Month: March 2024

Jeffrey Sachs is truly outrageous, calling Biden all kinds of names, while defending Putin & Xi on one of Russia’s worst propaganda programs that is persistently calling for nuclear war against the West. There is no excuse for his behavior. https://t.co/6bZEQKS9ui

— Anders Åslund (@anders_aslund) April 1, 2024

Live update: Gallant: Captured Hamas operatives told interrogators that group is ‘collapsing from within’ https://t.co/JhhZQs9Taz

— ToI ALERTS (@TOIAlerts) March 31, 2024

BREAKING:

Greg Edgreen, the man who ran the Pentagon’s investigation into the “Havana Syndrome attacks” – speaks out publicly for the first time.

He says American top officials are “being neutralized” by Russian agents… pic.twitter.com/1XgqaeldOr

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 1, 2024

It’s time for a coordinated effort among Western democracies to apprehend and immediately imprison Russian spies for potential future prisoner swaps. #spyswap #espionage #geopolitics #Russia #spieshttps://t.co/W2THDGaSrm

— Robert Morton (@Robert4787) April 1, 2024

Pope Francis overcomes health concerns to deliver message of peace on Easter Sunday  Yahoo! Voices

Iran Ramadan | World News | postregister.com  Post Register

Iran Ramadan | World News | postregister.com  Post Register

Thursday’s announcement by the US Census Bureau that it will, for the first time, include a limited category for Americans from the Middle East or North Africa is clearly a political and desperate ploy by President Joe Biden to counter the growing opposition to his reelection bid among Arab and Muslim voters.

Under the banner #AbandonBiden, Arab and Muslim Americans are refusing to vote for Biden during the Democratic primary elections, instead selecting “uncommitted” or writing in “Gaza Strip” as a way to protest the Biden administration’s funding and arming of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military assault on the Gaza Strip, which has taken more than 32,000 lives.

The US Census Bureau announcement follows the pattern of Biden responding in partial and fractured ways in an attempt to satisfy Arab and Muslim voters and get them to return to the fold. I do not think it will work.

Census forms will, from the next survey in 2030, mention four of the 22 Arab countries by name: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt. But the new MENA banner will also cover Israel and Iran.

All other Arab Americans, including the two largest Arab populations in America (Palestinians and Jordanians) and the fastest-growing population (Yemenis), will be required to continue to write their nationalities on a separate blank line.

Arabs have been allowed to write in their nationalities for years, but only a small segment of the community has done so, due to them feeling politically excluded.

Instead of pushing for an “Arab” category, many Arab American groups opted to compromise, hoping that the “MENA” section would list all 22 Arab nationalities. But that is not the case and many leaders have told Arab News they are disappointed.

Inclusion in the census is critical to countering the stereotypes in America that have fueled racism and held the community back on almost every level. Once identified in the census, ethnic and national groups can qualify for federal funding to promote their identities and culture. Such a move would also allow the funding of advertising to strengthen the weak Arab American news media.

More importantly, once identified in the census, national groups like Palestinians would receive political continuity protections, meaning that the political powers would be prohibited from redrawing congressional districts to divide large, cohesive Arab populations.

Several years ago, Democrats in Illinois did just that, dividing the 3rd Congressional District, which had one of the country’s largest concentrations of Palestinian American voters. This district elected pro-Palestinian champion Marie Newman to Congress in November 2020. A year later, Democrats seeking to silence Newman’s pro-Palestine voice redrew the district, diluting the Palestinian American voter strength.

Newman attempted to win the 6th Congressional District in 2022 but was defeated in the Democratic primary by Sean Casten, who Arab American leaders have described as “unresponsive” to the community’s needs and concerns. Casten opposed calls for a Gaza ceasefire resolution and has accepted pro-Israel political action committee contributions to his campaign fund.

By limiting the MENA listing to only four Arab nationalities while also including Israel and Iran, the US Census Bureau is attempting to make everyone happy. It will not work.

Similarly, instead of supporting the adoption of a humanitarian ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council, Biden’s ambassador to the organization Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstained on last week’s vote, allowing it to pass with a weak mandate. On three previous occasions, Thomas-Greenfield vetoed similar resolutions to satisfy the pro-Israel community in the US, which has a much stronger voice than Arab Americans.

Biden’s half measures will only further aggravate the Arab American community’s opposition to his reelection. Activists have repeatedly told me that “four years of negative rhetoric” under Donald Trump, who will face off with Biden in November, is far more appealing than four months of Biden’s funding and arming of Israel’s carnage in the Gaza Strip.

Trump insulted Arabs and Muslims with his words and restrictive policies. But Biden’s policies have failed to prevent thousands of deaths and helped to create even greater uncertainty for Palestinian statehood.

Biden should find the courage to do what is right. Arab Americans have been calling for inclusion in the census since the early 1980s. They have been actively engaged in every aspect of American society, not just in politics, and have defended America by serving in all the country’s conflicts since the Civil War.

Arab Americans are fully American and, one day, they will be treated as such and be given the same rights and benefits as all other Americans, as well as a more engaged place in US politics. But that will not happen by accepting half measures or Biden’s breadcrumbs.

The #AbandonBiden movement is ensuring that our voices will be heard in the upcoming presidential election, telling Democrats — the political party that has long claimed to be more supportive of Arabs than the Republicans — that Arab Americans cannot be taken for granted.

The #AbandonBiden group is not advocating for Trump’s reelection. They plan to gather in the fall to consider alternative candidates to endorse. But Democrats like Biden cannot claim to support Arab American interests while offering diluted rights to the community. They need to be shown the power of the Arab American vote.

One day, Arabs in America will be formally identified as what they are: Arab. This will not be achieved through incomplete gestures or diluted references that seek to satisfy other powerful political lobbying groups.

We have earned and we deserve respect.

By William Chislett

Tractors driven by angry farmers have inundated Madrid and other cities as part of protests in other countries, including France, the EU’s largest agricultural producer, Greece, Germany, Poland and Portugal, against conditions that are eroding their livelihoods.

Farmers are suffering to varying degrees from falling prices (the average price of products they receive was 9% lower in the third quarter of 2023 than a year earlier), rising costs, heavy regulation, burdensome paperwork, the impact of climate change, already acute in Spain, and increasing competition, viewed as unfair, from cheap foreign imports that do not have to meet the same strict EU requirements. A common complaint is that they are expected to farm during the day and spend long evenings with burdensome paperwork.

EU-wide agriculture generates a mere 1.4% of the bloc’s GDP, provides 4.2% of employment and receives around a whopping 30% of the EU budget. Alarm bells ring when the farming sector rebels, because of the importance of food production and the need to maintain rural communities. Spain grows one in four of the fruits and vegetables produced in the EU, more than half of the world’s olive oil and 25% of the world’s citrus fruits.

Agriculture has undergone huge change since the 1959 Stabilisation Plan during the Franco regime, which moved the country from autarky to a market economy. The sector’s share of GDP dropped from 23.5% in 1960 to 2.6% in 2022 and of employment from 39% to 3.6% (see Figures 1 and 2). More than half of merchandise exports in 1960 were agricultural (around 20% today). Yet the sector remains at the heart of life: most city-dwellers have family connections with the countryside and often second homes there. Farmers are popular.

Figure 1. GDP by sector, 1960-2022 (%)

	1960	1975	2022
Services	41.7	51.3	74.6
Agriculture	23.5	9.6	2.6
Industry	30.8	30.2	17.4
Construction	3.9	8.9	5.4

Source: Leandro Prados de la Escosura (2017), Spanish Economic Growth, 1850-2014, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Figure 2. Employment by sector, 1960-2022 (full-time equivalent, % of the active population)

	1960	1975	2022
Agriculture	39.0	20.4	3.6
Services	32.1	44.3	78.2
Industry	20.7	24.9	11.3
Construction	8.3	10.4	6.9

Source: Leandro Prados de la Escosura (2017), Spanish Economic Growth, 1850-2014, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Today, there are around 900,000 farms in Spain of very different size, most of them under five hectares, and around 660,000 of their owners receive some kind of EU aid. The workforce in agriculture is rapidly ageing: 41% are over the age of 65 and 4% under 35. There are also sharp regional differences: just 0.3% of jobholders in the Madrid region work in agriculture compared with 11% in Murcia. Completing this snapshot is a productivity that is well below the EU average: €1,183 per hectare in 2022 as against the bloc’s €1,433, and less than half of Italy.

Spanish farmers are particularly incensed by what they view as the non-enforcement of the law guaranteeing wholesale major supermarket buyers pay fair prices, while consumer prices have soared, and by the competition from non-EU imports, which rose 80% in volume between 2012 and 2022.

The impact of Spain’s drought is acute and prolonged. The year 2023 was the driest on record as a result of abnormally high temperatures. By the autumn, 40% of territory was in a state of drought. Nine million people are still suffering water restrictions, mainly in Catalonia and Andalusia.

Agricultural production dropped sharply in 2022, with the fall much larger than in the EU as a whole. Output last year was reportedly down again, particularly in cereals. Olive oil production was 15% higher than in 2022, but 34% below the average of the previous four years, according to estimates. High temperatures during flowering hit the quantity and quality of the blossoms.

The surging price of olive oil, a staple of the country’s cuisine, has made the ‘liquid gold’ the most stolen supermarket item this year, resulting in security tags on bottles, normally reserved for the most expensive alcoholic drinks. The price has soared from €5 a litre or less four years ago to as high as €14.

In response to the protests, the European Commission weakened last month some parts of its flagship Green Deal environmental policies, removing a recommended target to cut farming emissions from its 2040 climate road map. The map no longer includes a reference to a 30% reduction target in methane, nitrogen and other gases linked to farming, part of the measures to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050. Agriculture is responsible for 14.2% of the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions.

A bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 was also withdrawn, and EU farmers no longer have to set aside part of their land to foster biodiversity, under green farming measures. They will be able to continue receiving subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget by growing cash crops and nitrogen-fixing crops on set-aside land, provided pesticides are not used there.

The Commission also modified the duty-free measures for Ukrainian imports, which are due to remain until June 2025, by capping imports of sugar, poultry and eggs. The measures were first introduced following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to help the country’s economy, which is very dependent on agricultural products.

Spain’s farmers are at the heart of what is known as ‘Emptied Spain’, the large swathes of the countryside suffering depopulation and with it inadequate services. In all, 17 of Spain’s provinces have lost around 900,000 inhabitants in the last 20 years, while 10 others, mostly coastal but also including Madrid, have seen their population rise by 10 million, mainly lured by the vibrant tourism industry. There is no let-up in the exodus, albeit at a slower pace.

Rural dwellers are beginning to organise politically. The 2022 snap election in Castile and León –Spain’s largest region (18.6% of the country), comprising nine provinces and bigger than 17 of the 27 EU countries, but where 57% of their 2.4 million inhabitants live in just 3.4% of the territory– saw a new party, Soria ¡Ya! (‘Soria Now!’), created from the anger at abandonment by the political class, win all three seats assigned to the province of that name in the 81-seat regional parliament.

The farmers’ protests come ahead of June’s elections for the European parliament when hard-right parties are expected to gain ground. Portugal’s hard-right Chega quadrupled its number of parliamentary seats in this month’s general election to 48 and its share of the vote rose from 7.2% to 18.1%. In the case of Spain, the farmers’ discontent is a breeding ground for VOX, the hard-right party founded in 2013, which entered the national parliament in April 2019 with 24 of the 350 seats (52 in the November 2019 election and 33 in the 2023 general election), and hopes to harvest support.

The Popular Party (PP) governs 12 of Spain’s regions and in four of them –Aragón, Castille and León, Extremadura and Valencia, where farming plays a significant role– the agriculture post is held by VOX. The PP, like the Socialist-led national government, supports the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, but not VOX.

Both the main parties are also in favour of free-trade agreements, such as the proposed deal between the EU and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), for which a political agreement was signed in 2019 after two decades of talks, but has yet to happen. President Emmanuel Macron, with one eye on June’s European elections, threw the signing of the deal last December under the tractor, because it did not offer enough environmental guarantees and the perceived downsides for French farmers.

The EU has made concessions and the protests have died down, but change is inevitable in a costly sector of declining relevance and a need for more environmentally sustainable policies.

• About the author: William Chislett (Oxford, 1951) is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute. He covered Spain’s transition to democracy for The Times of London between 1975 and 1978. He was then based in Mexico City for the Financial Times between 1978 and 1984. He returned to Madrid on a permanent basis in 1986 and since then, among other things, has written 20 books on various countries.
• Source: This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute