What Europe Doesn't Need the Euro , by the firebrand writer Thilo Sarrazin, means for Germany.
Thilo Sarrazin poses with his new book. (Reuters)
It's hard to think of a good American equivalent to Germany's Thilo Sarrazin, the politician turned best-selling author. The closest one could be Pat Buchanan: in some circles, he and his writings are considered entirely legitimate. In others, they're considered shocking and revolting to the point of scandal. The last time that Sarrazin, the former German central bank director, wrote a book, he suggested that African and Middle Eastern immigrants were destroying the country, in part because of "hereditary factors" that made their children stupid and violent. He suggested educated Germans out-breed them. Controversy raged for months.
Now, Sarrazin is addressing the euro crisis. Tuesday, his new book Europe Doesn't Need the Euro, hit the shelves. If you're just paging through idly, it doesn't seem to be as provocative, and, on balance, it really isn't: you'd expect as seasoned a provocateur as Sarrazin, especially with his leanings towards ideas of ethnic and educational superiority, at least to say some obnoxious and offensive things about Greek people or their ability with a balance sheet. He doesn't do that. The book, nevertheless, has immediately drawn fire -- and with good reason.
If it's hard to think of an American equivalent for Sarrazin the man, it's not too hard to think of an analogy for Sarrazin's book: it's like the schoolboy's tame little poem that turns out to be an acrostic spelling out a vulgar suggestion regarding the schoolteacher's mother. Many of the paragraphs are entirely reasonable, picking apart the questionable logic of Germany's euro-savior syndrome with remarkable dexterity. But Sarrazin's underlying message is this: Germans are being taken for a ride by countries that aren't holding up their end of the bargain -- and Germans are willing to go along with it because they feel guilty about the Holocaust.
The theme is a subtle one. Though Der Spiegel ran a story on publication day pointing it out, to see it you have to be thinking about European history, current European dynamics, and Sarrazin's own reputation. The far-right National Democratic Party in Germany was quick to praise the new publication, but Sarrazin throws in a few (some might say token) lines clearly intended to distance him from some of the nastier figures he appeared in bed with in his last book. One such line comes as he pushes back against German Chancellor Angela Merkel's pronouncement that "if the euro fails, Europe fails":
Angela Merkel has been wildly successful with the formula "if the euro fails, Europe fails," as no one in Germany, aside from a couple of German nationalists and right-wing populists, wants to be responsible for the failure of Europe.
In other words: "ew, those nasty German nationalists and right-wing populists. That's not me. And it's not most people. That's why Merkel's phrase works." Sarrazin distances himself from the far-right while setting up his argument.
Nevertheless, this is a little bit, like an American treading awfully close to a racial stereotype while prefacing his statement with "now, I don't want to be called a racist." Why? Because what Sarrazin is really saying is that Germans are hostage to their sense of not wanting to be responsible for Europe's failure. Germans are hostage to their sense of historical guilt. To use Der Spiegel's translation for one of the pre-publication excerpts, pro-euro Germans "are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War II when we have put all our interests and money into European hands."
Heady stuff. Is it representative of the whole of the book? Not exactly -- the whole of the book says much less about the Holocaust than that excerpt would suggest. But does the excerpt fit in with the book's broader architecture? Definitely.
"Europe Doesn't Need the Euro" is a book obsessed with both history and with an odd and alternating sense of German victimhood and saviorhood. And in some ways it's this broader approach which is more problematic. The euro, in Sarrazin's view, is just the old German deutschmark extended to a lot of countries with less robust currencies. And that is exactly how countries like Greece treated it, he argues.
The introduction of the euro was seen economically as nothing less than the commitment of the deutschmark to all members of the eurozone. Oftentimes many partner states thought, just as the markets did, that the deutschmark currency zone was bound up with a promise of solidarity to the newly introduced members.
Germany, in other words, is being used as a guarantor of other countries' debts. According to this view, the euro is the old deutschmark, renamed and redistributed as an act of semi-conscious misguided German charity.
This is a tricky view to advance, not least because Sarrazin has some sidestepping of his own to do: he admits in the book that he himself became a euro convert in the '90s. He writes the euro off, however, as a sort of failed bet. ("With the advance payment of the common currency," he says, "the German political class bet that the political union would follow shortly thereafter almost as a matter of natural law, because without that the common currency wouldn't be stable. That bet has failed.")
It's also problematic, though, because some economists and commentators hold that Germany actually profited quite a bit from the introduction of the euro, and is in fact even profiting from the current eurozone instability. The theory isn't without its detractors, but it's got enough support to be taken seriously. German exports, this argument goes, became extra competitive with the introduction of the euro and the lack of trade barriers allowed Germany to sell huge quantities of stuff to its European neighbors. Now, with the euro sinking, Germany can't sell as much to completely bankrupt and unemployed Greeks, but it's still cranking out products which, thanks to a fallen euro, are now cheaper for the rest of the world to buy than if Germany had stuck to the deutschmark.
Sarrazin counters with numbers showing German trade to non-euro states rose farther than trade with euro-states. But, as Der Spiegel also points out, "he doesn't factor in that the increase in trade outside the euro area was largely due to soaring economic growth in Eastern Europe and Asia over the last decade." Furthermore, "the figures give no insight into how trade inside the euro zone would have developed without a single currency."
What we're left with is a book that has some superficial similarities to Günter Grass's controversial poem about Israel and Iran back in April, though Sarrazin's economic credentials are significantly better than the poet's foreign policy credentials. It's not that the arguments themselves don't have merit. It's that the author doesn't seem all that concerned with complexity. Toss in a casual suggestion that Germans are suppressing their natural reactions due to Holocaust guilt, and the whole thing starts to look offensive -- not least because the Holocaust argument reinforces the idea that the debate isn't really a complex one: implicitly, were the Holocaust shadow banished, everyone would come to the same conclusion as the author, because it's the only rational and natural conclusion available.
The really provocative and revealing part of Sarrazin's book isn't the oft-repeated quote about Holocaust guilt, it's sentences like, "It's certainly very complicated, but on the other hand not as complicated as many want to make it!" or "Everyone who has an opinion on the euro also has either consciously or unconsciously an opinion on Europe." It's sentences comparing Angela Merkel to "the friendly woman on the navigation system in my car."
These sentences reveal that, despite his dismantling of Merkel's "if the euro fails, Europe fails," Thilo Sarrazin himself thinks in similarly tidy phrases. Outside of Sarrazin's head, it is possible to have an opinion on the euro and have no idea whether Greeks are fundamentally culturally and ethnically similar to Frenchmen. It's possible for Germany both to have profited and to be suffering for its part in instituting the current euro zone apparatus. And it's possible for uneducated immigrants to produce the next generation's engineers and poets -- and, even if they don't, to be no more or less morally deserving than ethnic Germans with a university degree. Thilo Sarrazin's two books, when you get down to mechanics, aren't all that different.
A CFPB investigation concluded that Transunion and Equifax deceived Americans about the reports they provided and the fees they charged.
In personal finance, practically everything can turn on one’s credit score. It’s both an indicator of one’s financial past, and the key to accessing necessities—without insane costs—in the future. But on Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that two of the three major credit-reporting agencies responsible for doling out those scores—Equifax and Transunion—have been deceiving and taking advantage of Americans. The Bureau ordered the agencies to pay more than $23 million in fines and restitution.
In their investigation, the Bureau found that the two agencies had been misrepresenting the scores provided to consumers, telling them that the score reports they received were the same reports that lenders and businesses received, when, in fact, they were not. The investigation also found problems with the way the agencies advertised their products, using promotions that suggested that their credit reports were either free or cost only $1. According to the CFPB the agencies did not properly disclose that after a trial of seven to 30 days, individuals would be enrolled in a full-price subscription, which could total $16 or more per month. The Bureau also found Equifax to be in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which states that the agencies must provide one free report every 12 months made available at a central site. Before viewing their free report, consumers were forced to view advertisements for Equifax, which is prohibited by law.
Journalists keep invoking Nate Parker’s rape case when discussing the sexual-harassment lawsuits against the Manchester by the Sea star. But the comparison does more harm than good.
In recent weeks, Casey Affleck’s performance in Manchester by the Sea has gone from acclaimed awards contender to near-Oscar lock. The soft-spoken, scraggly-bearded actor has taken the stage at a number of ceremonies already—the Critics’ Choice Awards, the Gotham Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle—ahead of what’s looking like an increasingly likely victory at the Academy Awards. The surge of publicity has brought renewed attention to twosexual harassment lawsuits filed against him in 2010 that alleged he had manhandled women, was verbally abusive, and generally behaved outrageously on the set of his film I’m Still Here, which he directed. Both cases were mediated and eventually settled out of court for undisclosed sums.
These voters overwhelmingly oppose the Affordable Care Act. Yet millions of them have gained health-care coverage under the law.
The impending Republican drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act is crystallizing the class contradiction long embedded in the health-care debate.
From the start, President Obama’s health-care reform has faced fierce opposition from working-class whites, the same constituency that anchored Donald Trump’s electoral coalition. But blue-collar whites have been among the law’s principal beneficiaries, particularly in the Rustbelt states that tipped the 2016 race to Trump. The critical question now is whether the practical prospect of losing coverage will dislodge the ideological skepticism about the law that is endemic in white working-class communities.
Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, some Democratic strategists have viewed a pledge to provide universal health care as the party’s best opportunity to refute the widespread view among blue-collar whites that Washington cares less about struggling working families than it cares about the poor (which many of those whites equate mostly with minorities). Yet Obamacare did more to reinforce those perceptions than dissolve them.
I bought into the St. Ives lie for years. In the already insecure times of high school and college, my skin was host to constant colonies of acne, my nose peppered with blackheads, my chin and forehead a topographical horror of cystic zits that lasted for weeks. But as I moved into adulthood, it didn’t go away, making me, I suppose, part of a trend—adult acne is on the rise, particularly among women.
I’m sure it never really seemed so bad to others as it did to me, as is the way with these things. I covered it up with layers of gloppy foundation, then with more proficiently applied makeup later on, then went on hormonal birth control, which improved the situation significantly.
But for many of the years in-between, I washed my face with St. Ives Apricot Scrub, which is an exfoliator made with granules of walnut shell powder. It is extremely rough. Perhaps too rough. We’ll find out: Kaylee Browning and Sarah Basile recently filed a class-action lawsuit against St. Ives’s maker, Unilever, alleging that the wash “leads to long-term skin damage” and “is not fit to be sold as a facial scrub.”
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is among those appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday morning.
Senior members of the U.S. intelligence community are appearing Thursday morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The hearing was billed as covering foreign threats to American cybersecurity, and the officials are expected to discuss Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence; Admiral Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command; and Marcel Lettre, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence are testifying before the committee, which is chaired by Arizona Republican John McCain.
Intelligence officials have said Russia deliberately tried to influence the November election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee and into the personal emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, among other targets. McCain in particular has been sharply critical of Russia’s meddling, calling the attacks an “act of war.” President-elect Donald Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly cast doubt on officials’ assessment of Russia’s involvement.
A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next
In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was.
There is a reason the film’s machines seem stuck in the 20th century.
We expect certain storytelling forms to pay special attention to setting. Historical fiction spends a great deal of energy in recreating the past. Fan fiction does something similar for its source material. Science fiction and fantasy fans expect world-building. Rogue One, a combination of all of these forms, does this very well on multiple levels. It is, after all, science fiction, and the Star Wars universe has long had a strong fantasy vibe.
Being a work by other creators in a beloved franchise built by others, the movie is very much like fan fiction. And given the way the movie’s setting and plot slot into a specific timeline within the Star Wars universe, it’s pretty close to a work of historical fiction. Accordingly, we get meticulous recreations of shots, dialogue, plot points, sound tracks, characters, spacecraft and various other technologies, and two actors, one dead, the other aged nearly a half-century past her original performance.
The trendy concept is in high demand among educators, but its specifics are vague.
At a recent teaching conference in Richmond, Virginia, a session on “design thinking” in education drew a capacity crowd. Two middle-school teachers demonstrated how they had used the concept to plan and execute an urban-design project in which students were asked to develop a hypothetical city or town given factors such as population, geography, the environment, and financial resources.
The teachers in the audience were enchanted by the details of the project; and if the photographs in the presentation were any indication, the students who participated in the lesson enjoyed it, too. The presenting teachers were bubbling over with enthusiasm for what they saw as the potential inherent in teaching design thinking.
Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy
In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.
Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.
Several decades before hebecame the father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy boarded the SS France in 1919 to sail across the Atlantic from his devastated continent to the United States. The influenza pandemic had taken his mother and father, and his service in the French army was over. At the age of 25, Loewy was looking to start fresh in New York, perhaps, he thought, as an electrical engineer. When he reached Manhattan, his older brother Maximilian picked him up in a taxi. They drove straight to 120 Broadway, one of New York City’s largest neoclassical skyscrapers, with two connected towers that ascended from a shared base like a giant tuning fork. Loewy rode the elevator to the observatory platform, 40 stories up, and looked out across the island.