The SPD should not boast (nd-aktuell.de)

If the Berlin SPD didn’t exist, all tenants in Berlin would already be sitting on the streets, that’s how it looks again. Joking aside. It is bitter how the construction industry and car lobby faction of the Social Democrats in the capital always manages to put itself in the right light when it is asked to offer political solutions that not only symbolically correspond to the principle that they also bear their party name.

Nothing else, however, is the moratorium on terminations, which the building and urban development senator Andreas Geisel boasts about, as well as the governing mayor, Franziska Giffey, herself. In view of the energy price and inflation crisis, which is also being fueled by a shameful war, there is no need for a symbol – or signal policy. An excess profit tax is needed, as has been discussed in the federal SPD for almost four months and was initially only handled with very sharp fingers in the Berlin SPD. Franziska Giffey believes that there is only a small step left in Berlin. Meanwhile, time is ticking. An excess profit tax would be the only effective gas levy, but that should actually already have been decided. How does the government want to prevent the energy suppliers from sending out their bills? With a friendly-emphatically put forward request? As always, Giffey grossly overestimates her authority.

And it is also not the case that the moratorium on termination laid down in the Housing Supply Act, which temporarily protects at least about a third of the tenants in the capital, was invented by the SPD. What the historic SPD had invented, however, was the possibility of socializing corporations, an equally effective tool in times when a large part of the population is threatened with slipping into poverty as a result of the distortions of the capitalist system. But what position Andreas Geisel and Co. hold on this is known. In this respect: It is better not to believe the SPD, but to demand from it!