Non-State Actors

By Péter MARTON Here's a short story. ------------- A man came to the village one day. A mysterious figure. No one could quite make out his face under the wide-brimmed hat he wore. He even kept his head tilted constantly downward as if reading patterns from the ground to be covered by his steps. The people of the village came out to greet him and to learn who he is. They were a curious folk -- not the kind that would bunker in and hunker down if once in a while a stranger comes by. "I am the Truthteller," announced the unknown person, speaking with the confidence of someone accustomed to winning over audiences immediately. "No, you're not," replied one of the village elders. "You're a teller of lies, that's what you are." Now the man was ready to look people in the eye! A frantic gaze, challenging everyone -- how dare they! "That is a lie concocted by my enemies, the powers-that-be in this land," he shouted. "...

Corporations can have a very clearly political role -- easily. But even when it is just their normal everyday operation, beyond politics, its impact on society and the world around you may still be very significant. On such occasions their being beyond politics is itself a problem so politics may have to get up, reach out and touch them, and do something about it. Recently in the news: Uber paid off hackers to get them to destroy stolen consumer data (belonging to some 57 million users), and even wanted guarantees from them that they will not disclose their theft. Facebook still can't handle (and consequently serves) advertisers in the housing sector who discriminate on a racist basis. After Kobe Steel, Nissan and Subaru, Mitsubishi turns out to have sold sub-standard products in large quantities, with the safety of cars, aircraft, buildings, and much else, affected by the dysfunctional quality control at the companies concerned. Just a couple of examples of corporations...

It may be a familiar thing by now on this blog: once again I am preparing to speak at an event, this time about the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, and I am putting together some notes to share (relatively briefly this time) before I head off to do this. For a reminder, this ( see map ) is the part of the world we are talking about. No offense meant by including that map above. You may know more about Myanmar than me. But even as a non-Myanmar-specialist I will risk saying that in general people in the West know very little about the place. Many are not really sure if Myanmar should be Burma rather, because everyone heard of the military junta (so who knows if using one or the other name in reference to the country is appropriate or not). Many may have heard that there was some kind of "democratic" change but in pictures appearing in the media about the country generals in military uniform and military uniforms in general still proliferate. And there are those names for th...

By Péter MARTON Because I need to speak at an event about the situation in Iraq/Syria tomorrow, here are some of the recent trends and developments related to ISIS -- my digest of these. These are research notes, effectively. For starters: Aaron Zelin notes how much the ISIS media presence diminished since the fall of Mosul: "In particular, after the fall of Mosul in July 2017, the IS distribution of governance-related media dropped precipitously (by 66 percent) until the complete end of such media activity (on September 12 in Syria; September 16 in Iraq). For reference, at its apex, between June and August 2015, IS released 3,762 pictures related to governance activities in Syria and 3,305 in Iraq. When Mosul fell, between May and July 2017, IS only released 315 pictures related to governance in Syria and 171 in Iraq. And the most recent count prior to the mid-September 2017 rupture was 142 in Syria and 113 in Iraq, between July and September 2017." And yet......

By Péter MARTON The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation warns in its most basic factsheet (under the very first point in that factsheet) that "Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted." Even if some of this waste is inevitable, this is a staggering figure. Two things happened to me recently that are worth mentioning related to this; or, in truth, this post is getting written because of those two things , actually. I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora , a major recent work of hard science fiction (Orbit Books, 2015). It looks at future multigeneration starship travel in a socially and environmentally sensitive (read: sober) way. The implications of this sensitive, or perhaps simply just sensible, approach include that the idea of making a run for the distant starts comes to seem... preposterous. The book makes you ask those basic...

By Péter MARTON " (It's) just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed ," said Bono, born Paul Hewson, U2 frontman (pictured), when asked about his shares in the company Nude Estates , a firm based in low-tax jurisdiction Malta and mentioned in the Paradise Papers , saying so with reference to the "loads of" other companies connected to U2 and its members. Don't have smart people working for you? Don't have loads of companies? If you fail to benefit from this system you do so out of your own negligence.

Posted by Péter MARTON Just a link today, to a recent and interesting publication , to browse and (from time to time) raise your eyebrows over... The "Agrifood Atlas" from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Friends of the Earth Europe... A report about trends in the agrifood sector, problematised from the perspective of increasing market concentration through mergers and acquisitions... For instance: have you heard about that Bayer-Monsanto deal in the works ? -- A discussion of the resulting processes from the spread of intensive cash crop farming to supermarketisation and the coming introduction of CRISPR-edited crops (read: crops genetically modified through the technological use of the process called CRISPR ) to the market... Food for thought!

By Péter MARTON This recent ARD report about German gummy bear maker Haribo is a must watch for those interested in where components of different products that may be part of our lives are sourced from. Normally you find things once you search for them. Here the searching may come after the finding as the findings presented in the report may lead to some soul-searching in the end... All those cute little gummy bears you have eaten. They. Are. Not. Coming. Back. There are all sorts of issues here. Gummy bears being made of up to 46% sugar, to start with. And then. Dreadful conditions in a supplier's pig farm, inside Germany, so you don't need to go all inter- and transnational to run into first-rate horror along supply/value chains. The pigs are not simply held in dire conditions. These are conditions that make you wonder if the owner of the pig farm actually hates these animals. That's where at least some of the gelatin in the gummy bears is coming from. And...