The Guardian: How Matteo Salvini pulled Italy to the far right

Then in 2012, prosecutors discovered that the Northern League’s treasurer had misappropriated some €40m in public money, and that hundreds of thousands of euros had gone to the Bossi family. A party that had run on the slogan of “Roma, ladrona!” (“thieving Rome”) had been caught out in the basest kind of corruption. Money had gone to pay for renovations of the Bossi home, a luxury car and a phony university degree purchased in Albania for Bossi’s less-than-brilliant son, who was being groomed for a leadership position.[...]

The magazine found that Salvini’s following often spiked after he made an especially provocative statement – such as declaring, in 2016, that the pope’s welcome to immigrants would “encourage and fund an unprecedented invasion”. But another Wired study found that Salvini has become increasingly sophisticated in the last few years, stimulating positive feelings as well as the usual negative emotions of anger and fear. “The rhetorical strategy is clear: you lower the reader’s guard by playing on fear and anger, but also suggesting that, by putting faith in the Lega, things will get better,” the magazine concluded. “There is a positive element to his posts, even a bit of joy.”[...]

Salvini’s rise to power has heightened concerns in Italy about the escalation of racist and xenophobic violence in the country. Dozens of attacks on black people and Roma have been recorded in the last year, all over Italy, from Treviso in the north to Gioia Tauro in the south, including Florence and Rome. The attacks range from drive-by shootings with air guns, in which the attackers were reported to shout “Salvini!” to the assassination of a Malian trade unionist campaigning for fair pay for migrant workers. An Italian athlete of Nigerian descent, Daisy Osakue, the Italian under-23 champion discus thrower, was hit in the eye by an egg thrown from a car. Police have been pursuing attackers and making arrests, but the government has been more reticent. After a torrent of criticism for his anti-migrant policies – culminating with the headline “Get behind me, Salvini” on the cover of Italy’s largest Catholic magazine – Salvini responded with a favorite phrase of Mussolini: “many enemies, much honor.” He also insisted that the idea of widespread Italian racism was “an invention of the left”.[...]

While stopping boatloads of refugees from north Africa may satisfy an emotional need to restore a sense of order to immigration, it doesn’t change the basic demographic arithmetic, which shows that Italy actually needs a healthy level of immigration to survive. Last year, 664,000 Italians died, while only 464,000 Italian babies were born – 100,000 of those were of mixed couples, with one Italian parent and one foreign-born one, according to Istat, the national statistics bureau. If the country is going to maintain something close to its current population of 60 million and have enough working people to keep its pension system afloat, it will have to add to its population. Most of Italy’s immigrants are young, arrived legally, and are working and paying taxes.

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Jacobin Magazine: Bolsonaro’s Conservative Revolution

The reasons for this reactionary wave are diverse. As has been noted elsewhere, since the PT’s narrow victory over the PSDB in 2014 there has been a radicalization of the predominantly white middle to upper classes towards authoritarian solutions. This was the part of the population that dominated the street protests calling for Dilma’s impeachment in 2016, but have become disillusioned by the mainstream right. Not all have authoritarian preferences, of course, and many would prefer it if the PSDB continued to represent a viable option. Many dislike Bolsonaro, but their virulent “antipetismo” (hatred of the PT) leads them towards viewing him as a lesser evil.[...]

The demographic breakdown of first-round voting intentions by pollster Datafolha, a few days before the election, shows that 51 percent of voters earning between five and ten minimum wages ($1,261–2,522 USD per month) and 44 percent earning over ten minimum wages ($2,522) planned to vote for Bolsonaro, compared to 12 percent and 15 percent respectively for Haddad. Meanwhile, 42 percent of those self-defining as white planned to vote for Bolsonaro, compared to 15 percent for Haddad. (That said, the relationship between race and class in Brazil is complex and should be treated with caution. While the middle and upper classes are predominantly white, whites are not predominantly well-off. Furthermore, racial self-classification varies significantly according to both income level and region of the country.)[...]

As with any trend involving large numbers of people, there is no single explanation for “Bolsonarismo popular” — ie. Bolsonaro’s appeal to lower-income people. Some, thanks to the media’s relentless attacks on the PT, have developed antipetista attitudes similar to those of elites, complaining about everything from PT corruption to high taxes to the unfairness of racial quotas in universities. However, in my experience, such attitudes are relatively rare. [...]

It is true that neo-Pentecostal churches have grown precipitously among the poor and built a powerful clientelistic machine. It is also true that Bolsonaro’s agenda fits with a broader popular conservatism among lower-income groups. As shown by a Datafolha survey last year on Brazilians’ social attitudes, poorer people are more likely to think that those who believe in God are better people, that abortion is a crime that should be punished, and that drugs should be prohibited. They respond well to Bolsonaro’s claim to be resisting the “deconstruction of heteronormativity” and to proposals of forced internment for drug addicts.[...]

However, few poor people ever saw the mainstream right as offering a meaningful alternative. I would suggest that their anger about the economic crisis and corruption scandals are fundamentally motivated by a desire for more redistribution, whereas the elite’s embodies indignation about the limited redistribution that already occurred under the PT. In any case, with the mainstream parties all implicated in the crises, both groups became receptive to any candidate who was sufficiently distant from the incumbents to look like an “outsider” and who sounded as angry as they were.

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Vox: “Welcome home, Matt”: Bishop Robinson welcomes Matthew Shepard — and gay Christians — back to the church

Robinson’s words, and those of the Shepard family, provided a powerful blueprint for a politically progressive, radically inclusive Christianity. Like the sermon of Bishop Michael Curry, the presiding — and thus most senior — bishop of the American Episcopal Church who delivered a fiery liberation theology-tinged sermon about social justice at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Robinson’s words seemed designed to present a religiously radical Christianity — and, in particular, a mainline Protestant tradition — as a viable and necessary alternative to the political conservatism and pro-Trump nationalism increasingly associated with white evangelicalism in America.[...]

Robinson’s speech, like Curry’s before it, should be seen in a much wider context: the potential resurgence of the mainline Protestant tradition for political progressives. While historically centrist Protestantism has been in decline for the past few decades — ceding its cultural and political influence to the evangelical right — prominent mainline figures and institutions have become increasingly political in recent years.[...]

These numbers might not be significant. Political liberals, particularly young ones, are far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than, say, Episcopalian — nearly 40 percent of liberals self-identify as religious “nones.” But Robinson’s words, like Curry’s, offer a vision of a religious tradition that marries a commitment to fight social injustice with a theologically robust account of why that fight is so important. For Robinson and Curry alike, a commitment to inclusion and justice isn’t just part of political progressivism, but part of the Christian message itself.

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Wisecrack Edition: Kanye and The End of Reality

Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the Wide World of Kayfabe – a wrestling concept by which we choose to consume fiction as 'reality.' Learn how this one principle as it work in so much of the content we consume today – from celebrity gossip and rap beefs to spicy political campaigns and beyond!

Vox: Can technocracy be saved? An interview with Cass Sunstein.

That approach earned Sunstein considerable scorn from some progressives, who thought the process wound up junking or delaying invaluable life-saving regulations. More broadly, Sunstein’s philosophy represents a commitment to technocracy that a growing number of liberals and leftists are increasingly rejecting as politically naive at best, and suicidal at worst given the realities of asymmetric polarization and Republican interest in minority rule. Why strand your own policies in a procedural quagmire of your own making when the other side just does what it wants when its party is in power?[...]

I think some people on the left think we underestimate the benefits of regulation and overestimate the costs, so cost-benefit analysis is inadequate or it needs to be accompanied by a discounting of the costs we see or a boosting of the benefits we see. The data on the past 30 years doesn’t justify that broad conclusion. Such data as we have suggests that agencies do err — sometimes in understating and overstating both costs and benefits — without a systematic skew toward benefits understatement.[...]

My observation from afar says that the Trump administration in some ways has been admirably committed to cost-benefit analysis, which is why the assault on the administrative estate has been less severe than widely reported.[...]

The book is not an unambivalent celebration of the revolution. We’ve referred to distributional factors, which matter, and the knowledge factor, which matters. Cost-benefit analysis is the best way of capturing human welfare right now. But we’re increasingly learning that something might have increasingly high costs and not as high benefits, but it might make people’s lives better regardless. Something Trump just endorsed, which is a tribute to this, is mandatory cameras in cars so you can see behind you. That saves lives, and driving is a lot easier. You can see if you’re about to hit something.

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The Atlantic: A Brief History of Anti-Semitic Violence in America

Saturday’s shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 11 people were murdered and six more were injured, is believed to be the deadliest attack against the American Jewish community in U.S. history. The massacre is an unprecedented act of violence against American Jews—but it is by no means the first time that anti-Semitism has manifested in deadly violence against Jews in the United States.

American anti-Semitism is as old as America itself. For decades, American Jews have faced social discrimination, acts of vandalism against sacred spaces, and, in recent years, social-media harassment—and the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has risen dramatically since 2016. Fatal attacks against American Jews have been far less common than these other forms of discrimination. And yet American history is full of episodes of physical violence against Jews and Jewish institutions. What follows is a list, far from comprehensive, of some of the many violent attacks targeting Jews in recent history.

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Politico: Merkel’s coalition lives to fight another day — just

Angela Merkel’s “grand coalition” of conservatives and Social Democrats (popularly known as the “GroKo”) suffered substantial, though not crippling, losses in a regional election in the state of Hesse on Sunday. While the result was somewhat better than predicted for the major parties and should quiet fears of an imminent coalition collapse, it highlighted how fragile and unloved the Berlin government has become after little more than half a year in office.[...]

The chancellor’s CDU won 27 percent of the vote in Hesse, down from 38.3 percent in the last election in 2013, while the Social Democrats (SPD) finished second with 20.1 percent, dropping from 30.7 percent, according to a projection by Infratest dimap, a polling institute, for ARD public television. The Greens won 19.6 percent, nearly doubling their 2013 result.[...]

National issues dominated the campaign in Hesse, a wealthy region that is home to Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt. That turned the election into a referendum on the performance of Merkel’s coalition with the SPD, which has been plagued by infighting since it took office in March.[...]

Above all, the result signals that German politics have become more volatile than at any time since World War II, meaning established parties are no longer able to rely on the allegiance of core constituencies. For example, nearly 75 percent of voters who abandoned the CDU and more than 50 percent of those who left the SPD said they did so in order to “send the party a message.”

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Al Jazeera: How much power does Saudi Arabia wield over the global economy?

Saudi oil is "actually quite important, particularly in the short-run," according to Chris Garcia, CEO of Vicar Financial and former deputy director of the US Department of Commerce under US President Donald Trump. "This is why when we look at some of the potential retaliation tactics that the Saudis have threatened, we have to take them seriously."[...]

"It's the short-run repercussions of the Saudis cutting [oil] output that would send shockwaves throughout the global economy, but I would say that's leverage that would diminish in the long run unless they diversify as the world continues to diversify itself from its energy resources," explains Garcia.[...]

Saudi's sovereign wealth fund is called the Public Investment Fund, which traditionally had a strategy of low-risk investments. But everything changed in 2016 when the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund invested $3.5bn in Uber, making it the largest single investment ever made in a privately-held company at the time.

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Haaretz: Israel's Chief Rabbi Refuses to Call Pittsburgh Massacre Site a Synagogue Because It's non-Orthodox

The country’s ultra-Orthodox newspapers, in reporting on the event, have also refused to acknowledge that it took place in a Jewish house of prayer because Tree of Life is a Conservative congregation, and they do not recognize the non-Orthodox movements.

In the interview with Makor Rishon, a newspaper popular in the Israeli Modern Orthodox community, Rabbi David Lau said that “any murder of any Jew in any part of the world for being Jewish is unforgivable.” But rather than acknowledge that the crime had been carried out in a synagogue, he referred to the location as “a place with a profound Jewish flavor.”[...]

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox newspapers all reported on the attack, but likewise, refused to refer to Tree of Life as a synagogue, preferring instead to call it a “Jewish center.”

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