The Atlantic: 'It's a Mistake to Underestimate China'

But there are few signs that Washington has the political appetite to compete with the kinds of investments China has been making around the world. The most visible aspect of Beijing’s ambition to extend its economic and political influence around the world is the Belt and Road initiative, a massive infrastructure plan that aims to connect China to its Asian neighbors and farther afield. Think of it as a hub-and-spoke model: China, the hub, builds infrastructure in countries around the world, the spokes, in order to facilitate trade. China is building roads, bridges, seaports, and airports in more than 60 countries to facilitate the import of raw material in order to further fuel its own economic growth while it searches for new markets. Unlike the West, China offers cheap loans, doesn’t ask questions about human rights or the environment, and doesn’t export its political ideology. [...]

To be sure, there are challenges to China’s ambition. For one thing, the market logic underpinning some Belt and Road projects is questionable. One example: China’s investment in a Sri Lankan port didn’t get the traffic or cargo it had expected, saddling the Sri Lankan government with massive debt that it had trouble paying off. For another, the reaction to Belt and Road-funded projects isn’t always positive. Vietnam and Burma are good examples. In those countries, China is accused of importing workers, degrading the environment, building shoddy infrastructure, and eroding sovereignty. Meanwhile, regional rivals like India, Japan, and Russia, which fears China’s influence in Central Asia, are wary of Belt and Road. [...]

But, ultimately, Kilman pointed out, “none of these challenges are insurmountable” for China. Indeed, if Beijing has shown one thing, it’s the ability to learn from its mistakes. For instance, while some of its projects may be white elephants, such as the one in Sri Lanka, they serve an important geopolitical goal; following complaints and protests in other countries, China has built local capacity and provided jobs. “Not all of what China is doing is market-driven, but there are infrastructure needs in the Indian Ocean area,” Kliman said. China is meeting those needs.  

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Quartz: Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts

Rather than fake news or alternative facts, the primary danger of these times are selective facts. Selective facts are “true” facts that only tells us part of the story, and they influence our views on every issue from gun control to Islamic terrorism to free trade. [...]

Business leaders of media organizations therefore consciously focus on what readers want, not what they need to make the best decisions—even though most of us use news for the latter purpose. Sam Zell, the former CEO of Tribune, is characteristically blunt, telling journalists, “You need to help me by being a journalist that focuses on what readers want and therefore generates more revenue.” Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch echoes him, saying “Stop writing articles to win Pulitzer Prizes…Give people what they want to read and make it interesting.” On the social media side, Mark Zuckerburg, likely the most powerful news editor in human history (though, of course, he wouldn’t call himself that), designed an algorithm that focuses on featuring news we’re most likely to engage with. [...]

This is why some Americans might think there is a “war on the West” by the Muslim world. American news sources like the New York Times cover Western terrorist attacks by Muslims more than any other terrorist attacks, even though most victims of Islamic terrorist incidents are Muslim. As one American accurately observed in an article in the New York Times, “I don’t begrudge my grandma who never met a Muslim in her life—but all she sees on TV are Muslims blowing things up. It is not irrational that people are worried.”

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Slate: What Is Going to Happen to Zimbabwe Now?

Michelle Faul: It came as a shock. It came as a shock to everybody, even though I was home for three weeks last month, and everyone was saying, “Something’s got to happen. It cannot continue. People are suffering so much.” People are starving in my country. It’s disgraceful. Mugabe inherited, when we finally got independent black rule in 1980, a country that was self-sufficient. Five thousand white farmers, whatever their politics—and I am black—produced enough food to feed more than 8 million people, and food for export. And he has reduced our nation to one in which one-third of the people need food aid. Another third of the nation has left. We are scattered all over the world. [...]

I said Emmerson Mnangagwa is evil because he is considered the mastermind or what we called, or Mugabe called, Gukurahundi. This means the cleaning of the chaff—when you have wheat and clean it. That was a project to try and wipe out the minority Ndebele people. Nobody knows how many people were killed between 1984 and about 1988. I had to leave the country. I was forced to leave my country as a result of my reporting on Gukurahundi. Perhaps 20,000, perhaps 30,000 people were killed, and Emmerson Mnangagwa is considered the mastermind of those killings. [...]

I think Mnangagwa realizes that for the country to have any kind of positive future it can’t continue in the way it has been ruled. Mnangagwa has indicated that he would be willing to allow white farmers to return to Zimbabwe and farm the land. What happened with that project was that Mugabe accused the white farmers of supporting the opposition MDC party, which we believe has won at least two out of three of the last elections. He said the white farmers were supporting his opponents, which is when he began his program of violently forcing them from the land. The real reason, we think, was that his moneybags—an Indian chap who had done all his laundering of money for him—had taken off with all the veterans’ pension money. Mugabe no longer had money to pay veterans; the veterans were getting angry. So instead he said, “I will give you land. You can go take the farms.” [...]

I would suspect that they will be allowed to retire in disgrace. What I would like to see is someone like Mugabe being sent to the International Criminal Court to face trial for all the killings that occurred and other human rights abuses. Nobody knows how many people have died because of Mugabe’s destruction of everything he built up. He built up a fabulous education system. He was a teacher. He then destroyed it.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Catholic Cure for Poverty

The Catholic Church is often held up as the primary culprit, but it is not the only guilty party in this story. It acted in partnership with the state and elites, creating an institutional nexus that rejected social-democratic solutions to poverty and pushed back against women’s liberation. Instead, the effects of poverty became transformed into moral issues to be solved by institutionalization — a process that undergirded Ireland’s carceral state and profoundly impacted the treatment of women and children in the country. [...]

Yet many of the hopes of this period were dashed. Politically, socially, and economically, the 1920s and ’30s were full of setbacks: censorship was introduced, legal divorce was abolished, women were banned from sitting on juries, the civil service marriage bar was introduced along with quotas for women working in industry, and contraceptives were banned. The radical women of the revolution — like many of their male counterparts — disappeared from public life or were silenced. [...]

Their children were usually adopted illegally from the homes, and as historian Michael Dwyer has demonstrated, some babies were even used for medical testing by universities and pharmaceutical companies. One company, Wellcome, conducted vaccine trials from 1930 to 1977 in children’s institutions in Dublin, Cork, and Tipperary that were sanctioned and overseen by state-salaried medical officers and academics.

Women’s supposed “immorality” was a welcome red herring, distracting from the realities of poverty, unemployment, poor housing, and high infant mortality. In debates on the state provision of a social safety net, women were depicted as “blackmailers” and “temptresses,” and while the married mother was revered in popular culture, the unwed mother was deemed “illegitimate.” Oliver St John Gogarty summed up the situation well in 1928, declaring to the senate: “it is high time that the people of this country find some other way of loving God than by hating women.” [...]

The unwillingness to recognize the central role of class, poverty, and sexism in policing Irish families obscures the connection of past abuses to present ones. The state’s relationship to Ireland’s Travelling community is illustrative. Here again the extraordinary poverty of Travellers has been cast as a cultural and moral issue — eliding the need for state social services, jobs programs, and anti-discriminatory legislation.

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Social Europe: Jamaica And The Eurozone (26 October 2017)

The source of this disturbance is the Free Democratic Party (FDP) which is prepared to follow a radicalized Schäuble strategy.  The FDP manifesto is clear: in order to avoid permanent wrong incentives, ‘we want to continuously reduce the lending capacity of the ESM (European Stability Mechanism) until it comes to a long—term end‘. Of course, this statement is not meant as a serious economic policy statement that aims to improve the eurozone’s institutional setup. First, , it is an expression of an ideological fixation which plays with a deep-seated narrative in German politics. In this sense such a policy proposal is not unique to the FDP but can be found in many segments of German political opinion: it is the German taxpayer who paid for the fiscal profligacy of the eurozone’s southern periphery, and this must come to an end. And it is the Free Democrats who see it as their task to do just that. [...]

Of course, Schäuble, the politic pro that he is, did not lose any time in securing backing for his tough line by leaking the ‘non-paper’ ‚Paving the Way to a Stability Union’ of his experts in the Finance Ministry which reflects the FDP program 1:1. Chances are that this may soon become official German policy. When it comes to the eurozone, the difference with the proposals of the AfD is extremely slight. And so is the difference to the current policy stance of CDU/CSU, both of which are very much in favor of stamping German interests on the eurozone’s architecture. Programmatically, the Greens have different views on eurozone reforms but for them getting into power may override all else. In the past, the Green Party did not try to differ from the mainstream pack when it came to crisis management in the eurozone. Seen in this light, the FDP is only spelling out what a majority of parliamentarians thinks and what three of the four Jamaica parties favor. [...]

The question, though, is why the block of CDU/CSU/FDP takes such a harsh stance? The best answer is given by Schäuble in his long interview with the Financial Times where he again and again stated that the rules-oriented austerity policy was a huge success. And indeed, this view is deeply entrenched in German public discourse, and even more so in Germany’s economic branch. In the US, the recession lasted about a year and a half – from December 2007 to June 2009.  By way of contrast, the eurozone recession started technically in January 2008, ending April 2009 only to turn into a long recession from Q3 2011 until Q3 2013. The eurozone thereby on average lost substantial amounts of income in comparison to the US, largely because of different fiscal policy stances. Moreover, without the intervention of Draghi and the policy change of the ECB (QE), the outcome would have even been worse. The attempt to declare the crisis strategy of Schäuble & Co a success story has no empirical base whatever German public discourse asserts.

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CityLab: Vandals Are Attacking Berlin's Powerful Citywide Holocaust Memorial

The vandals certainly chose their date carefully. In the run-up to November 9th, the 69th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms, vandals in the Britz neighborhood of southern Berlin prized away 16 so-called Stolpersteine (literally “stumbling blocks”), brass cobblestones commemorating victims of the Nazis. Embedded in sidewalks outside the victims’ former homes, they detail the deportations and deaths (and, occasionally, escapes) under Nazi terror. They mark dwellings of people from persecuted groups, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and Jehovah’s witnesses. [...]

That the desecration of any Holocaust memorial matters deeply is too obvious to be worth stating. The attacks on these stones are especially painful because Stolpersteine might be among the most powerful monuments to the victims of tyranny yet created. When introduced in the 1990s by artist Gunter Demnig, they offered a privately funded alternative to the tradition of larger-than-life commemorative monuments commissioned by the state (which are often powerful in their own right). Rather than becoming part of a city’s catalog of heritage—places where dignitaries came to lay flowers—these markers distributed around the city force people to integrate the memory of Nazi atrocity into their daily lives. [...]

But why this sudden spike in Berlin? As across Europe, the extreme right is currently on the rise in Germany. On September 24, they even entered Germany’s national parliament in the form of the AfD, an extreme-right party which nonetheless loathes being described that way. There’s no direct evidence to link the rise of the AfD with the Stolpersteine vandalisms. One nauseating detail, however, is that this October, AfD representatives in the borough where the vandalism happened (Neukölln) protested the idea of public funding for Stolpersteine—because concentrating on Nazi victims was supposedly offensive to people who suffered under the East German government, under whose jurisdiction Neukölln never fell. This kind of public denigration of the monuments’ role may not be a direct cause of their vandalism, but it certainly doesn’t help.

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Al Jazeera: How has Islamophobia changed over the past 20 years?

"Over the past two decades awareness of Islamophobia has increased, whether in terms of discrimination against Muslims, or in terms of public and policy discussion of it," the report said.

"It is good that British Muslims increasingly challenge Islamophobia. However, to challenge and end Islamophobia and all forms of racism effectively, we all need to confront and condemn it where we see it, and commit to raising awareness in others of its wider effects." [...]

Published in 1997, Runnymede's report "Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All" shed light on the considerable growth in anti-Muslim prejudice and the profound impact it had on the lives of British Muslims, identifying and catapulting the relatively unknown term and issue of "Islamophobia" into public consciousness. [...]

Tuesday's report criticised the government's ambiguous definition of the term Islamophobia, stating that while it still retained some purchase being widely used amongst politicians and the public, it was poorly understood, detracting from the multifaceted nature of contemporary anti-Islam sentiment as well as the lived experiences of individuals and communities. [...]

"One of the things we wanted to show in the report is that all these things are interlinked. Policy focus and media representation which frame Muslims in a particular way feeds particular stereotypes about Muslims. They all feed off each other and the effects manifest in larger labour market penalties, larger mental health impact, and penalties in the criminal justice system."

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Quartz: Walmart's big investment in workers is paying off

Two years ago, facing moribund sales in its stores and stiff competition online, Walmart committed $2.7 billion to improving employee wages and training. Shares tumbled and analysts scratched their heads; it was not the kind of news Wall Street tends to embrace.

But Walmart’s decision to invest in workers is now paying off with increased sales both in stores and online, as the the world’s biggest retailer reported third-quarter earnings today (Nov. 16) that surpassed analyst estimates.

Revenue from stores open at least a year rose 2.7%, a substantial increase given the struggles most retailers are facing. And online sales jumped 50%, as the company is now counting results from Amazon competitor Jet.com, which Walmart purchased last year. [...]

Walmart still has a ways to go to outrun its history of questionable business practices and mistreatment of workers. Its earnings were impacted by a $283 million expense to settle overseas bribery accusations, and last week a group of female employees sued in federal court, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender, and are seeking class-action status. A Walmart spokesman told Bloomberg that a class-action suit isn’t appropriate because the various claims don’t represent how most women at the company were treated.

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The Guardian: The Guardian view on white nationalism: a rising danger

The end of the second world war gave rise in the west to a very different ideal of nationhood. The European Union was built on the hope that national boundaries might become very much less salient, preserved as wrinkles on the gentle face of history rather than its fixed expression; and after the fall of the Berlin Wall it seemed that this pattern must in time spread east, even into the former Yugoslavia. If there was one lesson that every European – and not just Jewish ones – had learned from the first half of the 20th century, it was “never again”.

Never has that slogan sounded more hollow than on Saturday, when a white nationalist parade drew 60,000 people, mostly men, to Warsaw to march through the streets with most banners proclaiming “We want God” but others demanding a “White Poland”, “A holocaust for Muslims”, and “a brotherhood of white nations” – as if that had worked out after 1918. Of course, the breakdown of international order between the wars was blamed by the far right on Jews, whereas the threat now is supposed to be Muslims. But the present coalition extends to traditional antisemites, too. The organisers included groups who had been active in the antisemitic agitation of 1930s Poland, and Richard Spencer, the American neo-Nazi, had been invited, although he was kept out of the country by the merely authoritarian nationalist Law and Justice party.

Self-conscious Nazis are still a very small part of this movement. We are not seeing a straightforward return to the 1930s. But the slogans shouted today still wake disturbing echoes from 80 years ago. What we have once more is a growing cohort of men who know that the economy has no dignified use for them, and who feel this insult to their own personal self-worth is also an insult to the nation, the religion, or even the race, that they are proud to belong to. Their reaction brings shame on all three. These are dangerous emotions. When we watch these marches, we should remember the delirious enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of the war whose ghastly end four years later we still commemorate. The hard-won common sense of each generation is easily forgotten by the children to whom it is offered as a gift. The only counter to this kind of twisted idealism is an idealism of progress and decency which can carry an equivalent meaning and urgency, but values all people for themselves, not for their race or creed.

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