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
