Category: Europe

Fascism is Back in Europe

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In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Fascism had as its philosophical basis the idea that liberal democracy had failed.

Well, the current President of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is making exactly same argument:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an “illiberal state,” citing Russia and Turkey as examples.

The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.

………

Orban, who has fueled employment with public works projects, said this weekend that he wants to replace welfare societies with a “workfare” state. He has earlier said more centralized control was needed to confront multinational companies such as banks and energy firms, to escape from “debt slavery,” and to protect Hungarians from becoming a “colony” of the EU.

Orban said his “illiberal democracy” won’t deny the “fundamental values” of liberalism, such as “freedom.”

Am I the only one who think that Hungary in 2014 is looking a lot like Italy in 1924.

Not good.

When juxtaposed with the ECB working too hard at fighting imaginary inflation, though not to the extremes taken the German central bank in the 1930s, it’s not tough to imagine Europe at war again before I die.

Well, This Explains Something About the MH17 Shootdown

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Bill Sweetman has a very good article on the Buk missile system, and how it was likely deployed, and how this contributed to the shoot-down of the Malaysian Airlines jet:

With mounting evidence that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian separatist rebels who believed they were engaging a military aircraft, attention is focusing on the Russian-built Almaz-Antey Buk-M1 ground-based air defense system (GBADS) that destroyed the airliner.

The Buk-M1 (SA-11 Gadfly to NATO) can be used by minimally trained operators to deliver a lethal attack, without the safeguards built into other comparable GBADS, an Aviation Week analysis shows. It is also one of the two GBADS — both of Soviet origin — that are most widely distributed in conflict zones with the potential for large-scale, cross-border or civil violence.

The feature that makes the Buk-series weapons uniquely dangerous was introduced in the 1970s when Tikhomirov NIIP, now part of Almaz-Antey, designed the system to replace the 2K12 Kub low-altitude missile system, known to NATO as the SA-6 Gainful. (The similar names are coincidental: “Kub” means “cube” and “Buk” means “beech.”)

The Buk transporter-erector-launcher is designed to operate both as a part of an integrated air defense system (IADS) and independently, and this capability is what probably led to the incident:

The designers of the replacement Buk system had anticipated this problem. In addition to a new radar vehicle – the Phazotron 9S18M, Snow Drift to NATO – they fitted each launch vehicle with its own X-band multi-mode radar, under a radome on the front of the rotating launch platform. The vehicle is defined as a transporter/erector/launcher and radar (Telar). Similar to a fighter radar, the Telar radar (known to NATO as Fire Dome) has search, track and illuminator functions and can scan through a 120-deg. arc, independent of the movement of the platform.

This feature may have been a crucial factor in the destruction of MH17. The Fire Dome radar’s main job was to permit simultaneous engagement of more targets – one per Telar – under control of the battery’s 9S18M Snow Drift. But the Soviet military and the designers installed a set of backup modes that would permit the Telars to detect and attack targets autonomously, in the event the Snow Drift was shut down or destroyed by NATO’s rapidly improving anti-radar missiles.

The autonomous modes are intended for last-ditch use by the Telar operators, not the more highly trained crews in the battery command vehicle. According to an experienced analyst of Russian-developed radar, the automatic radar modes display targets within range. The operator can then command the system to lock up the target, illuminate and shoot.

Critically, these backup modes also bypass two safety features built into the 9S18M Snow Drift radar: a full-function identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system and non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) modes. The IFF system uses a separate interrogator located above the main radar antenna and most likely will have been upgraded to current civilian standards.

The 9S18M introduced new NCTR processing technology, according to a 1998 interview with Buk designer Ardalion Rastov. NCTR techniques are closely held, but one of the most basic – jet engine modulation, or the analysis of beats and harmonics in the radar return that are caused by engine fan or compressor blades – should easily discriminate among a 777 with high-bypass turbofans, a turboprop transport or an Su-25 attack fighter.

There is no sign of an IFF interrogator on the Buk Telar’s Fire Dome radar or elsewhere on the vehicle. In normal operation, it would not be necessary since the target’s identity would be verified (according to the prevailing rules of engagement) before target data was passed to the Telar. Other GBADS also leave identification to the main search radar and the command-and-control center; however, the launch units cannot engage and fire without central guidance. The Buk’s combination of lethality and lack of IFF/NCTR is unique.

In a heavy SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) environment, the capability to operate autonomously, with the main battery turning on only briefly, and then passing the general targeting parameters to the TELs would be highly desirable.

However, in a situation like the Ukrainian civil war, where the rebels clearly are not operating an IADS, nor they are even operating as a complete Buk system.  They are operating as a lone TEL.

No central guidance, acquisition radar, no IFF, no trained command center, no kidding.

Why on earth airlines were routing aircraft through the Ukraine in such a situation, and the rebels possession of Buk TELs was well known, is completely beyond me.

Best Soccer Hooliganism Ever!!!1!!! – Stellar Parthenon

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It was at the World Cup, when the US team played the German team:

As Germany basks in its World Cup victory, it’s easy to forget that one of the most telling geopolitical moments of the tournament came during the Germany-U.S. game. As American fans chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”, the Germans countered with, “N-S-A! N-S-A! N-S-A!”

The author tries to make the bigger point about America’s role in the world, that our allies are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of the indispensable America.

While I agree that this is true, particularly with regard to the next generation coming online, this is not my takeaway on this story.

My takeaway is that Germans must be the cleverest soccer rowdies in the world, though I will acknowledge that, “cleverest soccer rowdy,” is a lot like, “world’s hairiest naked mole rat.”

If You Can’t Make School Vouchers Work in Sweden, You Can’t Make it Work Anywhere

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It turns out that Milton Friedman education reform, much like all of his real word ideas, has turned out to be a huge clusterf%$#:

Every three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and languages. Across all subjects, America ranked squarely in the middle of the pack when the tests were first given in 2000, and its position hardly budged over the next dozen years.

 The angst over U.S. student performance—and its implications for the American workforce of the near future—is inevitably accompanied by calls for education reform: greater accountability, more innovation. Just as inevitable are the suggestions for how more accountability and innovation could be realized: more charter schools, more choice, less bureaucratic oversight.

 Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.

 ………

 But Swedish school reforms did incorporate the essential features of the voucher system advocated by Friedman. The hope was that schools would have clear financial incentives to provide a better education and could be more responsive to customer (i.e., parental) needs and wants when freed from the burden imposed by a centralized bureaucracy. And the Swedish market for education was open to all, meaning any entrepreneur, whether motivated by religious beliefs, social concern, or the almighty dollar, could launch a school as long as he could maintain its accreditation and attract “paying” customers.

 For a while, at least if media accounts of the reforms are any indication, things looked like they were going pretty well. Voucher school students consistently outperformed their counterparts at government schools; in 2008, the London Telegraph described the reforms’ impact as “tremendous.” The number of private schools increased tenfold in less than a decade, with a majority run as for-profits.

 But in the wake of the country’s nose dive in the PISA rankings, there’s widespread recognition that something’s wrong with Swedish schooling. As part of ongoing efforts to determine the root cause, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (the equivalent of the U.S. federal government’s Department of Education) called for a regrading of a subset of standardized tests administered during 2010 and 2011. In total, nearly 50,000 students at all grade levels from more than 700 schools had their tests in English, Swedish, science, and math re-evaluated.

BTW, Friedman’s ideas were implemented for about a year at the beginning of the brutally totalitarian rule of Augusto Pinochet with the assistance of his acolytes, the “Chicago Boys”.

After less than a decade, these “reforms” collapsed under the pressure of incompetence and corruption:

After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile’s public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet’s Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalise several of the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)

If you hear Milton Friedman’s name invoked in support of an idea, be very, very afraid.*

*Full disclosure, I do agree with Milton Friedman that Marijuana should be legalized.†
†More full disclosure: I know Milton Friedman’s son, David Friedman, though our discussions have entirely dealt with medieval history.

Un-Dirtyword_Believable

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The German parliamentary committee investigating the NSA may, “may revert to typewriters,” in order to thwart spying from the Americans:

German politicians are considering a return to using manual typewriters for sensitive documents in the wake of the US surveillance scandal.

 The head of the Bundestag’s parliamentary inquiry into NSA activity in Germany said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV programme that he and his colleagues were seriously thinking of ditching email completely.

 Asked “Are you considering typewriters” by the interviewer on Monday night, the Christian Democrat politican Patrick Sensburg said: “As a matter of fact, we have – and not electronic models either”. “Really?” the surprised interviewer checked. “Yes, no joke,” Sensburg responded.

 “Unlike other inquiry committees, we are investigating an ongoing situation. Intelligence activities are still going on, they are happening,” said Sensburg.

You know, the magic slate works to.

During the cold war, the members of the American embassy assumed that they were bugged, and they used these 99¢ toys to communicate when they wanted not to be overheard.  (No, this is not a joke)

We live in profoundly strange times.

Germany Spurns U.S. Offer to Join “The Club”

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In an attempt to ameliorate German concerns over spying on its citizens, Angela Merkel has been offered membership in special intelligence sharing regime occupied by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, colloquially known as the Five Eyes Pact.

She has turned down this offer:

U.S. Ambassador John Emerson made his way to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin armed with a plan to head off the worst diplomatic clash of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship.

Emerson came to the July 9 meeting with an offer authorized in Washington: provide Germany a U.S. intelligence-sharing agreement resembling one available only to four other nations. The goal was to assuage Merkel and prevent the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Berlin.

It wasn’t enough.

The same morning, across the boundary once marked by the Berlin Wall, Merkel convened her top ministers following the 9:30 a.m. Cabinet meeting on the sixth floor of the Chancellery and resolved to ask the U.S. intelligence chief to leave German soil.

Merkel, who ultimately determined the government’s course, had to act. Public and political pressure after more than a year of accusations of American espionage overreach, stoked by indignation at the lack of a sufficient response from Washington, had left the German government with no alternative.

“We don’t live in the Cold War anymore, where everybody probably mistrusted everybody else,” Merkel, who has previously reserved her Cold War-mentality accusations for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF today.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, we see how, when we allow our state security apparatus to operate unsupervised, those in charge of providing intelligence on our opponents serve their own narrow institutional interests, and not the interests of our nation.

Unfortunately, there currently is no political will to keep our intelligence agencies on a leash.

And In Yet Another Case of Our Security State F%$#ing It Up for the Rest of Us

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The CIA hits the trifecta.

First,  we discover that the CIA conveniently forgot to tell Barack Obama about that spy being caught before he talked with Angela Merkel:

When President Obama placed a call to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany last Thursday, he had a busy agenda: to consult with a close ally and to mobilize wavering Europeans to put more pressure on Russia to end its covert incursions in Ukraine.

 What Mr. Obama did not know was that a day earlier, a young German intelligence operative had been arrested and had admitted that he had been passing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency.

 While Ms. Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call, the fact that the president was kept in the dark about the blown spying operation at a particularly delicate moment in American relations with Germany has led frustrated White House officials to question who in the C.I.A.’s chain of command was aware of the case — and why that information did not make it to the Oval Office before the call.

You know, sometimes this is judgement call when you tall the boss about a f%$#-up.

When your boss is about to talk to the victim of said f%$#-up, and it is likely that said victim knows, this most certainly isn’t one of these cases.

Heads need to roll at the CIA, and not just Brennan.  You need some of the long time professionals who decided to withhold this information to be gone as well.

But it gets better.  You see, the Germans caught a 2nd CIA mole:

German authorities are investigating the second case of a government employee suspected of spying on confidential government affairs for US secret services within a week.

 Public prosecutors confirmed that the home and office of a defence ministry employee in the greater Berlin area had been searched on Wednesday morning.

 They told the Guardian that a search had been conducted “under suspicion of secret agent activity” and that evidence – including computers and several data storage devices – had been seized for analysis. The federal prosecutor’s office confirmed that no arrest had yet been made.

 According to Die Welt newspaper, the staffer being investigated is a soldier who had caught the attention of the German military counter-intelligence service after establishing regular contact with people thought to be working for a US secret agency.

 The news came just days after a member of the German intelligence agency BND confessed to having passed more than 200 confidential files to a contact at the CIA.

 The new case is not thought to be directly related to that of the BND staffer. However, one government insider familiar with the case told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the new case being investigated was “more serious” than that of the BND spy, in which the sold documents are thought to have been of limited value.

 Last week’s spying scandal gave a detailed picture of how US security agencies manage to recruit foreign agents. The staffer, employed at the German intelligence agency’s department for foreign deployments, had managed to establish contact with the CIA after emailing the US embassy in Germany.

 At a meeting in a Salzburg hotel, the CIA then equipped the BND employee with a specially encrypted laptop, which allowed the agent to keep in touch with the US secret service on a weekly basis: every time he opened a programme disguised as a weather app, a direct connection was established with a contact in America.

 The BND employee, who is said to have a physical disability and a speech impediment, received around 25,000 euros (£20,000) for 218 confidential documents, though sources within the intelligence service told German newspapers that the 31-year-old had been motivated less by financial interests than by a craving for recognition.

 After the CIA had apparently lost interest in him, he had offered his services to the Russian general consulate in Munich, inadvertently catching the attention of the German counter-espionage agency.

And in response to this, Germany has expelled the CIA’s Berlin station chief:

The German government on Thursday demanded the removal of the top American spy in the country, the strongest evidence yet that mounting revelations about widespread American intelligence operations in Germany have gravely damaged relations between once close allies.

The decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly announce the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin station chief was seen as a highly symbolic expression of the deep anger and hurt that German officials have felt since the exposure of the American espionage operations.

It is likely to force another reassessment inside the C.I.A. and other spy agencies about whether provocative espionage operations in friendly nations are worth the risk to broader foreign policy goals. One such assessment was conducted last summer, when President Obama ordered a halt to the tapping of Ms. Merkel’s phone after it came to light because of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Current and former American officials said that the Berlin station chief, who works undercover, has been in the position for about a year. It was his predecessor in the job, the officials said, who oversaw the recruitment of the German intelligence officer arrested last week who has reportedly told his interrogators he was spying for the C.I.A., touching off a storm of criticism of the United States. German investigators are also looking at a second case of an official inside the Defense Ministry who may have been working for the Americans.

The expulsion of a C.I.A. station chief — the ranking American intelligence officer in a foreign country — was a staple of the Cold War, but it is a move almost never made by allies. “It’s one thing to kick lower-level officers out, it’s another thing to kick the chief of station out,” said one former C.I.A. officer with extensive experience working on European operations.

The closest precedent may be an episode in 1995, when the C.I.A. station chief in Paris, his deputy and two other agency officers were expelled for trying to pay French officials for intelligence on France’s negotiating position in trade talks. But Thursday’s move is potentially more significant, since the intelligence cooperation between the United States and Germany has historically been far closer than that with the French.

It is almost certain that the BND will be all over the CIA activities in the country for the forseeable future.

German ‘double agent’ is arrested on suspicion of spying for the U.S.

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An agent at the BND, the German intelligence service, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US:

German detectives have arrested a man suspected of spying for the United States in what could prove the ‘biggest scandal involving a German-American double agent since the Second World War’.

 The 31-year-old German citizen was being questioned today on suspicion of snooping on Germany’s parliamentary inquiry into the NSA affair.

 According to one German newspaper, he was first arrested amid suspicions he tried to make contact with Russian intelligence, only to confess he was in fact spying for the Americans.

………

The man has admitted passing to an American contact details about a special German parliamentary committee set up to investigate the spying revelations made by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, two politicians, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

Both lawmakers are members of the nine-person parliamentary control committee, whose meetings are confidential, and which is in charge of monitoring German intelligence.

The parliamentary committee investigating the NSA affair also holds some confidential meetings.

(emphasis mine)

First, let me state the obvious: Allies spy on each other. It’s a fact of life.

In a properly run intelligence service, this tends to be low key, and it’s confined to items of direct security interests, things like divining the relationship with other states, basic positions in negotiations, potentially military technology, etc.

This is not this. This is the CIA/NSA/etc. spying on an official parliamentary inquiry because they are worried that the revelations might embarrass them personally.

This is stupid, and, as I have noted many times before, it is indicative of an intelligence apparatus that is completely out of control of either our defense and diplomatic establishment, to say nothing of the the President.

This is insane.

And finally, Glenn Greenwald comes very close to saying that the origins of this story has nothing to do with Edward Snowden, so there is necessarily a 2nd  leaker as its source:

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who has worked closely with exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, says there may be a second leaker providing the NSA’s secrets to the press.

Two German media reports co-authored by former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum are the cause of his suspicion.

The first report was published in December by Der Spiegel and describes a 50-page catalog of NSA surveillance tools. The second came last week from the German broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), detailing NSA surveillance of people who use Tor and other online privacy services.

Both articles “notably fail to mention anything about the sourcing for the documents,” Greenwald tells U.S. News. “That’s particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents – including Der Spiegel – specifically identified him as the source.”

Bruce Schneier, a technology security expert who worked with Greenwald to evaluate the cache of documents Snowden leaked, offered similar speculation on his blog Thursday.

“I do not believe that this [information about Tor surveillance] came from the Snowden documents,” Schneier wrote. “I also don’t believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there’s a second leaker out there.”

Seriously, this is a bureaucracy to run amok, and the fact that we have to rely on the kindness of leakers to provide any oversight scares the hell out of me.

“Right to be Forgotten,” My Ass

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Robert Peston, Economics Editor at the BBC, was notified by Google that it was removing one of his blog posts from its European search index in accordance with the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling giving people “The Tight to be Forgotten”:

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:
Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/ robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.

Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.

So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?

Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new “right to be forgotten”, following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

(emphasis original)

The only person mentioned in this article was the disgraced former head of Merrill Lynch, Stan O’Neill, but the Ex-Merrill CEO has denied any knowledge of this request, though this is a kind of non-denial denial, where he might have hired a law form, or someone like Reputation.com to monitor his online presence, and they sent the request at his request.

You will notice that O’Neill did not deny that he had taken action to improve his reputation on the web, only that he lacked specific knowledge of this request.

In an update, Mr. Peston suggests that the request might have come from someone who commented on his post, since a search for Mr. O’Neill still pulls up the post, but I did a search of Google.co.uk for all of the commenter’s who left a proper name, and they all came up as well.

The Guardian revealed that they had been notified that 3 sets of articles, about a lying soccer ref, French Post-It® art, and a lawyer on trial for fraud.

This is, of course, a complete clusterf%$#, as was predicted when this ruling came down.

I So Want to See this Covered on the Daily Show

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While posing for a photograph, an American student fell off a statue of a Giant Vagina and had to be rescued by firemen:

………

On Friday afternoon, a young American in Tübingen had to be rescued by 22 firefighters after getting trapped inside a giant sculpture of a vagina. The Chacán-Pi (Making Love) artwork by the Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara has been outside Tübingen University’s institute for microbiology and virology since 2001 and had previously mainly attracted juvenile sniggers rather than adventurous explorers.

According to De la Jara, the 32-ton sculpture made out of red Veronese marble is meant to signify “the gateway to the world”.

Police confirmed that the firefighters turned midwives delivered the student “by hand and without the application of tools”.

The mayor of Tübingen told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that he struggled to imagine how the accident could have happened, “even when considering the most extreme adolescent fantasies. To reward such a masterly achievement with the use of 22 firefighters almost pains my soul.”

I want this to get the Daily Show treatment.

I am not sure what is weirder, the Germans having a giant vagina sculpture, or someone getting stuck in it.

Help me Jon Stewart, you’re my only hope.

Trying New Things………

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Cornish (Devonian) pastys just went into the oven.

First time I’ve ever tried them.

I used a very basic recipe (PDF).

To the Americans out there, “Swede” is Rutabaga.

We will see how it goes.

Filling (beef, swede, potatoes, and onions with salt and pepper) seems pretty simple, but I am concerned about the theoretically but not really as simple crust (flour, water, various fats, salt).

As an FYI, the oldest record of a pasty is in neighboring Devon, not Cornwall, so, notwithstanding the EU’s Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) designation of the savory pastry.

I Got my Ass Owned

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When I wrote about evidence that Poland training Right Wing Paramilitaries from the Ukraine, I relied (and noted at the time) that the story came from a translation of a Polish weekly by a 911 truther.

Well, it appears that the original source, the Polish publication Nie is a news and PARODY publication, much along the lines of Le Canard Enchainé, which has both broken news, and done parody.

As Thierry Meyssan notes, “This article is based on information obtained by the Polish opposition. I erroneously cited as my source the satirical weekly Nie, which published a pastiche mixing truths and non-truths. The data it provides needs to be verified.”

Needless to say, 911 truthers are inherently unreliable sources, so without alternate credible sources, I will not publish.

Note also that Google translate is not adequate for many foreign sources for verification.

My apologies.

911 Truther Links Polish Government to Right Wing Paramilitaries in Ukraine

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There are reports that the Polish government gave military training to fascist militia members from the Ukraine:

The Polish left-wing weekly Nie (No) published a startling witness account of the training given to the most violent of the EuroMaidan activists.

According to this source, in September 2013, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector (Sector Pravy), allegedly in the context of a university exchange program. In reality, the guests were not students, and many were over 40. Contrary to their official schedule, they did not go to the Warsaw University of Technology, but headed instead for the police training center in Legionowo, an hour’s drive from the capital. There, they received four weeks of intensive training in crowd management, person recognition, combat tactics, command skills, behavior in crisis situations, protection against gases used by police, erecting barricades, and especially shooting, including the handling of sniper rifles.

Such training took place in September 2013, while the Maidan Square protests were allegedly triggered by a decree suspending preparations for the signing of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, which was issued by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on November 21, i.e. two months later.

The Polish weekly refers to photographs attesting to the training, which show the Ukrainians in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing.

Let me be clear: this source is highly dubious.

I know nothing of the Polish weekly Nei, and the machine translation is anything but clear, but I do know that the author of this article, Thierry Meyssan, is a 911 truther, and hence highly suspect.

That being said, if there is one thing that is certain about “Tradecraft”, as some are wont to call covert activities, it is that Poland would not do something like this without explicit support and approval from the US state security apparatus.

After all, they supported the CIA’s establishment of torture sites following 911.

So the short form is that if this report is accurate, and that is a big if, then the CIA or the State Department had to give support and approval.

Hopefully someone with a bit more journalistic credibility will look into this.  (It’s one of the reasons that I put “911 Truther” in the hed: it is simply not credible at this time).

Not Enough Bullets………

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The hedge fund vultures have outdone themselves, the first example are the pukes who are buying shares in the in the 1983 Marine Corpse bombing in Beirut:

Iran is still a pariah in the international community, but one hedge fund thinks it will eventually pay $1.8 billion as ordered by a U.S. court.

RD Legal Capital hopes to raise up to $100 million to buy the rights to payments from families of the 241 U.S. Marines killed in a terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. A federal court in 2007 found Iran liable for the truck-bomb attack, which led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from war-torn Lebanon.

Iran, of course, is not on the best of terms with the U.S., and the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. Still, Iran’s central bank is appealing the $1.8 billion verdict against it.

Victims’ families agreed to allow RD to buy stakes in the judgment. The firm will not buy out any of the beneficiaries, instead investing only in pieces of each of the 151 claims. The Iran fund is RD’s first ever focused on a single case, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And then there are the vulture funds who are buying into the abject misery and death that the banksters (and the Germans) have caused in Greece and Portugal:

Yield-hungry investors are flocking back to Greek and Portuguese markets, shunned by international buyers for four years, as the outlook for the bailed-out countries improves and alternatives look more expensive or increasingly risky.

Portuguese and Greek shares and bonds have been the best performers in Europe in 2014, and funds invested in them are making a killing, Thomson Reuters data shows.

Investors say they are driven by economic improvement, which provides fresh impetus to an initial bounce triggered by the European Central Bank’s pledge in 2012 to save the euro.

Potential investment alternatives are also less tempting. Tensions between the West and Russia and global growth concerns cloud the outlook for similar-yielding emerging markets, while a 1-1/2 year rally has shrunk returns elsewhere in euro zone debt.

“It’s not so much an interest-rate-driven rally but much more a structural shift and a perception that the euro crisis is behind us,” said Franz Wenzel, chief strategist at AXA Investment Managers, which manages assets worth about 550 billion euros ($760 billion).

After nearly crashing out of the euro zone in 2012, Greece’s recession is easing, while the Portuguese economy is already rebounding. Lisbon is due to exit its international bailout in about two months.

As much as Timothy Geithner might disagree, there has to be well defined limits to what is a legal financial speculative instrument.

These people are F%$#ing ghouls.

Oh Crap

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Russia has annexed the Crimea.

This is going to be a complete clusterf%$3 for everyone involved, particularly the people of the Ukraine, about whom all the actors profess to care.

There is a lot of blame to allocate:

  • Some of it goes to Vladimir Putin, because, after all, he is the one sending troops.
  • Some of it also goes to the EU, which is so hell bent on expansion that it ignored the nature of its premature attempts to bring the Ukraine into its its orbit because ……… Europe.
  • Viktor Yanukovych for his abject corruption and venality.
  • Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko for their abject corruption and venality, which is what got Yanukovych elected.
  • The oligarchs, because ……… oligarchs.

That being said, the decision to support and bolster the Fascists in the Svoboda party and the Right Sector militia, and make them the tip of the spear in the protests that drove Yanukovych from power after a deal had already been cut, tripping every switch in Russian psyche, that wasn’t any of them.

That was us.  That was neocon Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland and our State Department, and our CIA, and our front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy that put the Fascists in control of the defense and interior portfolios in the new government.

The Neocons have been wrong about everything since before they were Republicans, when they were staffers for Scoop Jackson’s (D-WA) staff, and yet they continue to drive our foreign policy decisions.

Where are the “Adults in the Room” who are supposed to keep the metaphorical firearms out of the metaphorical hands of metaphorical children (neocons)?

Theoretically, Barack Obama, who won the primaries, and later election as president, over his opposition to “stupid wars”, and so should be keeping these people’s hands away from the reigns of power.

The fact that Nuland was promoted from spokesman to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs by Secretary of State John Kerry, but Obama is in charge, and the decision to place a former Cheney aide in such a position is ultimately his decision.

Or, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point, the Cossacks work for the Czar, which is kind of ironic, because the Cossacks actually come from the Ukraine.

    Thank You Victoria Nuland

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    Thanks to neocon support right-wing nationalists Ukraine, courtesy of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, Ur-neocon Robert Kagan’s wife, a deal got killed, and there was coup in the Ukraine, followed by anti-ethnic Russian legislation, which was in turn followed by the Russian occupation of the Crimea.

    Well, now we have an overwhelming vote for the Crimea to join Russia:

    Russian state media said Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia on Sunday, as Kiev accused Moscow of pouring forces into the peninsula and warned separatist leaders “the ground will burn under their feet”.

    With over half the votes counted, 95.5 percent had chosen the option of annexation by Moscow, the head of the referendum commission, Mikhail Malyshev, said two hours after polls closed. Turnout was 83 percent, he added – a high figure given that many who opposed the move had said they would boycott the vote.

    Western powers and leaders in Kiev denounced it as a sham.

    Underlining how Moscow’s military takeover of the peninsula two weeks ago has driven Russia and the West into a crisis with echoes of the Cold War, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama spoke by telephone and, according to the Kremlin, the Russian and U.S. presidents agreed on a need to cooperate to stabilize Ukraine.

    This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland, and those who have decided to employ her in (Obama, Clinton, Kerry) need to realize that neocon triumphulism has been a recipe for a US foreign policy disaster.

    I’m not saying that neocons should not be employed by the State Department, but I am saying that they should not be put in positions of authority.

    Witness how we are now repeating the South Ossetia debacle all over again.

    It’s like giving an AK-47 to a hyperactive 6-year old child.

    From the Department of Double Standards………

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    I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

    The big news in diplomacy recently is the leaking of a conversation between Victoria Nuland,the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and Geoff Pyatt, the Ambassador to the Ukraine, regarding the recent political upheavals in that former Soviet republic.

    Diplomatic heads have been exploding over Neuland telling Pyatt, “F%$# the EU.

    America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.

     “F%$# the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country. The call appears to have been intercepted and released on YouTube, accompanied by Russian captions of the private and candid conversation.

     Although the US state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been “tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia’s role”.

     ………

     State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”.

     She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

    Well, first, I would argue that if a diplomat decides conduct a conversation over unsecured cell phones, they pretty much had it coming, and second, given the very recent history of the NSA targeting the sex lives of domestic political opponents of the Bush administration.

    If intercepting an unencrypted call between two people discussing how to intervene in political instability on a nation state bordering your own is “a new low in Russian tradecraft,” then there are simply no words to describe what the NSA has been doing against domestic critics of our government.

    Neither the EU’s outrage over the comments about the EU, which is a participant in the conflict, and therefore cannot be a good faith interlocutor on this issue, nor the US’s crocodile tears over being spied upon are justified.

    They are simply exercises in self serving hypocrisy.

    Would You Let the Vampire Squid Get a Hold of Your Dong?

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    It appears that the coalition in Denmark has collapsed over this issue:

    After a recent spate of controversies and ministerial resignations, the Danish centre-left government suffered another blow on Thursday when the Socialist People’s party (SF) left the ruling coalition amid anger over Goldman Sachs‘s investment in Denmark’s state-owned energy company.

     Goldman’s 8bn kroner (£900m) purchase of a 19% share in Dong Energy has been championed by the government but caused a revolt among SF’s parliamentary group. After a night of tension and discussions, SF’s leader, Annette Vilhelmsen, announced her resignation and said her party was leaving the coalition.

     “It has been a dramatic 24 hours,” Vilhelmsen said. “Yesterday it became clear to me that it wasn’t possible to unite the party. For the sake of SF, I take the consequence of this.”

     The Goldman Sachs deal was approved by the parliament’s finance committee on Thursday, but it has come under widespread scrutiny and criticism in recent weeks. A poll showed 68% of Danes were against the sale, and close to 200,000 people signed an online petition opposing the deal.

    (emphasis mine)

    Even worse, like most privatization deals, it is a hand out from taxpayers to overpaid CEOs:

    My friend Niels-Jakob Harbo Hansen and I calculated some of the financial aspects of the deal, and they don’t look that good. The bidders are offering about 107.25 kroner per share, supposedly valuing the company at 31.5 billion kroner before the investment. In addition to a healthy package of minority rights, they also get a put option for 60% of the shares: if DONG doesn’t go public within 4 years or so (and Goldman can veto that), the investors can sell 60% of their shares at a strike price equal to the purchase price of 107.25 kr per share, plus a healthy return of about 3% per year.

     That’s like an insurance policy that covers not only your loss, but also the insurance premium you originally paid, plus interest.

     Once you account for the put option, the deal values the shares at 24.5 billion kr., around 47% of book value. Maybe that’s fair because DONG just had a big loss and will be constrained by its business plan to invest in windmills and such, but it still seems awfully low. On the other hand, the investment bankers have deemed it Fair™, so who am I to question that.

     The main thing we did was to compare the deal to the most obvious alternative: the Danish government (AAA rating, 26% debt/GDP, 45% including local government) could borrow at an interest rate of about 1%, and make the investment itself. The expected loss from the deal compared to a government investment is about 2.5 billion kroner.

    So, it costs the taxpayer 3x as much as a public investment, and you can be certain that rates will go up faster than they would if the company were to remain completely publicly owned.

    Better Than Bullets

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    François Holland has gotten court approval for a 75% tax on €1 million:

    French President Francois Hollande received approval from the country’s constitutional court to proceed with his plan to tax salaries above 1 million euros at 75 percent for this year and next.

    Under Hollande’s proposal, companies will have to pay a 50 percent duty on wages above 1 million euros ($1.4 million). In combination with other taxes and social charges, the rate will amount to 75 percent of salaries above the threshold, the court wrote in a decision published today.

    “The companies that pay out remuneration above 1 million euros will, as expected, be called upon for an effort of solidarity on remuneration paid in 2013 and 2014,” the Economy Ministry said in an e-mailed statement.

    ………

    A first proposal to put the change into law was turned down by the constitutional court in December last year because the tax applied to individuals and not households. The country’s top administrative court said any rate above 66 percent would be rejected as confiscatory.

    Hollande revived the plan this year, making it apply to salaries and be paid by employers rather than individuals. The total amount is limited to 5 percent of a company’s revenue.

    I’m not sure if “company’s revenue” means total revenue (turnover) or profit (net revenue).

    Hopefully the former.

    €1 million is about $1.3 million, and I’m fine with that.  It’s a sin tax, like those on alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, (in Colorado) and gambling.

    If there is anything that the financial crisis shows, it is that excessive compensation is at least as corrosive as society as anything mentioned above.