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Gauck: see the human cost of our luxuries
Published: 17 Nov 12 14:16 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20121117-46227.html
President Joachim Gauck says consumers risk becoming so obsessed with getting the latest fashionable product that they ignore the suffering of the people making them – and called for responsible capitalism.
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He called for lessons to be learned from the financial crisis, but complained that little had changed. “The uncontrolled growth in the financial sector has still today not been got rid of,” he said, adding that fundamental changes were needed and that risk must be reasonable.
Bankers should not, “take bonuses in good times, and then in difficult times.. call upon the tax-payer,” he said.
“The current knowledge that in an emergency they will be rescued, distorts how risk is regarded by the banks in a way that neither helps the market nor the wishes of the tax-payer,” he said.
“Numbers in the black are not reason enough to cross red lines,” he said.
And he said the 1990s demands for a small state had in many ways been a mistake. Rather, he suggested, the aim should be to create a state which was able and willing to deal with things.
The point was, to try to develop a responsible capitalism which looked further than the demands of business to include responsibility for social rules.
“Responsible capitalism is possible,” he said, adding that pushing for profits was not improper – but that greed for more at any price was dangerous.
Yet this sense of responsibility should also be an everyday measure for consumers too. “How long will Europeans continue to buy jeans for €10 although they know that the poorest of the poor in Asia or Latin America pay a high price, with their health or their human dignity?” he asked.
DPA/DAPD/The Local/hc
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Your comments about this article:
Every five years, you could add a number of things onto the list that were now manufactured overseas....NOT in Germany. German factor jobs went away. Unemployment since 2000 has been an ongoing problem in Germany. There are good years and bad years.
Responsible capitalism? It's an invented term that professors sit and use on occasion but in the real world.....it's not useful or capable of being implemented. You don't take risks in the business world based on responsible capitalism. You don't brew beer with responsible capitalism. And you don't sail a cruise boat down the Nile River based on responsible capitalism. It's all based on acceptable risks and an open import concept.
The only reason why you don't pay 99 Euro today for a pair of rough German-made shoes is because people figured out that you could make the same shoes in Vietnam for 16 Euro, and sell them in German shops for 39 Euro. Otherwise, Germans would be existing in the most expensive country on the face of the Earth.
I would urge the good President to go and ask how much things would cost in Germany, if you added this little concept of responsible capitalism. The truth is....you couldn't even afford. And you'd be visiting the shoe-maker every two years to put a new sole on a pair of shoes that you couldn't replace.
Does Gauck actually believe the nonsense he is spewing, or is this some calculated political manipulation and propaganda? (I suppose both he and Merkel learned from the best.)
Almost of of the G8 is massively de-industrialized and generation
debt bombs as a consequence. Go to Wikipedia and google Britains
wool industry as an example. The powerhouse that once was is
crumbling and begging for it's very existence. The same can be said
for the west. As a child I wore clothes knitted by my mother, skates
made in Canada, ice rinks we made ourselves, drove cars that
were manufactured 15 miles down the road from our house by
my father. We ate food grown in the fields all around us and even
exported massive quantities because of supplus. Now the
made in China label is omnipresent. Germany if you give up
your industrial economy you will be toast like the rest of us.