I keep reading German newspapers and I am aghast at the level of propaganda, sheer misinformation, misrepresentation of facts and even, explicit racism.
This article, on the pretense of offering some way of an 'insider's viewpoint', does exactly what German media, in their majority, have been doing for 2 years now: creating a very inaccurate and racist picture of a whole nation.
In the present article, I read that in order to get into university, you have to bribe. Who told you that? Greece has one of the most demanding educational systems, with school children learning three foreign languages, plus ancient Greek and Latin, science and humanities in ages that children in Germany or the Netherlands or the UK wouldn't even dream of and I have lived in all above countries and can speak.
To get into university, there is a pan-hellenic, meaning country-wide system of anonymous series of exam papers submitted to an anonymous series of spatially randomly -selected school professors, happening in EVERY school in Greece at the same time. It is by far one of the fairest systems you could devise and implement and much fairer that in most other countries. I am an academic, I have taught at the University of Oxford and I can tell you the Greek transparency in university examination entry can only by difficulty be matched by other countries, where both the NAME of the candidate, its school and background are known and where final exams marks are subjectively treated by the university admission bodies.
I could continue at length with the nonsensical information you publish -including the supposed case of an impending juda. Might you want to inform your readers, the dictatorship in Greece was installed by the USA? Is there any dignity of your journalistic profession that you have not shed? The goal of globalization is not wealth for a few, but justice for all.
This still sounds like an unattainable vision today, but human progress has always begun this way. But aren't many citizens afraid of free trade and digitization? Of a world that no longer seems to have a place for them as individuals? Citizens remember the experience that liberalized markets have always gone hand-in-hand with a lowering of social standards. Many see the United States as the place where this development comes from.
Just look at the financial markets. But the solution is not that we can do everything on our own. We need to do the right thing. Well, it isn't as if there were no support for it at all. SPD-led administrations like the ones in the states of Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, which need open markets for their industry, support the plan. Why do you think the party is struggling with approval ratings of around 20 percent? Many decent Social Democrats think that we're doing the right thing.
We have achieved our government projects, such as the minimum wage and retirement at But the low approval ratings must be the chairman's fault. The social democratic movement is struggling with a declining faith in collective advocacy in an individualized society.
In the first industrial revolution, the debate revolved around expanding the social welfare state. This is not the case in the second industrial revolution, which is today, because a strong national, social welfare state alone can no longer control global capitalism. This doesn't mean that the social welfare state is incapacitated. It's just that we have weakened it more and more in the last 25 years. A strong and capable government, one that invests in education as well as internal security, is indispensable today.
This is because many people justifiably have a deep-seated need for greater social and cultural certainty. But we need strong Europe for that. Both are our issues. Name me a party in Germany that stands for democratic cohesion as much as the SPD.
The SPD is the only party that attempts to bring together economic success, security in social terms and environmental sense. All other parties succumb to the temptation to focus on only one thing at a time. But that's bound to fail in a modern society. The SPD has never abandoned its claim to shape social policy, not in good and not in bad times. And we're sticking to that. At its core, it's a debate about values. Is work and achievement worth anything in our society?
After all, a decent pension is nothing but the result of a lifetime of achievement. In one of the richest countries on earth, a person who has worked for 45 years, or even longer in some cases, should be able to retire without pension cuts. My concern is proper compensation for the work people have done. My concern is appreciation for work that people have performed. There has been much talk about lower pensions lately. But we're also talking about perfectly normal pensions.
I can't send someone who has worked for 40 years into retirement with only 40 percent of his salary, but we're moving in that direction.
There's more at stake than the pension level. The question is whether politicians are perceived as cynical. Is pension policy an opportunity to reduce the influence of the Alternative for Germany? The pension issue is closely tied to the low-interest phase in Europe.
It undermines pretty much everything we have said about private pension plans in recent years. It also destroys the basic notion we have received from our parents, namely that we should save for a rainy day. People say to me: "First you introduced the euro, and then everything became more expensive. Than you reduced pension levels and told people to contribute to private pension plans. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions were spent on ailing banks.
And now all of this has led to nothing. That's what right-wing populists are exploiting throughout Europe. I think it's fundamentally wrong to hold Mr. Draghi responsible. The root of the problem lies in the weak growth we've had since , which is crippling Europe.
The real question in Europe should be how we combine growth and structural reforms. The European left believes it's merely a question of investments. The conservatives believe it's all about austerity. We need to combine these two things.
It isn't just about spending money. It's also about investing intelligently, in education, research and the digital world. That's our future. The actions of the ECB are a consequence of misguided policy in the euro zone. This misguided policy is dangerous in the long run.
Sven Afhuppe is Handelsblatt's editor in chief. Thomas Ludwig leads Handelsblatt's political coverage from Berlin. Klaus Stratmann writes about the energy sector.
To contact the authors: [email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected]. Politics Companies Finance Opinion About us. Handelsblatt met Sigmar Gabriel as the vice chancellor traveled to Wolfsburg. Top-Jobs des Tages. In part, we did original writing, conceived and narrated by native Anglophones for other native Anglophones. And yes, I had no choice but to lump the Kiwis, Aussies, Canucks, Yanks, Limeys and others together; graciously, you always forgave us for that.
The resulting stories in effect became mash-ups that were only loosely based on the source texts. To my delight, this approach and philosophy piqued the interest of vaunted media observers such as the Nieman Lab at Harvard.
In this position as bridge builder, we also became acutely aware of the deep-seated differences between German and Anglo-Saxon storytelling. Some of my German colleagues, naturally, have asked me what those are. You can give an answer that is short but unsatisfying Hemingway wrote shorter sentences. Or you could attempt an answer that is long and subtle.
Such an explanation must start with the question of relevance. Yes, there are some events that are relevant to every audience, and can be reported in formats that will translate easily. Recall the day John F. Kennedy was shot. You could have translated these articles, and these translations would have worked. But most journalism is not like this. Most storytelling starts with a journalist looking at the world and finding something interesting, important, urgent, shocking, counterintuitive or surprising.
This is where relevance kicks in. In our experience at the English-language Handelsblatt newsroom, our German colleagues often paid attention to things that we found boring. Simultaneously, they skipped over things that we found fascinating.
And they would say the exact same thing about us. None of this should be surprising: After all, as I already said, they explain the world to Germans; we explained Germans to the world.
The differences accumulated from there. That starts with formats i. Dabei hat Evergrande nun schon zum dritten Mal innerhalb weniger Wochen einen Zahlungsausfall abgewendet. Ist ein Crash an Chinas Immobilienmarkt abgewendet? BMW und VW sind nicht dabei.
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