While Angela Merkel criticizes Hugo Chavez…

…maybe she should clean this plank out of her own eye before criticizing the dustmotes she imagines she sees in his.

New details continue to emerge on the spying scandal that has hit German telecommunication giant Deutsche Telekom. In addition to rifling through telephone records for a year from 2005 to 2006 to determine the extent of contacts between management and journalists, it now looks as though Telekom was also using mobile phone signals to keep track of their locations.

According to information from SPIEGEL, Telekom sought to follow the movements of journalists covering the telecommunications company as well as members of Telekom advisory boards, in an effort to determine how sensitive company information was finding its way into business magazines and newspapers.

[…]

In addition, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on Friday reports that investigators are also looking into whether Telekom nosed into bank data of journalists and company managers.

Also on Friday, SPIEGEL TV reports that a Berlin private detective company allegedly hired by Telekom to spy on a business journalist as far back as 2000 was founded and run by former employees of the infamous East German secret police, the Stasi.

The Financial Times Deutschland reported on Thursday that Tasso Enzweiler, who reported on Deutsche Telekom for the paper, was spied on with hidden cameras in an effort to determine who was passing him sensitive company information. Telekom has denied knowledge of the 2000 incident.

The Stasi, huh? Nice to know that all that police-state totalitarianism didn’t die after all when the Berlin Wall fell. I guess capitalism just found it too irresistible to leave alone. And hey, what are all those old Stasi guys gonna do now that their old employer is no more? Spying on private citizens and journalists is right up their alley, after all. It’s what they used to do in the olden, not so golden days. It’s only natural that they should go to work for a private corporation; the last thing the German state needs is to have them stinking the joint up.

But shhhhh, don’t tell that to Angela Merkel. She’s a capitalist, after all; one of those former East Germans who couldn’t wait to suck up to the “free” market when Germany was reunified. No doubt she thought it would be profitable to do so, and hey, it must have worked. She got herself elected, albeit with no majority and a very unspectacular showing in the Bundestag. How unspectacular? Two words: Grand Coalition. Yes, that’s right: She had to lean on her party’s traditional foes to get enough seats to form a government! Sehr traurig. Guess unfettered capitalism isn’t really all that popular with Germans; what a surprise. It never was, or Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg wouldn’t have put pen to paper, and Germany wouldn’t have any public services at all. And certainly big business and other traditional conservative forces wouldn’t have conspired to install Adolf Hitler to combat the growing influence of the German left, either.

Now, contrast her with the man she most recently attacked in Latin America. Hugo Chavez don’t need no stinkin’ grand coalition, beeyotch. He promised, and delivered, free health care to everyone, ditto education, ditto infrastructure. He got over 60% of the popular vote that way, plus an overwhelming majority in the Venezuelan parliament. And what has he done with that? Plenty. He nationalized key industries so that they would serve, rather than exploit Venezuelans. One of them just happened to be the country’s largest telecom provider, CANTV. Which, to my knowledge, doesn’t spy on anyone. Let alone using former DISIP (the old and infamous Venezuelan secret police, soon to be disbanded). Yes, even the most rabid oppositionists are free to babble away in Venezuela; they won’t be spied upon. Communism!

Yeah, Angela, what WAS that you were saying about him again? I can’t find your Beschimpfung anywhere in the lamestream media over here, but I can certainly find what Chavecito said about you, and he was only too kind. Corporatism, as Giovanni Gentile wrote (though his words are often attributed to his employer, Benito Mussolini) is what fascism really is.