Middle East: ‘America in Retreat’: Why Neo-Isolationism Exploded Under Obama and What We Can Do About It - by James Kirchiek

Pulitzer Prize winner Bret Stephens’ new book looks at an America in retreat from global engagement.

One of President Barack Obama’s more annoying habits is a rhetorical propensity for describing policies in black-and-white terms. The nation can either accept his ideas or risk ghastly consequences.

Naturally when you paint the world in such stark colors, you see any and all opposition as delusional, malevolent, venal or a combination of all three. In no realm of policy-making has Obama’s obduracy been more profound than foreign affairs, the area about which he knows the least but presumes to know the most.

An early and memorable indication of Obama’s tendency to portray disagreement unfairly was his response to John McCain’s suggestion, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that America maintain a troop presence in Iraq for “maybe 100 years.” The U.S. maintains forces in Germany and Japan as a stabilizing presence decades after defeating those countries in war, the Republican nominee said, and the lives of its soldiers there are not under threat. Deliberately misconstruing McCain’s remarks in both letter and spirit, Obama assailed McCain as a warmonger, “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq.”

A generous appraisal of Obama’s comments might chalk them up to mere campaign rhetoric. That might have been possible had not Obama—acting against the advice of his Secretary of State, Joint Chiefs Chairman, two Secretaries of Defense, and numerous other national security officials—executed plans to remove all American troops from Iraq by December 2011. The results of that rash decision, the most dire of which has been the rise of ISIS, are now plain for us to see. Obama had inherited an Iraq that was largely pacified, yet so committed was he to reducing America’s footprint in the Middle East that he sacrificed a set of hard-won gains to fulfill an ideological commitment.

Read more: ‘America in Retreat’: Why Neo-Isolationism Exploded Under Obama and What We Can Do About It - The Daily Beast

A Sovereign Wealth Fund For The Eurozone? - by Henning Meyer

Social Europe Journal has just published its latest Research Essay “Public Capital in the 21st Century” by Giacomo Corneo. The main argument of the paper is that the state should become a kind of investment state in order to make sure that high returns on capital do not further increase inequality but benefit the wider public. To achieve this, Corneo argues that governments should set up sovereign wealth funds to manage their investments and take advantage of low interest rates on sovereign bonds as investments should be debt-financed.

Having read the paper I was wondering whether this would also be an option to create the much-touted fiscal capacity for the Eurozone. Such a mechanism wouldn’t need Eurozone taxes or tax harmonisation (although both would be desirable) and does not require an open-ended commitment to joint debt. Here is how it could work: Let’s assume a Eurozone debt instrument backed by all governments can borrow for 1.5% in financial markets.

 For the sake of it let’s assume an annual return of 6% on a globally diversified portfolio, which is a realistic scenario. 25% of the return would be required to service the debt and Corneo argues that the rest should be used to pay back the principal so the debt incurred will be repaid in 15 years or so. I would argue that the remaining 75% of the return should be split between repaying the principal and increasing the size of the fund. So an alternative split of the return could look like this: 50% repayment of debt, 25% debt service, 25% increasing the size of the fund.

The key points are that the initial debt will be fully repaid after a defined period of time (so there is no open-ended commitment to joint debt) and that such a sovereign wealth fund could create a significant amount of revenue that could be the income source for a Eurozone budget. The budget would be administered by a Eurozone group in the European Parliament and could be used to help stabilise the currency area.

Apart from the need to complement this pro-cyclical instrument with counter-cyclical measures (issuing debt for current spending rather than investment that would also be repaid with priority?) that should kick in if there is a general crisis, I cannot see a reason for why this wouldn’t work, especially given that a budget of about 2% of GDP is regarded as big enough to effectively counterbalance asymmetric shocks.

Read more : A Sovereign Wealth Fund For The Eurozone?

De waanzin van de consumptiemaatschappij - blijf kopen tot je er bij neervalt

 We leven in een consumptie gerichte maatschappij, waarin alles de “perfecte” kleur, de “perfecte” geur, het “perfecte” uiterlijk etc. moet hebben. Onze maatschappij is verwend en staat totaal niet meer in contact met de echte realiteit; de natuur en onze natuur. Alles wordt met behulp van de zogenaamde (Westerse) “perfectie standaard” beoordeeld.

Read more: De waanzin van de consumptiemaatschappij « Groene Nationalisten

Dutch language posts in Almere Digest

Almere Digest has  started publishing some of its posts in Dutch to meet a growing number of requests for this by some of our local readers.

For those of you who don't know Dutch and want to read the post in their own language just go to the right hand column of Almere Digest  and click on the symbol of the man who is puliing the light cord and copy past what you want translated from this blog. The translator is self explanatory.

We hope this tool will shed some light on all your translations requests.

Almere-Digest

Woede om VVD-gegraai .....

VVD-fractieleider Halbe Zijlstra heeft zich uw woede op zijn hals gehaald door een mooi verhaal op te hangen over uw loon, terwijl u flink wordt gekort op uw vakantiegeld.

Zijlstra liet gisteren weten dat u maandelijks meer nettoloon zult ontvangen. Met die uitlating probeerde de liberaal op slinkse wijze een nieuwe nivelleringsoperatie van het kabinet te verbloemen. U krijgt namelijk beduidend minder vakantiegeld.

Uiteindelijk moest minister Henk Kamp van Economische Zaken met de billen bloot tijdens het vragenuurtje, meldt De Telegraaf.

Middeninkomens zien tot ruim 250 euro vakantiegeld verdwijnen. De VVD  benadrukt echter dat er gekeken moet worden naar het "totaalplaatje".

"Wat een 'gebrabbel' van Halbe Zijlstra .......

Read more: PowNed : Woede om VVD-gegraai

'Nederlanders willen ziekenfonds terug' - privatisering kost belastingbetaler altijd meer geld

60 procent van de Nederlanders wil de zorgverzekeraars afschaffen en in plaats daarvan een publieke
basisverzekering invoeren. Dat blijkt uit een peiling die de SP heeft laten uitvoeren.

De regerings partij VVD voelt weinig voor het SP-plan. En dat terwijl uit de peiling blijkt dat een meerderheid van de VVD-stemmers ook voor afschaffing is.

Read more: 'Nederlanders willen ziekenfonds terug' | RTL Nieuws

Energy Renewables and the Private Sector: IKEA a shining star when it comes to efforts made by the private sector

The lion’s share of debate about the progress of renewable energy is missing an important dimension. It seems that the media, banks and NGOs largely value the worth of each renewable source by their rate of adoption at the national and international level. These measurements seem to rely on macro-economic indicators or on agreements such as that made last week by the U.S. and China. However, the efforts of private corporations to go green, while not wholly unnoticed, do not seem to weigh in. It would make no sense in most other industries to measure their health purely by public efforts. In fact, many renewable energy developers today are seeking to change their industry’s reputation as being dependent on government subsidies and costly to the taxpayer with little return. One way to fight this reputation is to show concrete evidence of global corporations going renewable. This week has given plenty of evidence of just that, with IKEA, Google and Amazon all making real commitments.

Back in March, IKEA acquired the Hoopeston wind farm in Illinois, which is set to produce more than enough energy to power all its stores and distribution stores in the country. 65% more. But this energy will not be sent to IKEA’s stores, instead, the Swedish retailer will sell it off as part of a strategy to offset its entire consumption by 2020. This week, an ever bigger announcement came. IKEA has purchased a 165MW wind farm in Cameron County, Texas, marking “the single largest renewable energy investment made by the IKEA Group globally to date.” IKEA goes on to say that it will invest $1.9 billion in renewables by the end of 2015.

Where IKEA is investing in renewables to offset its energy usage, Google and Amazon are doing so for a far more practical reason: data centers have incredibly high energy consumption and renewable projects can be a good way to reduce that burden. To power its new 600 million euro data center at Eemshaven in the Netherlands, Google has agreed to buy a wind farm being built by Eneco near Eemshaven. The 19-turbine 62MW wind farm will power the data center from day one, and comes on the heels of Google buying two other wind farms in Sweden to provide for its data center in Finland.

Other tech and retail leaders are making forays in the same direction, albeit with less emphasis. After being slammed on Greenpeace’s ranking of the green track records of IT leaders, Amazon seems to want to become more sustainable. Amazon Web Services, responsible for cloud computing, stated that it was taking a “long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint.” Unlike Google and IKEA, though, Amazon has not stated any outright investments it is planning on making. It will likely take years for Amazon to become fully renewable, but even doing so for its cloud computing needs would be a major achievement, given how the likes of Pinterest, Netflix and Spotify rely on Amazon’s cloud.

On the negative side of the equation, Walmart is slipping backwards, having used renewables for 3 percent of its energy needs in 2013, as opposed to 4 percent in 2011. Although long identifying itself in its corporate branding as a green leader, a new think tank has revealed that Walmart is relying on coal for 40% of its energy needs in the U.S. This is a particularly damning accusation since Walmart’s stores use more power than Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont combined, according to the report. Walmart immediately rebutted the report, saying it gets 24 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources—and that it would “expand its renewable energy projects and procurement to reach 7 billion kilowatt-hours of wind, solar, hydroelectric and biogas globally by 2020, up from 2.2 billion kilowatt-hours today.”

Whether companies are making quantifiable commitments to renewables or are fudging the statistics to look sustainable, it is becoming increasingly nonsensical to weigh up the value of renewable energy sources through public investment alone.

EU-Digest