Posts Tagged ‘Germany’
Europe’s Carbon Mafia, And Ours
by IBD Editorials, 5/06/2010
Corruption: The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It’s about money and power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.
All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren’t corrupted. Europe’s Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it’s turned out to be a scam built upon a scam.
Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids by British and German authorities as part of a pan-European crackdown on carbon credit VAT tax fraud.
U.K. officials announced raids on 81 offices and homes, nabbing 13 people in England and eight in Scotland. The operation involved 450 investigators from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office.
German authorities raided 230 locations, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe. The German operation involved 1,000 investigators targeting 50 companies and 150 suspects.
The amount of money involved in carbon trading is huge and the temptations vast. While our Congress demagogues about banks and their “complex financial instruments,” they are simple compared to cap-and-trade, which as we have noted involves essentially the buying and selling of air. Throw in an oppressive value-added tax and you have a recipe for corruption and fraud.
Read more at http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=532610
America’s future could be all Greek to us
by Mark Steyn, OC Register, Feb. 27, 2010
While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.
What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.
So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?
Read more at http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/greece-236468-government-america.html
German High Court Outlaws Electronic Voting
by Michael Collins, dailycensored.com, Oct 19, 2009 (yes its old, I just found out about it)
The justices above are clearly the most rational group of high level functionaries in the industrialized world. They did what no other court would do in Europe or the United States. They effectively outlawed electronic voting. On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.
They reasoned that electronic voting is not verifiable because citizen votes are counted in secret. It obscured a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates. Most importantly, the German high court noted, electronic voting machines don’t allow citizens to “reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner” Mar. 3, 2009.
The written opinion effectively bars electronic voting in future elections based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. This raises the bar of acceptability well above the meaningless solutions offered by “paper trails” for touch screen votIing or the so-called “paper ballots” for computerized optical scan voting machines, the most popular form of voting in the United States.
Germany’s 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots.
Read more at http://dailycensored.com/2009/10/19/a-censored-headline-and-why-it-matters/
Yes its old, I just found out about it. Now, since the US Supreme Court is starting to follow international precedents, will this one be among them?
Glenn Beck Show - The Revolutionary Holocaust
Glenn Beck Show - The Revolutionary Holocaust - January 22, 2010 - Pt 1 of 7, Youtube.com
Pt 2 of 7 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkRHCzd_5rA
See all 7 parts at http://lucianne.com/article/?pageid=glenn_beck_show
Not enough about him? Barack Obama skips Berlin Wall ceremonies
by Toby Harnden, Daily Telegraph, November 9th, 2009
There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”.
The White House has cited a packed schedule, though looking at it he had nothing much on yesterday (brief chat to reporters about healthcare – by far his biggest priority) and just blah briefings and a bill signing today until a metting this evening with Benjamin Netanyahu. This time, Der Spiegel has reported it as “Barack Too Busy”.