Slate: What Does the Japanese Emperor Do?

The reason this today is such a big deal is that this emperor is the first emperor who has actually transformed the institution by performing his role as the symbol of the people. He has actually changed the performance of the role.

He has changed it in accordance with the constitution, which he always mentions. He stays completely away from politics, and is utterly prudent and cautious about the constitutional fulfillment of his duties. And I think this is the most important thing: He has used his role to do things symbolically that the government never did. He has made statements about war memory repeatedly. When he mourns the war dead, he says that Japan must never forget what we did to your country, whether it is the Philippines or Palau. He even said that Japan had to remember the war starting with the [Japanese invasion of] Manchuria in 1931. They never start the war there. He did things for the polity in terms of war memory that the government has refused to do. Pretty impressive. [...]

The connection is very interesting because in fact this particular regime doesn’t feel about the constitution the way that the emperor does. The emperor repeatedly evokes the constitution. And that does have a political valence. He says he supports the peace constitution and is trying to live up to it. It definitely puts Abe in a harder spot, because he is a nationalist, and the right wing of his party—many of them are emperorists: “The imperial institution is the heart of our identity” and stuff like that. The emperor himself has been consistent over the years, but the meaning of it is different when you have a regime which is as conservative and nationalist as this prime minister.

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Slate: Can Brazil Be Saved?

But Lula’s program wasn’t fundamentally about the redistribution of wealth; it was about the redistribution of status. There were good reasons for the poor to feel they’d been denied the fruits of citizenship. With a good lawyer, the rich could exploit a lengthy appeals process to escape punishment for the worse crimes while the police meted out justice in the favelas with a harshness and capriciousness familiar to black Americans. Over the past decade, police have killed 8,000, mostly black men. (The Brazilian war on drugs is no more of a shining success than the American one.) Lula engineered a new sense of social inclusion. When he arrived in Brasilia, his Cabinet included three black ministers, an unprecedented integration of political power. João Moreira Salles, the publisher of Piauí magazine, followed Lula for a documentary about the campaign that finally brought him to the presidency. He recalls the emotional outpouring that greeted Lula’s arrival in the poorest neighborhoods: “Everyone was crying, because we the downtrodden had reached power.” [...]

This program had glaring faults, and these faults contributed to the current crisis. All those new cars and washing machines felt good, but they were less life-changing than Lula imagined—and sometimes they inadvertently changed life for the worse. New cars clogged the megalopolises; the government hadn’t thought to invest in the roads and mass transit that might manage the increased vehicular volume. And the toll of traffic fell hardest on the working poor, who suffered increasingly elongated commutes from their homes on the geographic fringes of economic life. Two- or three-hour journeys to work, inching through congestion, are commonplace—and brutal when paired with a return trip at the end of the day. When the mayor of São Paulo wanted to increase bus fare by 21 centavos in 2013, the country erupted in the largest mass protests in its history. It wasn’t a dramatic hike—just nine cents—but a perfect symbol of the increasing burdens on the working poor, forced to fend with an inadequate system, insensitive to their plight. [...]

But the public’s understandable despair isn’t wholly shared by the experts I spoke with. Stepping back, they saw unlikely causes for hope. Impeachment revealed the worst about Brazilian democracy—and the worst wasn’t so terrible. There’s no talk of returning to dictatorship, no real fear of a Hugo Chávez–like figure clouding the sky. Impeachment was a poor showing of democracy, but it was still democracy. Even with all the budgetary turmoil, Bolsa Família remains firmly ensconced. Austerity will whack the poor, yet Lula’s evolution of Brazilian social democracy won’t reverse course. Most important, the Petrobras scandal is so spectacular that its grasp on the popular imagination doesn’t seem to be slipping. Indeed, Temer’s impeachment gambit has yet to slow the Moro investigation. Brazil has a once-in-a-generation chance to untether its politics from its debilitating state of codependence with the big firms. Hosting the Olympics was never going to bring Brazil the national greatness Lula advertised. Freeing its democracy and economy from the plague of corruption could.

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BBC4 Analysis: Money for Nothing

Should the state pay everyone a Universal Basic Income? Sonia Sodha finds out why the idea is winning support from an unlikely alliance of leftists and libertarians.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Airport security, Retiring to Spain

Airport security: what are the costs of a surveillance regime which turns us all into potential suspects? Laurie Taylor talks to Rachel Hall, Associate Professor in Communications at Syracuse University, New York, about her study into the 'transparent traveller' who must submit their bags and bodies to technologies aimed at countering terrorism. Also, Anya Ahmed, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Salford, explores the pleasures and pitfalls of retiring to Spain in her research into the lives and times of working class British women who've made this choice.

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The New Yorker‎: Wall Street's Reluctant Embrace of Clinton

Despite their fundamental disagreements, one perspective both Trump and Clinton seemed to share was that banks and bankers are not to be trusted and that banks should possibly even be broken up. In the past few days, however, Trump has made one of his trademark sharp turns, suggesting ahead of his speech today that he might institute a moratorium on new financial regulation. He also announced a list of economic advisers on Friday—thirteen men, heavily populated with billionaire business figures, such as the hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Stephen Feinberg, of Cerberus Capital, and many of whom are Trump political donors, according to Politico. The list suggests that he won’t be seeking the policy expertise of academic economists and, combined with the ban on regulation, might be seen as an effort to inch back into the good graces of Wall Street. [...]

It used to be that the Republican Party was the party of Wall Street, or at least of a certain urban-professional, socially moderate, economically conservative banker type. Republicans could be relied on to offer policy ideas that the financial sector loved: free trade, tax cuts, and loosened regulation were the predictable trifecta, with a little budget austerity sprinkled in. The alignment between wealthy political donors from major banks and corporate executive suites and candidates like Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President in 2012, made logical sense, as predictable as the sun setting in the West. [...]

The tilt in Clinton’s favor among financial-industry types may have less to do with their love of her than with a rejection of what Trump represents: instability. As Warren put it in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last week, “Nuclear war is bad for business.” Wall Street’s backing of Clinton is therefore less a vow of support than an attempt to stave off catastrophe.

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The Atlantic: Republicans Are Not Attacking Democracy

But this recognition of an ideological disagreement shows that much of what Roth describes in the book as part of “a coordinated attack on democracy” is not quite so nefarious. If conservatives genuinely believe their arguments then it is less a conspiracy than it is a disagreement about what is best for the United States and how to best protect the rights in the Constitution.

This point is most evident in Roth’s discussion of campaign finance. Roth tells the story of the fight over campaign-finance rules, emphasizing the challenge to post-Watergate rules passed by Congress that culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo. In Ross’s reading, it was just Republicans who were fighting for the right to spend unlimited money in politics. Totally absent from his version of the story is the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union, which was a leader in arguing against these laws out of fears that limiting campaign money would lead to government censorship. [...]

Of course, many Republicans fight for less environmental protection, no federal minimum wage, a lifetime ban on felons’ voting, and courts with Republican-appointed judges who uphold their legislative agendas and constitutional vision.  That doesn’t mean they are rigging democracy any more than Democrats are rigging things when they fight for more environmental protection, higher minimum wages, reinstatement of felon voting rights after they complete their sentences, and courts with Democratic-appointed judges who uphold their legislative agendas and constitutional vision.

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Politico: 50 top GOP officials: Trump would 'risk our country's national security'

Donald Trump's effort to appeal to establishment Republicans suffered another setback on Monday as 50 senior GOP national security officials warned in a new letter that Trump would "risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

The signatories of the letter, which was first reported by The New York Times, all worked in Republican administrations, with many serving as top aides to President George W. Bush. They said none of them would be voting for Trump. [...]

“We also know that many have doubts about Hillary Clinton, as do many of us,” they wrote. “But Donald Trump is not the answer to America’s daunting challenges and to this crucial election. We are convinced that in the Oval Office, he would be the most reckless President in American history.”

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Salon: U.N. expert warns racism, police threaten civil rights in U.S., slams biased justice system

A United Nations human rights experts has warned that racism threatens Americans’ basic civil rights.

“African-Americans are subjected to systematic police harassment — and sometimes much worse — often for doing nothing more than walking down the street or gathering in a group,” wrote U.N. special rapporteur Maina Kiai on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, after a recent trip to the U.S. [...]

Kiai published a detailed, 6,500-word summary of his experience, which warns of extreme “racial, social and economic inequality, which are often intertwined.” It also shows how harsh, police state-like conditions in the U.S. are threatening the basic rights of Americans, particularly Americans of color.

His report was mostly ignored by the U.S. media. [...]

He highlighted the double standards of the U.S. justice system. “Wall Street bankers looted billions of dollars through crooked schemes, devastating the finances of millions of Americans and saddling taxpayers with a massive bailout bill,” Kiai wrote.

But no Wall Street executives were punished. “Instead, criminal justice resources go towards enforcing a different type of law and order, targeting primarily African-Americans and other minorities.” [...]

“The outcry for accountability for police shootings is deafening. Given the attention to this issue and its importance, it is incomprehensible that a modern society such as the United States lacks official records that accurately document the number of victims of such shootings, the precise circumstances and the follow-up actions taken,” Kiai said.

The U.N. rights expert also criticized the U.S. government’s time and place restrictions on protests, which he said “not conform with international law.” Almost all major U.S. cities require permits for protests. These violates international law and standards, he said.

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The Atlantic: The Time Is Ripe for Détente, 2.0

As a starting point, the debate should assess whether NATO’s relentless expansion—begun during the 1990s and proceeding in waves, with Montenegro’s eventual accession, once-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia having been promised membership, and even historically neutral Finland and Sweden now pondering participation—played a role in Russia’s increasingly aggressive posturing toward the West. As the world’s most powerful military alliance slid up to Russia’s borders, the West couldn’t have expected Putin to sit idle. After all, what would the United States do if Russia began stationing troops in northern Mexico? History offers a precedent: When the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, President John F. Kennedy took the world to the brink of nuclear war to force their withdrawal. [...]

From Putin’s point of view, NATO’s campaign in support of the rebels in Libya in 2011 appeared duplicitous, to say the least. The intervention exceeded what the United States had agreed to with Russia under the relevant U.N. Security Council resolution, and led to the death of Muammar Qaddafi. Then came Vice President Joe Biden’s stated opposition—declared in Moscow, no less—to Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Putin’s suspicion that the United States had backed mass protests against him in 2011 and 2012, and the occasional backhanded insult from President Obama (who has said Putin acts like a “bored kid in the back of a classroom,” and that Russia is no more than a “regional power” that threatens its neighbors out of “weakness”). Seen through Russia’s eyes, this adds up to decades of humiliation, dished out by a triumphalist United States eager to draw attention to its shrunken sphere of influence, question the legitimacy of its government, and treat the country as if it were, in Putin’s words, “vassal” of the West—not the Great Power it had been since the days of Peter the Great.

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