For all of Israel’s great achievements in its seven decades of statehood, our country now finds its very future, identity and security severely threatened by the whims and illusions of the ultranationalist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
.. this government has been irrational, bordering on messianic
.. The government realizes that carrying out its one-state plan must entail steps and practices that necessarily clash with Israeli and international law — which is why it has effectively declared war on
- the Supreme Court of Israel,
- the free press and civil society, as well as
- the Israel Defense Forces’ ethical code.
This disrespect for the rule of law permeates other aspects of the government, too. It helps to shield the prime minister, his family and his aides from corruption investigations. Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party recently introduced legislation that would explicitly forbid the police from recommending indictments at the end of high-profile investigations.
.. there is a broad consensus among Israelis that rests on three pillars.
- First and foremost, security comes before everything; every Israeli understands this.
- Second, the unity, solidarity and integrity of the people take priority over the unity of the land — namely, the wish to possess the entirety of our historic homeland.
- Third, the principles of the 1948 Declaration of Independence, which lay out a vision for a democratic Israel based on freedom, justice and peace, are the foundation of our country’s de facto constitution.
.. The entire debate, then, is actually only over the fate of the isolated settlements, fewer than 100 small communities deep in the West Bank, containing around 100,000 settlers. Even if it is not possible to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at this stage — and it probably is not — it is obvious that continued construction in those isolated settlements directly damages Israel’s vital interests... Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition claims to support the three pillars of Israeli consensus but the truth is it is determinedly undermining all three... He prefers a Greater Israel with an Arab majority, violence and division over a united, self-confident Israel with a solid Jewish majority.. He sanctifies the Land of Israel before the People of Israel. And he systematically erodes Israel’s democracy and liberal norms of governance... In the service of this agenda, Mr. Netanyahu elevated fake news, alternative facts and whataboutism into art forms in Hebrew, long before those terms gained any traction in English.
Fascism’s Rising in America Because America Doesn’t Understand Fascism
How History Ends Up Repeating Itself
Fascism is a way to ration a stagnant economy to in-groups. If you understand just one sentence about fascism, let it be that one — because it’s the key. Like everything in life, our love, our fear, our desire, so too, our hate serves a purpose. Fascism exists for a reason: to ration the dwindling fruits of a stagnant economy. Think about it this way: if the harvest suddenly fails, then the crop must be rationed somehow — a way must be found to take from some, and give to others, because markets and prices and so on will begin to leave people hungry. What is that way? Who will get it, and how much?
Well, that way is usually this: blaming a scapegoat for the stagnant economy, for the failed harvest, whether it’s Jews in the 1930s, Muslims and Jews and immgrants today, or virgins and witches in the dark ages. And then therefore excluding those scapegoats from the economy altogether, just as laws were passed to first expropriate, take the possessions of, Jews, and then to push them into ghettoes, then into labour camps, and then, finally, terribly, into
.. Of course, the problem then is that even those chosen few must either dwindle, along with the failed crop, in a vicious circle — or the fascist must declare war, and find someone else’s crop to seize, which is what Germany did. Either way, the point remains.
.. Fascism rations stagnation. It’s so vital I’ll say it again. We have never, ever once seen fascism arising during good times in all of human history because fascism is a way to take from some and give to others — a bad, inhuman, and foolish way to solve a problem: the problem of stagnation, when the harvest begins to fail. But it is a way to solve a problem nonetheless, and until we understand that, we have understood precisely nothing about it at all.
.. The fascist’s hate in this way serves a purpose: it is a social mechanism of rationing in order to solve the problem of stagnation.
.. Myth: our existing institutions will save us from fascism.
Reality: fascism can only arises when those institutions have already failed
.. So the rise of fascism tells us in the strongest terms possible that institutions don’t work anymore—fascism rising is their ultimate failure. That is what we see in America today: an institutional vacuum. Nothing works anymore, does it? Not the law, the media, politics, capitalism, democracy. That is precisely what gave fascism the room, space, fuel, freedom to arise.
Trump Should Give Thanks, Not Take Credit, for Economic Growth
The president’s presence alone can’t explain why the whole world is enjoying growth and booming stock markets
In the year since Donald Trump was elected president, the economy and markets have been on a roll. Stocks have set one record after another, unemployment has dropped sharply and the U.S. enjoyed its strongest six months of economic growth since 2014.
Mr. Trump thinks he knows why: “The reason our stock market is so successful is because of me,” he declared earlier this week.
But Mr. Trump should be giving thanks, not taking credit. The entire global economy is picking up steam, and foreign stocks are outperforming American markets. This suggests the U.S.’s good fortune is due less to Mr. Trump’s presence than to a broader, global trend. Years of highly stimulative monetary policies by central banks have finally overcome various postcrisis headwinds holding back growth.
.. growth in China, the eurozone and Japan this year has exceeded both economists’ expectations and those countries’ long-term potential growth rates.
.. Blue chip shares are up 21% in the U.S. since election day last year, 22% in France, 28% in Germany, 34% in Japan and 26% in emerging markets.
.. So why is the market up so much? The overall economy “was better than markets realized this time last year,” says Charles Himmelberg, Goldman’s co-chief markets economist. “It was a little bit of a happy coincidence that markets started to fully price the strength of that macro data when Trump got elected.”
.. The problem is that pace of growth isn’t sustainable. It required employers to add so many more workers that the unemployment rate dropped 0.4 percentage point. Keep that up and the labor market is going to run out of people.
That would finally make the Fed nervous enough about inflationary pressure to pick up the pace of interest rate increases, withdrawing the monetary medicine that got the current global upswing started.
The Economy Can’t Grow Without Birth Control
Before the A.C.A., 85 percent of health insurance plans at large companies offered contraceptive coverage, but most required at least a co-payment. Individual women paid about $250 a year. Now the president has given insurance companies a way out of taking on that burden.
.. The Trump administration has tried to reassure women that they can still get inexpensive birth control, asserting that “many forms of contraception are available for around $50 a month.” Even if that’s the case, $50 a month — $600 a year — is no small item in many people’s budgets, particularly for the women who make up a majority of low-wage workers. As the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pointed out, the cost of an intrauterine device, one of the most effective forms of contraception, is about the same as a month’s minimum-wage pay.
.. On the other hand, a raft of evidence has definitively found that when women gained greater access to the pill in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they were able to delay marriage and childbirth and invest in careers through education, job training and staying in paid work.
Legal access to the pill transformed the economy in that era. It increased young women’s labor force participation by 7 percent. Those who were able to get it the earliest because of relaxed state laws worked significantly more hours than those who couldn’t get it until later. In fact, about a third of the increase in how many women attained careers in fields like law and business was due to birth control.
.. About half of women who use it say they do so to complete education or to get and keep a job. Contraception is still increasing the share of women who get educated and get paid work, particularly prestigious jobs... The high growth rates during the Reagan years were linkedin part to women continuing to enter the workplace. But women are already trickling out of the work force, and it could get worse with more unexpected pregnancies.