Category Archives: Analysis

The white supremacists fully emboldened and energized by Trump

Shaun King reports: On Monday, 30 black students attending a Donald Trump rally at Valdosta State University in rural Georgia were forcefully ejected — simply for being black.

On Tuesday, in Louisville, Kentucky, what happened to young black protestors at another Trump rally wasn’t just racist — it appears to be outright criminal.

While we have already widely reported that white supremacists are openly proclaiming that they are fully emboldened and energized by Trump, the natural progression of their romance with Trump is now on full display.

A man wearing a make America great again hat — thought to be Matthew Heimbach, a leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party — can be seen next to a protestor at the Trump rally in Louisville.
While Trump was giving his typical campaign speech about making America great again, several different predominantly black groups of protestors, who were simply there to hold up signs, began having those signs snatched and getting cursed by the white Trump supporters surrounding them.

We now know that those Trump supporters are open bigots, Neo-Nazi’s, and white supremacists belonging to many different groups including the Traditionalist Worker Party — a well-documented hate group. Their social media profiles are full of Nazi photos, KKK and white supremacist references, and some of the most insulting, despicable hate speech you’ll ever see. [Continue reading…]

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How the precarious economy got built on top of disposable workers

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Louis Hyman writes: In 1967, the celebrated economist and intellectual John Kenneth Galbraith argued in his best-selling book The New Industrial State that “we have an economic system which, whatever its formal ideological billing, is in substantial part a planned economy.” Though postwar American politicians juxtaposed US free markets to the centrally planned economies of the Soviet bloc, Galbraith recognized that the two were more similar than one might have thought. The private planning of corporations, whose budgets were sometimes bigger than those of governments, defined postwar American capitalism, not markets. Markets meant uncertainty, and postwar corporate planners eschewed risk above all else.

After the chaos of depression and war, corporate planners had worked in conjunction with federal policymakers to make a world that promoted stability. None of the top 100 postwar corporations had failed to earn a profit. This profitability was not an accident. Nor was it the result of seizing every lucrative prospect. Rather, it had come from minimizing risk in favor of long-term certainty.

This postwar economy had allowed employees and employers alike to plan for the future, assuring them steady wages and steady profits. Big business had to be big to contain all the functions it would not entrust to the market. Through their own five-year plans, Galbraith argued, corporations “minimize[d] or [got] rid of market influences.” This American planned economy — which had appeared to be the natural future of capitalism in 1967 — began to fall apart only two years later, in 1969, nearly twenty years before the fall of the Soviet Union.

The collapse of this postwar economy came from the overreach of its new corporate form—the conglomerate—whose rise was legitimated by the belief in managerial planning. But its essential moral underpinnings — stability for investment and, especially, stability for work — took more of an effort to dislodge. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, this effort succeeded as corporations began to embrace risk and markets, undoing the stability of the postwar period. By the 1980s, the risk-taking entrepreneur had displaced the safe company man as the ideal employee. [Continue reading…]

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Most of the refugees stuck in Greece are now women and children

The Washington Post reports: In a cold drizzle, Aziza Hussein, a 30-year-old Syrian widow traveling with her four children, stood amid a surge of migrants trapped at the northern Greek border. Her way forward blocked by armed Macedonian troops, police dogs and a razor-wire fence, she stood in the middle of the chaotic scrum of refugees, clutching her 5-year-old son.

“What are we going to do?” she said, shielding her eyes with a trembling hand as she cried.

In recent days, European nations have moved more aggressively than ever to shut down the route used by more than a million migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond. Yet even as they do, the region is confronting a new kind of migrant flow — waves of women and children.

Last year, most of the asylum seekers fleeing to Europe were men, many of them young and single. But in the past several weeks, the balance has shifted, with women and their children, as well as unaccompanied minors, now accounting for roughly 57 percent of asylum seekers. [Continue reading…]

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From astronaut to refugee: How the Syrian spaceman fell to Earth

The Guardian reports: The Neil Armstrong of the Arab world has an office in a ramshackle building in Istanbul’s Fatih or “Little Syria”. Muhammed Faris is a refugee, just like the people milling outside, facing up to the hardest challenge in his life; one that has already seen the roles of fighter pilot, spaceman, military advisor to the Assad regime; protester, rebel and defector.

In Syria, Faris is a national hero, with a school, airport and roads named after him. Medals on the wall of his office honour his achievements as an astronaut (or, strictly speaking, a cosmonaut). Here, hundreds of miles from his birthplace, Aleppo, he campaigns for democratic change in Syria, “through words, not weapons”.

In 1985, he was one of four young Syrian men vying to join the Interkosmos training programme, for allies of the Soviet Union, at Star City just outside Moscow. There had been one Arab in space before, Sultan Bin Salman Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, but never a professional Arab spaceman. Despite the thawing of the cold war, US relations with Iran and its ally Syria were deteriorating. Syrian ties to the Soviet Union were strong: Russia supported Bashar’s father, Hafez Assad, in his rise to power in a coup in 1970. In return, the Soviets were allowed to open a naval base in Tartus, which remains in Russian hands today. [Continue reading…]

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Once I saw light in Iran — now it’s mostly shadows

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Azadeh Moaveni writes: I remember vividly the first time I ever voted in an Iranian election. It was a balmy summer day in June 2001, in the election that won the reformist president Mohammad Khatami a second term. The blue stamp was the first on the voting page of my identification card, and I felt a sharp, exhilarating pride.

That election is much on my mind now, as I watch the results of Friday’s voting with my family, disagreeing on what it might mean for the future.

Back in 2001, Iran was heading down an irrevocable path toward internal reform, a process untainted by any Western intrusion, with citizens and progressive-minded leaders showing the way. Those leaders seemed, at the time, as exciting as Vaclav Havel and the revolutionary cleric Musa al-Sadr rolled into one. Elections felt — unlike the vote this past weekend — full of consequence, a genuine chance to recast political power rather than an exercise in slightly recalibrating it.

Tehran then was a naïve young intellectual’s paradise. There were Islamist reformers and secular reformers, women’s rights campaigners who went door to door in villages, and urban activists working to save everything from the Iranian cheetah to the rapidly evaporating Lake Urmia. You could sit at the feet of an ayatollah in the morning and hear a Koran-backed strategy for gender equality; by afternoon, you could be with the radical student opposition in a decaying house in the center of the city, still strewn with shredded documents removed from the United States embassy during the 1979 hostage-taking. There were literary readings almost every night, and subversive theater that lampooned the system, using metaphors from baseball to Moliere.

The reformists in those days were punchy; they invoked Karl Popper, and said one day freedom would come to Iran, and we would all support the Palestinians and thumb our noses at the West and be a beacon of progress for the rest of the Middle East, which in those days was a political wasteland, the kind of place that “didn’t have politics.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s lack of confidence in Arab countries

Semih Idiz writes: Speaking a few days after Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir put to rest speculation that Turkey and his country were preparing for a ground operation in Syria, [Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu made several remarks that are bound to go down badly in Moscow and Tehran, suggesting that Ankara is betting on a defeat of the Syrian regime and its principal allies Russia and Iran, much like the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He also said Turkey would not actively intervene in Syria because it was not confident of support from Arab countries, citing the condemnation by the Arab League of the deployment of Turkish troops in Bashiqa near Mosul on Dec. 3.

Davutoglu’s remarks revealed that the Arab League’s reaction to the Bashiqa deployment, the complaint lodged at the UN Security Council by the Iraqi government and the lack of support from Arab countries for this deployment still rankle in Ankara.

Jubeir told Agence France-Presse on Feb. 18 that any special forces sent by Saudi Arabia to Syria would only fight the Islamic State, underlining that they would not get involved in unilateral operations against the Syrian regime unless an international coalition was established for this purpose. Jubeir’s remark deflated growing expectations in some quarters of the Islamist and pro-government Turkish media that Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with their own “coalition of the willing,” were preparing to intervene in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Ideological forces and divisions growing across China

Taisu Zhang writes: From the early 1980s to the 2000s, democracy, the rule of law, and free market reform were the political lingua franca not merely of most Chinese intellectuals, but also of most business leaders, and even some officials, who paid at least regular lip service — and probably more than that — to these aspirational ideals. During this period, Chinese elites appeared to share the consensus that China should, in a word, Westernize. To a large extent, both the New Left and neo-Confucianism were intellectual backlashes against this consensus, driven partly by perceived incompatibilities between Western thought and Chinese socioeconomic and political realities; partly by frustration at (perceived) Western hostility and ideological discrimination towards China; and partly by the nationalist urges that came naturally with economic takeoff.

More recently, these movements have shown signs of convergence. Neo-Confucianism appears to be latching on to New Leftism, and not without reciprocity from the leftist camp. Several prominent scholars, particularly Sun Yat-sen University’s Gan Yang, now self-identify as both leftist and Confucian. The linchpin of that joint-identity is the strong nationalism shared by both ideological camps, which allows these scholars to argue that resources from “traditional culture” should play a prominent role in the crusade against Western liberalism — if not as a necessary component of national identity, then at least as an ideological alternative to Western intellectual hegemony.

Recent statistical studies suggest that these trends go well beyond the sheltered confines of China’s top universities and halls of power. An oft-quoted 2015 paper by Harvard and MIT researchers, for example, found that Chinese Internet users have largely coalesced around two poles: a “Leftist-Confucian” pole that advocates an expansive socialist state, limited civil rights, aggressive foreign policy, and some rehabilitation of traditional culture; and a “Western liberal” — or “rightist,” if one prefers that term — pole that supports free market principles, constitutional democracy, civil rights, international cooperation, and some hostility towards traditional culture. The high levels of homogeneity within these camps suggest, moreover, that ideological awareness and commitment is already quite deep, and deepening, across the board.

Liberal-leftist conflicts now seem to color and shape the online population’s consumption of almost any popular news item, ranging from major geopolitical issues–such as China’s newly assertive foreign policy in the South China Sea — to minor public scandals, such as a recent administrative conflict at Sun Yat-sen University, in which a junior faculty member accused Gan Yang of blocking his promotion path, and physically assaulted him.

Of course, there are other possible explanations for why these nationalist movements gained force. Some might argue that they simply took advantage of China’s growing social and economic problems over the past decade, in particular skyrocketing inequality. A more sympathetic take might be that they actually offer potential solutions to some of these problems – by promoting, for example, a group-oriented social morality that helps alleviate the urban economy’s apparent lack of social trust. Others might argue that they represent the kind of intellectual self-reflection and anxiety that comes naturally after societies reach a basic level of economic prosperity, and are therefore a kind of middle income nationalism.

Whatever its causes, the current ideological landscape likely has serious consequences for Chinese policymaking: ideological resurgence dramatically alters the social and political landscape in which the party-state operates. The sources of legitimacy are very different in a pragmatically materialist society than in an ideologically charged and polarized one. Whereas robust economic growth was the key to popular support in the former, it is probably insufficient, and perhaps not even necessary, in the latter. At the moment, it’s profoundly uncertain which side — liberals, leftists, or cultural conservatives — will eventually gain the upper hand in these ideological wars. If one side does emerge on top, the government may find itself forced, or at least strongly incentivized, to seek sociopolitical legitimacy via redistributionist policies, civil rights reform, or perhaps a full-scale swing towards some reconstructed notion of traditional cultural values. This could be either a curse or a blessing: it might force the party-state into uncomfortable ideological positions, but it could also provide alternative sources of social support in times of economic or geopolitical turmoil. [Continue reading…]

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Riyadh’s wrath towards Lebanon

Alex Rowell writes: Beginning with its surprise suspension of $4 billion in pledged aid to the Lebanese army and Internal Security Forces on February 19, Saudi Arabia has undertaken an extraordinary set of punitive measures against Lebanon and Lebanese nationals, including warning its own citizens against traveling to the country (a step later emulated by the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait); designating several Lebanese companies and individuals as “terrorists;” and firing at least 90 Lebanese expatriates from their jobs in the Kingdom.

Most recently, speculation has mounted that Saudi and other Gulf states could also withdraw their deposits in Lebanon’s central bank (said to amount to around $900 million out of Lebanon’s total foreign reserves of over $37 billion), while Saudi sources told NOW investment from the Kingdom in Lebanon had likely ceased already.

“I’m sure a Saudi businessman, even without receiving a telephone call from his government […] is very much reluctant to invest more in Lebanon right now,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a veteran Saudi journalist and former advisor to then-ambassador Prince Turki al-Faisal.

Officially, the trigger for this sudden deterioration in Riyadh-Beirut ties was the refusal by Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil to sign a recent Arab League statement condemning Iran and Hezbollah in the wake of the January attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran. The anti-Hezbollah March 14 coalition subsequently blamed the loss of Saudi’s $4 billion donation on the Party of God, which it accused of forcing its ally Bassil’s hand. Hezbollah has substantially escalated its rhetoric in general against the Kingdom in recent weeks, with leader Hassan Nasrallah calling it a “takfiri and terrorist” state and mass-murdering agent of Western imperialism and Zionism in a January speech, drawing repeated chants of “Death to the Saud family!” from the audience. Responding to calls for an apology to Saudi Friday, Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said it was Saudi who ought to apologize to Lebanon: “Saudi Arabia is the one that attacked us, we did not attack it.” [Continue reading…]

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As Europe falls apart, America clowns around

Fred Hiatt writes from Adasevci, Serbia: It is hard to watch the desperate, dignified families huddling around the phone-charging stations in the government shelter in this Balkan village as the clownish spectacle of a presidential campaign unfolds at home.

Foot soldiers of misery, they tumble out of buses and their first request is not for water, food or diapers. They have been on the move for weeks, in some cases months, and they need to connect — with relatives they’ve left behind and may never see again, with comrades who can relay rumors on the dangers of the road ahead.

They are escaping the wreckage of entire countries. A million have washed into Europe in the past year, and another million are on the threshold. The continent’s leaders see the mass migration as their starkest test since World War II. Far-right xenophobic parties are on the rise. Longtime commitments to free speech, tolerance and open borders are eroding. Many of the leaders despair at the absence of U.S. leadership and the rise of Russian meddling.

Whatever your politics, you cannot fail to grasp that the problems are deadly serious, and any remedies complex and elusive. Meanwhile, the Republican presidential debates unfold like some grotesque game of playground taunting, with real problems, to the extent they are discussed at all, presented as amenable to easy solution. [Continue reading…]

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Bernie Sanders might be discouraging his own supporters from voting

Jake Flanagin writes: Voters go to the polls for the issues they care about most — right?

For Bernie Sanders, things may not be so simple. The Vermont senator’s campaign to highlight income inequality and the pervasive influence of Big Money in politics may be inadvertently suppressing the very votes he needs to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary.

Adam Seth Levine, an assistant professor of government at Cornell University and author of American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015), thinks that Sanders’s twin themes might actually be discouraging Americans in “the broad middle class” from participating in politics altogether. [Continue reading…]

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Andrew Bacevich: Donald Trump and the remaking of America

As a child of the 1980s, certain touchstones, figures, and moments are seared into my brain: Pac-Man and Michael Jackson, the personal computer, Yuppies, crack hysteria, AIDs, the Challenger disaster, and in the waning days of the decade, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two newsmakers also stand out in my mind. From my local area, there was Mafioso John Gotti, the “Teflon Don,” who always seemed to be mugging for the camera and beating the rap. On the national front, there was Ronald Reagan, the “Teflon president,” who slipped and slid (and maybe slept) through one scandal after another: the Iran-Contra Affair, influence-peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development , the Ill Wind Pentagon fraud scandal, Sewergate at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Inslaw Affair, and so on.

Something else stands out from those years, a commercial that always seemed to be playing on TV, perhaps even between stories about the two Teflon newsmakers. It began with a team of horses charging through the night pulling a carriage. As the coach comes to a stop, a clone of Henry VIII steps forth, his eyes wide, his mouth open, awed by the utter 1980s opulence arrayed before him. “You’re the king, you’re the king of the castle,” sings a woman with a cruise-ship-quality voice. “Trump Castle, hotel and casino, and baby, baby, do we know how to treat a king!” What follows is a barrage of a montage: a tux-clad maître d’, Vegas-style showgirls, a cork popping from a bottle of champagne. And then Henry’s back. “Now this is a castle!” he booms, his arms lifted to the sky as the camera pans to take in the gaudy “elegance” of Donald Trump’s Atlantic City pleasure palace.

For decades, that commercial, or at least the horrible jingle sung by Trump’s sequin-clad chanteuse, never quite left my brain. Still, who could have imagined that the man who sired that ad would emerge as a “serious” presidential candidate of the party of the Teflon president and prove to be, at least to this moment, more resilient, more Teflonesque, no matter what he says or does, than Dutch Reagan and John Gotti combined? What started as a joke has become a disaster-in-the-making and the wink offered by a tiara-wearing cocktail waitress at that ad’s end has taken on a new resonance for me.

Trump’s Castle was rebranded out of existence in the 1990s and The Donald’s Atlantic City empire — the Trump Taj Mahal (now owned by activist investor Carl Icahn), Trump Plaza, and the Trump Marina (the old Castle) — crumbled. But Trump himself has somehow emerged stronger than ever. The man who sought to lure all aspiring monarchs to A.C. (“welcome to a kingdom where everybody’s treated like a king”) has whipped up a heady mix of xenophobia, political bromides, and so-light-it-floats policy proposals into a movement. Call it Trumpism, or maybe even Trumpismo. And should he ride this populist wave of fear and loathing to the Republican nomination for president, the American political system will never be the same — so says TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich whose monumental new book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, is due out this April. If the Teflon doesn’t wear thin soon, you might want to start preparing yourself for this once-improbable candidate to become, as Bacevich suggests, America’s very own Juan Perón, though he might prefer to be called the king of the castle. Nick Turse

Don’t cry for me, America
What Trumpism means for democracy
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well. Should he prevail in November, his election will alter its very fabric in ways likely to prove irreversible. Whether Trump ever delivers on his promise to “Make America Great Again,” he is already transforming American democratic practice.

Trump takes obvious delight in thumbing his nose at the political establishment and flouting its norms. Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.

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The megacities most endangered by climate change are doing the least about it

Lucien Georgeson and Mark Maslin write: Cities across the world are increasingly at risk from climate change. People living in extreme poverty are especially vulnerable, both because global warming will tend to hit developing countries the hardest, and because they have less money to throw at the problem.

We used newly-available data to investigate how cities are responding to climate change and whether resources are being allocated efficiently or fairly. We expected there to be differences in spending between rich and poor. But we did not expect them to be so vast, with New York for instance spending more than £190 (US$260) per person to protect its people and infrastructure from the impact of climate change, while Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa spends less than £5 ($7).

It seems the amount spent on climate adaptation is driven more by the amount of wealth at risk rather than the number of vulnerable people. [Continue reading…]

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Barack Obama’s broken nuclear promise

Jared Keller writes: In the early days of his presidency, during a visit to Prague’s Hradčany Square, Barack Obama launched what observers saw as a centerpiece of his foreign policy: a doctrine for a nuclear free world. “The Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not,” President Obama announced, pointing out the paradoxical twist of the modern nuclear dilemma — as the threat of global nuclear war has subsided, the risk of a singular nuclear attack has only intensified.

“More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build, or steal one,” Obama continued. “Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.”

Taken in the context of his other campaign promises — the closure of Guantanamo, (which has only truly blossomed in the twilight hours of his presidency) and the end of the two costly wars he inherited — Obama’s nuclear promise seemed both heroic and unimpeachable, especially given its tacit support by past foreign policy luminaries. Mere months after his Prague address, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — a symbolic endorsement of his nascent doctrine — with the Nobel Committee specifically citing the “special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Obama used the moment to make the case for “just war” in the modern geopolitical stage: “We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” [Continue reading…]

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Mapped: Russian airstrikes in Syria post-cease-fire

The Washington Post reports: Russian airstrikes continued in Syria despite a shaky truce between factions fighting on the ground, according to a report published Monday. Though said to be hitting terrorist factions, some strikes have reportedly struck U.S.-backed opposition groups.

The report, written by the Institute for the Study of War, compiles data based on open-source data including “local Syrian activist networks, Syrian state-run media, and statements by Russian and Western officials.”

According to the report, there was a lull in strikes Saturday — the day the cessation of hostilities was supposed to go into affect — but they began again in earnest Sunday. In the hours leading up to the pause, reports on the ground indicated that there were more than 100 airstrikes in northern Aleppo as Russian and Syrian government forces attempted to consolidate last-minute gains. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas said to have tortured and executed one of its commanders

The New York Times reports: The death of Mahmoud Ishtiwi had all the trappings of a telenovela: sex, torture and embezzlement in Gaza’s most venerated and secretive institution, the armed wing of Hamas.

Mr. Ishtiwi, 34, was a commander from a storied family of Hamas loyalists who, during the 2014 war with Israel, was responsible for 1,000 fighters and a network of attack tunnels. Last month, his former comrades executed him with three bullets to the chest.

Adding a layer of scandal to the story, he was accused of moral turpitude, by which Hamas meant homosexuality. And there were whispers that he had carved the word “zulum” — wronged — into his body in a desperate kind of last testament.

His death has become the talk of the town in the conservative quarters of Gaza, the Palestinian coastal territory, endlessly discussed in living rooms, at checkpoints and in cabs. But to astute Gaza observers, this was more substantive than a soap opera.

Mr. Ishtiwi, who is survived by two wives and three children, was not the first member of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, to be killed by his own. What was unprecedented was the way his relatives spoke out publicly about it. [Continue reading…]

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How much change do Iranians really want?

Hooman Majd writes: Wash, rinse, repeat. If you’re a politician in Iran running for election or re-election, your best bet is to have the endorsement of Khatami. Mohammad Khatami, that is. In another era, Khatami was twice elected president, but today he is banned from leaving the country and his name and face are banned from the domestic media. No matter, his hands suffice these days: Election posters for the Reform and moderate list of candidates running for parliament last week showed only them, recognizable from the ring on his finger. People knew what that meant. Simultaneously, a reminder that he was backing the candidates and a “bilakh” (the finger) by the Reformists to those who insist he is so dangerous that his very features must remain hidden from the public.

Iranians are good at giving the finger: They collectively raised it almost three years ago, too. The same Khatami, only days before the 2013 presidential election — enough time for a message to register, but not enough time for hard-liners to counter it — endorsed the lesser-known Hassan Rouhani and urged the electorate to make their voices heard. They followed, if only to give the finger to those, inside and outside Iran, who claim Iranian elections don’t matter. This time, he endorsed a long list of candidates — whose names would have to be handwritten on ballots by voters — via video on the popular messaging app Telegram. To be safe, the video was also uploaded to YouTube, which is censored in Iran but available to those who want to access it via VPN. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There was always something unclean (haram) about certain members of parliament. Members who Iranians and outsiders alike call hard-liners, some who even threatened Rouhani’s Cabinet members — not with censure for making a nuclear deal with the West, but with death, buried in concrete, as one member of parliament, perhaps channeling Tony Soprano, suggested, and not in jest. As of this writing and where the vote count stands, parliament appears to have been washed and rinsed of that particular stain. Representing Tehran province, which has 30 seats in the parliament, the hard-liners have all but disappeared. There will be quite a few left in the body, of course, but they are somewhat defanged, if not fully declawed. And as with any bad stain, repeated washing and rinsing will eventually fade even the most stubborn. That is what voters seem to want, judging by how they also approached voting for the other state body — the Assembly of Experts. [Continue reading…]

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Half of the Earth’s surface and seas must be preserved for nature, or humanity will have no future

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Edward O. Wilson writes: Unstanched haemorrhaging has only one end in all biological systems: death for an organism, extinction for a species. Researchers who study the trajectory of biodiversity loss are alarmed that, within the century, an exponentially rising extinction rate might easily wipe out most of the species still surviving at the present time.

The crucial factor in the life and death of species is the amount of suitable habitat left to them. When, for example, 90 per cent of the area is removed, the number that can persist sustainably will descend to about a half. Such is the actual condition of many of the most species-rich localities around the world, including Madagascar, the Mediterranean perimeter, parts of continental southwestern Asia, Polynesia, and many of the islands of the Philippines and the West Indies. If 10 per cent of the remaining natural habitat were then also removed – a team of lumbermen might do it in a month – most or all of the surviving resident species would disappear.

Today, every sovereign nation in the world has a protected-area system of some kind. All together the reserves number about 161,000 on land and 6,500 over marine waters. According to the World Database on Protected Areas, a joint project of the United Nations Environmental Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, they occupied by 2015 a little less than 15 per cent of Earth’s land area and 2.8 per cent of Earth’s ocean area. The coverage is increasing gradually. This trend is encouraging. To have reached the existing level is a tribute to those who have led and participated in the global conservation effort.

But is the level enough to halt the acceleration of species extinction? Unfortunately, it is in fact nowhere close to enough. The declining world of biodiversity cannot be saved by the piecemeal operations in current use alone. The extinction rate our behaviour is now imposing on the rest of life, and seems destined to continue, is more correctly viewed as the equivalent of a Chicxulub-sized asteroid strike played out over several human generations.

The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To those who feel content to let the Anthropocene evolve toward whatever destiny it mindlessly drifts, I say please take time to reconsider. To those who are steering the growth of reserves worldwide, let me make an earnest request: don’t stop, just aim a lot higher. [Continue reading…]

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‘We know what the U.S. can do with bombs,’ a Libyan student said. ‘What else can you do?’

In a 12,000-word two-part report for the New York Times on the U.S. intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it, Jo Becker and Scott Shane write: President Obama has called failing to do more in Libya his biggest foreign policy lesson. And Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United Nations during the revolution, is deeply troubled by the aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only “300 miles from Europe,” a refugee crisis that “is a human tragedy as well as a political one” and the destabilization of much of West Africa.

“You have to make a moral choice: a blood bath in Benghazi and keeping Qaddafi in power, or what is happening now,” Mr. Araud said. “It is a tough question, because now Western national interests are very much impacted by what is happening in Libya.”

It was late afternoon on March 15, 2011, and Mr. Araud had just left the office when his phone rang. It was his American counterpart, Susan E. Rice, with a pointed message.

France and Britain were pushing hard for a Security Council vote on a resolution supporting a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from slaughtering his opponents. Ms. Rice was calling to push back, in characteristically salty language. Continue reading →

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