Corruption-fest 2016
The Noos case began today. Despite a plethora of pre-trial motions the charges against Princess Cristina were not dismissed.
Also in Spain, the Taula case is taking shape. It involves 30 to 50 PP (right wing) politicians from Valencia in a complicated web of illegal secret donations and money laundering. The laundering was actually quite straightforward, which isn’t always the case. Members of the party were asked to regularly “donate” certain amounts to the PP, usually around €1000 each time; they then received those amounts back in cash. The cash came from businesses who paid the PP 3% of government contracts awarded to them.
Meanwhile in France the Cahuzac case also began this week. The former Budget Minister and his wife are accused of squirreling away millions in offshore accounts thereby avoiding tax. That was of course while Mr. Minister was promoting “stiff penalties for tax dodgers.” Early on in the case he stood up in parliament and announced he’d never had an account outside of France.
Other interesting news:
- Stock prices are falling (again) around the world. Tokyo is down 5.4%, the Ibex is down 3%.
- Michael Meyer, former communications director for the UN, has written a very interesting article on the Coming Wave of Oil Refugees. A number of countries are heavily dependent on oil revenue and the price of crude is at record lows. Sub-Saharan Africa is at particular risk and Mr. Meyer suggests quite convincingly that will dramatically compound the refugee crisis in Europe (and more affluent parts of Africa.)
- There’s a fantastic article in Nature Geoscience about Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD.
And finally, Debora Diniz has written a very good piece for the NYT on the Zika virus and poor Brazilian women’s (lack of) right to choose to terminate pregnancies.
And it’s only Tuesday morning.
My Mazamet 
The abortion “debate” is raging here online over Zika… And i actually have Diniz’s article here today for translation.
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It’s good, but Brazil needs more aggressive voices. She states the facts, which of course are already known to most educated people. We’ve known them for years.
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As you know, people (generally) don’t “think” here, not really, not in any meaningful way, and that is a recipe for silliness, especially when it’s all superimposed over a Catholic backboard.
You know, through this whole Petrobras debacle, there is not a single voice calling for the company to be sold. To me, that would be the FIRST thing to do to sort out that particular thread of political corruption… but no, not a word. Not a single word.
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Infuriating and exhausting. There’s an aspect of it that’s even worse than not thinking. Not thinking is at least passive. In Brazil there’s an active refusal to think. “We shall not consider the evidence.”
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Bingo.
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Unfortunately the women of Brazil (and other Catholic countries) only have bad choices. They can carry their unwanted/Zika-infected/deformed babies to term or they can do what American unmarried girls in the 1950s did–throw themselves down flights of stairs in an effort to induce misscarriage/have a “friend” beat them in the stomach in an effort to induce miscarriage/visit a back alley butcher for an illegal abortion–no good options.
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This is a very nineties blog. Early blogs were web logs, records of the blogger’s web-surfing, interesting things found on the world wide web.
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I’m a very 90’s person, 1890’s 😛
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Coverage of the trials is similar to when powerful people here in the U.S. were tried. I have to commend European courts for actually getting better charges than what U.S. elites are typically charged with. It all seems like a circus, though.
The things that helped the elites get around the rules still exist. In a very real way, these people are simply guilty only of getting caught.
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Nothing doing in the U.K.,needless to say…the CPS knows its place.
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