How did America become the world’s predominant power? Historian Stephen Wertheim joins the Prospect podcast this week to discuss the short history of America as the world’s policeman, which he outlines in his new book, Tomorrow the World. He also talks about what might happen next—and what a foreign policy under Joe Biden might look like.
15 November 2020
The Red Line: Who Controls the Caspian Sea?
What was once considered a Soviet lake is now quickly becoming one of the most important strategic locations in the region, with Russia working hard to maintain its grip over the sea. The important part though may be what lies beneath its surface, that being enough gas to power Europe and blunt Russia's gas monopoly. So whoever controls the Caspian, will have major leverage over the European powers, but to discuss this further we turn to our expert panel. Eugene Chausovsky (Centre for Global Policy) Stanislav Printchin (ECED) Robert M Cutler (NATO Canada) For more info visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod or Michael on @MikeHilliardAus
BBC4 Analysis: The Future of Welfare
The furlough scheme, introduced in response to Covid-19, has raised a question: should Britain’s social insurance be a bit more German? Germany has what’s known as an earnings-related contributory system – individuals pay quite a lot in, and if they lose their job, they receive quite a lot out - around 60% of their previous salary, for at least a year. Critics of the German system say it’s costly and puts too little emphasis on redistribution. But advocates claim it commands far wider support than the British system. So does the pandemic and the calls it has provoked for a fresh look at the shape and scope of our welfare state provide an opportunity? Should Britain move towards a system that is more like Germany’s?
The Guardian: Inside the airline industry's meltdown
To customers, investors and airlines, an earthbound existence was unimaginable before the coronavirus. For commercial aviation, the past two decades have been a period of superheated growth. In 1998, airlines sold 1.46bn tickets for one kind of flight or another. By 2019, that number had shot up to 4.54bn. This year has undone it all. Early in March, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) published two potential scenarios. The more extreme one forecast a global loss of revenue of $113bn. By mid-April, about 14,400 passenger planes around the world – 65% of the global fleet – had been placed into storage, according to the aviation research firm Cirium. Companies that have been brought to the brink, or in some cases collapsed entirely, include Virgin Australia and Virgin Atlantic, Flybe in the UK, South African Airways, LATAM and Avianca in South America, Compass and Trans States in the US. Airlines for America, a trade group, calculated that the last time the US averaged fewer than 100,000 daily passengers was in 1954. Emirates became so desperate for passengers that it promised to shell out $1,765 for a funeral if anyone died of Covid-19 after flying with them. [...]
Last year, KLM unveiled an initiative that sounded like a plea for less business. “Do you always need to meet face to face? Could you take the train instead?” a voiceover in an advert asked. “We all have to fly every now and then. But next time, think about flying responsibly.” (“There was a little bit of bravery in that,” a KLM executive told me. “It had to be pitched to the board three times before they approved it.”) The ad, bold as it was, also fit a broader pattern. As ever, individuals are being requested to tame their habits of consumption, even while governments and large corporations do far less than they might to curb their expenditure of carbon. At the same time, we’re assured by airline companies that our self-restraint has to be only temporary, and that some technological salvation – a plane running on batteries or hydrogen – will let us return to our habits very soon. [...]
But the true leaps in efficiency were achieved by new craft, which airlines began to request from manufacturers in the early 00s. The Boeing 787, for example, claims to burn 20% less fuel than its older sibling, the 767. Van Hooff recalled how, when KLM inducted its first 787 into its fleet in 2015, a pilot accustomed to the 747 was appointed to fly it to Dubai. “The 747 is beautiful, but it burns around 11,000 kilos of fuel per hour on a trip like this, so he was used to seeing around 100,000 kilos on his storage gauge when he got into the cockpit,” Van Hooff said. “This time, he saw 50,000. He put in a call to dispatch to ask: ‘Are you really sure this is enough?’ Of course, he knew it was. But he couldn’t get past his gut feeling that he needed more fuel.”
FiveThirtyEight: Why Many Americans Don't Vote
In any given election, between 35 and 60 percent of eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. It’s not that hard to understand why. Our system doesn’t make it particularly easy to vote, and the decision to carve out a few hours to cast a ballot requires a sense of motivation that’s hard for some Americans to muster every two or four years — enthusiasm about the candidates, belief in the importance of voting itself, a sense that anything can change as the result of a single vote. “I guess I just don’t think that one person’s vote can swing an election,” said Jon Anderson, who won’t be voting for president this year because of moral objections to both candidates. [....]
Of the 8,000-plus people we polled, we were able to match nearly 6,000 to their voting history. We analyzed the views of the respondents in that slightly smaller group, and found that they fell into three broad groups: 1) people who almost always vote; 2) people who sometimes vote; and 3) people who rarely or never vote. People who sometimes vote were a plurality of the group (44 percent), while 31 percent nearly always cast a ballot and just 25 percent almost never vote. And as the chart below shows, there weren’t huge differences between people who vote almost all the time and those who vote less consistently. Yes, those who voted more regularly were higher income, more educated, more likely to be white and more likely to identify with one of the two political parties, but those who only vote some of the time were also fairly highly educated and white, and not overwhelmingly young. There were much bigger differences between people who sometimes vote and those who almost never vote.
Nonvoters were more likely to have lower incomes; to be young; to have lower levels of education; and to say they don’t belong to either political party, which are all traits that square with what we know about people less likely to engage with the political system. [...]
There are, of course, other systemic reasons why some people might vote more inconsistently. Our survey found, for instance, that occasional voters were slightly more likely than frequent voters to have a long-term disability (8 percent vs. 5 percent), and nonvoters were even more likely to fall into this category (12 percent). Black and Hispanic voters are also more likely to experience hurdles, perhaps in part because there tend to be fewer polling places in their neighborhoods. About 24 percent of Black respondents said that they had to stand in line for more than an hour while voting, and Hispanic respondents were more likely to say they had trouble accessing the polling place or couldn’t get off work in time to vote.
Social Europe: China takes the climate stage
The online exchanges were, by all accounts, meatier than expected. But that was no preparation for what happened next. On September 22nd, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, made a surprise announcement: China would aim for carbon neutrality ahead of 2060.
Xi has done big climate policy before. In November 2014 he appeared alongside the then US president, Barack Obama, to declare that China—despite its status as a developing country and although the climate problem was the historical responsibility of the west—would make commitments to curb its emissions from 2030. That declaration opened the door to the Paris Agreement. [...]
For the mass of the Chinese population, the threat of catastrophic flooding this summer was a far greater concern than fear of Islamism in Xinjiang or troublesome student protests in Hong Kong. Authoritarian environmentalism under the banner of ‘ecological civilisation’ is one of the watchwords of Xi’s regime.
Increasingly, climate is being inserted into a vision of great-power rivalry, rather than co-operation. In the US there are already voices calling for the establishment of green energy policies on the basis of a bipartisan national-security front against China.
Social Europe: Poland’s abortion protests—democratic standards at stake
The PiS has been in power for five years now. From the outset, these have been turbulent times, marked by diverse protests—by doctors, teachers, farmers, miners and parents of disabled children. The pandemic has only aggravated the public mood, adding to the frustration of the most affected groups, such as micro- and small entrepreneurs, as well as coronavirus-deniers, a movement also germinating in Poland.
Nevertheless, it’s the ideological war which seems to have agitated the society and petrified the political polarisation. The presidential election during the summer was won by Andrzej Duda, candidate of the United Right, by the skin of his teeth. The PiS retains a majority in the Sejm, the lower chamber, thanks only to its two junior coalition partners, while the Senat was lost to the opposition after the parliamentary elections in October 2019. Local governments and cities remain independent and very often in opposition to the central government. [...]
It was in this context that over the summer the LGBT community in Poland became the target of a defamation campaign, which sadly mobilised many and mainstreamed homophobic narratives. It seems the PiS wanted to deliver a pointed response, to prove its ideological ‘purity’—and completely overdid it, putting its own government at existential risk. In so doing, it again tested the boundaries of what remains a young Polish democracy.
Social Europe: Minimum-wage directive: yes, but …
On October 28th, the European Commission published its proposal for a directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union. It’s a watershed in the history of European social and economic integration: for the first time, the commission is initiating legislative action not only to ensure fair minimum wages but also to strengthen collective bargaining in Europe. [...]
Without a clear and common definition of wage adequacy at EU level, there is a clear danger that some member states will apply a very restrictive definition, which will fail to foster real improvement of minimum-wage levels. In its impact-assessment report, the commission has calculated that an increase of national minimum wages according to the double decency threshold—60 per cent of the median and 50 per cent of the average wage—would improve the wages of around 25 million workers in Europe. This estimate should be the decisive benchmark to measure whether or not the directive is a success: either it will genuinely contribute to the improvement of wages or it will remain a political symbol with no discernible impact. The inclusion of a more precise definition of adequate minimum wages in the legal provisions of the directive will thus be a core issue in the debates on its adoption. [...]
The proposed directive certainly has the potential to improve the wages of millions of Europe’s low-wage workers and strengthen their collective-bargaining position. To ensure its effectiveness however requires recognising there is much room for improvement, especially on more precise and binding criteria for adequate minimum wages and more practical tools for the promotion of collective bargaining.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)