Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
Benjamin Franklin
We
have reached showdown time in Catalonia. Will tomorrow’s independence referendum
take place or not? If thwarted, how will the Catalan’s react. Catalonia
accounts for about 20% of Spain’s GDP and taxes, a double edged sword for Spain’s
already wobbly economy and budget. With the main winter tourism season just
about to get underway, will a winter of unrest cause Spanish tourism to slump?
How did Spain get to so mismanage this domestic entirely man made crisis. How
will the EUSSR Brussels bureaucrats react?
More on Monday, I think. Euros anyone?
Democracy
is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been
tried from time to time.
Winston
Churchill.
Catalonia Pledges to Hold Referendum in Defiance of Rajoy
By Esteban Duarte and Maria Tadeo
Catalonia
heads into a watershed moment in its modern history this weekend, and no one
really knows how it’s going to play out.
Spanish
government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo said Friday that there’s no way the
regional administration will pull off its plans to hold an illegal referendum
on independence Sunday. Jordi Turull, the Catalan executive’s spokesman, said
Friday in Barcelona that almost 7,000 volunteers are ready to open 2,315
polling stations across the region of 7.5 million people.
“Today we’ve defeated an authoritarian state,” Catalonia’s regional president, Carles Puidemont, said at the closing rally of the secession campaign Friday. “Each difficulty has made us stronger.”
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is deploying thousands of police to Catalonia to uphold public order ahead of a vote declared illegal by the Spanish constitutional court. The region’s bid to break away is the biggest challenge to the political settlement instituted following the death of dictator Francisco Franco that sought to tie restive regions into Spain’s new democracy.
Earlier
Friday, scores of farmers backing secession drove tractors from the provinces
into Barcelona to blockade Spanish government offices. Both sides
projected their resolve.
“All
polling stations will be in place -- even if someone tries to stop it, citizens
will still be able to vote,” Oriol Junqueras, Catalan economy vice president,
said.
After
Rajoy met with his cabinet in Madrid, his government repeated its pledge that
the referendum wouldn’t happen.
“The
government, exercising its constitutional functions, will enforce the law,”
Mendez said at a news conference. “No one is above the law, and anyone who
breaks it should face the consequences.”
Spain’s data protection agency warned that polling station workers face fines of as much as 300,000 euros ($355,000) for accessing and managing data for the electoral registry. The aviation authority said it would restrict airspace over Barcelona during the referendum weekend.
A magistrate at Catalonia’s High Court ordered Google Inc. to remove "On Votar 1-Oct" app from Google Play service, according to an email statement from Catalan supreme court. In a separate ruling, the magistrate ordered the Catalan technology agency to shut a chain of applications that potentially could be used for the vote.
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Stalemate over Catalan vote keeps Spain in suspense
CIARAN GILES and ARITZ PARRA Associated
Press
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Scores of Catalan farmers on
tractors rumbled into downtown Barcelona on Friday, driving down the city's
broad boulevards in a show of support for a potentially explosive vote on
whether the prosperous region should break away from the rest of Spain and
become Europe's newest country.
The Spanish government and secession-minded authorities in the
northeastern Catalonia region were on a collision course, with the independence
referendum still slated for Sunday despite efforts by the courts and police to
stop it.
The tractors carried the Catalan pro-independence flag, called
the "estelada," to the office of the national government's
representative in Barcelona. Similar tractor protests were being held across
Catalonia. The region's biggest farmers' union said the demonstrations were
part of their fight for "democracy and liberty."
With weeks of antagonism and tension coming to a head, neither
side was showing signs of backing down from a confrontation that has pitched
Spain into a political and constitutional crisis.
The Madrid-based Spanish government has maintained the ballot
cannot and will not happen because it contravenes the constitution, which
refers to "the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation." Any vote on
Catalan secession would have to be held across all of Spain, the government
says.
"This secessionist process has been illegal from the
start," government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo said Friday. "Since
the referendum ... won't have any political consequence, pursuing it won't do
anything but extend the damage, the harm and the disintegration that it is
already doing."
Acting on court orders, police have confiscated about 10
million ballot papers and some 1.3 million posters advertising the referendum,
and have blocked the distribution of ballot boxes. On Friday, the Catalan
police were ordered to clear out all 2,315 polling stations, most of them in
schools, by 6 a.m. Sunday to prevent the referendum from taking place.
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Elsewhere
in the wealth and jobs destroying, dying EUSSR, problems mount up for Germany,
with or without a soft or hard Brexit. In a deeply age split Germany, the next
government faces a pensions dilemma, trash their supporters or trash the young.
Meanwhile
Volkswagen’s dirty killer diesel problems just keep mounting up. Oh what an tangled web VW wove, when they
decided to deceive the world with dirty cheating diesels.
Deutsche
Bank goes back on the rocks. When the next economic downturn hits, is DB about
to be the next Lehman?
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for
the people.
Oscar Wilde
A Graying Germany Complicates Merkel's Task
Older voters have
supported the establishment, which rewards them generously. But that is
creating a dangerous rift.
by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry 29
September 2017, 15:21 GMT+1
As she builds her new coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
will be mindful of the need to counter nationalism at home and the imperative
of finding a consensus on integration in the euro zone. But the election also
exposed a demographic rift that could present an even bigger challenge to
Germany's leaders: between a graying population that backed the establishment,
and a young one that sought alternatives or stayed home.Former German President Roman Herzog warned in 2008 that Germany risked turning into a “pensioner democracy” where “older generations plunder the younger ones.” As the number of older people steadily rose, he noted, the political parties were paying disproportionate attention to them. Last week's election, where the biggest age cohort was voters over the age of 70, showed that Herzog may have been onto something. While the West is graying overall, Germany getting older faster, with the highest median age in Europe, and one of the lowest birth rates. And Germany’s future will inevitably shape the future of Europe.
The age rift played out as an establishment versus anti-establishment divide. The establishment parties (Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU; the Social Democratic Party; and the Free Democratic Party) drew their support from older voters, with CDU/CSU getting 41 percent of the over-60 vote, versus 32.9 percent nationally. Meanwhile, younger people disproportionately support either less establishmentarian parties or don’t vote, showing alienation from the political establishment that has steered Germany since the end of World War II.
Martin Schulz, the SPD candidate, campaigned on higher
pensions, while Angela Merkel’s CDU rejected
further pensions reform, which would bring a reduction in benefits. Despite
Germany’s reputation for fiscal rectitude, the country’s pensions are headed
for a cliff. Close to 80 percent of pensions remain
pay-as-you-go and therefore unsustainable given Germany’s graying.
Company-sponsored private pensions are supposed to fill the gap, but they are reported
to be 30 percent to 50 percent underfunded, and they are overwhelmingly
defined-benefit schemes. Recent reforms to raise the retirement age slightly
and introduce defined-contribution pensions schemes didn’t come close to
putting the country’s liabilities on a sustainable path.
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VW's Diesel Damages Approach $30 Billion After Surprise U.S. Hit
By Chris Reiter and Elisabeth Behrmann
Volkswagen AG took a surprise
charge of about 2.5 billion euros ($3 billion) in the third quarter as
plans to buy back or retrofit tainted diesel cars in North America proves more
complex than expected, highlighting how the scandal continues to grip the
automaker.
The additional provisions will hit operating results
in the third quarter, which will be reported on Oct. 27, the Wolfsburg,
Germany-based company said Friday
in a statement. The latest charge brings total damages from the
diesel-cheating scandal, which erupted more the two years ago, to over 25
billion euros. Volkswagen’s third-quarter operating profit was forecast at
4.45 billion euros, according to three analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
“The size
of the provision is surprisingly large, considering the numbers of cars
involved isn’t very large,” said Juergen Pieper, a Frankfurt-based analyst with
Bankhaus Metzler. “It shows VW remains some distance from coming through the
scandal.”
Volkswagen
shares, which haven’t rebounded from the crisis, fell as much as 4 percent to
132.85 euros and were down 2.9 percent at 10:07 a.m. in Frankfurt. The company
didn’t specify why the issues in the U.S. were more costly than anticipated.
The company has struggled to draw a line under the crisis. Munich prosecutors this week arrested a former Volkswagen engineer, the second person detained in the probe into cheating at the automaker’s Audi division. In addition to criminal probes in Germany, the company still faces hundreds of investor lawsuits as well as consumer complaints.
The continuing fallout from the diesel cheating crisis compounds the pressures facing the automaker as it grapples with the spending demands to develop next-generation vehicles. The world’s largest automaker plans to invest about 20 billion euros by 2030 to develop a fleet of electric cars and another 50 billion to buy the batteries needed to power the vehicles.
The move comes as the scandal set off a backlash that has led consumers to turn away from diesel technology amid concerns about pollution and driving bans. That creates problems for Volkswagen as it relies on diesel cars to boost profit and lower carbon-dioxide emissions to reach tightening European environmental targets.
Deutsche Bank Rating Cut by Fitch as Cryan Turnaround Stalls
By Michael J MooreDeutsche Bank had its long-term credit grade cut one level by Fitch Ratings late Thursday, which said the lender will take longer to revive growth under a turnaround plan unveiled in March. That came a week after Autonomous Research LLP said the lender may be “beyond repair” unless there’s a “miracle” boom at its once-mighty bond-trading business.
Cryan is struggling to boost earnings as the Frankfurt-based lender undertakes its third revamp in as many years. The CEO brought the bank back from the brink in late 2016 by settling misconduct lawsuits and raising 8 billion euros. His plan to restore “modest growth” by pivoting Europe’s largest investment bank to corporate clients and emphasizing its German roots was thwarted when the lender suffered its weakest revenue in 3 1/2 years in the second quarter.
“We no longer expect revenue to demonstrate any clear signs of franchise recovery this year, and we expect necessary further restructuring costs to continue to erode net income,” the Fitch analysts wrote in a statement Thursday.
The company’s stock fell 0.3 percent to 14.33 euros and has declined 7 percent this year, the second-worst performer in the 46-member Stoxx 600 Banks Price Index. The company’s 6 percent perpetual bonds were little changed.
Fitch said low volatility and persistently low interest rates, especially in Europe, continue to weigh on the bank’s top line, and it will take longer to reverse a loss in market share the bank experienced at the end of last year, when some clients stopped doing business with Deutsche Bank amid speculation about its capital strength.
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Finally,
in closing, yet more fake news from America. While in Europe it’s always blame
it on Brexit, at least until after Catalonia votes or doesn’t, in America it’s
always blame it on Russia.
Below,
blame it on Russia falls apart yet again.
21st
century adage: Is that true, or did you hear it on the BBC?
Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?
Glenn Greenwald September
28 2017,
Last Friday,
most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack
into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of
Homeland Security. “Russians attempted to hack elections systems in
21 states in the run-up to last year’s presidential
election, officials said Friday,” began
the USA Today story, similar to how most other outlets presented this
extraordinary claim.
This official story was explosive for obvious reasons,
and predictably triggered instant decrees – that of course went viral –
declaring that the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential
election is now in doubt.
Virginia’s Democratic Congressman Don Beyer, referring
to the 21 targeted states, announced that this shows “Russia tried to hack
their election”:
---- MSNBC’s Paul Revere for all matters relating to
the Kremlin take-over, Rachel Maddow, was indignant that this wasn’t told to us
earlier and that we still aren’t getting all the details. “What we have now
figured out,” Maddow gravely intoned as she showed the multi-colored
maps she made, is that “Homeland Security knew at least by June that 21
states had been targeted by Russian hackers during the election. . .targeting
their election infrastructure.”
They were one small step away from demanding that the election results be nullified, indulging the sentiment expressed by #Resistance icon Carl Reiner the other day: “Is there anything more exciting that [sic] the possibility of Trump’s election being invalidated & Hillary rightfully installed as our President?”
So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin – one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its election systems targeted by Russian hackers:
---- The spokesman for Homeland Security then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there was still evidence that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: “Wisconsin’s chief elections administrator, Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted.”
Then the
story collapsed completely last night. The Secretary of State for another one
of the named states, California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the
claimed report:
---- Sometimes stories end up debunked. There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were an isolated incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader meaning.
But this is no isolated incident. Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence.
The examples of such debacles when it comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. I wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time in June when 3 CNN journalists “resigned” over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network was forced to retract:
---- Remember
that time the Washington Post claimed
that Russia had hacked the U.S. electricity grid, causing politicians to
denounce Putin for trying to deny heat to Americans in winter, only to
have to issue multiple retractions because none of that ever happened? Or the
time that the Post had to publish
a massive editor’s note after its reporters made claims about Russian
infiltration of the internet and spreading of “Fake News” based on an anonymous
group’s McCarthyite blacklist that counted sites like the Drudge Report and
various left-wing outlets as Kremlin agents?
Or that time when Slate claimed that Trump had created a secret server with a Russian bank, all based on evidence that every other media outlet which looked at it were too embarrassed to get near? Or the time the Guardian was forced to retract its report by Ben Jacobs – which went viral – that casually asserted that WikiLeaks has a long relationship with the Kremlin? Or the time that Fortune retracted suggestions that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN’s network? And then there’s the huge market that was created – led by leading Democrats – that blindly ingested every conspiratorial, unhinged claim about Russia churned out by an army of crazed conspiracists such as Louise Mensch and Claude “TrueFactsStated” Taylor?
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Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the
rulers.
Aristotle
