The EU, Serbia and the Kosovo

Some time ago the EU had decided to support the Kosovar people in becoming independent from Serbia – besides the question and discussion about why they did so, i would also ask who thought about where to draw the Line?

In North-Kosovo (see german conflict-portrait) the majority are Serbs – now if the Kosovar can’t live in Serbia and think they need their own independent state – why should the Serbs be forced to live in that independent state (or flee and thus lose their home and property)?

I think that the decision to support an independent Kosovo should have made with more thought and planning (though of course i don’t know many details of the proceedings there…) – and the EU should have tried to keep mostly serbian areas out of the independent Kosovo to avoid further ethnic and nationalist conflict there.

Just my 2 Cents…

We are the people! (are we?)

Some time ago we had elections in Hesse, Germany- the results: the CDU-governor lost a substantial amount of public support, while the SPD-candidate made quite some surplus and the new left-wing party ‘DIE LINKE’ made it into parliament.

The SPD struggled quite some time for whether they should have their candidate elected by the ‘DIE LINKE’ or stay to the words they had given in the election campaign, that they wouldn’t collaborate with them.

To me the question is, why such discussions exist and why a party that democratically got 5,1% of voices shouldn’t be a legitimate partner for the established parties.

I see the following reasons for unwillingness to accept collaboration with ‘DIE LINKE’:

• they are successor of the GDR communist party and the west-german establishment seems to have problems collaborating with a party where some members where part of the GDR-establishment
• they are more left than the SPD and thus seem like a threat to their results
• for whatever tactical reasons the SPD had given word to not collaborate

I would see the following reasons for collaboration (i assume there would be more to list here…):

• programmatic matching in many issues (like education, minimum-wages, etc – see their program and compare with the SPD-program)
• the left-to-mid-wing block of SPD, GRÜNE and DIE LINKE got 57 seats against the mid-to-right-wing block of FDP and CDU which only got 53 seats in the federal parliament (Landtag) (see data-source)

So – my 2 Cents for that whole discussion:

• DIE LINKE is a legal party and from a formal viewpoint there is no reason to ignore the voices of their voters
• DIE LINKE seems to become a party which has a basis for getting above 5%, so the other parties and especially the ones in the left-middle-block should think about collaborating with them – or find good programmatic arguments why they don’t do so
• from a democrat’s viewpoint it’s strange, why some voices should just get ignored – if you think that this party is in any way illegal or unacceptable for our country: make your case – but respect voters.

Webservice for code-cleaning around?

Did you ever have to clean up “dirty” HTML to make it somewhat more readable and standard-conforming?

If not – you’re lucky enough to be in another business…

But if you sometimes have to, it is rather stupid work and for sure you don’t like it… to get around this i just googled for a Webservice which would do that for me… but my (not very extensive) search yielded no results.

So, if you’re a developer and have some time for programming a new rather useful web-service – two proposals:
- a web-service where you can paste Word-HTML, any HTML with unreadable indents, spans with style-settings, style-attributes, font-tags, etc in and it would produce readable, clean HTML (of course it would be cool, if the settings for what should be kept and what not would be configurable)
- a web-service where you can upload Icons and replace a given color with another one (helpful for finishing a “color-branded” design, which is based on an existing one, when the designer is not at hand)

The western view on free press in Russia

The german chancellor and the german media come up with a lot of criticizm towards Russia that the free press there would be suppressed.

I think it’s good, that we sometimes put freedom first and try to implement our view of how things should work against the views of other countries.

But lets also take another viewpoint:
- Free press is not part of peoples primary needs, so maybe it’s not one of their priority issues in a country which was in a difficult situation 10 years ago
- Russia and everyday-life for its citizens has become better and more stable under Putins adminstration
- changes should evolve and grow from within a country

I would also propose to think about how free the western press really is:
- large parts of the western media didn’t recognize (or didn’t tell) that Saddam wasn’t linked to Al Qaida and didn’t own WoMD (in Germany we had been lucky, that our chancellor opposed the war at that time and thus media was also critical)
- the non UN-backed war against Serbia was not seen with much criticism (at least not in Germany)
- there is not much criticism about the effectiveness and strategy of the Afghanistan-mission
- it’s rare, that an Iranian viewpoint on being embargoed, being surrounded by US troops and being named part of the Axis of Evil is taken
- it’s rare, that critizism regarding the US-embargo against Cuba is brought forward by our chancellor and by our media (though the UN pass resolutions condemning that embargo every year since 1992 or so)

So, don’t take me wrong – i think that free press is good and that e.g. Russia should improve on this – but shouldn’t we also take care of our own backyard?

Proposal: cut german income tax-rates by rel. 15-21% by cutting subsidies!

According to what i found out about tax-income-structure and expense-structure the german state could cut tax-rates by est. 15-21% by restructuring subsidies for the economy, real-estate and if the EC stops subsidies for agriculture (structural and social ones could still exist).
This is not a proposition to do it this way, as it’s rather clear to me that one would need to take a closer look at details – it’s just a number-game to show, how big the impact of subsidies on tax-payers money is.
The actual numbers are rather difficult to estimate as the subsidies paid on the different structural levels (state, federal state, municipalities) are a bit intransparent, also i would be glad if you looked at this as a rough estimate rather than an exact calculation, as i just did some research on this in my rather rare spare-time.

German state-income-structure (source: German Federal Statistical Office):
State (Bund) 2006: 254.5 bln EUR
Federal states (Länder) 2006: 246.7 bln EUR
Municipalities (Gemeinden) 2006: 158.6 bln EUR
Wage-taxes (LSt) 2005: 153.6 bln EUR
Income-taxes (EKSt) 2005: 9.76 bln EUR

German state-expenses 2006:
State (Bund): 282.8 bln EUR
Federal states (Länder): 258.7 bln EUR
Municipalities (Gemeinden): 155.7 bln EUR

Subsidies planned for 2008 (source: German Ministry of Finance):
total: 21,5 bln EUR for the state-level
for the economy: 12 bln EUR
for real-estate: 3.8 bln EUR (a closer look would be needed at what to cut there and what not…)
subsidies paid by the federal states (Länder) and municipalities: est. 10 bln EUR

Germanies payment-relations to the EC:
in 2005 Germany paid 21.3 bln EUR to the EC which in turn puts ~40% of its expenses into agriculture – so we could save 8.5 bln EUR by not supporting an industry which should be able to sustain itself (as we all need food) and stop hindering third-world-countries to get more access to our agricultural markets.

So we could save 12+3.8+8.5+(est. 10) = 24.3 (34.3) bln EUR – which is ~14,9% (21%) of german personal taxes (153.6+9.76=163.36 bln EUR). So instead of a tax-deduction of e.g. 25% from your income, you could have e.g. 21.25% (20%).

Why i think we should cut those subsidies to a minimum:
- the private sector may spend its money with more thought than the administration which in turn may be better for our economy
- est. 80% of agricultural subventions go to 10-20% of the big companies in that industry which i assume don’t desperately need the money (or lets say, i assume all would profit more, if you chose where to spend your money…)
- in some agricultural markets the EC keeps prices artificially high to support those markets, which i think doesn’t reflect the interests of EC-citizens but those of agriculture-lobbyists and additionally make it more difficult for third-world-countries to sell their products to us
- companies that receive subsidies should be able to attract investments if they have a sustainable model and not by good lobbying
- why should you want to cross-subvention the building of someone who is basically able to afford a house?
- in general i would vote for strategic subsidies like giving incentives to save energy, invent products and found companies instead of supporting the survival of existing industries/companies – support the small and new, not the big and old.

The agenda for achieving this:
- check my numbers and build your own opinion
- in case you don’t live in Germany: calculate those numbers for your country
- try to force our administration to bring more transparency into all this at every administrational level (the subventions-report is already quite good and an interesting read, but it misses details about federal-states spendings)
- talk with our EC-partners about those agriculture (and maybe also other) subventions
- elect people thinking in this direction or become active yourself
- support organisations like Farmsubsidy and Oxfam as they work into this direction
- let me know, if all this looks like a naive miscalculation to you, then i’ll put more work into it

Comments on Gazproms serbia-deal

Just some thoughts on this which i may elaborate a bit further later:

• it’s nice for Serbia, that they’ll become gas-delivery-hub to western europe and thus become more important in the region
• it’s nice for Russia that they are in a strong position when it comes to european energy needs
• the EC needs to make sure that we are not becoming too dependent on russian oil+gas
• a pipeline project into the Gulf-region resp. support for the Nabucco-project should be considered as strategic investment by the EC-member-states (this doesn’t conflict with my thoughts on subventions, as this is imho a strategic-issue)