Haaretz: This Is Netanyahu's Dying Israel. Where the Doctor Is the Disease

Though they go by many names, we all know the symptoms and signs of the disease. There is the physical, psychological and genetic damage caused by generations of ever-deepening occupation, associated with and exacerbated by creeping annexation, and a behind-the-wall West Bank apartheid which is seeping unchecked into pre-1967 Israel.  [...]

This week, a barrage of rabid incitement was levelled squarely at President Reuven Rivlin, a level of extreme-right venom that approached the ferocity of the public-arena hate storm which directly preceded – and led to – the 1995 assassination of then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. [...]

In 20-plus years of having himself contributed to incitement against Arabs, against leftists and liberals, against Reform and Conservative American Jews, against human rights groups, against asylum seekers and a host of others, this week Benjamin Netanyahu managed to hit a new low. [...]

Israel crossed a line this week. Then again, of late, Israel crosses a line every week. The list of the disloyal grows by the day. Arabs and leftists and Reform Jews and rights activists have been joined by the chief of police, the Shin Bet, the Supreme Court, the attorney general, and the state comptroller – to name a few.

This is Netanyahu's Israel. Where a quarter to a third of the people stand with their ruler no matter what. No matter what segment of Israeli citizens his party demonizes – as long as it's leftists or Arabs or Reform Jews or Ashkenazim or kibbutznikim or Haaretz readers or Breaking the Silence or B'Tselem or a judge in the army who convicts a potential voter like Elor Azaria.

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openDemocracy: Populism has no side

All of these leaders were fighting the oligarchies while creating coalitions that produced new oligarchies and not more homogeneous and egalitarian societies. Latin America remains still marked by structural heterogeneity, both productive and notably social. Despite their very real differences, these populist platforms pursued in the various Latin American countries were marked by a dynamic of popular inclusion while benefitting from massive popular support which was engendered by a new urban industrial working class and which in turn was swiftly and steadily coopted by the political leaders –all of which was accompanied by the rise of new elites. [...]

But we have been through a third wave of populism. This came in the wake of the Pink Tide and was marked by a political shift in the populist tradition through the rise of a radical populism committed to refounding the “nation and reinventing twenty-first century socialism. Chaves, Morales and Correa were swept to power by the excluded masses – namely the urban poor and lower classes, destitute peasants as well as the impoverished and repressed Indigenous communities, those who continued to be the genuine outsiders in our societies, though now integrated into market relations. The “true people” were once more mobilized against the elites and oligarchies. [...]

The most immediate consequence was that natural resources, such a precious and outstanding differential, have been commodified in a disgraceful and irresponsible fashion. In agriculture as well as in large-scale mining projects, extractivism has stolen the scene and made the development model a corollary of violence, blood, and the denial of the most fundamental rights of those populations traditionally marginalized by growth. Extractivism went a step beyond, dominating the agricultural and animal husbandry sector. The spread of genetically modified organisms in Argentina and Brazil helped to wipe out native species. The environmental costs are extraordinarily high, and may not be reversible. Indigenous and peasant resistance to extractivism, meanwhile, has resulted in violent criminalization and numerous deaths. The death toll of environmental activists and nature defenders has never been so high in Latin America. We are back to colonial times, marked by violence, incarceration and expropriation.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: GDP, Mali music

GDP - Laurie Taylor talks to Lorenzo Fioramonti, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Pretoria, and author of a new book which exposes the flaws of an economic system which values this statistic, above all others, as a measure of prosperity and growth. They're joined by Douglas McWilliams, Deputy Chairman of the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Also, Mali music - Caspar Melville, Lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Industries at SOAS, discussed his study into the ways in which Eurocentric copyright is impacting on African musical traditions.

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Wendover Productions: The Nuclear Waste Problem

Politico: In defense of Christian Lindner

In the current political climate, a government bringing together such different animals as traditional conservatives, left-leaning environmentalists and free-market liberals was never going to be a safe bet. The parties clashed on taxation, agricultural policy, climate change and pretty much everything else. Migration turned out to be the most contentious issue, with the CSU and the Greens at odds over the issue of family reunifications of refugees. (Lindner’s FDP sided with the Bavarian conservatives on that one.) [...]

It was first and foremost in Angela Merkel’s interest to overcome obstacles and make the thing fly. The German chancellor has become the reigning world champion in running coalition governments. She excelled at bringing about the kind of hard-won compromises struck in late night meetings that power-sharing requires — and flourished at the expense of her coalition partners. Running a supremely complex government called Jamaica would have been Merkel’s magnum opus, a crowning achievement.

The other players, on the other hand, had less to gain. They wanted the power and the glory and the ministries, of course. But the political differences on key issues were such that each party had to bend over backwards to compromise. A Jamaica coalition, no matter what, would have been a tough sell to the most loyal voters. [...]

Lindner’s decision to pull out, on the other hand, suggests that the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy are kicking in. True, a fair amount of political stability — prioritized by Merkel in recent years — is essential to a functioning system. But in times of change, democracy also needs debate and dissent. Today’s Germany is nothing like the Weimar Republic; following years of political and economic stability, the country can cope with a little uncertainty.  

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Vox: “You can’t just say, ‘I hate Trump, vote for me’”: Danica Roem on her historic win

Danica Roem made history two weeks ago as America’s first openly transgender state lawmaker, and she already has a lot on her mind. [...]

The fact that Roem and dozens of other minority and LGBTQ candidates won state and municipal elections made Election Day 2017 a historic one. But the centerpiece of Roem’s campaign was fixing Route 28, a highway that has been prone to traffic jams for decades.

Her Republican opponent, incumbent Del. Robert Marshall, didn’t hesitate to try to turn Roem’s gender identity into a campaign issue. He once called himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe” and refused to debate Roem. In the runup to Election Day, the Virginia Republican Party paid for campaign flyers repeatedly referring to Roem with male pronouns and displaying a header that read: “Danica Roem, born male, has made a campaign issue out of transitioning to female.” [...]

My strategic assumption during the Democratic primary, when I was facing three other people, was that field was the most important thing — whoever knocked on the most doors would win. Whoever had the most quality conversations at the doors would win. The volunteers that we had come out, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people knocked doors for us. That’s how you win.

We set out to knock 20,000 doors during the last four days of the election for get out the vote. We made a full pass through our universe of our targeted doors the first day, which means that over the next few days, we hit every single door again — whichever doors hadn’t responded. [...]

As I said on election night, discrimination is a disqualifier. One of my mantras for the campaign was, “Flip the script.” Anytime anyone did something negative to me, I would flip it and turn it into a positive. And when they went all in on gender, when they used an anti-transgender slur, “transgenderism,” which isn’t even a word, it’s just made-up bullshit.

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Vox: The bizarre saga of the Lebanese prime minister’s un-resignation

Hariri’s resignation was destabilizing in part because the Lebanese political system requires different religious groups to share power: Lebanon’s prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, the president must be a Maronite Christian, and the parliamentary speaker must be a Shia Muslim. Saudi Arabia, as the regional Sunni leader, usually backs the prime minister — as it seems to with Hariri. [...]

Had Hariri not returned, there would likely have been a political tug-of-war between Saudi Arabia and Iran to fill the power vacuum. And if Iran had to focus on a protracted political crisis in Lebanon, it would’ve had less time to focus on the wars in Yemen and Syria, Saab noted, which meant Iran might not have been able to fight Saudi Arabia’s proxies as aggressively. [...]

Despite the accusations, an actual Hezbollah-Saudi war was unlikely. “Casting Lebanon as a Hezbollah-dominated pariah state does make waging a war simpler, so I think it’s safe to say the chance of such a war has increased,” Faysal Itani, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, told me. “But I don’t think it has increased dramatically, because no one seems willing to fight this war.” [...]

The growing tensions in the region helped explain why French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to Saudi Arabia on November 10 in an unscheduled two-hour visit to discuss the tensions between Beirut and Riyadh. France and Lebanon have a historically close relationship, as France was the ruling colonial power in Lebanon from the end of the Ottoman Empire until Lebanon’s independence in 1944. It’s unclear if Macron’s visit had any effect, though.

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Al Jazeera: What is behind the covert Israeli-Saudi relations?

The inclusion of Israel as a potential partner reflects a break from the fragmented order in the Middle East, where since the early 2000s the United States has sought to create a hegemonic system to dominate West-friendly states, brought about by either elections or deposition. [...]

According to Ofer Zalzberg from the International Crisis Group, this shifting political order must pertain to the parameters of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which the US and Saudi leaders see as an imperative condition for enabling such a regional cooperation. [...]

"Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states - excluding Qatar - have two strategic threats: Iran and the Salafi or radical Islamic terrorism," Michael said. "Unfortunately, the US left a vacuum in the region which was filled by the Russians in Syria and by the Iranians and their proxies in other parts of the Middle East. [...]

Israel has a military, nuclear and hi-tech capability not matched by other countries in the region, he added. The alignment of some of the Arab countries to the interests of Israel is due to maintaining their control under hegemonic arrangements.

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CityLab: Brexit Just Got Real

On the surface of it, these effects might seem slight. The European Banking Authority, which oversees the E.U.’s banking sector with measures such as stress tests, employs just 167 people—barely enough to occupy a whole floor of the East London skyscraper where it currently lodges. The European Medicines Agency, which evaluates and regulates European medical products, is a little more hefty at 900 employees. Taken together, the two agencies still constitute barely a drop in London’s huge employment ocean. But their departure from the British capital still matters.

For a start, they draw in money, both from their own budgets and through the many officials who visit London to conduct business with them. It’s estimated, for example, that those calling on the EMA fill around 350 hotel rooms every week. For a city as small as Amsterdam, with less than a tenth of London’s population, that alone is a major boost in income.

More significantly, the moves shift the map of European influence. Paris gaining the EBA is a major coup for its aspirations to become the E.U.’s de facto financial capital, a position currently held by Frankfurt, which failed to win its bid to host the agency. The EBA’s move to Paris could bring other relocations in its wake and replace much of the past year or so’s bluster about profiting from Brexit with something concrete. It also sets the scene for what may be a tug-of-war between Paris and Frankfurt for greater influence, one underlined by Goldman Sachs’ announcement yesterday that both cities would host its future European headquarters.

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