Tag Archives: Wikileaks

Latest Developments, September 28

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Dodd-Frank setback
The New York Times reports that a US judge has struck down a rule aimed at imposing restrictions on speculative commodities trading:

“The court decision dealt the latest blow to the Dodd-Frank Act, the regulatory crackdown passed in response to the financial crisis. The decision on Friday, aimed at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s so-called position limits rule, is the second time a Dodd-Frank rule has suffered legal defeat.
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The ruling is sure to embolden Wall Street as it shifts the attack on Dodd-Frank from piecemeal lobbying to broader legal challenges. Industry groups are currently challenging another C.F.T.C. rule, while others are weighing lawsuits against the so-called Volcker Rule, a still-uncompleted plan to stop banks from trading with their own money.”

Enemy of the state
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the US military has added Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange to a list of national enemies that include al-Qaeda and the Taliban:

“Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with ‘communicating with the enemy’, a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.” 

Defunct land grab
The Oakland Institute examines the consequences in Tanzania of an 8,211-hectare biofuel project whose British developer went bankrupt:

“People have lost their land and their supply of fresh water as well as access to essential natural resources, while the promises of development and better life never materialized. In 2011, what was left of Sun Biofuels was acquired by 30 Degrees East, an investment company registered in the tax haven of Mauritius. At the time of our field research, the project had not resumed. The new company only employed 35 staff, mostly security guards, who ban villagers from accessing their land and natural resources.”

False revolution
Friends of the Earth warns that the Gates Foundation is promoting “damaging industrial farming” in Africa:

“Multi-million dollar investments from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – a major Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa donor – into shares in biotech corporations, and revolving doors between donors and these corporations skew the agenda of AGRA in favor of profit-based, corporate-led farming rather than farming that benefits local people and small farmers.
The bulk of projects funded by the Gates Foundation and its brainchild AGRA favor technological solutions for high-input industrial farming methods. These include patented seeds, fertilizers and lobbying for genetically modified crops. Evidence from the roll-out of genetically modified crops in other countries shows that these crops push farmers into debt, cause irreversible environmental damage and encourage land concentration.”

Transparent ownership
Save the Children’s Alex Cobham suggests the “post-2015 development framework” that will replace the Millenium Development Goals should include greater transparency regarding the beneficial ownership of companies:

“The Norwegian presidential commission on tax havens presented considerable evidence on the links between developing countries and havens, pulling out link after link that threatens development and revolving around the hiding of ownership – whether for purposes of facilitating corrupt payments, trade mispricing to dodge tax, or money laundering. In addition, the commission set out a model of how governance in a country could be broadly undermined by greater exposure to tax havens.
Because the key to havens is not in fact tax rates but secrecy, I prefer the term ‘secrecy jurisdiction’. Ultimately, it is the hiding of ownership that havens facilitate which undermines regulation and taxation around the world – not any tax competition they may engender.”

Drone development
Citing a new investigation into the civilian impacts of US drone strikes in Pakistan, New York University’s William Easterly questions his government’s claim that defense and development are “complementary”:

“It would be hard for Development to benefit from “drones hovering 24 hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning.”
The report alleges that drones strike areas multiple times, killing rescuers of victims of the first strike.
Next challenge in US: getting people to care about this.”

Workers’ rights
Human Rights Watch reports that one of the world’s biggest auditing firms has warned that companies involved in an Emirati mega-development must ensure workers’ rights are being respected:

“The government-owned developer of Abu Dhabi’s high-profile Saadiyat Island project, the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC), faces ‘significant challenges’ to carry out agreed-upon minimum labor standards, says the September 23, 2012 report published by independent auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Saadiyat Island will be home to branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim Museums and a New York University (NYU) campus, and has been the focus of criticismover migrant workers’ rights.
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The 34-page report detailed a range of ongoing violations of the [Employment Practices Policy] and domestic labor law. It says that 75 percent of workers interviewed had paid recruitment fees and 77 percent had paid visa and travel costs, which are supposed to be paid by employers. According to Human Rights Watch’s research, these recruitment fees are the most significant factor in creating conditions of forced labor in the UAE. Twenty percent of those interviewed reported illegal deductions from their salaries.”

Nuclear pressure
Inter Press Service reports that 50 years on from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the international community is pushing the world’s nuclear-armed countries to ratify a ban on testing nuclear weapons:

“Opened for signature in September 1996, the [Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Teaty] has been signed by 183 nations and ratified by 157. However, it cannot be enforced without ratification by 44 countries that had nuclear power or research reactors when the CTBT was negotiated.
Most of those nations have ratified the treaty, but the United States, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran, and Egypt remain unwilling to do so. In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama declared his intention to seek Senate reconsideration of the treaty. The administration has given no firm timeframe for action.”

Latest Developments, August 17

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Miners shot
Bloomberg reports “the worst death toll in police action since the end of apartheid” after South African police opened fire on striking workers from a platinum mine owned by UK-registered Lonmin, killing 35:

“Violence erupted yesterday after police used tear gas and live ammunition to disperse thousands of workers gathered on a hilltop near the mine. Clashes between rival labor unions at the mine led to a six-day standoff with police in which 10 people had already died, including two officers. Police say they acted in self-defense yesterday after coming under attack from the workers armed with spears, machetes and pistols.”

Setting a precedent
The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Mark Weisbrot argues Ecuador’s decision to grant asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has “considerable historic significance”:

“Why is this case so significant? It is probably the first time that a citizen fleeing political persecution by the US has been granted political asylum by a democratic government seeking to uphold international human rights conventions. This is a pretty big deal, because for more than 60 years the US has portrayed itself as a proponent of human rights internationally – especially during the cold war. And many people have sought and received asylum in the US.
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Assange’s successful pursuit of asylum from the US is another blow to Washington’s international reputation. At the same time, it shows how important it is to have democratic governments that are independent of the US and – unlike Sweden and the UK – will not collaborate in the persecution of a journalist for the sake of expediency. Hopefully other governments will let the UK know that threats to invade another country’s embassy put them outside the bounds of law-abiding nations.”

DNA ruling
The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed disappointment at a US federal appeals court’s ruling that companies can obtain patents on human genes:

“ ‘This ruling prevents doctors and scientists from exchanging their ideas and research freely. Human DNA is a natural entity like air or water. It does not belong to any one company,’ [according to the ACLU’s Chris Hansen]
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Myriad’s monopoly on the BRCA genes allows it to set the terms and cost of testing and makes it impossible for women to access alternate tests or get a comprehensive second opinion about their results. It also allows Myriad to prevent researchers from even looking at the genes without first getting permission.”

Deadly crossing
Human Rights Watch has released a new briefing calling on European governments to do more to prevent fatalities, of which there have been “as many as 13,500” since 1998, among migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa:

“The European Union is developing a new European External Border Surveillance System, EUROSUR. It includes rescue at sea as a main objective, but does not include specific guidelines or procedures to ensure this objective is reached.
Preventing deaths at sea needs to be at the heart of a coordinated European-wide approach to boat migration, Human Rights Watch said. During the Arab Spring, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said that all overcrowded migrant boats in the Mediterranean should be presumed to be in need of rescue. This idea should inform the approach of the European Union toward the rescue of boat migrants.”

Pivot to Africa
Georgetown University’s Rosa Brooks writes that the US Department of Defense has come to dominate America’s relatively new and growing strategic interest in Africa:

“Whether Africom represents a viable new model for the future of the U.S. military naturally depends on your point of view. To some, the Africom approach is downright dangerous. Military traditionalists are apt to view it with suspicion — as a dangerous slide away from the military’s core competencies and the very apotheosis of ‘mission creep.’ Many civilian observers are equally skeptical, viewing Africom as further evidence of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy — and of the devaluing and evisceration of civilian capacity.”

Non-aligned summit
Inter Press Service reports that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is under pressure not to attend this month’s Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran where the host nation will take over as chair of the 120-country body:

“Chakravarthi Raghavan, a veteran journalist who has covered the United Nations both in New York and Geneva for decades, told IPS whether one likes it or not, NAM is a political gathering, and represents the largest group of nations, and members of the U.N.
‘Whatever the views and policies of the host, it would be a folly for the head of the U.N. Secretariat not to go there to present a U.N. view – and not act as a partisan of U.S.-Israeli interests or Israeli lobbying groups in the U.S.,’ said Raghavan, who has covered NAM summits from the very inception.”

Redefining development
Former South African cabinet minister Jay Naidoo argues the global development industry has sucked the passion out of the “fight for freedom and human dignity”:

“A whole development industry has spawned a class of poverty consultants. Global development assistance has been packaged into projects.
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The rush to seek single-issue solutions to complex problems fails to recognize or respond to the overarching structural social and political factors that connect them. Typically, the search is for a new technology or a market-based device that could change lives dramatically.”

Bankers’ bluff
German MP Frank Schäffler and the Friedrich A. von Hayek Society’s Norbert Tofall want to see indebted banks lose their ability to “blackmail their rescuers” into granting them effective exemption from liability:

“Above all, the G-20’s decision to prop up systemically relevant banks must be revisited. And governments must respond to the banks’ threats by declaring their willingness to let insolvent banks be judged accordingly.
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Zombie assets would be destroyed. A large part of the money and credit that was created out of nothing from former interbank transactions, now excluded from official guarantees, would return to nothing. Afterwards, the liquidated, formerly over-indebted banks could be sold.

Latest Developments, August 16

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Embassy threatened
The New York Times reports that an Ecuadorean government official has said that Ecuador would be prepared to let Wikileaks founder Julian Assange stay at its London embassy “indefinitely under a type of humanitarian protection”:

“Earlier Wednesday, Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, said that the British authorities had threatened to barge into the country’s embassy in London if officials did not hand over Mr. Assange. ‘Today we have received from the United Kingdom an explicit threat in writing that they could assault our embassy in London if Ecuador does not hand over Julian Assange,’ Mr. Patiño said at a news conference in Quito, adding defiantly, ‘We are not a British colony.’
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Under diplomatic protocol, Mr. Assange was thought to be off limits while in the embassy. But the BBC reported Wednesday that British officials had raised the notion of revoking the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuadorean Embassy, allowing British officials to enter.”

Consultation required
Al Jazeera reports that a Brazilian judge has suspended construction of a controversial hydroelectric megaproject that is expected to flood 500 sq km of Amazon rainforest: 

“In a statement released on Tuesday, Judge Souza Prudente said that work could only resume on the $11bn, 11,000MW Belo Monte Dam after the indigenous communities living in the area were consulted.
The dam has been condemned by environmentalists and rights activists, who say that it would devastate wildlife and the livelihoods of 40,000 people who live in the area that would be flooded.”

Plain packaging
Bloomberg reports that the backing of Australia’s highest court for a ban on trademarked labeling of cigarette packs has public health experts hoping for a “domino effect” around the world:

“The High Court of Australia today dismissed claims by Japan Tobacco Inc. (2914), British American Tobacco Plc (BATS), Philip Morris International Inc. (PM) and Imperial Tobacco Group Plc that the government illegally seized their intellectual property by barring the display of trademarks on packs. The judges gave no reasons for the decision and said these will be published later.
The ruling is a victory for a government faced with A$31.5 billion ($33 billion) in annual health costs from smoking, a habit it estimates killed 900,000 Australians over six decades. New Zealand and the U.K. are among countries whose governments have indicated interest in implementing similar legislation, which takes effect in Australia Dec. 1.”

Four-star tastes
The Associated Press reports that former US Africa Command head William “Kip” Ward is being investigated “for allegedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars improperly”:

“The defense officials said Ward is facing numerous allegations that he spent several hundred thousand dollars allowing unauthorized people, including family members, to fly on government planes, and spent excessive amounts of money on hotel rooms, transportation and other expenses when he traveled as head of Africa Command.
A four-star general is the highest rank in the Army.”

Exxon spill
Reuters reports that ExxonMobil is “investigating” an oil spill off Nigeria’s coast that has shut down the local fishing industry:

“Sam Ayadi, a fisherman in Ibeno, said by telephone that no one had been able to go fishing since the spill was first noticed on Sunday.
‘The fishermen are still off the waters due to the spill. We cannot return yet. We are waiting for Mobil to open to discussions with us about what happened,’ he said.
Oil spills are common in Africa’s top energy producer. Stretches of the Niger Delta, a fragile wetlands environment, are coated in crude. Thousands of barrels are spilled every year, and lax enforcement means there are few penalties.”

Aid’s colonial roots
Aid on the Edge of Chaos’s Ben Ramalingam presents a collection of thoughts on the “implications of complexity science for development aid” by Nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom who passed away in June:

“The lack of long timeframes and a lack of supporting cultures means that aid agencies don’t help people learn how to think about and change the structure of the situations they are facing. In many situations, this is because of colonial roots of aid, which did not respect local institutions – they didn’t understand them so they were treated as non-existent.
The difference between this approach and that of Darwin is stark – the care and diligence that was given to studying animal species in the 19th century is so evident, and it from this that we have evolutionary theory. But these countries also had people, but there was no attempt to understand their knowledge systems, the rules they had developed to manage various kinds of socio-ecological systems… Colonial powers assumed we have the answers, and destroyed social capital. Aid agencies, unfortunately, do much the same thing.”

Haiti’s gold rush
Jacob Kushner writes in Guernica Magazine about “behind closed doors” negotiations between Haitian politicians and foreign mining companies over access to the country’s underground wealth:

“Since 2009, Haiti’s government ministers have been considering a new convention. This would allow Eurasian, Newmont’s business partner, to explore an additional 1300 square kilometers of land in Haiti’s north. But according to Dieuseul Anglade, Haiti’s mining chief of two decades, unlike previous agreements, this one doesn’t include a limit—standard among mining contracts worldwide—on how much of a mine’s revenue the company can write off as costs. Without any cap, a mining company can claim that a mine has an unusually low profit margin, allowing it to pay fewer taxes to the Haitian state; Anglade opposed these terms, and was fired in May.”

Corporate inconvenience
Harvard Law School student Maia Levenson has little sympathy for oil giant Shell’s argument, ahead of its US Supreme Court showdown with Nigerian plaintiffs, that corporate liability for foreign conduct could have “an adverse effect on a company’s stock price and debt rating”:

“Sure, major corporations may find it inconvenient to defend against allegations that they were complicit in crimes against humanity. But that is not a reason to find that they are immune. Major corporations, and the United States itself, are frequently the subject of lawsuits that may have adverse commercial implications—and we don’t deny plaintiffs the opportunity for redress because of the potential or actual costs. If we don’t deny victims a forum for even ordinary claims, why would we do so when the crimes at issue are the very worst kinds imaginable?”

Latest Developments, April 10

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Inequality warning
The BBC reports that the Asia Development Bank is warning that growing inequality – particularly in China, India and Indonesia – could threaten the continent’s stability.
“During the 1960s and 1970s, Asia was better at ensuring that growth did not marginalise large chunks of the region’s population and was actually reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.
However, over the past decade the sudden explosion of growth and rapid enrichment of many people has seen the rich-poor divide grow. The ADB estimates that currently in most Asian countries the wealthiest 5% of the population now account for 20% of total expenditure.
At the same time, for hundreds of millions of people access to education, healthcare and housing has become more difficult and expensive.”

Hijacking democracy
The Independent reports that two of Britain’s top lobbying firms are offering to help corporate clients benefit from the European Citizens’ Initiative, which is intended to increase public input into EU lawmaking.
“A leaked memo shows that Bell Pottinger, the subject of an undercover investigation published in this newspaper in December last year, has offered to help potential clients set up petitions demanding changes to EU law under the new programme, whose rules specifically bar organisations from doing so.
And information posted on the website of its fellow lobbyist Fleishman-Hillard shows it too is offering to help businesses hijack the initiative, which came into force on 1 April.”

Inivisible Children leaks
RT reports that diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks suggest “collaboration” between the group behind the Kony 2012 video and Uganda’s intelligence services.
“A memo written by a public affairs officer at the US embassy in Uganda documents Invisible Children’s collaboration with Ugandan intelligence services. It notes that the US-based NGO tipped the Ugandan government on the whereabouts of Patrick Komakech, a former child soldier for the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), who was wanted by security officials for extorting money from the government officials, NGO’s and local tribal leaders. Ugandan security organizations jumped the tip and immediately arrested Komakech.
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Invisible Children also actively supported Operation Lightning Thunder (OLT), a joint attack by Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the then-autonomous South Sudan against the LRA. The operation, which was also received US intelligence and logistical backing, killed more civilians than LRA militants.”

Sacred hills
The Guardian reports that the Dongria Kondh people’s “Avatar-like battle” against a UK-based mining company has reached India’s Supreme Court.
“Lingaraj Azad, a leader of the Save Niyamgiri Committee, said the Dongria Kondh’s campaign was ‘not just that of an isolated tribe for its customary rights over its traditional lands and habitats, but that of the entire world over protecting our natural heritage’.
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A government report accused the firm of violations of forest conservation, tribal rights and environmental protection laws in Orissa, a charge subsequently repeated by a panel of forestry experts.”

Illegal lumber
Inter Press Service reports on a new investigation that found more than 20 US companies had imported illegal timber from Peru’s Amazon region in recent years.
“ ‘Exporters in Peru and importers in the United States and around the world are currently integral parts of a systematic flow of illegal timber from the Peruvian Amazon. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes through sheer negligence, each of the actors and agencies involved in this system are working as gears in a well-oiled machine that is ransacking Peru’s forests and undermining the livelihoods and rights of the people that depend on them,’ the [Environmental Investigation Agency] report stated.
The investigation discovered at least 112 shipments of protected cedar and mahogany were illegally laundered with fabricated papers and imported by U.S. companies between 2008 and 2010.”

Complicity in genocide
Groupe Rwanda argues in Billets d’Afrique that the French government was complicit in the Rwandan genocide that started 18 Aprils ago.
“In fact, according to the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR): ‘…an accused is liable for complicity in genocide if he knowingly and voluntarily aided or abetted or instigated a person or persons to commit genocide, while knowing that such person or persons were committing genocide, even though the accused himself did not have the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, specifically targeted as such.’ In the name of geopolitical considerations dictated by a minority above all accountability due to the so-called ‘reserved domain’ of the head of state, French decision makers consented without qualms to the preparation and subsequent carrying out of the massacre of nearly a million human beings. Once the crime was completed, they did not break their alliance with the killers. François Mitterrand even said to his inner circle in the summer of 1994: ‘You know, in such countries, genocide is not too important.’ ” (Translated from the French.)

Judicial racism
The Guardian’s Gary Younge argues that incidents of judicial racism in the US and UK are not the result of “people simply going rogue.”
“All these perpetrators were reported to the authorities and – in the absence of massive public pressure and media exposure – all were cleared. Both systemic and systematic, the racism these incidents and statistics reveal is embedded within the judicial system itself, rendering it part of the problem rather than the solution. This goes beyond the parental to the political. For it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the state, as currently imagined and experienced, is simply not set up with the purpose of protecting the rights of black people – indeed quite the opposite. It seems to function with the specific intent of violating their rights.”

Skin whitening
India Real Time’s Rupa Subramanya looks into India’s $400 million market for skin-whitening products, including one whose ad promises to “make a woman’s vagina fairer.”
“But before this gets branded a uniquely Indian phenomenon, consider that ever since the craze for the Brazilian wax, skin whitening for your private parts has been a thriving industry in the U.S. and elsewhere for some time. There are skin whitening products for just about every orifice. These were invented and marketed in the West long before they came to India. Like Coca-Cola and many other consumer goods, they’ve arrived here a little later.
The premium on fair skin isn’t unique to India and the developing world.”

Latest Developments, February 27

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OccupyLSX dismantled
Reuters reports that police have dismantled the Occupy London “anti-capitalist camp” after more than four months of protest outside St Paul’s cathedral.
“The [City of London] Corporation won its right to remove the camp after arguing in court that it hindered planning control, attracted crime, and interfered with a public right of way and the rights of those who wished to worship in the cathedral.
It won a case in the High Court last month for the tents to be taken away. The protesters went to the Court of Appeal arguing that their case had ‘unique and global’ significance but the appeal was rejected.
The protesters could still apply to the European Court of Human Rights.”

Latest from WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks has begun releasing over 5 million emails from Stratfor, a Texas-based company it says “fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations” and government agencies.
“The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.”

Class morality
The Globe and Mail reports on new findings that suggest the rich are more likely to behave unethically than the poor.
“In results from seven separate studies, they found a consistent tendency among those they termed ‘upper-class’ to be more likely to break the law while driving, take valued goods from others, lie in negotiations, cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and endorse unethical behaviour at work.
The reason for the ethical difference was simple, according to the paper being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a leading U.S. science journal. Wealthier people are more likely to have an attitude that greed is good.”

Legal opinions
The Huffington Post’s Mike Sacks writes that European governments do not share the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for equating “natural and judicial persons” when it comes to liability for crime committed overseas.
“In an ironic twist, the conservative [US Supreme Court] justices, who loudly resist being influenced by foreign legal trends, can look to European interpretations of U.S. law as the best cover for now discovering corporate immunity from international human rights allegations. In briefs filed in support of Royal Dutch Petroleum, the United Kingdom and Netherlands governments wrote that they have long opposed “overly broad assertions of extraterritorial civil jurisdiction” based on foreigners’ claims against foreign defendants for alleged activities in foreign countries. The German government took a similar stance. These positions arose out of all three nations’ express preference for multilateral agreements to resolve such problems, rather than unilateral action by any one country’s courts.”

Burn Berne
Kent Law School’s Alan Story believes there is little hope of  “a ‘balanced’ intellectual property agenda across the world” as long as the global copyright system is governed by the Berne Convention.
“In fact, the Berne Convention, the main provisions of which were drafted by a handful of industrialised countries in 1886 and is essentially unchanged in ideology or substantive assumptions since then, is one of the most lopsided and unequal international legal instruments one can imagine. Almost a decade ago in my Burn Berne article, I wrote that, for the peoples of the global South, Berne ‘operates as Western-based and unreconstructed colonial relic which they had no role in drafting and which was imposed on them without consultation in an earlier era’ ; I concluded the leading international copyright convention was both ‘unbalanced and unbalanceable.’
In 2012, I hold the same view. It is both illusory and delusory to think that a so-called balanced or re-balanced Berne and /or global copyright system can constructed; it is not only wishful, but also wistful, thinking and is based on a naive understanding of how this system operates, as well as its ideology and power relationships within it.”

Fair trade
The Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence argues the Fairtrade movement is guilty of making its case in the language of philanthropy, not rights.
“By doing that it throws responsibility for making sure farmers and workers are fairly paid back on to consumers – who may or may not be able to afford to take their morals shopping, especially in a recession – rather than on the big businesses, the international traders, the manufacturers and the retailers that make substantial profits out of the goods they sell.
Fair trade alone cannot address the core problem of excessively concentrated markets in which a handful of overpowerful transnational corporations dictate terms of trade and suck profits up into their own coffers.
What is needed for really fair trade is a more equitable distribution of the money in the chain. That will only be achieved with a shift in power which requires political action.”

EU overfishing
The Guardian reports that Spain is lobbying hard for stricter new fishing rules not to apply to EU boats operating outside European waters, despite evidence that current practices are overtaxing ocean resources and hurting the economy and diet of African coastal populations.
“According to the [Greenpeace] study, the EU paid €142.7m to secure the fishing rights for just one fleet of 34 giant factory trawlers to work in Mauritanian and Moroccan waters between 2006 and 2012. Of this, EU taxpayers paid €128m, and the companies only €14m.
The report shows that these 34 vessels catch 235,000 tonnes a year of fish from the Moroccan and Mauritanian waters, leaving little for the local fishers. Mauritania is one of seven Sahelian countries to have declared a food emergency in the last month and appealed for emergency aid.”

Closing loopholes
UC Berkeley’s Robert Reich cannot understand why US President Barack Obama is talking about cutting corporate taxes.
“Corporate taxes have plummeted as a share of total federal revenues. In 1953, under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, corporate taxes accounted for 32 per cent of total federal tax revenues. Now they’re only ten per cent.
But now the federal budget deficit is ballooning, and in less than a year major cuts are scheduled to slice everything from prenatal care to Medicare. So this would seem to be the ideal time to raise corporate taxes – or at the very least close corporate tax loopholes without lowering corporate rates.”