EU - US Trade Negotiiations: Greenpeace Netherlands releases TTIP documents

TTIP: ggiving multi-national corporations more power

Today (May 2, 2016) Greenpeace Netherlands releases secret documents of the EU-US TTIP negotiations. On www.ttip-leaks.org the documents will be made available for everyone to read, because democracy needs transparency.

Sylvia Borren, Executive Director Greenpeace Netherlands noted:.
  
“These documents make clear the scale and scope of the trade citizens of the United States and the European Union are being asked to make in pursuit of corporate profits. It is time for the negotiations to stop, and the debate to begin.

Should we be able to act when we have reasonable grounds to believe our health and wellbeing is at risk, or must we wait until the damage is done?

Were our governments serious in Paris when they said they would do what was necessary to protect the planet, and keep climate change under 1.5 degrees?

Environmental protection should not be seen as a barrier to trade, but as a safeguard for our health, and the health of future generations.

We call on citizens, civil society, politicians and businesses to engage in this debate openly and without fear. We call on the negotiators to release the latest, complete text to facilitate that discussion, and we ask that the negotiations be stopped until these questions, and many more have been answered. Until we can fully engage in a debate about the standards we and our planet need and want”

The documents that Greenpeace Netherlands has released comprise about half of the draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US (New York, 25-29 April 2016).

As far as we know the final document will consist of 25 to 30 chapters and many extensive annexes. The EU Commission published an overview stating that they have now 17 consolidated texts. This means the documents released by Greenpeace Netherlands encompass 3/4 of the existing consolidated texts.[1]
Consolidated texts are those where the EU and US positions on issues are shown side by side.

This step in the negotiation process allows us to see the areas where the EU and US are close to agreement, and where compromises and concessions would still need to be made. Of the documents released by Greenpeace Netherlands, in total 248 pages, 13 chapters offer for the first time the position of the US.

To make sure the documents were not fake, the documents were studied by both Greenpeace Netherlands and Rechercheverbund NDR, WDR und Süddeutsche Zeitung, a renowned German investigative research partnership which analysed them and compared them to existing documents.

The Rechercheverbund, which consists of different German media outlets, has covered, amongst other big stories, the Snowden leaks and the recent Volkswagen emissions scandals.

First conclusions made following review of the report reveal that there are four aspects are of serious concern.

1) Long standing environmental protections appear to be dropped
2) Climate protection will be harder under TTIP 
3) The end of the precautionary principle
4) Opening the door for corporate takeover 

TTIP is really only about giving multi-national corporations more power and to slowly but surely dismantle European laws on Privacy, Pollution, GMO, Pesticides , Food additives, Healthcare, Insurance, Finance and the list goes on and on. 

Let us keep in mind the EU is a market of more than 500 million people with the worlds no one GNP.  Obviously a juicy fruit to pick, and eventually destro,y by our "treasured corporate friends" across the "big pond" .

 Read more Greenpeace Netherlands releases TTIP documents | Greenpeace International

Almere-Digest

May Day Celebrations Europe: National issues highlighted in Europe’s May Day rallies

May Day celebrations turned sour in Istanbul as Turkish police fired tear gas and sprayed water cannon at anti-government protesters.

They were prevented from entering the main Taksim Square which was closed by the authorities.
A man was killed in an accident after being run over by a police truck
.
Security was tight with some 15,000 police deployed, following two terrorist attacks in the city this year blamed on ISIL.

In Paris the events were marked by opposition to the French government’s labour reforms, aimed at freeing up the hiring and firing of workers to tackle chronic unemployment.

One young protester in the Place de la Bastille echoed the feelings of many: “liberalising the labour market is not democratic and social progress,” he said.

Many countries had their own particular theme. In Germany unions called on people to oppose xenophobia , right-wing extremism and a divided society.

The main rally took place in Stuttgart, where the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was holding its congress – and on Sunday, voted to back an election manifesto saying Islam was incompatible with the constitution.

Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella paid tribute to people killed at the workplace, laying a wreath at the headquarters in Rome of the government agency for insurance against work-related injuries. Last year saw a 16 percent increase in fatal injuries at work.

Rome’s San Giovanni Square is also the venue for a traditional May Day concert. The organisers dedicated this year’s event to Italian student Giulio Regeni, murdered in Egypt.

Left-wing party leaders joined thousands in Madrid as Spain’s two main unions highlighted low pay, workers’ rights and social exclusion – targeting the outgoing conservative government eight weeks before parliamentary elections.

Moscow staged its traditional rally in Red Square – while thousands of Russian communists also marched, nostalgic for the Soviet past as they called for a return to state-controlled resources.

Read more: National issues highlighted in Europe’s May Day rallies | euronews, world news

EU-ISLAM: Leading German politician Volker Kauder suggests mosques should come under state control

Should Mosques in the EU come under state control?

Volker Kauder an influential politician from Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU party suggested all mosques in Germany should be subject to state supervision in light of what he sees as a threat from extreme Muslims.

Volker Kauder, who heads the conservative parliamentary grouping in Germany’s lower house, used his twitter account air his views on controlling mosques and radical imams.

Kauder says that Germany was constituted as a secular state and that sermons delivered in some mosques donot conform with that concept.

The Berliner Zeitung newspaper on Friday quoted him as saying religion does not stand above the state, but rather the state over religion.

Kauder’s remarks came just before a meeting of the right-wing Alternative for Germany(AfD) party, which has drafted an anti-Islamic manifesto.

Some analysts see his remarks as an attempt win back voters from the radical right-wing AfD party.

Germany is home to around four million Muslims.

The foreign-born Muslim population in Germany is primarily made up of Turkish immigrants, but also includes many born in Kosovo, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Morocco and now also Syrians. The roughly 3 million foreign-born Muslims in France are largely from France’s former colonies of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

A Pew Research study done last year predicts that the  Muslim share of Europe’s total population (EU and non EU states)  has been increasing steadily. In recent decades, the Muslim share of the population throughout Europe grew about 1 percentage point a decade, from 4% in 1990 to 6% in 2010.

This pattern is expected to continue through 2030, when Muslims are projected to make up 8% of Europe’s population.

Research Center survey conducted this spring found that majorities in France, Britain and Germany had favorable views of Muslims. Opinion was on balance favorable in Spain while negative views prevailed in Italy and Poland. Views about Muslims are tied to ideology. While 36% of Germans on the political right give Muslims an unfavorable rating, just 15% on the left do so. The gap between left and right is also roughly 20 percentage points in France and Italy. And significant differences are found in the UK as well.

On January 2015, the total population of the EU was around 508.2 million people of which 14 million were Muslim immigrants.


EU-Digest

EU-US Trade Negotiations: TTIP Rhetoric and Reality: Europe's Regulations at Risk - by Frank Ackerman

TTIP:downward harmonization 
outweighing optimistic estimates

During the final week of April 2016, New York City was playing host to U.S. and European trade negotiators for the 13th round of talks on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Protocols agreement (TTIP).

That it is still even under discussion reflects not only the vast political influence of multinational corporations, but also a certain automatic orthodoxy among many economists. The latter assert that trade liberalization can create huge worldwide economic benefits.

If those benefits sound important, I hope you enjoyed them – because they have already happened. In the “bad” old days – think 1990 or earlier – there were real barriers to international trade. Tariffs, import quotas and many varieties of protectionist legislation did appear to limit the flow of goods between nations.

But then, NAFTA and CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement equivalent) opened up Western Hemisphere trade. Next, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), and WTO rules lowered worldwide trade barriers.

Also, a longstanding textile quota agreement was allowed to expire as well.

Meanwhile, the European Union continued to expand its single market across more and more of Europe. Bilateral and regional trade agreements, too numerous to mention, continued to pop up on every continent.

Analyses sow there are enormous benefits from multiple areas of European regulation. In chemicals policy, the EU requires manufacturers and importers of chemicals to provide well-defined evidence on the safety of their products.

In the U.S., unfamiliar chemicals are treated as innocent until proven guilty, with almost no requirements for safety testing.

In climate change and renewable energy, Europe is far ahead of the United States. Thanks to feed-in tariffs and other policies that promote renewables, more than 25% of EU electricity now comes from renewable energy.

This has climate benefits, because it avoids CO2 emissions from conventional generation (usually coal-fired, in Europe).

It has health benefits, because it avoids the other pollutants caused by coal combustion.

And there are more than 1.2 million jobs in renewable energy industries throughout the EU.

The benefits of just these two areas of European regulation, chemicals policy and renewable energy, are almost as valuable as the entire economic benefit of TTIP to Europe (as estimated by TTIP advocates).

So suppose that Europe accepted TTIP and gained as much income as the trade optimists predict. If this came at the price of downward harmonization to U.S. standards,

Europe would lose about as much in the benefits of chemical safety and renewable energy as it gained in higher incomes. 

Since many other valuable areas of regulation would also be at risk, the overall losses from downward harmonization would greatly outweigh the optimistic estimates of the gains from slightly expanded trade.

The rhetoric of trade liberalization lives on. Only the reality has changed. As Janis Joplin might have put it, is free trade just another word for nothing left to lose?

We need another word for orderly, democratically governed trade between sovereign nations that are free to protect their citizens from social and environmental harm.

TTIP and similar proposed treaties have nothing in common with the international agreements we need to promote the common good.

Read more: TTIP Rhetoric and Reality: Europe's Regulations at Risk - The Globalist

Turkey: Clearing customs - "but we also come with heavy bagage"

"We were also paid €6 billion to change our flag"

Serhan Turkoglu stands outside one of Istanbul’s many visa-application bureaus, clutching his flight and hotel bookings, travel insurance, proof of employment, social-security registration, recent salary slips and bank statements, and a vehicle licence. Mr Turkoglu, an accountant, needs all of this simply to secure a holiday visa to Spain. For his next European holiday he will have to go through the whole rigmarole again. “It makes you feel like a second-class citizen,” he says.

Turkish diplomacy towards the European Union is focused on obtaining visa-free travel. It is easy to see why. Turkey has been negotiating to accede to the EU for more than a decade; it is the only candidate country whose citizens still need visas to enter the bloc’s Schengen area. Peruvians, Malaysians and Mexicans, by contrast, no longer need visas to travel there.

Europe’s panic in the face of mass migration from the Middle East has provided Turkey with a new opening. In March, in exchange for a pledge to re-admit thousands of migrants deported from Greece, the EU offered Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president, €6 billion ($6.8 billion) in aid, progress in the moribund membership talks and visa-free travel for his people by June.

To qualify, Turkey must meet 72 benchmarks by late April, from biometric passports to better data-protection. Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, claims that his country already meets most of the conditions. But the EU says much more needs to be done. “The criteria will not be watered down,” insists the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker.

In fact, it is hard to see how Turkey could meet the political conditions for visa liberaliation. These include bringing its terrorism laws into line with the EU’s, and guaranteeing the rights to assembly and free speech. But for quite some time, Turkey has been restricting political activity and going in the wrong direction on human rights.

The government is prosecuting a group of academics on terrorism charges, after they signed a petition to end a crackdown against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has raged in Turkey’s south-east since last year. Two journalists face life in prison for reporting on covert arms shipments to Syria.

Last week a Dutch columnist was detained and barred from leaving the country pending trial; her offence was a profane tweet and an article calling Mr Erdogan a “dictator”.

If the commission agrees that Turkey meets the benchmarks, on May 4th it will recommend that the EU’s 28 governments (as well as the European Parliament), approve visa-free travel for Turkey. In theory this could be done by a qualified-majority vote; in practice, rejection by a large country would torpedo the deal. Far-right anti-Muslim parties are surging in many parts of the continent.

With Marine Le Pen looking stronger in the run-up to France’s presidential election in 2017, notes Marc Pierini, a former EU envoy to Turkey, “France cannot afford to vote yes” to visa-free travel.

Turkish officials warn of a diplomatic train crash if they do not get their way. The first victim would be Europe’s migrant deal. “If the EU does not keep its word, we will cancel the readmission agreement,” the country’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said recently.

Note Almere-Digest: If Turkey cancels the agreement because of Europe's democratic election system, respect of human rights, and freedom of expression - one can only say - "Mr Erdogan -  it takes two to Tango, and if you want to shoot yourself in your foot, be our guest".


Read more: Clearing customs | The Economist

The Netherlands: Dutch officials wanted information about 301 Facebook accounts last year

Dutch officials asked Facebook for information about 190 different Facebook accounts in the Netherlands in the second half of last year, and 80% of the requests were honoured, the social network says in a new report.

In the first half of the year, officials asked about 111 different accounts and in the second half of 2014, just 76.

n 2014, just 40% of requests for information were honoured.

In most cases, the request was made in connection with a criminal investigation, website nu.nl said.

Read more: Dutch officials wanted information about 301 Facebook accounts last year - DutchNews.nl

EU Politics: Austrian (European) Democrats Must Unite To Stop The Far Right - by Robert Misik

"Alarming populist"ultra-right-wing surge in European politics"

The resistible rise of the Far Right in Austria. The presidential election is on a knife-edge before the deciding round of the deciding round of at the end of May.  It did indeed come as a shock that moment when the blue bar on the TV screen last Sunday at 5 pm shot upwards: 35 per cent of the votes for the far right FPÖ presidential candidate Norbert Hofer with his nearest challenger – the Greens’ ex-chairman Alexander van der Bellen – pretty far behind on 21 per cent.

And the candidates of the two ruling (former) big parties, the Christian democrats and the social democrats, had shrunk to barely more than ten per cent. Nobody had bet on an upset on this scale, not one political expert, not one opinion pollster.

For the FPÖ this first round of the presidential election represents the biggest breakthrough they’ve ever had in a federal election. Behind it lie several pivotal reasons. First: the candidate and his campaign. From a FPÖ point of view the candidate and campaign were simply brilliant. One banked on Austria First, anti-EU, anti-refugees and on the well-honed, all-encompassing anti-Establishment messaging. But with Hofer they had a candidate who came across as a man one could trust, a little bit nerdy, a shade too boyish. Of the type: a right-wing radical nobody can be afraid of; an extremist but harmless. So he was the ideal figure to exceed his party’s potential support so dramatically. If party boss Strache is like an agitator who frightens people away then Hofer is the nice and sweet son-in-law type one can plump for one time at least out of sheer dissatisfaction with the rest.

This explains why Hofer ended up significantly ahead of the expected potential vote for his party. This potential is in any case frighteningly high and is nurtured by everything that generally favours right-wing populists in today’s Europe: utter disenchantment with the political and economic elites, the feeling of the “man on the street” that nobody gives a fig. Add to that in Austria: rage about a grand coalition of those parties that have marked post-war Austria, which, in the eyes of the people, have for ever and a day viewed the country as in their possession and today put dreadfully incapable apparatchiks into the top jobs. This is all embodied in the person of the chancellor, Werner Faymann. The candidates of the two established but now former big parties experienced a pretty unprecedented collapse. Incredibly, Faymann clings to his seat even after this debacle as in no way responsible.

The next four weeks will be tricky. The FPÖ man Hofer has by no means won. Of course, the significant gap between him and second placed but favourite Alexander van der Bellen is a shock to the system for the centre-left camp. And courage and energy are now required if this advantage is to be wiped out. We need solidarity among democrats – though this is complicated by the fear it might possibly help Hofer if the entire country, from the chancellor to the cardinal, lines up against him, enabling the FPÖ to bang the drum: “Look, the entire Establishment is joining forces to block the candidate of the little people.”

From today’s perspective the final round in four weeks is on a knife-edge. Hofer has comprehensively exhausted the voter potential of the FPÖ but can still net a few votes from the conservative camp. Traditional Green and social democrat voters, on the other hand, largely stayed at home in the first round. So that means van der Bellen might win on the backs of non-voters. If he wins the bigger part of voters for the independent, liberal democrat candidate Irmgard Gris and, on top, half of those who voted in the first round for the SPÖ candidate, then he might well get over the required 50 per cent plus-1 hurdle. Equally, the FPÖ has got huge momentum after this first round result – it’s brimming with confidence.

Blocking Hofer as federal president is anyway just the immediate minimalist programme that, even if it succeeds, will do nothing about the deep crisis afflicting the political system. The government is a spent force, the social democrats are a lifeless torso with a chancellor and party chairman Werner Faymann who has absolutely zero credibility after the dozens of twists and turns and endless tactical manoeuvrings he’s carried out. The governing parties haven’t even the shred of a positive idea in their heads about how one can help the country progress. For months polls have shown that the Freedom lot would be the biggest party when it came to National Assembly elections. And by a distance too: The far right is on a stable 32 per cent, with the Christian and social democrats ten points behind.

The old political scene is breaking up. If we want to stop the turn in Austria towards ‘Orbanistan’ it would require open-heart surgery: the social democrats in particular would have to get rid of the greater part of their political top brass and do so whilst chained to a government whose protagonists simply block each other. It’s not entirely impossible that might happen but let’s put it like this: This is not exactly the best time for such an operation. The country is tilting to the right and a left-wing alternative that can use popular disenchantment and dissatisfaction to its own purposes is nowhere in sight. If the social democrats cannot execute this U-turn then such an alternative will have to be built with lightning speed. The next parliamentary elections are due in 2018 but nobody is betting on the coalition dragging on for as long as that after this debacle.

Note EU-Digest: "It is high time for Europeans to recognize the dangers of this "populist" ultra-right-wing surge in European politics. For those that seem to have forgotten - remember that man with the mustache?  - also from Austria - who promised many things which would make a better and stronger Europe. It turned out into a disaster ".   

Read more: Austrian Democrats Must Unite To Stop The Far Right