31 October 2017
America Magazine: What would Martin Luther say about today’s migrant and refugee crises?
Pastoral and theological reflections on immigrants and refugees from the perspective of theological traditions, including Catholic and Lutheran, are available. However, as Christians commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it is surprising that little has been said on what Martin Luther’s teaching on hospitality toward strangers and exiles might offer to our current situation. We need to revisit the views of this 16th-century reformer on hospitality now more than ever: We live in an increasingly multiethnic nation, at a time when Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted to the global South, and in a world experiencing the greatest transnational movement of refugees and immigrants in history, including those coming to our shores and their children. In this day and age, I believe we are called to embody a radical hospitality toward these marginal neighbors. Let us rediscover that part of Luther’s teaching that can help us in this task. [...]
Although Luther focuses on exiles who flee for their lives due to religious persecution, he also reminds Christians to be “generous not only toward the brethren...but also toward those who are strangers in the state, provided that they are not manifestly evil.” For example, if a “Turk” (in today’s language, a Muslim) came to us as a “stranger” and “in distress” we should not disregard him “even though he is not suffering because of the Word.” Even if a Christian’s first responsibility is to those of “the household of faith,” they also should assist others “who experience misfortune.” [...]
Moreover, Luther teaches us that Christians must not lump all immigrants together with those who have an evil intent. This suggests we must put a human face on debates about refugee policy and immigration law. Not all refugees and travelers from the Middle East are radical Muslims bent on killing Americans. Not all undocumented immigrants are criminals, rapists or “bad hombres.” Christians must set a higher example and ask deeper questions about the kinds of sufferings these neighbors experience. As church, we must hear their stories with compassion. As citizens and residents, we must also seriously consider whether there is, as Luther would say, “some little domain of a godly prince in which there can be room for such people.” Going through this process of discernment will help us make decisions about advocacy and support for those whom Luther calls exiles on account of God’s Word and other “exiles of the state.”
America Magazine: Ahead of Reformation anniversary, Lutherans pray for full communion with Catholics
Though today’s Lutherans and Catholics may feel more unified, obstacles remain to sacramental unity between the churches. The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification allowed Lutherans and Catholics to express a common understanding of “justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ.” The central issues for which Lutherans and Catholics mutually condemned each other in the 16th century are no longer church-dividing. The issues of church and ministry—particularly the ordination of women, married clergy and apostolic succession—are today’s main challenges. [...]
But Ms. Johnson knows the pain of Catholic-Lutheran tensions. When she was growing up, her Catholic cousins told her younger brothers that they were going to hell because they were not Catholic. Later in life, a priest publicly told her she was not welcome when she went up for Communion at her Catholic granddaughter’s Confirmation. Today, she is grateful for Pope Francis, whom she sees as moving away from the pain of the past. [...]
With Pope Francis and Catholic leaders making institutional efforts to promote unity among Christians, the work of ecumenism should also flourish at the ground level. Pastor Mills and his parishioners can offer Catholic parishes a model of friendship and prayer while both Catholics and Lutherans await full sacramental unity.
minutephysics: Time Travel in Fiction Rundown
For ages I’ve been thinking about doing a video analyzing time travel in fiction and doing a comparison of different fictional time travels – some do use wormholes, some relativistic/faster than light travel with time dilation, some closed timelike curves, some have essentially “magic” or no consistent rules that make any sense, or TARDIS's, or whatever. This video is an explanation of how time travel functions in different popular movies, books, & shows – not how it works “under the hood", but how it causally affects the perspective of characters’ timelines (who has free will? can you change things by going back to the past or forwards into the future?). In particular, I explain Ender's Game, Planet of the Apes, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Primer, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, Looper, the video game “Braid”, and Lifeline.
The Guardian: The Guardian view on the Reformation: justification through faith
Historians today have a much more balanced and pluralistic view. It is impossible to read Luther, for all his coarse vitality, as an apostle of common sense. Nor is it clear that he, or the other reformers, wanted to end the traditions of argument in which they had themselves been schooled. The reformation was an argument within western Christianity, not a rejection of all that had gone before. No one involved could have imagined the consequences that would flow from the argument Luther started – consequences that ranged from mass literacy to the emergence of modern nation states, among them Germany; to the vast European empires of the 19th century; to the modern liberal idea that people exist as individuals before they are a part of society; the archbishop of Canterbury has even claimed that it led to the emergence of modern banking. It certainly gave us the principle of religious tolerance, after all possible alternatives had been tried and bloodily failed. [...]
The Reformation gave us the idea of progress: the hope that the future might be better than the past, and fundamentally different to it. This is implicit in Christianity itself, but it first took earthly shape when the Anabaptists – extreme reformers who rejected all external authority – took control of the town of Münster. They turned it into a kind of hell, before being bloodily suppressed, with Luther’s enthusiastic approval. But their idea that earthly history might improve towards a heavenly state has haunted us ever since.
The Reformation is in one sense over. Christianity has not entirely faded away even in Europe. But the theological arguments of the Reformation no longer seem central. Christians today can live with each other while disagreeing over transubstantiation: if they are going to excommunicate each other it will be over sexuality or even politics. “Theology” has become a term of abuse.
Deutsche Welle: Pope Francis speaks out against nationalism in Europe
He pointed to the two world wars that ravaged the Continent during the last century, and described peace as a "fragile good," when he spoke near the end of the two-day Catholic Church in the European Union (COMECE) conference on Europe's future that was held at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican City. [...]
"A European Union that, in facing its crises, fails to recover a sense of being a single community that sustains and assists its members - and not just a collection of small interest groups - would miss out not only on one of the greatest challenges of its history, but also on one of the greatest opportunities for its own future," the pope said. [...]
The pope also appeared to warn against the dangers posed by anti-immigrant parties. "Extremist and populist groups are finding fertile ground in many countries," he said. "They make protest the heart of their political message, without offering the alternative of a constructive political project."
Maps on the Web: Polio-free countries by year of last recorded case of indigenous wild poliovirus
Most of the world is free of indigenous transmission of wild, or naturally-occurring, poliovirus. Only six cases of polio caused by the wild virus have been reported so far in 2017. Polio remains endemic in three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. Until poliovirus transmission is interrupted in these countries, all countries remain at risk of importation of polio, especially vulnerable countries with weak public health and immunization services and travel or trade links to endemic countries.
This is different from vaccine-derived polio, which happens if a population is seriously under-immunized and an excreted vaccine-virus spreads in the immediate community. This is a very rare occurrence, as it happened in Israel and Palestine during 2013-2014, and in Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo during 2017.
29 October 2017
Vox: Why small talk is so excruciating
The problem, of course, is that small talk precedes big talk in the normal course of human affairs. Most people feel the need to get comfortable with one another before they jump into the deep end of serious conversation or ongoing friendship. Which means if you hate and avoid small talk, you are also, as a practical matter, cutting yourself off from lots of meaningful social interaction, which is a bummer. Also, research shows that more frequent small talk, even among those who identify as introverts, makes people happier. Also, despite recent advances in technology, small talk remains an unavoidable part of many basic life tasks. [...]
For all its ubiquity, small talk hasn't come in for a ton of academic study. The first theoretical account is generally traced to anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in his 1923 essay "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages." He noted that a great deal of talk "does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas" but instead "serves to establish bonds of personal union." Malinowski termed the exchange of such talk "phatic communion" ("phatic" from the Greek phatos, for "spoken"). It is speech as social bonding rather than communication. [...]
In the 1970s, however, sociolinguistics became more attuned to the everyday forms of speech that, after all, constitute the bulk of our verbal communication. And feminist sociolinguistics in particular noted that a dismissive attitude toward speech that establishes and maintains relationships — as opposed to task-oriented or informational speech — was of a piece with patriarchal disrespect for traditionally female roles. Think of the derogatory implications of the term "gossip," which is, after all, social talk about social dynamics. [...]
Malinowski was wrong — small talk is not just important for those seeking companionship (or avoiding silence). It's also important in a whole range of social, commercial, and professional settings. It weaves and reweaves the social fabric, enacting and reinforcing social roles. Think of the different varieties of small talk between doctor and patient, vendor and customer, employer and employee. Each has its own rhythms and rules. And of course the character of small talk differs from place to place, culture to culture. For example, silence, contra Malinowski, is not viewed as threatening or uncomfortable in all cultures.
The New Yorker: How Martin Luther Changed the World
The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks. [...]
He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen—trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” [...]
Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker. [...]
Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer, quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.
The Atlantic: When Rich Places Want to Secede
A major reason cited for the crisis? As Catalan protesters cried, “Madrid nos roba”—“Madrid is robbing us”—by which they mean the federal government is taking more than it gives in transfer payments. Catalonia, the northeastern region that includes Barcelona and holds 16 percent of the Spanish population, accounts for about a fifth of Spain’s $1.2 trillion economy and about a quarter of all Spanish exports and industry. Most crucially, it pays Madrid $12 billion more in taxes per year than it gets back.
As a relatively rich region with its own independence movement, Catalonia's not alone: A small set of secession movements in historically productive areas, most visibly in Europe, say they’d be better off on their own, and more are pointing to Catalonia's example to regain momentum. Belgium’s Flanders region, one of the birthplaces of modern commerce and the host to a separatist party that made gains after the global financial crisis, boasts a GDP per capita 120 percent higher than the EU average. If the German state of Bavaria were its own country, as the Bavarian Party wishes, its economic output would crack the top 10 of EU member states, according to its government. And last weekend, two deep-pocketed northern Italian regions that are home to each Milan and Venice, passed nonbinding referenda for greater autonomy. In Europe, resentments of paying to cover less productive countrymen are longstanding, but recently they seem to have intensified as a swirl of nationalist sentiments has swept the continent. [...]
Erin Jenne, a professor of international relations at Central European University, agrees. Economic inequality is one of a few factors that can keep independence movements simmering, but they won’t boil over without a catalyst—usually some external circumstance like a major political crisis, or an offer from another country to provide military support to a region with separatist aspirations, she said. After all, inequality between regions is baked into the entire concept of modern nationhood—if subsidizing poorer parts of a country were motivation enough to split off, every region would have done it by now.
Jacobin Magazine: Against Conspiracy Theories
To be blunt, this is hokum. It’s true that Kennedy made a few decisions that angered one faction or another of the national security establishment; almost every president does at some point. But overall, Kennedy was a gift to that establishment, a militaristic, anticommunist hawk dressed up in the soft garments of trite, inspirational liberalism. Kennedy perpetuated the myth of a US-Soviet “missile gap” to win the 1960 election, despite almost certainly being informed it didn’t exist. (To be fair, there was a missile gap — it was just in the United States’ favor). Once in office, he then sharply increased military spending, expanded the US nuclear arsenal, and stationed nuclear-armed missiles around the world.
The Cuban missile crisis could have been avoided had Kennedy put a stop to the CIA’s ultimately disastrous Cuban regime change operation, including multiple assassination attempts against Castro. Sure, he resisted some of the most extreme elements of the national security establishment, but Kennedy was a reliable Cold Warrior. And while there’s evidence he had private doubts about Vietnam, so did almost every policymaker involved in that catastrophe. As it happens, Kennedy initially expanded the US presence there, despite his personal ambivalence. [...]
To some extent, this conspiracy theory is a funhouse mirror reflection of the Bush administration’s very real dishonesty and depravity. But it’s also a bizarre distraction from the administration’s very real, behind-the-scenes wrongdoing around September 11 — from the fact that Bush was on vacation all of August while warnings of an attack came in (some of which were simply ignored) to the administration’s very real conspiracy to lie its way into the Iraq War. In fact, to some extent the nuttiness of the inside-job theories helped delegitimize such critiques.
IFLScience: Prominent British Ex-Politician Claims Pollution Is Making People Transgender
Another day, another outdated, outmoded, and anachronistic politician saying something ridiculous and offensive. This time it's the turn of former Chairman of the British Conservative Party, Lord Norman Tebbit, who has written in a national newspaper that he thinks pollution is making people transgender.
In a comment piece in The Telegraph, the 86-year-old Peer, who it is worth noting has a pretty detailed record of speaking out against LGBT+ rights, claims that the rise in people identifying as transgender is possibly down to the increase in pollution, and that science backs him up. I fear this might be overkill, but science really doesn’t. [...]
Predictably, this isn’t the first time that a British politician has come up with some bat-shit explanation for the increase in people identifying as LGBT+. Only earlier this year a Liberal Democrat (yeah, the irony isn’t lost on us either) parliamentary candidate Susan King claimed that “there are a lot of feminising hormones getting into the environment and that has to be taken into consideration; it's affecting people's sexuality, basically.”
28 October 2017
openDemocracy: “Even when they’re wrong, they’re right”
One response is to claim that the data fails to reflect voters’ lived experience and that people’s first-hand perceptions are surely more accurate than dry statistics and aloof academic analysis. Yet a subjective interpretation of an anecdote – an unemployed local builder sees a Polish one working and blames the immigrant for his lack of a job – is scarcely rigorous evidence.
Indeed, negative perceptions of immigration are often not based on personal experience. It is telling that while few people in Britain think immigration is negative for them personally, many believe it is detrimental to the country as a whole. And in both the UK and the US attitudes towards migration are often much more negative in areas where there are few or no migrants than in areas where there are many. Mediated misperceptions are even less credible than first-hand ones. [...]
It is vital that instead of validating misperceptions and lies, politicians, campaigners and commentators put a positive, evidence-based case for immigration. They need to dispel ignorance and misinformation with information, misinterpretation with explanation, and confront prejudice head on. For instance, people typically think the immigration share of the population is much higher than it really it is; better information can help. Many people believe it is common sense that every job filled by a migrant is one less for locals; one can explain that there isn’t a fixed number of jobs to go around and migrants also create jobs when they spend their wages and in complementary lines of work. When Donald Trump slurs Muslim refugees as would-be terrorists, it can be pointed out that no American has been killed by Islamist terrorists who arrived in the US as refugees. [...]
Stories need to be accompanied with an attempt to reach out to those with different values and to speak their language. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, argues that liberal westerners suffer from a rationalist delusion that reasoning can cause good behaviour and is our pathway to moral truth. Yet in practice, he writes, most of our conscious reasoning is after-the-fact justification for our moral intuitions, which shape our emotions and unconsciously govern our behaviour.
Jacobin Magazine: Information Is Power
NARMIC wanted to research the power and money behind the defense industry and get this research into the hands of peace activists who were resisting the Vietnam War so they could fight more effectively. They wanted — as they put it — to “fill the gap” between “peace research” and “peace organizing.” They wanted to do research for action — hence, their use of the term “action/research” to describe what they did. [...]
NARMIC was started in 1969 by a group of antiwar Quakers who were active with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). They were inspired by the Quaker preacher and abolitionist John Woolman, who told his followers “to see and take responsibility for injustice imposed through economic systems.” [...]
The first was a list of the top one hundred defense contractors in the United States. Using data available from the Department of Defense, NARMIC researchers meticulously put together rankings that revealed who the nation’s biggest war profiteers were and how much these companies were awarded in defense contracts. The list was accompanied by some useful analysis from NARMIC about the findings. [...]
The story of NARMIC is an example of the critical role that power research has played in the history of US social movements. NARMIC’s research during the Vietnam War, and the way this research was used by organizers to take action, made a dent in the war machine that contributed to the end of the war. It also helped educate the public about the war — about the corporate power profiting off of it, and about the complicated weapons systems the US was using against the Vietnamese people.
The Atlantic: What Is Really Unprecedented About Trump?
If we use “unprecedented” with care, then we are able to see what is genuinely distinct about the moment within which we live. Never have we had a president, for instance, who directly communicates with the public in the same kind of unscripted, ad-hoc, and off-the-cuff manner as we have witnessed with Trump. The kind of unbridled rhetorical attacks that he has unleashed on every enemy from the news industry to Puerto Rican officials to kneeling NFL football players to Republican legislators has been a striking contrast to what we have witnessed in American presidential history. In contrast to FDR, who spoke directly to the public through fireside chats on the radio that were carefully crafted, thoughtfully edited, and broadcast strategically, President Trump has used Twitter to literally say what is on his mind at any moment without much consideration for the consequences. This is a new style of presidential communication and a dramatic lowering of the editorial barrier as to what the commander in chief is willing to utter before the world.
Another truly unprecedented part of the Trump presidency that doesn’t get much attention anymore has to do with the massive conflict of interest that exists in this Oval Office. When the president made a decision in January to avoid erecting a strict firewall between his family business and the presidency, he set the democracy on a dangerous path that we have not yet experienced. Never have we had a businessperson with such vast economic holdings as president. To have our leader be the titular head of a sprawling global company with property interests all over the globe, even with his two sons “running the business,” creates obvious problematic situations where the line between making money and making policy is permanently blurred. [...]
Of course, even the evidence that President Trump has been willing to push the boundaries of what is permissible by abusing his presidential authority, such as when he fired FBI Director James Comey to get rid of that “Russia Thing,” he replicated the kinds of behavior we saw under President Richard Nixon with the Saturday Night Massacre and his efforts to stop the investigation of the FBI or, possibly, President Reagan when his national-security team conducted an illegal operation to provide assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras—despite a congressional ban on doing so. When the public frets that we can’t have someone as president who is so out of control given the power they hold, particularly to launch a nuclear war, we need to remember that this is a risk we have already encountered, including Nixon’s dark days toward the end of his presidency.
The Atlantic: Trump Is Radicalizing the Democratic Party
But what if the asymmetric trend is no longer so asymmetric? Recent polling from Pew finds, as one might expect, that not only are parties becoming ideologically homogeneous, but so are people. Two decades ago, or even one decade ago, most Americans had a mix of conservative and liberal views. That’s increasingly not the case. Today, 97 percent of Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican—an even more extreme concentration (by a hair) than across the aisle, where 95 percent of Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat.
Digging into Pew’s numbers, something notable emerges. Starting around 2015, views among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (I’ll just refer to this group as Democrats from here on out) tend to change sharply. For example, here are Democrats’ view on immigrants, perhaps Trump’s No. 1 target on the stump: [...]
Yet there is, naturally, a connection between the voters and their representatives, as Mann and Ornstein pointed out about the GOP in 2012. One question to track is whether Democratic legislators now start behaving as Republicans have in Congress. Predictions of a “Democratic Tea Party” or an irredentist faction equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus have so far come to naught. One reason is that Democratic voters tend to value compromise more per se, and the Pew poll suggests that is one thing that hasn’t changed. Seven in 10 Democrats say they like elected officials who can reach deals, while a slim majority of Republicans prefer ones who stick to their positions.
27 October 2017
The Atlantic: The Mystery of Why Japanese People Are Having So Few Babies
But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to. [...]
This may seem surprising in Japan, a country where the economy is currently humming along, and the unemployment rate is below 3 percent. But the shrinking economic opportunities stem from a larger trend that is global in nature: the rise of unsteady employment. Since the postwar years, Japan had a tradition of “regular employment,” as labor experts commonly call it, in which men started their careers at jobs that gave them good benefits, dependable raises, and the understanding that if they worked hard, they could keep their jobs until retirement. Now, according to Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University’s Japan campus and the author of several books about Japan, around 40 percent of the Japanese workforce is “irregular,” meaning they don’t work for companies where they have stable jobs for their whole careers, and instead piece together temporary and part-time jobs with low salaries and no benefits. (Such temporary workers are counted as employed in government statistics.) Only about 20 percent of irregular workers are able to switch over to regular jobs at some point in their careers. According to Kingston, between 1995 and 2008, Japan’s number of regular workers decreased by 3.8 million while the number of irregular workers increased by 7.6 million. [...]
In a culture that places such an emphasis on men being breadwinners, this has serious implications for marriage and childbearing. Men who don’t have regular jobs are not considered desirable marriage partners; even if a couple wants to get married, and both have irregular jobs, their parents will likely oppose it, according to Ryosuke Nishida, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology who has written about unemployment among young workers. About 30 percent of irregular workers in their early 30s are married, compared to 56 percent of full-time corporate employees, according to Kingston. “Japan has this idea that the man is supposed to get a regular job,” said Nishida. “If you graduate and you don't find a job as a regular employee, people look at you as a failure.” There’s even a tongue-in-cheek Japanese board game, Nishida told me, called “The Hellish Game of Life,” in which people who don’t land a regular job struggle for the rest of the game. [...]
The second is that Japan’s is a culture in which hard work and long hours are widely accepted and in which it is considered rude to leave before your boss. People who complain about working long hours may not find much sympathy from friends and family members, let alone the government. Finally, Japan is a country in which labor unions are weak, and often focus on collaborating with companies and preserving the good jobs that do exist, rather than fighting on behalf of all workers, according to Konno. “Unions here are for the companies—they’re not effective,” he said.
CityLab: How Much Food Do Cities Squander?
To sniff out specifics, the engineering company Tetra Tech (in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rockefeller Foundation) recruited more than 1,151 residents in Denver, New York, and Nashville. Of these, 631 supplied qualitative info in the form of kitchen diaries noting what they tossed and why. Researchers also inspected the contents of 277 residential trash bins, and 145 containers of commercial or industrial garbage. [...]
The researchers divided trashed food into three categories: stuff that is typically edible, questionably edible (including peels and cores), and inedible (such as pits, bones, and egg shells). They then tallied up findings from the bin digs and kitchen diaries to gauge how much is going to waste in each city. In Denver and New York, residents trashed the majority of the wasted food; in Nashville, the residential and restaurant sectors were neck and neck. [...]
The researchers flag that discrepancy, among other sticking points: At least in New York City, they found that participating in a compost program led to more overall waste, compared with families whose garbage all goes into a single stream. In other words: Compost-happy residents were disposing of more total scraps than residents who just threw the whole lot in the trash. To counter that trend, the report’s authors recommend reminding consumers that “preventing food waste is preferable to composting it.”
Social Europe: No More Crises As Opportunities: An Answer To Yanis Varoufakis
The concept of crises engendering opportunities for the “rebirth” of Europe should have died with the Greek experience in the most dramatic phase of which Yanis Varoufakis took an active part. Having worked with former Prime Minister George Papandreou before embarking on his “radical Left” experiment, which nearly cost Greece its place in the Eurozone, Varoufakis should have learned that courting the abyss and generating crises is never a good way to change what needs to be changed. [...]
Varoufakis uses the Catalan crisis as a mere illustration for his favorite topic, which he espoused after he quit the Syriza government and denounced its policies: the reconfiguration of the European Union with “radical” changes like “fiscal autonomy”. He now has another radical idea: fostering regional governance (that’s where Catalonia comes in handy) and even creating a “Code of Conduct for secession”, facilitating regions all over Europe (why should one stop in Spain?) to become autonomous. This is presented as a progressive idea. In fact it is, to my eyes, both a misrepresentation of reality and a rallying call for nationalism, which, for all non-radical socialists, and a majority of democrats, constitutes the opposite of progressiveness.
The Catalan question flared up not on the basis of the economic situation in Spain but because of a combination of political mismanagement, or pure populism, by both sides of the conflict. The right-wing government of Mr. Rajoy challenged the special regime for Catalonia established under the socialist government of Mr. Zapatero, tolerated then disparaged a first referendum on independence, never treated the Catalan government as equal, constantly sought legal remedies to political and societal issues and opted for repression where it should have opted for dialogue. Still independence is at best a 50-50 option for the Catalan people and not an inescapable conclusion. On the other hand, the current Catalan government has been elected on an “independentist” agenda, but it overplayed its hand and misjudged both the Spanish environment (although it provides about 20% of Spanish output, Catalonia is only one of 17 regions) and the European drive for unity and integration. [...]
“Regionalization” is not the answer, nor do we need a crisis as dramatic as Catalonia’s to understand this. Regionalism is already a part of the European project – Varoufakis gets the relationship between Spain’s central government and Catalonia’s regional government or Barcelona’s City Hall completely wrong and of course there could be no such thing as a “secession (of rich regions like Veneto or Catalonia) with an obligation to maintain fiscal transfers” (to the poorer regions), since the main reason for secession would be to stop paying for others. From both a political and a legal point of view it is obvious that the EU framework allows for many types of regional settlement (ranging from advanced autonomy to federalism) other than separatism. The non-negotiable and unilateral “secession” of Catalonia evokes the populist themes of Brexit much more than the nuances of a regionalist settlement.
Motherboard: The World Spent $14.4 Billion on Conservation, and It Actually Worked
Between 1992–2003, $14.4 billion was spent in total in the 109 countries studied, including Brazil and China. (Dollar amounts here are in what researchers call "international dollars," a conversion from US dollars to account for differences in purchasing power in each country.) That investment resulted in a 29 percent-per-country average decrease in the rate of biodiversity decline between 1996–2008, the new paper concludes. [...]
"Our study answers the big question about the effectiveness of conservation investments," said Waldron. Most of the funding in that time period supported reserves and protected areas. "We only looked at spending that went directly to conservation, such as funding for park rangers, habitat protection, and so on." [...]
An additional $5 million investment in conservation could have slowed the loss of plant, animal, and other species by 50 percent in Peru and 90 percent in Rwanda during the period studied, according to the model. In some poor countries, the entire conservation budget amounts to $10 million or less, so an additional $5 million could have a big impact, Waldron said. [...]
In 2010, the 193 countries that are part of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to put under protection 17 percent of land and 10 percent of oceans globally by 2020 to reduce the loss of biodiversity. But only a few countries are actually expected to reach their targets, according to a 2016 report.
Vox: The Republican purge has only just begun
But conversations with conservative activists, GOP operatives, and people close to Bannon and the White House suggest that the Breitbart executive chair is engaged in a bold, ambitious project that has a relatively clear vision. He doesn’t just want to destroy the old Republican establishment — he wants to build a new one. [...]
He’s exactly the sort of senator Bannon wants gone. Indeed, the only Republican senator on the ballot in 2018 whom Bannon wants to return is Ted Cruz, whom he’s deemed sufficiently anti-leadership and anti-establishment. Everyone else in the party running — everyone else happy to work closely with Mitch McConnell — is a target. Besides Wicker, they are Sens. Dean Heller (R-NV), Deb Fischer (R-NE), John Barrasso (R-WY), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), should the 83-year-old choose to run again. [...]
It’s a bold strategy, and a risky one. Successful Senate primary challenges are rare. In hundreds of Senate elections since 2003, a mere six incumbents running again have lost renomination — and two of them, Joe Lieberman and Lisa Murkowski, ended up winning their general elections anyway. And there is of course the added risk that a more extreme primary victor could lose the general election to a Democrat, as McConnell has warned. [...]
But while Bannon is reportedly encouraging Senate challengers to support ending the legislative filibuster, something that would make legislation easier to pass, there’s an element of opportunism to his critique too. In most cases, replacing leadership-loyal generic Republican senators with independent outsiders would likely make it harder for the Senate to get bills to Trump’s desk, not easier.
Independent: Poll reveals Christians feel four of the Ten Commandments are no longer important
Most Christians believe that four of the commandments are not "important principles to live by" according to a YouGov poll in the UK.
The four which have fallen by the wayside are the requirement not to worship idols, use the Lord's name in vain, to worship no other God, and to keep the Sabbath day holy.
Less than one in three Christians believe in preserving Sunday as a day of rest, with 38 per cent against using the Lord's name in vain and 43 per cent condemning the worshipping of idols. [...]
Stealing and killing were the most widely condemned transgressions, with 94 per cent of Christians and 93 per cent of non-religious people believing those commandments are still important and relevant.
On Tuesday the Archbishop of Canterbury signalled support for a day of rest, tweeting that he was "encouraged" by the Chief Rabbi's campaign for people to spend time offline over the Sabbath. [...]
The Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell, said: " In an age as busy, frantic and feverish as ours I would have thought that keeping the Sabbath, or at the very least observing a balance between work and rest and play was more important than ever.
Deutsche Welle: Thailand ends year of mourning King Bhumibol with cremation
On Thursday evening in a $90 million (€76 million) ceremony, King Bhumibol's subjects will express their devotion in central Bangkok as they witness what they believe to be the divine monarch's return to the mythical Mount Meru, the spiritual heart of the Buddhist kingdom. More than ten million sandalwood flowers have been folded for the ceremony, as the scent is believed to guide souls to the afterworld.
Despite the rain in Bangkok on Wednesday, tens of thousands of mourners lined up to secure their places to witness the cremation. The sun came out on Thursday and a crowd of a quarter of a million is expected while other Thai communities gather around scores of replica cremation pavilions which have been set up across the Asian nation. [...]
In more than seven decades on the throne, King Bhumibol oversaw Thailand's change to a modern, globalized economy with the monarchy as its central institution. Some 16 royal families and 26 "distinguished representatives" are due to attend the central ceremony in Sanam Luang, including the UK's Prince Andrew, Spain's Queen Sofia and former German president Christian Wulff.
Quartz: A new American revolution is starting in New England—against Daylight Saving Time
Earlier this year, Bailey sponsored a bill that would move Maine to the Atlantic Time Zone, an hour ahead of its current position in the Eastern Time Zone, and no longer observe Daylight Saving Time. The bill passed both chambers of the Maine state legislature. But the Senate added a provision that Maine voters must approve the change in a referendum, and the referendum could only be triggered by neighboring Massachusetts and New Hampshire changing their time, too. Since neither of those states had immediate plans to change their time zones, the move seemed doomed.
But now there is hope. Massachusetts is considering a permanent change in its time zone. A commission is studying the issue was prompted by public health advocate Tom Emswiler. He argues that a shift to Atlantic Time would boost the economy by encouraging college students to stay in Massachusetts, instead of moving to sunnier places like New York City. If the commission votes to recommend the change next week, the report will move to lawmakers and maybe result in legislation. It is a long shot, to be sure. If Massachusetts moves to Atlantic Time, Maine probably will too, and that will pressure New Hampshire to follow. [...]
Time’s main purpose is to facilitate economic coordination, so the more time zones there are, the more scope there is for confusion. Maine’s chamber of commerce opposes the time-zone bill, since modern business demands greater economic integration with faraway places. Maine’s lawmakers understood they couldn’t go at it alone, but three states isn’t an adequate economic block anymore.
26 October 2017
Foreign Policy: Xi Jinping Has Quietly Chosen His Own Successor
Throughout the Western press, the removal of Sun Zhengcai was treated as conclusive proof that Xi plans to remain in charge after 2022, when term limits and political tradition will require him to give up power. This has been a common trope in the hazy world of Chinese political analysis since at least 2015, when Foreign Policy published “Xi Jinping Forever,” arguing that the Chinese leader would try to extend his rule beyond two terms. A constant stream of articles, especially in the run-up to this week’s 19th National Congress of the Communist Party, has reinforced the consensus that Xi Jinping isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. [...]
Xi has more than half a dozen allies in positions of power throughout China’s provinces — like Li Qiang, the Mongolian Bayanqolu, or Li Xi — any one of whom could have been named as Sun’s successor in Chongqing. But Xi’s choice was striking: He promoted his ally Chen Miner, who was born in 1960. Why is his year of birth so important? Because, based on the traditional retirement age of 68, Chen Miner — unlike Xi’s other prominent allies, who are older — will be able to serve out a double term from 2022, when he will be 62. Were he born even just a year earlier, in 1959, this would have been impossible, as he would have been forced to retire in 2027. [...]
Now in charge of the party, Xi announced the start of an anti-corruption campaign whose intensity surprised every observer. In 2015, the anti-corruption campaign targeted a sitting provincial party chief for the first time: Zhou Benshun, the top official in Hebei. Out of more than two dozen provincial party secretaries, Zhou’s replacement was the party secretary of Guizhou, who left his seat to head to Hebei. Thus Chen was promoted from governor to party secretary — a higher-ranking position — in Guizhou, where he would remain in charge for two more years. This was the first, but not the last time Chen would benefit from the anti-corruption campaign.
Chen’s five-year stint in Guizhou coincided with an acceleration of China’s fight against extreme poverty. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces but has a good track record of producing leaders. Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor, was Guizhou’s party chief in the 1980s. There, Chen was tasked with tackling one of Xi Jinping’s most important objectives: the eradication of extreme poverty by 2020. In the process, he made some resounding moves, like convincing Apple to build a data center in Guizhou. Under Chen’s leadership in 2016, Guizhou reported the third-fastest growth among Chinese provinces, with a claimed GDP growth rate of 10.5 percent.
Salon: World hunger is increasing thanks to wars and climate change
Between 1990 and 2015, due largely to a set of sweeping initiatives by the global community, the proportion of undernourished people in the world was cut in half. In 2015, U.N. member countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which doubled down on this success by setting out to end hunger entirely by 2030. But a recent U.N. report shows that, after years of decline, hunger is on the rise again. [...]
Around the world, social and political instability are on the rise. Since 2010, state-based conflict has increased by 60 percent and armed conflict within countries has increased by 125 percent. More than half of the food-insecure people identified in the U.N. report (489 million out of 815 million) live in countries with ongoing violence. More than three-quarters of the world’s chronically malnourished children (122 million of 155 million) live in conflict-affected regions. [...]
Globally, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons doubled between 2007 and 2016. Of the estimated 64 million people who are currently displaced, more than 15 million are linked to one of the world’s most severe conflict-related food crises in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia. [...]
In many places, one of the best ways to bolster food security is by helping farmers connect to both traditional and innovative social networks, through which they can pool resources, store food, seed and inputs and make investments. Mobile phones enable farmers to get information on weather and market prices, work cooperatively with other producers and buyers and obtain aid, agricultural extension or veterinary services. Leveraging multiple forms of connectivity is a central strategy for supporting resilient livelihoods.
Politico: German far right’s vote surge means financial bonanza
The Rheinische Post newspaper estimated that the AfD could be entitled to €12 million annually in the coming years, while Spiegel calculated that the party could receive €10 million next year thanks to its recent electoral success — nearly double the €6 million allocated for this year.
But public funding for a party is not allowed to exceed the contributions and donations it gets from members and supporters. So the AfD’s funding could end up being less. This was the case for 2016, according to Spiegel, when the AfD could have been awarded €8.7 million in public cash on the basis of its election results, but collected just €7.1 million in donations and contributions — so the public funding was cut to the same amount. [...]
The level of funding for parliamentary groups in the new Bundestag has also not yet been determined. But based on the figures from last term, the AfD’s parliamentary group could be entitled to about €1.2 million per month or €14.5 million per year, according to a member of the Bundestag’s Council of Elders — a body that helps to coordinate parliamentary business — who spoke on condition of anonymity. [...]
Bernhard Weßels, a professor at the Berlin Social Science Center research institute, expects the AfD to spend its new money mainly in three areas: campaigning (mostly through social media), employing party footsoldiers as assistants and researchers, and establishing a foundation that will be both a major right-wing think tank and a recruiting tool for the party.
Political Critique: Britain’s Empire State is the cause of Brexit. Can the English now liberate themselves from its influence?
Brexit and Trump were explosions. Each was the result of both a revolt against and a breakdown of the existing order. A number of causes were at work. But the detonation came about through what I call ‘combined determination’. This means I don’t accept that there is any one primary determination. I oppose a Marxist view that it was caused by economic factors, although these were essential. Or a Brexiteer or Trumpite view that they were caused by honest rejections of rigged and elitist systems. Certainly, both mattered; both economic forces and freely judged opposition to a rigged system.
But it was the way the forces combined that made the mixture explosive. Forces such as the loss of popular trust in historic states, caused by strategic military defeat and the catastrophe of the financial crash. The elites of Washington and London lied, lost, went bust and then bailed themselves out while everyone else got poorer and more insecure. That was a big cause. So too for Brexit was the undemocratic nature of the EU. So too was the absence of a left-wing, democratic alternative for Europe – an opposition to the EU within the EU. This allowed the right to monopolise and distort criticism of the EU. All these were also essential parts of the explosive mix.
BBC4 Profile: Martin Selmayr
As the EU commission meets to discuss the progress of Brexit negotiations, Mark Coles profiles the man some say really runs Europe, Martin Selmayr - right hand man to the President of the European Commission.
Just what impact is the passionate European having on the process of Britain leaving the EU? And does he deserve his reputation as the 'Monster at the Berlaymont'?
Business Insider: We flew a drone over the changing fall leaves in New England — and the footage is spectacular
While on a recent trip to the northwest corner of Connecticut, we flew a drone to capture an aerial view of the fall foliage that's starting to peak in the region.
Due to warmer temperatures, the leaves are changing colors a little behind schedule this year, which means you still have time to travel to the region for peak "leaf peeping" season.
This footage was filmed in the towns of Sharon and Lakeville, Connecticut. Following is a transcript of the video:
Fall foliage is peaking. The Northeastern US is the best place to see it. This was filmed in northwest Connecticut.
The leaves change color as the days get shorter. Warm temperatures have delayed the seasonal change. Southern states usually peak in November. When it comes to fall foliage, it's hard to compete with New England.
Some trees have yet to change color, so you'd better plan a trip soon.
watch the clip
Due to warmer temperatures, the leaves are changing colors a little behind schedule this year, which means you still have time to travel to the region for peak "leaf peeping" season.
This footage was filmed in the towns of Sharon and Lakeville, Connecticut. Following is a transcript of the video:
Fall foliage is peaking. The Northeastern US is the best place to see it. This was filmed in northwest Connecticut.
The leaves change color as the days get shorter. Warm temperatures have delayed the seasonal change. Southern states usually peak in November. When it comes to fall foliage, it's hard to compete with New England.
Some trees have yet to change color, so you'd better plan a trip soon.
watch the clip
Independent: Brexit: MPs may not get vote on deal until after Britain has left EU, David Davis reveals
David Davis has stunned MPs by warning they may not get a vote on any Brexit deal until after Britain has left the European Union. [...]
Asked if that meant the promised Parliamentary vote on the agreement could be delayed until after Brexit Day, in March 2019, Mr Davis replied: “Yes, it could be”.
The threat blows out of the water the Prime Minister’s repeated pledge of a vote – although she insisted it would not allow Parliament to halt withdrawal.
A cross-party alliance of MPs is attempting to amend the Brexit Bill to require that vote to be a separate Act of Parliament, to give Parliament more muscle. [...]
Earlier, Mr Davis acknowledged that major banks are threatening to move out of London to Frankfurt, Paris or Dublin if there is no deal “by March or April next year”.
He argued they would not incur that huge cost, if a transition deal looks likely, but admitted: “They might reduce the size of the office.”
Independent: Conservative MP demands universities give him names of lecturers teaching about Brexit
A Conservative MP and government whip has written to all UK universities demanding a list of professors who are teaching students about Brexit, prompting an angry backlash from academics.
Chris Heaton-Harris, a staunch Brexit supporter, was accused of “McCarthyism” after writing to university vice chancellors asking that they send him information on what their lecturers are telling students about Britain’s departure from the EU, as well as the names of the lecturers.
In the letter, he requested a list of academics “who are involved in the teaching of European affairs, with particular reference to Brexit”. The Daventry MP also asked for a version of every university’s syllabus and even demanded copies of online lectures on Brexit. [...]
Professor Kevin Featherstone, head of the London School of Economics (LSE) European Institute, told The Guardian: “The letter reflects a past of a McCarthyite nature. It smacks of asking ‘Are you or have you ever been in favour of remain?’ There is clearly an implied threat that universities will somehow be challenged for their bias.”
Quartz: Germany has set up a website to debunk the lies traffickers tell refugees
The Federal Foreign Office today (Oct. 23) launched the RumoursAboutGermany.info website in French, English, and Arabic. It’s part of the government’s ongoing #RumoursAboutGermany public awareness campaign that’s been running in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2015.
The site lists the seven biggest lies told by smugglers, based on what refugees told European media. The top lie: “The ship for the crossing is very big, it even has a pool and a cinema.” The site explains that human traffickers use old, unseaworthy boats so they can make as much money as possible, adding that more than 5,000 people died crossing the Mediterranean in such boats last year. [...]
The Federal Foreign Office says the website’s goal is to inform, not deter refugees, as “many irregular migrants make the decision to set out for Europe based on inaccurate information and rumours spread by people smugglers who are interested in profit, not the benefit and safety of the migrants.”
25 October 2017
Foreign Affairs: How Should Governments Address Inequality?
In 2014, an unusual book topped bestseller lists around the world: Capital in the Twenty-first Century, an 816-page scholarly tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty that examined the massive increase in the proportion of income and wealth accruing to the world’s richest people. Drawing on an unprecedented amount of historical economic data from 20 countries, Piketty showed that wealth concentration had returned to a peak not seen since the early twentieth century. Today in the United States, the top one percent of households earn around 20 percent of the nation’s income, a dramatic change from the middle of the twentieth century, when income was spread more evenly and the top one percent’s share hovered at around ten percent. Piketty predicted that without corrective action, the trend toward ever more concentrated income and wealth would continue, and so he called for a global tax on wealth.
Quartz: Eastern Europe’s major economies are having an underappreciated “Goldilocks moment”
The IMF now forecasts that “emerging and developing Europe” economies to grow 4.5% this year, upping their prediction by 1.5 percentage points from six months ago. This increased optimism is based, in part, on bumper growth in the second quarter of 2017, when Romania’s economy increased 5.7% versus a year earlier, the Czech Republic’s by 4.7%, and Poland’s by 4.4%. By comparison, the EU average was 2.4% growth over the same period.
All of these economies are still heavily reliant on manufacturing, exporting much of their production to the rest of the EU. For example, the Czech Republic—er, Czechia—has the lowest unemployment rate in the EU and about 35% of the Czech labor force is employed in manufacturing, the highest proportion of any EU country. When Europe is growing, demand for the things made in these economies grows. Often this means cars: automakers including Toyota, Volkswagen, and Peugeot have factories in the Czech Republic. Romania’s largest exporter is Dacia, a subsidiary of French car company Renault. [...]
Poland is also benefiting from a surge in workers from Ukraine. It’s estimated that as many as 1 million Ukrainians are working in Poland at any one time, who come for higher wages and more opportunities, especially since the recession that hit after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia. Ukrainian workers have helped address Poland’s demographic issues—an aging population and low fertility rate—in addition to counterbalancing the emigration of millions of Poles after the nation joined the EU in 2004. [...]
For now, the benefits of their economic models seem to outweigh the risks, so the EU’s eastern economies are likely to keep growing, according to JPMorgan’s Amoa. EU funds are there to be invested, central banks have supportive monetary policies, and political tensions aren’t yet at a breaking point. JPMorgan Asset Management is buying these countries’ currencies and government bonds in Poland, Amoa said.
Vintage Everyday: Amazing Photographs of 1980s New York City Subway Through the Lens of a Teenager
Most of these photographs below were shot in 1982 and 83 by native New Yorker Ken Stein when he was 17 and 18 year old, and was the staff photographer for a weekly community newspaper in The Bronx. Through his work he managed to capture the spirit of a New York quite different than the one we currently know, one with an undertone of danger and edge that has transformed over the past few decades. "The city was different back then," he told Gothamist. "I think it was quieter, the street lights were darker, there was more room to walk and more places to wander—often everything seemed new and the different areas of the city were just that; different."
Ken Stein recently shared some of his old photos of New York City from the 1980s on his Flickr page. "I pulled my slides from 20 years ago out of storage and began scanning them. It's like a portal back to my teenage years when i dreamed of going to art school to become a photojournalist."
SciShow Psych: What Causes Near-Death Experiences?
The light at the end of the tunnel, the peacefulness, your life flashing before your eyes—it's all been documented thoroughly in pop culture. What usually gets left out, though, are the potential scientific explanations for what happens to your brain during a brush with death.
Bloomberg: How Ukraine's Elites Are Holding the Line
The Ukrainian government, however, shows signs of lapsing into a "muddling-through" mode. The pension reform required by the International Monetary Fund to stabilize public finances has been watered down with 1,000 legislative amendments. President Petro Poroshenko and his cabinet are not pushing hard on another key element of Western aid conditionality, the introduction of a free market in land, because the immediate benefits are uncertain. The Russian market for Ukrainian agricultural goods is all but closed, the quotas for exports to the EU are tiny, and the owners of Ukrainian agricultural businesses fear that, once land can be bought and sold, foreign competitors with deep pockets will eat them alive. Privatization efforts have largely failed because of a lack of investor interest ("Corruption and war are not incentives to invest," the Chatham House report notes drily.) [...]
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian political elite is strikingly unpopular. Poroshenko is still the most popular choice for president, but according to the latest poll by the Razumkov Center for Political and Economic Research, only 9.3 percent of Ukrainians would vote for him now. Just 9.6 percent would vote for Poroshenko's party, now the biggest in parliament. That's understandable: According to the World Bank's October report on Ukraine, poverty is still higher than it was before the 2014 revolution. Ukraine traditionally runs extremely long election campaigns, and it's time for Poroshenko to prepare for the 2019 election. Both he and the parliamentary parties have strong incentives to use the fruits of macroeconomic stabilization and tax reform to boost social spending. That's already happening: The World Bank expects the public deficit to exceed its 3 percent target this year after hitting 2.2 percent in 2016. [...]
Poroshenko and his team have hit a point where neither the Western donors nor Putin can apply much pain without overreaching themselves. Last week, a group of opposition parties and civil society movements -- including some of the organizers of the original 2013 protests -- tried to stage a major rally in the government quarter in Kiev to demand "a big political reform" including tougher action on corruption. The protest, however, wasn't well-attended. Unlike in 2013, Ukrainians are not ready to rise up for pro-Western or, much less, for pro-Russian causes.
Social Europe: Europe’s Attackers From Within (Joschka Fischer)
On October 1, the Catalan government held an independence referendum in which less than half – some estimates say a third – of the region’s population participated. By the standards of the EU and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the vote could never be accepted as “free and fair.” In addition to being illegal under the Spanish constitution, the referendum did not even have a voting register to determine who was entitled to participate. [...]
The EU is an association of nation-states, not regions. Although regions can play an important role within the EU, they cannot stand in as an alternative to member states. If Catalonia were to set a precedent of secession, encouraging other regions to follow suit, the EU would be thrown into a deep, existential crisis. In fact, one could argue that nothing less than the EU’s future is at stake in Catalonia today. [...]
One can only hope that reason will prevail, particularly in Barcelona, but also in Madrid. A democratic, intact Spain is too important to be jeopardized by disputes over the allocation of tax revenues among the country’s regions. There is no alternative but for both sides to abandon the trenches they have dug for themselves, come out to negotiate, and find a mutually satisfactory solution that accords with the Spanish constitution, democratic principles, and the rule of law.
Social Europe: Dutch Aggression
On September 26, Emmanuel Macron made a speech on new a vision for Europe. He spoke about the need to harmonize corporate taxes in the European Union, tackle tax avoidance and protect our welfare states. Just one day later President Trump gave a speech on exactly the same topic, albeit with an entirely different message. He vowed to lower corporate taxation for American companies by a whopping 15 percentage points.
Unintentionally, the two speeches give an excellent illustration of the dilemma that countries, and especially EU countries, face. This is a result of a new logic in corporate taxation, in which 20th century tax systems designed for brick-and-mortar industries are no match for the 21st century developments of digitalization and globalisation. The choice is clear. Either countries work together to tackle the ingenious tax avoidance schemes ran by multinationals, or they participate in the cynical race towards the lowest tax rate. [...]
In that sense, the Netherlands sets a bad example, taking a step back from earlier solutions, and thus genuflecting towards Trump’s bogus solution. The new four-party cabinet revealed its plan to reduce the corporate tax rate incrementally from 25 to 21 percent, and even from 20 to 16 percent for the first €200K of profit. Besides that, a 15 percent tax on shareholder dividends will be removed. Any reference to an EU-coordinated effort to modernise the corporate taxation system is missing. All that said, one good thing is that the incoming government wants to introduce a source tax on royalties and interest to counter the Netherlands’ reputation for facilitating letterbox companies.
Deutsche Welle: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledges more 'moderate' kingdom
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said his country would become more "moderate" and "open" on Tuesday and pledged to "eradicate" radical Islamist ideology from the Gulf kingdom.
"We are returning to what we were before – a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world," the 32-year-old said at a major investment conference in Riyadh. [...]
In September, the Saudi government issued a decree that overturned a previous ban on women driving. Some officials have hinted the government may soon permit long-banned cinemas.
The young prince has also been the primary force driving "Vision 2030," an initiative designed to wean Saudi Arabia off of its traditional dependency on oil revenues by creating a more dynamic and diverse Saudi economy. [...]
Earlier Tuesday, bin Salman promised the conference attendees, which included representatives from some of the world's largest companies, that the Gulf kingdom will create a massive economic zone along the country's northwestern coastline.
24 October 2017
openDemocracy: Global politics at a crossroads
Even in our fraught and imperfect world, the idea of the politics of compromise and accommodation – the bedrock of democratic politics – can just about survive. Political compromises are made, negotiations continue, rhetoric rises and falls with the ebb and flow of democratic politics. Barring some extreme examples, legislators from different sides of the aisle can still talk and have tea across most, if not all, democratic countries. While all ideologies regard their views as right, in the politics of accommodation, opposing views are at least considered valid.
This is no longer is the case in several countries, with opponents and opposing views increasingly delegitimised and discarded, and their advocates mocked, dehumanised and even threatened. Recent examples range from Trump’s America to Brexit Britain, from Orbán’s Hungary to Modi’s India, and from Erdoğan’s Turkey to Duterte’s Philippines. When political systems become tolerant of falsehood and deceit on seismic levels, and when they even offer promotion to those who champion lies, democracy becomes vulnerable and highly fragile. And when those who oppose this are ridiculed and cast aside, the politics of accommodation begins to fracture. [...]
There are four reasons for this blockage, or four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and institutional fragmentation. Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms. [...]
We see such trends across many different kinds of countries. But the anti-global backlash is heterogeneous and rife with contradictions. It encompasses terrorism in the name of Islam, and Islamophobic discrimination against Muslims. It includes leftist rejection of trade agreements, and right-wing rejection of environmental agreements. The powerful tie that unites these disparate movements is a rejection of global interdependence and collective efforts to govern it. The resulting erosion of global cooperation is the fourth and final element of self-reinforcing gridlock, starting the whole cycle anew.
Jacobin Magazine: Austria’s Right Turn
Austrian voters have elected the most right-wing parliament since 1945. The FPÖ gained 5.5 points, totaling 26 percent of the vote. But the undisputed winner was the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), which rose from 24 percent in 2013 to 31.5 percent.
With a combined share of 57.5 percent of the vote and 103 (out of 183) MPs, the right bloc has never been larger. After you add in the neoliberal, pro-business “Neos,” who entered parliament with 5.3 percent, right-wing elements enjoy a two-thirds majority, giving them the power to potentially change constitutional law. [...]
The plan worked. With Kurz, Austrian voters could vote for the FPÖ’s program without associating themselves with the far right or fascism. The extreme right’s preferred topics — Islam, migration, refugees — dominated the campaign. Both Kurz and FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache presented closed borders and Islamophobic laws as the best solution to the country’s social and political problems. [...]
The new right-wing government will also target Austria’s system of collective bargaining, a key component of wage regulation in a country where 97 percent of all employment contracts are covered by a minimum union wage. Together, these reforms will create a low-wage sector with a highly flexible — read: precarious — workforce, which will drive up profits from global export markets. [...]
Authoritarian right-wing populism has now become a truly hegemonic, cross-class project. 74 percent of blue-collar workers voted for one of the two right-wing parties, as did 64 percent of entrepreneurs. Shockingly, the FPÖ won among voters 16 to 29 years old with 30 percent of the vote. Add Kurz’s 28 percent, and you have a 58 percent majority for authoritarian right-wing populism among young people. The only demographic that liked the Social Democrats were pensioners. This is what deep, right-wing hegemony looks like.
Social Europe: Germany: What Happens Next?
The key question now is: What happens next? After the social democrats have (wisely, I think) opted for a role in the opposition, there will be an extended period of bargaining on coalition formation, with only one majority option remaining on the table: the black-yellow-green “Jamaica”. That option is likely to fail. Differences among the participants cannot possibly be bridged in stable ways. After all, the Greens would at the very least have to win the support of the majority of their membership constituency, which is hard to imagine. The next option is the formation of a black-yellow minority government. That would be without precedent in Germany at the federal level. But it will be tried, as new elections are unlikely to yield an easier-to-handle result, perhaps a worse one. Moreover, there are creeping succession leadership crises in both the CDU and CSU (if not SPD), plus looming divorce issues between the two Christian “sister” parties regarding the continuation of a joint faction in the Bundestag. [...]
Also, a historical virtue of PDS/die Linke is a thing of the past. It consisted of its capacity to mask the legacies of East German xenophobic, authoritarian nativism by reframing it in terms of social justice issues. Now die Linke has lost 420,000 of its voters to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, which also mobilized nearly 1.5 million non-voters, making it the party with by far the greatest success in mobilizing this group relative to the number of votes it received). In spite of this massive loss to AfD, however, die Linke has been able to more than compensate for it by winning the support of 700,000 former social democratic and 330,000 former green voters.
There is a clear East/West divide in Germany. The new Länder in the East provided almost twice the level of electoral support for AfD as that of the old Länder. In Saxony, AfD even overtook CDU by a narrow margin and came in first. The same divide worked in Berlin as well as in the EU in general: populists are in power in Hungary and Poland and (so far) nowhere in the West of Europe. [...]
One lesson we can draw from the 2017 campaign and its outcome is this: Centrism of grand coalition governments breeds anti-elite centrifugality and the further fragmentation of party system, with an unprecedented number of seven distinct parties now in the Bundestag. As one commentator observed: “Fighting extremism in Germany may demand less political centrism.” (Another one has joked: There are two right answers to the question: Are there still true social democrats in Germany? One answer is: No – all socialist projects have been abandoned by SPD. The other is: Yes – there are even two of them, namely both members of the grand coalition whose social and economic policies have become virtually indistinguishable.)
The Atlantic: The Toxic Politics of Migration in the Czech Republic
The self-promotion of the former communist elite into a new post-communist ownership elite ranked high among populist grievances everywhere in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Babis responded to these resentments with his own distinctive approach to problem-solving: He purchased almost all the Czech Republic’s media—one of its largest radio stations, its two most influential daily newspapers, and its most popular news website, among other properties. [...]
Anti-refugee feeling turned about the fortunes of Viktor Orban, which had been sagging in Hungary after a failed attempt in 2014 to impose heavy taxes on internet use. Anti-refugee feeling delivered an unprecedented majority of the vote to the reactionary and authoritarian Law and Justice party in the Polish elections of October 2015. Anti-refugee feeling prevailed in Austria, where on October 16 an absolute majority of the population voted for immigration restrictionist parties: 31.6 percent for the People’s Party, and 27.4 percent for the Freedom Party—once such a pariah that in the year 2000 the rest of the EU sanctioned Austria for allowing Freedom Party members into a coalition government. [...]
Babis was never a true believer in the far right. He is not a true believer in anything. While he rejected EU resettlement quotas and opposed adoption of the euro currency, he did not share the more ideological anti-EU position of the rest of the European far right. “They give us money,” he said of the EU in October 2016, “so our membership is advantageous for us.” What Babis offered Czechs was all the benefits of EU membership with none of the costs. If that position was unrealistic … well, that was information that could await the post-election period.
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