Loomnie

1. Why is Hosni Mubarak clinging to power? Maybe because the life of an exiled dictator isn’t what it used to be – FP

2. Ms Merkel: Eurozone nations would have to agree on retirement age, tax and spending rules – Guardian

3. German companies great and small are making the most of globalisation. Their success owes more to judgment than to luck – The Economist

4. “If Marx were alive today he would be 193 years old. Keynes would be 128. Discussions of what they would think today implicitly assume that they would have retained the intellect of their prime and adjusted their thinking to later events. How can anyone know how they would have done this?” – FT

5. “Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.” – Brought to you by Google

6. The Oscar Curse (or, Why It Stinks to Be a Successful Woman) – Economix

By keith Hart. The conclusion:

The euro is the most tangible symbol of the European Union, but not co-extensive with it. For the last century or more, member states had supplied their citizens with a monopoly currency that served both as the reification of the national economy and as their principle link to the world market. The move towards political and monetary union in Europe is the most striking example of a general trend. Everywhere nation-states are coming together into regional trading blocs as one kind of response to globalization: NAFTA, Mercosul, ASEAN, ECOWAS etc. At the same time, many states have hitched their waggon to the sinking dollar. In the meantime, the sheer size and volatility of global money markets and internet commerce undermine the credibility of existing national polities as an effective bridge to world society. The international settlement after 1945 looks increasingly inadequate. Before long, calls for a world currency will become louder than at present… .

Money is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity…. Money links us imaginatively and practically to the widest reaches of society, while lending precision to the fulfillment of our most concrete desires and obligations. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative.

One of anthropology’s objects might be to explore those features of humanity that are most conducive to the making of world society. If so, the substantial intellectual gains made by ethnography in the twentieth century must be married somehow to humanistic, historical and philosophical inquiries adequate to the task. The study of money offers one strategic focus for this, since money, more than most institutions, links each of us directly with the contemporary world as a whole.

It is fairly long, but every bit of it is worth your time.

The Economist has a nice article on immigration in Germany. If you can recall, Angela Merkel recently said that multiculturalism has utterly failed in Germany. This was following the furore that was raised by the publication of a book that claimed that immigrants and muslims were causing the downfall of Germany. The book was written by Thilo Sarazzin, a member of the board of the German Bundesbank. He was subsequently forced off the board of the Bundesbank. (See the Economist article for a recap of the main issues.)

What some of the people I have spoken with are scared of is that this might yet become a major political issue, leading, for instance to the creation of an acceptable right wing party. (There are the crazies, like NPD, the neo-Nazi party, but nobody really takes them seriously.) The fear is that if Ms Merkel is unable to contain the discussions surrounding immigration within her party, it is possible that some members might decide to go with the general sentiment of anti-immigration and form a political party that retains the basic economic policies of the right of centre CDU, but adds to it anti-immigration rhetorics and policies. A party like that, I am afraid, will be appealing to certain segments of the German middle-class.

From the BBC: A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.

Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) if the richest people paid a 5% wealth tax for two years, they say.

The petition has 44 signatories so far, and will be presented to newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The group say the financial crisis is leading to an increase in unemployment, poverty and social inequality.

Simply donating money to deal with the problems is not enough, they want a change in the whole approach.

“The path out of the crisis must be paved with massive investment in ecology, education and social justice,” they say in the petition.

Those who had “made a fortune through inheritance, hard work, hard-working, successful entrepreneurship, or investment” should contribute by paying more to alleviate the crisis.

The man behind the petition, Dieter Lehmkuhl, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel that there were 2.2 million people in Germany with a fortune of more than 500,000 euros.

If they all paid the tax for two years, Germany could raise 100bn euros to fund ecological programmes, education and social projects, said the retired doctor and heir to a brewery.

Signatory Peter Vollmer told AFP news agency he was supporting the proposal because he had inherited “a lot of money I do not need”.

He said the tax would be “a viable and socially acceptable way out of the flagrant budget crisis”.

The group held a demonstration in Berlin on Wednesday to draw attention to their plans, throwing fake banknotes into the air.

Mr Vollmer said it was “really strange that so few people came”.

We woke up this morning to learn that the new center-right coalition of Ms Merkel’s CDU and Mr Westerwelle’s FDP have decided to cut taxes.

I visited the German parliament about a month ago, and even managed to get to the press gallery while the Bundestag, the parliament, was discussing the treaty of Lisbon. After that I decided to find out more about how the parliament works. While I may still write a post about it on this blog, this report from The Economist does a good job of explaining how the German electoral system works. By the way, elections to the Bundestag is today.