Jacobin Magazine: Italy Is the Future

Nonetheless, the aggressive tones of Italian public life conceal the real reason why Italy is a case study for the new politics. M5S proclaims its will to “clear out” the established political “caste” and the hard-right Lega hopes to impose its leadership over more conservative forces. But the most notable aspect of contemporary Italian politics is the lack of belief that anything will in fact change.[...]

The Italian political system certainly looks chaotic. None of its parties are thirty years old, and even those created in the early 1990s have constantly changed their identities. Today’s rising force, the Lega (formally known as the Lega Nord or Northern League) was once a hodgepodge of Thatcherites, libertarians, and former Communists bent on Northern autonomy (or even independence) from the South. Today it is a national movement encroaching on the terrain of the far right. [...]

In many countries the old class-based parties of the twentieth century still soldier on. Even as they weaken they can retain some residual social roots and serve as sites of collective identification: “my granddad was a miner” has long been the cry of the reluctant social democrat. Conversely, the Italian parties that emerged in the post-Cold War era more immediately reflect today’s lack of belief in collective projects or state action. Created at a moment when the “end of history” was so widely proclaimed, they have been unable to cohere new identities. [...]

The result is the rise of parties that are defined precisely by their sense of being “outsiders,” in different countries reflecting a hostility to perceived cultural decline brought by immigration (as in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe) and an opposition to austerity (as is broadly true of Southern Europe). Combining both “South” and “Northern” regions, Italian populism concentrates the worst traits of both, reflecting social despair rather than offering a way out of it. [...]

In practice, the M5S has not only backed away from any significant reforming agenda, but has even cast doubt over the viability of “anti-corruption” politics itself. This is illustrated by a recent scandal over its MPs’ salaries. M5S parliamentarians are supposed to remit half their salaries to a finance ministry microcredit fund, and then post online scans of their transfers. However, over the last fortnight ten of them were caught cancelling the transfers as soon as they published the images online. They along with three candidates with Masonic links were expelled from M5S.

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Jacobin Magazine: It Never Went Away

Throughout Italy’s election campaign its main parties have imitated anti-migrant and racist rhetoric from the far right, an alarming trend in a country where fascist groups are increasingly finding a foothold again. The Left’s weakened social roots and a pliant media have combined not only to boost hard-right forces like the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, but also militant fascist groups such as CasaPound and Forza Nuova. [...]

These two cases were part of a longer pattern. In Florence in 2011, CasaPound supporter Gianluca Casseri killed two Senegalese men, Samb Modou and Diop Mor, and injured a three others,Mbenghe Cheike, Moustapha Dieng, and Sougou Mor, and then killed himself before he could be captured by the police. While the mainstream media and political parties have treated these events as isolated incidents caused by lone wolves, they are in reality chapters in the story of resurgent fascist and xenophobic ideas in Italy. [...]

Despite the smokescreen which still hangs over the events of these years, it has been established that fascist groups were involved in at least one coup attempt (the so-called Golpe Borghese, named after the former fascist Navy official behind the initiative) and a number of massacres across the 1960s and 1970s. The bomb that killed seventeen people and injured eighty-eight in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 marked the beginning of a decade that culminated in the August 1980 with the bombing at Bologna railway station, which left eighty-two people dead. Although we still don’t know the names of the instigators, trials have established that fascists carried out both atrocities, as well as a number of other killings and shootings throughout that decade. [...]

The demand “put Italians first” has not only been a rhetorical device. As the housing situation became explosive during the crisis, with evictions skyrocketing as tenants were unable to pay their rent, fascist groups promoted squatting for Italians only, or attempted (often successfully) to impede migrant families’ rightful access to public housing. Playing on the burgeoning feelings of fear and insecurity, fed by a media campaign over migrant criminality, fascists instigated neighborhood patrols, often under the cover of murky citizens’ associations. Taking advantage of an increasing poverty rate, they have collected food in front of or even inside supermarkets, but for indigenous Italians only.

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FiveThirtyEight: How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals

Two factors appear to be driving this divide. First, the number of white evangelicals is in decline in America at the same time that the evangelical population is becoming more racially diverse. According to 2016 data from the Public Religion Research Institute, about 64 percent of evangelicals are non-Hispanic white, compared to about 68 percent in 2006. [...]

And these nonwhite evangelicals see politics differently than white evangelicals. While the largest plurality of white evangelicals identify as Republicans, most black evangelicals are Democrats. A plurality of evangelical Latinos, in contrast, identify as political independents — and they’re less supportive of the Democratic Party than Latinos overall — but they are still more likely to consider themselves Democrats than Republicans.   [...]

In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network cast Trump as God’s gift to evangelical Christians, arguing, “The Bible is replete with examples of flawed individuals being used to accomplish God’s will.” Congressional Republicans often defend the president, but few compare him to biblical figures.

Why are influential figures in the white evangelical community so willing to align themselves with Trump? Well, first of all, Trump remains popular with white evangelical voters. A Pew survey from December found that 61 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trump’s job performance,2 compared to 32 percent of voters overall. (This was a substantial decline from Trump’s 78 percent approval among white evangelicals in February 2017, but they are are still one of the most pro-Trump blocs in the electorate.)

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CityLab: When Teens Protest, Race Matters

In the spring of 2016, African-American children as young as 11 marched in protest against the gun violence in their Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. The low-income area had lost 13 teens and children so far that year to guns. The kids demanded the right to play outside safely; they held signs and chanted slogans like “We want to live” and “We want to see another day.” Phillip Agnew, leader of the Florida-based Dream Defenders, a youth-led group fighting for racial justice, said the demonstration didn’t get much attention from the national media at the time.

Liberty City is about 40 miles from Parkland, Florida, site of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago. But it’s been hard not to notice the difference between how youth-led protests against gun violence in these two communities were received. Since the Parkland tragedy, the national news has been filled with the school’s student survivors, who rose up to protest school shootings and demand—in eloquent and defiant terms—tighter gun legislation. Across the country, teens have been walking out of class in solidarity, often standing together in silence for 17 minutes, one for each of Parkland’s victims. National walkouts are planned for March 14, the one-month anniversary of the shooting, and April 20, which will mark 19 years since the Columbine High School massacre. [...]

In contrast, teens and adults of color have often faced very different responses when protesting gun violence. Indeed, while youth of color have been confronting the issue for years, the protests and actions associated with the Movement for Black Lives have often been criminalized, greeted with police repression and public scorn, or simply ignored.

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Rolling Stone: Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration

In 2017, a string of climate disasters – six big hurricanes in the Atlantic, wildfires in the West, horrific mudslides, high-temperature records breaking all over the country – caused $306 billion in damage, killing more than 300 people. After Hurricane Maria, 300,000 Puerto Ricans fled to Florida, and disaster experts estimate that climate and weather events displaced more than 1 million Americans from their homes last year. These statistics don't begin to capture the emotional and financial toll on survivors who have to dig through ashes and flooded debris to rebuild their lives. Mental-health workers often see spikes in depression, PTSD and suicides in the months that follow a natural disaster. After Harvey, one study found that 30 percent of residents in flooded areas had fallen behind on their rent or mortgage. One in four respondents said they were having problems paying for food. [...]

One recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change predicts that by 2050, as much as 30 percent of the world's land surface could face desertlike conditions, including large swaths of Asia, Europe, Africa and southern Australia. More than 1.5 billion people currently live in these regions. In the U.S., a recent study by Mathew Hauer, a demographer at the University of Georgia, estimates that 13 million people will be displaced by sea-level rise alone by the year 2100 (about the number of African-Americans who moved out of the South during the Great Migration of the 20th century). In Hauer's study, about 2.5 million will flee the region that includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Greater New Orleans loses up to 500,000 people; the New York City area loses 50,000. The biggest winners are nearby cities on high ground with mild climates, good infrastructure and strong economies: Atlanta; Austin; Madison, Wisconsin; and Memphis. [...]

The likelihood of another catastrophic levee collapse has been greatly reduced, thanks to $14.5 billion spent in the aftermath of Katrina on bigger, stronger barriers against the sea. But the city has other problems. For one thing, the protective coastline around it is vanishing. Louisiana is losing a football field of land to the sea every hour, due to a combination of subsidence, sea-level rise and reduced sediment flow from the Mississippi River. For -another, large parts of New Orleans, which was originally built on a swamp, have been sinking for 100 years – some parts of the city have subsided as much as 15 feet. As a result, even ordinary rainstorms are becoming existential threats. Last August, nine inches of rain fell on the city in three hours, and it looked like Katrina all over again. "The city is like a big bathtub," says Ed Link, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland who led the effort to rebuild after Katrina. "You can build barriers to protect it from storm surges, but when it rains, you still have big problems."

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The Local: Immigration in Itay: Myths and reality ahead of election

Italy's national statistics institute Istat says that there are five million foreign nationals legally residing in Italy. That is 8.3 percent of the country's population of 60.5 million.

The biggest proportion, 23 percent, are from Romania followed by Albanians (9 percent), Moroccans (8 percent), Chinese (5.5 percent) and Ukrainians (4.5 percent) and many of them are employed in retail, farming or domestic work.

More than 690,000 migrants, most from Sub-Saharan Africa, have arrived by boat from Libya since 2013. Migration study foundation ISMU estimates that around 500,000 are living in the country illegally -- equivalent to 0.9 percent of the population. [...]

However Italy's interior ministry says the crime rate has dropped by 8.3 percent in the last 10 years, despite the fact that the number of foreigners in the country has increased from three to five million over the same period.

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Politico: 950 attacks on Muslims recorded in Germany last year

The figures were released by the interior ministry in response to an inquiry made by the far-left Die Linke party, the paper reported Saturday. The government did not previously collect data on anti-Muslim attacks, and therefore has no point of comparison to 2016 data.

According to the data, 33 people were injured in the attacks, which were predominantly perpetrated by far-right extremists. The report also recorded 60 cases vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers, some of which were defaced with Nazi grafitti. [...]

“There is a big blind spot, because the authorities — police and prosecutors — are not yet sensitized, and therefore many cases do not appear in the statistics,” Mazyek told the paper.

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Politico: How Italy does Putin’s work

“Italy is a weird exception [among Western states] because the relationship between Italian politicians and Putin is very open,” said Anna Pellegatta, a digital forensic research assistant at the Atlantic Council, a think-tank monitoring the rise of digital falsities worldwide. “The line between misinformation and officials promoting Russian messages is very blurred.” [...]

But it’s not just Berlusconi’s media empire that has been willing to portray Russia in a more favorable light. Last year, Rai, the country’s national broadcaster, ran uninterrupted a four-hour interview between Putin and Oliver Stone, the U.S. filmmaker, which gave a broadly positive spin to the Russian leader’s aggressive foreign policy. [...]

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Facebook rolled out a series of programs to counter these false narratives, including a clampdown on people making money from advertising connected to fake news. The social network also teamed up with Pagella Politica, a local fact-checking site, to debunk online myths. [...]

Italy’s politicians are divided over how to fight digital misinformation, with some actively embracing and sharing outright lies among their followers. Candidates from the Northern League and 5Star Movement are skeptical that false information is even a problem.

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Al Jazeera: The problem with leftist myths about Syria

A great number of leftist in the West and the East have been buying into regime propaganda for years now. From Australian academic Tim Anderson, who's claimed that Bashar al-Assad has not been involved in mass killings of civilians and was simply demonised by the imperial West to British and US journalists Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh who have claimed the regime did not use chemical weapons in various attacks on civilians, leftist public figures continue to believe that the Assad dictatorship is a bastion of anti-imperialism in the region and needs to be supported. [...]

For me, it is unfathomable how people who have stood up for social justice and human rights across the world remain in support of a regime that has exploited its population economically and tortured and killed innocent civilians in the most horrendous ways possible. Or how people who had seen through US imperial war propaganda cannot see through the Russian equivalent of it. [...]

In schools, we were brainwashed daily. I attended Baathist schools, where the president's portrait adorned every wall. During the flag salute every morning, we called for the immortality of Hafez al-Assad before heading to class. We memorised songs praising him and the Baathist Party, we had to recite his speeches. He was our leader and father. When Hafez died in 2000, I was 9 years old. I cried because the person who I'd always been told was immortal had died like a normal human.  [...]

Bashar's cousin, Rami Makhlouf, is the richest man in Syria. Makhlouf controls the major mobile phone company, TV channels, pro-government newspapers and used to control the oil and gas industry of the country before the war.

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