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anonymous

Why America's Fiscal Reality Will Make Euthanasia Inevitable | The Ümlaut - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...ill-make-euthanasia-inevitable

shared by anonymous on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • “A third of the Medicare budget is now spent in the last year of life, and a third of that goes for care in the last month,” reports Susan Jacoby. In the unlikely event that everyone agreed to be euthanized 30 mere days before natural death, we would save 11 percent of the cost of Medicare—or more, counting the secondary effects of decreased demand for medical services. And considering that most of these end-of-life expenses are concentrated in relatively few patients, we wouldn’t need 100 percent uptake to make a substantial dent in costs.
  • But even putting aside fiscal considerations, social acceptance of these practices seems inevitable in the long run. Social norms tend to converge—albeit slowly at times—toward economic efficiency. And devoting enormous medical resources to keep people alive, often uncomfortably, for a few additional weeks is clearly inefficient.
  • We are simply at an early stage of the convergence of social norms toward the efficient equilibrium in which euthanasia is widely accepted and practiced. The fact is, the problem of the long-term ailing elderly is relatively new to human history and even to our society. Not so long ago, old people would simply die when they got sick. Consequently, we are still holding onto the norms that were quite possibly efficient for that era—that unlimited care must be given to those near death. But as such care becomes ever more costly, the old norms will be steadily undermined, and we will move toward the new efficient equilibrium.
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 13
     
    "Liberal attitudes toward end-of-life decisions are gaining political ground, both in America and around the world. Twenty years ago, assisted suicide was legal only in Switzerland. Today, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and three American states allow assisted suicide or euthanasia for at least the terminally ill. These trends will continue. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to imagine a future in which euthanasia is illegal in rich countries. But perhaps surprisingly, the legalization of euthanasia is likely to be driven not by moral contemplation but by the economics of life and death."
anonymous

Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It) - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...260639

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years. One reason for this is that the visibility of this inequality has been increasing gradually for a long time--as society has become less segregated, people can now see more clearly how much other people make and consume.
  • imagine that we took all Americans and sorted them by wealth along a line with the poorest on the left and continuing as wealth increases until on the right we have the richest. Now, imagine that we divide them into five buckets with an equal number of citizens in each. The first bucket contains the poorest 20% of the population, the next contains the second wealthiest tier, and so on down to the wealthiest 20% (see Figure 1).
  • With this in mind, from the total pie of wealth (100%) what percent do you think the bottom 40% (that is, the first two buckets together) of Americans possess? And what about the top 20%? If you guessed around 9% for the bottom and 59% for the top, you're pretty much in line with the average response we got when we asked this question of thousands of Americans.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The reality is quite different. Based on Wolff (2010), the bottom 40% of the population combined has only 0.3% of wealth while the top 20% possesses 84% (see Figure 2). These differences between levels of wealth in society comprise what's called the Gini coefficient, which is one way to quantify inequality.
  • When economists consider the desirable level of inequality, they usually define the ideal inequality from the perspective of economic efficiency: What level of inequality will motivate people to be the most productive and move up the wealth ladder? What level of inequality will allow those at the top to lift up society as a whole (say, by having the resources to invent new technologies)? What level of wealth will keep salaries low and competition high?
  • inequality is not just about economic efficiency. It's also about our day-to-day experience as citizens, the influence of envy, our social mobility, the importance of equal opportunity, our mutual dependency on each other, etc.
  • We took a step back and examined social inequality based on the definition that the philosopher John Rawls gave in his book A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' terms, a society is just if a person understands all the conditions within that society and is willing to enter it in a random place (in terms of socio-economic status, gender, race, and so on).
  • They could be among the poorest or the richest, or anywhere in between. Rawls called this idea the "veil of ignorance" because the decision of whether to enter a particular society is disconnected from the particular knowledge that the individual has about the level of wealth that he or she will have after making the decision.
  • we did two things.
  • First, we asked 5,522 people to create a distribution of wealth among the five buckets such that they themselves would be willing to enter that society at a random place.
  • What was particularly surprising about the results was that when we examined the ideal distributions for Republicans and Democrats, we found them to be quite similar (see Figure 4).
  • When we examined the results by other variables, including income and gender, we again found no appreciable differences. It seems that Americans -- regardless of political affiliation, income, and gender -- want the kind of wealth distribution shown in Figure 3, which is very different from what we have and from what we think we have (see Figure 2).
  • in another task, we made things simpler (see Figure 5) and asked people to choose between two unidentified distributions (again under the veil of ignorance). The first option, unbeknownst to participants, reflected the distribution of wealth in America. For the second option we modified the distribution found in Sweden, making it substantially more equal (we referred to this fictional nation as "Equalden").
  • We discovered that 92% of Americans preferred the distribution of "Equalden" to America's. And if one were to assume that the 8% who preferred America's distribution was made up of wealthy Republican men, he or she would be mistaken. The preference for "Equalden" was slightly different for Republicans and Democrats, and in the expected direction, but the magnitude was very small: 93.5% of Democrats and 90.2% of Republicans preferred the more equal distribution.
  • similarity across the political spectrum is far more substantial than the differences.
  • There are a few lessons that we can learn from this.
  • The first is that we vastly underestimate the level of inequality that we have in America.
  • Second, we want much more equality than both what we have and what we think we have.
  • when asked in a way that avoids hot-button terms, misconceptions, and the level of wealth people currently possess, Americans are actually in agreement about wanting a more equal distribution of wealth.
  • In fact, the vast majority of Americans prefer a distribution of wealth more equal than what exists in Sweden, which is often placed rhetorically at the extreme far left in terms of political ideology
  • A third lesson concerns the political gap between Democrats and Republicans
  • how is it possible that we found so little difference between them in our study?
  • One reason for this could be our inability to separate our ideology from our current state of wealth.
  • Another reason could be politicians, who, in order to rally people to their side, try to generate feelings of greater difference and opposition--and therefore conflict--than actually exist.
  • The veil of ignorance accomplishes something similar to blind taste testing.
  • when we express opinions about politics and life in general, we can't help but be influenced by our own varying degrees wealth and ignorance of others' lives. The veil of ignorance works to separate our core beliefs from the biases and prejudices we develop over time and through the subjective experience of being part of a certain class and demographic.
  • It is one thing to get people to tell us what kind of society the would want to join, and another to get them part with their money in order to create that society.
  • Social justice and optimal wealth distribution are highly complex topics, and it's hard to imagine that any study could dramatically change opinions about education, welfare, or tax reform. But consider this. When we ran the same basic experiment in Australia, we found Australians did not differ much from Americans in their views of the ideal distribution. When we ran another version of it with NPR listeners, and then readers of Forbes Magazine, the results were still basically the same. And most likely, if you participated in one of our tests, your response too would have fallen in line with these findings.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "We asked thousands of people to describe their ideal distribution of wealth, from top to bottom. The vast majority -- rich, poor, GOP and Democrat -- imagined a far more equal nation. Here's why it matters."
anonymous

Annual Forecast 2012 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2012

annual forecast stratfor

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 12 - Cached
  • In this period, the European Union has stopped functioning as it did five years ago and has yet to see its new form defined. China has moved into a difficult social and economic phase, with the global recession severely affecting its export-oriented economy and its products increasingly uncompetitive due to inflation. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has created opportunities for an Iranian assertion of power that could change the balance of power in the region. The simultaneous shifts in Europe, China and the Middle East open the door to a new international framework replacing the one created in 1989-1991.
  • Our forecast for 2012 is framed by the idea that we are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works.
  • the driving force behind developments in Europe in 2012 will be political, not economic.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Normally, we would predict failure for such an effort: Sacrificing budgetary authority to an outside power would be the most dramatic sacrifice of state sovereignty yet in the European experiment -- a sacrifice that most European governments would strongly resist. However, the Germans have six key advantages in 2012.
  • First, there are very few scheduled electoral contests, so the general populace of most European states will not be consulted on the exercise.
  • Second, Germany only needs the approval of the 17 eurozone states -- rather than the 27 members of the full European Union -- to forward its plan with credibility.
  • Third, the process of approving a treaty such as this will take significant time, and some aspects of the reform process can be pushed back.
  • Fourth, the Germans are willing to apply significant pressure.
  • Fifth, the Europeans are scared, which makes them willing to do things they would not normally do -- such as implementing austerity and ratifying treaties they dislike.
  • The real political crisis will not come until the sacrifice of sovereignty moves from the realm of theory to application, but that will not occur in 2012.
  • The economic deferment of that pain is the sixth German advantage. Here, the primary player is the ECB. The financial crisis has two aspects: Over-indebted European governments are lurching toward defaults that would collapse the European system, and European banks (the largest purchasers of European government debt) are broadly insolvent -- their collapse would similarly break apart the European system.
  • In 2012, the Kremlin will face numerous challenges: social unrest, restructuring Russia's political makeup (both inside and outside of the Kremlin) and major economic shifts due to the crisis in Europe.
  • Russia will continue building its influence in its former Soviet periphery in 2012, particularly by institutionalizing its relationships with many former Soviet states. Russia will build upon its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as it evolves into the Common Economic Space (CES).
  • This larger institution will allow the scope of Russia's influence over Minsk and Astana, as well as new member countries such as Kyrgyzstan and possibly Tajikistan, to expand from the economic sphere into politics and security as Moscow lays the groundwork for the eventual formation of the Eurasian Union, which it is hoping to start around 2015.
  • In the Baltic countries -- which, unlike other former Soviet states, are committed members of NATO and the European Union -- Russia's ultimate goal is to neutralize the countries' pro-Western and anti-Russian policies
  • Russia will continue managing various crises with the West -- mainly the United States and NATO -- while shaping its relationships in Europe.
  • Russia will attempt to push these crises with the United States to the brink without actually rupturing relations -- a difficult balance.
  • Numerous factors will undermine Central Asia's stability in 2012, but they will not lead to a major breaking point in the region this year.
  • Iran's efforts to expand its influence will be the primary issue for the Middle East in 2012.
  • In 2012, Saudi Arabia will lead efforts to shore up and consolidate the defenses of Gulf Cooperation Council members to try to ward off the threat posed by Iran, but such efforts will not be a sufficient replacement for the United States and the role it plays as a security guarantor.
  • Iran's goal is for Syria to maintain a regime -- regardless of who leads it -- that will remain favorable to Iranian interests, but Iran's ability to influence the situation is limited, and finding a replacement to hold the regime together will be difficult.
  • Despite its rhetoric, Turkey will not undertake significant overt military action in Syria unless the United States leads the intervention -- a scenario Stratfor regards as improbable -- though it will continue efforts to mold an opposition in Syria and counterbalance Iranian influence in Iraq.
  • Hamas will take advantage of the slowly growing political clout of Islamists throughout the region in hopes of presenting itself to neighboring Arab governments and the West as a pragmatic and reconcilable political alternative to Fatah.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia: China's response to the economic crisis and possible social turmoil amid a leadership transition; the European Union's debt crisis and economic slowdown sapping demand for East Asia's exports; and regional interaction with the U.S. re-engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
  • While Beijing knows that rolling out another massive fiscal stimulus and bank loans as it did in 2008-2009 is unsustainable and would put the economy at risk, it sees few other short-term options and thus will use government-led investment to sustain growth in 2012.
  • As it learned from the Tiananmen Square incident, CPC factional infighting exploited at a sensitive time is a serious risk, and we expect to see measures to ensure ideological and cultural control throughout the Party and down through the rest of society.
  • The United States will continue to consider a political accommodation with the Taliban, but such accommodation is unlikely to be reached this year.
  • The most important development in South Asia is Pakistan's ongoing political evolution.
  • Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west.
  • Brazil will spend 2012 focused on mitigating shocks to trade and capital flows from the crisis in Europe. However, with only 10 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product dependent on exports, Brazil is much less vulnerable than many other developing countries.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 12
     
    "There are periods when the international system undergoes radical shifts in a short time. The last such period was 1989-1991. During that time, the Soviet empire collapsed. The Japanese economic miracle ended. The Maastricht Treaty creating contemporary Europe was signed. Tiananmen Square defined China as a market economy dominated by an unchallenged Communist Party, and so on. Fundamental components of the international system shifted radically, changing the rules for the next 20 years. We are in a similar cycle, one that began in 2008 and is still playing out."
anonymous

Stephanie Coontz on "Mad Men" - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...stephanie-coontz-on-mad-men

generations

shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Let me bring this discussion back around to generations, turnings, and cyclical versus linear time.  One thing  Bill and I discovered many years ago, even before  The Fourth Turning appeared, was that most people who really do not like our perspective on history have fairly strong ideological motivations.  These tend to be people whose ideology colors their perspective on history, who see history moving from absolute error toward absolute rectitude, and who (therefore) are really bothered by a view of history that is not linear.  In this view, the idea that there might be something archetypal in a bygone generation or era of history seems bizarre, even perverse.  There can be no archetype for social dysfunction and blatant injustice.  It’s like a disease.  When it’s over, you hope and expect it never returns.
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "I have argued before that " Mad Men" is a fundamentally unhistorical rendition of how most Americans felt and behaved in late First Turning (the High) America. To summarize, my point was basically that most of the roles are played by Generation X (born 1961-1981) who meticulously "look" like circa-1960 business-world people-but who fail to reflect the authentic mood of the era as it was lived and experienced. Instead, the actors come across as Gen-Xers dressed in 1960 clothing and trapped in 1960 social mannerisms. Let me put aside all instance in "Mad Men" where the script is simply impossible-like characters telling each other to "get in touch with their feelings." Even aside from such obvious anachronisms, most scenes (to my eye and ear) are suffused with a sense of oppressive tension and cynicism." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on October 11, 2010.
anonymous

Debt: The first five thousand years - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...-the-first-five-thousand-years

longnow

shared by anonymous on 29 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.
  • In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him; a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts – obligations – you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists.
  • A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and finally take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do).
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, also, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money.
  • levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around. However, for our present purposes, the critical question is: how were these taxes justified? Why did subjects owe them, what debt were they discharging when they were paid? Here we return again to right of conquest.
  • Here there is a little story told, a kind of myth. We are all born with an infinite debt to the society that raised, nurtured, fed and clothed us, to those long dead who invented our language and traditions, to all those who made it possible for us to exist. In ancient times we thought we owed this to the gods (it was repaid in sacrifice, or, sacrifice was really just the payment of interest – ultimately, it was repaid by death). Later the debt was adopted by the state, itself a divine institution, with taxes substituted for sacrifice, and military service for one’s debt of life. Money is simply the concrete form of this social debt, the way that it is managed.
  • the logic also runs through much of our common sense: consider for instance, the phrase, “to pay one’s debt to society”, or, “I felt I owed something to my country”, or, “I wanted to give something back.” Always, in such cases, mutual rights and obligations, mutual commitments – the kind of relations that genuinely free people could make with one another – tend to be subsumed into a conception of “society” where we are all equal only as absolute debtors before the (now invisible) figure of the king, who stands in for your mother, and by extension, humanity.
  • money did not originally appear in this cold, metal, impersonal form. It originally appears in the form of a measure, an abstraction, but also as a relation (of debt and obligation) between human beings. It is important to note that historically it is commodity money that has always been most directly linked to violence. As one historian put it, “bullion is the accessory of war, and not of peaceful trade.”
  • Commodity money, particularly in the form of gold and silver, is distinguished from credit money most of all by one spectacular feature: it can be stolen.
  • I. Age of the First Agrarian Empires (3500-800 BCE). Dominant money form: Virtual credit money
anonymous

China's 'Two Sessions' Event Begins at a Sensitive Time - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-sessions-begin-sensitive-time

geopolitics china

shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The primary focus of the NPC this year will be launching the 12th Five Year Plan, the country’s comprehensive goals for 2011-15.
  • By this time next year, China will be in the thick of the leadership swap, and by 2013, a novice leadership will be in charge.
  • across the country there is a sense of rising dissatisfaction with social conditions that have not kept pace with economic improvements, and dismay at the threat of inflation.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Beijing has an eye on the Jasmine protests for their potentiality rather than their weak manifestations. It is wary of the Tiananmen model.
  • China is far more integrated in the global economy now, and is in a far more delicate position economically. It maintains the current status quo as long as foreign states tolerate it and do not block its trade.
  • anonymous on 07 Mar 11
     
    "China begins its annual "Two Sessions" on Thursday, starting with the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, an advisory body, and followed by the National People's Congress (NPC), the national legislature, on Saturday. The event has already elicited the usual calls for economic reform, improvement of governance, and alleviation of social problems. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao struck the tone in a recent speech by emphasizing that the country's foremost priority now belongs to improving people's living conditions - making people "happy," a new official buzzword - and correcting economic imbalances to benefit households even at the risk of slower growth in the coming years."
anonymous

Exploitation and Social Justice - 0 views

bhl.typepad.com/...tation-and-social-justice.html

libertarian

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 11 - Cached
  • All else being equal, it is a good thing for governments to prohibit harmful exploitation - at least when the unfairness rises to a high enough level that we regard it as a violation of the victim's rights.  Taking someone’s labor without giving them the money you promised them is such a case.  It is harmful, and seriously so – they come away worse off (sans their labor and their wages), you come away better off.  Laws that prohibit this protect the vulnerable and are a value tool in the promotion of social justice.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 11
     
    "The normal tendency of classical liberals is to recoil upon hearing the term "exploitation," especially when its invocation is tied the demand for increased powers for the government. At least since the time of Marx, talk of "exploitation" has mainly been the domain of the political left, especially in critique of the relationship between capital and labor. But it would be a rhetorical and philosophical mistake for classical liberals to concede this concept to the left. Marx was wrong to think that capitalism is inherently exploitative, a mistake grounded in both a theoretical error about the nature of value and various empirical errors about the nature of a market economy. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as exploitation, nor that exploitation is not a serious moral wrong, nor even that capitalism as it exists today is not very often wrongfully exploitative."
anonymous

Graduate students: Aspirations and anxieties - 1 views

www.nature.com/...nj7357-533a.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 11 - Cached
  • About 5,000 graduate students from dozens of countries responded to the survey, which Nature publicized through its e-mail lists and website, the Naturejobs.com newsletter and social media. Respondents hailed from a variety of scientific fields, but the basic biological sciences were most heavily represented.
  • Across all disciplines, PhD students became less pleased with their experience as their degrees progressed. Of first-year students who responded to the survey, 76% were “satisfied” or “very satisfied”; that decreased to 66.8% for second-years and 61.3% for third-years, although the numbers varied with region (see 'Continental divide').
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 11
     
    Life as a graduate student can mean hours of daily toil, little social contact and no guarantee that all that work will lead to a job. But it can also offer intellectual stimulation, independent projects that nurture a love of discovery and the development of a skill set that opens a host of science-related opportunities for a budding scientist.
  • Erik Hanson on 28 Jul 11
     
    Yeah, I think part-time was the right choice for me.
anonymous

A Crisis of Political Economy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...edman-crisis-political-economy

geopolitics politics economics

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • A more penetrating look at the very slow recovery of the world’s largest economy points to systemic failure by the financial and political elites.
  • Can you put the last three years in perspective?
  • It’s not that it’s not soluble, in many of these countries, but you see it in a destabilization going on beneath the surface. In fact, the riots in London are kind of symptomatic of this, of the fact that some elements of society have lost such respect for the elites that they’re prepared to take extreme action.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Well you know, I think there’s a kind of model you could argue that people are deprived of things so they revolt. But it’s much deeper than that.
  • when criminality starts to look legitimate to large numbers of people, that’s when you have a social crisis.
  • I think it’s a mistake to look at what happened in London simply in terms of “well there were social cuts and so that’s why there was a rising.” That rising couldn’t have occurred if the elites themselves hadn’t appeared to be so corrupted, so compromised, and even one could say, so incompetent. That was the real issue that we faced there and I think if you simply say that if you do social cuts then people will riot, that’s not empirically true.
  • It’s when you wind up in a situation where you no longer know who’s in charge nor do you care, that opportunities are created for the criminal class.
  • You really have to distinguish between the constant comings and goings of the system and the silliness of Rupert Murdoch, who in the end turns out to be a very silly man in many ways.
  • People who were supposed to be experts in finance did inexcusably stupid things and also in the process, profited handsomely. People in the political system who were supposed to hold these people accountable and prevent them from doing these things, failed to do it.
  • But when the fundamental thing that legitimizes an elite, the financial elite’s ability to manage money prudently, is violated in two ways.
  • First, that they clearly can’t do it. And secondly that they profit from it anyway.
  • And the fact that they don’t seem to regard themselves as particularly having failed. I mean, this is what creates a crisis I think.
  • I’ll put it this way: this is a crisis in virtue — in the virtue of the political leadership, in the virtue of the financial leaders. There’s expected to be a certain degree of self-restraint and moral probity. You can’t substitute regulations for that, and you can’t worry about whether or not they’re going to be enforced in the future. The heart of the matter is that the integrity, the intelligence, the morality of these elites, have now been called into question.
  • The issue is: who are these people who are running things, what gives them the right to do so, and if that right does not somehow flow from competence, what does it flow from? So we have a crisis I think, not in corruption, but of sheer incompetence and indifference to incompetence, and that is something that is not necessarily unmanageable, but it’s certainly not a question of getting better regulations.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    "STRATFOR CEO George Friedman says the current economic problems in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are the result of systemic failure in two major communities: the financial and political elite."
anonymous

Borderlands: Hungary Maneuvers - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...borderlands-hungary-maneuvers

shared by anonymous on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • For me, Hungarian was my native language. Stickball was my culture. For my parents, Hungarian was their culture. Hungary was the place where they were young, and their youth was torn away from them.
  • For them, it was always the Germans who were guilty for unleashing the brutishness in the Hungarians.
  • This was my parents' view: Except for the Germans, the vastness of evil could not have existed. I was in no position to debate them.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • This debate has re-entered history through Hungarian politics.
  • Some have accused Prime Minister Viktor Orban of trying to emulate a man named Miklos Horthy, who ruled Hungary before and during World War II.
  • It has become a metaphor for the country today, and Hungarians are divided with earnest passion on an old man long dead.
  • Adm. Miklos Horthy, a regent to a non-existent king and an admiral in the forgotten Austro-Hungarian navy, governed Hungary between 1920 and 1944.
  • Horthy ruled a country that was small and weak. Its population was 9.3 million in 1940. Horthy's goal was to preserve its sovereignty in the face of the rising power of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Caught between the two -- and by this I mean that both prized Hungary for its strategic position in the Carpathian Basin -- Hungary had few options.
  • Horthy's strategy meant a great deal to the Jews. He was likely no more anti-Semitic than any member of his class had to be. He might not hire a Jew, but he wasn't going to kill one. This was different from the new style of anti-Semitism introduced by Hitler, which required mass murder.
  • Thousands were killed early on, and anti-Jewish laws were passed. But thousands are not hundreds of thousands or millions, and in that time and place it was a huge distinction.
  • Horthy conceded no more than he had to, but what he had to do he did. Some say it was opportunism, others mere cowardice of chance. Whatever it was, while it lasted, Hungary was not like Poland or even France. The Jews were not handed over to the Germans.
  • Horthy fell from his tightrope on March 19, 1944. Realizing Germany was losing the war, Horthy made peace overtures to the Soviets. They were coming anyway, so he might as well welcome them.
  • Hitler, of course, discovered this and occupied Hungary
  • Horthy signed off on this. But that signature, as he pointed out, was meaningless. The Germans were there, they could do as they wanted, and his signature was a meaningless act that spared his sons' lives.
  • My parents were grateful to Horthy. For them, without him, the Holocaust would have come to Hungary years earlier. He did not crush the Hungarian Nazis, but he kept them at bay. He did not turn on Hitler, but he kept him at bay.
  • What Horthy did was the dirty work of decency.
  • He made deals with devils to keep the worst things from happening.
  • Hungary is in a very different position today, but its circumstances still bear similarities to Horthy's time.
  • This is the old argument about Horthy, and in fact, in Hungary there is a raging argument about Horthy's role that is really about Orban. Is Orban, like Horthy, doing the least he can to avoid a worse catastrophe, or is he secretly encouraging Jobbik and hastening disaster?
  • This discussion, like all discussions regarding Budapest, is framed by the tenuous position of Hungary in the world.
  • Orban sees the European Union as a massive failure. The great depression in Mediterranean Europe, contrasted with German prosperity, is simply the repeat of an old game.
  • Hungary is in the east, in the borderland between the European Peninsula and Russia. The Ukrainian crisis indicates that the tension in the region is nearing a flashpoint. He must guide Hungary somewhere.
  • There is little support from Hungary's west, other than mostly hollow warnings. He knows that the Germans will not risk their prosperity to help stabilize the Hungarian economy or its strategic position.
  • Nor does he expect the Americans to arrive suddenly and save the day.
  • The Ukrainian crisis can only be understood in terms of the failure of the European Union. Germany is doing well, but it isn't particularly willing to take risks. The rest of northern Europe has experienced significant unemployment, but it is Mediterranean Europe that has been devastated by unemployment. The European financial crisis has morphed into the European social crisis, and that social crisis has political consequences.
  • The middle class, and those who thought they would rise to the middle class, have been most affected.
  • The contrast between the euphoric promises of the European Union and the more meager realities has created movements that are challenging not only membership in the European Union but also the principle of the bloc
  • Compound this with the re-emergence of a Russian threat to the east, and everyone on Ukraine's border begins asking who is coming to help them. The fragmentation of Europe nationally and socially weakens Europe to the point of irrelevance. This is where the failure of the European Union and the hollowing out of NATO become important. Europe has failed economically. If it also fails militarily, then what does it all matter? Europe is back where it started, and so is Hungary.
  • Orban is a rare political leader in Europe. He is quite popular, but he is in a balancing act.
  • To his left are the Europeanists, who see all his actions as a repudiation of liberal democracy. On the right is a fascist party that won 20 percent in the last election. Between these two forces, Hungary could tear itself apart. It is in precisely this situation that Weimar Germany failed.
  • Orban knows what Horthy did as well. Hungary, going up against both Germany and Russia, needs to be very subtle. Hungary is already facing Germany's policy toward liberal integration within the European Union, which fundamentally contradicts Hungary's concept of an independent state economy.
  • Orban's strategy is to create an economy with maximum distance from Europe without breaking with it, and one in which the state exerts its power.
  • This is not what the Germans want to see.
  • I think Orban anticipated this as he saw the European Union flounder earlier in the decade. He saw the fragmentation and the rise of bitterness on all sides. He constructed a regime that appalled the left, which thought that without Orban, it would all return to the way it was before, rather than realizing that it might open the door to the further right. He constructed a regime that would limit the right's sense of exclusion without giving it real power.
  • if the United States enters the fray, it will not happen soon, and it will be even later before its role is decisive.
  • For Horthy, the international pressure finally overwhelmed him, and the German occupation led to a catastrophe that unleashed the right, devastated the Jews and led to a Russian invasion and occupation that lasted half a century. But how many lives did Horthy save by collaborating with Germany? He bought time, if nothing else.
  • Orban isn't Horthy by any means, but their situations are similar. Hungary is a country of enormous cultivation and fury. It is surrounded by disappointments that can become dangers. Europe is not what it promised it would be. Russia is not what Europeans expected it to be. Within and without the country, the best Orban can do is balance, and those who balance survive but are frequently reviled.
  • anonymous on 20 May 14
     
    "I am writing this from Budapest, the city in which I was born. I went to the United States so young that all my memories of Hungary were acquired later in life or through my family, whose memories bridged both world wars and the Cold War, all with their attendant horrors. My own deepest memory of Hungary comes from my parents' living room in the Bronx. My older sister was married in November 1956. There was an uprising against the Soviets at the same time, and many of our family members were still there. After the wedding, we returned home and saw the early newspapers and reports on television. My parents discovered that some of the heaviest fighting between the revolutionaries and Soviets had taken place on the street where my aunts lived. A joyous marriage, followed by another catastrophe -- the contrast between America and Hungary. That night, my father asked no one in particular, "Does it ever end?" The answer is no, not here. Which is why I am back in Budapest."
anonymous

The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...4048180.htm

Pocket

shared by anonymous on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 18 Jul 14
     
    The material prosperity that capitalism has wrought is the product of technology, as well as markets (and social norms and state institutions).
  • anonymous on 18 Jul 14
     
    The material prosperity that capitalism has wrought is the product of technology, as well as markets (and social norms and state institutions).
anonymous

5 hard truths progressives must face about Obama - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ressives_must_face_about_obama

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • We’ve now dodged the bullet of a Mitt Romney White House, so let’s get back to reality. Despite his campaign-trail populism, the president will continue the politics of accommodation to conservatives. Two of the three priorities he has set out for his next term are at the top of the GOP agenda: a “grand bargain” to cut government spending over the next 10 years and corporate tax reform that would cut rates—don’t hold your breath—and close loopholes. The third priority, rationalizing immigration law, is one of the few progressive ideas that also has the support of the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
  • President Obama says his top priority is a deal with House Republicans to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. His “liberal” position starts with a ratio of spending cuts to tax increases of 2.5-to-1. The only real dispute between the president and Republicans is whether the rich will have to give back the tax breaks George W. Bush gave them. So when the eventual deal is struck, the federal government will be taking more out of the economy over the next decade than it is putting in.
  • Off-shoring and automation will continue to shed jobs with no offsetting increase in the demand for labor. Budget cuts—including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid—will widen the holes in the social safety net and further limit investments in education, infrastructure and technology upon which any chance at future prosperity depends.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The president’s Council of Economic Advisers will not admit it, but their default strategy for growth is to let American wages drop far enough to undercut foreign competition.
  • That is the only possible policy rationale for Obama’s enthusiasm for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a further deregulation of trade that will strip away the last protections for American workers against a brutal global marketplace of dog-eat-dog.
  • The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a victory for corporate America. In exchange for giving up their rules against covering pre-existing conditions and agreeing to raise the age limit in which children could be covered under their parents’ policy, the health insurance corporations got the federal government to require every citizen to buy their product and commit to subsidizing those that can’t afford the price.
  • Although it abandoned the public option, the White House whispers to Democrats that Obamacare will pave the way for single-payer. Fat chance. The bill was inspired by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and largely drafted by a former insurance company executive precisely to stop single-payer from ever happening.
  • The largest companies now have a bigger share of the financial markets than they had in 2008 and their “too-big-to-fail safety net” is even more explicit.Perhaps most important, nothing has been done to lengthen the horizons of U.S. investors from short-term, get-rich-quick financial speculation to the long-term investment in producing things and high-value services in America.
  • With the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, the transformation from democracy to plutocracy is virtually complete.
  • The corruption of our governing class goes beyond just campaign contributions. It can include the hint of a future job or lobbyist contract when you leave office, a hedge fund internship for your daughter, a stock market tip. But all this depends on your remaining in power, so nothing matches the importance of raising enough money to get yourself reelected.
  • Democratic leaders’ primary response to Citizens United has been a tepid proposal to require more transparency in campaign contributions.
  • But even areas where the president could act alone—as with an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose political contributions or even filling vacant seats on the Federal Election Commission—Obama took a pass
  • In response to an interviewer’s question in August, he said that “in the longer term” we may need a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United. He is right. But the “longer term” certainly means sometime after he leaves office.
  • Without a radical shift away from the policies of the last four years, living standards of most people in the United States will continue to drop, with potentially ugly social and political consequences.
  • The stakes for Democrats are also high. Obama’s victory has reinforced the widespread notion among pundits that the projected future increase in the non-white voting population and the party’s advantage with women already makes it the favorite for 2016 and beyond. But it is precisely these constituencies that economic stagnation has hit the hardest. Whatever the demographic changes, if the Democratic Party produces another four years like the last four, it can kiss goodbye to the next election and probably several after that.
  • anonymous on 20 Nov 12
     
    "5 hard truths progressives must face about Obama Now that the joy of election night has subsided, it's time for a reality check: The president's still a centrist"
anonymous

Ayn Rand is for children - 1 views

www.salon.com/...ayn_rand_is_for_children

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 13 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Since I first met Objectivists (read: libertarians) in college, my Unified Theory of Rand Groupies posited that they all probably fit into at least one of three groups: those who 1) never grew out of the usual “the world is persecuting me and doesn’t see my true genius” phase that momentarily afflicts the typical high schooler 2) think saying “Ayn Rand” in any context makes them sound intelligent, even though they’ve never actually read her work or 3) have read Rand’s work, don’t genuinely believe in her ideology as evidenced by their lifestyle/politics, but still say they love her because it serves to make them feel good about their own avarice.
  • Typically, they are more than happy to (among other things) drive on taxpayer funded roads; to have their assets defended by government agents (aka police and firefighters); to have their property rights protected by a law enforcement collective known as the judiciary; and to pocket their share of handouts. Some alleged Randian individualists are even willing to decry the social safety net for others but not for themselves, and still others are happy to to vote in Congress for the epitome of what Randianism stands against.
  • Nonetheless, after my three-week voyage to the poorest province in China in 2009 (which you can read about here), I can say with confidence that if you have been to the non-Tom-Friedman developing world – aka the actual developing world – you don’t need Saunders’ MacArthur Genius-worthy intellect to arrive at his very same conclusion.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Simply put, once you actually see laissez faire capitalism and greed-is-good extremism at work, it doesn’t look as nice as it sounds in Rand’s works. On the contrary, as Saunders implies, it makes “Fountainhead Shrugged” look less like serious treatise than bad young adult fiction, with all the corresponding misguided parables and oversimplified conclusions.
  • To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if “Fountainhead Shrugged” was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 13
     
    "With this week's news that Glenn Beck and others are preparing to build libertarian communes and "Going Galt," I figure now is the time to finally refine my theory about those who claim to be Ayn Rand acolytes or who brag that their favorite book is "Fountainhead Shrugged" (they are the same book written twice in order to double Rand's profit, so for brevity, let's just use one name)."
anonymous

The First Latin American Pope - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...first-latin-american-pope

shared by anonymous on 14 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The selection of Bergoglio, who took the name Francis, was a surprise due to his nationality and because he was not discussed as a top candidate by the media in the weeks since the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. 

  • Because of its Spanish and Portuguese colonial history, Latin America has the highest number of Catholics in the world. An estimated 483 million Catholics live in Latin American countries -- 200 million more than in Europe. Moreover, some 50 million Hispanics live in the United States, most of whom are Catholic.


  • In addition, the markedly different birth rates in Europe and in Latin America make it likely that the gap in Catholic populations will continue to widen in the coming decades.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Catholicism in Latin America is under threat by the expansion of evangelical churches and various Afro-Latin American creeds. Still, the selection of a Latin American pope confirms that the church has ceased to be a preeminently European institution and is seeking to strengthen its influence outside the Continent.
  • Another surprise is the new pope's religious background. Francis is a Jesuit -- a member of one of the most reform-minded and outspoken orders of the Catholic Church.
  • The Jesuits have been characterized by two elements: their deep educational efforts -- the order founded thousands of schools and universities around the world -- and their active participation in politics.
  • Because of the latter trait, the Society of Jesus often clashed with the European monarchies, to the point that the order was temporarily suppressed in the late 18th century. 
  • A core feature of liberation theology is outspoken criticism of social injustice in Latin America, a position that has led many priests to criticize governments in the region -- a large number of which have been dictatorships.
  • Though he has criticized liberation theology, Bergoglio has also been a constant critic of social inequalities in his native Argentina. This stance has led the Argentine church to clash on numerous occasions with the governments of former President Nestor Kirchner and his wife, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
  • In keeping with the philosophy of his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, Francis will likely be very vocal in denouncing inequalities. His choice of name was highly symbolic and undoubtedly intentional.
  • As criticism of austerity measures grows in Europe, the new pope will likely align with the demands of the peripheral governments. 
  • One of the biggest issues in Latin America where the Church could have real influence is violence. Some gangs in Mexico and Central America are actively religious, and the church could play a unique role in denouncing their violent tactics.
  • Benedict XVI's relatively short tenure marked a transitional period for the Catholic Church after the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005 -- arguably the most geopolitically significant pope in modern history because of his prominent role in the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe.
  • For his part, Francis faces the challenge of leading a church that is still physically and politically present around the world but the influence of which has been significantly diminished over the past century.
  • anonymous on 14 Mar 13
     
    "The appointment of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the new pope could indicate a change in strategy for the Roman Catholic Church. After a conclave that lasted just two days, the Vatican elected the first non-European pope in more than 13 centuries. The selection of Bergoglio, who took the name Francis, was a surprise due to his nationality and because he was not discussed as a top candidate by the media in the weeks since the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI."
anonymous

Turkey is ... | Headrush - Ed Webb's Dickinson Blog - 0 views

the-ed-rush.blogspot.com/...turkey-is.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 13 - Cached
  • What strikes me most about analyses I have looked at is the urge to compare. Taksim is or isn't Tahrir. Turkey is or isn't like Egypt/Tunisia/the USA. The protests in Gezi Park and elsewhere are more like #Occupy or more like the Arab uprisings of 2011.
  • Prime Minister Erdogan has little in common with Mubarak, Ben Ali or, even less, Qadhafi. He is a legitimately elected (and re-elected) and popular leader. Turkey is a multiparty democracy in a way that the North African states never were before the uprisings.
  • represent a broad frustration with the Prime Minister and his party (AKP/JDP)
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • That frustration appears to be driven by two key factors:
  • Erdogan's increasingly autocratic, populist governing style
  • pursuit of conservative social policy beyond many Turkish citizens' comfort zones
  • The ballot box is not, therefore, proving sufficiently responsive to that large segment of the population who feel underserved by the present government.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jun 13
       
      Man, that sounds familiar. ;)
  • Where comparative political analysis may be helpful, apart from providing some of the vocabulary to discuss these events, is in drawing attention to international forces that have played roles in the Turkish protests:
  • Demonstration effects
  • information and communications technologies
  • the context of neoliberalizing globalization
  • In Tunisia and Egypt this enabled crony capitalist reforms, enriching a small elite and excluding the vast majority. Social justice and dignity became central demands of the protestors there.
  • The protestors are not, by and large, economic victims of globalization. But the development of Gezi park was symptomatic of runaway gentrification and had the stench of corruption about it:
  • Protestors globally are confronting local interactions of their national political and economic systems with the dominant economic ideology and forces of the post-Cold War world.
  • Turkey is not Tunisia is not Egypt is not the USA. But neoliberal globalization has disrupted societies in all of those places, and some people have pushed back and are pushing back.
  • anonymous on 05 Jun 13
     
    An awesome look at Turkey from Ed Webb: "Students and others have been asking me for my thoughts on the protests in Turkey. There is much reporting and analysis already available, of varying quality, so I will be brief. I encourage those interested to keep an eye on my Twitter stream and my Diigo account where I have been collecting some of the more interesting interventions."
anonymous

The conservative case for an assault weapons ban - 0 views

articles.latimes.com/...s-assault-weapons-ban-20121220

shared by anonymous on 23 Dec 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Dec 12
     
    "Last month, I sentenced Jared Lee Loughner to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in federal prison for his shooting rampage in Tucson. That tragedy left six people dead, more than twice that number injured and a community shaken to its core. Loughner deserved his punishment. But during the sentencing, I also questioned the social utility of high-capacity magazines like the one that fed his Glock. And I lamented the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004, which prohibited the manufacture and importation of certain particularly deadly guns, as well as magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition."
anonymous

The Geopolitics of the Yangtze River: Developing the Interior - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...gtze-river-developing-interior

yangtze geopolitics river developing interior

shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 13 - Cached
  • As the competitive advantage of low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing in China's coastal industrial hubs wanes, Beijing will rely more heavily on the cities along the western and central stretches of the Yangtze River to drive the development of a supplemental industrial base throughout the country's interior.
  • Managing the migration of industrial activity from the coast to the interior -- and the social, political and economic strains that migration will create -- is a necessary precondition for the Communist Party's long-term goal of rebalancing toward a more stable and sustainable growth model based on higher domestic consumption. In other words, it is critical to ensuring long-term regime security.
  • China is in many ways as geographically, culturally, ethnically and economically diverse as Europe. That regional diversity, which breeds inequality and in turn competition, makes unified China an inherently fragile entity. It must constantly balance between the interests of the center and those of regions with distinct and often contradictory economic and political interests.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • the central government has targeted the Yangtze River economic corridor -- the urban industrial zones lining the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai -- as a key area for investment, development and urbanization in the coming years. Ultimately, the Party hopes to transform the Yangtze's main 2,800-kilometer-long (1,700-mile-long) navigable channel into a central superhighway for goods and people, better connecting China's less developed interior provinces to the coast and to each other by way of water -- a significantly cheaper form of transport than road or railway.
  • The Yangtze River is the key geographic, ecological, cultural and economic feature of China.
  • Stretching 6,418 kilometers from its source in the Tibetan Plateau to its terminus in the East China Sea, the river both divides and connects the country. To its north lie the wheat fields and coal mines of the North China Plain and Loess Plateau, unified China's traditional political cores. Along its banks and to the south are the riverine wetlands and terraced mountain faces that historically supplied China with rice, tea, cotton and timber.
  • The river passes through the highlands of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the fertile Sichuan Basin, the lakes and marshes of the Middle Yangtze and on to the trade hubs of the Yangtze River Delta. Its watershed touches 19 provinces and is central to the economic life of more people than the populations of Russia and the United States combined.
  • The river's dozens of tributaries reach from Xian, in the southern Shaanxi province, to northern Guangdong -- a complex of capillaries without which China likely would never have coalesced into a single political entity.
  • The Yangtze, even more than the Yellow River, dictates the internal constraints on and strategic imperatives of China's rulers.
  • The Yellow River may be the origin of the Han Chinese civilization, but on its own it is far too weak to support the economic life of a great power.
  • The Yellow River is China's Hudson or Delaware. By contrast, the Yangtze is China's Mississippi -- the river that enabled China to become an empire.
  • Just as the Mississippi splits the United States into east and west, the Yangtze divides China into its two most basic geopolitical units: north and south.
  • This division, more than any other, forms the basis of Chinese political history and provides China's rulers with their most fundamental strategic imperative: unity of the lands above and below the river. Without both north and south, there is no China, only regional powers.
  • The constant cycle between periods of unity (when one power takes the lands north and south of the Yangtze) and disunity (when that power breaks into its constituent regional parts) constitutes Chinese political history.
  • If the Yangtze did not exist, or if its route had veered downward into South and Southeast Asia (like most of the rivers that begin on the Tibetan Plateau), China would be an altogether different and much less significant place.
  • The provinces of central China, which today produce more rice than all of India, would be as barren as Central Asia. Regional commercial and political power bases like the Yangtze River Delta or the Sichuan Basin would never have emerged. The entire flow of Chinese history would be different.
  • Three regions in particular make up the bulk of the Yangtze River Basin
  • the Upper (encompassing present-day Sichuan and Chongqing), Middle (Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi) and Lower Yangtze (Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, as well as Shanghai and parts of Anhui).
  • Geography and time have made these regions into distinct and relatively autonomous units, each with its own history, culture and language. Each region has its own hubs -- Chengdu and Chongqing for the Upper Yangtze; Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang for the Middle Yangtze; and Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai for the Lower Yangtze.
  • In many ways, China was more deeply united under Mao Zedong than under any emperor since Kangxi in the 18th century. After 1978, the foundations of internal cohesion began to shift and crack as the reform and opening process directed central government attention and investment away from the interior (Mao's power base) and toward the coast.
  • Today, faced with the political and social consequences of that process, the Party is once again working to reintegrate and recentralize -- both in the sense of slowly reconsolidating central government control over key sectors of the economy and, more fundamentally, forcibly shifting the economy's productive core inland.
  • Today, the Yangtze River is by far the world's busiest inland waterway for freight transport.
  • In 2011, more than 1.6 billion metric tons of goods passed through it, representing 40 percent of the nation's total inland waterborne cargo traffic and about 5 percent of all domestic goods transport that year
  • By 2011, the nine provincial capitals that sit along the Yangtze and its major tributaries had a combined gross domestic product of $1 trillion, up from $155 billion in 2001. That gives these cities a total wealth roughly comparable to the gross domestic products of South Korea and Mexico.
  • Investment in further industrial development along the Yangtze River reflects not only an organic transformation in the structure of the Chinese economy but also the intersection of complex political forces
  • First, there is a clear shift in central government policy away from intensive focus on coastal manufacturing at the expense of the interior (the dominant approach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s) and toward better integrating China's diverse regions into a coherent national economy.
  • Thirty years of export-oriented manufacturing centered in a handful of coastal cities generated huge wealth and created hundreds of millions of jobs. But it also created an economy characterized by deep discrepancies in the geographic allocation of resources and by very little internal cohesion.
  • By 2001, the economies of Shanghai and Shenzhen, for instance, were in many ways more connected to those of Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles than of the hinterlands of Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces.
  • The foundation of this model was an unending supply of cheap labor. In the 1980s, such workers came primarily from the coast. In the 1990s, when coastal labor pools had been largely exhausted, factories welcomed the influx of migrants from the interior. Soon, labor came to replace coal, iron ore and other raw materials as the interior's most important export to coastal industrial hubs. By the mid-2000s, between 250 million and 300 million migrant workers had fled from provinces like Henan, Anhui and Sichuan (where most people still lived on near-subsistence farming) in search of work in coastal cities.
  • This continual supply of cheap labor from the interior kept Chinese manufacturing cost-competitive throughout the 2000s -- far longer than if Chinese factories had only had the existing coastal labor pool to rely on.
  • But in doing so, it kept wages artificially low and, in turn, systematically undermined the development of a domestic consumer base. This was compounded by the fact that very little of the wealth generated by coastal manufacturing went to the workers.
  • Instead, it went to the state in the form of savings deposits into state-owned banks, revenue from taxes and land sales, or profits for the state-owned and state-affiliated enterprises
  • This dual process -- accumulation of wealth by the state and systematic wage repression in low-end coastal manufacturing -- significantly hampered the development of China's domestic consumer base. But even more troubling was the effect of labor migration, coupled with the relative lack of central government attention to enhancing inland industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, on the economies of interior provinces.
  • In trying to urbanize and industrialize the interior, Beijing is going against the grain of Chinese history -- a multimillennia saga of failed attempts to overcome the radical constraints of geography, population, food supply and culture through ambitious central government development programs.
  • Though its efforts thus far have yielded notable successes, such as rapid expansion of the country's railway system and soaring economic growth rates among inland provinces, they have not yet addressed a number of pivotal questions. Before it can move forward, Beijing must address the reform of the hukou (or household registration) system and the continued reliance on centrally allocated investment, as opposed to consumption, as a driver of growth.
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 13
     
    "This is the first piece in a three-part series on the geopolitical implications of China's move to transform the Yangtze River into a major internal economic corridor."
anonymous

Escape from Tomorrow, Disney World, and the Law of Fair Use : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...d-and-the-law-of-fair-use.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Jan 13
     
    ""Escape from Tomorrow" is, essentially, a commentary on a shared social phenomenon, namely the supposed bliss of an American family's day at Disney World. In Moore's version, the day is a frightening and surreal mess that destroys the family forever. The film isn't so much a criticism of Disney World itself but of the unattainable family perfection promised by a day spent at the park."
anonymous

Sovereignty, Supranationality and the Future of EU Integration - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...lity-and-future-eu-integration

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 13 - Cached
  • The European Union is an entity like no other in world history. After the end of World War II, the international system was configured around a series of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and NATO. But the process of economic and political cooperation that West Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg began in 1951 is fundamentally different from the rest of the post-war organizations.
  • The project was a direct challenge to the classical idea of ​​the nation-state and generated new forms of government and administration hitherto unknown.
  • Immanuel Kant believed that Europe would only overcome its constant state of war by achieving some form of political unity.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • From the Roman Empire to Nazi Germany, all the attempts to unify Europe meant war and conquest. It took World War II to convince the Europeans that the future of the Continent depended on overcoming age-old antagonisms and building a lasting political settlement to boost trade and prevent another war.
  • The central problem to be solved was the historical emnity between France and Germany
  • The French government understood that the only way to achieve lasting and sustainable economic growth in France was by ensuring a stable peace with Germany.
  • The European Economic Community, the institutional heart of the emerging continental unity, had three main objectives.
  • Its immediate goal was to create a customs union, which would eliminate trade restrictions between member states and establish a common external tariff for trade with the rest of the world.
  • It would also seek the consolidation of a common market, to allow the free movement of people, goods, capital and services.
  • Finally, it would seek the progressive coordination of social and fiscal policies among its members.
  • The rationale behind the European Communities was that if countries gave up sovereignty in specific areas, over time a greater amount of national prerogatives would be transferred to the supranational institutions.
  • Throughout the process, unanimity would be replaced by majority voting (so that the interest of the majority would overtake individual interests) and concessions of sovereignty would not be limited to economic issues, but also political and military affairs.
  • In other words, the process of European integration would progressively weaken the nation-state and its strategic interests.
  • Six decades later, many of these goals have been achieved.
  • The Commission, the Parliament and the Court of Justice today have powers that notably exceed those designed in the 1950s. More impressively, the European Union currently has 28 members, 17 of whom share the same currency. In 1945, with Europe in ashes and occupied by foreign powers, it was unimaginable to think that six decades later France and Germany would share the leadership of a continental alliance stretching from Portugal to Finland and Cyprus.
  • However, the remarkable growth of the European project did not bring about the abolishment of the nation-state that many analysts predicted.
  • EU institutions tend to generate their own agendas, which often go against the national strategies of some member states. As a result, the clash between national and supranational interests is often unavoidable.
  • This friction did not begin with the current economic crisis. In 1965, the French government withdrew its representation in the European Commission in protest of a plan that would give more power to Brussels in the management of the Common Agricultural Policy. To resolve the crisis, the Europeans reached an agreement under which a de facto veto power was given to member states on issues that were considered crucial to national interests. This agreement (commonly known as the Luxembourg Compromise) was designed to protect the intergovernmental nature of the European Communities and virtually froze the process of supranational integration in the 1970s and 1980s, until the Single European Act in 1986 introduced new mechanisms for qualified majority voting.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Jul 13
       
      This paragraph is a good example of something I would never have known about otherwise. I wish I had been shown (much earlie) how history is shaped by the continuity and discontinuity of policies. Among, you know, an infinite soup of other variables. :)
  • On top of the traditional tensions between national governments and supranational institutions, in times of crisis member states also tend to distrust each other.
  • The creation of the euro has further complicated things. Seventeen countries with very different levels of economic development and competitiveness now share a common currency. This has particularly reduced Mediterranean Europe's room to maneuver, because it has deprived those countries of the possibility of applying independent monetary policy to tackle crises.
  • Governments must find a balance between their foreign policy objectives, pressure from the European Union and their desire to be re-elected -- which means decisions that may make sense for the future of the European Union (such as fiscal consolidation efforts) would probably not be made if governments consider them too unpopular among voters.
  • Other institutions, such as constitutional courts, often threaten to block decisions accepted by national parliaments. The recent investigation by the German constitutional court on the validity of the European Stability Mechanism and the decision by the Portuguese constitutional court to block some austerity measures promoted by Brussels and implemented by Lisbon are examples of this situation.
  • The deep unemployment crisis in the eurozone adds yet another complication to this problem. The European elites are still largely pro-European, and most of the voters in the eurozone want to keep the euro. But with the European Union's promise of economic prosperity weakening, its members have begun to rethink their strategies. Fidelity for the European project is not unbreakable. Nor is it strong enough to support an indefinite period of extremely high unemployment.
  • Despite its remarkable evolution, the European Union is still a contract. And contracts could be modified or even canceled if they stop being beneficial for their signatories.
  • Non-eurozone countries in Central and Eastern Europe have also begun to think of a more independent foreign policy. They remain formally aligned with the European Union and NATO, but the pursuit of closer ties with Russia is no longer taboo. And for most of them, joining the eurozone is no longer a priority.
  • Because of the pervasiveness of the nation-state, the future of the European Union will not be in the hands of the EU institutions, but in those of the same actors of 1951: France and Germany. Since the beginning of the economic crisis, Paris and Berlin have reiterated their commitment to the European Union, but as the economic downturn moves to the core of Europe, the differences between them become more obvious.
  • Like most economies in Mediterranean Europe, France's has lost competitiveness since the creation of the euro, and the common currency has led to a constant trade deficit with Germany. France will seek to change its relationship with Germany without breaking it (as Paris is still interested in containing Berlin), but Paris is increasingly aware that the European project should be remodeled.
  • In this context, Paris and Berlin will need to find a balance between their desire to preserve their alliance and the need to protect their national interests.
  • The Germans are interested in preserving their alliance with France and protecting the currency union because it benefits its exports to its neighbors and out of fear of the immeasurable financial consequences of a breakup of the eurozone.
  • Europe's main challenge will be to prevent these frictions from paralyzing the bloc. The European Union will also face the test of mitigating the alienation of its eastern members and closing the gap between eurozone and non-eurozone countries. In the meantime, Brussels and national governments will have to find ways to alleviate the bloc's corrosive unemployment crisis before it leads to dangerous levels of social unrest. In all these challenges, the European Union is running a race against time.
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 13
     
    "Tensions between the European Commission and France have escalated in recent weeks. After Brussels suggested that Paris should apply structural reforms to reactivate the French economy, French President Francois Hollande said that the Commission cannot dictate policy to France. A few days later, the Commission's president, Jose Manuel Barroso, criticized the French pressure to exclude the audio-visual sector from the negotiations for a free trade agreement between the European Union and United States."
anonymous

1848: History's Shadow Over the Middle East - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...storys-shadow-over-middle-east

shared by anonymous on 14 Mar 12 - Cached
  • ethnic interests in Europe soon trumped universalist longings.
  • While ethnic Germans and Hungarians cheered the weakening of Habsburg rule in massive street protests that inspired liberal intelligentsia throughout the Western world, there were Slavs and Romanians who feared the very freedom for which the Germans and Hungarians cried out. Rather than cheer on democracy per se, Slavs and Romanians feared the tyranny of majority rule.
  • There are fundamental differences between 1848 in Europe and 2011-2012 in the Middle East.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • his polyglot Habsburg system, lying at the geographical center of Europe, constituted a morality in and of itself, necessary as it was for peace among the ethnic nations. This is why Metternich's system survived, even as he himself was replaced in 1848.
  • While there is no equivalent in the Middle East of the Habsburg system, not every dictatorial regime in the Arab world is expendable for some of the same reasons that Habsburg Austria's was not.
  • That is the burdensome reality of the Middle East today: If conservative -- even reactionary -- orders are necessary for inter-communal peace, then they may survive in one form or another, or at least resurface in places such as Egypt and Iraq.
  • Iraq in 2006 and 2007 proved that chaos is in some respects worse than tyranny. Thus, a system is simply not moral if it cannot preserve domestic peace.
  • nobody is saying that conservative-reactionary orders will lead to social betterment. Nonetheless, because order is necessary before progress can take hold, reactionary regimes could be the beneficiary of chaos in some Middle Eastern states, in a similar way that the Habsburgs were after 1848. For it is conservative regimes of one type or another that are more likely to be called upon to restore order.
  • To wit, if the military is seen to be necessary for communal peace between Muslims and Copts in Egypt, that will give the generals yet another reason to share power with Islamists, rather than retreat entirely from politics. The overthrow of Mubarak will therefore signify not a revolution but a coup.
  • Indeed, democratic uprisings in 1848 did not secure democracy, they merely served notice that society had become too restive and too complex for the existent monarchical regimes to insure both order and progress.
  • So one should not confuse the formation of new regimes in the Middle East with their actual consolidation.
  • If new bureaucratic institutions do not emerge in a more socially complex Middle East, the Arab Spring will be a false one, and it will be remembered like 1848.
  • Syria is at this very moment a bellwether. It is afflicted by ethnic and sectarian splits -- Sunnis versus Shia-trending Alawites versus Druze and Kurds. But Syria also can claim historical coherence as an age-old cluster of cosmopolitanism at the crossroads of the desert and the Mediterranean, a place littered with the ruins of Byzantine and medieval Arab civilizations. The Western intelligentsia now equate a moral outcome in Syria with the toppling of the present dictator, who requires those sectarian splits to survive.
  • But soon enough, following the expected end of al Assad's regime, a moral outcome will be associated with the re-establishment of domestic order and the building of institutions -- coercive or not. Because only with that can progress be initiated.
  • 1848 had tragic repercussions: While democracy in Europe flowered briefly following World War I, it was snuffed out by fascism and then communism. Thus, 1848 had to wait until 1989 to truly renew itself.
  • Because of technology's quickened advance, political change is faster in the Middle East. But for 2011 to truly be remembered as the year of democracy in the Arab world, new forms of non-oppressive order will first have to be established. And with the likely exception of Tunisia -- a country close to Europe with no ethnic or sectarian splits -- that appears for the moment to be problematic.
  • anonymous on 14 Mar 12
     
    1848 in Europe was the year that wasn't. In the spring and summer of that year, bourgeois intellectuals and working-class radicals staged upheavals from France to the Balkans, shaking ancient regimes and vowing to create new liberal democratic orders. The Arab Spring has periodically been compared to the stirrings of 1848. But with the exception of the toppling of the Orleans monarchy in France, the 1848 revolutions ultimately failed. Dynastic governments reasserted themselves. They did so for a reason that has troubling implications for the Middle East: Conservative regimes in mid-19th century Europe had not only the institutional advantage over their liberal and socialist adversaries but also the moral advantage.
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