EU Europ Union brussels
oddly blank 12/17 SLIGHT RENAME 9 26
see europe
merri ok
this includes eur parliament for now
also eur commission
eu and UK bettter on tech regs than US SOC MEDIA KIDS, AI, GLYPHO, DISINFO
7 26 HEAT DEATH DOME 1K KIA GERMANY, FRANCE SPAIN?
1300
Starting in late May 2026, several severe heatwaves affected Europe. Temperature records were broken in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The first heatwave began on 24 May, with temperatures higher than normal, causing several deaths. Temperatures were the highest ever recorded for May, with climate change causing the earlier onset of Central Europe's summer Continued in Wikipedia
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9 26 DRILLED TECH BRO ~ EU CENSOR DISINFO
GGL 9 26
AI Overview
The keywords you provided point directly to the intense, ongoing geopolitical clash between the European Union's aggressive anti-disinformation regulations and the U.S. government's pushback against perceived global tech censorship, specifically highlighting the intersection of climate disinformation tracking. [1]
- The "Drilled" and "Westervelt" Connection
The name Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative journalist and founder of the critical climate reporting podcast and newsroom known as Drilled. [1]
- Westervelt and Drilled are heavily involved with organizations like the EU DisinfoLab, where they speak on panels exploring how tech platforms are responding to European regulations to combat organized climate disinformation campaigns. [1]
- These groups track how fossil fuel entities and bad actors use algorithmic amplification to spread misleading narratives, using the EU's strict legislative tools to demand transparency from American tech platforms. [1]
- The EU's "Censor" & Disinformation Crackdown
Europe has taken the global lead in policing online speech through landmark legislation like the Digital Services Act (DSA). More recently, the EU Parliament has pushed to implement a robust "European Democracy Shield" and the European Centre for Democratic Resilience. These frameworks enforce strict rules on: [1, 2, 3, 4]
- Big Tech Compliance: Forcing companies like Meta, TikTok, and Google to aggressively label AI-generated content, curb foreign election interference, and restrict hate speech.
- Financial Penalties: The EU Commission has levied heavy fines against major platforms, including a massive fine against Elon Musk’s X. [1, 2, 3]
- The U.S. Backlash against "Extraterritorial Censorship"
The United States—spearheaded by the House Judiciary Committee and the Trump administration—views these European rules as a decade-long campaign to censor American free speech globally. The U.S. government argues that the EU uses its laws to strong-arm American firms into altering their global content moderation policies. [1, 2, 3]
This culminated in explosive retaliatory actions:
- The "Censorship" Travel Ban: The U.S. State Department issued visa bans blocking five prominent European regulators and anti-disinformation researchers from entering the United States. [1, 2]
- High-Level Targets: Among those barred were former EU Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton and Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized them as "radical activists" and "weaponized NGOs" trying to force their speech standards onto American companies. [1, 2]
- Trade Threats: President Trump launched probes into whether EU tech laws unfairly target American industries, leading Brussels to warn that it may retaliate by pulling out of major transatlantic trade agreements. [1, 2]
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AFP
EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen on Wednesday played down the regulatory gulf between Brussels and Washington, arguing that US courts end up policing the same companies for the same behavior that European law targets in advance.
"The differences are not so big when we look at it in practice," the European Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty told AFP on the sidelines of a G20 meeting of technology ministers in North Carolina.
"In Europe, we have regulation in advance, and in the USA they are often coming with the court cases," she said. "The same companies, the same practices, are under investigation and under discussion."
Her remarks came after two days of sessions in which the ministers were addressed by industry figures including Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, who used the platform to repeat the familiar charge that Europe over-regulates technology.
Virkkunen said she did not accept the premise.
"We don't see -- and I don't see -- that innovation and regulation are opposite things," the Finnish official said.
She pointed to a recent Eurobarometer survey published in which 80 percent of European respondents said careful regulation of AI was important for safety reasons.
"For Europeans, it's important that we can trust these technologies," she said, while acknowledging that Brussels would bring forward proposals to streamline some EU rules.
She noted that the absence of national tech laws in the United States has not left the industry free of government rules there.
"At (the) state level, there are hundreds of rules now on AI (in the US)," she said. "That is the situation we wanted to avoid with our AI Act -- that we have one rule for the whole market."
Virkkunen said the convergence between Europe and the United States could be seen most clearly in attitudes toward protecting minors on social media.
Meta last month reached a landmark settlement with nearly every US state, promising curfews and time limits for teens on Instagram and Facebook.
Asked about the settlement, she said some of its provisions were already law in Europe under the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to let users flag illegal content and choose the recommender system that serves them.
But she said Brussels was pursuing the same underlying concerns about how addictive the platforms can be -- an issue that has seen Meta, YouTube and TikTok face thousands of lawsuits in the United States.
The Commission published preliminary findings in July on the addictive design of Meta's services, and earlier in the summer on how the company checks whether a user is at least 13 years old.
It has also issued preliminary findings against TikTok on addictive design and opened an investigation into Snapchat in the spring.
"We are ready to come up with stronger rules also in Europe on this matter, but I think social media platforms could also do much more now already," Virkkunen said.
- 'Comply on AI' -
On AI safety, she said the enforcement powers attached to the EU's AI Act took effect in August, and that most leading AI developers had been cooperating with the Commission voluntarily before then.
"They understand that if they want to operate in the European markets, we have our rules and they have to comply with our rules," she said.
Asked whether Europe was seeing the kind of local opposition to data centers now spreading in the United States, Virkkunen said the debate was already lively in some EU member states -- an outcome she said careful planning was meant to avoid.
She described an imbalance within the bloc, with data center builders gravitating toward countries with abundant cheap clean power.
"It's not a good solution if they are just located in some countries in Europe," she said. "We need them in all countries because they are a very important part of our digital infrastructure."
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DK 9 26
X hit by complaints to EU over user data and targeted advertising
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AN 9 26
Earthquake as Canada negotiates with the EU to join as associate member
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CDA WILL JOIN EU? EVEN EUR ALT RT DISTANCE?
AN 4 26
Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward America’s allies may please his domestic political base, but it is harming America’s international standing — perhaps permanently.
“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”
Avlon replied to Stengel by noting that polls found presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who engaged in positive diplomatic relationships with other countries, were far more popular than the bellicose Trump. Indeed, Stengel noted that America’s foreign standing has “plummeted” during Trump’s two terms.
“It always seemed absurd to me when Trumpists would say that we need to be respected on the world stage, when you could see in the data that America was not respected — was held in worse regard when Trump was president, even than Chinese president-for-life Xi,” Avlon told Stengel. “So I wonder now with Iran, though — we seem to have crossed a Rubicon, because it was a war of choice, because our allies are not with us. And tell me about the downstream effect of that as you see it.”
Stengel added that, even though Joe Biden tried to reverse the damage to America’s reputation caused by Trump’s first term, America’s allies were not convinced that Biden would remain in power long enough to keep those policies in place. Trump’s reelection in 2024 confirmed their fears.
“This seesaw in presidential politics is something that people don't really understand,” Stengel told Avlon. “And then this Iran thing — by the way, what was probably most popular about Trump on the world stage was his sort of isolationism: that this isn't about America invading foreign countries and this world of endless wars, that America would retrench globally in terms of militaries but increase their presence globally in terms of trade and globalization. In some ways, it's the exact opposite. The alliances are also part of this idea of soft power, because — and I hate that phrase we used to use — we're not the world's policemen. We weren't the world's policemen, but we were the kind of foundation of the global world order, that people could trust America to abide by the rule of law, to be a pretty fairly honest broker. Not to say we wouldn't do bad things, but that is completely out the window.”
He concluded, “And the kind of ‘America First’ which has now actually caused it to get into a war is something that makes us much more isolated and much less popular, to an extraordinary extent.”
In February the New York Times reported that Trump’s imperialist rhetoric toward Denmark about acquiring Greenland and his conquest of Venezuela had convinced America’s European allies to decouple their most valuable financial and digital assets from American corporations. His tariffs have similarly prompted talk among Europeans of a permanent “divorce” from the US, with a senior European official telling Politico that “there is a shift in U.S. policy and in many ways it is permanent. Waiting it out is not a solution. What needs to be done is an orderly and coordinated movement to a new reality.”
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an 1 26?
undress over a million? women and kids? grok?
French authorities raid Paris offices of Elon Musk's X
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PCO
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deporting a British man who was recently placed on a visa ban after U.S. officials accused him and four other Europeans of online censorship.
Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed filed a complaint Thursday against Secretary of State Marco Rubioand Attorney General Pam Bondito prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest,” the lawsuit reads.
“The government’s actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny,” it continues. “Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation — may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”
The suit adds that Ahmed is a lawful permanent resident with a wife and son who are U.S. citizens.
The complaint cites other recent cases where foreign nationals on student visas, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, were stripped of their documentation and faced with deportation as “part of a larger pattern of attempted repression of constitutionally protected speech.”
“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,'” the suit reads.
The administration placed the visa ban on Ahmed, along with French former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, Global Disinformation Index CEO Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, on Tuesday.
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates
Breton backed the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compelled online platforms to tackle hate speech and misinformation and remove it from their pages. U.S. officials claim the law unfairly targets American tech companies and citizens, Reuters reported.
On Tuesday, Rubio accused the five of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”
“Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States,” Rubio posted on social media. “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers shared Rubio’s message and warned that “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”
Breton criticized his visa ban, asking in an X post if “[former. Sen. Joe] McCarthy’s witch hunt” was back.
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gmail 12 25 icc
- Climate deception starts young.Over the past decade, a Shell subsidiary has paid the Queensland Museum in Australia _millions of dollars to fund children’s educational programs_ that do not identify fossil fuels as a primary driver of climate change.
- Fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, have been working to undermine and dilute the impact of the European Union’s flagship human rights and climate law, according to _leaked documents_. The companies worked to “divide and conquer the Council” in order to destroy the law that aims to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses and climate damage.
AN 8 25
During his four years as president, Joe Biden worried that if Donald Trump ever returned to the White House, it would pose a major threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trump, during his first term, toyed with the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO — whereas Biden, as president, aggressively championed NATO's expansion when Sweden and Finland opted to join the alliance.
Seven months into Trump's second presidency, the U.S. is still a NATO member. But author/military historian Phillips O'Brien, during an interview with economist Paul Krugman, stressed that Trump's return to the White House marks a dramatic change in U.S./Europe relations.
Krugman, on August 23, posted video of the interview on his SubStack page and also published it as a Q&A article. And O'Brien voiced major concerns about the United States' relationship with Europe.
READ MORE:Bill Maher hits raw nerve with detailed warning of Trump's 'slow-moving coup'
"The United States is going to great lengths to antagonize its allies," O'Brien told Krugman. "I don't get it. None of this makes any sense to me."
The author/historian said of the Ukraine/Russia War, "I think what happens to Ukraine will determine how Europe deals with this. If Ukraine is sacrificed, I think Europe is going to have a terrible future. Because it's going to be dependent on the U.S., which has basically sacrificed Ukraine to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's Russia. Europe might even break apart, structurally, such that you'll have the Central Eastern Europeans, the ones who want to stand by Ukraine, the Finns, the Baltics, the Nordics going one way and then the Western Europeans sort of pretending things are OK."
O'Brien added, "So, I think people are underrating the chance of Europe splitting over Ukraine, which is why it's so important, I think, that Ukraine comes out of the war in good shape."
According to O'Brien, U.S. allies in Europe will be paying very close attention to the outcome of the United States' 2026 midterms.
READ MORE:MAGA is panicking as Trump finally meets his match
"Well, that's the key thing, isn't it? The 2026 midterms," O'Brien told Krugman. "I don't think people are paying enough attention, because they have to be run fairly. I do think the Democrats have a very good chance of winning them if they are run fairly and happen under normal conditions. But they could also be easily perverted…. I would say that 2026 elections will show not whether America can come back, but whether it has a chance to come back — or whether the period we're going into could be a lot longer and darker than we imagined."
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4 24
On Tuesday (9 April), a group of elderly Swiss women , called KlimaSeniorinnen or Senior Women for Climate Protection, won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights. Europe's top court ruled that Switzerland's efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate.Apr 10, 2024
'Swiss grannies' win climate case: How climate litigation is ...
Firstpost
https://www.firstpost.com › Explainers](https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/swiss-grannies-climate-case-litigation-rising-world-unep-13758187.html#::text=On%20Tuesday%20%289%20April%29%2C,targets%20had%20been%20woefully%20inadequate.)~
Swiss women win landmark climate case at Europe top ...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com › sustainability › climate-activi...](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-activists-seek-breakthrough-human-rights-court-ruling-against-european-2024-04-09/)
Apr 9, 2024 — The Swiss women, known as KlimaSeniorinnen and aged over 64, said their government's climate inaction put them at risk of dying during heatwaves ...
Elderly Swiss women bring European court's first climate ...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com › world › europe › elderly-swi...](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/elderly-swiss-women-bring-european-courts-first-climate-case-2023-03-29/)
Mar 30, 2023 — Thousands of elderly Swiss women have joined forces in a groundbreaking case heard on Wednesday at the European Court of Human Rights, ...
Heat Waves Are Killing Older Women. Are They Also ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › World › Europe](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/world/europe/heat-wave-older-women-lawsuit.html)
Aug 7, 2023 — A group of Swiss women over 64 has filed a lawsuit against Switzerland with Europe's top human rights court, saying the country has violated ...
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Human rights violated by Swiss inaction on climate, ECHR ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › environment › apr › hu...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/09/human-rights-violated-inaction-climate-echr-rules-landmark-case)
Apr 9, 2024 — Court finds in favour of group of older Swiss women who claimed weak policies put them at greater risk of death from heatwaves.
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omg going on offense?!
jj comm dr an 12 22
Fresh off posting the highest quarterly profit in its history, the U.S.-based fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil sued the European Union on Wednesday in an attempt to stop the bloc from imposing its recently approved windfall tax targeting major oil and gas companies.
The Financial Times, which first reported the new lawsuit, noted that the challenge takes aim at the European Council's "legal authority to impose the new tax—a power historically reserved for sovereign countries—and its use of emergency powers to secure member states' approval for the measure."
:{:{"The new tax is due to take effect from December 31 and will apply a levy of at least 33% on any taxable profits in 2022-23 that are 20% or more above average profits between 2018 and 2021," the newspaper explained.}:
}:
In a statement, Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton insisted the company recognizes that sky-high energy costs are "weighing heavily on families and businesses" but claimed the tax would "undermine investor confidence, discourage investment and increase reliance on imported energy."
Reuters reported Wednesday that Exxon's chief financial officer has estimated the E.U.'s windfall tax could cost the corporation around $2 billion through the end of next year—a fraction of the company's 2022 profits.
Approved in late September amid a mounting cost-of-living crisis across Europe, the windfall tax was presented as an effort to generate additional revenue to "provide financial support to households and companies" struggling with high energy costs.Oil and gas companies like Exxon have been accused of exploiting global energy market chaos spurred by Russia's war on Ukraine to hike prices and pad their bottom lines.
In late October, Exxon announced it brought in $19.7 billion in profits from July to September, its largest-ever quarterly haul. The company also announced it would raise its dividend and expand its share buyback program, rewarding wealthy investors as consumers continue to face elevated prices at the pump.
According to a recent filing, Exxon has also been rewarding its top executives, boosting the annual salary of CEO Darren Woods from $1.70 million to $1.88 million for the coming year.
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FT 7 22
the deadly heatwaves that have fuelled blazes and caused transport disruptions in Europe, the US and China this month have one thing in common: a peculiar shape in the jet stream dubbed “wavenumber 5”.
Scientists are racing to understand whether the band of fast-moving air that controls weather in the mid-latitudes is changing in a way that makes heatwaves more frequent and persistent.
“The jet stream is the leading driver of our weather,” explains Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading. “The jet stream is like a conveyor belt, delivering storms to us one after the other.”
It can also generate heatwaves when it forms into a U-bend shape, called an “omega block” because it resembles the shape of the Greek letter omega.
Right now, a global pattern of five big waves is circling the world, leading to simultaneous heatwaves across continents. This pattern, known as wavenumber 5, can persist for weeks, causing hot areas to stay hot for a long time.
In China, more than 900m people are experiencing heatwaves, and more than 70 weather stations have broken records this month. In the US, Texas and Oklahoma are experiencing record-high daily temperatures, and more than 20 states have issued heat warnings.
The UK also recorded its highest-ever temperature this week — 40.3C — while France and Spain have been battling wildfires after an extreme heatwave that has lasted for weeks and set temperature records.
“As often happens in the atmosphere, it is connected: if we see an extreme event in one place, it can be connected to extreme events in another,” says Stephen Belcher, chief scientist at the UK Met Office. “The Met Office forecasters are looking very, very closely at this wavenumber 5 pattern to see how long it persists,” he added.
Belcher says three factors contributed to the heatwave over Europe: the wavenumber 5 pattern in the jet stream; the increase in global average temperatures; and the dry soils, particularly around the Mediterranean, resulting from prolonged hot weather.
Dim Coumou, a climate scientist at VU Amsterdam, says there aretwo important patterns in the jet stream in summer — with five waves, or with seven waves — that tend to remain in the same place when they form. “If such wave patterns become stagnant and persist over longer periods, then we typically see simultaneous heatwaves.”
A growing body of research is trying to answer the question of how exactly the jet stream is being changed by global warming and what this means for future weather patterns. Temperatures have already risen by about 1.1C since pre-industrial times due to human activity.
The jet stream itself appears to be changing its behaviour over the long term and slowing down in summer — which can make the “omega block” pattern more likely.
Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, says the rapid warming of the Arctic region appears to be the cause of this slowdown.
“There is a general decrease in the winds in summer,” says Francis. “The reason there is a jet stream at all, is because it is cold to the north, and warm to the south, and that temperature difference creates [the condition for the jet stream],” she said.
Because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, there is less temperature difference between those air masses now.
Some of the jet stream behaviour is still unexplained: “Over the Atlantic, the jet has shifted south in summer,” says Tim Woollings, author of Jet Stream and professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford. “Whereas we were expecting it to shift north in response to climate change.”
The heatwave that the UK recently experienced is “just a little taster” of what the rest of Europe experienced, says Woollings. “The real event is over Spain and France,” he says.
The UK experienced two days of extremely high temperatures on Monday and Tuesday before the weather cooled off; Spain and France have seen elevated temperatures for weeks.
As global average temperatures increase, climate models show that heatwaves will get hotter. However, it could be years before researchers know precisely how global warming is influencing these patterns of the jet stream.
“We need a very long record of observation,” says Williams. “It might be decades, or even a century, before we convincingly detect any changes.”
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no lnx
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/coronavirus-is-shaking-the-global-economy-but-its-had-an-underlying-disease-for-a-long-time/
Why the coronavirus could be the tipping point in reshaping the global economy
[President Donald J. Trump joins the G7 Leadership and Extended G7 members as they pose for the “family photo” at the G7 Extended Partners Program Sunday evening, Aug. 25, 2019, at the Hotel du Palais Biarritz, site of the G7 Summit in Biarritz, France. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)]
Written by Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute March 17, 2020
The coronavirus has now gone global, and economies are in freefall. The pandemic is clearly the precipitating cause of today’s crisis, but there’s an underlying disease that has been with us for a long time: neoliberal economics. Globalized travel and trade, multinational supply lines, offshoring and overly financialized economies that have prioritized banking interests, cartels and oligarchy above all else have made a large portion of our population highly vulnerable to the effects unleashed by this pandemic.
Policymakers have a tricky task ahead of them. The virus has created a supply shock, as businesses have shut down and workers have been told to stay at home. In response, demand is plunging as a result of the lost income and the corresponding collapse in sales. That’s highly deflationary (as the bond markets are now signaling). What is required is a robust fiscal response so that workers’ incomes are protected and have adequate financial resources to get health care.
At the same time, an environment in which work and production grinds to a halt for a prolonged period to mitigate the effects of the virus likely means that goods are not being produced or delivered. This creates the conditions for hyperinflation, if not accompanied by rationing or some form of price control. Hyperinflationary eras are relatively rare, but they can occur when countries continue to pay the workers in local currency despite limited production being possible, but nominal demand continues to rise relative to real output, which is now grinding to a halt. This is the real downside of mass lockdown, and self-quarantining, if those workers continue to receive fiscal support through the duration of the crisis (as they should). But absent fiscal support (or having it largely directed to society’s top tier as occurred after the 2008 crisis), you could get depression. Get the balance wrong, then, and civil unrest becomes a real possibility in either scenario. To paraphrase Barack Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, we can’t afford to let another serious crisis go to waste.
As one might have expected, the Trump administration has proved itself fully inadequate to the task at hand. Their proposed payroll tax cut is useless to someone who is an hourly earner and where there are no wages upon which to be taxed. A better policy for our circumstances is along the lines recently proposed by Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration: “Congress should pass a simple one-time payment of $1,000 to every adult who is a U.S. citizen or a taxpaying U.S. resident, and $500 to every child who meets the same criteria.”
While it is good to see the Trump administration now considering some variant of the Furman proposal, it is obvious that a one-time payment isn’t going to cut it. We need to sustain income support so long as people are affected by this pandemic. Therefore, other measures should also include: 1) Moratoriums on mortgage and rental payments for the duration of the crisis (no interest rate penalties/no evictions). 2) Extensive relief for out of work employees (not just unemployment insurance). 3) An expansion of credit to small businesses to cover carrying costs so long as the economy remains in lockdown.
Likewise, the attempt at providing guaranteed sick leave to most American workers affected by the crisis so far falls dangerously short of furnishing anything close to universal paid sick leave. According to the New York Times, the Coronavirus Bill “guarantees sick leave only to about 20 percent of private-sector workers.” This comes on top of a decades-long crisis in the U.S. health care system, the world’s most expensive health care system that distributes care poorly and inequitably.
What’s most worrying about this bill is that the House Democrats caved on virtually every exemption insisted on by the White House and congressional Republicans, which should give voters a good sense of how a future Biden presidency would perform, given the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s long history of appeasing the GOP.
But the problems in the U.S. go well beyond the Trump administration, as the extent of the U.S. government’s long-term misplaced policy priorities is coming home to roost. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for example, have thoroughly screwed up the response, first and foremost by bungling testing for the coronavirus. With the same parochial hubris of American exceptionalism that has caused our medical and health care establishment to ignore results of pharmaceutical drug tests and clinical advances from abroad, the CDC rejected the already-developed Chinese and World Health Organization tests for coronavirus and insisted on unnecessarily inventing their own test kits—which turned out to be a dog’s breakfast that delayed our all-important mass testing program by several weeks. And, of course, the testing mess is continuing because the CDC made no advance provisions for turning on adequate emergency test lab capacity during this or any other epidemic crisis. The problems of the CDC are symptomatic of a broader problem in health care, in which a private sector oligopoly largely predicated on employment and income status, and prioritizing profits over adequate public provision, has proved itself wanting.
That said, the growing appreciation of the magnitude of the health crisis is now intersecting with the political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election. This has had the fortuitous result of producing additional fiscal expansion: the Trump administration has superseded its previous paltry paid leave proposal with a new $850 billion stimulus program (though still too reliant on “trickle-down” economics, as opposed to direct economic assistance to those most in need).
What about the rest of the world?
In Europe, the responses from the relevant authorities in Brussels and Frankfurt have exposed any pretensions about the EU acting like a cohesive political bloc. Bereft of a supranational currency, national governments have been reticent to undertake forceful fiscal policy actions absent the support of the sole currency-issuing entity, the European Central Bank (ECB), even as France and Spain have followed Italy by imposing widespread lockdowns and quarantines across each country (which will require a large fiscal stimulus to offset the likely economic impact). Here’s the other problem: Their economies have been shut down in response to the coronavirus, but the lockdowns themselves are a response to decades of austerity that have starved the health care systems of adequate resources to deal with the pandemic, thereby necessitating widespread quarantines to avert an even more serious breakdown of the system.
National borders, which since 2015 have been increasingly subject to “temporary” checks (despite the Schengen Agreement), are starting to look more permanent thanks to the virus. European solidarity is dissipating as all countries scramble to find national responses to the virus. There is no longer any pretense of having a coordinated EU-wide response. It’s every country for itself, as Professor Bill Mitchell notes, quoting a German ministry publication stating that the country’s “Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy published an order on 4 March 2020 in the Federal Gazette prohibiting the export of protective medical equipment (medical face masks, gloves, protective suits, etc.).” So much for “an ever closer European Union.”
Germany has also moved to seal off its borders to cope with the coronavirus, an ironic development from a government that had humanely granted asylum to 1 million refugees a mere five years ago. Next up, a reassessment of state aid and fiscal rules? Then perhaps repatriation of critical supply lines on national security grounds?
Meanwhile, the single-currency union is fraying at the edges, as credit spreads explode again. The euro may be in its death throes, as the new ECB president, Christine Lagarde, has proved herself unready for prime time. Her botched communication triggered a bond market sell-off on March 12 when she announced: “We are not here to close spreads, this is not the function or the mission of the ECB.” Although she subsequently apologized, the damage remains. Italy’s borrowing costs are likely to soar now that Lagarde has effectively repudiated the measures of her predecessor, Mario Draghi (whose “whatever it takes” speech was widely credited with calming the eurozone’s debt crisis in 2012, thereby substantially narrowing the cost of borrowing in the distressed Mediterranean economies).
It’s all well to call for a coordinated fiscal response, but the ECB president appears unable to recognize that the absence of explicit support from the eurozone’s sole currency issuer (along the lines proposed by Draghi) is precisely what constrains the ability of the national governments to undertake the kinds of robust coordinated actions that she rightly advocates. Absent that support, these countries are all exposed to solvency risk, and the vagaries of private portfolio preferences.
Suffice to say, COVID-19 might prove to be a major tipping point, as it accelerates a paradigm shift in terms of people’s attitudes toward the EU, the role of the state and public health, the need for monetary sovereignty, the madness of austerity, etc. Even the former chief economist of the historically austerity-oriented International Monetary Fund (IMF), Olivier Blanchard, has suggested incurring budget deficits of the magnitude of those sustained by the U.S. during World War II (which went as high as 26 percent of GDP). Truly, the age of austerity is behind us.
Likewise in the UK, Boris Johnson’s budget statement of March 11 outlined the most sustained fiscal loosening seen in that country since 1992. Yet even that is unlikely to be enough, given the rapid spread of the contagion and likely collapse of economic output (which is probably going to be closer to 4-6 percent of GDP, if the 2008 experience is anything to go by). As a result, UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has followed up the budget with an announced £330 billion to support the economy during the coronavirus outbreak, including a system of loans and grants for companies; temporary tax relief for companies in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors; and help for the airline industry. The Johnson government is also moving to “war footing,” urging British manufacturers to make the ventilators, masks, gloves, beds, and other items health care workers and others on the front line of the crisis need, according to the Sunday Times.
Wartime analogies have understandably been invoked to convey the magnitude of the crisis and corresponding need for massive, sustained government spending to support the life and health of the population and efforts to restructure manufacturing supply chains in ways reminiscent of war economies. This is more problematic today, given the extent to which excessive offshoring has exposed our inability to ensure consistent and safe supply of anything and decades of austerity that have undermined basic social services.
On the other hand, the wartime analogy only goes so far: human capital is at risk, but physical infrastructure is not being destroyed, as in wartime. And in wartime, economic activity continues flat out, as the requisite munitions are turned out to conduct military operations. Here, workers are being told to self-isolate, and stay at home, which means a lot is not being produced.
In many respects, it is better to think of the current situation as a global economy being in a state of suspended animation: Virtually all activity has been frozen as policymakers work to contain the spread of COVID-19 and the rest of us engage in social distancing and self-quarantine at home, the major byproduct of which has been the decimation global supply chains, along with of a host of service industries, notably travel and tourism, restaurants and retailers.
The other key distinction is that unlike war, there is a definitive endpoint, the glimpses of which are slowly becoming apparent. Although now spreading across the globe, the number of Chinese cases (the original source of the virus) have trickled to a halt since first being identified late last year; that might provide us with a lead indicator in terms of duration in the rest of the world, as we scramble to find a vaccine, and level off the exponential rise in cases outside of China. But in the meantime, the coronavirus is creating an unprecedented situation where possibly half of our workforce, or possibly more, may not be able to work. The impact on economic activity is comparatively that much larger. Absent a return to production at some point, our Western economies could come to resemble Venezuelan anarchy.
It is true that the monetary authorities have responded aggressively, by cutting rates and providing access to cheap credit, especially for small business enterprises hit badly by the crisis. The U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, ECB and Swiss National Bank have all cut rates and revived the U.S. dollar swap line arrangements, a development that helped to mitigate the dollar liquidity shortage in 2009. On the other hand, easing credit conditions can only help so much when one experiences a supply shock that induces a cessation of production.
The other challenge is that the coronavirus has vividly illustrated many of the hollow claims behind the “gig economy.” Many of its celebrated “freedoms” masked the precariousness of the independent contractors most heavily exposed to this economy, notably their reliance on consumer debt, paltry wages, and the absence of any employee benefits, such as health care. In the U.S., in particular, this subsector is large and getting larger, “over 31.5 million, constituting nearly 30% of all production and non-supervisory jobs,” according to Dan Alpert, an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School.
Equally disturbing is that much of the postindustrial workforce that is in the front line of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic (in sectors such as health and elder care) is likewise in low-wage, low-benefit, insecure jobs, which not only generates increasing vulnerabilities to demand, but also mitigates the capacity of the system to limit the spread of the virus (especially when the care workers are starved of the resources to protect themselves).
Enforced isolation only provides a brief palliative against the true costs of the fraying of our social safety net brought about by decades of attacks on the working and middle class and in the long-term risks civil unrest. Growth and production do matter. As much as we might laud the sudden switch to telecommuting and working online as one of the liberating aspects of the gig economy, it is manifestly unsuitable for manufacturing, where excessive disbursement and modularization can adversely impact the production processes (the recent travails of Boeing being a perfect illustration of this phenomenon).
It is similarly unclear whether our educational institutes can adequately provide comparable results when so much teaching and research and development depends on a community of interacting minds. On top of this, there are the long-term social implications. If this were to become the “new normal,” increased atomization and anomie will likely follow, and the loneliness and meaninglessness that feed suicide, mass shootings, and drug addiction could well risk becoming a new pandemic.
There is also a risk that this virus could actually delay the transition from “rentierism” to a “national developmentalism,” as I suspect all sorts of goodies will be passed on to the rentier class under cover of dealing with the coronavirus. That’s already happening: lots more quantitative easing has been announced, and bailouts are being rapidly targeted to industries adversely impacted, such as the airlines, but a lot less to help has gone to the people who work in those industries. Had today’s rapidly emerging depression-like economic state occurred because of another financial crisis a la 2008, it would have been less politically feasible to deploy the same policy matrix we used in 2008. So while it is laudable to see fiscal stimulus proposals growing in proportion to the growth of the pandemic, it is important to consider the distributional aspects of these stimulus measures in the months ahead. We must avoid a situation like the last crisis, where the vast bulk of the gains were quickly funneled to the top 1 percent with minimal political scrutiny, exacerbating the current situation we have today.
The inequality question will become even more germane in the U.S. if we get a Biden restoration of the status quo ante. Even as the coronavirus has exposed many longstanding weaknesses, notably our inability to make and distribute the things people need, the Democratic Party is still prone to deficit fetishism. Democrats are today being outflanked by the GOP, even its most right-wing members. Trump is finally responding to the belated recognition that his presidency is now imperiled by this crisis. But even if he loses, the indications suggest that a political reconfiguration could emerge first in the GOP, especially if it is ultimately led by a “New Deal Republican,” such as Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, the eurozone stands alone as it risks repeating the dreadful 1931 policies that exacerbated a global depression. As surprising as it might have seemed a mere six months ago, the optimal way forward might be provided by the United Kingdom if it continues in its goal of revitalizing the country via intelligent economic nationalism in which government-guided industrial policy is used to revive high-end industrial activity and redomicile a whole host of supply networks that generate highly skilled, well-paid jobs that benefit the many, as opposed to a limited number of economic rentiers. Post-Brexit, this is exactly what the UK will need, as it extricates itself from the ideological sterility of Thatcherism and the eurozone’s neoliberalism.
But the biggest takeaway from the crisis is that our societies must be immunized from the sickness of a diseased ideology that has done far more long-term damage to us than the current pandemic.
Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/european-green-deal-exxon-lobbyists-2645438998.html
The European commission's effort to transition the 27-country economic bloc from a high-carbon to a low-carbon emitter in a few decades received input from the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil in the weeks prior to its passage, according to a watchdog that monitors lobbying activity, as The Guardian guk] reported.
As Common Dreams reported, a report released last week by InfluenceMap revealed that Exxon lobbyists met with commission officials in November to request an extension of the Green Deal's carbon pricing policy, known as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), to tailpipe emissions.
The report revealed that just ahead of the December announcement of the Green Deal, Exxon lobbyists met with Frans Timmermans, a member of the commission's cabinet, after the company avoided penalties for failing to attend a hearing on climate denial, as the EU Observer reported.
As InfluenceMap wrote in its report:
"In the meeting, the lobbyist for ExxonMobil tried to stall an overhaul of the transportation sector. ExxonMobil representatives pushed for the EU Commission to change its approach to climate regulation in the transport sector, including removing the EU's strict CO2 vehicle tailpipe standards, in what appears to have been an effort to stall a push towards electric vehicles. A direct extract from the meeting notes indicate the un-named ExxonMobil officials argued that the EU should: 'Give serious consideration to extending ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) beyond stationary sources. Tail pipe emission legislation should be substituted with power plant to wheel emission regulation.'"
According to The Guardian, the maneuver aimed to tamp down knowledge about the carbon footprint of driving a combustion engine running on fossil fuels. And the lobbying effort seems to have worked, since the European Commission did not include plans to phase out combustion engines. It also did not include cars running on fossil fuels in its carbon-pricing plan.
Furthermore, the move aims to create unrest that would be politically unfeasible. The only way for a carbon-pricing plan for tailpipe emissions to be influential is for it to make greenhouse gas emissions very expensive. Yet, that type of action that transfers costs to consumers has been the bedrock of protests like the Yellow Vests protests in France, which stemmed from a proposed tax on diesel and gasoline, as the EU Observer reported.
Edward Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said the document "represents yet another evidence piece" of ExxonMobil's efforts to protect its profits by thwarting meaningful regulatory action and shifting the focus to long-term technical solutions, as The Guardian reported.
The lack of decisive and meaningful regulatory actions that would change the transportation sector and the energy infrastructure of Europe in the immediate future drew the ire of climate activists, as EcoWatch reported. The Green Deal requires that European countries reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which many scientists say is too late to stop the climate crisis.
"Net zero emissions by 2050' for the EU equals surrender. It means giving up," Greta Thunberg and 33 other youth climate activists wrote in an open letter published Tuesday and reported by Reuters. "We don't just need goals for just 2030 or 2050. We, above all, need them for 2020 and every following month and year to come."
As Common Dreams pointed out:
"Exxon's attempt to further weaken the European Green Deal represents 'a shift from the propagation of climate science denial towards a range of more subtle tactics and narratives to distract policymakers and the public away from an urgent and robust policy intervention on climate on the scale recommended by the IPCC's 2018 special report on 1.5 [degrees Celsius] warming,' said InfluenceMap."
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European Commission Proposes Sweeping European Green Deal
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ew 1119
EU Parliament Declares ‘Climate and Environmental Emergency’
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719 desmog
ExxonMobil will retain its ability to lobby the European Parliament after MEPs refused to take away their badges.
The ability of the oil major to meet with Brussels decisionmakers was under question after the company refused to attend a hearing on their history of climate denial, citing ongoing litigation in the US.
Party presidents within the European Parliament decided against banning ExxonMobil in a meeting last week. Instead, they pushed the decision to a smaller group of MEPs, known as ‘quaestors’, and to Klaus Welle, the Secretary General of the European Parliament.
The quaestors declined to revoke ExxonMobil’s access badge on a technicality, according to parliamentary aides tracking the meeting. The company was not sent an official letter of invitation by the administration of the European Parliament, and therefore could not be formally excluded, the quaestors ruled, following a proposal from Welle.
“I’m deeply disappointed that ExxonMobil will continue to have the right the haunt the corridors of the Parliament, spreading their disinformation about climate change and blocking the action we need to take to protect the planet for future generations,” said Molly Scott Cato, a Green Party MEP in the South West, in a statement.
“If we want a real democracy in Europe, the Parliament needs to show that it is serious when it organises public hearings on important issues — especially on issues as important as climate denialism. We need to produce a legally watertight official invitation, issue it to Exxon, and let them make a choice being accountable and keeping out of the Parliament.”
Lobbying
Academics and non-governmental organisations tracking the hearing believe that the refusal to revoke ExxonMobil’s access badges could have been politically motivated.
“All the way from the committee itself, it felt as though the main parties — ALDE, S&D and the EPP — were not here to see Exxon being punished for this. I don't know if this is a genuine fear for jobs and investment, or the ramifications of lobby groups,” says Pascoe Sabido, a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory.
“There has been a lot of pressure around this, and an awareness among some fossil fuel groups that this could be a slippery slope.”
As parliamentarians weighed up the issue, the fossil fuel industry was lobbying in favour of the company.
Two days before MEPs were due to take the decision, FuelsEurope — a lobby group for the oil industry, of which ExxonMobil is a member — emailed the heads of the parliamentary groups, warning that debadging the company would send a “very worrying warning signal” to investors in the low-carbon economy across Europe.
In a leaked email, FuelsEurope CEO John Cooper wrote that the “hundreds of billions of Euros per year in energy technologies” required to reduce emissions across Europe could be at risk if MEPs decided to revoke ExxonMobil’s access badges.
“The Parliamentary Hearing and the proposed action at the Conference of the Presidents, even before the decision, sends the worst possible message to the global investment community; that despite making very substantial investments already, having thousands of employees, and tens of thousands of customers every day for their products, a company can be at risk of being excluded from the stakeholder engagement around the very enabling policies required to deliver the energy and industrial transition,” he wrote.
“This is likely to be a very worrying warning signal to a wide range of investors and potential investors in Europe.”
Exxon weighs in
Ahead of the hearing, ExxonMobil sent a letter to MEPs attempting to undermine the research of Harvard academics Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, who have tracked the company’s history of misleading the public on climate change. Supran was included on the parliamentary panel examining Exxon’s behaviour. Citing a report commissioned by ExxonMobil, the letter alleges Supran’s study contains “fundamental errors”.
“They don’t need to win this debate; they just need to make it seem like there is one,” Supran told DeSmog.
“This whole thing is very ironic and predictable — the fact they are not only employing the same tactics towards me and Naomi as I described in my testimony, but also just around the hearing in general, they’re employing the same kind of denial and delay that were the very basis on which the hearing was convened. In some sort of ironic way, they’re laying bare here, for the public and MEPs to see, their corporate capture strategies.”
Supran responded with his own letter to the European Parliament, criticising ExxonMobil for shunning peer review in their own report. He also expresses his shock at the extent to which the company’s interventions actively influenced the parliamentary hearing, with one MEP citing the accusations laid out in Exxon’s letter and accusing Supran of “villifying” and “trying to kill” ExxonMobil.
While the current process was unsuccessful, Cato sees an opportunity for parliamentarians to think about the wider process of tackling corporate lobbying within the EU.
“As we crack down on lobbying that works against the interests of European citizens we need to streamline this process [to] remove lobby accreditation, and other corporations can also be expecting to hear from us,” she said.
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tougher on chemicals and privacy than US
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/free-trade-for-liberals-can-a-us-europe-alliance-protect-democracy-fight-inequality-and-save-the-environment/
...But the fracturing of Europe predates Trump, and it will likely outlast him. Extreme nationalist parties have made steady gains in EU parliamentary elections. Unchecked, they will win control of more European countries, and they will use their authority to persecute minorities, weaken civil society, and perhaps even rip the union apart. Given the continent’s history, that’s a scary prospect. The United States needs new ways to bind European states to each other, to America, and to liberal democratic values.
Here’s one: establish a large, powerful trade agreement with the European Union. Call it the Atlantic Alliance. If implemented, it would bring Europe and America closer together by making them part of the largest free trade zone in the world.
Proposing a new free trade deal in 2019 might sound backward. Recent trade agreements have been archetypes of the runaway free market-ism that produced the very inequality fueling nationalist backlash on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s a reason that Trump ran—and won—on a stridently anti-trade platform. And indeed, the deal that policymakers have already proposed, called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), shows the flaws of the existing system. It’s designed to liberalize the flow of capital without serious respect for the consequences. Like trade agreements past, it would establish international tribunals that let corporations challenge and undermine the regulations of sovereign states.
But there’s no reason why a new deal with Europe has to follow this discredited template. Tariffs between the U.S. and Europe are already low. The Atlantic Alliance would lower them further not as an end in itself, but as a means of reinforcing strategic ties and strengthening liberal values.
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#2 in germany, ctr-left lose to greens and alt rt
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dutch green big in EU parliament?
Green Party Wins Record Support in EU Elections as Youth-Led Climate Strikes Grow
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ExxonMobil could be the second company after Monsanto to lose lobbying access to members of European Parliament after it failed to turn up to a hearing Thursday into whether or not the oil giant knowingly spread false information about climate change.
The call to ban the company was submitted by Green Member of European Parliament (MEP) Molly Scott Cato and should be decided in a vote in late April, The Guardian reported.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/greta-thunberg-eu-pledge-climate-2629705430.html
16 yo woman
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With millions of students taking to the streets and oil majors increasingly facing litigation, the fossil fuel industry is finally being held to account for its contribution to the climate crisis.
This week, the EU is taking this accountability up a notch, with ExxonMobil’s decades-long denial of climate science facing the scrutiny of MEPs and the public at a hearing at the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday.
During the two-hour session, scientists, campaigners and a historian will examine the history of climate denial and in particular the misinformation spread by Exxon, with MEPs able to ask questions about the role and behaviour of the oil major.
The hearing is being held jointly by the petitions committee and the environment, public health and food safety committee. It was arranged following a petition by Food & Water Europe, a Brussels-based non-governmental organisation, which gained 732 signatures.
“To my knowledge, this is the first major body of lawmakers, certainly at the national or international level, to hear on record expert testimony about the history of climate denial today,” says Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who has examined Exxon’s history of obfuscation on climate change, and who will testify at Thursday’s hearing. “There’s a general momentum here, that investigative bodies are starting to formalise this enquiry.”
Representatives from the oil company itself won’t attend the hearing, due to “ongoing climate change related litigation in the US”, according to leaked notes from the coordinators of the hearing. Exxon did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.[twt]
Political Access
One issue MEPs will be asked to consider is the easy access to policymakers that Exxon enjoys, which contrasts sharply with that afforded to members of civil society.
In a five-minute speech that Frida Kieninger, campaigns officer at Food & Water Europe, will make at the hearing on Thursday, she plans to highlight the lengths to which young people have recently gone to gain the attention of lawmakers, compared to the access that Exxon has to the corridors of power.
“We have the young people marching on the streets, while at the same time Exxon is sitting within the European institutions; it's basically on the table helping to draft climate and energy laws, and has a big influence and a lot of money to do so. It's not proportionate to what civil society organisations have,” says Kieninger .
“At the same time they have lied for decades to us about the importance of climate change that they are actually causing with their activities.”
Exxon came under fire in 2015 when investigations by various publications, including DeSmog, InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, revealed that the oil company had known about the causes and impacts of climate change since the 1970s. But instead of acting to reduce emissions, financed efforts to sow seeds of doubt about the science, and lobbied to block federal and international efforts to tackle the problem.
“The overwhelming consensus of experts studying the history of fossil fuel interests is essentially that the fossil fuel industry has known about the basic dangers of global warming caused by their products for 60 years, yet instead of taking action and warning the public, it orchestrated and funded decades of denial,” says Supran.
“A key actor in that history is ExxonMobil. But I also plan to give the committees a broader perspective, to point out that I’m only showing them the tip of the iceberg. We have now thousands of pages of documented evidence and it all points one way, and that’s that Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco. [I’m helping] them understand that I’m just talking about one cog in this web of denial machine.”
EU Lobbying
As well as examining Exxon’s history of climate science denial, Thursday’s hearing will also focus on the extent of Exxon’s lobbying within the EU itself, and on its efforts to delay climate action.
“In the US, I think the political climate is far friendlier towards climate denialism, and in the EU I think it has not been possible,” says Pascoe Sabido, a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory.
“Publicly in Europe, it's been a lot harder for Exxon and others to really downplay the reality of climate change, so instead they're spending millions and millions on lobbying to delay climate action and distract us with false solutions. This hearing is a chance to explore Exxon's climate denialism, which is well documented, but we're also hoping to hold them to account for scuppering much needed climate action.”
DeSmog UK has previously revealed how Exxon funneled millions of Euros to corporations, lobby groups, and academic institutions in the EU.
According to a new report by Corporate Europe Observatory, citing the EU Transparency Register, ExxonMobil spent up to €3.5 million on lobbying in 2018. The company declares 12 lobbyists, six of whom have badges that give them direct access to the European Parliament.
Campaigners hope that MEPs will punish Exxon for spreading climate disinformation by revoking its lobbyist access badges to the European Parliament, similar to its decision to revoke access to lobbyists from Monsanto, the US seed company, in 2017, following its refusal to participate in a hearing in Parliament on the ‘Monsanto Papers’.
the decision to revoke Exxon’s lobby badges would not be taken by the hearing, but rather by the leaders of the parliamentary groupings. Even so, given that the oil company has various means by which to access decisionmakers, any action taken to ban the group from parliament itself would be partially symbolic, says Kieninger.
“It's really affecting only the European Parliament. We know it's a very strong symbolic move, but we are aware of the fact that Exxon have other institutions that they can access, and we also want to make aware of the fact that they have many other channels to influence decision makers, even within the European Parliament, even without the lobby badges,” says Kieninger.
“It's a strong way of parliamentarians to show publicly what they think about Exxon lobbyists, and we can much more easily put pressure on those who are still engaging with Exxon or still showing up to events that Exxon are organising and so on.”
The European Commission has already proved reluctant to censure Exxon for its climate science denial, or to limit its lobbying power. Following the submission of the petition, asking for action against Exxon, the Commission refused to hold a hearing.
“Misinformation about climate change, while deplorable, is not in itself a breach of EU law,” the Commission responded in May 2017. “The best response to climate scepticism is to pursue the current actions and ensure the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
In a subsequent 2018 hearing, the Commission refused to hold a hearing on the grounds that everyone, including climate science deniers, have the right to freedom of speech.
While the potency of the hearing may be weakened by the absence of Exxon itself, the company’s refusal to cooperate could be what ends up making an impression on the MEPs in attendance, says Kieninger.
“I think it's losing some of its strength by Exxon not being there. On the other hand, it gives a chance for MEPs to really consider if they want to keep cooperating with Exxon who's obviously not cooperating with them once they invite them,” she says.
Sabido agrees that Exxon should have its lobbying privileges stripped for its refusal to show up before the committees, suggesting that their absence means the company doesn’t believe the Parliament will hold them to account.
“Exxon not showing up shows the disregard they have for democracy, and for European institutions. What's happening in Brussels is not a court case – it's a political hearing,” says Sabido, adding that their excuse of the ongoing litigation in the USdoesn’t hold much water as a result.
“If Exxon is not going to show up to be held to account, then they shouldn't be able to show up to lobby the Parliament.”
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/20/they-have-lied-decades-european-parliament-scrutinise-exxon-s-climate-science-denial
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https://www.ecowatch.com/glyphosate-approval-eu-2626086402.html
EU Approval of Glyphosate Based on Review That Plagiarized Monsanto Studies
The European Union's license extension of the world's most popular weedkiller, glyphosate, was based on a review that heavily plagiarized industry studies, according to a report (pdf) commissioned by European parliamentarians (MEPs).
The new analysis released Tuesday compares whether a risk assessment of the controversial herbicide was actually authored by scientists representing Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) or by the European Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), an industry group that includes Monsanto, the manufacturer of glyphosate-based Roundup, in its ranks.
"Plagiarism was discovered exclusively in the chapters dealing with the assessment of published studies on health risks related to glyphosate," according to the report by plagiarism researcher Stefan Weber and biochemist Helmut Burtscher-Schaden. "In these chapters, 50.1 percent of the content was identified as plagiarism."
In one of their most "remarkable findings," the report's authors determined that even BfR's assessment methods were directly lifted from GTF text.
"The BfR had thus copied Monsanto's explanation of Monsanto's approach in evaluating the published literature, yet had presented it as the approach of the authority. This is a striking example of deception regarding true authorship," the report states.
The BfR and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) rejected the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer's March 2015 classification of glyphosate as a possible carcinogen. The EFSA based its conclusion on the BfR's stance. Critics have previously accused both agencies of its close ties to the industry.
Weber pointed out to POLITICO that BfR's plagiarizing also means that dozens of studies dismissed by the Glyphosate Task Force were similarly disregarded by European food safety authorities.
"It is very concerning under the hypothesis that all these studies ignored are simply considered as not reliable," he said.
MEPs from the Greens, Socialists & Democrats and European United Left–Nordic Green Left parties commissioned the new report not long after the Guardian revealed that the BfR's glyphosate safety assessment copy-and-pasted large sections of text from a study conducted by Monsanto.
..[doc comp graf]
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"We've Made History': Ireland Joins France, Germany and Bulgaria in Banning Fracking
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https://www.alternet.org/fake-news-european-council-president-hits-back-after-trump-calls-eu-americas-foe
...minutes after CBS aired an interview in which President Donald Trump declared the European Union to be among America's greatest enemies, the head of the EU struck back.
European Council President Donald Tusk (photo, left) took to Twitter, and in an elegant mocking of Trump's favorite phrase, declared, "America and the EU are best friends. Whoever says we are foes is spreading fake news." The European Council represents the European Union.
America and the EU are best friends. Whoever says we are foes is spreading fake news.
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Plastic Bag Bans Actually Work, Study of European Waters Shows 4/18.
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3/18
https://www.ecowatch.com/bayer-monsanto-merger-2550813842.html
EU Approves Controversial Bayer-Monsanto Merger
The European Union approved Bayer's takeover of Monsanto, a major hurdle in the $66 billion merger that would create the world's largest integrated seed and pesticide conglomerate.
The European Commission said the German chemical-maker's takeover of the St. Louis-based agribusiness giant is "conditional on an extensive remedy package, which addresses the parties' overlaps in seeds, pesticides and digital agriculture."
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[https://www.ecowatch.com/eu-ban-single-use-plastic-2538546402.html The Last Straw? EU Official Hints Ban on Single-Use Plastic Across Europe] 2/18.
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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-endorses-criminal-conspiracy-crush-honduras-vote
Honduras is bleeding now, and Honduran blood runs from the hands of President Trump and Gen. John Kelly, long a vicar of American violence enforcing the imperial will. In their vicariously murderous way, Trump and Kelly are carrying on with a century-old, bipartisan American tradition of oppression and human disregard in the classic “banana republic” that the US Marines once kept safe for United Fruit. Trump and Kelly now are merely defending the corrupt military coup of 2009, sanctioned by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who was OK with death squads). Obama and Clinton are the godparents of the present Honduran thugocracy and its unchecked death squads that together provoked the massive emigration of Hondurans seeking safety here, thereby helping to elect Trump in 2016.
Reliable reporting on the current outpouring of protest in Honduras is hard to come by, but it’s rooted in the Honduran presidential election in November. The incumbent Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, 49, of the National Party, is a direct beneficiary of the 2009 coup, which elevated him to the leadership of the National Congress. He is a businessman (coffee, hotels, media) with a master’s degree in public administration from the State University of New York. He was first elected president in 2013 (with 34% of the vote) in a corrupt process during which at least 18 opposition-party candidates and supporters were murdered. Additionally, charges of fraudulent voting and corrupt campaign contributions were ignored by authorities, to the benefit of Hernandez. Once he was president, he was barred by the Honduran constitution from running for a second term. This obstacle was removed by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which is controlled by the president. Hernandez has a long personal relationship with Gen. John Kelly. Going into the election, Hernandez was considered the favorite.
Opposing Hernandez was democratic socialist Salvador Nasralla, 64, of the Libre-PINU Party (the Opposition Alliance against Dictatorship), the party of the coup-deposed President Manuel Zelaya. Nasralla graduated with honors from the Catholic University of Chile as a civil engineer and later earned an NBA. He was CEO of Pepsi Honduras before starting a television career in 1981. Since then, he has been harshly critical of chronic corruption in Honduras, founding the Anti-Corruption Party in 2013, when he won 13% of the vote for president. He was not expected to win the 2017 election.
As it stands now, the winner may never be known, but more than likely Nasralla won the popular vote. Among election monitors, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU) have rejected the results, while the US Embassy has said everything is hunky-dory. Meanwhile, the US and other anti-democratic forces are on the verge of installing their puppet Hernandez as the re-elected president of Honduras. The timeline of this stolen election illustrates just how secure the dictatorship and its allies in the US feel in their brazen criminality:
November 26. Apparently, something like 57% of Hondurans vote for a field of nine candidates. The Supreme Electoral Council, controlled by Hernandez, closes the polls an hour earlier than in the past, likely suppressing the vote. At first the Electoral Council releases vote totals as they come in, as is customary. Then, with Nasralla surprisingly leading, the Electoral Council suspends the count for seven hours.
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