On April 4th, the German Government’s main ‘news’-site DW, Deutsche Welle, headlined “Germany: Far-right AfD rises in the polls”, and reported that in response to their question “Which areas [of Govenment spending] most urgently need public investment?” 60% said “Daycare centers, schools, educational facilities”; 38% said “Roads, bridges, railways”; 36% said “Healthcare facilities”; 21% said “Housing construction”; 18% said “Digital infrastructure”; and 18% said “Climate protection, energy”; and those six options (which mysteriously total to 191% — an obvious impossibility) were the ONLY options that were published. Any further details about the poll were not published (they were hidden), but the pollster was identified as “infratest-dimap (03.04.25)” which says that the polling of 1,334 respondents occurred during 31 March to 2 April, and their report provides no way to know whether other options than those 6 had been offered to respondents (or how that 191% figure — impossible since the question said “most urgently” — resulted). Consequently, we can’t know whether “Military” was offered as an option but scored even lower than 18%, or instead was not offered at all as an option in order to hide from the public what would have been its percentage if it HAD been offered. This is remarkable especially because the expected incoming new Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced that he will take off the Government’s “debt brake” on the federal budget in order to soar spending for “defense.” That proposal from him is the biggest issue right now in German politics, and apparently Germany’s ‘news’-media (therefore) don’t want the public to be able to express in polls whether what Merz has announced his intention to do is at all approved-of by the German people — or to what extent. If Germany isn’t really a democracy, they don’t want the public to know this, it is now consequently clear.
By contrast (as I had first reported back on February 25th) I had headlined “It’s time to fire President Trump.”, and reported that
On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.
An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).
This is obviously a dictatorship, with little if any (other than of only the most formalistic type) of actual democratic legitimacy. It heads what it and its colonies (‘allies’) call “the free world,” but it is itself ripe for a Second American Revolution — not only because of the emergency-situation regarding the current President, but ALSO because clearly the U.S. Government NO LONGER IS ANY REAL DEMOCRACY AT ALL — the scientific studies have shown that at least ever since 1980, what the U.S. Government does has NO correlation with what its public want but VERY HIGH correlation with what its billionaires want. Corruption has killed whatever democracy America had.
However bad things are in America, it is by now clear that in Germany, things are even worse — at least as far as democracy is concerned.
PS: I might ALSO point out in that DW article and headline, the AfD Party is characterized as “Far-right” (or the “Rechtsextreme AfD”) though the policies of the Parties that have long been running Germany’s Government are today much more similar to Germany’s former Nazi Party (and especially to its Operation Barbarossa policy, and to Nazi militarism, both of which those Parties seem to want to restore) than the AfD is — and THOSE are the Parties that control Deutsche Welle and all other German ‘news’-media. If today’s Germany is essentially Nazi, it nonetheless has been far more sophisticated about its propaganda than Hitler’s version of it was.
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