Anti-austerity strikes sweep Europe

Anti-austerity strikes sweep Europe - Police and protesters clashed in Spain on Wednesday as millions of workers went on strike across Europe to protest spending cuts they say have made the economic crisis worse.

Hundreds of flights were cancelled, car factories and ports were at a standstill and trains barely ran in Spain and Portugal where unions held their first ever coordinated general strike.

Riot police arrested at least two protesters in Madrid and hit others with batons, witnesses said, and in Rome students pelted police with rocks in a protest over money-saving plans for the school system.

 

Reuters/Reuters - Commuters wait for trains at Atocha rail station during a 24-hour nationwide general strike in Madrid, November 14, 2012. REUTERS/Paul Hanna

International rail services were disrupted by strikes in Belgium and workers in Greece, Italy and France planned work stoppages or demonstrations as part of a "European Day of Action and Solidarity".

"We're on strike to stop these suicidal policies," said Candido Mendez, head of Spain's second-biggest labor federation, the General Workers' Union, or UGT.

More than 60 people were arrested in Spain and 34 injured, 18 of them security officials after scuffles at picket lines and damage to storefronts.

Protesters jammed cash machines with glue and coins and plastered anti-government stickers on shop windows. Power consumption dropped 16 percent with factories idled.

International lenders and some economists say the programs of tax hikes and spending cuts are necessary for putting public finances back on a healthy track after years of overspending.

While several southern European countries have seen bursts of violence, a coordinated and effective regional protest to the austerity has yet to gain traction and governments have so far largely stuck to their policies.

Spain, where the crisis has pushed millions into poverty, has seen some of the biggest protests. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is trying to put off asking for European aid that could require even more budget cuts.

Passion was inflamed when a Spanish woman jumped to her death last week as bailiffs tried to evict her from her home. Spaniards are furious at banks being rescued with public cash while ordinary people suffer.

In Portugal, which accepted an EU bailout last year, the streets have been quieter but public and political opposition to austerity is mounting, threatening to derail new measures sought by Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho.

His centre-right government was forced by protests to abandon a planned increase in employee payroll charges, but replaced it by higher taxes.

Passos Coelho's policies were held up this week as a model by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is despised in much of southern Europe for insisting on austerity as a condition of her support for EU aid.

"I'm on strike because those who work are basically being blackmailed into sacrificing more and more in the name of debt reduction, which is a big lie," said Daniel Santos de Jesus, 43, who teaches architecture at the Lisbon Technical University.

Some 5 million people, or 22 percent of the workforce, are union members in Spain. In Portugal about a quarter of the 5.5 million strong workforce is unionized.

Major demonstrations were planned for the evening in Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona and other cities.

FLIGHTS, FERRIES CANCELLED

Just 20 percent of Spain's long-distance trains and a third of its commuter trains were running. Lisbon's Metro was completely shut and only 10 percent of all trains will run under a court-ordered minimum service.

In Barcelona, Spain's second-biggest city, hundreds of trash containers were taken off the streets to stop them being burnt.

More than 600 flights were cancelled in Spain, mainly by Iberia and budget carrier Vueling. Portugal's flag carrier TAP cancelled roughly 45 percent of flights.

Italy's biggest union, CGIL, also called for a work stoppage of several hours across the country. The transport ministry expected trains and ferries to stop for four hours. Students and teachers were expected to march.

In Greece, which saw a big two-day strike last week while parliament voted on new cuts, unions geared for a march to parliament around midday although police expected a low turnout.

Holding banners reading "Enough is Enough" state workers started rallying on several squares in central Athens on Wednesday morning.

Spain's economy, the euro zone's fourth biggest, will shrink by some 1.5 percent this year, four years after the crash of a decade-long building boom left airports, highways and high-rise buildings disused across the country. Portugal's economy is expected to contract by 3 percent.

Spanish unions have never held two general strikes in one year before. The previous one in March brought factories and ports to a standstill and ignited flashes of street violence.

Unemployment stands at 25 percent and every week brings fresh job cuts. Spain's flagship airline Iberia, owned by UK-based International Airlines Group, said last week it will cut 4,500 jobs. The prestigious El Pais newspaper just laid off almost a quarter of its staff.

"We have to leave something better for our children," said Rocio Blanco, 47, a railway worker on the picket line at Madrid's main rail station, Atocha. ( Reuters )

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How A Leader Invites People's Best Thinking

How A Leader Invites People's Best Thinking - While sitting here waiting for the Presidential debate to start, I read a wonderful op-ed piece by Rodger Duncan in the Christian Science Monitor –What Romney and Obama Can Learn from Jim Lehrer in Tonight’s Presidential Debate. Duncan talks about Jim Lehrer’s thoughtfulness and experience, but the main focus of his piece is on the power of listening.

At one point Duncan talks about a conversation he had with Lehrer when he (Duncan) was a young reporter. Duncan was sharing with Lehrer his plan to conduct an interview by focusing on asking questions. Lehrer, however, responded by saying, “Don’t be too quick to believe that the only way to get answers is to ask questions,” he said. “Another way is to listen slowly.”

Lehrer went on to explain that “listening slowly” means to ask a question, listen carefully to the answer, and then – rather than immediately asking another question – leave some ‘open space’ to see what else the person will say. Duncan goes on to note, very eloquently, what he discovered in taking this approach:

Giving other people sufficient psychological breathing room – even those who weren’t very eager to talk with a reporter – seemed to work wonders. When I bridled my natural impatience to “get on with it,” they seemed more willing to disclose, explore, and even to be a bit vulnerable. When I treated the interview more as a conversation with a purpose than as a sterile interrogation, the tone of the exchange softened. It was now just two people talking, not a news reporter mining for data like a dentist extracting teeth.

This is a critical lesson for leaders as well. A few years ago, I was coaching a CEO who was very smart, very intense, very knowledgeable about her business. Her approach to questioning was to fire questions at her folks one after the other like verbal machine gun bullets. I watched her folks scrambling to answer, completely on the defensive.

I gave her advice very similar to Lehrer’s counsel: I told her that she’d get a lot more if she said a lot less. I suggested that she do two things:

- get curious about the other person vs. focusing only on your own agenda. 

Many leaders – and certainly this was true of my client – actually use questioning as a backhanded way to tell people what to do. Those questions sound like:“Have you done what we agreed you should on Project X? Why not? Have you solved the problem we discussed yet? Wasn’t that supposed to happen last week? What fell through the cracks? Have you held your folks accountable about this?” etc. When you use questioning like this, it simply feels like an interrogation…and people will just hunker down and try to defend themselves. No new information will arise. (Now don’t get me wrong; it’s OK to give your employees direction, to say “I’d like you to do this, or solve this, by this time.” But pinning them to the wall with tell-me-how-you’re-not-screwing-up questions is not an effective way to do that.)

Instead, when you question an employee, start with a question that gives the person the chance to tell you what’s going on in their head. That might be as simple as “How’s Project X going – good new and bad news?” Then really get curious about what that person knows, thinks or feels. This approach yields collaboration, innovation, new thinking. And any insight or advice that you provide in response to what you hear is much more likely to be useful and to be acted upon.

- ask the next question to go deeper vs. checking off your list. 

When you look at the interrogation questions I noted above, it’s clear that all of them were pre-existing: they lived in the ‘asker’s’ head before the conversation even started. These kinds of questions get asked independent of the answers given. Instead, let your questions arise from what you hear. For instance, let’s say you asked the question “How’s Project X going – good new and bad news?” And let’s say your employee said something like “We’re doing pretty well in terms of delivery – turn-around is good. But I’m worried about whether we’re going to be able to sustain it.” The checking-off-your-list approach would go right to the next question on your mental list, whether or not it had anything to do with that answer. The go-deeper approach would lead to asking a curiosity-based question like “What are some of the things that are worrying you?” or “What do you see as not sustainable?” or “What might get in the way?”

You may have noticed that everything I’ve suggested above is focused on finding out more about this person: what they understand and how they see the world; what they know and what they don’t. As a leader, this is absolutely critical information. And this kind of curious, open focus creates an environment where people feel able to open up, tell you the truth, learn, grow and improve. ( Forbes )

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A history of the U.S. Alien Tort Statute

A history of the U.S. Alien Tort Statute - The 33-word Alien Tort Statute, at the center of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, was enacted by the First Congress in 1789. It reads: "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

It lay essentially dormant for decades. Then, in 1978, a U.S. lawyer named Peter Weiss used the statute to bring a case against former Paraguayan police inspector Americo Pena-Irala over the torture and killing of Joelito Filartiga. In a ruling two years later, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said U.S. courts had jurisdiction and Pena-Irala was ordered to pay $10.4 million in damages to Filartiga's family.

 

The damages were never paid, but the case signaled that U.S. courts were open to victims of human rights abuses around the world. "Filartiga is to human rights litigants what Brown v. Board of Education was to civil rights litigants," said John Ruggie, the U.N. Special Adviser on Business and Human Rights.

In 1995, the 2nd Circuit issued a ruling in a case against the Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic that for the first time found the statute could be extended beyond just government officials to people outside government.

That opened the way for human rights lawyers to bring cases against corporations: In 1996, a lawyer named Paul Hoffman brought a landmark lawsuit under the Alien Tort Statute against oil company UNOCAL over abuses by the Myanmar government.

Companies have tended to settle the claims to avoid the expense and the bad PR. "These lawsuits come with a massive cost and are designed to leverage reputational damage on the company in order to extract a huge settlement or judgment," said Brian Quigley, a spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In the 17 years since the Karadzic ruling, there have been 154 cases against corporations under the statute, according to a database maintained by Jonathan Drimmer, who teaches a course on the Alien Tort Statute at the Georgetown Law Center.

The Supreme Court considered the Alien Tort Statute in 2004, in a case over an abduction in Mexico. Humberto Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican, was seeking damages from Jose Francisco Sosa, another Mexican. Alvarez-Machain accused Sosa of capturing him and handing him over to the United States. The court said that Alvarez-Machain's claim was not severe enough to fall within the Alien Tort Statute. ( Reuters )

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Deeper Asian splits possible after South China Sea spat: Indonesia

Deeper Asian splits possible after South China Sea spat: Indonesia - Deeper divisions could open up between Southeast Asian states and Beijing unless they do a better job of handling disputes such as a recent quarrel over the South China Sea, Indonesia's foreign minister said on Thursday.

Marty Natalegawa said Jakarta was trying to restore harmony after unprecedented arguments over the sea prevented a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) last month from issuing a joint communique, the first time this had happened in the 10-member bloc's 45-year history.

China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (L) walks with his Indonesian counterpart Marty Natalegawa after a bilateral meeting at the Foreign Ministry office in Jakarta August 10, 2012. REUTERS/Supri

"That's not good ... we will need to do better next time," he told Reuters in an interview during a visit to Canada.

The divisions stem from what some ASEAN members see as China's rapidly expanding influence in the region. Beijing has close relations with some ASEAN member states like Cambodia and Myanmar but there are tensions with others such as the Philippines and Vietnam. The Asian giant is not a member of the group.

China has territorial claims over a huge area of the South China Sea, including waters where the Philippines and Vietnam also claim sovereignty. At stake are potentially massive offshore oil reserves.

The area has become Southeast Asia's biggest potential military flashpoint. China and the Philippines have faced-off on a number of occasions in the disputed waters.

Natalegawa said he did not believe there was any one country in Southeast Asia or East Asia that "deliberately, with conscious aggressive intent" wanted to jeopardize peaceful international relations in the region.

"What we may have instead is a risk of miscalculation, of misperception, and action creating counter-reaction and a chain effect," he said.

Indonesia, by far the most powerful member of ASEAN, is working on a binding code of conduct for the South China Sea that would offer a guarantee that if one nation involved in a disagreement exercised restraint, the other would too.

"We have to save us from ourselves in assuming the worst of the other's intent and ending up having a self-fulfilling type of vicious circle. Now this is what Indonesia is trying to do," said Natalegawa.

"We are trying to intervene to say 'Look, stay calm and steady, let's not rush along a pathway that we don't want to go in' and avoiding this Cold War type of mentality, as if there are new fault lines."

China has yet to commit to the idea of a code of conduct, the details of which are still unclear. Natelegawa discussed the matter at a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi this month and "did not receive any negative response to my presentation of what is to come".

Natalegawa said he did not agree with the claim that China was becoming more assertive within ASEAN.

"I said (to Chinese officials) 'Look, what's going on? What's with you? Where are you coming from on this issue?' And when I hear from their world view, from their perspective, they have their own rationale and perception, as if they were caught by surprise as to what had happened at the (summit)," he said.

The arguments over the South China Sea were an unwelcome distraction for a grouping that plans to create a European Union-style economic community by 2015.

Natalegawa said he was encouraged by recent democratic reforms introduced by the military rulers of former rogue member Myanmar, which is due to chair ASEAN in 2014.

"A country that is chairing ASEAN on the eve of the ASEAN (economic) community 2015 must be more sensitive on human rights issues, on governance issues, than any one of us," he said.

"So it gives us a great deal of ... encouragement in making sure the process of reform in Myanmar is irreversible." ( Reuters )

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