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Latest Developments, April 16

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Kim prevails
Reuters reports that Jim Yong Kim has been chosen as the next World Bank president, thereby keeping alive the tradition that the US gets to decide who fills the position.
“The decision by the World Bank’s 25-member board was not unanimous, with emerging economies splitting their support. Brazil and South Africa backed [Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi] Okonjo-Iweala, while three sources said China and India supported Kim.
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Okonjo-Iweala congratulated Kim and said the competition had led to ‘important victories’ for developing nations, which have increasingly pushed for more say at both institutions.
Still, she said more effort was needed to end the ‘unfair tradition’ that ensured Washington’s dominance of the global development lender.”

National oil
The Canadian Press reports that Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has proposed a bill to nationalize an oil company currently controlled by a Spanish corporation.
“Fernandez said in an address to the country that the measure sent to congress on Monday is aimed at recovering the nation’s sovereignty over its hydrocarbon resources. She said the shares being expropriated will be split between the national and provincial governments.
The president complained that Argentina had a deficit of $3 billion last year as a net importer of gas and petroleum.”

G-77 awakes
Trinity College’s Vijay Prashad writes about the G-77’s resurgent feistiness in the context of the ongoing “crisis” that has engulfed the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
“[G-77 head Pisnau] Chanvitan’s statement complains that the G-77 has tried its best to be flexible with the negotiation, but ‘perhaps our constructiveness was viewed as weakness, and our accommodation viewed as capitulation’. The North has ‘regressed to behavior perhaps more appropriate to the founding days of UNCTAD, when Countries of the North felt they could dictate and marginalize developing countries from informed decision-making.’
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Remarkably, Chanvitan noted that the preparatory conference has seen ‘behavior that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neo-colonialism’. Such language has not been heard from the G-77 in decades. ‘Perhaps, in our desire for consensus,’ Chanvitan notes, ‘we have accommodated too much and this good faith was misunderstood, and abused. Perhaps this should end now.’ ”

World Bank and water
Corporate Accountability International has released a new report criticizing the World Bank for promoting water privatization in poor countries.
“The report, Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: The case for the World Bank to divest, documents the failures of water privatization efforts. It states that ‘thirty-four percent of all private water contracts marketwide entered between 2000 and 2010 have failed or are in distress – four times the failure rates of comparable infrastructure projects in the electric and transportation sectors.’
Despite these failures, the World Banks is set to spend billions on privatization efforts. The ‘Bank’s private-sector arm is aiming to increase investments to $1 billion each year beginning in 2013,’ the group states.”

British tax avoidance
ActionAid’s Aida Kiangi criticizes proposed new UK laws that would make it even easier for British companies to get out of paying “their fair share of taxes in developing countries like Tanzania,” which are already feeling the effects of corporate tax avoidance.
“Research by ActionAid has revealed that 23 of the FTSE 100 firms now operate in Tanzania. Between them, these companies have 3,166 sister companies located in tax havens. Barclays has 174 companies registered in the Cayman Islands alone.
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The sad fact is that both the Tanzanian and UK governments are encouraging damaging tax competition between countries. While this benefits big business, it means there isn’t sufficient revenue to invest in basic services and infrastructure. Tanzania has experienced strong growth rates over the last few years, but this simply hasn’t translated into improvements in the lives of the vast majority of Tanzanians.”

Africa reporting
The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch writes that despite efforts to present Africa in a less condescending light, Western media outlets still give too little voice to African journalists.
“At the height of Liberia’s civil war in 2003, for example, as rebels surrounded the capital Monrovia and US troops were drafted in, Liberian journalists looked on from their shelled out offices as the complex conflict they had spent the past decade covering was scooped up by western reporters. In Mali, the same thing is happening now.
The result of the continuing tendency to ignore Africans is a lamentable lack of specialist African coverage in the world’s media. An academic debate about this problem has been thriving for some time. In the meantime, however, informed consumers of African news have adopted a more proactive approach, using social networking to vent with immediate effect.”

Commodities bubble
Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma argues that the commodity boom is a much darker bubble than its high-tech predecessor, but a bubble nonetheless.
“The hype has created a new industry that turns commodities into financial products that can be traded like stocks. Oil, wheat, and platinum used to be sold primarily as raw materials, and now they are sold largely as speculative investments. Copper is piling up in bonded warehouses not because the owners plan to use it to make wire, but because speculators are sitting on it, like gold, figuring that they can sell it one day for a huge profit. Daily trading in oil now dwarfs daily consumption of oil, running up prices. While rising prices for stocks–tech ones included–generally boost the economy, high prices for staples like oil impose unavoidable costs on businesses and consumers and act as a profound drag on the economy.”

African globalization
In a Q&A with Africa is a Country, filmmaker Nuotama Frances Bodomo talks about space, place and globalization.
“I think we are used to ascribing human beings to sectioned portions of earth, giving them a place that is holistically and naturally theirs (the same way we are used to thinking that a person has a soul that cleanly lives in a body). But this understanding of home is culturally specific and has a history, which means that it changes and is changed over time. Something about a home-space feels obsolete nowadays. To organize ourselves in terms of nationality or homeland feels obsolete. But there is still a desire to have that. We haven’t quite made the paradigm shift. Something feels lost, but I can’t tell you what we have to replace it with.”

Latest Developments, March 28

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Syrian math
Embassy Magazine’s Scott Taylor compares fatalities in Arab-Spring Syria and US-occupied Iraq.
“According to the US State Department, approximately 10,000 Syrians have been killed in the fighting over the past 12 months (this figure includes both pro-regime security forces and rebel fighters).
As a counterweight to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s moral outrage at the Syrian violence, one need only look at the previous nine years, during which America occupied Syria’s neighbour.
In the US response to armed uprisings and inter-ethnic violence in Iraq, the lowest official estimate of casualties published by the Iraqi Body Count Project puts the death toll as of January 2012 at over 272,000.
While the death toll fluctuated during those years, the rough math brings us to an annual loss of 30,000 Iraqi lives per year—three times that of the current ‘unacceptable’ level of civil war violence in Syria.”

Pakistan’s drone opposition
The Associated Press reports Pakistan recently rejected concessions offered by US officials scrambling to save their drone campaign after “a series of incidents throughout 2011” damaged the two countries’ relationship.
“CIA Director David Petraeus, who met with Pakistan’s then-spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha at a meeting in London in January, offered to give Pakistan advance notice of future CIA drone strikes against targets on its territory in a bid to keep Pakistan from blocking the strikes — arguably one of the most potent U.S. tools against al-Qaida.
The CIA chief also offered to apply new limits on the types of targets hit, said a senior U.S. intelligence official briefed on the meetings. No longer would large groups of armed men rate near-automatic action, as they had in the past — one of the so-called ‘signature’ strikes, where CIA targeters deemed certain groups and behavior as clearly indicative of militant activity.”

Global Compact housecleaning
The Guardian reports that the UN Global Compact – “the world’s largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative” – is set to kick out more than 750 businesses over the next six months.
“Non-governmental organisations have long criticised the Global Compact, which promotes 10 principles in the areas of human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption, because it has no effective monitoring and enforcement provisions.
They also accuse businesses of using it to oppose any binding international regulation on corporate accountability and for benefitting from the Global Compact’s logo, a blue globe and a laurel wreath, which is very similar to the UN logo, while continuing to perpetrate human rights and environmental abuses.”

Climate change ruling
Reuters reports that an Australian court has ruled Swiss mining giant Xstrata can proceed with developing a massive coal mine despite arguments that it will contribute to climate change.
“The case against the 22 million metric tons (24.2 million tons) per year open-cut Wandoan coal mine is the first to use climate change as the primary argument against the development of a mine, according to Friends of the Earth.
Xstrata argued in the case that stopping the Wandoan coal project would not affect the total amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, since the coal that it would have produced by Wandoan would be replaced by coal produced elsewhere.
The Land Court agreed, saying in its ruling, ‘It is difficult to see from the evidence that this project will cause any relevant impact on the environment.’ ”

ICC’s Africa problem
Harvard Law School graduate student Nanjala Nyabola argues that the International Criminal Court has yet to earn the confidence of Africans, a problem that is especially troubling because all 28 people indicted by the court so far come from Africa.
“The answer may lie in investing universal jurisdiction in various African supreme or high courts, simply by passing statutes that give these courts authority to try cases related to the most egregious violations of human rights on the continent.
Using the judiciaries of smaller states in Africa that have succeeded in earning the confidence of their people provides an alternative that takes alleged offenders out of the immediate context of the crimes but still respects the idea of ‘African solutions for African problems’. Mauritius, Namibia, Botswana, Ghana – these are all nations with the capacity (albeit with significant assistance) to set up special chambers akin to those in Cambodia to try such cases.”

Misguided Principles
The University of Ottawa’s Penelope Simons argues that the UN’s current framework on addressing corporate human rights impunity is “misconceived.”
“[This article] seeks to demonstrate the problems with the [UN secretary-general’s special representative for business and human rights (SRSG)]’s approach by arguing that, along with the interventions of international financial institutions in the economies of developing states, one of the most significant impediments to corporate human rights accountability is the structure of the international legal system itself… It is argued that powerful states have used international law and international institutions to create a globalised legal environment which protects and facilitates corporate activity and, although the SRSG identified symptoms of this reality during his tenure, he did not examine the deep structural aspects of this problem. This article demonstrates that such an examination would have revealed the crucial need for binding international human rights obligations for business entities in any adequate strategy aimed at addressing corporate impunity.”

Third British Empire
Author Dan Hind argues that although its days of colonization and slave trading are over, Britain is now at the centre of a new imperial enterprise whose “signature crime is tax evasion.”
“Nowadays, if you believe what you’re told by respectable historians and broadcasters, Britain has turned its back on its imperial past and is trying as best it can to make its way as an ordinary nation. The reality is somewhat more complicated. One day, perhaps history will describe a third British Empire, organised around the country’s offshore financial infrastructure and its substantial diplomatic, intelligence and communications resources. Having given up the appearance of empire, the British have sought to reclaim its substance.”

Symmetry of slaughter
Syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer contrasts the public discourse surrounding recent mass murders committed by a Muslim man in France and an American soldier in Afghanistan.
“Predictably, Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front, called on French voters to ‘fight…against these politico-religious fundamentalists who are killing our Christian children, our Christian young men.’
The incumbent right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says much the same thing, but less bluntly.
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As for the Bales atrocity, it is already being written off by the American media and public as a meaningless aberration that tells us nothing about US foreign policy or national character.”

Latest Developments, March 14

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ICC’s big day
The Independent reports that even as the International Criminal Court handed down its first ever verdict – finding Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers – questions remain about the court’s ability to overcome the challenges it faces.
“The complicated nature of building cases in the absence of international legal precedent and the necessity of gaining support from states for its intervention, as well as the uneven support for the Rome treaty by major powers such as the United States, have undermined the court’s efforts to gain acceptance. The ICC and its controversial outgoing chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, have been criticised in some quarters for focusing exclusively on Africa. In an effort to weaken the accusations of an anti-African bias the ICC has appointed Fatou Bensouda from the Gambia to replace the departing Argentinian.”

Voluntary solutions
The Guardian reports not everyone is impressed by a new set of proposed “voluntary global guidelines” on land governance and resource rights that would theoretically address the issue of mass land grabs by foreign investors in poor countries.
“ ‘The breadth of participants, including governments, has seen the content watered down to secure consensus. Value for the immense time and money invested in producing the guidelines may be hard to come by,’ said Liz Alden Wily, an international land tenure specialist.  ‘These are only guidelines after all, not binding on the very governments, companies, elites and investors who are already so heavily involved in land and resource capture.’
She said the time and money might have been better spent reframing international trade law, on which resource exploitation so heavily depends, and ‘bringing feeble human rights law up to scratch. Or invested in mobilising the millions of poor affected by policies and laws.’
Alden Wily added: ‘It will be interesting to see if the global aid community promoting these guidelines will spend the same effort to translate the advice into 150 languages and get copies down to every poor community in the developing world. That’s a billion copies right there.’ ”

Water rights
Reuters AlertNet reports that NGOs were unable to get the World Water Forum declaration amended to include “an unequivocal commitment to the U.N.-recognised rights to water and sanitation.”
“…Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch – a small U.S.-based NGO – described the declaration as ‘a step backwards for water justice’, noting that signatures had not even been collected from nations that endorsed it. “The entire event itself is a corporate tradeshow parading as a multilateral forum,” she added.
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The firms supporting the event include French energy giant EDF, Veolia Eau, Bouygues Construction, HSBC and JCDecaux.”

WHO woes
Intellectual Property Watch reports on allegations that the private sector is using “financial leverage to gain undue influence” in the cash-strapped World Health Organization.
“A recent piece for the non-governmental Third World Network made the assertion based on developments such as the presence of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates sharing the stage with WHO Director General Margaret Chan at the WHO members annual meeting last year, and the presence of industry interests at a civil society meeting before last year’s UN summit on non-communicable diseases.
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Chan has sought repeatedly to assure member states that the WHO understands the necessary line between any stakeholders. But some see industry links in the reform proposals emerging from the WHO, the group said.”

Environmentalists, Martians and terrorists
The Huffington Post reports that the campaign by Canada’s ruling party against environmental groups took a “jaw-droppingly bizarre” turn when a Conservative senator asked “if environmentalists are willing to accept money from Martians,” would they also take money from Al Qaeda, Hamas or the Taliban?
“Many environmentalists are upset with [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper’s seeming obsession with the millions they receive each year in charitable funding from the U.S., while ignoring the millions more spent in Canada each year by foreign business interests.
Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell pointed out that the Tories have no trouble with foreign funding as long as it benefits it’s own causes, such as the National Rifle Association petitioning to kill the long gun registry.
‘Funding flows in all directions across borders, and to somehow single out a subset just because you don’t like the stance of certain organizations and then demonize them for it for receiving the funding…is really a reprehensible treatment,’ Peter Robinson, the chief executive officer of the David Suzuki Foundation told HuffPost.”

Tax haven runaround
EUobserver reports the EU’s top tax official is running into opposition from certain member countries over attempts to tackle tax avoidance in Switzerland.
“Algirdas Semeta told EUobserver that bank secrecy makes it impossible to say how much potential tax income is being lost even as EU countries cut wages and public services amid the financial crisis. But it is likely to be big bucks: Switzerland currently hands over €330 million a year in tax payments to EU countries, while its banks manage €1.5 trillion of private wealth.”

Bizjet bribes
Tulsa World reports an American aviation company and its German parent have agreed to a deal with US authorities over alleged bribes paid to Mexican officials between 2004 and 2010.
“In many instances, Bizjet allegedly paid the bribes directly to the foreign officials. On other occasions, Bizjet is accused of funneling the bribes through a shell company owned and operated by a person who was then a Bizjet sales manager.
The Justice Department also stated that Lufthansa Technik — which it described as Bizjet’s “indirect parent company” — also entered into an agreement with DOJ in connection with the purported unlawful payments by Bizjet and the directors, officers, employees and agents involved in the conspiracy.”

Bankers vs. Robin Hood
Intelligence Capital’s Avinash Persaud compares the London banking industry’s arguments against a proposed financial transaction tax, aka the Robin Hood Tax, to past denials of the link between cigarettes and cancer.
“Listening to some London bankers, you would think that a 0.1% tax would usher in a nuclear winter. Bankers are effectively saying that, while they justify their high pay with claims of superior creativity, credibility and connectivity, all of that cannot compete with a tax on each transaction of just one tenth of one per cent. If, despite the industry receiving billions in implicit public subsidies and guarantees, the largest sector in the UK economy hangs by such a thin thread, its value-added must be seriously questioned.”

Latest Developments, February 28

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Corporate immunity
The Huffington Post reports that the US Supreme Court looks set to decide that corporations should not be held liable for human rights violations committed overseas. “The Court was hearing oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, which was brought under a founding-era law, commonly called the Alien Tort Statute, that allows foreign nationals to bring civil lawsuits in U.S. federal courts ‘for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.’ The 12 Nigerian plaintiffs contend that Shell Oil’s parent company aided and abetted the Nigerian government in its torture and extrajudicial killing of environmental and human rights protesters resisting Shell’s operations in Nigeria in the 1990s.
The Alien Tort Statute says nothing about what types of defendants — corporate, individual, state — may be sued. In the past year, the four appeals courts to take on the issue of corporate liability have divided 3-to-1 in favor of those bringing the lawsuits. But Tuesday’s oral argument reinforced the relevancy of another aspect of all these decisions: their partisan nature. Save one defection from each side, every Democrat-appointed judge held for corporate liability, and every Republican appointee found for corporate immunity.”

Nuclear dysfunction
Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans argues the international community has lost its momentum on nuclear disarmament and calls for the G20 to take up the file.
“With its foreign ministers meeting in Mexico this month to discuss broader global governance issues, the G-20 is beginning to move beyond a narrow economic focus. That is to be welcomed. Economic destruction causes immense and intolerable human misery. But there are only two global threats that, if mishandled, can destroy life on this planet as we know it. And nuclear weapons can kill us a lot faster than CO2 can.”

Latin American legalization
Ralph Espach of the Center for Naval Analyses writes that Mexican, Colombian and Guatemalan leaders are discussing, over US objections, the possibility of legalizing the drug trade within their region.
“It is easy to see why. The drug war has been a disaster for the Latin American countries fighting it, especially Mexico, and Central Americans’ suspicion that legalization could be less painful and costly is reasonable. Whether or not legalization would in fact be a good thing for Central America, the situation is desperate enough that they must at least consider their options.”

Reverse colonization
Africa is a Country’s Buefixe takes exception to the tone of recent media reports on the changing relationship between debt-ridden Portugal and its booming former colony Angola.
“Then there is the quote from the foreign investment lawyer, Tiago Caidado Guerreiro, who says that ‘we’re being colonized after 500 years by them,’ referring to investments by Angolans in the Portuguese economy. True, wealthy, politically powerful Angolans have been buying up parcels of Portuguese companies, but that does not equal colonization, not by a long shot. Angolans are not, for example, creating settler colonies in Portugal, or changing the nature and character of local institutions of education, government and culture.”

Olympic sweatshops
just-style reports on new measures announced by organizers of the London Olympics following the discovery of labour abuses at factories making Olympic products.
“[London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games] will publish the names and locations of factories in China and the UK covering over 70% of the licensed products produced for London 2012, with a focus on licensees that still have production remaining.
It will make information about employment rights, based on national laws and LOCOG’s ethical code, available in Chinese and English, and establish a Chinese language hotline so that workers who feel they are being treated unfairly can either call or text to complain about their treatment.
It will also provide training for some of the workers in the various Olympic supply chains to make them more aware of their rights.”

Patent bullying
Bloomberg reports a US judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a group of American organic farmers against agribusiness giant Monsanto regarding patents for genetically modified seeds.
“ ‘[U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald’s] decision to deny farmers the right to seek legal protection from one of the world’s foremost patent bullies is gravely disappointing,’ Daniel Ravicher, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mail. ‘Her belief that farmers are acting unreasonable when they stop growing certain crops to avoid being sued by Monsanto for patent infringement should their crops become contaminated maligns the intelligence and integrity of those farmers.’ ”

General Electric’s tax bill
Citizens for Tax Justice alleges that General Electric paid “at most 2.3 percent” in US federal income taxes on $81.2 billion in profits over the last decade.
“[Citizens for Tax Justice’s Bob] McIntyre noted that GE has yet to pay even that paltry 2.3 percent. In fact, at the end of 2011, GE reports that it has claimed $3.9 billion in cumulative income tax reductions on its tax returns over the years that it has not reported in its shareholder reports — because it expects the IRS will not approve these ‘uncertain’ tax breaks, and GE will have to give the money back.
GE is one of 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies profiled in ‘Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010.’ The report shows GE is one of 30 major U.S. corporations that paid zero – or less – in federal income taxes in the last three years.”

Post-aid landscape
The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie makes the case for a diminished role for the OECD’s development assistance committee (DAC) that would better reflect the world’s shifting power relations.
“Rather than seeking to be a global broker of development co-operation, which was never going to work in a newly balanced world, the OECD should just be a club of particularly rich countries, and should meet with clubs comprising other countries to bash out agreements. Such debtors’ or recipients’ clubs have long been needed to balance the power of the DAC or the Paris Club (which manages sovereign debts), and may now emerge.”

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.”