Like the Americans, Germans Must Stand Up in Outrage at Last! (Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany)

Are we about to see protests like those in New York sweep the Western world? Columnist Alexander Hageluken of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung urges his German readers to get up and take resort to the only method of effecting change left to the average person: mass protest.

For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Alexander Hageluken writes in part:

To begin with, at first there were very few people occupying a park near Wall Street. It was easy to dismiss them as cranks unable to hinder the billion-dollar business that stock brokers pursue and which dominates the world every day. But their numbers are swelling with more and more trade unionists joining their ranks and even Europeans planning protests. “We get nothing, the bankers get everything!” This is a rallying cry that many Germans can surely identify with. In this, the fourth year of the financial crisis, protests against capitalism as it currently exists have begun. It is high time that citizens rise up against the madness that is enveloping them.

This repetition, this second massive redistribution at the expense of the public – shows just how all-important decisive protests have become. For years, banks profited from their speculative ventures, but the moment they stumbled in 2007-2008, states began to cover their losses by taking on their massive debt. This redistribution is now being followed by yet another. Meanwhile, the debt amassed during the financial crisis has overwhelmed unsound euro-countries like Greece. If one were to go by the textbook of the markets, it should be the nation’s debtors – in other words, the banks and other bond holders – who should come to the rescue. But yet again, it is the taxpayer who is footing the bill.

It is high time that even the German public take to the streets to force the political parties to reconsider. Not to abolish capitalism, but to reform it so that financial markets have less influence. Their must be barriers for banks, so that they attend to providing credit instead of dealing in derivatives – and a fair distribution of the costs of the crisis.

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