Finland has highest prices in eurozone, and they're about to get higher

Eurostat: Consumer price levels in 2010

In 2010, price levels for consumer goods and services1 differed widely across Member States. Denmark (143% of the EU27 average) had the highest price level, followed by Finland (123%).

This comes to us shortly after the end result of the parliamentary elections, the new Katainen cabinet, put together their agenda. One of the sticking points of the coalition talks was a rise in VAT, which the left-wing parties vocally opposed because of its impact on low-income earners. What they eventually went along with was a system that ditches the overall VAT increase, and slightly bumps up capital gains tax. Income tax will also be slashed slightly in the lowest bands.

At this point, the recently departed Peter Falk's best-known character would have turned around at the door and said "oh, just one more thing". Because they're also raising fuel duty by 10%, car taxes and Pigovian taxes on health and environmental, erm, things, including a broadening and raising of the controversial and badly implemented sugar tax. Also featured is a hike in waste duty and property tax.

So not only is Finland the most expensive country in the eurozone right now, but it's going to get even worse. Meanwhile, these tax hikes and the failure of the agenda to really address Finland's burgeoning deficit in any sensible way mean the whole economy is headed downhill fast. We're burdened with a huge public sector and tax burden to run a welfare state that barely functions at all and eats up a gigantic chunk of the economy. Simultaneously the political left is getting stronger, with the rise of the left-wing conservative-populist "Base Finns" and the collapse of the agrarian center-right party. In my opinion, if the current trend continues, it isn't going to be possible to put together a political coalition to fix the crumbling economy, because all parties except two are basically running on a platform of more taxes, more benefits. Together they're going to exert enough inertia that the deficit will simply not get fixed before it's too late. And then we'll go the way of Greece.

SSDD...

The news is nothing but Same Shit Different Day. More talk about the debt ceiling. The democrats still have no plan except to raise our taxes and keep spending money they don't have. joe biden was somewhere giving a speech and continuing to prove he is an idiot. obama goes on vacation... again.

Maybe this time obama will just stay on vacation. He doesn't do anything of any value when he is in washington anyway. He is quick to criticize anyone else who needs a little break, it's funny how that works.

harry reid proves he is still a dumbass. He thinks we should return to the "fiscal discipline" of the democrats. Is he serious? There is no such thing. There is no "fiscal discipline" involved in borrowing and spending trillions of dollars, none.

The government of Minnesota shut down. The citizens of the State are probably happy about that. At least their politicians aren't wasting tax dollars on stupid crap for a little while.

Nothing new, nothing exciting, same old shit...

The international drug war

On the one hand, Connecticut, USA:

BI: Connecticut Decriminalizes Marijuana Possession

Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut is expected to sign a bill passed by the state House of Representatives last night decriminalizing the possession of marijuana in limited quantities.

Wrapping up what the New York Times today called the state's "most activist, liberal legislative session in memory," the House voted 90 to 57 in favor of SB 1014, which would punish possession of a half-ounce or less with fines, rather than criminal charges.

First-time offenders would be hit with a $150 ticket; repeat offenders would get at least $200 but a maximum of $500 per offense.

According to the Hartford Courant, supporters hope the bill will save taxpayers money and provide "fairer treatment of those caught with small amounts of the substance."

Connecticut's non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis estimates the bill will save the state nearly $1 million and net upwards of $600,000 in new fines.

Connecticut joins the 13 other states in the U.S. - including two of its neighbors, New York and Massachusetts - that have already decriminalized the possession of marijuana in limited amounts.

That's not exactly legalizing it, but it seems to be about as close as they can get. And sign it the governor did, saying:

“Final approval of this legislation accepts the reality that the current law does more harm than good – both in the impact it has on people’s lives and the burden it places on police, prosecutors and probation officers of the criminal justice system. Let me make it clear - we are not legalizing the use of marijuana. In modifying this law, we are recognizing that the punishment should fit the crime, and acknowledging the effects of its application. There is no question that the state’s criminal justice resources could be more effectively utilized for convicting, incarcerating and supervising violent and more serious offenders."

What I especially like is the recognition that putting people in prison for smoking pot is ridiculous.

And on that note, the other hand: Russia.

Guardian: Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'

Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

(...)

The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".

Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."

While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.

The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.

Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany (addicts) a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."

I mean, there's a solution to the "problem" of prison luxury: send them to the Gulag!

Here's one direct consequence of their war on drugs:

Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

You'd really think that if they're so concerned with popular health in Russia, they might consider an AIDS epidemic to be somewhat more dangerous than people smoking pot. And because it's technically impossible to write about politics in Russia without doing the joke, here's the setup:

Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.

And here's the joke:

In Russia, the pot smokes you.

Radley Balko and Russia Today

Chances are, you've seen activist Adam Kokesh and his buddies get arrested with unnecessary brutality at the Jefferson Memorial. If not, here's the video:

What you may not know is which channel this show runs on: Russia Today, nowadays known as RT. Described by the Guardian as "the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire", RT is a TV channel funded almost entirely by the Russian government. In that same Guardian story, their then-editor-in-chief explains:

"I don't believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position."

And they do. Here's the Independent on the topic:

Russia Today, an English language service, was set up in 2005 to present a perspective from Vladimir Putin’s government as a counterbalance to Western global news organisations such as CNN and the BBC. Its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claims that the Russian state “doesn’t at all” interfere with the output of the network’s journalists.

But Shaun Walker, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, disputes this. “It is untrue that the channel’s journalists are able to report on what they want to without editorial influence; while as time has gone on there have been more features on “negative” aspects of Russia, there is still a total absence of any voices criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev,” he says. “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a “New Cold War” headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted “GENOCIDE” across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”

Indeed, one of their reporters resigned during the war in Georgia. Here's the Guardian:

Russians appear to be getting only one side of the story of the conflict in Georgia. According to a Moscow Times article, Russian television is showing the misery left by the Georgian assault in South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia's bombing of Georgia.

After William Dunbar, a correspondent for the English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report on Saturday, his scheduled reports later that day were cancelled by the station. He said: "I felt that I had no choice but to resign."

He added: "I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were cancelled. The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn't conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn't let me report it."

Of course, everyone knows how committed Russia is to the freedom of the press. The first Guardian article I quoted? Its author has since been expelled from Russia for no stated reason.

The idea for founding the channel seems to have come from former minister and Putin aide Mikhail Lesin, who wanted the channel to "polish Russia's international image". And they do, but not only by presenting Russian propaganda: part of their agenda is also to criticize Western countries.

For example, here's an RT reporter waxing lyrical over protests at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh:

RT: Who does this government consider an enemy?

The students were cornered, beaten, tear gassed, thrown to the floor and arrested – all for gathering inside a public park to express their political opinions.

This scene did not happen in a Third World country in the midst of a revolution. It occurred in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.

Of course, that very same year, a Gay Pride rally was held in Moscow. The rally was banned, and Moscow police had threatened the activists with "tough measures". When it went on anyway, police immediately arrested everyone present with "needless violence". Of course, that was better than some previous years when the police stood aside and let skinheads beat up the protesters.

You won't find any of this on RT: no reporters bemoaning the plight of the gay rights activists, let alone getting in amongst the demonstrators and writing harrowing first-person exposes of their arrest. No, on RT "Police disperse gay pride parade", without a hint of violence or impropriety. The channel unquestioningly accepts the official explanation for banning the marches, and under the sub-heading "A fight for gay rights or a farce?", goes on to lambast one of the organizers as a bully and a propagandist. Russia's embattled opposition gets similarly short shrift from RT, with no horror stories of police brutality.

Another topic that drew RT's ire is America's prison system. By contrast, read this Wikileaks cable or Amnesty International's report on Russia for some idea of what goes on over there; a topic you won't find any RT coverage on.

Finnish readers may be amused by the fact that notorious Finnish lunatic Johan Backman is a respected source for RT, quoted in stories like this one, which makes some hilariously over-the-top claims, including that in Finland, it's a crime to "criticize a legally operating organization". Their paraphrasing of what both Molari and Backman have said is also somewhat tenuously connected to reality. Molari and Backman are both rather well-known in Finland as extremists, and especially Backman is given fairly wide publicity in Russia because of his willingness to distort and exaggerate events in Finland in accordance with the Kremlin's propaganda line that Finland mistreats its Russian minority. That his views should be uncritically repeated by Russia Today speaks to the channel's ideology.

**

So a TV channel funded by the Russian government isn't exactly delivering objective journalism. Big surprise. It does raise some interesting questions, though, and to introduce them I'll promote a blog called The Agitator, by Radley Balko, a journalist and libertarian. I have great respect for the man as a chronicler of what I consider America's gradual evolution into a police state. His paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I read his blog regularly.

This May, Radley went on vacation and left us with a collection of guest bloggers. Most of them did well, even if it was a little odd when one of them felt that if we only divided ourselves into competing factions that identify themselves by differently colored uniforms, the world would be a better place. I thought we were already doing that. Another guest gleefully insulted a 17-year-old boy and expressed the fond hope that he would be assaulted in prison. These are just a couple of things that rankled me, though, and overall it was fine.

One of his guest bloggers, however, was RT's own Alyona Minkovski. Here's a clip from her show, which runs on RT:

As it happens, Radley's appeared on RT himself. As he explained, he went on RT "because they asked".

Now, I have a problem with this.

**

First of all, let me make absolutely clear that police brutality and the wholesale trampling of civil rights in America is reaching scary levels. Things like this, this and this are appalling, and so is the fact that the police will arrest you for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. The fact that police brutality and abuse is much worse in Russia is no excuse for the Americans or anyone else.

My problem is RT and the nature of their coverage. It's pretty obvious that they use a whole different yardstick for events in the US and in Russia, and much of their reporting consists of regurgitated Kremlin propaganda. They do go to some lengths to disguise this as critical journalism, but it's fairly obvious that when it comes to Russian interests, propaganda takes over. So when someone like Radley Balko attaches themselves to a channel like this, by appearing on it and hosting one of its reporters on his blog, I have a real problem with it, because he's lending his credibility to a Russian state propaganda operation.

I fully understand that there are economic incentives, direct or indirect, as well as the obvious political ones, for publicizing one's cause as widely as possible. In this particular case, though, that publicity comes with giving good press to the Russian state's propaganda machine; in other words, helping the Kremlin project a totally false image of Russia to the world. It also raises troubling questions about Mr. Balko's ethics as a journalist, in that he's willing to attach himself and his name to a government propaganda operation, seemingly without second thoughts.

In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.

To take just one example, Radley linked to the same Huffington Post piece I did above, on their questionable way of reporting an incident of police brutality in Washington, D.C. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it when RT glosses over Russian police brutality, though. In my books, that's hypocrisy.

Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.

It's a funny sort of libertarianism where you co-operate with one of the most repressive regimes in the world. I don't much care for it.

**

Last year, the Economist ran a piece on police brutality in Russia.

Cops for hire: Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy

THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.

Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.

American police brutality is alarming enough that I can't say it's nothing compared to what they do in Russia. Both countries' police forces at times terrorize their inhabitants like an occupying army. But having been to both countries, I'd still rather get arrested by American cops than Russian ones. Hell, I'd rather be raided by the Pima county SWAT team than by OMON. If American SWAT teams sometimes remind us of storm troopers, their Russian counterparts pretty much are the SS.

And one of the foremost critics of police brutality in America co-operates with their PR department.

Policing the Internet in Europe

First of all, the Matti Nikki saga continues in Finland. I wrote about it years ago, and here's a press release from Electronic Frontier Finland back in 2008 explaining the whole thing. In brief, Internet activist Matti Nikki runs a website that criticizes the Finnish and EU authorities' inefficient anti-child pornography actions. For this, his Finnish site, which doesn't contain pornography, was censored by the Finnish police under a law that allows censorship of foreign child porn websites.

Just last week, the Helsinki administrative court decided that the police were wrong to censor Nikki's site and ordered it removed from the block list. Bizarrely, they maintained that while the intent of the law was clearly to censor foreign websites that contain child pornography, the police couldn't have understood the law, and are therefore not to blame. In my Finnish-language post on the topic, I linked to Radley Balko's summation:

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The same standard operates here, as we now have a decision from our administrative court that effectively releases the police from any culpability for misinterpreting a law. The court entirely failed to address the fact that the censorship constitutes an attack on Nikki's constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. In my opinion, the sole reason Nikki's website was extralegally censored was his criticism of the Finnish authorities. The cops have just been let off the hook for that.

**

Meanwhile, in Germany, the police are taking a hand in the general elections:

Falkvinge.net: German Pirate Party’s Servers Confiscated In Police Raid — Two Days Before Election

Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage.

I have nothing to add. You'd think that in Germany, of all countries, they'd be a little leery of sending in the storm troopers to suppress a political party, but I guess not.

A question for Zionists

Playboy interviewed veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who recently lost her job because of her comments on Israel. Unsurprisingly, Playboy's interview generated some disgustingly vitriolic feedback, one piece of which reiterated an old Zionist argument: Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, which they have continuously occupied for millennia. The Palestinians, as most famously put by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, are a made-up people.

I'm quite deliberately leaving out the Biblical part, because it's the same thing as saying that Israel belongs to the Jews because God said so, a position also put forward by Golda Meir. Anyone who thinks they are privy to information from God qualifies as insane and isn't someone that can be reasoned with.

If you accept this argument in favor of Israel's unquestioned right to its territories, are you also in favor of abolishing the United States of America? After all, the Native Americans have inhabite their ancestral homelands continuously for millennia, and certainly the Americans are a made-up people. They're just a bunch of Europeans who showed up a couple of hundred years ago and conquered America for themselves. At least the Arab conquest happened well over 1,000 years ago; by those standards, the people who call themselves Americans today are newcomers. So if the Arabs living in Palestine have no right to be there, surely the Americans of European, African or Asian descent who form the vast majority of the population of North America have even less right to their current homes. Obviously, if over 1,400 years of living in Palestine doesn't make Palestinian Arabs a "real people", then how can a few hundred years in North America mysteriously create the "Americans"?

Certainly the same must go for the European and African-descended populations of Latin America and the Caribbean as well: if Arab Palestine isn't a real country and a real people, then there's no way something like Brazil or Peru is.

Where, in fact, do we draw the line? Will most of Britain have to be vacated? After all, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes only showed up in what is now England slightly before the Arabs took over Palestine. The English, as a made-up people, will be forced to leave, and the Welsh, Scots and Irish can divide up the islands among themselves. Can the Germans and French stay, or will they need to head back east as well? The question of the Slavs is even trickier, because no-one's quite sure where to count that from.

So if you accept the Zionist argument referenced here, you really have to be in favor of a very large-scale rearrangement of the Earth's population. Resetting everything to the criteria given will involve moving around a billion people, because if the Arabs had no right to be living in Palestine in 1948, there's no way in hell today's Americans have any right to be living where they are now. In short, this is an unworkable and monumentally stupid argument that no-one can seriously advocate as a justification for territorial claims. We simply cannot accept the idea that if a people were living on a certain territory c. 600 CE, their descendants, or people who claim to be their descendants, have a right to that territory over everyone else. Also, to maintain that a people who have lived on a certain territory for over a millennium aren't a real nation is to maintain that many other nations aren't real, either; most explicitly, if there are no such people as the Palestinians, then it's clear that there are no such people as the Americans, either.

That this argument can be put forward at all is testimony to the sheer idiocy of the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No reasonable person should stand for it.

I Got Election - a brief guide to the Finnish parliamentary elections of 2011

This Sunday, the small and boring country of Finland convenes at its schools and other voting posts to elect a parliament. As I happen to live there, I thought I'd explain what's going on.

* The system *

Using the d'Hondt method of proportional representation, the Finnish people will elect 200 members of parliament from 15 electoral districts. One of them is the autonomous region of Åland, annexed by Finland against the wishes of its Swedish-speaking inhabitants in 1918 and an unwilling participant in Finnish politics ever since with its single representative in parliament. The other 199 are elected from mainland Finland. Last time around, in 2007, as much as 65% of the electorate turned up to cast almost three million votes.

After the elections, the party with the most seats in parliament is designated to form a cabinet. Normally, the chairman of that party becomes prime minister, and he puts together a coalition of parties to form a cabinet that commands a majority in parliament. Almost all cabinets are based around two of the "big three" parties, with assorted smaller parties tagging along to make up the numbers.

The Finnish political system is incredibly dysfunctional. All real political decisions are made behind closed doors by the leaders of the parties, who control their MPs' votes in parliament, although the Greens pretend they're different by allowing the occasional few to vote against the party line. As a result, the real mechanisms of Finnish politics are invisible to the public and impervious to their influence, except every four years when the voters effectively get to decide which member of the good old boys' club gets to speak a little louder than the others.

I'll describe each party in terms of their social attitudes (liberal - conservative) and economic policies (right-wing - left-wing). These are all terms that need to be taken in a Finnish context; for example, in the field of economic policy, all parties, including the ones described as right-wing, are generally committed to maintaining Finland's gigantic public sector, massive income redistribution through a Byzantine welfare system and huge agricultural and area subsidies. Similarly, most socially liberal parties will not be opposed to male conscription or favor the separation of church and state, to take a few examples.

In reality, the practical differences between Finnish parties, or at least the ones large enough to be taken seriously, are minute. For most of the 1990s, the country was ruled by the "rainbow cabinet" that included almost every party in parliament, including the extreme right and extreme left. Those two parties held the two treasury appointments. That they were able to do so in concert should really demonstrate to everyone one that Finnish politics is basically a sham to deceive people into thinking that the country isn't actually run by an oligarcy of civil servants and party bosses.


* The players *


Agrarian Party (Keskusta) - 50 seats

Officially named the "Center Party" or whatever, the Agrarians are just that, the largest party in every electoral district north of the back of beyond. They were the largest party after the 2007 elections, and were thus in charge of forming the current cabinet. It was headed by the former prime minister, who later met a woman on the Internet but lied that he'd met her in Ikea, and became embroiled in a scandal over election contributions to his party. He is generally considered to be guilty of blatant corruption, but no charges were filed because there is no corruption in Finland. He was eventually replaced by someone else.

The Agrarians are socially conservative and economically mildly right-wing. While their conservative roots might otherwise make them economically more right-wing, their only real agenda is pork-barrel politics: Agrarian MPs are elected from the rural districts on the understanding that they will maintain Finland's gigantic agricultural subsidies and bring a few infrastructure projects their district's way every now and then. As a result, Finland produces sugar and a huge surplus of food, and is decorated by several massive, beautiful bridges that lead absolutely nowhere. It is expected that the party will be somewhat hurt by the election money scandal, but in the end, the pork barrel will carry the rural field like it always has.


The Gathering (Kokoomus) - 51 seats

Yes, I know, they're officially the "Coalition Party" or something immensely boring like that. Frankly, a Highlander reference is much better. If you prefer the Dutch heavy metal band, that's fine too.

Currently in cabinet, the Gathering is socially slightly conservative and economically right-wing. Long the bastion of Finnish right-wing politics, the Gathering was out of power during the Cold War when Finnish politics were subject to Moscow's veto. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall they have wielded the sceptre of fiscal responsibility (in Finnish terms) as the only party to come out decisively in favor of combating Finland's burgeoning debt deficit with public sector cuts. Wikileaks would also have us believe that they plan to have Finland join NATO, but few people in this country will take an effeminate Swedish alleged sexual predator's word on anything. Nonetheless, passionately hating the Gathering is the favorite activity of Finland's red-green angry young people, who blame them for everything, which makes them Finland's equivalent of the Republicans or Tories.

When the 2007 election results came in, the Agrarians were the largest party in parliament with 51 representatives; the Gathering had 50. Since then, one of the Green MPs has defected to the Gathering, and the Agrarians lost the captain of Finland's national bobsleigh, erm, curling team to defection, making the Gathering currently the largest party. They're expected to stay that way, which means that in all likelihood they'll be in charge of forming the next cabinet.


Social Democrat party (SDP) - 45 seats

After their Soviet-backed Finnish communist revolution was defeated in 1918 by the simultaneous German-backed Finnish fascist revolution, those Social Democrats who hadn't either fled to the Soviet Union or been shot by the Whites in a concentration camp got down to the business of moderate left-wing politics. They like to claim responsibility for the Finnish welfare state, kind of like how the Russians have at some point claimed that every invention in the world was actually invented in Russia. The Social Democrats are to Finland's central labor union what Sinn Féin was to the IRA.

The Social Democrats are socially middle-of-the-road and economically left-wing. For a while, it looked like they were in danger of being usurped by the Green party after losing eight seats in the previous elections, but the economic crisis has seemed to revive the Social Democrats' flagging fortunes and they remain one of Finland's "big three" parties. Their main focus is on opposing public sector and welfare cuts.


Leftist Alliance (Vasemmistoliitto) - 17 seats

After Finland lost the Second World War, the Soviet Union mandated that the previously banned Communist party be allowed to reform. It did so as the SKDL, which was the Moscow-based Finnish Communist Party's front organization in Finland, i.e. of the guys who fled to Moscow after the civil war. After the Soviets went the way of the dodo, the SKDL soldiered on and has since metamorphosed into a vaguely angry, anti-nuclear young leftist party run by a former football hooligan.

The leftists are socially liberal and economically about as left-wing as it gets, at least in parliament. Their fortunes have been boosted by the economic crisis and the blatantly dishonest nuclear policies of the Green party, which they oppose with dogmatic anti-nukeism.


Green Party (Vihreät) - 15 seats

The Finnish environmental movement started when some people chained themselves to logging machines or something back whenever, and they've since made the transition from a couple of eccentrics in cardigans to a major political party that's been in cabinet since the early 90's. Getting their hands on the reins of power has come at a price, and the Greens' critics accuse them of selling their principles. At the same time, their stand in favor of gay marriage and against racism has made the Greens to conservatives what the Gathering are to left-wingers: the fount of all evil. One particularly prominent Internet racist who's running for parliament maintains that Finland is actually run by a cabal of Green feminist women who are in cahoots with the liberal media.

The Greens are socially liberal and economically vaguely left-wing. The Green party is decidedly anti-nuclear, which has manifested itself in practice by them being in several cabinets that have voted to build more nuclear power plants. They also consider themselves social liberals, which is carried out in practice by voting for repressive Internet censorship laws and the right of employers to spy on their employees.


Swedish Party (Ruotsalainen kansanpuolue) - 9 seats

The Swedish party exists for the sole purpose of forcing Finnish schoolchildren to study Swedish and making sure Swedish-speaking Finns can waltz into any public facility in the country and demand service in Swedish. Swedish-speaking people vote for them.

The Swedes are socially liberalish and economically sort of right wing. In practice, they'll participate in any coalition government that maintains the status quo in language politics.


Christian Democrats (Kristillisdemokraatit) - 7 seats

Finland's version of Christian Conservatives, the Christian Democrats occasionally cause media outrage by being themselves. Last year, they triggered a mass exodus from the Finnish state Lutheran church by pointing out on state television that buttsex makes Baby Jesus cry.

The Christian Democrats are socially conservative, by which they mean that they hate gays, and economically middle-of-the-road. Religious loonies vote for them.


Finnish Fundamentalist Party (Perussuomalaiset) - 5 seats

The name of the party is actually quite difficult to translate. Last I checked, their official English-language name was "True Finns", which has probably been selected to imply an earlier Finnish political movement (aitosuomalaiset). "Perus" properly translates as basic or fundamental, as in basic course or fundamental principle. So in my opinion, it's either the Basic Finns or the Finnish Fundamentalist Party, and I prefer the latter. I also earlier suggested calling them the Base Finns.

The Finnish Fundamentalists are socially conservative and economically left-wing. The roots of the party are in an agrarian populist movement called the SMP, run by Veikko Vennamo back in the past. Their previous populist insurgency was headed by the late Tony Halme, better known to pro wrestling fans as Ludwig Borga, and yielded few results.

This time around, the Fundamentalists are still something of a protest movement, basically running on a platform of populism, disaffection with the larger parties, opposition to welfare cuts and jingoism. Their candidates include several members of a quasi-fascist organization called Suomen Sisu, dedicated among other things to preserving the racial purity of Finland, who have focused their energies on mobilizing Finnish racism into a political force euphemistically referred to as "immigration criticism". They are largely responsible for immigration being one of the major talking points of the election, and have brought about a situation where, in the middle of an economic crisis, one of their leading candidates refuses point-blank to even discuss economic policy, because he's only interested in the nefarious effects of African immigration into Finland. Among their other candidates is a Belgian holocaust denier who has confessed in public to enjoying prostitutes.

The Fundamentalists have also produced, among other things, a cultural program that calls for the elimination of state funding to "postmodern art" and the encouragement of patriotic art that celebrates Finnishness. They are also opposed to Finland's membership in the European Union, and development aid. As far as any economic program can be discerned, it is a broadly left-wing one, against cuts and in favor of increased taxation. Before the elections, the former captain of Finland's national curling team defected from the Agrarian party to the Fundamentalists, and proposed solving the economic crisis and the poverty problem by printing money.

In the 2007 elections, the Fundamentalist Party more than doubled their share of the vote, from ~1.5% in 2003 to 4%, netting a total of five seats. Since then, their popularity has skyrocketed with the rise of political racism and discontent with the ruling parties, to the point where the wildest opinion polls have them displacing one of the three major parties.

Other (Borgerlig Allians -yhteislista) - 1 seat

The representative from Åland. Damned if I know anything about politics in Åland. Hell, they don't even let mainland Finnish people buy land there without a special permit. For all I know, when the rest of us have elections, these guys re-enact the Wicker Man and have the guy with the best costume represent them.

* Also starring *

There's a whole melange of parties without representatives in parliament trying to acquire some. Here's a couple.


The Pirate Party

Judging from their election propaganda, the Finnish Pirate Party is in favor of smoking pot, ass-raping record executives and employing immigrant women as prostitutes. I'm a member, but having just written that, I'm not entirely sure why. I don't smoke pot, so it's probably the hookers.


The Independence Party

A rabidly anti-EU party that boasts several seemingly insane candidates dedicated to opposing the New World Order that threatens us all with gay marriage, hoaxed moon landings and chemtrails. It is actually so difficult to tell whether or not their candidates' blogs are parodies that I'm not sure this party actually exists.


The Finnish Workers' Party

An avowedly socialist party, the chairman of the Finnish Workers' Party participated in a "small parties'" debate on Finnish state television. The presenter described his party as representing Russian interests in Finland, and the chairman didn't contradict him. They boast such candidates as a Finnish vicar who is in favor of reintegrating Finland into Russia, and a Finnish academic who organized a rally opposing Sofi Oksanen's latest book because it was anti-Soviet. The rally was attended by him, a bunch of Putin-Jugend from Russia and the Finnish Islamic Party. Apparently the Islamic Party's chairman and the academic in question have the same KGB handler.


The Communist Workers' Party

The People's Liberation Front of Judea to the Finnish Workers' Party's Judean People's Liberation Front, the Communist Workers' party demands the introduction of a planned economy on Marxist-Leninist principles. I can't think of anything to follow that sentence with.


* Major talking points *

Here, at this virtual water cooler, I'll sum up what Finland is talking about leading up to these elections.


That Freedom Party woman who thinks the New World Order is poisoning us with chemtrails

Seriously, what the fuck.


Immigration

The biggest hot-button topic of the election is immigration. Specifically, immigrants from Africa who are taking our jobs and raping our women, according to our vocal "immigration criticalists" (THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!). Now, even though immigration criticalitists insist that all Africans are criminals and all Arabs are terrorists and we mustn't let them into our country to sully our precious bodily fluids, you're not allowed to call them racists, so we have to call them immigration criticalizers.

For context, Finland has the least foreign-born inhabitants per capita of practically any European country. We also spend at most something like 1% of our state budget on issues related to immigration. So in terms of reality, this is a non-issue. However, through several blogs aggressively dedicated to the idea that all foreigners, or at least all differently colored foreigners, are evil, the immigration criticalizationists succeeded in making the impervious horror of immigration the mega-issue to end all issues of this election.

Previously, in the municipal elections, the simple device of running a blog that sensationalized crimes committed by foreigners and was rude about Islam propelled an obscure academic into the Helsinki municipal council with a landslide. Once in that council, he proceeded to do absolutely nothing about anything. He is the man who, in the middle of an economic crisis, refuses to answer questions about economic policy or the deficit, and in general seems to have no opinions on anything except that foreigners are unspeakably evil. And on that platform, he's practically a lock for parliament.

I genuinely believe that future generations of Finnish political historians are going to look at the early 2000's, when our state and economy are teetering on the brink of collapse, and then look at the issues we were spending our time on and wonder what the hell was wrong with us.


The rise of the Finnish Fundamentalists

The biggest talking point of them all is that according to the polls, the Fundamentalists may get big enough to actually factor into the cabinet negotiations. The craziest predictions at one point had them winning the elections outright, installing a Catholic populist with a nonsensical political agenda as our prime minister. In retrospect, that appears exaggerated, but it seems sure that their share of the vote will go way up from the 4% they drew last time.

In a way, the Fundies are like Obama: a hell of a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable faith in them being somehow different from other politicians. It's going to work out the same way.


The EU

What have they ever done for us anyway?

**

So there you go; you're ready for Sunday! As you watch the elections, remember that according to a poll, half of all candidates want to limit access to the dangerous and potentially lethal dihydrogen monoxide. No, really.

Good night, and good luck.