CityLab: Why New York City Is Getting Its Money Out of Fossil Fuels

On Tuesday, New York City announced it would divest pension funds from fossil fuel interests, joining New York State, a cadre of other U.S. cities, and some private universities who say they will pull investments from companies that extract coal, gas, and oil. De Blasio also announced the city’s plans to sue five major oil companies for their role in damages brought on the city by climate disasters. [...]

The money on the table is significant. New York state’s common retirement fund is the third-largest in the nation, worth $200 billion, and provides pensions for more than 1 million New Yorkers. The fund has stakes in 50 oil and gas companies, with $1 billion tied to ExxonMobil alone. New York City’s pension fund, which pays for city employees like police officers, firefighters, and teachers, is also a huge bucket, worth $191 billion. Currently, $5 billion is currently tied up in fossil fuels. (For comparison, San Francisco’s has invested $1 billion; and Seattle’s, $17.6 million.) [...]

But it’s become as much an economic strategy as an environmental one. “Quickly, that advocacy opened the black box of the business model of the fossil fuel industry, and drew the attention of investors who said: Wait, there’s a whole financial conversation as well,” Dorsey said. As founder of 350.org Bill McKibben sees it, the future of energy—and, by extension, the financial markets—lies elsewhere. [...]

Divestment has been criticized by some as an empty, primarily symbolic move: Each million- or billion-dollar divestiture can have only marginal ripple effects to a $5 trillion dollar fossil fuel industry. Multi-billionaire Bill Gates called divestment a “false solution” in 2015, arguing that pouring funds into renewable energy sources—to ignite innovation in those sectors—would be more effective. Since then, however, he has divested his $187 million stake in BP oil.

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Foreign Affairs: Don’t Speak, Memory

Despite this bloody history, Russian authorities today avoid giving official assessments of either the Soviet past in general or individual Communist leaders in particular. That was not always the case. In 1987, during the period of liberalization known as glasnost, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in which he said that Stalin had committed “enormous and unforgivable” crimes. Today, such a clear statement would be unthinkable. In 2000, during his first inauguration as president, Putin set the new official tone, declaring that “there have been both tragic and brilliant pages in our history.” 

Since then, the Kremlin has maintained this official line. On the one hand, in 2015, the government announced a new policy called the Program for Commemorating the Victims of Political Repression. Last October, as part of that policy, Moscow saw the opening of the Wall of Grief, a memorial to the victims of Soviet totalitarianism. This marked an important watershed: official government acknowledgment of the scale and gravity of the mass repressions. But many human rights advocates have expressed skepticism of the Russian government’s ability to properly acknowledge the past. They point to the growing human rights violations in Russia and the fact that the archives containing the records of the security services’ crimes remain closed.  [...]

In that light, the new popular Russian ideology is worrying. It consists of a paternalistic conception of government paired with the glorification of the past, including the entire Soviet period. The ideology’s basic principles are simple: the government is always right, and if in the past its policies created any victims, even a great many of them, they were necessary to continue down the special path chosen by the country. To ensure popular acceptance of these ideas, the state increasingly intervenes in the teaching of history.

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The New York Review of Books: Memories of Mississippi

In a few days, with advice and contacts from John, I went on to Nashville, Tennessee, then to the SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, only to be told by the woman who opened the door that “everybody” was down in Albany. Rather than take a segregated seat on the Atlanta-Albany bus, with whites sitting in front, blacks in the rear, I stood. The only other person standing was a nattily dressed black man who suggested I not try to reach the colored half of town at night. That turned out to be Wyatt Tee Walker, one of Dr. King’s lieutenants. It was a hot and humid night, with bugs flying in the bright lights of the Albany Greyhound station. An overweight policeman stood in front of me as I stepped off the bus. [...]

Then I made one walk downtown too many. As I passed the small cinderblock Cleveland police station, an officer stepped out from the parking lot and pulled me inside. I sat across from the chief as he politely explained to me that “in order to engage in the practice of photography” in Cleveland I needed to post a $1,000 bond. He opened a book of ordinances and pointed to the line. Outside in the parking lot, the policeman who had pulled me in was waiting. Clearly agitated, he explained with deep emotion that “we don’t mix the races down here.” He was sweating and rocking back and forth. Bizarre as it sounds, Frank Smith had told me that if I got into trouble I should just say I was black. This was apparently a common SNCC ruse, but it escaped me that I was supposed to say that it was a black woman who numbered among my recent ancestors. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “my grandfather was colored.” The policeman went completely crazy, reached for the gun on his belt, and said he would kill me right there on the spot. I thought he meant it. [...]

When the summer project of 1964 started, bringing a thousand mostly white Northern college students into Mississippi, I didn’t particularly want to go. For one thing, there were now many other people photographing the movement. For another, I thought voter registration was a bore. I found direct action, sit-ins, and marches, all of which often led to arrests, more exciting to photograph. Then, on June 21, a week before the project started, two workers and a summer volunteer were spotted changing a flat tire outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and taken to jail while the sheriff gathered the Klan to plan their murder. James Chaney was a black Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) worker from Meridian. He died, along with his best friend, a professional organizer with CORE from New York City named Mickey Schwerner, and Andy Goodman, a Queens College student and summer volunteer who had been in the South two days. A black Southerner and two Jewish boys from New York were lynched for trying to register African Americans to vote in a state that had lost the Civil War—but won back the power over their former slaves twenty years later by denying the right to vote through terror.

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The Atlantic: The Voters Abandoning Donald Trump

Trump retains important pillars of support. Given that he started in such a strong position with those blue-collar whites, even after that decline he still holds a formidable level of loyalty among them—particularly men and those over 50 years old. What’s more, he has established a modest but durable beachhead among African American and Hispanic men, even while confronting overwhelming opposition from women in those demographic groups.

Together, the results crystallize the bet Trump is making for his own reelection in 2020, and for his party’s chances in November’s election: that he can mobilize enough support among older and blue-collar (as well as rural and evangelical) whites to offset the intense resistance he’s provoked from groups that are all growing in the electorate: Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites—particularly the women among them. [...]

Trump’s support rapidly rises among blue-collar white men older than 35 and spikes past two-thirds for those above 50. But his position has deteriorated among white women without a college degree. Last year he carried 61 percent of them. But in the new SurveyMonkey average, they split evenly, with 49 percent approval and 49 percent disapproval. His approval rating among non-college-educated white women never rises above 54 percent in any age group, even those older than 50. From February through December, Trump’s approval rating fell more with middle-aged blue-collar white women than any other group. [...]

Among African Americans and Hispanics, reactions to Trump depend more on gender than age or education. In every age group, and at every level of education, about twice as many African American men as women gave Trump positive marks. In all, 23 percent of black men approved of Trump’s performance versus 11 percent of black women. “The outlier here isn’t [black] men … it’s [black] women, where you have near-universal disapproval of Trump,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who studies African American voters. Still, black men are one of the few groups for which Trump’s 2017 average approval rating significantly exceeds his 2016 vote share.

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Haaretz: Why I'm Not a Zionist - and Why You're Not, Either

I’m not going to dwell here on the dual ironies of the government claiming Israel is a functioning democracy while denying entry to its critics, and the wailing from those who want to boycott an entire country and visit it at the same time. I’ve scant expectations of either side making any logical or moral sense. But the by-now-standard reaction from the opponents of every latest wheeze by the government still mystifies me. [...]

Their problem is with the latest racist law going through the Knesset, deportation of African asylum-seekers, discrimination against non-Jewish citizens and non-Orthodox Jews, the killing or arrest of a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank, the ongoing iniquities of the occupation and the gradual erosion of Israeli democracy. [...]

Many of those on the left who are now denying they are Zionists would probably approve wholeheartedly of the intellectuals of Brit Shalom who, in the 1920s, called for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state in Mandatory Palestine and accused the rest of the Zionist establishment of perverting Herzl's vision. The enlightened German-born professors who founded both Brit Shalom and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem claimed to be the "true Zionists." [...]

I'm Jewish and Israeli and believe we can fix Israel’s massive problems and injustices, but I’m not a Zionist, in the same way I'm not a Pharisee, a Roundhead or an Abolitionist. I may have been had I lived in the relevant period in history, but I can't belong to, or leave, a movement whose purpose ended long before I was born. 

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Haaretz: What the 'One-state Solution' Really Means: Israeli-sanctioned Apartheid or Eternal, Bloody Civil War

The Likud Central Committee and the Jewish Voice for Peace have joined the same team, along with other extremist forces on the right and the left. Both are intent on establishing a bi-national state in place of the Jewish state of Israel. Both are committed to a one-state solution that will put an end to Israel as a Jewish and democratic commonwealth. Both constitute a mortal danger to mainstream Zionism. [...]

Contrary to widespread press reports, the awkwardly worded resolution adopted that evening did not actually call for the formal annexation of territories. Its intention was to encourage the application of Israeli law in the West Bank to Jews - and Jews alone.

In fact, this is already the case; but the current legal situation is temporary, at least in theory, and is dependent on the approval of the military governor of the territories, who has ultimate legal authority. But if the resolution were to be passed into law, as Likud now demands, the legal discrimination would become official Israeli policy. [...]

And if adopted by the Knesset, the decision would put in place some form of apartheid - a word that most of us in the mainstream Jewish community have carefully avoided until now. But since the Likud resolution intends to apply two different sets of legal rules to different populations occupying the same territory, there is simply no word other than "apartheid" that fits.

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openDemocracy: Has rape become a weapon to silence atheists in Bangladesh?

This amendment aimed to curb free speech and targeted bloggers and writers who were trying to promote secular values in a civilised and peaceful way. Atheists were brutally attacked and several were killed in subsequent bloodbaths in 2015 and 2016. [...]

The organised persecution of atheists in Bangladesh began in 2013, following the Shahbag movement during which secular activists called for the hanging of Islamist politicians accused of war crimes during the 1971 war of independence, and the murder of atheist blogger Rajib Haider. [...]

The prime minister has herself publicly criticised those who speak out against religious belief. In 2015 she told Time magazine: “If anybody thinks they have no religion, OK, it’s their personal view... But they have no right to write or speak against any religion."

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Vox:Study suggests Trump’s “Muslim ban” actually improved attitudes toward Muslims

When President Donald Trump announced his “Muslim ban” barring visitors and would-be refugees alike from six majority-Muslim countries early last year, critics worried it might prompt an additional wave of Islamophobia across the United States, intensifying the anti-Islamic sentiments that had been a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign. [...]

The authors found that the national discourse about the Muslim ban — and a general sense from liberal and mainstream media that the policy was at odds with “American values” — prompted some respondents to shift their attitudes, ultimately causing many Americans who had previously supported or been neutral on the issue of Trump’s Muslim ban to come down against it. [...]

This is striking in part because, according to the study’s authors, sudden significant shifts in public opinion tend to be rare. Second, those whose views shifted most radically were those who cited their identity as Americans as a major part of their self-conception overall. This suggests that public debate that centered on the Muslim ban being “un-American,” or otherwise counter to American values of openness and hospitality toward foreigners, had contributed to this shift. Write the study’s authors:

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Politico: Beginnings of a Turkish-German bromance

The meeting might have drawn little notice were German-Turkish relations not at their lowest point in decades. Berlin has led criticism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s turn toward authoritarianism, which has included the arrest of a number of German citizens on what Berlin considers bogus grounds.

The Turkish leader has responded with a string of ad hominem attacks, accusing German companies of supporting “terror” in his country and drawing comparisons between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Nazis. Erdoğan has also lashed out at several other European countries and the U.S., suggesting they were trying to undermine Turkey in various ways.

The breakdown of the relationship with Germany has not been without cost. Tensions with Turkey’s most important trading partner and long a key ally in Europe has left Ankara particularly isolated. And with millions of Turks living in Germany, the collapse in the bilateral relationship worries many in Berlin, as well. [...]

The new tune suggests the Turkish leader is starting to take the economic impact of Turkey’s growing isolation seriously. Since the 2016 failed coup against Erdoğan, Turkey’s currency has taken a nosedive.

While the cheap lira has boosted exports and fueled growth, it has also led to a spike in inflation, which is near a 15-year high. Government interference in the economy has added to foreign investors’ concerns about Turkey’s course, and they are turning away from the country.  

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