Joe Biden achieves the first real success

it is no longer epochal, but it is so significant that US President Joe Biden calls it “historic”: his draft law for climate protection and social affairs. For months, Biden’s Democratic Party was at odds over the cause, and Senator Joe Manchin had to be calmed down with ever new compromises. The heavily watered-down bill passed the US Senate yesterday, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote by a simple majority. The approval on Friday in the democratically controlled House of Representatives is considered certain.

Biden’s strategists stress the key elements have remained: lower prescription drug costs, fighting climate change, closing tax loopholes and $300 billion in debt reduction. The President has a first real success, the mood for success has yet to come.

His old and possibly new opponent Donald Trump whipped the assembled ultra-conservatives into a world conspiracy frenzy at a congress in Dallas over the weekend. The two-hour speech was about war and the new world order, inflation, drugs, alleged electoral fraud and gender slurs: “We are a nation that allows men to play sports in women’s teams in order to dominate them.” People laughed long time in Dallas, but “laugh” also has something to do with the word “ridiculous”.

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If we lived economically in the best of all worlds, which the optimism philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz so beautifully described, then our stock exchange groups would do the following: invest with shareholders’ money, invent products, improve processes, research, and treat employees well. But reality is not Leibniz, reality is Scrooge McDuck, i.e. money storage capitalism. Listed companies have never used so much money to buy back their own shares.

This increases earnings per share and the price. In the USA alone, the companies in the S&P 500 index want to invest around 985 billion dollars (plus 11.7 percent) in their own securities. What Apple is doing excessively with buybacks worth 92 billion dollars, Adidas, Linde and BASF are copying in this country, as our cover story shows. There are no limits to the lack of imagination in management.

Johannes Kahrs was a right-wing man among the left, for years pulling the strings of the SPD. Especially as head of the conservative “Seeheimer Kreis”, which has a certain Olaf Scholz as a figurehead. Now things are getting pretty tight for the long-standing member of the Bundestag in the cum-ex affair about illegal tax refunds for rich investors. Some time ago, 214,800 euros were found in the safe deposit box of Kahrs, who had done a lot for the Hanseatic Warburg-Bank (an SPD donor) when it came to Cum Ex. That came out now.

He lacks “the imagination that there is a legally sound justification for this,” says even Kahrs’ party colleague Erik von Malottki, who sits in the Bundestag. “The locker is explosive for the Chancellor,” explains left-wing politician Fabio de Masi. Scholz, once Hamburg’s first mayor, had spoken to the Warburg owners about the threat of additional tax demands – and had to appear in the Cum-Ex investigative committee for the second time on August 19. If he has large memory gaps again, that is also a message.

Patricia Schlesinger resigns as RBB director.

(Photo: IMAGO/Michael Handelmann)

In a quiet minute, Patricia Schlesinger, 61, could have asked herself what goes well with public service broadcasting, who is committed to the public spirit (not to the common sense of earning a living). Five-digit annual bonuses, which are absolutely unusual on ARD and don’t even appear in the official salary of the director (a good 300,000 euros) and her top managers? Conversion of your own office floor for projected 658,112.25 euros, pre-oiled two-layer parquet and massage chair included? Domestic soirées with salon-safe guests from culture and society at the broadcaster’s expense? Luxury company car with a discount? Advisor networks reminiscent of nepotism?

Patricia Schlesinger did not ask herself that when asked about it by journalists. She resigned immediately as director of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), not without pointing out “personal accusations and defamation”. The renunciation of the continuation of the employment relationship takes place in accordance with the “contractual regulation, taking into account a notice period of six months to the end of the month with effect from February 28, 2023,” quotes “Bild” from an internal Schlesinger letter. She is also prepared to shorten this period in the event of a “contractual waiver”. In such a situation, the lawyer negotiates the farewell payment.

Someone here doesn’t want to be chased off the farm, but wants to walk with their heads held high and dictate conditions again. At today’s special meeting, the RBB Broadcasting Council will have to clarify the extent to which it specifically evaluates the barely enshrined idea of ​​an allowance (including pension entitlements). However, a concept for confidence-building measures for those who pay the broadcasting fee after Schlesinger’s double departure (as head of RBB and before that of ARD) would also be needed here.

What complicates matters: the broadcaster is chronically weak in terms of finances and ratings. The previous deputy, administrative director Hagen Brandstätter, 63, sits in the director’s ejection seat.

The future economy Ulrike Malmendier is an economist at the University of Berkeley.

(Photo: Berkeley)

And then there is the Council of Economic Experts, a name as long as the tradition of the advisory body planted in the republic by Ludwig Erhard almost 60 years ago. It’s just unfortunate that in the past four months, due to political quarrels, only three instead of the planned five “economic wise men” were active. Now the gap is closed. On Wednesday, the appointment of two economists will be confirmed in the federal cabinet.

  • Ulrike Malmendier, 49, proposed by the Federal Chancellery, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, with a research focus on money markets and behavioral economics. She has already researched what one already suspects – that dominant, craving managers are not good for an organization.
  • Martin Werding, 58, in turn, a specialist in social security systems, joins the committee at the suggestion of the employers. The professor at Bochum’s Ruhr University considers the social democratic pension plans to be unaffordable, which speaks for realism.

This replaces the retired top economists Lars Feld and Volker Wieland and two innovations can be observed. For the first time, there will be conferences across the Atlantic on current issues and the annual report, “remote work” makes it possible. The female majority in the Council is also a first. From the circle of established forces, either competition economist Monika Schnitzer, 60, or energy expert Veronika Grimm, 50, will take the chair.

Doubts about so much disruption can be answered with Albert Einstein: “The purest form of insanity is to leave everything as it is and still hope that something will change.”

I wish you an innovative start to the week.

It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor

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