Vox: Americans are losing faith in the government to solve their problems — and turning to corporations instead

It’s not just guns. Americans have come to anticipate that not only will companies act on political and social issues, but also that they will do so more swiftly than those in charge of public policy. Lawmakers have failed to address issues from immigration to health care and climate change — while corporate America, hardly a bastion of progressive values, has at least proven somewhat receptive. [...]

Times have changed, and businesses have become increasingly willing to weigh in and even act on social and political issues. They’re less worried that taking a stand will rock the boat and instead appear more concerned about the negative consequences of not doing so. [...]

Jerry Davis, a professor of management and sociology at the University of Michigan, recently identified two broad trends driving increased corporate social activism. First, social media and the internet have changed the environment for business, making it cheaper and easier for activists to join together and voice their opinions. [...]

Business isn’t doing much better. In the 2017 Gallup poll, 21 percent of Americans said they had confidence in big business, 32 percent said they had confidence in the presidency, and just 12 percent said they had confidence in Congress.  

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The Atlantic: Marriage Has Become a Trophy

But there is one statistical tidbit that flies in the face of this conventional wisdom: A clear majority of same-sex couples who are living together are now married. Same-sex marriage was illegal in every state until Massachusetts legalized it in 2004, and it did not become legal nationwide until the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Two years after that decision, 61 percent of same-sex couples who were sharing a household were married, according to a set of surveys by Gallup. That’s a high take-up rate: Just because same-sex couples are able to marry doesn’t mean that they have to; and yet large numbers have seized the opportunity. (That’s compared with 89 percent of different-sex couples.) [...]

Why would they choose to do so after living, presumably happily, as cohabiting unmarried partners? In part, they may have married to take advantage of the legal rights and benefits of married couples, such as the ability to submit a joint federal tax return. But the legal issues, important as they are, appear secondary. In a 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of LGBT individuals said that “love” was a very important reason to marry, and 71 percent said “companionship” was very important, compared to 46 percent who said that “legal rights and benefits” are very important. [....]

In this sense, these gay couples were falling right in line with the broader American pattern right now: For many people, regardless of sexual orientation, a wedding is no longer the first step into adulthood that it once was, but, often, the last. It is a celebration of all that two people have already done, unlike a traditional wedding, which was a celebration of what a couple would do in the future. [...]

Nevertheless, the last-step view of marriage is common across all educational groups in United States. And it is being carried to the nth degree in Scandinavia. In Norway and Sweden, a majority of the population marries, but weddings often take place long after a couple starts to have children, or even after all of their children are born. The median age at first marriage in Norway is an astounding 39 for men and 38 for women, according to a recent estimate—six to eight years higher than the median age at first childbirth. In Sweden, one study found that 17 percent of all marriages had occurred after the couple had had two children. Why do they even bother to marry at such a late stage of their unions? Norwegians told researchers that they view marriage as a way to demonstrate love and commitment and to celebrate with relatives and friends the family they have constructed. This is capstone marriage: The wedding is the last brick put in place to finally complete the building of the family.

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The Atlantic: The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance

Sometimes that is because of deadline rush: The clock is ticking, and you have to act now. (To give a famous example: In 1980 U.S. radar erroneously indicated that the Soviets had launched a nuclear-missile attack, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, had to decide at 3 a.m. whether to wake the president to consider retaliation. Before the world was rushed toward possible nuclear obliteration, the warning was revealed as a false alarm before Brzezinski could place the call.) Most of the time it is because the important variables are simply unknowable, and a president or other decision-maker has to go on judgment, experience, hunch. [...]

The most famous and frightening example is Lyndon Johnson’s, involving Vietnam. Johnson “learned” so thoroughly the error of Neville Chamberlain, and others who tried to appease (rather than confront) the Nazis, that he thought the only risk in Vietnam was in delaying before confronting communists there. A complication in Johnson’s case, as this book and all other accounts of Vietnam make clear, is that he was worried both about the reality of waiting too long to draw a line against Communist expansion, and perhaps even more about appearing to be weak and Chamberlain-like. [...]

From its Vietnam trauma, the United States also codified a crass political lesson that Richard Nixon had applied during the war. Just before Nixon took office, American troop levels in Vietnam were steadily on the way up, as were weekly death tolls, and monthly draft calls. The death-and-draft combination was the trigger for domestic protests. Callously but accurately, Nixon believed that he could drain the will to the protest if he ended the draft calls. Thus began the shift to the volunteer army—and what I called, in an Atlantic cover story three years ago, the “Chickenhawk Nation” phenomenon, in which the country is always at war but the vast majority of Americans are spared direct cost or exposure. (From the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago until now, the total number of Americans who served at any point in Iraq or Afghanistan comes to just 1 percent of the U.S. population.) [...]

What lesson do we end with? Inevitably any of them from the past will mismatch our future choices. The reasons not to invade Iraq 15 years ago are different from the risks to consider in launching a strike on North Korea or on Iran, or provoking China in some dispute in the East China Sea.  The value of tragic imagination remains: for leaders considering war or peace, for the media in stoking or questioning pro-war fever, for the 99 percent of the public in considering the causes for which the military 1 percent will be asked to kill, and die.

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The New Yorker: Putin, a Little Man Still Trying to Prove His Bigness

During his third term as President, which began in 2012, Putin and his allies grew increasingly ambitious, seizing Crimea, in 2014, intervening in Syria’s civil war, in 2015, meddling in the 2016 American Presidential election, allegedly plotting the assassinations of exiles and dissidents over the past couple of years, and, shortly before the 2018 Russian Presidential election, boasting of a new nuclear weapon capable of evading U.S. missile defenses. [...]

“He is not necessarily a Soviet man, but he is a Cold War man. And he’s a K.G.B. man,” Nina Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, reflected at an event at the New School, in New York, last month. “And, for every K.G.B. officer, it was a dream to be known or to be thought of as somebody who can take down American democracy. For him, that image around the world would probably be even more important than this kind of partnership and parity with the United States.” [...]

Western powers long considered resistant to Russian mischief are increasingly vulnerable. Britain is now investigating whether Russia tried to manipulate the 2016 referendum on Brexit. In Germany, Russia allegedly exploited tensions over immigration to undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s strongest advocate for aiding desperate refugees from war-torn countries. Moscow is blamed, for example, for planting a false story about a thirteen-year-old German girl abducted by migrants that emotionally skewed Germany’s immigration debate in the run-up to its election last year. Meanwhile, Spain has charged Russia with fomenting support for the Catalan referendum on independence in 2017. [...]

Russia may now be questioning its investment in Trump’s victory, however. Since his election, Trump has—so far—not helped improve Moscow’s relationship with Washington. This month, the United States imposed new sanctions on Russia—including on its intelligence service—for cyberattacks on the American electricity grid, aviation, and other infrastructure. “The Russians may want to take credit for Trump’s victory, but they may now see that as a mixed blessing,” Tom Pickering, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Under-Secretary of State, said. “They have a man in power who acts as if he’s on a reality-TV show, for whom governance is a second priority.”

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Jacobin Magazine: China’s One-Man Show

This has a number of knock-on effects. If you know that you have to step down at the end of ten years, you moderate your behavior. You don’t want to have a whole set of enemies waiting to get you. So, the tenor and tone of the administrations that followed Deng Xiaoping were altogether calmer than during the era of Mao Zedong.

Term limits also solved the question that has bedeviled China’s politics, which is the question of succession. All through the imperial period — 2,000 years of naked power struggles and succession struggles — you see the bad effects of not having a constitutional succession process. And we saw it also in the first years of Chairman Mao, when every person who was named number two, and therefore could be expected to succeed Mao, ended up either dead or in jail. [...]

There are a couple of possible explanations for that. One, it dovetails very well with an international role. As president, he gets to interact with other presidents, whereas as general secretary it’s a little more complicated to meet Queen Elizabeth or a US president. [...]

It’s not really clear how the state is going to deal with that going forward. There have been some measures to clean up what they call gray banking and shadow banking sectors, where financial instruments of the kind that caused so much trouble in the Western financial system were devised by local authorities and by state-owned enterprises in order to go on fueling their growth. You can’t run like that forever, and that is one of the problems that Xi Jinping is going to have to address. [...]

I think the ultimate vision is a restoration of the sense that China is the center of its world. That was the way China felt about itself for many centuries, partly because it didn’t really go very much farther. There was a brief period in the Ming Dynasty when ships went up and down the coast of Africa, and there was always land-based trade along the Silk Road, but China was content to treat the states and its neighbors in the immediate region as tributaries that paid homage to China as the great regional power. It was 20 percent of the world’s economy, which is pretty much where we’re heading back to.

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Al Jazeera: Invasion of Iraq: The original sin of the 21st century

Al-Qaeda was perceived to be an existential threat in Ba'athist Iraq and was hunted down, but the group found fertile recruitment ground in the country following the invasion. It used George Bush's characterisation of the so-called "war on terror" as a "crusade" as a rallying cry, inviting fighters across to world to join their fight. Al-Qaeda was almost non-existent in Iraq prior to 2003, but it became a powerful force following the invasion and increased its global recruitment rate substantially. It was the power vacuum created by the invasion that allowed people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to become powerful warlords almost overnight.  [...]

The Lancet published a study that showed that, up until 2006, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had been killed as a direct result of the invasion. The British defence ministry's then-chief scientific adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, praised the study as "robust", lending even further credibility to the findings demonstrating the catastrophic loss of life suffered by Iraqis in the first three years following the invasion.  [...]

All of these developments have a common ancestor - the Iraq war. The Middle East is more violent and unstable than it has ever been in living memory. Iran and Saudi Arabia are now engaged in a proxy war of grave regional implications that seems to have no end in sight. The United States is in retreat, as Russia and China assert themselves on the global stage and issue open challenges to the world's former unipolar power. And Europe is struggling with xenophobia born of a refugee crisis that primarily resulted from violence in the Middle East. The entire world has felt the effects of the Iraq war and, after a decade and a half of global chaos and instability, it is hard to characterise the invasion of Iraq as anything but the original sin of the 21st century.

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The New Yorker: Faces of an Epidemic

Opioids now kill more than fifty thousand Americans a year, ten thousand more than AIDS did at the peak of that epidemic.

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Independent: Fifteen years ago today we invaded Iraq – the repercussions are still being felt in British politics

The number of civilians dead as a result of the war ranges from The Lancet Medical Journal’s 650,000 figure up to a million. By 16 February 2007, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said that the external refugee number fleeing the war reached 2 million and that within Iraq there are an estimated 1.7 million internally displaced people. It is now thought to be as much as double that number.

It is well known that the oil wells were secured and privatised. But the privatisation of Iraq doesn’t stop at oil and Halliburton. Even the seeds of Iraqi farmers were privatised and sold off to international agribusiness, disrupting a centuries-old farming method. [...]

The EU referendum offered an opportunity to strike a blow against the political establishment. The arguments were led by the radical right – but they fed upon the idea that Britain had to be made “great again” after a decade and a half of powerful forces ignoring the will of the people. [...]

Today you will hear from some quarters that after a decade and a half it is time to move on. This is an impossibility because it continues to shape the political terrain in profound ways. And how can we simply “move on” knowing that the crimes that have been visited on the Iraqi people have not been accounted for by their perpetrators?

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The Atlantic: What Is Donald Trump Hiding?

The opaque nature of his family’s multinational company makes it impossible to understand his conflicts of interest as he directs foreign policy for the United States. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has repeatedly filed incomplete or inaccurate forms with the federal government, both as part of his effort to secure a permanent security clearance, and to comply with federal disclosure rules intended to forestall conflicts of interest. [...]

“In the early months of the administration, at the behest of now-President Trump, who was furious over leaks from within the White House, senior White House staff members were asked to, and did, sign nondisclosure agreements vowing not to reveal confidential information and exposing them to damages for any violation,” Ruth Marcus reports. As Ben Wizner of the ACLU subsequently noted, “These so-called NDAs are unconstitutional and unenforceable.” Still, the prospect of fighting a billionaire in court over an NDA could easily chill protected speech.  [...]

Law-abiding citizens of modest means are subject to inescapable government surveillance and opaque corporate data-gathering in their private lives, while the most powerful elected officials and many of the most powerful figures in tech— which rivals government in its ability to intrude on the privacy of billions—marshal their wealth and power to obscure even actions that profoundly affect the public sphere.

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