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aqconces

Americans Are Not the Only Ones Obsessed With Their Flag | History | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...ssed-with-their-flag-180955583

americans flag nationalism

shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • From the mild-mannered Danes to crazed soccer fans, people all over the world go nuts for their national colors
  • People across Europe also have a passionate relationship with their flying colors, even if they are less conscious of it, and don’t normally fly the flag at fast food joints.
  • Think back to the dramatic Mohammed cartoon controversy of 2006, when Danish flags joined American flags in flag-burning rallies across the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon depicting the prophet.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Newspaper accounts pointed out that in Denmark, the flag—affectionately called the Dannebrog or “Danish cloth” in ancient Danish—is everywhere. It flies on public buildings and churches to celebrate local and national holidays, including Denmark’s Flag Day—on June 15. It is hoisted over private homes to mark occasions like weddings and funerals, anniversaries and graduations, or just plain fine weather. It is printed on gift-wrapping paper. It decorates birthday cakes and Christmas trees.
  • Throughout Scandinavia, the flags of Norway, Sweden, and Finland are revered and domesticated broadly; they are considered people's flags, not state's flags.
mcginnisca

The European Prospect (Fall Preview) - 0 views

prospect.org/...european-prospect-fall-preview

european prospect fall economics refugee crisis french revolution history

shared by mcginnisca on 25 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • European project after World War II was among the most noble in modern history. Germany, twice the cause of catastrophic wars, would not be punished but rebuilt, rehabilitated, and contained within a larger democratic European whole.
  • hristian Democrats called it a social market economy; social democrats thought of it as a more flexible alternative to socialism
  • urope would be not just a continent with common traditions, converging aspirations and open trade, but an emergent political federation. It would be more than a customs union—an economic union with a single currency, consistent economic rules, and social Europe balancing market Europe at a continental scale.
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  • All of the pathologies evident in the 1930s, which weighed so heavily on the minds of the EU’s architects, are resurgent—the high unemployment, the economic extremes, the perverse austerity policies, the popular backlash against ineffectual parliamentary politics, and the resulting ultra-nationalism.
  • For the right, the remedy was a return to a more laissez-faire model, even though there was little evidence that Europe’s social market had anything to do with the economic slowdown
  • For the first four postwar decades, democratically mobilized citizens in strong nation-states anchored the social part of Europe while the European Economic Community, predecessor of the EU, promoted the market part
  • WHEN JACQUES DELORS, a moderate French socialist, launched a full-blown European Union in the 1980s, the hope was to expand social Europe and market Europe in tandem. But in the actual Maastricht Treaty of 1992—Europe’s de facto constitution—free movement of goods, services, capital, and people are fundamental rights, and social protections are add-ons
  • IF EUROPE NEEDED ONE more assault to further undermine the model, it came via the refugee crisis. The crisis laid bare two awful fragilities. The first is the dysfunction of the EU as a confederation with multiple veto points and little capacity for leadership in a crisis
  • Politically, the collision of a lingering and needless economic crisis with a random refugee crisis has energized nationalism, both moderate and neo-fascist. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Austria, and elsewhere, the second- or third-strongest party is far-right populist. Much of this support is working-class, at the expense of social democrats.
  • he refugee crisis also makes clear that much of Europe’s social compact assumes a common national identity, to which foreigners do not easily fit in.
  • Europe might be able to accept a million refugees economically, but it cannot do so politically. The refugee crisis is simply an overlay on a deeper crisis of solidarity and common purpose. Unless there is a renewal of popular energy and a burst of progressive leadership, the three-decade era of broadly shared prosperity—les trente glorieuses, as the French call it—will be remembered as a historical blip. The EU aspired to combine that impossible trinity of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. All three are now on the defensive.
redavistinnell

Women Have Very Little Political Power Anywhere In The World - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...power_564cb9e4e4b00b7997f88b70

little power world

shared by redavistinnell on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Women Have Very Little Political Power Anywhere In The World
  • When Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, announced he had appointed women to half of his government's cabinet positions, many people asked him why.  "Because it's 2015," he replied. 
  • A new report on global gender equality by the World Economic Forum, the Geneva-based nonprofit most famous for its uber-elite economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, shows that while women are inching toward global parity in education, health, and to a lesser extent economic outcomes, they are still woefully underrepresented in national governments. 
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Of 145 countries in the index, only four (Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Nicaragua) are more than halfway toward equality at the parliamentary, ministerial, and head-of-state levels of government.
  • "Political power continues to be one of the great bastions of masculinity, almost anywhere you go in the world,"
  • Many of the top 20 countries on the list in terms of political empowerment -- including Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Costa Rica -- only got there through some sort of quota system that forces political parties to recruit and groom women for political office.
  • The United States comes in 72nd on the list, about halfway down.
  • The burden that the U.S. political system puts on candidates to fund and run campaigns on their own is unique.
  • Political races only last a few weeks, or a few months. Hillary Clinton announced her presidential campaign a full 19 months before the November 2016 election.
  • Add to that the difficulty of beating (mostly male) incumbents, sexism from the media, the contemporary view of congressional politics (the young women she knows mostly see "white men shouting at each other," said Shames), and a grueling campaign schedule likely to put off anyone with significant family responsibilities.
  • The question now is whether there is any political will to change it. Maybe we need quotas.
katyshannon

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...CLIMATE_COUNTDOWN

news associated press politics environmental crisis US conference obama paris

shared by katyshannon on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The largest group of world leaders ever to stand together kicked off two weeks of high-stakes climate talks outside Paris on Monday, saying that striking an ambitious deal to curb global warming can show terrorists what countries can achieve when they are united.
  • The U.N.-organized gathering of 151 heads of state and government comes at a somber time for France, two weeks after militants linked to the Islamic State group killed 130 people around Paris. Fears of more attacks prompted extra-high security and a crackdown on environmental protests.
  • The conference is aimed at the most far-reaching deal ever to tackle global warming. The last major agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, required only rich countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions, and the U.S. never signed on. Since then, global temperatures and sea levels have continued to rise, and the Earth has seen an extraordinary run of extreme weather.
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  • More than 180 countries have already submitted individual national plans, but a climate deal is by no means guaranteed.
  • Among several sticking points is money - how much rich countries should invest to help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil, gas and coal producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.
  • Reviving the rich-poor differences that caused earlier climate talks to fail, Chinese President Xi Jinping said an eventual global deal must include aid for poor countries and acknowledge differences between developing and established economies.
  • Many of the leaders said the world must keep the average temperature within 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of current levels - and if possible to half that, to spare island nations threatened by rising seas.
  • The world has already warmed nearly 1 degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial age, and factories and cars continue to belch pollution around the world.
  • Many of the leaders framed the problem as a generational issue, where current leaders owe future generations a livable Earth.
  • Leaders called their attendance in Paris an act of defiance after the Nov. 13 attacks, some of which occurred near the airfield north of the city where the conference is taking place.
  • Many of the leaders paid their respects at sites linked to the attacks. Obama, in a late-night visit, placed a single flower outside the concert hall where dozens were killed, and bowed his head in silence.
  • To that end, at least 19 governments and 28 leading world investors were announcing billions of dollars in investments to research and develop clean energy technology, with the goal of making it cheaper. Backers include Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires George Soros and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, and Jack Ma of China's Alibaba.
  • Under the initiative, 19 countries pledge to double their spending on low- or no-carbon energy over the next five years. They currently spend about $10 billion a year, about half of that from the U.S.
  • Gates said he and other investors, including the University of California, are pitching in $7 billion so far and hope to raise more this week.
  • In another announcement, the United States, Canada and nine European countries pledged nearly $250 million to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to rising seas, droughts and other consequences of climate change. Germany pledged $53 million, the U.S. $51 million and Britain $45 million.
  • The money will be made available to a fund for the least developed countries. Other countries that contributed include Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland.
Javier E

Why Bernie Sanders Is Adopting a Nordic-Style Approach - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...473385

NordIC entrepreneur policies government benefits social socialism culture politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Nordic nations have produced what is, by any metric, an impressive output of successful entrepreneurs, international businesses, and brands. Sweden has Ikea, H&M, Spotify, and Volvo, to name a few. From Denmark have come Lego, Carlsberg, and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk. A Swede and a Dane co-founded the video calling service Skype. The core programming code of Linux—the leading operating system running on the world’s servers and supercomputers—was developed by a Finn. The Finnish company Nokia was the world’s largest mobile phone maker for more than a decade. And newer players like Finland’s Supercell and Rovio, creators of the ubiquitous video games Clash of Clans and Angry Birds, or Sweden’s Mojang, the publisher of the equally popular video game Minecraft, are changing the face of online gaming.
  • Nordic countries are well-ranked when it comes to helping facilitate starting a business. At the most basic level, what the Nordic approach does is reduce the risk of starting a company, since basic services such as education and health care are covered for regardless of the fledgling company’s fate. In addition, companies themselves are freed from the burdens of having to offer such services for their employees at the scale American companies do. And if the entrepreneur succeeds, they are rewarded by tax rates on capital gains that are lower than the rate on wages.
  • as capitalist economies the Nordic countries have proven that capitalism works better when it’s accompanied by smart, universal social policies that are in everyone’s self-interest.
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  • The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it. The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion
  • In an age when more and more people are working as entrepreneurs or on short-term projects, and when global competition is requiring all citizens to be better prepared to handle economic turbulence, every nation needs to ensure that its people have the education, health care, and other support structures they need to take risks, start businesses, and build a better future for themselves and for their country. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with the times.
  • as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism.
  • the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government.
  • In the U.S., supporters of not only Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but also of Donald Trump, are worried about exactly the kinds of problems that universal social policies can help solve: worsening income inequality, shrinking opportunity, the decline of the middle class, and the survival of the ordinary family in the face of globalization. What America needs right now, desperately, isn’t to keep fighting the socialist bogeymen of the past, but to see the future
Javier E

Looking Back at the Economic Crash of 2008 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...adam-tooze-crashed.html

crash financial crisis great recession populism crisis trump

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • e has persisted and produced an intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it. We continue to live with the consequences of both today.
  • By 2007, many were warning about a dangerous fragility in the system. But they worried about America’s gargantuan government deficits and debt
  • it was not a Chinese sell-off of American debt that triggered the crash, but rather, as Tooze writes, a problem “fully native to Western capitalism — a meltdown on Wall Street driven by toxic securitized subprime mortgages.”
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  • Tooze calls it a problem in “Western capitalism” intentionally. It was not just an American problem.
  • One of the great strengths of Tooze’s book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems.
  • In 2006, European banks generated a third of America’s riskiest privately issued mortgage-backed securities. By 2007, two-thirds of commercial paper issued was sponsored by a European financial entity.
  • “Between 2001 and 2006,” Tooze writes, “Greece, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the U.K., France, Ireland and Spain all experienced real estate booms more severe than those that energized the United States.”
  • while the crisis may have been caused in both America and Europe, it was solved largely by Washington. Partly, this reflected the post-Cold War financial system, in which the dollar had become the hyperdominant global currency and, as a result, the Federal Reserve had truly become the world’s central bank.
  • therein lies the unique feature of the crash of 2008. Unlike that of 1929, it was not followed by a Great Depression. It was not so much the crisis as the rescue and its economic, political and social consequences that mattered most
  • The Fed acted aggressively and also in highly ingenious ways, becoming a guarantor of last resort to the battered balance sheets of American but also European banks. About half the liquidity support the Fed provided during the crisis went to European banks
  • Before the rescue and even in its early stages, the global economy was falling into a bottomless abyss. In the first months after the panic on Wall Street, world trade and industrial production fell at least as fast as they did during the first months of the Great Depression. Global capital flows declined by a staggering 90 percent
  • The Federal Reserve, with some assistance from other central banks, arrested this decline. The Obama fiscal stimulus also helped to break the fall.
  • China, with its own gigantic stimulus, created an oasis of growth in an otherwise stagnant global economy.
  • The rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined
  • The governing elite did not anticipate the crisis — as few elites have over hundreds of years of capitalism. But once it happened, many of them — particularly in America — acted quickly and intelligently, and as a result another Great Depression was averted. The system worked
  • But Tooze also convincingly shows that the European Central Bank mismanaged things from the start
  • On the left, the entire episode discredited the market-friendly policies of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder, disheartening the center-left and emboldening those who want more government intervention in the economy
  • On the right, it became a rallying cry against bailouts and the Fed, buoying an imaginary free-market alternative to government intervention. Unlike in the 1930s, when the libertarian strategy was tried and only deepened the Depression, in the last 10 years it has been possible for the right to argue against the bailouts, secure in the knowledge that their proposed policies will never actually be implemented.
  • The crash brought together many forces that were around anyway — stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about immigration and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government — and supercharged them. The result has been a wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism in the West today.
  • confirmation of this can be found in the one major Western country that did not have a financial crisis and has little populism in its wake — Canada.
  • No government handled the crisis better than that of the United States, which acted in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion in late 2008 and almost seamlessly coordinated policy between the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. And yet, the backlash to the bailouts has produced the most consequential result in the United States.
  • experts are considering the new vulnerabilities of a global economy
  • we are confronting a quite different problem — an erratic, unpredictable United States led by a president who seems inclined to redo or even scrap the basic architecture of the system that America has painstakingly built since 1945. How will the world handle this unexpected development? What will be its outcome? This is the current crisis that we will live through and that historians will soon analyze.
Javier E

Spain's Watergate: inside the corruption scandal that changed a nation | News | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-scandal-politics-gurtel-case

spain corruption scandal politics

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • “Gürtel was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment for Spain,” said Carlos Delclós, a former indignados activist and author of a book on the movement and its political inheritor, Podemos. “Gürtel made it clear that it was not specific cases of corruption but that it was systemic. That corruption was the system.”
  • Even the royal family, it seemed, were at it: a corruption scandal centred on the then king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, threw the monarchy into disrepute. In 2014, the once popular King Juan Carlos abdicated, citing health reasons, amid a sharp decline in popularity. (Last year, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years in jail for tax fraud and embezzlement.)
  • Voters were shocked by just how brazen politicians and businessmen seemed to have been. Before being jailed in 2013 for tax fraud, one PP politician in Valencia won the lottery five times. (He denies wrongdoing, claiming he was merely very lucky.)
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  • In court, Correa provided details of his working relationship with the PP. He would take suitcases full of cash to party headquarters, he said, never passing through reception but entering with a special access card that allowed him to come and go discreetly. “[The PP HQ] was my home,” he said. “I spent more time there than I did in my own office.”
  • For the PP, the verdict was devastating: the party itself was convicted as a direct beneficiary of the Gürtel scheme. The court found that ever since the party was founded, it had maintained a parallel accounting system to collect money from kickbacks that could be used to fund the party. The court said the testimony of Rajoy and other PP figures who denied knowing about the existence of the slush fund were “not credible”
  • Before the crisis, satisfaction with the political system in Spain was among the highest in Europe, behind only Denmark, Luxembourg and Finland. After 2010, in the wake of austerity and endless corruption scandals, trust in institutions such as political parties and banks crumbled. Gürtel, like Watergate, has convinced many voters to take a conspiratorial view of politics
  • Corruption has also shaped political debate. Catalan separatists have cited PP corruption as one justification for their proposed split from Spain, although critics point out that the former party of former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont has also been involved in its own major corruption scandal.
  • Most worryingly, the far right has begun to use corruption to rally voters.
  • Vox, many polls suggest, now stand to become a major force on the national level, potentially overtaking Podemos as Spain’s fourth largest party.
manhefnawi

Charles XIV John | king of Sweden and Norway | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Charles-XIV-John

Sweden Bernadotte Napoleon Gustave IV

shared by manhefnawi on 17 May 18 - No Cached
  • original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
  • French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).
  • formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)
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  • he enlisted in the French army
  • supporter of the Revolution
  • Bernadotte first met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 in Italy. Their relationship, at first friendly, was soon embittered by rivalries and misunderstandings
  • In November 1799 Bernadotte refused to assist Bonaparte’s coup d’état that ended the Directory but neither did he defend it
  • When, on May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed the empire, Bernadotte declared full loyalty to him and, in May, was named marshal of the empire
  • he was invited to become crown prince of Sweden. In 1809 a palace revolution had overthrown King Gustav IV of Sweden and had put the aged, childless, and sickly Charles XIII on the throne. The Danish prince Christian August had been elected crown prince but died suddenly in 1810, and the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice.
  • he respected his military ability, his skillful and humane administration of Hanover and the Hanseatic towns, and his charitable treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany
  • Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. On October 20 he accepted Lutheranism and landed in Sweden; he was adopted as son by Charles XIII and took the name of Charles John (Karl Johan). The Crown Prince at once assumed control of the government and acted officially as regent during the illnesses of Charles XIII. Napoleon now tried to prevent any reorientation of Swedish foreign policy and moreover sent an immediate demand that Sweden declare war on Great Britain
  • Charles John was anxious to achieve something for Sweden that would prove his worth to the Swedes and establish his dynasty in power. He could, as many Swedes wished, have regained Finland from Russia, either by conquest or by negotiation
  • the conquest of Norway from Denmark, based on a Swedish alliance with Napoleon’s enemies. An alliance was signed with Russia in April 1812, with Great Britain in March 1813—with the British granting a subsidy for the proposed conquest of Norway—and with Prussia in April 1813. Urged by the allies, however, Charles John agreed to take part in the great campaign against Napoleon and to postpone his war with Denmark. The Crown Prince landed his troops at Stralsund, Ger., in May 1813 and soon took command of the allied army of the north
  • conserve his forces for the war with Denmark, and the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting
  • After the decisive Battle of Leipzig (October 1813), Napoleon’s first great defeat, Charles John succeeded in defeating the Danes in a swift campaign and forced King Frederick VI of Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), which transferred Norway to the Swedish crown. Charles John now had dreams of becoming king or “protector” of France, but he had become alienated from the French people, and the victorious allies would not tolerate another soldier in charge of French affairs
  • Charles John conducted an efficient and almost bloodless campaign, and in August the Norwegians signed the Convention of Moss, whereby they accepted Charles XIII as king
  • At the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), Austria and the French Bourbons were hostile to the upstart prince, and the son of the deposed Gustav was a potential pretender to the throne. But, thanks to Russian and British support, the status of the new dynasty was undisturbed
  • Upon the death of Charles XIII on Feb. 5, 1818, Charles John became king of Sweden and Norway, and the former republican and revolutionary general became a conservative ruler.
  • His foreign policy inaugurated a long and favourable period of peace, based on good relations with Russia and Great Britain
Javier E

The Profound Social Cost of American Exceptionalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-american-exceptionalism.html

exceptionalism American idea poverty inequality culture

shared by Javier E on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • The United States is one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations in the history of humanity. And yet it accepts — proudly defends, even — a degree of social dysfunction that would be intolerable in any other rich society.
  • My first column pondered why Americans didn’t care more about the nation’s income gap, so much starker than that of any other advanced democracy. I suggested that my compatriots might come to a consensus that inequality is harmful when they realized how vast inequities could gum up the cogs of economic and social mobility
  • You can bet it has gone higher, given the bull run in the stock market since then. And Republicans just passed another round of tax cuts to offer a helping hand to the upper crust.
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  • Most interestingly, Americans still don’t care that much. Sure, two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed, according to Gallup. Still, more than three out of five — compared with just over half six years ago — are satisfied with “the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.”
  • As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.
  • Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.
  • Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.
  • The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.
  • The children of poverty who survive will most likely hobble through life with mediocre educations — lagging their more affluent peers even before their first day in school and then falling farther behind, deprived of the resources that disadvantaged children in other advanced nations routinely enjoy.
  • Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?
  • America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.
  • populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.
manhefnawi

Gustav III of Sweden: The Forgotten Despot of the Age of Enlightenment | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...otten-despot-age-enlightenment

Scandinavia Sweden Catherine of Russia French Revolution Opposition

shared by manhefnawi on 02 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • In the seventeenth century, under a succession of outstandingly able soldier kings, Sweden had been a great power but after the death in 1718 of Karl XII, the last and most monomaniacal of the line, the country had become a by-word for weak government, corruption and impotence. Gustav III set himself the task of making Sweden great again. He was assassinated in March 1792 – the third Swedish monarch in 160 years to die of gunshot wounds
  • Under Karl XII’s successors, his central-German brother-in-law Fredrik I and his north-German second-cousin-once-removed Adolf Fredrik (Prince Bishop of Lubeck before the Swedish Riksdag chose him to be Fredrik’s heir) the country passed through the so-called Age of Liberty
  • When, shortly after his father’s death in February 1771, Gustav III met his uncle Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great), the latter sneered, ‘If there were Swedes in Sweden they would soon agree to bury their differences; but foreign corruption has so perverted the national spirit that harmony was impossible’. Gustav’s new kingdom was then the second largest in Europe after Russia. It comprised present-day Finland as well as Sweden, and a toe-hold in Germany in northern Pomerania.
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  • Adolf Fredrik, Gustav III’s father, was described by one English contemporary as having ‘the title of king, with hardly the privileges of a subject’. Unlike his British counterpart George II, he had no power to summon or dissolve his parliament.
  • Gustav was an unimpressive figure physically, weedy and foppish, and slightly lame since birth, but when he addressed the members of the Riksdag he made them flinch with his phrases of masterful contempt
  • The new constitution that Gustav now promulgated, in place of that of 1720-72, brought Sweden more into line with contemporary Britain.
  • The main difference between the British and Swedish systems was that, whereas in Britain the monarch’s executive power was in practice delegated to ministers more industrious, more  proficient and, for the most part,  more intellectually gifted than their royal master, in Sweden it was Gustav III himself who was indisputably in day to day charge
  • No other of the Enlightened Despots was more fond than Gustav of the time-wasting rituals of court life, the levées, formal audiences and ceremonial entries and exits.
  • Whereas Napoleon, in his coup d’etat of 19e Brumaire 1799 broke down and began mumbling in front of the popular assembly he was trying to overawe, Gustav III easily faced down his opponents in the Riksdag
  • Gustav III may well have held a record among monarchs prior to the nineteenth century for the number of other crowned heads he met. What Louis XV and Louis XVI of France or Ferdinand IV of Naples thought of him is uncertain, though none of these Bourbons were exactly noted for their insight into character. Pope Pius VI pretended to be delighted with Gustav (the first Protestant monarch ever to meet a pope) and made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. The other Enlightened Despots, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, agreed in thinking Gustav charming in a wearying sort of way, and faintly ridiculous. Leopold II, Joseph II’s brother and successor, perhaps the ablest politician among the Enlightened Despots – he was still only Grand Duke of Tuscany when Gustav met him
  • the Swedish king was a positive menace with his incessant scheming and readiness to interfere in other governments’ affairs
  • all radical improvements in national character take place during the severest wars’. Russia, having annexed the Crimea, had embarked on a titanic struggle with the Ottoman Empire which was absorbing stupendous quantities of manpower and treasure. At the beginning of 1788 he began making plans to attack Russia from the rear.
  • Gustav found himself far from his capital, stuck with an army that would not obey him. He was rescued  by the Danish government declaring war on him. Hurrying back to Sweden, Gustav rode to Gothenburg, 250 miles cross country in forty-eight hours – the last sixty miles quite alone and on borrowed farm horses, in blinding hailstorms – to rally the defences of the city against the invading Danes
  • The senior Swedish officers rejected all the courses of action proposed by Gustav and his latest discovery, William Sidney Smith, a British naval captain who had turned up without the permission of his own government; they even, according to Smith, talked of ‘proposing terms of Capitulation independent of the King’.
  • Catherine, still preoccupied with the war with Turkey, was glad to patch up a compromise peace
  • While the Stockholm crowds stood outside cheering him, Gustav confronted the chamber of nobles with a new constitution, and when they howled it down he coolly ordered the secretary of the chamber to record their vote as yes: a piece of blatant illegality combined with intimidation that anticipates the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. In fact, apart from giving the King the power to make war without the Riksdag’s consent, the new constitution marked little advance on that of 1772
  • Eleven weeks after Gustav rammed his new constitution down the throats of the nobles, the Estates General met at Versailles and by the time of the peace settlement with Russia the French ancien régime was well on the way to dissolution.
  • I cannot allow that it is right to support rebels against their Lawful King
  • Despite the fact that Sweden was virtually bankrupt in the aftermath of the Russian war he now offered to land 16,000 Swedish and 8,000 Russian troops at Ostend, in Austrian territory, and to march on Paris to overthrow the Constituent Assembly, with the support of an Austrian army advancing from the Rhine. In June 1791 he went to Aachen and was greeted there as a saviour by the French royalist exiles. While he was there Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made their bid to escape from Paris
  • Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, who had succeeded Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria the year before, was enraged by Gustav’s interference: there were some too, including Gustav’s uncle Henry of Prussia, who believed that his schemes for an armed intervention in France were merely a cover for a secret plan to seize Norway from the Danes
  • On March 1st, 1792, Leopold died – poisoned, it is said, by an aphrodisiac of his own concoction – but Gustav was destined never to learn that there was no longer any challenge to his self-appointed role as leader of the monarchist opposition to the French Revolution
  • Gustav III was only forty-six when he died. That was at least eight years older than the most brilliant of his predecessors on the Swedish throne, Gustav II Adolf, Karl X and Karl XII – and if he had lived a normal span he would still have been king at the time of Waterloo.
  • The economic weakness of his country, the inveterate opposition of the social class that elsewhere might have been a king’s chief support, and the increasing influence of the revolutionary ferment in France may have meant that, even if he had lived, he would not have been able to go as far as he dreamed: he is one of the great might-have-beens of history.
manhefnawi

Erik XIV | king of Sweden | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Erik-XIV

Sweden Monarch Erik XIV

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • expanded the powers of the monarchy and pursued an aggressive foreign policy that led to the Seven Years’ War of the North (1563–70) against Denmark.
  • Erik’s major foreign policy objective was to free Sweden’s Baltic Sea trade from Danish control.
  • his half brother John, duke of Finland, also sought a foothold in the east and signed a treaty with Sigismund II Augustus, king of Poland, agreeing to marry the king’s daughter against Erik’s wishes.
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  • Erik’s acquisitions in Estonia alarmed Frederick II, king of Denmark and Norway, who allied with Lübeck and Poland and declared war in 1563, initiating the Seven Years’ War of the North.
  • Duke John (later King John III), who was liberated in 1567, joined with his brother, the future Charles IX, and deposed Erik in 1568. Erik died in prison.
Javier E

Opinion | The Death and Birth of Europe's Parties - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...europe-politics.html

europe parties greens

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • In France, the ecologist party is now the first political force among 18- to 34-year-old voters. In Germany, the well-structured Greens have jumped to 20.5 percent of the votes in the European elections; national polls now credit them with an even higher share of the vote
  • The Greens’ popularity, also on the rise in the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Britain and Ireland, is forcing other parties to incorporate part of their agenda on environment
  • The relationship between ecology and capitalism is already emerging in the public conversation as a new paradigm, as political groups reassess their ideological foundations: those who believe that ecology and market economy are compatible compete against more radical advocates of a complete change of our growth model
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the 20th century, the fight against global warming was confined to far left groups and intellectuals. Today, in this age of globalization backlash and extreme weather, it has gone mainstream.
  • There is a silver lining to this European upheaval, and it is an important one: the search for a better system is on, and citizens want to be part of the solution, as the large turnout at the European elections has shown. Europe is being turned into a giant political laboratory. Stay tuned.
Javier E

The World Wastes Tons of Food. A Grocery 'Happy Hour' Is One Answer. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...food-waste-climate-change.html

food waste solution climate change culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • About one-third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That equals 1.3 billion tons a year, worth nearly $680 billion
  • The figures represent more than just a disastrous misallocation of need and want, given that 10 percent of people in the world are chronically undernourished.
  • From 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are related to food lost during harvest and production or wasted by consumers
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  • Landfills of rotting food emit methane, a gas that is roughly 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. And to harvest and transport all that wasted food requires billions of acres of arable land, trillions of gallons of water and vast amounts of fossil fuels.
  • For consumers, cutting back on food waste is one of the few personal habits that can help the planet. But for some reason, a lot of people who fret about their carbon footprint aren’t sweating the vegetables and rump steak they toss into the garbage.
  • “There’s been a lot of focus on energy,” said Paul Behrens, a professor in energy and environmental change at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “But climate change is as much a land issue and a food issue as anything else.”
  • Reducing waste is a challenge because selling as much food as possible is a tried, tested and ingrained part of all-you-can-eat cultures. Persuading merchants to promote and profit from “food rescue,” as it is known, is not so obvious.
  • “Consumers are paying for the food, and who wants to reduce that?
  • A growing number of supermarkets, restaurants and start-ups — many based in Europe — are trying to answer that question. The United States is another matter.
  • “Food waste might be a uniquely American challenge because many people in this country equate quantity with a bargain,
  • Nine of the 10 United States supermarket chains that were assessed by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity last year were given a C grade or lower on food-waste issues
  • Some of the most promising food waste efforts are apps that connect food sellers to food buyers
  • Among the most popular is Too Good to Go, a company based in Copenhagen, with 13 million users and contracts with 25,000 restaurants and bakeries in 11 countries. Consumers pay about one-third of the sticker price for items, most of which goes to the retailer, with a small percentage paid to the app
  • “I was on a business trip to Scotland and I read about Selina in a newspaper,” Mr. Jensen recalls. “Around that time, we learned that every Dane was throwing out 63 kilos of food per year” — about 139 pounds — “and I was sitting in this airport thinking, she’s right.”
  • After the two met in a Copenhagen cafe, REMA 1000 eliminated in-store bulk discounts. As of 2008, there would be no more three hams for the price of two, or any variations on that theme
  • Executives at S-market in Finland make no such claims about their happy hour. Mika Lyytikainen, an S-market vice president, explained that the program simply reduces its losses.“When we sell at 60 percent off, we don’t earn any money, but we earn more than if the food was given to charity,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s now possible for every Finn to buy very cheap food in our stores.”
Javier E

It May Be the Biggest Tax Heist Ever. And Europe Wants Justice. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cum-ex.html

tax fraud europe banker financial rich

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • “the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest tax theft in the history of Europe.” From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.
  • The scheme was built around “cum-ex trading” (from the Latin for “with-without”): a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.
  • One basket of stocks. Abracadabra. Two refunds
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  • The process was repeated over and over, as word of cum-ex spread like a quiet contagion. Germany was hardest hit, with an estimated $30 billion in losses, followed by France, taken for about $17 billion. Smaller sums were drained away from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Finland, Poland and others
  • Outrage in these countries has focused on the City of London, Britain’s answer to Wall Street. Less scrutinized has been the role played by Americans, both individual investors and branches of United States investment banks in London, including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Merrill Lynch Bank of America.
  • American bankers didn’t try cum-ex at home because they feared domestic regulators. So they moved operations to London and treated the rest of Europe as an anything-goes frontier
  • ”There was this culture in London, and it really came from New York,” he said. “These guys were either from New York or trained in London at New York banks, and they looked at Europe as their playground. People at the highest levels were collaborating to rip off countries.”
  • At Merrill, Mr. Shields’s job was to identify “tax-attractive trades,” as he put it in his testimony. He had joined one of the least visible sectors of the financial world, which pokes at the seams of international finance law, looking for ways to reduce clients’ tax bills.
  • the presiding judge issued a preliminary ruling that, for the first time, declared cum-ex a felony, calling it a “collective grab in the treasury.”
  • German prosecutors say they will now pursue 400 other suspects, unearthed in 56 investigations. Banks large and small will be ordered to hand over cum-ex profits, which could have serious consequences for some. Two have already gone bust.
  • officials in Germany say the trade was a form of theft, one so obviously illicit that forbidding it — which was tried twice, with ineffectively worded laws — was hardly necessary.
  • Precisely who invented cum-ex trading, and when, are mysteries, but ground zero for this scandal may have been the London branch of Merrill Lynch.
  • uffice it to say, the goal was to fool the financial system so that two investors could claim refunds for dividend taxes that were paid just once.
  • When he pointed this out to management, the policy was tweaked.“They said, ‘You can answer a call on your mobile, but you need to immediately move off the floor,’” he recalled. “So these guys would get up from their desks, start walking toward the edge of the floor, send a text message and then walk back. It was a joke.”
  • The trade was pure theater and required a huge cast: stock lenders, prime brokers, custodians, accounting firms, asset managers and inter-dealer brokers. It also required vast quantities of stock, most of which was sourced from American shareholders.
  • A lawyer who worked at the firm Dr. Berger founded in 2010, and who under German law can’t be identified by the media, described for the Bonn court a memorable meeting at the office.
  • Sensitive types, Dr. Berger told his underlings that day, should find other jobs.“Whoever has a problem with the fact that because of our work there are fewer kindergartens being built,” Dr. Berger reportedly said, “here’s the door.”
  • Worried about the growing pileup of tax-withholding credits on the books, Frank Tibo, the bank’s chief tax officer, flew to London in May 2007. He spent the day grilling Mr. Mora
  • When Mr. Tibo tried to signal his concern to executives at UniCredit, the bank’s Italian owner, they didn’t seem to care, he said
  • “There were big profits coming out of HypoVereinsbank, and most of it was from the investment banking section,” Mr. Tibo said. “The Italians quickly made up their minds: ‘We want to make money.’ No one gave us any internal support, because they didn’t want us to learn anything.”
  • By then, Mr. Mora and Mr. Shields were long gone from the London branch. Tired of niggling questions and feeling underpaid, they had left in 2008 to open Ballance Capital, one of the first full-service, one-stop cum-ex trading shops.
  • Dozens of German banks participated in cum-ex deals, too, gobbling up German taxpayer money at the same time they received a rescue package worth more than $500 billion.
  • Last year, the lawyer who testified anonymously at the Bonn trial described the culture of the cum-ex world to Oliver Schröm and Christian Salewski, two reporters on the German television show “Panorama,” under disguising makeup. It was a realm beyond morality, he said: all male, supremely arrogant, and guided by the conviction that the German state is an enemy and German taxpayers are suckers.
  • “That was the normal world to which we no longer belonged,” he told the reporters. “We looked out the window from up there, and we thought, ‘We’re the cleverest of all, geniuses, and you’re all stupid.’”
  • a former Merrill Lynch investment banker sat in a London restaurant near the Thames and described what had turned him into a whistle-blower. In the years after the financial crisis, he said, he noticed that a handful of colleagues on the company’s trading floor were using their personal mobile phones, a breach of company policy. All communication was supposed to be tracked and recorded. These guys were sending self-deleting texts on Snapchat.“Obviously, they were circumventing controls,”
  • Seemingly risk-free profits poured in, and over the years a mini-industry thrived, one that a former participant labeled “the devil’s machine.”
  • The complaint lays out, in painstaking detail, how the trades were confected, who executed them and which questions should be asked by investigators to uncover the “sham.” It states that Merrill Lynch earned hundreds of millions of dollars over the previous seven years from cum-ex trades.
  • “Anyone who stood in the way of this trade was swept aside, and those who enabled it were promoted,” the whistle-blower said in a follow-up phone call. “But it was widely regarded as insanity inside the bank for it to be extracting money from sovereign treasuries, particularly after the entire sector had been supported by the public purse.
  • American banks conducted their cum-ex trades overseas, rather than at home, out of fear, the whistle-blower said. Specifically, he mentioned a 2008 Senate investigation into “dividend tax abuse” that found it was depriving the Treasury of $100 billion every year. The report led to a ban on dividend arbitrage tied to stock in United States corporations.
  • But nothing prevented American bankers from conducting such trades with foreign companies on foreign soil.
  • German efforts to stamp out cum-ex with legislation, in 2007 and 2009, left holes through which certain types of financial players could still crawl. This included private pension plans in the United States, a niche financial product for wealthy people who want the kind of privacy, and exotic investment options, that Fidelity doesn’t offer.
  • Investors will have problems of their own. Many have said they had no idea how cum-ex traders returned such dazzling profits. That defense became less plausible in 2012, after the German government spent millions of dollars to buy 11 hard drives from industry insiders. The hard drives were filled with marketing fliers, written by bankers, who sold cum-ex with an antigovernment pitch.
  • “We learned that it was very common for these bankers to have conversations over coffee with clients about cum-ex,” said Norbert Walter-Borjans, a former minister of finance for North Rhine-Westphalia. “They would say, ‘If you have a problem with how your hard-earned money is being spent in taxes, we’ve got an idea for you.’”
  • Authorities across Europe are said to be waiting for a resolution of the Bonn trial to move ahead with their own. Many are livid that Germany didn’t alert them sooner about the perils of cum-ex. The failure, say lawyers, stems from a Europe-wide hypersensitivity about privacy, which is especially acute when it comes to taxes.
  • In 2012, soon after Germany shut down its cum-ex problem, a London trader began a cum-ex scheme that fleeced the Danish tax authority of $2 billion, officials there say. The trader, Sanjay Shah, who now lives in Dubai, denies wrongdoing but has never been shy about the source of his wealth.When he bought a $1.3 million yacht a few years ago, he found the perfect name: Cum-Ex.
brickol

Trump to suspend travel from Europe, excluding UK, amid coronavirus outbreak | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...virus-outbreak-us-trump-latest

crisis us trump economics

shared by brickol on 12 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has announced that the US would temporarily suspend most travel from the European Union, as the country reckons with the spread of coronavirus and the White House grapples with the severity of the situation.
  • The restrictions, which would begin on Friday and last for 30 days, would not apply to US citizens or to travelers from the UK.
  • During the rare address to the nation, Trump defended his administration’s response while laying blame on the European Union for not acting quickly enough to address the “foreign virus”, saying US clusters had been “seeded” by European travelers.
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  • “I can say we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now,” Fauci told the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He said it is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu”.
  • Trump’s speech comes on a tumultuous day as cases in the US topped 1,000 and the number of deaths rose to 37, while fluctuations in the financial markets continued and Washington strained to respond. Testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that the outbreak in the US is going to get worse.
  • The president also said he would take “emergency action” to provide relief to workers who are affected. He said he was asking Congress for $50bn for small business loans, and he also called for “immediate” payroll tax cuts.
  • In a statement, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the affected countries include: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland”.
  • The Trump administrators has faced a raft of criticism over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, from the shortage of testing kits available in the US to Trump’s own lack of urgency and downplaying the severity of the situation
  • Daniel Drezner, a professor of International politics at Tufts University, told the Guardian that limiting travel from Europe would “be a drop in the bucket” compared with the number of cases that are already in the US.
  • Democrats also called out Trump for failing to address the shortage of testing kits that has hampered containment efforts across the country. “We have a public health crisis in this country and the best way to help keep the American people safe and ensure their economic security is for the president to focus on fighting the spread of the coronavirus itself,” said Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House, in a joint statement. “Alarmingly, the president did not say how the administration will address the lack of coronavirus testing kits throughout the United States.”
lenaurick

Sweden reintroduces conscription as tensions rise - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics history crisis policy

shared by lenaurick on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Sweden has moved to reintroduce conscription "as a response to the new security situation" in Europe, the country's defense minister told CNN Thursday.
  • A government act on Thursday reintroduced compulsory military service in the country for the first time since 2010, and for the first time on a gender-equal basis.
  • Sweden's minister of defense, cited Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 as one of the triggers for the decision.
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  • Hultqvist added that Sweden is "strengthening its military cooperation with Finland and with the NATO partners."
  • According to Marinette Nyh Radebo, spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense, those born between 1999 and 2000, along with marginally older volunteers, will undergo testing on July 1 to see if they are eligible. Radebo explained that 13,000 men and women will be drawn from around 100,000 which fit into the correct age category. They will then undergo physical and psychological assessments.
  • Radebo told CNN that while there will not be a quota system in terms of the ratio between male and female recruits, the "gender equal" policy for the 1999 generation should mean there will be an increase in the number of women in the armed forces.
malonema1

Finnish PM Says Government Could Break up Due to New Finns Party Leader: Report | World... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...-new-finns-party-leader-report

Finland politics

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Finnish PM Says Government Could Break up Due to New Finns Party Leader: Report
  • HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila said that there is a risk his three-party government could break up following Saturday's leadership change in co-ruling nationalist Finns party. "Of course (there's is a risk). This is a tough spot for the government", Sipila told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
Javier E

Robert Peston: 'I'm not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...urrent-problems-are-not-a-blip

reform economic politics UK basic income

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.” The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, “is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions.”
  • Peston advocates a “wealth tax” – an annual levy of 1% on all net assets greater than £500,000. “Workers have become too powerless,” he goes on, and argues for “new forms of online collectivism” – digital trade union platforms – and the creation of a new ombudsman to regulate the labour market along the lines of the financial services’ Financial Conduct Authority.
  • . His book is full of depressing statistics about the vanishingly small prospect of disadvantaged Britons today climbing the economic or social ladder, but when I ask if he himself shares the worry that his own children will not enjoy a better life than his, he erupts.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The introduction of a universal basic income is, he believes, inevitable. This drastic reinvention of the welfare state would see the government pay every single citizen, irrespective of their wealth or employment status, a regular cash sum calculated to cover all their basic needs
  • Is he worried that the country’s economic woes are leading us towards the threat of civil unrest? “Yes – or certainly just to the rise of politicians who don’t believe in our democracy. I think that’s a genuine risk. I am genuinely fearful for the fabric of what we think of as this nation, if we don’t address these problems.” In his lifetime is this threat unprecedented? “Yes, of course it is. This is the most scary time since the second world war.”
  • “It is fucking mad for middle class people like us to want anything other than a decent life for our children,” he exclaims. “If you’re on shit wages, it’s completely reasonable to want your children to be better off than you are. Completely reasonable. But the notion that we,” and he gestures around his elegant townhouse kitchen, “should want more [for our children] is shocking and appalling. We shouldn’t think in those terms. We’ve actually got to think, maybe we should make some sacrifices and be a bit poorer. Because if we don’t make those sacrifices and become a bit poorer, so that those lower down the scale have better lives, we may end up facing utter chaos.”
  • “We will end up with it. We just have to reconcile ourselves to no growth. The natural tendency of the economy at the moment is to widen income and wealth disparities and in those circumstances, and particularly when you layer on top of that the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, it is very, very difficult to think of any alternative but guaranteeing some kind of universal basic income.” Does he assume this will become Labour party policy in the foreseeable future? “Yeah.”
  • “I think it’s becoming clearer that Labour will end up, as a minimum, signed up to a position where we are a bit like Norway.” In other words, a permanent member of the single market. “But it’s altogether conceivable that they end up being a party that says we have to have another vote on this. They will arrive undoubtedly at one or other of those positions.”
  • Peston is critical of Corbyn’s view that “the state can solve everything”, but isn’t at all surprised by his popularity. “Younger people think, ‘Fuck it, nobody’s running this place for me. And capitalism is shit, it’s doing nothing for me because when am I ever going to get any capital?’ So, it’s not surprising in those circumstances that they then say, ‘We want a public sector, state-based solution of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn is offering’.”
anonymous

Protesters Across Europe Clash With Police Over COVID-19 Lockdowns : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...police-over-covid-19-lockdowns

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Anger at restrictions imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic swept into the streets of Europe on Saturday.German police used water cannons, pepper spray and clubs on protesters rallying over the coronavirus lockdown in the town of Kassel in central Germany where demonstrators numbered some 20,000. Protests against government measures to rein in the pandemic were also reported in Austria, Britain, Finland, Romania and Switzerland.
  • Germany faces a surge of COVID-19 infections as a more contagious variant of the virus has spread. Experts say it highlights the need to accelerate vaccinations.But a botched vaccine rollout appears to have deepened distrust against the German government. The suspension of AstraZeneca vaccine was the latest hurdle in Germany's efforts to vaccinate its population of 83 million.
  • After a three-day pause in using AstraZeneca, Germany is now trying to right the course.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But it didn't stop thousands of people attending anti-lockdown demonstrations in London on Saturday.
  • Britain's speedy vaccine rollout — it was the first in the world to administer a fully tested vaccine — has been a surprise success for the government of Boris Johnson, who has received heavy criticism for his response to the virus.
  • "at the start of the pandemic Germany was a global model for how to manage it." But a year into it, the opposite appears to the case. Just 8.5% of Germans received their first shot, as of Friday, far behind other nations including the U.S. and the U.K.
  • In Hyde Park, police were forced back into their vans as demonstrators lobbed bottles and cans at them. The BBC reported that few protesters appeared to be wearing masks. London Metropolitan Police said 36 people had been arrested during the rallies, most of them involving violations of COVID-19 regulations.
  • The protests came the same day as 60 members of parliament urged the home secretary to ease restrictions on demonstrations. Due to coronavirus restrictions, it's currently unlawful for groups to gather for the purpose of protest. But the measures came under direct assault this week.
  • The outcry over lockdowns has combined with a groundswell of rage at the abduction and death of Sarah Everard, a 33-year old woman who went missing earlier this month while walking home. Her body was found a week later, and a serving police officer has been charged with her murder. Police are under scrutiny for their alleged heavy-handed tactics in breaking up a well-attended outdoor vigil for Everard last Saturday that ignited three nights of protests.
  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson is reportedly planning to introduce a controversial new law banning protests that are noisy or cause "serious annoyance," and would carry a maximum jail term of 10 years.
saberal

Furor in Japanese Town Casts Light on Fukushima's Legacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-fukushima-nuclear-waste.html

Global crisis history

shared by saberal on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It seemed like an easy payday. The Japanese government was conducting a study of potential locations for storing spent nuclear fuel — a review of old geological maps and research papers about local plate tectonics. It put out a call for localities to volunteer. Participating would commit them to nothing.
  • There are few places on earth eager to host a nuclear waste dump. Only Finland and Sweden have settled on permanent repositories for the dregs of their atomic energy programs. But the furor in Suttsu speaks to the deep anxiety that remains in Japan 10 years after an immense earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima Prefecture, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
  • Even before the Fukushima calamity, which led to three explosions and a release of radiation that forced the evacuation of 150,000 people, ambivalence toward nuclear energy was deeply ingrained in Japan.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Still, most Japanese had come to terms with nuclear power, viewing it as an inevitable part of the energy mix for a resource-poor country that must import about 90 percent of the materials it needs to generate electricity.
  • “Utilities and the government and us nuclear experts kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, there won’t be a serious accident,’” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. Now “people think that the industry is not trustworthy and the government that is pushing the industry is not trustworthy.”
  • Almost 2,500 of the huge radioactive tubes are sitting in temporary facilities in Aomori and Ibaraki Prefectures, waiting to be lowered 1,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface into vast underground vaults
  • The central government has tried to incentivize local governments to volunteer for consideration by offering a payment of around $18 million for taking the first step, a literature review. Those that go on to the second stage — a geological study — will receive an additional $64.4 million.
  • The government says it would make small releases over 30 years with no impact on human health. Fishermen in Fukushima say that the plan would wreck their long journey toward recovery.
  • Critics of nuclear power in Japan frequently point to the decades of failure to find a solution to the waste problem as an argument against restarting the country’s existing reactors, much less building new ones.
  • “Every normal person in town is thinking about it,” said Toshihiko Yoshino, 61, the owner of a seafood busines
  • Many in the town were initially opposed, he said during an interview in his office, but the project has delivered handsome returns. The town has spent the profits from selling electricity to pay off debts. T
  • The plan has fiercely divided the town. Reporters have flooded in, putting the discord on national display.
  • In October, an angry resident threw a Molotov cocktail at Mr. Kataoka’s home. It broke a window, but he smothered it without any further damage.
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