Germany’s alliance with the United States has proved incredibly expensive.

But they still love the United States because loving the United States is very moral and Germany is a very moral nation that does what they’re supposed to do.

CNN:

Germany’s economy, the largest in Europe, contracted for the second year in a row in 2024, official data showed Wednesday, underscoring the challenges facing the region as it tries to get economic growth back on track.

Germany’s gross domestic product fell 0.2% last year, according to the country’s Federal Statistical Office, following a contraction of 0.3% in 2023.

It’s the first time since the early 2000s, when Germany was grappling with high unemployment, that the economy has shrunk for two years in a row, according to Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at pan-European bank ING.

The data comes just weeks ahead of a crucial snap election, called after Germany’s governing coalition collapsed late last year over disagreements about how to bolster the country’s weak economy.

“Hope is that any new German government would decide on a longer-term plan for economic reforms and investments,” Brzeski wrote in a note.

The troubles facing the German economy are captured by the crisis at the country’s largest manufacturer, Volkswagen. In December, the automaker announced sweeping changes to operations in its home country, including more than 35,000 job cuts and plans to shift some production to Mexico.

…

Data from the European Union’s statistics office Wednesday showed that industrial production in the 20 countries that use the euro increased slightly in November compared with October. Still, it remains 9% below its level seven years ago, partly as a result of energy prices kept high by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Capital Economics.

The interesting part is that there is no timeline on which Germany turns this thing around.

They would have to fix the relationship with Russia, which they are never going to be allowed to do.

The United States decides what Germany is allowed to do, because Uncle Sam is the big boss, and they are not going to let Germany be friends with Russia.

They won’t be allowed to turn their nuclear plants back on either.

Because of global warming.

Or no, actually not because of global warming.

Because of Fukushima.

Because Germany is a serious earthquake zone, you know? And after all, Fukushima killed everyone in Japan.

Germans are the most productive people in the world, and their entire history is about getting sabotaged and then apologizing for being sabotaged.

]]> https://www.anglinarchive.com/2024/08/10/germany-police-union-chairman-finds-foolproof-way-to-stop-exploding-knife-crime/ Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

To think this could’ve all been avoided so easily…

How easy was this?

You hear it and you’re just like “wow, why did no one ever think of this before?”

Remix:

A German police union chief has urged the government to consider a proposal for criminals who hand in knives to receive substantial rewards, including a year’s subscription to the Netflix streaming service.

Jochen Kopelke, the chairman of the police union (GdP), expressed his concern about the rising knife crime epidemic enveloping German cities and called on the federal left-wing administration to think outside the box to tackle the issue effectively.

He proposed an amnesty for all those in possession of a knife willing to hand in their weapons but suggested that a material reward was necessary to incentivize youths in particular to do so.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

“For this measure to be effective, the federal government must create serious incentives for those who donate,” said Jochen Kopelke.

“Specifically, that could mean a year of Netflix for the delivery of a banned butterfly knife,” he added.

Jochen Kopelke: He’s basically a peaceful version of Batman.

German law prohibits possession of a knife with a blade length of 12 cm or greater. However, butterfly knives have become the go-to weapon for many, and knife crime has spiraled in recent years.

Butterfly knives are sweet.

Personally, I would trade a Netflix subscription for a butterfly knife.

Is that part of the program too? Can you trade the other way?

On Tuesday, surgeons at Berlin’s university hospital, Charité, revealed they treated more victims of knife crime in the first half of this year than they did in the whole of 2023.

Yeah, stabbing is really popular with the kids these days.

First, it’s rap music. Then they want to cut their dicks off. Then they get into stabbing.

Waddayagunnadoo?

Kids.

The injuries are also more serious with multiple and deeper stab wounds, often inflicted by larger knives, according to Ulrich Stöckle, managing director of the Center for Musculoskeletal Surgery.

“Why is there this increasing trend of violence?” he asked.

One indisputable fact from recently published interior ministry data is that foreign nationals are disproportionately represented in crime stats. Put simply, the sky-high immigration experienced by Germany in recent years has led to higher levels of crime.

Foreign nationals represented 41 percent of all crime suspects in 2023, despite comprising 15 percent of the population.

Everyone knows that.

But it’s really impolite to say it.

I think it’s actually illegal.

Instead of giving Netflix subscriptions in exchange for knives, Germany should do like the UK does, and organize pro-stabbing marches where the police get together with immigrants and attack white people.

No matter which way you try to slice it, Americans are getting poorer at an astonishing rate.

We remain the richest country in the world, so the only explanation for this is that the wealth is being transferred to someone. And we know who it is being transferred to: super-rich multinational corporations and hordes of nonwhite immigrants.

Axios:

A primary complaint about the current U.S. economy has been the hollowing out of “middle-skill jobs” — the type of work that people with high school educations and substantial training could do and earn a “middle wage.”

Be smart: But even if such jobs were restored, it would not mean a revival of America’s battered middle class. That’s because middle-wage jobs largely do not pay a middle-class salary.

Confused? So were we.

What’s happening: Since the early 1970s, the American middle class has shrunk to about half of all families, from about 60%, according to Pew, a trend that’s taken on more importance since the financial crash, becoming a substantial feature of the nation’s broad disaffection.

Digging into the economic fallout, study after study has noted the deindustrialization of numerous states, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, resulting in tens of thousands of job losses.

But while many of those jobs once paid middle-class wages, the collapse of unions and other factors have much-reduced the pay. Now, the same jobs are said to pay “middle wages,” but do not suggest a ladder to the actual middle class.

An example: In 1972, the average American union carpenter earned the current equivalent of $33.55 an hour — about $70,000 a year. Today, a carpenter earns $20.23 on average, about $42,000 annually, according to Indeed.

The difference in dollar terms is of course enormous. But it’s arguably more in terms of what it buys. In the 1970s, it was a ticket to the middle class, with the then-accouterments, including a home, a reasonably new car, and possibly even a summer vacation.

Today’s average carpenter salary is at the very bottom of the middle class, which begins at about $40,000, according to Pew, and does not typically put a worker in a position to purchase the 1970s middle-class lifestyle.

The background: In 1948, unionized auto industry workers achieved a major breakthrough — an agreement from the industry on a “basic wage.” Over the subsequent decades, the symbol of the basic wage was $20 an hour, a threshold that spread, representing the bottom of the union wage ladder.

By 1979, 23% of all U.S. hourly workers earned at least $20. Then it began dropping, to 18% in 1989 and 16% in 2000.

Today, economists and other experts typically call $15 an hour “middle wage;” the top of the middle-wage scale can be a little over $20. Since the financial crash a decade ago, some three-quarters of new jobs have paid around $15 or less an hour. As of 2015, 42% of all workers earned $15 or less per hour, according to the National Employment Law Project.

This is rarely reported on in any normie publication. Axios itself is wonkish and elite, even though it appears to be written for first graders.

The only person who actually covers this is Tucker Carlson.

So for most people, when they hear Trump say that the economy is doing so well that he has no choice but to flood America with third worlders, they think “oh it must just be me and my family and friends that are doing poorly – the rest of the country must be doing great!”

In actual fact, everyone is suffering, and the obvious solution is not only to do what Trump is sort of doing and regulate trade as a way to keep jobs in the country and bully corporations into bringing factories home, but to do what Trump said he was going to do and stop immigration.

The concept of bringing factories home and then bringing in foreign workers to staff the factories is utterly nonsensical if you are looking at it from the standpoint of the average American worker. It only makes sense if you’re singularly obsessed with the GDP as the only measure that means anything.

But as many people have pointed out lately, the GDP does not measure the quality of life of the average American, and in fact has virtually no relationship to it at all in a situation of globalism.

What we need in this country is for wages to rise. In order for wages to rise, you have to make labor more valuable, and to make labor more valuable, it has to be more scarce, meaning you have to have fewer people in the workforce. This is absolutely basic supply and demand, which is the first and simplest principle of economics.

And yet, these people all have the nerve to go on TV and say “immigration is good for the economy” – because it raises the GDP – and imply that this should mean something to the average American who is not a corporate executive.

It is simply a lie and a hoax. There is no reality in which more people in the workforce means higher wages for workers.

Trump and the rest of the GOP want to stress a dichotomy between “legal and illegal” immigrants, but this distinction is almost completely irrelevant. More people is more people, meaning the supply is higher, meaning the demand is lower, meaning the value of labor drops.

Also almost irrelevant is the distinction between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers. In fact, “skilled” workers coming in from India and China are going to drive down wages quicker. With “unskilled” workers, higher-level jobs cost less because the native population is driven into those fields by seeking higher wages, whereas if you bring in people with degrees, they just directly drive down the wages in credentialed fields.

Trump recently made his biggest policy reversal ever when he switched from “we need people for factories” to “America is full.”

But the truth is, America is way beyond full, as is evidenced by the above wage statistics. We are in fact “flooded.”

Any Way You Slice It

I prefer to make the argument that America doesn’t need immigrants because we are a nation, we are a people, we have a right to our own place where we live – a home, just like everyone else in the world has.

But apparently, no one wants to make that argument. People want to talk about crime and economics, instead of ethnic identity and ethnic rights.

But it really doesn’t matter. You can make the argument from any direction, and come to the same conclusion: immigration into developed, first world countries is always bad, no matter what.

I have argued that the response to all of this nonsense about legal vs. illegal and skilled vs. unskilled should be “we don’t want any immigrants, at all, period, end of story.”

And I think that this meme can and will catch on. It cuts through all of the bullshit, and simply addresses the core issue: we have enough people to have a great country. We are not a “nation of immigrants,” the poem on the Statue of Liberty is not our guiding philosophy, this all has to end.

We are a people.

And we have a right to exist.

No, he didn’t actually say exactly that.

But I think I got the gist of his blabbering.

MSN:

President Donald Trump took a step back on Tuesday from his threat to close the U.S. southern border to fight illegal immigration, as pressure mounted from companies worried that a shutdown would cause chaos to supply chains.

Trump threatened on Friday to close the border this week unless Mexico acted. He repeated that threat on Tuesday but said he had not made a decision yet: “We’re going to see what happens over the next few days.”

Closing the border could disrupt millions of legal crossings and billions of dollars in trade. Auto companies have been warning the White House privately that it would lead to the idling of U.S. plants within days because they rely on prompt deliveries of components made in Mexico. 

Yes, I remember when Trump was running for President in 2016 with the slogan: “It’s the GDP, stupid!”

With big businesses coming out and demanding that Trump keep the border open, there’s very little chance that he’ll actually bring the ban-hammer down.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest U.S. business lobbying group, has been in contact with the White House to discuss the “very negative economic consequences that would occur across the country,” said Neil Bradley, the group’s top lobbyist, on a call with reporters.

Trump praised efforts by Mexico to hinder illegal immigration from Central America at its own southern border. On Monday, the Mexican government said it would help regulate the flow of migrants.

“I really wanted to close it,” Trump said on Tuesday night at a fundraiser for congressional Republicans.

“I really didn’t want to sign the spending bill. I really didn’t want to sign the second spending bill. I’m really unhappy about the third spending bill. I really wanted to close the border. I…”

Tiresome.

For a while, I was under the impression that he was doing his best and fighting the good fight.

But he’s broken now. The fight is all gone out of him.

Trump seems to be putting on a show. A fake fight. He’s got experience in this.

There’s going to be a lot more kayfabe before we hit 2020.

But it will all be hollow.