THE STATUS QUO

By Barbara Borretsch

[This article “Nur immer so weiter” published in Ossietzky, 6/16/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=2438.]




The status quo, ladies and gentlemen, is advancing on the right path. We are fighting unemployment by lengthening working hours. If everyone works two or three years longer instead of drawing a pension at 65, if everyone foregoes three or four holidays to give them to our businesses and if weekly working hours increase 18 or 36 minutes or only a few hours, then we will have no unemployed sooner or later. How logical!

The dominant logic should be learned. Here are several more lessons: Continue the social reform. By reducing wages a little more along with pensions, the economy will thrive and prosperity will spread in the country even in the poor East. The unemployed must also contribute. Their grants must always be lower than wages, in other words cut a little more. What a good sign! The German Labor Office mismanages billions. Stay the course! Continue this health- and education reform. We must strengthen our competitiveness through lower costs – until no one can compete with us any more.

Stay the course in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and so on. We, the free West, must create order and peace below until nothing moves and no stone lies on another any more. Continue the course, march on, and only be consistent without any halfway measures!

This is the status quo: peace through war, prosperity through unemployment, jobs through mass layoffs and freedom through secret service. Since we Germans are world masters in bugging, we only need to bug more – logically! Torture a little if necessary for human rights and deploy the German army at home.

Continue on, ladies and gentlemen. Remain on the right paths. Don’t look left; don’t be diverted by anything. Trust Bush, Merkel, Muntefering, all the party leaders and above all Deutsche Bank, German television, the Frankfurter Allgemeinen newspaper, the Bild paper and your regional monopoly paper. Believe every word of the media – our free media that boasts daily of being the newest and most liberal monopoly capitalism, praising itself as God-given and without alternative. Keep to the true faith. Repeat after me: Our media can only be completely free in the hands of a few multi-millionaires.

Stay the course. The main point is increasing profits. Capital yields must reach at least 25 percent and 30 percent next year as Josef Ackermann promises shareholders of Deutsche Bank. Profits must rise ever faster, many times faster than the gross domestic product.

Continue the course with the tax reform. The rich must be relieved and the poor burdened. In this way, we rebuild the welfare state. How logical!

The system runs this way: Always reforming and changing nothing. When a medicine does not work or has an opposite effect, we may not reach for another medicine but must prescribe two times or three times the old dose to the patient. If the treatment still turns out badly, doubt in our competence is not allowed. Only optimize the methods and the speed.

So much for the dominant logic, the logic of the ruling class.