1. The
Prince and the President: Khashoggi Case Raises Saudi-Turkey Tensions
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have until now kept relations cordial in the interest of stability.CreditCreditKayhan Ozer/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images
The New York Times Oct. 11, 2018
ANKARA,
Turkey — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has long cast himself as a
champion of the Arab Spring uprisings and the political Islamists who once
seemed poised to ride them to power.
Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia anchors the opposite camp in an
ideological battle raging across the Middle East: the anti-Islamist strongmen
who quashed the revolts.
The
two leaders, each the head of a major regional power, have until now kept their
relations cordial in the interest of stability. But over the past week,
tensions between them have erupted over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and
Washington Post columnist who vanished after entering the Saudi Consulate in
Istanbul nine days ago.
Mr.
Erdogan has repeatedly challenged Saudi Arabia to explain Mr. Khashoggi’s
disappearance, while Turkish officials say they have video and audio evidence
proving he was killed, and have unleashed a stream of leaks suggesting that the
royal court ordered it. The crown prince and his spokesmen have insisted,
without providing evidence, that Mr. Khashoggi left the consulate freely,
professing that they, too, are worried about him.
The
dispute pits two staunch, headstrong nationalists against each other — both
with ambitions to reshape their region. They also share an aversion to public
criticism and a history of refusing to back down from a fight.
“These
are two people who each think he is the most important person in the Muslim
world,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who
studies both countries. “Ego is a factor on both sides.”
On
Thursday, there were signs that the two leaders were looking for a way out. Mr.
Erdogan’s office announced that he had agreed to a Saudi request to form a
joint “working group” that will examine Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.
Certainly,
each man has much to lose.
Mr.
Erdogan is struggling to manage a teetering economy and his entanglement in
war-torn Syria. He can ill afford a new battle with a deep-pocketed regional
power like Saudi Arabia.
For
Prince Mohammed, the affair threatens to severely damage the image of moderate
reformer that he has worked for years to cultivate. Eager to diversify the
Saudi economy before it runs out of oil, he has courted Washington, Wall
Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood with promises to open up and modernize the
kingdom.
The
prince has already endured his share of criticism in the West for leading
a devastating war in Yemen, temporarily detaining the prime minister of
Lebanon, and locking up hundreds of businessmen in a luxury hotel
on suspicion of corruption. If he is held responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s
disappearance — and perhaps death — that could strengthen domestic enemies
bruised by his swift rise to power.
Internationally,
it is already undermining his courtship of Western visitors and investors.
Several participants said Thursday that they were dropping out of an investment
conference known as Davos in the Desert that the prince is hosting this month
in Riyadh.
“His
credibility in the West and in the U.S. is at stake,” said Kristian Coates
Ulrichsen, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice
University. “The credibility gap is going to be huge, and the Saudi boosters in
D.C. are going to find it extremely difficult to portray the image that they
were generally quite successful in trying to push.”
2. Climate change will make the next global crash the worst
The storm clouds are gathering, but the world’s economies now have far fewer shelters from disaster than they did in 1929
The Guardian 11
Oct 2018
Illustration:
Eva Bee
Late
last month Indonesia was hit by a devastating
earthquake and tsunami that left thousands of people dead and missing. This
week the International Monetary Fund arrived in the country to hold its annual
meeting on the island of Bali. On the day when the IMF issued a warning about trouble ahead
for the global economy, the latest report from the UN’s
intergovernmental panel on climate change said the world had only a dozen years
left to take the steps necessary to prevent a global warming catastrophe. The
message is clear for those willing to hear it: get ready for a time when
economic failure combines with ecological breakdown to create the perfect
storm.
Even
without the added complication of climate change, the challenge facing the
finance ministers and central bank governors gathered in Bali would be
significant enough. The IMF has cut its forecast for global growth, but the
chances are that next year will be a lot worse than is currently forecast. The
risks, the IMF says, are skewed to the downside. You bet they are.
Here’s
a brief checklist. For the past 10 years, the world economy has been surviving
on a diet of low interest rates and money creation by central banks, but that
stimulus is now being gradually withdrawn. In the United States, growth has
been further pumped up by Donald Trump’s tax cuts for individuals and
companies, but only temporarily. The impact will start to fade next year as
higher interest rates start to bite. Trump is already berating the Federal
Reserve, America’s central bank, for increasing borrowing costs.
In
Europe, a colossal row is brewing between Italy’s
populist government and the fiscal conservatives at the European commission
because the budget proposed by Rome runs completely counter to the EU’s fiscal
rules. Officials in Brussels are more worried about Italy than they are about
Brexit, and with good reason. Italy’s banks are awash with bad debts and could
not survive the sort of financial crisis that appears to be in prospect. It is
a much bigger country than Greece, and far too big for Europe to bail out if
the worst happens.
The
standoff between Rome and Brussels is happening as Europe’s growth rate has
started to slow. One reason is that its export-driven economies are already
being hurt by the early skirmishes in Trump’s trade war. As the IMF noted this
week, protectionism is a key risk to global growth.
China,
the world’s second biggest economy, has always been Trump’s main target, and it has been
affected by new US tariffs, as its domestic economy was already slowing.
Elsewhere, in the past few months the IMF has been called in to help Argentina, there has been a run
on the Turkish lira, and inflation in Venezuela threatens to hit
Weimar Germany-style levels.
In
better times, oil-rich Venezuela might have been well placed to benefit from
the rising price of crude oil, which is heading steadily towards $100 a barrel.
Every big recession in the global economy has been prefigured by a jump in the
cost of crude, which makes it somewhat curious that share prices on Wall Street
are so high. Traditionally, stock markets anticipate trouble, but the mood
currently is to dismiss higher interest rates, rising oil prices, Italy and
trade wars as somehow unimportant. Ominously, next year is the 90th anniversary
of the Wall Street Crash. The Great Depression
that followed that market meltdown led to new economic thinking. It spawned
full employment policies, increased spending on welfare, and a new set of
multilateral organisations.
Turn
the clock forward to 2018 and the parallels are obvious. International
cooperation has broken down, economic failure has damaged mainstream political
parties, and belief in the invisible hand of the free market has been
shattered. But the threat posed by global warming means the current crisis of
capitalism is more acute than that of the 1930s, because all that was really
required then was a boost to growth, provided by the New Deal, cheap money,
tougher controls on finance and rearmament. In today’s context, a plain vanilla
go-for-growth strategy would be suicidal.
Even
so, there are countries that are prepared to self-immolate their economies in
pursuit of growth at all costs. America is one. Australia appears to be another.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who say there will be a future for
the planet only if the idea of growth is ditched altogether. Politically, this
has always been a hard sell, and has become even more difficult now that
populations in the west have experienced an entire decade of flatlining living
standards.
In
the developing world, the problem has been too little growth rather than too
much. Tackling global population growth is a no-brainer from a climate-change
perspective, and most of the projected increase comes from low-income
countries, most notably in Africa. The reason is simple: poor families have
more children. Birthrates fall as countries become richer.
3. How a homophobic, misogynist, racist ‘thing’ could be
Brazil’s next president
Jair
Bolsonaro is the monstrous product of the country’s silence about the crimes
committed by its former dictatorship
The Guardian 6 Oct 2018
147,591
Jair
Bolsonaro: ‘The content of what he says doesn’t matter – what matters is the
act of saying it.’ Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters
Many
people in Brazil cannot bring themselves to utter the name of the rightwing
extremist expected to win the first round of voting in the country’s presidential election on Sunday. On
social networks, the former army officer Jair
Bolsonaro is often referred to simply as “the thing”.
To
understand why Bolsonaro evokes such dread, consider some of the things he has said in the last few years:
• “They
don’t do anything. I don’t think they’re even good for procreation any more” –
referring to quilombolas, the black descendants of rebel African
slaves.
• “You
can be sure that if I get there [the presidency], there’ll be no money for
NGOs. If it’s up to me, every citizen will have a gun at home. Not one centimetre will be demarcated for indigenous
reserves or quilombolas.”
• “You
won’t change anything in this country through voting – nothing, absolutely
nothing. Unfortunately, you’ll only change things by having a civil war and
doing the work the military regime didn’t do. Killing 30,000, starting with
FHC [former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso]. Killing. If a few innocent
people die, that’s alright.”
Bolsonaro
has also said he will not accept the election result unless he is the winner –
only to backtrack after a negative reaction.
When
president Dilma
Rousseff of the Workers’ party (PT) was forced from office in 2016 through an
impeachment process of dubious legal merit, Bolsonaro viciously dedicated his
vote “to the memory of colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra”. Ustra was one
of the most sadistic torturers and murderers in the military dictatorship that
choked Brazil between 1964 and 1985. He died without answering for his crimes.
For
this election, Bolsonaro’s children and supporters have printed the
torturer’s face on their T-shirts, with the
phrase “Ustra lives!”.
By
celebrating Ustra, Bolsonaro has rekindled the horror of that period. And he
can do it only because Brazil has never punished those who tortured,
kidnapped and killed in the name of the state. Bolsonaro is the monstrous
product of Brazilian democracy’s silence about the crimes committed by its
former dictatorship.
Bolsonaro
embodies the grimmest forces of old and new Brazil
In
August, Ludimilla Teixeira, a black anarchist born in one of the poorest communities
of Salvador, Bahia, created a Facebook page: Women United Against Bolsonaro. The page, which accepts
only female followers, now has almost 4 million of them. A movement grew out of
this group, last week spurring hundreds of thousands of women – and men – on to the streets of Brazil and around the
world. Many carried banners with the slogan and hashtag: #EleNão –
#NotHim. It was the biggest demonstration organised by women in Brazil’s
history.
Famous
Brazilian women recorded videos explaining why #NotHim. Considering everything
the far-right candidate has said in public, such explaining might seem
unnecessary, but this is a feature of today’s Brazil – and today’s world.
Explaining
hasn’t had any effect. Bolsonaro is less a post-truth phenomenon than a
phenomenon of what I call self-truth. The content of what he says doesn’t
matter: what matters is the act of saying it. Aesthetics have replaced ethics.
By saying everything and anything, no matter how violent, he is labelled truthful
or sincere by his voters at a time when politicians are being shunned as frauds
and liars. At the same time, “truth” has become an absolute and a personal
choice. The individual has been taken to a radical extreme.
