clickety clack, clickety clack

[don]

German politicians are considering a return to manual typewriters for sensitive documents in the wake of the US surveillance scandal.

The head of the Bundestag's parliamentary enquiry into NSA activity inGermany said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV programme that he and his colleagues were seriously thinking of ditching email completely.

Asked "Are you considering typewriters" by the interviewer on Monday night, the Christian Democrat politican Patrick Sensburg said: "As a matter of fact, we have – and not electronic models either". "Really?", the surprised interviewer checked. "Yes, no joke", Sensburg responded.

During the ongoing row over alleged US spying operations in Germany, there had been speculation that the CIA may have actively targeted the Bundestag's NSA inquiry committee.

"Unlike other inquiry committees, we are investigating an ongoing situation. Intelligence activities are still going on, they are happening," said Sensburg..

Last year, the Russian government reportedly took similar measures in response to proof of NSA spying, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The federal guard service, a powerful body tasked with protecting Russia's highest-ranking officials, put in an order for 20 Triumph Adler typewriters, which create unique "handwriting", that allows its source to be traced.

According to German media, revelations about digital surveillance have triggered a fundamental rethink about how the government conducts its communications. "Above all, people are trying to stay away from technology whenever they can", wrote Die Welt.

"Those concerned talk less on the phone, prefer to meet in person. More coffees are being drunk and lunches eaten together. Even the walk in the park is increasingly enjoying a revival".

The ultimate counter-espionage tool?

[GRG55]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

..."Those concerned talk less on the phone, prefer to meet in person. More coffees are being drunk and lunches eaten together. Even the walk in the park is increasingly enjoying a revival".

The ultimate counter-espionage tool?

Perhaps this too??

[Woodsman]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

According to German media, revelations about digital surveillance have triggered a fundamental rethink about how the government conducts its communications. "Above all, people are trying to stay away from technology whenever they can", wrote Die Welt.

"Those concerned talk less on the phone, prefer to meet in person. More coffees are being drunk and lunches eaten together. Even the walk in the park is increasingly enjoying a revival".

The ultimate counter-espionage tool?

Reminds me of an Asimov story I read once where two worlds at war resorted to manned attacks once the robot weapons were perfectly countered. And weren't typewriters illegal at various times and places in the world?

[don]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

Commentary No. 381, July 15, 2014
"Germany and the United States: Unprecedented Breach"

On July 10, the German government demanded the immediate departure of the head of the CIA mission in Berlin. Such demands are not unusual, even between ostensible allies. What is unusual is that it should be publicly announced, and with much fanfare. What accounts for what some are already calling an "unprecedented breach" in the very close relations after 1945 between the United States and the German Federal Republic?

It only took one day for the subject to become the occasion of two major articles, one an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times and the other a major story in Germany's Der Spiegel. Both are pessimistic that the unprecedented breach can be swiftly, if ever, repaired.

The op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, written by Jacob Heilbrun, was entitled "The German-American Breakup." The word "breakup" is unequivocal, or almost. After an overview of various German commentaries, Heilbrun ends with this admonition:

"If Obama is unable to rein in spying of Germany, he may discover that he is helping to convert it from an ally into an adversary. For Obama to sayAuf Wiedersehen to a longtime ally would deliver a blow to American national security that no amount of secret information could possibly justify."


If Heilbrun seems to have little hope that his viewpoint will be heard in Washington, it pales before the lead article in Der Spiegel on the same date. The long article is entitled "Germany's Choice: Will It Be America or Russia?" One section of the article is entitled "The Last Straw." It cites not someone on the left or someone who has long advocated closer relations with Russia. It cites instead a conservative advocate of the free economy and of rocksolid relations with the United States, who chairs an organization called Atlantic Bridge. In a tone of desperation, he says: "If [the latest allegations about spying] turn out to be true, it's time for this to stop." Note that the article says it's time for it to stop, not that it's time for further discussions or negotiations about it. Just stop.

One last poignant detail: The U.S. ambassador to Germany speaks no German. The Russia ambassador is so fluent one scarcely notices his accent. Entrance to the U.S. Ambassador's office is protected by the highest-level security possible, surpassing that which governs the entrance to the White House's Oval Office. Entrance to the Russian embassy is so casual that it prompts disbelief.

Is this unprecedented breach so sudden and so unpredictable? By now, every major or minor paper in Germany, the United States, France, Great Britain and elsewhere is featuring the story, analyzing the causes, and preaching the solution. Above all, most articles are searching for whom to blame. The principal suspects are the National Security Agency (NSA) and President Obama. But is it simply the unwise decisions of the NSA or of Obama? In other words, could it have been different? Well, surely in detail. The U.S. government has been stupid and very clumsy. However, the problem is structural and not the passing mistakes and stupidity of those in power in the United States.


The basic problem is that the United States is, and has been for some time, in geopolitical decline. It doesn't like this. It doesn't really accept this. It surely doesn't know how to handle it, that is, minimize the losses to the United States. So it keeps trying to restore what is unrestorable - U.S. "leadership" (read: hegemony) in the world-system. This makes the United States a very dangerous actor. No small number of political agents in the United States are calling for some sort of decisive "action" - whatever that could possibly mean. And U.S. elections may depend in large part on how U.S. political actors play this game.

That is what Europeans in general, and now Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in particular, are realizing. The United States has become a very unreliable "partner." So even those in Germany and elsewhere in Europe who are nostalgic for the warm embrace of the "free world" are reluctantly joining the less nostalgic others in deciding how they can survive geopolitically without the United States. And this is pushing them into the logical alternative, a European tent that includes Russia.

As the Germans, and the Europeans in general, move inexorably in this direction, they have their hesitations. If they can no longer trust the United States, could they really trust Russia? And, more importantly, could they make a deal with the Russians that the Russians would find it worthwhile and necessary to observe? You can bet that this is what is being discussed in the inner circles of the German government today, and not how to repair the irreparable breach of trust with the United States.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

[don]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

Germany, as far as we know, has no nuclear deterrent so it's either the US or the Russian nuclear umbrella.

relevant factoids:

Currently there are 179 US base sites in Germany

Pentagon spending in Germany, 2002-2013 was officially $27.8 billion

[don]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

in related news . . .


The headline news is that this Tuesday in Fortaleza, northeast Brazil, the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) fights the (Neoliberal) World (Dis)Order via a new development bank and a reserve fund set up to offset financial crises.

The devil, of course, is in the details of how they'll do it.

It's been a long and winding road since Yekaterinburg in 2009, at their first summit, up to the BRICS's long-awaited counterpunch against the Bretton Woods consensus - the IMF and the World Bank - as well as the Japan-dominated (but largely responding to US priorities) Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The BRICS Development Bank - with an initial US$50 billion in capital - will be not only BRICS-oriented, but invest in infrastructure projects and sustainable development on a global scale. The model is the Brazilian BNDES, which supports Brazilian companies investing across Latin America. In a few years, it will reach a financing capacity of up to $350 billion. With extra funding especially from Beijing and Moscow, the new institution could leave the World Bank in the dust. Compare access to real capital savings to US government's printed green paper with no collateral.

And then there's the agreement establishing a $100 billion pool of reserve currencies - the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), described by Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov as "a kind of mini-IMF". That's a non-Washington consensus mechanism to counterpunch capital flight. For the pool, China will contribute with $41 billion, Brazil, India and Russia with $18 billion each, and South Africa with $5 billion.

The development bank should be headquartered in Shanghai - although Mumbai has forcefully tried to make its case (for an Indian take on the BRICS strategy, see here )

Way beyond economy and finance, this is essentially about geopolitics - as in emerging powers offering an alternative to the failed Washington consensus. Or, as consensus apologists say, the BRICS may be able to "alleviate challenges" they face from the "international financial system". The strategy also happens to be one of the key nodes of the progressively solidified China-Russia alliance, recently featured via the gas "deal of the century" and at the St. Petersburg economic forum.


Just as Brazil managed, against plenty of odds, to stage an unforgettable World Cup - the melting of the national team notwithstanding - Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping now come to the neighborhood to play top class geopolitical ball.

The Kremlin views the bilateral relation with Brasilia as highly strategic. Putin not only watched the World Cup final in Rio; apart from Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, he also met German chancellor Angela Merkel (they discussed Ukraine in detail). Yet arguably the key member of Putin's traveling party is Elvira Nabiulin, president of Russia's Central Bank; she is pressing in South America the concept that all negotiations with the BRICS should bypass the US dollar.

Putin's extremely powerful, symbolic meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana, as well as writing off $36 billion in Cuban debt could not have had a more meaningful impact all across Latin America. Compare it with the perennial US embargo.

In South America, Putin is meeting not only with Uruguay's President Pepe Mujica - discussing, among other items, the construction of a deepwater port - but also with Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and Bolivia's Evo Morales.

Xi Jinping is also on tour, visiting, apart from Brazil, Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela. What Beijing is saying (and doing) complements Moscow; Latin America is viewed as highly strategic. That should translate into more Chinese investment and increased South-South integration.

This Russia-China commercial/diplomatic offensive fits the concerted push towards a multipolar world - side by side with political/economic South American leaders. Argentina is a sterling example. While Buenos Aires, already mired in recession, fights American vulture funds - the epitome of financial speculation - in New York courthouses, Putin and Xi come offering investment in everything from railways to the energy industry.

Russia's energy industry of course needs investment and technology from private Western multinationals, just as Made in China developed out of Western investment profiting from a cheap workforce. What the BRICS are trying to present to the Global South now is a choice; on one side, financial speculation, vulture funds and the hegemony of the Masters of the Universe; on the other side, productive capitalism - an alternative strategy of capitalist development compared to the Triad (US, EU, Japan).

Still, it will be a long way for the BRICS to project a productive model independent of the casino capitalism speculation "model", by the way still recovering from the massive 2007/2008 crisis (the financial bubble has not burst for good.)

One might view the BRICS's strategy as a sort of running, constructive critique of capitalism; how to purge the system from perennially financing the US fiscal deficit as well as a global militarization syndrome - related to the Orwellian/Panopticon complex - subordinated to Washington. As Argentine economist Julio Gambina put it, the key question is not being emergent, but independent.

In this piece, La Stampa's Claudio Gallo introduces what could be the defining issue of the times: how neoliberalism - ruling directly or indirectly most of the world - is producing a disastrous anthropological mutation that is plunging us all into global totalitarianism (while everyone swears by their "freedoms").

It's always instructive to come back to Argentina. Argentina is imprisoned by a chronic foreign debt crisis essentially unleashed by the IMF over 40 years ago - and now perpetuated by vulture funds. The BRICS bank and the reserve pool as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank offer the possibility for dozens of other nations to escape the Argentine plight. Not to mention the possibility that other emerging nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran and Turkey may soon contribute to both institutions.

No wonder the hegemonic Masters of the Universe gang is uneasy in their leather chairs. This Financial Times piece neatly summarizes the view from the City of London - a notorious casino capitalism paradise.

These are heady days in South America in more ways than one. Atlanticist hegemony will remain part of the picture, of course, but it's the BRICS's strategy that is pointing the way further on down the road. And still the multipolar wheel keeps rolling along.Pepe Escobar

[GRG55]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

in related news . . .


The headline news is that this Tuesday in Fortaleza, northeast Brazil, the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) fights the (Neoliberal) World (Dis)Order via a new development bank and a reserve fund set up to offset financial crises.

The devil, of course, is in the details of how they'll do it...

...It's always instructive to come back to Argentina. Argentina is imprisoned by a chronic foreign debt crisis essentially unleashed by the IMF over 40 years ago - and now perpetuated by vulture funds. The BRICS bank and the reserve pool as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank offer the possibility for dozens of other nations to escape the Argentine plight. Not to mention the possibility that other emerging nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran and Turkey may soon contribute to both institutions...

...

This does not appear an attempt to escape US$ hegemony, but more an attempt to replicate the exorbitant privilege. These bastions of prudent government, Argentina and all the rest, want the same thing the USA enjoys...to be able to raise unconstrained quantities of public debt with impunity and no intention or real obligation to have to repay it.

[Southernguy]

Re: clickety clack, clickety clack

"Russia's energy industry of course needs investment and technology from private Western multinationals, just as Made in China developed out of Western investment profiting from a cheap workforce. What the BRICS are trying to present to the Global South now is a choice; on one side, financial speculation, vulture funds and the hegemony of the Masters of the Universe; on the other side, productive capitalism - an alternative strategy of capitalist development compared to the Triad (US, EU, Japan). "
As far as it goes, China influence in Latin America has been only to deepen dependancy on raw materials (oil, soy beans and other agricultural goods and metals) exports. Nothing done to foster industrialization. It repeats consistently the model set by Great Britain in the XIX century and the USA and Wester Europe in the XXth.
As to external debt in Argentina and Uruguay the first loans early XIX century were from Baring Brothers. Hardly 60-70% of the money was effecively disboursed. 100% had to be paid, however. Paraguay was at the time creating an autonomous development industrial model. Under British patronage Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina invaded around 1870. Resistance was fierce. When war ended the country had been leveled. Almost all men (including children over 9 years) were killed. Paraguay under Rodriguez de Francia and Lopez had refused to get loans from British banks.