Links I liked

Food Supply and tourism have been two of the many flows (of goods and people) badly hit by Covid19. And who better than Michael Pollan and Chris de Bellaigue to give us the lowdown on this – Pollan with a devastating story about the health of the meat-processing industrial workers in the New York Review of Books which has shades of Upton Sinclair about it; and de Bellaigue with an article in The Guardian about the serious consequences for the livelihoods of local people of the silence which has descended on many tourist hot-spots.

The World Economic Forum got into the act with this typically glossy collection of pieces about the pandemic’s “Challenges and Opportunities” 

And TNI did typically better with this little book about the role played by big finance in exacerbating climate breakdown, along with innovative micro and macro level solutions for building a green, just and democratic finance sector fit for the future

Podcasts and Videos     

LRB’s Talking Politics, with David Runciman, has been running podcasts with discussions about what changes Covid19 might cause

And BBC Radio 4 has a series called Rethink which is exploring that same issue. Their first episode had a short session with the Pope but I wasn’t too impressed with the first full episode this morning – which includedTony Blair, Kevin Rudd and other political leaders

The Democracy in Movement by 2025 (Diem25) have also been running a video series (called “Another Now”) on Covid19 which brings much more interesting characters – such as Anthony Barnett who recently produced Out of the Belly of Hell about the stepping stones of the past 50 years.

The episode with Barnett, Rosemary Bechtler and Yanis Varoufakis was one of the best bits of viewing I’ve seen – with Barnett arguing strongly that four of the forces his extended essay refers to could bring a new “humanisation” which has so far been lacking. Varoufakis was more sceptical, maintaining that what was need was a programme on which countries and parties could agree….

Previous posts have referred to the notion of “critical junctures” – a phrase which pops up in these discussions with the question on everyone’s lips being whether in fact we are living through such a turning point which will see significant change in our lifetime.

Humanity at the moment seems more like the famous frogs being slowly boiled in water and not noticing any significant change…..

In the last few days, I’ve been making progress on the book I’ve been trying to put together on “the global crisis” (however defined) – incorporating key points from Barnett’s essay. A crucial question is what we are going to do about the multinational company which, for the past 50 years, has been allowed to fixate only the interests of shareholders – at the expense of the interests of employees and wider society. The prestigious British Academy is currently exploring that issue – under the chairmanship of Colin Mayer who has the gem of a presentation here (text can be read here)

My faithful readers will know that the British Labour Party, having heavily lost the December election, selected a new Leader in April – who was previously the party’s Brexit spokesman. He has just been presented with the result of an internal inquiry which was carried out on the handling of the election. It’s a fairly savage indictment – using phrases such as “toxic atmosphere” – and its 150 pages can be read in full here

The last post contained an updated list of useful journals which included quite a few which hadn’t figured in the previous list of 3 years ago. One was a leftist journal called Soundings whose current issue runs an interesting article about the New Left in Britain

For those who missed the Progressive Governance Conference last week, here’s one of the youtube highlights – Adam Tooze

I generally don’t give the current incumbent of the US Presidency any air time and would reckon that nothing would shock us about his behaviour but an article in NYRB has me very concerned  

The Watergate scandal left many Americans wondering if they could ever trust their government again. In October 1978, hoping to restore public confidence in federal institutions, Congress created new mechanisms for oversight and new agencies to administer them, including the Office of Government Ethics, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

It further established a cadre of inspectors general at large federal agencies. Public servants like me who have worked in these agencies or inspector general offices think of 1978 as the 1776 of our anticorruption work.

Jimmy Carter, who signed the Inspector General Act into law, saw the new inspectors general as a tool to “root out fraud and abuse.” As his chief domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat later put it, “For him, Watergate was not simply the break-in and the cover-up. It was the abuse of power, the misuse of the IRS and the CIA against domestic enemies.”

If Donald Trump’s goal is to abuse power, he may have special cause to fear the seventy-four inspector general offices. They investigate wrongdoing and audit the performance of federal agencies and government programs to detect problems or identify systemic risks that could harm the public. They are supposed to be nonpartisan and independent; as a line of defense against the various forms of corruption that can infect government agencies, they have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. But that tradition is being tested as Trump seeks to gain control over these watchdogs.

The article goes on to record the scale of firings there have been