On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a  corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors [4] on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress [5] in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management—a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters [6] (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration—and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap labor—and vulnerable labor—is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous—but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the  [7]Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the state—you can’t do that. There was one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.

Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.

And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the workplace functions—that’s the job of management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they work.

On how higher education ought to be

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them—that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7 [8]). We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” [9] for newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party” [10][1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department meetings.

On “shared governance” and worker control

The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.

On the alleged need for “flexibility”

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements—you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees—what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a prettysubstantial raise [11], almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.

On the purpose of education

These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge—that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good ones.

On the love of teaching

We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting—and I don’t really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative—what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be done at any level.

It’s worth thinking about some of the imaginative and creative educational programs that are being developed at different levels. So, for example, somebody just described to me the other day a program they’re using in high schools, a science program where the students are asked an interesting question: “How can a mosquito fly in the rain?” That’s a hard question when you think about it. If something hit a human being with the force of a raindrop hitting a mosquito it would absolutely flatten them immediately. So how come the mosquito isn’t crushed instantly? And how can the mosquito keep flying? If you pursue that question—and it’s a pretty hard question—you get into questions of mathematics, physics, and biology, questions that are challenging enough that you want to find an answer to them.

That’s what education should be like at every level, all the way down to kindergarten, literally. There are kindergarten programs in which, say, each child is given a collection of little items: pebbles, shells, seeds, and things like that. Then the class is given the task of finding out which ones are the seeds. It begins with what they call a “scientific conference”: the kids talk to each other and they try to figure out which ones are seeds. And of course there’s some teacher guidance, but the idea is to have the children think it through. After a while, they try various experiments and they figure out which ones are the seeds. At that point, each child is given a magnifying glass and, with the teacher’s help, cracks a seed and looks inside and finds the embryo that makes the seed grow. These children learn something—really, not only something about seeds and what makes things grow; but also about how to discover. They’re learning the joy of discovery and creation, and that’s what carries you on independently, outside the classroom, outside the course.

The same goes for all education up through graduate school. In a reasonable graduate seminar, you don’t expect students to copy it down and repeat whatever you say; you expect them to tell you when you’re wrong or to come up with new ideas, to challenge, to pursue some direction that hadn’t been thought of before. That’s what real education is at every level, and that’s what ought to be encouraged. That ought to be the purpose of education. It’s not to pour information into somebody’s head which will then leak out but to enable them to become creative, independent people who can find excitement in discovery and creation and creativity at whatever level or in whatever domain their interests carry them.

On using corporate rhetoric against corporatization

This is kind of like asking how you should justify to the slave owner that people shouldn’t be slaves. You’re at a level of moral inquiry where it’s probably pretty hard to find answers. We are human beings with human rights. It’s good for the individual, it’s good for the society, it’s even good for the economy, in the narrow sense, if people are creative and independent and free. Everyone benefits if people are able to participate, to control their fate, to work with each other—that may not maximize profit and domination, but why should we take those to be values to be concerned about?

Advice for adjunct faculty organizing unions

You know better than I do what has to be done, the kind of problems you face. Just got ahead and do what has to be done. Don’t be intimidated, don’t be frightened, and recognize that the future can be in our hands if we’re willing to grasp it.

Prof. Chomsky’s remarks in this transcript were elicited by questions from Robin Clarke, Adam Davis, David Hoinski, Maria Somma, Robin J. Sowards, Matthew Ussia, and Joshua Zelesnick. Noam Chomsky’s OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity [12] is published by Zuccotti Park Press. [13]

The average “net worth” of a US Congressional representative rose to $1,008,767 in 2012 from $966,000 in 2011. A total of 268 out of the 534 members of Congress were worth more than $1 million. This was an increase over the 257 millionaires in Congress the previous year.

Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, topped the list of wealthy legislators with a net worth estimated by the report at between $330 million and $597 million. Senator Mark Warner (Democrat of Virginia), Representative Jared Polis (Democrat of Colorado), Representative John K. Delaney (Democrat of Maryland), Representative Michael McCaul (Republican of Texas), Representative Scott Peters (Democrat of California), Representative Richard Blumenthal (Democrat of California), and SenatorJay Rockefeller (Democrat of West Virginia) were all found to have an average net worth exceeding $100 million, with the high end estimates for six out the top ten surpassing $200 million. Also in 2012, the report found, the median net worth of US Senators rose to $2.7 million from $2.5 million.

These figures do not include the value of legislators’ personal residences, automobiles, and artwork, which would push the numbers even higher. Moreover, when reporting assets belonging to their spouses, legislators can report simply “Over $1 million” or “Over $50 million,” allowing them to conceal large portions of their holdings.

US lawmakers hold large amounts of stock in the largest US corporations and the most profitable sectors of the economy. The CRP report listed General Electric, Wells Fargo, Microsoft Corp, Proctor & Gamble, Apple Inc, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, IBM Corps, Cisco Systems, and AT&T as the corporations most heavily invested in by members of Congress. At least 40 members hold major investments in each of these companies. Congressional investments in real estate during 2012 were pegged by the report at somewhere between $442.2 million and $1.4 billion, and investments in securities ranged between $64.5 million and $229.6 million. Other sectors with heavy investment from congressional representatives included oil and gas ($34 to $97 million), commercial banks ($38 to $135 million), and automotive ($25 to $114 million).

The obscene wealth of US legislators is an expression of the domination of American society by a plutocracy. The concentration of such vast sums in the hands of the “people’s representatives” makes a mockery of claims that the US political system is genuinely democratic. Instead, it is an oligarchical system ruled by the ultra-wealthy and their bought-and-paid for lackeys who hold the levers of state power.

Securing election to Congress requires massive quantities of campaign money, ensuring that successful candidates are fully in the pocket of the big banks and corporations by the time they reach office. After their election, moreover, many lawmakers achieve staggering levels of personal enrichment, cementing their loyalty to the capitalist system.

As the CRP report noted, “Thousands of companies are given billions of dollars worth of government contracts every year, and many will often lobby Congress directly. Some of these businesses may also find themselves targets of congressional scrutiny for questionable business practices, accidents, even disasters. All the while, lawmakers themselves sometimes have stock holdings or other financial relationships with these corporations and associations.”

Upon ending their careers as “public servants,” Congressmen typically find their way to comfortable, lavishly paid positions in the private sector.

As recent developments illustrate, the millionaires’ club on Capitol Hill dutifully serves the interests of the capitalist class against those of the working class, stripping away regulations on big business and finance while dismantling social programs. On November 1, the US Congress passed a massive cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), reducing food assistance to 47 million Americans who rely on the program to put food on the table. Then, over Christmas, Congress allowed extended jobless benefits for long-term unemployed Americans to expire, condemning some 1.3 million long-term unemployed to destitution.

The great majority of the US population is facing levels of economic hardship not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The suffering of the population is a direct product of the socially corrosive, anti-working class policies being implemented by both parties in the Congress, which has pressed ahead with comprehensive attacks on the living standards and social conditions of the working class since the financial crash of 2008.

Of the economic chasm separating the politicians from the masses of working people, the CRP wrote, “About 1 percent of all Americans are millionaires. In Congress, that number regularly hovers between 40 percent and 50 percent, meaning elected leaders generally need not worry about the economic pressures many Americans face—from securing gainful employment to grappling with keeping a family financially afloat.”

In the figures published by the CRP, the historical bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy is on full display. The bourgeois democratic political institutions established in the course of the American Revolution have become bulwarks of reaction and privilege.

Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/11/mill-j11.html

Monsanto manufactures the genetically modified seeds that, when combined with toxic pesticides, create the devastating ‘monocultures’ — where nothing grows but a single plant — that increasingly cover our planet. Now they plan to build one of the world’s largest GM seed factories in Malvinas.

Sofía, worried about health risks from the plant, has joined the protests, backed by nearly 70% of the area’s residents. If 1 million of us join the people of Malvinas in the next 3 days, we can raise the profile of the issue in local media, feature the petition in an ad campaig n, and push the unpopular Argentine President to shut down the plant and roll back the spread of Monsanto’s toxic agriculture:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stop_monsanto_in_argentina_global_/?bskwlgb&v=33255

Sofia and the people of Malvinas have been lying in front of bulldozers to block the construction of the plant. If we can amplify their protest — we can help them win. President Kirchner is facing a wave of unpopularity right now, and she can’t afford to be seen to be choosing Monsanto’s profits over her own people.

The mega-plant will use toxic chemicals to engineer seeds, which sounds weird because seeds are supposed to come from plants right? Not in Monsanto’s scary new world, where plants are genetically designed to be sterile, and the only way farmers can keep planting food is by buying seeds every year from Monsanto! In the US, up to 90% of some types of crops are planted with Monsanto seeds, and with its new mega-plant in Argentina, the infamous company is extending its power over the globe.

The threats and beating of Sofía and her fellow protesters are the last straw — let’s stop Monsanto’s invasion of South America, and start rolling back the devastat ion wreaked on our ecosystems by their products:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stop_monsanto_in_argentina_global_/?bskwlgb&v=33255

Some argue that genetic modification holds great promise for increased agricultural efficiency. There may be many such benefits in the future, but often the gains are hyped by corporate PR (such as the line that GM seeds ‘feed the world’ by being far more productive than normal seeds — in fact there’s little evidence of that), and GM technologies often put profit over people and planet. Governments should adjudicate the public risks and benefits, but Monsanto is skilled in undermining democratic governance. They even passed a law in the US that says that a judge cannot order a recall of Monsanto products, even on grounds of public safety!

Our planet is being rapidly transformed by genetically modified, industr ial agriculture, and our governments are far too heavily influenced by the American mega-corporation at the center of it all — a corporation that is gradually coming to control the world’s food supply. Let’s not force our children and grandchildren to deal with a world fed by Monsanto, when we can stop it now.

With hope,

Ricken, Meredith, Laura, Nick, Alice, Luis, Marie, Nadia and the whole Avaaz team

More Information:

Anti-Monsanto activists assaulted in Argentina (RT)
http://rt.com/news/argentina-monsanto-protest-clashes-483/

Pesticide illness triggers anti-Monsanto protest in Argentina (DW)
http://www.dw.de/pesticide-illness-triggers-anti-monsanto-protest-in-argentina/a-17013525

Birth defects, cancer in Argentina linked to agrochemicals: AP investigation (CTVNews)
http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/birth-defects-cancer-in-argentina-linked-to-agrochemicals-ap-investigation-1.1505096

Sofia Gatica (The Goldman Environmental Prize)
http://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/sofia-gatica

Photos from Argentina’s farms, documenting an agrochemical plague (Denver Post)
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2013/10/21/photos-argentina-agrochemicals/6446/

Argentina’s Bad Seeds (Al Jazeera)
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2013/03/201331313434142322.html

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear (Vanity Fair)
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805

Anti-gold mining event by ReINFORM

http://www.reinform.nl/?p=6906

EFSA is responsible for the risk assessment of all issues related to food and feed safety including genetically engineered plants, pesticides and food additives. Its management board is the food agency’s governing body, also in charge of its independence2. EFSA’s independence remains problematic today, with numerous conflicts of interests with industry reported among its scientific panels3.

“The fact that the European Commission shortlists a food industry lobbyist, once again, for EFSA’s management board is an incomprehensible signal for all those concerned about the protection of consumers and the environment. Such a professional on EFSA’s board would by definition be a permanent threat to the EU’s food safety agency’s independence” says Martin Pigeon, a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory.

Seven seats on EFSA’s management board are up for renewal in June 2014. The European Commission has published a list of 23 names, mostly from national food safety agencies, research institutes and academia4 for the EU Parliament’s consideration and the member states’ decision. But four persons among those short-listed also have interests in the food industry:

• Jan Mousing, re-applying for the position, is the CEO of the Danish Knowledge Centre for Agriculture, a private company describing itself as the “main supplier of professional knowledge for the agricultural professions” in Denmark;

• Piet Vanthemsche, who is also re-applying for the position, holds a leading position in industrial farmers union COPA and also sits in MRBB holding, an agri investment fund which also has shares in companies selling GMOs5.

• Alan Reilly, chief executive of the Irish Food Safety Authority (Ireland’s public food safety administration), is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Food Information Council (EUFIC)6, a Brussels-based food lobby group financed by the some of the largest private food and drink companies in Europe7.

• Milan Kovac, from the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture, was a board member of ILSI Europe until 2011. ILSI Europe, an industry research institute supported by all the biggest agrofood multinationals, is a central actor in the agrofood industry’s scientific influence over EFSA8.

The Commission’s justification for these nominations is an industry-friendly interpretation of EFSA’s founding regulation, which states that four of the 14 board members “shall have a background in organisations representing consumers and other interests in the food chain”. But nowhere is it mentioned that the food industry should be involved, in fact quite the contrary: EFSA’s 2011 independence rules stipulate that “persons employed by industry shall not be allowed to become members of EFSA’s scientific committee, scientific panels and working groups9.

Source: http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2013/12/european-commission-nominates-food-lobbyist-eu-food-safety-agencys-management

Following our last action on November 9^th for Skouries international day, we are extending our scope to build a network on mutual struggles taking place all over the world. El Dorado Gold Co. is involved in mining activities in Greece, Romania, Turkey, China, Brazil and Canada among others.

The evening will include:

• screenings of short documentaries and presentation of the case of Skouries providing an insight of the related economic, environmental and social outrage
• live streaming via Skype with people from Skouries [Greece], Rosia Montana [Romania] and solidarity groups who are going to provide a closer look into their struggles
• presentation from SOMO; an independent, non-profit research and networking organization that investigates multinational corporations and the consequences of their activities for people and the environment around the world

Large scale extracting activities threaten to destroy a forest of incredible beauty and ecological value in Halkidiki, North Greece. El Dorado Gold Co, with open support from the Greek state and private interest groups, is involved in an immense mining project that will alter the character of the entire region.

The social movement of protest and resistance to these destructive plans has suffered terrible state repression, police violence, prosecutions, imprisonments, defamation, muzzling and criminalization.

With the help of SOMO we will look into the status of El Dorado Gold Co. regarding the violation of human rights, the environmental law infringement and the cash flows through mailbox and offshore companies.

Introducing the available research tools, we aim to create a platform that can take on this research and strengthen the links between all the involved actors.

If you are interested you are welcome to join this cause and contribute with new ideas.

The evening will start with a collective kitchen at 17:30 and will end with open bar.

Place: Joe’s garage

Pretoriusstraat 43hs, 1092 EZ, Amsterdam.

The sale is part of restructuring efforts by National Bank (NBG) (NBGr.AT) aimed at boosting its capital base.

Greece’s top four banks are implementing restructuring plans agreed with the European Commission as part of conditions imposed for their bailouts. The plans involve job cuts, branch closures and asset sales.

“The agreement will close in the next 10 days. Invel will acquire about 66 percent of Pangaia for more than 600 million euros ($808 million),” one of the bankers said.

Invel will pay part of the purchase price for Pangaia in cash, contribute equity in the form of real estate and finance the rest with a loan from National Bank, the bankers said.

Dutch-based Invel was set up in March 2013 to take advantage of opportunities in the European real estate market by offering investors the ability to co-invest in deals.

BSG Real Estate, controlled by Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz, will be one of the co-investors in the transaction, the bankers said.

“NBG will retain management control at Pangaia for five years,” the other banker said. “The loan by NBG for part of the majority stake will be at a spread of 275 basis points, secured by real estate contributed by Invel.”

The bankers said the sale would strengthen National Bank’s Core Tier 1 capital adequacy ratio by 40 basis points to 9.6 percent. The Bank of Greece plans to conduct stress tests later this year.

Pangaia’s real estate portfolio includes office buildings, branches operated by NBG and other property recently acquired from the country’s privatization agency.

Pangaia may pursue a listing on the Athens stock exchange by 2015, one of the bankers said.

The agreement has been approved by the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF), the bank rescue vehicle that recapitalized the country’s big four banks in the summer and is now their major shareholder, one of the bankers said.

Last month, Canadian firm Fairfax Financial Holdings (FFH.TO) announced its intention to raise its stake in Greek real estate firm Eurobank Properties.

(Editing by Jason Neely and Keiron Henderson)

Source: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AG06Z20131117?irpc=932

 9 / 11 / 2013

Halkidiki is a peninsula of Northern Greece, with a very diverse, biologically important natural landscape, combining mountainous primordial forests with beautiful coastline. Part of it belongs to NATURA 2000 network and is protected by international conventions. Halkidiki’s landscape is also of historically and culturally precious as it is the mother land of Aristotle the philosopher (384 BC).

Mining in the area goes back 2500 years. But today, as well as back then, locals are depended on nature, as the 80% of main activities are farming, fishing, animal husbandry, forestry and tourism. People of Halkidiki have been active against the destruction of their land since the 50’s but it was not until their recent fights when thy caught international attention.

All started in 2003, when a big political scandal broke out. The Canadian company TVXgold owning at the time the assets of Cassandra mines, transferred them by law to the Greek state for 11 million €. They were sold the same day to Hellas Gold S.A without any prior assessment nor an open competition. The minerals deposits alone were worth 12 billion $. For this action, EU fined Greece with 15, 3 million €.

Today, Hellas Gold S.A is owned 95 % by the Canadian Eldorado Gold Corporation which is based in The Netherlands as a letterbox company and 5 % by G. Bobolas, the powerful Greek media and construction persona. According to the Greek constitution, the owner has full possession of the minerals while the state requires no royalties. In 2012 and despite a broad reaction from the scientific community against the accuracy of the official Environmental Impact Assessment, deforestation begun and full scale mining activities set off.

Even in 2011, residents of the nearby villages and later people throughout Greece, have started a heroic fight to protect their right to health, safety and jobs and to safeguard their natural environment. The TROIKA driven Greek state, obsessed with promoting its hilarious “success story” plan is rushing out to close their mouths. Riot police suppressed violently all demonstrations first in Skouries area and later all around the villages. Old and young attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, peacefully protesting women dragged down and hit, DNA samples were taken by force, houses illegally broke and entered by the police. Basic human rights were  suppressed again and again with the compliments of the Greek state.

Most of the mainstream Greek media has openly supported Eldorado Gold Co and G. Bobolas by propagating in favor of its savior investment for the Greek local economy and against the “extremist” social struggle. Despite the efforts of the state to suppress any authentic expression of the struggling people, recently including charging them for “forming a criminal organization” – the same charge addressed to the neo – Nazi Golden Dawn and even prosecuting and imprisoning 4 of them, the Halkidiki movement is more alive than ever. In September 2013, verifying the fears of the ones rising concerns about environmental threats, drinking water around the mine of Skouries has been considered inappropriate for consumption due to high concentrations of Arsenic. Additionally, a minor toxic wastes accident warns that environmental regulations around mining activities might as well not be followed.

We raise our voice with all those in Roumania, Spain, Finland. N. Ireland, Bulgaria, Sweden, Turkey and in many other anti mining movements in Latin America, Africa and rest of the world, that a success story cannot involve industrialization of the region at the expense of all other means of production and increase of social dependency on a multinational corporation. Halkidiki’s struggle is our struggle for standing up to one’s believes, for safeguarding social protests, for protecting the constitutional rights of the citizens.

Halkidiki is reaching out to you. Inform yourself and go – engage.

Together we are stronger!

ReINFORM

“Gold is our land, gold is our water, gold is the mountain and our beautiful village”

BRUSSELS - One of the worrying issues that emerged from last week’s European Council in Brussels is the ‘cut red tape’ initiative promoted by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

The proposal, which was welcomed by other EU leaders, is cause for alarm and threatens the protection of European citizens and the environment.

The initiative is based on a report prepared by a UK Business Task Force specifically appointed by Cameron to advise him on identifying burdensome EU regulations.

Red tape, by definition, refers to regulations and policies that are unnecessary and do not serve society’s interests. The recommendations of the Business Task Force to withdraw, change, or weaken EU regulations have very little to do with addressing red tape.

The measures targeted include important pieces of regulation such as food labelling, safeguards against chemical poisoning, rules on greenhouse gas emissions from engine fuels, the rights of communities to be informed about industry activities affecting their environment, and rights to be able to take a company to court when it violates the rules.

What is under attack are essential measures to protect people and the environment in areas such as health and safety, data protection, climate change and labour and consumer rights.

We should be alarmed that European leaders do not recognise the social and environmental benefits of the safeguards business is trying to undermine, nor that these are an essential component of a positive economic environment.

Few businesses stand to benefit long-term from a world of depleted resources, environmental damage, and an unhealthy workforce.

A consultant report commissioned by the European Commission High-Level Group on reducing administrative burdens already found that more than 80 percent of EU red tape originates from a couple of policy areas – taxation and company law.

Only 1 percent of the burden relates to environmental rules such as the ones that ‘Cut EU Red Tape’ would like to get rid of.

This is revealing of the real agenda behind this initiative. When regulation serves the direct profits of big business, it is welcomed. When not, it is labelled red tape.

A real reform agenda would initiate an urgent transition away from the drive for short-term profits that has led us into the current crisis situation and towards a new economy based on sustainability principles.