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woodlu

A presidential pardon catches South Korea by surprise | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...atches-south-korea-by-surprise

politics culture policy

shared by woodlu on 19 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Ever since Park Geun-hye, a former president, was sent to prison for corruption and abuse of power in 2017 her supporters had been staging noisy protests in the middle of South Korea’s capital, calling for her release.
  • Even after mass rallies were banned in a bid to stem the spread of covid-19, lone protesters with megaphones or speakers mounted on vans continued to make the rounds of the square.
  • December 24th Moon Jae-in, Ms Park’s successor as president, announced he would pardon her and set her free on New Year’s Eve.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The protests, known as the candlelight movement, led to her being impeached as well as indicted for such offences as extorting bribes from conglomerates and pressing a university into admitting a close friend’s daughter.
  • he promised to honour the spirit of the movement and break with the old ways of the political establishment, including abandoning the custom of pardoning former presidents who had been convicted of corruption.
  • Ms Park’s deteriorating health and the approaching end of his term seem to have prompted Mr Moon to change his mind
  • His office said he hoped the decision would heal political divisions and help usher in an era of national unity, and asked those who opposed the pardon for their understanding, given Ms Park’s ailments.
  • Left-wing newspaper editorials and spokes people for organisations that led the protests against Ms Park accused him of betraying the candlelight movement.
  • His party, which was apparently not privy to the decision before it was announced, issued a terse statement noting that pardons were the president’s prerogative.
  • The conservative opposition welcomed the pardon. But it complained that Mr Moon had also released Lee Seok-ki, a pro-North Korean firebrand who was serving time for treason, and restored the civic rights of Han Myeong-sook, a former left-wing prime minister who served a two-year sentence for bribery from 2015 to 2017.
  • the political benefits for the outgoing president and his camp may well end up outweighing the costs of pardoning Ms Park.
  • Reports of the disgraced former president’s ill health are credible; she is likely to remain in hospital for several weeks before being sent home.
  • Had she died a prisoner on Mr Moon’s watch just a few weeks before the presidential election, the resulting outrage might well have tipped the scales against his party’s candidate.
  • South Korean presidents often find themselves being investigated for corruption after leaving office.
  • Lee Myung-bak, Ms Park’s predecessor, is in prison serving a long sentence for graft. Roh Moo-hyun, who preceded him, committed suicide shortly after leaving office, during a corruption probe into close aides and family members.
woodlu

Why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ccepted-ukrainian-independence

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
  • That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
  • if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
  • The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
  • For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith.
  • Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European.
  • Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
  • The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
  • The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
  • The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
  • disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
  • “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
  • When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
  • Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.
  • His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a transition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
  • Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problem with a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’s democratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself, took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that which puts Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
  • But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,
  • “A strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding, organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putin restored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to central planning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state was back. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It did not have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the “geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the Soviet Union.
  • The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
  • And the West, spooked by the increased belligerence Russia had shown in Georgia, was taking a keen interest in Ukraine. The EU offered the country an association agreement which would allow Ukrainians to enjoy the benefits of a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement and free travel across Europe.
  • Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.
  • Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote. Viktor Yushchenko, pro-Western and Ukrainian-speaking, beat Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt thug from Donbas (the easternmost part of the country and, save Crimea, the most ethnically Russian) who had claimed victory the first time round. The “Orange revolution”, as the protest came to be known, was a serious setback for Mr Putin—all the more so when a similar uprising in Georgia, the Rose revolution, put another pro-Western state on his borders.
  • Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.
  • The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.
  • A year earlier a group of economists had told Mr Putin that a customs union with Ukraine would be a smart move. What was more, such a deal would preclude Ukraine’s association with the EU. Pursuing it was thus a way for Mr Putin to achieve three things at once: push back against the West; give Russia a victory that would prove its importance; and help the economy.
  • Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.
  • This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
  • According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured
  • the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.
  • tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
  • All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to protect his own rule; the history is window-dressing. At the same time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be something other than a democracy it has to at least be able to think of itself as an empire. And in Russia, empire requires Ukraine—now more deeply opposed to union with Russia than ever before.
  • “The Russian state, with its severe and inflexible interior, survived exclusively because of its tireless expansion beyond its borders. It has long lost the knowledge [of]—how to survive otherwise.”
  • The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.
  • What he did not say was that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has severed the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
  • Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.
  • Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings. But the idea of something better had taken hold.
  • But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
  • That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.
  • Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within. They cannot do that in a forest retreat, or with a few phone calls. But only through such change will they become truly independent of the Soviet Union.
Javier E

Trump, Taxes and Citizenship - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-taxes-and-citizenship.html

citizenship taxes trump individualism community culture politics

shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • You can be a taxpayer or you can be a citizen. If you’re a taxpayer your role in the country is defined by your economic and legal status. Your primary identity is individual. You’re perfectly within your rights to do everything you legally can to look after your self-interest.
  • Within this logic, it’s perfectly fine for Donald Trump to have potentially paid no income taxes, even over a long period of time
  • As Trump and his advisers have argued, it is normal practice in our society to pay as little in taxes as possible.
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  • The problem with the taxpayer mentality is that you end up serving your individual interest short term but soiling the nest you need to be happy in over the long term.
  • A healthy nation isn’t just an atomized mass of individual economic and legal units. A nation is a web of giving and getting. You give to your job, and your employer gives to you. You give to your neighborhood, and your neighborhood gives to you. You give to your government, and your government gives to you.
  • If you orient everything around individual self-interest, you end up ripping the web of giving and receiving. Neighbors can’t trust neighbors. Individuals can’t trust their institutions, and they certainly can’t trust their government. Everything that is not explicitly prohibited is permissible. Everybody winds up suspicious and defensive and competitive.
  • this is exactly the atomized mentality that is corroding America. Years ago, David Foster Wallace put it gently: “It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries — we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie.”
  • The older citizenship mentality is a different mentality.
  • It starts with the warm glow of love of country.
  • It continues with a sense of sweet gratitude that the founders of the country, for all their flaws, were able to craft a structure of government that is suppler and more lasting than anything we seem to be able to craft today.
  • The citizen enjoys a sweet reverence for all the gifts that have been handed down over time, and a generous piety about country that is the opposite of arrogance.
  • Out of this sweet parfait of emotions comes a sense of a common beauty that transcends individual beauty. There’s a sense of how a lovely society is supposed to be. This means that the economic desire to save money on taxes competes with a larger desire to be part of a lovely world.
  • In a lovely society everybody practices a kind of social hygiene. There are some things that are legal but distasteful and corrupt. In a lovely society people shun these corrupt and corrupting things.
  • In a lovely society everyone feels privilege, but the rich feel a special privilege. They know that they have already been given more than they deserve, and that it is actually not going to hurt all that much to try to be worthy of what they’ve received.
  • You can say that a billionaire paying no taxes is fine and legal. But you have to adopt an overall mentality that shuts down a piece of your heart, and most of your moral sentiments.
  • That mentality is entirely divorced from the mentality of commonality and citizenship. That mentality has side effects. They may lead toward riches, but they lead away from happiness.
Javier E

A final plea: The case against Trump's dangerous authoritarianism - in one chart - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-authoritarianism-in-one-chart

trump authoritarian argument politics

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • At the heart of Trump’s case for the presidency lies two components. The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.
  • , the truly pernicious component of Trump’s argument is that our institutions and our democracy have themselves grown so hopelessly corrupted and compromised that they are no longer even capable of arresting and turning around that decline via conventional democratic processes.
  • The only outcome that can change this state of affairs is electing him president. Any other result would only confirm that our system has been so corrupted that it is fundamentally no longer capable of producing legitimate political outcomes.
Javier E

Trump's presser was remarkable. It means we're heading into truly uncharted territory. ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...into-truly-uncharted-territory

trump ethics corruption transparency gop press

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Trump tore into CNN as “fake news” for publishing a careful if provocative and envelope-pushing story on unverified claims that Russian intelligence gathered compromising information on him. Trump ferociously attacked Buzzfeed for publishing a dossier of those claims, pointedly noting that Buzzfeed would “suffer the consequences.”
  • it all starts to smack of an effort to stamp out the very possibility of shared agreement on the legitimate institutional role of the news media or even on reality itself. It’s easy to imagine that, if and when a news organization uncovers potential conflicts, Trump will simply deny the reality of what’s been uncovered (“fake news”) and begin threatening “consequences” towards that organization.
  • One thing that remains clear: Congressional Republicans are not going to step up and try to mitigate this situation. Republicans are not going to take any of the steps they could be taking to try to prod Trump into showing more transparency about his holdings, which would make conflicts and corruption less likely.
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  • It’s hard to see that changing, unless, perhaps, intensified media scrutiny shakes loose enough scandalous stories to make the lack of congressional action untenable.
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
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  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
Javier E

The Trump-Berlusconi Syndrome - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-berlusconi-syndrome.html

demagogue italy history politics culture corruption zeitgeist

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Within a decade or so, in 1994, Berlusconi was prime minister, at the head of a right-of-center political party he’d concocted the previous year, thrust to power on the basis that he would break with Italy’s dysfunctional politics and that, as a self-made billionaire, he knew how to fix problems. He used television unsparingly to buttress his meteoric rise through the wreckage of Italy’s post-1945 political order, which had recently collapsed with the end of the Cold War.
  • Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels. It’s not just the real-estate-to-television path. It’s not just their shared admiration for Vladimir Putin. It’s not just the playboy thing, and obsession with their virility, and smattering of bigotry, and contempt for policy wonks, and reliance on a tell-it-like-it-is tone. It’s not their wealth, nor the media savvy that taught them that nobody ever lost by betting on human stupidity.
  • No, it’s something in the zeitgeist. America is ripe for Trump just as Italy was ripe for Berlusconi. Trump, too, is cutting through a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. He is emerging after two lost wars, as American power declines and others strut the global stage, against a backdrop of partisan political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money. To Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, Trump opposes a Doctrine of Resurgence. To reason, he counters with rage
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In the same way, Berlusconi emerged as Italy ceased to be a Cold War pivot and the Christian-Democrat-dominated postwar political alignments imploded. Everything was in flux as the “mani pulite” (clean hands) investigation started by Milan magistrates in 1992 exposed what everyone knew: that graft and corruption were cornerstones of Italian politics. No matter that Berlusconi was also a target of the investigation: He was new, he talked the talk, he would conjure something!
  • the deregulation of broadcast media in the United States and Italy — in contrast to Britain or France or Germany where state media companies still “act as a kind of referee for civil discourse” and “commonly accepted facts” — has fostered the fact-lite free-for-all of “alternate realities” conducive to Trumpism.
  • What Berlusconi teaches is that Trump could go all the way in a nation thirsting for a new politics. The man known as “The Knight” ended up convicted of tax fraud and paying for sex with an underage prostitute — but it took 17 years of intermittent scandal and incompetence, from 1994 to 2011, for Italy to rub the stardust from its eyes.
  • Take note, America, before the die is cast.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513872

autocracy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.
  • What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.
  • the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?
  • Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
  • As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.
  • Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.
  • What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.
  • A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.
  • Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.
  • Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.
  • Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.
  • Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.
  • Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
  • In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.
  • Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.
  • His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
  • By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters
  • The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.
  • The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.
  • Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants. In the abstract, there’s much to recommend this idea. If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive. The intelligence agencies in particular would likely find themselves exposed to retribution from a president enraged at them for reporting on Russia’s aid to his election campaign.
  • The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.
  • The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. The relevant statute applied only to “official acts.” The Court defined such acts very strictly, and held that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event—without more—does not fit that definition of an ‘official act.’ ”
  • Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.
  • Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption.
  • You would never know from Trump’s words that the average number of felonious killings of police during the Obama administration’s tenure was almost one-third lower than it was in the early 1990s, a decline that tracked with the general fall in violent crime that has so blessed American society. There had been a rise in killings of police in 2014 and 2015 from the all-time low in 2013—but only back to the 2012 level. Not every year will be the best on record.
  • A mistaken belief that crime is spiraling out of control—that terrorists roam at large in America and that police are regularly gunned down—represents a considerable political asset for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent of Trump voters believed that crime had worsened during the Obama years.
  • From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about
  • Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him
  • Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.
  • If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.
  • In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in South Africa, delivered an ominous warning to the American media about what to expect. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’ ” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”
  • Mostly, however, modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power.
  • In true police states, surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.
  • A would-be kleptocrat is actually better served by spreading cynicism than by deceiving followers with false beliefs: Believers can be disillusioned; people who expect to hear only lies can hardly complain when a lie is exposed.
  • The inculcation of cynicism breaks down the distinction between those forms of media that try their imperfect best to report the truth, and those that purvey falsehoods for reasons of profit or ideology. The New York Times becomes the equivalent of Russia’s RT; The Washington Post of Breitbart; NPR of Infowars.
  • Trump had not a smidgen of evidence beyond his own bruised feelings and internet flotsam from flagrantly unreliable sources. Yet once the president-elect lent his prestige to the crazy claim, it became fact for many people. A survey by YouGov found that by December 1, 43 percent of Republicans accepted the claim that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016.
  • A clear untruth had suddenly become a contested possibility. When CNN’s Jeff Zeleny correctly reported on November 28 that Trump’s tweet was baseless, Fox’s Sean Hannity accused Zeleny of media bias—and then proceeded to urge the incoming Trump administration to take a new tack with the White House press corps, and to punish reporters like Zeleny.
  • the whipping-up of potentially violent Twitter mobs against media critics is already a standard method of Trump’s governance.
  • I’ve talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation.
  • he and his team are serving notice that a new era in government-media relations is coming, an era in which all criticism is by definition oppositional—and all critics are to be treated as enemies.
  • “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
  • lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.
  • In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead.
  • “Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.”
  • If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened.
  • If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
  • If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger cultur
  • A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.
  • The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
  • He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
  • Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”
  • By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world
  • The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do?
B Mannke

In Scandal, Turkey's Leaders May Be Losing Their Tight Grip on News Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-tight-grip-on-news-media.html

shared by B Mannke on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Mr. Erdogan’s lawyers have also filed suit against a newspaper columnist, once a reliable supporter of the prime minister, for his critical Twitter messages.
  • reports on the discovery of $4.5 million in cash stuffed in shoe boxes at the home of a director of a state bank.
  • “We would never have expected anything like this,” said Numar Baki, a waiter at an Istanbul cafe, referring to the public nature of the scandal.
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  • slow erosion of what had been Mr. Erdogan’s iron grip on all levels of power within Turkish society.
  • More journalists are in jail in Turkey than anywhere else in the world, including China and Iran.
  • hen Nazli Ilicak, a longtime journalist here, lost her job recently at the pro-government newspaper Sabah after emerging as a strong voice against the government’s handling of the corruption inquiry, she said she would simply keep up her criticism on Twitter and on independent websites.
  • Followers of the Muslim spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, have over the years secured top positions in the judiciary and the police and are said to be leading the corruption investigation.
  • “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism” and “This is just the beginning. The struggle continues” — slogans like those raised during the antigovernment protests last May and June.
  • I think I should o
  • “I think I should only tweet about penguins from now on,” Mr. Zeynalov wrote on Twitter after the case was filed, referring to some television channels’ practice of broadcasting a documentary about penguins last spring rather than reporting on the antigovernment protests.
  • “My phone is being tapped,” he said, “but I don’t care.”
  • “Erdogan wants to show that this is a conspiracy, that the United States and Israel are behind it,” he said. “Under no circumstances does he want to talk about corruption.
Javier E

Turkish Leader Disowns Trials That Helped Him Tame Military - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-helped-him-tame-military.html

turkey justice system politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In an assertion reminiscent of the many denials over the years by the officers and their lawyers, Mr. Erdogan’s office released a statement saying that the recordings released on Monday were “a product of an immoral montage that is completely false.”
  • Many of the prosecutors and investigators in both cases — the corruption inquiry and the old military trials — are followers of Fethullah Gulen,
  • Recently, under pressure from the government, Turkish lawmakers voted to abolish the special courts in which the officers were tried, a significant step toward new trials. Variations of these courts, set up under antiterrorism laws, have been in place in Turkey since the 1970s. They operate under special rules that allow secret witnesses and wiretaps that would not be admissible in regular courts.
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  • More remarkably, one of the judges involved in the trials, Koksal Sengun, recently said that he had never read all the indictments, and that if he had he would never have accepted them as legitimate. “I would have rejected the indictment for many reasons now,” he said in an interview with the Turkish news website T24.
  • top adviser to Mr. Erdogan, Yalcin Akdogan, who is considered the prime minister’s mouthpiece, has called those military cases a “plot against their own country’s national army,” which is now being replicated in the corruption investigation against the government. A government watchdog recently issued a report that determined that some of the evidence against the military was manipulated.
  • That makes them vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, legal analysts say. “The courts are specially designed for the government to use the judicial forces against opponents,” said Metin Feyzioglu, the head of Turkey’s bar association. “They managed to get the military out of politics,” but “that was not the right way to do it.”
  • These cases, Ergenekon and Sledgehammer, are the two pillars of Erdogan’s now autocratic system,” said Selim Yavuz, a lawyer who represents his father, a former army general who was convicted and imprisoned in Sledgehammer. “People saw if he could do this to the army, he could do it to anyone. Now he is seen as the almighty.”
  • In 2005, years before the trials, a man affiliated with the Gulen movement approached Eric S. Edelman, then the American ambassador, at a party in Istanbul and handed him an envelope containing a handwritten document that supposedly laid out a plan for an imminent coup. But as Mr. Edelman recounted, he gave the documents to his colleagues and they were determined to be forgeries.
  • is putting new light on what has been hailed, here and abroad, as Mr. Erdogan’s most important achievement: securing civilian control over the military. The way it was done, however, is now increasingly viewed as an act of revenge by Turkey’s Islamists against their former oppressors in the military
  • n now moving to discredit some of the evidence, Mr. Erdogan’s government is walking a tightrope, clinging to its record of democratizing the country and removing the military from politics, while putting distance between itself and the tactics employed to do so.
  • When the corruption investigation went public, Gareth Jenkins, a longtime writer and analyst in Turkey, said he noticed several similarities in tactics to the investigation of the military, and listed them: the same prosecutors, the use of simultaneous dawn raids on the homes and offices of suspects, an immediate defamation campaign in the Gulen-affiliated news media, and the leaks of wiretapped conversations.
  • They substantially weakened the military politically and empowered a mafia within the state,” Mr. Rodrik said. “That’s their record.”
Javier E

On Defensive, JPMorgan Hired China's Elite - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dealbook.nytimes.com/...ve-jpmorgan-hired-chinas-elite

cronyism corruption business Wall Street China

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • An era of financial deregulation in Washington coincided with a roaring economy in China, enabling questionable hiring practices to escape government scrutiny. The hiring became so widespread over the last two decades that banks competed over the most politically connected recent college graduates, known in China as princelings.
  • The S.E.C. and the Brooklyn prosecutors have bolstered enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which effectively bans United States corporations from giving “anything of value” to foreign officials to gain “any improper advantage” in retaining business. JPMorgan would have violated the 1977 law if it had acted with “corrupt” intent.
  • The investment banking unit experimented with a program that would have offered well-connected hires a one-year contract worth $70,000 to $100,000. The program, internal documents said, might offer “directly attributable linkage to business opportunity.”
Javier E

A gong for anti-corruption campaigners: A witness to change | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ng-anti-corruption-campaigners

corporations anonymity secrecy ownership

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As Global Witness has tirelessly pointed out, much of the corruption is made possible (or at least easier) by anonymous shell companies, which are open to abuse by drug lords, sanctions-busters, kleptocrats and their cronies. Ms Gooch and her colleagues liken shells to getaway cars—for money launderers rather than bank robbers.
  • the source of the problem is often rich countries. Corporate secrecy is particularly strong in America. Registration agents aren’t even required to collect and hold ownership information in states like Delaware and Nevada. (Just today your reporter received an email containing evidence that a Delaware shell company implicated in large-scale cocaine trafficking last year is still registered in the state and in good standing.)
Javier E

Can Greeks Become Germans? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20friedman.html

greece values culture economy interdependence

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • “When the world is bound together this tightly,” argued Seidman, “everyone’s values and behavior matter more than ever, because they impact so many more people than ever. ...We’ve gone from connected to interconnected to ethically interdependent.”
  • As it becomes harder to shield yourself from the other guy’s irresponsible behavior, added Seidman, both he and you had better behave more responsibly — or you both will suffer the consequences, whether you did anything wrong or not.
  • Natural resources create corruption, as groups compete for who controls the tap. That is exactly what happened in Greece when it got access to huge Euro-loans and subsidies. The natural entrepreneurship of Greeks was channeled in the wrong direction — in a competition for government funds and contracts.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • too much “Euro-oil” from the European Union went back to financing a corrupt, patrimonial system whereby politicians dispensed government jobs and projects to localities in retur
  • n for votes. This reinforced a huge welfare state,
  • for v
  • the political system was focused on growing public administration — not on [fostering] entrepreneurship, competition or industrial strategy or competitive advantages. We created a state with big inefficiencies, corruption and a very large bureaucracy. We were the last Soviet country in Europe.”
Hannah Caspar-Johnson

Xi's Selective Punishment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-xis-selective-punishment.html

china

shared by Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • A Chinese government official I know was put under
  • shuanggui, the secretive system of internal Communist Party investigation in which victims are detained, questioned without counsel and sometimes tortured
  • the most probable reason for his travails with the authorities was that his political patron also got in trouble.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • A huge number of top officials have been either arrested or placed under investigation.
  • Whenever a top official falls, people aren’t concerned about what he has done, but with those he might bring down with him.
  • In the past two years, President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption drive has burnished his reputation with the Chinese media
  • the anticorruption push is more of a Stalinist purge than a genuine attempt to clean up the government
  • Most telling of all, the purge has mainly targeted specific party factions, while those groups that support and pledge loyalty to Mr. Xi appear untouched.
  • Mr. Xi’s most important supporters are the so-called second generation reds — descendants of senior Communist Party founders. (Mr. Xi himself is one of them.)
  • This privileged tribe enjoys almost unimaginable power
  • High officials in China exercise unchecked power (until they don’t)
  • Recently the question was raised in a post on the Internet: Why have no “big tigers” been found in Fujian and Zhejiang? The message was almost immediately deleted.
  • This professor seemed to think that Mr. Xi might use his authority to guide China toward democracy. But this notion is wishful thinking. For a dictator, power is not a means to an end, power is the end.
  • Besides, anticorruption campaigns don’t guarantee real justice.
  • When the government media runs reports about cases that are still under investigation and gloats about how severely corrupt officials are being punished, it seems improbable that the accused will get a proper defense
  • He is just another dictator
  • They may well have committed crimes, but they have rights too, even if they have denied them to others.
  • Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15
     
    An opinion article that equates Chinese President Xi's recent attack on corruption in the government (directly almost completely towards politicians not from his party) to a dictatorial action such as that of Stalin.  
Javier E

Big Money Wins Again in a Romp - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oney-wins-again-in-a-romp.html

rich campaign donations corruption politics free speech financing

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Two days after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union.
  • Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.
  • But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.
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  • “So money equals speech?” I asked. No, he said. “But nobody speaks very effectively without money. If you limit how much you spend on speech, you are also limiting speech.”
  • Big contributors want something for their money. At its most benign, they want access, the ability to have their side heard whenever there is the possibility that legislation might affect their industry. Far less benignly, they want more — they want to know that their bidding will be done.
  • It can be subtle, this influence. “Maybe it’s the amendment that does not get introduced in committee because the congressman knows that it is not in sync with the desires of his money patrons,”
  • it can be not so subtle, too. “On any given Wednesday night in Washington,” says Nick Penniman, the executive director of Issue One, which is dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics, “you’ll have a member of, say, the finance committee, standing in the board room of a lobbyist’s office, surrounded by bank lobbyists. At some point, someone will hand a staffer an envelope with the checks in it, and the congressman will have raised $100,000 in 45 minutes. And they know exactly who was responsible for putting it together, and whose phone calls therefore need to be returned.”
  • Penniman makes a distinction between “ideological givers” — donors like the Koch brothers, motivated by the chance to get like-minded people elected — and “transactional givers,” those who donate because they expect something concrete in return. “These are folks who give just as generously to both sides of the aisle.”
  • “Big money wins regardless of which party wins the election.”
  • There are two other reasons big money is corrosive to our politics.
  • One is that the need to raise money has become close to all-consuming.
  • “It’s a never-ending hustle. You get elected to this august body to fix problems, and for the privilege, you find yourself on the phone in a cubicle, dialing for dollars.”
  • the constant need to raise money means that “you don’t have the time for the kind of personal relationships that so many of us built up over time.” When people don’t know each other, it is a lot easier to think the worst of them. Polarization is the result.
  • Finally, there is the effect of big money on the rest of us. The public, Sarbanes believes, knows full well the insidious influence of money in politics. “The rational voter will say to himself, why should I bother voting if the person I’m voting for is a captive of special interests,
  • how does Ira Glasser react to these tales of corruption? He doesn’t deny them. “Of course there is corruption,” he says. “Of course there is undue influence of money.” But he doesn’t believe that those problems are as great as they are made out to be, or that they trump his First Amendment concerns. “The question is whether the remedy does more harm than good and violates the constitution,”
Javier E

History News Network | What Makes People Do What They Do? - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...158826

history US foreign policy bias failure origins

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • what about us "experts?" What have we learned? Are there really any significant new insights? Do we know much more today than we did a generation ago?
  • France uplifted the downtrodden people of Algeria and Indo-China
  • My generation was deeply influenced half a century ago by economists and mathematicians. We scholars all wanted to be - and particularly to show -- that we had mastered all the techniques of our professions as social scientists, that we could build models, make graphs, juxtapose trends, etc. After all, we were writing our learned books and essays for our academic colleagues and our paymasters, not for those we were describing. So, at least those who were paid by our government and its proxy think tanks often became, as the English say, "too clever by half." They and their counterparts in universities, after all, had to prove their "smarts" in order to get funded, promoted or kept on
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • The basic question we face is, I suggest, what makes people do what they do?
  • I will offer a few suggestions in the following six categories. There may well be others, but these are mine. Top of the list, I think, is ignorance. Closely following ignorance is the issue of memory. Next, I suggest is suspicion. Somewhere down the line is escapism. "Why didn't we..." and "why do you remind us...." Then, there is the development process and its downside, corruption. Hard to "objectify" and impossible to "quantify," is my fifth category, the sense of identify. Finally, I reflect on the sense of dignity and its and itsviolation in shameandthe terrible burden of embarrassment.
  • Every survey on what Americans know about our world shows, objectively speaking, what can only be described as ignorance.  Few Americans know even where any foreign place is, who lives there, what language they speak, or what shapes their daily lives.
  • Casual conversations with people all over America indicate that few care. Such information is just not a significant part of their lives.
  • If one could have taken a poll in England at almost any time in its history one would have found the same results.  I suggest that what is different, operationally, is that in England the ordinary citizen did not play a role in determining policy.  That was the job of the small aristocracy. What the people knew or did not know was unimportant.
  • above all in America, which is the operational head of the world community, what "the people" know or don't know but believe is no longer irrelevant. It sometimes is crucial. That is because elections are more common, even if not always free, and because people almost everywhere, but particularly in the West, have been to some extent politicized. Thus, Ignorance is not new but today it is often determinant.
  • ignorance is not just unidirectional; it occurs in a context. What "we" think we know about others fits into what other people think "they" know both about themselves and about us. People everywhere tend to know quite a bit about their own circumstances and the actions that shaped those circumstances. That is, much more than foreigners know about them. This necessarily creates a lopsided worldview
  • These forms of mutual incomprehension or mutual misreadings often cause wars. Consider three examples:
  • Dirty tricks like our attempt to murder Nasser were and probably still are not uncommon. The Senate Committee headed by Senator Frank Church provided a chilling record, including cooperation with the Mafia, to assassinate Fidel Castro. Assassinations and attempted assassinations by the Russians, the British, the Israelis and others have been less subjected to sustained inquiry than Church provided, but their involvement in many deplorable incidents is not in doubt.
  • Britain developed Iran
  • The ancient Hindu who told the parable of the elephant was right. Those who grab the tail cannot understand those who handle the trunk. Understanding of the whole is always and everywhere necessary for intelligent action.
  • for how long does memory prevent people from doing the same things again?
  • long-term memory, memory of big happenings like wars, may be crucial but, it seems to me, last only about a decade.  Who today remembers much about American participation in the wars in Greece, Korea or even Vietnam.
  • Even when we get the sequences right, we usually stop short of determining the causes, that is, the connections between events.
  • my hunch is that as rapidly as we can, we put aside what we don't want to remember.
  • we have been able virtually to remove costly and painful events from the immediacy of daily life
  • Those who dwell on the costly and painful aspects of rising militarism are at best a nuisance who soon wear out their welcome. We find it so much easier to mesh our thoughts and attitudes with those of the people with whom we eat, work, sleep and play.  Better not to pay attention to those who challenge "conventional wisdom" or buck the tide.
  • Conventional wisdom and going with the mainstream are, arguably, necessary to make society function.
  • Sometimes, it seems to me that our questions get in the way of our answers and that our analytical tools themselves distort what our eyes are seeing.  We get so sophisticated that we may, to use the old saw, fail to see the forest for the trees.
  • These activities have created throughout the world a pervasive sense of illegality and immorality. And it cannot be restricted just to foreign affairs. It spills over into domestic affairs not only, as it commonly does, into societies with fragile legal systems but also into ours.
  • What is important, I suggest about all these -- and many other suspicious events which have never been fully illuminated -- is two fold: on the one hand, a climate of suspicion has been created that makes the achievement of security and peace far more difficult throughout the world and, on the other hand, trust in government, including the government of the United States, has been compromised.
  • Johnson charged Nixon with treason, but did not hold him accountable. Johnson's successors in the presidency have, similarly, not applied to political leaders the sort of legal standard to which we, as citizens, are held. Nor have they shared with the citizenry what they know has been done in our name. This is a fundamental attack on our system of government. Those who have "blown the whistle" on such activities, not the perpetrators, have been stigmatized or punished.
  • This adds up, I suggest, to a political form of corruption even worse than the financial corruption that so corrodes the nation "salvation" activities we have mounted in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • What about escapism?  I suggest that escapism is the child of suspicion. I would wager that if one could stop a hundred or so people on the streets of any village, town or city almost everywhere, he would find that only a handful of those he badgered would want to talk about issues some of us keep warning them that could ruin their lives. Most Americans and probably most people everywhere, simply do not want to think about them.
  • I have found that when such issues as war, environmental degradation, over population, hunger, pandemics, nuclear accidents or even financial collapse are raised, conversation dwindles. As the familiar expression has it, "eyes glaze over," and as quickly as politely possible, Americans flee from the person who raised the issues as though he had made a bad smell
  • For most people they are better kept at least out of sight if not totally out of mind. Real life, enjoyable life, life that gives amusement or pleasure right now is at hand. It is available even for the very poor on television.  Sports, even in countries where hunger is widespread, jobs few, life constricted and governments oppressive, these annoyances recede before the immediate excitement of football.
  • we think we are the doctors but really we are the disease. I don't want to believe that, but there is ample proof that much of what we have done with the best of intentions has made many people suffer
  • we all sought in the late 1950s and early 1960 to "objectify" and "quantify" the study of international affairs.
  • Insofar as it dealt with the struggles in the Third World, our analysis suggested to some of us that what we were seeking came down to achieving a growth rate of about 3.5 percent
  • It seems to me that to the degree possible, everything must be done to avoid attacks on dignity and humiliation.
  • So, what is a sense of identity, how is it manifested and how do outsiders relate to it?
  • when the first cities were formed about 3,000 years ago, the inhabitants became too numerous to identify themselves by kinship. So, they elaborated their sense of belonging into custom, religion, dress, diet and language. Gradually, and over centuries, they often elaborated their definition of their identity
  • whatever form "belonging" takes, it is the "glue" that hold societies together and make it possible for the members to live together.
  • What the residents needed was to stay put, to improve their housing, of course, but more important to be assisted in taking charge of their lives in their own pattern and at their own speed.
  • For me, this experience threw into relief the American efforts to remake other societies as the neoconservatives urge. Their proposals urge not only to "regime change" but also to "culture change" -- indeed to disassemble -- whole societies. As played out, particularly during the George W. Bush administration, they have caused or exacerbated unrest and war. To the degree we insist on overturning what the people believe to be normal and right -- in effect of undermining the sense of identity, belonging and self-respect even to improve their physical well-being -- we can expect unrest and war to continue
  • For what we have done, even with statistically proven improvements and with the best of intentions, both we and they have paid and will pay more. The Third and mainly Islamic world is now in revolt.
  • Last, and closely related to the sense of belonging and identity, I suggest is the deep need of human beings to avoid attacks on their dignity
  • Close analysis of almost any confrontation shows that it sets the parameters within which rulers have to act or are likely to be overthrown. We neglect it at our peril.
  • What had happened was that, unwittingly, the governments, at our urging and with our help, had undermined the fundamental "possession" of their peoples, their sense of identity.
  • Avoiding humiliation is the essence of diplomacy. But when one has overwhelming power, the temptation is always present to push one's advantage, to put the other person in the corner, to make him "blink," to humble him, even to destroy him.
Javier E

Trump's chickens may be coming home to roost. But the system has already failed. - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-the-system-has-already-failed

US political system trump

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • more fundamentally, that Trump got within 100 miles of the White House to begin with represents a massive failure of the system.
  • I say that because there was little mystery about how spectacularly corrupt he was — not just boorish, sexist and racist, but someone who had spent a career lying in public and engineering one grift after another to exploit people and cheat the gullible out of their money, whether it was Trump University or the Trump Institute or the Trump Network, or his habit of refusing to pay contractors, the exploitation of foreign models, or his foundation that was essentially a scam, or his apparent eagerness to have sketchy figures from the former Soviet Union use his properties for money laundering. We knew it all.
  • whatever chance we have at true accountability may only come because Trump and those around him aren’t capable of mounting a competent conspiracy or an effective coverup.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Trump spent a lifetime learning that the rules didn’t apply to him, which may have been why back in 2015 the idea that he could become president didn’t sound as crazy to him as it did to everyone else. Then he proceeded to teach us all how weak the safeguards against a corrupt demagogue becoming president really are. His party couldn’t stop him from winning its nomination, the media let his history of corruption slide while vivisecting his opponent for ludicrously trivial misdeeds, some timely intervention from the FBI director gave him a last-minute boost, and the electoral system allowed him to triumph despite winning the votes of 3 million fewer Americans than his opponent.
  • now, Trump’s last line of defense (apart from his willingness to use the powers of his office to protect himself) is the Republican Congress, an uncommonly craven collection of politicians. Fortified by a conservative media raising an increasingly urgent drumbeat of demands to hold fast, they will stand by Trump’s side because abandoning him poses the greater risk of backlash from their constituents, no matter what he is revealed to have done. So long as there are enough of them in office, Trump will be safe.
  • When it’s all over, we’ll ask, “Did the system work?” I think we already know the answer.
Javier E

Opinion | The Content of the G.O.P.'s Character - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gop-character-bad-faith.html

character gop morality corruption culture politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Trump’s latest outbursts were very much in character — and I don’t just mean his personal character. When did you last see a member of the Trump administration, or for that matter any prominent Republican, admit error or accept responsibility for problems?
  • Don’t say that it has always been that way, that it’s just the way people are. On the contrary, taking responsibility for your actions — what my parents called being a mensch — used to be considered an essential virtue in politicians and adults in general.
  • And in this as in so many things, there’s a huge asymmetry between the parties. Of course not all Democrats are honest and upstanding; but as far as I can tell, there’s almost nobody left in the G.O.P. willing to take responsibility for, well, anything.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • I don’t think this is an accident. The sad content of modern Republican character is a symptom of the corruption and hypocrisy that has afflicted half of our body politic — a sickness of the soul that manifests itself in personal behavior as well as policy.
  • consider a few non-Trump examples of the lack of character that pervades this administration.
  • And it didn’t start with Trump. In fact, way back in 2006 I wrote about the “mensch gap” in the Bush administration — the unwillingness of top officials to accept responsibility for the botched occupation of Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and more.
  • At the trivial but still telling end of the scale, we have the tale of Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who keeps flying first class at taxpayers’ expense. The money isn’t the important issue here, although his spending violates federal guidelines. The revealing thing, instead, is the supposed reason he needs to fly premium — you see, ordinary coach passengers have been known to say critical things to his face.
  • Nor, by the way, are we only talking about politicians. In my neck of the woods, I remain amazed by the unwillingness of right-leaning economists to admit that they were wrong in predicting that the Fed’s efforts to rescue the economy would cause runaway inflation. Being wrong is one thing — it happens to everyone, myself very much included. Refusing to admit and learn from error is something different.
  • in this case the personal is, ultimately, political. The modern G.O.P. is, to an extent never before seen in American history, a party built around bad faith, around pretending that its concerns and goals are very different from what they really are.
  • Flag-waving claims of patriotism, pious invocations of morality, stern warnings about fiscal probity are all cover stories for an underlying agenda mainly concerned with making plutocrats even richer.
  • And the character flaws of the party end up being echoed by the character flaws of its most prominent members. Are they bad people who chose their political affiliation because it fits their proclivities, or potentially good people corrupted by the company they keep? Probably some of both.
  • let’s be clear: America in 2018 is not a place where we can disagree without being disagreeable, where there are good people and good ideas on both sides, or whatever other bipartisan homily you want to recite. We are, instead, living in a kakistocracy, a nation ruled by the worst, and we need to face up to that unpleasant reality
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