Jacobin Magazine: After Choi-gate

On Saturday, November 5, approximately 200,000 people surrounded Cheonggyecheon, the reclaimed urban river in downtown Seoul, to denounce South Korean president Park Geun-hye. Phalanxes of neon-yellow-jacketed police, marching in groups of five hundred, surrounded the protesters at a respectful distance. It felt like a test; the narrow roads couldn’t hold all the attendees, making it seem like the organizers hadn’t expected so many. [...]

The next week, one million people crowded into central Seoul for the country’s biggest demonstration since 1987. Streets were closed off, and a last-minute court order rescinded the police’s non-assembly order near Park’s residence, the Blue House. The atmosphere buzzed: Myeongdong, Jongno, and other densely packed central neighborhoods — normally given over to heavy traffic and shopping — felt like a giant street party. Trains and buses into Seoul were completely booked as groups of students, seniors, and union members converged on Gwanghwamun Square.

But this was no celebration. The protesters expressed their anger at President Park, accused of being the avatar of Choi Soon-Sil, a shadowy billionaire and daughter of a cult leader, Choi Tae-min. Choi senior became the president’s confidante soon after her mother was assassinated in 1974 and remained close until his death in 2004. The younger Choi appears to have been running the country through Park, not just to get favorable land deals and donations to her charities but as a private fiefdom. Choi is accused of writing Park’s speeches and dictating government policy. [...]

The rallies themselves have been carefully stage-managed to keep the crowds excited. Officials and teenage activists scream themselves hoarse in front of giant crowds as their images appear on giant screens set up every few hundred meters. Trade unions have dance groups who perform choreographed numbers in between speakers. [...]

As Doucette and Koo argue, South Korea has a “post-democratic” system consisting of formally democratic institutions governed by elite, top-down rule. Its stability depends on its unique anticommunist context; in South Korea, the Cold War never ended. “The fear it produces helps facilitate the leveraging of power, protection of oligarchic interests, and even aggressive pursuit of further neoliberalization.” The Park Love Group reveals how much right-wing vitriol still exists: they’ve tried — and mostly failed — to muster anticommunist sentiment against the protests.

read the article 

Motherboard: US Power Will Decline Under Trump, Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse

The Norwegian professor at the University of Hawaii and Transcend Peace University is recognized as the ‘founding father’ of peace and conflict studies as a scientific discipline. He has made numerous accurate predictions of major world events, most notably the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Galtung has also accurately predicted the 1978 Iranian revolution; the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 in China; the economic crises of 1987, 2008 and 2011; and even the 9/11 attacks—among other events, according to the late Dietrich Fischer, academic director of the European University Center for Peace Studies. [...]

In the case of the USSR, the main structural contradictions were as follows: the working class was increasingly repressed and unable to self-organise through trade unions (ironic given the country’s Communist pretensions); the wealthier ‘bourgeoisie’ or elite had money to spend, but nothing to buy from domestic production, leading to economic stagnation; Russian intellectuals wanted more freedom of expression; minorities wanted more autonomy; and peasants wanted more freedom of movement.

The model works like this: the more those contradictions deepen, the greater the likelihood they will result in a social crisis that could upend the existing order. [...]

But this global collapse, also has potential domestic implications. Galtung warned that the decline of American power on the world stage would probably have a domestic impact that would undermine the internal cohesion of the United States. [...]

Galtung’s answer is, perhaps, revealing: “If he manages to apologize deeply to all the groups he has insulted. And turn foreign policy from US interventions—soon 250 after Jefferson in Libya 1801—and not use wars (killing more than 20 million in 37 countries after 1945): A major revitalization! Certainly making ‘America Great Again’. We’ll see.”

read the article 

Politico: Europe’s blurred lines between populism, mainstream

In fact, the Austrian vote no more represents an endorsement of traditional establishment ideals than the Italian referendum signals their rejection.

If anything, the two votes illustrate how the increasingly blurred lines between populism and mainstream across much of Europe are shaking the political landscape.

The Italian decision, for example, has been seen as the mirror image of the Austrian result: the rejection of an establishment prime minister in favor of populists. [...]

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s proposed constitutional reform would have meant a radical departure from Italy’s post-war democratic norms. Seen in that light, the No vote suggests above all that Italians are resistant to radical change, even at the cost of political instability. [...]

Consider Alexander Van der Bellen, Austria’s president-elect. A former Green leader whose party never garnered more than 11 percent of the vote under his stewardship, Van der Bellen tried to soften his image during the campaign to attract more mainstream voters. He declared himself an independent and even donned Tracht, or traditional Alpine garb, a favorite tactic of establishment conservatives, but anathema to those on the Left. [...]

The FPÖ has governed at the national level as the junior coalition party twice over the past 30 years and has led regional and municipal governments. It currently has representatives in all nine of Austria’s provincial assemblies as well as in the European Parliament.

In contrast, Austria’s Greens have never been part of a federal government. The party rarely polls at over 12 percent, about one-third of the FPÖ’s support.

read the article 

CityLab: A Bike Path for the Entire East Coast

From northern Maine to the tip of Florida, the East Coast of the United States stretches 3,000 miles. It’s a diverse, expansive route, cutting through wooded hills and rocky coastlines before hitting the sun-drenched beaches of the South. And all of it can be traveled by bicycle.

The East Coast Greenway Alliance has been working since 1991 to connect the whole geography of the Atlantic seaboard with protected bike paths. So far, 850 miles of trail have been designated as Greenway. The project is about 31 percent complete, says Dennis Markatos-Soriano, the executive director of ECGA. By 2020, the ECGA hopes to add another 200 miles. [...]

The East Coast Greenway, is, in a sense, riding a demographic wave that Markatos-Soriano hopes will speed the completion of the entire route. Fewer Americans are relying on cars, and more are looking at safe and accessible bike and footpaths as a top priority when selecting where to live. And there’s the health impact: The presence of a usable trail makes an active lifestyle more of a possibility. Well over 10 million people use the Greenway annually, Weis says, and as the national and global mentality shifts toward one of greater connectivity, the appeal of traversing the East Coast by one simple mode of transit will only grow.

read the article 

The Atlantic: What Will It Take to Convict a Police Officer for Shooting an Unarmed Man?

But despite an unarmed victim, forensics proving he was shot multiple times in the back, a police officer who made a false report, and clear video showing the entire debacle, Slager was not convicted of murder or manslaughter in his trial this week. A lone juror spared him that fate with a refusal to convict. That triggered a mistrial. [...]

My belief is that police officers should be treated like any other person accused of a crime. In the ongoing debate about policing, defenders of the status quo frequently point out, correctly, that patrolling America’s streets is a tremendously difficult job—one that puts all who perform it in frequent contact with dangerous criminals, risking injury or death while trying to protect public safety. Their view is that the risks involved, the difficult demands of the job, and the importance of the task to society mean cops should always be given the benefit of the doubt. [...]

In these two failed prosecutions of white police officers, the most proximate failures belonged to individual white jurors. The larger failure to hold police accountable in the United States, even in egregious cases, is a collective one, and any political movement that claims to revere individual liberty or the rights set down in the Constitution is lying to itself if it doesn’t expend effort to make things better.

read the article 

The Guardian: Google to be powered 100% by renewable energy from 2017

Google’s data centres and the offices for its 60,000 staff will be powered entirely by renewable energy from next year, in what the company has called a “landmark moment”.

The internet giant is already the world’s biggest corporate buyer of renewable electricity, last year buying 44% of its power from wind and solar farms. Now it will be 100%, and an executive said it would not rule out investing in nuclear power in the future, too. [...]

Technology companies have come under increasing scrutiny over the carbon footprint of their operations, which have grown so fast they now account for about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the aviation industry. [...]

“We don’t want to rule out signing a nuclear contract if it meets our goals of low price, safety, additionality and in a sufficiently close grid, we don’t want to rule that out, but today we can’t positively say there are nuclear projects out there that meet this criteria,” he said.

The company’s 100% renewable energy does not mean Google is getting all its energy directly from wind and solar power, but that on an annual basis the amount it purchases from renewable sources matches the electricity its operations consume.

read the article 

The Guardian: Modern life is rubbish: we don't need all this packaging

“Plastic can never be recycled completely. After two or three recycles it becomes inferior in quality. A staggering 72% of plastic packaging is not recovered at all: 40% is landfilled, and 32% leaks out the collection system,” says Watson.

In our oceans, plastic breaks down into molecules, which behave like sponges and sop up other toxins – colourants, additives, plasticisers – which get into our food chain and poison us. It’s simple, if you put toxins in they have to come out somewhere. All the plastic ever made is still here, in one form or another. [...]

The worse culprits are single-use plastic and plastic packaging: coffee cups (10,000 chucked every two minutes, just in the UK), straws (Americans use 500m every day), yoghurt cartons, cocktail stirrers, plastic razors, microbeads, and Tetra Pak cartons (because they’re made of several ingredients that are difficult to separate: card, aluminium, plastic coating) and coffee pods. [...]

On a national scale, France has passed a new law which will come into effect in 2020 to ensure all plastic cups, cutlery and plates can be composted and are made of biologically-sourced materials. Germany has the Original Unverpackt zero-waste supermarket and Hamburg has gone as far as banning coffee pods (often a mix of aluminium and plastic) from state-run buildings.

read the article 

Politico: How Manuel Valls aims to win back the French Left

To make the case, Vallsists have been operating in stealth mode for months. A major pre-campaign step was to lay out Valls’ views on issues normally outside the prime minister’s purview, namely Europe and the state of the world. On the first subject, Valls telegraphed a cautiously skeptical view in two speeches and an op-ed in the Financial Times published after Britain’s Brexit vote. EU nations, the prime minister wrote in October, needed to come “to terms with the fact that there are borders — that Europe starts and stops somewhere.”

On globalization, Valls signaled an equally skeptical tone. Once the Socialist Party’s most unabashedly free-market figure, he has now taken a step toward anti-globalists Montebourg, Mélenchon and even Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right National Front. “Globalization long held the promise of prosperity, more jobs and jobs with higher value-added,” he wrote in business daily Les Echos in November. “But we have to face facts: this promise has not been held.” [...]

A robust campaign, built upon solid promises to left-wing voters, could just clinch the primary for Valls. But what happens after that is another question. If he makes it through to the presidential election’s first round, Valls will be squeezed between the hard-left Mélenchon and the centrist Emmanuel Macron, his former economy minister. Both will compete with him for left-wing votes. Polls show Valls losing out to the competition.

read the article 

Politico: Matteo Renzi, from demolition man to demolished

The outcome of Sunday’s vote, widely seen as a referendum on Renzi’s government, suggests that the prime minister and his party have lost voters to the anti-establishment 5Star Movement as well as minor parties on both the Right and Left.

Renzi’s opponents won 60 percent of the vote and 17 out of Italy’s 20 regions. High voter turnout of more than 68.5 percent made it an even more conclusive defeat for the former mayor of Florence.

Renzi may be paying the price for an original sin: hijacking the PD as an outsider. Several party elders, who openly campaigned against Renzi, are now demanding his resignation as head of the PD, accusing him of having fomented divisions. [...]

Renzi loyalists have argued that if he also resigns as chairman, the party will be left “with a bunch of barons fighting each other – and no king.” They also argue that, despite the defeat, nearly 13 million Italians voted in favor of Renzi’s reforms and that such support should not be underestimated — or wasted.

“One of the mistakes of the Remainers of the Brexit campaign is that they did not capitalize on the over 40 percent of votes they got,” said Lia Quartapelle, chair of the PD’s foreign affairs committee. “We intend to do differently.”

read the article