Political Critique: Dutch unions back coal phaseout but demand compensations

Last fall, the new Dutch government coalition announced it would close down all five of the Netherland’s coal power plants by 2030, including three that opened as recently as 2015. The coal phaseout was a part of a plan to cut emissions by 49 per cent compared to 1990 levels by 2030, a target more ambitious than the one set by the EU (40 per cent). The coalition agreement also mentions a carbon floor price of 18 euros in 2020, rising to 43 euros per tonne in 2030. [...]

‘We backed this process because we thought, simply, that it was necessary: there are no jobs on a dead planet,’ explained Patrick van Klink. ‘Additionally, the changing of the economy came with the creation of new jobs which were not unionised, and this was an opportunity for us. Many of the new jobs that were created were flexible, precarious; because we were involved in the process, we could make a fuss about this from the start.’ [...]

Nowadays, about 2 500 jobs are threatened by the coal phaseout, in the coal plants, coal terminals at the Dutch ports and in transport sector. They are few in comparison to the number of mining jobs lost decades ago, but the political context has changed so much that the unions are worried whether they can get a fair deal today.

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Jacobin Magazine: From Zuma to Ramaphosa

Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” [...]

It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. [...]

Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. [...]

What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration, social harmony — but by and for elites, at the expense of workers. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations and Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the Left.

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Slate: The Parkland Teens Will Win. Eventually.

In response to the Parkland shooting, advocates are trying a few tactics that are relatively new to the gun-control debate, if not to progressive activism writ large. Students in Connecticut are trying to plan a National School Walkout on April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine massacre. Teachers have discussed doing their own. High school survivors from Parkland have announced a March for Our Lives to take place in Washington on March 24, with concurrent satellite marches in other locales around the country, along the lines of the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It has the potential to be the largest national demonstration for gun control the U.S. has ever seen.

Those who’ve watched children slaughtered in their classrooms many times over with no discernible change in gun-control policy or decline in American gun ownership may have reason to doubt that any of these activist measures will accomplish what the others have not. None of the organizations founded after other massacres have shifted the U.S. gun-control conversation in meaningful ways, jolted the general public into a new sense of urgency, or changed the hearts and minds—and, more importantly, the votes—of legislators. Recent polling shows that 97 percent of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchasers, including 97 percent of gun owners, and more than two-thirds support a nationwide ban on assault rifles. Clearly, public opinion is not enough to sway public officials bankrolled by the National Rifle Association, which opposes any expansion of federal gun regulations, including stronger background checks. [...]

In other words, the best outcomes gun-control activists can hope for in the foreseeable future are incremental. Florida legislators have agreed to consider instating a three-day waiting period for all rifle purchases and raising the legal age for assault-rifle possession to 21. Such a law might have prevented Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who allegedly murdered his Parkland classmates with an AR-15, from buying his gun, but only temporarily. The same legislative body refused to even discuss a possible ban on assault weapons, while teen survivors of Parkland looked on, even as they approved a resolution calling pornography a public health risk. These are not people prepared to be moved by a rousing address, postcards from progressives, or a march on the National Mall.

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Social Europe: How To Tackle Populism: Macron Vs Kurz

The re-branding of his Austrian People’s Party forestalled a tougher stance on immigration, while he borrowed the far-right’s polemical rhetoric on EU ‘Zentralisierung’, or ‘centralisation’. By the end of the campaign, the dividing lines between the centre-right and far-right were sufficiently blurred for one to ask: which is the populist? The subsequent announcement of a coalition government involving the far right is a cause for great concern.

Emmanuel Macron used different tools. His counter-vision approach involved debunking the tenuous promises made by his populist adversary Marine Le Pen, while offering attractive alternative arguments. This is the harder of the two to pull off. It requires an individual of political skill and personal charisma with the courage to confront the populist head-on, without fear of disturbing the ideological balance of one’s party. In his presidential election campaign, Macron offered a text-book example of how to deploy the counter-vision. He directly attacked Le Pen and her anti-euro arguments – and skilfully exposed their paucity. In so doing, he provided a convincing defence of France’s role in the European Union, while appealing to French patriotism. [...]

On the other hand, the Kurz strategy is a dangerous one. When a figure – and party – of the so-called establishment adopts the policies and rhetorical devices of an extreme opponent, and where electoral considerations trump sound policy making, the outlook promises to be grim. The Kurz approach, if followed by others, will equate to a gentle ‘hollowing out’ of the European Project from within. Europe might be spared the Austrian Freedom Party, or indeed the Front National in power. But, if the Austrian and French centre-right adopt their policies anyway, what difference does it make? [...]

A new vision and set of EU objectives must reflect features of international cooperation that today inspire and are of most value to Europeans. It must centre on extending the benefits of greater connectivity – digital, technological, mobility-related – to more Europeans. It must build on the theme of greater opportunity – where the EU makes more people more prosperous, keeping the best, while protecting citizens from the worst aspects of globalisation. It must also highlight the principle of solidarity – an EU demonstrating a social and humanitarian dimension, across member states and civil societies.  

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The New York Review of Books: Luther vs. Erasmus: When Populism First Eclipsed the Liberal Elite

The publication of Erasmus’s revised New Testament was a milestone in biblical studies. It gave scholars the tools to read the Bible as a document that, while divinely inspired, was a human product that could be deconstructed and edited in the same manner as a text by Livy or Seneca. As copies began circulating, the magnitude of Erasmus’s achievement was immediately recognized. Not since Cicero had an intellectual figure so dominated Western discourse as Erasmus did in that enchanted spring of 1516. “Everywhere in all Christendom your fame is spreading,” wrote John Watson, a rector in England with whom he was friendly. “By the unanimous verdict of all scholars, you are voted the best scholar of them all, and the most learned in both Greek and Latin.” [...]

Knowledge of geography, history, astronomy, and nature was all to be imparted through readings in the classical authors specified by Erasmus. His educational program was, in short, highly elitist, seeking not to prepare ordinary citizens for a productive life but to train an aristocracy of culture and taste that could guide the rest of society. This curriculum became the basis for upper-class schooling in Europe until well into the nineteenth century; through it, knowledge of the classical canon would become a ruthlessly clear indicator of class. [...]

Beyond that immediate matter of dispute, however, their conflict represented the clash of two contrasting world views—those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one; even some of Erasmus’s closest disciples eventually defected to Luther’s camp. Erasmus became an increasingly marginal figure, scorned by both Catholics, for being too critical of the Church, and Lutherans, for being too timid. In a turbulent and polarized age, he was the archetypal reasonable liberal.

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Vox: The Church of England’s Lent challenge: give up plastic

To critics, the church’s actions may seem emblematic of a wider “secularization” of Lent: in which an originally spiritually focused religious observance becomes more about anodyne notions of “wellness” and “doing good.” It’s fair, too, to critique the movement as a bid for relevancy by a fading institution: A 2016 poll found that the number of Britons attending a weekly Church of England service fell for the first time to fewer than 1 million (or less than 2 percent of the UK’s population).

Those criticisms would be valid. But at the same time, the Church of England’s actions reflect a wider willingness among many mainline Protestant and Catholic Christian groups to focus on combating structural or global issues — from income inequality to environmental stewardship — alongside individual misdeeds.  [...]

Francis’s notion of sin as something collective and structural, not just individual, has informed much of his theology, from his environmentalism to his fervently anti-capitalist stance, a dynamic also at play in the way the Church of England is talking about its own initiatives.

It’s worth noting that these initiatives, which tend to be popular with Catholics and mainline Protestants, are not necessarily shared by all Christians. American evangelicals, in particular, have long been wary of environmental causes, seeing them as a threat to what they envision as man’s God-given dominion over the earth.

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Quartz: Dear America, here’s how other countries stop mass shootings

Research shows that countries with fewer guns have lower homicide rates. Even US states with fewer guns have fewer homicides; in a landmark 2002 study, analysis of data from 1988 to 1997 showed that states with “high” gun ownership had three times the rate of homicide than states with few guns. A decade later, a 2013 study found that every percentage point increase in gun ownership corresponded to a 0.9% higher risk of gun homicide. Countries and states that legally limit overall gun ownership simply have fewer gun deaths. [...]

The United States stands out among countries for the frequency with which its mass shootings occur. But last year, after the US witnessed its most fatal mass shooting in history at Las vegas, the Trump administration made it easier—not harder—for people with mental illness to buy guns. (That decision rolled back Obama-era restrictions that had been passed in the wake of Sandy Hook.) [...]

Back in 1996, it took only 12 days after a mass shooting for Australia to pass the National Firearms Agreement, which banned automatic and semi-automatic weapon for “personal defense.” The country created a temporary buyback program for guns that had become illegal. Stricter background checks were enforced. As Zeif pointed out yesterday, there have been no school shootings in Australia since.

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CityLab: Court Says Paris's Car Ban Is Illegal

On Wednesday, Paris’s Administrative Court ruled that the city’s decision to ban cars from a promenade along the river Seine was illegal. For a city administration that approached the area’s car-calming, anti-pollution measures with a striking single-mindedness of mission, this decision is a bombshell. If Paris City Hall’s already-planned appeal fails, heavy car traffic will again return to what had become a riverside walkway reserved exclusively for pedestrians and cyclists.

This is one of the most famous, well-loved strips of urban land anywhere on the planet, and the scheme to remodel the area probably had the highest profile of any pro-pedestrian project underway anywhere. What makes the ruling’s timing especially sharp is that new statistics this week showed that road traffic on the streets adjacent to the quayside had actually fallen.

The court’s objections to the policy are clear enough. It was, the judges ruled, based on preliminary impact studies that “included inaccuracies, omissions and inadequacies concerning the effects of the project.” Furthermore, the legal article invoked to give Mayor Anne Hidalgo the right to bar cars from the waterside does not actually grant her that power, the court said; at most, the article means she’s only allowed to restrict traffic at certain times.

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Politico: Italian election’s biggest winner is Europe

In January, Renzi organized a pro-Europe event in Milan, in which he called for “a United States of Europe” and challenged his rivals to say where they stood on the issue. Among his electoral allies is former European Commissioner Emma Bonino, head of the explicitly pro-European +Europa party.

Berlusconi is also singing  a different song these days. He loves Europe, he now says. The past is the past, relations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel have always been good, and he’s proud of having her support. “Our relation has always been positive, and Signora Merkel backs our electoral campaign with determination,” he said last month during a visit to the center-right European People’s Party headquarters in Brussels. [...]

As recently as last December, the party’s candidate for prime minister, 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio, had said he would vote to leave the eurozone were Italy to hold a referendum on its membership. Today, he has ditched the idea of holding a referendum. And in an interview with the French daily Le Monde last week, he even argued that the party he represents is “pro-European.” [...]

In fall 2017, just 36 percent of Italians said EU membership was a good thing. That’s 21 percentage points below the European average. Only Cyprus and the Czech Republic were less in favor.

At the same time, however, a majority in the country is in favor of common European policies. “Italy ranks among the highest in considering that more decisions should be taken at the EU level (61 percent “agree,” ranking seventh of the EU28),” reads the Delors report.

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