The European Union: Where Corporate Fantasies Come True
By David Cronin | New Left Project | July 18, 2013
Edward Snowden has exposed more than a massive spying operation. The whistleblower has – perhaps unintentionally – drawn attention to just how obsequious Europe’s political leaders are towards the US.
Angela Merkel and François Hollande are reportedly furious over revelations that America has been reading their diplomats’ emails (though their fury can’t be that intense given that a rumour that Snowden was on a flight to Bolivia was sufficient for France to block the plane from its airspace). There were hints too that a planned trans-Atlantic trade agreement could be in jeopardy as a result of the controversy. Yet the talks have opened this month as planned. With many of the world’s most powerful corporations adamant that the talks take place, they were unlikely to be derailed by a spat over snooping.
In May this year, a ‘business alliance’ to support the planned trade deal was established. Many of the firms belonging to this coalition – BP, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, British American Tobacco, Nestlé – have been involved in similar initiatives since the 1990s. Using a highly dubious methodology, the alliance estimates that a transatlantic trade and investment partnership (known by the ugly acronym TTIP) would bring benefits of €119 billion to the EU and €95 billion to the US per year. What they don’t spell out is that the price of any such benefits could be the destruction of democracy.
A leaked document detailing what EU officials wish to achieve in the negotiations says that an eventual agreement should include ‘state-of-the-art’ provisions on ‘dispute settlement’. Under this plan, special tribunals would be set up to allow corporations to sue governments over laws that hamper them from maximising their profits.
When clauses like those being envisaged have been inserted into previous investment treaties, corporations have invoked them in order to challenge health and environmental laws that were not to their liking. Australian rules that all cigarettes be sold in unattractive packaging and Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear power are among the measures that corporations have tried to torpedo in the name of ‘investor protection’.
What will the masters of the global economy take on next: minimum wage levels; restrictions on hazardous chemicals; food quality standards? All of these advances are the results of struggle by workers and campaigners. All of them could be at risk if European and American negotiators go ahead with their plan to set up a special court system that corporations alone may use.
Peter Mandelson must shoulder some of the blame for the extremist agenda now being pursued. In 2006, when he was EU trade commissioner, Mandelson published an official blueprint called Global Europe. It committed the Brussels bureaucracy to work in tandem with corporations to remove any obstacles they encountered throughout the world.
The blueprint closely resembled recommendations made by pressure groups like the European Services Forum (ESF). Bringing together Microsoft, BT, Veolia and – at the time – Goldman Sachs, the ESF has its origins in the 1999 conference of the World Trade Organisation, best remembered for the ‘Battle of Seattle’ – the large-scale protests against it.
In The Brussels Business, an excellent film about corporate lobbying, the ESF’s Pascal Kerneis waxes emotional as he recalls how some ‘high-VIPs’ were unable to attend important meetings in Seattle because of the demonstrations outside their hotel. Kerneis, however, did not allow this display of people power to weaken his determination to refashion the international economy in the way that his elitist pals wanted.
In his dealings with Mandelson’s team of advisers, Kerneis argued that if the EU is unable to have the wishes of corporations fulfilled at the WTO level, it should concentrate on twisting the arms of individual governments. The stilted phrasing of some ESF briefing papers though could not conceal that they were designed to turn some of the wildest capitalist fantasies into reality. One advocated that the EU should strive to remove all capital requirements for banks and caps on foreign ownership of companies in its key trading partners, as well as any pesky rules preventing corporations from sending profits abroad (to, say, a tax haven).
As they were drafted before the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, these papers have a carefree, almost naive feel to them. And yet the European Commission is still striving to attain the core goals identified in such documents. The Commission’s latest annual report on ‘trade and investment barriers’ says that all ‘relevant instruments and policies’ will be marshalled worldwide ‘to make sure the playing field is levelled’. On the surface, that may sound innocuous. In practice though, it means that corporations are accorded more rights than human beings.
If an Indian arrived in Heathrow Airport tomorrow and demanded to automatically have the same entitlements as a British citizen, he or she would probably be arrested. Yet the EU executive believes that big Western companies active in India should enjoy ‘national treatment’ – that is they should be treated exactly like Indian firms. Britain’s industrialisation was achieved at least partly because the textiles sector was shielded from foreign competition. Yet blinkered by neoliberal ideology, Brussels officials want to prevent poorer countries from applying the same tactics, which they now describe as ‘protectionist’ (a dirty word, according to these ideologues).
The willingness to allow corporate lobbyists to set the rules is not confined to trade policy. Financial regulation too has been heavily influenced by the world’s most powerful banks.
Charlie McCreevy, the EU’s single market commissioner from 2004 to 2010, displayed a deep aversion to oversight during his time in office. His hands-off approach can be attributed to the fact that the ‘experts’ he appointed to guide him held exorbitantly-paid posts at the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. A consultative group on hedge funds that the Irishman assembled was comprised entirely of insiders from the financial services industry.
When Michel Barnier was tasked with taking over McCreevy’s portfolio, Nicolas Sarkozy (remember him?) contended that giving this post to a Frenchman was a defeat for the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. Like many of Sarkozy’s proclamations, it was fanciful. Barnier has kept up the dishonourable tradition of relying primarily on advice from the private sector. An ‘expert group’ on banking reform set up at his behest last year had a token representative from the European Consumers’ Organisation (known by the French acronym BEUC) and a couple of academics. Most of its eleven members, however, were sitting or former bankers – or, worse still, weapons salesmen.
Financial service whizzkids are held in awe by EU policy-makers. This became much apparent during 2009. Boris Johnson hopped on the Eurostar to Brussels that year to champion the City of London and predictably grabbed the headlines. Away from the glare of publicity, however, an army of hedge fund managers succeeded in eviscerating a law designed to restrain their gambling. When the law went before the European Parliament, the hedge fund industry prepared a voluminous set of amendments. Sharon Bowles, a Liberal Democrat MEP who chairs the Parliament’s economics committee, admitted to me that she signed amendments drafted by the financial industry and then tabled them in her own name. This obviously begs the question of whether she is really working on behalf of her constituents or on behalf of banks.
The corporate lobby has proven adept at concocting myths. Whereas it was patently obvious that the economic crisis was caused by the reckless behaviour of banks, powerful groupings have spread the falsehood that extravagance in public spending was really to blame. The European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT) – which includes the chief executives or chairmen of Shell, Volvo, Nestlé, Vodafone and Heineken – has been leading efforts to demolish the welfare state. Among its core demands are that healthcare should be privatised so that Europe more closely resembles the US. The ERT enjoys the kind of access to top-level politicians that defenders of the underprivileged are denied. Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s unelected ‘president’, is known to have dined with ERT delegations in private clubs, without any details of these encounters being posted on his website. And in March this year, Merkel and Hollande, along with the European Commission’s head José Manuel Barroso, met ERT representatives in Berlin. The ERT is pushing the Union’s governments to agree on a ‘competitiveness pact’ over the next twelve months. Under this pact, each EU country would become obliged to drive down its wage levels and dilute its labour laws.
‘Competitiveness’ is a byword for crony capitalism. It should not be confused with competition: among the ERT’s demands are that the EU becomes less fussy about controlling mergers between large companies. Far from encouraging diversity, it wants to have wealth concentrated in increasingly fewer hands.
Repeated so often, the idea of ‘competitiveness’ has assumed an almost religious significance among the EU elite. Opposing it is regarded as heretical.
Despite Thatcher’s tetchy relationship with the EU institutions, the main tenets of Thatcherism have gone mainstream in Brussels. Attempts made in earlier decades to give the Union a social dimension – by, for example, championing gender equality – always amounted to fig-leafs for a project that was essentially right-wing and anti-democratic. In more recent years, these fig-leafs have become increasingly slender.
Barroso is among a new generation of leaders who are demonstrably in thrall to the ‘Iron Lady’. While he habitually describes the EU as a ‘social market’ economy, it is evident from his favoured policies that his real agenda is to bolster corporate power. One key objective of the European Commission is to promote ‘public-private partnerships’. This idea of handing over services financed by taxpayers to unaccountable companies can be traced back to Thatcher and her successor, John Major.
With few exceptions, the Union is cuddling up to big business and screwing the rest of us. Building a mass movement to confront corporate power has never been more urgent.
‘French PRISM’ revealed: All communications tracked, metadata collected
RT | July 4, 2013
The French external intelligence agency spies on French citizen’s phone calls, emails and social media activity and web use, the Le Monde newspaper has reported.
France’s external intelligence agency the DGSE, intercepts signals from computers and telephones in France and between France and other countries in order to get a picture of who is talking to whom, although, apparently, they do not randomly spy on the content of phone calls, the daily revealed on Thursday.
Emails, text messages, telephone records, access to Facebook and Twitter are stored for years. “All of our communications are spied on,” read the article quoting unnamed sources in the intelligence services as well as remarks made publicly by intelligence officials.
The DGSE allegedly stores the metadata from private communications in a basement under its Paris headquarters. All of France’s seven other intelligence services have access to the data and can tap into it freely as a means to spot people’s suspicious communications. Individuals can then be targeted by more intrusive techniques such as phone-tapping, it was reported.
Le Monde pointed out the activities were illegal, but the French national security commission whose job it is to authorize targeted spying, and the parliamentary intelligence committee, challenged the papers report. It said that it works within the law and that the only body in France that collected communication information was a government agency controlled by the Prime Minister’s office to monitor for security breaches.
The report comes after revelations that America’s NSA regularly spies on its own people as well as on European citizens and embassies.
The allegations were leaked by Edward Snowden and published in the German magazine Der Spiegel, and have sparked a furious response from European governments just as a major US-EU trade talks are about to get underway.
The Guardian newspaper reported last month that Britain has a similar spying program and shares vast quantities of information with the NSA through its Prism program.
Related articles
Bolivia’s Morales Dissed and Pissed as France, Portugal, and Austria Violate Diplomatic Immunity
By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening | July 3, 2013
Those of us who have been saying that the US has become a weak, or at least more ordinary power among many in the world because of its military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of its economic decline, will have to recalibrate our analysis after watching the pathetic behavior of the leaders of Russia, Germany and France under pressure from the Obama administration not to allow Edward Snowden to gain asylum in those countries or even to escape his purgatory in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
Last night, in an astonishing display of fawning obedience to the demands of US leaders, France and Germany first announced that they would not grant asylum to Snowden, despite broad popular support by French and German people for such an offer of aid to the embattled whistleblower. Then, France and Portugal abruptly refused to allow a Bolivian aircraft carrying the country’s president, Evo Morales, from a state visit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, to land for refueling in their countries, saying that they were concerned he might be flying Snowden to asylum in Bolivia.
Although Spain said eventually it would allow the Morales plane to refuel in the Canary Islands, it did not have enough fuel to get there and had to be diverted to Vienna, where, astonishingly, it was then searched like a drug-smuggling flight over Bolivian protests. Snowden was not aboard. A furious Morales immediately blamed the US Department of State for the whole incident — a charge that no one has disputed, though of course the US is refusing to comment.
Aircraft carrying national leaders have absolute diplomatic immunity under international law and moreover, Bolivia would have the absolute right to grant Snowden amnesty, and to bring him to its territory, whether or not he had a valid passport. As the leader of a sovereign nation, Morales has every right to carry anyone he wants on his plane with him back to his country.
Bolivian President Evo Morales, forced under US pressure to land in Vienna to have his returning plane searched for Snowden, calls the blocking of his flight from Russia to Bolivia a “kidnapping,” and “act of aggression” and an “offense against all the whole Latin region.”
That France, Portugal and Austria would so violate such basic diplomatic rules suggests that the US (which of course has long demonstrated that it views diplomatic rules and international law as applying only to others, but not itself) has some powerful leverage to exert behind the scenes. The more so because this whole incident makes leaders like French President Francois Hollande, who only the day before had suggested his country might consider Snowden’s asylum appeal, look foolish, and because this aggressive and hostile action taken against the leader of a sovereign nation makes France, as well as Portugal and Italy, look pathetic and ridiculous at a time that public sentiment across Europe is solidly in support of Snowden. (An activist friend in Germany reports that sentiment there in support of Snowden and even of granting him asylum is “probably at about 80%,” and that is probably also true in France.)
This latest incident, which has incredibly not been protested either by Russia’s Putin, from whose country the disrupted flight originated, and who was Morales’ official host, also exposes Putin and Russia as being under America’s thumb. Who could have imagined Putin allowing a meeting of leaders in his own country to be so shamed by US intervention involving diversion and impoundment of a foreign leader’s return flight home without a loud protest and even some counter action. At a minimum the US ambassador should have been called in to be tongue-lashed by the Russian president. Yet even Russian state television station RT-TV, in its report on the halting of Morales’ plane and the unprecedented search of a state leader’s plane in Austria, carried no comment from Putin or the Russian government on the insult and outrage.
Has the US, with its incomprehensibly massive spy network, just demonstrated that it now has a power greater than its nuclear arsenal: a dossier perhaps on almost every leader in the world with which it is able to blackmail even the likes of Hollande, Merkel and Putin? It is hard to come up with another explanation for the way this incident played out.
We will have to see now whether Morales, a popular leader from an impoverished indigenous background who is clearly no coward and who is probably too clean to be blackmailed, will make good on his assertion made in Moscow that Snowden would be welcome in Bolivia. Russia could recover a modicum of its self-respect by flying him there on a Russian plane to avoid similar US-orchestrated interference. Venezuela’s new president, Nicolás Maduro, who has also spoken favorably of granting asylum status to the National Security Agency whistleblower, should also step up at this point. Since he is still in Russia, he could offer to bring Snowden back home with him, and dare the nations of Europe to try and stop him.
Europeans are pissed off already at the US, in the wake of National Security Agency leaker Snowden’s latest revelation that the US was aggressively spying on its European allies, both at their and the European Union’s embassies in Washington, and in Europe itself, gleaning not information about terrorism, but inside-track knowledge about trade negotiation positions and other areas of disagreement or negotiation.
Leaders in Germany, France, Italy, and other European countries are demanding that the US cease its spying on them, and give a “full accounting” of the spying that it has been engaging in. But given the steady stream of lies coming from the NSA, the Obama Administration, Secretary of State John Kerry, and other American sources, why should they believe anything they are being told? Most Europeans understand now that all this bluster from their leaders is just that: bluster.
Europe’s leaders have shown themselves to their own people to be sell-outs in the pocket of the US. As several commenters on the website of the German magazine Der Spiegel, which last week ran a cover expose about the NSA spying program directed against European leaders, have written, Germany’s and France’s leaders have sold out their countries and people by caving in to US demands. As one person wrote: “Our government has sold us out and is beyond help.”
To be sure there was a wave of tough talk only days earlier, with, for example, Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, saying that the NSA is like the Soviet-era KGB, and with leaders of countries like Ireland and Norway saying that they might consider amnesty for Snowden, but only if he could reach their soil first — a ludicrous requirement, since there is no international law requiring such silliness. Any country can grant asylum to any person it wishes, wherever that person may be at the moment. They cannot offer protection, of course, except in an embassy or in-country, but that’s different from just offering a grant of amnesty. Indeed, the mere fact that the US has cancelled Snowden’s passport doesn’t mean his passport cannot be respected as a travel document by another country. How, in fact, when you think about it, would a country know that a person’s passport had been “cancelled” unless the issuing nation had issued some kind of news release about it as the US did in Snowden’s case? There’s no international registry of global passports. Those records are held closely by each country and in fact are supposed to be secure. Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Norway, Ireland or any other country that had said at any point that it would be willing to accept Snowden, could stamp their visa on his passport and accept him on their planes. (Even the US Passport Office accepts an old, expired passport as an identity document when one is applying for a new one.)
After this abject display of rank servitude in the interest of the US Imperium by some of Europe’s most powerful nations, if little Bolivia and/or Venezuela don’t step up and show Europe how sovereign nations are supposed to act, it will be up to the people of Europe and Latin America to act.
Already, Latin nations seem to be rallying, with protests across the continent, and with Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and Cuba’s retired leader Fidel Castro expressing anger at the diversion of the Morales plane. An “urgent” Latin American leadership meeting is planned over the crisis, and if it is not just talk, this could indicate that the US may have overstepped in insulting a region that has been growing increasingly assertive about resisting US diktats.
Certainly, following the latest revelations in the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and elsewhere showing that the NSA has been vacuuming up data on millions of Europeans, and with former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden stating publicly that the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution — the one that at least used to protect Americans’ right to privacy and from government search and seizure — “is not an international treaty,” the anger among Europeans at US spying is swelling too, and with it, support for the embattled whistleblower Snowden.
We can only hope that the revelations of outrageous US intelligence abuses and violation of Europeans’ privacy rights will continue, that the rage against the US among ordinary European citizens will grow. We can only hope that with that growing rage, a desire to stick it to the US by protecting Snowden will grow too, until some European leader finally sees it as a popular or necessary move to offer him asylum.
This latest abomination in the treatment of Bolivia and its leader, which has shamed France, Portugal, Austria, Italy and Russia, will be a great test of how angry the peoples of those countries are about their leaders’ servile behavior towards the US.
Of course, we in the US should be the most outraged of all, but sadly, there is probably even less chance that a majority Americans will get angry at all this than that Europeans will.
Related article
The UK’s intransigence in the EU shows the West’s true intentions in Syria
By Phil Greaves | notthemsmdotcom | May 28, 2013
The UK Foreign secretary William Hague, and his French counterpart Lauren Fabius, are leading an isolated charge within the EU to lift a supposed arms embargo to self-described ‘rebels’, hitherto destroying Syria for over two years. Several underlying factors need to be addressed before these diplomatic (some would say military) manoeuvres are put into context.
Firstly, the most obvious issue with allowing the UK and France to freely arm ‘rebels’ of their choosing inside Syria is that this policy is against all international law, and will, as proven already to be the case, continue to vastly exacerbate the growing death toll and displacement in Syria. As the head of arms control at Oxfam noted:
“Transferring more weapons to Syria can only exacerbate a hellish scenario for civilians. If the UK and France are to live up to their own commitments – including those set out in the new arms trade treaty – they simply must not send weapons to Syria.”
Acting under the auspices, or “consultation” of Western intelligence services, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and non-state actors sending thousands of tonnes of arms and funds to extremist militants in Syria; is directly synonymous with both a huge increase in casualty numbers and civilian displacement; and the huge rise and proliferation of extremist militants operating in Syria. This highlights, as previous conflicts in the region have shown; that further Western military intervention is not about to bring peace and harmony to a nation already engulfed in the throes of war (much of which western powers promoted and enabled). But peace and harmony are not on either France, nor the UK’s list of priorities in the region; removing President Assad and weakening the state of Syria, Iran’s staunch ally, most certainly are. It seems the less Imperial-minded states of the EU, and indeed, those less attached to US militarism and designs for the Middle East, were incensed by Hague and Fabius’ stubborn attempts to stifle the popular opinion within the EU that sending yet more military equipment to a disparate melee of extremist rebels may be of dire consequence. Hague, with his vast intellect, failed to acknowledge this most obvious of pitfalls, and seems more eager than war-mongerer/profiteer US Senator John McCain is to feed into the western public the idea that ‘moderate’, or ‘secular’ minded ‘rebels’ in Syria actually exist.
To quote an equally moral and intelligent Western statesman, the UK is acting on the policy of “unknown unknowns”. Hague et al claim to know of ‘moderate’ and ‘secular’ fighting forces wishing to take up arms against the Syrian Government; yet literally no one in Syria or analysing the conflict from afar is able to find them. As the weapons flow increased and the funds from Gulf donors magnified, it has been the most extreme sectarian elements of militia that have been bolstered by such support, and indeed, further encouraged by Western diplomatic cover and the dutiful Western mainstream media’s glowing appraisals of freedom fighters and ‘rebel’ propaganda. This has only enabled the Jihaddi/Salafist elements hell-bent on sectarian violence and destruction to gain in recruits and popularity. As in Central America, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia, Kosovo, etc: these extremist elements form the ‘Shock Troops’ of a Western designed subversion model; used to great effect by Western powers to enable the social and structural destruction of a nation “outside the West’s sphere of influence”, in order to bring about regime change.
Libya, again, provides us with a recent, and very much relevant example of how the UK and France are free to manipulate what are, when first employed, supposedly ‘humanitarian’ measures to fit their own military and Imperial advantage. When the No Fly Zone resolution over Libya was first passed in the UN, it was designed to enable ‘rebel’ forces in Libya to “protect the civilian population” from air and armour attacks from the Libyan Army. What ensued almost immediately after the resolution passed was nothing of the sort: the UK and France – under US direction – took it upon themselves, in almost 10,000 airstrike sorties within six months, to not only destroy all of Libya’s meagre air-force and armour, but destroy the vast majority of the infrastructure Gaddafi had built. This ran alongside a targeted assassination campaign against Gaddafi himself to bring about the desired regime change, which just by chance, also happens to be completely against international law. The results of which were neither in the interest of civilians or humanitarianism. As former MI5 officer Annie Machon put it:
“They’ve had free education, free health, they could study abroad. When they got married they got a certain amount of money. So they were rather the envy of many other citizens of African countries. Now, of course, since NATO’s humanitarian intervention, the infrastructure of their country has been bombed back to the Stone Age,”
This “bombing back to the stone age” is what Imperialist apologists might term: holding down the competition. As previously noted by many a statesman and scholar, the last thing any Western government desires is the self-determination and independence of resource-rich, strategically placed nations.
Furthermore, as candidly revealed by Hague himself, the UK and France’s pressure to lift the embargo is solely designed to pressure the Assad government to meet their demands, stating: (my emphasis)
“[it is] important for Europe to send a clear signal to the Assad regime that it has to negotiate seriously, and that all options remain on the table if it refuses to do so”.
One thing is certain, Hague does not speak for Europe. 25 of the 27 European nations were against the lifting of the embargo. The French and British refusal to accept the popular consensus meant that no decision or required extension of the current embargo could be made, resulting in its expiration. This in turn allows EU states to act as they please, as Hague said himself, this was the exact outcome the UK was hoping for. Once more, Hague is speaking with no authority, only 16% of the UK population agree to sending arms to ‘rebels’ in Syria: UK democracy in action.
The desired outcome of the lifting of the EU embargo will be increased military support to what the CIA, and NATO aligned governments describe as “vetted moderate” rebel forces. Which for all intents and purposes, simply don’t exist. The more likely outcome will be to create further reluctance of the Syrian ‘opposition’ elements within the SNC to negotiate with the Assad Government; further encouraging them and the extremist elements on the ground in Syria to continue their futile quest for a military solution. This policy will embolden extremist rebels fighting the Syrian Army in the hope they are to receive further Western support, with the ultimate desire of Western intervention just around the corner.
As Hague warns of “conflict spread”, which is evidently already occurring in Northern Lebanon, and inextricably linked to increased sectarian strife in Iraq; his Orwellian mindset seems unable to realise that adding more arms to this conflict ridden region will result in anything other than further destabilization. Surely Western powers cannot uphold this pretence any longer, it is glaringly obvious to many that Western involvement and “concern” over Syria has nothing to do with the civilian population and everything to do with regime change by all means necessary, including the tacit arming, funding and diplomatic support of extremist Al Qaeda affiliated ‘rebels’.
Furthermore, while the UK was desperate to lift the arms embargo on Syrian ‘rebels’. It was at the forefront of attempts to uphold the crippling economic sanctions put in place against the Syrian Government. These sanctions, as applied to devastating effect many times before, are again, solely designed to punish the civilian population in attempts to create civil unrest and discord against the Syrian government to bring about regime change, a wholly illegal act in itself. Hague, in another world-class show of diplomatic cognitive dissonance, candidly admitted the failure of these sanctions as a reason to lift the arms embargo, stating: “The EU arms embargo must be lifted because the current economic sanctions regime is ineffective.” If the economic sanctions aren’t working, yet evidently punishing the civilian population, why is the EU keeping them in place? Simply as a tool to further pressurize the Syrian Government and push the civilian population into chaos, poverty and revolt.
Whilst the UK government declares a “battle against terrorism” on its own soil, its Foreign Policy wilfully follows the Western trend of fomenting, arming and supporting the very same ideologues abroad. All to suit the pernicious Western establishment agenda of economic and military dominance throughout the Greater Middle East and beyond.
Related articles
- EU Continues with US-Led Sanctions against Syrians as It Scraps Arms Embargo
- Syria: Border Clashes Pit FSA Against Kurds
- Several injured in Syrian rocket attacks on Lebanon
Russia slams end of EU arms embargo, calls S-300s ‘stabilizing factor’ in Syria
RT | May 28, 2013
The failure of the European Union to agree on a new arms embargo for Syria is undermining the peace process, Moscow says. But the delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missiles may help restrain warmongers.
The comments come from Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, referring to the results of Monday’s meeting in Brussels. After a lengthy negotiating session, EU governments failed to resolve their differences and allowed a ban on arming the Syrian opposition to expire, with France and Britain scoring an apparent victory at the expense of EU unity.
The EU’s move, which the Russian diplomat branded as an “example of double standards”, opens the door for Britain and France to supply weapons to Syrian rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad.
Criticizing Europe’s decision to open the way for potential arms shipments to Syrian rebels, Russia insists that its own sale of arms to the Syrian government helps the international effort to end the two-year-long conflict, the diplomat added. He was referring to the delivery of the advanced S-300 long-range air defense systems, which Russia is carrying out under a contract signed with Syria several years ago.
“Those systems by definition cannot be used by militant groups on the battlefield,” Ryabkov said. “We consider this delivery a factor of stabilization. We believe that moves like this one to a great degree restrain some hotheads from escalating the conflict to the international scale, from involving external forces.”
The S-300 is a series of Russian long-range surface-to-air missile systems designed to intercept ballistic missiles, regarded as the most potent weaponry of its class. The missiles are capable of engaging aerial targets as far away as 200km, depending on the version used.
Once the Russian SAM missiles are deployed by Syria, it will have a better control of its airspace. The country endured three airstrikes this year, which are widely thought to have been conducted by Israel, but were never officially confirmed as such.
Britain and France have made a commitment not to deliver arms to the Syrian opposition “at this stage,” an EU declaration said. EU officials, however, said the commitment effectively expires on August 1.
London and Paris have argued support for rebels fighting Assad by allowing EU arms deliveries, despite the fact that extremist elements are known to work alongside the rebels.
Other EU governments, led by Austria and Sweden, argued that sending more weapons to the region would increase violence and spread instability.
Russia’s envoy to NATO Aleksandr Grushko said that the abolition of the EU arms embargo on the Syrian opposition will only exacerbate armed conflict in that country.
“We need to refrain from taking steps that would be contrary to this logic. Such steps include armed or non-lethal support to the opposition. This just adds fuel to the fire,” Grushko said on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Moscow and Washington remain undecided as to the content of a proposed international conference on Syria, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov.
“There remains a gap between the positions of Russia and the US regarding some issues and aspects of this major international crisis,” he emphasized.
“And we, for our part, cannot agree to hold such events [the international conference on Syria] amid a situation where partners and possible participants in such a conference seek to impose solutions on the Syrian people from the outside, as well as predetermine the course of a transitional process, the parameters of which have not been determined yet,” Ryabkov said.
Related article
IMF chief escapes indictment in corruption case
PressTVGlobalNews · May 25, 2013
The Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) has not pressed criminal charges against International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde after days of investigation into a corruption case, Press TV reports.
Lagarde walked out of the court after two days of court hearings looking into her involvement in fraud and misappropriation of public funds.
The French court was probing Lagarde’s handling of a dispute in 2007 that resulted in a 400 million-euro (USD 515 million) payment to former politician and controversial business figure, Bernard Tapie.
On Friday, the former finance minister was given the status “assisting witness”. This means she will be regarded as a witness in future related questioning.
The IMF chief was France’s finance minister under the government of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Reports indicate Sarkozy had promised Tapie benefits if he agreed to become a major funder in his 2007 presidential election campaign.
Some say the court’s decision is an unfair one.
“Christine Lagarde’s behavior in this affair is unacceptable, because she allowed one of France’s biggest businessmen to bypass traditional public justice and gave him a private arbitration… her decision greatly favored Mr. Tapie,” Copernic Fondation’s Pierre Khalfa said.
In 2007, Lagarde asked a panel of judges to arbitrate in a row between Tapie and the partly state-owned Credit Lyonnais over his sale of sports group Adidas in 1993.
She has been accused of “numerous anomalies and irregularities.”
The criminal charges are regarded as the second straight scandal for an IMF chief since Lagarde succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who quit over allegations of an assault on a hotel maid in New York.
Follow our Facebook on: https://www.facebook.com/PRESSTV
Follow our Twitter on: http://twitter.com/presstv
Follow our Tumblr on: http://presstvchannel.tumblr.com
Related articles
- France investigates IMF chief over 2007 payout (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Prosecutors grill IMF chief (morningstaronline.co.uk)
France investigates IMF chief over 2007 payout
Press TV – May 23, 2013
French authorities are interrogating International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde in connection with a controversial payout to a French tycoon during her term as France’s finance minister.
The 57-year-old appeared in France’s Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) on Thursday.
The court, which investigates cases of ministerial misconduct, is probing Lagarde’s handling of a dispute in 2007 that resulted in 400 million euros (USD 515 million) payment to the former politician and controversial business figure, Bernard Tapie.
The CJR prosecutors suspect that he was granted the treatment in return for backing former President Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential race.
Lagarde, who was France’s finance minister at that time, is accused of being responsible for “numerous anomalies and irregularities” which could lead her to be charged for complicity in fraud and misappropriation of public funds.
The investigation focused on Lagarde’s move in 2007, when she asked a panel of judges to arbitrate in a row between Tapie and the partly state-owned Credit Lyonnais over his sale of sports group Adidas in 1993.
Tapie had accused the bank of defrauding him by deliberately undervaluing Adidas at the time of the sale. He further said that the state – as the former principal shareholder in the bank – should compensate him.
Tapie was previously jailed on charges of match-fixing when he was the president of French football club Olympique de Marseille.
The criminal charges are regarded as the second straight scandal for an IMF chief since Lagarde succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who quit over allegations of an assault on a hotel maid in New York.
Lagarde, however, has downplayed the investigation.
“There’s nothing new under the sun. Ever since 2011 I had known very well that I will be heard by the investigative commission of the Cour de Justice,” she said last month.
Related article
- Prosecutors grill IMF chief (morningstaronline.co.uk)
‘UK, France barring UN Syria inspection’
Press TV – April 29, 2013
Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar al-Jaafari says Britain and France are trying to undermine Damascus’s official request from the United Nation to investigate chemical weapons use in Aleppo.
Al-Jaafari said in an interview with the Lebanese NBN TV channel that the western governments seek to repeat the Iraqi scenario in Syria through questioning its sovereignty by opening its borders to undisciplined inspections by the UN under the pretext of chemical weapons use.
Al-Jaffari said the western sides do not want an investigation to take place suggesting they know full well that the anti-government militants used chemical agents in the town of Khan al-Asal, near Aleppo, and elsewhere.
The Syrian official said the comparison with Iraq is pretty clear as the UN also sent an inspection team to the country to examine weapons of mass destruction claims, but Iraq was occupied despite the fact that the inspection team did not find any WMDs.
He also rejected claims by Britain and France that chemical weapons were used in Homs four months before the Khan al-Asal incident saying they would have reported it earlier if any such attack ever existed.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry has written to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon calling on the body to explain the details of a likely inspection in Khan al-Asal.
However, Britain and France have demanded the team to be also sent to other areas of the country to investigate the use of chemical weapons.
The request has been rejected by the Syrian government that says inspectors cannot have unlimited access to all regions of the country without coordination with Damascus.
The Syrian government has also called for an independent inspection of Khan al-Asal saying Damascus and the UN could discuss the details on other alleged chemical weapons uses separately, though the UN has so far refused to do so.
Related articles
- Russia accuses UN of politicizing approach to chemical weapons in Syria (voicerussia.com)
- Bashar Al-Jaafari: “West Raising Chemical Weapons Issue Part of Pressure Campaign” (syrianfreepress.wordpress.com)
French train company banned non-white workers for Peres visit
Al-Akhbar | April 15, 2013
The French national railroad company banned black and Arab employees from working at a Paris train station during a visit by Israeli President Shimon Peres for “security reasons,” a recent union statement revealed.
In a statement issued on April 10 and made public by French investigative news outlet Mediapart, railroad workers union SUD Rail revealed that the SNCF excluded its black and Arab workers from working at the Gare du Nord on March 8, as Peres arrived by train from Belgium.
The SNCF – the French acronym for the national railroad company – and one of its subsidiaries justified the decision by saying there shouldn’t be “Muslim employees welcoming the Israeli head of state,” the statement quoted.
The head of SNCF subsidiary ITIREMIA later confirmed that workers had been removed based on their race as a “precautionary principle” to “protect employees from the humiliation they might encounter” at the hands of security personnel.
The SNCF said the decision had come from the French interior ministry and the Israeli embassy, but employees are arguing that the decision was taken by the company itself.
In addition to selecting staff in contact with Peres based on race, a non-white train controller was also allegedly barred from checking the wagon Peres was traveling in, and an Arab train conductor was prevented from going through a part of Gare du Nord near Peres to reach his train.
SUD Rail said its committee on hygiene, security and work conditions has launched an investigation into the discriminatory acts.
Related articles
How Europe’s Fight with Google Over Privacy Ignores Real Privacy
By Alfredo Lopez | This Can’t Be Happening | April 10, 2013
Last week the governments of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom fired a warning shot at Google and it appears they’re reloading the gun with real ammunition.
This past December, about a year after the Internet behemoth announced a new privacy policy, a working group of representatives from these countries called the policy grossly abusive of people’s privacy and said Google had four months to bring itself into compliance with European law. Google dismissed the ultimatum: “Our privacy policy,” it said, “respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services.” The European countries response was that they will take actions, based on their national laws and in coodination with each other, by the Fall.
These government/corporation tiffs are frequent and their rhetorical fire normally turns into quickly dissipated smoke. This one could be different. It comes at a time when the world’s powerful are trying to decide how much privacy we people will have and what the term privacy actually means, and this squabble’s outcome will affect that and, of course, our freedom. That alone makes it worth watching.
But there’s something deeper here that transcends this conflict. Privacy is, in fact, a core component of democracy and any infringement on complete privacy is an obscene attack on the possibility of having a free and democratic society. As important as the outcome of this show-down might be, the most important and frightening development is that it’s taking place at all.
The political shoot-out began a year ago when Google announced that it was unifying about 60 privacy policy agreements, covering its myriad services, into one big one. The company explained that lumping together these “agreements” (the things you’re asked to read before pressing the “I Accept” button on a website) was a matter of efficiency and transparency. There’s a logic to that: how many privacy policies have you read on the Internet? One would assume that if you don’t read one, you can hardly be expected to read 60.
That, however, is a corporate shell game. Google made this move not to make our reading easier but to make gathering information about us more efficient. Google is a marketing company and nothing makes a marketing company more powerful and valuable to advertisers than having pertinent information on hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Its privacy policy is fitted to that purpose. It says that, once you sign up and begin using these services as an identified user, you give up that right of refusal. So, because people don’t read that privacy policy, they don’t realize that it effectively eliminates their privacy.
For a very long time, Google has known who uses each of its services and how, but now it knows which combination of services you use and how they interact with each other in your daily life. It also knows cities or towns of residence (and, in many cases, addresses) of its registered users, the IP addresses of their computers, their names (and often the names of their family members and friends), what they do on the Internet every day, what they buy and consider buying and, for those using Gmail, who they write to and what they write. It can hone in a your specific physical location with Goodgle Maps and will store that info if you map it. In fact, all this info is stored on Google’s databases with members’ tacit approval and Google’s complete understanding of what all this means.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2009. “If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
The information Google holds rivals and in some cases surpasses the information most governments have on their own citizens. So when Google released this new policy which permits it to combine that information and use it for evaluation, marketing and advertising, these governments commissioned France’s CNIL to investigate.
That selection, in itself, is striking. The CNIL is an independent, government-supported authority that specializes in data privacy law enforcement. France has among the strongest data collection restrictions in the world and, while CNIL has often been criticized by advocates for being too sheepish in its advocacy, data protection “sheepishness” in France would be considered ferocity in many other countries.
Like a trained bulldog, CNIL investigated all the Google data policies for nine months and then presented its report. It was devastating, accusing Google of policies and mechanisms that effectively violate privacy laws in most European countries. Based on that report, 24 of the EU’s 27 data regulators wrote Google a letter last December proposing about a dozen changes: among them that Google shouldn’t collect information on users without their consent, combine information from different services without additional consent or use the data it collects for advertising.
The four months passed. “Google did not provide any precise and effective answers,” CNIL said last week. “In this context, the EU data protection authorities are committed to act and continue their investigations. Therefore, they propose to set up a working group, led by the CNIL, in order to coordinate their reaction, which should take place before summer.”
In the diplomatic jargon of international regulation, those are fighting words. “Coordinate their reaction” is something the European Union’s countries seldom do (witness their financial crisis) and they almost never make threats around technology. Action against Google in Europe could affect the company’s relationship with one of its largest markets and a critical marketing link in the world-wide chain that is the Internet. Google could be crippled. That’s what that statement threatens.
But let’s not kid ourselves. A capitalist government, like those in Europe, has a system to protect and, to do the protecting, its police agencies routinely use data collected on the Internet about its citizens. As Google’s Schmidt put it in 2010: “In a world of asynchronous threats it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”
So the issue here isn’t really how to protect people’s privacy; it’s how to balance the various approaches to impinging on it. Google says it needs information about you to match its marketing to what you buy; governments say they need information about you to monitor and control what you do the rest of the time. They’re trying to work out how these two approaches to information gathering can co-exist and not conflict with each other.
If, for example, a particular policy draws too much public attention to this issue or provokes a large lawsuit or gets people asking why their government isn’t — or is — doing something, that’s a problem. The government will then find its own privacy policies in the spotlight. That’s only one way this balance can become unbalanced, but in any case balance is the issue being disputed. There is really no debate about whether or not you have a right to privacy on the Internet. As far as both sides are concerned, you don’t, and both sides are most pleased if you’re not paying much attention to that fact.
It’s persistently perplexing how little most people care about this issue. Even many of the most politically conscious will often just shrug and say “there’s nothing that can be done about it”. After decades of increasing surveillance (oiled by a government-encouraged paranoia about terrorism) we expect the powerful of our society to know everything about us and, apparently, most of us can live with that. Some of us appear to think we can’t live without it.
But that battering of our democratic consciousness has not only lowered our guard against violations of our privacy; it has actually fostered a distorted understanding of what privacy actually is. Or better put: it’s convinced many of us that a small part of the privacy debate is the entire debate.
For purposes of the Internet, privacy is your ability to communicate with other people excluding anyone you want from that conversation and your ability to say what you want to those people (and listen to what they have to say) excluding people you don’t want listening.
Sure, what you say to your family or which websites you visit or what you consider buying on the Internet should, in a sane society, be your business and taking a snapshot of all this is a horrible personal violation. But the more dangerous violation is that, in establishing the means to eavesdrop on your life and honing the ability to store and analyze that information, powerful forces are systematically limiting what the Internet can be about.
What humanity created as a tool of freedom and, in many cases, struggle has been taken over by corporations and governments wielding lawsuits, imprisonment and largely unnoticed anti-freedom laws to pervert its original intent.
“When the Internet began… it was seen largely as a non-commercial oasis,” free-speech advocate and writer Robert McChesney told Democracy Now in a recent interview. “It was a place where people could go and be equal and be empowered as citizens to take on concentrated economic and political power, to battle propaganda… And there was no surveillance. People could do what they wanted and not be tracked.
“What’s been taking place… is that on a number of different fronts, extraordinarily large, monopolistic corporations have emerged: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, at the access level; Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, at the application and use level. And these firms have changed the nature of the Internet dramatically… (and) they work closely with the government and the national security state and the military. They really walk hand in hand collecting this information, monitoring people, in ways that by all democratic theory are inimical to a free society.”
“Privacy” isn’t primarily individual and privacy laws aren’t in place only to address individual activities. In fact, you can’t be individually private on the Internet because then you wouldn’t be using the Internet. The privacy laws are there to make sure people can function in our exercise of free speech, exchange of information and association. They are, and always have been, a way to protect us from government inquiry and inquisition. Those laws that say a cop can’t just walk into your house and search it without a warrant or question you and those with you or keep close tabs on everything you do and who you do it with — those are privacy laws. They protect our collaborative activity from
government repression.
That collaborative activity is what the Internet has deepened and broadened. It lets us communicate with people all over the world involved in activities emanating from issues and concerns similar to ours. It lets people who are fighting for their rights in a country where such activity can get you jailed or killed talk to people world-wide who can support them. It permits coordination of struggles going on in vastly different environments in far-away countries. It cuts through our media’s lies about other countries with solid truth we learn from people in those countries. It helps unify us and helps us support each other in a rapid, almost immediate, way.
It’s what humanity needs and it’s the reason why the Internet now reaches two billion people.
But if the privacy is taken away, if a government or a corporation can read your email or follow you around as you visit and use websites, your use of the Internet for its most important political purpose becomes stored information that can be used to oppose and repress you.
Privacy, viewed that way, is the litmus test of a free environment. In that context, Google is a monster and the governments that are challenging it on such restricted grounds aren’t much better.
Yes, the progressive response to the European initiative on Google privacy should be to encourage it but with an understanding of its pitfalls and a loud outcry about them. Even if Europe has its way, the outcome will still be an erosion of our privacy and a further empowerment of those who would, in some situations, repress our movements for change.
So right now, those of us who are truly concerned about the future of this society and the world, need to place Internet privacy among our most prominent issues.
Featured Video
WARNING: Delete TikTok Immediately!
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
In 2014, Michael Parenti Wrote A Prophetic Article About Ukraine
The Dissident | January 28, 2026
This week, the influential left-wing scholar Michael Parenti passed away at the age of 92.
Parenti was well known for his sharp criticism of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism throughout his life, waking up many to the reality of it and the lies used to justify it.
This is best underscored in one of his last published articles, “Ukraine and Regime Change”, which was published in the book “Flashpoint In Ukraine: How the U.S. Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III”, where he predicted to a tee what the result of the 2014 U.S. backed coup in Ukraine would be. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
eddieb on Conspiracy Denial eddieb on WEF Calls for ‘Cultural Revolu… loongtip on Trump wanted to play peacemake… Coronistan on EU member to sue bloc over ‘su… loongtip on Vicious loongtip on EU turns to India for defense… Coronistan on Donald Trump Is No Peace … seversonebcfb985d9 on French court jails pro-Palesti… eddieb on Fourteen Incredible Facts Abou… Bill Francis on European leaders’ shift in the… seversonebcfb985d9 on Villains of Judea: Philip Esfo… loongtip on Report warns that ‘Jewish terr…
Aletho News- EU labels Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ‘terrorist organization’
- Security Guarantees Supported by Russia Agreed on in Istanbul in 2022 – Lavrov
- Russian oil major agrees sale of foreign assets to US firm
- European Union Sanctions Russian Journalists and Artists
- Fānpán – Is China Turning the Tables on the ‘Democratic’ West?
- Davos, Mark Carney’s frankness, and the Euro-American rift
- Austrian lawmakers propose to revoke citizenship of former foreign minister
- Switzerland plans tax hike to revamp military
- In One Of His Final Pieces, Written in 2014, Michael Parenti Wrote A Prophetic Article About Ukraine
- More Bombs, More Talks Zelensky Rejects Trump’s Plan
- If Americans Knew
- “Hey ChatGPT, is Israel building a concentration camp?” (spoiler: yes) – Not a ceasefire Day 111
- “The Gaza ceasefire is a minefield” – Not a ceasefire Day 110
- Israel to seek new security deal from US, official says
- Leaked “Board of Peace” Resolution Outlines U.S.-Led Plan to Rule Over Gaza
- Jonathan Greenblatt Rolls Out Plan to Activate Hispanic Evangelical Golems
- Violence against hundreds of Gazan remains to find one Israeli – Not a ceasefire Day 109
- Greenpeace Demonstrator Exposes Folly of Protest Restrictions
- From CBS to TikTok, Pro-Israel Ellison is now in the driver’s seat
- Israel pays for UK advertisements attacking Doctors Without Borders
- Israel accused of extracting billions from Gazan people to pay for their own genocide
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Affirms Rising CO2’s Greening Impact Across India – A Region With No Net Warming In 75 Years
- Germany’s Natural Gas Crisis Escalates … One Storage Site Near Empty …Government Silent
- Polar Colding…Antarctica Saw Its Coldest October In 44 Years!
- New Study: Sea Levels Rose 20 Times The Modern Rate During The Roman Warm Period
- As German Gas Storage Dips Dangerously Low…Shortage Hardly Avoidable
- New Study: Brazil’s Relative Sea Level Was 2+ Meters Higher And SSTs 3-4°C Warmer 6000 Years Ago
- Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems From Stupidity, Ignorance
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
Aletho News 
