French Presidential Elections: Can France's 'new man' prevail?-by Trudy Rubin

 Trudy RubinTrudy RubinThe final vote for the next French president, on May 7, will not only be critical for all of Europe but will have a major impact on the United States.

Despite their country's political and cultural differences from America, the French are going through an election upheaval that is amazingly similar to the convulsion that produced Donald Trump. The country is split between the winners from an open, globalized society and the losers who feel abandoned by traditional politicians.

On Sunday, in a first-round ballot with a field of 11 candidates, voters rejected mainstream parties of left and right, along with a host of independent candidates. The top two choices for a runoff were a political novice, Emmanuel Macron, who heads a new centrist party and supports an open society, closely followed by the populist, immigration-bashing nationalist, Marine Le Pen.

The polls show Macron ahead by 20 percent, yet - in these strange times - the outcome is far from certain. Should Le Pen pull an upset, we could see the collapse of NATO and the European Union and a further surge of populism on the continent.

In conversations this week with the current French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, and a former French ambassador Pierre Vimont, I heard serious concerns about the likely results.

"I would bet yes for Macron," says Araud, who was in Philly speaking for the French-American Chamber of Commerce and at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. But then the ambassador listed his caveats.

Le Pen appeals to those who have been hurt by free trade agreements or automation. "It's not by chance that Hillary Clinton lost in the [U.S.] rust belt," he says, "and Marine Le Pen has done well in the French rust belt." Moreover, says Araud, the problem goes well beyond the issue of trade. "Ahead of us we have more automation, so how do we retrain a 45-year-old truck driver? We are facing a real problem that may worsen.

"As in America, the result in Europe is that we increasingly have dual societies, where 50 percent are quite comfortable and confident, and the other part of the population is suffering, with their income stagnating and dropping. They are looking for scapegoats, like immigrants."

This new political climate has helped Le Pen overcome the long-standing French distaste for the neo-fascist origins of her National Front Party. She has disavowed the party's anti-Semitic founder, her father, who advanced to the second round in 2002 presidential elections but then lost 80 percent to 20 percent.

Araud fears that Le Pen could win "because Macron is an unknown quantity and he will need people from the left and right to vote for him." That poses a problem which may look familiar to Clinton's supporters. In the first round of voting, third place with 20 percent of the ballots went to a far leftist with a certain resemblance to Bernie Sanders; many French Berniacs, including young activists, say they will never vote Macron, while some may switch to Le Pen.

Some voters for the fourth-place candidate, from France's conservative Republicans Party, may also vote Le Pen. And many disgruntled voters may stay home.

So the future of Europe depends on this: whether the 39-year-old Macron, a banker whose only political experience was a brief stint as economics minister for the current socialist government, can convince enough French voters that he offers new answers for a divided country.

Note EU-Digest: We can only hope the French voters contraruto the US voters will vote with their head,  and not vote for candidate Le Pen who is not only supported by Putin and Trump, but who, with her convoluted ideas, could also destroy France and the EU.

Read more:Can France's 'new man' prevail?

Germany: Ivanka Trump gets booed, hissed at during Berlin event – by Annie Karni

Ivanka Trump arrived in Berlin Tuesday morning armed with facts and figures to recite at what was expected to be a high-brow international summit to discuss women entrepreneurship, alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But on her first international trip as an official representative of the United States, the first daughter was put on the spot about her father’s attitudes toward women, booed and hissed at by the crowd, and grilled by the moderator about what, exactly, her role is in President Donald Trump’s administration.
“You’re the first daughter of the United States, and you’re also an assistant to the president,” the moderator, WirtschaftsWoche editor-in-chief Miriam Meckel, said.

“The German audience is not that familiar with the concept of a first daughter. I’d like to ask you, what is your role, and who are you representing, your father as president of the United States, the American people, or your business?”

It was an aggressive opening for the first daughter, who was seated next to Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and one seat down from Merkel. Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was also a participant on the W20 panel. And it appeared to put her on the spot.

She did not define what her new role as a senior White House official entailed, but said that she cared “very much about empowering women in the workplace” and defined her goal as enacting “incremental positive change. That is my goal. This is very early for me, I’m listening, learning.”

But she was booed and hissed at by the majority-women audience at the conference when she lauded her father for supporting paid leave policies. “I’m very proud of my father’s advocacy,” she said, calling him “a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive.”

Meckel, the moderator, pushed her to address the vocal disapproval from the audience.

“You hear the reaction from the audience,” she said. “I need to address one more point — some attitudes toward women your father has displayed might leave one questioning whether he’s such an empower-er for women.”

 She defended her father from her vantage point of loyal daughter — a familiar crouch from when she was confronted by uncomfortable questions about her father on the campaign.

A private meeting with Merkel, a privilege normally reserved for the most senior foreign representatives, was not on Ivanka Trump’s agenda.

And despite the insistence of the White House that Ivanka Trump was invited to attend the panel by Merkel in her role as a senior White House official a  German government spokesman also stressed that, contrary to reports that Merkel had personally asked Ivanka Trump to attend the conference, she was in fact invited by two women’s groups organizing the event.

“The Chancellor didn’t invite her,” spokesman Georg Streiter said during a press briefing on Monday. Streiter added that after Merkel’s “pleasant discussion” with Ivanka Trump in Washington, she signalled to the organizers that she would welcome Ivanka Trump’s participation.

Read more: Ivanka Trump gets booed, hissed at during Berlin event – POLITI

French Presidential elections: Parties in France Unite Against Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Penn is expected to have great difficulty in overcoming the united opposition of all other French mainstream political parties now united against her in support of Emmanuel Macron, the Centrist Candidate

Read more: Parties in France Unite Against Marine Le Pen - The New York Times

Suriname: A struggling country's past and future shaped by Alcoa and its aluminum - by Rich Lord and Len Boselovic

Suriname: The Brokopondo dam at Afobaka

The following excerpts come from a lengthy and fascinating  report in the US Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Pulitzer Center , describing the Multi-National Aluminum Company of America's exploitation of  Suriname's (a former Dutch colony on the North East Coast of South America) natural resources (bauxite deposits) since 1916. 

It must be noted that several governments, especially in Latin America and Africa, have been receptive to the negative images and have adopted hostile policies towards MNCs. 

However, a careful examination of the nature of MNCs and their operations in the Third World reveals a positive image of them, especially as the allies in the development process of these countries.

Even as MNCs may be motivated primarily by profits to invest in the Third World, the morality of their activities in improving the material lives of many in these countries should not be obscured through miss-perceptions and negative publicity usually circulated by corrupt local governments.

"It electrified this South American country even as it drowned a jungle, so the 1.2-mile-long dam Alcoa built here to harness the Suriname River is more than stone and turbines. It’s a symbol, in this tropical land of 560,000, of progress, trauma and a global company’s ability to dominate a little country’s landscape and society.

Now the Alcoa Corp. is leaving Suriname, and the Afobaka Dam’s future rivets everyone from the capital’s dealmakers to the forest’s subsistence farmers.

In a country just north of the equator that would fit within a combined Pennsylvania and West Virginia — a country that’s already in a downturn locals call “the crisis” — Alcoa’s decision to permanently end mining and refining has delivered a resonating blow.

Alcoa, the aluminum company founded in Pittsburgh in 1888 that eventually spanned six continents, set up shop here in 1916 when it found bauxite beneath the jungle floor. Cutthroat conditions in the global aluminum market compelled a shutdown in November 2015.

Halfway through that century, Alcoa finished the dam, flooding a forest people’s heartland but also jolting a plantation-based economy into the industrial age. Alcoa created mammoth mining and refining sites and raucous river towns, building a middle class while toughing out a nation’s independence, civil war and an unstable government.

Alcoa found in Suriname, circa 1916, “an almost forgotten and impoverished Dutch colony … which had to look forward to a future without a glimmer of hope,” according to a glossy, celebratory magazine the company produced in late 2014.

It was a land of subsistence farms and wild rubber extraction, plus “colonial plantations” producing cocoa, coffee and sugar. In Alcoa’s first half-century there, the company mined bauxite to the east and south of the capital and sent it abroad, by boat, for processing.

In 1958, the company, the local minister-president and the Dutch governor agreed on a plan to power an ore-to-aluminum industrial complex and signed the 75-year Brokopondo Agreement, named for the town just north of the proposed dam site.

From 1959 through 1965, Alcoa built the Afobaka Dam, and in Paranam a refinery to turn bauxite into alumina, and a smelter to convert that to aluminum ingots. The plans were crafted “on the drawing table of Alcoa’s Engineering Department in Pittsburgh,” according to a company history of the project.

The lengthy Brokopondo Agreement contained just one sentence about the 6,000 people living in 43 villages just upstream of the dam — leaving it to the government to “remove the population, the buildings and other property from the reservoir area.”

The lengthy Brokopondo Agreement contained just one sentence about the 6,000 people living in 43 villages just upstream of the dam — leaving it to the government to “remove the population, the buildings and other property from the reservoir area.”

The 1958 agreement gave Suriname’s government a fraction of the dam’s cheap electricity priced at 0.4 cents per kilowatt hour. But circumstances changed in 1999 when Alcoa closed the smelter, a big user of the dam’s electricity.

Although many say the smelter’s small size and environmental issues were the reasons for the shutdown, there was a nagging suspicion among some that Alcoa had another motive.

Henk Ramdin, Suralco’s general manager until retiring shortly before the smelter was shuttered, said many employees at the time believed the company could make more money selling the power than it could making aluminum.

“They didn’t say it openly, but I could feel it,” Mr. Ramdin recalled.

An Alcoa spokesman wrote that such decisions are based on “a comprehensive evaluation of market conditions, regulatory certainty, and capital requirements,” but declined to be more specific.

The dispute over the dam and electricity pricing came to head in October 2015, when Alcoa and Suriname’s current minister of natural resources signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding outlining proposed terms for Alcoa’s departure.

Alcoa agreed to clean up its mines and industrial sites to U.S. standards, to consider eventual mining of bauxite in western Suriname, and to give the dam to the country’s government at the end of 2019 — 13 years before the Brokopondo Agreement ended ".

For the complete report click here: A struggling country's past and future shaped by Alcoa and its aluminum | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

France: Tight race for the Elysee Palace - by Bernd Rieger

French voters will be going to the polls this Sunday with the memory of Thursday's deadly attack in Paris still fresh in their minds. All candidates, from left to right, cancelled their final campaign appearances following the incident. They are all calling for police and investigative authorities to be boosted.

The right-wing populist Marine Le Pen accused the Socialist government of having failed in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in his turn accused Le Pen of exploiting the terror threat for the purposes of her campaign.

Surveys indicate that, after the fear of economic decline, voters are most worried about security and the threat posed by terrorism. There are no opinion polls recent enough to have measured voter sentiment following the most recent attack, which targeted police officers in the heart of Paris.

The state of emergency imposed in France after the Islamist attacks in Paris in November 2015 is still in force.

The race for France's presidency is wide open. The latest polls predict that four candidates out of the 11 candidates have a realistic chance of advancing to the decisive May 7 runoff. Two candidates, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, who founded a new party, have both been touted as favorites for the last several weeks. Some polls give Le Pen a slight edge; others give it to Macron. It is a neck-and-neck race. But far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon and conservative Francois Fillon, the only representative of an established party, also have a decent chance of advancing. The two are just 2 or 3 percentage points behind front-runners Le Pen and Macron. That is well within the margin of error for such polling.

Election researcher Stephane Wahnich warned in a recent DW interview that nothing was certain. "We have many undecided voters in France. About a quarter of all voters have said that they will not decide until election day. That means that we are asking people who they will vote for even though they have yet to make up their minds." Wahnrich complains that France's voting public is no longer stable. "Our society is radically changing. This makes it difficult to come up with reliable projections. When you consider that fact, you have to conclude that opinion polls for this election are completely overrated."

Far-right populist Le Pen lost out in the first round of France's last presidential election in 2012. This time it seems certain that she will advance to the runoff. The ruling Socialist party of departing - and extremely unpopular - President Francois Hollande is playing no role whatsoever in the election. That is also something completely new in French politics. The country's political left is more divided than ever before. On the other hand, the rise of far-left politician Jean-Luc Melenchon, who is especially popular among young French voters for his radical anti-EU slogans and calls for 100 percent taxation on the rich, is rather astonishing. Melenchon utterly rejects globalization and free-trade: "All trade deals that devastate the signatory countries must be stopped."

Read more: Tight race for the Elysee Palace | Europe | DW.COM | 22.04.2017

Earth Day: April 22: The G20’s Time for Climate Leadership, as Trump Adm. ready to block project - by Teresa Ribera

Global Warming Disaster:The question is not if but when

At the start of 2016, the United States was well positioned to lead the global fight against climate change. As the chair of the G20 for 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been counting on the US to help drive a deep transformation in the global economy. And even after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, Merkel gave him the benefit of the doubt, hoping against hope that the US might still play a leading role in reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions.

But at Merkel and Trump’s first in-person meeting, no substantive statements were issued, and their body language made the prospect of future dialogue appear dim. Trump’s slogan “America first” seems to mean “America alone.”

By reversing his predecessor’s policies to reduce CO2 emissions, Trump is rolling back the new model of cooperative global governance embodied in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The countries that signed on to that accord committed themselves to sharing the risks and benefits of a global economic and technological transformation.

Trump’s climate-change policy does not bode well for US citizens – many of whom are now mobilizing resistance to his administration – or the world. But the rest of the world will still develop low-carbon, resilient systems. Private- and public-sector players across the developed and developing worlds are making the coming economic shift all but inevitable, and their agendas will not change simply because the US has a capricious new administration. China, India, the European Union, and many African and Latin American countries are still adopting clean-energy systems.

As long as this is the case, businesses, local governments, and other stakeholders will continue to pursue low-carbon strategies. To be sure, Trump’s policies might introduce new dangers and costs, domestically and worldwide; but he will not succeed in prolonging the fossil-fuel era.

Still, an effective US exit from the Paris agreement is a menacing development. The absence of such an important player from the fight against climate change could undermine new forms of multilateralism, even if it reinvigorates climate activism as global public opinion turns against the US.

More immediately, the Trump administration has introduced significant financial risks that could impede efforts to address climate change. Trump’s proposed budget would place restrictions on federal funding for clean-energy development and climate research. Likewise, his recent executive orders will minimize the financial costs of US businesses’ carbon footprint, by changing how the “social cost of carbon” is calculated. And his administration has already insisted that language about climate change be omitted from a joint statement issued by G20 finance ministers.

These are all unwise decisions that pose serious risks to the US economy, and to global stability, as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently pointed out. The US financial system plays a leading role in the world economy, and Trump wants to take us all back to a time when investors and the general public did not account for climate-change risks when making financial decisions.

Since 2008, the regulatory approach taken by the US and the G20 has been geared toward increasing transparency and improving our understanding of possible systemic risks to the global financial system, not least those associated with climate change and fossil-fuel dependency. Developing more stringent transparency rules and better risk-assessment tools has been a top priority for the financial community itself. Implementing these new rules and tools can accelerate the overall trend in divestment from fossil fuels, ensure a smooth transition to a more resilient, clean-energy economy, and provide confidence and clarity for long-term investors.

Given the heightened financial risks associated with climate change, resisting Trump’s executive order to roll back Wall Street transparency regulations should be a top priority. The fact that Warren Buffet and the asset-management firm Black Rock have warned about the investment risks of climate change suggests that the battle is not yet lost.

Creating the G20 was a good idea. Now, it must confront its biggest challenge. It is up to Merkel and other G20 leaders to overcome US (and Saudi) resistance and stay the course on climate action. They can count as allies some of the world’s large institutional investors, who seem to agree on the need for a transitional framework of self-regulation. It is incumbent upon other world leaders to devise a coherent response to Trump, and to continue establishing a new development paradigm that is compatible across different financial systems.

At the same time, the EU – which is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome this year – now has a chance to think about the future that it wants to build. These are difficult times, to be sure; but we can still decide what kind of world we want to live in.

Note EU-Digest: the EU needs to take its own independent and united position on this issue. Compromise should not be part of the equation. In addition, it has become extremely difficult  for any country to negotiate with the Trump Administration on just about any issue, given they change their position more often than the Kama Sutra.

 

Read more: The G20’s Time for Climate Leadership by Teresa Ribera - Project Syndicate 
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France: Champs-Elysées terror shooting impact on the French election? Could Marine LePen Presidency increase terrorism?

Terrorism or manipulation ?: The French Presidential Elections

France has long feared a terror attack in the run-up to the presidential election. What impact will the Champs-Elysées shooting of a policeman that was claimed by terror group Isis have on Sunday's crucial first round vote?

The news that a policeman had been shot dead on the famous Champs-Elysées avenue broke as the 11 presidential candidates were appearing live on TV in a show dubbed “15 minutes to convince” France.

The far-right Marine Le Pen had not long finished her 15-minute slot when it became clear that France had been hit by another jihadist attack against its forces of law and order. An attack quickly claimed by terror group Isis.

Authorities had long feared an Isis-inspired or organised attack in the run-up to the election, as it would represent not just a symbolic attack on democracy, but also a chance to perhaps influence the result to their liking, with a victory for Le Pen fitting in with their desire to divide France's communities.

Hence the reason the government extended the state of emergency to cover the campaign.

The immediate impact of Thursday night's attack saw Marine Le Pen, François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron announce they were suspending their campaigns. They all cancelled meetings on Friday, the last official day of campaigning.

Although events have been cancelled the candidates haven’t quite gone quiet.

Marine Le Pen, who has seen her campaign tail off in recent weeks launched an attack on previous governments.

Mrs. Le Pen, however, has several major supporters in Europe and the US, including President Putin and President Trump

Marine Le Penn also went to Russia recently and met with President Putin and has often also praised  President Trump on  his foreign and immigrant policies.

Yesterday, right after the attack in Paris, Mr. Trump went live on US TV and deplored not only the attack in Franc,  but also indirectly mingled into French politics, supporting Marine Le Penn by saying that the attack will have a "big impact" on the polls in France as they relate to the Sunday Presidential elections there. 

Unfortunately, US president Donald Trump, whose own populist victory was celebrated by Marine Le Pen, used this deplorable attack in France to once again show his loyalty to  a fellow populist right-wing nationalist politician in Europe - just as he had done earlier in the week, after the Turkish contested Referendum, by congratulating Turkish "strongman" Erdogan with his so-called victory.

Even though the Paris Champs-Elysées terrorist carried a note on himself  showing support  for ISIS, one can only hope that the French criminal investigators will scrupulously investigate this case to eliminate all possible doubts as to the motives of this attack, so close to the elections French Presidential   

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