oh, larissa

Lack of notice “in the English language press that the man who put up the money for the Pirate Bay has a remarkably unsavoury past, straight out of Stieg Larsson. Carl Lundström inherited a fortune from crispbread, and has put some of it into extremist right-wing parties, with a strong anti-immigrant line. In 1985 he was involved with a group of skinheads who beat up some Latin Americans in the old town in Stockholm; in the early Nineties he was thrown out of New Democracy, a populist and xenophobic party, for being too right wing; this month it turns out that one of the men arrested for his part in an armed burglary and assault in a small town on the West Coast, part of a feud within a neo-nazist organisation, was the managing director of one of Lundström’s companies.

…he was also involved with an attempted coup within the Taxpayers’ Federation, a pressure group, which wanted to get it explicitly to blame Sweden’s high taxes on the presence of immigrants. A couple of years ago, Svenska Dagbladet found that the Pirate Bay’s revenues have all been shipped to Switzerland via Israel, to save them from the taxman. Lundström apparently put up the money for 100 candidates from the Sweden Democrats (roughly equivalent to the BNP) to stand for election to the Federation’s board.”

From Andrew Brown’s post “Who put up the money for The Pirate Bay”; also at The Register

February 28, 2009, 6:31pm

A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas | NYT

“The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them. It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Mr. Clinton or George W. Bush. And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care and education, among other areas.

More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational gains.”

Governments across Europe tremble as effects of global recession prompt angry people to take to the streets | The Guardian

A snapshot of Jan. 30 in Athens, Riga, Paris, Budapest, Kiev and Reykjavik.

Keep internet broadcasting unregulated, Google tells CRTC

Unbelievable!  The CRTC is contemplating regulating the internet, when there really should be no “forcing” Canadian content.  Net neutrality!

In the U.S. south, is Canadian a new racial slur?

article in the National Post