Norbert Häring | norberthaering.de

German economic output contracted in the second quarter and there is every indication that in the third quarter, the has just finished half time, has rather run worse than better. This is only superficially to Donald Trump and his trade wars. The German economy was not on one in several respects a sustainable path. Now, the government is called upon to take a courageous and planned action to avoid a deep changeover crisis.

The German model of success was not sustainable, because it was the boundaries of the debt capacity of the rest of the world and because it was ignored that we are already very close to the borders of ecological the capacity of our home planet are.

As far as the economic limits are concerned, it cannot be said that in the long run that, in addition to the catching-up giant empire, China will also have a 1.5 % share of the market. billion people even the rich Germany is trying to to increase prosperity through export and economy, and in the long term to exports increased by seven or eight percent of its economic output in the year under review. as imported. The counterpart to the export successes of these two nations is that the rest of the world is incurring ever-increasing foreign debt to build. The longer this is possible, the more countries will achieve their debt limit and no longer want or are able to play this game. join in. If Trump hadn’t stood crosswise, it would have been sooner or later. later others did. Or there would simply be more and more countries – also EU countries – into crises and our exports would no longer have been there for us. can lose weight.

As far as ecological boundaries are concerned, without a plan on how to individual transportation with the requirements of climate protection and the cities worth living in, an industry that can depends to a large extent on the unchecked growth of individual traffic – sooner or later slide into crisis.

The German economy is therefore currently experiencing a combination of and fundamental changeover problems that have the stuff, to grow into a deep structural crisis. Against both helps now only fast and courageous planning and acting of the government.

Action against the economic crisis

To prevent the recession from deepening, a switchover in the Fiscal policy on more-money-spend-than-intake to meet demand animate. Because companies and private households tend to to cut their spending during the crisis. This can into a downward spiral of lack of demand, loss of income, savings and thus lead to an even greater lack of demand.

What does not help, or at most at short notice, are measures, based on the wrong diagnosis of the problem that Germany did not have a enough for its competitiveness. Therefore, under the tax burden on businesses should be reduced. That the German industry is not competitive enough in terms of price, the in view of years of huge export surpluses a downright absurd Statement.

For sustainability

To prevent a deep changeover crisis in German industry it is important that the extra money is spent in such a way as to reduce the long-term challenges and not intensified. Clever and reliable planning is in demand. This is what creates the prerequisite for the necessary investments of the private sector, which will also would help a lot in the economic cycle. Because in unsustainable business models you don’t invest more than necessary and you don’t invest in new business models only if the uncertainty is not too high. The Politics must therefore not continue in disjointed, symbolic actions, such as the proposed ban on the use of plastic bags and a scrapping premium for oil heating systems.

An integrated master plan is missing

In energy policy, the absence of an overall plan makes the many Individual measures too expensive and at the same time ineffective. In the The same applies to transport policy, and both do not even fit the together in the same direction. If one promotes solar energy and wind power massively, you need a conclusive plan on how to deal with the highly volatile energy generation from these sources. The targeted, but due to the lack of a shop network, the massive increase of the Electric cars on the roads would exacerbate the problem. One Imagine ten days without sun and wind in December, with millions Electric cars whose batteries run out. After a few days charge all their batteries in addition to their normal power requirements, and Bake Christmas cookies, but there is no solar or wind power.

But the government is not giving any signals that it will ever take part in a comprehensive integrated plan for energy supply and distribution and usage. The regional distribution of the power plants and the expansion of the distribution network does not seem to be reasonably coordinated will be.

A few ideas:

1. Close lignite production. Job creation in the affected areas. Promoting regions. State licences and contracts wherever possible dependent on the fact that non-local investments in these regions.
2. A reliable plan for the expansion of public transport so that Daimler and Co. can focus their capacities more closely on the Car-Sharing can be financially and administratively promoted and promoted through government coordination to ensure that the necessary economies of scale are achieved. (large offer with car at almost every corner) can be achieved, especially in the countryside.
3. CO2 tax not applicable to consumers of energy sources because the too many, but to the importers and producers of these products. Energy carrier. Then it’s much easier to handle.
4. Create a plan of which industries to enter if you want to CO2 price to the necessary level, and what to do to reduce its to keep employees in pay and bread. Without that, the talk is about CO2 pricing only symbolic policy, because the price necessarily to will remain low.
5. >Stop talking about emission-free means of transport etc., because it will be that doesn’t exist. Even the sailing yacht, with which Greta Thunberg to the UN and is responsible for a lot of CO2, if you sail back the right way. and the calculations. If one pretends that electric cars are emission-free, one can do not create a reasonable plan.

However, the sad truth then becomes apparent that we cannot achieve the climate targets without a substantial reduction in our material consumption. But that doesn’t have to be bad. For there are many things that could significantly improve people’s lives without being associated with material consumption – first and foremost better care, better childcare and health care, less work, more leisure time and more meaningful leisure activities.

The Reason in Capitalism

Andreas Triebel

Yes, Mr. Häring, these are beautiful, sensible suggestions. But the reason of the capitalist social order is not shown in the welfare of the peoples, but in the accumulation of capital. The general line is the pursuit of returns. The consumption of our air, our atmosphere, which should belong to everyone, primarily serves the interests of profit. Our water, which should be sufficiently available to all people, is used for the purpose of increasing returns and is directed unfiltered into the oceans. Industrial raw materials are extracted from the soil, while people in countries rich in raw materials have to live in inhumane conditions. Bandits are used by the protective power of the West to form government cliques or military clans, whether in Chile (after the murder of Allende), in Congo (after the murder of Lumumba), in Nigeria under landscape devastation by the Shell corporation or in Saudi Arabia by a religiously coloured dictatorship. Africa’s agriculture is destroyed, the population is deprived of its livelihoods and the strong and viable sections of the population who have the strength to flee have to live as cheap day labourers in Western Europe. They serve the local working class as a warning and threat in the event of strikes and social unrest.

The political class must under no circumstances question class rule and the privileges associated with it. The bourgeois ideology also subordinates the national economy to this goal. It has developed neoliberalism into the domination technique of our time. With the demand for the so-called black zero, the actual goals of the austerity program, the depravation of large sections of the population and the unrestricted exploitation of the labor pool, can be excellently clouded. The huge masses of capital accumulated are not available to improve the situation of the working class.

Our social order is based on the production of goods and the exploitation of labour. Soft factors, such as better care of the sick, good care of children, more leisure time are harmful to the system, must therefore be fought for and are only temporary. They will be restricted again in the coming crisis. There is already a strong dispute about the abolition of the so-called solidarity surcharge in accordance with the neo-liberal mantra, in order to explain at the next opportunity that there is no money for better care, better child care and more leisure time.

Wise plans should have an anti-capitalist thrust:

The privatisation of the water supply should be stopped.

The enrichment of corporations by health care, which was introduced by SPD Minister Ulla Schmidt, would have to be stopped.

The laws on the abolition of social protection by the Schröder SPD government must be repealed.

In order to make social disputes manageable, national sovereignty should be able to emerge more clearly again.

And it is likely that state investments will hardly change the course and depth of the coming crisis. The withdrawal of purchasing power is essentially part of capitalism. History offers hardly any examples of successful state intervention. Roosevelt’s New Deal did not unfold until the Great Depression came to an end. And the dwindling return on investment in the global economic crisis at the beginning of our century provoked a more aggressive approach by the political class; in Germany, social democracy immediately offered itself, freeing larger sections of the working class for exploitation and repealing social protection laws. After all, Schröder and Fischer did not let German workers be shot like Noske and Ebert, but limited themselves to bombing Yugoslavs. But the state, as an investor, was not a major player that would have contributed to ending the crisis.

National economy is a question of power. Power beats utopia. Scholz and his associates have understood this. The Western European movement of the Yellow West can still be suppressed. But the middle class suspects that the reduction of material consumption cannot only be imposed on the lower class. 1789 could come otherwise faster, than conceivable up to now.