[Marxism-Thaxis] Party of a New New Type
At Bert's Entertainment Complex in Eastern Market I'd say that the USSocial Forum in Detroit may pose a slight challenge to the thesis of no coherent left in the US; coherent yet loose. They are averaging 30 years younger and yet more mature than I am (smile). 1000 workshops bloomed. It even included the Leftist Lounge the biggest People's Party of a new type ever, at Bert's Marketplace (my yard). http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111370 Power to the Social Forum ! ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Party of a New New Type
In a message dated 7/5/2010 7:21:31 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: It even included the Leftist Lounge the biggest People's Party of a new type ever, at Bert's Marketplace (my yard). _http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111370_ (http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111370) Comment It was beautiful. I forget how beautiful young people are. I was at Bert's Friday evening and my estimate of the crowd was maybe 3 - 4 thousand. Without incident, except for the young women who apparently drank a tad bit to much. We are going to see and feel the social consequences of the Social Forum starting now but certainly over the course of the next few years. Twenty, thirty years down the road, many activists will pin point the Detroit Social Forum as a turning point in their political development. This was a really big thing. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Why a Social Forum? Why Detroit?
Politics http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=15162 Radical listening Why a Social Forum? Why Detroit? MT Photo: Travis R. Wright The opening march makes its way downtown Tuesday afternoon. MT Photo: Tera Holcomb Clockwise from top left: Adrienne Maree Borwn, Lydia #Wylie-Kellermann, Elena Herrada, Marian Baker, Rich Feldman and Oyatunde Amakisi AUDIO W. Kim Heron and Curt Guyette discuss the U.S. Social Forum on WDET. (MP3) SEE ALSO RELATED STORIES Actions and reactions Four protest targets — and a couple of responses More Politics Stories Scenes from the social forum (6/30/2010) But what did it accomplish? It's the USSF, baby (6/23/2010) Cultural high points of the lefty confab taking over Detroit Actions and reactions (6/23/2010) Four protest targets — and a couple of responses More from W. Kim Heron and Curt Guyette Aronson's guide for the godless (1/7/2009) A WSU prof contemplates America as a not-so-religious nation By W. Kim Heron and Curt Guyette With Thousands of marchers headed down Woodward Avenue toward downtown as we went to press, the second United States Social Forum got under way Tuesday at noon. It's the culmination of more than a year of organizing by a number of groups in Detroit — and the next step for the international network that has been meeting and organizing under the umbrella of the World Social Forum since the first gathering was held in 2001. This is only the second time such a gathering has occurred in the United States, following a forum in Atlanta in 2007. Why make Detroit the focus of leftists, progressives and various likeminded types? And what might come from a gathering that features an anticipated 20,000 participants and more than 1,000 workshops put on by groups ranging from major unions to churches to the Sierra Club to Planned Parenthood to the ACLU to Oxfam to the Socialist Party USA? Along with all those workshops, the forum will feature a handful of protests slated against businesses and institutions, and a lengthy program of cultural activities. How did all of this come together, and what is the hoped-for outcome from all the networking and idea-sharing slated to take place here in Detroit this week? What will it mean for the city, and the broader movement as a whole? In an attempt to answer those questions and more, we recently sat down with six of the event's key organizers: • Oyatunde Amakisi is a 39-year-old activist, mentor, artist, businesswoman and the Executive Director of the Detroit Women of Color, Incorporated. Producer of the annual Detroit Women of Color International Film Festival, she is the national chair of culture in the United States Social Forum and the representative of the Detroit Local Organizing Committee. After the social forum she will also lead the Detroit Progressive Library and Community Theater. • Rich Feldman is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (boggscenter.org) and the Detroit City of Hope (dcoh.org). Feldman, 61, spent 20 years on the assembly line at the Ford Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne before becoming an elected union official. He has been active with the labor committee of the USSF, the disability justice committee of the USSF and outreach committee. • Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is part of the Jeanie Wylie Community, an intentional community on the southwest side of Detroit focused on urban agriculture, sustainability and hospitality. Wylie-Kellermann, 24, is working with Word and World, which is putting on a series of workshops, cultural events and actions surrounding the idea of Sabbath Economics. She is also working with the Faith and Spirituality Committee. • Elena Herrada is a second-generation Detroiter, daughter and granddaughter of autoworkers, and a grassroots activist and local historian of her community's history. She is a former president of a cafeteria worker's local, and spent several years negotiating contracts for labor unions. She has worked with United Farm Workers and was deeply involved in the launching of Centro Obrero (The Worker Center) in southwest Detroit. Herrada is currently an adjunct faculty member at Marygrove College in the Master of Social Justice program. • Marian Baker was a founding member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Panther Party in Detroit. She is co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union (NWRU) an organization of, by and for the poor in America, and was president of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization 1982-1989. She has been particularly active in fights to stop water and utility shut-offs to the poor for nonpayment. • Adrienne Maree Brown is the Executive Director of the Ruckus Society — a nonprofit group involved in, among other activities, organizing protests and training protesters — and is a national coordinator of the U.S. Social Forum. Brown, 31, grew up primarily in Europe — her father was in the military — and has lived in New York and Oakland, Calif., before
[Marxism-Thaxis] Worst case scenario
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The struggle continues; victory is certain. From RENSE.COM http://www.rense.com/general90/predicts.htm Predictions For The Rest Of 2010 5-25-10 Bob Chapman First 6 months of 2010, Americans will continue to live in the 'unreality'the period between July and October is when the financial fireworks will begin. The Fed will act unilaterally for its own survival irrespective of any political implications (source is from insider at FED meetings). In the last quarter of the year we could even see Martial law, which is more likely for the first 6 months of 2011. The FDIC will collapse in September 2010. Commercial real estate is set to implode in 2010. Wall Streetbelieves there is a 100% chance of crash in bond market, especially municipals sometime during 2010. The dollar will be devalued by the end of 2010. Gerald Celente Terrorist attacks and the Crash of 2010. 40% devaluation at first = the greatest depression, worse than the Great Depression. George Ure Markets up until mid-to-late-summer. Then all hell breaks lose from then on through the rest of the year. Igor Panarin In the summer of 1998, based on classified data about the state of the U.S. economy and society supplied to him by fellow FAPSI analysts, Panarin forecast the probable disintegration of the USA into six parts in 2010 (at the end of June ? start of July 2010, as he specified on 10 December 2000 Neithercorps Have projected that the third and final stage of the economic collapse will begin sometime in 2010. Barring some kind of financial miracle, or the complete dissolution of the Federal Reserve, a snowballing implosion should become visible by the end of this year. The behavior of the Fed, along with that of the IMF seems to suggest that they are preparing for a focused collapse, peaking within weeks or months instead of years, and the most certain fall of the dollar. Webbots July and onward things get very strange. Revolution. Dollar dead by November 2010. George Ure Markets up until mid-to-late-summer. Then all hell breaks lose from then on through the rest of the year. LEAP 20/20 2010 Outlook from a group of 25 European Economists with a 90% accuracy rating- We anticipate a sudden intensification of the crisis in the second half of 2010, caused by a double effect of a catching up of events which were temporarily laqno; frozen ? in the second half of 2009 and the impossibility of maintaining the palliative remedies of past years. There is a perfect (economic) storm coming within the global financial markets and inevitable pressure on interest rates in the U.S. The injection of zero-cost money into the Western banking system has failed to restart the economy. Despite zero-cost money, the system has stalled. It is slowly rolling over into the next big down wave, which in Elliott Wave terminology will be Super Cycle Wave Three, or in common language, THE BIG ONE, WHERE WE ALL GO OVER THE FALLS TOGETHER. Joseph Meyer Forecasts on the economy. He sees the real estate market continuing to decline, and advised people to invest in precious metals and commodities, as well as keeping cash at home in a safe place in case of bank closures. The stock market, after peaking in March or April (around 10,850), will fall all the way down to somewhere between 2450 and 4125 during the next leg down. Harry Dent (investor) A very likely second crash by late 2010. The coming depression (starts around the summer of 2010). Dent sees the stock market?currently benefiting from upward momentum and peppier economic activity?headed for a very brief and pleasant run that could lift the Dow to the 10,700-11,500 range from its current level of about 10.090. But then, he sees the market running into a stone wall, which will be followed by a nasty stock market decline (starting in early March to late April) that could drive down the Dow later this year to 3,000-5,000, with his best guess about 3,800. Richard Russell (Market Expert) (from 2/3/10) says the bear market rally is in the process of breaking up and panic is on the way. He sees a full correction of the entire rise from the 2002 low of 7,286 to the bull market high of 14,164.53 set on October 9, 2007. The halfway level of retracement was 10,725. The total retracement was to 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009. He now sees the Dow falling to 7,286 and if that level does not hold, I see it sinking to its 1980-82 area low of Dow 1,000. The current action is the worst he has ever seen. (Bob Chapman says for Russell to make such a startling statement is unusual because he never cries wolf and is almost never wrong) Ni?o Becerra (Professor of Economics) Predicted in July 2007 that what was going to happen was that by mid 2010 there is going to be a crisis only comparable to the one in 1929. From October 2009 to May 2010 people will begin to see things are not working out the way the government thought. In May of 2010, the crisis starts with all its force
[Marxism-Thaxis] Center for Economic and Policy Research Press Release
Center for Economic and Policy Research Press Release U.S. Experiencing Worst Episode of Prolonged Unemployment Since Great Depression Adjusting for demographic factors, current labor market downturn steeper than '82-'83 recession. For Immediate Release: July 1, 2010 Washington, D.C.- A new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research demonstrates that the unemployment rate, after adjusting for age, is higher now than during the recession of the early 1980s. The study, The Adult Recession: Age-Adjusted Unemployment at Post-War Highs, adjusts the current unemployment rate to account for demographic differences and finds that the unemployment rate has not fallen below 10.8 percent in the last 12 months. During the worst episode of the recession of the 1980s -- the second half of 1982 and the first half of 1983 -- unemployment passed 10 percent for 7 months. An unemployment rate that has hovered above 9 percent for several months is striking, but the jobs picture is even worse than it looks, said report author and CEPR Economist David Rosnick. The analysis notes that the population is older today than it was in the 1980s, which has the effect of lowering today's unemployment rate relative to the past. Since they change jobs more frequently and are more likely to move in and out of the labor market, Young people have a higher unemployment rate than older workers. Adjusting for this older workforce shows that the United States is experiencing the weakest labor market since the Great Depression. The severity of the current unemployment situation suggests that policy makers should consider measures that would slow or reverse this trend. Additional stimulus such as work sharing or the extension of unemployment benefits by Congress would go far in addressing the plight of the millions of unemployed Americans suffering as a result of this downturn. The full analysis can be found at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/ur-2010-07.pdf. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why a Social Forum? Why Detroit?
This is a really good interview that ought to become part of a package of literature that is a post summary of the Social Forum - Detroit. The scale of this event was massive. each might of the event a couple of comrades and new people we met would gather at my home and go over all the literature passed out at the convention (not each work shop which would have been impossible). The common thread of all the literature was a plea for a new political/organizing center or focal point. The Social Forum Detroit was something new and different. I want to try and describe the Social Forum as a process, while stating the right to revise and clarify my estimate later. This was an anti-capitalist social trend under conditions where the advancing revolution in the means of production has brought the system to crisis on the basis of irreparably breaching the unity of productive forces and the old industrial-capitalist relations of production. Consequently, all classes and segments of classes are involved in attacking the system from different directions with a different vision of how to shape the society of the future. We are part of this living process and have to learn how to fight for our collective vision as socialist, communists and revolutionaries manning the barricades against the increasing fascist political currents seeking consolidation. Under conditions of irreparable breach the struggle for reform is not reformism but the only game in town. Under conditions where the system is passing from one quantitative boundary to the next, the struggle for reform leads to reform of the system and adjustment of relations within and between classes. The last great reform of the system was the Civil Rights Movement and before that the victory of the industrial union form. Concretely this means the form of organizations of the proletariat, that grew up and matured based on reform of the system are in decay and collapse. The Social Forum as a process emerged outside of these old forms of struggle. One of the things some of us are working on in the aftermath of this event is the presentation of our specific vision of the future society and how things work and get paid for. In this sense the Boggs Center represents and presented a plausible vision of cooperation and the collectivist society. We desire to go much further and pinpoint how the new technology regime can be utilized to redeploy labor and reorganize society based on our existing state of development of means of production. Detroit is in fact ground zero and a new narrative on the rise and fall of the industrial working class and the industrial form of social organization would naturally be birthed in Detroit. Obviously, I have personally autographed copies of the pamphlet Detroit for you. The material from Political Affairs with Dave Moore are a part of the booklet. The Marxist Glossary is one years away from production and ultra advanced from the first impressions sent to the list. Rally Comrades for the last fight we face. The Internationale shall be the human race. WL. In a message dated 7/5/2010 8:01:51 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: Politics http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=15162 Radical listening Why a Social Forum? Why Detroit? MT Photo: Travis R. Wright The opening march makes its way downtown Tuesday afternoon. MT Photo: Tera Holcomb Clockwise from top left: Adrienne Maree Borwn, Lydia #Wylie-Kellermann, Elena Herrada, Marian Baker, Rich Feldman and Oyatunde Amakisi AUDIO ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Whoops !
Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester (Allen Lane, 2010) by Christian Lorentzen thenational.ae (February 18 2010) Much about the present financial crisis has baffled members of the public not intimately familiar with the workings of Wall Street. How did a bursting housing bubble bring down the economy of Iceland, paralyse international credit markets, put Lehman Brothers out of business, and necessitate government bailouts of private institutions to the tune of trillions? Volumes chronicling, lamenting, and apologising for the crisis have poured forth from journalists, economists, Wall Street insiders, and public officials. Most of the crisis literature - if it deserves that name - has thus been written in the language of the business pages or the policy elite. What has been lacking is the perspective of an enlightened outsider: someone who might see through the many veils of jargon, dogma and excuse-making in order to connect the dots for the rest of us. The novelist John Lanchester is ideally suited to that role. Lanchester, whose father was an international banker, set out in the summer of 2007 to research a novel set in the world of London finance. But he soon realised that I had stumbled across the most interesting story I've ever found. The novel was laid aside and Lanchester began to write about the crisis itself. Those efforts, published in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, became the foundation for a book called Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everybody and No One Can Pay, a highly readable and elegant guide to the last two years of financial calamity. Though Lanchester's literary flair is evident on every page, Whoops! does not resemble a novel. The author makes no attempt to tie the events of the past two years into a coherent linear narrative or to draw any characters at great length. Instead he has written a broad and lucid dissection of an arcane system and its recent implosion. Laymen may find the financial crisis as impenetrable as Finnegans Wake. For good reason, argues Lanchester: finance underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality and abstraction, and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English. (Lanchester's facility in explaining derivatives, securitisation, collateralised debt obligations, and credit default swaps is one of the work's great virtues.) Lanchester dates this seismic change to the 1973 publication of an article in the Journal of Political Economy under the title The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes. The authors put forth an equation that made possible the calculation of the price of financial derivatives according to the value of the underlying assets. (Black died in 1995, but Scholes was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1997 for their joint work.) It was as if a casino had been opened. It still seems wholly contrary to common sense, writes Lanchester, that the market for products that derive from real things should be unimaginably vaster than the market for things themselves. These new financial instruments presented an apparent paradox: complex derivatives allowed traders to hedge against shifts in the value of underlying assets, minimising risk; they were equally useful as tools for speculation, capable of producing immense profits if the right bets were placed on future asset values. But the potential downside to any miscalculation could be immense: it was now possible, as happened in January 2008, for a reckless trader like Jerome Kerviel of Societe General to lose $7.2 billion in a matter of days making allegedly unauthorised bets on European stock markets. Such catastrophic losses are rare. But, Lanchester argues, once they become possible - as a result of lax corporate oversight, over-the-counter trading, and scant regulation - their periodic occurrence becomes practically inevitable. Bankers, Lanchester explains, view risk differently than the rest of us: the greater the risk, the greater the opportunity for profit. The trend that perhaps rendered the financial crisis inexorable was the new practice of swapping the risk that a borrower would default. Thus lenders could lend without worry that the borrower might not be able to pay because they could sell off the risk, which could then be bundled off and sold again. Banking, Lanchester writes, is a guaranteed way of making steady money forever ... as long as one all important rule is followed: the bank has to be careful about to whom it lends money. Subprime lending emerged as a formalised method of being uncareful about to whom money might be lent. Lanchester, a fan of the television programme The Wire, visits Baltimore, where more than 30,000 households have fallen to mortgage foreclosures. Lawsuits have been filed by the city and various non-profit against lenders such as Wells Fargo. Home
[Marxism-Thaxis] Thank You, Rand Paul (from a Historian)
Thank You, Rand Paul (from a Historian) Van Gosse Historian and author Posted: June 30, 2010 02:41 PM http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-gosse/thank-you-rand-paul-from_b_630625.html Rand Paul is a gift to historians. As a candidate he embodies some of the longest-lasting, most picturesque -- and most reactionary and dangerous -- elements of the American political tradition: contempt for government; veneration of personal property over all else; freedom defined as the absence of restraint, meaning the 'freedom' to exploit. Like his father Ron, Rand Paul is schooled in the late- modern ideology of libertarianism (Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman). But learned discourses on capitalism and freedom hardly matter to their base, which wouldn't know Hayek from a hole in the wall. When they rouse audiences, they appeal to currents in American life that predate Friedman's free markets utopia. The real ancestors of the Pauls, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the Tea Partiers are the antebellum Jacksonian Democrats, who drew on the Old Republican tradition of Southern slaveholders. Deeply concerned about threats to their way of life, they accused national government supporters of monarchical tendencies, and authored the doctrine of states' rights and nullification of federal authority. Sound familiar? Like today's Tea Party, Jacksonians considered themselves the inheritors of the American Revolution. Above all, they venerated private property of two types. First was the land they had extorted at gunpoint, following massacres, from the Southern Indians, who mistakenly thought federal treaties protected them. The second form of property was the slave labor that turned the forests of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana into the Cotton Kingdom after Jackson's armies expelled the Indians. Led by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, the men who rose to power on the wealth slaves created broke up the Union rather than accepting Lincoln's victory. Jacksonians like Davis believed in their rights, as white men, over everyone else--their women, children and slaves, the Indians, the land itself. They asserted that this was America's identity: conquering nature, accumulating wealth and ruling over others. They wanted only enough government, under their control, to protect them in these endeavors. Anything else they viewed as treason. To libertarians and Jacksonians alike, freedom belongs to those who can take it, and practicing freedom means having the liberty to make money any way you can. No wonder Rand Paul called Obama's criticism of BP and the Massey Coal Company un-American and told Rachel Maddow that government had no business deciding whom restaurant owners must serve. The sanctity of private property, no matter how you got it or the societal effects of how you use it, is the dogma animating this kind of constitutional conservative. I'd really like to know Paul's views on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments -- respectively, the abolishment of slavery in 1865, the creation of government-enforced equal citizenship in 1868 and requiring the states to let all black men vote in 1870. My gut tells me that's not the Constitution he has in mind! The Jacksonian attitude toward the rule of law also prefigures today's Tea Partiers. As Daniel Walker Howe points out in his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winner What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Jackson did not manifest a general respect for the authority of the law when it got in the way of the policies he chose to pursue. A notorious duelist, Jackson regularly executed without trial his own soldiers and Indians, and he used his 1835 State of the Union address to endorse mob violence against abolitionists while gangs burned black churches in New York and Philadelphia. It is a short move from that brand of vicious demagoguery to Palin's telling white rural audiences in 2008 that only they were the real Americans and instructing her followers after health care reform passed: don't retreat, just reload. The Pauls' antigovernment rhetoric about the income tax and the Federal Reserve stokes the Patriot movement, which denies the authority of the federal government entirely. The benighted Patriot trucker Jerry Kane and his son, who both died in a shootout with police May 22, are only the most recent casualties in the long history of Jacksonianism. States' rights, a glorification of the private interest over the public good, and race hatred are certainly, historically speaking, American, but there's nothing constitutional or conservative about them. So, I would like to thank Rand Paul for bringing history so vividly to contemporary light, if only I didn't think these elements of our history were far better left in the past. _ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Painful Birth of a New German President
Berlin Bulletin: No. 12, 2010 The Painful Birth of a New German President By Victor Grossman July 1, 2010 Berlin It all began with a jolt, and hasn't stopped jolting yet! Presidents in Germany are not too important; they do have a veto right, make occasional speeches, pin on medals and take the oaths of new cabinet ministers, making them a notch or two more useful than Elizabeth II. When President Koehler set a precedent a month ago by resigning after an ill-considered interview admitting far too candidly that German troops were sent abroad for commercial purposes, it came as a surprise but got hardly more attention than rougher problems like winning in a world soccer championships in South Africa. But the sudden decision kept gaining importance like a snowball setting off a minor avalanche. A replacement was needed by June 30th. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the real boss, decided with her retinue (or maybe by herself) on Christian Wulff, 51, the minister president of Lower Saxony. He is handsome, has a nice family, a friendly smile and has made no major blunders in his conservative career as a Christian Democrat. By kicking him upstairs, Merkel would be rid of the last regional party leader who might threaten her leadership. Since her CDU and its coalition partner, the fat cat Free Democrats, even further to the right, had a slim but clear majority in the special electoral college with 1244 parliamentarians and delegates from all states, it all seemed cut and dried. But then the Social Democrats and Greens, now in the opposition, had a great idea. As a rival candidate they nominated Joachim Gauck, 70, a retired East German pastor, once a leader in the victorious uprising of 1989-1990, then for ten years head of the giant government bureau processing material from the GDR State Security forces, or Stasi. Using this material, the bureau decided the fates of countless former GDR citizens who were involved at some time in their lives with the Stasi, either snooping and spying on colleagues or friends (with similarities to the FBI informer network), in harmless encounters as adolescents, in contacts required by even minor managerial jobs and as often motivated by devotion to the GDR as by money or pure nastiness. Some of the evidence was be based on boasting or hearsay but regardless of degree or motivation, thousands were affected by the so-called Gauck Authority. Careers were wrecked, teachers, historians, linguists, surgeons, writers fired. Some took their own lives. Many saw Gauck as a sort of composite Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and a symbol of hatred and rejection of everything in the GDR, good or bad. Others, especially in West Germany where the Stasi paint brush had been wielded most broadly, saw Gauck as a democratic hero, rather like Reagan. When the SPD and Greens nominated him, nearly the entire media, above all the Springer tabloid Bild, with its millions of readers, switched on,almost overnight, a giant hype campaign in favor of Gauck, even though it had in the past always supported Merkel and the Free Democrats against Greens and Social Democrats. The plan was doubly masterful. On one hand, it cashed in on growing dissatisfaction with the government and with parties and politicians in general. Gauck was retired and not in any party. The only message the granite-jawed Gauck ever conveyed was repetition of the words Democracy, Freedom and German Unification plus attacks against the horrible GDR which had oppressed him so terribly that in every speech, at every mention, he had to fight back the tears. He never mentioned that in the GDR he had studied theology at public expense, regularly led a congregation and been able to send his children off legally to studies in West Germany, causing unfriendly rumors as to the contacts he must have had with the Stasi to gain this rare privilege. Nor did he say much about political policies. It only gradually leaked out that he favored sending troops to Afghanistan, opposed most social measures, and had always felt closer to the CDU and the Free Democrats. Yet it was the SPD and the Greens who nominated him. As the campaign wound down their motives became clear; this was one more attack on the young party, The Left. It had been winning votes and members from both Social Democrats and Greens; people recalled that it was these two parties, when they were in command, which cut aid to the unemployed, raised the retirement age, increased sales taxes while sharply cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, sent German troops to wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and still supported the latter war (though with many Greens defecting). It seemed that they made promises, sounding very leftist whenever they were out of office, but only then. And the Social Democrats had lost disastrously in the September elections. But if they were able to switch the subject back to the old GDR and its crimes, though it had been dead for twenty years, it
