Svet

[Jozef K.]

Ok, deluje to ok. Kako li će se formirati vlada? Verovatno manjinska.

[Takeshi]

sutra u austriji pocinje godisnji sastanak bilderberg grupe.

nikako mi nije jasno zasto bi neko imao potrebu da se sastaje u ovakvom formatu, potpuno sarena ekipa i uz medijski hajp preko vestacke tajanstvenosti.

na spisku su uglavnom politicari i razni bogatuni. ima par zanimljivih imena.

 

Barroso, José M. Durão

Former President of the European Commission

 

Gusenbauer, Alfred

Former Chancellor of the Republic of Austria

 

Kissinger, Henry A.

Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.

 

Kravis, Henry R.

Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

 

Monti, Mario

Senator-for-life; President, Bocconi University

 

Petraeus, David H.

Chairman, KKR Global Institute

 

Stoltenberg, Jens

Secretary General, NATO

Edited June 10, 2015 by Takeshi

[Budja]

Je l ide Vucic da se nabacuje?

[reg]

 

'It's a political failure': how Sweden's celebrated schools system fell into crisis

 

International ratings have plummeted and inequality is growing after raft of changes including introduction of voucher system

 

Fridolin, who has a degree in teaching, says not only have scores in international tests gone down, inequality in the Swedish system has gone up. “This used to be the great success story of the Swedish system,” he said. “We could offer every child, regardless of their background, a really good education. The parents’ educational background is showing more and more in their grades.

 

“Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.”

 

 

Ulla Hamilton, chief executive of the Swedish Association for Independent Schools says the decline in Sweden’s schools has nothing to do with the introduction of free choice or the emergence of independent schools. Hamilton quotes research by the IFAU, the Swedish Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, which suggests that results had started to drop even before the changes. “The free schools are not the cause,” she says.

 

Nisam znao gde da postavim ovu vest, cini mi se zanimljiva.

 

[Prospero]

Malo detaljnije o "free trade" sporazumima (TPP i TTIP) i njihovom očekivanom uticaju na odnos strani investitor-država koji bi se u najvećoj meri izmestio iz lokalnih sudova i stavio u ruke arbitraža (ISDS) koje nemaju demokratsku odgovornost ni kontrolu:
 
 

Monday, June 08, 2015

The Case Against ISDS
 
Guest Blogger
 
 
David Singh Grewal and Marco Simons
 
If the Obama administration’s ambitious new trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—are ultimately ratified, what kinds of stories are we likely to hear from the world of international trade?
 
In Washington State, a mining company wants to expand a quarry. The local communities participate in the environmental impact statement (EIS) process, and many residents object to the project. Citing these concerns, the state government rejects the quarry expansion. Is this participatory democracy in action? No, it’s the violation of a foreign trade agreement. Because the mining company is registered abroad, a panel of arbitrators rules that the U.S. government needs to pay the company for the loss of profits it might have made had the expansion been approved.
 
In Philadelphia, the city twice denies a permit to build a hazardous waste dump; residents are concerned about threats of contaminated water. A new private company buys the site and obtains federal and state licenses to build the dump. Rather than wait for a city construction permit, it begins construction. The city again denies the permit, citing the fact that construction had started illegally without a permit, as well as environmental impact and public opposition. Unfortunately, the company is a subsidiary of a foreign corporation, and an international tribunal decides that the government needs to pay back the company for its investment in the project, including the costs it expended in the unlicensed construction.
 
Horror stories? Fear-mongering from the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren—or what President Obama has dismissed as “law professor hypotheticals”? We wish that were the case. But substitute Nova Scotia for Washington State, and Gaudalcazar, Mexico, for Philadelphia, and these cases have already happened. In March of this year, a NAFTA arbitration panel awarded Bilcon, a Delaware-based mining company, damages because the Canadian authorities rejected its EIS for a quarry expansion. This was not a particularly novel ruling; the case against Mexico, which denied a construction permit for a hazardous waste facility in Guadalcazar, was decided by a tribunal back in 2000.
 
These results are the consequence of a procedure known as “investor-state dispute settlement,” or ISDS. Thanks to the Obama-Warren debate over fast track, this acronym has made an unlikely journey from the obscure world of international arbitration to the headlines of major newspapers. But what is ISDS – and why does it have us worried?
 
 
ISDS is an arbitration mechanism unfamiliar to many legal academics and businesspeople, let alone the politicians and activists who are now rapidly getting up to speed on its arcane details. In essence, it allows multinational corporations that believe they’ve been harmed by government regulation to sidestep the national court system and turn, instead, to a panel of private arbitrators. Trade and investment treaties, such as NAFTA and the proposed TPP and TTIP, grant multinationals the right to special investment protections, including compensation when government regulation affects their expected profits. Arbitration panels are empowered to decide on the extent of the harm and the appropriate level of compensation.
 
Giving foreign corporations the right to sue governments, including our government, has many people worried. Senator Warren has pointed to a litany of ISDS cases, including challenges to a minimum wage increase in Egypt and to financial regulation in the Czech Republic, to argue against the current trade deals. The White House has responded that these concerns are unfounded – and that the investor protections in the TPP and TTIP merely provide the “same protections” provided by U.S. law, and that arbitrators cannot force changes in U.S. regulations.
 
Neither side is completely correct. But Warren is right to believe that Americans should be very concerned about incorporating this procedure in the trade deals that will encompass most of the world’s economy.
 
Let’s take a look at NAFTA, rather than the examples that Senator Warren has chosen, since the Egyptian and Czech cases have arisen under different agreements, and have not yet been decided. Anyone who suggests that NAFTA provides the “same protections” as U.S. law is either unfamiliar with the law, or simply not telling the truth. Consider, for example, NAFTA’s provision protecting companies from loss due to “indirect expropriation.” Direct expropriation is expropriation as normally understood – as the White House puts it, when the government “takes its citizens’ property from them.” But indirect expropriation is a different concept altogether: it allegedly occurs when government regulation hurts a foreign corporation’s expected profits or increases its costs of doing business. Under U.S. law, such “indirect expropriation” would be considered under the standards developed to assess “regulatory takings.” These standards are, rightly, strict—since an expansive view would make government nearly impossible—and they include looking at a range of factors.
 
In NAFTA decisions, indirect expropriation occurs when a corporation suffers a loss of a “significant part” of its “reasonably-to-be-expected economic benefit.” And it is compensable if a panel of arbitrators decides that the government’s action is not “proportional” to the public interest rationales for its regulation, in relation to the corporation’s economic harm.
 
The White House is thus correct to claim that arbitrators cannot make a government change its regulation. But they can force it to pay money to keep those regulations in place. That’s what actually happened in the Guadalcazar case, Metalclad v. Mexico, which was decided under NAFTA. The arbitrators decided that even though the company had gone forward with construction of a hazardous waste dump without a municipal permit, they reasonably expected that permit to be issued anyway, despite the fact that it had been denied twice before.
 
And this is only one of several interpretations of “indirect expropriation.” Because there is no system of precedent in ISDS, different arbitrators may come to different conclusions without regard for previous rulings. The Metalclad decision is one approach, but another – which also arose in a case against Mexico – is even more worrying. Tecmed v. Mexico was another case involving a hazardous waste dump, in which the government had refused to renew a license to operate the facility. The arbitrators decided that expropriation was present so long as the company suffered a substantial economic loss due to the regulation, and that the government’s action was not “proportional to the public interest presumably protected” in relation to the company’s financial loss. (Bizarrely, this proportionality test was borrowed from decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.) While Tecmed was decided under a different treaty, its proportionality test has since been adopted by at least one NAFTA tribunal.
 
The Nova Scotia case, Bilcon v. Canada, was decided under a different NAFTA investor protection – the “minimum standard of treatment” – but the analysis was similar to Metalclad. In both cases, a panel of arbitrators decided that the corporation’s expectations were an important factor in determining whether their rights had been violated. And, in both cases, the arbitrators decided that the government needed to pay a foreign company as the price of domestic environmental protection decisions. We are confident that this would never have happened under U.S. law.
 
It isn't at all clear that these cases would have come out this way under US law. Further, these cases are being decided by a class of private adjudicators acting without precedent or public accountability. ISDS puts private arbitration panels in the position of deciding whether governments have chosen policies to protect labor rights, public health, and the environment in a way that changes the expected profits of multinational corporations—and whether those changes should be compensated. What this means is that these agreements create a bias against new regulations, including those in the public interest. Without these treaties, the U.S. government would be free to regulate in any way consistent with the Constitution – even if it were to diminish the expected profits of domestic or foreign companies in doing so.
 
While these would be worrying results for the United States, ISDS poses perhaps a greater risk to our foreign allies. We already have a robust system of environmental, public health, and labor protections, but many of our trading partners – especially the several developing countries in the 12-nation TPP negotiating bloc – do not. They are still working to write new laws as their economies develop. President Obama has suggested that the TPP will help these countries bring their laws up to global standards, but ISDS may, in fact, lead to the opposite result. Each new law will be subject to challenge if it costs multinationals or reduces their profits—and thus the very “catch-up” that proponents hope to stimulate may be undermined.
 
Some commentators have referred to this problem as regulatory “chill”—that governments will be afraid to enact new regulations owing to the threat of ISDS arbitration. Last year the New York Times reported that Namibia has delayed implementing tobacco regulations due to such threats. But regulatory “freeze” might be a more accurate description. Regulations are effectively frozen at the time ISDS is enacted: everything that happens after that might diminish an investor’s value becomes the basis for a potential lawsuit.
 
While this concern about ISDS has been raised by academic commentators—including celebrated economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and over a hundred law professors and jurists—there are other serious issues, which have not gotten enough attention in this debate.
 
First, the usual rationale for ISDS is that it increases investment where it is most needed—in the developing world—by protecting foreign investors from undue government interference. But by shielding the most powerful corporations from the normal judicial system and putting them into a privatized, parallel track, ISDS may take pressure off these countries to achieve judicial reforms that would benefit everyone—foreign corporations and ordinary citizens alike.
  
With ISDS, multinational corporations have no need to support the rule of law, because they don’t need local courts. Likewise, governments that want to attract investment don’t need to root out corruption and unfairness in their judicial systems as a whole.
 
Second, ISDS rather obviously threatens to undermine sovereignty by substituting ad hoc private arbitral panels for the decision-making of the legitimate public authorities. But a recently proposed solution to this problem—the creation of permanent courts of arbitration—would only compound the legitimacy gap. An ad hoc panel deciding cases that come before it may prove compatible with national legal systems, particularly if future ISDS mechanisms specify that panel rulings may be subject to appellate review by national bodies. But a “closed list” of arbitrators constituting a permanent “Investment Court,” as recently proposed by European trade negotiators, presents not a viable reform to ISDS but a far-reaching transfer of sovereign power from national governments to a new supranational body. Such a move may be consistent with recent European Union experience, but not with American norms of self-government.
 
So why is ISDS in Obama’s proposed trade agreements? To be clear, we don’t know what role it will play in these agreements, as the drafts remain classified under a national security provision—and it is only from leaks and the release of the European negotiating draft that we know about the proposed ISDS. But there is no doubt that U.S. negotiators are pushing to include ISDS provisions.
 
Some of the enthusiasm for investor-state arbitration can be attributed to the success of a different, earlier arbitration regime. Under a 1958 treaty, commercial arbitration for cross-border disputes between companies has become extremely widespread and highly effective. Such international commercial arbitration (ICA) differs crucially from ISDS in that the parties under ICA are only corporations, not entire governments and their attendant public policies. Nonetheless, the success of ICA has boosted arbitration in the view of international lawyers, who have sought to extend this success to the very different terrain of foreign investment disputes.
 
But it would be naïve to place too much weight on the success of ICA in explaining the current push for ISDS. The real force behind this push comes from the interests of powerful corporations and the politicians they influence. The current U.S. Trade Representative in charge of shepherding these agreements through Congress, Mike Froman, is a former managing director of Citigroup. The U.S. negotiating positions were drafted with abundant input from over 500 “advisors” – 85% of whom represent corporate interests – and it is unsurprising that they offer a corporate perspective on ISDS.
 
It is now up to the House of Representatives to decide whether it wants to keep special rights for foreign corporations in these agreements. If the House rejects fast track authority, Congress can exercise its discretion in choosing what it wants to pass of any proposed trade deals. But even in granting fast track, it would still be possible to keep ISDS out, via an amendment to specify the terms of any future agreement.
 
In the recent Senate vote for fast track authority, Senator Warren’s proposed amendment to prohibit ISDS was defeated. But a new chance to stop ISDS will come up in the House debates.  Legislation sponsored by Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) and co-sponsored by a dozen lawmakers would ban investor-state provisions in future trade agreements.
 
It remains to be seen whether the strange alliance of President Obama and the House Republicans will succeed in pushing through these trade agreements—and, with them, a new legal regime for cross-border corporate investment. President Obama has argued that the TPP is necessary because “if we don’t write the rules, China will.” But with these special investor protections included, the only rules that will get written are those that pass muster with multinational corporations.
 

David Singh Grewal is Associate Professor, Yale Law School. You can reach him by e-mail at david.grewal at yale.edu

Marco Simons is Legal Director, EarthRights International. You can reach him by e-mail at marco at earthrights.org.

Inače su demokrate juče u donjem domu glasale protiv Obaminih trenutnih predloga (pre svega o "fast track" opciji za buduće glasanje o TPP/TTIP).

 

Ovaj poslednji bold je baš super ("ako mi ne napišemo pravila, napisaće ih Kina") - Kina odavno igra po američkim pravilima i kida i u takvoj igri.

[Prospero]

"Osećam se crnkinjom, ostavite me na miru":
 
 

Rachel Dolezal strikes defiant tone over ethnicity: 'I consider myself to be black'

President of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, adds in interview with Sky News she did not ‘give two shits’ what her parents said about her ethnicity



 Rachel Dolezal, president of Spokane’s NAACP chapter, said in the interview most people ‘don’t really understand the definitions of race and ethnicity’. Photograph: Tyler Tjomsland/AP

Rory Carroll @rorycarroll72
Friday 12 June 201523.04 BST
Last modified on Saturday 13 June 201500.08 BST
 
 
 
The civil rights activist in the middle of a tempest over her ethnicity has insisted she is black and denounced her parents for telling the media she is white.

Rachel Dolezal, an outspoken activist for African American culture and racial injustice in Washington state, struck a defiant tone on Friday and said the controversy reflected ignorance over race and ethnicity.
Asked in an interview with Sky News if she identified as African American, Dolezal said she did not like the term.
“I prefer black,” she said. “If I was asked I would say, yes, I would definitely consider myself to be black.”
Dolezal, the head of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), added she did not “give two shits” what her parents said.
She said she was not in touch with the couple because of an ongoing lawsuit and does not view them as her real parents.
The combative statements were likely to inflame an already combustible mix of race, lies and identity that quickly dominated the airwaves and social media.

The city of Spokane is investigating whether Dolezal, 37, misidentified her race on her application for the ombudsman commission, where she serves as chair.
The Eastern Washington University professor has been a prominent activist in the Pacific north-west for years, speaking at demonstrations and giving interviews, including about hate mail and nooses allegedly sent to her, claims which are now also under scrutiny.
Her black persona unravelled this week when Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, a couple named on her Montana birth certificate as her biological parents, told Spokane’s KREM 2 News that her ancestry was German and Czech, with traces of Native American.
 
“Rachel has wanted to be somebody she’s not. She’s chosen not to just be herself, but to represent herself as an African American woman or a bi-racial person and that’s simply not true,” said Ruthanne Dolezal. The couple showed a photo of her as a white child with freckles and blond hair.
When a reporter with the TV channel KXLY asked the activist, who now has frizzy hair and apparently browner skin, if she was African American she fled, abandoning her keys and purse. The clip has gone viral, provoking a range of astonishment, scorn, anger and sympathy.
 
In the interview with Sky, which appeared to be filmed at her office, Dolezal appeared poised and defiant.
Asked about her estranged parents’ statements, she replied: “What I’d say to them is I don’t give two shits what you guys think. You’re so far done and out of my life.”
She said she could “understand” why people may think she was guilty of misrepresentation but did not confirm or deny the accusation, saying she wanted to first discuss the matter with the NAACP: “It’s more important for me to clarify that with the black community and with my executive board than it really is to explain it to a community that, quite frankly, don’t really understand the definitions of race and ethnicity.”
The academic listed her ethnicity as a mix of white, black and Native American in her application to the office of the police ombudsman commission and has implied black heritage in lectures and Facebook posts.
Social media has seized on the story, turning the Eastern Washington University’s professor of African studies into a figure vilified and mocked for cultural appropriation in the midst of fraught debates over transgender identity and police shootings of black people.

The hashtags #transracial and #wrongskin trended on Twitter, with many expressing indignation and bafflement. Others found the whole affair hilarious. A fake Twitter account, @_RachelDolezal, added to the tumult.
A few voices defended her. A commenter on the Spokesman Review said there was nothing wrong with identifying as a different race. “Obviously she’s probably felt for years that she was black on the inside and denied it all through her childhood ... since she’s transitioned and identifies herself as black, than we should just let her be and live her life in peace.”
Mary Elizabeth Williams, a Salon writer, echoed those who said Dolezal’s alleged fraud was unforgivable. “This isn’t about being an ally, or making the family of your choosing, or even how one feels on the inside,” she wrote. “It’s about, apparently, flat out deception.”
The television personality Montel Williams joked about Dolezal’s frizzy-haired attempt to pass as black. “Would love to see ‪#RachelDolezal tanning and perm bills – must be astronomical,” he tweeted.

The NAACP Alaska-Oregon-Washington State Conference issued a statement sayings it stood behind the Spokane chapter president’s advocacy record. “One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership,” it added. The statement made no mention of her future.
The mayor of Spokane, David Condon, and city council president Ben Stuckart, said in a joint statement they were gathering facts to determine if city policies related to volunteer boards and commissions had been violated. “We are committed to independent citizen oversight and take very seriously the concerns raised regarding the chair of the independent citizen police ombudsman commission.”
Mike Wendling, a BBC journalist who interviewed Dolezal in 2011, said he had not suspected anything was amiss. “She told us that she was of mixed racial heritage but that she primarily identified with her black ancestors,” he wrote.
In recent years Dolezal has reported several hate crimes, including receiving a packet of hateful letters and pictures at the NAACP post office box in North Spokane – a claim that prompted rallies of support outside city hall.
Police are still investigating but said whoever placed the mail must have had access to the box as it was not processed through the regular mail. Dolezal denied any implication that she was responsible.

 

 

Navijam za nju :D, njena stvar kako će se definisati, a ako se ogrebala za karijeru a propos svog samodefinišućeg identiteta, well, tough luck za sistem.

[Tribun_Populi]

^^Svako ima svoje Indijance iz Aleksinca :)

[ObiW]

"Osećam se crnkinjom, ostavite me na miru":

 

 

 

Navijam za nju :D, njena stvar kako će se definisati, a ako se ogrebala za karijeru a propos svog samodefinišućeg identiteta, well, tough luck za sistem.

 

In 1978, Churchill began working at the University of Colorado Boulder as an affirmative action officer in the university administration. He also lectured on American Indian issues in theethnic studies program. In 1990, the University of Colorado hired him as an associate professor, although he did not possess the academic doctorate usually required for the position. The following year he was granted tenure in the Communications department, without the usual six-year probationary period, after having been declined by the Sociology and Political Science departments.

 

In June 2005, the Rocky Mountain News published an article about Churchill's genealogy and family history. It "turned up no evidence of a single Indian ancestor" among 142 direct ancestors [of Churchill's] identified from records.^[34] The News reported that both Churchill's birth parents were listed as white on the 1930 census, as were all but two of his great-great-grandparents listed on previous census and other official documents.^[30] The News found that some of Churchill's accounts of where his ancestors had lived did not agree with documented records. Numerous members of Churchill's extended family have longstanding family legends of Indian ancestry among ancestors;^[30] but, none was confirmed among the 142 direct forebears of Churchill who were identified.^[34]

 

Documents in Churchill's university personnel file show that he was granted tenure in a "special opportunity position."^[20]. Some of Churchill's Native American critics, such as Vernon Bellecourt (White Earth Ojibwe) and Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne-Muscogee Creek), argue that his assertion of Native American ancestry without the ability to prove it might constitute misrepresentation and grounds for termination. The University has said that it does not hire on the basis of ethnicity.^[35] The University of Colorado's Research Misconduct Committee conducted a preliminary investigation into whether Churchill misrepresented his ethnicity to "add credibility and public acceptance to his scholarship."^[36] The committee concluded that the allegation was not "appropriate for further investigation under the definition of research misconduct."^[37]

 

Ukratko, zajebao ih je da je Indijanac, primili su ga bez doktorata zato sto je Indijanac, a onda mu na brzinu dali i mesto redovnog profesora zato sto je Indijanac. Na kraju su ga i otpustili, ali ne zato sto je slagao za poreklo.

[Shan Jan]

Bila bi fora da gospojica sa identity problemom sada tuzi za rasizam BBW koje je prozivaju da nema sta da trazi u njihovom pokretu ^_^

[ObiW]

Bila bi fora da gospojica sa identity problemom sada tuzi za rasizam BBW koje je prozivaju da nema sta da trazi u njihovom pokretu ^_^

A tek bi bila fora kad bi ti naucio sta BBW znaci. 

[maximus]

[Meazza]

Well, ne moze se reci da nije avanzovala in terms of color.

[Prospero]

Poplave u Tbilisiju rasturile i Zoo vrt, živuljke se razmilele gradom 
 

Flooding kills 5, sets zoo animals free in Georgia
 

 

 
 

Спецназ пытается усыпить бегемота на площади Героев в Тбилиси
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

[urkozamanje]

jbt, cek bre.. zar hypo nije ekstremno zajebana zivotinja? neverovatno mi je da ih hendluju kao neke tamo krave najobicnije :) 

[mandingo]

najsmrtonosnija u africi, koliko ja znam.

 

ovaj je verovatno naviknut na ljude, pojma nemam.