jackthurston.com

The Financial Times has reported on new figures from the French government statistical service showing that French farmers are “getting steadily worse off compared with their fellow citizens and their European peers”. Such figures are grist to the mill of those calling for a strong defense of EU farm support from the internal pressure of the EU budget and the external pressure of the WTO’s Doha Round of multilateral trade liberalization negotiations. What such figures fail to show is the changing structure of farming in France as in other European countries and the likelihood that subsidies are actually accentuating inequalities. (more…)

It must be frustrating being the President of the European Commission: a whole lot of responsibility but very little power. When Jose Manuel Barroso meets George W Bush at the White House next week he may be able to offer some advice to a US President who has just lost control of Congress and is watching his Iraq strategy slip further into chaos.

On the agenda is climate change, international security and global trade. Bush is currently the world’s leading climate change denier and the chances of him recanting are as good as those of snowball in hell - or the polar ice caps, the way things are going. On international security, the EU lacks a standing army and even a foreign minister, so Barroso has very little to offer here. It is only trade policy that the two men can use this high level meeting to achieve something concrete: sealing a deal that has so far eluded their respective trade negotiators at the WTO in Geneva. Presidential ‘fast track’ Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) will expire in a matter of months, and so if there is to be a deal on Bush’s watch, it needs to be made now. (more…)

Last month I gave my last ever Powerpoint presentation. It was on the findings of a new public opinion survey commissioned by the German Marshall Fund, where I am currently a non-resident transatlantic fellow. You can view it or even listen to a recording:

I gave slight variations of this presentation in Brussels, at the WTO in Geneva and finally at the Houses of Parliament in London. The knowledge that this would be the last time I would ever have to run the most desperately woeful application of the Microsoft Office suite gave me an unexpectedly wholesome and satisfying feeling. Bad Powerpoint has done much to kill the art of communication. How many times have you sat comatose while a speaker reads through 20 slides, each featuring an almost identical bulleted list, as if the slides were the main act and the speaker is merely the prompt, standing hidden in the wings? Is this the power of rhetoric? Is this the way to communicate with fellow human beings? (more…)