Ten years ago, the tobacco industry was formally identified as the enemy. The World Health Assembly approved a resolution stating that cigarette makers have operated with “the express intention of subverting the role of governments” in implementing policies designed to reduce cancer deaths.
An illustration of just how dangerous that industry is came in February 2010, when Philip Morris International sued Uruguay over graphic new health warnings on cigarette packets. Philip Morris was able to take this action under the provisions of an investment treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland. Like many similar agreements, that one allows corporations to take an entire nation to court if they encounter obstacles perceived as damaging to their profitability.
This kind of litigation could become commonplace if Karel de Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, has his way.
He appears determined to seize on provisions in the Lisbon treaty that give the European Commission responsibility for negotiating investment deals with foreign countries. India is likely to be a test case. De Gucht is hoping that he will wrap up talks on a free trade agreement with New Delhi this coming February. According to a paper drawn up by EU officials, such an agreement “shall provide for the progressive abolition of restrictions on investment, with the aim to ensure the highest level of market access and provide protection for investors and investments of both parties.”
In other words, de Gucht wants clauses in the agreement that would allow corporations sue India or the EU in the way that Philip Morris is suing Uruguay. The recent history of investment treaties has shown that because they allow for company-state arbitration, health, environmental or labour standards can be challenged on the grounds that they restrict investment. Vattenfall, the Swedish firm, is invoking a 1994 energy treaty to sue Germany over its decision to abandon nuclear power.
Making a killing
Philip Morris, incidentally, views the EU-India trade talks as an opportunity to make a killing (literally).
I have seen a copy of a letter sent to the European Commission in March 2010 signed by Kristof Doms from Philip Morris’ Brussels office and Jack Bowles, who represents British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International. The two men lamented that India is a “virtually closed market” because it applies high taxes on imported cigarettes. “In order to open the Indian market for cigarettes manufactured in the EU,” the despicable duo urged the Commission to insist on a free trade agreement that would remove all import duties they now have to pay in India.
Irrespective of whether these peddlers of disease get their way, there are strong reasons to fear that a free trade agreement will harm India’s poor.
Karel de Gucht and his team should read two important new documents.
The first one is a report published by the UN’s working group on human rights in India earlier this month. It gives an overview of the human rights situation in India, stating that the planned free trade agreements threatens the rights to health, food and work for much of the population. While that comment is directed at India’s trade agreements in general, the report zooms in on the one under negotiation with the EU, predicting it “would cut tariffs to zero for key sectors that support many producers and workers, thus exposing them to highly competitive international markets.”
The second paper de Gucht should study is a “right to food impact assessment” on the likely consequences of a trade agreement between the EU and India. It was prepared by the Third World Network, an Indian veterinary organisation called Anthra and the German anti-poverty group Misereor, among others.
Legal obligation
This study emphasises that de Gucht is under a legal obligation to respect human rights. Despite its numerous flaws, the Lisbon treaty does at least require that trade policy upholds rights of both a social and economic nature and a civil and political one.
So when trade with India is being discussed, de Gucht is obliged to recall that India is not simply a land with 55 dollar billionaires, it also has an estimated 224 million people living in chronic hunger. One of the enormous paradoxes of India is that food producers are themselves frequently vulnerable to food deprivation. About 70% of Indians depend on agriculture as their primary source of livelihood.
The impact assessment indicates that India’s dairy and poultry farmers would struggle to cope if they had to compete with cheap imports of European meat and milk products. Such farmers typically have to borrow for feed and other essentials and pay back their loans at high interest rates, making them dependent on getting reasonable prices. Women involved in small-scale agriculture would have to cut down on vital sources of nutrition like rice if their incomes were to decline, the assessment stated.
De Gucht is hoping that India’s middle class will flock to supermarkets owned by Carrefour and Tesco as a result of a free trade agreement. Those supermarkets tend to favour better-off farmers when buying food, meaning that they will bring no benefit to India’s poor. And the arrival of giant stores will surely be bad news for the family-run shops and street hawkers that form the backbone of the Indian economy.
Christmas is supposed to be a season for caring. As de Gucht tucks into his Yuletide dinner, I hope he will feel some remorse about the suffering he is trying to inflict on India.
●First published by New Europe, 19 December 2011.
Showing posts with label Karel de Gucht. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karel de Gucht. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Red carpet treatment for bulldozer of Palestine
Caterpillar, the maker of bulldozers used by Israel in destroying Palestinian homes, tried to project a caring image this week.
Paolo Fellin, a Caterpillar (CAT) vice-president, was the main corporate speaker at a session of the European Business Summit devoted to the global trade agenda. In his presentation, Fellin posited the highly disputed theory that unfettered free trade could lift millions out of poverty. He also sought to display his tree-hugging credentials by bragging of how he supports the recycling of spare parts from old machinery.
When I asked Fellin how his championing of the poor could be squared with CAT’s role in the dispossession of Palestinians, he said: “I am proud of what our products have done in building the world’s infrastructure: agricultural development, dams, roads, freeways in these countries. If our products end up in certain parts of the world, then I have no control over that.”
Fellin’s hand-washing should not be taken at face value. For a start, his job title gives him responsibility for distribution in Europe and the Middle East, so he can’t plead ignorance about Palestine. And more to the point, Caterpillar’s exports to Israel are covered by the US foreign military sales programme. That means they have been tailored to meet Israel’s “requirements” and are effectively categorised as weapons.
Last year, Israel’s Channel 2 reported that CAT had decided to stop deliveries to Israel. The decision was taken because of the adverse publicity the company received as a result of the legal proceedings initiated by the parents of Rachel Corrie, the courageous activist who died in 2003 after an Israeli soldier ran over her in a D9 bulldozer (one of CAT’s best-known vehicles). However, the suspension of deliveries was temporary. It does not alter the fact that CAT’s logo has been displayed prominently during thousands of house demolitions in the occupied territories since 1967.
In a December 2010 blog post, Amnesty International’s Edith Garwood wrote: “CAT equipment has been used to uproot olive trees and destroy other agricultural products and land. During Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip two years ago, Israel used armored D9 bulldozers to demolish wide swathes of homes, factories, agricultural land and civilian infrastructure, including water pipes and networks needed for basic survival.”
CAT’s record of profiting from war crimes does not trouble BusinessEurope, the employers’ federation that organised this week’s “summit”. In 2008, another senior CAT figure Michael Baunton addressed a similar BusinessEurope event and argued that his company’s vehicles shouldn’t be subject to robust pollution controls.
Paolo Fellin had good reason to be satisfied with his trip to Brussels. The European Union’s trade commissioner Karel de Gucht was heard asking Fellin for ideas about how American entrepreneurs can be convinced to be a little more enthusiastic about the Doha round of world trade talks launched in Qatar almost a decade ago. Official Europe appears so desperate to see these protracted negotiations bear fruit that it is turning to merchants of death for advice.
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 20 May 2011
Paolo Fellin, a Caterpillar (CAT) vice-president, was the main corporate speaker at a session of the European Business Summit devoted to the global trade agenda. In his presentation, Fellin posited the highly disputed theory that unfettered free trade could lift millions out of poverty. He also sought to display his tree-hugging credentials by bragging of how he supports the recycling of spare parts from old machinery.
When I asked Fellin how his championing of the poor could be squared with CAT’s role in the dispossession of Palestinians, he said: “I am proud of what our products have done in building the world’s infrastructure: agricultural development, dams, roads, freeways in these countries. If our products end up in certain parts of the world, then I have no control over that.”
Fellin’s hand-washing should not be taken at face value. For a start, his job title gives him responsibility for distribution in Europe and the Middle East, so he can’t plead ignorance about Palestine. And more to the point, Caterpillar’s exports to Israel are covered by the US foreign military sales programme. That means they have been tailored to meet Israel’s “requirements” and are effectively categorised as weapons.
Last year, Israel’s Channel 2 reported that CAT had decided to stop deliveries to Israel. The decision was taken because of the adverse publicity the company received as a result of the legal proceedings initiated by the parents of Rachel Corrie, the courageous activist who died in 2003 after an Israeli soldier ran over her in a D9 bulldozer (one of CAT’s best-known vehicles). However, the suspension of deliveries was temporary. It does not alter the fact that CAT’s logo has been displayed prominently during thousands of house demolitions in the occupied territories since 1967.
In a December 2010 blog post, Amnesty International’s Edith Garwood wrote: “CAT equipment has been used to uproot olive trees and destroy other agricultural products and land. During Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip two years ago, Israel used armored D9 bulldozers to demolish wide swathes of homes, factories, agricultural land and civilian infrastructure, including water pipes and networks needed for basic survival.”
CAT’s record of profiting from war crimes does not trouble BusinessEurope, the employers’ federation that organised this week’s “summit”. In 2008, another senior CAT figure Michael Baunton addressed a similar BusinessEurope event and argued that his company’s vehicles shouldn’t be subject to robust pollution controls.
Paolo Fellin had good reason to be satisfied with his trip to Brussels. The European Union’s trade commissioner Karel de Gucht was heard asking Fellin for ideas about how American entrepreneurs can be convinced to be a little more enthusiastic about the Doha round of world trade talks launched in Qatar almost a decade ago. Official Europe appears so desperate to see these protracted negotiations bear fruit that it is turning to merchants of death for advice.
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 20 May 2011
Monday, November 8, 2010
How the Israel lobby dictates EU policy
There is an easy way for a mediocre politician to grab headlines: upset the Israel lobby. Karel de Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, discovered this to his cost in September when asked about Middle East “peace” talks on the Flemish radio station VRT.
Deviating from the official EU script, de Gucht rated the chances of the Obama administration resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict as extremely low. After describing the Zionist lobby as the “best organised” in US politics and inferring that it was a major obstacle to progress, he expressed a view about how Jews in general perceive Israel. “There is indeed a belief – it’s difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right,” he said. “And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments.”
Clearly, these comments lacked nuance and someone in de Gucht’s position should be wary of making blanket statements about an entire religious or ethnic group. But did they actually betoken hostility to Jews or, as The Wall Street Journal claimed, constitute an “anti-Semitic riff”?
One consequence of de Gucht’s remarks is that they highlighted how the Israel lobby is a force not only on Capitol Hill, but in Brussels, too, and that it is attempting to stifle debate about Israel’s sadistic treatment of the Palestinian people.
It is telling that the European Jewish Congress (EJC) reacted by alleging that sharply-worded criticism of Israel amounted to the same thing as hatred for Jews. “What sort of environment allows such remarks to be made openly by a senior politician?” the EJC’s president Moshe Kantor wondered. “This is part of a dangerous trend of incitement against Jews and Israel in Europe that needs to be stamped out immediately.”
While the overwhelming majority of Palestine solidarity and human rights activists – and indeed millions of decent people – can see a difference between Zionism as an ideology that is little more than a century old and Judaism as a religion dating back several millennia, the Israel lobby has been eager to blur the distinction between the two. Lamentably, it has had considerable success in convincing policy-makers that anyone who dares speak the truth about Israel should be labelled an anti-Semite.
In 2005, the European Union’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia – subsequently renamed the Fundamental Rights Agency – accepted a working definition of anti-Semitism. It stated that anti-Semitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews”. As well as being directed towards Jewish religious institutions, displays of anti-Semitism could “target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish entity,” the definition said. Examples of anti-Semitism given in an accompanying document included “claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
This definition was not the result of painstaking research by neutral observers. Rather, the monitoring centre has acknowledged that it was drafted in consultation with the aforementioned EJC, along with the American Jewish Committee.
Gauging exactly how much power the Israel lobby wields in Europe is fraught. Most of the relevant organisations are secretive about their activities. The Transatlantic Institute – a Brussels-based front for the American Jewish Committee – appears to be the only such grouping to have entered some details into a voluntary register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission. Apart from its address and phone number, all its entry reveals is that it has a reported budget of €255,000 for 2010.
Nor should the power of the lobby be exaggerated. The decision by EU and NATO – both headquartered in Brussels - to forge ever-closer ties with Israel over the past decade are largely explained by geo-strategic factors. Israel has skilfully – and cynically - positioned itself as an indispensable ally to the “war on terror” declared by George W. Bush. Moreover, its status as a key EU “partner” for scientific research is due to how Israeli firms have pioneered technologies ranging from instant messaging for the Internet to the drones used by NATO forces in bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan, Turkey in northern Iraq and, of course, by Israel itself in Gaza.
Although this deepening of relations may well have occurred without the growth of pro-Israel lobby groups in Brussels, those groups have certainly acted as a kind of match-maker. Conscious that the US may not dominate global politics during this century as stridently as it did in the second half of the twentieth century, the American Jewish Committee has decided that it must also influence important players outside Washington. And so it opened the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels six years ago, at a time when the EU’s efforts to present more cohesive foreign and military policies to the wider world were bearing fruit.
As well as persuading policy-makers to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the Transatlantic Institute has acted as an apologist for Israeli war crimes, while simultaneously pounding the drumbeat of war towards Iran. In January 2009, the institute’s then director Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote a piece for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which he gloated at how “Iran got a bloody nose” through Israel’s three-week offensive against Gaza. (Ottolenghi’s theory was based on his assertion that because Iran had shown Hamas how to fire rockets further into southern Israel than it previously could, pain inflicted on Hamas could be felt in Tehran).
Like all propagandists, the Israel lobby feels under no obligation to tell the truth. After Israel’s murderous attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla at the end of May this year, the EJC tried to smear the nine Turkish peace activists killed. Moshe Kantor called on the EU to place the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (known by its Turkish acronym IHH) on its list of terrorist organisations. In a letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kantor said that the IHH’s “ties to terrorist activities have been well-documented” yet cited no sources to support that accusation.
Fortunately, the Israel lobby is not yet as influential in Brussels as it is in Washington. Whereas the number of US legislators prepared to berate Israel can often be counted on one hand (a mere five members of Congress opposed the attack on Gaza in January 2009), the European Parliament has occasionally been willing to resist pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists. In March this year, MEPs were inundated with messages from the EJC urging them to reject a resolution endorsing the report of an official United Nations investigation into the Gaza attacks. (Headed by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone, the report stated that Israel had committed war crimes). To its credit, the Parliament still approved the resolution by 335 votes to 287.
That does not mean, however, that MEPs can always be relied on to defend the rights of the Palestinians. On the contrary, Zionist zealots have pulled off something of a public relations coup within the Parliament. Since September 2009, the assembly’s official delegation to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has been headed by Bastiaan Belder, a Dutch Christian fundamentalist who maintains that Israel does everything it can to avoid civilian casualties when it bombs the occupied Palestinian territories. Under Belder’s leadership, meetings of his delegation have been highly partisan; at one such meeting the main guest speaker was the aforementioned Emanuele Ottolenghi.
Another important initiative within the Parliament has been the foundation in 2006 of the European Friends of Israel (EFI). Functioning as a cross-party alliance of MEPs, it is at least partly modelled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the best known pro-Israel lobby group in Washington. Dimtri Dombret, the EFI’s first director, has confirmed to me that he has attended several AIPAC events and studied how it operates.
Among the most active participants in the EFI is Charles Tannock, the foreign policy spokesman for Britain’s Conservative MEPs. Tannock is something of a mouthpiece for Israeli diplomats. In September, he urged colleagues to “be unswerving in our condemnation of Iran’s appalling human rights record”. By contrast, he has defended Israel’s human rights abuses; following the flotilla attack, he parroted the whitewash from the Netanyahu government by declaring: “What is sure is that the IDF [Israel Defence Force] had no intention to use lethal force”.
Writing in 1946, George Orwell stated that political language is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” The Israel lobby has elevated this language into an artform.
·First published by Spinwatch (www.spinwatch.org), 6 November 2010
Deviating from the official EU script, de Gucht rated the chances of the Obama administration resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict as extremely low. After describing the Zionist lobby as the “best organised” in US politics and inferring that it was a major obstacle to progress, he expressed a view about how Jews in general perceive Israel. “There is indeed a belief – it’s difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right,” he said. “And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments.”
Clearly, these comments lacked nuance and someone in de Gucht’s position should be wary of making blanket statements about an entire religious or ethnic group. But did they actually betoken hostility to Jews or, as The Wall Street Journal claimed, constitute an “anti-Semitic riff”?
One consequence of de Gucht’s remarks is that they highlighted how the Israel lobby is a force not only on Capitol Hill, but in Brussels, too, and that it is attempting to stifle debate about Israel’s sadistic treatment of the Palestinian people.
It is telling that the European Jewish Congress (EJC) reacted by alleging that sharply-worded criticism of Israel amounted to the same thing as hatred for Jews. “What sort of environment allows such remarks to be made openly by a senior politician?” the EJC’s president Moshe Kantor wondered. “This is part of a dangerous trend of incitement against Jews and Israel in Europe that needs to be stamped out immediately.”
While the overwhelming majority of Palestine solidarity and human rights activists – and indeed millions of decent people – can see a difference between Zionism as an ideology that is little more than a century old and Judaism as a religion dating back several millennia, the Israel lobby has been eager to blur the distinction between the two. Lamentably, it has had considerable success in convincing policy-makers that anyone who dares speak the truth about Israel should be labelled an anti-Semite.
In 2005, the European Union’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia – subsequently renamed the Fundamental Rights Agency – accepted a working definition of anti-Semitism. It stated that anti-Semitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews”. As well as being directed towards Jewish religious institutions, displays of anti-Semitism could “target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish entity,” the definition said. Examples of anti-Semitism given in an accompanying document included “claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
This definition was not the result of painstaking research by neutral observers. Rather, the monitoring centre has acknowledged that it was drafted in consultation with the aforementioned EJC, along with the American Jewish Committee.
Gauging exactly how much power the Israel lobby wields in Europe is fraught. Most of the relevant organisations are secretive about their activities. The Transatlantic Institute – a Brussels-based front for the American Jewish Committee – appears to be the only such grouping to have entered some details into a voluntary register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission. Apart from its address and phone number, all its entry reveals is that it has a reported budget of €255,000 for 2010.
Nor should the power of the lobby be exaggerated. The decision by EU and NATO – both headquartered in Brussels - to forge ever-closer ties with Israel over the past decade are largely explained by geo-strategic factors. Israel has skilfully – and cynically - positioned itself as an indispensable ally to the “war on terror” declared by George W. Bush. Moreover, its status as a key EU “partner” for scientific research is due to how Israeli firms have pioneered technologies ranging from instant messaging for the Internet to the drones used by NATO forces in bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan, Turkey in northern Iraq and, of course, by Israel itself in Gaza.
Although this deepening of relations may well have occurred without the growth of pro-Israel lobby groups in Brussels, those groups have certainly acted as a kind of match-maker. Conscious that the US may not dominate global politics during this century as stridently as it did in the second half of the twentieth century, the American Jewish Committee has decided that it must also influence important players outside Washington. And so it opened the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels six years ago, at a time when the EU’s efforts to present more cohesive foreign and military policies to the wider world were bearing fruit.
As well as persuading policy-makers to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the Transatlantic Institute has acted as an apologist for Israeli war crimes, while simultaneously pounding the drumbeat of war towards Iran. In January 2009, the institute’s then director Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote a piece for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which he gloated at how “Iran got a bloody nose” through Israel’s three-week offensive against Gaza. (Ottolenghi’s theory was based on his assertion that because Iran had shown Hamas how to fire rockets further into southern Israel than it previously could, pain inflicted on Hamas could be felt in Tehran).
Like all propagandists, the Israel lobby feels under no obligation to tell the truth. After Israel’s murderous attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla at the end of May this year, the EJC tried to smear the nine Turkish peace activists killed. Moshe Kantor called on the EU to place the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (known by its Turkish acronym IHH) on its list of terrorist organisations. In a letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kantor said that the IHH’s “ties to terrorist activities have been well-documented” yet cited no sources to support that accusation.
Fortunately, the Israel lobby is not yet as influential in Brussels as it is in Washington. Whereas the number of US legislators prepared to berate Israel can often be counted on one hand (a mere five members of Congress opposed the attack on Gaza in January 2009), the European Parliament has occasionally been willing to resist pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists. In March this year, MEPs were inundated with messages from the EJC urging them to reject a resolution endorsing the report of an official United Nations investigation into the Gaza attacks. (Headed by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone, the report stated that Israel had committed war crimes). To its credit, the Parliament still approved the resolution by 335 votes to 287.
That does not mean, however, that MEPs can always be relied on to defend the rights of the Palestinians. On the contrary, Zionist zealots have pulled off something of a public relations coup within the Parliament. Since September 2009, the assembly’s official delegation to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has been headed by Bastiaan Belder, a Dutch Christian fundamentalist who maintains that Israel does everything it can to avoid civilian casualties when it bombs the occupied Palestinian territories. Under Belder’s leadership, meetings of his delegation have been highly partisan; at one such meeting the main guest speaker was the aforementioned Emanuele Ottolenghi.
Another important initiative within the Parliament has been the foundation in 2006 of the European Friends of Israel (EFI). Functioning as a cross-party alliance of MEPs, it is at least partly modelled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the best known pro-Israel lobby group in Washington. Dimtri Dombret, the EFI’s first director, has confirmed to me that he has attended several AIPAC events and studied how it operates.
Among the most active participants in the EFI is Charles Tannock, the foreign policy spokesman for Britain’s Conservative MEPs. Tannock is something of a mouthpiece for Israeli diplomats. In September, he urged colleagues to “be unswerving in our condemnation of Iran’s appalling human rights record”. By contrast, he has defended Israel’s human rights abuses; following the flotilla attack, he parroted the whitewash from the Netanyahu government by declaring: “What is sure is that the IDF [Israel Defence Force] had no intention to use lethal force”.
Writing in 1946, George Orwell stated that political language is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” The Israel lobby has elevated this language into an artform.
·First published by Spinwatch (www.spinwatch.org), 6 November 2010
Europe grabs energy sources from poor
Only the brightest and the best will represent the EU as top diplomats, Catherine Ashton has promised. On paper, the Union’s foreign policy chief should have no difficulty honouring this pledge: you can be sure that the recruits to her external action service did a lot more at college than keep a bar-stool warm.
With few exceptions, though, the same recruits leave their intellectual curiosity in the car park each morning. For being a diplomat requires that one swallows assumptions that are demonstrably false and then regurgitate them ad infinitum.
Trade issues inevitably absorb a great deal of any envoy’s time. To an outsider unschooled in jargon, they can seem bewildering, yet for an EU diplomat there is really just one rule to follow: denounce protectionism at all times.
According to the European Commission’s propaganda, it is an unpardonable offence for any country to try and avoid losing jobs to somewhere with lower wages or to shield a home-grown industry from cheaper imports. Yet anyone with even a flimsy grip of history can tell you that protectionism is vital under many circumstances. The United States became the world’s fastest-growing economy in the late nineteeth and early twentieth century, at a time when it slapped some of the world’s highest taxes on imported goods.
Later this week, Karel de Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, will in effect tell China that it is not allowed to use the kind of policies that have helped other economies to flourish in the past. A strategy paper outlining his key priorities for his term in office proposes that retaliatory measures should be taken against countries that forbid EU firms from bidding for government contracts.
De Gucht’s aides are taking aim at a 2002 law requiring that Chinese authorities buy goods or services from Chinese companies. This restriction has clearly paid dividends. Since it was placed on the statute books, China’s public procurement market has tripled. State purchases are now worth at least $88 billion, according to the magazine China Business Review.
Contrary to what Brussels officials claim, Western firms do not have some God-given entitlement to operate wherever they wish. It is clever of the Commission to infer that it merely seeks a “level playing field”. The reality of global capitalism is that poorer countries are at an unfair disadvantage and would be foolish not to favour domestic suppliers.
Indeed, the Commission itself recognised in a separate paper published in October that the “underlying motivation” behind such favouritism was to safeguard jobs. And yet it described a “buy local” law introduced in Brazil as a “worrying development”. Lest we forget, Brazil remains an impoverished country by European standards. The United Nations estimates that gross national income in Brazil per head of population is about $10,000 per year – well under half that of the Czech Republic and one-third that of France.
De Gucht’s strategy document suggests he has tested positive for the same kind of neo-imperial hubris that afflicted his predecessor Peter Mandelson. It resolves to get tough on countries audacious enough to think that their natural resources should be used for purposes other than padding the wallets of European entrepeneurs.
Plans by de Gucht to lean heavily on countries that restrict exports go even further than statements made by Mandelson shortly before he unexpectedly returned to London in 2008. Whereas Mandelson simply undertook to tell off governments that don’t hand over their minerals to foreigners, de Gucht is now committed to achieving international rules that deny poor countries the possibility of lifting themselves out of poverty. “The sustainable and unrestricted supply of raw materials and energy is of strategic importance for the competitiveness of the European economy,” his new paper says.
Never mind, then, that countries need to levy taxes on exports to raise sorely-needed revenue – as Argentina did when it was beset by an economic crisis in 2002. Never mind that Botswana’s diamond industry has illustrated the benefits of banning exports of unprocessed gems, in order to stimulate their processing and provide vital jobs at home. Never mind that there can be good environmental grounds on which to regulate trade – as Mozambique’s parliament decided in May, when it reacted to deforestation by imposing a tax on exports of unprocessed wood. If de Gucht has his way, all such measures would be declared inadmissible by the guarantors of market liberalisation.
De Gucht must have his head in the clouds if he really believes all that blather about how the European economy should have an “unrestricted supply” of raw materials. Although the EU does not measure its resource use or have any targets for reducing it, a 2009 study by the Sustainable Energy Research Institute in Vienna calculated that at 43 kilos each day an average European consumes three times as much of the earth’s resources as an Asian and four times as much as an African. Thinking we are less gluttonous than Americans won’t get us very far: while it’s true that we use up less resources than our cousins in the US, Europe relies more on imports than any other continent.
By genuflecting to a narrow concept like competitiveness, de Gucht is locking the Union into a voracious cycle of exploitation. Rather than acting responsibly – by insisting on a more efficient use of resources and greater recycling – he is refusing to accept that there are bounds to the planet’s riches. When will this madness end?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 7-13 November 2010
With few exceptions, though, the same recruits leave their intellectual curiosity in the car park each morning. For being a diplomat requires that one swallows assumptions that are demonstrably false and then regurgitate them ad infinitum.
Trade issues inevitably absorb a great deal of any envoy’s time. To an outsider unschooled in jargon, they can seem bewildering, yet for an EU diplomat there is really just one rule to follow: denounce protectionism at all times.
According to the European Commission’s propaganda, it is an unpardonable offence for any country to try and avoid losing jobs to somewhere with lower wages or to shield a home-grown industry from cheaper imports. Yet anyone with even a flimsy grip of history can tell you that protectionism is vital under many circumstances. The United States became the world’s fastest-growing economy in the late nineteeth and early twentieth century, at a time when it slapped some of the world’s highest taxes on imported goods.
Later this week, Karel de Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, will in effect tell China that it is not allowed to use the kind of policies that have helped other economies to flourish in the past. A strategy paper outlining his key priorities for his term in office proposes that retaliatory measures should be taken against countries that forbid EU firms from bidding for government contracts.
De Gucht’s aides are taking aim at a 2002 law requiring that Chinese authorities buy goods or services from Chinese companies. This restriction has clearly paid dividends. Since it was placed on the statute books, China’s public procurement market has tripled. State purchases are now worth at least $88 billion, according to the magazine China Business Review.
Contrary to what Brussels officials claim, Western firms do not have some God-given entitlement to operate wherever they wish. It is clever of the Commission to infer that it merely seeks a “level playing field”. The reality of global capitalism is that poorer countries are at an unfair disadvantage and would be foolish not to favour domestic suppliers.
Indeed, the Commission itself recognised in a separate paper published in October that the “underlying motivation” behind such favouritism was to safeguard jobs. And yet it described a “buy local” law introduced in Brazil as a “worrying development”. Lest we forget, Brazil remains an impoverished country by European standards. The United Nations estimates that gross national income in Brazil per head of population is about $10,000 per year – well under half that of the Czech Republic and one-third that of France.
De Gucht’s strategy document suggests he has tested positive for the same kind of neo-imperial hubris that afflicted his predecessor Peter Mandelson. It resolves to get tough on countries audacious enough to think that their natural resources should be used for purposes other than padding the wallets of European entrepeneurs.
Plans by de Gucht to lean heavily on countries that restrict exports go even further than statements made by Mandelson shortly before he unexpectedly returned to London in 2008. Whereas Mandelson simply undertook to tell off governments that don’t hand over their minerals to foreigners, de Gucht is now committed to achieving international rules that deny poor countries the possibility of lifting themselves out of poverty. “The sustainable and unrestricted supply of raw materials and energy is of strategic importance for the competitiveness of the European economy,” his new paper says.
Never mind, then, that countries need to levy taxes on exports to raise sorely-needed revenue – as Argentina did when it was beset by an economic crisis in 2002. Never mind that Botswana’s diamond industry has illustrated the benefits of banning exports of unprocessed gems, in order to stimulate their processing and provide vital jobs at home. Never mind that there can be good environmental grounds on which to regulate trade – as Mozambique’s parliament decided in May, when it reacted to deforestation by imposing a tax on exports of unprocessed wood. If de Gucht has his way, all such measures would be declared inadmissible by the guarantors of market liberalisation.
De Gucht must have his head in the clouds if he really believes all that blather about how the European economy should have an “unrestricted supply” of raw materials. Although the EU does not measure its resource use or have any targets for reducing it, a 2009 study by the Sustainable Energy Research Institute in Vienna calculated that at 43 kilos each day an average European consumes three times as much of the earth’s resources as an Asian and four times as much as an African. Thinking we are less gluttonous than Americans won’t get us very far: while it’s true that we use up less resources than our cousins in the US, Europe relies more on imports than any other continent.
By genuflecting to a narrow concept like competitiveness, de Gucht is locking the Union into a voracious cycle of exploitation. Rather than acting responsibly – by insisting on a more efficient use of resources and greater recycling – he is refusing to accept that there are bounds to the planet’s riches. When will this madness end?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 7-13 November 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Corporate power bleeds Canada dry
Barely noticed by most media outlets, top corporations are finding ways to assert their control over policies nominally designed to serve public interests. Unglamorous trade talks between the European Union and Canada offer a prime example of the headway they are making. Since their launch in Prague last year, these negotiations have largely followed an agenda drawn up by the European Services Forum (ESF). Bringing together Goldman Sachs, IBM, Vodafone and Deutsche Bank, the ESF is determined to usher in a trans-Atlantic investment regime where elected institutions play second fiddle to unaccountable chief executives.
The forum’s principal recommendation is that an EU-Canada trade deal should be modelled on the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). More specifically, it wants chapter 11 of NAFTA to be copied and pasted into an EU-Canada accord. That chapter facilitates private firms to sue any of the three governments that signed NAFTA – the US, Canada or Mexico – if obstacles to making profits are encountered. The courts of arbitration provided for by the chapter can issue legally binding verdicts after hearings held in camera. If the ESF has its way, firms would also be able to put the European Union in the dock.
The likely implications of the ESF’s demands can be foreseen by examining the case law for NAFTA. When an American waste management company called Metalclad was ordered to cease building a toxic dump in Mexico during the 1990s, it initiated proceedings against the Mexican government. Even though there were sound reasons – for protecting human health and preventing soil and water pollution - why Metalclad had been told to stop work on a site that was already contaminated, a NAFTA tribunal found that Mexico had failed to ensure there was a “clear, transparent and predictable framework for foreign investors.” And so Metalclad was awarded almost $17million.
The EU-Canada talks cannot be viewed in isolation from a discussion taking place among Brussels officials about how imports of tar sands from the Canadian province of Alberta should be regulated. Last year a European Commission paper proposing revisions to an EU fuel quality law stated that petrol derived from tar sands would have a 20% greater effect on the climate than conventional petrol. But this warning was removed from later versions of the paper after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador to the EU, objected. Hornby signalled that Canada would retaliate if a “barrier” to trade in tar sands was erected.
Should the EU-Canada trade deal be tailored to satisfy big business, Shell and other energy companies could litigate against measures that impede them from selling tar sands. And so the EU would be giving its tacit blessing to the large-scale vandalism being planned in Alberta, where an expansive boreal forest – one quarter of the world’s remaining undisturbed forest – is under threat. Operations that encroach into this ecosystem will not only harm bears, caribou and lynx but the First Nations communities, who are already suffering heightened incidences of cancer because of exposure to naphthenic acid, a constituent of petroleum that becomes concentrated in the hot water required to process tar sands.
Similarly, it is conceivable that Europe’s restrictions on genetically modified (GM) foods could be one of the first targets of aggrieved corporations once the EU-Canada deal comes into effect. Whereas the planting of GM crops can only be authorised in the EU after their probable ecological consequences have been assessed, the safeguards in Canada are considerably less robust. Last year SmartStax, a new corn designed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals to resist a variety of different pesticides, was authorised in Canada without having to go through the health and environment checks required in Europe.
As its contribution to the trade talks, Monsanto’s Canadian subsidiary has advocated that the EU and Canada would recognise each other’s standards, rather than having to introduce anything more rigorous than those currently in place. This position has been endorsed by the Canada Europe Roundtable for Business, an influential lobby group in both Brussels and Ottawa.
The strategy being pursued by the captains of industry is all the more troubling, when one considers that they are sneakily trying to attain objectives that have been rejected by separate international fora. In a triumph for the so-called anti-globalisation movement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was shelved in the late 1990s. Discussed at the level of the World Trade Organisation, that treaty was also designed to give corporations the power to counter green or social rules they regarded as pesky.
Recently, however, a letter signed by prominent writers and activists such as Naomi Klein, Susan George and José Bové (now a French MEP) dubbed the draft EU-Canada agreement a “carbon copy” of the MAI. Both contain the same “judicial monstrosity”, the letter noted.
Often the EU’s representatives seek to portray themselves as slightly more progressive than their north American peers by bragging of how they have set deeper targets for greenhouse gas reductions or of how they are committed to maintaining a “social market” economy. Yet in reality, they are just as ideologically blinkered as Stephen Harper and his right-wing government in Canada. It was the European side, for example, which insisted that public procurement markets at both federal and provincial levels in Canada should be opened up to European competitors. Although Canada’s 10 provincial governments were not party to the NAFTA talks, they are participating in the trade discussions with the EU.
In the past few weeks, the EU has complained about entirely reasonable efforts by the Montreal authorities to ensure that new trains for its subway were made in Quebec. If the EU’s arm-twisting pays off, it will be illegal for such tenders to contain “buy local” caveats in the future, while a range of other vital services – including healthcare and water – will be opened to competition. Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” indicated that politicians across the political spectrum in Canada regarded access to affordable healthcare as a basic right. That right would be harder to protect once the business of keeping people alive is handed over to the private insurance industry.
The EU-Canada talks should be viewed against the backdrop of the wider external trade policy being pursued by the European Commission. In 2006, Peter Mandelson, then the EU’s trade chief, published a strategy known as Global Europe. It committed the Union to attack relentlessly any obstacles encountered by corporations doing business abroad. Brussels officials have had no qualms about seeking counsel from some of the least ethical players in the marketplace. When the Commission held a conference in 2008 to evaluate the first two years of Global Europe, the vehicle-maker Caterpillar was invited to thunder against air pollution standards it felt should not apply to its products. None of the conference speakers saw fit to query if Caterpillar, provider of the specially designed bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes, was a suitable source of advice.
During November, a follow-up paper to Global Europe will be published by the current EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht. It is expected that this will recommend sticking to the objectives set by Mandelson, though to enlarge the geographical focus of trade policy. With a free trade agreement with South Korea in the bag though encountering difficulties winning approval from the European Parliament) and one with India likely to be clinched next year, the European Commission is eyeing potential deals with China and Japan.
Heedless to regional variations within its negotiating “partners”, the EU has been striving to ram through a series of largely identical trade deals. At the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, it has been pressurising India into imposing patents on medicines in a way that would jeopardise its status as a leading manufacturer of generic drugs for the world’s poor. Some African governments, meanwhile, have accused the EU of trying to bully them into accepting liberalisation plans they regard as inimical to their economic development. And the Union has gone ahead and finalised a free trade agreement with Colombia, despite receiving voluminous evidence from human rights watchdogs documenting how the Bogota authorities have connived in numerous violent attacks on trade unionists.
Back in 1999, protesters fighting the ‘Battle of Seattle’ raised many awkward questions about how the rules of world commerce had been rigged to benefit the super-rich. Global trade talks have been at a standstill for most of the subsequent decade, yet that doesn’t mean the rigging has stopped. Rather, it is taking place in a greater number of venues, making resistance to it increasingly difficult, yet no less urgent.
·First published by openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net), 29 October 2010
The forum’s principal recommendation is that an EU-Canada trade deal should be modelled on the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). More specifically, it wants chapter 11 of NAFTA to be copied and pasted into an EU-Canada accord. That chapter facilitates private firms to sue any of the three governments that signed NAFTA – the US, Canada or Mexico – if obstacles to making profits are encountered. The courts of arbitration provided for by the chapter can issue legally binding verdicts after hearings held in camera. If the ESF has its way, firms would also be able to put the European Union in the dock.
The likely implications of the ESF’s demands can be foreseen by examining the case law for NAFTA. When an American waste management company called Metalclad was ordered to cease building a toxic dump in Mexico during the 1990s, it initiated proceedings against the Mexican government. Even though there were sound reasons – for protecting human health and preventing soil and water pollution - why Metalclad had been told to stop work on a site that was already contaminated, a NAFTA tribunal found that Mexico had failed to ensure there was a “clear, transparent and predictable framework for foreign investors.” And so Metalclad was awarded almost $17million.
The EU-Canada talks cannot be viewed in isolation from a discussion taking place among Brussels officials about how imports of tar sands from the Canadian province of Alberta should be regulated. Last year a European Commission paper proposing revisions to an EU fuel quality law stated that petrol derived from tar sands would have a 20% greater effect on the climate than conventional petrol. But this warning was removed from later versions of the paper after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador to the EU, objected. Hornby signalled that Canada would retaliate if a “barrier” to trade in tar sands was erected.
Should the EU-Canada trade deal be tailored to satisfy big business, Shell and other energy companies could litigate against measures that impede them from selling tar sands. And so the EU would be giving its tacit blessing to the large-scale vandalism being planned in Alberta, where an expansive boreal forest – one quarter of the world’s remaining undisturbed forest – is under threat. Operations that encroach into this ecosystem will not only harm bears, caribou and lynx but the First Nations communities, who are already suffering heightened incidences of cancer because of exposure to naphthenic acid, a constituent of petroleum that becomes concentrated in the hot water required to process tar sands.
Similarly, it is conceivable that Europe’s restrictions on genetically modified (GM) foods could be one of the first targets of aggrieved corporations once the EU-Canada deal comes into effect. Whereas the planting of GM crops can only be authorised in the EU after their probable ecological consequences have been assessed, the safeguards in Canada are considerably less robust. Last year SmartStax, a new corn designed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals to resist a variety of different pesticides, was authorised in Canada without having to go through the health and environment checks required in Europe.
As its contribution to the trade talks, Monsanto’s Canadian subsidiary has advocated that the EU and Canada would recognise each other’s standards, rather than having to introduce anything more rigorous than those currently in place. This position has been endorsed by the Canada Europe Roundtable for Business, an influential lobby group in both Brussels and Ottawa.
The strategy being pursued by the captains of industry is all the more troubling, when one considers that they are sneakily trying to attain objectives that have been rejected by separate international fora. In a triumph for the so-called anti-globalisation movement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was shelved in the late 1990s. Discussed at the level of the World Trade Organisation, that treaty was also designed to give corporations the power to counter green or social rules they regarded as pesky.
Recently, however, a letter signed by prominent writers and activists such as Naomi Klein, Susan George and José Bové (now a French MEP) dubbed the draft EU-Canada agreement a “carbon copy” of the MAI. Both contain the same “judicial monstrosity”, the letter noted.
Often the EU’s representatives seek to portray themselves as slightly more progressive than their north American peers by bragging of how they have set deeper targets for greenhouse gas reductions or of how they are committed to maintaining a “social market” economy. Yet in reality, they are just as ideologically blinkered as Stephen Harper and his right-wing government in Canada. It was the European side, for example, which insisted that public procurement markets at both federal and provincial levels in Canada should be opened up to European competitors. Although Canada’s 10 provincial governments were not party to the NAFTA talks, they are participating in the trade discussions with the EU.
In the past few weeks, the EU has complained about entirely reasonable efforts by the Montreal authorities to ensure that new trains for its subway were made in Quebec. If the EU’s arm-twisting pays off, it will be illegal for such tenders to contain “buy local” caveats in the future, while a range of other vital services – including healthcare and water – will be opened to competition. Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” indicated that politicians across the political spectrum in Canada regarded access to affordable healthcare as a basic right. That right would be harder to protect once the business of keeping people alive is handed over to the private insurance industry.
The EU-Canada talks should be viewed against the backdrop of the wider external trade policy being pursued by the European Commission. In 2006, Peter Mandelson, then the EU’s trade chief, published a strategy known as Global Europe. It committed the Union to attack relentlessly any obstacles encountered by corporations doing business abroad. Brussels officials have had no qualms about seeking counsel from some of the least ethical players in the marketplace. When the Commission held a conference in 2008 to evaluate the first two years of Global Europe, the vehicle-maker Caterpillar was invited to thunder against air pollution standards it felt should not apply to its products. None of the conference speakers saw fit to query if Caterpillar, provider of the specially designed bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes, was a suitable source of advice.
During November, a follow-up paper to Global Europe will be published by the current EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht. It is expected that this will recommend sticking to the objectives set by Mandelson, though to enlarge the geographical focus of trade policy. With a free trade agreement with South Korea in the bag though encountering difficulties winning approval from the European Parliament) and one with India likely to be clinched next year, the European Commission is eyeing potential deals with China and Japan.
Heedless to regional variations within its negotiating “partners”, the EU has been striving to ram through a series of largely identical trade deals. At the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, it has been pressurising India into imposing patents on medicines in a way that would jeopardise its status as a leading manufacturer of generic drugs for the world’s poor. Some African governments, meanwhile, have accused the EU of trying to bully them into accepting liberalisation plans they regard as inimical to their economic development. And the Union has gone ahead and finalised a free trade agreement with Colombia, despite receiving voluminous evidence from human rights watchdogs documenting how the Bogota authorities have connived in numerous violent attacks on trade unionists.
Back in 1999, protesters fighting the ‘Battle of Seattle’ raised many awkward questions about how the rules of world commerce had been rigged to benefit the super-rich. Global trade talks have been at a standstill for most of the subsequent decade, yet that doesn’t mean the rigging has stopped. Rather, it is taking place in a greater number of venues, making resistance to it increasingly difficult, yet no less urgent.
·First published by openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net), 29 October 2010
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