| | | | Despite Brexit Chaos, UK's Democracy Is Working | | | Despite the abject mess Brexit continues to be, Tom McTague writes at The Atlantic that the current machinations are a sign the UK's parliamentary democracy is working: Things are chaotic, yes, but "stand back and a different picture emerges, one that makes more sense, in which the constitution and conventions governing Britain's archaic political system are holding, and pushing the country toward a decision, even if they are being taken to their limits in the heat of the crisis," McTague argues. The Tories who defied Prime Minister Boris Johnson, meanwhile, win high praise from The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum, who writes that the "21 Tory rebels aren't just standing against an ugly legal and economic mess; they also are standing up in favor of constitutional, behavioral and legal norms that they see being broken." | | Too Little, Too Late in Hong Kong? | | | Now that Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has announced she will withdraw the extradition bill that sparked months of protests, consensus among observers is that it won't be enough—and that Hong Kong's fight is about much more. "The reaction of most protesters, especially those who have repeatedly risked ten-year prison sentences for rioting, is likely to be that this concession is 'too little, too late,'" Tom Mitchell writes for the Financial Times, "especially if it is not accompanied by acquiescence to their second demand—a formal judicial inquiry into the government's handling of the crisis and alleged police violence." Lam's "dramatic U-turn drew more scepticism than hope," Tony Cheung and Sum Lok-kei write for the South China Morning Post. Sharing those assessments, Yi-Zheng Lian writes ominously in The New York Times of the rising popularity violence enjoys among some demonstrators and concludes that at "this stage, nothing short of the government's addressing the protesters' fifth, and most sweeping, demand—real universal suffrage for both executive and legislative elections—can be enough." | | Piketty: Inequality Is Ideological | | | Thomas Piketty, the French economist of Capital renown, will soon publish a new book, Capital and Ideology (with a French release date this month and an English translation coming in March), and Le Monde has some excerpts. In them, Piketty lays out an argument that inequality is a byproduct of political ideology—in effect, a lack of imagination, as societies cling to the conservative, "proprietarian" view that property rights are sacrosanct and that upsetting their balance (say, with redistribution) is a risk one cannot run. On the contrary, Piketty writes, "human progress is not linear," and alternative systems may well have emerged; today, "real progress in terms of health, education, and purchasing power mask immense inequalities and fragilities," Piketty notes, marking the current era of global political economy as a "hypercapitalist" one. His conclusion: Inequality is, at least in part, a result of how we've ordered things, and we should evolve past the current arrangement. While "proprietarian" ideology may be convincing, it's also "unequal and, in its most extreme and harsh form, aims simply to justify a particular form of social domination." In Piketty's view, we should consider alternatives. | | In Trump's Iran Policy, Israel Supplies the Teeth | | | That's the conclusion of Foreign Policy's Steven A. Cook, who writes that while President Trump has maintained his policy of "maximum pressure" against Iran, Israel is enforcing it on the front lines. Israel has carried out strikes in neighboring Syria, and it exchanged fire with Iran-backed Hezbollah on the Lebanese border over the weekend.
The Guardian's Simon Tisdall warns that Israel risks becoming the "fall guy in the wider, undeclared American 'shadow war' with Iran," but Cook sees a US-Iran rapprochement looming: It "seems clear that the trajectory for US-Iran relations is renewed negotiations," he writes. "And for that, all those supporters of engagement have Israel to thank," given the pressure Israel has applied to Iran-backed forces in the region. | | Off Balance in the Trade War | | | Though President Trump recently railed at Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, and blamed less-than-stellar economic forecasts on "badly run and weak companies," Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution offers a rejoinder: that Trump's trade unpredictability, designed to keep Chinese negotiators guessing, has had the same effect on US firms. "Perhaps Trump, the self-proclaimed great negotiator, thinks he gains some leverage by throwing the Chinese off balance," Epstein writes. "But the necessary side-effect of his grandstanding is to throw scads of American companies off balance as well. Now well-run firms all have to guess which way Trump's trade winds will blow." Meanwhile, tariffs are slated to get steeper as the year closes out. As the Peterson Institute for International Economics recently wrote, Trump has stacked up piles of tariffs in a short span of time: US tariffs covered 8.1% of Chinese exports to America in 2017, the Peterson Institute writes, while they now cover 68.5% and will expand to cover 96.8% on Dec. 15, if Trump holds to his announced plans. That will amount to an increase in average US tariffs on Chinese goods from 3.1% in 2017 to 24.3% by 2019's end. | | | | | | |
