Things are looking good for net neutrality. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on whether to treat the internet more like a public utility . This vote comes after a lengthy political battle over the best course of action, but it looks like that fight is winding down. The New York Times reports that key GOP opponents have accepted near-certain defeat:
Superstitions have surrounded the eerie solar eclipse since time immemorial. And now, for entirely scientific reasons, it turns out we have good reason to fear them. Earth’s biggest solar eclipse since 1999 is happening this March, and it could cause some real disruption—thanks to Europe’s reliance on solar energy.
President Obama unfortunately initially characterized the murders of four Jewish shoppers at the Hyper Casher market last month as “random,” but France’s Jews never saw it that way. I was in Paris during the Shloshim (30 day memorial service) for those victims and what I heard from friends wasn’t whether to leave but when and to where.
It is hard to blame them. Since 2000, French Jews have been targeted by escalating hate crimes, ranging from firebombed synagogues to terrorist murders. Since 2012, native French citizens who trained with Islamist extremists in the Middle East carried out three deadly attacks against Jewish sites: one on a schoolyard of a Yeshiva in the southern city of Toulouse, another at a Jewish museum in Brussels and last month’s terrorist outrage at kosher market in Paris. Twelve people died in total.
Three more incidents have since rocked the Jewish community:
– The murder of a heroic Jewish volunteer guarding a Bat Mitzvah celebration in Copenhagen by a native-born Dane of Arab descent.
– The desecration of hundreds of Jewish tombstones, including a Holocaust memorial in Eastern France.
– The ominous insertion of an anti-Semitic canard by a leading candidate in France’s next presidential race, Roland Dumas, who accused the current French Prime, Minister Manuel Valls, of being under the influence of his Jewish wife. Asked in an interview whether he thinks whether Valls — who is very popular in France’s Jewish community for his frank condemnations of anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism — is “under Jewish influence,” Dumas replied: “Probably. Everyone is under some influence… I can think so, so why not say it?”
Meanwhile, President Hollande has publicly reiterated that he wants Europe’s largest Jewish community to stay:
“We know there are doubts, questions across the community, ” he said, adding, “I will not just let what was said in Israel pass, leading people to believe that Jews no longer have a place in Europe and in France in particular.”
Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that the government would defend French Jews against what he described as “Islamo-fascism.”
“A Jew who leaves France is a piece of France that is gone,” Valls declared.
To their credit, Hollande and Valls have backed up their words with deeds. There are some 10,000 battle-ready soldiers deployed on France’s streets, protecting strategic (read Jewish) sites. Five of those soldiers have been sleeping in the Paris office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
But the question of the day for France Jews is what happens the day after the soldiers are sent back to their barracks?
Even before the latest murders, thousands of French Jews had already left–many to Israel. They had it with taunts, hate crimes, bullying on trains, shootings, kidnappings, home invasions, rape and murder. They had absorbed unending media bias against Israel, anti-Semitic taunts from Dieudonné, a judicial system that would not deal with anti-Semitism in a serious way. And they felt a wall of apathy from many non-Jewish neighbors, over 30% of whom agree with the Le Pens of France who would be happy to see the Jews just leave and that hopefully the Muslims would follow suit.
It is difficult for us Americans to understand the sense of isolation many French Jews feel. Even in the sea of a millions of protesters at the Charlie Hebdo solidarity march, there was only one balloon that included all these words in the “Charlie” slogans:
Nous sommes tous- Charlie, flics, Juifs.
“We are all Charlie, Police, Jews“
The lone sign hovering above the millions who took to the streets, which included the word Juif, was written and held aloft by members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Last June, during a face-to-face meeting with President Hollande when he confirmed to us that 1,000 French citizens had trained with ISIS in Syria and now posed a new threat to France and the entire continent, we told Mr. Hollande: Beyond dealing with this new terrorist threat, unless and until France’s 6,000+ Imams and other Muslim leaders, weigh in on the right side of this epic struggle, this war may not be winnable.
I got a small dose of the hate last week as were rushing to a meeting at a kosher restaurant near the Elysee Palace. Passing a pub with a lunchtime line spilling out onto the sidewalk, I briefly locked eyes with a young, hijab-clad Muslim woman. Her indifferent glance transformed into utter contempt when she saw my yarmulke.
Hate is learned and ISIS is but one of its only teachers. That woman’s anti-Semitism will not be erased by government decrees. Such hatred can only be deconstructed by Muslims themselves. It is hard to blame any European Jew for not waiting around to find out how this all plays out.
Maggie Baumann was completely unprepared for the backlash she received, when after more than 20 years, she started opening up about struggling with anorexia while she was pregnant.
Baumann discussed that period in an interview with HuffPost Live on Monday. “I … was very disconnected from myself and so I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I was overexercising, not eating enough, but it was all done in silence,” she told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani on Monday.
Baumann, now an eating disorder specialist, received serious hate mail when she first wrote about her experience in blog post five years ago.
When she began sharing her struggle, “no one had ever really talked about having an eating disorder during pregnancy. I was mainly doing a lot of promoting of moms with eating disorders at the time,” she said. “But a reporter asked me about my pregnancy.. I wrote a blog.”
The blog post was called “Pregorexia: Starving For Two.” and was covered by various media outlets.
The response to Baumann’s story was mixed.
“Oh my gosh, I had over 250 comments and probably 90 percent of them were negative, telling me … ‘You should be sterilized. Your children should be taken away from you,'” Baumann explained. “Even having had gone through my recovery, it put me back because the negative comments, they did get to me and the shame with it.”
The shame sometimes affiliated with eating disorders inspired Baumann to start an online support group for moms and pregnant women suffering and “hiding in silence.”
Click here to watch the full segment on struggling with an eating disorder while pregnant.
Need help? Call the National Eating Disorder Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237.
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!
“We’re improving the workplace by measuring it.”
That’s the idea behind InHerSight, a platform where women can evaluate their employers and rate how female-friendly workplace environments are. The idea is that providing women a space to communicate with other women about workplace issues they care about most could have an effect on this issues themselves.
“We believe that scoring employers on their support for women and making those scores public will hold companies accountable for their hard and soft policies,” InHerSight founder Ursula Mead told The Huffington Post. “And that providing women with a safe and anonymous way to share their insights is how we get there.
With many work environments proving to be unsafe or unwelcoming to women, websites like InHerSight could be very useful for women looking to move jobs.
Launched in January 2014, the organization provides a platform for women to anonymously rate past or present employers from any field on multiple topics including flexible hours, maternity leave, management opportunities for women and salary satisfaction.
InHerSight allows women to “rate the companies they work for on the metrics that matter to them,” their Facebook page reads. Some of these metrics include paid time off, family support and how many women are in top leadership positions in the company.
Users can search for a specific employer on InHerSight or browse through recently reviewed workplaces including large corporations and government agencies. Women can also add their current or past employers by creating a new rating.
“You have unique insights into how well your employer supports your needs and goals, where it excels and where it can do better,” InHerSight’s Facebook page reads. “And by sharing these insights, you can bring powerful transparency to the working world for women — and in turn make it possible for more women to find what they’re looking for.”
In the past year women have rated companies ranging from Google to Coca-Cola. While there aren’t very many evaluations on the site right now, the feedback is helpful and covers a range of topics including social activities and equal opportunities for men and women. Users can also add comments expanding on what their employers are getting right — and wrong.
Here’s an example of written feedback:
“We want to be like TripAdvisor for women in the workplace,” Mead said. “They help travelers find what they are looking for and improve what they get from service providers using user-generated ratings… there’s no reason that model can’t work for women and their employers.”
H/T The Daily Dot
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has confirmed that several turkey vultures have been poisoned from the veterinary euthanasia drug pentobarbital in Marin County, California.
Six turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) were brought to WildCare’s Wildlife Hospital in San Rafael, California between July and October 2014. All the birds were comatose and barely breathing, presenting a medical mystery to the Wildlife Hospital staff.
With immediate and intensive medical intervention (see video below), all of the birds recovered, and digestive samples were sent to a laboratory to determine what made them sick. CDFW confirmed pentobarbital exposure in all birds tested, but the source of the exposure remains unknown.
Pentobarbital is a drug used by veterinarians to euthanize companion animals, livestock and horses. If the remains of animals euthanized with pentobarbital are not properly disposed of after death, scavenging wildlife – such as turkey vultures and eagles – can be poisoned. Veterinarians and animal owners are responsible for disposing of animal remains properly by legal methods such as cremation or deep burial.
Turkey vultures are protected by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act and California Fish and Game Code. Improperly disposed-of euthanized remains are a danger to all scavenging wildlife.
Members of the veterinary and livestock communities are asked to share this information with colleagues in an effort to prevent further incidents.
WildCare also asks the public in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond to pay attention to grounded turkey vultures and other raptors and scavengers.
Pentobarbital-poisoned birds appear to be dead. They have no reflex response and breathing can barely be detected. The birds appear intact, without wounds or obvious trauma.
WildCare Medical Staff were baffled when the first of these poisoned patients arrived at the Wildlife Hospital. How do you treat a healthy-looking but comatose vulture? Unfortunately the solution quickly became obvious as the bird’s crop began to fill — these poisoned vultures needed to vomit, and Medical Staff would have to help.
Watch the video below of WildCare Director of Animal Care, Melanie Piazza helping this comatose vulture to vomit.
WildCare is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization supported almost entirely by private donations and individual memberships. Visit us online at wildcarebayarea.org.
Last week I re-posted the story of Lost Bird, the infant girl who was found alive beneath her mother’s frozen body four days after the Massacre of Wounded Knee on Dec. 29, 1890. Named “Zintkala Nuni” — “The Lost Bird”– by the tribe’s survivors, who tried to get custody of her, she was adopted– as a public relations move — by Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, whose men came to the killing field after the massacre was over. In her short life,”Lost Bird” suffered every kind of injury and abuse the White Man imposed on Native Americans. She died on Valentine’s Day in 1920, aged 29, and was buried in a pauper’s grave in California, but 71 years later, her people, the Lakota, found her grave and brought her remains back to Wounded Knee, the place where she was found as an infant beneath her mother’s frozen body.
The reason I re-posted her story last week was that I received a letter from Brian George, a Native American who lives and works at the St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain South Dakota. In our correspondence I was moved and delighted to learn that he honors Lost Bird every year at her grave and keeps her memory alive among her people 95 years after her death. Brian has given me permission to quote from the emails we’ve exchanged, and he promises to tell me more details of his experiences — sensing her presence during his pilgrimages to her grave — when he travels to New England next summer on business.
On Jan. 30 he wrote in part:
“Good morning Joan,
While researching Lost Bird, I came across Lost Bird: Survivor of Wounded Knee, Betrayed by the White Man. Thank you for sharing her story for the world to view and know. I have a special connection with Zintkala Nuni. I am also Native American, Chickasaw and Choctaw, from Oklahoma, but have worked here at St. Joseph Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota for 5 years. St. Joe’s is on the very same grounds Zintka went to school at Chamberlain Industrial Boarding School from 1904-05. She very much liked it at this school. One of the few bright spots in her life.
Every Valentine’s Day (day of her death), I go to Wounded Knee and take flowers and tobacco prayer ties for her. I spend some of the day with her in prayer. I am a cynical person, but have had many unexplained happenings while visiting her. These things are not scary, but comforting to know her spirit is still very much alive and I have always had witnesses with me. In two weeks I will be visiting her again.
Please don’t think I am some off-the-wall person. My job at the school is Major Gift Officer, but I started as a houseparent raising 12 Lakota children at a time. I can say that I have helped raise 12 teenage girls at once. Quite the experience, but I survived and have wonderful relationships with them to this day.”
I wrote back to Brian saying I was eager to hear more about his visitations with “Lost Bird” and he wrote back an email that I found inspiring, so I’m quoting it here in part, along with the photo of the tattoo that he wears to remember her–and why he has it.
“I have attached a photo of Zintka on my shoulder. Under her picture is the word, Wakanyeja, which translates in Lakota as ” children are sacred” or “children are a gift.” I have never wanted a tattoo in my life until my connection with her. I was 49 when I went to Pine Ridge and got the tattoo about 12 miles from where she was found. The artist freehanded the tattoo from a picture in the book. A Lakota artist had to do the work of someone so sacred in Lakota history.
Why did I get the tattoo? Every morning as I brush my teeth and I do mean EVERY MORNING, I look at the tattoo and think of all the hardship and tragedy she experienced in her short life and make sure I do everything I can each day so that our 212 young Lakota students don’t endure the same. I have tried to turn her tragedy into an inspiration. The Lakota children desperately need positive, strong and influential Native role models. My passion in life is empowering, motivating and mentoring our next generation of leaders in Indian Country. The values of work ethic, integrity, resiliency and self-determination are some of the traits I mentor to our students. I believe Zintka knows that all my waking hours I am about helping the Lakota children and she is my guide.
No one should have to live the life Zintkala Nuni lived. Living 30 minutes away from some of the poorest reservations in the country, I see the endless cycle of poverty, addiction, suicide and abuse. Almost a feeling of hopelessness. However the people are resilient, strong and have that special Native sense of humor. They are survivalists.
I call the reservations in our country, “The Forgotten America.” We don’t have a third world country in our backyard. It’s in our living room!
I believe Zintka is my “guiding spirit” and after I share my stories I’m sure you will agree. Even the spiritual journey about how I arrived in South Dakota from Oklahoma 5 years ago is incredible.
Generosity is the Heart of Native America !
God Bless
Brian
I’m grateful to Brian for sharing his experiences with Lost Bird and her descendants, and for his eloquent testimony about what she means to him and to the Lakota children. I’m looking forward to meeting Brian in person this summer to hear about his visitations with Lost Bird first hand, and I’ll definitely share them with you on this blog.
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City must offer more sports opportunities for high school girls in order to comply with federal Title IX provisions, federal officials said in a ruling made public Tuesday.
The ruling from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights says city high schools need to provide at least 3,862 more spots on teams for girls in order to achieve gender equity.
The ruling comes in response to a 2010 complaint filed by the Washington, D.C.-based National Women’s Law Center.
“Too many girls are being refused the chance to reap the positive benefits that extend beyond the playing field,” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the women’s law center. “The stark statistics represent lost opportunities that would have enriched girls’ high school experience and boosted their academic performance and overall health.”
The civil rights office said girls account for 44 percent of city high school athletes and boys make up 56 percent.
The New York City Department of Education said in an agreement resolving the complaint that it denies violating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 but that it would take steps to ensure compliance.
City education officials said they would complete a survey of girls in grades eight through 12 by the end of June to determine “the existence and/or scope of any unmet athletic interests of female students.”
They said they would consider expanding the team rosters of popular sports so more girls can take part.
Additionally, the city said its Public School Athletic League would publish an email address on its website that students and parents can use to request a new sport.
“We have been and remain deeply committed to ensuring that all of our students have access to our outstanding athletic programs,” department spokesman Jason Fink said.
The word “baroque” kept returning to my mind as I walked through the exhibition “Jim Morphesis: Wounds of Existence” at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. In part, it’s the sheer, intense, sometimes massively over-the-top materiality of many of these “paintings,” with their surfaces of nailed broken planks that might have been rescued from a demolition site, or the ooze of concrete and magna (acrylic resin paint), the sparkle and gold and glitter. In part, it’s the purposefully broken quality of composition, line and texture. In part the physically explicit passion for the fleshy human body, both male and female…
Female Torso with Green Doors, 1989 Oil, acrylic, gouache, charcoal, and collage on wood panel with wooden doors, 71 x 83 inches
Collection Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Gift of John and Phyllis Kleinberg
… in part the obsession with entropy and death; in part the emotional energy that reaches out from the surface of these artworks and grabs the viewer with its peculiar intensity.
Morphesis has been exploring such things for a good number of years now, and it’s good to see that dedication rewarded with a solo museum exhibition. (My only wish is that it could have been a more extensive one than this…) Even at a time when it ran counter to the mainstream, his art was unafraid to take up the challenge of those issues that confront us simply at the level of our existence as mortal human beings: such things as pain and vulnerability, love and sex, the metaphysical struggle between belief and disbelief, religion and existential doubt; and, eventually, between the light side of our nature and the dark. If we can bring ourselves to gaze with sufficient attention into its disquieting depths (and this is sometimes, truthfully, no easy task) his work is powerful enough to overcome any reserve we might bring to it. The artist’s process requires him to look fearlessly within; it invites us to look with equal fearlessness into our own inner lives.
Emotional intensity aside, Morphesis is an artist who pays serious attention to the work of those who preceded him, and who grounds himself firmly in the authority of tradition. In the series of crucifixion paintings in which he addresses his childhood associations with the Greek Orthodox church, for example, he evokes the images of Matthias Grünewald and Velasquez…
Jim Morphesis, No Sanctuary, 1981. Oil, acrylic, wood, nails, wire, tape,
and gold leaf on wood panel, 26 1/2 x 29 inches, Collection of Ray Mnich.
The raw impasto of his wounded, sometimes tortured naked human figures recalls the disturbing paintings of Chaim Soutine. He mines the deep well of archetypal images from the history of art and poetry–the rose, the skull…
Skull and Red Door, 1987, oil, magna, enamel, charcoal, paper, wood, and gold leaf on wood panel with wooden door 83 x 76 1/4 inches
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Gift of Jacob and Ruth Bloom
… and of motifs and themes–memento mori, the pietà…
Jim Morphesis, Destiny, 1982. Oil, magna, alkyd resin, and wood on wood
… that have for centuries resonated in the human consciousness, creating a powerful subtext of cultural reference that enriches these paintings with echoes from the past. Similarly, the written words and texts that lie half-buried in their surfaces bear witness to the artist’s restless inquiry into the ageless philosophical questions they address.
The seriousness and profundity of this inquiry is what sets Morphesis’s work apart from that of many of his contemporaries. In a culture that often seems content to skirt the surface of those things that affect our inner lives, I find his work to be not only emotionally provocative and intellectually engaging, but also remarkably courageous.
panel, 68 x 64 inches. Collection of Laifun Chung and Ted Kotcheff
When I first met Zoltan Illes in 1990, he was 29 years old and in his first month as the youngest state secretary in modern Hungarian history, working in the ministry of environment. He granted me quite a long interview and was unusually frank not only about the environmental situation in the country but also about the challenges he faced in his own position. At the end of the interview, he gave himself a 70-80 percent chance of making it through his first year without being fired.
As I learned when I met up with Illes again in May 2013, he only survived in that initial position for six months. “I had a very challenging half a year in 1990,” he told me in an interview in his office at the Central European University in Budapest. “I did my best for the environment. And finally they fired me. Officially, in written form, the minister wrote that ‘you are dedicated to the environment.’ Well, come on, I was sworn in to do that! Then he wrote, ‘But we have to consider other interests, and you are not capable of doing that. You are for the environment and that is why we are firing you.'”
After that short tenure in government, Illes occupied a number of different positions, including as an advisor to the EU’s ambassador in Hungary. He joined Fidesz in the 1990s and served in parliament. In 2010, he returned to government once again as state secretary of rural development, which includes the portfolios for environmental protection, nature conservation, and water management. This time, he has held the position for several years.
He was eager to return to government. “I understood that if I didn’t accept the position, then I would destroy my past and what I introduced into the field of environmental protection over the last 20-30 years,” he explained. “I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to prove myself not only as an outsider but as an insider in power to make change. For several decades, everyday I went to sleep understanding what I didn’t do that day and what was still remaining to do.”
He has certainly learned a thing or two since he first worked in government. “You have to accept the hierarchy of administration,” he told me. “If someone doesn’t accept hierarchy, they should be, like I was previously, a street fighter — which is an excellent opportunity for high-level performance in the field of environmental protection. And maybe I will return to that after my time as a ‘general’ in this position.”
In his first two years in the position, he focused a lot on job creation. “The government was also very actively trying to organize work opportunities for laid-off people, particularly those without education who could offer only their physical strength,” Illes told me. “It doesn’t matter whether they are poor Gypsies or poor Hungarians, there are few workplaces for them. Actually water management is one of the best places for such work. You can clean the channels with heavy machinery. But in some places you can’t manage it except by physical work by hand.” Before this aspect of water management was passed over to the interior ministry, Illes hired 11,000 employees for this kind of work.
In 1990, he told me that we “have to find somehow a third way. Western countries are showing that environmental protection was also pushed aside. On the other hand, the Communist regime showed that it could not solve these problems.”
Today, he is more a believer in one way: a set of global standards for addressing environmental issues. “We became part of the globalized world,” he concluded. “According to my experiences and my beliefs, the same standards and policies should be introduced around the world. Even if we push out ecocolonialism from our country, it will go to Ukraine or Romania. If you push out from there, it will go to the Caucasus. I hope we don’t have to wait 100 years for it to go all the way around the world and back again before we remove those comparative advantages of the different laws and regulations in different countries.”
We talked about what drew him into doing work on environmental issues, the difficulty of enforcing standards however good they might be, and the rise and fall of the Hungary’s notorious water lobby.
The Interview
One of the concerns you had 23 years ago was foreign companies exploiting the difference between the environmental regulations in Hungary and the EC — for instance, the recycling of metals that release arsenic and the sale of a French nuclear power plant that didn’t meet French levels. Was that extensive? Did it continue to happen?
Again this question reminds me that I didn’t answer the previous question. You were asking me about Hungarian lobbies, like the water lobby. The political changes, but mainly the economic changes, that took place in Hungary after 1990 helped to destroy these big lobbies. You will not believe the reason. Money! The water lobby, for instance, fell into millions of parts. Before 1990, 95 percent of the Hungarian public had access to fresh potable water from the tap. Nowadays, it’s 97 percent — those last couple percentages are very difficult to reach. During the Communist time, 95 percent of public got that water and 33 companies managed and provided that water. How many of those company nowadays exist? You would be shocked: 400!
We don’t need 400 companies, but each director and division chief from those 33 companies became a director of a smaller private company, which provides water maybe only to 22 settlements. As a result of those political and economic changes, there was a new interest to destroy the water lobby system. Every individual was pulling apart as much as he or she could manage, so the structure fell completely into parts. The efficiency dropped enormously. At the same time, there has been often useless investment into the technical system that produces and distributes the fresh potable water.
It wasn’t only individuals. It was also the municipalities that were charging people more for their water. You could see the corruption in the money that went into the renovation of a municipality-owned theater or the financing of the municipality basketball team. Basketball is a very important sport, but what’s its relationship with potable water? It was financed from the potable water fee because the municipality didn’t have enough money to support that sport. That was one outcome of that privatization process.
Second, the privatization of monopolies was a great mistake. It was an urban legend that private was always efficient and environment-friendly and only the government could destroy the environment. According to a Harvard University report on privatization processes in Central and Eastern Europe, the outcome was detrimental to the entire region because the living standard fell when we relied on only the market.
Then, answering your question about eco-colonization, yes, I’m still fighting the phenomenon that I faced at that time. There’s a German company, for instance, that didn’t fulfill the requirements and started to argue that if it had to pay a fine according to Hungarian laws, which are in accordance to EU regulations, then it would move to another country. I told them, “Come on, give me a break. Please, go!” That was my same suggestion for several years to several companies, and they never moved away. The comparative advantages keep them here: good workforce, highly educated, wages comparatively smaller than in the United States or Western Europe. And also natural resources like limestone — you cannot go to Romania or Ukraine because there’s no limestone.
In several cases, we are very strict in enforcing the laws and regulations and that is why these companies are not very happy. They are losing profit and that is why they are heavily attacking us in the political arena. They won’t say to their respective governments that they were robbing Hungarians or realizing huge extra profits. They’ll say that Hungary changed the law, and we are pushing them out because they are foreigners.
Actually, in the field of waste management, the Hungarian government made a decision that waste management – the collection and transportation of municipal solid waste – must be a public service, as in Germany and Austria. Public service in EU regulations means that there is no room for competition: only state- and municipality-owned companies can do it. But German and Austrian firms have gained a strategic position in this country. Out of 3,200 municipalities, one-third of them have been “occupied” by these German and Austrian companies collecting and transporting municipal solid waste. They can only do this now if they have 49 percent of the ownership, maximum. The company doing this service must be, at minimum, 51 percent owned by the municipality or the national government. It turned out that in several cases, what these German and Austrian companies gained in revenue, only 1/3 covered the cost of their activity. They were skimming off 2/3 through overcharging collection fees and transportation costs.
This current government would like to remain popular with the public and, if possible, win elections. And the government will remain popular if Hungarian citizens perceive its actions as benefiting them. If you compare the monthly costs versus revenue of Hungarian and Western European families, you see huge differences. From the salary of a Hungarian couple with two kids, a big chunk will go to these services, mainly utilities. That is why the current Hungarian government decided to decrease the cost of utilities by 10 percent. Of course the companies are screaming that it’s no longer profitable and they’ll stop providing these public services. And the prime minister says, “Yes, we don’t want public services that are profitable. We want zero sum — no profit.” Of course it’s acceptable to have a certain margin for new investments in that field. But these companies have been providing these services for extra profit, not just a little profit. Of course now they’re running back to Paris or Berlin to tell the prime minister and chancellor that those bad Hungarians are pushing us out of the Hungarian market and they don’t let anyone talk about the problems. They are making it a political issue. But this is not a political issue. It’s a question of money and profits, like always.
When we talked 23 years ago, you said that the Communist system produced an enormous environmental legacy. But you had been in the West and you knew that capitalist systems also produced an enormous amount of pollution.
To read the rest of the interview, click here.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
