Tag Archives: Political issues

When Sorry Is The Hardest Word

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Vladimir Putin, speaking in Moscow today, paid tribute to the courage of “all Europeans who resisted Nazism.” He also stated something which for my generation seems to be simply a fact: that the war?s most ?ruthless and decisive? events had unfolded within the Soviet Union, whose sacrifice of 27m citizens had underpinned the Allied victory. Had the Stalin-Hitler pact held, the war in Western Europe would probably have looked very, very different. However, as the FT notes:

Mr Putin stopped short of issuing the apology demanded by the Baltic states for the four decades of Soviet occupation that followed the war. He also made no reference to the post-war division of Europe.

Why is it sometimes so hard to say sorry?
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21st Century Socialism.

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As all of Germany seems to engage either in market or Marx bashing these days, I thought it is time to add my two cents to the debate – and I’ll do it with the help of the US Europhile Jeremy Rifkin, who gave the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” an interview about an old book of his, “the end of work.” The current German debate – the “Kapitalismuskritik” (“capitalism critique”) – is the result of a surprising lack of political imagination, a lot of disappointed social democrats, an important regional election in May, and the lack of a referendum about the European Constitution that would serve to channel the electorate’s fears, as it just happens in France.

Despite the fact that almost everyone, including business professors, in Germany – just as everywhere else – agrees at least theoretically, that there are issues to be debated with respect to the way our economy works, including obvious CEOcratic excesses, the political participants don’t seem to be able to update their class-struggle vocabulary to the needs of the 21st century. While I always thought “the left” had won a conceptional edge over so-called free-market fetishists by accepting that markets are “one coordinational mechanism among others”, I’m not sure about that anymore after having to endure the conflicting and confusing use of so many economic terms by leading German Social Democrats.

Thus, I suppose it was a good idea of the German government to invite Jeremy Rifkin to talk about his ideas concerning the future, or rather the end of work as we know it.
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EU or USSR ?

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I just read that a 4 year long investigation of Silvio Berlusconi was completed and that the investigating magistrates conclude that he missappropriated and did not pay taxes on “276,9 milioni di dollari, 9,4 miliardi di lire, 13,5 milioni di franchi svizzeri, 2 milioni di franchi francesi, 548.000 fiorini olandesi, a cui si aggiungono altre somme ancora da “quantificare”. ” According to the investigating magistrates the tax evasion continued for a while following a system “”elaborato negli anni ’80, e da allora costantemente seguito, fino al ’95”. (which means that Silvio was cheating on taxes while he was prime minister).

All in all it sounds like a rather important story wouldn’t you say ? However there was no (zero) mention of this on TG1 (main public nightly newscast) nor does any mention appear on televideo (text news on TV also public sector). Evidently the official accusation (based on banking records) that the prime minister is a megacrook isn’t news.

Which brings me to my question. Is this approach to news more typical of the European Union or of the Soviet Union ?

More on crime and (lenient) punishment

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If you are interested in the issues raised by the case of Wolfgang Daschner (discussed in two earlier posts), you might wish to acquaint yourself with the similar case of Alexander Holmes.

I mentioned this case in comments to the earlier of those two posts. I also mentioned that you really ought to read it. Happily, you can now do so even if you are reading afoe on your PDA and have foolishly left your leather-bound volumes of the Federal Cases at home. You’ll find the report of United States v. Holmes on the website of the State University of New York at Buffalo. The University deserves a hat-tip for making this report easily available to anybody with an internet connection. It is one of the most fascinating court reports ever written, and unlike most is also a cracking read. (And, unlike more modern reports, it records the arguments of counsel as well as the opinion of the court.)

At first blush, Holmes’s story doesn’t seem similar to Daschner’s at all. The crime for which Holmes was tried was far graver than Daschner’s. And, crucially, Holmes was not an agent of the state. Holmes’s story tells us nothing about whether torture may be justified and, if so, under what circumstances. But Holmes illustrates, even more dramatically than does Daschner, the problem faced by the state when a good man is driven to a terrible deed by overwhelming circumstances entirely beyond his control.
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Red Ribbons. Not just For Ukraine.

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HIV infections are once again rising in the EU and other parts of the West, particularly among younger people, because funding for awareness programmes has been slashed for years and fortunate medical advances in anti-retroviral treatment and a rising life expectancy of those infected are (thus) too often leading to a perception of HIV/AIDS as a chronic illness rather than a fatal disease.

In the US, the problem has been aggravated by the religious right’s efforts to abandon pragmatic policies in favor of a dogmatic prevention policy based predominantly on “abstinence only.”

Yet, in addition to some parts of Asia and large parts of Subsaharan Africa, where the virus is already out of control, Eastern Europe is extremely affected. In fact, as Dr. Peter Piot., head of UNAids, explained yesterday, the situation could hardly be more dramatic – the infection rate in Russia and the surrounding countries “…bears alarming similarities to the situation … faced 20 years ago in Africa” and is “perilously close to [the] tipping point” of spreading quickly through the entire population.

Ukraine, the country watched by the world these days seems particularly vulnerable. Despite well funded prevention efforts deemed “adequate and efficient” by UNAids, according to the agency’s 2004 report Ukraine

“has the highest prevalence of HIV amongst the CIS countries [1,4% of all “adults” aged 15-49]. Since 1995, the virus has spread dramatically, first due to HIV transmission among injecting drug users, but lately also increasingly through sexual transmission. In 2002, 74% of HIV-infected people were injecting drug users, 40% were women and about 64% were under the age of 29.

Thus, In addition to orange ribbons, red ribbons aren’t going out of style any time soon there. For additional info, the BBC has a nice interactive map showing the global spread of HIV based on the 2002 UNAids report.

In Other Important News.

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To those of you, gentle readers, who have only recently discovered afoe, it may be interesting to find out that we’re not usually an – almost – single issue blog. Quite to the contrary. However, one unfortunate consequence of having only limited resources is the obligation to choose how to use them. When we chose to make Ukraine a priority, it was unavoidable to write less about other important issues.

Yet there is one thing in particular that I would like to mention: Europe may have stood up for citizen rights in Ukraine, yet at home, things do not always look as brightly. According to a report by statewatch.org, the Council of the European Union has asked the European Parliament to “use its urgency procedure to rush through the measure on mandatory fingerprinting and biometric passports [(draft as pdf)] for all EU citizens at its plenary session [this] week (1-2 December).”
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Raise Your Hand If You’re Sick Of Hearing “Old Europe” and “New Europe”

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Glenn Reynolds made the following observation: “Well, New Europe has done pretty well on this front, with active and vigorous support [of the Ukrainian protestors] from Poland, Lithuania, and the Czechs. Old Europe, not so much.”

This is glib. Poland is indeed taking the lead in negotiating a solution — no surprise, since they’re right next door — but is there any basis for saying the protestors don’t enjoy much support from “Old Europe”?
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Tough On Software Patents.

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The Register informs that the new member states are already making a difference:

“The Polish government has withdrawn its support for the European software patent directive. At a cabinet meeting in Warsaw yesterday, officials concluded that the directive does not meet its original objective of limiting patents on software and business methods in Europe.

According to a statement from the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), without Polish support the bill is 16 votes short of a qualified majority, and cannot be passed. This is due, in part, to the new voting weights allocated to each member state.

…

“The questionable compromise that the EU Council reached in May was the biggest threat ever to our economic growth, and to our freedom of communication,” said Wladyslaw Majewski, president of the Internet Society of Poland. “The desire of the patent system and the patent departments of certain large corporations must never prevail over the interests of the economy and society at large.”

Autodaf

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Rocco Buttiglione, who resigned as Italian candidate for EU commissioner last week, now believes he can turn his political defeat into victory and form new religious movement in Europe (see related afoe post here). According to the Guardian –

At a debate entitled “The trial of the Catholic witch” in Milan’s Teatro Nuovo on Saturday, Mr Buttiglione said what happened to him in the EU was “a gift from God”, which he hoped would force debate over the religious discrimination in “politically correct Europe”.

He said he had received thousands of letters of support from sympathisers across Europe and from Muslim and Jewish leaders in Italy. “You can’t have a political community without a conscience and without values,” he said, inspired by the role of the Christian vote in the US election.

Very true. Let me repeat that: You can’t have a political community without a conscience and without values. It’s just that both terms are simply labels whose meanings are as individual as it gets.

And we shall keep it that way.