BBC4 Thinking Allowed: GDP, Mali music

GDP - Laurie Taylor talks to Lorenzo Fioramonti, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Pretoria, and author of a new book which exposes the flaws of an economic system which values this statistic, above all others, as a measure of prosperity and growth. They're joined by Douglas McWilliams, Deputy Chairman of the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Also, Mali music - Caspar Melville, Lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Industries at SOAS, discussed his study into the ways in which Eurocentric copyright is impacting on African musical traditions.

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Wendover Productions: The Nuclear Waste Problem

Politico: In defense of Christian Lindner

In the current political climate, a government bringing together such different animals as traditional conservatives, left-leaning environmentalists and free-market liberals was never going to be a safe bet. The parties clashed on taxation, agricultural policy, climate change and pretty much everything else. Migration turned out to be the most contentious issue, with the CSU and the Greens at odds over the issue of family reunifications of refugees. (Lindner’s FDP sided with the Bavarian conservatives on that one.) [...]

It was first and foremost in Angela Merkel’s interest to overcome obstacles and make the thing fly. The German chancellor has become the reigning world champion in running coalition governments. She excelled at bringing about the kind of hard-won compromises struck in late night meetings that power-sharing requires — and flourished at the expense of her coalition partners. Running a supremely complex government called Jamaica would have been Merkel’s magnum opus, a crowning achievement.

The other players, on the other hand, had less to gain. They wanted the power and the glory and the ministries, of course. But the political differences on key issues were such that each party had to bend over backwards to compromise. A Jamaica coalition, no matter what, would have been a tough sell to the most loyal voters. [...]

Lindner’s decision to pull out, on the other hand, suggests that the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy are kicking in. True, a fair amount of political stability — prioritized by Merkel in recent years — is essential to a functioning system. But in times of change, democracy also needs debate and dissent. Today’s Germany is nothing like the Weimar Republic; following years of political and economic stability, the country can cope with a little uncertainty.  

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Vox: “You can’t just say, ‘I hate Trump, vote for me’”: Danica Roem on her historic win

Danica Roem made history two weeks ago as America’s first openly transgender state lawmaker, and she already has a lot on her mind. [...]

The fact that Roem and dozens of other minority and LGBTQ candidates won state and municipal elections made Election Day 2017 a historic one. But the centerpiece of Roem’s campaign was fixing Route 28, a highway that has been prone to traffic jams for decades.

Her Republican opponent, incumbent Del. Robert Marshall, didn’t hesitate to try to turn Roem’s gender identity into a campaign issue. He once called himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe” and refused to debate Roem. In the runup to Election Day, the Virginia Republican Party paid for campaign flyers repeatedly referring to Roem with male pronouns and displaying a header that read: “Danica Roem, born male, has made a campaign issue out of transitioning to female.” [...]

My strategic assumption during the Democratic primary, when I was facing three other people, was that field was the most important thing — whoever knocked on the most doors would win. Whoever had the most quality conversations at the doors would win. The volunteers that we had come out, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people knocked doors for us. That’s how you win.

We set out to knock 20,000 doors during the last four days of the election for get out the vote. We made a full pass through our universe of our targeted doors the first day, which means that over the next few days, we hit every single door again — whichever doors hadn’t responded. [...]

As I said on election night, discrimination is a disqualifier. One of my mantras for the campaign was, “Flip the script.” Anytime anyone did something negative to me, I would flip it and turn it into a positive. And when they went all in on gender, when they used an anti-transgender slur, “transgenderism,” which isn’t even a word, it’s just made-up bullshit.

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Vox: The bizarre saga of the Lebanese prime minister’s un-resignation

Hariri’s resignation was destabilizing in part because the Lebanese political system requires different religious groups to share power: Lebanon’s prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, the president must be a Maronite Christian, and the parliamentary speaker must be a Shia Muslim. Saudi Arabia, as the regional Sunni leader, usually backs the prime minister — as it seems to with Hariri. [...]

Had Hariri not returned, there would likely have been a political tug-of-war between Saudi Arabia and Iran to fill the power vacuum. And if Iran had to focus on a protracted political crisis in Lebanon, it would’ve had less time to focus on the wars in Yemen and Syria, Saab noted, which meant Iran might not have been able to fight Saudi Arabia’s proxies as aggressively. [...]

Despite the accusations, an actual Hezbollah-Saudi war was unlikely. “Casting Lebanon as a Hezbollah-dominated pariah state does make waging a war simpler, so I think it’s safe to say the chance of such a war has increased,” Faysal Itani, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, told me. “But I don’t think it has increased dramatically, because no one seems willing to fight this war.” [...]

The growing tensions in the region helped explain why French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to Saudi Arabia on November 10 in an unscheduled two-hour visit to discuss the tensions between Beirut and Riyadh. France and Lebanon have a historically close relationship, as France was the ruling colonial power in Lebanon from the end of the Ottoman Empire until Lebanon’s independence in 1944. It’s unclear if Macron’s visit had any effect, though.

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