South America: Suriname's president warns U.S. over interference

President Desi Bouterse :" a stained history"

Suriname's President Desi Bouterse warned on Tuesday that the U.S. ambassador may need to leave the country due to the alleged interference in the upcoming election.

The U.S. ambassador in Suriname will most likely get a warning letter from the government of Suriname on Feb. 26,in which he will be asked to defend himself, said Bouterse during a ceremony commemorating the Revolution Day.

"If the ambassador cannot properly defend himself,he may be asked to leave the country," he added.

According to Bouterse, the U.S. ambassador said and did things to avoid the coming election in Suriname because "the other president is not ready."

Bouterse said he is well aware of possible scenarios to influence the election results, but they do not worry him.

"No matter the election is held earlier or later,the opposition has no chance of winning. The president that the people of Suriname want will come to power," Bouterse noted.

He stressed that Suriname is not happy with interference from foreign countries in its national matters.

The general election for a new parliament and government in Suriname is scheduled to be held in May 2015, but the political battle has already broken out.

A member of the Suriname opposition party NPS commented: "the Americans will probably laugh at this - its like the movie called "the Mouse that roared"

EU-Digest

Turkish PM Corruption Activities Exposed: Turkey PM Erdogan says 'tapped' phone call to son 'fabricated'

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has angrily condemned as fabricated an audio recording that appears to show him talking to his son about hiding large sums of money.

He said the recording, allegedly tapped and posted on social media, was a "treacherous attack".
It appears to reveal Mr Erdogan asking his son Bilal to dispose of millions of euros in cash from a house.

The opposition has called for the prime minister's resignation.

The recordings, which could not be independently verified, were said to be of four conversations dating back to 17 December, when the sons of three ministers and business allies of the prime minister were detained in a high-level corruption investigation.

Correspondents say that the inquiry has presented a major challenge to Mr Erdogan's 11 years in power ahead of key local elections in March.

Cagil Kasapoglu from BBC Turkish says that, interestingly, neither the prime minister nor his party's spokespeople have denied that the voices on the recording belong to Erdogan and his son.

Their statement so far is that their voices were "montaged" to implicate them, our correspondent says.

During the conversation, a voice can be heard discussing how to reduce the funds to "zero" by distributing them among several businessmen.

At one point, the second voice says some 30 million euros ($40m/£24m) remains to be disposed of.

Read more: BBC News - Turkey PM Erdogan says 'tapped' phone call to son 'fabricated'

Ukraine peace deal brokered by EU, opens way for early election - by Natalia Zinets and Sabine Siebold

Ukraine's opposition leaders signed an EU-mediated peace deal with President Viktor Yanukovich on Friday, aiming to resolve a political crisis in which dozens have been killed and opening the way for an early presidential election this year.

Under pressure to quit from mass demonstrations in Kiev, Russian-backed Yanukovich made a series of concessions to his pro-European opponents, including a national unity government and constitutional change to reduce his powers, as well as bringing forward the poll.

"There are no steps that we should not take to restore peace in Ukraine," the president said in announcing his concessions before the deal was signed. "I announce that I am initiating early elections."

He said Ukraine would revert to a previous constitution under which parliament had greater control over the make-up of the government, including the prime minister.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, one of the EU mediators, said the deal provided for a presidential election this year, although no date had been set. The vote had been due in March 2015.

A Reuters correspondent at the signing in the presidential headquarters said Yanukovich, 63, a towering former Soviet regional transport official with two convictions for assault, did not smile during a ceremony lasting several minutes.

Opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko, a retired world boxing champion, switched his nameplate to avoid sitting next to the president.

The European mediators signed as witnesses but a Russian envoy present did not sign the document.


Read more: Ukraine peace deal signed, opens way for early election | Reuters

Mexico - NAFTA: The "Three Caballeros" meet In Mexico: "Poor Results, No Deals and Many Promisses"

NAFTA Showtime: Stephen Harper, Enrique Peña Nieto, and Barrack Obama

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation noted: "Jean Chretien famously pronounced his last G8 summit as prime minister a success. When asked why, he replied, "Because it could have been a disaster.'
'
That same logic could be applied to this past weeks meeting of the three North American leaders in Toluca, Mexico.

Even though the" three Caballeros" called NAFTA a great success - looking at the results - tells another story. .

The Financial Times wrote about NAFTA: "Treally wenty years into Nafta, Mexico has too many criminals and not enough policemen; too many workers earning low wages and not enough skilled jobs; too many false dawns and not enough economic growth.

NAFTA really is a big economic failure. From 1994 through 2003, the Mexican economy has grown by only 11 percent per person. This is less than one-fourth the rate of growth that Mexico experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the relevant economic comparison for anyone who wants to evaluate Mexico's experience with NAFTA.

Of course, the reforms embodied in NAFTA did not begin in 1994 - they started in the early 1980s. But if we take the longer view, it looks even worse: From 1980 to the present, income per person in Mexico has grown by about 19 percent. This compares to 93 percent for the 1960-1979 (somewhat shorter) period. In other words, there is no economic evidence that the NAFTA model is a success at least not for the tax paying public.

U.S. economic winners and losers under NAFTA vary with company size, type of industry or sector, and geographical location. Sectors affected positively include planes, trains and automobiles, large agri-businesses, appliance makers and energy corporations. Clearly, large multi-national companies with investment capacities, world-market savvy and capital resources have benefited from protected investment and cheap labor. These companies enhanced management performance-based compensation while putting downward pressure on production-worker wages and benefits, collective bargaining clout and available jobs, especially in manufacturing. Many view their actions as a major contributor to compensation inequality.

According to one estimate, workers in Canada and Mexico have displaced 829,280 U.S. jobs, mostly high-wage positions in manufacturing. The heaviest U.S. manufacturing-job losses were in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Connecticut, New Jersey, California, Indiana and Florida. 

Canada has so far experienced significant benefit from:

• U.S. investment in automotive production,
• Increases in oil exports to the U.S. and the rest of the world,
• Increases in shipment of beef, agricultural, wood and paper products to the U.S.
• Export of mineral and mining products, which have fared well in U.S. markets.

Canada has, however, also experienced some losses in narrow sectors such as specialty steel production and processed foods due to U.S. imports.

Overall the conclusion is that NAFTA has not lived up to the high expectations of its proponents. It has made many U.S. companies and investors rich - and their managements even richer. But it has also cost many U.S. manufacturing workers their livelihoods while failing to raise living standards for most Mexicans. Any major market changes not dictated by market forces usually lead to both opportunity and loss, and this has happened with NAFTA. 

EU-Digest

Russia: President Vladimir Putin deserves kudos for 2014 Sochi Olympics - a job well done

President Vladimir Putin

Even though most of us in the Western Press had initially used every possible occasion to be critical about a variety of issues surrounding  the Sochi Olympics project, the Olympics not only got off to a brilliant start, but also throughout the games showed to be a smooth and perfectly managed operation.

This was recognized by just about everyone afterwards.

Olympic Committee officials went to great lengths to praise these much-maligned Games in their closing news conference.

"They've done a phenomenal job," said USOC chairman Larry Probst, mentioning everything from smooth transportation to Vladimir Putin's presence throughout the previous 15 days. "(Putin) has really owned these Games," he said.

Like it or not, President Vladimir Putin deserves to receive Kudos, not only for these Olympic games, but also for doing everything in his power to turn Sochi into a household word and exposing a cultural, warm and friendly face of  Russia to the rest of world.

Indeed, Mr. Putin might not be everyone's friend - which great leader ever is- but he will certainly be viewed by historians later as the Russian leader who picked up Russia by the bootstraps, after it was down and nearly out when the Soviet Union fell apart, and turning it into the modern society it is today.   

According to Russian public opinion polls, Mr Putin not only remains popular - his popularity is even rising.  In the latest poll, taken in December 2013, by the independent research organization, the Levada Centre, 68 per cent of respondents said that if new presidential elections were held this they would vote for Putin. This was up by 10 per cent from December 2012.

Why is Mr. Putin so popular at home? The simple answer is that the Russian population of 144 million is much better off today than it has ever been. Real incomes have risen substantially over the past decade, and the share of the population living below the poverty line has fallen.

The range of available consumer goods is worlds apart from when the Soviet Union fell apart little more than two decades ago.  Many of the middle class Russian families are now taking vacations outside their country and in the summer you will now find Russians vacationers just about everywhere in the world with a large contingent  in Turkey and Thailand..

During his two terms as president, Putin signed into law a series of liberal economic reforms, such as the flat income tax of 13 percent, a reduced profits tax, a new Land Code and a new edition (2006) of the Civil Code. Within this period, poverty in Russia was cut by more than half and real GDP has grown rapidly.

Some of the main features of Putin's regime so far have been: development of a corporatist system by pursuing close ties with business organizations, social stability and co-optation of opposition parties.

In 2005, Putin launched National Priority Projects in the fields of health care, education, housing and agriculture. In his May 2006 annual speech, Putin proposed increasing maternity benefits and prenatal care for women. Putin was strident about the need to reform the judiciary considering the present federal judiciary "Sovietesque", wherein many of the judges hand down the same verdicts as they would under the old Soviet judiciary structure, and preferring instead a judiciary that interpreted and implemented the code to the current situation.

In 2005, responsibility for federal prisons was transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice.

The most high-profile change within the national priority project frameworks was probably the 2006 across-the-board increase in wages in healthcare and education, as well as the decision to modernize equipment in both sectors in 2006 and 2007.

So far during Putin's government, poverty was cut more than half and real GDP has grown rapidly.

In a rare sign of emotion and patriotism, he once said in an interview with Time magazine: "Russia is an ancient country with historical, profound traditions and a very powerful moral foundation. And this foundation is a love for the Motherland and patriotism. Patriotism in the best sense of that word. Incidentally, I think that to a certain extent, to a significant extent, this is also attributable to the American people."

Kudos Mr. Putin, Sochi was a job well done.

EU-Digest

Economic Indicators: The Zombie Numbers That Rule the U.S. and Global Economy - by Zachary Karabell

Economic Indicators have outlived their time

This Thursday ( February 21) the Conference Board, a global business association, released its monthly index of “leading economic indicators.”

Like the unemployment and inflation, housing starts, G.D.P. changes and other figures, these numbers arrive in metronomic waves. Financial services like Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Reuters blast them out the moment they’re released. Stock markets will often respond within seconds. Commentators and policy makers attribute to them a near-cosmic significance.

We act as if they are markers from time immemorial, but in fact they were invented for modern industrial nations after the Depression and World War II and are now seriously outdated.

Take gross domestic product. Derived from formulas set down by the economist Simon Kuznets and others in the 1930s, its limitations have long been recognized, none more eloquently than by Robert F. Kennedy in a famous speech in 1968 when he declared that it measured everything except that which is worth measuring.

GDP treats all output as a positive. When you buy LED lights that obviate the need to spend on incandescent bulbs and reduce energy consumption, GDP goes down and what should be an unmitigated good becomes a statistical negative. If a coal company pollutes a river, the cleanup costs are positive for GDP, as are any health care costs for those harmed.

What’s more, we have also come to assume that with output comes more spending and employment, but factories today are powered by robotics and software, and robots don’t buy more lattes and shoes.

GDP is a good number for a nation that produces lots of stuff made by lots of workers, but for an information economy grounded in services and intellectual property and awash in apps that cost nothing yet enable commerce, it is not up to the task. Nor are many of our indicators. Our trade figures treat an iPhone made—more accurately, assembled—in China with no reference to the intellectual property created by Apple in California.

Yes, large corporations have economists who attempt to draw correlations between macro-indicators and business trends, and companies decide on how to much to spend based in part on a read of future interest rates, growth trends, and inflation. But even here, the connection between big numbers and business realities has broken down. If national retail sales that measure big stores in malls are weak, that says nothing about how much e-commerce might be up. If consumer spending writ large sags, that says nothing about higher end spending at mass luxury stores like Michael Kors or lower-end retailers such as Dollar Tree. Making decisions based on what the indicators say is almost certainly a recipe for making the wrong decisions.

Weaning ourselves from our obsession with economic indicators is a vital step to grappling with the world as it is and making decisions that yield positive results. Individuals, companies, and governments will find their interests best served by creative approaches that craft indicators that draw on the wealth of big data information rather than cramming all reality into a few simple averages. The indicators of the 20th did yeoman service in taming the worst extremes of economic cycles. We should thank them, and move on.

Read more: The Zombie Numbers That Rule the U.S. Economy - Zachary Karabell - The Atlantic

Global GNP: Holland outside the EU would be reduced to the same level of global importance as Florida

Netherlands equal to state of Florida

How does the U.S. economy measure up to the rest of the world? You could find out by poring over a table of GDP figures, or you could get a snap perspective from this map, which renames every U.S. state according to a country with a matching GDP.

One million Rhode Islanders have as much wealth as 15 million Guatemalans. Texas has an economy the size of Australia’s. And New York has met its match, Mexico.

The map from economist Mark J. Perry at the American Enterprise Institute puts America’s $16 trillion GDP in perspective. “The map and these statistics help remind us of the enormity of the economic powerhouse we live in,” Perry writes, at least to the 4% of the world’s population that lives there.

The Netherlands economy (GDP) is approximately the same as that of the state Florida in the USA with a similar number of inhabitants (17 million people) . 

This report underscore the fact that if the EU would break up - as most of the Eurosceptics would like to see happen -  individual EU member-states would not be able to play any significant role on the global scene in relation to international trade, economics, finances, jurisdiction or military matters. 

In other words a united Europe can be a master of its own fate but divided it will fall.

Read more: GDP Map of U.S. States Compared to World | TIME.com