Western European News Digest
Polish Prime Minister To Visit the U.S.
Poland's Prime Minister Marek Belka, after having received U.S. State Secretary Colin Powell in Warsaw for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, left on Aug. 8 for his first official visit to the U.S., to explore ways to reorganize the Polish-led multinational force in Iraq (which originally comprised 9,500 troops under Polish command responsible for South Iraq, and now is down to 6,200, after several countries like Spain pulled out). Poland has stressed that it wants to reduce its force to 1,000 next year. During his trip to Washington, Belka will meet with President Bush as well as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and discuss with U.S. officials the possibility that U.S. military bases might be moved to Poland as part of the Pentagon's global realignment plan, and also the possibility of putting anti-missile defense sites in Poland.
However, according to Polish military sources who spoke to EIR recently, these BMD (ballistic missile defense) plans are not official. What was confirmed was that reconnaissance missions, for selecting potential sites, have been undertaken in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary, for the last eight months.
Lafontaine Calls for Overthrow of Chancellor Schroeder
In an interview published in the Aug. 9 Der Spiegel weekly, former Social Democratic Party chairman and ex-minister of finance, Oskar Lafontaine, said that "things do not work anymore with Schroeder." The party either has to replace him and his policy, he said, or it will be faced with the emergence of a new left-wing partywhich Lafontaine said he would then get engaged with.
Lafontaine, a populist of the first order, even went so far as to say in the interview that in contrast to Schroeder, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had a policy of reducing unemployment. The reference to Schmidt is somewhat ominous, as Lafontaine did play a catalyst role in the overthrow of Schmidt in the autumn of 1982. Lafontaine has repeatedly been mentioned in the past weeks as a potential leader in a new left-wing party, along with Gregor Gysi, the former party chairman of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism).
Bernd Boehning, the new chairman of the Jusos, the SPD youth organization, tooting on the same horn as Lafontaine, said in Berlin today that the new Monday rallies show that "Hartz IV has failed," and with Hartz IV, the government has failed, too.
European Observers To Monitor U.S. Elections
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will send a team to observe the November Presidential vote in the United States. Democrats sought monitors because they felt that some ballots weren't counted in 2002, particularly in Florida.
Some OSCE representatives have observed U.S. elections before, but this will be the first time they will report publicly afterward, the State Department has said.
The Notorious Mandelson Appointed EU Trade Commissioner
Peter Mandelson has been appointed to the post of EU Trade Commissioner in Brussels, but has first to be approved by the European Parliament, according to British press reports Aug. 13. Hearings on the appointments are to begin Sept. 27. He was appointed, along with a crew of other globalization advocates, by incoming European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso.
Mandelson, who helped create "Prime Minister Tony Blair," has been forced out of the Blair cabinet twice, due to sleazy scandals, but Blair has always insisted on bringing him back into office. In the 1980s, Mandelson became director of Labour Party Campaigns and Communications, and supported the Blair bid for power in the party in 1994. Mandelson ran the New Labour election sweep in 1997, and entered Blair's cabinet, becoming Minister without Portfolio and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. But he had to resign just a year later in a personal financial scandal. In 1999, Blair brought him back in house as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but by 2001, Mandelson had to resign again due to a new scandal, illegally easing passport regulations for some sleazy South Asian businessmen.
The trade post is one of the most powerful in Brussels. Mandelson's job as EU trade negotiator with the rest of the world, will be to force through even more extreme "reforms" along the lines of the Blair-promoted "Lisbon agenda" for total globalization of the European Union economies.
Mandelson greeted his appointment with typical "globaldigook": "I'm excited at being given this responsibility, both for trade policy and the international dimension of competitiveness. Europe will continue to benefit from globalisation as long as trade and investment are further liberalised and if Europe preserves its long-term competitiveness, its capacity for innovation and its social market economy. We need to sustain a win-win, multilateral process of negotiation."
Mandelson was excited by other things in the past. In December 1998, he got a 373,000 pound house loan from Labour Party "moneybags" and Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson, and was forced out by the scandal. This was after he had become known all over London, including in Parliament, as "Lord Mandy of Rio" after he was exposed in Punch magazine for his government-paid romp through homosexual haunts in Rio de Janeiro in July 1998.
Mandelson is a total post-industrialist and ardent Thatcherite (as is the rest of New Labour). He is also a media-control obsessive, whose operations, along with Alistair Campbell, took Blairite media control to Josef Goebbels levels, as one former Labour insider told EIR at the time.
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