Author Archives: Igor Koršič

KOKS za rudarje

Delavci v kulturi solidarni z rudarji

Podpiramo stavko in druge akcije rudarjev, saj je njihov boj tudi naš. Poskus izigravanja rudarjev in njihovih pravic je še ena manifestacija nezmanjšanega kaosa, ki vlada v državi. Zahtevamo, da tako pozicija kot opozicija nemudoma prevzameta odgovornost za učinkovito upravljanje države. V tako upravljanje sodi tudi izvrševanje obveznosti do rudarjev. Vztrajanje na položajih s hkratnim izmikanjem odgovornosti povzroča in prikriva nepreglednost v upravljanju države in s tem vsesplošno, sistemsko in klasično korupcijo, kraje, nekompetentno vodenje, gospodarsko stagnacijo, socialno bedo in vsesplošno brezperspektivnost. Medtem ko se zatika pri vsaki obveznosti do državljanov in smo posamezniki zasuti z absurdno birokracijo in neizprosnostjo pri dajatvah, si vaši klienti brez težav, pred našimi očmi in pod pokroviteljstvom vaše neodgovornosti prisvajajo milijone. Niso odgovorni kreditni odbori. Veriga odgovornosti za vsako raboto se konča pri vladi in njenih ministrih. Ne tvezite nam, da delate v skladu z zakoni in da se tu vaša odgovornost konča. Za očitno nedelujočo ali zlorabljeno zakonodajo ste odgovorni vi. Opozarjamo vlado, parlament in predsednika države, naj se nehajo igrati z našo potrpežljivostjo. V primeru Štefanec gre za nazoren in prozoren poskus pohabljanja Komisije za preprečevanje korupcije. Zahtevamo odločen in takojšen obračun s sistemsko in klasično korupcijo v državi! Če politiki tega niste sposobni, odstopite in omogočite državljanom, da si izberejo druge.

za akcijski odbor KOKS

Igor Koršič

 

Tudi v Britaniji sodno preganjajo protestnike

Noam Chomsky and Ken Loach criticise University of Birmingham suspensions

University of Biracialmingham students

Students in Birmingham march in protest against the suspension of fellow students last month. Photograph: Thom Davies/Demotix/Corbis

 

Noam Chomsky and Ken Loach are among a host of academics, artists and politicians to condemn the suspension of five university studentswho took part in a protest on their campus.

In an open letter, signed by 40 people and published by the Guardian, they criticised the University of Birmingham‘s actions as being “at odds with freedom of speech“. They demanded the immediate reinstatement of the students, who were among 13 arrested during the demonstration at the university last month.

“We believe that the suspensions seen at the University of Birmingham are further evidence of the contempt for freedom of expression, both political and academic, in the contemporary university,” they wrote.

The signatories, also include former secretary of state for international development and Birmingham MP Clare Short, who said: “These suspensions are at odds with freedom of speech and the right to protest, setting a threatening precedent for how dissent is dealt with on campuses across the country.

“We condemn these suspensions in the strongest terms and call for the immediate reinstatement of the students affected.”

Their intervention comes amid growing tensions between student activists and the management in some universities, who have clashed over what the protesters called the “marketisation of education”. The protesters want to see an end to cuts and privatisations of university services, and a return to free access to education.

 

The Defend Education Birmingham activists who occupied part of Birmingham University’s campus said they were part of a peaceful protest and were unlawfully kettled by police, who demanded their personal details in exchange for release. But the university argued that their protest was not peaceful and caused damage to property. West Midlands police have also insisted that the protesters were detained as part of a criminal investigation, not kettled.

Deborah Hermann, 21, who studies European politics, society and economics was one of the students suspended, along with Simon Furse, 22, Kelly Rogers, 21, Emily Farmer, 20 and Pat Grady, 21. She said the university’s stance “shows the wider picture; the repression of the protest shows why the protest is so important”.

She added: “It is unjust, I have been treated very unfairly. I know the university doesn’t care about me, they just want to intimidate students. They always put out statements saying that they really support peaceful and legitimate action, but they don’t in practice.

“They try to stop any kind of protest. Anything we do, they call it illegitimate. Instead, they have just repressed us. In 1968, students occupied the same Great Hall as us. It was emotional, but incredibly frustrating to be there doing the same. Then the police came. It is clear the university doesn’t care about our opinions whatsoever.”

Edd Bauer, a campaigner with the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, said: “The reason we see oppression is because [the university management’s] ideological positions are weakly supported. They have no choice but to resort to the stick. It is their only answer because they have no political argument.

“The university is telling people not to protest and threatening them. Their message is that anyone who wants to protest, anyone who wants to occupy buildings, ‘We will have you arrested, we will suspend you and cut you off from education.’ We are seeing that all over the country.

He said that the student movement he is part of is protesting against “more corporate universities”.

In 2012, the University of Birmingham was criticised by human rights groups – including Amnesty International – over an injunction it sought to pre-emptively ban protests. Its actions were described as “criminalising” sit-in protests and were called aggressive and censorious by Amnesty, Liberty and Index on Censorship.

A University of Birmingham spokesman said the institution respects the right to protest peacefully and within the law and said that students have a “variety of ways” of making their concerns known.

The spokesman said: “Whilst peaceful protest is part of university life, the university will not tolerate behaviour that causes harm to individuals, damage to property or significant disruption to our university community.”

The spokesman added the Defend Education Birmingham demonstration “included defacing buildings and property, throwing smoke bombs and fireworks, smashing down doors, damaging historic buildings including Aston Webb and the Old Joe clock tower, and injuring staff”.

Govor pisatelja Vladimirja Kavčiča

Ljubljana –  Prejemnik velike Prešernove nagrade za opus, pisatelj Vladimir Kavčič, je v zahvalnem govoru opozoril na težavno stanje Slovenije in na nevarnosti, ki jim je v takšnih okoliščinah izpostavljena slovenska kultura. Govor je v Gallusovi dvorani Cankarjevega doma večkrat sprožil velik aplavz in ga v objavljamo v celoti.

Prejemnik velike Prešernove nagrade za opus, pisatelj Vladimir Kavčič. (Foto: Bojan Velikonja)
Spoštovani. Slovenski kulturni praznik je tudi primerna priložnost in spodbuda za razmislek o naši bližnji in celo bolj oddaljeni prihodnosti. K temu nas navaja Prešernovo izročilo, ki se ne kaže zgolj v njegovih pesniških mojstrovinah temveč tudi v njegovi preroški moči, s katero je spodbudil oblikovanje slovenske narodne zavesti, ki je danes eden bistvenih znakov naše skupne identitete.Sorazmerno majhna rodovna skupnost, katero so ves čas njenega obstoja ogrožali močnejši in bogatejši sosedi, se je v svojem tisočletnem vztrajanju ne le ohranila pri življenju, temveč celo razvila svoje potenciale, po katerih se danes lahko primerja z drugimi evropskimi narodi. Na višku svojega razvoja, ko se je ta formalno enakopravno priključila v Evropsko unijo in postala celo članica Nata, pa se je izkazalo, da razvojna logika globalizacijskih procesov ne samo, da ne zagotavlja več gospodarske rasti in civilizacijskega napredka, temveč celo ogroža njun že doseženi nivo.

Po vključitvi v gospodarski sistem EU in v evro območje je Slovenija izgubila več kot tisoč večjih gospodarskih družb. Praktično vsa večja gospodarska podjetja in številna manjša. Število brezposelnih delavcev je naraslo na 130 tisoč in se bo še povečevalo. 300 tisoč prebivalcev Slovenije se je znašlo na robu revščine in ne mine dan, da ne bi bili opozorjeni na številne lačne otroke, kar je civilizacijska sramota brez primera. Odraščajoča, izobražena in strokovno usposobljena mladina pa je ostala brez možnosti zaposlitve in brez vsakršne življenjske perspektive, medtem ko številni socialno povsem neodgovorni lastniki kapitala milijarde evrov povsem zakonito umikajo v davčne oaze ali izrabljajo za zasebni luksuz.

Slovenska politika, ki naj bi skrbela za vzdržno socialno stanje svojih državljanov in zaščito nacionalnih interesov pa s težkimi milijardami davkoplačevalskega denarja rešuje oropane banke, da bi še naprej počenjali isto, kar so počenjali doslej. Za oživljanje gospodarstva in za zmanjševanje brezposelnosti pa ne naredi niti koraka. Slovenija se je spet znašla v položaju, ko ni več sposobna preživeti lastnega prebivalstva. S trebuhom za kruhom morajo spet odhajati številni njeni državljani, predvsem mladi, v katere so bila vložena velika sredstva, nimajo pa možnosti, da bi svoje delovne sposobnosti uporabili doma in v skupno korist.

V takšnem brezperspektivnem gospodarskem stanju bosta v kratkem ogrožena tudi slovenski jezik in celotna slovenska kultura. Razprava o nujnosti univerzitetnega študija v angleščini se je že začela. Evropski program, ki študentom omogoča neoviran prehod z univerze na univerzo po mnenju njegovih snovalcev pomeni velik napredek, zahteva pa skupen jezik. Slovenci smo svojo univerzo dobili šele po prvi svetovni vojni, v Kraljevini Jugoslaviji. Ob njeni stoletnici, kot kažejo aktualna prizadevanja, pa na njej ne bi več predavali v slovenskem jeziku. V gospodarskih družbah, ki jih vodijo tuji lastniki, že zdaj prevladuje raba tujih jezikov in slovenščina bo v prihodnje vse bolj postajala lokalno narečje za popoldansko rabo.

Ob takšnih razvojnih trendih bodo postajale odveč tudi druge nacionalne kulturne ustanove nosilke slovenske etnične identitete. In kakor je splošni civilizacijski model privedel do stanja, da gospodarska rast sploh ne bo več mogoča, se zna zgoditi, da tudi slovenstvu na najvišji stopnji njegovega razvoja in afirmacije, ne bo več kaj početi. Od nas samih je odvisno ali se bomo za hip ustavili in se vprašali, kaj sploh hočemo, kakšna naj bo naša kulturna in civilizacijska prihodnost.

Ali se bomo še naprej prepuščali zunanjim tokovom, kot se prepuščamo sedaj, in se bo z nami zgodilo, kar se pač mora zgoditi? Kot smo slišali, se nekateri naši politiki že veselijo okrepljene prenovljene Evropske unije, ki se bo razvijala v smeri Združenih držav Evrope. To se bo seveda zgodilo po meri njenih največjih in najmočnejših članic. Dobrodošlo pa bo tudi našim, ki bodo dobili položaje v Bruslju. Tam namreč mimogrede, ne da bi prevzemali kakšno posebno odgovornost, postanejo milijonarji. Zato ne preseneča, da je ena sama naša stranka evidentirala kar 42 kandidatov za evropskega poslanca, nima pa niti enega kandidata za zdravstvenega ali gospodarskega ministra doma.

Kaj o prihodnosti EU menimo državljani, ni še nihče vprašal. Vstavimo se torej za hip in razmislimo, kakšno prihodnost pravzaprav pričakujemo, kakšna naj bi bila po naši meri. Ali svoj jezik, svojo kulturo in nazadnje tudi takšen praznik, kot je Prešernov dan, sploh še potrebujemo? Če ga, čemu naj služi? Smo sposobni svojo prihodnost oblikovati na svoj način, v spoštovanju svojih zgodovinskih vrednot in pridobitev ob enakopravnem priznanju teh tudi drugim? To je sedaj vprašanje. Hvala.

Javno pismo Saša Tabakovića Filmski iniciativi

Spoštovani,

žal ni razvidno, kdo je poimenski avtor vašega pisma, zato se na vas obračam kot na Filmsko iniciativo. Ne glede na to, da se je letošnja strokovna komisija PS odločila, da poleg odstopne izjave ne bo dodatno pojasnjevala okoliščine odstopa, saj je po statutu zavezana k molčečnosti, pa sem se odločil, da vaše pismo vseeno potrebuje razlago, če si kot ustvarjalci zares želimo delovati v klimi, ki bo zdrava za vse.

Za začetek bi rad poudaril, da ima vsako stanovsko združenje legitimno pravico lobirati za boljše pogoje delovanja na vseh področjih. Vseeno pa velja opozoriti, da gre pri Filmski iniciativi za umetnostno združenje, od katerega se že načelno pričakuje, da bo to počelo po principu gentlemanskega bontona, sploh kadar to počne javno. Jaz in ostali člani komisije pa pri tem nikakor ne mislimo biti kolateralna škoda.

V svojem pismu ste navedli, da gre pri letošnjem odstopu komisije za svojevrsten paradoks, saj komisija bojda ni kompetentna, da bi razsojala o prispelih predlogih s področja avdiovizualne umetnosti. Še več, ko bo naslednjič odstopila komisija, naj odstopi vsaj “prava”.”
Potrebno je vedeti, da Prešernova nagrada in nagrada Prešernovega sklada nista izključno stanovski nagradi, temveč se podelita posamezniku, katerega presežno delo prepoznata tako stroka kot tudi širša akademska javnost, ki ima lahko z dotičnim poljem umetniškega ustvarjanja nagrajenega posameznika posreden stik. Zato sta nagradi najviši državni občeumetnostni priznanji. Razumem, če bi problematizirali našo sestavo komisije pri svojih izključno stanovskih nagradah, recimo pri nagradah Festivala slovenskega filma ali Festivala dokumentranega filma. Vendar ne gre za to.
Ko že razpravljamo o kompetencah: nisem vedel, da smo igralci tako minoren del filmske umetnosti, da jo ne znamo ali ne zmoremo kvalitetno artikulirati, da bi se do nje strokovno in kritično opredeljevali. Oba igralca v komisiji se aktivno in profesionalno (ne ljubiteljsko) ukvarjava z avdiovizualnimi stvaritvami, kolikor to dopušča čas in prostor v katerem se je znašel slovenski film. Nagrajenka Prešernovega sklada in predsednica letošnje strokovne komisije Nataša Barbara Gračner ima celo več filmskih stanovskih priznanj kot jih ima marsikateri priznani slovenski filmski ustvarjalec. Tudi oba magistra dramaturgije Tea Rogelj in Primož Jesenko sta s svojim študijem na AGRFT globlje spoznala metode scenaristike, filmske teorije in zgodovine filma. Nagrajenec Prešernovega sklada Jani Virk pa je tako ali tako urednik igranega programa na RTV Slovenija. Torej letošnja strokovna komisija le ni svetlobna leta daleč od avdiovizualne obrti, kot to v pismu želi predstaviti Filmska iniciativa.
Jasno, strokovna komisija po statutu PS pokriva več področij, ki so med seboj sorodna in prepletena, zato je njena sestava raznolika, letošnja izbira članov pa (glede na zgoraj našteto) verjetno primerna. Samo poimenovanje strokovne komisije je v pristojnosti UO Prešernovega sklada ali Ministrstva za kulturo in ne strokovne komisije.
Naša komisija je vsakič po načelu pravičnosti podala UO enakovredne predloge na pobudo različnih stanovskih organizacij in posameznih predlagateljev z vseh umetniških področij, ki jih je pokrivala. Vedno v soglasju. Kadar do soglasja ni prišlo, je predlagala drugega kandidata, tudi z drugega področja.
Zanimivo, da se je Filmska iniciativa letos odločila diskreditirati člane komisije, saj so ti v skoraj isti sestavi (namesto Nataše Barbare Gračner je komisiji predsedovala Ženja Leiler, namesto Mihe Nemca pa je letos v komisiji Samo Strelec) lansko leto predlagali za nagrado Prešernovega sklada filmskega režiserja in predstavnika Filmske iniciative Metoda Pevca za dokumentarni film “Aleksandrinke”, ki je nagrado po odločitvi UO tudi sprejel!”
Kje je bila takrat Filmska iniciativa s svojimi javnimi pomisleki glede strokovnosti komisije? Zadovoljno pomirjena je licemerno uživala sadove stanovskega vrtičkarstva.

Jaz osebno sprejmem vašo žogico glede sestave strokovne komisije (da v njej sodelujejo dva igralca, dva filmska režiserja, montažer, direktor fotografije in scenarist), ki bi bila pripravljena odgovorno zavzemati estetska stališča do uprizoritvenih umetnosti in videno znala tehtno argumentirati. Seveda, če bi jo sestavljali tisti priznani člani, ki redno spremljajo uprizoritveno umetnost vsaj toliko, kolikor spremljamo avdiovizualna dela člani letošnje strokovne komisije.

Vam pa žogico tudi vračam : pozivam vas, da se kot stanovsko združenje strokovno opredelite do dokumentarnega filma “Pedro Opeka, dober prijatelj” režiserja Jožeta Možine, saj tega v svojem pismu niste storili. Tako bo lahko naša bodoča razprava vsaj jasnejša.

In še : Jože Možina je prejemnik letošnjega najvišjega državnega priznanja s področja avdiovizulane umetnosti. Verjetno javnost ne pričakuje preveč, če ga v kratkem povabite k častnemu članstvu vaše iniciative in ostalih filmskih združenj?

Lep pozdrav,

Saša Tabaković, bivši član strokovne komisije PS

 

Takle mamo: Vlade danes polagajo račune biznisu, ne volivcem.

Kako to spremeniti?

There is no alternative

Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead?

A child waits for her mother at a polling station in Rome, 24 February, 2013. Photo by Yara Nardi/ReutersA child waits for her mother at a polling station in Rome, 24 February, 2013. Photo by Yara Nardi/Reuters

Henry Farrell is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. His latest book is The Political Economy of Trust (2009).

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Last September, Il Partito Democratico, the Italian Democratic Party, asked me to talk about politics and the internet at its summer school in Cortona. Political summer schools are usually pleasant — Cortona is a medieval Tuscan hill town with excellent restaurants — and unexciting. Academics and public intellectuals give talks organised loosely around a theme; in this case, the challenges of ‘communication and democracy’. Young party activists politely listen to our speeches while they wait to do the real business of politics, between sessions and at the evening meals.

This year was different. The Italian Democratic Party, which dominates the country’s left-of-centre politics, knew that it was in trouble. A flamboyant blogger and former comedian named Beppe Grillo had turned his celebrity into an online political force, Il Movimento 5 Stelle (the Five Star Movement), which promised to do well in the national elections. The new party didn’t have any coherent plan beyond sweeping out Old Corruption, but that was enough to bring out the crowds. The Five Star Movement was particularly good at attracting young idealists, the kind of voters who might have been Democrats a decade before.

Worries about this threat spilt over into the summer school. The relationship between communication and democracy suddenly had urgent political implications. The Democratic Party had spent two decades suffering under the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s stranglehold on traditional media. Now it found itself challenged on the left too, by internet-fuelled populists who seemed to be sucking attention and energy away from it.

When Bersani started talking, he gave a speech that came strikingly close to a counsel of despair

The keynote speaker at the summer school, the Democratic Party leader and prospective prime minister Pier Luigi Bersani, was in a particularly awkward position. Matteo Renzi, the ‘reformist’ mayor of Florence, had recently challenged Bersani’s leadership, promising the kind of dynamism that would appeal to younger voters. If Bersani wanted to stay on as party leader, he had to win an open primary. The summer school gave him a chance to speak to the activists in training, and try to show that he was still relevant.

I was one of two speakers warming up the crowd for Bersani. The party members and reporters endured us patiently enough as they waited for the real event. However, when Bersani started talking, he gave a speech that came strikingly close to a counsel of despair. He told his audience that representative democracy, European representative democracy in particular, was in crisis. Once, it had offered the world a model for reconciling economy and society. Now it could no longer provide the concrete benefits — jobs, rights, and environmental protection — that people wanted. In Italy, Berlusconi and his allies had systematically delegitimized government and undermined public life. The relationship between politics and society was broken.

Bersani knew what he didn’t want — radical political change. Any reforms would have to be rooted in traditional solidarities. But he didn’t know what he did want either, or if he did, he wasn’t able to describe it. His speech was an attack, swathed in the usual billowing abstractions of Italian political rhetoric, on the purported radicalism of both his internal party opponent and the Five Star Movement. He didn’t really have a programme of his own. He could promise his party nothing except hard challenges and uncertain outcomes.

Why do social democrats such as Bersani find it so hard to figure out what to do? It isn’t just the Italians who are in trouble. Social democrats in other countries are also in retreat. In France, Francoise Hollande’s government has offered many things: a slight softening of austerity (France’s deficit this year will be somewhat higher than the European Commission would like); occasional outbursts of anti-business rhetoric (usually swiftly contradicted by follow-up statements); higher taxes on the very rich (to be rolled back as soon as possible). What it has not offered is anything approaching a coherent programme for change.

Germany’s Social Democrats are suffering, too. The Christian Democrat-led government can get away with austerity measures as long as it convinces voters that it will do a better job of keeping their money safe from the Spaniards, Italians and Greeks. And the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for Chancellor, Peer Steinbrück, is not well placed to object. In 2009 he helped introduce a constitutional measure to limit government spending, hoping that this would make his party look more responsible. He now appears like a weaker, less resolute version of his opponent, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and has 32 per cent job approval.

Greece’s mainstream socialist party, Pasok, won only 12.3 per cent of the vote in the election in June last year. Spain’s social democrats are perhaps in even greater disarray than the conservative government. Ireland’s Labour Party, a junior party in the current government, saw its vote collapse from 21 per cent to 4.6 per cent in a by-election in March.

Where they are in opposition, European social democrats don’t know what to offer voters. Where they are in power, they don’t know how to use it. Even in the United States, which has never had a social democratic party with national appeal, the Democrats have gradually changed from a party that belonged ambiguously to the left to one that spans the limited gamut between the ever-so-slightly-left-of-centre and the centre-right. It, too, has had enormous difficulty in spelling out a new agenda, because of internal divisions as well as entrenched hostility from the Republican Party.

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. In the 1990s and the 2000s, right-wing parties were the enthusiasts of the market, pushing for the deregulation of banks, the privatisation of core state functions and the whittling away of social protections. All of these now look to have been very bad ideas. The economic crisis should really have discredited the right, not the left. So why is it the left that is paralysed?

Colin Crouch’s disquieting little book, Post-Democracy (2005), provides one plausible answer. Crouch is a British academic who spent several years teaching at the European University Institute in Florence, where he was my academic supervisor. His book has been well read in the UK, but in continental Europe its impact has been much more remarkable. Though he was not at the Cortona summer school in person, his ideas were omnipresent. Speaker after speaker grappled with the challenge that his book threw down. The fear that he was right, that there was no palatable exit from our situation, hung over the conference like a dusty pall.

Crouch sees the history of democracy as an arc. In the beginning, ordinary people were excluded from decision-making. During the 20th century, they became increasingly able to determine their collective fate through the electoral process, building mass parties that could represent their interests in government. Prosperity and the contentment of working people went hand in hand. Business recognised limits to its power and answered to democratically legitimated government. Markets were subordinate to politics, not the other way around.

The realm of real democracy — political choices that are responsive to voters’ needs — shrinks ever further

At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. According to Crouch, it has been declining ever since. Places such as Italy had more ambiguous histories of rise and decline, while others still, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, began the ascent much later, having only emerged from dictatorship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, all of these countries have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.

Crouch lays some blame for this at the feet of the usual suspects. As markets globalise, businesses grow more powerful (they can relocate their activities, or threaten to relocate) and governments are weakened. Yet the real lessons of his book are about more particular forms of disconnection.

Neo-liberalism, which was supposed to replace grubby politics with efficient, market-based competition, has led not to the triumph of the free market but to the birth of new and horrid chimeras. The traditional firm, based on stable relations between employer, workers and customers, has spun itself out into a complicated and ever-shifting network of supply relationships and contractual forms. The owners remain the same but their relationship to their employees and customers is very different. For one thing, they cannot easily be held to account. As the American labour lawyer Thomas Geoghegan and others have shown, US firms have systematically divested themselves of inconvenient pension obligations to their employees, by farming them out to subsidiaries and spin-offs. Walmart has used hands-off subcontracting relationships to take advantage of unsafe working conditions in the developing world, while actively blocking efforts to improve industry safety standards until 112 garment workers died in a Bangladesh factory fire in November last year. Amazon uses subcontractors to employ warehouse employees in what can be unsafe and miserable working conditions, while minimising damage to its own brand.

Instead of clamping down on such abuses, the state has actually tried to ape these more flexible and apparently more efficient arrangements, either by putting many of its core activities out to private tender through complex contracting arrangements or by requiring its internal units to behave as if they were competing firms. As one looks from business to state and from state to business again, it is increasingly difficult to say which is which. The result is a complex web of relationships that are subject neither to market discipline nor democratic control. Businesses become entangled with the state as both customer and as regulator. States grow increasingly reliant on business, to the point where they no longer know what to do without its advice. Responsibility and accountability evanesce into an endlessly proliferating maze of contracts and subcontracts. As Crouch describes it, government is no more responsible for the delivery of services than Nike is for making the shoes that it brands. The realm of real democracy — political choices that are responsive to voters’ needs — shrinks ever further.

Politicians, meanwhile, have floated away, drifting beyond the reach of the parties that nominally chose them and the voters who elected them. They simply don’t need us as much as they used to. These days, it is far easier to ask business for money and expertise in exchange for political favours than to figure out the needs of a voting public that is increasingly fragmented and difficult to understand anyway. Both the traditional right, which always had strong connections to business, and the new left, which has woven new ties in a hurry, now rely on the private sector more than on voters or party activists. As left and right grow ever more disconnected from the public and ever closer to one another, elections become exercises in branding rather than substantive choice.

Crouch was writing Post-Democracy 10 years ago, when most people thought that things were going quite well. As long as the economy kept delivering jobs and growth, voters didn’t seem to mind about the hollowing out of democracy. Left-of-centre parties weren’t worried either: they responded to the new incentives by trying to articulate a ‘Third Way’ of market-like initiatives that could deliver broad social benefits. Crouch’s lessons have only really come home in the wake of the economic crisis.

The problem that the centre-left now faces is not that it wants to make difficult or unpopular choices. It is that no real choices remain. It is lost in the maze, able neither to reach out to its traditional bases of support (which are largely dying or alienated from it anyway) nor to propose any grand new initiatives, the state no longer having the tools to implement them. When the important decisions are all made outside of democratic politics, the centre-left can only keep going through the ritualistic motions of democracy, all the while praying for intercession.

Most left-wing parties face some version of these dilemmas. Cronyism is less a problem than an institution in the US, where decision-makers relentlessly circulate between Wall Street, K Street, and the Senate and Congress. Yet Europe has some particular bugbears of its own. Even if national political systems were by some miracle to regain their old responsiveness, the power of decision has moved to the European Union, which is dominated by a toxic combination of economic realpolitik and bureaucratic self-interest. Rich northern states are unwilling to help their southern neighbours more than is absolutely necessary; instead they press for greater austerity. The European Central Bank, which was deliberately designed to be free of democratic oversight, is becoming ever more important, and ever more political. Social democrats once looked to the EU as a bulwark against globalisation — perhaps even a model for how the international economy might be subjected to democratic control. Instead, it is turning out to be a vector of corrosion, demanding that weaker member states implement drastic economic reforms without even a pretence of consultation.

Let’s return to Italy, the laboratory of post-democracy’s most grotesque manifestations. Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi’s elaborate simulacrum of a political party, is a perfect exemplar of Crouch’s thesis: a thin shell of branding and mass mobilisation, with a dense core of business and political elites floating free in the vacuum within.

After the Cortona summer school, Bersani won his fight with Renzi in November last year and led his party into the general election. His coalition lost 3.5 million votes but still won the lower house in February, because the Italian electoral system gives a massive bonus to the biggest winner. It fell far short of a majority in the upper house and is doing its hapless best to form a government. Grillo’s Five Star Movement, on the other hand, did far better than anyone expected, winning a quarter of the votes. Grillo has made it clear that his party will not support the Democratic Party. Renzi has tried to advance himself again as a compromise leader who might be more acceptable to Grillo, so far without success. In all likelihood there will be a second general election in a few months.

‘We die if a movement becomes a party. Our problem is to remain a movement in parliament, which is a structure for parties. We have to keep a foot outside’

The Italian Democratic Party is caught on one tine of the post-democratic dilemma. It is trying to work within the system as it is, in the implausible hope that it can produce real change within a framework that almost seems designed to prevent such a thing. As the party has courted Grillo, it has started making noises about refusing to accept austerity politics and introducing major institutional reforms. It is unclear whether senior Democratic figures believe their new rhetoric; certainly no one else does. If the party does somehow come to power, the most it will do is tinker with the system.

The Five Star Movement has impaled itself on the other tine, as have the Indignados in Spain, Occupy in the US and UK, and the tent movement in Israel. All have gained mass support because of the problems of post-democracy. The divide between ordinary people and politicians has grown ever wider, and Italian politicians are often corrupt as well as remote. The Five Star Movement wants to reform Italy’s institutions to make them truly democratic. Yet it, too, is trapped by the system. As Grillo told the Financial Times in October: ‘We die if a movement becomes a party. Our problem is to remain a movement in parliament, which is a structure for parties. We have to keep a foot outside.’

The truth is, if the Five Star Movement wants to get its proposals for radical change through the complex Italian political system, it will need to compromise, just as other parties do. Grillo’s unwillingness even to entertain discussions with other parties that share his agenda is creating fissures within his movement. Grillo is holding out for a more radical transformation, in which Italian politics would be replaced by new forms of internet-based ‘collective intelligence’, allowing people to come together to solve problems without ugly partisan bargaining. In order to save democracy, the Five Star Movement would like to leave politics behind. It won’t work.

The problems of the Italian left are mirrored in other countries. The British Labour Party finds itself in difficulty, wavering between a Blairite Third Wayism that offers no clear alternative to the present government, and a more full-blooded social democracy that it cannot readily define. The French left has mired itself in scandal and confusion. The Greek left is divided between a social democratic party that is more profoundly compromised than its Italian equivalent and a loose coalition of radicals that wants to do anything and everything except find itself in power and be forced to take decisions.

All are embroiled, in different ways, in the perplexities of post-democracy. None has any very good way out. Ever since France’s president François Mitterrand tried to pursue an expansive social democratic agenda in the early 1980s and was brutally punished by international markets, it has been clear that social democracy will require either a partial withdrawal from the international economy, with all the costs that this entails, or a radical transformation of how the international economy works.

It is striking that the right is not hampered to nearly the same extent. Many mainstream conservatives are committed to democracy for pragmatic rather than idealistic reasons. They are quite content to see it watered down so long as markets work and social stability is maintained. Those on the further reaches of the right, such as Greece’s Golden Dawn, find it much easier than the Five Star Movement or Syriza, the Greek radical-left coalition, to think about alternatives. After all, they aren’t particularly interested in reforming moribund democratic institutions to make them better and more responsive; they just want to replace them with some version of militaristic fascism. Even if these factions are unlikely to succeed, they can still pull their countries in less democratic directions, by excluding weaker groups from political protection. The next 10 years are unlikely to be comfortable for immigrants in southern Europe.

Post-democracy is strangling the old parties of the left. They have run out of options. Perhaps all that traditional social democracy can do, to adapt a grim joke made by Crouch in a different context, is to serve as a pall-bearer at its own funeral. In contrast, a new group of actors — the Five Star Movement and other confederations of the angry, young and dispossessed — have seized a chance to win mass support. The problem is, they seem unable to turn mass frustration into the power to change things, to create a path for escape.

Perhaps, over time, they will figure out how to engage with the mundane task of slow drilling through hard boards that is everyday politics. Perhaps, too, the systems of unrule governing the world economy, gravely weakened as they are, will fail and collapse of their own accord, opening the space for a new and very different dispensation. Great changes seem unlikely until they happen; only in retrospect do they look inevitable. Yet if some reversal in the order of things is waiting to unfold, it is not apparent to us now. Post-democracy has trapped the left between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. We may be here for some time

Snowden – intervju za NDR 26.02.14

Snowden-Interview: Transcript

Edward Snowden im Januar 2014 im Interview mit dem NDR. © NDR / Cine Centrum Detailansicht des BildesEdward Snowden says he sleeps well – despite potential death treats.Mr Snowden did you sleep well the last couple of nights because I was reading that you asked for a kind of police protection. Are there any threats? 

There are significant threats but I sleep very well. There was an article that came out in an online outlet called Buzz Feed where they interviewed officials from the Pentagon, from the National Security Agency and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want and what they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals – and these are acting government officials. They said they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store and have me die in the shower

But fortunately you are still alive with us.

Right but I’m still alive and I don’t lose sleep because I’ve done what I feel I needed to do. It was the right thing to do and I’m not going to be afraid.

Snowden-Interview in English
– 26.01.2014 23:05 Uhr – Autor/in: Hubert Seipel

Whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked the documents about US mass surveillance. He spoke about his disclosures and his life to NDR journalist Seipel in Moscow. (Germany only)

“The greatest fear I have”, and I quote you, “regarding the disclosures is nothing will change.” That was one of your greatest concerns at the time but in the meantime there is a vivid discussion about the situation with the NSA; not only in America but also in Germany and in Brazil and President Obama was forced to go public and to justify what the NSA was doing on legal grounds.

What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a circling of the wagons of government around the National Security Agency. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights. What’s interesting is though that was the initially response, since then we’ve seen a softening. We’ve seen the President acknowledge that when he first said “we’ve drawn the right balance, there are no abuses”, we’ve seen him and his officials admit that there have been abuses. There have been thousands of violations of the National Security Agency and other agencies and authorities every single year.

Is the speech of Obama the beginning of a serious regulation?

It was clear from the President’s speech that he wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don’t need. The President created a review board from officials that were personal friends, from national security insiders, former Deputy of the CIA, people who had every incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best possible light. But what they found was that these programs have no value, they’ve never stopped a terrorist attack in the United States and they have marginal utility at best for other things. The only thing that the Section 215 phone metadata program, actually it’s a broader metadata programme of bulk collection – bulk collection means mass surveillance – program was in stopping or detecting $ 8.500 wire transfer from a cab driver in California and it’s this kind of review where insiders go we don’t need these programs, these programs don’t make us safe. They take a tremendous amount of resources to run and they offer us no value. They go “we can modify these”. The National Security agency operates under the President’s executive authority alone. He can end of modify or direct a change of their policies at any time.

Snowden-Interview: Transcript

For the first time President Obama did concede that the NSA collects and stores trillions of data.

Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace and the government has decided that it’s a good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of any crime. Traditionally the government would identify a suspect, they would go to a judge, they would say we suspect he’s committed this crime, they would get a warrant and then they would be able to use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the investigation. Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advance – prior to an investigation.

You started this debate, Edward Snowden is in the meantime a household name for the whistleblower in the age of the internet. You were working until last summer for the NSA and during this time you secretly collected thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive moment or was there a long period of time or something happening, why did you do this?

I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realisation that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public, but neither of these things we were allowed to discuss, we were allowed no, even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programmes and that’s a dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the FISA Court, which is a sort of rubber stamp authority

When you are on the inside and you go into work everyday and you sit down at the desk and you realise the power you have  – you can wire tap the President of the United States, you can wire tap a Federal Judge and if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting.

We’re not talking only of the NSA as far as this is concerned, there is a multilateral agreement for co-operation among the services and this alliance of intelligence operations is known as the Five Eyes. What agencies and countries belong to this alliance and what is its purpose?

The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers banded together to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure.

So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades what sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries.

In many countries, as in America too the agencies like the NSA are not allowed to spy within their own borders on their own people. So the Brits for example they can spy on everybody but the Brits but the NSA can conduct surveillance in England so in the very end they could exchange their data and they would be strictly following the law.

If you ask the governments about this directly they would deny it and point to policy agreements between the members of the Five Eyes saying that they won’t spy on each other’s citizens but there are a couple of key points there. One is that the way they define spying is not the collection of data. The GCHQ is collecting an incredible amount of data on British Citizens just as the National Security Agency is gathering enormous amounts of data on US citizens. What they are saying is that they will not then target people within that data. They won’t look for UK citizens or British citizens. In addition the policy agreements between them that say British won’t target US citizens, US won’t target British citizens are not legally binding. The actual memorandums of agreement state specifically on that that they are not intended to put legal restriction on any government. They are policy agreements that can be deviated from or broken at any time. So if they want to on a British citizen they can spy on a British citizen and then they can even share that data with the British government that is itself forbidden from spying on UK citizens. So there is a sort of a trading dynamic there but it’s not, it’s not open, it’s more of a nudge and wink and beyond that the key is to remember the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.

How narrow is the co-operation of the German Secret Service BND with the NSA and with the Five Eyes?

I would describe it as intimate. As a matter of fact the first way I described it in our written interview was that the German Services and the US Services are in bed together. They not only share information, the reporting of results from intelligence, but they actually share the tools and the infrastructure they work together against joint targets in services and there’s a lot of danger in this. One of the major programmes that faces abuse in the National Security Agency is what’s called “XKeyscore”. It’s a front end search engine that allows them to look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.

What could you do if you would sit so to speak in their place with this kind of instrument?

You could read anyone’s email in the world. Anybody you’ve got email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that you’re tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one stop shop for access to the NSA’s information. And what’s more you can tag individuals using “XKeyscore”. Let’s say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was interesting or you just have access that’s interesting to me, let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint which is network activity unique to you which means anywhere you go in the world anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence hide your identity, the NSA can find you and anyone who’s allowed to use this or who the NSA shares their software with can do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries that have access to “XKeyscore”.

This sounds rather frightening. The question is: does the BND deliver data of Germans to the NSA?

Whether the BND does it directly or knowingly the NSA gets German data.  Whether it’s provided I can’t speak to until it’s been reported because it would be classified and I prefer that journalists make the distinctions and the decisions about what is public interest and what should be published. However, it’s no secret that every country in the world has the data of their citizens in the NSA. Millions and millions and millions of data connections from Germans going about their daily lives, talking on their cell phones, sending SMS messages, visiting websites, buying things online, all of this ends up at the NSA and it’s reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it in some capacity. Now whether or not they actively provide the information I should not say.

The BND basically argues if we do this, we do this accidentally actually and our filter didn’t work.

Right so the kind of things that they’re discussing there are two things.  They’re talking about filtering of ingest which means when the NSA puts a secret server in a German telecommunications provider or they hack a German router and they divert the traffic in a manner that let’s them search through things they’re saying “if I see what I think is a German talking to another German I’ll drop it” but how do you know. You could say “well, these people are speaking the German language”, “this IP address seems to be from a German company to another German company”, but that’s not accurate and they wouldn’t dump all of that traffic because they’ll get people who are targetes of interest, who are actively in Germany using German communications. So realistically what’s happening is when they say there’s no spying on Germans, they don’t mean that German data isn’t being gathered, they don’t mean that records aren’t being taken or stolen, what they mean is that they’re not intentionally searching for German citizens. And that’s sort of a fingers crossed behind the back promise, it’s not reliable.

What about other European countries like Norway and Sweden for example because we have a lot of I think under water cables going through the Baltic Sea.

So this is sort of an expansion of the same idea. If the NSA isn’t collecting information on German citizens in Germany are they as soon as it leaves German borders? And the answer is “yes”. Any single communication that transits the internet, the NSA may intercept at multiple points, they might see it in Germany, they might see it in Sweden, they might see it in Norway or Finland, they might see it in Britain and they might see it in the United States.  Any single one of these places that a German communication crosses it’ll be ingested and added to the database.

So let’s come to our southern European neighbours then. What about Italy, what about France, what about Spain?

It’s the same deal worldwide.

Does the NSA spy on Siemens, on Mercedes, on other successful German companies for example, to prevail, to have the advantage of knowing what is going on in a scientific and economic world.

I don’t want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but what I will say is there’s no question that the US is engaged in economic spying.

If there’s information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it

There is this old saying “you do whatever you can do” so the NSA is doing whatever is technically possible.

This is something that the President touched on last year where he said that just because we can do something, and this was in relation to tapping Angela Merkel’s phone, just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should, and that’s exactly what’s happened. The technological capabilities that have been provided because of sort of weak security standards in internet protocols and cellular communications networks have meant that intelligence services can create systems that see everything.

Nothing annoyed the German government more than the fact that the NSA tapped the private phone of the German Chancellor Merkel over the last 10 years obviously, suddenly this invisible surveillance was connected with a known face and was not connected with a kind of watery shady terrorist background: Obama now promised to stop snooping on Merkel which raises the question: did the NSA tape already previous governments including the previous chancellors and when did they do that and how long did they do this for?

This is a particularly difficult question for me to answer because there’s information that I very strongly believe is in the public interest. However, as I’ve said before I prefer for journalists to make those decisions in advance, review the material themselves and decide whether or not the public value of this information outweighs the sort of reputational cost to the officials that ordered the surveillance. What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency. The question is how reasonable is it to assume that she is the only German official that was monitored, how reasonable is it to believe that she’s the only prominent German face who the National Security Agency was watching. I would suggest it seems unreasonable that if anyone was concerned about the intentions of German leadership that they would only watch Merkel and not her aides, not other prominent officials, not heads of ministries or even local government officials.

How does a young man from Elizabeth City in North Carolina, 30 years old, get in such a position in such a sensitive area?

That’s a very difficult question to answer. In general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatising government functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer, a government employee for the Central Intelligence Agency but I’ve also served much more frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means is you have private for profit companies doing inherently governmental work like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems and anyone who has the skills who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to do so will be empowered by the government to do that and there’s very little oversight, there’s very little review.

Have you been one of these classical computer kids sitting red eyed during the nights in the age of 12, 15 and your father was knocking on your door and saying “switch off the light, it’s getting late now”? Did you get your computer skills from that side or when did you get your first computer?

Right I definitely have had a … shall we say a deep informal education in computers and electronic technology. They’ve always been fascinating and interesting to me. The characterisation of having your parents telling you to go to bed I would say is fair

If one looks to the little public data of your life one discovers that you obviously wanted to join in May 2004 the Special Forces to fight in Iraq, what did motivate you at the time? You know, Special Forces, looking at you in the very moment, means grim fighting and it means probably killing and did you ever get to Iraq?

No I didn’t get to Iraq … one of the interesting things about the Special Forces are that they’re not actually intended for direct combat, they’re what’s referred to as a force multiplier. They’re inserted behind enemy lines, it’s a squad that has a number of different specialties in it and they teach and enable the local population to resist or to support US forces in a way that allows the local population a chance to help determine their own destiny and I felt that was an inherently noble thing at the time. In hindsight some of the reasons that we went into Iraq were not well founded and I think did a disservice to everyone involved.

What happened to your adventure then? Did you stay long with them or what happened to you?

No I broke my legs when I was in training and was discharged.

So it was a short adventure in other words?

It’s a short adventure.

In 2007 the CIA stationed you with a diplomatic cover in Geneva in Switzerland. Why did you join the CIA by the way?

I don’t think I can actually answer that one on the record.

OK if it’s what you have been doing there forget it but why did you join the CIA?

In many ways I think it’s a continuation of trying to do everything I could to prosecute the public good in the most effective way and it’s in line with the rest of my government service where I tried to use my technical skills in the most difficult positions I could find in the world and the CIA offered that.

If we go back Special Forces, CIA, NSA, it’s not actually in the description of a human rights activist or somebody who becomes a whistleblower after this. What happens to you?

I think it tells a story and that’s no matter how deeply an individual is embedded in the government, no matter how faithful to the government they are, no matter how strongly they believe in the causes of their government as I did during the Iraq war, people can learn, people can discover the line between appropriate government behaviour and actual wrongdoing and I think it became clear to me that that line had been crossed.

You worked for the NSA through a private contractor with the name Booze Allen Hamilton, one of the big ones in the business. What is the advantage for the US Government or the CIA to work through a private contractor to outsource a central government function?

The contracting culture of the national security community in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees at the same time as keeping lobbying groups in Congress typically from very well funded businesses such as Booze Allen Hamilton. The problem there is you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind. The result of that is what we saw at Booze Allen Hamilton where you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone

At the very end you ended up in Russia. Many of the intelligence communities suspect you made a deal, classified material for Asylum here in Russia.

The Chief of the Task Force investigating me as recently as December said that their investigation had turned up no evidence or indications at all that I had any outside help or contact or had made a deal of any kind to accomplish my mission. I worked alone. I didn’t need anybody’s help, I don’t have any ties to foreign governments, I’m not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter. If I am a traitor who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss not their enemy. Beyond that as far as my personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.

After your revelations none of the European countries really offered you asylum. Where did you apply in Europe for asylum?

I can’t remember the list of countries with any specificity because there were many of them but France, Germany were definitely in there as was the UK.  A number of European countries, all of whom unfortunately felt that doing the right thing was less important than supporting US political concerns.

One reaction to the NSA snooping is in the very moment that countries like Germany are thinking to create national internets an attempt to force internet companies to keep their data in their own country. Does this work?

It’s not gonna stop the NSA. Let’s put it that way. The NSA goes where the data is. If the NSA can pull text messages out of telecommunication networks in China, they can probably manage to get facebook messages out of Germany. Ultimately the solution to that is not to try to stick everything in a walled  garden. Although that does raise the level of sophistication and complexity of taking the information. It’s also much better simply to secure the information internationally against everyone rather than playing “let’s move the data”. Moving the data isn’t fixing the problem. Securing the data is the problem.

President Obama in the very moment obviously doesn’t care too much about the message of the leak. And together with the NSA they do care very much more about catching the messenger in that context. Obama asked the Russian president several times to extradite you. But Putin did not. It looks that you will stay to the rest of your life probably in Russia. How do you feel about Russia in that context and is there a solution to this problem.

I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that these leaks didn’t cause harm in fact they served the public good. Because of that I think it will be very difficult to maintain sort of an ongoing campaign of persecution against someone who the public agrees serve the public interest.

The New York Times wrote a very long comment and demanded clemency for you. The headline “Edward Snowden Whistleblower” and I quote from that: “The public learned in great detail how the agency has extended its mandate and abused its authority.” And the New York Times closes: “President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.” Did you get a call in between from the White House?

I’ve never received a call from the White House and I am not waiting by the phone. But I would welcome the opportunity to talk about how we can bring this to a conclusion that serves the interest of all parties. I think it’s clear that there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long for either an American or a German to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things which were not right.

President Obama obviously is in the very moment not quite convinced of that because he said to you are charged with three felonies and I quote: “If you Edward Snowden believe in what you did you should go back to America appear before the court with a lawyer and make your case.” Is this the solution?

It’s interesting because he mentions three felonies. What he doesn’t say is that the crimes that he has charged me with are crimes that don’t allow me to make my case. They don’t allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. The espionage act was never intended, it’s from 1918,  it was never intended to prosecute journalistic sources, people who are informing the newspapers about information that’s of public interest. It was intended for people who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments who are bombing bridges who are sabotaging communications not people who are serving the public good. So it’s I would say illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial.

Hollandova kapitulacija

Scandal in France

I haven’t paid much attention to François Hollande, the president of France, since it became clear that he wasn’t going to break with Europe’s destructive, austerity-minded policy orthodoxy. But now he has done something truly scandalous.

I am not, of course, talking about his alleged affair with an actress, which, even if true, is neither surprising (hey, it’s France) nor disturbing. No, what’s shocking is his embrace of discredited right-wing economic doctrines. It’s a reminder that Europe’s ongoing economic woes can’t be attributed solely to the bad ideas of the right. Yes, callous, wrongheaded conservatives have been driving policy, but they have been abetted and enabled by spineless, muddleheaded politicians on the moderate left.

Right now, Europe seems to be emerging from its double-dip recession and growing a bit. But this slight uptick follows years of disastrous performance. How disastrous? Consider: By 1936, seven years into the Great Depression, much of Europe was growing rapidly, with real G.D.P. per capita steadily reaching new highs. By contrast, European real G.D.P. per capita today is still well below its 2007 peak — and rising slowly at best.

Doing worse than you did in the Great Depression is, one might say, a remarkable achievement. How did the Europeans pull it off? Well, in the 1930s most European countries eventually abandoned economic orthodoxy: They went off the gold standard; they stopped trying to balance their budgets; and some of them began large military buildups that had the side effect of providing economic stimulus. The result was a strong recovery from 1933 onward.

Modern Europe is a much better place, morally, politically, and in human terms. A shared commitment to democracy has brought durable peace; social safety nets have limited the suffering from high unemployment; coordinated action has contained the threat of financial collapse. Unfortunately, the Continent’s success in avoiding disaster has had the side effect of letting governments cling to orthodox policies. Nobody has left the euro, even though it’s a monetary straitjacket. With no need to boost military spending, nobody has broken with fiscal austerity. Everyone is doing the safe, supposedly responsible thing — and the slump persists.

In this depressed and depressing landscape, France isn’t an especially bad performer. Obviously it has lagged behind Germany, which has been buoyed by its formidable export sector. But French performance has been better than that of most other European nations. And I’m not just talking about the debt-crisis countries. French growth has outpaced that of such pillars of orthodoxy as Finland and the Netherlands.

It’s true that the latest data show France failing to share in Europe’s general uptick. Most observers, including the International Monetary Fund, attribute this recent weakness largely to austerity policies. But now Mr. Hollande has spoken up about his plans to change France’s course — and it’s hard not to feel a sense of despair.

For Mr. Hollande, in announcing his intention to reduce taxes on businesses while cutting (unspecified) spending to offset the cost, declared, “It is upon supply that we need to act,” and he further declared that “supply actually creates demand.”

So what’s the significance of the fact that, at this of all times, Mr. Hollande has adopted this discredited doctrine?

As I said, it’s a sign of the haplessness of the European center-left. For four years, Europe has been in the grip of austerity fever, with mostly disastrous results; it’s telling that the current slight upturn is being hailed as if it were a policy triumph. Given the hardship these policies have inflicted, you might have expected left-of-center politicians to argue strenuously for a change in course. Yet everywhere in Europe, the center-left has at best (for example, in Britain) offered weak, halfhearted criticism, and often simply cringed in submission.

When Mr. Hollande became leader of the second-ranked euro economy, some of us hoped that he might take a stand. Instead, he fell into the usual cringe — a cringe that has now turned into intellectual collapse. And Europe’s second depression goes on and on

Števec škandalov – Slovenija

Republic of Slovenia: Scandal counter

23. januar

Michali : Klokočovnik, za zdaj 1: 1 – vojna kirurgov

Golob :  Biščak, za zdaj 1:0  – vojna energetskih mafij

Združnje manager + Mišič : Lahovnik 1: 1 – vojna države proti menežerjem

Bruselj : slovenska vlada:  1: 0 –  Bruselj zavrnil slovensko prijavo za strukturna sredstva z “Kakšen  zmazek je to?”

Direktor Onkološkega inštituta Remškar : karteli: 0 : 0 –  šikane od neznao kod, ker hoče urediti naročila

Davkoplačevalci: tuji managerji 0 : 1 –  Plača enega tujih direktorjev slabe banke 23.000 na mesec

Števec dosežkov

Sodišče v Murski soboti : ZDA    1 : 0 – Slovenija ne bo izročila romunskega hekerja

 24. januar

menežer Časar : novinarka Carl  1 : 0  –  Obsojeni Časar toži novinarko in se hkrati skriva pred roko pravice

meščani Ljubljane –  uradniki   0 : 1 –  Četrt milijona za službene prevoze

29. januar

Odmevi

župan Vidma : javni interes 1 : 0, župan je sebi posodil 100.000 občinskega denarja, Praprotnik pravi, da do leta 2011 to ni bilo nezakonito

župan Zanoškar : Slovenj gradec  1: 0, ne spomni se kako je njegov sin dobil zaposlitev na njegovi občini

opozicija in koalicija : volilci  1 : 0, njegova stranka tega ne bi komentirali, opozicija (Vizjak) razume njegovo skrb za sina, sestrska stranka da mora vsaka stranka sama poskrbeti za te stvari

Bratuškova : volivci  1 : 0, ob interpelaciji komentira očitke, da mora vsak, ki očita nezakonitost in neetičnost najprej pomesti pred svojim pragom  !!!!

1. februar

Vlado Ambrožič : Zoran Thaler, župan Zanoškar in slovenski pravni sistem,  0 : 1 .                     RTV in gospod Amrožič bosta plačala nad 13. 000 za napačen klik, ki je razkril ambudsmanove naslovnike, Thaler bo za pripravljenost na korupcijo v Evropskem parlamentu plačal približno enako in nekaj vikendov prespal v zaporu. Župani, ki pridno delajo v svoj prid so pa itak nedolžni.