I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.

The CDU will sell the German people’s future if it means they can increase their stock portfolios for a few extra years.

The stock market is not a marker of a good economy, the number of hours a person has to work to afford a home is. To afford healthcare and retirement and education and transportation an OLED TV etc.

Don’t vote for the CDU or the FDP ever again, they’ve proven they’re incapable of improving society more than they hurt it.

Merz is in power today because Germans feared the AfD gaining power if they voted for more extreme parties capable of change so they voted for safe choices. The catch is voting for the CDU guarantees things get worse, which then further cultivates the AfD.

Merz wants the AfD to exist because it helps keep him in power. People most vote progressive, must vote to tackle wealth inequality, or the AfD is inevitable. We either fix the root problems or we decline into fascism. The CDU are incapable of fixing the root causes because that is where they thrive.

Why would we want to increase working hours? That’s the opposite of progress in society. Why would we ever think this is necessary?

Conservatives will put our country in debt, they will make it less safe, they’ll blame the most marginalized groups as they enrich themselves and their friends, and they will ask you to work more and for longer.

This is why the AFD are succeeding, because what people see as the most safe options are also the ones destroying their country and worsening our lives.

Educate your friends, educate your neighbors, organize with your unions, don’t give an inch to the conservatives. Demand progress, not societal decline.

Right! They got punished by the voters but they haven’t received the social stain that should follow them for a decade. They’ll be back next election and I fear not enough people will remember what they did. That’s not enough punishment for what they did.

Being new to German politics I was shocked how obvious it was that Merz was not someone working for the betterment of Germans but for political power - and he is still successful in his party.

I also don’t understand why the country has fallen into this belief that the squabbling of the last coalition has caused AFD to be successful. I think it’s incredibly clear that the FDP sabotaged the coalition from the start - people should be calling for the removal of the FDP at the federal level for what they did (and thankfully they were punished in this last election). But why we didn’t go back to giving progressives more power and another chance I don’t understand - it was the one conservative party that undermined them. Instead we gave more power to conservatives who are the real cause for the rise of the AFD.

The only cure to the AFD is to shrink wealth I equality and a continued push for pro-worker progressive policies. Improve the trains, improve our green energy, regulate our businesses so they have higher quality bars to reach, protect the workers, tax the ultra wealthy, tax landlords out of existence so a working German can afford their flat or their home, support farmers, hold media accountable for misinformation, and protect us from foreign interference.

We need more actions that Die Linke would endorse and less actions that the CDU would, because fundamentally the CDU are pro-corporation and anti-worker and that’s the heart of the rise of fascism - a decline in living standards brought on by corrupt politicians bleeding the public coffers for the betterment of their corporate friends.

And we just witnessed this, they paid for corporate contracts with debt when they could have paid for it with increased taxes on the ultra-wealthy.

I can’t speak to that specific situation but I believe power should be held the shortest distance from the people it effects - balanced only by having more power for more people. I imagine health insurance owned and controlled by unions is less powerful than owned and controlled by the government but the distance is shorter. So ideally it would be held by a government to maximize the negotiating power essentially, but if the government is run by incompetent or immoral people (like I’d assert the CDU is) I could see union control being better.

Assuming you’re in Germany, where do you read/watch/ get your media from? I’m very interested in becoming more politically helpful in this country and creating simple messages explaining why some parties deserve your support and some absolutely don’t and I don’t know where Germans get there material.

I’m contacting some local parties to see how I can help and volunteer, but I’d also like to be putting out material on a YouTube or blog or discord if that was beneficial and discoverable by my neighbors and friends of friends etc.

I believe a core tactic of a conservative government is to lower the revenue base of the government so less services are effective and efficient. This leads to the ability to privatize those services. Remember conservatives fundamentally lack policies that would benefit the majority of the countries they lead, they are grifters. Instead of fixing problems or raising revenue through taxing the rich (their friends and donors) they cut services to fund tax cuts. When that becomes too unpopular they focus on deregulation until they can again cut services and lower taxes on the rich again.

Please, help educate everyone on the actions of this conservative government and the last - whatever - three decades of conservative government. They hurt people so they can give more money to the rich, don’t ever vote a centralist or right wing party ever again. Only political parties that work for workers, that’s who deserve your vote and support.

The only way to address the AfD is to tax the rich, deal with wealth inequality, improve the lives of the working German, and root out corruption and oligarchy at every level.

The CDU and the SPD allow the AfD to thrive because one of them encourages and cultivates the climate that leads to the AfD and the other refuses to make significant enough changes to reverse the damage conservatives do to a country.

And they’ll continue to as long as the ultra wealthy use unregulated media to blame culture issues to avoid fair taxation and political unification. If we want terror attacks to stop we must tax the rich out of existence - we must improve the lives of the average person.

🫡

I swapped to Arch Linux in the last month and it’s been great. Gaming has been fun. The Nvidia drivers are still kinda confusing, and honestly I wouldn’t put my mom on Arch Linux as of right now, but it’s good enough.

I’m writing a document so my SW engineering friends can swap over as well within a day and be up and running, and it’s just neat to see Linux gradually growing in my circles.

If you’re on Linux, don’t forget to donate to your favorite SW creators even if they’re less flashy than say Larian studios or what have you lol.

I love this and I support the greens. If Merz’s top priority is giving tax cuts to the rich and paying for fundamental needs like infrastructure with debt (which is financed by the wealthy and who reap the interest) then he should be treated like an enemy of the state. If they’re willing to sell out their neighbors for Blackrock’s enrichment and the enrichment of other massive corporations than we should be calling them out on this every time they walk out of their homes.

To call himself a Christian too, while stealing from the poor and the working class, is unbelievably frustrating. Not that organized religion is a good metric to judge someone’s morality by, for that to be one of his defining characteristics is gross.

Thanks for this, I think an additional valuable data point is what the net tax income is in a typical year.

According to Wikipedia the budget for Germany has a net balance of ~97 billion Euros (2023). Which, if that value is correct and the analysis of the Linke plan is accurate, means we could wipe out the yearly deficit and still have €100 billion left over to spend. Which if carried over a decade would match the spending estimated by the debt break reform (over that same period of time) aimed entirely at the war complex and vague infrastructure needs.

This sounds like it proves that the majority of parties in Germany are not thinking about the future of the common man but of the future of the wealthy class. Perhaps there’s an argument for these plans being unpopular by the German populace, but that’s a matter of education and communication. We need everyone in Germany, east and west, young and old, historically conservative or progressive, to understand that reducing the tax on the wealthy and corporations only hurts everyone - and that the reverse benefits everyone.

I completely agree. I just want to see this topic brought up more by German news and journalists (admittedly as someone learning the language and new to the country I’m not exactly plugged in to the entire media landscape yet and won’t be for many more years, but what gets shared to Lemmy I do my best to read or get translated).

The CDU are going to lead Germany to the same problems the Americans have. The SPD needs to move farther left. And the German populace needs to rally around sane policy demands like taxing the rich, investing in public infrastructure (trains far more than cars), and heavily discouraging landlords and corporate land ownership.

How much of the debt would be eliminated if we taxed the rich more? Why is the conversation always around the debt brake instead of increasing the income of the government from the people most likely to corrupt and abuse it (and which have plenty to go around)?