Politico: How Martin Selmayr became EU’s top (un)civil servan

Selmayr has won fame and disdain and spurred envy and fury by deploying ruthless autocracy in the name of European democracy. His sudden election ensures the German lawyer and avowed European federalist will retain a perch at the apex of power in Brussels beyond the end of Juncker’s mandate in 2019 — for as long as he desires, or until a new set of commissioners dares to try to remove him.  [...]

In more than three years as Juncker’s chief of staff, Selmayr has shown time and again that he would fit in well with the cast of ruthless characters in the political drama. He has steamrolled higher-ranking commissioners, blocked legislation, upended negotiations and picked fights with officials from national governments. [...]

Selmayr’s consolidation of power sets the stage for more clashes with the European Council, the body representing the governments of the EU’s member countries. A number of Council officials view Selmayr as poisonous and claim he created a fight in his own mind between the institutions over who would lead the Brexit negotiations, leading to the rushed appointment of Michel Barnier as chief negotiator. [...]

Some EU diplomats griped angrily that Selmayr’s election will concentrate too much power in the hands of Germany — already the predominant power in the EU. The secretary-general of the European Parliament, Klaus Welle, is also German, as is Helga Schmid, the secretary-general of the European External Action Service.

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The Guardian: The fascist movement that has brought Mussolini back to the mainstream

By the early 2000s, it was no longer taboo for mainstream politicians to speak warmly of Mussolini: admirers of Il Duce had become government ministers, and many fringe, fascist parties were growing in strength – Forza Nuova, Fronte Sociale Nazionale, and various skinhead groups. But where the other fascists seemed like throwbacks to the 1930s, CasaPound focused on contemporary causes and staged creative campaigns: in 2006 they hung 400 mannequins all over Rome, with signs protesting about the city’s housing crisis. In 2012, CasaPound militants occupied the European Union’s office in Rome and dumped sacks of coal outside to protest on behalf of Italian miners. Many of their policies looked surprising: they were against immigration, of course, but on the supposedly “progressive” grounds that the exploitation of immigrant labourers represented a return to slavery.  [...]

They also began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again, such as the renationalisation of Italy’s banking, communications, health, transport and energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of Mussolini’s politics, focusing on his “social doctrines” regarding housing, unions, sanitation and a minimum wage. CasaPound accepted that the racial laws of 1938 (which introduced antisemitism and deportation) were “errors”; the movement claimed to be “opposed to any form of discrimination based on racial or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination”.

CasaPound’s concentration on housing also appealed to voters of the old left. Its logo was a turtle (an animal that always has a roof over its head) and Ezra Pound’s name was used in part because he had railed, in his poem Canto XLV, against rent (considered usury) and rapacious landlords. One of the first things CasaPound did in its occupied building was to hang sheets from the windows protesting against rent hikes and evictions – in 2009, there were an average of 25 evictions in Rome every day. They campaigned for a “social mortgage”, in which rental payments would effectively become mortgage payments, turning the tenant into a homeowner. Within months, they had given shelter to dozens of homeless families, as well as to many camerati down on their luck. [...]

These ideas are not likely to appeal to many Italian voters – but CasaPound’s job is already done. It has been essential to the normalisation of fascism. At the end of 2017, Il Tempo newspaper announced Benito Mussolini as its “person of the year”. It wasn’t being facetious: Il Duce barged into the news agenda every week last year. A few weeks ago, even a leftwing politician in Florence said that “nobody in this country has done more than Mussolini”. Today, 73 years after his death, he is more admired than traditional Italian heroes such as Giuseppes Garibaldi and Mazzini.  

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The Atlantic: The Rise of the Anti-Liberals

Wherever I go and wherever I’ve lived, there are others, from all over the world, who I can easily connect with—“anywheres” of the center-left and center-right who share a similar disposition. They don’t really have a local community or “home” they feel particularly strongly about. They tend to have graduate degrees; be interested in politics; speak various languages; avoid sports-related conversations; and be vaguely privileged financially (it’s never entirely clear how privileged). Perhaps most importantly, they are suspicious of happy people but especially earnest people. No one’s particularly religious, but if they are, they’re probably members of a minority group, usually Muslims or Jews, which makes it okay. No one’s perfect, of course, but such are the people of my “tribe.” [...]

Self-professed liberals often describe liberalism as indifferent to how we live our lives, so that liberalism effectively serves as a kind of referee or neutral bystander. But this does not necessarily entail ideological neutrality, since liberalism itself emerges from a set of ideological and philosophical assumptions regarding religion, human nature, and the state. Liberalism only offers neutrality within itself. (Political liberalism, as expounded by John Rawls, is based on the “veil of ignorance”—the notion that the founders of a new polity are free to construct their own society without any knowledge of their future position and without any distinctive set of preferences or values. But, as the philosopher Lenn Goodman writes, “Every one of Rawls’s choosers is trapped in a liberal society. … They are not free to construct a value system for themselves.”) [...]

All transformations, even largely good ones, come at a cost. Most Americans and Europeans, including those who benefit most from the liberal status quo, understand that something is not quite right. Take our unprecedented levels of inequality, which are only likely to grow. But the incentives for meritocratic elites to do anything serious about it—Deneen suggests a rather unappealing “household economics” model while social democrats like Matt Bruenig propose “social wealth funds”—are limited. Liberals are the new conservatives.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Homeopathy Explained – Gentle Healing or Reckless Fraud?

Vox: How the economy shapes our love lives

 It may seem like the way we date is dictated by things like love and affection but it’s actually driven by something far less romantic: the economy.

Dating as we know it didn’t really start until the Industrial Revolution when young people left farms and small towns to flock to cities for work. They got jobs in factories, bars, and restaurants and being away from their families for the first time offered them the freedom to mix and match with other young people.

Ever since then the way single people have gotten together has been dictated by the ups and downs of the economy in the United States. We talk to Harvard’s Moira Weigel, author of “The Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating” about how our woes about dating are nothing new, they’ve been around since people starting pairing off.

The Washington Post: Sweden is taking on Russian meddling ahead of fall elections. The White House might take note

Russia has a big stake in Sweden’s political affairs: Sweden is a rare outlier in Europe, because it is not a member of the NATO military alliance, which the Kremlin sees as a strategic threat. But attitudes toward NATO started to shift here after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and now Sweden’s center-right political opposition says it wants to join the alliance if it comes to power. About 47 percent of Swedes support joining NATO, a Pew survey found last year. 

Separately, Sweden is embroiled in a debate about how widely to open its doors to immigrants, a split that Russian state media have played up. [...]

Before the presentation, Bay said Swedish authorities are not trying to predict exactly what Russia might do as they figure out ways to thwart such moves. Instead, he said, they want to improve the political system’s overall readiness. [...]

The project by Swedish public television, Swedish public radio and two major newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, will seek to combat misinformation from both domestic and foreign sources, proponents said.

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The Local: Italy is 'steeped in hate', Amnesty warns amid toxic election campaign

Against this background, the campaign for Italy's election on March 4th has only aggravated the problem, Amnesty said. The group has been monitoring comments made on social media by political leaders and candidates nationwide and in the past two weeks alone has identified more than 200 that it flagged as hateful or discriminatory on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. 

Virtually all were made by members of the centre-right alliance that the latest polls show leading, comprised of Forza Italia centrists, the populist League and far-right Brothers of Italy. [...]

Meanwhile the Brothers of Italy, while making fewer discriminatory statements about migrants, refugees and Roma people, made the highest number of negative comments about women and LGBTI people. While the party has a high-profile female leader, Giorgia Meloni, it promotes "traditional family values" that tend to exclude orientations other than heterosexual.  [...]

Amnesty's Rufini warned that Italy is more polarized than ever before, saying that part of the public believes itself to be "great, pure, Italian while the rest don't deserve to share the country [...] creating an impossible climate in this country and killing all chance of debate". 

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openDemocracy: Brazil militarizes its war on crime

The military has repeatedly been called in to assist civilian police in Rio de Janeiro in recent years, but Temer’s decree — subject to congressional approval that is expected this week — represents the first time that the government is using the constitutional provision allowing the federal armed forces to assume control over civilian police since the end of the country’s military dictatorship in 1985. [...]

Moreover, the head of Brazil’s army, Eduardo Villas Bôas, recently cautioned against using the military for domestic crime-fighting, arguing that such actions increase the risk of politicization and corruption of the troops. [...]

Etchegoyen’s description of Rio as a “laboratory” for militarized security policies is telling, given that the city has seen multiple past deployments of the armed forces in recent years that have not achieved any sustainable security gains. The results of militarized anti-crime strategies implemented by civilian authorities in the city have proven to be similarly lackluster.

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Politico: China’s trash ban forces Europe to confront its waste problem

Of the 56.4 million tons of paper EU citizens threw away in 2016, some 8 million ended up in China, purchased by recycling centers that turn it into cardboard and send it back to Europe as packaging for Chinese exports. That same year, the EU collected 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, and sent 1.6 million tons to China.

At the end of last year, Beijing put an end to the practice, putting in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste. Only eight weeks later, Europe is struggling to deal with mountains of plastic and paper waste. [...]

The EU is to some extent a victim of its own success. For years, European leaders have touted the benefits of limiting and reusing waste. Just last month, the European Commission presented its vision for the future of plastics, exhorting Europe to turn waste into an economic opportunity. [...]

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe’s capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

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