Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Wednesday German News

EU continues payments to Turkey for migration control:  Various European news sources report that the EU has guaranteed it's payment schedule through 2017 to Turkey.  The end-result for 2017? Three billion Euro.....as the agreement from 2016 stipulated.  The agreed upon talks to bring Turkey into the EU and grant free-visa status to Turks?  Actually still engaged and has not been halted or terminated.  One might get the impression that with the Brits staging BREXIT.....maybe they need someone to fill the missing funds spot.

Focus asks readers over deportation:  Interesting piece....the Focus magazine folks asked readers their humble opinion.  24,000 responded.  What Focus-readers typically say is that more new regulations or laws on deportation are NOT necessary....you've got adequate laws already (roughly two-thirds of the group said this).  Almost a third of the responding group said that well-integrated asylum seekers should be excluded from deportation.  Who defines well-integrated?  That's the big unknown.  If you walk into a group of a dozen Germans from all walks of life and ask what does well-integrated mean.....you get various definitions.  Focus avoided addressing that part of the issue.

Green Party from Lower Saxony wants Sundays free from on-line shopping:  Well, it's a Focus story from Lower Saxony.  There's a Green Party suggestion to mandate that call-centers open on Sundays....be shut down, and that mailing/shipping staffs working on Sundays.....be mandated to close for the day.  If you go back a dozen years ago, you simply wouldn't find any commercial sales people being available after Saturday afternoon.  Then this call-center thing got to being a regular thing.  No one can even say that it's run entirely from within Germany (some of these might be from India or Philippines).  As for getting the Greens votes?  I doubt if this theme really sells to more than 5-percent of German society.

Nuke tax paid back to companies:  So back in 2011, the German government (led by Chancellor Merkel's CDU Party)....passed a levy or tax onto nuclear energy companies in Germany.  At the time, the companies said that it was unfair and unconstitutional.  It took almost six years to get this case clear to the highest court.  The court today?  It said it was illegal.  The government will have to pay back six billion Euro to the companies.  Tremendous pay-out to the companies and the stock-holders. For the government?  No one says if they held the money in a trust or just spent it along the way.  It'll be curios how the various parties will discuss this matter tonight on TV news.

100 Million Euro for empty beds:  NDR sat and told the story of an audit of government funding from Lower Saxony.  What people talked about in 2014....as the immigration crisis unfolded....that a lot of unplanned spending was going on and real management was not existent.  So, a full audit has occurred here in the spring of 2017, and it shows roughly 100 million Euro is being spent on empty housing and empty beds in various asylum centers in the German state.  The positive here is that the audit really helped to clear the air and force standards to be applied....hopefully to cease the over-spending.  But it demonstrates precisely what people talked about three years ago....that no real management existed....no real plan was set....and that it was mostly just a hit-and-miss system with the whole crisis.  Excellent article.

Curious update on Romanian murder suspect:  I chatted last week about the fine effort of the German cops who'd figured out who killed a German female jogger back in late 2016.  A second murder is attributed to this guy, who is from Romania.  Well....Romanian authorities have opened up the folder and realized that a mystery murder from 2004 exists.....within 20 kilometers of where the guy was living at the time.  So they are asking more questions as well.  More murders to be pulled out of the unsolved file and examined with this guy?  Maybe.

Qatar business affecting German business:  Well, it got brought up today that 2.5 billion Euro of business occurs with German companies in Qatar each year.  There's a meeting with the German Foreign Minister today and the Saudi Arabian leadership.  So far, the German press is saying this whole Saudi matter is based on fake news.  I'm guessing that the Saudis are laying out the facts they have and there's going to be some comments by tonight over what the Qatar affair is about.  

2 comments:

Brad said...

Re the Focus article on deportations - Andrew Hammel has a very interesting post showing, using Bundestag data, how the German government, starting in the mid-1990's, significantly relaxed enforcement of deportations of illegal immigrants.

http://www.germanjoys.eu/2017/06/one-chart-to-rule-them-all.html

Schnitzel_Republic said...

While German federal laws exist....the whole deportation game in Germany....is a state-by-state operation. Sixteen states. Sixteen ways of interpreting deportation. So when anyone says relation has been going on....maybe so, but it's the various states making this occur. The Bundestag (since 2012), has has dumped a vast amount of leadership and responsibility down onto states and cities to run this whole 'game'. You can only blame the national leadership for part of this, and the rest goes to individual states.