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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (252042)	9/20/2005 12:03:05 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574006

"What a conundrum? The citizens of the former GDR are one big pain in the ass! <g>" they aren't happy. All of the differences between East and West didn't sink in. On some level, many expected to keep all their social services and get better paying jobs with full access to western goods. They didn't really see all of those things that the state did for no additional charge. So now they, for the most part, are either unemployed or making low wages, their rent is western german and not eastern german, prices are western german, etc. Eastern Germany was the wealthiest of the Eastern Block. Wealthier than even Moscow. Now they are the poor part of Germany. Well, I contend they made a mistake when they put Germany back together again. They should have started out with two countries in a very loose federation so that the GDR could have some autonomy esp. when it came to their currency; permitting them to have cheaper wages and making them the Ireland of the continent. The combo of cheaper wages and German know how would have been a great lure for all kinds of industries that instead went to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia etc. Secondly, I think the Western German underestimated the ability of the Germans of the GDR to make the transition over to capitalism. Apparently, the 20 somethings and thirty somethings in the cities were able to make the transition but the older urban East Germans as well as the young in the rural areas were not. Not that W. Germans didn't make a grand effort to help them over the hump..........its just that sometimes you can't force people to drink water even when you carry them to the source I just don't see what the Left Party is accomplishing. All it did was pull votes from the SPD like Nader did with Gore in 2000. Playing the spoiler in a tight race does nothing but create more problems IMO. ted