The Spiegel Says: US-Amerika One Big Debtor’s Prison

More and more Americans are being punished for their poverty: Above all in rural areas judges have been putting delinquent debtors in prison as of late. This medieval practice is illegal, unconstitutional – and widespread.

“Diese Unsitte verbindet man mehr mit der Zeit von Charles Dickens als mit dem modernen Amerika.”

PS: Speaking of deplorable customs and disturbing developments – and good fiction – when are these deplorable refutations of sacrosanct scientific certainties ever going to stop?! I mean, what ever happened to the ozone hole? It’s not there anymore or something.

Ozone

Well it’s One drink of wine, two drinks of gin… and I’m lost in the ozone again.

Environmentally Motivated?

Berlin is more of a hartes Pflaster (tough pavement/place) than you might think (these guys are everywhere).

More and more locals are scouring the city’s streets and bins for empty glass and plastic bottles, which they can turn in to collect a cash deposit. Many of the bottle-collectors say they are forced to do it to make ends meet.

Consumers pay the deposit when they buy drinks in shops and supermarkets – eight euro cents ($0.10) for glass bottles and 25 euro cents for plastic ones. They get their deposits back when they return their empties.

Initially, it was mainly homeless people, alcoholics and drug addicts living on the streets who collected the bottles. But recently, it’s been Berlin’s financially troubled pensioners and long-term unemployed who have turned to collecting the discarded bottles as well.

Nothing Nouveau on the German Front

This is a very complex article, I grant you, a lot like that other one I mentioned recently, but with a little bit of effort I think I can somehow manage to summarize it for you thus (and I quote, more or less):

American society is breaking apart.

Everything is spiraling further and further into the abyss.

The American people are going through a Kafkaesque odyssey, the humiliation of which is hard to comprehend.

Help is not in sight, our government and our society have abandoned us.

Wall Street is preoccupied with chasing new profits again.

That old myth about working your way up, of bootstrap success and its ultimate prize, homeownership, has evaporated.

The middle class, America’s backbone, is crumbling.

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare.

Nothing’s going to happen because the political swing to the right is extremely hurtful and absolutely disastrous to the interest of the weakest.

Becoming unemployed is a devious trap. And on and on and tra, la, la until the amen part.

Like, you had no idea, did you? My fellow Americans, I mean. So there you have it. Yet again. And no, the O Word didn’t appear in this article either.