Places Journal: Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City

Growthmanship spread abroad, too, along with the internationalization of production, and soon growth in GDP became the most important yardstick for nations in the advanced or developing world. Slowing growth rates provoked concern, while falling numbers indicated that something was awry and that close scrutiny, even intervention, from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund was in the offing. Those who believed otherwise were not wrong; they were simply treated as dropouts from modernity. So entrenched was this orthodoxy that The Limits to Growth, the momentous 1972 Club of Rome report that concluded that current rates of industrial growth could not be sustained ecologically in the long term, was received among business and policy elites as a genuinely heretical document that had to be publicly pilloried. [...]

Top-level resistance to absorbing and acting on this information has been profound, and is often compared, with some reason, to the force of religious dogma. Looking back on decades of widely publicized and verified warnings, Dennis Meadows (one of the authors of Limits to Growth) reflected on why they “did not prompt any fundamental changes in the policies that govern growth in population or industrial activity and that are driving this planet to major ecological disruptions.” Breaking with the growth gospel, he concluded, has been equivalent to overturning a deeply rooted belief system: “Think of the Catholic Church condemning Galileo to life imprisonment for his suggestion that the universe does not revolve around the earth.” 3 [...]

Nor, despite the improvements in environmental policymaking it introduced, did the Obama administration come close to pushing an alternative to carbon-based GDP growth as the lodestone of economic policymaking. Larger federal investments in clean energy, mass transit and smart grids were dwarfed by the subsidies handed out to high-carbon industries; nor was climate change legislation accorded priority attention, not even during the long nightmare of British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — surely an optimal moment for any president to sue for divorce from fossil-fuel dependency. The time could not have been riper to reset industrial policy, but the will to do so was up against the stronger (and easier) belief that a return to positive short-term growth figures would be the panacea for the recession’s ills. And feeding the GDP beast meant turning away from the dictates of healthy living — good health actually equates with negative GDP because it does not lead to medical expenditures that show up as monetary exchanges. 4 [...]

In truth, and as many historians have noted, the free enterprises continued to rely on federal funding. 15 The money just flowed less directly, and, most importantly, it was channeled into and through the large corporations that used Phoenix’s secure federal ties to make it a profitable branch town. The major firms that built plants in Phoenix in the postwar era — Motorola, Honeywell, Sperry Rand, General Electric, Kaiser, Unidynamics, and AiResearch — subsisted on Cold War defense contracts, and their decisions to locate in the region were shaped by the Pentagon’s policy of decentralizing military production away from the more vulnerable East Coast population centers. In this respect, their arrival was simply an extension of the wartime production programs that had drawn Goodyear, Alcoa, and others to Phoenix’s arsenals, ordnance plants and flight training facilities in the 1940s. These firms were pillars of the military-industrial complex, and the Sunbelt, or “Gunbelt” as Ann Markusen labeled it, became its homeland. 16 At the height of the Cold War, federal income for Arizona amounted to between 16 percent and 24 percent of the state’s economy, after which there were sizable upswings during the Vietnam War and the rearmament of the Reagan years. 17

The California Sunday Magazine: Urban Dreams

The officials wanted me to imagine this land replaced by a futuristic megacity called Amaravati. By 2035, they projected, it would be home to 11 million people and cover 3,322 square miles — ten times the area of New York City. The government had already acquired 90 percent of the land they’d need for the first major phase of the project, and as we drove farther, the fields were increasingly brown and fallow, because the government had already started paying the farmers to cease farming. [...]

Gandhi is losing this argument badly. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company has estimated that at its current rate of urbanization, India will need to build the equivalent of “a new Chicago every year.” Most of those Chicagos will materialize by expanding already existing cities. A handful will be built from scratch, and Amaravati is one of them. So why this particular Chicago, at this particular time, in this particular place? The short answer is that in 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh split in two, and the new state, called Telangana, got the capital. So what’s left of Andhra Pradesh needs a new capital city ASAP. [...]

Many have asked why Vijayawada couldn’t just have been refurbished to serve as the capital. The advantages of a “greenfield” project, as cities from scratch are called, are huge. “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness of laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasília,” the American megabuilder Robert Moses once said. “But when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Many Indian cities are currently struggling with the logistical agony of adding critical new metro lines to narrow old streets. [...]

A greenfield plan, though, also comes with no shortage of risks. Critics have pointed out that Amaravati’s chosen site is prone to flooding, unbearably hot for much of the year, and susceptible to earthquakes. These are technical problems with technical solutions. But there are much bigger risks.First is that planned cities often fail to come to life the way their planners hope. They are always a gamble — with the exception of war and space exploration, they are the costliest gamble humans make. South Korea hasn’t even finished building a $40 billion planned city called Songdo — which, like Amaravati, was conceived as a model “smart city” — and it’s already been dismissed, even by some techno-optimists, as a failure. China, despite an urbanization rate faster than India’s, has built several planned cities that are ghost towns. The danger with a planned capital is that it will be strictly administrative, without the spontaneity that makes a city thrive — an accusation that is often levied against the planned capitals India has already built.

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Jacobin Magazine: France Is Transformed

The second round marked a moderation of the results of the first round. Many surveys recorded that a majority of those interviewed did not want the newly elected president to be able to rely on a compliant majority in the future National Assembly. The En Marche! tactic that might have proven devastating — seeking to mobilize right-wing voters to wipe out the Left, and then to mobilize the Left to wipe out the Right — was in fact only a moderate success. [...]

When almost 60 percent of eligible voters abstain from casting their ballot — that is to say, when they are given the opportunity to vote in what is meant to be a decisive contest — this means that politics is in crisis and that democracy is ill. All the indices — structural abstention, the discredit that the parties have fallen into, distrust of elected officials — indicate that we have reached the point where in most people’s minds the political institutions have lost their meaning. [...]

If we do not free ourselves of this crisis, the very basis of any democracy will be under threat. Discontent and anxiety will not lead to concerted collective action, but to resentment, bitterness, and hatred. Combativeness will give way to the stigmatization of scapegoats, to flare-ups of violence followed by resignation. There is nothing to be won for emancipation in this game, where in the last instance it is always the dominant who will remain the strongest. [...]

By virtue of its majoritarian principles, the Fifth Republic reinvigorated the binary of left and right. But the centrist temptation persisted, insofar as both the Right and Left in power gave an appearance of fragility. In the mid-1960s the rise in opposition to Gaullism revived political centrism as a possible alternative to historical Gaullism. At that time, it took the “American form” of Jean Lecanuet’s Democratic Center and then the Union for French Democracy (UDF) under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, which sought to replace Gaullism by setting itself the ambition of rallying “two in three French people.”

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Haaretz: A Turkish Fantasyland and an Israeli Nightmare

Turkish gross domestic product officially grew 5% year on year in the first quarter, a rate of growth far in excess of what economists expected, and, on the surface, a remarkable comeback for an economy hit hard by last year’s coup. [...]

Last year, the government’s statistics bureau suddenly announced it was changing the way it calculates economic data, throwing away the conventional tools statisticians use for others that suddenly made the economy a fifth bigger than it had been. For Erdogan, however, that wasn’t enough, especially as real growth remained sluggish. To get the numbers that would make the Turks continue to feel good, he’s turned to a dangerous game of deficit spending and easy credit. [...]

The president insists he needs that power to defend the country, but the use he has made of it is actually destroying the Turkish economic miracle that began about the time he came to power. Foreign investors, who Turkey desperately needs to help offset a gaping current account deficit, have shunned the country. [...]

But there was a time not too long ago when Erdogan was hailed as a responsible leader and an example of how Islam and democracy could go hand in hand. It all changed in the space of a few years, into a Turkey of repressive politics and crony capitalism, which are more natural partners than Islam and democracy.

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Vox: How Steve Bannon sees the world (Feb 14, 2017)

Deutsche Welle: What does China want to achieve in Afghanistan?

China is already part of a Quadrilateral Coordination Group - comprising Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the United States - that was established to end the protracted Afghan crisis. The grouping has not achieved any significant breakthrough so far, with Islamabad and Kabul at loggerheads over the militancy issue, and Beijing and Washington lacking trust.

Experts say that China has heavily invested in Pakistan and that is why it wants peace in at least those areas where its "One Belt One Road" project is being implemented. China has built a port in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan as part of its nearly 60-billion-dollar project to establish overland and sea trade routes to reach Middle Eastern, European and African markets.

While Chinese authorities enjoy tremendous influence on Pakistan's civilian and military establishments, Afghanistan is still closer to the United States. Thus, bringing Kabul and Islamabad onto the same page over an Afghan solution won't be easy for Beijing. [...]

"China's counterterrorism measures exclude the US and India. Chinese authorities have historically treated New Delhi as a geopolitical rival. India's close ties with the US are also perceived as a threat in Beijing, therefore China prefers not to cooperate with India. It appears that Beijing is trying to construct a new security bloc in Asia. This, however, does not involve the Sino-Indian security cooperation," underlined Wolf.

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The Washington Post: Europe has been working to expose Russian meddling for years

In the recent French elections, the Kremlin-friendly presidential candidate lost to newcomer Emmanuel Macron, who was subjected to Russian hacking and false allegations in Russian-sponsored news outlets during the campaign. In Germany, all political parties have agreed not to employ automated bots in their social media campaigns because such hard-to-detect cybertools are frequently used by Russia to circulate bogus news accounts. [...]

Methods vary. Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. The Defense Ministry has created new units to seek out and counter Russian attempts to undermine Swedish society.

In Lithuania, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed “elves” link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes “Elves vs. Trolls.” [...]

Russia has not hidden its liking for information warfare. The chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013 that “informational conflict” is a key part of war. Actual military strength is only the final tool of a much subtler war-fighting strategy, he said. This year, the Defense Ministry announced the creation of a new cyberwarrior unit.

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Politico: Trump allies push White House to consider regime change in Tehran

“The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who speaks regularly with White House officials about foreign policy. “I don’t see how anyone can say America can be safe as long as you have in power a theocratic despotism,” he added.

Cotton advocated a combination of economic, diplomatic and covert actions to pressure Tehran’s government and “support internal domestic dissent” in the country. He noted that Iran has numerous minority ethnic groups, including Arabs, Turkmen and Balochs who “aren’t enthusiastic about living in a Persian Shiite despotism.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to endorse subverting the Iranian regime during recent testimony about the State Department’s budget when Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) asked the diplomat whether the Trump administration supports “a philosophy of regime change” in Iran. [...]

National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said that manipulating Iran’s internal politics is not currently a U.S. goal — nor among the “objectives” set in the initial stage of the White House’s routine Iran policy review. “An explicit affirmation of regime change in Iran as a policy is not really on the table,” Anton said. [...]

As a member of Congress, Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, last year publicly called for congressional action to “change Iranian behavior, and, ultimately, the Iranian regime.” And Derek Harvey, the Trump National Security Council’s director for Middle East affairs, told an audience at the conservative Hudson Institute in August 2015 that the Obama administration’s hope of working with moderates to steer Iran in a friendlier direction was a “misread” of “the nature and character of the regime,” whose structure he said he has carefully studied.

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The California Sunday Magazine: Postcards from America

When the photo agency Magnum embarked on its Postcards from America project in 2011, it was evoking a tradition that goes back at least to the 1930s, when the Farm Security Administration hired photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks to wander back roads and big cities and document what they found. The Farm Security Administration’s aim was to chronicle the Great Depression, and it believed that the lone photographer — solitary, almost invisible — was the best instrument to portray a nation coming apart.

Magnum was responding to another economic catastrophe, one that saw, among other things, the collapse of many of the commercial outlets that once proudly assigned and published photography. But rather than dispatching photographers on their own, Magnum sent them in groups, as if they were rock bands barnstorming the country. The first group, a quintet, bought an RV and started out on May 11, 2011, from San Antonio, Texas, and arrived in Oakland two weeks later, where they mounted a pop-up show at the Starline Social Club.

Since then there have been five more excursions, and the number of photographers rotating in and out of the band has expanded to 14. The most recent project took place in the Inland Empire, the vast expanse of desert, mountains, and sprawl east of Los Angeles that encompasses the third-largest metropolitan area of California. Instead of buying an RV, Jim Goldberg, Mark Power, Moises Saman, and Alessandra Sanguinetti rented a house in San Bernardino, overlapping with one another for two weeks. As with the previous projects, they employed students from local colleges as their assistants. Then they set out to look for what Evans, Lange, and Parks were in search of 80 years ago: images of hope and desolation, beauty and despair, that might help explain what kind of country we are and might become.

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