Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [211]
6. Ferdinand Protzman, “Privatization in East Is Wearing to Germans,” The New York Times, August 12, 1994, p. D 1. According to its interim report published in The International Herald Tribune, as of August 1994, Treuhand had sold 247 chemical companies with only a dozen remaining; 181 steel and metal fabricating firms with 25 remaining; 238 iron and nonferrous metal manufacturers with 16 pending; 1,060 machine tool and die companies with 54 pending; 490 electronics firms with 14 left to be sold or liquidated; 512 textile manufacturers with 19 to go; and 1,017 construction companies with just 7 left. The liquidations comprised mainly sales to Westerners but also included the return of companies to pre-Communist ownership and liquidations. Most of the jobs lost came from downsizing to make companies more attractive to investors rather than from straight liquidations.
7. The Week in Germany, July 15, 1994. Detlev Rohwedder, Treuhand’s first chairman, was assassinated on April 1, 1991, and replaced by Birgit Breuel.
8. Even sober academic accountants with no political ax to grind such as Wolfgang Siebel have warned that the Unification Treaty had a “financially flawed basis,” despite the “gigantic transfer of funds to East Germany.” Wolfgang Siebel, “Necessary Illusions: The Transformation of Governance Structures in the New Germany,” The Tocqueville Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1992. Despite the fact that the transfers amount to roughly a third of Germany’s federal budget (about 9,500 Deutsch Marks per East German), “most of these federal transfers are not destined for productive investment. Sixty-two percent is spent subsidizing social benefits such as unemployment compensation and housing subsidies.” These subsidies make up nearly 70 percent of eastern Germany’s GNP, and can be compared with the Marshall Plan’s transfers in 1947 of roughly 800 Deutsch Marks per capita.
9. Ibid. Saxony, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia are the eastern Laender, based on older provinces that had been eliminated by the Communists in 1947. Siebel concludes that privatization in Germany finally “undermines the basis of healthy municipal finance. Municipalities are left with only those programs that run at a loss. This in turn tends to undermine the political and administrative credibility of local administration as a whole.” Ibid., p. 187. Siebel suggests that hysteria about former Communist associations “appeared as a psychological compensation for the political incompetence to deal appropriately with the material consequences of unification.” Ibid., p. 189.
10. Stephen Kinzer, “German Neocommunists Surging, Capture a City Hall,” The New York Times, June 29, 1994, p. A 6. The Democratic Socialist party has 130,000 disciplined members of whom perhaps 90 percent were Communists earlier and 20,000 are hard-liners. Gregor Gysi, a member of parliament, is its telegenic and politically astute chief, while Hans Modrow who was East Germany’s last Communist leader serves as its Honorary Chairman. The Party Handbooks insist, “Our goal is not the revolutionary overthrow of the democratic parliamentary order or the building of some kind of dictatorship, but rather the true democratization of Germany.” Party leader Gysi says: “People in Eastern Germany have lost important rights, and there is much social injustice … we are not facing the global social, ecological and cultural challenges that confront us. So for me there are still very good reasons to be anticapitalist.” See ibid.
11. Stephen Kinzer, “Group Is Formed to Defend East German Interests,” The New York Times, July 12, 1992, p. A 11. Also see Kinzer, “In Germany, Too, an Effort to Mobilize Political Outsiders,” The New York Times, July 19, 1992, Section 4, p. 2.
12. Stephen Kinzer, “Group Is Formed.”
13. She remonstrated, “The people I worked with wanted to reform East Germany. We never thought