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.