Economics « Aletho News

Russia and Japan create joint investment pot with $1bn entry ticket

RT | April 29, 2013

Russia and Japan have launched a new tool for the development of mutual investments. The new Russo-Japanese investment platform involves injections starting from $1 billion and is aimed at boosting Russia’s Far East.

The agreement was reached on an official visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Moscow where he met with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. It was the first official trip by a Japanese Premier to Russia for ten years.

The two sides agreed to jointly invest in infrastructure, medicine and health, technology, “smart cities” and alternative energy sources.

Among the top priorities for regional investment program are Russia’s Far East and Eastern Siberia. Russia’s Eastern regions provide excellent conditions for creating highly profitable projects due to the resource base and transport potential, and companies that are already involved in business there will get additional efficiency with the influx of foreign investment, Kirill Dmitriev, Director General of Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said.

The new two-way platform is based on a powerful financial component. In addition to RDIF, Russia’s Vnesheconombank and Japan Bank for International Cooperation is also on board.

“The new mechanism is designed to simplify the exchange of technology and experience,” Dmitriev said. “The Japanese economy is built on advanced technology, and this is exactly what we are lacking.”

Leading Japanese corporations were invited to meet on the sidelines of the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow. Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Olympus and many have expressed interest in in investing in Russia. “Now RDIF’s goal is to turn that interest into real projects,” Dmitriev said.

Another cooperation agreement was reached between Japan’s Hokkaido Bank and the government of Russia’s Amur region.

Earlier it was reported that Russian-Japanese joint investments may increase by 10 times over the next three years. “But with such financial and technological support we have reason to think that the real figures can get higher. So far Russia’s interest in Japanese foreign investments is less than 1% (0.62% in 2012). But we already have a lot of positive examples of investment by Japanese companies in our country,” Dmitriev said.

Abe, Putin vow to increase efforts to sign Japan-Russia peace treaty (japandailypress.com)

April 30, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics | Japan, Japan Bank for International Cooperation, Russia, Shinzō Abe, Vladimir Putin | Leave a comment

Venezuela and Cuba Deepen “Strategic Alliance”

By Ryan Mallett-Outtrim | Venezuelanalysis | April 29, 2013

Mérida – Venezuela and Cuba signed 51 bilateral agreements related to energy management and social programmes in areas including healthcare, education and recreation this past weekend and pledged to spend $2 billion on bilateral social development projects this year.

The agreements were signed during Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s visit to Cuba over the weekend.

“We came to ratify a strategic…[and] historical alliance,” Maduro told Cuban press.

Details of the bilateral agreements are yet to be released, though Maduro described the deals as focusing on “social development”.

After meeting with Maduro, Castro told the press that the agreements reaffirm Cuba’s “unyielding will to continue co-operation in solidarity with Venezuela, determined to share our fate with the heroic Venezuelan people”.

The agreements represent Cuba’s largest source of foreign capital, according to AFP.

In his first trip abroad since being sworn in as Venezuela’s new president, Nicolas Maduro also met with former Cuban president Fidel Castro.

“I spent over five hours with Fidel, talking, sharing memories of Comandante Chavez, remembering how he and Chavez had built this alliance, which is more than a strategic partnership,” Maduro stated, according to the Havana Times.

The visit was criticised by Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who during his recent election bid advocated for cutting most ties with Cuba.

“Our great lackey is travelling to Havana to get instructions from his boss,” he tweeted on Saturday.

Venezuela is Cuba’s largest trade partner, currently providing the island nation with more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day. In exchange, over 30,000 Cuban medical personnel work in Venezuela.

During his election campaign, Capriles maintained his long standing policy that if elected, “not another drop of oil” would be sent to Cuba.

However, his views on the doctors are less consistent; alternating between offering them citizenship and accusing them of being spies involved in a “Castro-communist” plot and threatening them with deportation.

Maduro indicated that his administration would maintain continuity with former president Hugo Chavez’s Cuba policy, stating that the two countries “will continue working together”.

According to the Uruguayan newspaper La Republica, Maduro’s next international trip will be to Uruguay, where he is expected to meet with the country’s leftist president Jose Mujica.

The newspaper cites diplomatic sources as stating that the trip will take place around May 7, and will be part of a regional tour.

However, La Republica’s report on Maduro’s travel plans have not been officially confirmed by the Venezuelan government.

April 30, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics, Solidarity and Activism | Cuba, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela | Leave a comment

In Search of Their Roots: The Mapuche and Modern Society

By Aigul Safiullina | The Argentina Independent | April 29, 2013

Around five hours after leaving Bariloche our bus suddenly stops in the middle of nowhere. “Leleque. La comunidad,” the driver announces. “We’ve arrived muchacha”. Outside, fields stretch towards mountains and the eye struggles to fix on the horizon. There is nothing resembling a town or even village outside the bus, only a tiny improvised wooden gate and a sign on a huge white canvas that says: “Comunidad Santa Rosa. Territorio Mapuche recuperado” (Santa Rosa community, Recovered Mapuche territory).

A sign on the fence reads: ‘Santa Rosa community. Recovered Mapuche territory.’ (Photo: Fabio D’Errico)

Here, in a forgotten place, lost in the very heart of Patagonia, we have arrived at the point of a now globally-famous conflict: Santa Rosa de Leleque, where the indigenous Mapuche community is engaged in a long struggle to reclaim land they say is rightfully theirs from one of the world’s most recognisable clothing brands.

The Benetton Case

When we arrive, Santa Rosa de Leleque is bustling with people, as it has been for the last six years. Not only is this is the week of Kamaruko, the main religious festival of the Mapuches, but it is also the anniversary of the recovery of this stretch of land by the Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family and 30 other community members on 14th February, 2007.

“They’ve been evicting us from our land for many years, using physical power and law of those who had invaded our territories,” Rosa Rúa Nahuelquir leaves her kitchen utilities for a while as she talks. “But we know we are stronger, because the truth is on our side and we will stand for it, no matter what it costs us.”

Dancing and celebrating around the fire. (Photo: Fabio D’Errico)

Atilio Curiñanco y Rosa Rúa Nahuelquir first entered the territory now called Santa Rosa de Leleque in August 2002. They planned to return to their ancestral land and start a new life after long years of working in the factories of Texcom and Frigorífico in nearby Esquel. And so began a long legal struggle with the global corporation Benetton Group over 535 hectares of remote land in the province of Chubut, Argentina.

The Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family claims the territory as part of that which originally belonged to their ancestors before the colonisation of Patagonia in the 19th century. Benetton Group, meanwhile, insists on the land certificate issued in 1991, when the corporation purchased over 900,000 hectares from the British company The Argentine Southern Land Company Limited (CTSA).

Atilio Curiñanco recalls: “We presented a written statement at the police station of Esquel after consulting with the Autarkic Institute for Colonisation and Rural Development (IAC), which verbally confirmed that the space was public and abandoned for many years.” According to Curiñanco, many other campesinos from nearby territories used the space to gather wood it was all dusty and windy and required a lot of work to make the piece of land productive. However, only a few days after they had entered the territory, local police made inquiries about the “land usurpation” and soon returned with a legal claim by CTSA.

In October of that year, the Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family was forcefully evicted from Leleque, having all their belongings either confiscated or destroyed. In 2004, the family travelled to Italy to meet Luciano Benetton, who offered around 2,500 hectares of the land to all indigenous communities in the region as a donation. “We obviously refused the offer, as Benetton wasn’t eligible to donate something he didn’t own,” Rosa Nahuelquir says, indignantly.

Benetton later proposed a donation of the same amount of land to the Argentine government who could distribute it among indigenous communities. In 2005, the government of the province of Chubut also refused the offer, announcing that the 2,500 hectares were unproductive and saying it would not enter into any conflict with the inhabitants of the territory.

In February 2007, the couple came back to Leleque with 30 other community members and began to build a house. CTSA immediately accused them of damaging the territory, though the penal court found the claim illegitimate. In the five years since, the family has faced many more legal claims from CTSA with charges for property destruction and eviction orders, the latest coming in February this year. The family has repeatedly rejected these claims, based on their need to cultivate plants, raise domestic animals, and build basic living conditions to survive. “How could I let my family die from hunger because of someone else’s cruel decision?” Curiñanco asks rhetorically.

Mapuche vs Benetton. (Photo: Fabio D’Errico)

Mapuche in Argentine

The ‘Mapuche vs Benetton’ case has attracted a lot of attention from global and local human rights organisations, the media, political parties, fixing an unflattering spotlight on a range of problems – from land conflicts to racism and equality.

The Argentine state included indigenous rights in the Constitution only in 1994, when it recognised “the legal capacity of these communities to the possession and property of land that they have traditionally occupied.” Yet those who have tried to exercise this right face long legal battles against powerful foes. Benetton is just one in a long list of corporations and celebrities engaged in land conflicts with the Mapuches – others include Levi Strauss & Co, Grupo Loma Negra, Jane Fonda, Ted Turner, Emanuel Ginóbili, Marcelo Tinelli, Lopez Rey and many others.

In the 2013 annual report issued by The Observatory of Human Rights of Indigenous peoples (ODHPI), investigators say about 347 Mapuches are currently involved in lawsuits related to the land conflicts just in the province of Neuquen. “They [the government] make us feel as foreigners in this country, but at the same time they give out all lands to the foreigners!” claims Ruben Curricoy, a Mapuche activist from Bariloche. The ODHPI report, which focuses on Neuquen, Rio Negro and Chubut this year, adds: “Territorial dispossession continues to be the main obstacle for indigenous people to survive and develop in Patagonia as autonomous population.”

To understand the power and complexity of today’s land struggles in Patagonia, it is important to remember the history of Argentina and the treatment of indigenous people. You need go no further than Argentina’s $100-bill for a reminder of the infamous ‘desert campaign’ run by president Julio Argentino Roca in 1878 – 1885, which empowered Argentina as a leading agricultural country via the genocide of indigenous people who were evicted from their lands and killed. Back then, those families that invested in the campaign were handsomely rewarded, as one family descendant, who preferred not be named, recalls: “A beneficiary would be asked to look forward and take all the land that his eye was able to capture. And believe me, some people used to have a very good vision.”

Curricoy is quick to give other historic examples: “The government talks about 30,000 disappeared people during the dictatorship period. It’s not true. They only count disappeared huincas (a ‘white person’ in the Mapusungun language), while our people were dying in much higher numbers. I admire the fight of Madres de Plaza de Mayo, however, I can’t imagine an indigenous mother being heard by society. Only because she is not as white as a huinca.”

Indigenous people from all over Argentina marched to and in Buenos Aires to proclaim their heritage and be heard by the government during the Bicentennial celebrations (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Even with recent advances, many in the Mapuche community still feel as though they are misunderstood. Curricoy remembers a visit to the Casa Rosada during the country’s bicentenary celebrations in 2010, when President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner made a joke about the use of modern facilities after one of the delegate’s cell phone rang. “That was a turning point and made it clear that indigenous people were still excluded from this country really,” says Curricoy.

In another recent example, when three Mapuche communities in Neuquen were attacked by ten unidentified people, mainstream media barely covered the event.

The ODHPI report concludes: “the government bodies that are supposed to respond to the legal claims of indigenous people don’t perform their work” and in some cases even contradict the law. The report emphasises on the overall support that the government shows to private companies, speculating in such industries as exploitation of natural resources, tourism, and construction at the cost of indigenous people. In addition, the recent reforms to the Civil Code, proposed by the government, “will provoke more evictions and prosecutions for land usurpation” according to the ODHPI report.

Communitarian vs Private Property

With the provinces in desperate need of foreign investments and incomes, it is hard to imagine local governments supporting those who have no intention to exploit the land for commercial interests, like the Mapuche community, whose whole philosophy is built on protection of mapu, the land.

Atilio Curiñanco digs his land in Patagonia. (Photo: Fabio D’Errico)

Sharing is one of the fundamental values among the Mapuche – in the Mapusungun language there are no such words as ‘no’ and ‘property’ – and this further complicates the land conflicts involving Mapuch communities. “We don’t have land certificates, because the ones we need don’t exist,” explains Ruben Curricoy. “We were offered individual deeds, which imply higher taxes and a lot of restrictions. Moreover, individual forms of property go against our philosophy of a communitarian form of life.”

According to the Mapuches, a ‘communitarian property certificate’ would include all members of the community and prevent selling of the land. Every member in this type of property has the same rights and opportunities to use the land. As the leadership style among Mapuches is horizontal, no one would have special privileges in decision-making and distribution.

“However, it is sad to see so many villages that can’t grow territorially with the population growth, so our future generations basically don’t have land to live and work on. And how would they, when on the left you have one owner and on the right another one?” Curricoy shakes his head.

The Struggle for Identity

For Gustavo Macayo, former lawyer of the Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family, the Benetton case is especially important in creating awareness of the Mapuche struggle. “This case has placed the whole situation with the foreign land ownership into a very important point and opened so many profound questions of Argentine society, questions that had never been asked.” Moreover, according to Macayo, those historical, ethical and juridical questions had always been hidden and silenced before the legal studies around the case of Leleque came into light.

“The problem goes outside of the small territory of Leleque. It includes at least three provinces in the south, where the Mapuche population counts on big numbers and is becoming aware of their land rights,” adds Macayo.

Curiñanco hopes the notoriety of his family’s case has also helped some younger generations rediscover their ethnicity. While many in Buenos Aires would probably be surprised that the ‘People of the Earth’ use cell phones, drive cars, watch TV, speak Spanish among themselves, and do most activities considered ‘normal’ for Westerners, some differences between the cultures remain very obvious.

Emmanuel Maripi from Comodoro Rivadavia is 21 and has diverse roots that include European and indigenous ancestors. He discovered he was Mapuche when he turned 18, and since then has started learning deeper about the culture of his grandparents and practicing traditional customs. This year’s Kamaruko was his first one and, a musician, he learnt a few Mapuche’ songs to perform them at the festival. “I live my life in the city in the same way as any other person of my age,” Emmanuel shares during a break between performances. “I study, work, hang out with my friends, take part and organise events related to music. At the same time, I see that a big part of my identity belongs to Mapuche society, and now I always try to find some time to spend close to the nature and understand better who I am as a Mapuche.”

“However, we also see other examples, when our people give up or even criticise us,” Curiñanco says sadly. “Some of them even don’t consider themselves Mapuches and feel ashamed of their roots.

Atilio Curiñanco holds the mate as he discusses the plight of the Mapuche in Patagonia. (Photo: Fabio D’Errico)

“Many of them live in the cities where they are marginalised pretty quickly, and bring the fame to the whole ethnicity as criminalised and dangerous,” Curricoy joins the conversation and brings examples of big cities like Buenos Aires, Bariloche that count with a large number of Mapuche’ descendants.

Conversely, those that visit the Mapuche community in Leleque are always welcomed. “We’ve got visitors from all the parts of the world,” señora Rosa Rúa Nahuelquir recalls, “journalists, human rights defenders, artists, and a lot of policemen.” At this last word, she smiles ironically. “Our doors are open to everyone, regardless if the person is Mapuche or huinca and we never know if we can trust all these visitors. But we do anyway. We never learn from our mistakes…”

She is right. In eight days we spent in Santa Rosa de Leleque, each day was highlighted with an external visit. Every person was received warmly and invited to share meals, mate and conversations with the inhabitants.

Some visitors become lifelong friends, like Florencia Santucho, director of Argentina’s Independent Film Festival for Human Rights. Santucho has supported Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family since 2003. Nine years ago she produced a documentary called MariciWeu that narrates the story of the Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family and raises questions regarding their human rights’ violations. Not only she is perceived as a friend in this community, but also as one more Mapuche who continuously learns and incorporates parts of their culture in her own life.

“When you understand the Mapuche vision of the world you won’t have any more questions,” Santucho assures. “Recovering the land is a part of the ‘cosmovision’, which allows Mapuches to gain power in other aspects of their identity. Talking about Atilio Curiñanco, she shares: “He used to be a very timid person who never spoke a lot and didn´t seem confident at all. Now, I observe him as the person with a decent and firm position, and I am sure it comes thanks to his struggle for the land, for identity and connection with the Earth. Ñoque Mapu (Mother Earth) sees that and rewards with even more power.”

Where Civilisations Collide

“The powerful always have more rights, but we have different values that don’t fit into the western way of life,” Curiñanco looks at the Ruta 40 in only few metres from his house. “Some people consider us backward for our views and principles, but having another was of thinking doesn’t mean you shall destroy it with rules that go against our vision.”

The newest house under the stars. (Photo: Fabio D’Errico)

Leleque now symbolises a spot, where two civilizations clash with their fundamental differences. On the one side is the owner of a big corporation with a network of over 6,500 stores, a total income of 2 billion euro a year, and over 900,000 hectares of Patagonian lands. On the other side is the Mapuche community, which believes in a communitarian type of lifestyle and simple, self-sustaining living.

“In the last ten years we’ve observed how Benetton was trying to avoid this case and show it as something small and less important. And I believe they will keep with that strategy,” Macayo speaks about the future of the case. “The Mapuches will do all they can to bring more problems to the surface, starting with the essential one – colonisation.”

Meanwhile, the Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family deals with another criminal suit filed by CTSA, who have now targeted INAI, an institution that works with indigenous people, and provides the legal support to the Mapuche family. At the moment Supreme Court is in charge of it, which might take two or three more years due to the complexity of the issue.

“We will obviously continue the fight, as there is no way back,” Curiñanco firms his position. His eyes sparkle and his voice gets stronger. “This is our land and we are responsible for it. It has given so much to us that it would be a crime not to take care of it…”

As we talk, on the other side of the room little Rosita, a granddaughter in the Curiñanco – Rúa Nahuelquir family, is learning some basic Italian words from Fabio, an Italian photographer who arrived in Leleque with his personal project. She absorbs the new language rapidly, and soon they are speaking basic Italian and then switch to Spanish and even teaches some Mapusungun in terutnr. It’s a small scene that depicts a wider hope that dialogue is always possible between our civilisations, even though it requires a lot of will from both sides.

April 29, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Argentina, Benetton Group, Jane Fonda, Latin America, Mapuche, Patagonia | Leave a comment

Tracking CEO Pay

By Sam Pizzigati · OtherWords · April 24, 2013

Under current U.S. law, all our publicly traded corporations must annually disclose exactly what they pay their top executives. So why do all those CEO pay scorecards we see every spring show such different results?

USA Today found an 8 percent hike in 2012 CEO pay while The New York Times detected an 18.7 percent increase. Towers Watson, a corporate consulting firm, announced that CEO pay growth “slowed considerably,” rising at just a 1.2 percent rate last year.

What explains all these wildly divergent results? Let’s start with how corporations pay their top execs. This can get tricky.

Most executive pay today comes as stock-related compensation. Stock “options” give executives the right, down the road, to buy shares of their company stock at today’s share price. If that share price jumps, the execs can buy low and sell high. Instant windfall.

“Restricted” stock awards, on the other hand, give executives actual shares of stock, not just an option to buy them. Execs do have to wait a few years before they can actually claim these shares. No big deal. The shares will still have value in future years even if a company’s stock takes a hit.

But how should we value all this share-related compensation right now? Should CEO pay scorekeepers estimate how much stock awards granted this year will be worth in years to come? Or should scorekeepers only tally stock-related awards when execs actually profit personally from them?

Different executive pay scorekeepers give different answers. Scorekeepers also keep score on different sets of corporations. USA Today‘s new scorecard for 2012 tallies pay at 170 firms, the New York Times at just 100.

Given all this, do we have any single stat that tells us what we need to know? We do. That stat: the divide between worker and top executive pay.

America’s big-time CEOs, labor researchers at the AFL-CIO report, are now making 354 times the pay of average U.S. workers, the “largest pay gap in the world.”

Three decades ago, in 1982, American CEOs averaged just 42 times more than average U.S. workers. Two decades ago, in 1992, the gap stood at 201 times. A decade ago: 281 times.

The overall trend line, in other words, couldn’t be clearer. How can we reverse it? Identifying the specific pay gap between individual CEOs and their own workers would be a good first step.

Corporations have had to publish, for decades now, how much they pay their top execs. They haven’t had to reveal publicly how much — or how little — they pay their workers. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act enacted in 2010 changes this dynamic, at least on paper.

Dodd-Frank requires corporations to annually disclose the gap between what they pay their CEOs and their most typical workers. But a corporate lobbying blitz has kept the Securities and Exchange Commission from writing the regulations needed to enforce this disclosure mandate.

Why do our biggest corporations so fervently oppose disclosing their CEO-worker pay ratios? Disclosure by itself, after all, won’t shove down CEO pay levels. But disclosure could open the door to other steps that could curb CEO pay excess.

Lawmakers could, for instance, choose to deny government contracts or tax breaks to corporations that pay their top executives over 25 or even 50 times what their own workers are making.

Far-fetched? Current law already denies government contracts to companies that discriminate by race or gender in their employment practices. As a society, we’ve concluded that our tax dollars must not go to corporations that widen racial or gender inequality.

So why should we let our tax dollars enrich corporations that widen our economic divide?

Sam Pizzigati is the author of The Rich Don’t Always Win, Seven Stories Press, New York.

Why it’s time to rein in CEO pay (globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com)
Once Upon a Time, Corporations Paid Taxes (truth-out.org)

April 29, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Executive pay | Leave a comment

Hundreds of Bangladeshi garment workers die

IndustriAll | 25.04.2013

The worst ever industrial accident in Bangladesh has killed more than 200 garment workers with fears of a final death toll reaching 1,000 as hundreds remain injured and trapped in the debris.

“Cut off my hand, save my life!” screams a woman trapped under the collapsed eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar, 30 kilometres outside Dhaka. The same request is shouted by trapped Aftab, while other screams in the rubble demand oxygen. 200,000 local people have assembled in Savar offering to donate blood to the rescue effort, as hospitals are gravely under supplied.

The mass industrial manslaughter occurred at 9am, 24 April. The collapsed building, illegally constructed, contained five garment factories with 2,500 workers. Those five factories are Ether Tex, New Wave Bottoms, New Wave Style, Phantom Apparels and Phantom-TAC. These factories are believed to have produced for several well-known western brands including Mango, Primark, C&A, KIK, Wal-Mart, Children’s Place, Cato Fashions, Benetton, Matalan and Bon Marché.

On 23 April, the day before the collapse, large structural cracks appeared in the supporting pillars of Rana Plaza, but local authorities were ignored by the building owner Sohel Rana and the garment factory owners when they gave the order to evacuate, while the three shops and bank on the building’s ground floor heeded the warning and evacuated. A Rana Plaza garment worker had to work three days unpaid for every one work day missed, so workers were reluctant to stay safe at home on 24 April.

Now over 2,000 workers are injured in hospital, many critically, 254 are dead and many more continue screaming from under the rubble. The IndustriALL Global Union affiliated textile and garment trade unions in Bangladesh are present and supporting the rescue efforts. Affiliates work jointly through the IndustriALL Bangladesh Council (IBC) which yesterday used a joint press conference to put forward joint demands and a programme of action, calling for justice and action from authorities and brands. The IBC will mobilize all affiliates in a mass demonstration on 26 April in front of the Dhaka Press Club.

20,000 furious garment workers from neighbouring factories this morning brought five major highways to a halt, and several local skirmishes saw angry protestors target garment factories that were not respecting the national day of mourning, forcing them to close and show respect to the dead. Protestors also targetted the building of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers & Exporters Association (BGMEA).

The systemic problems must be tackled immediately in Bangladesh’s garment industry and much responsibility must fall on the western clothing brands making enormous profits from items made in deadly conditions on poverty wages. While brands continue refusing to pay a sufficient price for safe production of their clothes, their calls for improved safety are not sincere.

Much needed improvements to the national labour law have been debated through Bangladesh’s legislative process, with the government cabinet approving revisions on 22 April. However this process has been lobbied by the global garment industry buyers who have demanded a scaling back of workers’ rights initially proposed in the reform.

IndustriALL Global Union believes that Bangladeshi garment workers deserve the right to work in safety, with full access to organize and bargain collectively in trade unions, and a substantial rise of the current US$38 monthly minimum wage.

IndustriALL Global Union General Secretary Jyrki Raina said:

This terrible tragedy highlights the urgency of putting a stop to the race to the bottom in supplying cheap means of production to international brands, a race in which hundreds of workers have lost their lives. Global clothing brands and retailers have a responsibility for their full production chains. Now it is time for them, suppliers and the Bangladeshi government to sit down with IndustriALL and its affiliates to agree on a safety program that will ensure this will never happen again.

April 27, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Bangladesh, Benetton, Dhaka, IndustriALL Global Union, Matalan, Sohel Rana, Wal-Mart | Leave a comment

The New Yorker Should Ignore Jon Lee Anderson and Issue a Correction on Venezuela

By Keane Bhatt | NACLA | April 24, 2013

As a result of many dozens—possibly hundreds—of messages from readers over the past few weeks that criticized The New Yorker’s inaccurate coverage of Venezuela, reporter Jon Lee Anderson issued a response in an online post on April 23. This marks the first time the magazine has publicly addressed its controversial and erroneous labeling of Venezuela as one of the world’s most “socially unequal” countries (I highlighted the error in mid-March). Although Anderson deprives his readers of the opportunity to evaluate his critics’ arguments (he offered no hyperlinks to either of my two articles on the subject, nor to posts by Corey Robin, Jim Naureckas, and others), he is clearly writing in response to those assertions.

To his credit, Anderson unequivocally admits two of his three errors: regarding Venezuela’s homicides, he acknowledges that he falsely wrote “that Venezuela had the highest homicide rate in Latin America. Actually, Honduras has the top rate.” Anderson proceeds to explain why Venezuela’s high homicide rate is nevertheless a grave problem—a position none of his critics, myself included, dispute.

The importance of this error rests instead in its revelation of a media culture under the influence of the consistent demonization of a country deemed an official U.S. enemy. This culture certainly played a role in allowing Anderson’s obvious falsehood to remain uncorrected for five months—five months after I first wrote about it, one month after I directly and publicly confronted Anderson about the error, and even then, days after I wrote another article urging readers to demand a correction.

While The New Yorker has dedicated literally no articles to U.S. ally Honduras since its current leader Porfirio Lobo came to power in repressive, sham elections held under a military dictatorship, Anderson was allowed to assert that Venezuela—a country with half the per capita homicides of Honduras—was Latin America’s leader in murders. One might reasonably suspect that a claim on The New Yorker’s website asserting that the United States had a higher homicide rate than Bolivia (Bolivia’s rate is actually over two times as high), would be retracted more expeditiously.

Anderson’s explanation for his second error—claiming that Chávez came to office through a coup d’etat rather than a free and fair election—further lays bare the corrupting effects of the generalized vilification of Chávez on basic journalistic standards of accuracy.

Anderson writes that despite his gaffe, he obviously knew Chávez “gained the Presidency by winning an election in 1998,” as he had “interviewed Chávez a number of times, travelled with him, and came to know him fairly well.” For Anderson to write such an egregious misstatement, then, and have it pass through what is likely the most rigorous fact-checking process in the industry, exposes a pervasive ideology under which he and his many editors and fact-checkers operate. As Jim Naureckas of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting wrote, “It’s like writing a long profile on Gerald Ford that refers to that time when he was elected president.”

Finally, Anderson offers a desperate attempt to justify his third factual error, stating:

A number of letters I’ve received dispute, out of context, my reference to “the same Venezuela as ever: one of the world’s most oil-rich but socially unequal countries”; several cite an economic statistic known as the Gini coefficient—a measure of income inequality.

Notice that Anderson never tells his readers what Venezuela’s Gini coefficient actually is. According to the United Nations, Venezuela’s Gini, at 0.397, makes it the least unequal country in Latin America and squarely in the middle range of the rest of the world. Only by sidestepping this brutal empirical obstacle can Anderson attempt to lay out his case. He carries on by reposting three paragraphs of his original essay, which in no way mitigate the falsity of his original claim, for “context.” Anderson finally concludes by offering a novel justification for his error:

In terms of some of the components of social inequality, notably income and education, Chávez had some real achievements. (Income is what’s captured by the Gini coefficient, although that statistic has its own limitations, some particular to Venezuela.) But in housing and violence, his record was woefully insufficient. Those social factors are intimately related, to each other and to the question of equality.

A quick recap is in order before unpacking Anderson’s argument. Readers may remember that he first responded to evidence on income inequality by proclaiming, on Twitter, his agnosticism toward empirical data. Next, a senior editor at the magazine justified Anderson’s contention by arguing that Venezuela was one of the most unequal amongst other oil-rich countries—a point I debunked. Now, Anderson has settled on a definition of social inequality that minimizes Venezuela’s high educational and income equality in favor of high homicide rates and unequal housing.

But simply saying that Chávez’s record “was woefully insufficient” on housing and violence does not naturally equate to Venezuela’s standing as a world leader in social inequality. Anderson must rely on comparative international statistics to justify his position, but fails to do so.

While Venezuela’s homicide rate is high by international standards and a significant social ill, this alone does not necessarily make the country more socially unequal than another country with a lower homicide rate. Are Venezuelan homicides more skewed toward low-income residents than those in Costa Rica? Or Haiti? Are Venezuelan murders more targeted at women or ethnic minorities than those in Mexico or Guatemala? And given that the high homicide rate directly affects far fewer than one in a thousand Venezuelans annually, how could this statistic possibly outweigh the effect of massive income-inequality and poverty reductions? If he is solely basing his argument on murder rates, Anderson has no credible explanation as to why Venezuela is one of the world’s most socially unequal countries.

Anderson also doesn’t offer statistics showing that housing is more unequal in Venezuela than anywhere else. That’s because it’s not.

Out of the 91 countries for which the United Nations has available data, Venezuela is 61st in terms of the percentage of its urban population living in slums. That is to say, two-thirds of the world’s countries with available data have larger percentages of their urban citizens living as slum dwellers. In the Western Hemisphere, this includes Guayana, Honduras, Peru, Anguilla, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, Bolivia, Jamaica, and Haiti.

click to enlarge

It is also worth mentioning that this data was taken from 2005, when the percentage of Venezuela’s urban population living in poverty and extreme poverty was at 37%. By 2010, according to the United Nations, it had been cut by a quarter, to 28% (p. 43). Furthermore, 2005 predates a massive governmental push in 2011 to build affordable housing. Earlier this year, Venezuela’s Housing Commission chair asserted that “in the years 2011 and 2012, the Bolivarian government together with the people reached the goal of building 350,000 homes.”

It appears, then, that Anderson has discovered a new definition of “social inequality” that has eluded economists and sociologists worldwide—one that systematically downplays Venezuela’s educational and income equality while emphasizing a high frequency of murders and a rate of slum-dwelling that is low by international standards.

While one can applaud Jon Lee Anderson for finally acknowledging the value of social indicators and statistical data, he and his magazine cannot be allowed to define “social inequality” any way they see fit. No social scientist analyzing the available data could argue, like Anderson, that Venezuela is one of the world’s most socially unequal countries. While semantics games may be expedient in avoiding a necessary correction, readers should let The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick (david_remnick@newyorker.com) know that a retraction of Anderson’s claim is long overdue.

Update (4/24): FAIR’s Jim Naureckas also offers sharp criticism of Jon Lee Anderson and his fact-checkers for a transparently inadequate attempt to justify his error regarding Venezuela’s social inequality. Read more, at “Jon Lee Anderson Explains: Because I Said So.”

UN: “State of Latin American and Caribbean Cities”

Keane Bhatt is an activist in Washington, D.C. He has worked in the United States and Latin America on a variety of campaigns related to community development and social justice. His analyses and opinions have appeared in a range of outlets, including NPR, The Nation, The St. Petersburg Times, and CNN En Español. He is the author of the NACLA blog “Manufacturing Contempt,” which critically analyzes the U.S. press and its portrayal of the hemisphere. Connect with his blog on Twitter: @KeaneBhatt

The New Yorker Corrects Two Errors on Venezuela, Refuses a Third (alethonews.wordpress.com)
On Venezuela, The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson Fails at Arithmetic (alethonews.wordpress.com)
50 Truths about Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (alethonews.wordpress.com)
‘Little Twerp … Get a Life’: The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson Thinks He’s Somebody on Twitter (gawker.com)

April 26, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Honduras, Hugo Chávez, Jon Lee Anderson, Latin America, New Yorker, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Another Lawsuit Threat Raises the Question: Why Don’t We Have a Federal Anti-SLAPP Law Yet?

By Adi Kamdar | EFF | April 25, 2013

Another innocent customer unfortunately has been sued for defamation, simply for leaving a negative review of a company on eBay. The Ohio-based company, Med Express, had sent a customer in South Carolina a package that required additional postage to be paid. She chose to express her dissatisfaction with the service on eBay’s seller feedback. Med Express apologized, offered reimbursement, and asked her to revise her review; when she wouldn’t, they decided to sue.

The customer’s truthful review is, by definition, not defamation—yet definitions and truth tend not to matter in this sort of lawsuit, known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP. Recipients of negative opinions sometimes try curbing free speech by threatening expensive and inconvenient defamation lawsuits, forcing targets into settling—and into silence. (Med Express also tried suing eBay, though the auction site is relieved from liability over its users actions in this case thanks to CDA 230.)

As Public Citizen’s Paul Alan Levy notes in his analysis of this case:

If Ohio had an anti-SLAPP statute, a lawsuit like this would never be filed, and if it was filed, it would be quickly dispatched because the certainty of an attorney fee award in response to a special motion to strike would give local lawyers an incentive to represent the customer on a strictly contingent fee basis.

In other words, cases like this reinforce the need for strong anti-SLAPP laws. These laws provide remedies that allow innocent free speakers to quickly shoot down these frivolous lawsuits without having to worry about legal fees.

Currently 28 states have anti-SLAPP laws, and that isn’t enough. Free speech should never be threatened by deep pockets. EFF is pushing Congress to support a strong federal anti-SLAPP bill, which would grant strong protections to targets of these absurd lawsuits across the nation, and you can push Congress too.

April 26, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Med Express, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Strategic lawsuit against public participation | Leave a comment

Rosneft sets sights on Iraq and Venezuela

RT | April 24, 2013

Rosneft has announced joint ventures with ExxonMobil in Iraq, and with a Venezuelan national oil company. According to CEO the expansion will double the company’s share of the Russian gas market.

Igor Sechin told reporters on Tuesday that the company is considering teaming up with veteran business partner ExxonMobil in Iraq.

“We will work with anyone who offers good terms, we’ll work with ExxonMobil too,” Reuters reported Sechin as saying.

An Iraqi oil ministry delegation will arrive in Moscow on May 10 to further discuss the deal.

Since Sechin became CEO, Russia’s largest producer of oil Rosneft, has upped its game against state-controlled rival Gazprom which currently controls 70% of Russian gas exports.

His first big step was acquiring the Anglo-Russian company TNK-BP from BP for $55 billion on March 21 2013, which will give it an Arctic niche.

Sechin aims to chip away at the Gazprom monopoly, and to double Rosneft’s domestic gas market by 2020, from 9% to 19-22%, plans made clear at an investor meeting in London on Tuesday.

“We like to work with gas very much,” Sechin said at the meeting. “The domestic market is also attractive, and it suits us well.”

Sechin predicts the new mega company may reach a market capitalization of $120 billion in the next two years, which would trump Gazprom’s estimated value of $73-90 billion.

According to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, by 2013 Russia will even outperform its pre-crisis levels of 2008.

Rosneft expects to produce more than 40 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas in 2013, over 60 by 2016 and 100 bcm in 2020, half of which will be produced in new projects.

The company is also on Gazprom’s heels in LNG development, as both companies are looking to expand their influence, particularly in exports to China.

Venezuelan vision

Just hours after the Iraq announcement, Venezuela’s government trumpeted a joint venture with Rosneft and PDVSA, the national oil company that dominates the Venezuelan market.

Rosneft will get a 40% share and the preliminary license is set for 25 years, and subject to extension.

The Venezuelan project will develop 342 kilometers in the Orinoco River basin, one of the richest oil reserves in the world, with an estimated 86.4 billion barrels, according to RIA Novosti.

Russian companies are involved in 5 oil projects in Venezuela, the world’s fifth largest oil exporter.

Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez has estimated the joint Russian-Venezuelan projects will be worth close to $50 billion by 2019.

April 25, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics | ExxonMobil, Gazprom, Iraq, Rosneft, Russia, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Moral monstrosity: America’s for-profit Gulag system

By Nile Bowie | RT | April 23, 2013

The private prison population in the US has rocketed 17-fold over the last two decades mostly on the shoulders of the deep-pocketed prison lobby, and the business continues to thrive.

Try confining yourself to a small room in your home, like a bathroom or a closet, and spend a few hours there. One only cringes to imagine the detrimental psychological effects that kind of solitude creates for individuals who are subjected to solitary confinement for years at a time, knowing only the walls of their cell and the shades of light that creep across them. The abhorrent state of affairs at the Guantanamo facility often makes international headlines and arguably overshadows the calamity that is the US domestic prison system – where over six million people are subject to some form of correctional supervision, an amount exceeding those who toiled in the Soviet gulags during Stalin’s reign. In the United States, some fifty thousand inmates pass their days in solitary confinement. While there is undoubtedly no shortage of violent criminals in America’s jails, millions are dolled out annually by privately owned prison lobbies directly to politicians in an effort to influence harsher ‘zero tolerance’ legislation and mandatory sentencing for many non-violent offenses.

While the US faces economic stagnation and unprecedented spending cuts to programs of social uplift, business is booming for the private prison industry. Like any other business, these institutions are run for the purpose of turning a profit. State and federal prisons are contracted out to private companies who are paid a fixed amount to house each inmate per day. Their profit depends on spending the minimum amount necessary on each inmate day-to-day, allowing private-hands to pocket the remaining money. For the corrections conglomerates of America, success depends on housing the maximum numbers of inmates for the longest potential time as inexpensively as possible. Consider that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other nation – for every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. The harsher sentences meted out to non-violent offenders in contrast to other industrialized nations speaks volumes of America’s enthusiastic embrace of a prison industrial complex.

The number of people imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible influence that private corrections corporations wield against the American legal system. The argument is that by subjecting correctional services to market pressures, efficiencies will be increased and prison facilities can be run at a lower cost due to market competition. What these privatizations produce in turn is a system that destroys families by incentivizing the mass long-term detention of non-violent criminals, a system that is increasingly difficult to deconstruct and reform due to millions paid out to state and federal policymakers. According to reports issued by advocacy group Public Campaign, the three major corrections firms –Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the GEO Group, and Cornell, have spent over $22 million lobbying Congress since 2001.

As a means of influencing policy-making at the federal level, at least $3.3 million have been given to political parties, candidates, and their political action committees, while more than $7.3 million has been given to state candidates and political parties since 2001, including $1.9 million in 2010, the highest amount in the past decade. Senators like Lindsay Graham and John McCain have received significant sums from the private prison corporations while Chuck Schumer, Chair of the Rules Committee on Immigration and Border Enforcement, received at least $64,000 from lobbyists. The prison lobby thrives off of laws that criminalize migrants and submit them to mandatory detention prior to being deported, sometimes up to 10 months or more; private firms have consistently pushed for the classification of immigration violations as felonies to justify throwing more and more immigrants behind bars. The number of illegal immigrants being incarcerated inside the United States has risen exponentially under Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency responsible for annually overseeing the imprisonment of 400,000 foreign nationals at the cost of over $1.9 billion on custody-related operations.

The private prison industry has become increasingly dependent on immigration-detention contracts, and the huge contributions of the prison lobby towards drafting Arizona’s controversial immigration law SB 1070 are all but unexpected. Arizona’s SB 1070 requires police to determine the immigration status of someone arrested or detained when there is “reasonable suspicion” that they’ve illegally entered the US, which many view as an invitation for rampant racial profiling against non-whites. While the administration of Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer is lined with former private prison lobbyists, its Department of Corrections budget has been raised by $10 million in 2012, while all other Arizona state agencies were subject to budget cuts during that fiscal year. The concept of privatizing prisons to reduce expenses comes at great cost to the inmates detained, who are subjected to living in increasingly squalid conditions in jail cells across America. In 2007, the Texas Youth Commission (TYC), a state agency that overseas juvenile corrections facilities, was sent to a West Texas juvenile prison run by GEO Group for the purpose of monitoring its quality standards.

The monitors sent by the TYC were subsequently fired for failing to report the sordid conditions they witnessed in the facility while they awarded the GEO Group with an overall compliance score of nearly 100% – it was later discovered that the TYC monitors were employed by the GEO Group. Independent auditors later visited the facility and discovered that inmates were forced to urinate or defecate in small containers due to a lack of toilets in some of the cells. The independent commission also noted in their list of reported findings that the facility racially segregated prisoners and denied inmates access to lawyers and medical treatment. The ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center have also highlighted several cases where GEO Group facility administrators turned a blind eye to brutal cases of rape and torture within their facilities, in addition to cases of its staff engaging in violence against inmates. According to the Justice Department data, nearly 210,000 prisoners are abused annually (prison personnel are found responsible half the time), while 4.5 percent of all inmates reported sexual assaults and rape.

It’s not possible to conceive how such institutionalized repression can be rolled back when the Obama administration shows only complicity with the status quo – a staggering $18 billion was spent by his administration on immigration enforcement, including detention, more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Under Obama’s watch, today’s private prison population is over 17 times larger than the figure two decades earlier. Accordingly, Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, has condemned the recently passed state laws in Colorado and Washington that legalize the possession of marijuana in small amounts. The Obama administration is bent on keeping in place the current federal legislation, where a first-time offender caught with marijuana can be thrown in prison for a year. It’s easy to see why common-sense decriminalization is stifled – an annual report released by the CCA in 2010 reiterates the importance of keeping in place harsh sentencing standards, “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

Such is the nature of a perverted brand of capitalism, and today’s model bares little difference to the first private prisons introduced following the abolition of slavery in the late 1800s, where expansive prison farms replaced slave plantations where predominately African-American inmates were made to pick cotton and construct railroads in states such as Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Today, African-Americans make up 40% of the prison population and are incarcerated seven times more often than whites, despite the fact that African-Americans make up only 12% of the population. Inmates are barred from voting in elections after their release and are denied educational and job opportunities. The disproportionate levels of black people in prisons is undeniably linked to law enforcement’s targeting of intercity black communities through anti-drug stipulations that command maximum sentencing for possession of minute amounts of rock cocaine, a substance that floods poor black neighborhoods.

Perhaps these social ills are byproducts of a system that places predatory profits before human dignity. Compounding the illogic is that state spending on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education over the past two decades. Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner, has spent over three decades on death row; he was convicted in 1981 for the murder of a white police officer, while forensic experts say critical evidence vindicating Jamal was withheld from the trial. In an interview with RT, Jamal relates his youth activism with the Black Panthers party against political imprisonment in contrast to the present day situation, “We could not perceive back then of what it would become… you can literally talk about millions of people incarcerated by the prisoner-industrial complex today: men, women and children. And that level of mass incarceration, really mass repression, has to have an immense impact in effect on the other communities, not just among families, but in a social and communal consciousness way, and in inculcation of fear among generations.” The fear and immortality the system perpetuates shows no sign of abating. Being one of the few growth industries the United States has left, one can only imagine how many people will be living in cages in the decades to come.

April 23, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Arizona, Chuck Schumer, Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group, Human rights, Jan Brewer, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Texas Youth Commission, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, United States | Leave a comment

Karuturi: a litany of problems

GRAIN | April 22, 2013

Karuturi Global Limited, a publicly registered holding company headquartered in Bangalore, India, may be under fire from the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) for tax evasion, but the complaints against it go further than that. The agribusiness firm, whose farm operations also straddle Ethiopia and India, has been dodging bullets about labour law violations, human rights abuses and environmental issues. Even the World Bank Group is no longer considering the company’s request for risk insurance for its investments in Ethiopia. This background note summarises the various problems that Karuturi has come to be known for among social justice movements around the world.

Tax evasion

Every year around US$ 1000 billion disappears without a trace from developing countries, ending up in tax havens or rich countries. The main part of this is driven by multinational companies seeking to evade tax where they operate.

The sum that leaves developing countries each year as unreported financial outflows, referred to as illicit capital flight, amounts to ten times the annual global aid flows, and twice the debt service developing countries pay each year. During 2000-2008 Africa was the region with the largest real growth of illicit capital flight, amounting to 21.9 % per year.

This money, if properly registered and taxed in the country of origin, could of course contribute to fulfilling human rights like the right to education and health care, and make a major difference in the fight to combat poverty. Due to just two forms of illicit capital flight used by corporations (‘mispricing’ and ‘false invoicing’), developing countries are losing three times the amount that is missing to achieve the UN millennium development goals (like universal education, stopping the spread of HIV, and halving extreme poverty) in tax revenues every year.

(For all facts on tax evasion above and more info on mispricing please see “Bringing the billions back: how Africa and Europe can end illicit capital flight” by Fröberg and Waris, 2011)

In 2012, the Kenya Revenue Authority developed a team of transfer pricing experts to audit accounts of companies in order to assess whether there was transfer mispricing and tax evasion taking place. Some transnational companies that export from Kenya are notoriously adept at it. However, the government has had difficulty tracing these firms’ operations due to lack of capacity and to date all audits and assessments, apart from one against Unilever, have been settled outside of public view.

On the 4th of April 2013 Karuturi filed a notice of appeal against the decision of the tax tribunal for taxes due to the Kenyan government and the Kenyan people. According to ICRA, an Indian credit rating research agency, in an October 2012 analysis commissioned by Karuturi as well as Karuturi’s 2012 annual report, Karuturi has been facing a number of potential threats to its financial viability, namely:

An INR 57.8 crore (= KES 975 million / USD 10.7 million / EUR 8 million) dispute from the Kenya Revenue Authority over transfer pricing
An INR 83.5 crore (= KES 1.4 billion / USD 15 million / EUR 11.5 million) claim on unpaid income taxes from the Indian authorities
A risk of default on a USD 54.7 million (= KES 4.8 billion / EUR 40.3 million) foreign currency convertible bond due for redemption on 19 Oct 2012 which was since restructured

The overall tax claims come to USD 26 million, which is about one-quarter of the multinational’s global turnover in fiscal year 2012 (USD 106 million) while the amount for Kenya amounts to almost 1 per cent of Kenya’s total annual tax collection.

Money of this magnitude could be used as additional income for development or to replace some current taxes that target the poor like value added tax or even to delay the enactment of additional taxes like the one on maize flour due to be activated in Kenya in 2015.

Land grabs

Since 1996, Karuturi’s core business has been floriculture, producing 580 million roses per year from 289 hectares of land the company leases in Kenya (154 hectares), Ethiopia (125 hectares) and India (10 hectares). In 2012, the group commanded no less than 9% of the cut rose market in Europe. Since the 2007/2008 global food crisis, Karuturi began expanding from floriculture into food production. Its plan is to set up farming operations on over one million hectares, mainly in eastern and southern Africa, to produce primarily maize, rice, sugarcane and palm oil for international markets.

The hub of this expansion is Ethiopia. In 2009, Karuturi acquired 10,700 ha of land in Bako for maize, rice and vegetable production. In 2010, it got an additional 300,000 hectares for expansion in Gambela. The company aims to farm a total of 750,000 ha in Ethiopia. This land is leased from the government at bargain prices, but local communities consider it their own.

As a result, many conflicts have emerged around compensation, displacement and the relocation of villagers and herders who suddenly found themselves fenced off of their lands by the Indian company.

In 2011, Karuturi announced it was expanding further by pursuing a US$500 million investment for 370,000 ha in Tanzania, including an initial 1,000 ha in the country’s fertile Rufiji Basin. That same year, the company announced that it was in discussions with government officials in the Republic of Congo for a farm project in a special economic zone in Oyo-Ollombo, 400 km north of Brazzaville. In addition, it has been planning fruit and vegetable farms in Sudan, Mozambique and Ghana, and, says CEO Ramakrishna Karuturi, “in Senegal, we have made an exploratory probe and in Sierra Leone we have made initial contacts.” All of these countries are rife with land grabs right now.

Labour issues & disputes

According to a 2012 report published by the London Business School, 5% of Karuturi’s workforce in Ethiopia is composed of foreigners. Karuturi has been bringing in staff and consultants from abroad, including India, to run management, irrigation & drainage operations, and logistics because they said they could not find the experience locally. Same for manual labourers. Karuturi hires Ethiopians as unskilled labour but for skilled labour it says it faces problems. At the end of 2011, Karuturi got into a dispute with the Ethiopian government because they brought in several hundred Indian farmers to work on their farms in Gambela, which the Ethiopian authorities said contravened Ethiopian law and for which they would not give the permits. Karuturi reportedly also expects to rely on Indian farmers to handle its work on oil palm.

According to media and labour organisation organisation reports, workers on Karuturi farms in both Kenya and Ethiopia have been complaining about, and initiating labour actions against, various conditions, especially related to wages and safety.

In November 2012, Karuturi reportedly began laying off about 900 of its 3,500 seasonal workers in Naivasha, Kenya, due to financial problems. The number was later reduced to 600. In December 2012, 1,000 Karuturi workers went on strike to demand action from management on unpaid salaries and poor working conditions.

Earlier, in June 2010, Workers Rights Watch, a Kenyan association, carried out focus group discussions with Karuturi flower farm workers in Naivasha and registered a mixed scorecard of positive and negative opinions about the company.

Regarding Karuturi’s Ethiopian farms, various media and research reports have exposed complaints of poor wages. For example, a solid report commissioned by the International Land Coalition shows that Karuturi pays Ethiopian farm labourers at its Bako farm ETB 10 per day (US$ 0.50) which compares with about ETB 20 per day (US$ 1.00) for labourers on commercial sesame farms in the country. Night guards for the company are said to be paid ETB 300 per month (US$ 15) if they own a gun and ETB 200 (US$ 10) per month if they do not.

Human rights violations

According to a powerful 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, the Ethiopian government is forcibly relocating thousands of indigenous people in western Gambela to new villages lacking adequate food, farmland, healthcare, and educational facilities to make way for large scale agricultural projects of foreign investors, including Karuturi. The report said, based on interviews with community representatives, that crops of local Anuak communities were cleared without consent for the Karuturi operations and that residents of Ilea, a village of over 1,000 people within Karuturi’s lease area, were told by the Ethiopian government that they would be moved in 2012 as part of its “villagisation programme”. In response, CEO Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi denied any connection between his company’s activities and the government’s villagisation programme. In conversation with the Wall Street Journal’s unit in India, he described the Human Rights Watch report as “hogwash” and “a completely jaundiced western vision”, and even denied that the villagisation programme exists.

Loss of livelihoods

Karuturi’s 10,700 ha Bechera Agricultural Development Project in the Bako Plains of Ethiopia has deprived several local communities of their communal grazing areas and access to water for their livestock, thus severely affecting their livelihoods. This comes from a study commissioned by the International Land Coalition, based on detailed discussions with local communities, local authorities and Karuturi employees. The study documents how the lands were provided to Karuturi without the consent of the local communities and without compensation. It reveals that Karuturi is refusing to implement even the most minimal measures recommended by local authorities to address some of the impacts from its operations. For example building a livestock corridor through its fields so that locals could access water sources for their animals, or allowing them to graze their animals on crop residues.

Environmental & health concerns

Karuturi operates one of the largest flower farms in the Lake Naivasha Basin in Kenya, the country’s second largest freshwater lake. The flower farms are blamed for causing a drop in the lake’s water level, for polluting the lake with pesticides and chemical fertiliser runoff and for affecting the lake’s biodiversity. Workers at Karuturi’s flower farms in Naivasha who spoke with Muungano wa Wanavijiji, a local partner organisations of Forum Syd, in February 2013 said that the dilapidated condition of the Karuturi operations and poor protective clothing puts them at risk to exposure from chemicals. They say the company does not seem to care about their concerns.

For its farm in Gambela, Ethiopia, Karuturi has developed an irrigation system with 50km of canals, 50km of drainage, and 40km of dykes, to pump a reported 22,000 litres of water per second from the Baro River, a crucial source of water for people dependent on the White Nile. Karuturi’s smaller 10,700 ha farm in Bako also generates significant issues related to access to water and water quality for the local communities. Although environmental impact assessments are usually required for irrigation projects in Ethiopia, Karuturi reportedly did not undertake any such assessment prior to constructing its farming complex in Bako.

Investor confidence

Karuturi and its shareholders have been waiting since at least May 2011 for the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) to approve the company’s long pending bid for political risk insurance for its Ethiopian operations. According to Sai Karuturi, as of 2012 the application had still not been approved due to Karuturi’s plans to produce palm oil — a sensitive issue for which the Bank would require the Ethiopian government to put in place environmental protocols. Karuturi explained that he was therefore advised by MIGA to omit palm oil from the application for now and so he did. If MIGA protection fails to materialise, the company told investors that its fallback option would be to seek support from India’s Export Credit Guarantee Agency. On 29 January 2013, MIGA informed GRAIN, flatly, that Karuturi’s application “is no longer under consideration”.

In March 2013, Bloomberg reported that Karuturi was seeking “hundreds of millions” of fresh investment dollars from an unnamed sovereign wealth fund after yet another unnamed development bank refused it a loan.

In April 2013, the Indian paper Business Today reported that Karuturi was thinking of taking the company private.

The Green Green Gold of Ethiopia (alethonews.wordpress.com)

April 23, 2013 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Ethiopia, India, Karuturi, Kenya, Kenya Revenue Authority | Leave a comment

Flynt Leverett: U.S. Is Engaged in A Dirty War against Iran

Iran Review | April 21, 2013

Interview with Flynt Leverett by Kourosh Ziabari

If you regularly follow the headlines on the American and European radio stations, TV channels or newspapers, you come to believe that Iran’s nuclear program is the world’s most important, unsolvable and complicated problem. It’s been more than a decade that they have been incessantly talking of an Iranian threat that has endangered world peace and security. At the same time, they turn a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the fact that Israel is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The claim that Iran is trying to produce atomic weapons has laid the groundwork for the U.S. and its allies to impose harsh economic sanctions on Iran and damage Iran’s economy and trouble the daily lives of the ordinary Iranian people.

To study the different aspects of the sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and the European Union, Iran Review has conducted a series of interviews with world-renowned political scientists, lawyers, journalists and authors and asked them some questions on the humanitarian and legal impacts of the sanctions, their compatibility with international law and the human right standards, etc.

Today’s interviewee is Prof. Flynt Leverett, a prominent Iran expert. Leverett is a professor of international affairs and law at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Prof. Leverett has written on Iran’s nuclear program extensively and is regularly interviewed by international media. What follows is the text of the interview.

Q: The United States claims that by imposing sanctions on Iran, it intends to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but the sanctions have recently targeted the ordinary citizens and consumer goods and medicine. Why have the sanctions swiftly diverted from the issue of disarmament and are directed toward the daily life of the ordinary Iranian citizens?

A: This is the inevitable logic of sanctions. American and other Western officials declare that the targets of their sanctions policies are governments, not people. In reality, though, the point of sanctions is to make ordinary people in targeted countries miserable.

In the Western logic of sanctions, if enough ordinary people are made sufficiently miserable, then they will rise up and either force their governments to change policies that Washington views negatively or else force these governments from power. There is no other strategic rationale for sanctions.

Q: While the process of passing on Iran’s nuclear dossier to the Security Council was illegal, do the resolutions issued on this basis have a legal warranty?

A: A number of prominent international legal scholars have advanced a powerful argument, with which I agree, that the Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to stop enriching uranium are legally invalid. Article 25 of the UN Charter establishes a strong presumption that UN member states should comply with Security Council resolutions. But the same article also limits member states’ obligation in this regard to Security Council decisions “in accordance with the present charter.” Likewise, Article 24 of the Charter holds that, in discharging its duties, “the Security Council shall act in accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” (Those purposes and principles are presented in Articles 1 and 2 of the Charter.)

The Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment demand, in effect, that the Islamic Republic surrender what the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognizes as signatories’ “inalienable right” to the peaceful use of nuclear technologies—including uranium enrichment. By adopting these resolutions, the Council was acting neither “in accordance with the [UN] Charter” nor “in accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” And that renders these resolutions invalid.

Q: Don’t you think that focusing the sanctions on basic staples and goods, especially medicines, is tantamount to a continued and systematic violation of the human rights?

A: The U.S. government claims that the sanctions are not focused on items like food and medicine—that there is an explicit exemption for food and medicine in the sanctions policy. But, as the question implies, this is, to say the least, hypocritical. Formally, there is an exemption in the sanctions for food and medicine. But, in practice, as long as banking sanctions deter Western and many other international banks from processing transactions with Iranian counter-parties—even for “permitted” items like medicines—the effect is to bar the export of medicines to Iran, with predictably tragic consequences.

This is both inhumane and illegal, on multiple levels. Besides the horrible impact of U.S.-instigated sanctions on ordinary Iranians, U.S. sanctions policy is a gross violation of international economic law. Most of the sanctions that are having such terrible effects on ordinary Iranians are not unilateral U.S. sanctions—which the Islamic Republic has been dealing with for decades—or multilateral sanctions authorized by the UN Security Council. Most of the sanctions that are creating real difficulties and hardships for Iranians are so-called “secondary” sanctions, whereby Washington threatens third-country entities doing perfectly lawful business with the Islamic Republic with punishment in the United States. In recent years, Congress has been regularly expanding and intensifying Iran-related secondary sanctions through laws that President Obama immediately signs and obediently implements.

Secondary sanctions clearly violate American commitments under the World Trade Organization (WTO), which allows members to cut trade with states they deem national security threats but not to sanction other members over lawful business conducted with third countries. If challenged on the issue in the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism, Washington would surely lose. That’s why U.S. administrations have been reluctant to impose secondary sanctions on non-U.S. entities transacting with Iran, and have done so pretty rarely. What Washington relies on is that, in many cases, the legal and reputational risks posed by the threat of U.S. secondary sanctions reduce the willingness of companies and banks in many countries to transact with Iran, with negative consequences for Iran’s economy and for many ordinary Iranians. It is the approach of a bully who does not believe he is constrained by the same laws that apply to others.

Q: It’s said that the sanctions that target ordinary civilians are a kind of collective punishment, and collective punishment is a crime according to the Nuremberg Tribunals. The Western states claim that they care for human rights, but they are behaving in such a hypocritical manner and punish the Iranian citizens for a crime they have not committed. What’s your viewpoint on that?

A: As a matter of policy, the United States is not and never has been interested in human rights in any sort of universal or objective way. The United States is only interested in the selective, instrumental exploitation of human rights concerns to undermine governments it does not like. As Washington has co-opted, and corrupted, the human rights agenda in this way, it has also undermined its credibility to address human rights in Iran or anywhere else. Moreover, as the question implies, America’s professed concern for human rights in Iran is especially hypocritical so long as the United States continues what I would call its “dirty war” against the Islamic Republic—including economic warfare targeting civilians (through sanctions), cyber-attacks, and support for groups doing things inside Iran that, in other places, Washington condemns as “terrorism.”

Q: It seems that the sanctions are not simply aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program but the main objective of the sanctions is seemingly to create social unrest in Iran which can finally lead to a regime change. So, what’s the message which the sanctions impart? Diplomacy or conspiracy?

A: Since the Iranian revolution, no American administration—not even that of Barack Hussein Obama—has been prepared to accept the Islamic Republic as a legitimate and enduring political entity, representing legitimate national interests. Every administration has seen the Islamic Republic as fragile and vulnerable to internal subversion, and has sought in various ways to encourage such subversion. Of course, it has not worked, but this outlook continues to dominate mainstream foreign policy discussions in the United States about Iran.

U.S. sanctions policy toward Iran needs to be seen in this context. The proposition that sanctions are somehow intended to promote a diplomatic “solution” is, to put it bluntly, dishonest. Consider the way that the sanctions have been drawn up. Even just a few years ago, most of them were imposed by executive orders, which are more or less at the discretion of the White House. Now, though, most of the sanctions have been written into law, which greatly reduces the President’s ability to pull back on them as part of a negotiating process, or to lift them even if Iran acceded to all U.S. demands on the nuclear issue.

Regarding this point, look at the language in current U.S. law on sanctions. Even if the Islamic Republic allowed the U.S. government to come in, dismantle every centrifuge in Iran, and take them back to the United States—like Qadhafi did in Libya—there would still be no legal basis for the President to lift sanctions. The law says that, in order for sanctions to be lifted, the President would also have to certify to Congress that Iran had stopped all dealings with resistance movements like Hizbullah and Hamas, which the United States persists in calling terrorist organizations, and that the Islamic Republic had effectively turned itself into a secular liberal “Republic of Iran” to meet U.S. standards on “human rights.”

That’s not a serious approach to diplomacy. The argument that sanctions are somehow meant to encourage a diplomatic outcome is detached from reality.

Q: Along with the expansion of sanctions, the resistance of the Iranian nation has increased, as well. Why haven’t the sanctions had the effects the West desires, whether in the political or social level?

A: There is no case in history in which sanctions have prompted a target population to rise up, overthrow their government, and replace it with a government prepared to adopt policies sought by the sanctioning power. That has literally never happened. Even in Iraq, where for twelve years the United States led the way in imposing sanctions so severe they killed more than a million Iraqis (half of them children), the population did not rise up to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That took a massive U.S. invasion—and even then, the United States did not get a “pro-American” government in Baghdad.

Beyond this history, the Islamic Republic, as I have come to understand it, is the product of a revolution that had, as one of its highest priorities, the restoration of Iran’s effective sovereignty and independence after a century and a half of domination by Western powers.

Q: The experts say that something around 15-20% of the current price of the oil is a result of the EU’s oil embargo against Iran. How much has the oil embargo influenced the EU’s economy in the current critical juncture?

A: In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when some European elites had serious ambitions for the European Union to emerge as an independent force in international affairs, capable of balancing the United States, European nations pursued an at least somewhat independent policy toward Iran. However, with the collapse of the EU’s constitutional project in the mid 2000s, European elites calculated that the next-best way for Europe to have influence in the Middle East is by helping the United States pursue its hegemonic ambitions in the region.

To understand what I am talking about, just look at the extraordinary shift in the Middle East policies of France and Germany. Both of those countries were absolutely right in anticipating what a strategic and moral disaster America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq would be, and in refusing to go along with the United States in this ill-conceived campaign. But within just a few years of having been right on Iraq—and having been proved right by events on the ground there—the French and German governments aligned themselves almost completely with Washington’s Middle East policies.

As a result of this shift, Europe has, over the last few years, almost completely subordinated its Iran policy to that of the United States—even though, as the question implies, this imposes additional costs on European economies at a time when those economies are already under significant strain. A few EU countries, like Sweden, continue trying, on the margins, to keep some element of rationality in European discussions on Iran, but they are fighting a losing battle.

Q: Currently a number of countries implement the sanctions for different reasons, but several others don’t, so the sanctions have practically turned into an economic opportunity for those countries which haven’t put into effect the sanctions because those countries that adopt the sanctions have deprived themselves of robust and profitable trade with Iran. Are the sanctions capable of curtailing or stopping Iran’s foreign trade?

A: I agree with the premise of the question. Those countries which comply with illegal U.S. secondary sanctions and limit their trade with the Islamic Republic are ultimately hurting themselves more than they may hurt Iran. Sanctions may distort Iran’s foreign trade to some degree, but they cannot stop it.

Q: Complementing the sanctions with valid threats of military strike and intelligence operations are among the most important advice given by Israel to Europe and the United States. How successful have these countries been in sabotaging Iran’s security?

A: They have not been successful at all. I hope that my country will not engage in overt military aggression against the Islamic Republic. If, however, the United States is so foolish as to launch another war in the Middle East, to disarm yet another Middle Eastern state of weapons of mass destruction it does not have, I believe that the blowback to U.S. interests in the region will be disastrous for America’s strategic position. The United States will be the big loser in such a war.

Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Assessing the Iran Sanctions (consortiumnews.com)
South Africa slams US, EU over Iran oil sanctions (alethonews.wordpress.com)
UN Sanctions on Iran: The Dance of Mutual Deniability (alethonews.wordpress.com)

April 23, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Flynt Leverett, Iran, Sanctions against Iran, United States, World Trade Organization | Leave a comment

Big Banks Back to Old Tricks Bundling Loans and Mortgages for Investments

By Matt Bewig | AllGov | April 22, 2013

Proving that those who are not punished for their misdeeds are allowed to repeat them, the Wall Street banks that created and sold risky combinations of mortgages and loans during the pre-2008 boom—and crashed the world economy with them—are doing exactly the same thing again. Once again, financial products with obscure, complex-sounding names like “collateralized debt obligations” and “securitized mortgage instruments,” are being sold by Wall Street to people on Main Street.

The ominous return from the dead of these investments, also called structured financial products, has largely evaded new regulations meant to avert another crisis, prompting concern from financial industry observers. Manus Clancy, managing director at commercial real estate research firm Trepp, worries that “All of this seems like a fairly quick round trip. You are seeing a fair number of sins being forgiven.”

And the sinners who committed those sins are acting like they’ve been forgiven as well. “The players in the business are generally the same as they were before,” noted Tad Philipp, a commercial real estate analyst at Moody’s. “Because it’s the old players, they know how to push the boundaries.”

Wall Street is certainly pushing boundaries on securitized commercial mortgage-backed securities, in which a pool of commercial mortgages are mixed together into bonds, ranked by varying levels of risk. So far in 2013, banks have issued $33.5 billion in such bonds, slightly more than they did in early 2005. Before the 2008 crash, 57% of the outstanding money in such securities was in high-risk interest-only loans, a number that fell hard and fast, to just 11% two years ago. Today, that number has more than tripled to 34%.

Even faster to revive have been collateralized loan obligations, which are pools of loans given to companies with junk ratings. In the first quarter of 2013, banks issued about $26 billion of them—more than in the same period of the last boom year of 2007. Demand has been so strong that banks have started to loosen underwriting standards on the underlying loans and bonds, prompting the Federal Reserve to warn last month that “prudent underwriting practices have deteriorated.”

Those willing to learn from history will recall that securitization—the bundling of many loans into one investment—proved dangerous during the real estate bubble because when the bubble burst, investors learned that the complexity of the instruments had obscured their real risks, leading to unexpected losses by those investors, chaos in the financial system and the Great Recession. They will also recall that those who created these “shoddy deals” and then defrauded their investors escaped wealthy but largely unpunished, and are still working on Wall Street today.

To Learn More:

Wall St. Redux: Arcane Names Hiding Big Risk (by Nathaniel Popper, New York Times)

SEC Tricks Judge to Help Citigroup (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)

Why No Prison for Banksters Who Caused Financial Crisis…Yet? (by David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

April 22, 2013 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | Citigroup, Commercial mortgage-backed security, Federal Reserve System, Financial services, Wall Street | Leave a comment

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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen

By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026

For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.

Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.

“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.

I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.

Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”

And he does. … continue

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