Germany is swiftly losing its confidence in the basic honesty of the men (and I think that they all are men) who run some of their most prestigious companies. the director of the Deutsche Bank managed to escape prosecution for misuse of funds only by paying what amounts to a fine of over 3 million Euros. Worst of all, it seems like a group of top level financial managers in Siemens managed to squirrel together a bribery pot of more than 200 million Euros, much of which was used for bribes in Nigeria. There is a suspicion that this could not have been done without the knowledge of the absolute top level directors of Germany’s premier high tech company. The question now is: where will it end, what can still be coming, and how long has this been going on. OK, the Germans would recently have said that they expect that from some of their new European Union colleagues, like Rumania, Number 84 on the list of corruption-infiltrated countries, just behind Cuba and Burkano Fasso. But Germany? Speaking of the EU, it is quickly displaying some of its basic weaknesses. It seems like they didn’t really mean it when they wrote in the constitution that decisions had to be made unanimously. Or perhaps they hadn’t considered what that meant when Malta and Cypress joined. But it is Poland, run by the strangest of all family duos, which has demonstrated what it means. They vetoed an otherwise unanimous motion to negotiate with Russia on energy matters, since the Russians banned their meat imports. So now they can’t talk to Russia which supplies most of the energy to Europe. Putin can laugh his way back to Moscow.
Germany
The Great White North confronts the invisible fence
US President George Bush has announced that Boeing has been awarded a multi billion dollar contract to build a 10,000 kilometer long “invisible fence†along the Mexican and Canadian borders, similar to the one that dog owners place around their backyards to keep fido from leaving the property. 18,000 towers, outfitted with motion detectors and cameras, will ensure that US citizens enjoy the kind of internal protection previously offered to populations behind the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the North Korean no-go zone.
Canadian authorities were taken by surprise by the announcement of the end of what used to be called “the world’s longest undefended borderâ€. Recalling that more than 37,000 Hungarians showed up in Canada when the Iron Curtain was briefly breached in 1956, Canadian aid societies have begun to make preparations for the expected flow of refugees moving north across the mountains before the watchtowers are in place. In Whitehorse the Yukon government has asked for a 2-year delay to make certain that the 200,000 strong porcupine caribou herd is on the right side of the border lest they get permanently lost amidst the oil drilling equipment dotting the wildlife refuge on the Alaska side of the border. Should the herd cross while under detection, it is feared that an energy crisis will be inevitable as the detectors and cameras become challenged beyond their capabiilties.