Elections often have little to do with democracy.
Stepping into a polling booth once every four or five years is a pretty meaningless exercise if the people we chose to “represent” us either belong to a financial and corporate elites or are subservient to them. The European Parliament is an elected institution but is it a democratic one?
Democracy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state”. A code of conduct for MEPs approved by a majority of them last month seems to chime with that concept. It said that MEPs shall “act solely in the public interest”.
But there are strong reasons to predict that the code will be habitually violated. Many MEPs have joined secretive clubs, known within the Brussels beltway as “intergroups”, that serve private, rather than public interests.
Karl-Heinz Florenz exemplifies why these clubs are pernicious. In 2010, this German Christian Democrat set up the European Raw Materials Group, with the objective of making the supply of natural resources a top priority for the EU’s political activities. The invitation for the group’s inaugural meeting indicated that it was an initiative of the Small and Medium Entrepreneurs Union, a business association led by Paul Rübig, the group’s co-founder. Rübig combines his job as an MEP with being a managing director of an eponymous metal company.
Florenz has been tasked with drafting the Parliament’s official position paper on a planned EU law for dealing with old computers, mobile phones and electrical equipment. His paper, scheduled for debate in Strasbourg this week, recommends that a proposal made on this topic by the European Commission should be amended to emphasise that “retrieval of critical raw materials” is a guiding principle when managing electronic waste. Florenz has argued that the Commission’s blueprint paid insufficient attention to raw materials.
Conflict of interests
Florenz’s key suggestions (which include a target for recycling 85% of electronic waste by 2016) may well be sensible. But his eagerness to stress the raw materials component of this dossier must raise questions, considering his links to companies that have a vested interest in pushing the EU to pursue a more aggressive agenda on ensuring access to the often rare resources required by modern technology. Recycling plays little more than a cameo role in that agenda, which is mainly focused on ensuring that corporations won’t be held back from exploiting the resources of foreign (and frequently impoverished) countries by namby-pamby ideas like ecological protection or national sovereignty.
The new code of conduct for MEPs also commits them to abide by the principles of “selflessness, integrity, openness, diligence, honesty [and] accountability”.
When I asked Florenz if corporate interests had any input into this work, he replied that he had personally drafted the paper, along with an assistant. “There is no conflict of interests, firstly because the European Raw Materials Group has not yet started its content-based work and secondly because the European Raw Materials Group is simply a group of like-minded members of all political groups in the European Parliament who exchange views on a subject,” he added.
Can we really believe that his intention was merely to start a talking shop for policy wonks?
Bribes
It is worth recalling that the MEPs’ code of conduct is the direct result of a sting operation undertaken by reporters working for The Sunday Times. Unlike the despicable phone-tapping undertaken by other newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, this operation was perfectly defensible as it exposed how corruptible some politicians are. When the paper’s reporters posed as lobbyists and offered 60 MEPs large sums of money in return for tabling amendments to legislative proposals, they found that 14 MEPs were willing to accept such bribes.
Florenz was not among the 14 but it has been documented that he has tabled amendments written by private sector interests in the past. An investigation by the organization Corporate Europe Observatory revealed that when the Parliament’s environment committee was conducting a debate on the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2008, Florenz copied and pasted amendments drawn up by the steel industry group Eurofer and signed them as if they were his own work.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that such behaviour is common in the Parliament, yet there is no appetite to stamp it out. Even if no cash is offered in return for tabling amendments, the practice is unethical.
Florenz is undeniably influential. He was chairman of the environment committee from 2004 and 2007 and then served as the Parliament’s point man on climate change between 2007 and 2009.
In a 2004 interview with The New York Times, he was quoted as whinging about the inordinate number of lobbyists who badger MEPs. His staff, however, appear to be on such good terms with those pests that they sometimes end up being hired as lobbyists. Axel Eggert, a director of public affairs with the aforementioned Eurofer, is a former assistant to Florenz. Another one of Florenz’s previous advisers, Christian Hierholzer, went on to work as a healthcare specialist with Weber Shandwick before heading the Brussels office of hanover, a public relations firm so cool that it spells its name in lower case.
The career path followed by these men illustrates the unhealthily close relationship between MEPs’ offices and big business. How can we have democracy if the EU’s only directly elected institution serves as a corporate dating agency?
●First published by New Europe, 15-21 January 2012.
Showing posts with label raw materials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raw materials. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2012
Monday, November 8, 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
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