Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, All The Time”? You could be forgiven for thinking so. Or consider the alternate, “natural progression” perspective: what first was but a tweet engendered a post amplifying that tweet – and now just one more to show how crazy things have become.

We need to remember that, in the first place, this is all about the Germans (!) really messing up a major engineering project, one that directly involves their capital. Is that “man-bites-dog” or what? I can’t believe that this has not attracted more attention from the press outside Germany! It’s not like you can keep the lid on news like this in today’s day & age. This could well turn out to be a highly instructive test-case on how to ensure the rest of the world is content to remain ignorant when you have news that you would just as soon not spread – if only I could distill the key lessons.

But that’s not what this post is about. Some extra crazy has popped up, in none other than the German newspaper of record, the FAZ. There author and journalist Ralph Bollmann urges the Berlin authorities to Lass es bleiben – Let it be! He ain’t exactly trying to channel the Beatles; he is actually urging the abandonment of that Berlin-Brandenburg airport project, which was supposed to have opened to the public about a month from now!

Why on earth? He actually lists ten arguments; let me just mention the highlights:

• Better to just stop this unending nightmare: Schrecken ohne Ende. A number of factors have convinced Bollmann that just starting to use the new airport will soon bring one new problem after another – for instance, it will have too little capacity from the very get-go, yet will be almost impossible to enlarge further.
  
• Tegel is better: That’s Berlin’s Tegel airport, of course, on the west side of town, famously built in a hurry (90 days for the first runway) during the Berlin Blockade to expand vital airport capacity. Even more interesting – I had not picked up this fact – is that Tegel was supposed to be closed at around the same time the new BER opened! (Obviously, those plans have been put on hold.) Right now Tegel is merely Berlin’s main airport, and the fourth-biggest in Germany! I think Bollmann zeroes in on why Tegel must die with his sentence “Back then [the early 1970s, when Tegel was upgraded to what it is today] architects didn’t build a shopping mall, just an airport.”
  
• Riding by train is more comfortable: Amen to that. Too much time lost travelling to, getting “screened” at, etc. the airport.
  
• Only poor people fly to Berlin: Incoming passangers to Berlin have doubled in ten years, Bollmann writes – but are these new visitors the kind Berliners really want to see? “Exiles from Schwabia, party-goers from all of Europe, recently unemployed Spaniards.”
  
• Templehof deserves another chance: This is rather surprising to read. The old Templehof airport is famous from the Airlift, but it sits right in the middle of the city, among dense urban areas. What’s more, there was a referendum a few years ago about shutting it down – and it passed! So that decision has already been made.
  
• Put Nature back: Apparently the route south from the Berlin city center that the new airport now blocks was a favorite for heading out to commune with nature on weekends and holidays. So demolish the airport!

So there you are: quite the mix of the reasonable (first three) and the insane (last three). Still, maybe he has a point: it would have been better just to expand Tegel, as well as to further encourage train over air transportation.

And just who is this Ralph Bollmann, anyway? Turns out he’s a fairly prominent journalist and commentator, with a side-line in writing history books about the Roman Empire. So he’s familiar with grandiose projects, and he’s familiar with the imperial hubris often associated with them.

Didja hear the one about the sentinel at his Bab-al-Aziziyah estate in Tripoli?

Guard at compound to rebels: “Gaddafi? You have the wrong place. This is the Qaddafy residence.”

August 23, 2011 6:51 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz

Yes, there’s much to laugh about concerning Muammar Qaddafi, especially now that the former Libyan dictator has been reduced to scurrying through underground tunnels, occasionally finding the time and microphone to record more “Zenga Zenga”-type rants for broadcast on whatever medium will still have him. (Listening to one of those being rebroadcast today on the Flemish radio news, I swear I also heard chickens clucking in the background – anyone else encounter this?) Hans-Christian Rößler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pitches in with a combination comedy-sketch/political obituary entitled Dictator and figure of fun. (more…)

As Saturday 9 July 2011 dawns around the world, a new entity takes its place within the family of nations: South Sudan. But is this really any cause for celebration? Or is the feeling on hearing the news more like the one evoked when a welfare mother gives birth to another child: “OK, it exists now, bless its soul – but who is supposed to support it?”

In any event, the new government needs to get to work and come up with a better name than “South Sudan”! How about just stealing “Sudan” for themselves and letting their former northern compatriots come up with a new one instead? There would be plenty of justification: the reason that such a split was necessary in the first place is the significant cultural differences between the Arab North and Black South of the country – and “Sudan” is derived from the Arabic for “black”!

Any state has got to have its head-of-government, and an article by Thomas Scheen in the FAZ introduces us to the first president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, complete with a thumbs-up picture of him up top, resplendent in black suit, black tie, black beard, and black stetson hat – from which he apparently is rarely parted. Little is known about him personally, and he’s loathe to grant interviews; he’s said to be around 60 years old, and his family lives in Nairobi, Kenya for safety reasons. That’s logical, for Kiir has been fighting all his life for South Sudanese independence, starting with the so-called Anyanya Revolt of the late 1960s/early 1970s through a second Sudanese civil war that started in 1983 and is really only ending now – if it is ending – with independence.

Indeed, that’s why Kiir is now president: nobody ever elected him, rather, he co-founded the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) along with the more-charismatic John Garang (later killed in a helicopter crash) and remains its top general. As Scheen points out, “Kiir is ultimately a soldier in the first place, and so far the South Sudan cabinet has shown more similarity to a military council than a democratic government.” Will democracy ever take root in that part of East Africa? For now, at least, South Sudan has many other things to worry about instead.

In German political terms this year of 2011 was always going to be about not any grand national-level election to (possibly) change the faces at the very top, but rather a very numerous series of elections at lower levels of that country’s federal system, none of them of decisive importance in itself but collectively fully capable of pointing to the likely result of the next truly national-level election, scheduled for 2012.

The latest of these occurred last Sunday (among other places) in Baden-Württemberg, the “other” southern federal German state (i.e. the one that’s not Bavaria), and Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party continued its long record of performing poorly in such local elections. To give you a pretty precise idea of what exercises voters in that particular prosperous corner of Germany, it’s generally agreed that the election revolved around just two issues: Fukushima (i.e. “nuclear power is dangerous”) and Stuttgart 21. The Green Party, especially, was on the “correct” side of both questions; so the Green Party won big, more than doubling its share of the vote and climbing to a position where it can lead a coalition state government together with its traditional political ally, the Social Democrat Party. (more…)

Oh, is he controversial! He likes to sleep with three females at a time, all of them clad in fur. (And this after a notorious separation from what was supposed to be his exclusive mate.) He’s been the subject not only of lawsuits but also full photo-spreads in Vanity Fair (by Annie Liebovitz, no less) and parody on the Colbert Report. Meanwhile, both his obsessive need to ingest things that are not good for him and to always be the center of attention have made most observers very concerned about his welfare.

And rightly so, for now he is dead, and way too young . . . what’s that? No, I was never talking about Charlie Sheen, this is about the celebrity that was Knut the Polar Bear, whose adventures at the Berlin Zoo this weblog has occasionally covered over the years. Maybe to make myself clear I should have brought up Knut’s being featured on his own postage-stamp, or even the public calls in the past for his castration, but frankly, all of that and more seems well within the capability of the out-of-control 2 1/2 Men once-and-future star.

No, this is about Knut, and I guess I can take a sort of bittersweet pride in having realized, from the very beginning of my coverage, that “it is perhaps the life of a child movie star that provides an even more-exact template to what has been happening with Knut.” You’ll surely know by now that last Saturday, as he was lounging on an island in his Berlin Zoo enclosure (which he shared with the aforementioned three female polar bears – who somehow seemed to want little to do with him) the lumbering grayish bear suddenly stood up, spun around a couple of times, fell into the water and was gone. Well, at least you probably heard that he died; those additional details I got from having the fortune to hear an interview on the BBC World Service with the Berlin Zoo Bear Dept. Head Heiner Klös. The interviewer put Klös on the spot (as BBC interviewers are increasingly wont to do with their subjects in recent years), accusing him of feeding Knut too many of the infamous croissants he was mad about. Yes, OK, there were croissants, Klös stammered in his reply, but mostly the keepers made sure he received the sort of wholesome meat-and-vegetables diet a still-growing young polar bear requires.

Anyway, while Knut was never in what you could call polar bear athletic shape, it’s unlikely it was anything in his diet that caused his death at age 4 – untimely, as polar bears in captivity are routinely known to live forty years or more. Just what it was remains something of a mystery; it was not a tumor, for example, as Christina Hucklenbroich of the FAZ let us know in an article of yesterday, although it did seem to involve some disease in his brain. Nothing in the environment provided to him at the Berlin Zoo was at fault, either – despite calls from no less than the Financial Times Deutschland for polar-bear enclosures across Europe to be subject to “stress tests.” (For real – although I suspect the piece is written tongue-in-cheek.) Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of in-breeding – Knut’s mother was a full-blooded wild polar bear out of Canada, Zoo Director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz assured the assembled press hordes.

Of course, it was that very same mother-bear who started Knut off on his celebrity adventure in the first place by rejecting him and thus making it necessary that he be raised in a rather more public fashion by the zookeepers. And although that life is now at an end, the legend (and, possibly, the need for further coverage here – whatever the traffic will bear, you might say) will surely live on. They want to raise a statue to him; his fur is already in the hands of expert taxidermists at a museum; and, inevitably, you know there is going to be a movie. For – relative to his species, at least – Knut lived fast and he died young: may I suggest “Polar Without A Cause”?

Yes, as if you don’t have enough to worry about these days . . . but the decision-process is now starting to get in gear for who will get to host the 2018 Winter Olympics! We’re reminded of this by Evi Simeoni with her article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, brought out on the occasion of the recent deadline for submission of official “bid-books” from candidate cities to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Understandably, Ms. Simeoni is particularly interested in Munich’s bid for the honor, which was delivered to Lausanne in person (because that’s simply what you do) earlier this week along with the documents of competitors Annecy (France) and Pyeongchang (South Korea). What follows from this point is inspections by the IOC’s Evaluation Committee to each site (to happen 1-3 March for the Bavarians), followed by formal presentations at the Lausanne headquarters on 18-19 May and the announcement of the decision at an IOC meeting in Durban, South Africa, on 6 July. (more…)

I recently covered here the Deutsche Bundesbahn’s troubles this year with operating their trains satisfactorily in extreme-ish weather, both hot and cold. But – How could I forget? – there has always been a bigger problem with the German trains, one that shows its ugly face year-round: they’re damned expensive! Now, anyone familiar at all with transportation and/or public-sector economics will have already known about this, whether s/he has ever travelled on the Bundesbahn or not, for this is an affliction shared by most public monopoly transportation systems requiring substantial prior capital investment (therefore also e.g. for city public transport systems): since it’s generally messy and often even politically unpopular to play the Grinch and show any resistance to escalating wage-demands from unions representing the labor required to keep these systems running, the costs and therefore ticket-prices inevitably rise higher than the rate of inflation. For myself, then, as much as I otherwise like the German trains, I tend to only travel on them as a result of some special offer and/or early booking which offers considerable savings. (more…)

Oh, didn’t you know? That’s the airport for Hamburg, Germany! And yes, it’s about to mark the 100th anniversary of its existence – somewhat. That’s actually next Monday, 10 January; and 10 JAN 1911 actually marks the date when a group of rich Hamburg merchants – among which executives of the prominent steamship line HAPAG were prominent – made the collective decision to purchase some meadowland out in the Fuhlsbüttel part of the city to set up an airport. (more…)

Talk about ending the year on a sour note! Der Tagesspiegel journalist Caroline Fetscher starts her post-Christmas opinion column (Project Europe is only beginning) with Belarus, which is certainly depressing enough. Through the vicious wave of police-repression following his recent presidential election “victory,” Aleksandr Lukashenko has cemented his title as “Europe’s last remaining dictator.” That much is clear, but Fetscher has a rather different point to make: Europeans should not assume that Belarus is the only problem when it comes to democracy, i.e. that there are no other stains elsewhere.

That would be a complacent thing to do; and after all, Die Zeit republished Fetscher’s piece under the new title Complacency is the enemy of Democracy. So where are there problems elsewhere in Europe? Well, there’s the Vatican, with its pedophilia scandals; Italy itself where “there rules an operetta-premier, who systematically subjugates the media, laws, and several submissive girls”; the Netherlands, where eurosceptic and anti-Islam ideologies thrive (and where Jews live uncomfortably – allegedly); and then Hungary, where antisemitism and anti-Gypsy feelings prevail.

This is mostly incoherent. First of all, Fetscher’s subject is supposed to be threats to democracy; the Roman Catholic scandals have little to do with that, while one would think that at least some of the opinions she condemns (at least euroscepticism) are precisely what free, democratic peoples are supposed to be allowed to hold if that suits them. She also strangely misses one recent phenomenon that would seem to have constituted a datapoint strongly supporting her thesis, namely the new media-supervision law in Hungary (which I recently covered here) that some see as paving the way for the return of something resembling a dictatorship.

But does the new law really make up such a threat? Why not go ask someone actually on the ground there, which is what Hanno Mussler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung does in an interview with Jan Mainka, publisher in Budapest of a German-language weekly.

This is a remarkable piece, mainly because of the calm lack of concern Mainka displays for the new media law:

The Budapester Zeitung [his paper] reports in a fair and balanced manner. In our editorials we support no party. At most you could describe our line as pro-Hungary. I don’t see that we will get in conflict with the new law. I’m not so sure about other Hungarian media outlets. Many are anything but fair and balanced. The interregional dailies stand on the side of either the opposition or the government.

To him, concern elsewhere in Europe over the media law (even as expressed by German Chancellor Merkel, or by the EU Commission) is “hysteria.” The new Hungarian premier, Viktor Orbán, was after all one of the leaders of the opposition that brought Communism down in Hungary twenty years ago. Of much more concern for the country’s media business are its economic troubles, for which the Orbán administration is just the set of personnel you would want to look to for solutions. Yes, recent taxation measures (bank tax, tax on foreign companies) have been drastic, but drastic solutions are what is needed; only their somewhat unpredictable nature is to be regretted.

So there you have it. If we are to believe Herr Mainka – again, responsible for putting out and making money with a publication in Hungary’s capital – neither the new media law nor Orbán’s ruthless revenue-raising measures are anything to worry about. But I don’t know: in particular, his dismissal of the Hungarian dailies – implying that it’s no problem if the government comes down hard on them, after all, they’re partisan – for me strikes the wrong note: newspapers are supposed to be allowed to be partisan! I’m getting too much here of the syndrome “OK, they’re going after the Jews; but I’m an upstanding and decent citizen, and they’ll never come after me!”

Still, this is a “don’t worry” viewpoint from an expert who is right there where the things are happening. Maybe all of us who were viewing developments in Hungary with alarm should stop and reconsider. Mainka also makes the point that few if any have likely taken the trouble to read the new media-law act to see what it actually says – maybe that would be a good first step for everyone!

Hey, former President George W. Bush was hanging out at a few selected US media outlets last week, did you know? Granted, you had many more important things to do during that time – by definition – than to notice, but it’s true. He got himself out of his comfy Dallas townhouse and back into some degree of public exposure, mainly on the Today Show, on Oprah, and with Sean Hannity on Fox. He didn’t have much of interest to say – to the sharpest questions from his friendly, hand-picked TV hosts he usually replied with a plug to buy his newly-issued memoires, Decision Points to get an answer – but anyway, there he was again.

Over at the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung it was Nils Minkmar who drew the short straw to actually pay this man some token amount of the attention he was seeking in order to write about the brief book-tour. The result is The week of the retread (my own interpretation of the German word Wiedergänger), which turns out to be an excellent bit of coverage even as Minkmar’s distaste with the whole exercise comes through loud and clear. Of course he wouldn’t welcome George W. Bush’s reappearance: most of the European continent held Bush in rather low regard throughout most of his presidency and certainly do now, when they can be compelled to think about him at all. The lede:

The preparation for the TV appearances on the occasion of his book lasted two years. After three days no one talked about them anymore. The comeback with his memoirs was a PR-disaster, as is only fitting for George W. Bush

Minkmar does brieflly go into the bizarre “scoop” Bush had ready with which to reward his TV-hosts, namely the strange tale of his mother showing him the preserved-in-formaldehyde remains of a stillborn sibling. But it is rather two other elements that stand out. The first is rapper Kanye West; apparently it was his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” remark in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster which moved NBC to invite West on the air after the Bush-Matt Lauer “Today” interview to give a response. There West managed to deliver a reasoned message on racism that completely overshadowed anything the ex-president had just said! If there was one name on people’s lips as a result of this book-tour, Minkmar claims, it was “West” and not “Bush.”

The second notable bit which Minkmar emphasizes is the torture issue, which inevitably reared its ugly head no matter how much Bush might have preferred to send such questioners off to consult his book about it instead. Minkmar asks, Wasn’t a government prosecutor listening in when Bush explicitly confirmed and defended his approval for torture techniques during his time in office? When, in response to questions of “Isn’t that illegal?”, he responded that, in fact, it must have been legal because his lawyers told him that it was? This hiding-behind-your-lawyer defense is particularly ironic, he notes, when contrasted with the tough, no-nonsense “Decider” persona which Bush was using the book and this book-tour to try to establish as how he will be remembered through History.

And indeed, that is what is important: not this brief and cynical publicity campaign, but George W. Bush’s historical legacy. Minkmar:

His appearances were deeply saddening for all friends of the United States. Here was a man challenged above his abilities, who took over at the beginning of the century an admired, young superpower and in just eight years plunged it into a financial, political and above all moral ditch. The judicial working-out of this era has hardly yet properly begun. That must change after this week.

The US midterm election returns are now in, for the most part. The result? Greater-than-expected Democratic losses in the House of Representatives – and a loss of their majority in that chamber – together with somewhat less-than-expected losses in the Senate, capped by the unexpected electoral survival of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

His counterpart as most powerful official of the House now becomes Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, someone relatively unknown to this point even within the US, and certainly internationally. The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung steps into the breach today with a brief portrait entitled The Patriot.

“Patriot”? That’s taking Boehner at his own word. President Obama is of a slightly different opinion; as the election neared and he started sharpening his rhetoric against his political opponents, he began to zero in on Boehner as the face of the Republican Party – “the Party of No” – as a whole, often singling out his name multiple times in campaign speeches. (That face, FAZ correspondent Matthias Rüb adds, which is always “tanned brown.”) He also was the presumed target of the President’s now-infamous remark during an interview with a Spanish-language radio station about how Latino voters needed to start voting to “punish their enemies” who stood in the way of legislation they want, like immigration reform. No, I’m a patriot, is how Boehner responded in his own campaign speech soon afterwards, since he is against high taxes and high government indebtedness.

Be that as it may, it will no longer be possible simply to dismiss John Boehner after 3 January when he becomes Speaker of the House, so Obama and the rest of us need to get to know him better. (Naturally, Obama is way ahead on this.) He is said by author Rüb to be “amiable,” and renowned as a “renewer and clean-up man” (Erneuerer und Saubermann) within the halls of Congress, which he first started to prowl in 1991. Since that freshmen term his rapid rise to the top came about through close association with, first, Newt Gingrich and then with Tom Delay, whom he succeeded as House minority leader after the latter resigned his seat in February 2006 over corruption allegations (only now coming to trial). Interestingly, before that point his main legislative accomplishment was probably the “No Child Left Behind” education act, which he maneuvered through Congress in cooperation with then-President George W. Bush and noted liberal grandee Senator Ted Kennedy.

But there is also no need to idealize the man. For one thing, there was his own remarkable admission in a recent interview that, as far as he was concerned, the chief Republican legislative goal was to ensure that Obama becomes a one-term president. At the same time, he is by far the champion fund-raiser for Republican electoral coffers, largely because of how especially “amiable” he is towards lobbyists for financial and big business concerns, as noted in this NYT piece of only a couple months ago. But we probably cannot expect the FAZ – even the paper’s dedicated Washington correspondent – to be able to fully fathom the increasingly commercial nature of American legislative deliberations.

Post modified: Sorry, it was rather Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who stated the bit about making Obama a one-term president being the Republican Party’s #1 objective.

In case you haven’t heard – maybe you’ve just been too busy with your status updates – Facebook has come under considerable fire lately for its apparent loose attitude towards security and users’ privacy. Maybe you also haven’t heard about the four NYU students who managed in a relative flash to raise tens of thousands of dollars for their project to create an open-source alternative to Facebook called “Diaspora*.” (Yes, with that asterix at the end; further information about their project here.)

But here at EuroSavant our job is to inform you of things that you may not have heard about from the Eurosphere. So had you heard that your great-uncle in Germany also doesn’t want you using Facebook? Well OK, maybe he’s not really your great-uncle, he just looks like he should be, as you will realize if you surf to the recent interview with him in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose rather sensationalist title I have borrowed for the title of this post out of similarly sensationalist motivations. Actually, he’s probably someone worth listening to even more than any great-uncle in Germany: he’s Ernst Pöppel, renowned professor of psychology at the University of Munich. (more…)

Aygül Özkan: Ever heard of . . . Well, wait! In the first place, is it a he or a she? (No fair looking at the title. And don’t worry, I won’t ask you to try to pronounce the name; I can’t hear you from here anyway.)

Unless you live in Hamburg or in Lower Saxony, you probably don’t have a clue. Aygül Özkan is a she, 38 years old, of Turkish descent. And, as it turns out, she is the choice of Lower Saxony state president Christian Wulff (CDU) to be the Social and Integration Minister in his new cabinet. (She’s also rather pretty, check out the picture – but I’m not allowed to say that about Muslim women, is that right?)

Ah yes: as the profile in the FAZ by Frank Pergande is careful to explain, Ms. Özkan is Muslim, or at least nominally so, the daughter of parents who both emigrated to Germany in the 1960s from Turkey, of which the father has long run his own tailor-shop in the Hamburg suburb of Altona. As it turns out, the “C” in that “CDU” that describes the party of which both she and her boss Wulff are members stands for Christlich, or “Christian”; it’s the mainstream party of the conservative Right that is also in power (under a coalition arrangement) at the federal level in Berlin. It’s the party of Chancellor Merkel – indeed, the Bundeskanzlerin certainly knows who Aygül Özkan is, and a picture of them together has appeared in the press, including in Germany’s leading Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. (more…)

Today is the day EU heads-of-government convene in Brussels for yet another summit. There will be an elephant in the room, a problem that needs to be handled – Greece, of course – but which some (mainly, but not only, Germany) don’t want to handle just now. So, bizarrely, the summit meeting itself will not have Greece on its agenda; rather, there will be a meeting called of all Eurozone heads of government (16 of them) just prior to the main summit event to address the Greek problem.

I learn this from the preparatory blogpost to the summit provided by the Economist’s “Charlegmagne” correspondent, and I have to admit that, here, that source (in English, of course) is the best provider of information and analysis that I have been able to find. Among other things, his main insight (as embodied in his column’s title, “Why Greece is not suffering enough yet”) that Greece will only be bailed out after it has been forced to suffer considerable economic pain – namely to set an example to other potential fiscal miscreants – is spot-on. And he also reports (although indirectly, from FT sources) the very valuable information of what Germany is demanding to help Greece: 1) Greece must first exhaust all other sources of finance from the markets; 2) It must then get as much as it can from the IMF; and 3) Then Germany will help, but will at the same time demand “tough new rules on debts and deficits that will impose more budgetary discipline than before, even if that involves changing the treaties.” (more…)

Here’s another obscure blast from the past – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better-known by its initials (in French) CERN. Do you happen to remember the brief stir of publicity from around two years ago when that institution’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was finally built and could start smashing sub-atomic particles into each other along a 27 kilometer-circumference magnetic track? That fleeting bit of excitement (among those who cared, at least) quickly evaporated when the huge thing didn’t work quite right when they first flipped the proverbial switch, and so had to be repaired.

Don’t worry, though, because the scientists finally got the LHC to function properly late last year. Or rather, if you do need something to worry about, consider the possibility out of theoretical physics that has been looming ever since the LHC finally started operations, and which was also certainly known about before the gigantic thing was even built. When it smashes these sub-atomic particles into each other, you see, one by-product is black holes – small black holes, to be sure, but there has always been some possibility of one or more of them getting bigger and basically swallowing up the whole Earth. (more…)

Climate change – remember that? It doesn’t seem to be much in the news anymore, ever since that “COP15” climate change conference back in December in Copenhagen, where all the world’s important leaders flew in to confer but then only emerged with some lame, non-binding agreement. So is the crisis somehow over? Can we all go back to our old, comfortable carbon-emitting ways?

That is highly unlikely, as most realize, but that distinct lull in any seeming concern about human-caused climate change has come about not only from the damp squib that COP15 turned out to be, but also from the steep drop in credibility that has been suffered lately by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). And remember, that IPCC has been pushing the urgency of doing something about global warming just as much as Al Gore has with his Inconvenient Truth – as we are reminded from the picture of Gore and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, both holding up their Nobel medals and certificates at the 2007 ceremony in Oslo, that stands at the top of Where have the doubts gone?, an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which reporter Matthias Wyssuwa pays a visit to the IPCC’s Geneva offices to see how that organization is doing. (more…)

As we can with most of the rest of the world’s newspapers, it looks like those of us who can read German can currently enjoy extensive on-line coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics . . . yes, from the Financial Times Deutschland! Okay . . . but just as would be the case if Sports Illustrated ever decided to expand its news coverage to international bond markets, you have to wonder how successfully the publication in question can bring off the task of either finding or cultivating internally the sort of expertise needed to report in a credible manner on such subjects so far outside of its core competence. In the FTD’s case things are not helped by the apparent lack of reporters’ by-lines attached to the Winter Olympics articles.

Prompted by these concerns – and, to be honest, also by my essential indifference to the pure sport element of the events now happening in and around Vancouver anyway – I’d like to highlight for your consideration this interesting piece covering one mass outdoor sporting activity in which the FTD does boast extensive experience: scrimmages between demonstrators and riot police. A further consideration prompting me to do this is the concern that coverage of such ugly scenes on the Games’ periphery will be downplayed or even omitted entirely by the media (especially TV) that my readers might rely on for their “mainstream” news coverage. (more…)

The European Union’s Lisbon Treaty is set to officially go into force on Tuesday (December 1), but the breakthrough that finally assured that that would happen after all came a month ago, when Czech president Václav Klaus finally signed it on November 3. By that point it was also clear that Commission President José Manuel Barroso had enough support to be re-appointed to his position for another seven-year term, so that Klaus’ signature set off a scramble, led by Barroso but by no means under his full control, to name the appointees for the EU’s list of top jobs a list slightly-expanded by the new treaty.

The headlining appointments were of course the new posts of EU President (actually, “President of the European Council”) and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. These went, respectively, to Belgian premier Herman van Rompuy and to the English Baroness Ashton, who has been serving as EU trade commissioner – two relative nonentities whose selection says quite a lot, most of it discouraging, about the sort of political horse-trading that lies at the heart of how EU politics operates. But just as significant is the composition of the new 27-member team of EU commissioners, with Mr. Barroso at their head, since this truly constitutes the EU’s “cabinet” of leaders heading bureaucratic departments (actually termed “Directorates-General”) covering specific areas of policy. It is the changes and personnel-shifts occurring here that offer insights into transformations in policies and priorities over the past five years since the last EU Commission was formed. (more…)

On the old media/new media front, a couple of German on-line sources give us an update on how the landscape is evolving over there.

First there is a brief piece in Der Spiegel about the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or FAZ. The FAZ’s fortunes are worth tracking because, like the New York Times in the US, it is really Germany’s own “newspaper of record.” (You can even call it the Teutonic “Grey Lady” as well if you like, since it still publishes no illustrations of any kind on its front page, but always has instead two commentary articles over on the right side, with their headlines in the old Gothic script.) Of course, as with the Times it’s also true for the FAZ that it is currently suffering heavily from declining subscriptions and declining advertising revenues, to the point that it expects to suffer a financial loss this calendar-year “in the area of the high single-millions [of euros]” – the precise number will of course depend upon how things turn out over the holiday period rounding out the year. Still – and here’s a contrast with the Times – management has ruled out any lay-offs. Of course, they’ve also had a hiring-freeze in place for a year, and the “no lay-offs” stance is also dependent upon an anticipated upturn in the paper’s fortunes sometime in the second half of next year, so that it will be able to actually turn a profit through 2010. So maybe the difference here with American employment practice is not the German’s being more “compassionate” in holding on to employees, but merely being more deluded about the future. (more…)

As a bibliophile, one event near and dear to my heart is the Frankfurter Buchmesse or Frankfurt Book Fair*, which takes place every year in the second week of October and has been doing so for some five hundred years (missing a few years on rare occasion due to wars and such) since shortly after Johannes Gutenberg invented movable-type printing in the first place in the near-by city of Mainz. I even managed to attend this event once and so can attest that, although it’s mainly meant for publishing professionals, visiting it is well worth the while of any mere civilian with any interest in books – even despite the knotty problem of finding someplace affordable to stay as local hotel rates skyrocket.

This year, however, I had no interest in making the journey even if I could get away. It was clear things were going to be especially awkward. One main highlight of each Buchmesse is the exhibitions and events put on for the literature of the “guest of honor” country, but this year that Ehrengast was to be the People’s Republic of China. That’s right: not the country in the world known particularly for its free press or tolerance of free expression, which you would think would be central themes to the very ethos of the annual Frankfurt goings-on. Maybe the Buchmesse executives, after honoring one country each year for so long, simply ran out of non-problematic countries to feature. More likely – since this custom of Ehrengast countries/literatures probably does not go back that far in time – someone in charge rather felt it was time to acknowledge the economic/political/demographic gorilla in the room and finally come to grips with granting the People’s Republic that one-time special status that it “deserves.” (more…)

The German press has lately also taken to covering events in Iran in a big way. First a couple of informative articles from the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, both from reporter Wolfgang Günter Lerch: here you’ll find a handy diagram (title: “Who has authority in Iran”) showing the formal structure of governmental power in Iran; helpfully, the most important Machtzentren, or “power-centers,” are outlined in red. They are, from left-to-right, the Guardian Council (twelve persons total, made up of six religious personnel and six jurists/legal experts); the Supreme Spiritual Leader, which is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (in English spelling); and the State President, which is still our good friend Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad. Then you also have this interesting article, entitled “Fragile state of many peoples,” about Iran’s ethnic and religious make-up. (If you visit, do be sure to click to check out the fantastic color-map at the upper-left.) We tend to think of Iran as Shiite and Persian/Farsi, but only the Shiite part is really true (90% of the population); the Persians make up only about 50%, followed by ten other ethnic groups, of which the Azeris are the next-largest. They are to be found in the northwest (near neighboring Azerbaijan, naturally), speak a different language that is close to Turkish, and boast a capital city, Tabriz, that is the home-town of presidential challenger Mir Hussein Musavi. (more…)

Various American papers (such as the Washington Post) covered the recent 2009 Monopoly US National Championship, which was actually staged last week inside of Washington, DC’s Union Station. But people play Monopoly other places, too, as we are reminded by Matthias Wyssuwa of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with his coverage of the eleventh annual German national Monopoly champion competition (Go to jail).

Granted, America was the original source, in the 1930s, of this ultimate free-market, real estate buying-and-selling competition (looked at it that way, where else could it have come from?), and Wyssuwa informs us that all of this world-wide Monopoly tournament activity is in preparation for the World Championship to take place later this year in Las Vegas. That’s also a fitting choice, except that Atlantic City – whose street-names are the ones you find used in the classic American edition of the game, you’ll recall – would have been even better. Of course, it’s German street-names that are used in the German edition; for example, Hans-Georg Schellinger, the ultimate winner of this 2009 German championship, is said by Wyssuwa in the final round to build up a real estate empire “from the Badstraße to the Opernplatz.” (more…)

. . . and now back to our regularly-scheduled coverage of depressing news from the current economic crisis. The latest development is the Congressional Budget Office’s report, released yesterday, maintaining that the US Government actually faces budget deficits and total indebtedness amounting to even higher unbelievably-large numbers than the unbelievably-large numbers presented under President Obama’s budget proposals.

The respected German daily Die Welt promptly picked up on this news to come out with its own article: Congress expects highest deficit of all time. What we should look at first here is the German word for “deficit” itself, used in that headline: Fehlbetrag, derived from the verb fehlen, “to err, sin, blunder” – so a “blunder-amount,” if you will. That pretty much sets the tone, right there; even before the reader’s eye gets to the inserted photo of an earnest President Obama – i.e. while it is still reading the lede – it gets assaulted not only by enormous numbers ($1.8 trillion/€1.3 trillion deficit for 2009, $9.3 trillion debt by 2019) but also by the accompanying loaded descriptions (“record total,” “without precedent,” “a debt-mountain”). Then the remainder of the relatively short piece fills in the remaining horrific details, like that such deficits would amount to over 4% of US GDP – “a value that experts term untenable.” US Budget Director Peter Orszag is quoted as conceding that a 5% deficit (getting close!) would truly be unbearable, even as he also maintains that the CBO’s estimates are unduly more pessimistic than the administration’s proposals. (more…)