Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. October 17, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: First, Fareed gives his take on Iraq's recent elections—and what the US could learn from that country's surprisingly healthy democracy.
"18 years after America's invasion … elections have become routine," Fareed says. "Political parties compete and horse trade, and there is even a fledgling media and judiciary—not quite free and independent by Western standards, but one that is showing some progress. The independent electoral commission, for example, comprised of judges, has been remarkably impartial and effective."
One question lingers, after the recent vote saw Iran-aligned factions lose ground: Will they acknowledge the results as legitimate? After the chaos of Jan. 6, that might sound to Americans like a familiar problem. "The losers should accept their loss and all parties must compromise," Fareed says. "Who could have imagined a decade ago that Iraqi politics might provide some useful lessons for American democracy?"
Next: Why are ports backed up, store shelves empty, and what you can find at the store more expensive? A tangled supply chain is now the biggest story in global economics; Fareed asks Washington Post financial writer David Lynch, who covers trade and globalization, just what is going on.
After that: In the US, "help wanted" signs are everywhere—but no one seems to want the jobs. Why are companies struggling to hire when so many Americans aren't working? Fareed talks with Washington Post economics correspondent Heather Long about America's mysterious labor shortage and how Covid-19 has prompted workers to think differently.
Where is Poland heading? After a controversial court ruling prompted mass protests, Fareed talks with The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum about the country's continuing troubling turn toward illiberal democracy.
If you're a kleptocrat, what's the best place to stash your millions? After the so-called Pandora Papers revealed still more secret money around the world, Fareed talks with Sarah Chayes, journalist and author of "On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake," about how and where money hides—including in a somewhat surprising state in the US.
Finally: Fareed examines what Germany's election results reveal about Europe's future and how the center just might be able to hold.
Climate Change Is a Political Problem At The New York Review of Books, noted climate activist Bill McKibben reviews Saul Griffith's "Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future," which argues we'll do better to save the planet if we skip the small acts (using public transit, buying more sustainably raised fish, etc.) and instead focus on electrifying everything, from cars to home heating and cooling. Half-measures, the argument goes, aren't going to help enough.
Which is all well and good, McKibben writes, but it misses the point: that averting climate disaster is a political enterprise, one that can't succeed if it merely amounts to "repeating rational arguments in the face of vested interests. If you do that, you win the argument but lose the fight, because the fight is about money and power, not reason and evidence." Building consensus and pressuring companies, McKibben argues, is what creates the space for engineering advancements to be put into use. Was the War in Afghanistan Worth It? The US missed many opportunities, and ended many lives, along the way through its unfortunate war in Afghanistan, Christian G. Appy writes for the Boston Review, examining Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." Appy's review amounts to a comprehensive takedown of the war, including its genesis. By the time the war ended, Appy writes, the Taliban were debatably stronger than when it began.
Appy's stark conclusion is that the US "abandoned" Afghans "long before the war was over"—a current sore spot for the US and a focal point in the discussion of what comes next. As Elise Labott writes for Foreign Policy, engaging with the Taliban won't be easy, but the US must talk with its victorious enemy to avoid worse outcomes for Afghans. If Everything Is More Expensive, Fat Paychecks Don't Help The global economy could be entering a "wage-price spiral," The Economist writes, as hourly wages are rising, but so are prices. "To avoid enduring inflation," the magazine writes, "some combination of three things must happen. Firms could absorb higher wages in their margins rather than raising prices. Productivity growth could make higher increases in real-wages sustainable. Or idle workers could return to the labour force, dampening wage growth." With labor participation still low in the US, the magazine suggests policymakers keep a close eye on jobs numbers, especially if wage growth slows. How Watergate Helped Birth the Information Age The 1972–4 Watergate saga happened during a "kind of 'dark ages' of computer history," Chelsea Spencer writes in the current issue of the interdisciplinary MIT journal Grey Room, borrowing a term from computer scientist Severo Ornstein. By virtue of that, Spencer writes, it helped birth the modern information age.
Documents were central—and there were lots of them. Copiers had become available, but digitization and modern computing hadn't yet; as a result, Spencer writes, the Nixon White House was putting massive amounts of information in paper documents and, of course, on tape. Watergate was marked by "messy entanglement of paper flows and magnetic tape at a time when transmitting large stores of information still meant transporting it on physical media," Spencer writes. For some, "Watergate was an unsettling symptom of friction between Americans and their office technologies."
Which is where innovation came in. At the time, the Library of Congress was dabbling in computerized cataloguing and suggested to Watergate's investigators that it might help. It did: Congressional investigators were aided by "a distributed quasi-network of components—an IBM System/370 mainframe (the first model to use virtual rather than physical storage), line printers, punched-card reader, twelve programs written in COBOL, formatting protocols, tape drives, tape disk packs, and microfilm scanners and readers, as well as multiple interlocking forms of expertise (legal, computer systems, and security)—that were spread across Capitol Hill," Spencer writes. During hearings, one prosecutor recalled, newfangled cataloguing helped staff produce newspaper clippings on demand to prod witnesses. That prosecutor would later credit the computer system with writing the committee's final report "for me because we had [it] organize and analyze all of the evidence by subject matter and chronologically."
To Spencer, it was a pivot point in technological history, as Watergate heralded the coalescence "of information itself as a peculiar kind of resource to be managed (or in this case, criminally mismanaged): a source of order and disorder both." |
