28

Feb

Direktbank

A new type of bank apparently that doesn’t spend a lot of money on brick-and-mortar branches. Direktbanks use the internet and provide interest advantages. ING-Direktbank, the German subsidiary of the large Dutch bank ING, is the first major bank in Germany to eliminate overdraft interest rates for the standard giro accounts everyone uses in lieu of checking. Overdrafts there will now be charged the bank’s normal interest rate for short-term small loans [Dispokredit or drawing credit], which they also lowered from 8.5% to 7.95%. The eliminated overdraft interest rate had been 12%; other German banks are still charging up to 18% on overdrafts. The European Central Bank’s prime interest rate is currently 0.25%.

Spiegel.de said that last year ING-Diba acquired half a million new customers. That was before they eliminated overdraft interest and other banks didn’t.

The bank’s top German executive also proposed that a [neutral, reliable] central authority should publish a list of all short-term credit and overdraft pricing schemes offered at all German banks. Perhaps the Stiftung Warentest could do it, he said, mentioning a product-testing foundation that has the reputation of Consumer Reports in the U.S.A.

Update on 21 Apr 2014: A Spiegel.de article said some smaller banks were first to end overdraft interest rates on giro accounts but it didn’t list them. The article was in praise of another bank of the Genossenschaftsbank type (a mutual?) which reduced the highest interest rate on one type of extreme overdraft.

(Dear ECKED bonk.)

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27

Feb

Gassenfeger

“Street sweeper.” The Gassen are the charming little narrow alleys, las calles, in medieval towns. Terry Pratchett joked that some of them faithfully reproduce the paths cows used to take to the river.

A Gassenfeger is a television show that’s so interesting people magically melt away from the town’s parks and picturesque little byways when it’s about to be broadcast, drifting instead into neighborhood pubs and living rooms.

(GOSS en fae gah.)

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26

Feb

Verrechnungspreismissbrauch

Transfer pricing tax evasion.

Under international finance rules that allowed corporations to assign profits earned by subsidiaries in countries with taxes to subsidiaries in countries without taxes, an online documentary explained, commodities companies could avoid taxes in source countries by having their extracting subsidiary sell the commodity to subsidiaries abroad at prices that did not reflect market prices, moving around on-paper profits and on-paper losses. The tactic is called transfer pricing. Rules supposed to prevent it required among other things that divisions of the same organization deal with each other “at arm’s length,” as if they were not part of the same organization.

Profits from this and other paper shuffles can apparently show up decades later and inflict serious fiscal damage on countries, even countries with the resources to give government auditors enough training to stand up to international corporations’ negotiators. In 2013 Rupert Murdoch’s giant News Corp. appears to have received the “largest cash payout from the Australian Tax Office ever,” a rebate of US$800 million for some on-paper loans to itself made in 1989. The money showed up in News Corp’s U.S. subsidiary’s Q4 2013 accounts as a US$800 million payment from “a foreign tax authority.” The original deduction was estimated by the Australian Financial Review at AU$600 million, but it was decided that News Corp was owed additional interest on it of almost AU$300 million.

The huge payment is being described as a substantial inconvenience or “blowout” to the current Australian federal budget. Last summer then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd accused News Corp companies in Australia of running a “ferocious” media campaign against his government, including accusing the Labour government of overspending. Kevin Rudd lost the Australian election to Tony Abbott on 07 Sep 2013.

This is how the tax deduction happened, according to an online 17 Feb 2014 article from the Australian Financial Review:

“In a 1989 meeting, four News Corp Australia executives exchanged cheques and share transfers between local and overseas subsidiaries that moved through several currencies.

“They were paper transactions; no funds actually moved. In 2000 and 2001 the loans were unwound. With the Australian dollar riding high, News Corp’s Australian subsidiaries recorded a $2 billion loss, while other subsidiaries in tax havens recorded a $2 billion gain.

“By last July that paper “loss”, booked against News Corp’s Australian newspaper operations, had become an [A]$882 million cash payout.

“Under a legal arrangement when the company was spun off last June, News was forced to pass all of the tax payout to Mr Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

“News Corp said it had retained $A81 million because it faced income tax charges on the interest payments by the Tax Office. However it seems unlikely to actually pay these funds: News Corp Australia carried another $1.5 billion in tax deductions from a separate paper shuffle that it made when News reincorporated in the US.”

(Fair ECHH noongs price mis BROW chh.)

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25

Feb

Sondergerichte vs. Schwurgerichte

Special courts vs. jury courts (lit. “oath courts” because jurors are sworn in).

Apparently Turkey has been under international criticism for years for using special courts [Sondergerichte] to try serious political crimes. Now Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has announced they will be using normal Schwurgerichte [jury trials] for these crimes as well. However, the announcement comes after Mr. Erdoğan’s government made other, unhelpful changes to Turkey’s judicial system: Human Rights Watch asked Turkish President Abdullah Gül not to sign a new law passed in the second week of this month that reduced the autonomy of Turkey’s High Council of Judges and Prosecutors or H.S.Y.K., saying the law exclusively serves to increase the government’s control over that council.

The Sondergerichte/Schwurgerichte legislation package passed in the third week of this month did contain some mild improvements. In addition to eliminating special courts for trials of serious political crimes it also reduced the maximum time you can be held in Turkish prison while they’re investigating you for a crime, from 7.5 to 5 years. In future, arrest warrants and house razzias can only be executed on the basis of “concrete evidence.” Supposedly this legislation made tapping phones more difficult.

However, in the first week of this very busy February 2014, after having quickly replaced the head of Turkey’s telecommunications oversight authority, Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı, Mr. Erdoğan passed Turkey’s now notorious new Internet surveillance and censorship law that expanded the agency’s powers to collect data about people’s internet surfing and to block web pages.

In the second week of this month, fistfighting is said to have broken out in the Turkish parliament during debate over Mr. Erdoğan’s bill to get more control over the national board of prosecutors and judges, H.S.Y.K. They passed the legislation anyway. One M.P. had to go to hospital for a broken nose.

In the third week of this very busy February, the government put forward draft legislation expanding the power of the country’s National Intelligence Organization (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı or M.İ.T.). It would define prison sentences of up to 12 years as punishment for publishing secret M.İ.T. documents, for example. Update on 17 Apr 2014: The parliament passed this. Prosecutors are no longer allowed to investigate M.İ.T. agents for crimes if the agents say they were on government business. M.İ.T. is to have access to all government data, to be able to listen without a court order to phone calls inside and outside Turkey, and to be given all businesses’ data about their customers if they request it.

The brief time span in which three terrible laws were created—the drastic Internet law on 06 Feb, the kneecapping of judges and prosecutors on 15 Feb, and now this latest proposal on 21 Feb announced as democratic reforms in response to outside criticism of the Ergenekon trials—cloaked the scope of these anti-democratic changes to the rest of the world.

Turkish protesters’ anger over all the bills and the trend they indicate was easily misinterpreted by outsiders as a response to the first, internet law. Attempts to mitigate or react to one of the new terrible laws interfered with attempts to prevent the next one. The winter Olympics in Russia and the historic events in Ukraine also diverted attention from Turkish politics.

Update on 11 Apr 2014: Turkey’s Constitutional Court found the reforms unconstitutional that gave Mr. Erdoğan’s justice minister sweeping powers over the H.S.Y.K. board that appoints and fires prosecutors and judges. The F.A.Z.’s article only said the court overturned parts of this reform, however.

The prime minister’s son’s foundation received donations of >72 million euros from outside Turkey and ~10 million euros from inside Turkey. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son and daughter Bilal Erdoğan and Esra Erdoğan are members of the Türgev foundation’s management board [Vorstand]. The organization is supposed to support Turkish youth and education; the opposition C.H.P. party said it’s a corruption center where businesspeople launder bribes they have to pay to get public contracts.

(ZONE dah gr-r-r ICHH tah   vair seuss   SHVOOR gr-r-r ICHH tah.)

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24

Feb

Stilwechsel

A change of style.

On 22 Feb 2014, Italy’s new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, and his cabinet were sworn into office. Eight of the sixteen cabinet ministers were women, apparently a first in Italy. It’s also one of the youngest cabinets in Italy’s history, with a relatively low number of ministers.

Mr. Renzi said he wants to start reforming Italy’s election laws and institutions this month, with labor market reform in March 2014, public administration reform in April 2014, and tax reform in May 2014.

Background gleaned in February 2013 from international reporting trying to make sense of Italy’s post-2013-election carnage:

Italy’s complex governing problems arose from post-Mussolini fears of a strong Prime Minister and the arcane electoral laws passed by Silvio Berlusconi in 2006. According to the 27 Feb 2013 F.A.Z., problems to be fixed included:

A weak prime minister who could not, e.g., fire ministers from his own cabinet. Tiny majorities were inflated by being awarded bonus seats in both sides of the legislature, in the interest of increasing governmental stability; this must have contributed to Italian voters’ furious sense of powerlessness. Young Italians were in fact powerless, having been deliberately disenfranchised: the minimum voting age was 18 to vote for House members but 25 to vote for Senators! Some election rules were so abstruse it seemed like deliberate confustication (surfed successfully in 2013 by Mr. Berlusconi’s intense campaigning in the more populous regions):

  • Parties had to win at least 4% to enter the Italian house of representatives, unless they were in coalitions that won >10% in which case they only needed to win 2%; but the “best loser” party was also allowed to keep its House seats at even <2%.
  • Senate seats were won regionally and the minimum for a party to enter the Senate was 8% in each region, unless the party was in a coalition with ≥20% in which case it needed only ≥3%.

Update on 13 Dec 2013: Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s election reform will be eliminating state financing of campaigns; it will be gone by 2017 said Spiegel.de. Campaigns in Italy will be financed only by donations from individuals and companies. The parties had been receiving payments from the government based on the number of votes they collected in elections. This will be reduced to 60% in 2014, 50% in 2015, 40% in 2016, and then zeroed out. The new law limited the tax-deductible donations to Italian political parties to max. 300,000 euros per person and 200,000 euros per company.

Germany uses a similar public-funding system for political parties but, said Spiegel.de, only gave 145 million euros to its political parties in 2012 while Italy spent 182 million euros. Mr. Letta’s predecessor Mario Monti had already begun reducing the heavily criticized funding (down to 91 million euros in 2013), which had had the reputation among some Italian voters of making Italy’s political parties a “Selbstbedienungsladen,” a help-yourself shop, for politicians.

It seems Mr. Letta’s plan to eliminate public campaign financing entirely would ultimately reduce democracy in Italy. Large companies could live very comfortably with that kind of power, as we can see in the U.S.A. before and especially after the Citizens United decision by the U.S.’s Supreme Court.

(SHTEEL vecks el.)

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23

Feb

Selbstschutz

“Self protection,” i.e. self-policing groups that the Ukrainian opposition organized in multiple cities to “arrest” plunderers and actual and accidental provocateurs during the protests.

In the town of Lviv this week, in western Ukraine, police and military buildings and barracks were occupied and then guarded by Selbstschutz volunteers, said ZDF heute journal. “Anyone whose blood is boiling can go to Kiev,” said one such guard, speaking into a megaphone.

After protesters stormed President Janukovytsch’s huge country residence at Mezhyhirya on 22 Feb 2014, the paramilitary Selbstschutz found themselves guarding it as well. “Why should we plunder what belongs to us?” At first they tried to admit only small groups of people but, when the students and families with children massed outside threatened to tear the gates off the hinges, they let everyone in after asking them not to trample the lawns. Amazing photos resulted of Ukrainians wandering bemused around the giant hunting lodges, zoos and one fake 16th-century? Spanish galleon.

(ZELBST shətz.)

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22

Feb

Erste erfolgreiche paneuropäische Bürgerinitiative

“The first successful paneuropean citizens’ initiative” was handed in to officials in Brussels, who said they were overjoyed to be meeting with privatization opponents to mark such a happy milestone for grass roots democracy in Europe. They were serious.

The group Right2Water collected 1.6 million signatures protesting new rules that would have made it easier to privatize European water utilities, and in ways large companies would have dominated. Not only was theirs the first initiative to meet the Lisbon agreement’s requirements but “who knows what would have happened” without the discussion Right2Water created, said Süddeutsche.de. In response to the signatures campaign, the commission officials under Michel Barnier canceled plans to enable privatization of municipal water utilities with bidding open to companies from all of Europe. They announced public water utilities would not be subject to the internal market’s liberalization rules.

Currently, a citizens’ initiative that fulfills the Lisbon agreement’s criteria of collecting >1 million signatures from at least seven Member States will get a hearing from the European Parliament and from the European Commission. The European Commission is obligated to issue a statement in response within three months, so in this case by 19 Mar 2014.

Right2Water organizers made three demands: that all Europeans have a right to water and basic sanitation, that the E.U. push internationally for universal access to water, and that the potable water supply not be subjected to the interior market’s rules.

The group clearly achieved some progress on the third demand, preventing the worst from happening for the time being. Regarding the second demand, European parliament president Martin Schulz (S.P.D., Germany) recently caused a scandal in the Israeli Knesset by asking why the discrepancy between the per capita water volumina available to Palestinians and to Israelis.

(Eh ah stah   eh ah FOAL gry chh ah   ponn oy roe PEI ish ah   BIR gah ee nee tsee ah TEE vah.)

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21

Feb

Patienteninformation & Patienteneinwilligung

“Patient information form and patient consent form,” often translated into English as “informed consent” which sounds like a single document rather than the German pair of patient information materials + patient’s consent statement [Einwilligungserklärung].

Medical ethics require patients agreeing to participate in pharmaceutical testing to be adequately informed about the drug or device trial and associated risks and benefits, and then to give their written consent to participate in the trial so described. Translators of these forms must take extra pains to render them in clear language because the people reading them might not be in the best of health.

As recovering law student and standup comedian Susan Calman said, “there’s no consent without informed consent!”

General practitioners in the U.K. are concerned, she said, that people there have not been sufficiently informed about the National Health Service’s plans to put physicians’ records and hospitals’ records on a “superserver,” central database, to which more than just health professionals will have access. The patient data will be at least partially anonymized, proponents said. It’s unclear what the rules will be for selling or sharing patients’ data with third parties.

People not worried about data privacy might nevertheless be concerned about any unclarity in David Cameron’s government’s communications about how it will share or not share the U.K.’s digitized medical records because his coalition’s recent privatization projects have been accused of selling at too-low prices. Protection adequacy is also in question now since the Snowden revelations.

Update on 24 Feb 2014: Despite reassurances from the British agency currently in charge of patient medical records in the U.K., the Health and Social Care Information Centre, that “data held in the new giant database would never be used for insurance purposes, stating that any such actions would represent a criminal offence,” the Telegraph.co.uk has discovered that David Cameron’s government already sold the N.H.S. medical records, to an actuarial firm that advises “insurers and actuaries on how to ‘refine’ critical illness cover,” in 2012, for two thousand pounds.

The contract to extract and anonymize patient data from individual physicians’ office records for the new central database has been awarded to a company called Atos. Atos has asked for early release from its previous government contract because of death threats to its employees.

Update on 03 Mar 2014, from the Guardian:

“A prominent Tory MP on the powerful health select committee has questioned how the entire NHS hospital patient database for England was handed over to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based outside the UK.”

This database contained H.E.S., hospital episode statistics, and these management consultants called themselves PA Consulting. In addition to Google, anyone tapping communications lines leading to Google, actuaries and consultants, N.H.S. patient records might have already been obtained by or available to “pharmaceutical firms, government departments [including police] and private health providers.”

(Pot YENT en in foh mah tsee own   oont   pot YENT en eye n vill ee goong.)

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20

Feb

Betriebsrat und Gesamtbetriebsrat befürworten

Advocating for a factory workers council and a corporation workers council.

Volkswagen’s organizational structure includes the legally-mandatory German committee of workers that is allowed a say in co-managing their workplace: the Betriebsrat. Recently the U.S.’s United Auto Workers union, quietly supported by VW management, tried to “unionize” a factory in Tennessee but was voted down by the workers themselves. U.S. media described it as a vote against union representation, while German media apparently initially reported that the workers had rejected forming a Betriebsrat. They followed up by saying the company had thought unionization was the logical first step for creating a works council at the Chattanooga factory but now they’ll just have to do it another way. “Our employees did not make a decision saying they’re against a Betriebsrat,” plant C.O.O. Frank Fischer reassured German reporters.

Had Chattanooga’s workers voted yes, they would have also gotten a seat on VW’s Gesamtbetriebsrat, apparently a workers’ council for the entire corporation consisting of employees representing VW’s ~105 locations around the world.

Since unionized U.S. auto manufacturing workers were made to seem responsible for the results of inferior car design decisions in the 1970’s, many potential employees appear to not support unions because they fear their own laziness. Fearing your own and others’ laziness seems to be part of the human condition in the U.S. but that fear isn’t as strong in Germany. It’s been interesting to me to see how Germans handle the balance of working hard, <40 hours/week, and then playing hard the rest of the time with a clear conscience, rather than coasting through a twilight lifetime of trying to live at the workplace without sufficient time off.

Süddeutsche.de and Spiegel.de both mentioned that the U.S. has a National Labor Relations Board that must still confirm the plant’s unionization vote and where objections can be filed. U.S. reporting mentioned that U.S. senators are protected under “freedom of opinion” from being sued for spreading disinformation.

(Bet REEBZ rott   oont   gez OMT bet REEBZ rott   beh FIR wort en.)

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19

Feb

Bayerische Brandschutzübung

Foreigner German for the “Bavarian Fire Drill” plot device entertainingly defined at TVTropes.org. Contributors say it’s a social engineering subtype assisted by a person pretending there’s an emergency.

(BUY rih shah   BROND shətz ew boong.)

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18

Feb

Unendliche Weiten!

“Unending vastnesses, widenesses, expanses, amplitudes, breadths, scopes, sizes, ranges.”

From the introduction to the German version of Star Trek:
The Next Generation.

Space. Infinite expanses. We find ourselves in a faraway future. These are the adventures of the new spaceship Enterprise, flying maaaany lightyears away from Earth, to find alien worlds, unknown life forms and new civilizations. In doing this, the Enterprise advances into galaxies no human has ever seen before. [SPACESHIP ENTERPRISE: The Next Century.] Der Weltraum. Unendliche Weiten. Wir befinden uns in einer fernen Zukunft. Dies sind die Abenteuer des neuen Raumschiffs Enterprise, das viiiiiele Lichtjahre von der Erde entfernt unterwegs ist, um fremde Welten zu entdecken, unbekannte Lebensformen und neue Zivilisationen. Die Enterprise dringt dabei in Galaxien vor, die nie ein Mensch zuvor gesehen hat. [RAUMSCHIFF ENTERPRISE: Das Nächste Jahrhundert.]

(Oon ENNED lichh ah   VIGHT en.)

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17

Feb

Medienkompetenz

Media competency, one of many areas speakers celebrating
Safer Internet Day on 10 Feb 2014 said should be strengthened in children and young people by increasing discussions, by what sounds like awesome classes already being taught in some schools, by working together with state broadcasting corporations, by strengthening data protection laws and by improving consumer protection laws, said ARD tagesschau.de, the new families minister Manuela Schwesig (S.P.D.) and the new justice minister & consumer protection minister Heiko Maas (S.P.D.).

(MAY dee en com pet TENCE.)

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16

Feb

Verbandsklagerecht der Verbraucherschutzorganisationen

Right for an association to file suit, for consumer protection organizations.

The new justice minister and consumer protection boss, Heiko Maas (S.P.D.), said he is thinking about making it possible for consumer protection organizations to file lawsuits on behalf of consumers in response to data protection violations.

Currently, consumer protection organizations in Germany can only file data protection lawsuits if a company’s terms and conditions contain data protection violations. Mr. Maas wants to have draft legislation “closing this loophole” ready by the end of April 2014.

The Spiegel.de article continued,

Maas and Germany’s data protection officer Andrea Voßhoff [(C.D.U.)] furthermore admonished companies to treat their customers’ privacy with more respect. Customers’ trust is, in the end, the fundamental basis of all business models in the internet, they said. Instead of pages and pages of terms and conditions, what [customers] need is true freedom of choice when it comes to what’s allowed to happen to their own data, said Maas. “If some providers want to stubbornly persist in the digital Flegeljahren [boor, churl, cub, lout years, meaning teenagers], if they disesteem/disregard/disdain/ignore/flout/violate their customers, and if they refuse transparency, then the state will have to intervene regulatorily to protect users.”

(Fair BOND sklah geh rechh t   dare   fair BROW chh ah SHƏTS oregon ee zot see OWN en.)

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15

Feb

“Niedrige Beweggründe”

Low motivations, base motives.

Germany’s new justice minister (and consumer protection minister, since that office was moved to the justice department under the new coalition) is Heiko Maas (S.P.D.). In January 2014 he refused to legalize dragnet surveillance in Germany as written into the new government’s coalition agreement, saying he wanted to wait until the European Court of Justice’s upcoming decision. Surprisingly, this worked, thus pivoting or at least pausing one aspect of the grosse Koalition’s “respectlessness” toward data protection, as writer and activist Julie Zeh called it.

Now Mr. Maas has announced he wants to redefine murder and manslaughter in Germany’s penal code, saying the current laws include Nazi-era language such as “low motivations” that was intended to describe not an act but an actor, a murderer as imagined by Hitler’s jurists, furthermore using “morally loaded attitude attributes” [moralisch aufgeladene Gesinnungsmerkmale]. Among other problems, defining crimes by the person instead of the deed is out of step with the system now used in Germany’s criminal laws.

In 1941, he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Nazis changed the country’s definition of murder to include the following:

[W]hoever, because of a lust for murder, to satisfy sexual urges or otherwise because of low motivations, dastardly or cruelly (…) kills a person

[“wer aus Mordlust, zur Befriedigung des Geschlechtstriebs, aus Habgier oder sonst aus niedrigen Beweggründen, heimtückisch oder grausam (…) einen Menschen tötet“]

Mr. Maas said the courts did Germany a service by even figuring out how to apply such a bad law. He announced that a group of experts will set to work to provide a good foundation for the upcoming discussion in parliament, “whose job it is now to give the courts better laws.”

(NEE driggah   bev EGG grin dah.)

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14

Feb

Aufmerksamkeitslücke

“Attention gap,” a technique used in online headlines to pull in curious clicks by e.g. asking a question and promising answers.

Reforms proposed to increase transparency of organizational publishing have suggested bylines for a news article’s editors as well as its writers and investigators. Perhaps headline writers ought to start receiving credit for their work as well. Current technology makes it possible to attach movie-type credits to every online post without disturbing readability.

(Ow! f MEAHK some kites LICK ah.)

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13

Feb

Wissenswertes

Stuff that’s worth knowing.

(VISS enz VEAH tess.)

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12

Feb

Vorabentscheidungsverfahren

“Advance decision process.”

For the first time ever, Germany’s supreme court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Karlsruhe, sent a case on to the European Union’s supreme court, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. It was for a “decision in advance” on a lawsuit brought in Germany by members of the C.S.U. and Leftists political parties together with other groups, about whether the policy of the European Central Bank announced by Mario Draghi (Goldman Sachs) of buying theoretically unlimited amounts of debt from Member States would be exceeding the Bank’s current brief by redistributing money to countries that hadn’t cleaned up their governments yet. It’s also feared if left unlimited the policy might put the E.C.B. in the hazardous position of becoming a “bad bank” on behalf of the banks in the troubled countries whose debt it was buying.

Süddeutsche.de reported that this sort of debt purchasing, which a government must promise to cut costs and carry out structural reforms in order to receive, has never occurred, but the announcement that it was possible calmed the markets in 2012. Spiegel.de made it sound more like the structural reforms and cost cutting were linked to aid from the Euro-Rettungsschirm, the “euro rescue umbrella” bailout programs, but repeated that the E.C.B. has never carried out any of these so-called Outright Monetary Transactions.

After the Bundesverfassungsgericht receives the decision of the European Court of Justice on these questions, said the Spiegel.de article, it will then decide its own case. And here are four ways the Bundesverfassungsgericht said in its 52-page submission that the European Court of Justice might deal with the Bundesverfassungsgericht’s concerns:

  • “The bond purchases should not undermine the policies of the bailout funds [Rettungsschirme] which link loans to clear conditions such as savings programs and reform programs.”
  • “The E.C.B. would have to rule out the possibility of a debt haircut [Schuldenschnitt] for the purchased bonds, because in the end a haircut would mean financing of the country.”
  • “Individual Member States’ bonds may not be bought in unlimited amounts.”
  • “The E.C.B. should influence so-called pricing [Preisbildung] as little as possible by buying bonds shortly after their emission by the States.” Apparently the E.C.B. previously agreed to limit O.M.T.’s in this way to some degree by agreeing to not buy bonds immediately after emission and to follow purchasing time frames that will be defined in a guideline that will not be made public.

(Fore OB ent SHY doongs fair FAR en.)

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11

Feb

Doch drohnenfähige Handydaten!

Cell phone data are droneable after all!

Last summer Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, admitted they’d been sharing phone data with U.S. intelligence agencies for years but said it was okay because cell phone data couldn’t be used to locate people and something about the N.S.A. promised not to use German-supplied phone data to kill anyone. Regarding the first claim, whistleblowers from U.S. drone programs have now explained to reporters how phone data were used for targeting assassinations around the world.

One whistleblower, describing countermeasures persons of interest have taken to keep using phones while evading geolocation and how these countermeasures can deliberately or accidentally increase the drone strikes’ already terrible civilian casualties, called the U.S. drone programs “little more than death by unreliable metadata.”

Details from the article and online discussions included:
“Pods” on U.S. drones (and presumably on urban utility poles because this might be what police have been quietly installing in U.S. cities using Dept. of Homeland Security funds) can spoof cell phones into providing data and can vacuum information off wifi networks from altitudes of four miles. Telecommunications standards in some “countries of interest” make it possible for many users there to share data the U.S. uses to identify targets’ cell phones. Wireless “party lines” quietly shared by pools of low-income civilians increase the chances that countries indulging in drone assassinations will accidentally kill party line participants and their families and neighbors, or be tricked into killing their enemies’ enemies, such as by firing missiles at wedding parties or legislatures after someone hides a cheap phone there.

(Daw chh   drone nen fey igga   HEN dee dotten.)

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10

Feb

Höhere Gewalt

Higher violence or higher power, but it means force majeure, an event or effect that can be neither anticipated nor controlled. This has been defined more narrowly recently to limit E.U. railways’ and airlines’ ability to refuse to compensate passengers by claiming helplessness after poor management.

Even in force majeure cases such as bad weather, landslides or labor strikes, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said on 26 Sep 2013, passenger railways will still owe customers some money back after a late train arrival.

If your E.U. train is 1 hour late, you have the right to reimbursement of 25% of the purchase price of your ticket. 2 hours, 50%.

As part of their reporting on the Court’s decision, ARD tagesschau.de interviewed rail passengers waiting at German train stations, many of whom said they had in the past qualified for money back due to late trains but didn’t bother going through with the paperwork.

On 05 Feb 2014, the E.U. Parliament voted to strengthen air passenger rights, in part by passing a stricter, eight-part definition of force majeure for airlines.

Though they’re not done wending their way through the governments yet, the new rules would give passengers on E.U. flights delayed >3 hours the right to 300 euros from their airline, >5 hours = 400 euros, and >7 hours = 600 euros.

(HƏ ƏH rah   geh VAULT.)

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09

Feb

Straftatbestand

A criminal offense, fulfilling the conditions to meet the definition of a crime.

The outgoing E.U. parliament voted to pass draft rules making it a crime to manipulate interest rates in the European Union. After approval by the Member States, countries will have two years to implement the new rules, and their minimum penalty of at least four years in jail, into national laws. Countries may impose stricter penalties.

The E.U. parliament’s press release said the passed legislation criminalized more than interest rate manipulation:

“The draft rules lay down tougher criminal penalties, including prison terms, for serious market abuses such as unlawful disclosure of information, insider dealing or market manipulation and also inciting, aiding or abetting them.”

[…]

“Market manipulation offences punishable by a four-year jail term would include entering into a transaction or placing an order which gives false or misleading signals about the supply, demand or price of one or more financial instruments or providing false or misleading inputs to manipulate the calculation of benchmarks, such as the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) or Euro Interbank Offered Rate (EURIBOR).

“Insider dealing offences punishable by fouryears’ imprisonment include those in which inside information is used with intent to buy or sell financial instruments or to cancel or amend an order.”

(SHTROFF tot beh SHTOND.)

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08

Feb

Dammbruchargument

“Dam breach argument,” warning that if someone does something then a consequences dam will break or a plane will tilt, sliding everyone toward bad effects.

Inspired by Andrew Bacevich’s amusing classification of four Ronald Reagan-era foreign policy decisions—to send troops into Lebanon, to hassle Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, the so-called “tanker war” in the Persian Gulf from 1984–88 and to support the Taliban in Afghanistan throughout the 1980’s—as “Operation Slippery Slope,” saying they appeared to be based on short-term thinking and had in common that they only made sense against a backdrop of overriding U.S. interest in foreign oil reserves.

(Dohm BROOCHH awg you MENT.)

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07

Feb

Friedensklausel des Grundgesetzes

“Peace clause” of the German constitution, Article 26, which says

(1) Actions suitable for and done with the intention of disturbing the peaceful coexistence of peoples, in particular making preparations for carrying out a war of aggression, are unconstitutional. They are to be punished.

(2) Weapons intended for warfare may only be manufactured, transported and disseminated with the approval of the Federal Government. A federal law will regulate this in more detail.

(FREE den z cl ow! zəl   dess   GROONT g’zetsess.)

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06

Feb

Europeana1914-1918.eu

Wonderful pan-European website of digitized photos and documents about World War One from libraries, archives, online submissions and, among other things, family history roadshows taking place in many European cities. Now available in the languages Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and Slovenian, the website’s collections are intended to tell the stories of regular people, “simple soldiers,” and their families who were involved in the “war to end all wars.” The collections, research and electronic documentation have been going on for three years now. Organizers said this might be the world’s largest collection so far of European WWI items from private owners, i.e. the families involved. It is intended to “show, well, perhaps unity in suffering,” said historian Frank Drauschke.

Even public school systems that teach more than 0–1 year of history have problems with societal forgetting, it seems. As part of their commemorations of the centenary, German television news programs recently did street interviews with German high school students asking basic facts about the First World War but discovering a shocking lack of answers. Apparently teaching the atrocities of World War Two to German schoolchildren has over time come to overshadow teaching about its causes and its first iteration.

This Europeana.eu project also seems wonderful because it probably preserved so many materials by digitizing them and posting them online. It saved the stories of descendants who still remember why each item is important. The format allows people to see the war from inside more than one of the countries that participated in it. While providing jobs to historians and translators!

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05

Feb

Europäische Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte

European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France.

The E.C.H.R. just published its list of 2013 judgments finding violations of basic human rights, ranking the top offenders by country.

Spiegel.de reported the court also announced they are improving their procedures to filter out redundant or insufficiently documented complaints, to increase processing of processes. In 2013, apparently, thousands of complaints were filed with the court but only hundreds of judgments were reached.

(Oy roe PAY ish ah   g’RICHH ts hoaf   fir   MENSCH en rechht ah.)

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04

Feb

Deutscher Verkehrsgerichtstag

“German Traffic Court Day,” a misleading calque. This is apparently a fruitful annual meeting of traffic experts, from government and academia, organized by an e.V. association.

This year’s topics included “Data Protection in Cars.” The president of the host association called for regulation of information protection in automobiles, saying modern cars contain up to 80 devices that record data, such as navigation systems and even airbags. He said at the moment it’s not clear whether these collected data belong to the car manufacturers or the drivers.

Cars with airbags, for example, collect information about how fast we’re driving and whether we’re alone. Onboard sensors record whether passengers are wearing a seatbelt. Courts are already hiring I.T. experts to read cars and car toys to determine whether drivers are telling the truth in hit-and-run cases. In leased electric vehicles, companies can remotely shut down the battery if payments are in arrears. A luxury S.U.V. in Cologne managed to trap an alleged car thief inside until police arrived, even though he tried to kick out doors and windows. Customers already using products that reroute them around Germany’s ubiquitous traffic jams by constantly pinging their cars’ locations can have their data unethically used for marketing and other purposes if no legislation controlling this is crafted.

In 2015 all new cars in Germany are scheduled to be equipped with “eCall,” a 911-type emergency services function that will automatically call for help after the car is in an accident but that can also be used to locate any one of these cars at any time. An E.U. press release about eCall said the system doesn’t transmit data about its users because it is usually “sleeping.”

(Doytcha   fair CARES g’RICHHTS tochh.)

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03

Feb

Grosse Kohlelition

Grand “coal”-alition.

Since the 22 Sep 2013 Bundestag election, Germany’s second-largest political party, the socialist S.P.D., has had a new boss: Sigmar Gabriel. He managed to get his party to agree to form a grosse Koalition with Chancellor Merkel’s largest political party, the conservative C.D.U. (and its Bavarian state branch, the C.S.U.), even though this effectively eliminated opposition from the Bundestag and usually causes the S.P.D. to lose voters after unethical compromises of its core principles. After delivering the S.P.D., via much talk, singing rousing songs and an up-or-down vote on whether to rule, Mr. Gabriel became the deputy chancellor of Germany and took on two cabinet ministries: Economics and Energy. He announced he would “reform” Germany’s switch to renewable energy sources, the awesome Energiewende, to cap government support of solar and wind power because he wanted to reduce electricity prices for consumers. The reporting indicated Mr. Gabriel has no plans to significantly reduce the C.D.U.’s exemptions, “industry privileges,” granted to high-volume electricity-consuming companies, which goes up by about 1000 companies/year and which the E.U. competition authority has said if not stopped or at least better organized may be reason for that authority to kill the Energiewende entirely. In fact, ZDF heute journal correspondent Stefan Leifert said, the new minister has refused to specify which important industries will get which rebates to their contributions to the Energiewende.

Mr. Gabriel’s hand-picked successor as head of the S.P.D. is a representative of coal workers, from the Industriegewerkschaft Bergbau, Chemie, Energie (IG BCE, “industrial union for mining, chemistry, power”).

Because Bavaria has been investing in biofuel systems, the C.S.U. was not 100% behind kneecapping the Energiewende when Mr. Gabriel submitted his reform proposals on 30 Jan 2014. Bavaria’s Economy & Energy minister Ilse Aigner (C.S.U.) explained that biomass electricity generation is a reasonable alternative for times when there are low quantities of sun or wind.

(GROSS ah   COAL a lee tsee OWN.)

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02

Feb

Postenschacherei

“Job chess,” a derogatory Austrian term for a specific type of government corruption where officials give jobs to each other without public announcements seeking outside candidates for the post. Said recently after the Chancellor’s chief of staff Ronald Pofalla—in charge of Germany’s intelligence agencies and famous for telling reporters last summer that N.S.A.-type suspicionless surveillance and warrantless wiretapping were “off the table,” done with, handled, fixed, over—announced he was quitting government to spend more time with his family. Perhaps a week later rumors flew that he would be taking a well-paid newly-created post on Deutsche Bahn’s management board [Vorstand] responsible for lobbying and long-term company development despite very little identifiable railroad management experience or long-term company development experience in the private sector.

The good news is that several notable groups have proposed fixes. To prevent conflicts of interest, Transparency International Deutschland said, it has asked for a waiting period of three years between leaving German government and becoming a lobbyist, and the Greens agreed with that. Jurist Hans Herbert von Arnim thought it should be five years, and the Leftists agreed with that. ARD tagesschau.de noted that Germany already has laws requiring nonelected bureaucrats to wait five years before they can take a job in the private sector. The E.U., said Süddeutsche.de, has rules mandating an 18-month waiting period before European commissioners can take private sector jobs, with questionable cases to be adjudicated by an ethics council, though that system remains a work in progress.

Even the new grosse Koalition apparently wants to introduce a waiting period too, because they wrote it into the new coalition agreement.

Though long, the new coalition agreement is an incomplete document, because the three political parties were unable to reach agreements on every issue under discussion, because they never worked out how to pay for the agreements they did reach, and because the C.S.U. has already started challenging those. Nevertheless, here is a translation of the relevant revolving-door passage according to ZDF heute journal:

“To avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, we will strive for an appropriate regulation that will apply to outgoing cabinet members, parliamentary state secretaries and political officials.”

German news showed a clip of Mr. Pofalla in 2005 criticizing the decision of ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (S.P.D.) to accept a seat on the board of a German-Russian gas pipeline. ZDF heute journal’s Marietta Slomka said Mr. Pofalla said then that he could imagine a type of “self-obligation” for members of government to voluntarily impose “business thoughtfulness” on themselves for the time immediately after they left office.

In early January, the Deutsche Bahn’s supervisory board [Aufsichtsrat] was expected to decide the Pofalla case in late January 2014. A member of that board told Spiegel.de they were actually planning to reduce the size of the management board rather than add more members.

Update on Monday, 03 Feb 2014: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that, as part of the E.U.’s first anti-corruption report, which was published today, the European Commission asked Germany to define more specific revolving-door rules.

The report also criticized insufficient German regulations preventing smaller and medium-sized German companies from paying bribes outside of Germany. Which sounds like a type of progress. German election campaign financing is inadequately regulated to prevent companies from exerting influence, the authors said, and the limits defined for lifting German politicians’ immunity from prosecution are too strict.

On the whole, the report gave Germany a somewhat decent grade in the fight against corruption. Great gains can be quickly undone by a few key decisions, however: and despite the “to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest” paragraph in the new coalition agreement, the F.A.Z. wrote, it had begun to appear inter alia that Germany’s new huge grosse Koalition was no longer going to pass legislation regulating the revolving door but was instead going to leave it up to the new cabinet to make some rules limiting itself.

The E.U. said in two years it will check how well member states have implemented this report’s “homework assignments.”

(POSSED en PSHAW chh ah WRY.)

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01

Feb

Bliff

What the Ukrainian word for “bluffed” sounded like in the commentary of protesters behind frozen snow walls in Kiev’s icy Maidan square last week. They were analyzing Viktor Janukovytsch’s offer of cabinet posts to two of the three opposition leaders, with himself remaining at the helm and no early elections before the scheduled one in 2015.

The offer was made on 25 Jan 2014 and the Ukrainian opposition turned it down on 26 Jan 2014.

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01

Feb

Führerkrankenhausbesuch als Unschuldstarnung

Leader’s hospital visit as innocence camouflage.

After last week’s compromises in the Ukrainian Rada, which Mr. Janukovytsch did not sign into law, Mr. Janukovytsch announced he was ill and disappeared into a hospital. Vitali Klitschko said that tended to be a bad sign in the Soviet era, when leaders would pretend to be sick and out of the loop when their people were getting ready to visit some atrocities on a population.

Update on 26 Jan 2014: Protests have spread beyond Kiev to many other regions of the country. The head of the military said his organization would not act against protesters.

Update on 31 Jan 2014: Army leadership spoke up “for the first time” and said the country was threatening to split apart and Mr. Janukovytsch must take steps to achieve stability and harmony in Ukrainian society. The Ukrainian opposition complained that activists were being systematically kidnapped and tortured; the United Nations called for an independent investigation of those allegations. At least 30 people are missing. One of the missing was recently found dead in the woods.

Though post-Soviet leaders may still be able to hide in hospitals, injured protesters in Ukraine cannot. Ukrainian police have also been accused of going through hospitals to menace people beaten by Ukrainian police. On 30 Jan 2014, after disappearing for nine days, activist Dmitro Bulatow turned up again with wounds all over his swollen body. It looks like they hammered nails through his hands, and cut off an ear. His spokespeople said during his ordeal he was interrogated every day by men asking, “Where is the money?” and “Who and what countries are behind the demonstrators?” After his return, the government first declared Mr. Bulatow under house arrest, because he was too injured for prison, for “organization of massive disturbances.” This prevented him from being able to seek safer medical treatment in a foreign country—reporters showed footage of police who turned up to interrogate Mr. Bulatow at the clinic where he was receiving treatment.

Germany’s foreign minister announced on Saturday, 01 Feb 2014, that he’d heard Mr. Bulatow will be permitted to leave Ukraine on Sunday. Also, Mr. Janukovytsch reportedly did finally sign the repeals of the new anti-demonstration laws.

(Führer CRONK en house be ZOO chh   ollss   OON shooldz tah noong.)

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