You’re 50 years old or something. And you’re still ugly as sin.
But I love you, you big dummy.
It took four years to build the prestigious building, and the construction costs were three times higher than initially planned – a fact which only emerged after the fall of the Wall.
We’re so ugly we’re beautiful.
What few in 1989 wanted was the supposedly dumpy, chronically unfashionable late-1960s buildings around Alexanderplatz, relics of a defunct, unlovable regime that were perceived as having little or no architectural value.
So that’s precisely what we all just got.
The monuments are certainly far from the worst constructions of their time. Best known and most popular is the World Clock, a kitschy but delightful sculpture-cum-timepiece created in 1969 that has long been a popular meeting spot for locals.
is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Already on Saturday pictures of anxious savers queuing outside banks to withdraw money were circulating. A slow-motion bank run that had already drained €35 billion ($39 billion) of household and corporate deposits out of the Greek banking system between November 2014 and May 2015 threatens to get out of control. Greek banks have been able to cope with the haemorrhage of deposits only thanks to massive borrowing from the Bank of Greece, permitted by the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. The ECB is now likely to call time on this and to prevent further increases in this “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA). That will in turn force limits on cash withdrawals along with capital controls to prevent money leaving the country… Even if the ECB stays its hand this weekend, it will be forced to act early next week. Without a deal this weekend, the cash-strapped Greek government will be unable to repay the IMF €1.5 billion that is due at the end of this month.
The climax to 10 days of fraught bargaining in Brussels and Luxembourg was the decision by Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, to call a plebiscite on the terms of Greece’s bailout, stunning the other eurozone governments. “I am very negatively surprised,” said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch chair of the committee of eurozone finance ministers. “The situation [in Greece] will deteriorate very rapidly … How the Greek government will survive, I do not know.”
And it must be stopped immediately (the capitalism, not the affluence). And let’s get rid of democracy while we’re at it.
Survey says… Nearly a third of Germans believe that capitalism is the cause of poverty and hunger.
The poll of 1,400 people found that 59 percent of Germans in the formerly communist east consider communist and socialist ideals a good idea for society. In western Germany, 37 percent said they considered communist and socialist ideals to be good…
The survey found that more than 60 percent of Germans believe there is no genuine democracy in their country because industry has too much political influence and that the voice of the voters plays only a subordinate role.
Although not covered by this particular survey, capitalism and democracy are clearly also the cause behind the German obesity problem, the German six weeks of vacation a year problem, the German lowest unemployment rate and highest per capita (does that word come from capitalism?) savings in all of Europe problems, too. To name just a few.
Einer Studie zufolge glauben mehr als 60 Prozent der Bürger, dass in Deutschland keine echte Demokratie herrscht.
When Red Friday comes, I’m gonna dig myself a hole…
Germany’s Left Party, descended from East Germany’s Communist SED in an unbroken line, now heads a “red-red-green” coalition government in Thuringia with boss Bodo Ramelow as the new state prime minister.
This truly is historic. No, not so much because the good folks at the Linke have gotten this far (Thuringia is about as East in East Germany as East in Germany can get). It’s historic because the good folks at the SPD (currently partners in the federal government‘s grand coalition) have proven that their promises to never-ever-ever-never work together with the Linke are now history.
If they could help the Left Party enough, the SPD wouldn’t hesitate to form a coalition at the national level with these people and now everybody in Germany knows it – who didn’t know it already, I mean.
Good News: Communists Are Back in Germany
This wall is your wall,
From Mountain View, California,
To Seoul, Korea,
From Buenos Aires,
To the island of Langeland,
This wall was made for you and me.
That means “the miserable remnants” and that’s what singer-songwriter and former East German dissident Wolf Biermann just called SED leftovers the Left Party today at a ceremony commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. To their faces. In the Reichstag itself.
Somebody’s got to remind folks about this now and then. Not that anybody here cares…
“Eure Sprüche, die habt ihr drauf … ihr müsst mir gar nichts erzählen.”
Another Ex-cellent chance to ex-ceed, I’d say. And a great way to celebrate the coming 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall!
Well isn’t this special. Germany’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats (SPD) – currently in power in Berlin with Merkel & Co. – said Tuesday a party ballot in eastern Thuringia state showed 70 percent favoring negotiations to join a regional government led by Left Party candidate Bodo Ramelow. The Left Party used to be the PDS which used to be the SED (the East German communist party), of course, but nobody with any manners likes to put it that way so I figured I would.
Do you think this coming ex-communist coalition with the SPD upsets anyone over here? Of course not. The only thing that ruffled a few folks’ feathers was the audacity Germany’s president Joachim Gauck had – a former East German pro-democracy activist – by openly questioning whether a party with communist roots like the Left Party could really be trusted or not. Can you imagine that? Who does this president of Germany think he is anyway? The president of Germany?
“There are parts of this party where I, like many others, have problems developing this trust (he means like the openly Stalinist folks).“
But how do you lose a 5.6-foot tall one of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin? It’s not easy, but Berlin city authorities can do it.
It was the star of Good Bye Lenin, Wolfgang Becker’s tragicomedy set around the fall of the Berlin Wall: a statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, suspended from a helicopter, seemingly waving goodbye to the crumbling socialist republic.
But more than two decades after it was torn down, Berlin authorities have admitted the giant monument may be lost in storage.
Who would have expected that? The German Left Party itself (they used to be called the PDS or Partei der Stasi) has expressed grave concern over the EU’s aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union, I mean Vlad Putin’s democratic Russia.
Rosa Luxemburg, I mean Sahra Wagenknecht herself has sharply critisized European crisis management with regard to the Ukraine conflict, saying it consisted of “vile Russia bashing right out of the Cold War” and that the West is pursuing a vicious anti-Russian policy of exclusion and unniceness and rottenness and that everybody, those damned faschist Ukrainians included, should finally just leave our commrades, I mean Russian partners alone already.
May Day, May Day… Earth to Wagenknecht. Earth to Wagenknecht. Can you read me?
Das ist übles Russland-Bashing aus Kalter-Krieg-Zeiten.
