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manhefnawi

House of Savoy | European dynasty | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • the ruling house of Italy from 1861 to 1946
  • acquired considerable territory in the western Alps where France, Italy, and Switzerland now converge
  • raised to ducal status within the Holy Roman Empire, and in the 18th century it attained the royal title (first of the kingdom of Sicily, then of Sardinia). Having contributed to the movement for Italian unification, the family became the ruling house of Italy in the mid-19th century and remained so until overthrown with the establishment of the Italian Republic in 1946
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  • By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Victor Amadeus II (reigned 1675–1730) was raised in 1713 from duke to the status of a king as ruler of Sicily
  • During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), only Sardinia remained free of French control, but in 1815, Victor Emmanuel I (reigned 1802–21) added Genoa to the family’s holdings
  • At the beginning of the Risorgimento, the territory of the house of Savoy, centred on Piedmont, was unique among Italian states for its freedom from foreign influence and for its relative military strength. A liberal revolution in 1821 forced Victor Emmanuel I to abdicate in favour of his brother, Charles Felix. On the death of the latter in 1831, Charles Albert, of the Carignano branch of the family, obtained the throne. He contributed to the cause of unification under Piedmont’s leadership by modernizing his government
  • and fighting against Austrian power in Italy in the First War of Independence of 1848–49. Under his son Victor Emmanuel II (reigned 1849–1878, king of Italy from 1861), who supported Piedmont’s prime minister, Count Cavour, in the diplomatic maneuvering immediately before unification, the Kingdom of Italy was formed with the house of Savoy at its head
  • Victor Emmanuel III (reigned 1900–46), who remained as figurehead king during the Fascist regime, abdicated in 1946, at the end of World War II, in favour of his son Umberto II in an attempt to save the monarchy, but the Italian people voted in a referendum of June 2, 1946, for a republic, ending the rule of the house of Savoy
  • No longer royal, the Savoy family moved abroad, and the monarchist movement, strong in the 1950s, went into decline
malonema1

France's Emmanuel Macron: Birth of the anti-Trump? - BBC News - 0 views

  • France's Emmanuel Macron: Birth of the anti-Trump?
  • In less than 24 hours, his Trump-defying message "make our planet great again" was shared more than 140,000 times, easily ousting the previous record-holder, the rather less high-minded TV presenter Cyril Hanouna. One fifth of the re-tweets were in the US.
  • In giving his TV reaction to the US president, not only did Macron break brazenly with longstanding convention, according to which French presidents never speak publicly in English, but he even had the chutzpah to subvert the US leader's personal campaign slogan.
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  • The French leader has a growing fan club: in France, the US and across the globe, among people who see him as the polar opposite, the perfect antithesis of his counterpart in the White House.
  • Macron himself never planned any of this. When he first thought of running for the presidency, the chances of a Trump in the White House seemed too ludicrous to contemplate.
  • Just as in domestic politics doors seemed to open miraculously for President Macron, so in the world of international affairs shifts of power and ideology are also working in his favour - for now. Media playback is unsupported on your device
  • With its perpetual harping on about ideals and morals, France's capacity to irritate is prodigious. Perhaps it will not be long before Macron loses his touch and the world starts panting for his comeuppance.
ecfruchtman

Emmanuel Macron Tries to Rebrand - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • He’s five months into his term, and French President Emmanuel Macron is wasting little time.
  • But saying what he thinks hasn’t always helped Macron. His characterization of his presidency as that of a “Jupiterian” leader who remains above the fray of day-to-day politics earned him criticism early on, with some detractors accusing him of being “pharaonic.”
  • His popularity aside, Macron hasn’t faced much in the way of parliamentary opposition—he holds a legislative mandate that, paired with fragmented opposition parties on the left and the right, has put few barriers in his way.
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  • ultimately he will have to be unpopular, and therefore I doubt very much he will be changing tack in any real way.”
manhefnawi

Victor Amadeus II | king of Sardinia-Piedmont | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • through his diplomacy became the first king of Sardinia-Piedmont and thus established the foundation for the future Italian national state
  • When the War of the Grand Alliance broke out, Victor Amadeus in 1690 joined the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs against Louis
  • The French defeat at Turin (1706) secured his position in Italy; and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave him the royal title as king of Sicily
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  • In 1730 Victor Amadeus abdicated in favour of his son, Charles Emmanuel III, but, when he changed his mind and attempted to reassume his throne, Charles Emmanuel had him arrested (1731) and confined for the remainder of his years
malonema1

Emmanuel Macron's Amateur Politicians Are Poised to Remake French Parliament - The New ... - 0 views

  • Emmanuel Macron’s Amateur Politicians Are Poised to Remake French Parliament
  • Mr. Berville is the face of a new type of citizen-candidate in France, one with no political experience, no allegiance to the traditional parties and an undefined if firmly held belief that France needs to change. Surprisingly, polls before Sunday’s first round of national voting show that a majority of French voters may agree
  • A month ago, there were doubts about whether Mr. Macron could come up with enough candidates, let alone win a majority. But a widely acknowledged strong beginning by Mr. Macron — one veteran politician from the rival Socialists was quoted as saying the French were “stupefied” to discover the new president’s adroitness — has swept away the skepticism.
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  • Many, exceptionally for France, are also minorities, and 50 percent are women. After the last elections, one researcher found a mere 12 members of Parliament of minority origin, barely 2 percent of the legislature — hardly representative of France’s diverse population.
  • Like Mr. Berville, over 50 percent have never held political office (only 5 percent are incumbents), and their average age is under 50. Mr. Berville is not even the youngest.
  • “People are needing renewal. They’re needing change,” said a farmer listening to Mr. Berville, Olivier Bruyant, who later gave the candidate a bunch of organic carrots.
  • But even more significant: The predicted majority for Mr. Macron, 39, would put the finishing touches on the new president’s dismantling of the parties that held power in France for 50 years until he came along.
  • The incumbent opposing Mr. Berville in the Côtes-d’Armor department, the Socialist Viviane Le Dissez, does not even give her party’s name on the cover of campaign literature.
  • He speaks fluently about developing-world economic strategies, says he has never been the subject of racial discrimination in a part of France where there are few immigrants and shrewdly recognizes the exoticism of his appeal to the voters.
  • Mr. Macron wants to open up unemployment benefits to independent workers, while loosening up the rigid French labor code to make it easier to hire and fire. His candidate in Brittany had no difficulty defending a program “liberating energies and protecting individuals,” as he put it.
johnsonel7

A revolution in Africa's relations with France is afoot | Financial Times - 0 views

  • You could call it west Africa’s Brexit. In what amounts to be the biggest shift in the region’s relations with France since independence, eight west African countries will in 2020 ditch the CFA franc in favour of a new currency to be called the eco. It cannot be long before the six central African states, members of a separate CFA franc union, follow suit.
  • The symbolism is important, though the changes go beyond that. It is no small matter for eight nations, seven of them former French colonies, to rid themselves of a currency whose acronym originally stood for Colonies françaises d’Afrique, or “French colonies in Africa”. 
  • s if to underline the message, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, chose the day he announced the end of the currency to declare French colonialism in Africa a “profound mistake”. The first French leader born after African independence, Mr Macron had already, during the 2017 election campaign, deemed France’s activities in Algeria a “crime against humanity”.
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  • Alassane Ouattara, president of Ivory Coast and a former central banker himself, was a strong supporter of the CFA franc, ritually praising its stability and solidity. For a certain class of entrepreneur, the currency has indeed been excellent news. Large French companies — such as Bolloré, EDF, Orange, Total and Veolia — could invest knowing that they were protected against devaluation by the French state. For the African elites that did business with them, the overvalued CFA franc in their pocket could easily pay for imported luxuries. 
  • Like the CFA franc, French soldiers breed resentment. Some argue they help bring stability, others that they foster the very resentment they have been sent to quell. If the special relationship is over, more people could start asking what they are doing there.
Javier E

Mutual Distrust at the 2019 Munich Security Conference - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, which took place over the weekend, the charade ended.
  • The American position is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Europeans are defaulting to nostalgia for a multilateral order. Meanwhile, the true challenge of a rising authoritarian bloc goes largely ignored.
  • The substance of Pence’s speech, though, was more significant and worrying. In 2017, Pence spoke at length about the importance of the NATO alliance and its historic accomplishments. In 2019, there was none of that. The only praise of NATO was for its response to Trump’s leadership on defense spending. Otherwise, Pence offered a litany of criticism leveled against NATO and the EU—for not doing enough on Iran, Nord Stream 2, or Venezuela. (Ironically, the EU would have had a common position on this last item were it not for the effective veto of the pro-Trump Italian government.)
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  • Pence could have come and spoken about the common challenge facing the alliance from China—which is what many Europeans and Americans expected him to do.
  • He did not choose that path, possibly fearing that it would be shot down by a president who has repeatedly rejected the idea of working with the EU on China.
  • There was also a notable absence. French President Emmanuel Macron canceled his joint appearance with Merkel after a dispute about the EU’s energy policy. The French are exasperated with the Germans, with whom they believe they cannot and will not work on needed reforms to the EU. The Germans, on the other hand, see the French as hopelessly nationalist, dreaming of Franco-German leadership with nothing to offer the Italians, the Poles, or others
  • With no explanation for the U-turn, Pence demanded that the EU now withdraw from the JCPOA. His message was clear: Under Trump, the alliance means getting behind whatever Washington decides, even if that changes weekly.
  • The administration’s national-security strategy of great-power competition wasn’t mentioned, nor was election interference, which Trump’s intelligence chiefs identified as a top threat facing the United States.
  • The German and British defense ministers and the EU High Representative all seemed stuck in the mid-2000s, offering little on the great-power competition unfolding around them.
  • Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund astutely observed that Merkel “was finally playing the role that American liberals had wanted her to play—that of leader of the free world.”
  • Meanwhile, the British have just decided to continue to work with the Chinese technology firm Huawei, cutting against the prevailing winds in Western democracies. This is the sort of concrete issue that should have been discussed by the alliance
  • In Munich, Yang Jiechi, a senior Chinese official, gave a long and meandering speech about win-win solutions and the benefits of multilateralism, which was completely at odds with China’s increasingly assertive and disruptive behavior.
  • Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reveled in the disarray between the allies and sought to drive a wedge between them, weaponizing the Trump administration’s rhetoric about sovereignty.
  • There is a big problem. Western leaders are retreating into their foxholes, taking potshots at one another, rather than figuring out how to deal with new challenges
manhefnawi

Henry II | king of France | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • a vigorous suppressor of Protestants within his kingdom
  • Henry was sent with his brother Francis, the dauphin, as a hostage to Spain in 1526
  • The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was to be cemented by the marriages of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth and his sister Margaret to Philip II of Spain and to Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, respectively
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  • A bigoted Roman Catholic, Henry was rigorous in the repression of Protestantism, which was approaching the zenith of its power in France.
  • In foreign affairs Henry continued his father’s warfare against the Holy Roman emperor Charles V
  • He left four sons by his marriage to Catherine de Médicis: the future kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III and François
  • Claude, who married Charles III the Great, Duke of Lorraine
  • Margaret, who married Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV)
carolinehayter

France and Germany 'seeking full clarity' from US and Denmark on spying report - CNN - 0 views

  • France and Germany are "seeking full clarity" on a report claiming that one of Denmark's intelligence agencies helped the United States spy on several senior European officials, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday.
  • "If the information is true," Macron said during a statement to the press following a virtual Franco-German summit , these practices are "unacceptable between allies, and even less acceptable between European allies and partners."
  • Revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) tapped Merkel's cellphone emerged in 2013 after former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden shared documents with The Guardian showing that a US official had handed the agency 200 phone numbers, including those of world leaders, for the agency to monitor.
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  • The report did not name any of the 35 world leaders that were allegedly on in the list. However, few months after the initial reports, the German government publicly said it had information that suggested the US might have monitored Merkel's cell phone.
  • Denmark's independent public service broadcaster, DR, published a report on Sunday saying that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE) had launched an internal investigation in 2014 over whether the NSA used its partnership with FE, and Danish internet cables in and out of Denmark, to spy on senior European officials, according to Reuters.
  • Merkel on Monday said she agreed with French President Emmanuel Macron's assertion that wiretapping between allies was unacceptable. "Nothing has changed in our stance to the clarification given by the predecessor at the time," Merkel said, referencing the initial claims raised in 2013.
  • The DR report also found that the NSA spied on Germany's then-foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is now the country's president, and the former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück, Reuters reported.
  • DR reported that the intelligence was gathered through an analysis of software known as Xkeyscore, developed by the NSA. Reuters reported that the agency "intercepted both calls, texts and chat messages to and from telephones of officials in the neighbouring countries," citing the DR report.
anonymous

How Le Pen, Baudet and More in Europe Are Looking Away From Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

  • But his refusal to accept defeat and the violence that followed appears to have damaged the prospects of similarly minded leaders across the continent.
  • “What happened in the Capitol following the defeat of Donald Trump is a bad omen for the populists,” said Dominique Moïsi, a senior analyst at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “It says two things: If you elect them, they don’t leave power easily, and if you elect them, look at what they can do in calling for popular anger.”
  • Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels, said the unrest showed how the populist playbook was founded on “us versus them and leads to violence.”
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  • “When you’ve aroused your supporters with political arguments about us versus them, they are not opponents but enemies who must be fought with all means, and it both leads to violence and makes conceding power impossible.”
  • In France, Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Rally, is expected to mount another significant challenge to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 election. She was firm in supporting Mr. Trump, praised his election and Brexit as precursors to populist success in France and echoed his insistence that the American election was rigged and fraudulent.
  • after the violence, which she said left her “very shocked,” Ms. Le Pen pulled back, condemning “any violent act that aims to disrupt the democratic process.
  • Thierry Baudet, another high-profile Dutch populist, has aligned himself with Mr. Trump and the anti-vaccination movement, and in the past has called the independence of the judiciary and a “phony parliament” into question.
  • Even if populist leaders seem shaken by the events in Washington and nervous about further violence at the inauguration on Jan. 20, there remains considerable anxiety among mainstream politicians about anti-elitist, anti-government political movements in Europe, especially amid the confusion and anxiety produced by the coronavirus pandemic.
  • “Now the most pressing issue is Covid-19, but it’s not at all clear how politics will play out post-pandemic,” he said. “But,” he added, “the fear of the worst helps to avoid the worst.”
  • If economies tank and populists gain power in France or Italy, he said, “God forbid when Europe faces the next crisis.”
  • In Poland, the government has been very pro-Trump and public television did not acknowledge his electoral defeat until Mr. Trump did himself, said Radoslaw Sikorski, a former foreign and defense minister who is now chairman of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States.
  • “With Trump’s defeat, there was an audible sound of disappointment from the populist right in Central Europe,” Mr. Sikorski said. “For them, the world will be a lonelier place.”
  • Similarly, Prime Minister Victor Orban of Hungary, a firm supporter of Mr. Trump, declined to comment on the riot. “We should not interfere in what is happening in America, that is America’s business, we are rooting for them and we trust that they will manage to solve their own problems,”
  • Enrico Letta, a former prime minister of Italy who is now dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, said that Mr. Trump “gave credibility to the disruptive attitudes and approaches of populist leaders in Europe, so having him out is a big problem for them.” Then came the riot, he said, “which I think changed the map completely.”
  • Now, like Ms. Le Pen, Italian populist leaders have felt “obliged to cut their ties to some forms of extremism,”
  • “We even start to think that Brexit has been something positive for the rest of Europe, allowing a relaunch,” Mr. Letta said. “Nobody followed Britain out, and now there’s the collapse of Trump.”
anniina03

Macron escorted by police as protesters try to storm theater - CNN - 0 views

  • Police in Paris were forced to call for backup on Friday as dozens of protesters outside a theater tried to storm the building and reach President Emmanuel Macron.
  • Riot police holding up shields formed a line against the protesters, who shouted "Macron, out," in the latest of more than a month of protests against the embattled President's pension reform plans. The President and his wife, Brigitte Macron, "were secured" for several minutes but were able to return and finish watching "The Fly," French news agency AFP reported, citing sources from the President's office.
  • Protests across France over pension reforms have hit fuel and power supplies, and cause large-scale transport disruption and the shutdown of schools. Macron says the changes are necessary to make the system fairer and more sustainable, but unions say workers will lose out.
yehbru

Joe Biden and the History of 'Hidden Earpiece' Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 0 views

  • rumors began spreading among right-wing influencers and Trump campaign surrogates that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, was being outfitted with a hidden earpiece in order to receive surreptitious help during the debate
  • If Joe Biden isn’t hiding anything,” wrote the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Twitter, “why won’t he consent to a third party checking for an earpiece before tonight’s debate?”
  • “Secret earpiece” rumors are nothing new. In fact, they’ve become something of a fixture during presidential debate cycles, and part of a baseless conspiracy theory that tends to rear its head every four years.
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  • In 2008, rumors again circulated online that a candidate was being fed answers during a debate. Ann Althouse, a law professor and conservative blogger, wrote that close-up TV stills showed that Barack Obama “was wearing an earpiece” during a debate with John McCain.
  • 2000, when Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, accused then-candidate Al Gore of getting answers fed to him through an earpiece during a “Meet the Press” appearance.
  • Four years later, during the 2004 presidential debates, rumors circulated among left-wing bloggers that George W. Bush was getting help from a surreptitiously placed earpiece.
  • In 2016, the rumor appeared again, this time attached to Hillary Clinton, who was accused by right-wing websites of wearing a secret earpiece. (One such story, which appeared on the conspiracy theory website Infowars, was shared by Donald Trump Jr. and other pro-Trump influencers.)
  • Foreign politicians, including Emmanuel Macron of France, have also been baselessly accused of wearing earpieces during debates.
  • But the idea of a hidden helper giving one side an unfair debate advantage has proved seductive to campaign operatives trying to explain away a lopsided debate, or sow doubts about cheating on the other side.
carolinehayter

France's Emmanuel Macron Tests Positive For The Coronavirus : Coronavirus Updates : NPR - 0 views

  • French President Emmanuel Macron tested positive for the coronavirus and will quarantine for a week, his official residence announced Thursday.
  • He will isolate himself for seven days and will continue to work remotely
  • Because of his age, Macron, 42, is not considered to be part of the population most at-risk for severe complications from COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, Macron has taken the threat of the virus seriously and was always seen wearing a mask.
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  • France underwent a strict monthlong lockdown in November and was able to reduce the infection rate from a record high of more than 60,000 confirmed cases in a single day, down to 14,000.
  • News of the president's infection comes just weeks before France is set to receive 1.16 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Javier E

Opinion | Europe May Be Headed for Something Unthinkable - The New York Times - 0 views

  • European elites are right to worry. But the focus on divisions within the bloc obscures a much more disturbing development taking place beneath the surface: a coming together of the center right and the far right, especially on questions around identity, immigration and Islam.
  • With European parliamentary elections next year, this convergence is bringing into clearer view the possibility of something like a far-right European Union. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed unthinkable. Now it’s distinctly plausible.
  • Since then, the convergence between the center right and the far right in Europe has gone further. The lesson that center-right parties drew from the rise of right-wing populism was that they needed to adopt some of its rhetoric and policies. Conversely, some far-right parties have become more moderate, albeit in a selective way. At a national level, parties from the two camps have governed together, both formally, as in Austria and Finland, and informally, as in Sweden.
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  • Yet the most striking illustration of this convergence is the harmonious relationship between the European center right and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, who became prime minister of Italy last year. As soon as she indicated that she would not disrupt the bloc’s economic policy and would be supportive of Ukraine, the European People’s Party was willing to work with her — and its leader, Manfred Weber, even sought to form an alliance with her. The center right, it turns out, doesn’t have a problem with the far right. It just has a problem with those who defy E.U. institutions and positions.
  • Such thinking is behind the hardening of migration policy. But it is also influencing Europe in a deeper way: The union has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization, particularly in its foreign policy. During the past decade, as the bloc has seen itself as surrounded by threats, not least from Russia, there have been endless debates about “strategic autonomy,” “European sovereignty” and a “geopolitical Europe.”
  • figures like President Emmanuel Macron of France have also begun to frame international politics as a clash of civilizations, in which a strong, united Europe must defend itself.
  • Supporters of the bloc tend to see European unity as an end in itself — or to assume that a more powerful European Union, long idealized as a civilizing force in international politics, would automatically benefit the whole world
  • as the union unites around defending a threatened European civilization and rejecting nonwhite immigration, we need to think again about whether it truly is a force for good.
Javier E

Opinion | Biden's course correction on China is smart and important - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • French President Emmanuel Macron might have been too blunt about his worries about Europe becoming a “vassal” of the United States, but his views are in fact widely shared in Europe and beyond. The war in Ukraine has hurt Europe by raising its energy costs while benefiting the United States, which is the world’s top producer of hydrocarbons and sells many at low cost. European companies are shifting investment to the United States, lured in part by the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A German CEO said to me recently, “You cannot expect us to forgo cheap Russian energy as well as the Chinese market. That would be suicide for Europe.”
  • More broadly, if geopolitical tensions win out and economic ties continue to weaken, we will move into a very different world, marked by much greater chaos and disorder at every level. One sign of this can be seen in the impasse over debt restructuring. Dozens of the world’s most vulnerable economies are in or at high risk of debt distress. (Lebanon, for example, has been in default for three years.) Yet the International Monetary Fund cannot bail out these countries because China (which is one of the world’s largest creditors) cannot come to an agreement with Western nations on the terms of relief. The two sides blame each other and hundreds of millions of people suffer.
  • The last time two major world powers tried to manage a relationship of economic interdependence and rising geopolitical rivalry was Britain and Germany in the period from the 1880s to 1914. That experiment ended very badly, with a war that destroyed much of the industrialized world. Both sides should try to ensure we do better this time
Javier E

How Africans Are Changing French - One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa.
  • More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris.
  • Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.
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  • “We’ve tried to rap in pure French, but nobody was listening to us,” said Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, a 24-year-old Ivorian hip-hop artist listening to Marla on the rooftop. “So we create words from our own realities, and then they spread.”
  • The youth population in Africa is surging while the rest of the world grays. Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries.
  • Nearly half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or protectorates, and most of them use French as their official language.
  • President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a 2019 speech: “France must take pride in being essentially one country among others that learns, speaks, writes in French.”
Javier E

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive.
  • Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.
  • public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends
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  • Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.
  • Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top.
  • America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top.
  • The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction
  • Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.
  • The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves.
Javier E

Why the Rich Are So Much Richer by James Surowiecki | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.
  • “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”
  • Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.
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  • Stiglitz has made the case that the rise in inequality in the US, far from being the natural outcome of market forces, has been profoundly shaped by “our policies and our politics,” with disastrous effects on society and the economy as a whole. In a recent report for the Roosevelt Institute called Rewriting the Rules, Stiglitz has laid out a detailed list of reforms that he argues will make it possible to create “an economy that works for everyone.”
  • his entire career in academia has been devoted to showing how markets cannot always be counted on to produce ideal results. In a series of enormously important papers, for which he would eventually win the Nobel Prize, Stiglitz showed how imperfections and asymmetries of information regularly lead markets to results that do not maximize welfare.
  • He also argued that this meant, at least in theory, that well-placed government interventions could help correct these market failures
  • in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) he offered up a stinging critique of the way the US has tried to manage globalization, a critique that made him a cult hero in much of the developing world
  • Stiglitz has been one of the fiercest critics of the way the Eurozone has handled the Greek debt crisis, arguing that the so-called troika’s ideological commitment to austerity and its opposition to serious debt relief have deepened Greece’s economic woes and raised the prospect that that country could face “depression without end.”
  • For Stiglitz, the fight over Greece’s future isn’t just about the right policy. It’s also about “ideology and power.
  • there’s a good case to be made that the sheer amount of rent-seeking in the US economy has expanded over the years. The number of patents is vastly greater than it once was. Copyright terms have gotten longer. Occupational licensing rules (which protect professionals from competition) are far more common. Tepid antitrust enforcement has led to reduced competition in many industries
  • The Great Divide is somewhat fragmented and repetitive, but it has a clear thesis, namely that inequality in the US is not an unfortunate by-product of a well-functioning economy. Instead, the enormous riches at the top of the income ladder are largely the result of the ability of the one percent to manipulate markets and the political process to their own benefit.
  • Inequality obviously has no single definition. As Stiglitz writes:There are so many different parts to America’s inequality: the extremes of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, the increase of poverty at the bottom. Each has its own causes, and needs its own remedies.
  • his preoccupation here is primarily with why the rich today are so much richer than they used to be.
  • the main reason people at the top are so much richer these days than they once were (and so much richer than everyone else) is not that they own so much more capital: it’s that they get paid much more for their work than they once did, while everyone else gets paid about the same, or less
  • while incomes at the top have risen in countries around the world, nowhere have they risen faster than in the US.
  • One oft-heard justification of this phenomenon is that the rich get paid so much more because they are creating so much more value than they once did
  • as companies have gotten bigger, the potential value that CEOs can add has increased as well, driving their pay higher.
  • Stiglitz will have none of this. He sees the boom in the incomes of the one percent as largely the result of what economists call “rent-seeking.”
  • from the perspective of the economy as a whole, rent-seeking is a waste of time and energy. As Stiglitz puts it, the economy suffers when “more efforts go into ‘rent seeking’—getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie—than into enlarging the size of the pie.”
  • The work of Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez has been instrumental in documenting the rise of income inequality, not just in the US but around the world. Major economic institutions, like the IMF and the OECD, have published studies arguing that inequality, far from enhancing economic growth, actually damages it. And it’s now easy to find discussions of the subject in academic journals.
  • . After all, while pretax inequality is a problem in its own right, what’s most destructive is soaring posttax inequality. And it’s posttax inequality that most distinguishes the US from other developed countries
  • All this rent-seeking, Stiglitz argues, leaves certain industries, like finance and pharmaceuticals, and certain companies within those industries, with an outsized share of the rewards
  • within those companies, the rewards tend to be concentrated as well, thanks to what Stiglitz calls “abuses of corporate governance that lead CEOs to take a disproportionate share of corporate profits” (another form of rent-seeking)
  • This isn’t just bad in some abstract sense, Stiglitz suggests. It also hurts society and the economy
  • It alienates people from the system. And it makes the rich, who are obviously politically influential, less likely to support government investment in public goods (like education and infrastructure) because those goods have little impact on their lives.
  • More interestingly (and more contentiously), Stiglitz argues that inequality does serious damage to economic growth: the more unequal a country becomes, the slower it’s likely to grow. He argues that inequality hurts demand, because rich people consume less of their incomes. It leads to excessive debt, because people feel the need to borrow to make up for their stagnant incomes and keep up with the Joneses. And it promotes financial instability, as central banks try to make up for stagnant incomes by inflating bubbles, which eventually burst
  • exactly why inequality is bad for growth turns out to be hard to pin down—different studies often point to different culprits. And when you look at cross-country comparisons, it turns out to be difficult to prove that there’s a direct connection between inequality and the particular negative factors that Stiglitz cites
  • This doesn’t mean that, as conservative economists once insisted, inequality is good for economic growth. In fact, it’s clear that US-style inequality does not help economies grow faster, and that moving toward more equality will not do any damage
  • Similarly, Stiglitz’s relentless focus on rent-seeking as an explanation of just why the rich have gotten so much richer makes a messy, complicated problem simpler than it is
  • When we talk about the one percent, we’re talking about two groups of people above all: corporate executives and what are called “financial professionals” (these include people who work for banks and the like, but also money managers, financial advisers, and so on)
  • The emblematic figures here are corporate CEOs, whose pay rose 876 percent between 1978 and 2012, and hedge fund managers, some of whom now routinely earn billions of dollars a year
  • Shareholders, meanwhile, had fewer rights and were less active. Since then, we’ve seen a host of reforms that have given shareholders more power and made boards more diverse and independent. If CEO compensation were primarily the result of bad corporate governance, these changes should have had at least some effect. They haven’t. In fact, CEO pay has continued to rise at a brisk rate
  • So what’s really going on? Something much simpler: asset managers are just managing much more money than they used to, because there’s much more capital in the markets than there once was
  • that means that an asset manager today can get paid far better than an asset manager was twenty years ago, even without doing a better job.
  • there’s no convincing evidence that CEOs are any better, in relative terms, than they once were, and plenty of evidence that they are paid more than they need to be, in view of their performance. Similarly, asset managers haven’t gotten better at beating the market.
  • More important, probably, has been the rise of ideological assumptions about the indispensability of CEOs, and changes in social norms that made it seem like executives should take whatever they could get.
  • It actually has important consequences for thinking about how we can best deal with inequality. Strategies for reducing inequality can be generally put into two categories: those that try to improve the pretax distribution of income (this is sometimes called, clunkily, predistribution) and those that use taxes and transfers to change the post-tax distribution of income
  • he has high hopes that better rules, designed to curb rent-seeking, will have a meaningful impact on the pretax distribution of income. Among other things, he wants much tighter regulation of the financial sector
  • t it would be surprising if these rules did all that much to shrink the income of much of the one percent, precisely because improvements in corporate governance and asset managers’ transparency are likely to have a limited effect on CEO salaries and money managers’ compensation.
  • Most importantly, the financial industry is now a much bigger part of the US economy than it was in the 1970s, and for Stiglitz, finance profits are, in large part, the result of what he calls “predatory rent-seeking activities,” including the exploitation of uninformed borrowers and investors, the gaming of regulatory schemes, and the taking of risks for which financial institutions don’t bear the full cost (because the government will bail them out if things go wrong).
  • The redistributive policies Stiglitz advocates look pretty much like what you’d expect. On the tax front, he wants to raise taxes on the highest earners and on capital gains, institute a carbon tax and a financial transactions tax, and cut corporate subsidies
  • It’s also about investing. As he puts it, “If we spent more on education, health, and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” So he wants more investment in schools, infrastructure, and basic research.
  • The core insight of Stiglitz’s research has been that, left on their own, markets are not perfect, and that smart policy can nudge them in better directions.
  • Of course, the political challenge in doing any of this (let alone all of it) is immense, in part because inequality makes it harder to fix inequality. And even for progressives, the very familiarity of the tax-and-transfer agenda may make it seem less appealing.
  • the policies that Stiglitz is calling for are, in their essence, not much different from the policies that shaped the US in the postwar era: high marginal tax rates on the rich and meaningful investment in public infrastructure, education, and technology. Yet there’s a reason people have never stopped pushing for those policies: they worked
Javier E

Establishment Populism Rising - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.
  • Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.
  • Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.
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  • If we had the same income distribution in the United States that we did in 1979, the top 1 percent would have $1 trillion less today [in annual income], and the bottom 80 percent would have $1 trillion more. That works out to about $700,000 [a year for] for a family in the top 1 percent, and works out to about $11,000 a year for a family in the bottom 80 percent.
  • he is “all for” more schooling and job training, but as an answer to the problems of the job marketplace, “it is fundamentally an evasion.”
  • “The core problem,” according to Summers, is thatthere aren’t enough jobs, and if you help some people, you can help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. And unless you’re doing things that are affecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs, and there are only so many of them.
  • To counter the weak employment market, Summers called for major growth in government expenditures to fill needs that the private sector is not addressing:In our society, whether it is taking care of the young or taking care of the old, or repairing a lot that needs to be repaired, there is a huge amount of very valuable work that needs to be done. It’s much less clear, to use a modern phrase, that there’s a viable business model for getting it done. And I guess the reason why I think there is going to need to be a lot of reflection on the role of government going forward is that, if I’m right, that there’s vitally important work to be done for which there is no standard capital business model that will get it done. That suggests important roles for public policy.
  • In other words, any attempt to correct the contemporary pattern in income distribution would require large and controversial changes in tax policy, regulation of the workplace, and intervention in the economy to expand employment and to raise wages.
  • The lion’s share of the income of the top 1 percent is concentrated in the top 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent. The average income of the top 1 percent in 2013, according to data provided by Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economist, was $1.2 million, for the top 0.1 percent, $5.3 million, and for the top 0.01 percent, $24.9 million.
  • the report calls for tax and regulatory policies to encourage employee ownership, the strengthening of collective bargaining rights, regulations requiring corporations to provide fringe benefits to employees working for subcontractors, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, sharper overtime pay enforcement, and a huge increase in infrastructure appropriations – for roads, bridges, ports, schools – to spur job creation and tighten the labor market.
  • Summers also calls for significant increases in the progressivity of the United States tax system.
  • He advocates aggressive steps to eliminate “rents” — profits that result from monopoly or other forms of government protection from competition. Summers favors attacking rents in the form of “exclusionary zoning practices” that bid up the price of housing, “excessively long copyright” protections, and financial regulations “providing implicit subsidies to a fortunate minority.”
  • Signaling that he now finds himself on common ground with stalwarts of the Democratic left like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Stiglitz, Summers adds, “Government needs to try to make sure everyone can get access to financial markets on an equal basis.”
  • Summers supports looking past income inequality to the distribution of wealth. During our conversation, he pointed out that “a large fraction of capital gains escapes taxation entirely” through “the stepped up basis at death.”
  • The idea that an economy could suffer from a persistent shortage of demand is an enormous switch for Summers or anyone who had been adhering to the economic orthodoxy in the three decades prior to the crisisin 2008. Baker goes on to argue that Summers “now recognizes that the financial system needs serious regulation.”
  • Many of the policies outlined by Summers — especially on trade, taxation, financial regulation and worker empowerment — are the very policies that divide the Wall-Street-corporate wing from the working-to-middle-class wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way, these policies divide the money wing from the voting wing.
  • Summers has forced out in the open a set of choices that Hillary Clinton has so far avoided, choices that even if she attempts to elide them will amount to a signal of where her loyalties lie.
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