Meaningful World Economic Forum presenter ~ Angela Merkel

Two world wars and a genocide have a way of focusing the mind. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave meaningful remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  

Unlike Donald Trump, Merkel described factual economic and social challenges. (Donald Trump pandered to the WEF by begging for international investment to the US, in spite of the forum's focus being on improving the human condition.)

Her remarks to the WEF could be summarized in the cliche: "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it..."

"Lessons of the past”: German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

“100 years after the end of the First World War, and with eyewitnesses to the Second World War dying off, we must ask: have we really learned from this history, or haven’t we?”

In the era of Brexit, such statements are a reminder that the European Union (EU) was created not to tweak trade measures or to massage monetary policies, but to make Europeans stop killing each other. 

As Merkel noted, the generations born after World War II will determine whether those lessons stick. 

Merkel's implicit message was that the jury is still out.

Yet in Merkel’s remarks, the generational divide appeared most consequential not in attitudes toward the European Union or immigration, but rather in another context: digitalization.

The postwar generations

Merkel was born in 1954: a true representative of the postwar generation. Yet, she appeared at Davos, as she does in so many international settings, as the staid senior counterpoint to France’s flashier President Emmanuel Macron, who was born in 1970. 

To express concern about “postwar generations” is not necessarily to hand elders the moral upper hand: Today’s seniors as well as young people are products of postwar Europe.

The economic challenges of an aging society are familiar in Europe. Fewer working people paying into the system, more retirees drawing from it. 

Moreover, Merkel also lamented another pitfall of an aging population – a lack of appetite for innovation, particularly in regard to digital technologies. Germany, Merkel bluntly said, is far behind the digital curve. Yet delaying digitization because seniors are comfortable without it is a disservice to younger generations.

Nevertheless, Merkel held, Europe has a critical role to play in shaping the digital future by navigating the issue of ownership of data. As she put it: In the United States, private firms have nearly uninhibited ownership of data; in China, the bodies collecting data and the state function almost as a single unit. Europe’s social market economy offers a middle way: a more just digital order built on a balance between private ownership and state control of data.

The “social market economy” does not just evoke Europe’s more generous welfare and labor policies. It is also a historical reference: a nod to the architects of postwar West Germany, who sought a middle way between free market capitalism and a state-planned economy. In the 1950s, memories of capitalism’s failure in the Great Depression, and its catastrophic political consequences, were close at hand. The equally frightening counterpart was the repressive, state-command economy of the USSR and its satellites. Now, Merkel seemed to say, the social market economy not only remains necessary: It should be a model for solving a distinctly 21st-century problem.

Germany’s concern for privacy is also a legacy of the past. During the Great Depression, social workers’ collection of information to assist with clients’ medical and mental health needs seemed like a good idea – until the Nazis got their hands on all those records. For decades after the war, West Germany took painstaking measures to protect citizens’ privacy. The state-run telephone company, for example, did not keep records of numbers dialed by customers lest someone, someday be tempted to use those records to track a private citizen’s telephoning habits.

That was all well and good as long as the state had a monopoly on telephone lines.

If older Germans show little appetite for full-bore digitalization, younger Germans are as quick to post selfies in an age of facial recognition technology as their U.S. counterparts. Germany maintains stricter privacy laws than many other states, but German industry complains that such laws hinder innovation. As Merkel put it, “The Europeans haven’t decided how we want to handle data, and there’s a great danger that we may be too slow, that the world may steamroll us as we conduct philosophical debates about the sovereignty of data.”

Merkel’s metaphoric eye-roll at “philosophical debate” evoked a popular stereotype of Europeans - but one with queasy associations. The Weimar-era Nazis and Communists mocked parliamentary democracy as an impotent debating society. They, by contrast, were parties of action.

Merkel is not criticizing parliamentary democracy. She’s trying to save it from a re-emergent radical right. But in an era when firms like Google are more powerful than most states on the planet, liberal democracy faces a threat that is at least as potent as xenophobic political parties: preservation of the rights of the individual if individuals’ data is the property of private corporations or the state.

Merkel’s – and Europe’s – quandary is this: how to move forward in the digital age when Europe’s contribution is to seek balance between state power, individual rights and the dynamism of capitalism. Achieving that balance – achieving any balance – means slowing things down. It means philosophizing.

And so the question at hand may not be: Will postwar generations remember the lessons of the 20th century? Rather, the real question may be: Is this history an adequate guide to our present-day circumstances? And if it isn’t, can Germany, Europe or some other actor find an alternative in time to save us from the privacy-wrecking options already in play?

Additionally, Chancellor Merkel warned the audience:

Angela Merkel 

Germany is currently going through a political impasse — something that Europe wants to see fixed very soon in order for it to move forward with more integration.

Speaking at Davos, German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that Germany has problems of its own.

"Frankly speaking, the country I have the honor to represent and where I am chancellor has difficulties. And polarization is something that we see in our country as well, which we haven't had for decades," she said.

Angela Merkel at Davos: Even though she didn't mention him, was it all about Trump?

German Chancellor said we have not learned the lessons of history

America's labor shortage and help for farmers

Republicans are averse to investing in education and they also don't want farmers to have access to labor. There is no international company that wants to invest in helping Donald Trump when his only ambition is to make the rich more wealthy while farmers and middle class workers struggle.

Donald Trump was making a plea to the rich who gathered in Davos Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, because he wanted their money invested in the United States. 

Unfortunately, the rich people who can afford to attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) won't be enticed to help Donald Trump to bolster the American economy. Anybody who believes otherwise is delusional. Those rich who gathered in Davos were looking for economic prosperity, to feather their own philanthropist or governmental nests.

Nevertheless, in Donald Trump's "straight jacket" teleprompter speech delivered to the attendees who bothered to listen (to quote the description of his delivery style, reported by Peggy Noonan on Morning Joe).....he said "America is open for business".

Unfortunately, what Trump forgot to tell the audience was that the US labor shortage is acute. In fact, it's been worsened by Republican cuts to education that have made it difficult for potential workers to access the training needed to meet the needs of many employers.  

Rich people are looking for places to invest where highly skilled laborers are affordable for their purposes. That's not here in America, because Republicans have taken away the tax revenues that would be available to invest in growing our nation's workforce. In other words, if you want to open a business in America, the company must train the workers on their own payroll, plus pay for their health care.  Again, anybody who believes rich international investors want to make this deal with Donald Trump, must be delusional, especially when China and India have the infrastructure to make their businesses profitable.

Yet, American farmers need the help of unskilled laborers and Republicans are preventing them from hiring the people who will work in the harvests.  

Here is the opinion on this under-reported subject described in an editorial "echo", published in America Magazine.  

What we owe America's farmworkers

U.S. agriculture is facing a silent crisis. 

The Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants has sown fear among farmworker communities, making workers harder to find than ever. 

Farm owners across the country are anxious about meeting their labor needs. Millions of dollars worth of crops are at the risk of rotting.

The present labor shortage reveals U.S. society’s dependence on farmworkers. The hands that pick what Americans eat are hands the country relies on. And with almost no native-born Americans willing to do the job, Latino immigrants have become indispensable. Even in the midst of the severe fires in California, farmworkers could not stop working lest harvests be lost.
Yet the nation’s collective reliance on farmworkers is not reflected in the way they are treated. In California, which produces two-thirds of the nation’s fruits, rates of food insecurity for farmworkers and their families range from 40 percent to 70 percent. Farmworkers’ low wages directly contribute to growers’ profit, but farmworkers regularly cannot afford to buy the food they pick.

Working conditions for farmworkers can be (and are often) harsh. 

Even under the best conditions, a day of work is one of hard manual labor, with long hours and often high temperatures. The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of a pesticide known to be harmful to human beings. Farmworkers have already gotten sick on the job as a result.

Society’s failures toward farmworkers extend beyond poor working conditions. The children of migrant farmworkers endure seasonal displacement that can make staying in school difficult. 

Social mobility is weak for those born into farmworker communities, creating a generational cycle of poverty. State and local governments resist attempts by farmworkers to organize for greater protections. And despite being dependent on farmworker labor, many local communities are openly hostile to migrant workers.

It does not have to be this way. 

In 2016, California recognized the right of farmworkers to equal overtime pay. In Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers secured commitments from fast-food chains to buy only from agricultural sources that meet improved standards on pay and work conditions. That model of direct pressure on major companies is spreading. In Vermont, immigrant dairy workers just claimed victory in an agreement with the ice cream maker Ben and Jerry’s.

It is curious that so many Americans care about eating ethically (vegan, vegetarian, organic or free range) but do not think as much about the poverty and exploitation among the largely Latino farmworkers who are making their meals possible. 

Labeling programs, including the Equitable Food Initiative label, the Food Justice Certified label and the United Farm Workers Union label, support the fair treatment of farmworkers, but there is little indication that products carrying those labels are sought out by consumers.

The United States must do more to treat farmworkers with justice. A huge step would be to lift the threat of deportation that looms over many farmworkers by passing comprehensive immigration reform that recognizes both the need for labor in the United States and those laborers’ right to dignity and opportunity. Rectifying the injustice of the 1930s—when farmworkers were excluded from new federal labor standards—and finally offering farmworkers the same labor protections as other workers is also necessary. Farmwork, like all work, carries an inherent dignity and should be a viable path for immigrant families into the American middle class.

The common thread in all the challenges farmworkers face is a lack of urgency. Perhaps every time Americans say grace before a meal, they could spare a moment to remember those who make that meal possible.