TLDR News: Could Coronavirus Start a Global Recession?

COVID-19, more commonly known as coronavirus, continues to spread across the world. As the virus spreads investors and businesses are getting nervous. So in this video, we're going to explore the economic effect of COVID-19 and how the global economy is reacting to the virus.

The New York Review of Books: Imperial Exceptionalism

It is hard to give up something you claim you never had. That is the difficulty Americans face with respect to their country’s empire. Since the era of Theodore Roosevelt, politicians, journalists, and even some historians have deployed euphemisms—“expansionism,” “the large policy,” “internationalism,” “global leadership”—to disguise America’s imperial ambitions. According to the exceptionalist creed embraced by both political parties and most of the press, imperialism was a European venture that involved seizing territories, extracting their resources, and dominating their (invariably dark-skinned) populations. Americans, we have been told, do things differently: they bestow self-determination on backward peoples who yearn for it. The refusal to acknowledge that Americans have pursued their own version of empire—with the same self-deceiving hubris as Europeans—makes it hard to see that the US empire might (like the others) have a limited lifespan. All empires eventually end, but maybe an exceptional force for global good could last forever—or so its champions seem to believe. [...]

Most textbooks date the beginning of America’s overseas expansion to 1898, when it acquired sovereignty over Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the conclusion of its war with Spain. Yet as Bulmer-Thomas shows, the US empire went offshore much earlier. During the 1810s and 1820s, Americans carved out the state of Liberia in West Africa, allegedly as a refuge for free American blacks; the country in fact functioned as an American colony and later as a protectorate of the Firestone Rubber Company. The US established an imperial presence in East Asia as early as 1844, when the Treaty of Wanghia gave it the same privileged access to Chinese ports as the British Empire, and went on to acquire dozens of “guano islands” in the Pacific, where abundant bird droppings provided a rich source of fertilizer.[...]

Statehood was never considered during the debate over the Philippines: the only question was whether to establish a naval base at Manila and give the islands back to the Spanish or to annex the entire archipelago. The imperialists won the argument, and after the insurgents were finally suppressed the Philippines became a colony, from which investors in sugar, hemp, tobacco, and coconut oil could gain privileged access to US markets and Filipinos could emigrate to America in search of jobs. By the 1930s, congressional opposition to cheap exports as well as to cheap (and nonwhite) labor created support for Philippine independence, which was finally achieved in 1946. But it came with so many restrictions on trade and so much preferential treatment for American investors—not to mention continued maintenance of US military bases—that “it would be more accurate to describe the Philippines as becoming a US protectorate,” Bulmer-Thomas writes. “Thus, the end of colonialism in the Philippines did not mean the end of US imperial control.”[...]

The Point Four Program, drawn from Harry Truman’s inaugural address in 1949, linked the World Bank to the struggle with the Soviet Union for influence in the developing world, where the bank would make loans, with many political conditions attached, to governments and state-owned enterprises (later privately owned ones as well). The requirement that Congress approve these loans ensured that they would reflect what the US government considered its national interest. The United Nations, too, began as an American-dominated institution, though as its membership grew it became progressively harder for the US to control. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and bilateral treaties worldwide also served American policy under the guise of “collective security” against the Soviet threat. [...]

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon provided a new enemy, international terrorism, that was even more shadowy and elusive than international communism had been. Widespread panic among Americans and their allies was taken (especially in the US) to justify a permanent state of emergency, with damaging consequences for civil liberties and public debate at home, as well as for the many thousands of civilians who would become “collateral damage” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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UnHerd: The truth about GDP figures

In a fascinating paper they compare the official GDP figures to their “core GDP” measure and find that the choice of method makes a big difference to the relative sizes of the western and non- western economies. For instance, according to the official figures the non-West only overtook the West in the middle of 2000, but according to the core GDP figures the cross-over took place much earlier – at some point before 1990 (when the comparison starts).

Choice of statistical method doesn’t change how rich or poor people actually are, but the authors observe that the bias to the West does impact on “our perception of growth in the world” and also on the weight of western influence in global institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. [...]

In fact, taking rent out of GDP would remove some deeply perverse incentives for policy-makers. Ever wondered why government does such a bad job of solving the housing crisis? Well, if it did a better job, and rental values came down, GDP would take a corresponding hit.

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Forbes: The Brutal Reality Of Brexit

For Brexiters and Remainers alike, this is the worst of all possible solutions. But horrible though it is, this deal satisfies the conditions set by Mrs. May in her Lancaster House speech. It also satisfies the EU’s conditions. No other proposal achieves this. It is, therefore, the best deal available. The U.K. Government has struck a deal that allows Britain to have its cake and eat it - but the cake tastes so disgusting that no-one wants to eat it.

The hard-Brexit European Research Group (ERG) seems to think that if it succeeds in replacing Mrs. May with a hard Brexiter, he or she could negotiate a deal more to its liking. On the other side of the political divide, the Labour party seems to think that if it succeeds in replacing Mrs. May with Jeremy Corbyn, he will be able to negotiate a deal more to its liking.

Both are deluded. The EU has no incentive whatsoever to renegotiate any of the deal. The road to this point has been long and painful, and the U.K. government has negotiated in bad faith throughout, repeatedly saying one thing to the EU then the opposite to its own politicians and the British press, and hurling insults when things don’t go its way. There is very little goodwill left on the EU side, and negotiation fatigue has well and truly set in. [...]

But if there is no second referendum – and at present neither the Government nor the Labour party seem to be seriously considering it – then Parliament must decide whether a complete break with the EU in the interests of sovereignty, even at the cost of a deep economic recession, is better or worse for the British people in the longer term than “frozen Brexit”. Or, of course, whether it is best to call the whole thing off.

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Politico: Europe’s dependence on the US was all part of the plan

As feared, the president of the United States arrived at last week’s NATO summit in a mood of preposterous spleen, profound contempt and shocking rudeness. He insisted on sharing before the cameras imaginary facts that hadn’t a thing to do with the summit agenda, and he refused to listen to anyone who tried, however gently, to correct him. In the words of Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, “These are not negotiating tactics. They are the tactics of someone who does not want a deal.” In a private meeting, Trump reportedly threatened that unless the allies boosted their military spending beyond previous agreements by January, the United States would “go it alone.” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, implored Americans not to “normalize” this. “He is the first American president since Harry Truman,” Burns noted, “to not believe that NATO is central to American national security interests.” And Burns is a Republican. [...]

The open, liberal world order we know today was built in the wake of World War II and expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By design, it is led by the United States; by design, it ensures permanent U.S. military hegemony over Eurasia while uniting Europe under the U.S.’s protection. The goal of this American grand strategy is to prevent any single power from dominating the region and turning on United States and its allies. American hegemony serves, too, to quell previously intractable regional rivalries, preventing further world wars. Dean Acheson, George Marshall and the other great statesmen of their generation pursued this strategy because they had learned, at unimaginable cost, that the eternal American fantasy of forever being free of Europe — isolationism or America-Firstism, in other words — was just that: a fantasy. Four hundred thousand American men lost their lives in the European theaters of the First and Second World Wars. (American fatalities in all of the other 20th century conflicts — including Vietnam, Korea and the Persian Gulf — do not total one quarter of that number.) Our postwar statesmen were neither weak nor incompetent. They were the architects of the greatest foreign policy triumph in U.S. history. [...]

In recognizing this history of blood, however, we must recognize something equally true: In the wake of World War II, liberal democracy saw its fullest realization in the West. This flourishing of peace and human rights cannot be explained by a sudden outbreak of European pacifism. (Consider the 1956 Suez expedition, crushed by an infuriated President Dwight Eisenhower; or the 1954-62 Franco-Algerian War.) It happened because during World War II, Europe destroyed itself, leaving the United States overwhelmingly powerful by comparison, its only rival the Soviet Union. Through the application of economic, diplomatic and military force majeure, the United States suppressed Europe’s internal security competition. This is why postwar Europe ceased to be the world’s leading exporter of violence and became, instead, the world’s leading exporter of luxury sedans. [...]

At the same time, the United States built an open, global order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the International Court of Justice. This order is in many respects an empire — a Pax Americana — but it is more humane than any empire that preceded it, with institutions that are intended to benefit all parties. Postwar U.S. statesmen believed that prosperous, liberal democracies that traded freely with each other would neither go to war with each other nor the United States. They ascribed, in other words, to the so-called Democratic Peace theory — a theory with overwhelming empirical support.

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Haaretz: How the Saudi-led Blockade of Qatar Actually Made the Tiny Emirate Stronger

As the crisis continued fears of a Saudi-led military incursion into Qatar grew - although with the U.S.’s largest military base in the Middle East located in the country that seemed unlikely. Doha turned for support to Turkey, which deployed troops to Qatar and, along with Iran, sent food and supplies. In the following months there were regular complaints of Qatari and UAE jet interceptions, reports of a missing Sheikh and even a Saudi plan to turn Qatar into an island - cutting the peninsula off with a maritime-canal, turning the border area into a military zone and nuclear waste site.

In the initial weeks after the blockade was announced, Qatar’s imports dropped nearly 40 percent from the same time a year earlier.  Today those numbers have returned to normal as Doha, the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas, responded by developing new trade routes, propping up its banks with state money and helping local firms develop domestic output of some goods - including food. Qatar has also begun to develop the world’s largest LNG field that it shares with Iran in the Persian Gulf. [...]

Human Rights Watch has praised Qatar in its World Report 2018 - entitled, “Qatar: Year of Crisis Spurred Rights Reforms.” The report credits Qatar for a range of significant human rights reforms during 2017 that if fully implemented “would usher in some of the most progressive human rights standards in the gulf region.” [...]

Qatar is one of the most heavily invested countries in the world. For such a small country, it wields an oversized influence on global politics largely because it has invested hundreds of billions of its energy wealth, through its national wealth fund, in companies and property (there is a “Qatari quarter” in London) overseas - although it is nowhere in the ballpark of countries like China or Norway.

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Social Europe: The Troubling Transformation Of The EU

However, there are two quite different ways of thinking about the Commission’s proposals. For Macron, they were part of a vision for a “Europe qui protege” in which there would be greater “solidarity” between citizens and member states. In the context of this vision, the new European Monetary Fund would be a kind of embryonic treasury for the eurozone. But many in Germany, including Wolfgang Schäuble, seem to support the same idea for entirely different reasons. They see it as a way to increase control over EU member states’ budgets and more strictly enforce the eurozone’s fiscal rules and thus increase European “competitiveness”. If that vision were to prevail, “more Europe” would mean “more Germany” – as many of the steps that have been taken in the last seven years since the euro crisis began have. [...]

It is as if the EU is in the process of being remade in the image of the IMF. It increasingly seems to be a vehicle for imposing market discipline on member states – something quite different from the project that the founding fathers had in mind and also quite different from how most “pro-Europeans” continue to imagine the EU. Indeed, it is striking that, in discussions about debt relief for crisis countries, the European Commission has often been even more unyielding than the IMF. As Luigi Zingales put it in July 2015: “If Europe is nothing but a bad version of the IMF, what is left of the European integration project?” The transformation of the ESM into a European Monetary Fund may be the final, logical step in this process of remaking the EU in the image of the IMF. [...]

In particular, Merkel clearly believes that, in order to be “competitive”, Europe needs to cut back on the generous welfare state for which it is known. She likes to say that Europe has 7 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP and 50 percent of its social spending in order to suggest that “it cannot continue to be so generous.” This logic is behind the imposition of austerity on “crisis countries”. For example, former Greek Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis says that, in their first meeting, Schäuble told him that “the ‘overgenerous’ European social model was no longer sustainable and had to be ditched” in order to make Europe “competitive”. This “competitive” Europe bears little resemblance to the one of the “pro-European” imagination with its emphasis on the “social market economy”.

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The Atlantic: Tillerson to Latin America: Beware of China

China’s trade with and investment in the region deepened at around the time of the great recession of 2008. Between 2015 and 2019, it plans to invest $250 billion in direct investment in the region and about $500 billion in trade. It’s well on its way: China is already the largest trading partner of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru.

As I’ve previously written, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have a hard time securing international financing because of poor governance, corruption, and their economic policies. But China goes to them, builds desperately needed roads, railways, and ports, and uses these new facilities to transport raw material to feed its growing economy and population. China is an attractive investor not only because it has a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of its partner countries but because its projects are completed at a speed that developing nations are unused to. More importantly, perhaps, it offers to finance these projects on easy terms. But there’s always a catch, Tillerson said Thursday at the University of Texas, his alma mater. [...]

“China is experimenting with market-based solutions, and moving incrementally in its international economic efforts, much as it did during its domestic development,” he wrote. “Its approach to global economic affairs appears to be more pragmatic than ideological—and may be more likely to defend than upend the liberal economic order.”

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Al Jazeera: The myth of Tunisia's exceptionalism

What is central to these narratives is a rather superficial comparison between the relative peacefulness of Tunisia's transition and the state disintegration in Libya, Syria and Yemen. After all, having an example of a "successful revolution" can always provide a glimpse of hope and optimism especially in these dystopian times. But this framing of the democratic transition in Tunisia since 2011 dismisses a dismal reality.    

The construction and consolidation of the idea of "Tunisian exceptionalism" support the fetishisation of Tunisia's democracy as a political commodity. In turn, this process of fetishisation enables neoliberal political campaigns and interventions to be implemented while it denies the possibility of establishing radical democratic frameworks and policies. 

During Ben Ali's era, exceptional improvements in women's rights and the implementation of dogmatic secularism were used to promote the "impressive accomplishments" of the regime and hide its widespread and systematic human rights violations such the persecution of political opponents and abuse of government critics. France and the EU were complicit in promoting the "successes" of Ben Ali's regime and establishing Tunisia as "a pillar of stability and peace" despite a deteriorating social and political reality. [...]

The ongoing protests, for example, erupted after the Tunisian government implemented austerity measures that caused commodity prices to go up dramatically. These policies, pushed onto the government by neoliberal institutions like the International Monetary Fund, fall in line with the ones Ben Ali's regime implemented. It was these very policies that led to the mass impoverishment of the Tunisian population and ultimately a pervasive popular malaise.  [...]

"Tunisian exceptionalism", this logic goes, must be maintained through peace and stability; any demands for radical change are seen as dangerous and disruptive. Hence, when the latest wave of protests erupted, the Tunisian political elite called for unity and peaceful demonstrations and reminded Tunisians how we are being perceived abroad. The angry protestors were portrayed as a threat to the "success story". 

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Social Europe: Restoring Social Cohesion: A Project For 2018 And Beyond

May I contend that at the heart of our present discontents lies a deep and growing disjunction in the distribution of power and authority, not simply between the citizen and the state, but between the state and legally protected concentrations of wealth and power, namely incorporated and non-incorporated organisations, and then in turn between the citizen and the actions and policies of those same organisations. In short, we are coming from a period when the state has retreated, or been ideologically pushed to retreat, or redefine its role, the citizen’s social opportunity to fully participate or flourish, as many social philosophers would put it, has been diminished, and unaccountable sources of wealth and power have advanced. [...]

To achieve any new departure, we must be very clear of the causes of our present distempers, and so I am very pleased that many of the papers presented here today reflect on and describe some of the manifold sources of the fracturing of the triadic relationship between citizen, state and society: growing inequalities in wealth and income within and between nations and regions, the rise of new forms of work characterised by precarity, and the threat to, or even curtailment of some of the most foundational elements of our systems of social protection.

May I suggest that we must first acknowledge that these changes in our society are not natural phenomena – the result of the inevitable laws of history or economics – they are the result of a distinctive set of policies and a political philosophy which has been pursued over the past forty years to the point that it has become what the French call the pensée unique, the single permitted form of political and economic thought. [...]

Many of the sources of the fractured relationship between citizen and state – increasing inequality in income, power and wealth, the breakdown, in some countries of a positive relationship between productivity and wage growth, the continuing power of over-mighty financial markets in misallocating and distorting investment, the increased precariousness of employment, particularly for young people, and even the reduction in the labour share of the proportion of national income – may be traced to the retreat and transformation of the role of the state in the neoliberal era. As I have outlined I believe that this commenced in the 1970s and still, without perhaps the same self-confidence as before, continues today.

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Al Jazeera: Joyce Banda: Africa is not poor

Joyce Banda became the first female president of Malawi, second in African history, when she took office in 2012 following the death of President Bingu wa Mutharika.

In this week's Headliner, Mehdi Hasan asks Banda about aid and development, as well as the allegations surrounding the $250 million corruption scandal known as "Cashgate". [...]

Asked about why she argues that Africa needs more trade, Banda stated: "Africa is not poor. We are rich in our natural resources. So what we need to do, in my opinion, is to set our priorities right. Is to sit down and say how can we best use our natural resources for the benefit of our people?" 

At the time of her presidency, Joyce Banda was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by various publications. 

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Jacobin Magazine: How Washington Hacked Mongolia’s Democracy

Many people are familiar with the Clinton administration’s efforts to give then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin a much-needed — and decisive — boost in the country’s 1996 presidential election. Fewer are aware that from 1991 to 1996, US political operatives, funded by the federal government and directed by an influential senator, played an active role in bringing Mongolia’s right-wing opposition to power, a move that would prove as much a disaster to ordinary Mongolians as it would a boon to US government and corporate interests. The incident is so little-remembered today, it’s not even listed in Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Don Levin’s otherwise exhaustive list of superpower meddling in foreign elections.  [...]

Strategists sent by the IRI to Mongolia taught the parties about membership recruitment, campaign messaging, and grassroots party building. At the start of 1996, they convinced the opposition to form a united coalition — the Democratic Union Coalition (DUC) — and advised the candidates to personally tour their message around the country, routine practice in most Western democracies but a new concept in Mongolia at the time. [...]

It’s doubtful all this could’ve happened without the large sums of US taxpayer money being lavished on the coalition. According to the NED’s annual reports at the time, between 1992 and 1996 it gave a total of $480,520 to the IRI for expressly partisan purposes — to help the free market opposition “develop strategies to make them a more effective force within the legislature,” and to help them “solidify their platforms and develop comprehensive and viable communications strategies for the parliamentary elections.”

To put that into perspective, the total cost of Mongolia’s 2000 parliamentary elections was $333,000. In 1996 alone, the NED gave the IRI $158,327 to assist the coalition in that year’s election, nearly half that total. [...]

But the damage was already done. Driven partly by a collapse in world copper prices, the economy quickly fell apart after the DUC’s victory. Unemployment ballooned over 20 percent, helped along by the purging of government departments and the decline of domestic industries. Close to four hundred children were estimated as living permanently on the streets. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization determined that one-third of the population was below nutritional-starvation levels. Even the founding chairman of one of the parties in the DUC admitted that average real incomes had dropped by 30 percent in the year they were in power.

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openDemocracy: Eastern Ukraine: “We need new ways of organising”

The Eastern Human Rights Group (EHRG) — a lawyers collective that gives support to individuals, workplace collectives and community groups — is working with other activists to set up territorially-based workers’ organisations that will embrace employed, unemployed and precariously employed people in the region. [...]

Lisyansky reckons this could be the beginning of the end for Ukraine’s old post-Soviet trade unions — not only the old “official” unions, which originated in quasi-state Soviet structures, but also the post-Soviet “independent” unions set up to compete with them. Indeed, membership is falling: a worker who has been ignored at his time of need in his old workplace is unlikely to sign up in his new one. [...]

The EHRG has pursued claims for back pay by workers who were effectively abandoned by their unions at some of the largest workplaces, including the Severodonetsk Azot chemical plant, whose 5,000 workers are owed six months’ wages; Lysychanskugol coal company, with 5,000 employees at four pits; Toretskugol coal company, with 2,500 employees at four pits; and the Donetsk railway network. Workers have protested with strikes — and, at Lysychanskugol, with an underground sit-in and lobby of the energy ministry — and cases have been taken up by the EHRG and some union officials. [...]

The EHRG has participated in a widespread protest against pension reforms being undertaken by the Ukrainian government at the behest of the IMF. The reform will strengthen the link between the level of contributions and what people receive, and effectively raise the statutory retirement age, by increasing the term over which a person must contribute from 15 to 25 years. Lisyansky said: “Yes, I spoke out and will keep speaking out against this reform, which I think breaches people’s rights.” Both “official” and independent unions had protested, but this had had “little effect” on the political process, he said.

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Vox: “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas.

Neoliberalism, at its core, describes the stage of capitalism that has existed over the past 30 years, one that evolved out of the economic crises of the 1970s. The underpinnings of this stage are buckling under the weight of our own crises, perhaps even collapsing, all of it in ways we don’t yet understand. A careful consideration of the term can help us grasp a lot of what is going on in the world, especially as the Democratic Party looks to change. [...]

These policies included reduction of top marginal tax rates, the liberalization of trade, privatization of government services, and deregulation. These became the sensible things for generic people in Washington and other global headquarters to embrace and promote, and the policies were pushed on other countries via global institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This had significant consequences for the power of capital, as the geographer David Harvey writes in his useful Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism. The upshot of such policies, as the historical sociologist Greta Krippner notes, was to shift many aspects of managing the economy from government to Wall Street, and to financiers generally. [...]

The third meaning of “neoliberalism,” most often used in academic circles, encompasses market supremacy — or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices, and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional markets. [...]

This is a little abstract, but it really does matter for our everyday lives. As the political theorist Wendy Brown notes in her book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, the Supreme Court case overturning a century of campaign finance law, Citizens United, wasn’t just about viewing corporations as political citizens. Kennedy’s opinion was also about viewing all politics as a form of market activity. The question, as he saw it, was is how to preserve a “political marketplace.” In this market-centric view, democracy, access, voice, and other democratic values are flattened, replaced with a thin veneer of political activity as a type of capital right. [...]

We can leave it to the historians to piece together why and how Democrats made the decision to shift course in the 1980s, emphasizing means testing, privatization of key government services, education as a cure-all, and a trusting attitude toward large business. But they did, and we have to figure out what comes next. We need a full break with what happened before, both because the times are different and because the recent solutions — whatever word you use to describe them — aren’t cutting it anymore.

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Al Jazeera: Eurogroup approves $9.5bn bailout for Greece

The Eurogroup praised Greece for legislating all 140 prior actions required to pass its second review under the programme – specifically in terms of tax reform, pension reform and labour market reform, all of which aim to make its economy more competitive.

In terms of debt relief, the Eurozone made two concrete concessions. First, it promises to link Greece's rate of debt repayment to its rate of growth. The better the economy does in a given year, the more Greece will pay back. The corollary is that if Greece has little or no growth, it ought to receive a reprieve from creditors. This was a key demand of former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in 2015, who claimed that a depressed economy could not reasonably be squeezed for debt repayment. [...]

Second, the Eurogroup agreed to defer and extend repayment of Greece's second bailout loan by up to 15 years. This loan, which ran from 2012 to 2015, was Greece's largest and $145bn (€130bn) of it is still outstanding. That amounts to almost half of the entire debt.

These two measures will be put into effect between now and the end of the programme, but the Eurogroup will specify further debt relief measures to take effect after the summer of 2018. It has to specify these by July 27, in order for the IMF to become a participant in the third bailout. [...]

The Greek economy was forecast to grow by 2.7 percent this year, but the Hellenic Statistical Authority reports that it Grew by just 0.4 percent in the first quarter. The Federation of Greek Industry today reports 53.6 unemployed people for every job vacancy. 

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Jacobin Magazine: Yemen’s Disaster

What led Yemen down this path to chaos? After all, the country includes the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only socialist state in the Arab world. In the 1970s, the other Yemeni state, the Yemen Arab Republic, had a strong rural movement based on community and tribal solidarity, which organized, financed, and managed development initiatives. The Republic of Yemen, born in 1990, was the only democracy in the Arabian Peninsula. However flawed, it held real multiparty elections. [...]

In this context, it is worth remembering that 70 percent of Yemen’s population lives in rural areas and depends on cultivation and livestock. The first decade of the twenty-first century, however, saw a shift from agriculture to casual urban labor as the primary source of rural households’ incomes. In towns and cities, men congregated in search of casual unskilled employment, where living conditions were also affected by water scarcity. [...]

Ordinary citizens, especially young people and women, demanded the downfall of the Saleh regime and an end to his regime’s corruption and nepotism. They also wanted jobs, a national economy that would benefit the population as a whole, and true democracy. Participants were often young — not surprising in a country where 80 percent of the population is under thirty-five. [...]

The coalition has maintained a blockade that is claimed to be designed to prevent Iran from providing weapons and ammunition to the Saleh-Houthi alliance, but its primary impact has been preventing food and fuel imports, which the Yemeni people need to survive. Due to population increase, climate change, and other factors, Yemen depends on imports for the overwhelming majority of their fuel and basic staples — 90 percent of wheat and 100 percent of rice, tea, and sugar come from external sources.

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The Guardian: Unequal Russia: is anger stirring in the global capital of inequality?

Measuring levels of inequality, rather than simply tracking absolute poverty levels, has become a watchword for economists of late, with some believing it is the uneven distribution of wealth that is one of the key factors driving political discontent and disenfranchisement globally.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said increased inequality was one of a number of factors leading to the rise of populism around the world – adding she had first warned of these dangers four years ago, but that after the victory of Donald Trump in the US and the increasing popularity of far-right parties across Europe, she hoped people would now pay it more attention.

A recent report by Credit Suisse showed that Russia is the most unequal of all the world’s major economies. The richest 10% of Russians own 87% of all the country’s wealth, according to the report, compared with 76% in the US and 66% in China. According to another measure, by VTB Capital, 1% of the Russian population holds 46% of all the personal bank deposits in the country. [...]

Approximately 23 million Russians – about 16% of the population – now officially subsist below the poverty line, and there are increasing signs that the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population is starting to annoy more Russians – especially as many of the richest people are government officials, or those close to them. A recent report found that 41% of Russians say they struggle to get enough money together for food and clothing.

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