openDemocracy: “Putin is your God!”

The Kyiv Patriarchate is a national church that its head, Patriarch Filaret, calls “genuinely Ukrainian” — the protector of the national heritage. Other Orthodox churches around the world refuse to recognise it, although, according to surveys, it enjoys considerable support from Ukrainian society. The dead child had been baptised into this church.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a completely different matter. Its leadership seems condemned to spend each day reconciling the irreconcilable. On the one hand, there’s its loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate, and on the other its loyalty to the Ukrainian society, which has been dragged into an armed conflict known unofficially as the “Ukrainian-Russian war”. It was a priest of this church who refused to read the funeral service to the boy in Zaporizhzhya — just because the child had been baptised in a church belonging to the Kyiv Patriarchate. [...]

Since 2014 the UOC’s public face has been firmly associated with Russia and Russian politics — because that is how it’s presented to the public. For example, despite the fact that its official name is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Ukrainian media invariably refer to it as “the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine” or the “Russian Orthodox Church”. This strategy, whether by accident or design, neatly fits the image of an enemy. Ordinary Ukrainians who don’t go to church or care about religious minutiae will watch news about the war with Russia on TV and quite reasonably ask themselves what the Russian Orthodox Church is doing in their country. [...]

Yet this attempt to override the national just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because the UOC is promoting as un-national, supra-national, something that is in fact only too national, or, to put it bluntly, Russian. Fraternal peoples, the “reunification of Ukraine and Russia” — these are all Soviet clichés that will sooner or later lead seminary students, or indeed ordinary believers, to ask the simple question: if we are brothers, if we profess a common faith, then why is there a border between us? In their most radical variations, these ideas relate to the concept of a “Russian World” or “Holy Rus”, as it was called a few years ago when Moscow Patriarch Kirill was actively promoting the idea. This is why the patriotically-minded part of the Ukrainian population sees UOC as an apostle of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

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The Atlantic: America’s Mirror on the Wall

Nativism is nothing new. Each era when the nation liberalized its immigration policies to let more people into the country, the open doors have quickly been followed by a fierce backlash. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 followed several years of brutal violence against Chinese workers. The influx of immigrants in the early 20th century from Eastern and Southern Europe ended after a decade of intense nativist attack that found respectability at the highest levels of power. Scholarly experts were praised when they promoted the pseudo-science of eugenics to demonstrate how the brains of the urban newcomers were inferior. Politicians warned of “race suicide” for Anglo-Saxons and even progressive reformers were desperate to Americanize the “foreigners” who were living in cities like New York and Chicago. Labor leaders in the burgeoning union movement, the historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote, were so deeply divided along ethnic and racial lines before the 1930s that effective organization and strike activity often proved impossible to sustain. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that imposed a national quota system that limited the number of immigration visas to be granted to specific nationalities, particularly those regarded as inferior to “Anglo-Saxon” stock (such as Italians or Eastern Europeans), in order to restrict immigration that would remain in place until 1965.

Racism has always been in the American bloodstream. Of course, the national economy and its government were founded on the institution of slavery. The subjugation and importation of Africans to the American South was at the heart of the cotton trade. Americans fought an entire Civil War before slavery came to an end, and the nation subsequently experimented with a bold plan for Reconstruction, only to see noxious Jim Crow laws put into place that denied African Americans their newly won political rights and created a racially segregated economy that left much of the freed population living in conditions that were decisively separate and unequal. Notwithstanding the enormous progress born out of the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans have learned in recent years how little progress the nation has made on problems like institutional racism. Residential segregation continues, racism shapes every part of the American criminal-justice system, and American educational policies perpetually place significant portions of the population in a disadvantaged position simply because of the color of their skin. In 1968, the Kerner Commission warned that, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal,” and that "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.” That assessment could easily apply to today, where segregation and racial inequality remain lingering problems. [...]

The expansion of white male suffrage in the 19th century depended on the perpetuation of a system where African Americans and women were denied the right to vote. President Andrew Jackson, whose portrait now occupies the Oval Office, is an ongoing reminder of these contradictory impulses. During the New Deal—a highpoint of liberalism—FDR famously won the support of southern Democratic committee chairmen in the House and Senate by excluding the African American workforce from programs such as Social Security. Policies such as unemployment insurance, the historian Linda Gordon recounted, were crafted around the ideal of the single male wage-earning family, leaving women to be brought under coverage only as widows or mothers. Though the nation rejected Alabama Governor George Wallace’s troubling brand of racist populism during his presidential runs in 1964 and 1968, submerged appeals to such sentiments could be found as part of the campaign rhetoric of Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Both men called for “law and order” in the cities railed against dishonest welfare recipients, and praised states’ rights in their right-wing appeal to disaffected Democrats. Conservatives of this era deride “political correctness,” often a code-word for the rights of women or the rights of LGBT citizens, as getting in the way of “serious” programs to help struggling Americans find good jobs.

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The Atlantic: The Fire That Fueled the Iran Protests

In Iran, street protests by workers or the disenfranchised are not rare. Since the nineties, workers have been protesting over pay, benefits, lay-offs, independent unions, and the effects of economic liberalization, which has left labor more fragmented, informal, and vulnerable. Today, some 80 percent of all workers in Iran are in insecure, temporary contracts. Perhaps a result, there were some 400 labor protests in 2015 and nearly 350 in 2016, according to a study by Kevan Harris and Zep Kalb at UCLA; there have been some 900 protests since March of last year, according to labor researcher Zahra Ayatollah. In the recent unrest, five labor organizations issued a statement calling for an “end to poverty and misery,” urging the government to undertake pro-labor reforms. Organized labor has clearly supported the protests, but the extent of its actual involvement is not known. [...]

The recent unrest, by contrast, came from neither the dissent of the traditional poor, nor the modern middle classes: According to the Ministry of Interior, over 90 percent of those detained were, on average, under the age of 25 and likely educated. Instead, recent events exhibited the revolt of the middle-class poor, the product of a large youth cohort, expanded education opportunities, urbanization, and aggressive economic liberalization.

There’s something paradoxical about this class. It holds college degrees; it is versed in social media; it possesses knowledge of the world; it dreams of a middle-class life. But economic deprivation pushes it to live the life of the traditional poor in slums and squatter settlements, and subsist on family support or on largely precarious and low-status jobs—as cab drivers, fruit sellers, street vendors, or salespeople. A member of the middle-class poor frequents the city centers, but lives on the periphery. He yearns to wear Nike shoes, but has to settle for cheap knockoffs. He dreams of working or vacationing abroad, but feels trapped by a dearth of money and the strictures of border controls. This is a class that links the world of poverty and deprivation, of shantytowns and casual work, of debt and precarity to the world of consumption, higher education, and the internet—to a global life. Its members are acutely aware of what is available in the world and what they painfully lack; their precarity and limbo are supposed to be temporary conditions, but in reality, become permanent. Feeling neither fully young nor adult, and filled with a profound moral outrage, this class is becoming a critical player in Iran’s radical politics. [...]

But even as education raised expectations, it failed to secure economic mobility, at least for the 2.5 million college graduates who currently remain without work. On the whole, 35 percent of educated youths are unemployed, according a parliamentary report. These people must bury their dreams of owning a middle-class home, for which they would need to save one-third of their monthly income for 96 years. Instead, many of them settle in the squatter communities, which now house over 20 percent of Iran’s urban inhabitants, according to 2014 study of 14 cities by Iran’s Ministry of Urban Development. With little money and poor housing, plans for marriage fade or are suspended—one reason why four million of Iran’s young college graduates at the traditional age of marriage remain single. Even though families in Iran usually help out their needy members, the shame of dependency and the general feeling of stagnancy make these adult youths exceedingly indignant. As the economy failed to create jobs for them and the government failed to protect them, these restless youth seemed ready to spark to revolt. The spark came with the Mashhad protests.

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America Magazine: How the Catholic Church is fighting the drug war in the Philippines

But apartheid between Europeans and indigenous Filipinos grew such that by the 19th century the latter were still obliged to kiss the hand of any passing Spanish clergyman and were forbidden to break bread at the same table.[...]

That everyman image is a key reason Duterte became president last June. The Philippines is deeply corrupt and economically divided. In 2011, 40 families, most of whose wealth stems from the Spanish era, reaped 76.5 percent of its GDP growth. Since the turn of the century, the country has moved 32 places on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which surveys citizens on how problematic they consider day-to-day malfeasance to be. The Philippines moved from 69th to 101st of 176 countries. [...]

The police have recorded 6,000 deaths under investigation. The Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates has recorded at least 12,000. Over 100,000 people have been arrested, and prisons are packed like slave galleons. Duterte has pledged to kill 100,000 “drug personalities.” Duterte is like the movie character Dirty Harry, one Manila taxi driver told me, holding his fingers up like a gun. “You do something bad now you have two things: the cemetery and the hospital.” [...]

“The sheer number of killings during martial law will pale in comparison with the records of killings in the war on drugs,” Edwin A. Gariguez, of Caritas Philippines, told me. “And the authoritarian rule of Duterte is beginning to become even worse than the martial law of Marcos, which he tried to disguise through some semblance [of] legality. Duterte is more brazen, unreasonably vindictive, with little or no regard for accountability.”

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The Washington Post: Long, uneasy love affair of Israel and U.S. evangelicals may have peaked

The idea of a Palestinian state conflicts with the belief of some evangelicals that the entire territory — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the West Bank — was promised by God to the Jewish people.

And those voices are becoming louder. Evangelical lobbying groups such as Christians United for Israel, advocating views that align more tightly with the Israeli right, now rival the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in their influence on behalf of Israel. While AIPAC backs a two-state solution, CUFI does not.  [...]

Over the past half-century, many American evangelicals came to support Israel through an end-of-days theology. The idea — popularized in the 1970 book “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which later became a movie with Orson Welles, and the Left Behind series, which began in the 1990s — is that the establishment of Israel was part of a preordained divine plan preparing for the return of the Messiah. [...]

A poll released last month by the evangelical firm LifeWay Research asked American evangelicals about their overall perception of Israel. Among people over 65, 76 percent said it was positive, compared with 58 percent among those ages 18 to 34. About 30 percent of the people in the younger group said they were “not sure,” nearly double the figure for the older group.

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Politico: Macron has an answer to populism

Take employment policy. In a dramatic contrast to the empty promises of traditional politicians and populist parties, Macron has openly and unapologetically admitted that no one — himself included — can protect jobs in this disrupted economy. [...]

Instead, Macron has recognized that in a global economy, the welfare state should seek to protect not jobs, but individuals. And he has acknowledged that the most detrimental inequality in modern societies is not in income levels, but professional preparation.

And so he has called for the state to invest heavily in education and training to help prepare workers to compete in global labor markets. He is also seeking to provide individuals with the support — like health care and child care — that boosts productivity. [...]

If Macron is to succeed, he will have to rip the banner of “disruption” from the populists and reveal them for what they really are: a conservative force that wants to protect an unsustainable status quo. He will have to make it clear that their so-called solutions are not only doomed to fail, but that they will also harm the most vulnerable groups of society.

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The Conversation: Macron’s pledge to wipe out coal is just as meaningless as Trump’s plan to revive it

Its data show that in 2006 about 10 percent of all electric power plants—616 in total—ran on coal. By 2016, the latest year for which data are available, that figure dropped to just 4 percent, or 381 coal-fired power plants. That compares with 1,801 natural gas plants and 3,624 “other renewables” such as wind, up from 1,659 and 843 in 2006, respectively.

In other words, slightly more than 20 coal plants are shutting down each year on average. If the trend continues at the same rate, then most coal-fired power plants will be closed in the US within 18 years, or around 2035. A few will likely remain, since utilities close the oldest, least efficient plants first, but the trend is clear. [...]

No matter what they say in speeches, however, economic forces will inevitably dictate whether reality can match their words. And for now, the economics of the power generation business suggest coal’s days are numbered, and the world’s power generation will continue to shift to other sources.

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The New York Times: Ireland Prime Minister Says He Will Campaign to Repeal Abortion Ban

Mr. Varadkar’s announcement came one day after The Irish Times published an opinion poll that suggested a majority of Irish people, 56 percent, favor repealing the constitutional ban and permitting abortion for up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy, as recommended by a parliamentary committee. Only 29 percent were opposed to repealing the ban, a stark change from 1983 when nearly 67 percent of voters approved the introduction of the Eighth Amendment. [...]

If repealed, the constitutional ban would be replaced by legislation regulating abortion, most likely permitting it under at least some circumstances. Mr. Varadkar’s government says it will disclose its proposed legislation before voters act on the constitutional provision, but it has yet to formally agree on what the measures might be. An all-party parliamentary committee voted in December in favor of permitting unrestricted abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and later in cases of rape, incest or fatal fetal abnormality. [...]

Several thousand Irish women travel abroad for abortions each year, the majority to Britain. Figures from the United Kingdom’s health care service for 2015 showed that at least 3,400 Irish women had gone to England and Wales for abortions that year.

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The Guardian: Natural gas killed coal – now renewables and batteries are taking over

Similarly, another 2014 study found that based on the latest estimates of methane leakage rates from natural gas drilling, replacing coal with natural gas provides little in the way of climate benefits. Though it’s been touted as a ‘bridge fuel’ to span the gap between coal and renewables, this research suggests natural gas isn’t significantly better than coal in terms of global warming effects, and thus may not be suitable for that purpose. The ‘bridge’ doesn’t appear to achieve its goal of steadily cutting our greenhouse gas emissions. [...]

The redundancy and potential replacement of natural gas with cleaner alternatives extends far beyond these examples. Most electrical service providers in California are now required to develop integrated resource plans. These are electric grid planning documents that outline how the utilities will meet a number of California’s goals, including a 40% reduction in carbon pollution below 1990 levels and 50% electricity production from renewable sources by 2030. Meeting these goals will require replacing non-critical natural gas plants with renewable power. [...]

Fortunately, rapidly falling costs are already making renewables and battery storage cost-competitive with natural gas, and cheaper than coal. If we’re going to succeed in avoiding the most dangerous climate change consequences, that transition away from all fossil fuels and towards clean energy can’t happen soon enough.

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