EU-DIGEST

According to a report by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) based on asset figures from 2007 to 2015, the number of millionaire households in the Netherlands rose by 500 to 106.000 in 2015. The report did not look at the value of the millionaire’s residence or mortgage debt.

Of the 106.000 millionaire households, two-thirds reported employment as their main source of income. The majority of millionaires work in the agricultural industry, financial services, trade, specialised business services, or in the care industry.

About 80 percent of millionaires are entrepreneurs in one way or another, with half taking the title of managing director or major shareholder and a third being self-employed.

Coming in first with the highest percentage, 19 percent of millionaire breadwinners work in the agricultural industry, half of which are active in dairy farming businesses. Many people in this industry are self-employed, and often their money is tied up in their business, for example, in land and equipment.

Financial services came second as the industry in which the most millionaires work.

In 2015, there were 94 Dutch municipalities with 2,5 percent or more residents who had millionaire status. However, in 5 municipalities, 6 percent or more of the residents were millionaires.

The greatest number of millionaires lived in Laren, followed by Bloemendaal, Blaricum, Wassenaar and Rozendaal.

Dutch Millionaires are often married, with 71 percent having tied the knot compared to 45 percent of non-millionaires. Few, 7 percent, had also gone through a divorce, as opposed to 14 percent of non-millionaires.

Read more: More millionaires in the Netherlands

Total Failure Folks - It is all "Bla-Bla-Bla-Bla"

A hundred years ago, the armies of World War I fought to a bloody stalemate on the Western Front and desperately searched for ways to break it and gain an edge. They field-tested tanks and poison gas, rolling barrages and storm-trooper tactics.

Today, the United States is stuck in an analogous stalemate in the Middle East and Islamic world in general. And we are field-testing all manner of novelties, much like the great armies of Europe mired in the trenches: the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs and counterinsurgency, precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles, not to mention such passing fancies as “overwhelming force,” “shock and awe,” and “air occupation.”

Yet as was the case a century ago, the introduction of some new battlefield technique does not necessarily signify progress. On the contrary, it only deepens the stalemate.

To reflect on this longest of American wars—why it goes on and on, and at such a cost of blood and treasure—is to confront two questions. First, why has the world’s mightiest military achieved so little even while absorbing very considerable losses and inflicting even greater damage on the subjects of America’s supposed beneficence? Second, why in the face of such unsatisfactory outcomes has the United States refused to chart a different course? In short, why can’t we win? And since we haven’t won, why can’t we get out?

The answer to these questions starts with questioning the premise. The tendency to see the region and Islamic world primarily as a problem that will yield to an American military solution is, in fact, precisely the problem. To an unseemly and ultimately self-destructive degree, we have endorsed the misguided militarization of U.S. foreign policy. As a consequence, we have allowed our country to be pulled into the impossible task of trying to “shape” the region through martial means.

It’s long past time to stop trying (a conclusion that even President Obama appears to be edging his way toward, judging from his recent comments to The Atlantic). 

The United States plunged militarily into the Middle East out of the mistaken belief that the privileged status that Americans take as their birthright was at risk. Way back in 1948, George Kennan, State Department director of policy planning, noted that the United States then possessed “about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing U.S. policymakers, he believed, was “to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.” The overarching aim of American statecraft, in other words, was to sustain the uniquely favorable situation to which the United States had ascended by the end of World War II.

A half century later, that strategy succeeded and the Soviet Union collapsed.

But the passing of the Cold War period left our massive national security apparatus underemployed while rendering obsolete the policy underlying postwar U.S. military policy—energetically preparing for global war in order to prevent it.

The armed services and their various clients came face to face with a crisis of the first order. With the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote and infinitesimal—with the overarching purpose for which the postwar U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled—what exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies, institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?

The US Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question. Rather than keeping the peace, it declared, the new key to perpetuating Kennan’s position of disparity was to “shape” the global order. Shaping now became the military’s primary job. In 1992, the Defense Planning Guidance drafted under the aegis of Paul Wolfowitz spelled out this argument in detail. Pointing proudly to the “new international environment” that had already “been shaped by the victory” over Saddam Hussein the year before, that document provided a blueprint explaining how American power could “shape the future.”

The Greater Middle East was to serve—indeed, was even then already serving—as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil that would maintain America’s privileged position and, not so incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of national security. That region’s predominantly Muslim population thereby became the subjects of experiments ranging from the nominally benign—peacekeeping, peacemaking and humanitarian intervention—to the nakedly coercive. Beginning in 1980, U.S. forces ventured into the Greater Middle East to reassure, warn, intimidate, suppress, pacify, rescue, liberate, eliminate, transform and overawe.

They bombed, raided, invaded, occupied and worked through proxies of various stripes. In 1992, Wolfowitz had expressed the earnest hope of American might addressing the “sources of regional instability in ways that promote international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic government and open economic systems.” The results actually produced over the course of several decades of trying have never come even remotely close to satisfying such expectations.

The events that first drew the United States military into the Greater Middle East and that seemed so extraordinary at the time—the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—turned out to be mere harbingers. Subsequent upheavals have swept through the region in waves: revolutions and counterrevolutions, episodes of terror and counterterror, grotesque barbarism and vast suffering.

Through it all, a succession of American leaders—Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal, calculating and naive—persisted in the belief that the determined exercise of U.S. military power will somehow put things right. None have seen their hopes fulfilled.

In the 21st century, the prerequisites of freedom, abundance and security are changing. Geopolitically, Asia is eclipsing in importance all other regions apart perhaps from North America itself. The emerging problem set—coping with the effects of climate change, for example—is global and will require a global response. Whether Americans are able to preserve the privileged position to which they are accustomed will depend on how well and how quickly the United States adapts the existing “pattern of relationships” to fit these fresh circumstances.

Amid such challenges, the afflictions besetting large portions of the Islamic world will undoubtedly persist. But their relative importance to the United States as determinants of American well-being will diminish, a process even today already well advanced even if U.S. national security priorities have yet to reflect this fact.

In this context, the War for the Greater Middle East becomes a diversion that Americans "and Europe, which has blindly followed the US's lead in this drama can ill afford".

A chart via Reddit shows how ten huge corporations control the production of almost everything the average person buys, from food to clothes to hygienic products.

$84 billion-company Proctor & Gamble is the largest advertiser in the U.S. and owns enough brands to serve 4.8 million people around the world, according to LinkedIn.

Nestle is famous for its chocolate, but the $200 billion-corporation is also the biggest food company in the world. It also owns L’Oreal, Gerber, Diesel and even pet food makers Purina and Friskies.
Serving two billion people around the world is renowned soap-maker Unilever, which can attribute the majority of its success to its ownership of Q-tips and Skippy peanut butter.

For the complete report click here: The Illusion Of Choice: These 10 Companies Are Responsible For Virtually Everything Around You

Since its inception the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland has attracted an ever-increasing amount of media attention. This year was no exception.

Four thousand high-powered business executives, global leaders (presidents and ministers) not to forget celebrities like Matt Damon and Goldie Hawn converged on the exclusive Swiss resort to attend sessions, to wine, to dine, to schmooze, to make deals and to be entertained.

Amid the hoopla these "stakeholders" discussed the dangers of technologically induced employment reduction, the possibility of doing business with Iran and the increasing stability of the Eurozone.

This year Davos attendees also discussed the social responsibility of global elites to confront and remedy the persistent presence of income inequality.

Focusing on the Davos debate about the distribution of wealth, Katrin Bennhold of The New York Times quoted Pope Francis, who challenged the attendees to change the dynamic of income inequality.

The message of the Pope said: "The growth of inequality demands something more than economic growth, even though it presupposes it," Pope Francis said in a message read by one of his cardinals at the conference. "It also calls for decisions, mechanisms and processes directed to a better distribution of wealth, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.

In addition the Pope added his plea to the conference attendees, "I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it."

Given the tone and texture of his papacy, it is clear that Pope Francis has direct experience of poverty. Can we say the same for the movers and shakers of the global elite who attended the WEF? How can these economic leaders, the vast majority of whom have little direct experience with economic hardship, have any idea what to do about it? A one-hour radically chic sensitivity session is not likely change a corporate ethos in which the world is ruled rather than served by wealth.

Which leads me to a Davos disconnect -- about assumptions. Global elites tend to look upon the world through economic lenses. This practice makes perfect economic sense, but fails to consider sufficiently, as does Pope Francis and most social scientists, the social dimensions of economic relations. From the beginnings of complex society thousands of years ago, economic and social inequality have been inextricably intertwined. Indeed most of our social systems have been constructed to reinforce social inequality rather than to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots.

Might it not be better for Davos delegates to spend more time among those whose worlds are in desperate states? If that were the case the aforementioned Davos disconnects would be less glaring. If that were the case, WEF dialogues might compel a degree of real economic and social change.

Now that would be a breath of fresh mountain air.

Read the complete report: Davos Disconnects | Paul Stoller