Vox: Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism

Warren wants to eliminate the huge financial incentives that entice CEOs to flush cash out to shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses. She wants to curb corporations’ political activities. And for the biggest corporations, she’s proposing a dramatic step that would ensure workers and not just shareholders get a voice on big strategic decisions. [...]

The conceit tying together Warren’s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths whose sole obligation is profitability — as is currently conventional in American business thinking. [...]

The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades. [...]

One important real-world complication that Friedman’s article largely neglects is that business lobbying does a great deal to determine what the laws are. It’s all well and good, in other words, to say that businesses should follow the rules and leave worrying about environmental externalities up to the regulators. But in reality, polluting companies invest heavily in making sure that regulators underregulate — and it seems to follow from the doctrine of shareholder supremacy that if lobbying to create bad laws is profitable for shareholders, corporate executives are required to do it.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: Bangladesh’s Authoritarian Turn

Alam’s legal team managed to appeal to a higher court, which ordered that he be taken to a hospital and examined by a physician who can investigate torture. But over the weekend, Alam was moved to another jail and charged with spreading rumors and hurting the image of Bangladesh. On August 13, UN human rights experts called for his immediate release, but as of this writing he is still imprisoned. [...]

The students had taken to the streets because of a July 29 incident in which the driver of a private bus, competing with the driver of another private bus to pick up passengers near a stop, had rammed into a group of students who were attempting to cross a major road, killing two of them and injuring twelve others. Road safety is notoriously poor in Bangladesh. According to the national committee to protect shipping, roads, and railways, 7,397 people died on Bangladeshi roads last year, and the figure for this year had already reached 2,471 in June. Driving standards are lax, with many unlicensed drivers, a high proportion of unroadworthy vehicles, poorly lit highways, malfunctioning traffic signals, and ill-maintained roads. [...]

This summer, students’ demands were for something far more modest and straightforward: safer roads. But the government of Sheikh Hasina did not appreciate their show of defiance. As the current student protest entered its second week, on August 3, young men belonging to two ruling party-affiliated leagues, Chhatra (students) and Jubo (youth), disrupted the demonstrations. Armed with machetes and sticks and wearing helmets so that they couldn’t be identified, they began attacking students and journalists to break up the protests. Alam witnessed all this and began recording—and then told Al-Jazeera what he’d seen. [...]

The government’s anxiety is surprising, considering it faces no real opposition. Hasina is probably calculating that, aside from criticism from some NGOs, the international community won’t bother her because her government has performed the important task of providing asylum for hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who recently fled murderous persecution in neighboring Myanmar. With nearly 800,000 displaced Rohingyas now in southern Bangladesh needing to be looked after, none of the major donor countries—the US, the EU, and Australia—want to alienate Bangladesh. Nor is Hasina likely to come under any pressure from Bangladesh’s closest regional ally, India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing elections there in a few months, and he wants to crack down on Bangladeshi migration into Assam, which neighbors Bangladesh. Modi would also like to expel some 40,000 Rohingyas elsewhere in India, a decision human rights lawyers have challenged in Indian courts; if he succeeds, Bangladesh would likely be the refugees’ ultimate destination. Finally, although her government has done little to protect secularist bloggers, Hasina presents herself to the international community as its partner against fundamentalist terrorism.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: Last Chance, SPD

The report concluded that the SPD is no longer perceived as a credible voice on issues of social and economic justice. It argued that Martin Schulz’s election as leader had been a small step in the right direction, but that the many compromises among the party leadership (whose main goal seems to be avoiding having to distance themselves from the neoliberal reforms they imposed in government in the mid-2000s) meant that his election slogans about social justice rang hollow. Above all, the report emphasized a “collective failure of leadership” — not only were Schulz and his predecessor Sigmar Gabriel at fault, but the entire leadership which had set the party’s agenda for years. Despite these blunt truths, and earlier announcements that the party would be seeking to renew itself, the SPD has made an almost pathological choice to continue with more of the same. [...]

The SPD now promised to reinvent itself while in government and sent both Martin Schulz and Sigmar Gabriel into (temporary) political retirement. “Renewal,” however, meant that not a single member of the party’s left wing joined the new leadership: no one who campaigned against re-forming the grand coalition found themselves in a leading position. The only new face in the party leadership is the new general secretary, Lars Klingbeil. But Klingbeil is by no means a man of the Left; he is, in fact, a long-standing member of the Seeheimer Kreis (“Seeheim Circle”), an influential grouping on the right of the party. [...]

After the election, when it initially seemed as if the SPD would take up a position in the opposition, Nahles told journalists that the party would attack the CDU head-on. Now, she is busy explaining that Germany “can’t take in all” of the refugees. Pragmatism veering into cynical opportunism is nothing new for SPD elites, but nonetheless never fails to amaze. [...]

The list of Scholz’s political achievements is long but give the list to someone with no knowledge of the man, and they may be shocked to find out that he claims to be a social democrat. This is not to say that he could have been from the right-wing extremist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), but simply that Scholz largely embodies the archetype of a bourgeois rather than Social Democratic politician. In 2001, as the Hamburg city-state’s Senator of the Interior, he passed a law that allowed police to forcibly administer emetics to drug dealers — a measure the European Court of Human Rights later labelled a human rights violation. This, from a man who began his career as a left-wing Juso.

read the article

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Wormholes Explained – Breaking Spacetime

Are wormholes real or are they just magic disguised as physics and maths? And if they are real how do they work and where can we find them?

openDemocracy: Research the revenge: what we’re getting wrong about Russia Today

But Margarita Simonyan isn’t alone in her vigorous love-hate relationship with America and the west. Many of her accomplices at RT are disgruntled former staffers of western media in Moscow. These people are well-trained, well-educated, well-travelled — and completely disillusioned in press freedom, having formed their opinions after the abrupt ending of their comfortable and well-paid careers in western bureaus in Moscow. They all have this unifying event in the past: when you’re fired (or rejected) by someone who defined you and your life, it leaves a taste of betrayal in the mouth. [...]

To my colleagues researching Russian propaganda, I have this advice: don’t overcomplicate RT’s practices. It is possible you will find some vicious patterns and suspicious signs of high intelligence capabilities — but this evidence is false. What you see is not a calculated offensive operation with long-term goals, but a pattern of rage and revenge. Furious in their revenge, people of RT and other Russian “disinformation troops” are merely trying to implement their sense of betrayal. They share this feeling with the Kremlin, which feels deceived by the triumphant post-Cold War West. And, because of this shared hate (and zeal), they tirelessly work and direct work of others — to revenge, to humiliate and deceive in return.

While I agree generally with the importance of scientific and data-rich research of RT’s activities, I see fewer reasons to develop any recommendations based on these kind of studies. There’s no algorithm in RT’s malevolence, no scrupulous propaganda technology. What powers it is the burning hatred of smart boys and girls who once thought of the West — and particularly Western media — as the “shining city on the hill”, but now feel offended and deceived. The ingenuity of broken illusions is the fuel of RT, coupled with lavish state funding and emotional reimbursement. Nothing is more creative than a desire for revenge — and this means that no “computational” or restrictive measures for opposing this revenge will be successful.

read the article

Politico: Europe mulls stripping carbon from the skies

As part of that, the Commission began work this summer on a carbon removal strategy, and for the first time is seeking views on possible options to suck up carbon, including “intensive” efforts to plant new trees, using forests and croplands, and “direct air capture” of carbon. It’s also testing public views on various carbon capture and storage (CSS) technologies, where carbon is caught, often from industrial smokestacks, and sequestered underground. [...]

Whatever the worries about diverting effort from cutting fossil fuel use, the Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) argued in early July that there is no other viable option. “Carbon dioxide removal is … no longer a choice, but a necessity for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” it wrote in a commentary to accompany a paper in Nature Climate Change. [...]

Some scientists talk of putting mirrors in space to deflect the rays of the sun; spraying sulfur high in the atmosphere to seed clouds; or dumping iron into the sea to foster growth of carbon-absorbing algae.

But those ideas of overt climate manipulation are still far from the mainstream policy agenda. In early August, Germany decided that ocean seeding will only be allowed for research purposes and under strict conditions.

read the article

Politico: Trump’s Iran sanctions are backfiring in Iraq

When the international community imposed sanctions on the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from 1990 to 2003, next-door Jordan was exempt. The United Nations excused Jordan from sanctions that banned it from buying oil from Iraq, for instance. So there’s a strong precedent for exempting Iraq from the Iran sanctions. [...]

Even Abadi, who is considered to be more pro-American than his predecessor, cannot afford to comply with sanctions. He has been backpedaling since last week. On August 13, he said: “I did not say we abide by the sanctions, I said we abide by not using dollars in transactions. We have no other choice,” the prime minister told reporters in Baghdad. [...]

Second, Iraq’s water supplies are dependent upon the flows of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers from where it gets 98 percent of its surface water. If it chose to do so, Iran could divert 13 percent of Iraq’s water resources. Iraqi Deputy Water Minister told Gulf News in April that 20 to 30 percent of the Tigris River’s water in Iraq originates in Iran. If Iraq complies with sanctions, Iran could easily cut the flows of water, as it already has done in the northern Kurdistan area in Sulaimaniyah province, according to the Kurdistan regional government’s Ministry of Agriculture. At a time of serious drought in Iraq, this is no idle threat. [...]

Iran has political leverage, too. Since the May 12 national election, Iraq’s political elites have been unable to form a government in part because of enormous pressure from Tehran to install politicians in their favor. If Iran’s loyalists succeed and dominate the new government, Iraq’s rulers will definitely make decisions that support Iranian interests.

read the article

Al Jazeera: Qatari emir vows $15bn investment in Turkey after Erdogan meeting

Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has said Qatar is standing by its "brothers in Turkey" as he announced a $15bn investment into the country's financial markets and banks. [...]

"Qatar will continue to stand by its Turkish brothers as it did during the failed coup attempt in 2016," Al Shafi said, adding Qatari people purchased millions of Turkish lira to support Ankara against the "economic operation", the country is witnessing, local media reported. [...]

Earlier on Wednesday, Erdogan spoke on the phone with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Turkish presidency. He is due to speak with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.

read the article