05.26.09
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Europe, GNU/Linux, Windows at 8:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The real purpose of the Gates family trip to Spain is finally made public
IN TWO previous posts [1, 2], we wrote about the unfolding of disturbing events in Spain, where Microsoft had plans of turning children into its customers and vassals.
The predictions are now confirmed. To Bill Gates, a major lobbyist these days [1, 2, 3, 4], the whole charity gig [1, 2, 3] is a convenient excuse and a tool for political power struggles. He uses that power to ensure that countries sell their entire population and public sector to Microsoft. With it, the commercial sector must follow (Microsoft ensures interoperability is a no-go).
An informant from Spain has just sent us the following update regarding this news article (English translation):
The excuse of Bill G. visiting Mr.Zapatero was collaboration with the developing world under the disguise of the Gates Foundation.
Seems Mrs. Rosa Garcia, former Microsoft CEO for Spain and current person in charge for the whole EMEA region of Microsoft business had to “call the cavalry” in order to ensure GNU/Linux would be banished from Spanish educational system.
It seems clear that the “high diplomacy game” visit of William Henry Gates III has nothing to do with curing malaria and its real aim is to ensure GNU/Linux has no place in the recent plan to bring netbooks to Spanish schoolchildren.
Several regions in Spain have developed successful programs with GNU/Linux, but Microsoft wants to push the only one that has used an All-Microsoft (including the failed Tablet-PC concept) approach in the Aragon region in order to sabotage GNU/Linux educational initiatives already working in many other regions of the country like Extremadura, Andalusia, Madrid, Catalonia and Valencia.
So, the purpose of this trip turns out to be as many people expected. █
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Posted in Asia, Australia, DRM, Europe, Fraud, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Lenovo, Microsoft, Vista 7, Windows at 7:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Protests in India used Boycott Novell banners
Summary: More collusion to exclude GNU/Linux and more pressure to impose Windows+DRM on innocent schoolchildren
ASUS and Microsoft kickbacks are a subject we have not re-raised for weeks [1, 2, 3], but fresh signs are suggesting that Microsoft’s anti-competitive tactics in this area of sub-notebooks continue unabated.
Over at InfroWorld (IDG), a writer has just accused Microsoft (and OEMs) of collusion and here is the summary:
Microsoft is colluding with netbook hardware vendors to deny customer choice and protect profits
On to the impacts that are most disturbing, yesterday we wrote about Bill Gates and his visit to Spain. Today we find this new report:
A widespread project to equip Spanish primary students with laptops was under attack by the free software community for being an undercover operation from Microsoft to take over the educational system in the country. Now the government is considering a kind of dual booting system.
[...]
But it still seems that the powers that be in Spain haven’t given this new focus much consideration: publishing school textbooks in Spain is a multimillion-euro business and many publishers have insisted that the digital books that go on to the laptops be DRM-protected. How exactly this would be technically and legally implemented on an all FLOSS-based device remains to be seen.
It’s just like Portugal and the Magalhães fiasco. The company involved was brought to court for charges of fraud. Microsoft et al seemingly pass on their scam on to a bigger country accommodating even more children whom they want to become prisoners of Microsoft and DRM.
In other news, now that we’ve seen the invalid reasons for rejection of GNU/Linux in NSW education, having used children to advance corporate agenda (the Linux-hostile Lenovo is among those to blame, Adobe being a problem as well but for other reasons), there is this report which reveals that children will become marketing tools and beta testers for Microsoft. Who will pay? taxpayers of course.
“It’s just like Portugal and the Magalhães fiasco. The company involved was brought to court for charges of fraud.”Our informant from Australia writes: “I don’t think I’ve ever been more disgusted and angry at the state of IT and education in Australia… ever. Today the blatant nepotism and conflicts of interest (corruption) has reached a new level, especially in New South Wales.
“They won’t use Linux but they’ll voluntarily become beta testers for Microsoft and make our children beta testers for Microsoft as well as part of their corporate advertising slog [PDF].
“They reject the top flight Linux distro’s and then they willingly agree to become Microsoft guinea pigs and test bunnies. Do I smell CORRUPTION ? Money changing hands…
“Ubuntu is not good enough but Windows 7 is ???? It is nothing short of sheer brinkmanship, disgusting corruption, and child abuse. Making our children corporate beta testers for Microsoft and offering kickbacks to schools who adopt and push Microsoft software.”
We have already seen kids waging protest against it.
“It reeks of collusion — collusion in which our children are used,” concludes our informant and reader. █
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
“DRM is the future.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Read the log
Enter the IRC channel now
To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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05.25.09
Posted in Europe, Fraud, Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Red Hat at 5:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ZDNet or eWeek (Ziff Davis) spins Microsoft’s illegal contracts as Red Hat whining
LAST YEAR we wrote about ZDNet and its modification of headlines by editors so as to provoke readers and disseminate noise. A reader of ours has just complained that the good article from Peter Judge had an improper headline. “Eighteen vs Red Hat,” calls it our reader, meaning to say that a lawsuit from 18 companies was somehow cast as just a lawsuit from Red Hat. There is also the implication in the headline that Microsoft’s monopoly should be defended and that Red Hat is a crybaby.
“So who was responsible for the irresponsible headline that daemonises Red Hat without reason?”Peter Judge is an excellent ZDNet writer and also a supporter of GNU/Linux for the most part. So who was responsible for the irresponsible headline that daemonises Red Hat without reason? Red Hat is among the victims. “From my understanding, it would be the editorial staff which determines the (pro-Microsoft) titles for articles,” claims our reader. “FWIW, the article itself is fantastically informative. However, the title blows chunks. It seems that the editors always have to spin the titles.”
What gives? Peter Judge would never choose such a headline given his biases, but maybe he approved a change imposed by superiors. Either way, this does no favours to his reputation and the editor of eWeek Europe is probably worth identifying. eWeek is a Ziff Davis publication, so it is deep in Microsoft’s pocket. For background see:
“Eighteen companies are in the law suit but eWeek decides that it is only Red Hat alone in the title,” our reader writes in reference to an article we cited here regarding an incident we last mentioned today. Also see:
Unlike ZDNet/eWeek, Heise has just published an article about the event, under the headline “Open source businesses oppose restricted tender in Switzerland.” Yes, it says “Open source businesses”, not “Red Hat”. It’s also about illegal procurement procedures, not Microsoft’s “monopoly”.
A group of open source companies has launched a legal action against the Swiss Federal Office for Buildings and Logistics (FBL). The agency awarded a 3-year, 42 million Swiss franc contract for licence extensions to Microsoft following a “no-bid” process for those extensions. Linux specialists Red Hat, Univention and Collax, groupware vendors Zarafa and Open-Xchange and a range of other companies which earn their living from open source software are now protesting against the award.
Also in Heise, today we find this humourous article which mentions Microsoft, Novell, and TomTom.
The hostile species is Microsoft, of course. The energy moon that exploded, in this parallel is Windows, as Microsoft dug deeper into the franchise it produced Vista which blew up in their faces. Their enemy, the Federation of Planets, would be the open source and Linux communities, who have constantly felt threatened by Microsoft’s posturing over open source. The warring factions have been separated by a neutral zone which few, save Novell, dared to cross. And that attempt to reach out to find détente would be last year’s reaching out to the Apache Foundation and Microsoft’s open source contributions.
[...]
That is where we are right now in the story, though with open source, the disruption that threatened the peace was the Microsoft lawsuit against Tom Tom which sent a chill through the Linux community as it mentioned FAT software patents. “See”, the Kirks of the open source community said, “we cannot trust them.”
The convictions of the author are telling. He knows the plot. Thumbs up to Heise and thumbs down (again) to ZDNet or even eWeek, which we wrote about in:
Heise is still among our recommended sources of news. █
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Posted in Deception, Finance, GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell at 5:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell PR used to obscure the company’s harm to the community
Under the banner of “Novell Executive Summit gives back to the community” Novell has just pushed a self-promotional plug, a press release by some measures. ITWeb publishes this as though it is news because it’s hardly structured like a press release. What is this, journalism [1, 2]? Or the handing over of one's soapbox directly to corporations, which means one no longer has to just pretend that NBC, for example, is independent from GE and Microsoft?
Novell is rightly concerned about its public image. It’s seen as the pariah in many circles of the very same people and products which it targets. As this new article put it:
Patent infringement and sharing have been a big issue for Microsoft in recent years. The company has in some cases avoided going to court by signing patent sharing agreements with several companies, most notably Linux vendor Novell.
Novell is hardly a “Linux vendor”. GNU/Linux accounts only for a small portion of its revenue. The financial reports are just a couple of days away and here is a little preview.
Novell Inc NOVL $0.04 $0.05 25.0% 5/28 AMC $4.06
Novell will report alongside the following companies:
Costco Wholesale Corp.; H.J. Heinz Co.; Novell Inc.; Sears Holdings Corp.
Will it be a terrible quarter like the previous one? █
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Law, Microsoft at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The impact of the Symbian case revisited; Europe under threat of anti-FOSS laws, which Microsoft craves
NOKIA (proprietor of Symbian) deserves no honour or credit whatsoever for what it did in Europe regarding software patents [1, 2].
According to these lawyers, however, the infamous Symbian case did not really change anything in the UK. To quote:
If anyone thought that Symbian really changed anything at the UK-IPO, the IPKat thinks that they are probably either overly optimistic or mistaken. The test, such as it is, is now still the familiar 4-step Aerotel test, but bearing in mind that computer programs can make a technical contribution, contrary to what the 4-step test might suggest.
In other older news, attempts to legalise software patents in Europe are back, but they are dressed a little differently.
Another open door for software patents in EU
[...]
A new international treaty United Patent Litigation System (UPLS) that may create an centralised trusted patent court is the new open door for software patents in the European Union.
The draft UPLS is inspired from the now defunct European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) and is estimated to creat a new international patent court. As FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) points out, the system will by-pass the national courts. This court system would be shielded against any review by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Thus, hand-picked patent judges will have the last word on software patents, meaning that will have the ultimate power to interpret patent law.
To quote Jefferson, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Microsoft is still lobbying for software patents in Europe, despite some setbacks. Don’t let them pawn tomorrow’s programmers and even hold them hostage by pieces of paper that symbolise nothing of substance. █
“[The EPO] can’t distinguish between hardware and software so the patents get issued anyway.”
–Marshall Phelps, Microsoft
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This week’s editorial talks about the Ubuntu Developers Summit. In the Linux distribution announcement section you will find the following releases: Clonezilla Live 1.2.2-14, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8, NetSecL 2.4, ArtistX 0.7 and Puppy Linux 4.2.1. In other news: AMD announced the release of ATI Catalyst 9.5 video driver suite for Linux systems and the GNOME developers released the second maintenance version of GNOME 2.26. Last week we also published an in-depth review of the Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) operating system. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.
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The biggest problem most people have with making The Big Move from Windows to Linux, indeed the problem I had, is the One Critical App. Yes, you say, the cost is great, the security is better, the use of resources is better, I even like the open source philosophy. But there’s this one program I absolutely can’t live without, and it won’t work.
[...]
Crossover Office really isn’t in the open source spirit. It’s based on WINE but contains additional, proprietary code and costs money. They had a free download day last fall, when I grabbed it, but normally each version–Crossover Linux, Crossover Mac and Crossover Games–is $39.95. I’d call it good value for the money.
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I’m not the world’s biggest Linux fan and I don’t own a Wii, but I can always appreciate ingenuity, even if the clear benefits of said ingenuity are not immediately recognizable.
Case in point, Matt Cutts has connected a Wii Fit balance board to a Linux box via Bluetooth. So far, all he can do is weigh himself in kilograms and move a red dot around by leaning in different directions on the balance board.
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Desktop
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The Alexander Maconochie jail in Canberra will this week deploy 30 more Ubuntu Linux-based computers for prisoner use after a successful first phase.
The Prison PC computers created by Melbourne consultancy, Cybersource, were deployed in prisoner group areas such as the education centre and the library.
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Bob Sutor, vice president for Linux and open source for IBM, was speaking on the publication of a global survey on Linux deployment on the desktop, commenting that there was a gradual erosion of Windows use within enterprises. “It’s not a full frontal assault,” he said. He said that users were learning that there were other alternatives to Microsoft. “It’s not just about Linux,” he said. “It’s the growing use of Macs and the rise of smart phones as alternatives to Windows desktops.” He said that Microsoft must be hoping that it gets Windows 7 right or it’s really in trouble.
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Server
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After close to two years of development and preliminary marketing in India, IBM’s Smart Cube application appliances went on sale last Tuesday in its home market in the United States, moving one step closer to a worldwide launch. The Smart Cube appliances, which we have been watching closely since Big Blue first started talking about them a year ago, come in Power-i and X64-Linux flavors and are designed to tap into the Smart Market, a clearinghouse for systems and application software aimed at small and medium businesses.
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Kernel Space
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Ok, so 90% of the patch is the addition of one new driver, at around 9000 lines for the the Cisco PCI-Express FCoE HBA SCSI driver.
If you ignore that (and you should – unless you happen to have such hardware and have been pining for the driver to be merged for a long time), the rest is really mostly a collection of small fixes. Several regressions fixed, lots of small cleanup.
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A couple of days back, my friend Stuart and I were trying to configure a device via a serial port. You’re probably thinking that’s not so hard, just hook up a console cable, fire up a terminal emulator, make sure you have the right settings and you’re good to go, hey?
[...]
Reading around on the ‘net afterwards I came across Van Emery’s Linux Serial Console HowTo which turns things around the other way (using a serial port to get into a Linux machine).
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Mandriva
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There have been few misconceptions which have been cleared by developers : The software was meant to be released previous year but due to some difficulties they plan it to release with 2009.1 Spring , and they say they don’t aim to UbuntuOne service which is pretty irrelevant ? Even if they initially didn’t launch it to compete with Ubuntu One it doesn’t make sense that it is not in competition with Ubuntu one and dropbox..and this service seems to be a good competitor to Ubuntu One and Rockbox ,.
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For years now I’ve recommended Mandriva Linux as the best choice for newcomers to Linux. I have always found it to be an incredibly user-friendly distribution that manages to avoid sacrificing functionality for simplicity. I’ve also found that, more often than not, it has fewer significant bugs than a certain more popular distribution that touts itself as being Linux for the masses. Naturally, when Mandriva announced their 2009.1 release a few of weeks back, I was interested to see how the latest version stacked up. I freely admit I had very high expectations for Mandriva 2009.1.
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Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR) project is presenting the second beta version of its live CD, at SIGINT 09, a conference organized in Cologne by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The conference is debating the topics of monitoring and political interference. The Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR) is based on a modified version of Ubuntu 9.04, the most popular Linux distribution.
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Many Open Source supporters have noted again and again, that Linux repositories are pretty much the equivalent of an AppStore. Interestingly enough, many Mac users noted the same thing, equaling Ubuntu’s Add/Remove program to the iPhone AppStore.
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New Releases
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A small start-up will debut at Computex in June with its open source software for an integrated media server and home router going up against giants such as Google and Microsoft, reports EE Times.
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Phones
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“The global market for smartphones based on open source platforms including Android will reach 100 million units in three years”. That is the claim made by Panasonic’s director of mobile terminal business this week.
Panasonic is placing its bet on Android and other open-source platforms to aggressively compete with other smartphones, mainly iPhones and BlackBerrys.
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Sub-notebooks
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Here’s a simple concept that’s been evolving over the past couple months: Create A Facebook Connect Powered Micro-Payment strategy to promote OLPC, generate awareness and ultimately raise funds to deliver more educational tools to children around the world. It works like this…
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At the moment, few netbooks come with an interface as slick as the iPhone. Asus’ original Xandros-equipped Eee PC and the Acer Aspire One with Linpus at least have some extra engineering on board. This is particularly important as Microsoft appears to be doing little perceivable work in matching Windows XP Home Edition to this new level of hardware.
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While a lot of people are still using closed source, proprietary software, the message of Free Software is becoming better understood by more people. I believe we are gaining the critical mass needed to provide good jobs for anyone writing and contributing to Free Software.
On Tuesday, May 26th I leave for a conference in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. There, as I have for a couple of conferences this year and will for a couple more conferences this year, I will be talking to young people (and not-so-young people) about both the past history and the future promise of Free Software.
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There’ve been some siginificant changes to the UI when GIMP went from 2.4 to 2.6. However always keep in mind that the current state is an in-between-state for future improvements of GIMP (I’m thinking of the empty window which was introduced first in 2.6).
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You don’t hear people dismissing open source software as a fad, a farce, or an IT freak of nature so much these days. Open source used to be a topic that enterprise systems administrators would joke about. It’s not so funny, and it’s not so freakish, anymore. And that’s not to say the switch to open source software has been flipped to the ON position. This is an evolutionary process and it has evolved to the point that acceptability is much more widespread than it was even a year ago, let alone three or four years ago.
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Business
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As the global economic crisis deepens, companies are considering options they might once have rejected out of hand in order to cut costs. Open source vendors have long waved the lower-TCO banner, and the recession seems to fueling business in the sector. It’s not quite clear, though, whether a switch to open source will result in cost savings in the long run.
[...]
As the global economic crisis worsens, it is likely that adoption of open source systems will increase.
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Openbravo, the Spanish developer of professional open source solutions for businesses, has released version 2.5 of its open-source ERP suite. The modular concept introduced with this release is aimed at enabling developers and clients to create additional functions as modules, so fine-tuning the ERP software to meet their wishes better, but without having to change the suite itself. Other new things in Openbravo 2.5 are support for right-to-left languages like Arabic, an autosave function, and improved support for complex organizations.
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Openness
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The end of July will see a British BarCamp in Oxford to discuss transparency and openness in government, cyber activism, data and identity protection and the ethics of social media.
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The latest version offers increased design flexibility with twice the memory (256 MB RAM), additional high-speed USB port, and an LCD expansion connector. Based on a Texas Instruments OMAP3530 processor, the BeagleBoard bridges desktop and embedded development by delivering laptop-like performance in a 3×3-inch form factor.
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Debian, OpenServer, OpenBSD and Mac OSX all have their place in history shown.
Kendall Dawson, Linspire Community Liaison 02 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Europe, Finance, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Windows at 7:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: Spain is being taken over by foreign agenda and corporations, according to an unnamed source
Microsoft hopes to do in Spain what Bill Gates did in France and in Finland over a year ago (and in Portugal less than a year ago). Microsoft is losing ground to Free software. It routinely sends the über-lobbyist [1, 2, 3, 4] Bill Gates to bypass technical decision-makers and strike predatory deals which do not account for the desire and welfare of the affected population (victims).
Here is a report that was sent to us from a reader in Spain this morning.
This is a big and long one. Let me introduce some economic background:
As you know, Spain is being hit especially hard by the current economic crash. Due to the country’s reliance on the building and real estate businesses and due to rampant speculation, there has been created an enormous speculative/corruption bubble that has just burst, leading to the highest rate of unemployment in the EU.
Prime minister Zapatero has been trying to implement urgent measures and to boost public expenditure in order to alleviate the effects of this crisis. He announced plans to change the economic growth model from real estate and speculation (“the economy of the brick,” as we’ll call it here) to one of R&D, IT business, etc. One of his proposals was just announced a couple of weeks ago and it is to bring “a laptop per child” (kind of) to the Spanish school students, subsidising a laptop for each child of the fifth grade (12 years old) (a total of 400,000 or 500,000 units).
There is a document describing most these behind-the-scenes deals and the characteristics of this operation. The situation seems dismal.
http://devolucion.org/educacion20
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&u=…
It will provide Microsoft Windows pre-loaded HP mini-laptops manufactured in Portugal by a big OEM (Same as the Magalhaes program of the Intel OLPC rival) and these will be serviced by the computing division of “El Corte Ingles” (The Spanish equivalent to Harrod’s — very expensive department stores), leading to an unnecessary and very, very high expenditure, none of which will benefit the local economies (El Corte Ingles is one of the largest enterprises in the country, with a labor policy similar to that of Walmart, i.e. it harasses labor unions, and never gets criticised in the mainstream press for fear of losing the expensive ad campaigns the enterprise inserts constantly in all the major Newspapers, Magazines and Radio and TV channels).
The educational contents (with DRM!!!) would be awarded to Grupo Santillana, the biggest educational books publisher, and part of the corporation Prisa Group, which is the owner of the biggest newspaper in the country “El Pais”, as well as many editorials and several of the country’s biggest Radio (Ser, 40) and TV (Canal+, Cuatro) channels.
It all reminds me of the recent Chilean-Microsoft debacle.
http://eldiabloenlosdetalles.net/acuerdo-marco-de-colabora…
http://www.elfrancotirador.cl/2007/07/23/el-dia-que-chile-se-v…
http://sss.cl/noalacuerdoM-G/
This measure has immediately been contested for its lack of planning and lack of any public tender by many consumer associations, retail vendor associations, teacher associations, and FLOSS associations around the country.
http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/05/19/valencia/1242740973.html
http://www.apimadrid.org/2009/05/14/manifiesto-de-apimadrid-sobre-prop…
https://www.facua.org/es/noticia.php?Id=4146
http://www.apicv.es/?q=node/608
As you know there have already been several very successful educational projects involving FLOSS and GNU/Linux in many regions of the country (Madrid, Extremadura, Andalucia, Catalonia, Valencia, Canary Islands), involving specially-tailored GNU/Linux distributions prepared for education and for different regional languages (Spanish, Catalonian, Valencian), most of which are varieties of Debian or (Edu)Buntu:
http://lliurex.net/home/en
http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/averroes/curso-guada…
http://www.educarex.es/linexcolegios/
http://www.educa.madrid.org/web/madrid_linux/archivos/cara…
http://www.educa.madrid.org/web/madrid_linux/archivos/pro…
http://linkat.xtec.cat/portal/index.php
http://www.gobiernodecanarias.org/medusa/contenidos…
http://lula.unex.es/index.php?seccion=participantes
Now, guess what? Mrs. and Mr. Gates will be meeting with Spanish prime minister tomorrow (Tuesday, May 25th)
http://www.adn.es/politica/20090522/NWS-2387-Zapatero-Gates-Bill-proxi…
Supposedly in order to talk about development projects in Africa jointly with the B&M Gates Foundation, but I’m sure, he will be there to make sure the Linux projects get abandoned and instead the Spanish students get addicted to Microsoft’s (and its partners’) products, thus securing not only the calculated 50 million euros in software licences it will cost the government, but a whole new generation of captive customers (along with the teachers and the educational system nationwide, and associated support/software contracts with MCPs and ISVs). At the same time it eliminates one of the “rotten apples” that could serve of example for other European countries willing to empower their educational systems with GNU/Linux and FLOSS.
Speculation: Top it maybe with some tax exemptions following the Irish (Microsoft’s European Tax Heaven) model, so MSFT can help Zapatero (being a total technological and computer illiterate, and ill-advised by lobbyists as most of politicians) with the “growth model change”???
And in exchange for what? Well, Joe Biden, who is leading a crusade to defend US media and entertainment industry and to obtain legislation similar to the French HADOPI, met recently with Zapatero and there has been an attempt to pass an EU-wide law that would allow national governments to impose their own “HADOPIs” with the typical excuse for the angered citizens “…we have no choice: the EU commands that we do this”.
Also, the US secretary of transport Ray Lahood will be visiting Zapatero next Saturday in order to look at high-speed trains and infrastructure: Many construction enterprises that are rapidly getting into deadline to pay their billionaire debts with the big banks (Santander Bank, BBVA and others would lose millions in their balance, should these deadlines expire and they would have to re-structure their balances, publicly acknowledging loses and losing many good ratings in the international stock markets) and are badly needing new contracts are expecting to be awarded contracts to build the railway infrastructures in the US (these are very big fishes of the Spanish stock exchange IBEX35 index, that many people suspect financed the political parties and campaigns in exchange for public works and building concessions by the governments: Ferrovial, ACS, Sacyr, Acciona…) and also there is the train builder Talgo…
As you always say: Follow the money…
More answers might come tomorrow. █
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