The Berlin Wall and India make The Jerk Movement possible!!!

The Jerk/Skinny Jeanz Movement is a byproduct of the fall of the Berlin Wall and India running out of currency about 20 years ago….WHAT?....Yup, the factors that have allowed young kids to go online, build social networks, create copy-written intellectual properties, and network to manufacture goods at lower prices abroad, are all results of international political policies. To explain this concept of how politics has affected The Jerk/Skinny Jeanz Movement here is an excerpt from “The World is Flat” written by Thomas L. Friedman:

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire. But it actually did so much more. It tipped the balance of power across the world toward those advocating democratic, consensual, free-market-oriented governance, and away from those advocating authoritarian rule with centrally planned economies. The Cold War had been a struggle between two economic systems – capitalism and communism – and with the fall of the wall, there was only one system left and everyone had to orient himself or herself to it one way or another. Henceforth, more and more economies would be governed from the ground up, by the interests, demands, and aspirations of the people, rather than from the top down, by the interests of some narrow ruling clique. Within two years, there was no Soviet Empire to hide behind anymore or to prop up autocratic regimes in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America. If you were not a democracy or a democratizing society, if you continued to hold fast to highly regulated or centrally planned economics, you were seen as being on the wrong side of history.

For some, particularly among the older generations, this was an unwelcome transformation. Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich, and for some who were used to the plodding, limited, but secure Socialist lifestyle – where a job, a house, an education, and a pension were all guaranteed, even if they were meager – the fall of the Berlin Wall was deeply unsettling. But for many others, it was a get-out-of-jail-free card. That is why the fall of the Berlin Wall was felt in so many more places than just Berlin, and why its fall was such a world-flattening event.

Indeed, to appreciate the far-reaching flattening effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s always best to talk to non-Germans or non-Russians. Tarun Das was heading the Confederation of Indian Industry when the wall fell in Berlin, and he saw its ripple effect felt all the way to India. “We had this huge mass of regulation and controls and bureaucracy,” he recalled. “Nehru had come to power [after the end of British colonial rule] and had a huge country to manage, and no experience of running a country. The U.S. was busy with Europe and Japan and the Marshall Plan. So Nehru looked north, across the Himalayas, and sent his team of economists to Moscow. They came back and said that this country [the Soviet Union] was amazing. They allocate resources, they give licenses, there is a planning commission that decides everything, and the country moves. So we took that model and forgot that we had a private sector . . . That private sector got put under this wall of regulation. By 1991, the private sector was there, but under wraps, and there was mistrust about business. They made profits! The entire infrastructure from 1947 to 1991 was government-owned . . . [The burden of state ownership] almost bankrupted the country. We were not able to pay our debts . . . Sure, we might have won a couple of wars with Pakistan, but that did not five the nation confidence.”

In 1991, with India running out of hard currency, Manmohan Singh, the finance minister at that time (and now the prime minister), decided that India had to open its economy. “Our Berlin Wall fell,” said Das, “and it was like unleashing a caged tiger. Trade controls were abolished. We were always at 3 percent growth, the so-called Hindu rate of growth – slow, cautious, and conservative. To make [better returns], you had to go to America. Well, three years later [after the 1991 reforms] we were at 7 percent rate of growth. To hell with poverty! Now to make it you could stay in India and become one of Forbes’ richest people in the world . . . All the years of socialism and controls had taken us downhill to the point where we had only $1 billion in foreign currency. Today we have $118 billion . . . We went from quiet self-confidence to outrageous ambition in a decade.”

This perspective, by Thomas Friedman, should allow one to see how it is possible in 2010 for teenagers in Los Angeles to collaborate with Jerkin Crewz in France and Germany on music and merchandise.