Archive for category Global Depression
An American Hero: Alayne Fleischmann
Posted by Scott Erb in Corruption, Economic crisis, Global Depression on November 7, 2014
Alayne Fleischmann is risking her career and all her assets by going public with information about the fraud perpetuated by JP Morgan Chase, a Wall Street bank.
If you really want to read about how dirty the big banks are, take the time to read through this piece, published in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. Here’s a very condensed version. Everyone knows that the 2008 economic crisis was caused not by the real estate market or sub prime loans, but by a nearly $700 trillion dollar per year market in unregulated derivative bonds.
The banks were making so much money with these bonds that they got in bed with dirty mortgage brokers (i.e., the biggest ones) who engaged in inflating the incomes of people applying for loans, approving without documentation, and creating wild mortgage packages that would have payments low the first two years then kick in to incredibly high rates. All of this created a massive bubble, as people saw prices rising and wanted in. The banks then doubled down and made more money. By 2005 these bonds were backed by mortgages that would never be repaid.

Note how fast over the counter (unregulated) derivative trade increased after 2000 – it was the motor of the economic crisis, and still could be hiding financial shenanigans.
In short, the crisis of 2008 was a free market creation, caused by unregulated big Wall Street banks selling bonds they knew were bad – leaving investors from schools, fire departments, retirement accounts and the like holding the bag. Moreover it caused a massive recession and structurally weakened the world economy. Never has there been a more convincing case that proves capitalism does not work without regulation, and that big money will game the system thinking only of itself if allowed the opportunity.
Yet there is more. Once the collapse hit, the US was faced with the real possibility of a credit crunch that would not only hit banks and the mortgage market, but also even the ability of consumers to buy cars or use credit cards. That was a looming threat in October 2008, and the immediacy of that threat was handled through TARP – the so called bail out.
So act one: bail out the players who gamed the system, whose executives made billions, leaving both investors and the world poorer. Yet not to bail them out would have intensified the crisis to the point of causing a great depression.
Act two: the Justice Department of the new Obama Administration would work with the banks to try to avoid them having to pay massive fines, or have the extent of their corruption made public. That’s what Fleischmann’s case shows. Rather than go after the big banks for their fraud and crimes, Attorney General Eric Holder choose to get in bed with them and help them cover their tracks. Why?
Again, to avoid a credit crunch and not to gum up the recovery. With the big banks on the ropes, the recovery could fade. If trust in the remaining financial institutions started to fail, we again would risk depression. The big banks were not only too big to fail, but too big to even hold accountable.
Consider this brief monologue from the film Syriana in which corruption is defended – it’s a more common view than we might want to believe:
In Syriana the government wants the merger of two oil companies to go through, despite clear corruption. “We’re looking for the illusion of due diligence,” one attorney declares. But because increasing access to oil is so important, they really don’t want to dig. In this case, the settlements with Chase and other banks created only the illusion that the Justice Department wanted to keep the banks accountable. Fleischmann’s revelations we know how deep and thorough the corruption had become.
So what next? Will JP Morgan Chase set out to destroy Fleischmann as an example for anyone else who might want to come forward? Will others come forward to give her cover and tell the full story? Will her courage create a desire to really dig to the bottom of what happened?
Alas, this stuff is complex. That’s why so many people don’t get the reality of what caused the crisis, and find it easy to blame things like government policy on home loans. Yet the more we learn, the more we see that Wall Street has immense control over US policy, in part because of their dominance of the economy. If the banks fail, the world economy is in peril.
Yet this is unsustainable. As the big banks again gain record profits, with only a meager effort to regulate them after the collapse, we’re setting up the next big crisis – perhaps worse than the last one. One can only hope that heroes like Alayne Fleischmann show the courage to tell the world what’s really going on, and how whether Republican or Democrat, no one has the guts to take on Wall Street.
The Time of Transition
Posted by Scott Erb in Climate Change, Consumerism, Energy, Fiction, Global Depression on June 15, 2012
A piece of the fabric of space-time fractured in my office today and a description of a course to be offered in 2279 slipped through. Weird, that.
It is the year 2279. Here Professor Hubert Morgan talks about the popular history course on the era of transition from 1985 to 2065 when somehow the global system survived a series of crises without collapsing. Instead, the basis for the peaceful global union we have today was forged.

We look back at the era as one of instability, riots and fear that we luckily managed to survive – students in this course learn to understand the era through the eyes of those who actually lived through it!
People come to the course with a variety of expectations. They know that this was the era of globalization, economic crisis, the collapse of the sovereign state as a system of governance, intense global warming, energy crises and famine, but they also know that the story had a happy ending. Not only did they solve their problems through a mix of technological ingenuity, political creativity and adaptation, but they forged an ongoing era of peace, known as the Global Union.
In my course I try to as much as possible get them to experience that era the way the people living through it did — not knowing for sure what was happening, finding it hard to let go of old concepts and ideals, and fearful of the future.

Students get hands on experience with old technology such as this mid-1980s version of a “personal computer.” Now seen as ancient and archaic, these machines were the gateway into the information revolution that changed the world.
We start at 1985 – the year when both globalization and the information revolution started to take off. We spend time there, learning about the culture, the state of the world, the films (students especially enjoy one called “Back to the Future”), the games, and the music.

Students laugh when they see the 1985 game “tetris,” which looks much like the exercises two year olds engage in to develop spatial cognition. “It’s surprisingly addictive,” one student grudgingly noted.
People choose various media experiences – that was the age of motion pictures, television, and the emergence of music on compact discs – large cumbersome devices that nonetheless opened the door to the era of digital music. The idea is to immerse themselves in this strange but fascinating past before heading onto the roller coaster of the next eighty years.
Students take awhile to understand ideology. Ideology is now seen as a kind of mental prison forcing people into stagnant modes of thought, but politics was ideological in those days. Students need to understand the bizarre “Cold War” and why it was so difficult for people to think outside narrow political or national boundaries. It’s not that people were stupid or bigoted, they simply saw that world of ideology, ethnicity and states as natural.
We also explore why warnings on the growing economic imbalances, the loss of oil as a major energy source, and global warming were ignored and even denied. One student described it as “cultural group think.”
I think the part that often most startles them is the “trips” to virtual farms to see how animals were treated and food produced. Even though they know it’s not real, when talking to the farmers the odors, inhumane treatment of the animals and the way in which chemicals and other additives are simply dumped into the food chain sometimes makes some students physically ill. Of all the things that make life 300 years ago so wretched, most say food production is the biggest reason they wouldn’t want to go back!

Nothing prepares students for the virtual tours of chicken farms, and immersion into the food and chemical culture of the era. “How could they eat what was treated so barbarically?” students ask. The answer – most people never gave a second thought to where their food came from, or how it was manufactured.
Of course, the worst part of that era — 2015 to 2045 — can’t help but grab attention. Looked at as a thirty year “era” it’s easy to understand it and figure out why things worked out the way they did. In our course we try to accentuate the uncertainty people living through that era experienced – they truly feared global instability, mass warfare, disease and even human survival.

As global warming rendered huge sections of the planet virtually uninhabitable due to drought and disease, many thought that humans would fall back into savagery and chaos.
We follow the side stories of the scientists, politicians, thinkers and cultural icons that strove to keep civilization together and built ties between the impoverished suffering states of Africa and parts of Asia with the technologically advanced people in Europe and North America. Students recognize how fragile these connections were, especially early on, and how easily they might have been destroyed by fearful nationalism and bigotry. The wisdom that global cooperation was necessary was a hard sell only on!

In 1901 the first “gusher” at Mt. Spindletop in Texas helped usher in the age of oil – cheap, transportable and extremely efficient energy. A whole society was built on cheap energy, and when oil became scarce by the 2020s people feared collapse.
The final era is that of consolidation, from 2045 to 2065 when the Treaty of Global Union was signed and most of the severe problems of the 21st Century were solved. This includes the new economics in which the ideologies of capitalism and socialism were jettisoned for a pragmatic approach that combined ideas from all, but focused on human liberty and opportunity as the core values. Massive debt was wiped out as all old currencies were simply abolished and the world started a new with a global currency and blank slate. In retrospect all that seems to have been inevitable, but students learn how gut wrenching and scary it was while the issues were debated.
In the course we trace how the information revolution led to the capacity to massively decentralize government and bring it closer to the people, making possible a “Global Union” of core shared rules but little centralized power. They realize how odd such an arrangement would look to an early 21st Century human so used to seeing centralization and de-centralization as mutually incompatible.
The new science of energy, food and climate is perhaps the most intriguing. We all learn it as natural, and look back at the materialism, consumerism, pollution and poisonous chemicals as a barbaric aspect of the old era. In this class students learn how that was taken as natural, and how dramatic the change in thinking was — so dramatic that absent global catastrophe it might never have happened.
The virtual trips to the era are life like. It is as if we have traveled back in time, our ability to use holography to create worlds that appear completely real to our senses makes this possible.

The past comes alive for students with hyper-programmed holographic technology — something imagined (albeit in very crude form) back in 1987 on a show known as Star Trek.
This course reminds us of crises caused by the era of greed, corruption, materialism, lack of respect for the environment and pursuit of pure self-interest without regard for the common good. By learning about the past we can better understand our present, appreciate what we’ve accomplished, and remind ourselves that humans do best when we understand we share a common destiny, both with each other and with our planet.
Tea Party vs. OWS
Posted by Scott Erb in Democrats, Dennis DeYoung, Economic crisis, Global Depression, Occupy Wall Street, Protest, Tea Party on October 20, 2011
I found this diagram on politico.com, which linked it to this site, belonging to James Sinclair who writes:
Yeah, I’m oversimplifying, but only a little. The greatest threat to our economy is neither corporations nor the government. The greatest threat to our economy is both of them working together. There are currently two sizable coalitions of angry citizens that are almost on the same page about that, and they’re too busy insulting each other to notice.
Mr. Sinclair has a point — not only are the roots of both movements similar, but neither side really sees the true problem, it’s the nexus of corporate and government interests that create the most problems. Therein lies the possibility of a true alternative to politics as usual.
This doesn’t mean a new third party or some rising independent candidate. Rather, the two major parties have gotten into a rut. When the economy was booming and it appeared the US was doing it right through deregulation and lower taxes, the parties got lazy. Democrats like Bill Clinton embraced Wall Street and an economics team that was more laissez faire than even Reagan’s cohort. To keep their ‘base’ the Democrats played interest group politics while pushing for programs like an overhaul of the health care system. They didn’t get much accomplished on that front, but with the times good it didn’t matter.
The Republican party played similar games with social conservatives. They gave lip service to issues like abortion and gay rights, but overall it was ineffective and just enough to keep the base in line. So while the spectacle of intense partisan rancor filled the airwaves, the reality was that the two parties were becoming more alike than different. Issues dear to social conservatives were not prioritized by the GOP, and the Clinton Administration ended up partially dismantling rather than building up social welfare programs.
Perhaps because of the growing ideological convergence of the two parties politics turned to personal stuff. Did Clinton (or Bush the Younger) evade service in Vietnam unfairly? Clinton was impeached for nothing he did as President but for an affair with a younger intern. The personal trumped the substantive in a politics that was more about illusion and spectacle than substance.
During all that time both government and private citizens fell into the debt trap, driven in part by illusions of wealth thanks to the dot com craze and the real estate bubble. The hypnosis of consumerism blinded people to the decay right before our eyes. Day trading, flipping real estate and get rich quick schemes trumped hard work and imagination. But unemployment was low and the GDP rising. What me worry?
As more money flowed into campaigns a nexus between big business and big government formed. As the middle class eroded thanks to the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the service sector, only the bubble economy and cheap goods from China prevented people from grasping how their country was changing into something less democratic with leaders less accountable than before. Then in 2007 the housing bubble burst, starting a period of economic stagnation which turned into crisis in September 2008.
Now the veil’s been lifted from our eyes. Now we see the corruption on Wall Street, the scandals in government, the links between big money and the Administration, touching both Obama and Bush. President Obama’s election came because people thought he represented change. But fearing a revolt from the elites of Wall Street, he embraced the same advisors that worked for Clinton, and took a very establishment approach.
Campaigns now are more marketing than an exchange of ideas. Candidates are packaged and speak in bland generalities. They have to, because if they break from the script they might make a gaffe and have it spread until it destroys their candidacy. Spectacle over substance; illusion over reality. Talk radio peddles emotion over reason, demonizing and mocking rather than engaging in real political discourse. Politics becomes a “contact sport,” where one chooses a team and gets into the game, or one takes the view of Dennis DeYoung in his song “I don’t believe in Anything”:
I hate the bloody liberals and the neo-cons, they’re all so full of shit
Oh the way they talk to us, I think they think we’re idiots
What a bunch of hypocrits!
Obama’s approval ratings are low, but those of Congress are far lower. We’re in crisis and our political system is unable to respond. 20th Century thinking doesn’t cut it, the bubble years are over, so now what?
Now we have the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street representing two different movements driven by similar concerns. The Tea Party has lost some of its luster, and no doubt that will happen to OWS as well. But the two movements signify a desire of the electorate to change the nature of politics in the US. It should be closer to the people, less bureaucratic, less in service of big corporate interests, and more respectful to average citizens. Take away the fringe social conservatives on the right and socialists on the left, and you have a broad range of agreement between the two groups.
The agreement is this: big money and big government have gotten too cozy with each other and have too much power. The only way to counter this is not to dismantle the corporate world and introduce socialism, nor to dismantle government with faith that markets can work magically. The answer is to increase accountability at all levels by making both government and business decision making transparent. We need to decentralize power – both governmental and in the private sector.
There will still be fights about proper tax rates, social welfare programs, abortion, gay marriage and all that. But the potential for agreement on the need to restructure our socio-economic-political system is real. The left needs to stop defending governments at every turn, the right needs to stop defending big money. When power is concentrated it is always dangerous, whether in the form of a private corporation or a state.
We have the technology to decentralize and force greater transparency. One aspect of both the Tea Party and OWS is their ability to use social media to build their movement and get the message out. The partnership between big government and big money needs to be derailed. Now if the activists on each “side” can put aside their differences long enough to focus on what they agree upon, maybe both movements can be a force for positive change.
Global Economic Collapse Imminent?
Posted by Scott Erb in Economic crisis, Economics, European Union, Germany, Global Depression, Italy, Markets, Political Economy, US Politics on October 8, 2011
Alarming words from the head of the IMF: a global economic collapse could occur within weeks if something isn’t done head off the ongoing crisis in Europe. The warning may seem overblown, but the danger is real.
Here’s the problem: unless investors are convinced that bonds issued by Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are safe, they’ll start selling them off in the bond market. That will drive down the price (supply increases, demand will be low). When the price of a bond falls, that increases its interest rate. An Italian bond set to pay off 1000 Euros in three years might normally cost 940 Euro, meaning you’d earn 60 Euro (about 2% per year) on your investment. But if people start thinking the Italian economy is going to tank then the price may drop dramatically — the 1000 Euro bond might cost only 850 Euro, meaning a 5% yield, or go even lower. Right now the Italian 10 year bond has a 5.5% yield rate.
By comparison, US Treasuries have about 2% yield on the ten year bond, as does Germany’s. This means that if the US and Germany sell bonds to finance government debt, the cost is relatively low — 2% a year. If Italy wants to run deficits, they pay a much higher interest rates. Now, guess what Greece’s 10 year bond yield rate is. 23%. That is simply unsustainable even in the short term. It shows that people are expecting a Greek default and thus dumping bonds to those who want to take a big risk to potentially pocket a 23% investment gain.
Spain is also at about 5%, but Portugal’s bond yield is 11%, and Ireland’s at near 8%. Those are getting into very high risk territory. Now, at this point all these yields are kept somewhat low (relative to what they could be) by the hope/expectation of an EU bailout. The EU has intervened in Greece, Greece has undertaken a very unpopular austerity program (after all you can’t keep running up debt borrowing at 23%!), and the panic has been minimal.
But what if the EU can’t save Greece? Then the Greeks will likely default, they simply can’t make payments on their bonds. The bond holders — banks throughout Europe (including Germany) will then be under stress, as some of their assetts become worthless. Still, if it stopped there, that wouldn’t be that big of a crisis. The danger is Contagion. Holders of Portugese, Italian, Spanish and Irish bonds would realize that the world has changed: default is possible. Yields on all those bonds would likely rise dramatically creating default threats across southern Europe. At that point bank assets would be so stressed that credit markets would dry up and the European economy would be hit by a crisis larger than what hit the US in 2008.
US and British banks are relatively unexposed, but the economic impact would be to sink the world deeper in recession. But it doesn’t end there.
Banks, including those in the US and UK, have been issuing credit default swaps on these bonds. These swaps can be seen as akin to a life insurance policy. Let’s say your neighbor confides with you that he has cancer, even though he’s young and fit. You then go to an insurance agent and buy a life insurance policy on him for $1 million. You pay a policy of $300 a year, but if the cancer kills him you could get $ 1 million.
Insurance companies sell these policies because statistically they don’t expect to make large payments. Most of us go through life paying for insurance “just in case.” But in the world of finance it’s more like a casino. The credit default swaps are cheap, but have a potentially very large payoff. It’s like placing a bet on a long shot horse — you’ll probably lose, but if you win the earnings are big. So if you decide to bet against the EU and Italy, you can buy credit default swaps on Italian bonds. If the bonds mature and Italy pays their value, you get nothing and lose the “premium” you paid to buy the swap. But if Italy defaults, you get the value of the bond — potentially a huge pay off. That happened back in the US when owners of credit default swaps on mortgage backed bonds made a killing when the real estate bubble burst.
The thing is, we don’t know how exposed banks are in terms of credit default swaps. If they’ve felt confident that the crisis would be contained, they may be very exposed. So even banks that don’t directly hold bonds might be on the hook if defaults spread. That would add to the depth of the crisis and could spark a breakdown in the entire financial system of the kind that the bail outs of 2008 managed to avoid. In such a case credit would be very difficult to come by, even for “safe” auto loans, perhaps even credit cards would be hit.
If the EU doesn’t manage to convince investors that Greece will not default the whole thing could spread quickly — within weeks. If the EU came up with a very comprehensive package they could allay fears and Greek yields would come back down to earth and overcome the crisis. It would be a couple years before deleveraging would get them out of the woods, but investor confidence would return and the system would survive.
However, although this may look like a no brainer in those terms, in political terms it’s a tough sell. Any kind of package that saves the system would appear to be a bail out of countries who had been irresponsible in their borrowing and spending, and protection of banks who made irresponsible loans. That would be very unpopular in countries like Germany, which would pay a lion’s share of the cost. But it would also be unpopular in Greece, whose people protest cuts in spending and increases in taxes. In their eyes they’re being made to suffer for mistakes of bureaucrats and banks, and a mix of spending cuts and tax increases assures a deeper recession and more pain. They’d rather default than suffer austerity. So the moves needed to save the global political economy are by nature very unpopular and arose anger.
Most people don’t know how bonds work, wouldn’t know a credit default swap from collaterized debt obligation, and have no sense of just how interconnected the financial industry is world wide. The argument supporting such “bailouts” is only persuasive if you really work through the intricacies of how the financial system functions. Most voters don’t do that, so any politician who tries to save the system will probably lose their job.
With so much on the line I think they’ll find a way to avert catastrophe. The stakes are just too high, and the insiders know what the stakes are, and how inaction could mean utter catastrophe. Still, the danger is real. That’s why stories about European bond yields and bailout plans may be the most important news to follow in coming weeks. Global economic collapse is still unlikely, but quite possible.
Modell Deutschland
Posted by Scott Erb in Budget, Economic crisis, Germany, Global Depression, Markets, Merkel, Political Economy, Politics, Unions, Values on August 4, 2011
The term “Modell Deutschland” was coined by the Social Democratic party for the 1976 election campaign: Germany as a model economy. Europe and the US had endured a recession in 1974-75 that had a whiff of the deeper recession that would come in the early 80s — stagflation, an oil shock, and high unemployment. In Germany, however, Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democratic party managed to handle the recession with aplomb. Germany fared well, and in fact the Social Democrats expanded worker co-determination (giving workers a say in how companies are run, and seats on the boards of directors).
Based on this New York Times piece, the phrase still fits, this time with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party. Germany’s success so far in handling the recession even while paying the lions’ share of bailouts for Greece and Ireland is the envy of the industrialized world. While Germans themselves grumble about the difficulties of the Euro and trying to keep the economy going during a global depression, they’ve managed to keep growth going and out perform most other countries.
Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU – the right of center Christian Democratic Party) was in a “grand coalition” with the left-of-center Social Democrats when the crisis hit in 2008. Together the two parties passed a balanced budget act, requiring the Bundestag and German Länder (states) to limit budget deficits to .35% of GDP by 2016 and to have them balanced by 2020. There are exceptions in the case of national disasters and emergencies, but the point was clear: there is German consensus that debt has to remain under control.
Most economists are uncomfortable when debt to GDP ratios rise above 60%. By that point increasing the debt does little to stimulate the economy (and actually becomes counter-productive when you get to about 100% of GDP) and creates long term damage. After getting budgets under control by 2007, the recession pushed them back up over 70% of GDP. Given that 60% is the proscribed (but ignored) Eurozone limit, the high debt level was embarrassing. The Germans wanted to send a clear message that this was short term, with both the left and the right united in vowing to cut debt moving forward.
President Obama urged the Germans to pass a stimulus in 2009 to help get the European economy going. Merkel, a physicist by profession, simply could not see the logic in Obama’s view. While the US with the dollar as a global reserve currency and massive economic clout might be able to get away with debt to GDP ratios nearing 100% (though she had her doubts on that too), it would be reckless for Germany to take that approach. Instead, after securing re-election and joining the FDP in a new center-right coalition, her government passed an austerity program at home, even as it had to pay to help the Greeks and Irish. Merkel was hesitant to help (her hesitancy was criticized as making the situation worse), but it’s hard to tell your own citizens to take cuts while paying for countries that had little economic discipline.
Merkel’s program was what Obama would call balanced — revenue increases and spending cuts. However, the Germans did things differently than the Americans. First, they weren’t driven by ideology. You didn’t have people condemning government “as the problem” and trying to blame either the right or the left for the situation, making it a political football. They approached it rationally.
There is a recession. The debt is too high. Our demographics show our population is aging. It is a part of Germany’s moral and ethical character to have a stable social welfare system that guarantees health care, helps the unemployed and assures that the elderly do not suffer. It is essential for Germany to educate its children well in order to compete in the future. How can we make reforms that allow us to adapt to the recession, cut debt, but not endanger our population and our social welfare system?
The answer, of course, was to look at their spending and determine where there were inefficiencies, what areas could be cut, and to set priorities. Yes, a modern industrialized state without a quality social welfare system may be barbaric, but you can’t allow social welfare programs to remove incentives to work, to cost more than the people can afford, and undercut rather than support social solidarity. Of course, cuts aren’t all it takes – when you’ve got debt, you also have to increase revenue, so taxes had to go up. This also was done pragmatically — rather than just a “tax the rich” vs. “taxes or evil” debate, they had to figure out how to raise revenues in ways that didn’t hurt the economy or create inequities.
Tax increases are a less harmful way of reducing debt than spending cuts. Spending cuts slow the economy more than a tax increase. But too many taxes alongside wasteful spending creates a lose-lose situation. These are not decisions for ideologues or political pontificators, they are decisions to be reached with a cool rational eye on the facts.
To be sure, Germany has advantages. It does not have the gap between the rich and the poor that the US has. While America’s middle class has had stagnant wages the last thirty years, all Germans have seen consistent income growth. While the gap between the rich and and poor has been growing here, that hasn’t happened in Germany. There are still people who are very rich, and there are poor people — and there are incentives to innovate, produce and invest. But the power hasn’t shifted completely to the wealthy elite. Strong labor unions especially assure that more equitable relations are maintained — business and labor have more a partnership than separate classes. Germany proves that those who hate or demonize labor unions are misguided.
Germany also avoided the housing bubble, even if many of its banks invested in dubious CDOs. Germany’s financial and economic sectors are heavily regulated, and therefore resist the kind of wild fiascos that engulfed Ireland, the US, Iceland, Spain and all the others who believed the 1990s myth that de-regulation was good and the ‘market gets it right.’ A good strong regulatory regime has helped Germany stay afloat.
Finally, Germany didn’t let it’s industrial sector die off in the last recession like the US did. While the US went towards service industry and financials — producing less and consuming more through debt — Germany maintained a current account surplus (consumed less than it produced), and supported its industrial base. That means that Germany lacks the huge imbalance the US suffers; the US has been living beyond its means, for the most part the Germans have not.
Germany has challenges — if you talk to Germans they’ll be vociferous in the need to still reform the health system, concern about the Euro, worries about high subsidies to industries, etc. There are ideological differences between the left and right, though not usually pitched in the emotional ‘good vs. evil’ way of American politics. There are vast differences between the US and Germany, and the US does do many things better. Still, given the situation, there’s a lot we can learn from “model Germany.”
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