Jacob Christensen

While we’re at it: The European Parliament election campaign is so not happening up until now. Okay – we have the parties, the platforms and the candidates, but not really much in way of a campaign.

Perhaps we ought to thank the former Bendt Bendtsen who unexpectedly pulled Turkey into the non-campaign by asserting that Turkey should never be a member of the EU. The Danish People’s Party loved it, the Conservatives turned out to be split on the issue, and now one of the Liberal hopefuls have joined the chorus criticising Bendtsen.

The question now is: If we leave aside that Turkish EU membership is at least 30 to 40 years out in the future, what got into Bendtsen?

I would guess that the Conservatives wanted to keep this as a non-issue, and we don’t have any indications that Bendtsen’s move was cleared with the Conservative leadership. Perhaps he was beginning to fear that the party would be left without MEPs and looking to poach prospective Liberal and DF voters?

Who knows: Maybe Turkey will be the issue that will liven up the campaign, even if it in that case is destined to become ugly. That the Conservatives otherwise have tried to place themselves to the left of the Liberals and DF on the authoritarian-libertarian dimension just makes the picture more complicated.

Well, with a bit of help, actually.

No, no real link between the two. Or perhaps?

Matthew Yglesias considers the outcome of Chrysler filing for Chapter 11:

Looks like Chrysler will wind up in a pre-packaged bankruptcy before becoming a firm jointly owned by Fiat, the United Auto Workers, the United States of America, and Canada.

Robert Reich is skeptical of the idea of bailing out US companies, because – well, what is a US company these days:

Besides, as I’ve said before, the “American auto industry” shouldn’t be defined as auto companies whose headquarters are in the United States. The true “American auto industry” is Americans who make automobiles. At the rate the Big Three are shrinking even as they’re bailed out, foreign automakers with American plants may soon employ more Americans than the Big Three do. The Big Three have gone global anyway.

And just by accident those links appeared along with a link to a lecture at the LSE about Friedrich Engels. You know, the guy with the really big beard who played Chris Lowe to Marx’ Neil Tennant.

With capitalism in crisis, the shadow of Karl Marx is looming large. But what about the co-author of The Communist Manifesto? In advance of a major new biography, The Frock-Coated Communist, Tristram Hunt explores the life and work, the personal contradictions and ideological breakthroughs, of Friedrich Engels. Cotton-lord and communist, Engels was the man who turned Marxism into a political force – and whose vision was then brutally betrayed in the 20th century. Tristram Hunt is an historian, broadcaster and a lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London.

Right-click on the link to download the lecture.

Update: Tristram Hunt also has a column on Mr. E for May Day.

As we are rapidly approaching the 60th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany (and the defunct German Democratic Republic), Länderreport of the Deutschlandradio Kultur has been revisiting the history of the east German Länder. Interesting listening, provided you understand German.

Here are the links to the individual programmes:

1. Partition.
2. Going different ways.
3. Restart.
4. The costs.

One question which merits consideration: Was the (re)partitioning of the GDR into five länder the best solution – the Berlin-Brandenburg problem is one aspect, the economic problems of most of the new Länder another – or should the GDR have been partitioned in two or three states? Also: Was the reunification a missed window of opportunity for a reform of the organisation of the west-German Länder, both in terms of geographical and bureaucratic structures?

Willem Buiter:

[China] badly needs an unfunded pay-as-you go social security retirement scheme to boost consumption by the old. China’s fiscal position is such that the country could introduce the benefit (pension) part of the social security scheme for a number of years without having the social security tax in place!

The rest of his blog post isn’t for the faint-hearted. And that’s without mentioning the swine flu.

From the Neighbourhood, originally uploaded by jacobchristensen.

It’s not all concrete around SDU.

I am generally the last person who should advise anybody about parenting but I used to think that it was a good thing that students had children while they were – well, students. Sure, students do not have that much money, but they have a certain degree of flexibility in their lives, and we also know that demographers and doctors yak about Danish women having their children too late in life.

But as a university person, I am now obliged to say to (female) students who announce their pregnancy:

I’m so sorry. As you know, this will delay your studies and we can’t afford this. So on behalf of the Minister of Science and Technology, I must advice you to have an abortion.

Surprising? Well, as part of the drive to turn universities from research and development units into units of production (we don’t educate people in this country – we produce ST?s), the minister has come up with a bonus for each student who finishes his (!) education within the time-norm. And – drum roll – this norm expressively does not allow for parental leave.

It’s not that nobody told the minister or the ministry – they have been made aware of the situation and decided to stick with their original proposal (but then, nobody gets the minister or the ministry to change their minds).¹

And that means that university lecturers and professors must now do their utmost to prevent female students to get pregnant.

Update: The Red-Green Alliance is on the track. Cf. footnote.

1. The minister’s excuse is that it is technically impossible to see if a student has been on parental leave. Yeah, right. This is Denmark where just about everything about everybody gets registered. [↩]

HT: Camilla Sandström.

And in case you wonder, I haven’t seen any public traces of the upcoming election for the European Parliament in this part of the world.

Unemployment Fund Advertising, originally uploaded by jacobchristensen.

Lousy as a picture of a bus but it wanted to catch trade union 3F’s advertisement for the unemployment fund.

Non-Danish readers should note that unemployment insurance is voluntary in Denmark and coverage has declined during later years. Technically, unemployment funds are supposed to be independent of trade unions, but in practice there have always been close links.

Because the Lene effect is so 2008, we now have the Løkke effect.

However, just as I suspect that Løkke’s electoral potential was underestimated as long as he wasn’t the leader of the Liberal Party, I would like to see some kind of systematic analysis of short- and long-term effects of party leader change on opinion polls.

Or to put it in another way: I didn’t want to bury Løkke politically before he had had a chance to prove himself, but I also don’t want to see him as the Second Coming of Christ Uffe. Yet.