Word: germane
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Once Bitten While Germany has learned the lessons of creative destruction the hard way, the government still believes it has a critical role to play in industry. Just this month, the fate of Opel, the German subsidiary of General Motors, has been at the top of the political agenda. Government ministers are refusing to loan the billions the carmaker says it needs to survive - and even imposing conditions on would-be buyers, which include Fiat. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
...German skepticism about the utility of big government-spending programs endures, bolstering Merkel's determination to resist international pressure to take more decisive action to counter the economic crisis. Among those arguing forcefully against any new stimulus packages is the Taxpayers' Federation. Holznagel says that in the early 1990s his organization kept to itself doubts about the big spending on reunification - it was politically foolish to do otherwise. But now, he says, "the situation is completely different. The danger is always that money is spent neither appropriately nor efficiently...
That assessment may sound admirably prudent. But Germany is in bad shape. In Halle, they're feeling the pinch, again - even if the situation is (remarkably) not quite as bad as it is in west German regions such as the environs of Stuttgart, where almost half a million people have been put on short-term work since last October as auto and machinery factories have slowed production. The east has been somewhat protected because its firms don't export as much as their west German opposite numbers. An unmistakable streak of eastern stoicism helps, too. "I notice that when...
Then an unlikely figure entered the fray: Angela Merkel. German Chancellors don't usually weigh in on church matters, she said. But when the Vatican gave "the impression that it could be possible to deny that the Holocaust happened," she felt compelled to demand that the Pope repudiate the idea, lest it affect relations with "the Jewish people as a whole." In essence, Merkel (a Protestant) was tutoring the German Pope on his responsibilities to the Jews...
...address that day was marked by some highly peculiar ellipses. He failed to mention anti-Semitism, instead contending that "ultimately" the Nazis' motive in killing Jews was to "tear up the taproot of the Christian faith." And although he claimed to speak as a "son of the German people," Benedict seemed to downplay any ordinary-German implication in the Holocaust. Instead, he placed blame on a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises ... through terror ... with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power...