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

Turkey's President Erdoğan Says Women's Position In Society Is For Motherhood

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday at a women's rights summit in Istanbul that women and men cannot be equal because it is "against nature," claiming that women and men have inherently different roles in society. Erdoğan, a devout Muslim, made statements during his time as prime minister that suggested he held conservative ideas about women's rights, but his speech Monday underscores just how strongly he rejects the notion that women should have the same civil liberties as men.

"You cannot get women to do every kind of work men can do, as in Communist regimes," he said. "You cannot tell them to go out and dig the soil. This is against their delicate nature."

Erdoğan attacked feminists in his speech, claiming they "reject the concept of motherhood."
"Our religion (Islam) has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood," Erdoğan said. "Some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood."

Erdoğan expanded his message, saying that women should each have at least three children and that abortion was "murder." He also said he was against the morning-after pill.

Opponents of Erdoğan took to Twitter to protest the president's statements, some claiming that he is "backwards," others saying he "is digging himself a grave."

Read more: Turkey's President Erdoğan Says Women's Position In Society Is For Motherhood

Internet: The Cloud -No, your data isn't secure in the cloud - by Lucas Mearian

While online data storage services claim your data is encrypted, there are no guarantees. With recent revelations that the federal government taps into the files of Internet search engines, email and cloud service providers, any myth about data "privacy" on the Internet has been busted.

Experts say there's simply no way to ever be completely sure your data will remain secure once you've moved it to the cloud.

"You have no way of knowing. You can't trust anybody. Everybody is lying to you," said security expert Bruce Schneier. "How do you know which platform to trust? They could even be lying because the U.S. government has forced them to."

While providers of email, chat, social network and cloud services often claim -- even in their service agreements -- that the data they store is encrypted and private, most often they -- not you -- are the ones who hold the keys. That means a rogue employee or any government "legally" requesting encryption keys can decrypt and see your data.

Even when service providers say only customers can generate and maintain their own encryption keys, Schneier said there's no way to be sure others won't be able to gain access.

For example, Apple's SMS/MMS-like communications platform, iMessage, claims both voice and text are encrypted and can't be heard or seen by third parties. But because the product isn't open source, "there's no way for us to know how it works," said Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "It seems because of the way it works on functionality, they do have a way to access it. The same goes for iCloud."

Note EU-Digest: The Cloud services are also offered to European Internet users. Given that  the storage data banks of  Google, and Apple for Cloud and other similar systems are kept in the US by American companies, and consequently  fall under US jurisdiction, it probably would not be a good idea for EU citizens and businesses to store sensitive material on these data bank services.

Read more: No, your data isn't secure in the cloud | Computerworld

The Netherlands: Dutch jihadi bride: 'Is she a victim or a suspect?' - by Harriet Alexander, and Anna Mees

She was a blonde-haired, blue eyed Catholic girl whose family was a pillar of the Dutch town of Maastricht. He was a smiling, bicycle-riding Dutch former soldier - a man considered such an asset to his country he was encouraged to try out for their elite special forces.

And yet the marriage of Sterlina Petalo and Omar Yilmaz was, for their families, anything but a cause for celebration.

Yilmaz, 26, was one of the most high-profile Europeans to become a jihadi, travelling to Syria to live in the Islamic State and fight on behalf of the extremists. He gloried in the teenage fantasy of war - posting a series of Instagram photos of himself pouting at the camera on a motorbike, amid bombed-out buildings in his combat fatigues, AK47 slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. Miss Petalo was a recent convert to Islam, who fell in love with Yilmaz after seeing him on television, picturing him as a Robin Hood figure.

Last week their story took a remarkable twist when it was revealed that Miss Petalo had in fact returned to her hometown - after her mother travelled to the Turkish-Syrian border to bring the 19-year-old home from the jihadist-held city of Raqqa.

“Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” said her mother, Monique Verbert. “She rang me and said 'Take me home.’ But she could not leave Raqqa without help.”

The pair arrived back in the Netherlands on Wednesday, said Annemarie Kemp, a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office. Clad in a niqqab, with only her eyes showing, the teenager - who has changed her name to Aicha - was photographed being driven through the town on her way to custody.

“Upon her arrival, Aicha was detained at once on suspicion of crimes threatening state security,” said Ms Kemp.

Miss Petalo is being held in a police cell - the prosecutor, Roger Bos, ruled on Friday that she should be detained for questioning for three more days. Mrs Verbert, 49, an administrator for BP, argued that her daughter’s flight to Syria was little more than teenage infatuation. Today Monday November 24 the court will decide whether to press charges.

Note EU-Digest: Every civilized human being should condemn the violence and terror IS is using to instill fear and terror in the areas where they operate. In that same breath one should also condemn social media and the International Press for publicizing these horrific scenes of barbarism, including the decapitation of body parts. This is pure commercially based sensationalism, which can only lead to popularizing these horrific acts in the minds of susceptible young people - case in point Ms Petalo who acted upon her teenage fantasy of a "glorified" war and followed this "insanely obsessed man" into certain disaster. 

Kudos to her mother for taking the proper action to bring her daughter back to reality and safety.   
 Read more: Dutch jihadi bride: 'Is she a victim or a suspect?' - Telegraph

Religious cults:: Mormon founder Joseph Smith wed 40 wives - by Daniel Burke

The founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, wed as many as 40 wives, including some who were already married and one as young as 14 years old, the church acknowledged in a surprising new essay.

Smith's marital history had been the subject of frequent historical debate, but until recently Mormon leaders had taken pains to present its founding prophet as happily married to one woman. Now, the church says, "careful estimates put the number between 30 and 40."

The church, officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, disavowed plural marriage in 1890 under pressure from the U.S. government, which had imprisoned polygamists and seized their assets.

According to the church's essay, Smith had not wanted to take multiple wives, but relented after an angel appeared to him three times between 1834 and 1842. On the angel's last visit, the church said, "the angel came with a drawn sword, threatening Joseph with destruction unless he went forward and obeyed the commandment fully."

Readd more: Church: Mormon founder Joseph Smith wed 40 wives - CNN.com

Refugees: U.N. says 13.6 million displaced by wars in Iraq and Syria

About 13.6 million people, equivalent to the population of London, have been displaced by conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and many are without food or shelter as winter starts, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Tuesday.

Amin Awad, UNHCR's director for the Middle East and North Africa, said the world was becoming numb to the refugees' needs.

"Now when we talk about a million people displaced over two months, or 500,000 overnight, the world is just not responding," he told reporters in Geneva.

The 13.6 million include 7.2 million displaced within Syria - an increase from a long-held U.N. estimate of 6.5 million - as well as 3.3 million Syrian refugees abroad.

Read more: U.N. says 13.6 million displaced by wars in Iraq and Syria - Chicago Tribune

Global Economy: European economic figures far more accurate than those from the US - by RM

Transparency key to success Atlantic Alliance

When listening to or reading US financial reports there are some remarkably disturbing facts popping up.

One of these is the fact that it was actually the US which caused the 2007/2008 financial crash but this has been completely swept under the mat by the US.

Keep in mind though that all the media outlets in the US, except very few, which are "not for profit organizations" (who mainly get their income from public/private donations and grants) are mostly profit based multi-national corporations. This should immediately raise a red flag as to the impartiality and balance of the news/financial reports they release.

Possibly, this is also the reason that at the same time there is this constant barrage of attacks coming from those same US media circles bashing and critizicing the EU/ECB for not adopting the US QE financial policies (printing more money and pumping this" monopoly money" into the marketplace) in order to get the EU economy going again.

As to the US QE policies,  many economists believe this could eventually be a recipe for future US economic disaster.

Also, looking at some of the official figures put out by the US Government and reading between the lines, the attentive reader will quickly find a lot of nebulous statistics on a variety of issues and items, including employment, trade, debt, infrastructure, military and security expenditures.

In this volatile scenario Wall Street is a special "Chapter" by itself.  Some critics call Wall Street a financial "fairyland" where words and phrases as versatility, headwinds, optimize, boldness, performance, choices, transparency, bubbles, wealth, growth, state of the art, profitable, opportunity are used in different ways as shares go up and down and traders turn out the big winners in dividing up the spoils.

Obviously without any doubt there are also "forces" in Europe ( Britain) who are following and would love to have the EU adapt this "flawed" US financial model.

Fortunately, and maybe unfortunately for some,  the EU is a Union of 28 countries with 28 central banks.  Of these 28 countries 18 belong to the so called European Economic Zone (Eurozone) that have adopted the euro (€) as their common currency.and sole legal tender.

The ECB is the central bank for the euro and administers monetary policy for the whole Eurozone.

Any report or statistic on or about the state of the EU economy issued by the ECB  is scrutinized very carefully by all 18 members of the ECB before they become public.Canada which is a Federated country also applies similar rules.

Official EU financial reports and statement are therefore without any doubt far  more accurate and reliable than those coming from US government agencies.

Isn't it time for the EU to get to the point with our friends across the other side of the pond on this issue? And what better venue to do it than during the ongoing EU-US trade negotiations?

EU-Digest

The Wall: 25 Years After Berlin, Do We Still Need Walls? - by Peter Schurman

The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago this week. People on both sides filled the streets in celebration, cheered on by virtually everyone around the world. For all of us who were alive then, it remains one of the most hopeful historical moments we've ever experienced.

Now that 25 years have passed, it's an appropriate time to take stock. Have we seized our historic opportunity to create, at last, a more peaceful world?

Sadly, we have not:

• By Wikipedia's count, the US has engaged in 10 wars since then, and we now live in a surveillance state the East German secret police would have envied.

• Russia has reasserted regional military dominance, annexing Crimea, threatening other parts of Ukraine, and re-conquering Chechnya.

• The Middle East is a boiling cauldron of warfare, much of it touched off by the American invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

• China is building a potentially formidable Navy and picking fights with its neighbors.

How can it be that we've made so little progress, following such a breakthrough?

As global citizens, we largely left the job of converting the end of the Cold War into a lasting peace in the hands of our national governments.

We had little alternative at first: in 1989, the Internet had not yet been
widely adopted, so people worldwide had no way to band together at scale.

The arrival of the Internet has upended virtually every major system on earth, revolutionizing our economy and breathing new life into grassroots politics.

Yet our governance structures remain stubbornly anachronistic. And they're failing us, not only on the great question of war or peace, but also on many other front-burner issues today, including global warming, economic inequality, disease response, immigration, human trafficking, and financial crimes.

Although we seldom consider it, one key factor that ties all these failures together is our fragmented system of nation-states, separated by militarized borders.

Almere-Digest Note: After the wall went down in Berlin many new walls went up. There is now a wall built by Israel which will eventually stretch for 750 km's between Palestine and Israel. There is also a new wall between the US and Mexico and China has built an electronic wall around China to curb what the Chinese citizens can see on the Internet .   

Read more: 25 Years After Berlin, Do We Still Need Walls? | Peter Schurman

EU-US Trade Negotiations: Europe faces weapons of legal destruction in USA trade talks - by Kevin Albertson

Efforts to build a more effective trading regime between Europe and the USA can reasonably be called positive, both for growth and the ease of doing business. Currently, however, negotiations include proposals which threaten to distort the way governments regulate companies and which might cost the taxpayer dearly.

The sticking point for many is the inclusion in the TTIP negotiations of the contentious Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision.

ISDS gives international investors the right to bring a case for damages against the local government if they (the investors) feel government policy has harmed their interests. A supposed independent international tribunal hears such claims. In other words, under ISDS, multinational corporations have the right effectively to sue a sovereign state, demanding the state (that is, the taxpayer) compensates them for enacting domestic policy if it reduces profitability below that which was expected.

There are clear potential conflicts of interest. The responsibility of the corporate sector is to maximise profits, while the responsibility of government is to promote competition which might reduce corporate profits; also governments must promote the public good – which is likely in some instances to affect corporate profits, for example in controlling pollution or enforcing health and safety legislation. Establishing a means by which disagreements might be resolved is, therefore, of some importance. However, to this end, the ISDS is not an efficient means – it is apparently skewed.

ISDS arguably weakens the rule of law, forces the public to subsidise the risk of multi-national investment abroad, and effectively encourages outsourcing.

Read more: Europe faces weapons of legal destruction in USA trade talks