Merry Christmas (war isn't over)

This morning I took part in some direct action against Europe's support for the arms industry.

Wearing a royal blue tie with images of machine guns, tanks and warplanes in bright yellow, I pretended to be a weapons dealer. Money rained down on me -- thrown by a man in a José Manuel Barroso mask. Two guys braver and more agile than me climbed flagpoles outside the European Commission's enterprise department to hoist a banner, thanking the officials inside for aiding the makers of drones.

It was deliberately farcical but it emphasised a very serious point. During their summit in Brussels today, EU leaders are discussing how to increase corporate welfare for the merchants of death, while social welfare payments are being slashed in many countries.

The reason why our protest took place outside the enterprise department is that it has overseen the expenditure of €1.4 billion on a "security research" programme between 2007 and 2013. This programme has involved examining how drones can be used for such purposes as maritime surveillance -- a euphemism for blocking asylum-seekers from reaching Europe's shores. Some of the world's biggest weapons companies have benefited directly from these subsidies.

Nothing to worry about?

The powerful tell us that there is nothing to worry about here. Philip Hammond, Britain's defence secretary, has written an opinion piece for The Guardian claiming that drones -- or "remotely piloted air systems" as he prefers to call them -- save more lives than they end.

Hammond enthused about Watchkeeper drones that the British Army wants to deploy in Afghanistan soon. Yet he neglected to mention a salient fact: the Watchkeeper was largely developed by the Israeli company Elbit.

As a new study by the campaign group War on Want explains, the Watchkeeper system is based on Elbit's Hermes 450, a drone that the Israeli military has used to attack civilians in Gaza. To say the least, it is baffling that Hammond would boast of the British Army's intention to avail of this technology, when it is has facilitated crimes against humanity.

Moral void

Or maybe it isn't baffling. Both arms dealers and senior politicians operate in a moral void. They are happy to overlook the human rights abuses which they abet, provided that they can gain a "healthy slice" of the world's weapons market, to quote Hammond's predecessor, Liam Fox.

The police did not seem too perturbed by our direct action this morning (at least, not by the time I had left for another appointment). Fourteen others were arrested, however, in a related protest, which involved blocking the entrance to the European Defence Agency's headquarters.

It is deeply ironic that these protesters were apprehended, when it is the EDA itself that is trying to upend the law.

Rules pertaining to aviation forbid the flying of warplanes in civilian airspace. With the full approval of the Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, the EDA is seeking to overturn that ban so that drones can be flown alongside passenger jets.

The EDA, too, has been less than frank about what it is up to. Earlier this year, it held an experiment on flying drones in Spain. A "fact-sheet" that it prepared stated that the drone tested out then was a Heron. The agency failed to spell out that the Heron is manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries. Like the Hermes, it has dropped bombs on children in Gaza.

Good people throughout the world mark the festive season by taking care of those less fortunate than themselves. The European Union's leaders, by contrast, are plotting ways of boosting an industry that thrives on destruction.

Merry Christmas. War isn't over.

•First published by EUobserver, 19 December 2013.

Don't buy Israeli toys this Christmas

My 11-month-old daughter has an impeccable taste in music. When I played the Motown Christmas album on Spotify, she starting bobbing her head to some vintage Stevie Wonder.

I was delighted, then, that she received a bag of small instruments as an early Christmas present. That was before I picked up one of them and saw the dreaded words "made in Israel."

Halilit, the manufacturer of this "baby band", is headquartered in Or-Yehuda in the Tel Aviv district. Or-Yehuda was built on land belonging to Saqiya, a Palestinian village forcibly depopulated during the Nakba, the vicious ethnic cleansing that led to Israel's foundation in 1948.

I'm sure there are many shoppers who have bought Halilit goods without being aware they are Israeli. It would be easy to do so: I checked the entries for some Halilit products on the Amazon website and didn't see any information about where they were made.

Vigilance

So I'm writing this post as an appeal for vigilance. The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel has made tremendous progress since it was first launched in 2005. The decision by the American Studies Association to support the academic boycott of Israel is the latest in an ever-expanding list of victories notched up by BDS campaigners.

Now that the pressure is piling on Israel, let's not undermine our efforts by inadvertently putting Israeli goods in our shopping baskets. Reading the small print is vital.

I recall a speech given by Nelson Mandela to a concert held in London not long after his release. Business leaders were evidently eager for the West to lift the sanctions its governments had imposed (reluctantly) on South Africa. But Mandela insisted that it was not yet the right time for the pressure to be eased.

Israel has not even began the small steps that the white minority government in Pretoria had taken towards dismantling aspects of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s. On the contrary, Israeli racism is becoming increasingly entrenched. A raft of discriminatory bills is being processed by the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, that was elected earlier this year.

By, among other things, according special privileges to those who have served in the Israeli military, these emphasize that Israeli Jews are considered more important by the state than Palestinian citizens of Israel. And it's important to underscore that the Prawer Plan -- a blueprint for the mass displacement of Palestinian Bedouins in present-day Israel -- has not been entirely abandoned, even if the legislation that would have put into effect has been withdrawn.

For tactical reasons, some human rights campaigners have concentrated on advocating a boycott of goods produced on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. That approach is understandable. Yet it overlooks how Palestinian citizens of Israel also live under an apartheid system.

Don't hesitate

That's why we should not hesitate to urge a boycott of companies like Halilit that are based inside Israel. To the best of my knowledge, the movement against apartheid South Africa did not draw distinctions between goods based on what part of the country they were produced in; it sought a boycott of all South African goods. The same should apply to Israel.

Predictably, Halilit's promotional material is replete with photographs of smiling infants. The images tell us nothing about how Israel treats Palestinian children.

We do not learn that pupils in Gaza have to do their homework in the dark because the besieged Strip is encountering severe power cuts. We do not learn either that an estimated 30 percent of Gaza's children are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because Israel subjected them to eight consecutive days of bombing in November 2012.

Murder

And we do not learn about Wajih Wajdi al-Ramahi, a 15-year-old boy murdered by Israeli forces near the West Bank city of Ramallah last Saturday.

No doubt, there are Zionists with a ready-made response to my plea for a boycott of Israeli toys. The most likely argument they will use is that Israel has higher labor standards than some Asian countries where so many of the items in the West's shopping malls are made.

I accept that, with the exception of some fair trade products, the range of "ethical" toys available is limited. So long as capitalism reigns supreme, the captains of industry will put profit maximization ahead of all other concerns.

We should not be distracted, though, by any crocodile tears that Zionists may shed for sweatshop workers. The fact remains that Palestinians have asked people of conscience to boycott Israel. It is a call that should be heeded this Christmas -- and at every other time of the year.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 18 December 2013.

Facebook isn't our friend

A few days ago, I was told by the organisers of a "social media" festival that the hashtag was my "new best friend". As I've never hugged a hashtag or cried on the shoulders of one, I felt it was important to question this "wisdom".

Like millions of others, I'm addicted to Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter. I check these websites so frequently that I often forget they are owned by vast corporations.

Some of these firms' activities are inherently anti-democratic.

Facebook's Brussels office is headed by Erika Mann, a former German member of the European Parliament. She has long fought to enable the interests of big business triumph over those of ordinary people.

During her 15 years as an MEP, Mann continuously advocated that the European Union should liberalise its trade with the United States.

At one point, it seemed that her calls were being ignored by political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. All that changed in February this year, when Barack Obama expressed his support for such an agreement during his State of the Union address. Talks aimed at reaching a very broad trade and investment deal were formally launched in July.

Now wearing her Facebook hat, Erika Mann is still extolling the apparent virtues of "free" trade at every available opportunity.

In April, she spoke at a conference in Dublin, where Facebook's international headquarters are located. Mann argued that it would be "extremely important" for an eventual deal to make the standards faced by internet companies in the EU and US "more coherent".

Risible

While Mann claimed that she did not wish to see standards becoming "identical", it is highly improbable that she will be pushing for more robust rules. Facebook recently submitted detailed recommendations to MEPs about how to weaken a new data protection law.

Information leaked by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden demonstrated that Facebook has been helping the National Security Agency to undertake espionage on a massive scale.

Before those revelations were made, Erika Mann claimed that Facebook was "leading the way" both in protecting privacy and in helping the digital sector to flourish. Her assurances now appear risible.

Facebook isn't alone in hoping that the trade agreement will lead to "regulatory convergence" on different sides of the Atlantic. The European Commission has drawn up a paper for the talks, which indicates its willingness to copy and paste demands made by the car industry. The paper suggests that whenever either the EU or the US feels the need to have new rules on the amount of pollution vehicles may cause, they will consult each other with a view to finding a common approach.

In practice, this is a recipe for preventing Europe from having tougher emissions standards than the US.

Few qualms

Mann has few, if any, qualms about lobbying her former colleagues. She has spoken at events within the European Parliament's buildings on a number of dossiers.

Last year, she addressed a conference on data protection organised by one of the assembly's committees. She also spoke at a reception sponsored by the beer industry, during which she voiced support for "voluntary initiatives" undertaken by those behemoths of booze eager to portray themselves as responsible.

That wasn't simply a case of Mann meeting some old pals for a knees-up. Facebook had clinched a huge advertising contract with Diageo - owner of Guinness and Smirnoff - a few months earlier.

Her participation in the beer-fuelled reception involved sending a signal to law-makers that they should abandon any plans they may have to ban or restrict the marketing of alcohol. The idea that the drinks industry can be expected to behave responsibly is, of course, daft. The only objective of corporations is to amass as much money as they can.

Breaking the rules

Following a scandal in 2011 in which a few MEPs were recorded stating they would be happy to receive bribes from journalists posing as lobbyists, the European Parliament drew up a code of conduct. In theory, the code applies to both sitting and former MEPs.

And yet a Parliament spokeswoman told me: "from what I gather of your description of Mrs Mann's activities, it doesn't seem that she has breached the code of conduct".

The code states that former MEPs should not benefit from the Parliament's "facilities" if they wish to engage in lobbying "directly linked" to EU law-making. According to the spokeswoman, this clause did not relate merely to accessing the Parliament's buildings but to such perks as use of its car-parks and libraries.

If Mann is undertaking lobbying on the Parliament's premises, there is strong prima facie evidence that she is not playing by the rules. But it seems that the Parliament's administration is happy to overlook how former MEPs are usurping democracy by cajoling their old colleagues into tweaking laws to placate certain vested interests.

A leaked internal paper from the European Commission indicated that it plans to make extensive use of Twitter and Facebook to sell the so-called benefits of a trans-Atlantic trade deal.

Fortunately, the Commission's officials aren't the only people who know to tweet, share and "like".

Given that Facebook's Brussels office wants a trade deal to be concluded, it behoves those of us opposing the deal to flood the pages of Facebook with the unvarnished truth. We should spare no effort in calling out the lobbyists seeking to destroy the last vestiges of our democracy.

•First published by EUobserver, 2 December 2013.

EU rekindles love affair with Livni

A short memory can be an asset in politics.

Around this time five years ago, Tzipi Livni was being fêted as a paragon of moderation by EU insiders as she won a commitment to "upgrade" Israel's relations with the Union. The love turned a little sour soon afterwards when Livni marked the end of her stint as foreign minister by approving a brutal three-week offensive against Gaza.

The human suffering caused by this monstrous crime seemed to upset European diplomats far less than how Livni hadn't given them advance notice of the plans to attack; it all came as a "nasty shock," one senior Brussels official told me.

It didn't take long for Livni to be forgiven for springing that surprise. This week, she reached an agreement with Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, to end an unseemly squabble over guidelines aimed at preventing firms and institutions active in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank from receiving EU subsidies.

Apartheid's "sensitivities"

A joint statement by the duo says that the agreement respects both the EU's "financial requirements" and Israel's "political sensitivities." Precise details on how the guidelines will be implemented were not contained in the statement but it appears that a bureaucratic formula has been found which will allow firms profiting from the occupation (as most Israeli firms do) to continue benefiting from EU subsidies.

I had a vomiting bug last week. Having read that statement, I feel like throwing up again.

If the European Community (the EU's precursor) had promised to respect the "political sensitivities" of South Africa when it was under white rule, you can be sure it would have been excoriated by progressives the world over. Why should Israel be treated any differently?

Tasking Livni with sorting out the "guidelines" row was an admittedly shrewd move by Benjamin Netanyahu's government. She enjoys a much better rapport with the EU elite than Avigdor Lieberman, lately re-appointed as foreign minister.

Blood on their hands

The stylistic differences between Livni and Lieberman notwithstanding, both have blood on their hands. Both have authorized military operations against Gaza, in which the main victims were innocent civilians. Both represent an apartheid state.

Livni has never repented for -- in her own words -- encouraging the Israeli military to go "wild" when it bombed Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009. Until she displays genuine remorse -- or, better still, is punished for her war crimes -- there can be no reason to forgive her.

The involvement of Livni was the only thing I found surprising about how the "guidelines" issue was resolved. (Settling diplomatic disputes of this nature is not normally the job of a justice minister).

Tips for settlers

Ever since the guidelines were leaked to the Israeli press during the summer, EU representatives have been eager to downplay their significance.

The Union's embassy in Tel Aviv swiftly published advice on its website about how the recommendations could be circumvented. One helpful tip was that Israeli banks active in the occupied West Bank could continue applying for EU loans, provided the end recipients of the money were based within present-day Israel.

The questions involved here are, of course, bigger than a simple bilateral spat.

Next month, the prime ministers and presidents of the EU's 28 countries will gather in Brussels for a summit devoted to building a stronger weapons industry.

More than likely, the communiqué they will issue following this confab won't mention Israel explicitly. But anyone who has followed the EU's "defense" debate closely -- as I've had the misfortune of doing -- knows that European weapons-makers are being encouraged to foster close relations with their Israeli counterparts.

Challenge

It was by no means accidental that François Hollande, the French president, was accompanied by representatives of the arms-maker Thales or that Antonio Tajani, the EU's enterprise commissioner, brought along salesmen from its Italian equivalent Finmeccanica when the two men visited Israel recently.

The agreement between Ashton and Livni paves the way for Israeli arms makers to receive grants from Horizon 2020, as the EU's new scientific research program is called. Allocating a greater share of the Union's science budget to the weapons industry will almost certainly be one of the topics discussed at the aforementioned summit in December.

Despite feeling a little despondent upon hearing about the EU's latest act of capitulation towards Israel, I'm not entirely disheartened. The decision by EU diplomats to draft these guidelines was a small victory for those Palestine solidarity activities who have exposed how taxpayers' money was going to Ahava, a firm making cosmetics in an Israeli settlement.

These guidelines would never have been drawn up if the Union hadn't been shamed and embarrassed into doing so. The challenges we face now are to keep on drawing attention to the EU's embrace of Israel and to demand genuine action against that apartheid state.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 27 November 2013.

Peter Mandelson: a battering ram for big business

Is it still possible to be shocked by the arrogance of New Labour's architects? I didn't think it was. Then I started investigating Peter Mandelson's stint as the EU's trade commissioner.

In 2007, Mandelson sent a threatening letter to several ministers in the Thai government after it overruled patents on medicines for AIDS and high blood pressure. Taking such steps to reduce the costs of prescription drugs could make Thailand lose foreign investment, Mandelson warned, employing a tried and tested bullying tactic.

Briefing notes prepared for Mandelson by Brussels officials acknowledged that the Bangkok authorities were legally entitled to circumvent the intellectual property "rights" of major pharmaceutical firms on public health grounds. The officials nonetheless advised Mandelson to instruct the Thais that any patent-busting in which they engaged must be restricted to medicines for AIDS. Extending it to treatments for heart disease and other ailments would set a "dangerous precedent", the officials argued.

Those documents indicate that Mandelson's willingness to act as a battering ram for Western multinationals knew few bounds. The idea that a relatively poor Asian country could put the interests of its own citizens before those of the world's top pharmaceutical companies was anathema to his mindset. His attempts to make Thais recovering from heart attacks foot higher medical bills constituted a far more greater affront to humanity than those misdemeanours which prompted him to resign (twice) from the British cabinet.

New extremes

During his four years in Brussels, Mandelson pushed the EU's agenda to new extremes.

In the past, trade negotiators had traditionally focused on cutting or removing taxes levied on imports and exports. A 2006 policy paper called Global Europe - drawn up at Mandelson's behest - pushed for that scope to be enlarged.

It committed the EU to strive towards dismantling a range of "barriers" encountered by firms doing business abroad. Workers' rights and environmental standards across the world would be vigorously challenged if they harmed corporate profits, the paper inferred.

Sadly, this agenda has gained more momentum than Mandelson could have dreamed. I remember quizzing one of Mandelson's team about whether or not the EU wished to sign a free trade agreement with the US. The reply was simple: it wouldn't be realistic to expect a trans-Atlantic deal any time soon.

That was about seven years ago. As I write these words today, an American delegation is visiting Brussels for formal talks aimed at reaching such an accord.

The trans-Atlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) - as the eventual accord will probably be known - looks set to be a full-frontal assault on democracy. Corporate lobbyists have quite literally set the agenda for the talks - the Trans-Atlantic Business Council, a coalition of British American Tobacco, Deutsche Bank, Microsoft and Pfizer, has been given that task by both the EU and the US authorities.

Among the lobbyists' core demands are that a "dispute resolution" tribunal be formed, in which private corporations can sue governments over laws and policies that hamper the maximisation of profit. Having such a clause would confer greater rights on the denizens of company boardrooms than on every one else: the rest of us mere mortals would have no access to this exclusive court.

It would not be fanciful to predict that part of the deal will be influenced by Kentucky Fried Chicken and similar purveyors of "junk food". Yum!, the owner of the KFC brand, wants to overturn an EU ban on washing chickens with chlorine. Food safety standards of that nature would be suppressed if the trans-Atlantic partnership leads to "regulatory convergence", as many firms have demanded.

Cloaking their intentions

Preachers of the "regulatory convergence" gospel are cloaking their real intentions in technical terms. Ultimately, they wish to destroy a central tenet of EU policy on health and the environment.

Under the so-called "precautionary principle", the Union's authorities and governments can stop substances being used if there are sound reasons to suspect they are hazardous. Earlier this year, for example, the European Commission invoked this principle to introduce temporary bans on a few pesticides linked to the rapid decline in bee numbers.

Banning bee-killers may not be possible in the future. Pesticides manufacturers like Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer are pressing for the trans-Atlantic trade pact to severely curtail the EU's powers to take precautionary measures.

The bans were put in place after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy, found that certain pesticides posed environmental risks. EFSA, incidentally, does not have a deep aversion to pesticides. Rather, it has a long track record of accommodating agri-food giants.

Not only is it guided primarily by industry-financed research - the impartiality of which is questionable by definition - EFSA's decisions on whether to approve ingredients or products is based on "experts" with strong links to Big Food. A recent study by the organisation Corporate Europe Observatory found that over 58 percent of EFSA's "experts" had a conflict of interests.

Comical

I came across a particularly comical - and tragic - case of a lobbyist masquerading as an "independent" scientist. Ettore Capri, a professor at the Catholic University in Piacenza, Italy, sits on EFSA's panel of "experts" on pesticides. He also runs a "think tank" called OPERA, which has been compiling reports on "bee health" that suggest factors other than pesticides could be imperilling Europe's bees. The reports state that they were prepared in close contact with Syngenta, BASF, Dow and Bayer, all of which have a vested interest in downplaying the dangers of the pesticides they sell.

OPERA also jointly hosted a 2012 conference with Syngenta on biodiversity - a subject that is meaningless unless bees and other insects are taken into consideration. Yet when I contacted him during the summer, Capri insisted that his work on bees is not financed by the private sector.

Of course, one could contend that EFSA's acknowledgement of how certain pesticides may be harmful indicates it is not beholden to industry. It is important to emphasise, however, that the aforementioned bans are of a fixed duration. EFSA and other EU bodies will almost certainly face pressure to ensure they are not renewed.

Furthermore, EFSA's policy on the alleged bee-killers (neonicotinoids, as they are known) is slightly atypical. On numerous occasions, the authority has rubber-stamped applications from food giants based on superficial scrutiny. By its own admission, EFSA has only ever delivered favourable assessments of genetically modified (GM) crops.

Secret talks

EFSA has been taking part, too, in a series of secret discussions with biotechnology firms like Monsanto about trying to accelerate the approvals process for GM foods.

Despite EFSA's bias towards biotech, the stance of some EU governments has led to a de facto moratorium on placing GM foods on the market. Monsanto is so frustrated with Europe that it has effectively given up on this continent, if media reports are to be believed.

There is still hope for the Missouri marauder. Monsanto would be given new ammunition to challenge the obstacles it's encountering if the kind of EU-US trade deal now being envisaged comes into effect.

Having set in motion a process aimed at allowing corporations play dangerous games with nature and human health, it is perhaps only logical that Mandelson is now a grubby lobbyist himself. In his current capacity as chairman of two consultancies, Mandelson habitually attends the annual conferences of the Bilderberg Group and other gatherings for the world's political and business elite.

To use his own words, Mandelson always appears "intensely relaxed" when surrounded by the "filthy rich". It is not hard to understand why. He has worked tirelessly to allow Europe be captured by his corporate chums.

•First published by Spinwatch, 14 November 2013.

Arms dealers sniff opportunities as French president visits Israel

François Hollande will give his blessing to closer military cooperation between France and Israel when he visits the Middle East next week.

The French president will be the "guest of honor" at the "France-Israel innovation day" in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. Ubifrance, an enterprise promotion agency sponsoring the event, has arranged for French entrepreneurs to meet sales representatives from the arms-makers Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries.

An information note prepared by the agency applauds the Israeli aeronautics sector for record annual sales of more than $6 billion in 2009 and 2010. Although it lists drones as one of that sector's key products, it neglects to mention that they have been tested in bombing attacks against children in Gaza.

The note also says that Israel's aeronautics sector presents many opportunities for French firms. Airbus, the Toulouse-based corporation, "opened a gap" in the Israeli sky in 2009 by selling planes to the airline Israir. Until then, Israel's three commercial carriers had been exclusively supplied by Airbus' American rival, Boeing.

"Guaranteed success"

According the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce, the "innovation day" will be a "guaranteed success." IsraelValley, the chamber's technology-focused website, reports that it's "almost certain" that Hollande will discuss cooperation on drones with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

In a recent policy paper on "defense," France made a commitment to boost the number of drones in its arsenal. While the French government announced plans to buy a consignment of Reaper drones from the US in June, it is still shopping around for other types of these pilotless warplanes. The Paris-headquartered firm Thales has already teamed up with the aforementioned Elbit to make drones known as Watchkeeper for use by the British Army in Afghanistan.

No problem with humiliation

Admittedly, this cooperation requires the French elite to gobble up a few helpings of humble pie. A few months ago, the French National Assembly was informed that Israel has now taken over France's position as the fourth largest weapons exporter in the world.

Yet France doesn't seem to have a problem being humiliated by Israel. In September, a French diplomat, Marion Castaing, was pushed to the ground by Israeli soldiers when she accompanied a convoy delivering aid to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

If a hostile nation's forces had attacked a French diplomat in this way, you can be sure that retaliatory measures would be taken. In this case, Israeli and French journalists alleged that Castaing provoked the soldiers; the diplomat herself was soon recalled to Paris.

The European Union is another sponsor of the "innovation day." That is despite how the EU supposedly caused an existential crisis for Zionists when it published guidelines during the summer declaring that firms and institutions active in the settlements built by Israel in the West Bank were ineligible for the Union's subsidies.

"Sensitive"

Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, carried a story this week indicating that the row is nearing resolution. This isn't surprising. No sooner had the guidelines been leaked than EU mouthpieces tried to downplay their importance and promise they would be implemented in a "sensitive" manner (sensitive towards Israel, that is).

Hollande is scheduled to address Israel's parliament, the Knesset, during his sojourn. We can expect him to fawn before his hosts, while celebrating Israel as a beacon to the world.

The French political elite, after all, has an ignoble history of facilitating Zionist aspirations. In 1917, Jules Cambon, then secretary-general of the French foreign ministry, assured the World Zionist Organization, of France's support for the colonization of Palestine. The French government "cannot but feel sympathy with your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the allies [then fighting Germany]," Cambon wrote.

François Hollande is a modern-day Jules Cambon, determined to help Zionists continue dispossessing the indigenous Palestinians.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 15 November 2013.

Business chiefs demand more austerity

The plebs must suffer.

That's the chilling message - admittedly expressed in less cogent terms - that powerful businessmen have delivered to senior political figures in Brussels behind closed doors.

I've got hold of briefing notes prepared for a lunch discussion between a group of chief executives and José-Manuel Barroso, the European Commission's president, on 19 February this year. One of the businessmen's key demands was that the austerity cuts undertaken across the EU should be made "more enforceable".

Representing such firms as Ericsson, Fiat, Telecom Italia, the software giant SAP and the chemicals manufacturer Solvay, these high-flyers all belong to the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT). The brevity of their notes does not conceal their determination to crush ordinary people.

During that lunch, the industrialists argued that the Brussels institutions should have a bigger say in dictating how each EU government spends its taxpayers' money. The ERT knew that it would be listened to.

Jubilant

Before the financial crisis erupted in 2008, the likelihood that nominally sovereign nations would send their budgets to an unelected bureaucracy for prior scrutiny seemed remote. This week, however, Barroso sounded jubilant as he noted that such checking of budgets has now taken place for the first time. Echoing his dining companions in the ERT, Barroso warned against "reform fatigue". After acknowledging that "huge sacrifices" had been made, he contended that more are necessary.

It is noteworthy that Barroso hasn't offered to give up his pension or his severance pay when he steps down from heading the EU executive in October 2014. Instead, it is the little people who will be making all the sacrifices.

I got a taste of the "reforms" we can expect in the foreseeable future from an ERT paper from December 2012. Marked "confidential", the paper argues that the EU should pursue objectives at marked variance with those set by trade unions (or "some social partners," as the ERT calls them).

"Modernising labour market policies and education systems is not about a 'race to the bottom', as some social partners claim, but rather a 'race to the jobs of the future' before leadership is claimed by other regions of the world," the paper states.

A serious reading of the ERT's demands indicates that the "jobs of the future" will be precarious. It advocates, for example, that the Union's governments should "ease employment protection" by reducing payments to workers undertaking training or making a transition from one job to another. And it wants "wage evolution" to be dictated by factors like "international competitiveness" - this can only be viewed as an assault on indexation schemes such as the run by Belgium, where pay rises are guaranteed when the cost of living increases.

Battle

The ERT is adept at using code. In June, its chairman Leif Johansson (day job: running Ericsson), told EU governments that industry was "confronting a competitiveness battle that threatens the immediate and long-term ability of Europe to maintain a vibrant, innovative manufacturing base".

His prescription for fighting this "battle" is to ensure that corporations are involved in education "at all levels".

If taken literally, this means that big business should have a say in what songs the effervescent staff may sing at the créche my baby daughter attends. Though Johansson hasn't gone that far (yet), the ERT has argued that industrialists should have a role in managing and setting the curricula for schools and colleges. It has also argued for greater use of "public-private partnerships" in scientific research. That is code to giving big business a greater say in running universities.

Back in 2000, ERT bigwig Gerhard Cromme argued in favour of the "privatisation of all schools, subjecting them to market forces and thereby encouraging competition. Schools will respond better to paying customers, just like any other business."

It should go without saying that schools are not "like any other business". Teaching children to read and write, to share and articulate is quite different to churning out biscuits or assembling computer chips. In civilised countries, children with learning difficulties are not discarded on the basis that they are too slow for the rat race.

The ERT's fingerprints can be detected on several initiatives which have shaped recent European history. Indeed, the EU's fixation on "competitiveness" - a euphemism for destroying labour standards and the welfare state - largely originated with recommendations made by the roundtable in the 1990s. The ERT's intention was to transform this continent's economic policies so that they resembled the rawer version of capitalism found in the US more closely.

If you think that there is nothing particularly untoward about lunches between businessmen and politicians, then I recommend you take the following course of action: call Barroso's office and ask to meet him for a pizza. Assuming you are not super-rich, I suspect you might find it difficult to fix a date. And yet the European Roundtable of Industrialists has no such problems. So whose voices are heeded the most?

•First published by EUobserver, 15 November 2013.