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The decline of social Europe Offshore balls is part of a world trend Teddy Locsin Jr.
Roberto Savio
Inter press service
R
OME—After the Italian Navy, through the sea search-andrescue operation Mare Nostrum—which costs €9 million a month to conduct—has rescued nearly 100,000 migrants (although, perhaps, up to 3,000 have died) from the Mediterranean Sea since last October, Europe is now presenting its new face in the Mediterranean.
The European Union (EU) is launching Joint Operation Triton, which has a monthly budget of €2.9 million and has secured funds until the end of the year. Its function is to enforce border controls—not to save “boat people”— and conduct patrols just 30 nautical miles from the coast, which pales in comparison with Mare Nostrum, which saw patrols being sent close to the Libyan coast. Even with this very limited operation, British Prime Minister David Cameron has said the United Kingdom will not contribute to it, because operations that save migrants only encourage them to try to cross the Mediterranean. Of course, there is a perverted logic in this: the more migrants die, the greater will be the discouragement for others to try. Following this logic through, the ideal situation, therefore, would be to reach a death rate that would stop illegal immigration, once and for all! In this context, it is worth noting that the UK government is considering withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights (something that even Russian President Vladimir Putin has never considered). The argument is that nobody can be above UK courts. London is also refusing to pay its share of increased of contributions to the EU and is considering how to put an annual cap on the number of Europeans who are entitled to work legally in the UK. And, finally, the UK government received with great uproar the sentence of the European Court of Justice, which placed a European cap on banker bonuses, rejecting Britain’s claims that it was illegal. The British argument was that pay levels (also of discredited bankers) were part of social policy and, thus, under the authority of memberstates, not of the EU.
Not obliged
MEANWHILE, the same court issued another sentence, under which EU member-states are not obliged to support European citizens who do not have economic activities in the EU countries to which they have migrated. And the German Parliament is now preparing a law to expel European immigrants who do not find a job within six months. Of course, this will open the doors to all other countries to reduce the free movement of Europeans in Europe, a cornerstone of the original vision of a solidary Europe. Now Europeans will be obliged to take any job and, therefore, the law of the market will become the primary criterion for their movements in Europe. Since 1986, the year the Single European Act was signed, Europeans have never been able to agree on a minimum social basis, which would have given them rights, as workers, to act collectively as Europeans in the face of a market that is economically unified, but has no common social legislation. In fact, the point has now been reached where social criteria are the last to be used in judging whether a country is recovering or not, well after the economic and financial criteria. A devastated Greece is now again being considered in financial markets, because its economic indicators are on the up. And, at the last Group of 20 meeting in Brisbane, Spain was touted as the example that implementing austerity policies—those indicated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the example for laggards like Italy and France—are the correct way out of the crisis. At the same time, a very different source—Caritas—has reported that only 34.3 percent of Spaniards live a normal life, while 40.6 percent are stuck in a state of precariousness, 24.2
percent are already suffering moderate exclusion and 10.9 percent are living in severe exclusion. To understand the trend, 50.2 percent of Spaniards had a normal life six years ago. Now, one citizen in four is suffering from exclusion. Of those 11 million excluded citizens, 77.1 percent have no work, 61.7 percent lack a house and 46 percent have no healthcare support. According to the recent United Nations Children’s Fund report on children under recession, 76.5 million children in rich countries live in poverty, and 36.3 percent of Spain’s children (2.7 million) are living in a state of precariousness. What is now new is that some major financial institutions have started to draw attention to social issues. United States Federal Reserve Chairman Janet L. Yellen has declared that she is concerned about the growing inequality of wealth and income in her country, and that the chances for people to advance economically appear to be diminishing. And European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is now constantly mentioning the issues of “unbearable unemployment” and “growing exclusion”.
Free fire
O
NCE again, the world takes up a brilliant suggestion of mine without giving me credit for it. Last week the United States Navy canceled nine ports of call in the Philippines. Just last month I said, Why not just cancel shore leaves? Same banana, which is, oddly enough, the appropriate fruit, given the shape of what is most handled on shore leaves.
This was actually an improvement on an earlier suggestion of mine during the talks on the
Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (Edca) to forbid US Navy ports of call for rest and
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recreation, confining them to national defense. All hard-ons are to stay on board. Surely, I said, the murder of Jennifer Laude—perhaps, by the concierge of a Subic motel named after a folded pizza, Calzone—the jury’s still out on that one—does not require a review of the Mutual Defense Treaty, the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Edca. None of those agreements covers what happens between two genitals or, for that matter, between a pair of hands around the same or around a throat. Those agreements only cover how two military allies shall conduct their mutual defense in the event of an attack by any foreign power
on the other. The jurisdiction of offenses committed by the military personnel of one ally in the country of the other, say, Filipino Marines in Sausalito—almost certainly they will never be allowed in the country, lest they vanish into thin air and reemerge in Serramonte—or US Marines in Subic—are just details that, in no way, have an impact on the basic agreements. Last month I suggested that the Americans cancel short leaves in the Philippines. The Americans have done better; they have canceled ports of call. Now that those balls will be kept offshore, the ball is in our court. How will the bar girls take the news in Subic?
Weaker growth
IN the background there is the fact that countries that took emergency measures to reduce public borrowing have mostly posted weaker growth, like most European countries (with the exception of Germany, which is helped by a boom in machinery exports to Russia and China), while those that introduced a policy of stimulus, like the US, Japan and the UK, have done much better, also in reducing unemployment. But Merkel continues to ignore calls from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other monetary institutions. She is only interested in pleasing her constituency, which is increasingly looking to its immediate interests and losing sight of European perspectives. In all this, the banks continue to be uninterested in any social perspective. A few days ago, European and US regulators imposed new fines—worth $4.5 billion—on a number of major banks (we are now approaching the $200 billion mark since the global financial crisis started in 2008) for illegal activities. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the largest of them, JP Morgan Chase and Co., declared in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC that it is important that the US creates a “safe harbor” where JPMorgan’s illegal practice of hiring the relatives of political leaders “is not punished.” In Dimon’s country, between 2009 and 2010, 93 percent of incomes ended up in the pockets of 1 percent of the population, according to Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the 16,000 families with at least $111 million have seen their share of national wealth double since 2012 to 11.2 percent. The last US presidential election cost $3.4 billion, and most of that came from this small minority. Democracy, where all votes are equal, is increasingly becoming a plutocracy where money elects. Meeting leaders of social movements on October 26, Pope Francis told them: “They call me a communist [for speaking of] land, work and housing… but love for the poor is at the center of the Gospel.” Certainly, governments are doing otherwise. Roberto Savio is the founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service news agency, and the publisher of Other News.
Hunt in cosmos could tell us whether Earthlings are special By Caleb Scharf Los Angeles Times (TNS)
H
UMANS have had quite a ride in the 500 years since Copernicus. We’ve built and tested a rational vision of the universe in which our circumstances, and those of Earth, are unexceptional and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We are fleeting specks on a crumb of cosmic dust, among countless other crumbs in the briefest sliver of a far bigger story.
This perspective has guided us to the innermost sanctums of matter, and to the origins and nature of space and time itself—an expanding fabric that has no spatial center, in which all places are shining examples of unimportance. Except that our great hominid egos have always nagged at us, resisting the soothing embrace of cosmic mediocrity, looking for excuses to be special. Surprisingly, science has now come across reasons to think that life—and life on Earth, in particular—may not be quite so ordinary, after all. It might be a rare, accidental gem. Its presence could even offer clues to the deeper functioning of the universe. There is now a burgeoning, supremely ambitious scientific endeavor to answer the gem-versuscommon speck question by seeking life elsewhere in the cosmos. The outcome of this quest will influence not only our perception of the nature of existence, but also the way in which our species chooses to make use of its time. A piece of the puzzle emerged in the 1970s, when physicists pointed out the apparently coincidental alignment of fundamental properties of the universe and the requirements of living organisms. We live,
for example, in a cosmos that makes and disperses plenty of the element carbon, the central piece of known biochemistry. We also live in a galactic landscape of stars that’s neither too sparse nor too crowded, and we live in a time when the universe has cooled, but not yet succumbed to thermodynamic extinction. If nature’s forces were tuned just a little differently, all these things would change, and life might not have ever occurred. If the universe is the one and only such reality, it’s disquieting that it would be tuned this way, because life—even if there is only a single instance—is also providing predictive information about physics. In other words, anthropic reasoning leads to a suspicion that there is, indeed, something special about us. However, theoretical physics and cosmology have come up with a possible answer to that. If our reality is merely one of a vast number of universe-like phenomena—part of a multiverse—we naturally find ourselves in a type of universe that allows for life. The catch is that no multiverse theory can yet tell us how much life there should be in a given cosmos—how exceptional life on Earth is. Clues may be emerging from more
parochial directions. The remarkable new science of exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars—is at this frontline. On the face of it, the discovery of a wealth of exoplanets simply verifies the doctrine of mediocrity that Copernicus helped seed. We’re surrounded by billions of planetary systems that could, in principle, host life. But exoplanets are incredibly diverse, ranging from giant balls of gas to small rocky worlds and large super-Earths, the likes of which don’t exist around the Sun. Their configurations also come in an unanticipated range: from tightly packed clusters of planets to systems with highly elliptical orbits and histories of playing gravitational dodgem. And the types of stars that harbor planets include those that are far more numerous than the family the Sun belongs to. By these measures, in very crude terms, our solar system is somewhat unusual. Is there a connection to the presence of life here? Is this a clue to the fertility of the cosmos? It could be. The story of biological evolution on Earth may also hold important lessons about what we can expect elsewhere. A seemingly improbable merger of two single-celled organisms here gave rise to complex cells containing the marvelous little power generators, mitochondria. Otherwise, there would be no animals, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, fungi, sponges or celebrities. Some biologists argue that the low likelihood of this microbial tango implies that a similar step could happen only in very, very few life-bearing planets across the universe. Once again, life such as ours could be the exception
rather than the rule. Yet, this might be just a cautionary tale of how we make inferences. Events can take on new meanings after the fact. For example, when something lucky takes place— a winning lottery ticket, for instance—we can always trace the history of small choices leading to that point. Except that history becomes relevant only in retrospect— the snap decision to play, a number that sticks in your head—regardless of whether the end product is actually rare or common. Speculation has almost had its day, though. The solution to understanding life’s cosmic status is at hand. Whether it’s through the eyes of a robot on Mars, the probing of a dark ocean on the moon Europa, or in the telltale chemical imbalances seen on a distant exoplanet, the hunt is afoot. The challenges are extreme, but scientists’ efforts to count the instances of biological origins across the galaxy will yield an empirical, not philosophical, answer. It will let us crack the puzzle open. Discovering that cosmic context is an old ambition made new. It comes as we find ourselves living in our own planetary filth. It has the potential to teach us much about our future prospects. Being exceptional would have little value if we choose to remain carelessly and perilously locked to Earth. Whatever else we are, we are the first arrivals at this particular horizon. Whether or not we cross it is entirely up to us. Caleb Scharf is director of astrobiology at Columbia University and author of The Copernicus Complex and Gravity’s Engines.