New York Times attack Greek (and EU) co-ops

In Olive Growers' Claims Prompt Investigation, Stephen Castle writes:

The story of the miracle harvest turned up on an application for European agricultural subsidies that surfaced in 2007; officials determined the amount requested was well in excess of what the farmers could conceivably have been entitled to. But something disturbed investigators more than the simple size of the claim: It was filed not by the hard-pressed growers themselves, but by the leaders of their agricultural co-operative — one of thousands of locally powerful, politically connected producers' associations across Europe.

In poor, remote areas of Southern Europe, evidence is emerging that what happened in Crete — where the European Union is demanding a refund of nearly €375,000, or about $540,000, paid to the collective that operates around Vamos — is not a minor aberration but a symptom of a broader problem involving co-ops.

Investigators believe that tens of millions of euros may have been lost in the few cases they have investigated — which they say are just a snapshot of the wider picture. They are currently looking into four new cases, while five have been completed.

Writing in a report about several scams involving two Portuguese banana co-ops two years ago, the European Union's fraud investigative agency, known as OLAF, said it had found “that this pattern of abuse by some producer organizations was a problem throughout” the bloc.

Writing in a report about several scams involving two Portuguese banana co-ops two years ago, the European Union's fraud investigative agency, known as OLAF, said it had found “that this pattern of abuse by some producer organizations was a problem throughout” the bloc.

The story appears accurate enough but, perhaps deliberately, does not mention that private enterprise is guilty of the same fraud as lowly agricultural co-ops (a longtime target of the State Department). As always, we only see the news that fits.

Clinton apologizes to Haiti - calls dumping cheap rice "a mistake"

Nova Scotia activists are expressing surprise that former US president Bill Clinton has apologized for flooding Haiti with cheap American rice beginning in the mid 1990s. During testimony before a US Senate committee last month, Clinton admitted that requiring Haiti to lower its tariffs on rice imports made it impossible for Haitian farmers to compete in their domestic economy. The trade policy forced farmers off land and undercut Haiti's ability to feed itself.

“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” Clinton—now a UN special envoy to Haiti—told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee March 10. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.”

“I would like to believe that Clinton has had a change of heart,” wrote Heidi Verheul of the Halifax Peace Coalition in an e-mail. “But he actually needs to do something to challenge the free market shock doctrine economic policies that are being designed to further subjugate and impoverish Haiti,” she added. “The policies of aid and development in Haiti have continuously served to undermine democracy [and] local economies, and have driven tens of thousands of people from their land, enslaved them in sweatshops, makeshift homes, and absolute grinding, miserable poverty.”

Clinton's apology attracted scant media attention in the US and none in Canada. It was included as part of an Associated Press news agency report that was published March 20 by the Washington Post. The AP report from Haiti's earthquake-ravaged capital, Port au Prince, suggests world leaders are reconsidering trade and aid policies that make poor countries dependent on rich ones. It quotes UN aid official John Holmes as saying that poor countries, like Haiti, need to become more self-sufficient by rebuilding their own food production.

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500 Years Later

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Owen 'Alik Shahadah award winning film 500 Years Later (www.500yearslater.com), produced by M.K. Asante,Jr.

"To understand the entire Eurocentric discourse on Africa and African people is a vivid exercise in the removal of agency from a people. The almost primary purpose of this study, new and old, is the continuous reassertion of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness ." This is the Eurocentric tradition in anti-African scholarship that provides the moral-academic justification for the slave trade; the most successful commercial venture in the history of humanity. In Europe's bid to protect their trade interest it is clear the marriage between racist academia and the exploitation of Africa were not strangers. The need for the continuation of this tradition is not lost in today's markets which are heavily dependant on sustaining the impoverishment of Africa. "

The Coming Insurrection

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination, but by resonance, according to this report by Sarah Nardi in Adbusters.

...Officially authored by “The Invisible Committee,” an anonymous group of activists and intellectuals, The Coming Insurrection is a slim manual that predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture and outlines a plan for the regeneration of collectivist values. Written in the wake of widespread riots that gripped French suburbs in 2005, the text is interpreted by some as an anarchist manifesto, a situationist-inspired call to arms. The French government sees it as a “manual for terrorism.” The move against Coupat and the rest of the Tarnac 9 was intended as a preemptive strike against the burgeoning anti-capitalist movement in France. While the others were released with relative speed, Coupat was held under “preventative arrest” until May of 2009 and labeled by the government as a “pre-terrorist.”

And there, buried within the idiom of conservative fear – leftist, anarcho, collectivist, commune – is the word that points to the real danger in this story: pre. Preemptive. Preventative. Pre-terrorist. The French government, fearing the societal upheaval that a mass rethink of capitalism would spawn, exercised the principles of preventive medicine as the doctrine of law. It suspected the presence of renegade cells, mutating into malignant tumors of dissent and threatening the health of the entire body politic, so the government acted preemptively by swiftly excising the tissue in question.

The one ray of hope shining down on this brave new world – in which people can be detained for transgressions they have yet to commit – is the massive show of solidarity that has grown around Coupat and the others. Groups have sprung up across France, Spain, the US and Greece. In Moscow, supporters marched in protest outside the French embassy. And in June an unauthorized reading of The Coming Insurrection at a Barnes & Noble in New York City sparked a spontaneous – albeit brief – insurgency that flowed through the streets and nearby shops...

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The coming insurrection - The Invisible Committee

Apparently that text can't wait -- not even during sex

Report Reveals Surprising News About Social Media and Its Grip on Our Lives

Beth Snyder Bulik  reports for AdAge:

Would you answer a text during sex? If you're younger than 25, one in 10 of you would.

How about during a meeting? While you're eating? Or even while, as the Retrevo Gadgetology Report recently asked, when you're "on the john"? Some 22%, 49%, and 24%, respectively, of online under-25-year-olds agreed they "could be interrupted by an electronic message" while doing any of those things.

The older 25-plus age group was only half as tolerant to electronic interruptions -- 6% could be bothered during sex; 17% during a meeting; 27% during a meal; and 12% in the bathroom. But that's still a lot of people of all ages engaging in social media anywhere and anytime.

"Social media is embedded in our lives. It's why people go to a restaurant and check Foursquare before they sit down with their friends, then take a picture of their food before they eat and upload it to Facebook," said Manish Rathi, co-founder and VP-marketing at Retrevo, a consumer electronics shopping and review site. "We've started asking these questions because we wanted to know how social media is contributing to gadget buying and usage."

While not that many people actively engage in social media during sex, they do in bed. Retrevo found that almost half of social-media users check in via phone while lying in bed. About 48% of those polled said they check or update Facebook or Twitter after they've gotten into bed at night and/or before they get out of bed in the morning. That number jumps to 76% for the 25-and-younger set, with a whopping 19% of those millennials saying they also check in whenever they wake up during the night.

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