HARBINGER

( Originally posted on May 4 2017 as fahrenheit451:147 ) and the UK government and parliament have been going round in ever decreasing circles since. The historically moribund European Union  can be viewed as a sleazy,corrupt,kleptocratic hellhole of outright fraud and embezzlement. Amid all the venal hubristic posturing surrounding #Brexit ,once all the vacuous platitudes have been aired and philosophical points have been examined it all comes back down to money.Who pays what to whom and for what and how long for. The current article from the euro observer is particularly instructive on this matter :- Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, in exchange for their access to the EU single market, fund initiatives aimed at reducing social and economic disparities in poorer EU member states. FOCUS Hungary and Poland risk losing €1bn in Norway aid row Girl visiting the Museum on Wheels, a mobile educational exhibition presenting the history and culture of Polish Jews. The exhibiti...

Truth is most people probably don't a give a shit about investigative journalists.Or what happens to them or doesn't happen to them.Perhaps the only time when some random spark ignites the public's interest in investigative journalism is when a scandal is uncovered and wrong doing is exposed to the bright daylight of public scrutiny. Not all journalists are investigators but it goes with the profession's territory.Born to snoop,to pry,to ask the really awkward questions,to dig, to get their goddamn head blown off if they dig too deep and wind up annoying the wrong people at the wrong moment. But when all the sums get added up at the close of business,not too many give a damn one way or the other;unless and until,of course events start to impinge too often and bodies start to pile up in plain sight of the civilians who would,if they could choose,rather not know,rather not confront the mire and the blood of Realpolitik as it gets played in real time with real conseque...

There comes a point, and in any event we are in fact way,way past it, where reiterating the same arguments,exposing the same facts,re-heating the same revelations that had once initially shocked us just becomes tedious. It is axiomatic that within the European Union the further east and south east that you go,the greater the increase in fraud and corruption there is in any given member state. However, even before the annexation,sorry accession, in 2004 and 2007 of the virtual entirety of the economically moribund and socially sclerotic former post-1945 communist states - institutionalised fraud and corruption abounded in stalwart EU member states such as Portugal,Spain,Greece and Italy. The litany of antiquated,clapped out rustbelt national economies includes those of the former baltic Soviet republics - Estonia,Latvia,Lithuania, parts of the Yugoslav federation -Croatia ,Slovenia alongside Poland,Hungary,Czechia,Slovakia,Romania and Bulgaria. Many of these never came close to pa...