US President Obama has been pushing for two free trade agreements: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The trade pacts are incredibly complex and cumbersome and the only way to ensure passage of such bills is to get the US Congress to give up its right to place amendments on each of the trade bills. Such legislation is known as fast-track legislation, or, more formally, Trade Promotion Authority or TPA. Today the Senate refused to grant such authority to the President, largely because Senate Democrats refused to back the President. These Democrats believe that free trade pacts have led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the last thirty years. This vote, if it stands, could mark the end of globalization as supported by the US.
The Pew Research Center has polled Americans about their religious beliefs. Interestingly, the number of Americans who describe their faith as Christian has declined in recent years: 71% describe themselves as Christian as opposed to 76% in 2007. The number of Americans who do not profess a religious faith has increased. The numbers certainly do not resonate with the mainstream media’s characterization of American religious beliefs.
The US is considering whether to test China’s activities in the South China Sea by sending US naval vessels within 12 miles of the reefs upon which China is building up facilities. The challenge would be to see whether China’s activities have led to a Chinese territorial claim to those islands. The US is committed to the idea that the South China Sea is “high sea” and not territorial–a point of view essential to freedom of navigation for all countries using those sea lanes. The Chinese, however, may decide that the reefs are part of Chinese national territory. It will be an interesting confrontation.
“In Amnesty International’s view, the USA is granting what amounts to a de facto amnesty for crimes under international law and has effectively engaged in an executive encroachment on judicial power. This arrogation of judicial function can be seen as a continuation of the Bush administration’s deliberate and calculated removal of the judiciary from any oversight over the secret detentions in question. During the course of these detentions multiple crimes under international law were committed, crimes which the Obama administration continues to insulate from judicial determination of individual criminal responsibility.”
On Monday the US appeared before the UN High Commission on Human Rights and was asked questions about its commitment to human rights given these allegations. The media brief released by the UN on this review of American policy can be accessed here.
Medical scientists have identified a strain of the typhoid bacteria, called H58, that is resistant to most typical antibiotics. Typhoid fever affects about 30 million people a year and, if not treated, can lead to death (25% of untreated patients). The disease is most common in South Asia and Africa and is usually quite debilitating. The drug-resistant bacteria was first identified many years ago, but it is becoming much more prevalent.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, fresh from his recent electoral victory, has decided to move up his proposed referendum on the terms of British participation in the European Union to next year. The move was made to prevent a conflict with the French and German elections scheduled for 2017. Cameron campaigned on renegotiating these four issues:
Give Britain an opt-out from the historic EU ambition to forge an “ever closer union” of the peoples of Europe.
Create safeguards to ensure that changes in the single market cannot be imposed on non-eurozone members by the eurozone.
Tighten access to in-work and out-of-work benefits for EU migrants.
Hand greater powers to national parliaments to block EU legislation.
He is clearly in a stronger position given the outcome of the election and the EU will need to respond to these concerns without jeopardizing its larger mission of a united Europe.
Jeffrey Rothfeder has written an article for the Washington Post entitled “The great unraveling of globalization”. The article details some of the problems of businesses that decided to globalize their operations, as well as the relatively meager returns on globalized investments. The article does a great job of signalling problems, but does not really address the question of what happened to those businesses that did not decide to globalize. Sometimes one has to dance even if the music sucks.
Much attention has been given to the flood of refugees who are crossing the Mediterranean in hopes of a safer life, but the movement of peoples globally is huge. Thousands of Rohingya, Muslims from Myanmar, are feeling that country in hopes of ultimately getting to Australia. They end up either lost at sea or at the mercy of human smugglers in Thailand or Indonesia. One of the unfortunate legacies of the political opening in Myanmar is the open persecution of the Rohingya by Buddhists who regard the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Djibouti is a very small country, but the US, France, Japan, and Germany have military bases there since it is so critically situated in the global petroleum traffic. Now China is building a base there. The move is not the first for China in Africa–it built a military base in Zimbabwe, close to strategic minerals in central Africa, in 2014. The moves signal the quiet rise of China in global affairs. Building and maintaining bases abroad is a profoundly important step and inevitably causes concerns in countries that have similar bases in the world.
NASA has released a composite image of average cloudiness all over the earth. The darker areas average more sunny days and the lighter ones more cloudy days. According to NASA:
…this version of the map shows an average of all of the satellite’s cloud observations between July 2002 and April 2015. Colors range from dark blue (no clouds) to light blue (some clouds) to white (frequent clouds).
North Korea has claimed that it has launched a ballistic missile from a submarine. If true, the test suggests that North Korea has considerably widened its range of delivery to most places in the world. The test does not indicate whether North Korea has developed a miniaturized nuclear warhead to fit on the missile–a very difficult feat. But it does suggest that the current sanctions against North Korea are not discouraging the country from pursuing an active nuclear weapons capability. It is not clear what the next step should be. In many ways, the next steps really depend upon the Chinese reaction to the test.
The US and its allies have been bombing the Islamic State for nine months. The attacks have cost the US about $2 billion and have killed about 8,500 people in the area controlled by the IS. But it is difficult to assess how effective the strikes have been. The military consensus is that the strikes alone cannot really do more than slow down the IS, and the US military is prepared for a long bombing campaign. The Saudi attack on the Houthis in Yemen has diverted some of the bombing capabilities away from the IS so the campaign is at reduced strength.
British voters decided to confound all the pollsters and voted overwhelmingly to keep Prime Minister Cameron and the Conservative Party in power. All talk of a “hung” Parliament disappeared as the Conservatives won an outright majority in Parliament. The big losers were the Labor Party and the UK Independence Party. Curiously, the big winner (aside from the Tories) was the Scottish National Party which only a few months ago lost the referendum to make Scotland independent of the United Kingdom. Now the European Union must brace for the changes in EU policy that Cameron will likely make.
There were four allies in the war against Nazi Germany: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the US. Yet they do not celebrate the end of World War II on the same day. The Russians observe 8 May; the US, France, and Great Britain observe 7 May. The difference is explained by fastidious attention to diplomatic detail, the errors of translation, and the significance of geography for historical memory.
It’s Friday night. Time to kick back.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was able to cobble together a 61 vote coalition in the 120 seat Israeli Knesset at essentially the stroke of midnight. The adamant refusal of the Labor Party to join the coalition diminished the significance of Netanyahu’s Likud Party’s commanding victory in the election 6 weeks ago. The coalition is an odd assortment of parties that really do not have much in common, except for the fact that they represent some of the most extreme views in Israel’s polity. Perhaps the most significant alliance was between Netanyahu’s Party and Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party. That alliance resulted in the appointment of Ayelet Shaked as the Justice Minister who is known for her dismissal of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. In a Facebook Post during the last Gaza War (since taken down), Shaked posted an essay by the late Israeli writer Uri Elitzur which reads in part:
“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
We will see how long this coalition lasts.
A few posts ago, I wrote about the new T-14 Armata Russian tank, reputed to be one of the most cutting edge weapons developed in recent history. Unfortunately, it suffered a very embarrassing moment in the parade in Red Square. I suspect someone will find themselves in Siberia very soon.
Alan Taylor has compiled some large-crowd photographs taken in China. The large-crowd phenomenon is extraordinary, but the Chinese do a brilliant job of orchestrating large crowds in mesmerizing ways. Some of the photos are strikingly beautiful; others are simply awesome.
Tomorrow the British will vote in a general election, but the polls suggest that there will be no clear majority party or coalition in the next Parliament. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it occurs the phenomenon is known as a “hung” Parliament. In the election of 2010 the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a majority coalition fairly quickly even though the coalition was a marriage of very different parties. The speed last time was a function of a clear fear in Great Britain that a hung Parliament would cause great financial distress given the economics of the Great Recession. This time around there a similar sense of urgency doesn’t really exist. So we can watch as the British parties try to come up with a governing majority. Israel has been going through intense bargaining since its general election and the deadline for forming a government there ends at midnight tonight.
For the first time since records have been kept the whole world averaged 400 parts per million Carbon Dioxide, a level long considered to be dangerously high. Parts of the earth’s atmosphere had reached that level in the past, but this time the global average topped 400 ppm. The levels have increased by 120 ppm since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the rate of increase over 2012-2014 was 2.25 ppm, the highest rate ever recorded. In many respects, the planet has now crossed the point of no return: even if emissions of C)2 were to stop completely, the levels would continue to go up for years and will only decline very slowly.
The parliament of Belarus has just passed a law which requires all unemployed persons to pay an annual tax of about $250. The law is designed to prevent “social dependency” and encourage people to find employment and was passed on a vote of 100-2. The interesting aspect of the law is that it is designed to prevent a huge “shadow” economy in which a large number of people are not “officially” working in an attempt to avoid paying taxes.
This post is somewhat arcane and mysterious. It really should not be. The story is actually straightforward: A major bank is convicted of manipulating interest rates at the expense of those who borrowed money at those rates. One of the Commissioners for the Securities and Exchange Commission described the crime in these terms:
“Deutsche Bank’s illegal conduct involved nearly a decade of lying, cheating, and stealing. This criminal conduct was pervasive and widespread, involving dozens of employees from Deutsche Bank offices including New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and London. Deutsche Bank’s traders engaged in a brazen scheme to defraud Deutsche Bank’s counterparties and the worldwide financial marketplace by secretly manipulating LIBOR.[7] The conduct is appalling. It was a complete criminal fraud upon the worldwide marketplace.”
There is a punishment for such fraudulent action in a law called the Securities Offering Reform of 2005: the criminal entity should lose its special status as an offerer of capital and be forced to compete with offerers of capital without a large asset base or highly regarded reputation. Except in this case, the bank is a very large bank (Deutsche Bank) and is not penalized in this fashion because a special waiver is granted to the bank. In fact, no personis the bank is penalized either through jail time or fine.
Just make sure you don’t go for a walk in Baltimore. Or sell open cigarettes in New York City. For those crimes, one will be executed.
Russia has just paraded in public its newest tank, the T-14 Armata, which is designed to replace the current Russian tank, the T-90. Russian tanks, like Russian aircraft, are especially formidable and the Armata is considered to be the equal to the best in the NATO arsenal. The new tank was shown in parades in Moscow celebrating the 70th anniversary of the ending of World War II. Unlike earlier celebrations, many of Russia’s allies in the war are boycotting this year’s celebrations because of Russian actions in Ukraine. The Russian-NATO arms race heats up.
Expo 2015 opened in Milan, Italy on 1 May. The exposition is a celebration of architectural design and culture and shares an incredible legacy with historical world expos including the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Space Needle. There were, however, strong protests in Milan at the extravagance of the expo against the backdrop of the dismal European economy right now. The photographs in the Atlanticare stunning.
Chrystia Freeland is a member of the Canadian Parliament and one of the most perceptive observers of world politics in the world today. She has written an essay with a particularly grim view of the state of the world entitled “The Disintegration of the World.” Interestingly, Freeland emphasizes the role of geopolitics, one of the more traditional approaches to the study of world politics. The underlying source of the pessimism is the stubborn refusal of the global economy to revive itself after the Great Recession.
There has been an incredible controversy in the US in the last few months over the number of people killed by police. Most of us, however, have no basis for assessing whether the number is large or small, although the reported incidents seem especially egregious. When one compares the US to other developed countries, the numbers are simply staggering. We do not have an accurate data base for fatalities caused by police action, but it is possible to make a very rough comparison. The numbers work out this way: in the US, police kill 35.5 people for every one million residents. In comparable countries the numbers are as follows:
Denmark: 11 people — number of people killed per one million residents: .187 people
Sweden: 13 people — .133 people
Norway: 3 people — .060 people
Finland: 2 people — .034 people
Germany: 81 people — .089 people
The Netherlands: 24 people — .137 people
England/Wales: 25 people — .042 people
Tensions in the Baltic Sea between NATO and Russian forces have been growing for some time. The number of military incursions and activities in the region are the highest since the height of the Cold War. There really are no issues at stake in the region, but Russian and NATO forces continue to play cat and mouse games as a way of testing both strength and resolve. Military spending has also been growing dramatically among the countries in the region.
The Italian coast guard rescued almost 6,000 refugees from the Mediterranean last week. There does not seem to be any let up at all in the flow of migrants. Fortunately, the EU has decided not to abandon the refugees, although the EU still has not addressed the issue of what happens to asylum seekers in each European country.
Britain will hold general elections on 7 May and the two favorites, the Tory David Cameron and Labor’s Ed Miliband, are making an all-out effort to win the election. The election will be an important one as the fate of Britain’s role in the European Union seems to be the backdrop of many of the debates. Britain, like most other developed countries, is experiencing an significant widening of the gap between rich and poor, and that issue also pervades many of the discussions.
The Soviet Union employed a strategy called “Russification” in order to unite the many disparate nations comprising the Soviet Union. The process involved moving Russians into the many regions of the Socialist Republics in order to ensure loyalty to Moscow. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, these Russian speaking populations often do not share national loyalties to the newly independent states. These Russian speaking populations have created the problems in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. They are potentially a problem in the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. And the are surfacing as a problem in Kazakhstan.
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