EU politics/economics

Vi lever i en interessant tid. Og den er ikke kedelig. Mange faste forestillinger ændrer sig. Det slår mig, at EU politikere og ditto amerikanske ved meget lidt om både Rusland og verden. Som EU borger kan jeg med beklagelse konstatere, at EU ikke har nogen politik i forhold til Rusland. Og højstemt forargelse og at snakke amerikanerne efter munden tæller ikke som en egentlig politik. Hvilke forestillinger har EU politikerne haft om slutspillet i Ukraine? Hvilke forestillinger har de haft om virkningerne af sanktionerne? Hvilken viden og forståelse af hvilket land Rusland er, har de samme politikere haft? Det er som om dæmonisering af Putin har gjort det ud for en politik. Jeg opfordrer ikke her til at man skal elske Putin. Men jeg opfordrer for det første til at finde ud af, hvad man ønsker med Rusland og for den sags skyld også med Ukraine. For det andet,...

Quality research leads to better predictions One criteria of quality research is that it predicts the future better than incompetent research. Because TFF is independent of governments and coroporations it doesn’t have to take political considerations or exclude certain theories, concepts or values. This free research enabled it over the years to make fairly precise predictions about for instance former Yugoslavia, the Iraq war and East-West relations. In 1998 – 16 years ago – we warned that NATO’s expansion would lead to future problems with Russia. Read it here. NATO should never have been expanded We backed this prediction up with 46 arguments and argued that so many other things would be wiser than containing Russia from the Baltic republics to Georgia – a strategy pursued by Bill Clinton in contravention of all promises given to the Soviet Union/Russia at the end of the Cold War about ten years earlier....

Note Published below is a letter prepared by the European Coordination of Committee and Associations for Palestine (ECCP) and endorsed by John Dugard, Michael Mansfield, Eric David, and myself; it urges adherence to guidelines relating to corporate and financial activity with unlawful economic activities in Israel and occupied Palestine, and is guided by principles similar to the BDS campaign; it is notable that today the Presbyterian Church by a close vote (310-303) voted to divest itself of shares in three corporations engaged in legally and morally objectionable activities in Israel. There is a growing momentum associated with this new nonviolent militancy associated with the global solidarity movement supportive of the Palestinian struggle to gain a just peace, including realization of rights under international law. European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine (ECCP) On 24-26 June, 37 European companies from 11 EU Member States will travel to Israel as a...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Lund, Sweden, June 3, 2014 Fears has been expressed in Europe about the recent EU parliament voting pattern. Instead of the fear and denouncing the winners we should ask: What causes such an outcome? My short answer is this: Democracy itself is in deep crisis. It has become performance or ritual rather than something genuinely lived. Two things stand out – one, the increase in votes going to nationalist, populist, right-wing and anti-Muslim parties as well as Euro-skeptics – particularly in Denmark, France, Greece and Britain. Secondly, the voter turnout has fallen from 62 per cent in 1979 to 43% in 2009 and this year it increased only 0.09% in spite of the EU Commission’s attempt to increase it. So while people struggle around the world for democracy, only 43% of the EU citizens find it meaningful to go and vote every 4th year. How tragic for an EU...

Speech given in Brussels to the European External Action Service, Free University The EU is in a crisis mainly of its own making. Some of it is economic and can be solved by strict control on speculation, separating savings and investment banks, by gradual debt forgiveness, by lifting the bottom up, the most miserable communities, by the GIPSI (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland) countries cooperating, by stimulating agricultural cooperatives with direct sales points, etc. But much of it is political; the EU has become invisible on the world scene, incapable of a foreign policy building peace and security, also much too tied to US and Israeli fundamentalisms and too anti-Islamic. The following are some ideas about steps that can be taken. The EU glittering success as a peace zone is much needed in zones of war and where war threatens: the Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia. A Middle East...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The Germany of the victorious Angela Merkel, the second most powerful political leader in the world, is the peacenik nation of the West. But it is also the quasi-authoritarian keeper of the “austerity” that uses its economic clout to impose its standards on the rest of Europe, reminding some southern European countries of the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler that imposed a sort of common market on its captured nations. We may like the one and detest the other but Germany, for better or worse, is at the moment a package deal. Germans themselves would like to shed the responsibilities of the second and concentrate on the first, encouraging Europe to use its underlying strength to do good and bring peace to the world. After all, not only is this the land of Hitler, his war and his Holocaust, it is the land of Bach and Beethoven which produced,...

From Alicante, Spain “Unemployment in Spain Tops 6.1M” – Unemployment rate is 26.6 percent; for those under the age of 25, 56.5 percent; all growing, all EU records. “Bank of Spain inspectors pen damning report about wrongdoing in Spanish banks: look the other way” was the reaction, while the government spends billions of Euros to bail out those banks. (El País, early January 2013). And this: “300 Madrid health chiefs resign over privatization”; “Locksmiths in Pamplona refuse taking part in evictions involving families with young children”; “Theater chief sells carrots at 13 Euro as entrance ticket” – value-added tax down from 21 to 4 percent for food; “Mothers strip for erotic calendar to drum up funds for canceled school buses”. A country rapidly de-developing, into low Third World levels, even in health. A country not only saving banks rather than people but also letting the banks get away with crimes....

A crisis so massive–with the health network in Greece collapsing and 50 percent of Spanish youth unemployed–begs for big causes. Some unknown planet with great gravitation pull, some super-radioactive element not yet identified? Probably; there may be more causes lining up–efforts to destroy the welfare state and to save the US$ as the world currency-but for the time being we have to do with what we have. Here are Four Big ones:

It was only a few years ago that Europe was being praised as the savior of world order, and heralded as the hope for the future of world order. Books with such titles as The European Superpower and Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century were widely read. They celebrated the realities of a European post-colonial recovery, even a new type of ascendancy, results that were welcomed by many who hoped for a more peaceful and equitable world. I shared much of this enthusiasm, believing that the European Union was a bold and generally progressive experiment in regionalism that was better suited to our era of intensifying globalization than a state-centric world of sovereign territorial communities habituated to the dynamics of warfare.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The French elections are almost over with the National Front, the party of the Far-Right led by the Le Pen family, losing strength. As recently as 2002 it did well enough to promote Jean-Marie Le Pen into the final round of the presidential election, up against Jacques Chirac. Needless to say in the final round even the left voted en masse for Chirac to ensure that Le Pen was thrashed. One might expect that the Far-Right with its pool of support from the disaffected working class might do well in these troubled times. But in fact the overwhelming majority of the working class is staying put in its traditional home on the left.

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities. Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> What have these eleven countries in common – Finland, Norway, Canada, Japan, Poland, Turkey, Australia and, to a lesser extent, the US, Russia, Sweden and Denmark? They have not put themselves through the economic purge and their economies are growing at a reasonable rate. Not for them savage cuts in social services and public investment combined with lower wages. They have kept their economies purring. They are pro-Keynesian – a policy attributed to John Maynard Keynes, the most brilliant economist of the last century, in an age when there were many brilliant economists, both of the left, the middle and the right.