ALTER-EU: The Alliance for Transparency in Lobbying

Clean up Brussels' Lobby Scene with ALTER-EU from ALTER-EU on Vimeo.

Short video clip explaining ways in which the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) wants to clean up Brussels' lobby scene.

Scottish Historian Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity

http://www.ted.com Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves.

Scottish Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture, call them the 6 killer apps, that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.

The West's 6 Killer Apps

The Great Divergence

Global Patent Registration

Is Europe building Big Brother?

The EU has tighter restrictions than the United States does on the collection, use, and sale of data by online companies, but also requires Internet service providers to store personal data in case the government ever wants to investigate an individual user. The European Parliament is currently considering passing a law called "Smile29" that would require the Google search engine – which processes billions of searches a month on the Continent – to retain data on users as well.

The EU effort is just the latest of government's around the globe seeking to glean more about their citizens from their online behavior. To critics, the EU laws amount to a surveillance land-grab that has prompted a groundswell of opposition across Europe. Now a group in Ireland is challenging the new regime – seeking permission from the Irish courts to sue the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to strike down new Irish laws designed to bring the country into line with broader European standards. If Digital Rights Ireland, which argues that the laws violate the European Convention on Human Rights, wins, it would set the stage for successful challenges to the rules across Europe. "The main thing we want to see is our data retention laws repealed," says T.J. McIntyre, a law lecturer at University College Dublin and head of the organisation. Mr. McIntyre says the laws criminalize ordinary citizens.

Online privacy has become a key civil liberty battleground. Facebook and Google are amassing colossal amounts of data about users' thoughts, desires, and impulses, which businesses covet and pay handsomely for. And across Europe, a backlash against the storage of private data is growing. Civil society groups like the European Federation of Journalists have criticized the practice, and in Germany almost 35,000 people, including Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, sued their own government over the issue. "There is a real problem in Europe today. It is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that everyone has the right to a private life. That fundamental right has to extend into digital life," says Christian Engström, a member of the European Parliament for Sweden's controversial Pirate Party, elected on a platform of digital rights.

In Ireland at present, telephone data must be retained for three years, but there are currently no provisions requiring Internet service providers to retain data, something both the EU and the Irish government want to change. McIntyre says the government already has the upper hand. "In 2002 the Irish government secretly introduced data retention. They did it by ministerial order, and to this day the department of justice has not confirmed it." McIntyre expects the case to be decided by the ECJ.

The EU itself seems to be of two minds when it comes to Internet privacy. While monitoring and surveillance powers have been greatly expanded, the EU body overseeing the effort to expand data retention to search engines under Smile29 complained in a report that EU members are already collecting more information on citizens than they should and "have scarcely provided statistics on the use of data retained under the Directive, which limits the possibilities to verify the usefulness of data retention."

The group advocates major changes to the law, including a reduction of the maximum retention period, reconsideration of the overall security of traffic data by the European Commission, clarification of the concept of "serious crime" at member state level, and "disclosure to all the relevant stakeholders of the list of the entities authorized to access the data." According to Mr. Engström of the Pirate Party, the problem with the EU is a democracy deficit: "Most of the power is with commissioners and [other] unelected officials."








Is Europe building Big Brother? | Presseurop – English

Beware the Greeks: They have no Gifts to Bring to the Party

The future of the planet may hinge on the deliberations under way in Denmark, but the eyes of many Europeans will be fixed on a country rather further to the south. For the future of the eurozone may hinge on the grim developments under way in Greece, a usually delightful country that accounts for less than 3 percent of the European Union's gross domestic product.

Greece is hurting. Its two prize industries are shipping and tourism. Shipping has been badly hit by the fall in world trade, and cargo rates are currently bumping along near the bottom of a 25-year low. Tourism has been hurt by the general recession in Europe but also by Greece's misuse of the euro currency. And years of massaging the economic statistics have battered the country's credibility.

The comfort blanket of the euro tempted recent Greek governments to live and spend far beyond the country's means, while prices for tourists remain high. They are much cheaper in Turkey, its neighbor and rival for the tourist euro, because Turkey was free to devalue its currency.

So Greece this year faces a budget deficit of 12.7 percent, with its debt soaring above 100 percent of GDP and the new center-left government reluctant to slash public spending in the draconian way the Irish did last week. So Greece now has to pay 2.5 percent more interest on its euro-denominated bonds than Germany does, and the downgrade of its debt from AAA- to BBB+ status means that the European Central Bank may be unable to accept them as collateral for loans.

This should be a Greek crisis, but the euro dimension makes it start to look like a European one, because several other eurozone countries are in similar difficulties. If members of the eurozone cannot be bailed out, then the credibility of the euro is in deep trouble. The ECB is hoping that the Greeks take the bitter Irish medicine, or that Greece turns to the IMF (which could to the same thing).

The question the ECB does not want to ask is whether Germany, the backbone economy of the euro, will stand by its partners. Germany's own borrowing is set to double next year to 6 percent of GDP, after its GDP shrank this year by 5 percent. The main reason for the increased deficit is the government is trying to revive the economy with tax cuts and more labor-market subsidies.

"Public finances are in an extremely strained state due to the dramatic weakening of overall economic activity," said a joint statement of finance ministers from the country's 16 states and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

Germany's unemployment has remained low because of a government measure to subsidize short-term working, paying up to 67 percent of an employee's salary to prevent layoffs, even when a company has few customers. This has worked in the short term, but unless German exports revive soon it is likely to prove unsustainable, and if the subsidy stops German unemployment will soar above 10 percent. At that point, it would become politically toxic to talk of bailing out the feckless Greeks.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Between them, governments and central banks have over the past year pumped about $5 trillion (or 10 percent of global GDP) into fending off another Great Depression. This has supplied a modest recovery, but the private economy has not yet been able to take over the heroic job of sustaining it.

"We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery," former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker warned the Germans in a widely cited interview with Der Spiegel last week. "We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy."

The G7 economies are approaching the ugly moment of transition. The massive deficit spending by states and liquidity creation by central banks cannot be long maintained. They are running out of ammunition. Within the next six to 18 months, they will have to rein in the deficit spending and increase interest rates, and hope that the private economy will by then have recovered sufficiently to restore growth. It is very questionable whether the private economy is healthy enough to do this. And in the case of weak economies like Greece, governments will then face an ugly choice between depression and default.

The crisis may come sooner, because of the growing threat of a major currency crisis. Since China will not revalue its currency and alleviate the problem of chronic imbalances, the United States is letting the dollar fall against more flexible currencies. This is pushing the burden of adjustment onto the euro and the yen in a way that is becoming unsustainable for eurozone exporters.

A currency crisis would be disastrous and probably trigger a wave of populist protectionism against Chinese exports. That is the main reason why the "recovery" is so unconvincing and also why gold remains above $1,000 an ounce. The risks are ahead are as daunting in Greece as they are in Denmark.

Europe joins US in applying pressure on China to revalue Yaun

The head of the European Central Bank said here Sunday that a revaluation of the yuan currency would be "appropriate" after talks with China's Premier Wen Jiabao.
"We discussed the exchange rate policy, the de facto peg of the yuan," Jean-Claude Trichet told reporters at a briefing after talks between EU officials and Wen in the eastern city of Nanjing.

He said officials encouraged Beijng to take "a more flexible policy," adding "it seems it would be appropriate."

The talks, which also involved Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker and EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner Joaquin Almunia, took place a day ahead of a major China-EU summit expected to focus on climate change.
The yuan currency's exchange rate is one of the thorniest issues between China and the European Union.

The Chinese currency has been effectively pegged to the dollar since the summer of 2008, and Europe fears the euro's rise against the yuan will hurt EU exports to China and eventually slow the continent's economic recovery.

Beijing, which faces complaints from both the United States and Europe that it is manipulating its currency to gain an unfair trade edge, says it wants to take its time and reform its exchange rate system.

Juncker also told reporters that the global economic recovery was not strong enough yet to withdraw stimulus measures introduced by various governments to fight the financial crisis.

"We are considering the moment has not yet arrived to withdraw the stimulus packages that are under way in various parts of the world," he said.

"The euro area will see no major withdrawal of stimulus measures in 2010."

Still Waiting on the Express Train to Financial Recovery? - Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo

Trust me, you will have plenty of time to check out the RISK in Europe 2009 - Frankfurt Conference

If you missed the Risk Europe 2009 conference in Frankfurt in June, catch up with our exclusive video footage, including the keynote address by European Central Bank board member Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo.