Deutsche Welle: Inequality - how wealth becomes power | (Poverty Richness Documentary)

Germany is one of the world’s richest countries, but inequality is on the rise. The wealthy are pulling ahead, while the poor are falling behind. [Online until: 17 September 2018]

For the middle classes, work is no longer a means of advancement. Instead, they are struggling to maintain their position and status. Young people today have less disposable income than previous generations. This documentary explores the question of inequality in Germany, providing both background analysis and statistics. The filmmakers interview leading researchers and experts on the topic. And they accompany Christoph Gröner, one of Germany’s biggest real estate developers, as he goes about his work. "If you have great wealth, you can’t fritter it away through consumption. If you throw money out the window, it comes back in through the front door,” Gröner says. The real estate developer builds multi-family residential units in cities across Germany, sells condominium apartments, and is involved in planning projects that span entire districts. "Entrepreneurs are more powerful than politicians, because we’re more independent,” Gröner concludes. Leading researchers and experts on the topic of inequality also weigh in, including Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, economist Thomas Piketty, and Brooke Harrington, who carried out extensive field research among investors from the ranks of the international financial elite. Branko Milanović, a former lead economist at the World Bank, says that globalization is playing a role in rising inequality. The losers of globalization are the lower-middle class of affluent countries like Germany. "These people are earning the same today as 20 years ago," Milanović notes. "Just like a century ago, humankind is standing at a crossroads. Will affluent countries allow rising equality to tear apart the fabric of society? Or will they resist this trend?”

Motherboard: Researchers Built a Cat Paradise for Science

As detailed in a recent paper in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, the research facility was created by University of Illinois researchers in order to study a new type of feline contraceptive that could drastically reduce feral cat populations. Although spaying and neutering cats is an effective way to control feline populations, the minor surgeries are expensive and invasive. An injectable contraceptive vaccine called GonaCon showed promise as an alternative population control mechanism in a variety of mammals, including laboratory-raised cats, but testing its effectiveness in the wild proved difficult. [...]

"Many facilities have come a long way in making research conditions more humane for the animals, but they still involve small enclosures without a lot of enrichment," said Amy Fischer, a researcher at the University of Illinois’ Department of Animal Sciences. "We wanted to make our cats' environment much more stimulating."

Of the 35 cats that live in the lab, 30 are female and all the cats were taken from local animal shelters. This in itself was a major departure from usual research protocols, which almost always use genetically identical, lab-raised cats. The hope was that this would provide better insight into the effectiveness of the vaccine as it would actually work in the wild.

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Politico: Berlin sees rise in Salafists, extreme right and radical left: report

The growing numbers in Berlin mirror a nationwide pattern that saw the number of Salafists — who espouse a hard-line interpretation of Islam, and in some cases embrace jihadist ideology — in Germany edge up to 10,800 in 2017 compared to 9,700 the previous year, according to an interior ministry report released last year.

In its report, the ministry describes Germany’s Salafism scene as “the main recruiting source for jihad” despite the fact that “political Salafists usually refrain from using violence.” It also noted that analysis of recent terror attacks in Germany and in Europe shows that “jihadist activities are very often preceded by Salafist radicalization.”

Berlin has also seen a rise in adherents of the extreme right Reich Citizens’ Movement, which advocates for a return to Germany’s pre-World War II borders and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. The movement counts 500 Berlin adherents, up from 400 the year before, according to the Berlin report. Roughly 100 are classified as far-right extremists.

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Politico: German foreign minister calls for revamp of EU-US ties

To “renew and preserve” the historic relationship, Germany, alongside France and its European partners, should seek a “balanced partnership” with Washington in which they “form a counterweight where the U.S. crosses red lines” and advance “where America retreats,” according to Maas.

He called on European allies to “strengthen the European pillar” of NATO — “not because Donald Trump is always setting new percentage targets [for defense spending], but because we can no longer rely on Washington to the same extent as before” — and to move forward with plans for closer security and defense cooperation among EU members. [...]

Maas also defended Europe’s efforts to legally protect its companies from U.S. sanctions linked to Iran. “It is of strategic importance that we say clearly to Washington: We want to work together. But we will not allow you to act over our heads at our expense,” he wrote.

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The New York Review of Books: NATO and the Myth of the Liberal International Order

Behind Trump’s bullying and bluster, though, the core message he delivered in Brussels was not that different from those given by previous administrations. Indeed, the same kvetches have recurred under every US government, Democrat and Republican alike, since the end of World War II. Even before NATO was founded in 1949, there were disagreements between the US and UK over how to divide the burden of the postwar transatlantic security architecture; Wallace Thies, in his 2002 book on NATO, Friendly Rivals, dubbed it “an argument even older than the alliance itself.” [...]

So why the sudden concern, if US complaints about their allies’ military and financial contributions are nothing new? Liberal anxieties about NATO stem more from discontent with Trump’s brusqueness and his discourteous tone—at a rally in Montana in early July, he said “we’re the schmucks paying for the whole thing,” and claimed to have told German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “I don’t know how much protection we get by protecting you”—than from the actual substance of US policy toward the alliance, which has remained remarkably consistent over time. Rhetorical differences aside, successive US governments have always been clear that NATO is not a gathering of peers. Its function has been to bind European states into an international order dominated by the US—and to do it on Washington’s terms. NATO communiqués talk about shared security goals, but it has always been the US that determines what those goals are; they are only shared after the fact. From that point of view, browbeating from Washington has been a structural feature of the alliance from the outset. [...]

NATO expansion was designed above all to enable the US to have a guiding hand in the post-Communist transformation of Eastern Europe. Much has been made in recent years of a growing threat to NATO’s eastern flank from a resurgent Russia. But it is important to register that this threat was of little account in the original decision to expand NATO in the early 1990s. On the contrary, the absence of a serious challenge to the West from a greatly weakened Russia was a crucial enabling condition for it. [...]

That prediction has certainly been borne out. In this sense, NATO expansion itself helped to generate the threat it was supposedly intended to counter. The rise in tensions between Russia and the West over the past decade, meanwhile, has highlighted the questionable wisdom of admitting to NATO the string of countries along Russia’s western border. Militarily, these new members were at best only ever going to make marginal contributions to the alliance. On the other hand, they have added significantly to NATO’s obligations for collective defense, under Article 5 of the organization’s charter. Indeed, while the alliance’s growth was notionally premised on the idea of extending the US security umbrella, it is not at all clear that Europe has, as a result, become any safer. Ukraine, where the US and Russia are effectively engaged in a proxy war, is a case in point: the deadly confrontation there has its origins in a contest between Washington and Moscow for Ukraine’s allegiance, which in turn developed inexorably out of the decision to expand NATO in the 1990s.

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