Senate The European Politics Thread

But you could strip it from someone else. After all, justice for the Jews was done by stripping it from the Palestinians. I suggest we strip from the Australians next.

 

Land was offered in Australia to the Zionists; they already declined.

 

The Palestinians aren't afraid.

 

It says (direct translation): Emmanuel Macron stated that he wouldn't cede "any ground to hate speech (...) to anti-Zionism because it's the modern-day form of antisemitism". It's a pretty absolute statement. (I'm waiting for the Elysée to upload the full transcript, because there's no way I'm enduring a 15-min video of twaddle by that pompous idiot.)

I don't think this comparison works, because 1) Israel doesn't define being Jewish as a religion but as an ethnicity based on ancestry, and 2) discrimination against 1948 Palestinians goes on ethnic criteria, not on religious ones. In England (or equivalent countries that guarantee freedom of religion) your religion doesn't impact your rights as a citizen. In Israel your ethnicity does, not only in socio-economic terms but in terms of law and law enforcement.

To me there's no doubt that Israeli Jews have acquired the right to stay where they are. That boat sailed a long time ago. At the same time, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Israel's definition of Jewishness as a national identity has no place in a democratic country, two-state solution or not. When your definition of national identity is 1) based on having the right blood and 2) phrased is such a way that the nation extends beyond the borders of the state, it is in essence discriminatory and undemocratic.

 

I thought as much Chyntuck, but I wasn't sure if context meant it was the same as saying "a form of" or "THE form of." Cheers.

 

I'll just chime in to say that, as an atheist, I find all religions equally dumb. Maybe not equally dangerous, but equally stupid. Therefore, disputes and wars based on religion are utter stupidity as well. I also refuse to be called either an antisemite for criticising Israel, or an anti-muslim for criticising the Palestinians. I know religion plays a big part in this conflict and I am convinced that if it weren't for religion, there wouldn't even *be* a conflict.

As a humanist, I fully support the Palestinian's claim for an independent, self-governed state. I am not afraid to state that the way Palestinians in the occupied territories are treated is, if not a war crime, at least as revolting as if it were one.

I am not stupid, however. Israel, as has been said, is here to stay.

What remains up for debate are its borders. I think the '67 borders should be a good compromise. The colonists in the West Bank can shove it because the only reason they want to live where they do is because some millennia-old fairytale has told them to. I also know that unfortunately many Palestinians are as religiously nuts as their jewish zionist counterparts. Chances are, if Israel stopped all agression, recalled all colonists and gave up on the occupied territories, there would still be Palestinians wanting more. Wanting all of Palestine back. Which is impossible.

The way I see it, there's stupid, dangerous, obnoxious, religious nutjobs on both sides of the conflict, and as long as the conflict is a religious one (which means, as long as Israel maintains that its nation is strictly a jewish one, despite many arabs living there, and as long as surrounding arab countries want "the Jews expelled from Palestine") nothing's gonna change.
The only thing I'm really hoping for, from a purely humanistic pov, is that the utterly inhumane, criminal treatment of West-Bank and Gaza Palestinians stops. If *I* were treated like they are, humiliated on a daily basis, chances are I'd be equally hateful and extremist as well. A man with his back to the wall can only escape forwards.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

Of, what? Coming here?

Vivec pls.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-f...4595&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

lol

 

Still 54% approval rating, Vivec.

Cutting house benefit, especially since Paris has driven so many low middle income families out of the city, probably isn't the wisest decision in the book.

 

Is the implication here that a Proper Socialist would be more popular?

Vivec what is this obsession with failure in politics? You're too old for first year university edgy rebellion.

 

Hollande manage to, at one point, to have an approval rating worse than Petain - who was convicted for treason and almost executed.

 

I feel like if the French people approve of a leader they're doing something wrong. Any excuse to take time off work under the banner of a 'strike', and they're mobilised.

 

https://www.economist.com/news/euro...erkel-can-tolerate-turkeys-growing-repression

On the topic of a country that was never and should never be Europe - Turkey.

Saying “no” to Erdogan
Turkey’s growing repression leads to a showdown with Germany
A human-rights activist’s arrest is more than Angela Merkel can tolerate

Europe
Jul 21st 2017
AFTER months of diplomatic tiptoeing, Germany’s patience has run out. On July 18th a Turkish court ordered that six human rights activists, including a German trainer who had been detained during a training workshop with Amnesty International, a human-rights group, should be officially arrested. Two days later Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, cut loose.


He warned his country’s nationals against travelling to Turkey, proposed rolling back European Union economic assistance and suggested his government might stop providing export credit guarantees to companies doing business in Turkey. “We cannot advise anyone to invest in a country where there is no longer legal certainty and even companies are being accused of supporting terrorists,” he said.

The Turkish government’s repression of opponents and civil-society groups has grown steadily worse since an attempted coup last summer. Over 50,000 people have been jailed on charges of association with the plotters. Previously, Germany and other EU countries had responded to the crackdown with statements of “deep concern”, accompanied by expressions of sympathy over the attempted coup.

That approach seems to be over. In a statement, Mr Gabriel’s ministry accused Turkish courts of taking orders from the government and of “inventing” links between human-rights outfits and terrorist organisations. A spokesperson for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president, condemned the German statements as unfounded. Mr Erdogan himself accused Germany of meddling in Turkey’s internal affairs. “Our judiciary is more independent than theirs,” he said on July 21st.

For Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, the arrests of the German activist, Peter Steudtner, and, among others, Amnesty International’s Turkey director appear to have been the last straw. Earlier this year, Turkish police arrested Deniz Yücel, a journalist and German-Turkish dual national, and another German journalist, Mesale Tolu, on terror charges. (Some 160 Turkish journalists are in prison, too.) Those arrests have raised fears that Turkey is using foreign detainees as hostages. According to Bild, a German newspaper, Mr Erdogan proposed swapping Mr Yücel for a pair of Turkish generals whom Turkey accuses of involvement in the coup, and who are seeking asylum in Germany.

The storm has been brewing for over a year. After the Bundestag recognised the World War I slaughter of Ottoman Armenians as genocide in June 2016, Turkey blocked its lawmakers from visiting German troops stationed at a Turkish airbase. (Germany has since announced it will redeploy the 280 soldiers to Jordan.) In March, Turkish ministers were blocked from campaigning in Germany to win Turkish-Germans’ support for a referendum granting Mr Erdogan more power; Mr Erdogan accused the Germans of “Nazi practices”. Mr Erdogan has lambasted Germany for refusing to hand over followers of the Gulen community, a powerful Muslim sect believed by many to have played a leading role in the failed coup. Turkish officials say Germany has become a safe haven for “terrorists”.

Relations between the two countries, already at their most toxic in decades, now seem destined to deteriorate further. There is much on the line. Germany is Turkey’s most important trading partner. Some 6,800 German companies do business in Turkey. The ailing tourism sector relies heavily on German tourists: 3.9m visited Turkey last year, down from 5.6m in 2015. A deal that commits Turkey to stopping migrants from crossing the Aegean Sea, in exchange for EU aid and the promise of visa-free travel to Europe, also hangs in the balance.

Even if Germany and Turkey manage to contain this falling-out, fresh disagreements appear to be inevitable. Mr Erdogan has made a habit in the past of whipping up anti-Western sentiment ahead of elections. European politicians, having found that tough talk on Turkey is popular with their voters, are beginning to reciprocate. Many Dutch ones did so in their election in March, and some in Germany will surely repeat the tactic as its national election approaches in September. The Turkish president has started a dangerous game.


Good. Bloody good work, Germany.

 

She might be a Christian conservative, who doesn't believe in equal marriage, but Europe is not going to be the same when Merkel finally leaves.

 

Yes but unlike Christian conservatives in the states, who are both evil c-words and aggressively anti-intellectual, she doesn't impose her view on others and accepts when the majority disagree.

 

https://www.economist.com/news/busi...orporate-assets-emmanuel-macron-serious-about

National treasuresIs Emmanuel Macron serious about privatisation?
The French state is mismanaging its valuable corporate assets

print-edition icon Print edition | Business


ONE reason for Italian anger over the decision on July 27th by Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, to stop Fincantieri, a shipbuilder from Trieste, winning control of a French shipyard at Saint-Nazaire, was that recent cross-border deals have mostly gone France’s way. Italian businesspeople have grown nervous about French firms’ “colonisation” by means of acquisitions in luxury goods, media and telecoms, including the €46bn ($55bn) merger between Luxottica, an Italian maker of spectacles, and France’s Essilor, announced in January (the group’s headquarters will be in Paris). The bad taste will linger even if the two governments strike a deal over Saint-Nazaire by the autumn, as they have pledged.
Yet Mr Macron’s move has been even more dismaying for those at home who want the state to get on with privatisation. During his presidential run Mr Macron promised to raise €10bn from sales of some of the state’s sprawling portfolio of holdings in firms. The aim was to pay for a new fund to help other companies invest in innovation. His threat to nationalise the Saint-Nazaire yard (rather than cede control to Fincantieri) is a retrograde step.
The direction of travel was supposed to be towards sell-offs. For the past few years the French state has been quietly disposing of its stakes in various regional airports, including Lyon, Nice and Toulouse. It was Mr Macron, as economy minister in 2015-16, who oversaw the sales and who pressed for the disposal of Groupe ADP, a large company that owns the main airports in Paris, at Charles de Gaulle and Orly.
Mr Macron left office before he could finish the job and ADP remains 50.6% state-owned. But under his economic team, led by politicians drawn from the centre-right, its sale looks all but inevitable (and should raise some €7bn). An obvious bidder is Vinci, a French infrastructure firm. Yet privatising airports only goes so far. The question is what comes next. Mr Macron’s government will soon, probably after the summer, announce its plan for ADP and say which other stakes are to be sold off.
A smaller role for the state in business is long overdue. A couple of decades after most countries in western Europe sold off many of their corporate holdings, France still has a huge portfolio. According to a report in January by the Cour des Comptes, an independent public auditor, the state has investments in nearly 1,800 firms, holdings which together are worth almost €100bn. The state-owned sector in France employs nearly 800,000 people, the most of all the countries surveyed by the Cour des Comptes (see chart). The number of firms in which the state has a majority stake has been rising since around 2006.

Public holdings are mainly managed by the Agence des participations de l’État (APE), by Bpifrance, a public-investment fund and the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC), a state investment bank. The Cour des Comptes reckons the trio are doing a poor job; its report was scathing about public management of corporate assets over the decades (while recognising some recent improvements). It laments a lack of purpose in ownership and chronic failures of supervision, for example in the collapse of Areva, a nuclear firm 92% owned by the state. One curse for EDF, an energy utility that is another big holding, was being made to absorb some of Areva’s struggling business last year.
The auditor also sees confusion between the three agencies, describes overall financial losses in recent years, poor governance and concludes that “the state has difficulty being a good shareholder”. Even more damning is the verdict of a former boss of APE, David Azéma, who ran it until 2014. His experience, he explains, taught him that lumbering, publicly owned companies always lose value to nimbler competition. Political meddling hurts, he says, as when ministers rather than boards pick chief executives—who cannot be sacked however badly they perform.

Politicians also bully, he says, citing pressure last year on EDF, forcing it to agree against managers’ wishes to finance and build Hinkley Point C, a nuclear power station in Britain that risks becoming a huge financial liability. Mr Azéma urges France “massively” to reduce the state’s stakes in all listed companies, or at least create proxy boards to block political meddling.
All these problems help explain why the value of the 13 listed companies managed by the APE, worth some €66bn as of mid-July, has declined in recent years. The performance of a few big firms, notably nuclear and energy companies, was particularly awful. Most striking is the withering of EDF, 83.4% owned by the state. The utility’s share price was €86 in 2007 and has fallen to under €9. Despite generating over €71bn in annual revenue, the company, which has enormous liabilities, is valued at less than €26bn.

Politicians do show a new readiness to divest public holdings, partly because the national budget needs revenue. Trade unions, too, are likelier to accept at least limited change. Support for hardline unions has declined, notably with the emergence this year of the reform-minded CFDT as the single-largest union. Asked about sales of public assets, its leader, Laurent Berger, says it would be “idiotic” to separate the state from strategic sectors, but that his members could accept changes on a “case-by-case basis”.
Yet some politicians are said to be lobbying to delay sales of public assets, arguing that innovation funds could instead be raised by setting aside cashflow from the firms. State bodies have grown cannier in finding ways of preserving their influence over companies, even as they reduce ownership. The APE’s holding in Safran, a big aeronautical and defence firm that has thrived in recent years, for example, has been cut from 30% in 2010 to just 14% this year. Yet the state retains nearly one-quarter of voting rights. It keeps other leverage, especially in the defence industry where it is a huge customer. It might further cut its holdings in Safran and could reduce its current 26% in another defence firm, Thales (that stake is worth just over €5bn). But it is less likely that the state would sharply reduce its 11% holding in Airbus, a plane manufacturer, that is worth some €6bn.
Mr Macron is not entirely hands-off in his attitude to public assets and his decision about Saint-Nazaire shows a willingness to meddle in private ones too. As economy minister in 2015 he increased the state’s stake in Renault, a big carmaker, by 4.7 percentage points, to nearly 20%, in order to force the firm to obey a new law giving double-voting rights to long-term shareholders (ie, the state). That infuriated Nissan, Renault’s other big shareholder. Government officials now talk about selling some of the stake.
Will Mr Macron and his team dare introduce radical changes? Probably not. A likelier outcome is a gradual slicing away of parts of public holdings. Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, talks of the state stepping back slowly from holding corporate assets. That would probably mean trimming its €5bn stake in Orange, formerly France Telecom, for example.
The chairman of two large companies, one with a large state stake, suggests that in the end the role of state is “too important in French economic life” to be changed quickly. An official at the state-owned railways firm, SNCF, concurs. That firm devours billions in subsidies, but is popular with the public who would not countenance its privatisation, or that of any other firm seen as “strategic”. Outright privatisation of airports might soon be inevitable, but other changes are likely to come one step at a time, with some in the wrong direction.

 

Don't forget, she's both the daughter of a Protestant minister and has a PhD in Physics, which she taught at University for quite a while before entering politics.

As for Turkey, they were already pushing the limits when they arrested a German-Turkish reporter several months ago. This latest arrest just went way, way over the line.

 

Wow, looking at that chart, Norway has an ungodly enormous public sector with over 200,000 employees in a population of only 5 million.

 

Norwegian public sector is very deregulated and independent of the government. Kinda 'public in name', but most are private enterprises under the tutelage of the state.

 

I think he knows this, living there...

But the thing is, when the MSB or Millennial Socialist Brigade, comes to power, Macron's just wasted their time. After all, they will just swipe right on the means of production so...

 

I didn't know VVM lived in Norway.

 

Posting this here, because it requires a more internationalist perspective than the US politics thread has:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2017/08/charlottesville-context

Charlottesville in contextHow Germany responds to “blood and soil” politics
What zero tolerance of neo-Nazi ideology looks like

Kaffeeklatsch

Aug 13th 2017
by J.C. | BERLIN
TO VIEW the footage of crowds in Charlottesville yelling Nazi slogans and flying Swastika banners is troubling anywhere. But do so from Berlin is particularly so. America in 2017 is not Germany in 1933. But the chants about “blood and soil”, the flaming torches, the Nazi salutes, the thuggery and violence turned on objectors—the whole furious display of armed ethno-nationalism—are nonetheless chillingly evocative. Similarly so is the strenuous ambivalence about it all from Donald Trump and some of his media cheerleaders. It could hardly contrast more vividly with how things are done here: Germany today is a case study in how not to give an inch to the dark politics of “Blut und Boden”.
That begins with the significance placed on remembering where this politics led in the past. Every German school child must visit a concentration camp; as essential a part of the curriculum as learning to write or count. The country's cities are landscapes of remembrance. Streets and squares are named after resisters. Little brass squares in the pavements (Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones) contain the names and details of Holocaust victims who once lived at those addresses. Memorials dot the streets: plaques commemorating specific persecuted groups, boards listing the names of concentration camps (“places of horror which we must never forget”), a giant field of grey pillars in central Berlin attesting to the Holocaust.
as I do in that case of the bestseller lists, while admiring the underlying determination to allow no slippage or normalisation.
Germany, of course, carries a unique historical burden. But every country has dark periods in its national past and far-right revisionists in its political present. The Charlottesville protests, marching under Confederate flags against plans to remove Confederate statues, are a distinctively American reminder of that (indeed, the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow laws and studied segregation as a possible model for German society). Countries without Holocausts on their history books can also learn from Germany's grown-up, vigilant and dutiful culture of remembrance. In America that may mean removing Confederate symbols from public spaces; Jim Grey, the mayor of Lexington, has announced plans to accelerate this in his city. It means unambiguously declaring the Charlottesville protesters beyond the pale (while defending their right to protest peacefully). And it means calling out Mr Trump's equivocal statements for what they are: a moral abomination.

Germany and America have, it seems, switched places.

 

You don't see too many Jews or African-Americans disputing that at all here...

 

No but you don't see enough people stating that fascists should live in fear of persecution for their beliefs either.

 

If only there were a thread here... maybe asking if it's okay to punch Nazis in the face...

Also, if only some people remember that "Antifa" was basically a term invented by the Nazis to make themselves sound more reasonable and persecuted...

Generically, though, I agree with you -- and it's striking that peaceful BLM marches are met with riot cops and mechanized infantry and a Nazi march is met with... not that.