Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Ich bin ein Berliner
I am in Germany, in the former East Berlin... which is now just Berlin. I was here 6 years ago, and at that time the distinction between East Berlin and West Berlin was still a more significant one in the minds of most people here. In this decade that seems to have mostly changed. That may have a lot to do with the rapid gentrification that is happening on this side of town. It is actually prettier, with more of the older, often pre-WWII buildings still standing, and now that those old buildings are being renovated and modernized, it seems the east side is becoming sort of fashionable. I find it lovely here actually. It seems surprisingly quiet for such a large and important city. Walking on the cobblestone streets and looking at old buildings, it is poignant to think of how dark and violent things got here in the last century. But it feels peaceful now. The people are quite nice, and I have been happy here. I even like the sort of gloomy weather that has prevailed the last couple of days. I am staying with friends, and, ever the spoiled English-speaking American, I seem to be getting by just fine with my native language, which is fortunate because I doubt all the German words I know total much more than 30. Last night I visited with my friend Oliver who is the president of the German chapter of the Entrepreneur Organization. It was interesting to compare notes on cultures, businesses, and local organizational experiences. He has an online childrens' toy business that is about 12 times the size of my own company... quite an operation. Oliver says the entrepreneurial tradition/spirit is not as strong here as it is in the USA. One reason for this, apparently, is that Germany doesn't offer the same personal bankruptcy protections and options that exist in the USA. That means if someone fails in business, the debts can follow them around for the rest of their lives. It's understandable that people would be deterred by that prospect. On the other hand, Americans seem almost pathologically willing to throw money into all sorts of dubious schemes. Sometimes they do this with their own money, but they especially seem to enjoy talking others into taking the risk. Failure results more often than not, and the perpetrators then walk away from their messes without a backward glance. My own company has lost tens of thousands of dollars to companies that ordered product from us which they knew or should have known they could never pay for. On the national scale, our nation's history is a 230-year junkyard of monster-sized business catastrophes. In recent memory, there was the S&L scandal in the 80s, all those multi-billion-dollar bad loans to developing nations, the wave of dot-com implosions, WorldCom, Enron, on and on. Just yesterday Jeffrey Skilling got a 24-year sentence for his fraudulent Enron work, but he's still protesting his innocence and showing little if any real remorse for the damage done by his central participation in a spectacular swindle. But in his defense, the corrupt financial mechanisms employed to make that dismal dog of a company look like a thriving money machine bear a remarkable structural similarity to the methods used by the US government (in its unholy alliance with the Federal Reserve) to keep itself going. Corruption tends to flow down from the top. Remember, friends, despite what people tend to assume about the Federal Reserve, it's not federal, and there's no reserve. Look into it if you dare. They sure do smoke a lot here. The locals seem less than delighted with the Euro. What I hear is that with the changeover, wages have stayed nearly the same while prices have risen. Apparently a recent poll said that 56% of Germans favor a return to the mark. But the new European central bank is solidly established now (and headquarted in Frankfurt) and it would take something approaching a revolution to go back now. It's possible the rising price situation is worse in Berlin than elsewhere, with the influx of population and capital, along with the decision to move the seat of government from Bonn back to Berlin. Although Berlin is not very central to the reunified country, Bonn isn't really either. Berlin is not only the historic capitol, but also the country's largest city... and second only to London in the EU. The extensive system of subways, elevated trains, and streetcars here fascinates me, partly for its current state and partly because of its history. Some of the locals seem to find reasons to complain about it, but having traveled a great deal, the public transportation system here seems excellent to me. It was mostly planned and built long ago, before the partitioning of the city. That means the system was cut in two for decades, and of course its intended efficiency and flow was disrupted. But with reunification, with some planning and repairs, and knocking out some walls and repairing tracks to restore the rails to their intended pattern, the system has been put back together again in the last few years. Now if we could only do that in L.A. But unfortunately, the dismantling of that city's once-excellent streetcar system was done in a way that ensured it could never be put back together again. There is plentiful evidence to believe that that dismantling was engineered by a corporate conspiracy led by General Motors, and it was done in many American cities all at the same time. Tomorrow morning, I will fly to Lisbon for an EO conference, and then I'm planning to visit my friends in Thailand for a week or so.
