Hungary's Orban defends education law in Brussels, calling EU outrage 'absurd'

Hungary's prime minister lashed out at George Soros, founder of the embattled Central European University. The PM's remarks came after the EU Commission sent a "letter of formal notice" to the Hungarian government.

In a speech given to European parliamentarians in Brussels on Wednesday, Orban insisted Hungary remained committed to the European Union, describing his nation's membership as "not questionable" but simultaneously expressing discontent with the bloc and a desire for EU reform of its "mistakes."
The Hungarian prime minsiter's appearence in the European Parliament came hours after the European Commission began legal action against the country in light of a recently passed controversial education law perceived as targeting George Soros' Central European University (CEU).

EU launches legal action against Hungary

EU sends Orban a letter

European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said on Wednesday that "a letter of formal notice" had been sent to Orban's government. According to Dombrovskis, the decision to begin the legal action was made after an "in-depth legal assessment" concluded the new Hungarian law allegedly breaches EU laws regarding freedoms for businesses, services and academia.
The letter is the first step of the EU's so-called infringement proceedings, whereby Brussels demands legal explanations from a member state on a particular issue. The Hungarian government has one month to respond to the letter. Brussels will then consider if any further steps are warranted. These could include referral to the European Court of Justice and possible financial penalties.

Orban criticizes EU criticism

Orban called the accusations against Hungary "absurd."
Standing before European lawmakers, Orban described the contested law as a "minor amendment" that applies to 28 universities and not just to the CEU. He described the flare-up around the law as "absurd," likening it to a pre-emptive murder conviction, given that the CEU continues to operate normally at present.
"It's almost like someone being accused of murder, then he's convicted, while the alleged victim is alive and kicking, moreover, pointing fingers at the convicted, crying: 'Murderer!'," Orban said.

Orban attacks Soros

George Soros' Central European University faces possible closure

Orban had even stronger words for CEU founder George Soros. He labeled the American-Hungarian billionare a "financial speculator" who was "attacking" Hungary.
Orban also painted Soros as detrimental to Europe as a whole, claiming Soros had "destroyed the lives of millions of Europeans with his financial speculations" and describing Soros as "an open enemy of the euro." The Hungarian leader also said the businessman wanted to open Europe's borders to millions of migrants.
Orban went on to criticize the EU for its warmth towards the billionare. On Thursday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is scheduled to meet with Soros.

Soros' CEU lies at the center of the controversy. The Univerisity has a campus in Budapest.

CEU at the center of controversy
The EU's formal letter focuses on the law passed on April 4 that requires foreign universities operating in Hungary also have a campus in their home country. The law is seen as aimed squarely at Central European University, which has been operating in Budapest since 1993. Despite being accredited in the US state of New York, the university does not have a campus in the United States.
Orban has accused the university of maintaining an unfair advantage over other Hungarian institutions because it confers degrees that are recognized in both Hungary and the United States, However, he denied wanting to shut it down.

DW exclusive: Central European University rector, Michael Ignatieff

Critics of the right-wing head of government have decried the law, taking to the streets in protest at what they described as a targeted attack on an institution that promotes liberal values Orban is seeking to repress.
Should an agreement cease to materialize, CEU may be forced to cease enrolling new students as of January 2018.
"My institution has a gun pointed to its head," CEU President Michael Ignatieff told EU parliamentarians on Tuesday.
Showdown between Brussels and Budapest
The launch of legal action has raised the temperature on an already fiery relationship between Orban and the EU.
The EU-skeptic Orban has claimed the supranational bloc threatens Hungary's sovereignty and has launched a "Let's Stop Brussels!" questionnaire asking the opinion of Hungarian households on how to respond to alleged EU interference in Hungarian independence.
Hungarian legislation regarding systematic detention of asylum seekers and the proposed required registration of NGOs that received international funds have also drawn criticisms from the EU.

http://www.dw.com/en/hungarys-orban-defends-education-law-in-brussels-calling-eu-outrage-absurd/a-38599683

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GEORGE GALLOWAY-The gods of economics have failed

SATURDAY, 4 AUGUST 2012

The gods of economics have failed

Headlines this week referring to the possible full-scale nationalisation of RBS bank sent my mind back to an exchange in the House of Commons a few years ago, not long after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Then Chancellor Alistair Darling made a dramatic statement to the house. For the sake of brevity and readability let me summarise.

The government was taking emergency bold measures to in effect nationalise the mountain of bank debt while leaving the banks in the same private hands that had been revealed, even then, to have spectacularly plunged us into the mess in the first place. I asked the Chancellor if it might not be a good idea, having stumped up so much public largesse, for the public to have a controlling stake on the board of the banks we'd just bailed out. Politely, it must be said, he refused the invitation as assorted Blairite creeps echoed one another's synthetic mirth.

And now we are four years down the line. The promises, hopes and clutching of straws of the last government and its even worse successor that the likes of Bob Diamond would turn their attention to bolstering the economy, lending to households and businesses if only we stuffed their mouths with silver have turned to ashes. As was entirely predictable, and predicted, the bankers have simply taken the money and refused to part with it back into productive investment in the economy.


The economic statistics attest to mounting misery - a weaker recovery from the initial crisis than from the Great Depression, now a double-dip recession worse than any in 50 years, manufacturing and construction slumping, shocking contraction across the economy as a whole. And the Prime Minister pledges that the savage austerity will carry on for the rest of the decade. There is certainly a fair share of culpability at the doors of Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street. But I think it unfair for sections of the media to brand Gideon George Osborne the part-time Chancellor.

Credit where it's due - it must have required great effort expended full time to bring about such a spectacular disaster. More seriously, the effort and intention are very real, outweighing charges of incompetence. This is a determined push to rehabilitate and turbo-charge the very economic model of neoliberalism that has come crashing down. It is the slaughter of the young, the old, the infirm and the vulnerable on the altar of the gods that have failed.

That's why the Labour front-bench attack on Osborne's open goal is all too often wide of the mark or merely ends up rattling the timber, creating a frisson on the opposition benches but not much else. For the problem is much more fundamental. It is the failure of the direction global capitalism has taken over the last 30 years. And that is an indictment not simply of Osborne, Cameron and Clegg, but of Blair and Brown who embraced the Thatcherite revolution with abandon. These were the good years, remember? But even then inequalities rose as the leviathans of the boardroom were cut loose of any moorings binding them to society.

So where we stand now is not in the winnowed space of what has come to pass for politics - great heat and clatter about differences that amount to so little. For politics, as in the mainstream farce, has also had the neoliberal treatment. It is policed by an army of spin doctors with focus groups and caution masquerading as radicalism, all aimed at winning the ear of powerful elite and the votes of a diminishing part of the electorate.

In one sense, it has become an anti-politics - the administration of things, not the transformation of lives. Instead, we stand at a new threshold where politics - the big political choices about the future of our society and planet - is back. As the giants of absolute impoverishment and the evils we witnessed in the 1930s gather themselves to their full, terrifying height, how dwarfish do the political class that struts their hour on the stage look. And deluded too.

In the comforting echo chamber they inhabit with the commentariat they mistake the apoplexy so many people feel at the political process for apathy with real politics. But "out there," where so few politicians dare to tread, the feelings of despair and rage are not only palpable, they are expressed in an idiom that is profoundly political. People have noticed that one by one central pillars of the Establishment have been shown to have feet of clay and boots filled with cash. The MPs' expenses scandal has left an indelible mark.

Then came the defenestration of not only Murdoch but so much of the rest of the right-wing media. Now the Libor scandal and other outrages have left millions of people unwittingly repeating Bertolt Brecht's dictum - what's robbing a bank compared to founding a bank? - a point eloquently made to me the other day in Parliament by a perfectly upstanding armed Metropolitan Police officer who guards the building.

There are important lessons here, I believe, for the left. So much of what we have to say can chime with vast numbers of people who feel abandoned. But to do so the message needs to speak with a radicalism - not to be confused with extremism - that genuinely matches both the scale of the crisis we face and the register of people's pain. Radicalism shapes not just the content, but also the form. A left that sounds formulaic and wearisome when it talks about the Dickensian levels of inequality will get little hearing.

If we want to advance the cause of working people and to reverse a whole epoch of right-wing ascendency, then we should sound like we mean it. We should also do things like we mean them to make a difference. That's why the decision by the trade union movement to build a people's demonstration against the government's austerity in October is so welcome. My experience in Bradford, on the street and in public meetings, from work in the media and from a growing interface through the social media is that there is a thirst for what I call an insurgent politics.

There is little sign of that registering on the front bench of the Labour Party, though to be fair Ed Miliband is reportedly of the view that the next general election will be like the epoch-making elections of 1945 and 1979. The problem is the Labour Party is behaving in anything but an epochal way. So this insurgency will have to advance where it can. Good people in the Labour Party should welcome that. If they hope to steer Labour back to where it once was, then the advance of real labour values in society and at the ballot box can only help them.

Many more people see this after the Bradford by-election in March. That's why the candidacy of Kate Hudson, standing for Respect in the Manchester Central byelection on November 15, is generating such widespread support. Hudson embodies those values and policies that the labour movement so sorely needs. She is an extremely prominent peace and anti-nuclear campaigner who has won respect through years of standing up for what is right, whatever the fashion. It is a mark of that respect that Alice Mahon, for many years as MP for Halifax and champion of the left in Parliament and in every movement that matters, has welcomed Hudson's candidacy, which will be putting the left case on the map in Manchester in a way that will shift the terms of what might otherwise pass for debate.

It is within the left's grasp to make what we have to say a central reference point again. It is already happening in Europe, as evidenced in the electoral campaigns of the left in Greece and France, and, in an attenuated way, even in the timid moves by French President Francois Hollande to tilt away from the neoliberal orthodoxy. Much more than that is needed. But for it to happen, those who not only recognise that this is a moment that will define our world for decades to come but who are prepared to act on that need to raise their sights, rally in unity and take the message of democratic insurgency across our country.

We know that nothing will simply fall into our laps. But if the extraordinary crisis we are living through has taught us anything thus far it is that the years of political humdrum are over, replaced with sudden shocks, explosions and new expressions of the centuries-old battle for peace, justice and equality.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/122239

Vernon Coleman-How The European Union Kills People

How The European Union Kills People
There is no doubt that one of the reasons why our health care system is a failure is because it is distorted by regulations, targets and legislation - some of which originate in London but much of which now comes from the European Union.

There is no doubt at all that the European Union has done enormous damage to the quality of medical care provided to patients in Europe. It is, for example, because of the EU that general practitioners in England no longer provide 24 hour cover for their patients and it is because of the EU that hospital patients rarely see the same doctor twice and may often go for several days (particularly over weekends and bank holidays) without seeing a doctor at all.

It was back in the 1990s that European politicians and bureaucrats insisted that the European working-time directive should be applied to doctors as well as coach drivers and factory workers. This was done purely for political reasons.

Britain accepted the EU rules for doctors. (The Government could have refused to accept the legislation but it didn't. As our politicians always do, our ministers bowed down to the EU's demands.) One reason for the acceptance of the new legislation was, without doubt, the fact that there will, as a result of sexual discrimination, soon be far more women in medicine. Women doctors are far less likely to be driven by vocation and altruistic motives and far more likely to want as much money as possible for as little work as possible. Many women doctors marry, have babies and want to work office hours. Just like female MPs, they demand a regulated `work-life balance' and expect the job commitments to be adjusted to suit them. They aren't prepared to give the commitment that male doctors have always given. And so patients lack continuity and male doctors have to work harder. The result has been the worst and fastest deterioration in the NHS since its inception in 1948.

Today the entire NHS is in a mess, doctors no longer provide patients with anything half way decent medical care, and patients are dying like flies because the quality of care has deteriorated. There is no longer any continuity of care.

Thanks largely to the EU employment rules doctors in hospital (as in general practice) are now working strictly limited hours. Many GPs no longer provide the 24 hour, 365 day service which was an integral part of family practice just a few years ago. The modern GP works the sort of hours usually associated with schoolteachers, librarians and accountants. Similarly, many hospital doctors now work only short, fixed weeks. Hospital doctors who are `on call' are deemed to be working when they are sleeping.

At the same time the EU has also taken rights away from patients and given all the rights to employees. The result is that staff everywhere have all the power and can be as rude as they like without censure.

Today, if doctors work more hours than the EU permits then the hospital must pay a huge fine. (In exactly the same way that the EU controls the amount and type of rubbish our councils can collect so doctors working hours are controlled precisely by the EU.) The result of this bureaucratic absurdity is that doctors have to leave half way through treating patients and at weekends hospitals are often completely empty of doctors. I wonder how many patients have died as a result of this policy? I'm damned sure it is considerably more than ever died as a result of doctors being tired. Today it is rare to see a doctor (or a physiotherapist or, indeed, anyone else who isn't a patient or a visitor) in a hospital at weekends. Patients are left lying in bed for over two days. No one, it seems, has heard of deep vein thromboses or pressure sores.

Today, hospitals don't discharge patients at the weekend because consultants aren't available then. And they know that if they send patients home at the weekend they will have empty beds and will have to take new patients - something they don't like doing over weekends with a skeleton medical staff in the hospital.

Another result of the shortage of doctors has been that nurses have been given the right to prescribe and to perform surgery - and to take on these responsibilities without any medical supervision and without the sort of training required for doctors. To the problem of bad prescribing by doctors has now been added the problem of bad prescribing by nurses. Most nurses (like most doctors) know very little about the drugs they prescribe and know next to nothing about side effects. We need fewer - not more - people handing out prescriptions.

To make sure that doctors stick to the EU's regulations, hospitals actually employ highly-paid bureaucrats whose sole job is to make sure that young doctors clock off on time and don't spend a moment more than they should looking after patients. Hospitals employ Working Time Directive Project Managers (salaries around £40,000 a year) whose job description involves ensuring the compliance of young professionals with the 48 hour working limit.

So, with one thing and another, it is hardly surprising that it is often difficult to find a doctor on a hospital ward these days. And it is hardly surprising that the standard of care in our hospitals has fallen and still falling rapidly.

And it is hardly surprising that more and more patients are getting fed up with the poor quality of care they receive from doctors. In 2007, the number of complaints heard by the General Medical Council was twenty times as great as it had been in 1997. Incidentally, a high proportion of the complaints relate to services provided by foreign born doctors. Naturally, no one is allowed to mention this although it has been the case for some years.)

Forcing the EU working directive into the world of medicine has created one other massive problem.

When doctors qualified in the 1970s, specialists only became consultants or GPs after around 30,000 hours of experience and training. In 1971, when I was a junior hospital doctor I worked all the hours available. It was not uncommon for a junior house officer to work 168 hours a week, snatching hours of sleep whenever there was a lull in activity. We didn't complain about this because it was an accepted part of our training and, being young, we managed perfectly well. Every patient was looked after by a designated consultant team. The consultant, registrar and house officer were responsible for patients from their admittance to their discharge. The extraordinary workload meant that young, resident doctors learned an enormous amount about practical, medical care. Today, thanks to reduced working hours, young doctors can become consultants or fully qualified GPs after 6,000 hours of training. So, today's specialists have one fifth the experience of their predecessors just 30 years ago. How can that possibly be acceptable? If airline pilots were suddenly allowed to fly passenger planes after a training period that had been cut by four fifths there would be a public outcry.

Copyright Vernon Coleman 2012 Taken from Do Doctors And Nurses Kill More People Than Cancer? by Vernon Coleman. This book is published by EMJ Books. For details of how to purchase a copy please visit the shop on this website. 

European Union defines criminal anti-semitism

ΝΕΑ ΔΕΣΜΑ ΕΤΟΙΜΑΖΕΙ ΓΙΑ ΜΑΣ, ΤΟΥΣ ΕΥΤΥΧΙΣΜΕΝΟΥΣ ΔΟΥΛΟΥΣ, Η Ε.Ε.!!!! 

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

European Union defines criminal anti-semitism

From the European Union:

Working Definition of Antisemitism

http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf

"The purpose of this document is to provide a practical guide for identifying incidents, collecting data, and supporting the implementation and enforcement of legislation dealing with antisemitism."

Working definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

In addition, such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.

Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.

Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).

Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
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Anonymous said...

I guess the thought police went into overdrive while writing these up. But, as Galileo said, "Oppure si muove!"
Does this mean we can legitimately require "israel" to now respect human right? Stop shelling a caged population? Treat its own citizens equally? Allow jobs, rentals and free passage to non-Jews inside the 'state'? After all, this is what's expected and demanded of any other democratic nation. And, does that mean we can also expect them to sign the NNPT and allow IAEA inspections?

.....Until the ACT like a civilized country, they will be regarded by the entire planet as a rogue, nuclear armed, racist, Apartheid 'state' not worthy of the name 'democracy.' No amount of pen-pushing in Strasbourg or Brussels will change that.

9:21 PM

Noachideous said...

There are no exemptions to facilitate dissent by those who reject the Noachide impost upon non-jews.

It is so because there are no exemptions actually.

The religion of the jews claims no future for those who reject the jewish messianic imperative.

To do so is "anti-semitic".
To affirm that the 6 million number is derived of Kabballah is "anti-semitic".

To demand truth in public life is "anti-semitic"

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http://revisionistreview.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/european-union-defines-criminal-anti.html