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The degree to which Europe has lost ground to the U.S. in terms of economic competitiveness since the turn of century is breathtaking. The gap in GDP per capita, for example, has doubled by some metrics to 30 percent, due mainly to lower productivity growth in the EU.
Put simply, Europeans don’t work enough. An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.
had to look this asshole up. wrote for the WSJ for 15 years and won something called the “Gerald Loeb Award” which is a finance journalism award cooked up by a founder of a huge brokerage form on wall street in the late 1950s. it’s given multiple times a year for “Excellence in Journalism”. The german wikipedia bio claims this award is the highest honor for journalism in the US. that’s news to me, Hauptman Matt! he has no english wiki, suspiciously. i wonder if this guy wrote his own german wiki.
anyway, this award worthy multi-author article in the WSJ was more or less a description of Bank of America buying Merrill when it went teats up. not an investigative retrospective, but literally an article saying it happened the day after it happened. how in the holy christ it’s worth a journalism award escapes me. very “Dog Bites Man” type shit that it apparently took 3 people to write.
what a fucking hack, though i can see why his career floats ever upward on the wings of capitalist love.
An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.
Not that the USA isn’t very much terrible but I’m assuming this guy picked up the ever popular “hours per job” metric instead of “hours per person” metric.
Schröders neoliberization effort introduced the mini job, where you could opt out or “opt out” out of social securities, costing you and your benefactorial employer way less money. THe purposed idea was that a mother of 5 could use her spare 5 hours a week to contribute some househould income, what actually happened of course is that 5 full time employees with all the admittedly “strong” social services benefits (compared to the USA) got replaced by 20 mini job employees who have none of those.
This drags down the “hours worked per job” average down a whole fucking bunch, since any given job is going to be like 20 hours a month max. It’s just that people mostly have 2 - 5 of those, so more like a 100 hour workweek. Or they just do undeclared work a lot, which means more necessary money in their pocket, it also means 0 pensions since it’s not in the system.
couldn’t have anything to do with the US blowing up pipelines or anything
the closest this article gets to mentioning NordStream 2:
Faced with some of the world’s highest energy costs, expensive labor and onerous regulation, many big German companies are simply upping stakes and relocating to other regions.
That’s right, the elephant in the room cannot be mentioned because then people might start asking who committed the biggest act of industrial terrorism in Europe since WW2.
it’s presented like weather or the natural state of things, you’re not allowed to ask why the energy costs are high
reminds one of O’Malley-Dillon and Plouffe and Cutter talking about “PoLiTiCaL hEaDwInDs”
It does seem like people are starting to clue in though. At first, most people didn’t see impact on their daily lives and that made state propaganda effective, but now as the material conditions continue to decline it’s becoming less palatable by the day.
It also honestly just reads like standard US news media propaganda that comes up whenever they want something to be privatized, whether that’s Venezuela’s oil, Chile’s copper, Chinese industry, the VA, USPS, public schools, etc. It’s basically an underhanded threat and an attempt to lay the groundwork for justifying gutting European public services.
What’s more, the Nordstream bombing is far from the only act of sabotage the US has done to Europe, which also includes stuff like the Ukraine war itself, suspicious fires at ASML plants, and the Suez canal blockage where the ship (for some reason) drew a giant penis before beaching itself.
Thing is that Europe is a capitalist economy and people who own companies will make decisions that increase their profits. You can’t compare Europe to China or Venezuela because the nature of the economy is not the same here. You are completely right that the US has been systemically undermining Europe though. The US has no interest in Europe becoming a competitor.
Thing is that Europe is a capitalist economy and people who own companies will make decisions that increase their profits.
I agree and I don’t want to sound like it’s just US vs EU here, because there are plenty of capitalists in the EU of course who would certainly love to have more “austerity” and gut public services with as little public backlash as possible. I’m just saying I’ve seen similar propaganda in the US my entire life, often directed at institutions in the US, and a lot of times it shares similarities with how the US media also treats certain foreign governments.
Oh yeah, no argument that the article is very clearly doing propaganda to justify the austerity that’s coming. Basically, the way I look at it is that there are two things at play here. First is that capitalists who own the means of production are going to use the economic crisis in Europe as an opportunity to drive austerity policies. Second is that capitalist own media is going to do a propaganda blitz to condition the public to accept that.
luigi has been showing me that the most effective way to suppress something is to acknowledge it as minimally as you possibly can and then push on with your narrative. that way, you can simply say you didn’t suppress anything because it was there.
Is the problem of Europe decades of neoliberalism and austerity? No, it’s a singular gas pipe that’s the cause of everything.
not what I am trying to say.
the world’s highest energy costs
would you also like a bad faith reading of your comment as “the bombing had zero effect on energy prices”
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I guess I’m supposed to apologize for noticing that western media never mentions one of the US empires worst crimes when handwringing about Europe’s loss of “cheap Russian gas”. if the Russians really had bombed it you had better believe they’d mention it in every fucking article along with “full-scale invasion”
I suppose you won’t see this, but part of the reason I have trouble shutting up about it is because of the wall of silence in western media
you are absolutely right that this dish has been cooking for decades, I’m just angry that they pretend like the bombing didn’t happen. I suppose I should “get over it” but it’s not working what can I say
