Sai. Nếu khả năng nghe của bạn chưa tốt thì chắc chắn là bạn nghe các kênh đó sẽ không hiểu tý gì cả. Bạn nhủ thầm cứ cố gắng nghe tiếp rồi sẽ tiến bộ thôi. Lần 2,3,4…n và kết quả là: WOAAAA….vẫn vậy =.=. Nguyên nhân rất đơn giản, thực ra không phải bạn không nghe được gì, bạn vẫn nghe được người ta nói đấy thôi. Nhưng các âm đấy bạn chưa nghe bao giờ (bạn không biết các từ đấy phát âm thế nào hoặc biết nhưng không đúng) nên nghe bạn không hiểu . Việc luyện nghe mà không có transcript cũng giống như bạn tập giải toán mà không có đáp án vậy. Bạn không biết mình đang làm đúng hay sai thì làm sao rút kinh nghiệm để tiến bộ được (Thực ra: nghe kiểu “tắm ngôn ngữ” bạn vẫn có thể áp dụng, nhưng chỉ nên coi nó như 1 supplementary method thôi chứ không phải main technique. Phương pháp này có đem lại hiệu quả nhưng rất ít)
Trang 1Who’s in charge in Iran?
Opioids in a world of pain America’s tangled voting laws Big-headed babies, big-brained parents Life in the fast lane: CEOs and F1
MAY 28TH–JUNE 3RD 2016
A nuclear nightmare
INSIDE: A 14-PAGE SPECIAL REPORT ON MIGRATION
Kim Jong Un’s
growing arsenal
Trang 5The Economist May 28th 2016 5
Daily analysis and opinion to
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Volume 419 Number 8991
Published since September 1843
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Compulsory voting is hardest
to enact in the places where itwould make most difference:Free exchange, page 66
On the cover
It is past time for the world
to get serious about North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions:
leader, page 11 Kim Jong Un
is on the home straight to
making his country a serious
nuclear power Nobody knows
how to stop him, pages 19-22
8 The world this week Leaders
11 North Korea’s weapons
Briefing
19 Nuclear North Korea
By the rockets’ red glare
Asia
23 America and Vietnam
Pull the other one
24 Afghanistan’s Taliban
Aiming for the head
25 India’s deep south
The fire next time
31 The Libertarian Party
Guns, weed and relevance
31 The campaigns
Heard on the trail
32 Hillary Clinton’s e-mails
Chávez’s little blue book
37 Britain and Argentina
42 The Torah in Abuja
Who wants to be a Jew?
Special report: Migration Looking for a home
1944 all over again
45 Greece gets its bail-out
45 The migrant crisis inEurope last year was only onepart of a worldwide problem.The rich world must get better
at managing refugees See ourspecial report after page 42
Who’s in charge in Iran?Thesupreme leader is clipping thewings of the reformistpresident, page 39
Trang 6© 2016 The Economist Newspaper Limited All rights reserved Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
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OpioidsAmericans take too
many painkillers Most other
people don’t get enough:
leader, page 14 The war on
drugs is depriving people in
poor countries of pain relief,
page 52
Regulating tech firmsThe
growing power of online
platforms is worrisome But
regulators should tread
carefully: leader, page 12
European governments are
not alone in wondering how to
deal with digital giants, page 55
Life in the fast laneBusiness
people are racing to learn from
Formula One drivers:
Schumpeter, page 60
Babies and intelligence
Children are born helpless,which might explain whyhumans are so clever, page 69
55 Regulating tech firms
Taming the beasts
Reviving the spirits
59 The future of carmakers
Upward mobility
60 Schumpeter
Life in the fast lane
Finance and economics
61 Banks and Brexit
Wait and hope
62 Buttonwood
Ignorant investors
63 Quicken Loans
A new foundation
63 Japan’s pension fund
That sinking feeling
Books and arts
73 Dawn of the oil industry
Guts, greed and gushers
Obituary
82 Fritz Stern
Another German
Trang 88 The Economist May 28th 2016
1
Alexander Van der Bellen, a
former head of the Green
party, won Austria’s
presi-dential election by just 31,000
votes, defeating Norbert Hofer
of the Freedom Party Had he
won this (largely ceremonial)
post, Mr Hofer would have
been the first far-right head of
state in the European Union
His surprisingly high support
reflected voter anger over
immigration As in several
European countries, the far
right has been making ground
In Brussels Greece’s creditors
agreed on a deal to secure debt
relief for the country The
measures, which were
thrashed out in late-night talks
after months of wrangling, are
intended to restructure Greek
debt, which is currently 180%
of GDP Greece will receive €10
billion ($11 billion) in aid to
help it avoid a default, starting
with €7.5 billion next month
After being detained in Russia
for two years Nadia
Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot,
was released from jail and sent
home She was exchanged for
two Russian prisoners
cap-tured in Ukraine On her return
home Ms Savchenko ironically
thanked those who had
“wished me evil”, and was
greeted as a national hero
In Turkey Binali Yildirim was
sworn in as prime minister
following the ouster of his
predecessor, Ahmet
Davu-toglu Mr Yildirim is a loyal
supporter of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the president, and
vowed to continue with an
overhaul of the constitution
which is handing more powers
to the presidency
New government, old problems
Romero Jucá, Brazil’s planning
minister, stepped aside aftertapes were leaked in which heappeared to suggest that theimpeachment of the president,Dilma Rousseff, would blunt
an investigation into the billion-dollar scandal centred
multi-on Petrobras, the state-cmulti-on-trolled oil company Mr Jucá,one of the targets of the in-vestigation, says his remarkswere misinterpreted He wasonly recently appointed by theinterim president, MichelTemer The new governmentproposed several reform mea-sures, including a cap on thegrowth of public spending
state-con-Cuba’s Communist
govern-ment said it would legalisesmall and medium-sizedenterprises That builds onearlier reforms, which allow
“self-employed” Cubans toown restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts and other smallbusinesses
Coca-Cola stopped producing
sugary drinks in Venezuela
because it cannot obtain sugar
Price controls have madegrowing sugar cane unprofit-able and the country suffersfrom a shortage of foreignexchange
The push back Iraq’s government announced
the start of an operation toretake Fallujah, a city just a30-minute drive from Baghdadthat has been held by IslamicState for the past two years
Avigdor Lieberman, who leads
Israel’s nationalist Yisrael
Beiteinu party, joinedBinyamin Netanyahu’scoalition government, andbecame defence minister MrLieberman, who lives in aJewish settlement in the West
Bank, has repeatedly deridedefforts to secure peace with thePalestinians
A series of bombings hit twogovernment strongholds on
Syria’s coast, killing as many
as 100 people
The government and
opposi-tion leaders in Burundi started
talks to resolve a crisis inwhich more than 1,000 peopleare thought to have beenkilled But the governmentexcluded key opposition fig-ures from the talks, reducingthe chances of a successfuloutcome
The monetary-policy
commit-tee of Nigeria’s central bank
voted to allow the currency,the naira, to float against thedollar The country has previ-ously maintained an over-inflated peg against the dollarthat is 40% higher than theblack-market rate, leading to ashortage of hard currency
Communications breakdown
In a report to Congress Hillary
Clinton was criticised by the
State Department’s general for using a privatee-mail server when she wassecretary of state Mrs Clintonshould have discussed thesecurity risks with officials, thereport said, though it recog-nised that the department had
inspector-a history of deinspector-aling ininspector-ade-quately with electronic mes-sages The issue continues todog Mrs Clinton’s campaign
inade-A bill that would help Puerto
Rico manage its $70 billion
debt pile was introduced inCongress The legislationwould set up a financial con-trol board and restructuresome debt It has bipartisansupport, but is opposed bysome of the American territo-ry’s creditors The governor ofPuerto Rico welcomed parts ofthe bill, but worries that afinancial control board would
be too powerful
Arms deal
During a visit to Vietnam,
Barack Obama announced anend to America’s embargo onthe sale of weapons to thecommunist country He said
this would remove a “lingeringvestige of the cold war” China,however, worries thatAmerica’s efforts to improve itsrelationship with Vietnam isaimed at keeping it in check
Tsai Ing-wen was sworn in as
Taiwan’s new president She is
the island’s first female leader,and the second from theDemocratic Progressive Party,which favours independencefrom China Ms Tsai called for
“positive dialogue” across theTaiwan Strait, but did notmention the “one China”notion that China insistsTaiwan must accept
In Afghanistan the Taliban
named a new leader to replaceMullah Akhtar Mansour whowas killed by an Americandrone He is HibatullahAkhundzada, a hardlinereligious scholar who served
as Mullah Mansour’s deputy
Protests by hundreds ofparents of universityapplicants spread to a fourth
province in China They are
angry about plans to reducethe number of places reservedfor local students Parentsworry that this will meangreater competition for placesand reduce their privileges,which is indeed the point
China’s Communist Party
stepped up its efforts to suade members to write outthe party’s constitution byhand Two newly weds havebecome famous for doing so
per-on their wedding night Theaim is to remind members oftheir communist ideals, but thearmy’s newspaper warnedthat some people were—
believe it or not—just goingthrough the motions whentranscribing the document’s15,000 characters
Politics
The world this week
Trang 9The Economist May 28th 2016 The world this week 9
Other economic data and news can be found on pages 80-81
Faced with a future where
ride-hailing could reduce car
ownership, Toyota and
Volks-wagen became the latest
car-makers to invest in startups
that provide such services
Toyota formed a partnership
with Uber, the biggest
ride-sharing app, to develop
“mobility services” And
Volkswagen invested $300m
in Gett, the Israeli outfit
be-hind the largest taxi-hailing
app in Europe Unlike Uber,
Gett signs up only regulated
drivers in the cities in which it
operates, such as London’s
black-cab drivers
Prompted by the market
domi-nance of Facebook, Google
and the like, the European
Commission set out
sugges-tions for regulating online
platforms The proposals
target specific problems such
as the ability to move personal
data from site to site The
com-mission also wants to make it
easier for consumers to shop
online by removing
“geoblock-ing” tools that prevent
shop-pers in one country getting
deals offered in another
Hewlett Packard Enterprise,
the smaller of the two
busi-nesses to emerge from Hewlett
Packard’s split last year,
an-nounced that it is spinning off
its enterprise-services unit The
unit grew out of HP’s takeover
in 2008 of EDS, an IT
out-sourcing company founded by
Ross Perot
If it could turn back time
Also picking up the pieces
from a takeover that hasn’t
worked out, Microsoft
announced more job cuts at
the mobile-phone business it
acquired from Nokia two yearsago and will take anotherwrite-down, of $950m Never
a big player in the business, itsshare of the global smart-phone market shrank again inthe first three months of theyear, to 0.7%, according toGartner, a research firm
Alibaba, China’s biggest
e-commerce company, closed that it is being investi-gated by America’s Securitiesand Exchange Commissionover the way it accounts forrevenue, including sales fromSingles’ Day, China’s version
dis-of Black Friday
The drama over Sumner
Red-stone’s control of Viacom
continued The 92-year-oldmogul removed PhilippeDauman, Viacom’s chairman,from a trust that will decidewhat happens to Mr Red-stone’s holdings when he dies
Mr Dauman filed a lawsuit tothwart the move, arguing that
Mr Redstone was mentallyincompetent and being manip-ulated by his daughter, Shari
Federico Ghizzoni is to stepdown as chief executive of
UniCredit, Italy’s biggest
bank Speculation had creased about his future as thebank’s problems mounted MrGhizzoni was heavily criticised
in-when UniCredit agreed tounderwrite Banca Popolare diVicenza’s disastrous capital-raising, which ended with agovernment-orchestratedrescue from a fund backed by itand other Italian financialfirms
Approaching vessels
The Singapore Exchange
(SGX) declared an interest in
taking over the Baltic
Exchange in London, which
would combine the two ing maritime-industry hubs
lead-The latter compiles the BalticDry Index, which measuresthe costs of shipping commod-ities, and has developed deriv-atives for shipowners to insureagainst fluctuations in freightprices Founded in 1744, it alsoprovides a code of practice forthe shipping market
BSI, a Swiss bank, was ordered
to close its business in pore after regulators identifiedserious anti-money-launder-ing lapses in connection with acorruption scandal at 1MDB, aMalaysian state investmentfund At the same time Swit-zerland fined the bank SFr95m($96m), opened a criminalprobe and approved a take-over of BSI by EFG Internation-
Singa-al, which is based in Zurich,that would see it “integratedand thereafter dissolved”
Bayer presented its $62 billion
takeover bid for Monsanto,
the latest attempt at tion in the agricultural seedsand chemicals business TheAmerican company said theinitial proposal from its Ger-man rival was “inadequate”,but believes in the “substantialbenefits” of a deal
consolida-Europe’s antitrust regulator
approved Anheuser Busch
InBev’s $108 billion merger
with SABMiller, after getting
the assurances it wanted thatthe newly combined beergiant will sell SABMiller’sEuropean brands The deal stillneeds to be cleared by compe-tition authorities in America,China and South Africa
In, out, shake it all about
The European Central Bank
warned that the rise of list parties in Europe couldslow the pace of economicreforms Populists on the leftand right ends of the politicalspectrum have made gains inelections by running againstspending cuts Another bigconcern of the ECB is the po-tential risk posed by the vote inBritain on whether to leave theEuropean Union, which will
popu-be held on June 23rd
Business
Trang 10The Economist May 28th 2016 11
BARACK OBAMA began hispresidency with an impas-sioned plea for a world withoutnuclear weapons This week, inhis last year in office (and as wewent to press), he was to be-come the first American presi-dent to visit Hiroshima, site ofone of only two nuclear attacks Mr Obama has made progress
on nuclear-arms reduction and non-proliferation He signed a
strategic-arms-control treaty (New START) with Russia in 2010
A series ofnuclear-security summits helped stop fissile
materi-al getting into the wrong hands Most important, he secured a
deal in July to curtail and then constrain Iran’s nuclear
pro-gramme for at least the next 10-15 years
But in one area, his failure is glaring On Mr Obama’s watch
the nuclear-weapons and missile programme of North Korea
has become steadily more alarming Its nuclear missiles
al-ready threaten South Korea and Japan Sometime during the
second term ofMr Obama’s successor, they are likely also to be
able to strike New York Mr Obama put North Korea on the
back burner Whoever becomes America’s next president will
not have that luxury
The other Manhattan project
The taboo against nuclear weapons rests on three pillars:
poli-cies to prevent proliferation, norms against the first use of
nukes (especially against non-nuclear powers) and deterrence
North Korea has taken a sledgehammer to all of them
No country in history has spent such a large share of its
wealth on nuclear weapons North Korea is thought to have a
stockpile of around 20 devices Every six weeks or so it adds
another This year the pace of ballistic missile testing has been
unprecedented (see pages 19-22) An underground nuclear
det-onation in January, claimed by the regime to be an H-bomb
(but more likely a souped-up A-bomb), has been followed by
tests of the technologies behind nuclear-armed missiles
Al-though three tests of a 4,000-kilometre (2,500-mile) missile
failed in April, North Korean engineers learn from their
mis-takes Few would bet against them succeeding in the end
North Korea is not bound by any global rules Its hereditary
dictator, Kim Jong Un, imposes forced labour on hundreds of
thousands of his people in the gulag, including whole families,
without trial or hope ofrelease Mr Kim frequently threatens to
drench Seoul, the South’s capital, in “a sea of fire” Nuclear
weapons are central to his regime’s identity and survival
Deterrence is based on the belief that states act rationally
But Mr Kim is so opaque and so little is known about how
deci-sions come about in the capital, Pyongyang, that deterring
North Korea is fraught with difficulty Were his regime on the
point of collapse, who is to say whether Mr Kim would pull
down the temple by unleashing a nuclear attack?
The mix of unpredictability, ruthlessness and fragility
frus-trates policymaking towards Mr Kim Many outsiders want to
force him to behave better In March, following the recent
weapons test, the UN Security Council strengthened
sanc-tions China is infuriated by Mr Kim’s taunts and provocations(it did not even know about the nuclear test until after it hadhappened) It agreed to tougher measures, including limitingfinancial transactions and searching vessels for contraband But China does not want to overthrow Mr Kim It worriesthat the collapse of a regime on its north-eastern border wouldcreate a flood of refugees and eliminate the buffer protecting itfrom American troops stationed in South Korea About 90% ofNorth Korea’s trade, worth about $6 billion a year, is with Chi-
na It will continue to import North Korean coal and iron ore(and send back fuel oil, food and consumer goods) as long asthe money is not spent on military activities—an unenforce-able condition
Protected by China, Mr Kim can pursue his nuclear gramme with impunity The sanctions are unlikely to stophim If anything, they may spur him to strengthen and up-grade his arsenal before China adopts harsher ones
pro-Understandably, therefore, Mr Obama has preferred to vote his efforts to Iran Because the mullahs depend on sales ofoil and gas to the outside world, embargoes on Iran’s energyexports and exclusion from the international payments sys-tem changed their strategic calculus But this logic will notwork with North Korea
de-Can anything stop Mr Kim? Perhaps he will decide to shelvehis “nukes first” policy in favour of Chinese-style economic re-form and rapprochement with South Korea It is a nice idea,and Mr Kim has shown some interest in economic develop-ment But nothing suggests he would barter his nuclear weap-ons to give his people a better life
Perhaps dissent over Mr Kim’s rule among the North
Kore-an elite will lead to a palace coup A successor might be readyfor an Iran-type deal to boost his standing both at home andabroad That is a possibility, but Mr Kim has so far shown him-self able to crush any challengers to his dominance
The last hope is that tougher sanctions will contribute to thecollapse of the regime—which, in turn, could lead to reunifica-tion with the South and denuclearisation of the Korean penin-sula That would be the best outcome, but it is also the one thatcarries the most danger Moreover, it is precisely the situationChina seeks to avoid
Fat boy
Without any good options, what should America’s next dent do? A priority is to strengthen missile defence NewTHAADanti-missile systems should be sent to South Koreaand Japan, while America soothes objections that their radarcould be used against China’s nuclear weapons China shouldalso be cajoled into accepting that sanctions can be harsher,without provoking an implosion Were that to lead initiallyonly to a freeze on testing, it would be worth having Because asudden, unforeseen collapse of Mr Kim’s regime is possible atany time, America needs worked-out plans to seize or destroyNorth Korea’s nuclear missiles before they can be used For thisChina’s co-operation, or at least acquiescence, is vital So clearand present is the danger that even rivals who clash elsewhere
presi-in Asia must urgently find new ways to work together 7
A nuclear nightmare
It is past time for the world to get serious about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions
Leaders
Trang 1112 Leaders The Economist May 28th 2016
1
AUSTRIA dodged a bullet thisweek So did Europe Nor-bert Hofer, a talented politicianwith a winning smile, nearly be-came the first far-right head ofstate in western Europe sincethe end of the second worldwar—but failed, by a nerve-jan-gling 0.6% of the vote (see page 45)
This is scant cause for relief Mr Hofer has shown that
well-packaged extremism is a vote-winner He sounds so
reason-able Austria must maintain border controls for as long as the
European Union cannot enforce its external frontiers, he says
Of course he supports the EU, but only on the basis of
subsid-iarity (“national where possible, European where necessary”)
It is easy to forget that his Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was
partly founded by ex-Nazis, and that its manifesto—much of
which Mr Hofer wrote—bangs on about Europe’s Christian
culture and the German ethno-linguistic Heimat Or that his
party demonises “fake” asylum-seekers and vows to outlaw
the distribution of free copies of the Koran
The FPÖ’s popularity, like that of xenophobic parties across
Europe, is in part an angry reaction to the recent influx of
Mid-dle Eastern refugees Alexander Van der Bellen, the former
Green Party leader who narrowly beat Mr Hofer, owes his
vic-tory to a broad alliance ofvoters trying to blockthe far right Yet
a fringe party that draws half the vote is no longer a fringe And
Austria is a harbinger: all over Europe, far-right parties are
be-coming too big to ignore (see chart)
In France Marine Le Pen will probably come first in the
ini-tial round of next year’s presidenini-tial election In the
Nether-lands Geert Wilders is polling far ahead of any rival Far-right
parties in Denmark and Switzerland have been winning
plu-ralities for years, and Sweden’s may soon This is not the 1930s
Ms Le Pen is unlikely to win the second round of the tial election In Denmark and the Netherlands, populists havequit or refused to join coalitions for fear of being blamed forunpopular decisions But they still influence policy, and forcethe centre-right and -left into grand alliances, leaving the popu-lists as voters’ only plausible alternative
presiden-How can mainstream parties beat them? Not by peddlingdiluted versions of their Eurosceptic or anti-immigrant poli-cies Austria’s Social Democrats switched from welcomingasylum-seekers to tightening border controls, and were flat-tened for it Voters prefer real populists to centrists who fake it.Besides, extreme policies fuel irrational fears rather than extin-guish them Look at France and eastern Europe: the far right isthriving, though few Syrian refugees have arrived
Stick to your guns
Moderates cannot defeat extremists by abandoning their als Rather, they must fight for them Voters are deserting main-stream parties because they stand for so little They are hungryfor politicians with clear values Radicals of the left have un-derstood this: witness the passionate support aroused by Brit-ain’s Jeremy Corbyn and Spain’s Pablo Iglesias The worldneeds leaders who can make an equally rousing argument formoderation The mushmouths that France’s mainstream par-ties appear set to nominate next year will not do
ide-Responsible parties must also bring results As our specialreport this week makes clear, the task of integrating refugees,economically and socially, is more urgent than ever And MrHofer is right about one thing: to open its internal borders, the
EUmust secure its external ones Extreme nationalist partiescannot integrate new immigrants, nor build an effective Eu-rope of shared asylum burdens and orderly borders Only theparties of tolerance and liberal values can do that They need
to convince voters of it 7
Austria’s presidential election
Disaster averted—for now
Europe’s far right is no longer a fringe
IN1949 FrankMcNamara, an ecutive at a struggling financecompany, had the idea of acharge card to settle the tab athigh-class eateries First, he had
ex-to solve a tricky problem taurants would not accept acharge card as payment unlesscustomers wanted to use one; and diners would not carry a
Res-card unless restaurants accepted it His solution was to give
away his card to a few hundred well-heeled New Yorkers: once
the elite of Manhattan’s gourmands were signed up, he could
persuade a few upscale restaurants to accept his new charge
card and also to pay him a commission Within a year, the ers Club card was accepted in hundreds of places and carried
Din-by over 40,000 people
The Diners Club may not seem to have much in commonwith digital giants like Facebook, Google, Uber and Amazon.But such businesses are all examples of “platforms”: they act
as matchmakers between various entities and they typicallycharge different prices to different actors in the market Googleconnects websites, consumers and advertisers, who foot thebill Facebook does something similar for its members Ubermatches passengers and drivers, who pay the ride-hailing app
a slice ofthe fare Amazon brings together shoppers with ers, who pay a fee
retail-Online platforms
Nostrums for rostrums
The growing power of online platforms is worrisome But regulators should tread carefully
Trang 12The Economist May 28th 2016 Leaders 13
1
2
IT IS the morning of November9th, the day after the election,and America is waking up tofind out who is the new presi-dent The result turns on thevote in North Carolina, wherethe ballot papers are being re-counted Even when the tally is
in, the result will be in doubt
North Carolina’s new voting laws are subject to a legal
chal-lenge, which could take weeks for the courts to resolve Both
sides complain that the election is being stolen; the acrimony,
sharpened by allegations ofracial discrimination, makes
Flori-da’s hanging chads and the Supreme Court’s ruling in favour
of George W Bush in 2000 seem like a church picnic
This is not as fanciful as it sounds America organises its
de-mocracy differently from other rich countries Each state
writes its own voting laws, there is no national register of
eligi-ble voters and no form of ID that is both acceptaeligi-ble in all
poll-ing booths and held by everyone Across the country, 17 states
have new voting laws that, in November, will be tested for the
first time in a presidential contest In several states these laws
face legal challenges, which allege that they have been signed in order to discourage African-Americans and Latinosfrom voting It is past time to start worrying about where thesechallenges might lead
de-The X factor
The new laws date largely from a Supreme Court decision in
2013 Before then, many states in the South, and a couple where, that had spent much of the 20th century finding inge-nious ways to prevent minorities from voting, had to clear anychanges to their voting laws with the Justice Department or afederal court Three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled thecountry had “changed dramatically” and that the formula forchoosing which states were covered was outdated That al-lowed all the states to write laws unsupervised
else-Handed power over the rules for electing themselves, publican politicians in southern statehouses have, unsurpris-ingly, tilted them in their own favour Early voting, which non-whites (who lean Democratic) are keen on, has been restricted.Another change has been to limit the kinds of ID that are ac-ceptable at a polling station In Texas student IDs are out, hand-gun licences are in
Re-American elections
Voting wrongs
America’s electoral laws are a recipe for chaos
The growing clout of online platforms is a boon to society
but a headache for trustbusters Platforms benefit from the
power of networks: the more potential matches there are on
one side of a platform, the greater the number that flock to the
other side The consequence may be a monopoly That is
nor-mally a red flag for trustbusters, who are scrambling to keep
pace with the rise of platforms (see page 55) But they should
tread carefully The nature of platforms means established
rules of regulation often do not apply
Think different
In a conventional, “one-sided” market, prices are related to the
cost of supplying goods and services If a business can charge a
big mark-up over its marginal cost of production, a wise
regu-lator would strive to ensure there are enough firms vying for
business or, where that is not possible, to set prices in line with
the monopolist’s costs Such precepts are little use in regulating
platforms Their prices are set with an eye to the widest
partici-pation Often consumers pay nothing for platform services—or
are even charged a negative price (think of the rewards systems
run by some payment cards) Pushing down prices on one side
ofthe platform may cause charges on the other side to rise, a bit
like a waterbed That in turn may drive some consumers away
from the platform, leaving everyone worse off Such
uncertain-ties mean that regulators must not act precipitously
But they are right to be thinking about the unique
econom-ics of platforms Tech giants like to claim there is no need for
special regulation The winner-takes-all aspect of networks
may mean there is less competition inside the market, but
there is still fierce rivalry for the market, because countless
startups are vying to be the next Google or Facebook
Unfortu-nately, incumbents may be able to subvert this rivalry
One of their strategies is to use mergers “Shoot-out” sitions is the name given to purchases of startups with the aim
acqui-of eliminating a potential rival Many claim that Facebook’s quisition of WhatsApp was in this category A recent parlia-mentary report in Britain noted that Google had made 187 pur-chases of other tech firms Trustbusters tend to ignore mergers
ac-of businesses in unrelated markets and big firms hoovering upsmall fry Buyers of firms with an EU-wide turnover of lessthan €100m do not have to notify the European Commission.Rules that take into account how markets may develop overlonger periods will be fiendish to craft But they are needed
A second concern is talent Tech firms are jealous of their crets When their best people leave, they take ideas with them.Yet clauses in job contracts that restrict what types of work em-ployees can do once they leave a company are also a means ofthwarting the emergence of rivals California has shown theway by clamping down on such practices
se-A third issue is the power of personal data Google is such
an effective search engine in part because its algorithms draw
on vast logs of past queries Amazon can use customers’ ing history to guide its marketing with greater precision Thesedata troves raise barriers to entry to the next Google or Ama-zon There are no easy fixes, however Even defining whoowns information is complex; making data portable is tricky
trad-As Frank McNamara and his heirs have found, a successfulplatform company finds ways of balancing the interests of theparties it brings together Regulators of online platforms face asimilar balancing act—between the incentives for new firms toemerge and the benefits to consumers of large incumbents.That will require new ways of thinking and careful judgment
In the meantime, however, the priority for trustbusters must
be to ensure they do no harm 7
Trang 1314 Leaders The Economist May 28th 2016
2
“PLEASURE is oft a visitant;
but pain clings cruelly,”
wrote John Keats Nowadayspain can often be shrugged off:
opioids, a class of drugs that cludes morphine and other de-rivatives of the opium poppy,can dramatically ease the agonyofbroken bones, third-degree burns or terminal cancer But the
in-mismanagement of these drugs has caused a pain crisis (see
page 52) It has two faces: one in America and a few other rich
countries; the other in the developing world
In America for decades doctors prescribed too many
opioids for chronic pain in the mistaken belief that the risks
were manageable Millions of patients became hooked
Near-ly 20,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2014 A
be-lated crackdown is now forcing prescription-opioid addicts to
endure withdrawal symptoms, buy their fix on the black
mar-ket or turn to heroin—which gives a similar high (and is now
popular among middle-aged Americans with back problems)
In the developing world, by contrast, even horrifying pain
is often untreated More than 7m people die yearly of cancer,
HIV, accidents or war wounds with little or no pain relief
Four-fifths of humanity live in countries where opioids are hard to
obtain; they use less than a tenth of the world’s morphine, the
opioid most widely used for trauma and terminal pain
Opioids are tricky Take too much, or mix them with alcohol
or sleeping pills, and you may stop breathing Long-term
pa-tients often need more and more But for much acute pain, and
certainly for the terminally ill, they are often the best
treat-ment And they are cheap: enough morphine to soothe a
can-cer patient for a month should cost just $2-5
In poor countries many people think of pain as inevitable,
as it has been for most of human existence So they seldom ask
for pain relief, and seldom get it if they do The drug war
de-clared by America in the 1970s has made matters worse It led
to laws that put keeping drugs out ofthe wrong hands ahead of
getting them into the right ones The UN says both goals matter.But through the 1980s and 1990s, as the war on drugs raged, itpreached about the menace of illegal highs with barely a whis-per about the horror of unrelieved pain
American policy has been especially misguided By ing cocaine and heroin illegal, drug warriors have empoweredcriminal gangs that torture and kill Even as American fee-for-service doctors overprescribed opioids at home, Americaspread its harsh approach to illegal drugs worldwide Poorcountries, scared of getting on Uncle Sam’s wrong side for nottrying hard enough to control narcotics, have written lawseven more restrictive than those recommended by the UN.One passed in India in 1985 saw legitimate morphine useplunge by 97% in seven years In Armenia morphine is onlyavailable to cancer patients, who must rush from ministry toministry filling in forms to receive a few days’ supply
keep-Opioids should be more widely available That entailsrisks One is addiction: doctors need training to minimise it.Long-term use is perilous; use by the terminally ill is not An-other risk—that the drugs will leak onto the black market—isreal, but less serious than America’s example might suggest.Many American buyers of street opioids were first hooked bytheir doctors; other countries can avoid that mistake They canalso avoid the mix of fee-for-service provision and direct-to-consumer drug advertising that aggravated America’s lax pre-scribing And they should copy Britain’s centralised system forprescription records, which stops patients from doctor-hop-ping their way to addiction
Biting on a stick is not good enough
Above all, the global bodies that monitor narcotics should cognise that easing suffering is as important as preventing ad-diction Forcing people in great pain to jump through hoops toget relief should be recognised as an infraction of internationalrules The UN has, belatedly, started to talk of unrelieved pain
re-as a problem As the cause of needless suffering, it should betrying harder to bring solace 7
Opioids
The ecstasy and the agony
Americans take too many painkillers Most other people don’t get enough
The authors of these laws protest that they have nothing to
do with race or political advantage and claim that they are
nec-essary to guard against voter fraud Yet there is scant evidence
of fraud To claim otherwise is cynical and corrosive In the 12
years before Alabama passed its new voter-ID law there was
one documented case of impersonation
The second argument made, in southern states, is that the
new voting laws merely bring them in line with those
else-where in the country, some of which do not allow early voting
at all This is true, but tantamount to an admission of guilt:
poli-ticians in some safely Democratic districts in the north have
not been above fiddling with election rules and redrawing
dis-trict boundaries to protect incumbents either Indeed, it is an
argument for a more general change
The worst of all the arguments for the new voting laws is
that casting a ballot should not be made too easy, because if
people are not clever enough to understand the rules
govern-ing elections they should not be entrusted with choosgovern-ing thegovernment Any political party that hopes for lower turnouthas lost its way William F Buckley, a conservative pundit, oncewrote that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 peo-ple listed in the Boston telephone directory than by 2,000members of Harvard’s faculty Republican lawmakers mustdecide whether they still believe in the good sense of thosethey aspire to govern, or whether they lost that faith some-where on the way to the statehouse
The new voting laws suggest the Supreme Court mated the grip the past still has on the present Were politi-cians really concerned about voter fraud they would handover the running of elections and voter registers to non-parti-san bodies Unfortunately, this will not happen Why disarmwhen you have all the bullets? As a second best, therefore, thecourts should expedite cases on voting laws to reduce thechances of legal challenges after the election.7
Trang 14underesti-ADVERTISEMENT
Trang 1516 The Economist May 28th 2016
Letters are welcome and should be addressed to the Editor at The Economist, 25 St James’s Street, London sw1A 1hg
E-mail: letters@economist.com More letters are available at:
Economist.com/letters
Risk rewards in science
You note current efforts to
harness the promise of
geno-mic medicine aimed at
se-quencing more genomes, to
understand labyrinthine
genetic susceptibilities arising
from variation in multiple
genes (“Encore une fois”, May
7th) However, it is also
note-worthy that the initial
se-quencing of the human
ge-nome in 2000 enabled entirely
new fields of discovery,
in-cluding transcriptomics (the
large-scale study of RNA
mole-cules), proteomics (the same
for proteins) and big-data
science in biology These
in-novations have revolutionised
translational research and may
now do the same for clinical
medicine Yet they would have
been impossible without
substantial funding for risky
science, from governments,
investors and philanthropic
bodies
Rather than failing to live
up to their potential, the
large-scale efforts to sequence the
human genome, and the
re-sulting “omics technologies”,
have yielded tremendous
economic and scientific
bene-fits for society
PROFESSOR THOMAS VONDRISKA
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los
Angeles
Suffer the children
It is not only a humanitarian
imperative to help
unaccom-panied child migrants who
arrive in Europe (“Under-age
and at risk”, May 7th)
Euro-pean states also have a legal
obligation to do so, having
ratified the 1989 Convention
on the Rights of the Child
Every child has a right to
ade-quate shelter, to a caregiver
and to an education It is
shameful that many of the
world’s richest countries,
which see themselves as the
cradle of human rights, deny
children those very rights
The children who arrive in
Europe without their parents
have fled their homes in fear of
their lives They have
entrust-ed themselves to gangs of
smugglers and put themselves
at risk of abuse and child
labour With borders closingaround them, some aretrapped in Serbia and Macedo-nia, with no way forward and
no way back Many have beenillegally detained in Greece
We all need to see thosechildren for what they are: not
as migrants, financial burdens
or threats to society but aschildren in need of protection
They have rights and theydeserve to be given a future
VITO ANGELILLODirector-generalTerre des HommesZurich
Foolish academics
“It was the worst of times”
(May 14th) marked 50 yearssince the start of the CulturalRevolution in China Yourarticle brought back memories
of Western intellectuals at thetime who supported MaoZedong’s eradication of oldcustoms, culture, habits andideas I recall one of my fellowgraduate students in London,
an avowed Maoist, burstinginto the college’s commonroom to announce that inChina mathematics teacherswere now being sent to theland to labour along with thepeasants
In a challenging tone, heasked whether we did notthink that was wonderful
“Certainly”, responded one ofour finest scholars with wide-eyed, possibly disingenuousinnocence, “as long as thepeasants reciprocate by going
to the towns to teach algebraand calculus.” They neverspoke to each other again
MICHAEL SINGERDickson Poon School of LawKing’s College London
Mao believed that knowledgewas too powerful a tool, lead-ing to wisdom, thoughts andquestions which could un-dermine his rule Both mygreat-aunt and uncle wereteachers at the Beijing DanceAcademy Both were de-nounced as intellectuals andsent to be reformed Whatmade it worse was not theforced hardship, but the con-fiscation of all the books, artworks and other culturallyrelated items they possessed
They managed to hide some,but many more were de-stroyed This is the real reasonbehind the atrocity Purging hisrivals at the same time was justconvenient for Mao
LOUISA VAN DIJKThe Hague
On the right track
There is a way for the newmayor of London to realise hisobjective of connecting thedevelopment of housing topublic transport (“Goingunderground”, May 14th) Hecould compulsorily purchaseland to build rail connectionsand homes and then sell orrent the new homes in part-nership with a developer topay for the railway Crucially,
he should keep in public ership any stations and othercommercial properties in thearea to provide ongoing rentalincome
own-This is the strategy used bythe Mass Transit Railway Cor-poration in Hong Kong MTRC
is 77% owned by the HongKong government It alreadyruns light-rail services in Lon-don and will operate Crossrail
It has also won a contract toextend Stockholm’s urbannetwork to the city’s commut-
er belt by using the profit fromrising land-values to pay forthe railway Its profits help payfor public services in HongKong by way of dividends
We don’t need to handLondon’s underground to theMTRC We could leave it toTransport for London, allow-ing it in time to become aprofitable business as opposed
to one with a permanentpublic subsidy
ANDREW PURVESLondon
Tech cronies
The technology industryshould have been included inyour crony-capitalism index(“The party winds down”,May 7th) Microsoft was in-novative in its early years, but
if it isn’t now a monopolist, Idon’t know what is You citedGoogle as a potential candi-date because it is involved inanti-competitive litigation Butlitigation is the wrong test The
American government takesthe view that there is a differ-ence between a monopolythat is established through itsown growth and one that isestablished through acquisi-tions The government bringsmany cases against mergersthat would have resulted in acompany taking enough mar-ket share to extract rents, butfewer against those that gainedtheir monopoly positionthrough growth
There is no reason whythere should be any difference
in the government’s treatment
of a monopoly Yet there is,despite the lack of litigation.The fact that more anti-com-petitive cases aren’t broughtagainst such technology com-panies suggests that cronieshave managed to convincegovernment about the merits
of this false distinction ANDY EDSTROM
Los Angeles
The great escape
Your review of AdrianTinniswood’s “The LongWeekend” asserts that the
“English country house casts along, rose-tinted shadow”(“Partying, hunting, shooting”,May 7th) I think that’s right
“Country House”, a songreleased by Blur in 1995, comes
to mind, describing the sured life of a modern-daynouveau-riche on his landedestate who is “reading Balzacand knocking back Prozac”.RICHARD SPENCER
lei-Woodland Hills, California7
Letters
Trang 16B e n e f i t f r o m a s e c u r e d b o n d
Trang 17The Economist May 28th 2016
Executive Focus
Trang 18The Economist May 28th 2016 19
1
IN JANUARY North Korea detonated a
nu-clear device underground, its fourth such
test and the first, it claimed, to show that it
could build a thermonuclear weapon In
February it successfully launched a
satel-lite It has since been testing missile
tech-nology at a hectic pace In March, its leader,
Kim Jong Un, posed with a model of a
nuc-lear weapon core and the re-entry vehicle
of a long-range missile On May 7th he told
the congress of the Korean Workers’ Party
in Pyongyang that his nuclear-weapons
and missile programmes had brought the
country “dignity and national power” He
boasts of his ability to “burn Manhattan
down to ashes”
The nuclear test, most experts believe,
did not in fact demonstrate the ability to
build a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb
The satellite does not seem to be working
Some of the missile tests failed Mr Kim
says a lot of nasty things But there is a limit
as to how much you can downplay this
se-quence of events As Mark Fitzpatrick of
the International Institute for Strategic
Studies, a think-tank, puts it: “Just because
Pyongyang wants us to pay attention, that
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.”
It is always tempting for America andother countries to put North Korea’s nuc-lear ambitions on the back burner of poli-
cy priorities, in large part because of achronic absence of good options for deal-ing with them But only an extreme opti-mist can today doubt that North Korea hasdeveloped missiles that threaten not justits southern neighbour but also Japan and,soon, the American base on Guam Manyexperts, such as John Schilling, who writesabout missile technology at 38 North, awebsite on North Korea run from JohnsHopkins University, believe that North Ko-rea is on track to have a nuclear-capablemissile with the range to reach the conti-nental United States by early next decade—
which is to say, within America’s next twopresidential terms Stopping that from hap-pening needs to be a front-burner priority
The history of unsuccessful responses
to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions began
in 1994, when Mr Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il,threatened to pull out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (see timeline onfollowing page) The Clinton administra-tion promised him two proliferation-resis-tant reactors—that is, reactors from which
North Korea would not have been able toderive weapons-grade nuclear material—economic aid and an easing of sanctions if
he agreed to freeze and then dismantle thecountry’s nuclear-weapons programme.This “Agreed framework” collapsed in
2002 when evidence of North Koreancheating became impossible to ignore.North Korea duly quit the NPT
The next diplomatic efforts were the
“Six-party talks”, which included China,Japan, Russia and South Korea as well asAmerica and North Korea They appeared
to bear fruit in 2005 when America firmed its recognition of North Korea as asovereign state that it had no intention ofinvading, and North Korea agreed to return
con-to the NPT, thus putting all its nuclear ities under the oversight of the Internation-
facil-al Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and toforsake “all nuclear weapons and existingnuclear programmes”
So different from Iran
Despite North Korea carrying out its firstnuclear weapon test in 2006, the six-party-talks process somehow limped on untilApril 2009 Then, over a period of littlemore than seven weeks, North Korea tried
to launch a satellite with a three-stageUnha-2 rocket in defiance of UN SecurityCouncil Resolution 1718, chucked IAEA in-spectors out of its Yongbyon reactor com-plex and carried out a second under-ground nuclear test Since then it has beenpretty much downhill all the way A finalattempt at a deal based on aid in exchange
By the rockets’ red glare
Kim Jong Un is on the home straight to making his country a serious nuclear power.
Nobody knows how to stop him
Briefing North Korea’s nuclear weapons
Trang 1920 Briefing North Korea’s nuclear weapons The Economist May 28th 2016
1
2for a testing moratorium in early 2012 was
stillborn when North Korea announced a
new missile launch only a fortnight later
Faced with such a record of duplicity
and intransigence, Barack Obama had
ap-parently long since concluded that if he
was to achieve anything in the sphere of
nuclear non-proliferation, Iran offered at
least a chance of success; with North Korea
there was virtually none
It was a cool calculation typical of the
president For a start, North Korea was a lot
further down the road to a
nuclear-weap-ons capability than Iran, which had
re-mained within the NPT and was still a few
years from being able to test a device And
Mr Obama realised there was also much
more leverage to be had over Iran than
North Korea Bill Clinton had come close to
authorising an air strike on Yongbyon in
1994, but pulled back in the belief it would
trigger a new war on the peninsula that, by
some estimates, could cost a million lives
After the nuclear test in 2006 the military
option was off the table for good That was
never true of Iran The Iranian leadership
could not fully discount the threat of a
pre-emptive strike by either Israel or America
Sanctions were also a much more tent weapon against Iran than they evercould be with North Korea Iran was vul-nerable because it is dependent on oil andgas exports And even though the country
po-is only minimally democratic, its ship has to pay attention to falling livingstandards and the anger they can bring
leader-That helped make the removal of tions a greater priority than pressing aheadwith the nuclear programme
sanc-By contrast, sanctions have had a tively low impact on North Korea’s closedeconomy In large part that is because 90%
rela-of the trade it does is with China, which fuses to cut it off because of fears that a sub-sequent economic collapse would bringwith it a torrent of refugees and the demise
re-of a useful buffer against a close Americanally Nor does Mr Kim have to worry muchabout the political consequences of hard-ship for his people So effective is the re-gime’s brutal system of control—anyonesuspected of disloyalty may be killed orbanished to a frozen gulag—that there waslittle sign of dissent even when hundreds
of thousands died of starvation during the1990s
Lastly, Iran always (if implausibly) nied that it was seeking the capability tomake nuclear weapons—the supremeleader Ali Khamenei even issued a fatwathat described possessing nuclear weap-ons as a “grave sin” Mr Kim believes thatnuclear weapons are essential Like his fa-ther before him he has built them into thenational narrative and iconography, seeingthem as fundamental to the dynasty’s sur-vival Even without nuclear weapons, Iran
de-is a regional power that America has totake seriously North Korea has no otherclaim to fame except its nastiness Its rulersees nuclear weapons as the key to gainingthe respect he demands from the outsideworld They are not bargaining chips to betraded for other benefits
You can observe a lot just by watching
That is why the evidence of an almostmanic amount of nuclear-weapons-relat-
ed testing since January is so alarming, andwhy interpreting what it means both interms of political signalling and technicalprogress has become urgent Gary Samore,
Mr Obama’s arms-control adviser until
2013 and now research director at vard’s Belfer Centre, cautions how littleoutsiders really know for sure about NorthKorea’s capabilities Jonathan Pollack, aKorea expert at the Brookings Institution,agrees the data are limited Nevertheless,
Har-he says: “In tHar-he words of Yogi Berra, youcan observe a lot by watching.”
David Albright, the president of the stitute for Science and International Secu-rity, a think-tank, and a former IAEA in-spector in Iraq, has carried out detailedanalysis of what is known of North Korea’scapacity to reprocess plutonium and en-rich uranium If the country is producingbombs similar in yield to the one thatAmerica dropped on Hiroshima—that is, of
In-10 to 20 kilotons, which would be small bymodern standards, but would therefore re-quire less-capable missiles for their deliv-ery—his central projection is that it can pro-
NK supreme leadersand
US presidents
Bill Clinton
Kim Il Sung
1993 94 95 96 97 98 99 2000 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
North Korea’s nuclear path
Threatens to leave Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), then relents
First test of Nodong 1 missile
UN inspectors say North Korea
is hiding evidence of nuclear
fuel for bombs
Agrees to freeze testing
on long-range missiles Signs “Agreed framework”
with US to freeze and
dismantle nuclear
programme in exchange
for nuclear reactors, aid
and easing of sanctions
Fires Taepodong missile over Japan
Carries out first underground nuclear test
Third nuclear test Restarts Yongbyon nuclear reactor
Launches satellite
on Unha-3
Claims to have carried out a hydrogen- bomb test
UN agrees new sanctions Three unsuccessful launches of Musudan missiles Apparently successful launch of missile from submarine
Launches Unha-2 rocket
in defiance of
UN security resolution Agrees to return
to NPT and
“forsake nuclear weapons”.
One day later, demands reactor from the US
Agrees testing moratorium in exchange for aid Launches a satellite using the Unha-3 rocket Expels UN
inspectors; pulls out of talks and restarts nuclear facilities Second underground nuclear test
Sinks the South Korean warship Cheonan
Claims it has tested submarine- launched missile
Six-party talks with China, Russia, United States, Japan and South Korea Series of US-North Korean talks
Expels UN inspectors from Yongbyon nuclear facility
Says it is leaving NPT Declares reactivation
of nuclear facilities
Says it will disable nuclear facilities America agrees to unfreeze assets and provide aid
Announces it has nuclear weapons
Whizz for atoms: a science and technology centre in Pyongyang
Trang 20The Economist May 28th 2016 Briefing North Korea’s nuclear weapons 21
1
2duce enough fissile material for around
seven warheads a year and that its current
stockpile is about 20
Mr Albright, like most analysts, is
deep-ly sceptical that the device tested in
Janu-ary was, as Mr Kim claimed, a true
hydro-gen bomb In hydrohydro-gen bombs a
“primary”, which gets its power from
nuc-lear fission in uranium or plutonium, sets
off a “secondary”, which gets its power
from the fusion of deuterium and tritium
Such bombs have yields in the hundreds
of kilotons, or megatons Estimates based
on seismology suggest this year’s test, like
its predecessors, had a yield of no more
than ten kilotons, though the fact that the
bomb was more deeply buried than the
first three suggests its makers may have
ex-pected something bigger Mr Albright
sus-pects the engineers were trying a
tech-nique developed by South Africa’s defunct
nuclear programme in which a lithium,
deuterium and tritium tablet at the centre
of a fission device boosts its yield with a bit
of fusion
The next issue is whether the North
Ko-reans have graduated from devices that
can be tested to devices that can be fitted
onto either its existing medium-range
No-dong missile (developed from the
Soviet-era Scud C) or its two missiles under
devel-opment, the Musudan intermediate-range
ballistic missile (IRBM) and the KN-08
in-tercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Mr
Schilling thinks that they would not have
carried out four nuclear tests on something
they did not think they could deliver On
March 9th, Mr Kim was photographed
pay-ing a visit to what may have been the
Chamjin missile factory outside
Pyon-gyang In a hall packed with several
ballis-tic missiles, Mr Kim posed beside a
plausi-ble-looking re-entry vehicle that would be
consistent in size with a fission device
about 60cm in diameter and weighing up
to 300 kilograms Both American and
South Korean officials are convinced that
North Korea can indeed make a warhead
small enough to fit on the Nodong, which
can reach targets in Japan, including
Amer-ican bases (see map)
A further question concerns the
re-en-try vehicle Mr Kim was proudly showing
off: would it survive its passage through
the Earth’s atmosphere? Until recently,
Western intelligence believed that North
Korea had not yet mastered this
technol-ogy But on March 15th pictures appeared in
the North Korean media of what appeared
to be a nose-cone from a KN-08 placed on
an engine test stand one and a half metres
beneath an ignited Scud rocket motor
An-other picture (above, right) showed Mr
Kim examining the re-entry vehicle after it
had seemingly passed its test
Another ground test on April 9th has,
according to Mr Schilling, put to rest any
doubts about North Korea’s ability to build
an ICBM sooner rather than later Two
en-gines from Soviet-era R-27 launched ballistic missiles were coupledtogether to provide the propulsive powerand range for a warhead carried by a KN-08
submarine-to hit the east coast of the United States It isnot known how many R-27s North Koreahas, but up to 150 went missing from Russia
in the post-Soviet 1990s Mr Schilling ons flight testing of a KN-08 enhanced inthis way could begin soon, leading to a
reck-“limited operational capability by 2020”
Other recent tests include a large fuelled rocket motor of the kind needed tolaunch a mobile medium-range missile atvery short notice (liquid-fuelled rockets,like those on the KN-08, take much longer
solid-to prepare for flight and are harder solid-to movearound) and the launch of a ballistic mis-sile apparently from a submerged sub-marine in late April
Not all North Korea’s tests meet with
success Three recent test fires of the dan flopped Michael Elleman, a missileexpert at the IISS, speculates that perhapsthe missiles were solid-fuelled and the en-gines still at an early stage of development
Mr Elleman reckons that getting the dans working, and thus being able tothreaten the American base in Guam over3,000km away, must be a priority He cau-tions that a string of failures is not groundsfor optimism; the North Korean approach
Musu-is to try it, find out what went wrong, find a
fix and then validate it “Their systems
nev-er work first time,” says Mr Schilling, “butthey persevere.”
Some of what Mr Fitzpatrick describes
as “this extraordinary amount of activity”may have been related to the seventh con-gress of the Workers’ Party, a sanctificationofMr Kim’s leadership A less frenzied pace
of testing may now resume Since 2013, Mr
NORTH KOREA
CAA
R U
S I A
K S
A
N M N O
IN
J AP AN
M
XICO
A U S
TRA L
Musudan, 3,500km
KN-08, 9,000km Enhanced 10,000- 13,000km
Selected North Korean missiles Maximum range estimates
Sources: IISS; 38 North
IN DEVELOPMENT
Here’s one I made earlier (which just happens to fit inside this)
Trang 2122 Briefing North Korea’s nuclear weapons The Economist May 28th 2016
2Kim has talked of his byungjin policy of
combining nuclear deterrence with
eco-nomic development Mr Pollack says that
if Mr Kim wants the sort of
bells-and-whis-tles deterrent deployed by the large
nuc-lear powers, with submarine-launched
and mobile missiles, the ruinous expense
would make such a policy impossible If,
on the other hand, Mr Kim just wants what
Mr Pollack calls a “don’t fuck with us”
de-terrent—one that keeps outside powers
from interfering with his regime—he
prob-ably has one now
Given what he has been testing, it
seems likely that Mr Kim has his heart set
on the former His talk of economic
re-form—he laid out the first new five-year
plan for decades at the congress—is short
on specifics If his enthusiasm for growth
has led him to be worried by the
suppos-edly tougher sanctions agreed to by the UN
Security Council in Resolution 2270 on
March 2nd in response to the nuclear test,
he has shown no sign of it
Deterrence, defence, despair
These latest sanctions reflect China’s
in-creased willingness to co-operate with
America and others on North Korea, a new
mood born of frustration and annoyance
that Mr Kim continues his nuclear
provoca-tions when China has asked him to stop
Still, unlike the sanctions on Iran, those on
North Korea remain focused on hobbling
the nuclear programme and denying
luxu-ry goods to Mr Kim and his cronies, rather
than on damaging the general economy
North Korea is free to buy fuel oil and sell
iron ore and coal as long as the revenues
are not used to fund military activities
This is not a condition that can be
practi-cally enforced
Chun Yung-woo, South Korea’s former
chief negotiator at the six-party talks and
national-security adviser to President Lee
Myung-bak until 2013, says that although
China has toughened its stance towards
North Korea, it has “not fundamentally
changed its policy of putting stability
be-fore denuclearisation—it will only
imple-ment sanctions that are tolerable to North
Korea” He hopes that the next American
president, with support from Congress,
will put China on the spot by applying a
“secondary boycott” to any Chinese
busi-nesses trading with North Korea
Another South Korean official, who
talks regularly to the Chinese, is more
sym-pathetic to their dilemma The official says
Beijing has been disturbed by an almost
complete lack of communication with the
North Korean regime since Mr Kim
execut-ed his uncle, Jang Song Taek, in 2013 Jang
was the one senior figure in Pyongyang
with whom the Chinese had close ties The
Chinese are changing their tactics, if not
their strategy, in response to what they see
as continuing provocations, looking for a
sanctions “sweet-spot”—harsh enough to
change Mr Kim’s mind but not so punitive
as to risk the collapse of the regime ever, if Mr Kim believes he is now on the
How-“home straight”, his instinct may be tosprint for the finishing line and talk after-wards Mr Chun thinks that North Koreawill never denuclearise; if it agreed to stoptesting it would be because it had achievedthe nuclear power and status it craves
The rest of the world will not agree tothat Still, Mr Fitzpatrick says that somekind of high-level engagement is overdue:
he thinks it preposterous that the onlyAmerican who knows Mr Kim is DennisRodman, a retired basketball player Peace-treaty talks with North Korea to bringabout a formal end to the Korean war, he
reckons, would not require recognition ofNorth Korea’s nuclear status and could bepart of an agreement to freeze nuclear-weapons development
Mr Samore thinks Mr Kim’s behaviourmay eventually exasperate China so muchthat it will bring into play sanctions whichreally hurt In the absence of such leverage,though, the focus must be on strengthen-ing deterrence and containment Thatmeans resisting or defusing Chinese dis-pleasure over the proposed fielding of theTHAAD (terminal high-altitude area de-fence) ballistic-missile defence system inSouth Korea The Chinese oppose THAAD
on the basis that its powerful AN/TPY-2 dar could undermine the effectiveness oftheir nuclear deterrent against America, aclaim that Mr Samore rejects
ra-China fears that, over time, a regionalnetwork of anti-missile systems deployed
by America’s allies might come to threatenthe deterrent effect of its relatively smallstrategic nuclear forces In this instance
that concern seems far-fetched TheTHAADsystem is designed to destroy mis-siles during the terminal phase of their tra-jectories, when they are coming backdown; it can do nothing against missilesduring their boost or midcourse phase, soChinese missiles aimed at America wouldhave nothing to fear from a THAAD battery
in South Korea Still, the Chinese claim to
be worried that THAAD’s radars, if used in
“look mode” rather than “terminal mode”,could reach deep into their territory Americans point out that using the ra-dar that way would decouple it from themissile-defence system it was deployedwith, which would defeat its purpose.More generally, they say that this is justsomething China will have to put up with
As America’s defence secretary, Ash ter, said last month: “It’s a necessary thing.It’s between us and the South Koreans, it’spart of protecting our own forces on theKorean peninsula and protecting South Ko-rea It has nothing to do with the Chinese.”The message to China was clear: as youhave done such a lousy job persuadingyour ally to rein in his nukes, you will have
Car-to accept the consequences
Mr Elleman has calculated that, facedwith 50-missile salvoes, a layered defenceconsisting of two THAAD batteries andSouth Korea’s existing Patriot systemswould be able to stop all but 10% of whatwas fired He and Michael Zagurek, in a pa-per for 38 North, base their calculations onwhat is known in the jargon as “single-shotprobability of kill” (SSPK) With two layers
of defence, the SSPK of each interceptorneed only be a bit over 0.7 for 90% of the in-coming missiles to be destroyed
That would be an impressively tive defence against conventionally armedmissiles But only one or two nuclear war-heads need to get through for the casualties
effec-to be immense (420,000 killed and injured
in Seoul for each 20 kiloton warhead,
reck-on Mr Elleman and Mr Zagurek) And if clear-tipped missiles were launched along-side or behind conventional decoys thesystem would be clueless as to which waswhich If Mr Kim were to add submarine-launched missiles to his arsenal, defencewould be harder still; they could be firedout of sight of THAAD’s radar
nu-Like tougher sanctions, THAAD is wellworth deploying But neither can fully con-tain the threat Nor is it certain that conven-tional deterrence (which rests upon the as-sumption that the regime to be deterred issufficiently rational not to invite its owndestruction) will necessarily work againstNorth Korea Another reason the Chinesegive for their unwillingness to tighten thescrew on the regime is that they fear its im-minent collapse could result in a last act ofsuicidal nuclear defiance by Mr Kim Thatmay just be what Mr Kim wants his adver-saries to believe But if it is a bluff, it is notone that anybody wishes to call 7
Is THAAD the best you can do?
Trang 22The Economist May 28th 2016 23
For daily analysis and debate on Asia, visit
Economist.com/asia
1
BARACK OBAMA fooled no one this
week when, having announced that
America was lifting its embargo on selling
weapons to Vietnam, he denied that the
decision was “based on China or any other
considerations” It was a tactful fib, to
por-tray the move as merely part of Mr
Obama’s legacy-building mission
ofrecon-ciliation with historic enemies, to be
fol-lowed days later by a historic visit to the
site of America’s atom-bombing of
Hiro-shima But at a time of increased tension in
the South China Sea, where Vietnam is
among the countries disputing territory
with China, America’s policies there are
bound to be seen in a different context The
headline in Global Times, a fire-breathing
Chinese tabloid, read simply: “Washington
uses past foe to counter China”
The American president made his
an-nouncement a few hours into his first state
visit to Vietnam, following a meeting with
the country’s new president, Tran Dai
Quang, in Hanoi Official enthusiasm was
mirrored in the thick crowds lining the
streets in the capital and in Ho Chi Minh
City to greet Mr Obama, whose visit
be-tween May 23rd and 25th was only the
third by an American leader since the end
of the Vietnam war in 1975 His star power
contrasted with the indifference most
Viet-namese show for the stiff apparatchiks of
the ruling Communist Party Locals in
Ha-noi gawped at Mr Obama tucking into bun
cha, a cheap meal of grilled pork and rice
America’s own armed forces, such as a turn to Cam Ranh Bay, once an Americannaval base on the south-eastern coast.America had previously insisted thatlifting the embargo would depend on Viet-nam’s progress on human rights, whicheven Mr Obama admits has been only
re-“modest” The regime’s thuggishnessmakes even a largely symbolic concessionhard to swallow The party was seen tohave eased up on critics during 2015, when
it was negotiating access to the led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free-trade deal—but it has since reverted toform, and its new leadership, reshuffled inJanuary, contains several former secret po-licemen Mr Obama’s arrival in Vietnamcoincided with a ludicrous parliamentary
American-“election”, boasting a 96% turnout, andwith a crackdown on environmentalistswho have been gathering in the cities toprotest about polluted canals and seas Theauthorities even sabotaged Mr Obama’s ef-forts to meet critics of the party by brieflydetaining several campaigners whom thepresident had invited to his hotel for a chat
China plays the Gambia gambit
Boosters say that improving Vietnam’s man-rights record is bound to be a longslog, and that gaining the regime’s trust is aprerequisite They say that arms sales arefar from America’s only bargaining chip:the terms of the TPP, for example, obligeVietnam to begin tolerating independentunions, a reform that could loosen theCommunists’ monopoly on public life Butthat deal will have no impact if, as seemsall too possible, America’s Congress re-fuses to ratify it
hu-So Mr Obama is taking the long-termview that closer partnership with Vietnam
is worth sacrificing some principles for.America and its regional friends arealarmed by China’s forcefulness in the
noodles bought from a street stall
The end of the arms ban will have littleimmediate impact America had alreadytwice loosened it, first in 2007 and again in
2014, allowing the sale of needed patrolvessels It will take years for the Vietnam-ese, short on cash and largely reliant onRussian weaponry, to integrate Americanhardware. Moreover, weapon sales to Viet-nam (like to anywhere else) will still need
to be approved case by case, and the firstpurchases are likely to be of relatively inof-fensive systems, such as radar China’spress has warned that America risks turn-ing the region into a “tinderbox of con-flicts”, yet its diplomats, not normally slow
to accuse America of stoking tensions,played down the decision A spokes-woman for the foreign ministry welcomedthe normalisation of ties between Viet-nam and America, and painted the armsban as a kooky anachronism
America’s move is partly a sop to servative factions within Vietnam’s Com-munist Party in need of reassurance Be-hind this week’s smiles they still fret thatAmerica harbours hope of overthrowingthe party Bigwigs in government feelbounced into their friendship with Ameri-
con-ca by virulent anti-Chinese sentimentamong ordinary Vietnamese, some ofwhom accuse the cadres of going soft onVietnam’s overbearing northern neigh-bour Trust earned by dropping the embar-
go might eventually gain advantages for
America and Vietnam
Pull the other one
Trang 2324 Asia The Economist May 28th 2016
1
2South China Sea—notably its building
boom, turning disputed rocks and reefs
into artificial islands, which may well,
de-spite Chinese denials, become military
bases Both diplomacy and American
dis-plays of might have failed to stop this
America currently has an
aircraft-carri-er battle group in the South China Sea to
re-mind the world of its military strength To
Chinese protests, it has sent ships and
planes close to Chinese-claimed rocks and
reefs Meanwhile, the Philippines has
chal-lenged China’s territorial claims at an
in-ternational tribunal in The Hague, which is
expected to rule soon China has said it
will ignore the ruling The Philippines’
new president, Rodrigo Duterte, has not
made clear how he would react to a
deci-sion in his country’s favour
Although nobody expects America and
China to go to war over some remote rocks
and man-made islands, an accidental clash
in or over the South China Sea remains a
risk On May 17th Chinese fighter jets gerously intercepted an American recon-naissance plane over the sea China deniesits planes did anything provocative
dan-China does seem to worry about its age, however Its foreign minister, Wang Yi,recently toured the smallest South-EastAsian countries—Brunei, Cambodia andLaos—and announced that China hadreached “consensus” with them on han-dling disputes in the sea This was news tothe countries concerned, and alarmedtheir fellow members of the Association ofSouth-East Asian Nations, who saw a bla-tant attempt to divide them China has alsolobbied G7 countries in the hope that thestatement their leaders issue on May 27thafter their summit in Japan will not scoldChina over the South China Sea AlreadyChina’s newest diplomatic partner, theGambia, in distant west Africa has, bizarre-
im-ly, confirmed China’s “indisputable eignty” over the sea So that’s that, then.7
sover-FOR the second time in under a year,
se-nior men from the Afghan Taliban have
descended on Quetta, capital of
Balochis-tan, the largest but least populated of
Paki-stan’s four provinces, to elect a new
su-preme leader The first time was hurriedly
to choose a successor to Mullah
Muham-mad Omar, the Taliban’s founding leader,
after attempts to hide his death in a Karachi
hospital two years earlier were exposed
But now that successor, Mullah Akhtar
Mansour, who was involved in the
cov-er-up of Omar’s death and in a ruthless
purge of rivals afterwards, is himself dead
He was killed on May 21st, on a lonely road
in Balochistan, by an American drone
For his Pakistani hosts, Mullah
Man-sour’s death has embarrassing echoes of
Osama bin Laden, who was killed by
American special forces five years ago in
his secret home near a Pakistani military
academy But Mullah Mansour was no
fearful recluse He had the backing of a
Pakistani state that gives sanctuary to
Tali-ban leaders as a means of maintaining
in-fluence in Afghanistan And whereas
American drone strikes against militants in
the tribal area ofNorth Waziristan are
long-established and carried out under rules
se-cretly agreed with Pakistan, Balochistan
was considered to be off-limits No longer
The Americans, whose strikes are usually
clandestine, were quick to announce
Mul-lah Mansour’s elimination (so much for
Pakistani feelings) They said he was an
“obstacle to peace and reconciliation” whohad stopped more reasonable Talibanleaders from “participating in peace talkswith the Afghan government”
Mullah Mansour got about On his finalday he had travelled 450 kilometres (280miles) by taxi from the border with Iran (hewas struck shortly after stopping forlunch) His Pakistani passport (under an as-sumed name) that was found at the scene
showed that he had also frequently flownfrom Karachi to Dubai and Bahrain ThatAmerican spooks tracked him after alengthy stay in Iran may lead comrades towonder about traitors in their midst
In Afghanistan, people sick of endlessTaliban attacks emanating from Pakistanwere delighted Afghan leaders had longwanted America to take the war againstthe Taliban to Pakistan That it has nowdone so is a boost for President AshrafGhani His attempts to befriend Pakistan inhopes of support for peace talks earnedhim scorn at home The talks have gone no-where, violence has escalated and the Tali-ban have grabbed more territory than atany time since their ouster in 2001
The peace talks, hosted by Pakistan inthe capital, Islamabad, involve Afghani-stan, America and China But in five meet-ings, there has been ever less to talk about.Mullah Mansour was more interested insending militants to Kabul than envoys tothe talks (in April over 60 Afghans werekilled in one attack alone in the Afghancapital) The Afghan government, believ-ing Pakistan had promised to use forceagainst “irreconcilable” insurgents, did noteven bother to send a senior official, bar itsambassador, to the last meeting on May18th It is not clear how much of a reputa-tion Pakistan can salvage as a self-pro-claimed peace broker, especially as MullahMansour’s sojourns in Iran suggest that hemay have been slipping from the Pakistaniorbit Some in the Pakistani establishmentmay even have been happy for the Ameri-cans to kill him
But America remains royally fed upwith Pakistan, not least because of its reluc-tance to go after a key Taliban ally, the Haq-qani network, sheltering in North Waziri-stan In February the American Congressrefused to give Pakistan financial help tobuy eight F-16 fighter jets As for China, akey Pakistani ally, it has promised billions
War in Afghanistan
Taliban reshuffled
ISLAMABAD AND KABUL
The Americans’ killing of Mullah Akhtar Mansour will deepen divisions within
the Taliban but not end the insurgency
Out of a clear blue sky
Trang 24The Economist May 28th 2016 Asia 25
2of dollars in roads and more, but is likely to
remain uncomfortable about its
invest-ments until the region’s Islamist
insurgen-cies are stamped out Meanwhile, on May
23rd the leaders of Iran, India and
Afghani-stan signed a deal to create a transit hub at
the Iranian port of Chabahar on the
Arabi-an Sea That would challenge PakistArabi-an’s
own port joint-venture with the Chinese at
Gwadar, 170km farther east
On May 24th the Taliban appointed as
their new leader Haibatullah
Akhund-zada, a former head of the courts with little
military experience but with a line in
fat-was endorsing executions and
amputa-tions He inherits a death sentence from
America, and a squabbling outfit at war
with itself as well as with the Afghan
gov-ernment and its sponsors
Mullah Mansour was viewed by some
field commanders as being too close to
Pakistan Mr Akhundzada may need to
prove his credentials by redoubling a
Tali-ban offensive in Afghanistan that has been
raging since last summer With the spring
fighting season under way, and a profitable
opium harvest gathered, the Taliban are
well placed to tighten their pincer around
Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand
prov-ince in the south, and to expand their
of-fensive in the north They may even
at-tempt to retake Kunduz, the northern
provincial capital that was briefly captured
last year Peace will have to wait.7
MAHATMA GANDHI would not have
enjoyed Texfair 2016 in Coimbatore
in the southern state of Tamil Nadu The
man hated machines and factories, and
promoted Indian independence by urging
every household to spin its own cotton
yarn But on display at the textile fair were
bobbins, rollers, waste balers,
quality-con-trol sensors and much, much more
Indeed, India is vying with China to be
the world’s biggest producer of yarn, with
over 45m spindles twirling around the
clock But what is striking about the trade
fair is how so much of the modern
wizard-ry on show is made not in better-known
industrial centres around the world but in
Coimbatore itself, a city of just 1.6m some
500 kilometres (310 miles) south-west of
Chennai, the Tamil Nadu capital
The fast-growing city is an inelegant
sprawl stretching into groves of coconut
palms It teems with technical institutes,
bustling factories and civic spirit Earnest
and ambitious, Coimbatore evokes theAmerican Midwest of a century ago A re-gional manufacturers’ group that wasfounded in 1933 during Gandhi’s home-spun campaign has now designed, builtand marketed a hand-held, battery-operat-
ed cotton picker that it claims is six timesmore efficient than human fingers
Gandhi would have been appalled Butthe gadget says something about the quietsuccess of parts of India’s deep south Millowners worry that with day wages in Tam-
il Nadu and neighbouring Kerala to thewest now far higher than those in northernIndia, local cotton may grow uncompeti-tive Tea planters in the hills west of Coim-batore are already squeezed One land-owner, in Kerala’s Wayanad region, wheresilver oaks shade trim ranks of tea bushes,says that his pickers get 300 rupees (about
$4.50) a day, nearly three times the wage inDarjeeling in India’s north
It may not sound like much, but it is alsomore than the average Indian earns And
as a whole, GDP per person in Tamil Naduand Kerala is 68% and 41% higher respec-tively than the national average of $1,390 ayear With the south’s booming new indus-tries, better education and higher wagescontrasted with declining industries in thenorth and east, India is undergoing a shift abit like the American one from the rustbelt
to the sunbelt in the 1980s Kerala shares inthis new industrialisation less than TamilNadu, but that is balanced by anothersource of prosperity: remittances fromabroad As many as one in ten of Kerala’s35m people workin the rich Arab countriesofthe Persian Gulf Their remittances boostlocal incomes, property prices and de-mand for better schools Kerala, under left-ist governments for the past six decades, al-ready has India’s best state education andits highest literacy rate Its school districthas again topped nationwide exams for 17-
year-olds, followed by Chennai region,covering the rest of southern India
Yet India’s deep south has not muted growing prosperity into greater po-litical clout It remains largely aloof frombroader political trends, including a slug-ging match between the Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP), in office nationally under Na-rendra Modi, the prime minister, and Con-gress, the once-dominant centre-left partythat worships Gandhi In elections acrossfour Indian states that wrapped up on May19th, attention elsewhere focused largely
trans-on the fortunes of those two parties TheBJP’s capture from Congress of Assam inthe north-east was seen as a big boost for
Mr Modi Congress’s failure to take anystate was seen as a sign of decay
Voters in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu,which has 72m people, paid hardly any at-tention at all In both states the contest wasbetween long-established state-level par-ties Keralites and Tamils alike admit that interms of policy not much distinguishes therival parties For a generation, power inKerala has alternated between two left-of-centre coalitions Tamil Nadu, meanwhile,has been in thrall to parties that both make
“Dravidian progress”—a reference to SouthIndia’s linguistic and racial separatenessfrom the “Aryan”, Hindi-dominatednorth—part of their name
Elections are often bidding wars InTamil Nadu this has meant offers of house-hold goods or simple cash The favouredlure in Kerala, where politics is so staid thatrival party bands traditionally deliver ajoint crescendo in village squares to markthe end of campaigning, has been prom-ises of ever more generous welfare
In practice, voters often punish theparty in power But this year voters in Tam-
il Nadu re-elected the incumbent ment for the first time in a generation TheAIADMK, whose boss is a former actressknown as Jayalalithaa, had the strongerparty machine and a track record of gener-osity It secured victory over the DMK, fromwhich it split in 1972 The outcome in Keralawas more traditional The corruption-taint-
govern-ed ruling coalition, lgovern-ed by a local affiliate ofCongress, was trounced by the commu-nist-led Left Front
Interestingly, gains were made by anewcomer to Keralite politics since the laststate elections in 2011: Mr Modi’s BJP Itpicked up just one seat in the 140-memberstate assembly, but almost doubled its pro-portion of votes, to 15% To some, the Hin-du-nationalist party’s entry reflects the im-patience of Kerala’s growing (and mostlyHindu) middle class with the handout pol-itics that tends, on paper at least, to favourreligious minorities in a state that is 27%Muslim and 18% Christian But Keralites fed
up with both Congress and the and-sickle mob, both of which have failed
hammer-to foster industrialisation and jobs, mayhave felt they had nowhere else to go.7
India’s deep south
Southern comfort
COIMBATORE
Tamil Nadu and Kerala dance to a
different tune from the rest of India
Coimbatore: bobbin and weavin’
Trang 2526 The Economist May 28th 2016
1
For daily analysis and debate on China, visit
Economist.com/china
THE cheongsam modelling contest
starts at 7pm; at 8pm it is group dances
in the style of ethnic Uighurs from China’s
far west, and of fan-waving
north-eastern-ers from provinces adjoining Russia and
North Korea Participants and spectators
alike are pensioners: retired miners,
teach-ers and industrial workteach-ers They sit in the
evening cool, gossiping and applauding A
man in a Hawaiian shirt keeps the beat
with castanets Fei Liyue, a former
con-struction manager, says that he and his
rel-atives come every evening He is 3,200km
(2,000 miles) from his home in the bleak
oil city of Daqing
Almost everyone is, like Mr Fei, from
the rust belt of the north-east, a region that
is gripped in winter by an Arctic chill But
the scene here is by the beach in the
sub-tropical city of Sanya in Hainan, an island
province as far south from their native
re-gion as it is possible to go without leaving
the country (see map) Palm fronds and
bougainvillea rustle in the breeze
Bikini-clad tourists dash by The crowds of elderly
visitors (some are pictured) are something
new in Sanya They may herald a profound
social change
Chinese people used to live, work,
re-tire and die where they were born The
country’s filial traditions reflect this:
chil-dren are supposed to look after their
par-ents The bureaucracy enforces it:
every-one has a hukou (household registration)
which provides subsidised health and
education, almost always in a person’s
ida Now Chinese people are moving fromthe industrial heartland of Heilongjiang, Ji-lin and Liaoning (the three north-easternprovinces) to Hainan And just as move-ment to America’s sunbelt helped trans-form a backward region, so the same thingcould happen in China
Fifty years ago Sanya was a small ing village Ye Yaer, who was born there in
fish-1961, survived on discarded ends of sugarcane and did not get a pair of shoes until hewas 12 Every day his mother walked 25km
to the nearest market town, carrying those
of her children too young to walk as well as
20 kilos of fish to sell Now Mr Ye is a cessful fish-dealer whose business extendsacross southern China; Sanya is full of five-star resorts And as happened in Florida, aretirement business is being built on theback of Hainan’s tourism
suc-According to Sanya’s government,400,000-500,000 pensioners head to thecity each year, perhaps half of them fromthe north-east That compares with thecity’s total population (those resident forsix months or longer) of 749,000 The in-comers are not the new rich Huang Cheng
of Sanya University says one-third of thesun-seeking pensioners have a monthly in-come of 2,000-3,000 yuan ($305-460),about the average for a working person Aquarter receive only 1,000-2,000 yuan amonth Most come for six months and re-turn to the north-east in summer “It’s toohot here then,” says Mr Fei, the oil-cityman, though he admits he is thinking ofsettling in Sanya full-time Rather like Flori-da’s “snowbirds”, many rent an apartmentjust for the winter
Fewer than 100,000 migrant ers live on the island year round, thinks MrHuang But there are signs that more aresettling Half of those he interviewed saidthey had bought property in Sanya Thenumber staying permanently started tosoar in 2010 when the city’s retirement
pension-place of birth
Thanks to the migration of workers,however, 260m people, about one-fifth ofthe population, now live somewhere oth-
er than their birthplace In the past fiveyears, the pattern of retirement has also be-gun to change Increasing numbers spendsome or all of their pensionable yearsaway from where they used to work Nei-
ther filial tradition nor the hukou system
have proved strong enough to prevent this
In the 1950s and 1960s Americansflocked from cold industrial cities, such asNew York and Chicago, to subtropical Flor-
Also in this section
27 Astroturfing the internet
28 Banyan: Failings of the China dream
Miami’s latitude New York’s l atitud e
Sanya
Beijing
Daqing
HEILONG-JIANG JILIN LIAONING
Source: “Mapping Crop Cycles in China Using MODIS-EVI Time Series”,
by Le Li et al Remote Sensing March 2014
Trang 26The Economist May 28th 2016 China 27
2boom began Hua Hong Investments, a
lo-cal property company, is about to open the
city’s first American-style residential care
home, with medical services, an indoor
golf driving-range and calligraphy classes
The winter pensioners are “awesome”,
enthuses Wu Qifa, a farmer in Danzhou, a
village on the edge of Sanya, who rents out
rooms to them “We couldn’t survive
with-out them.” The village pharmacy is
unusu-ally well stocked with heart medicines,
blood-pressure pills and pain relief for
knee and hip joints
Li Wen, from Heilongjiang, followed
the seniors down to Sanya and opened a
restaurant there offering north-eastern
cui-sine It has been doing a roaring trade, he
says, though this year business has
slack-ened, reflecting an economic slowdown in
the north-east Thanks to tourism and the
retirees, Sanya’s economy grew more than
tenfold between 2000 and 2013, almost
twice as fast as the country as a whole
But with so many moving in, problems
are inevitable Medical services—poor at
the best of times—are overwhelmed in
winter Doctors among the retired visitors
have been drafted in to help Everyone
complains about traffic In winter the price
ofvegetables typically doubles, and that of
seafood triples, says Mr Huang In summer
most pensioners go home, hurting firms
that cater to them
Not surprisingly, given the pressure on
public services, relations between locals
and the newcomers are “sensitive”, say
volunteers at the Sanya Association for
Re-settling Retirees “I would as soon befriend
an Iraqi as a north-easterner,” fumes one
Sanya resident It did not help when in
2014 Li Boqing, a deputy mayor who is
himself from the north-east, said that: “If
immigrants left the city, Sanya would
be-come a ghost town overnight.”
The city government, however, does
not want its hospitals and roads clogged
up, and so is trying to control the flood of
incomers One method is requiring that
new apartments be 80 square metres or
larger Typically, pensioners rent spaces far
smaller than that There are other factors
that may curb the influx Huang Huang of
the China Tourism Academy in Beijing
says that those in early retirement (which
usually begins at the age of 60 for men, 55
for female civil servants and 50 for other
women) will normally be well enough to
seek a cleaner, warmer environment away
from their children As they become less
active, however, many will migrate back to
be near their families At the last stage,
when they need frequent medical
assis-tance, they will probably enter old-age
in-stitutions It is unclear whether the
govern-ment will build these in big population
centres or in places like Sanya
Pensioners themselves are looking
be-yond Sanya’s overcrowded streets Some
are moving to villages along the coast, or
hill towns in Yunnan, a subtropical ince on the mainland In Guangxi prov-ince, bordering on Yunnan, the village ofBama attracts those keen to learn the secretoflongevity—it is said to have an unusuallylarge population of centenarians
prov-China has about 220m people over 60
If they prove as mobile as American ees (1.1% of whom move from one state toanother each year), that would mean over2m pensioners upping sticks annually, po-tentially making a huge difference to theeconomies and social structures of theirdestinations To judge by the experience ofSanya, few places are ready for it 7
retir-“THE people’s police love the people,the people love the people’s police”
is a well-known ditty that officials claim ischerished and accurate Earlier this month,
however, Global Times, a newspaper in
Beijing, said that police were struggling toconvince the public that they had actedproperly in the case of a 29-year-old manwho died in the capital while in their cus-tody Disdain for and distrust of the police
is, in fact, widespread But it is rare for an gan so closely linked to the CommunistParty to admit that officers have a credibil-ity problem
or-Police said they had detained the man,Lei Yang, on May 7th during a raid on abrothel; that he had resisted arrest anddied of a heart attack His family andfriends used social media to challenge thisaccount They said that Mr Lei was fit andhad no record of heart trouble; that he was
on his way to the airport to pick up tives when he disappeared; and that tim-ings and other details given by the policewere implausible These counterclaimscreated a firestorm online, and even instate-linked media
rela-The case is the latest illustration of howsocial media—despite huge efforts by thegovernment to block access to online infor-mation that it considers sensitive—play animportant role in China’s public and politi-cal life Censors tried hard to delete postscritical of the police handling of Mr Lei’scase But it proved impossible to keep upwith the deluge
Such efforts by the censors are
relative-ly easy for internet users to detect More ficult to monitor are the government’s at-tempts to influence online discussion byintervening surreptitiously with posts andcomments they disguise to look like theycome from the public A new study pub-lished by Harvard University offers a rareanalysis of how this works On the basis of
dif-a ledif-aked e-mdif-ail dif-archive from dif-a locdif-al ernment’s propaganda office, the authorsconclude that 488m such bogus posts ap-pear each year, about one out of every 178
gov-of the messages that are posted each year
on commercial sites
Contrary to popular belief, those volved in this effort avoid arguing withsceptics of the government Instead, thescholars write, they try to distract the pub-lic and change the subject Most of theirposts gush with praise for China, the party
in-or other symbols of the regime (such as themuch-loved police)
The authors describe this as a “massivesecretive operation” But its existence haslong been suspected The government’sonline cheerleaders are commonly dispar-aged as belonging to the “50-Cent Party”, areference to the amount, equivalent toeight American cents, that they are ru-moured to receive for each pro-govern-ment post The scholars believe, though,that most 50-centers are government orparty officials, and that they are paid noth-ing extra for their online scribblings
Their posts were clearly of little use ing another recent scandal that came tolight thanks to a furore on social media Itinvolved the death of a student who spentvast sums of borrowed money for an inef-fective course of cancer treatment at anarmy hospital He had learned about itfrom Baidu, China’s largest search engine,which did not make clear that advertisingpayments skewed its search results
dur-In an e-mail reportedly sent to his staffBaidu’s CEO, Robin Li, wrote that as a result
of the scandal, Baidu faced a crisis in publictrust “Baidu could go bankrupt in just 30days if we lose our users’ support,” hewrote The episode was a huge embarrass-ment to the party too But if its leaders havethe same worries as Mr Li, they have yet tobecome public 7
Social mediaThe dark art of astroturfing
BEIJING
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a running dog
Trang 2728 China The Economist May 28th 2016
THE “China dream” of the president, Xi Jinping, is of a
rejuve-nated, rich and strong country that will once again enjoy the
respect and fealty in Asia commanded by the empires of old That
last part is not happening: from a recalcitrant young despot,
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, on its north-eastern border, to those
ungrateful Vietnamese Communists to the south, flirting with
America, insolent insubordination abounds And perhaps most
alarming of all, the people of “inalienable” territories wrested
from the motherland by predatory imperialists—Hong Kong and
Taiwan—show no enthusiasm at all for a return to its bosom
Events in recent weeks have highlighted China’s difficulties in
both places In Hong Kong a visiting senior official from Beijing,
Zhang Dejiang, had to scurry around under high security to avoid
meeting protesters Paving stones were glued down in case they
became projectiles And in Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, at her
swearing-in on May 20th, rejected months of intense Chinese
pressure to pay lip service to the notion that there is “one China”
Mr Zhang presented a friendly face in Hong Kong, prompting
the Big Lychee, an acerbic local blog, to note: “Few sights are more
painful to behold than a senior Chinese Communist Party official
attempting to be nice They do it with undisguised distaste, only
when the usual thuggish methods like violence and bribery have
failed.” As for Ms Tsai’s performance, China did not mask its
dis-appointment Its Taiwan-affairs body, unabashed at treating a
popularly elected leader like an underperforming fourth-grader,
called it “an incomplete test answer” Some democracy-loving
Chinese citizens showed more sympathy, with supportive posts
online (soon deleted), and a rally (soon dispersed) by a handful
of people in the city of Chongqing to mark the inauguration
In Hong Kong and Taiwan China’s tactics are much the same
It uses economic sticks and carrots combined with occasional
heavy-handed displays of power It ignores or suppresses views
it does not like and appeals to pan-Chinese patriotism But it
should know by now that these methods do not work For
exam-ple, to help Hong Kong recover from the SARS epidemic in 2003,
China eased restrictions on the numbers of mainland visitors
The resulting throngs of Chinese tourists soon became yet
anoth-er of the locals’ grievances Similarly, in Taiwan, a massive
expan-sion of trade and tourism links with China under Ms Tsai’s
prede-cessor, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT), caused hugeprotests in 2014 Yet Mr Zhang spent his time urging Hong Kongers
to focus on the economy and not to “rock the boat” He dodged sues that have angered people, notably China’s refusal to allowproper elections for Hong Kong’s chief executive That decision,also in 2014, triggered large demonstrations, too
is-China’s approach to Ms Tsai suggests it has few new ideas, ther, on how to handle Taiwan She was elected in January de-spite China’s warnings It abhors her Democratic ProgressiveParty, which leans towards formal as well as functional indepen-dence from China So China insists that Ms Tsai must accept what
ei-is known as the “1992 consensus”—that there ei-is only “one China”,however defined, of which Taiwan is part Mr Xi last year thun-dered that if Taiwan rejects this “the earth will move and themountains shake.” To emphasise the point, last November hemade a remarkable concession for a Chinese leader by travelling
to Singapore to meet Mr Ma, then Taiwan’s president That was areminder of the importance to China’s leaders of reclaiming Tai-wan: the unfinished item in its agenda of national recovery from
a “century of humiliation” Since 1981 they have been trying towoo Taiwan with a “one-country, two-systems” arrangementcomparable to the one later offered to Hong Kong, but giving Tai-wan even greater leeway Hong Kong’s enjoyment of 50 years ofautonomy after its reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 wassupposed to be an advertisement of the advantages of this ar-rangement It has turned instead into a warning of its dangers.Since January, China has turned to its usual battery of eco-nomic, diplomatic and strong-arm methods to bring Ms Tsai intoline Tour operators report a sharp drop in the number of Chinesetourists China has signalled an end to the “diplomatic truce” ithad been observing by not competing with Taiwan for recogni-tion from poor countries: in March it established ties with Tai-wan’s former partner, the Gambia It has also bullied Kenya intosending Taiwan citizens, detained on suspicion of fraud, to Chi-
na And, just before Ms Tsai’s swearing-in, it staged military cises on the coast opposite Taiwan, as if rehearsing an invasion.The pageantry around the inauguration included a re-enact-ment of the brutal suppression of an uprising against mainland(then KMT) rule in 1947—a defining event for the island’s indepen-dence movement But in her speech Ms Tsai bent over backwards
exer-to keep exer-to her promise not exer-to upset the status quo She even knowledged the “historical fact” of the meeting in 1992 at whichthe alleged consensus was reached But she did not repeat the
ac-“one China” fiction Struggling to appease both her dence supporters and Taiwan’s domineering neighbour, she gaveneither quite what they wanted
pro-indepen-Straitened circumstances
It is Hong Kong that seems to be learning from Taiwan, not theother way round A small but vocal independence movementhas sprung up there But China is not changing course in eitherplace Its response to Ms Tsai’s speech was to resort to threatsabout cutting off contacts and to belittle her The lack of specifics,however, has left China room for manoeuvre It would be heart-ening to think that this means China’s leaders realise that the bestway to win hearts and minds in Hong Kong and Taiwan is not tobribe, browbeat and bully, but to make China itself look a moreattractive sovereign power More likely, however, is that Chinahas too many problems to deal with, at home and on its periph-ery, to risk another crisis in the Taiwan Strait just now 7
Rocking boats, shaking mountains
To bewilderment in China, neither Hong Kong nor Taiwan seems to want to follow its script
Banyan
Trang 28The Economist May 28th 2016 29
For daily analysis and debate on America, visit
Economist.com/unitedstates Economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica
1
THE 45-mile drive from Union Springs,
seat of Bullock County, Alabama, to
Montgomery, the state capital, might not
seem very arduous But for some locals,
the distance itself is not the main obstacle
Going to Montgomery, as some now must
to get a driver’s licence, means the best part
of a day off work for two people, the
test-sitter and his chauffeur (there is no public
transport) That is a stretch for employees
in inflexible, minimum-wage jobs—and
there are lots of them in Union Springs, a
tidy town in which the missing letters on
the shuttered department store’s façade
betray a quiet decline, surrounded by the
sort of spacious but dilapidated poverty
characteristic of Alabama’s Black Belt
To some, this trek is not just an
inconve-nience but a scandal The state’s voters
must now show one of several eligible
photo-IDs to cast a ballot, of which driving
licences are the most common kind Last
year, supposedly to save money, the
issu-ing office in Union Sprissu-ings, formerly open
for a day each week, was closed, along
with others in mostly black,
Democratic-leaning counties After an outcry, the
ser-vice was reinstated for a day per month; at
other times, applicants head to
Montgo-mery For James Poe, a funeral-home
direc-tor and head of the NAACP in Bullock
County, the combination of a new
vot-er-ID law and reduced hours is “insanity”
Such impediments may not be as flagrant
Altogether 17 states will have new rules
in place for this presidential election erend William Barber, a civil-rights activistwho is leading the fight against North Car-olina’s changes (among the most sweep-ing), shares Mr Poe’s outrage These are, hesays, summarising the general complaint,
Rev-“an all-out retrogressive attack on votingrights”, which his generation must defend,just as a previous one secured the passage
of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 Thushis slogan: “This is our Selma.”
Yet if this patchwork of initiatives is deed an assault on hallowed rights, it is,metaphorically speaking, a crime without
in-a body or incontrovertible smoking gun.That is partly due to the fiddly nature of thereforms Chief among them are require-ments for photo-IDs which, surveys sug-gest, minority citizens are more likely tolack (in Texas, which has the toughest IDlaw, you can vote with a gun licence butnot a student or employee card) Other re-visions include the curtailment of early-voting periods and the ending of election-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.North Carolina’s law contains all these ele-ments: all, say its critics, will dispropor-tionately affect minorities Elsewhere thereare conflicts over the need to produceproof of citizenship to register to vote (re-cently discounted by a court in Kansas)and the pruning of electoral rolls
Innocent or insidious, these tweaks arenot as luridly discriminatory as the blatant,often bloody shenanigans of the past.Moreover their impact is difficult to proveconclusively A study by the GovernmentAccountability Office found that, in Kan-sas, tighter ID laws led to a drop in turnout
of roughly 2% between 2008 and 2012, andslightly more in Tennessee; younger andblack voters were more likely to be affect-
ed Researchers at the University of
Cali-as when, Cali-as a young man in Union Springs,
he had to interpret the constitution in order
to vote, but, he thinks, they are obnoxiousall the same
For Mr Poe, the explanation of what hecalls “a slick Jim Crow” is simple: “Republi-cans want fewer people to vote.” Far from
it, insists John Merrill, who as a Republicanlegislator helped craft the new law andnow oversees its implementation as Ala-bama’s secretary of state Anyone without
a driving licence can apply for a free, native ID—in Union Springs, at the friendlyregistrar’s office in the courthouse True,fewer than 8,000 have been issued, butthat, Mr Merrill says, is because not manypeople need them (others disagree) Hepledges to ensure that anyone who wants
alter-an ID gets one, even if he has to go to theirhouse himself Turnout soared in the re-cent primary, he points out (though only
on the Republican side) As for racial crimination at the polls: “That day is over.”
dis-Across the Edmund Pettus bridge
The nuances, malleable data and emotiveclaims in the row over Alabama’s votinglaw are typical of similar disputes ragingacross the South, in and out of court, andelsewhere Some might not be resolved be-fore the presidential election and maycloud its outcome At their heart is thequestion of how far America has escapedthe racial traumas of its past
Voting rights
The fire next time
UNION SPRINGS, ALABAMA
Today’s voting-rights disputes are less clear-cut than those of the civil-rights era, but
they are inflammatory all the same
United States
Also in this section
31 The Libertarian Party
31 On the trail, surrender edition
32 Hillary Clinton’s e-mails
32 Disability lawsuits
33 Soccer flourishes
34 Lexington: Oh, Oklahoma
Trang 2930 United States The Economist May 28th 2016
2fornia, San Diego, also calculated that strict
IDlaws depress minority turnout, notably
among Hispanics There are worrisome
projections: Arturo Vargas of the NALEO
Educational Fund, a Latino lobby group,
reckons 875,000 Latino voters could be
im-peded by new regulations in November,
90% of them in Texas
But, as in Alabama, there is contrary
ev-idence, too For instance, in the
congressio-nal elections of 2014, the first held under
North Carolina’s new regime, black
turn-out rose—a bump Mr Barber’s side
attri-butes to an exciting Senate race and an
en-ergetic get-out-the-vote push As it
happens, Alabama’s turnout crashed in
2014, which officials ascribe to that year’s
dull, incumbent-heavy races Those
expla-nations point up a basic evidential hitch:
electoral behaviour is driven by many
fac-tors, from the political (a historic black
can-didate) to the personal (getting stuck at
work) Demonstrating a single rule’s
con-sequences is tricky; proving why people
fail to vote is particularly fraught And lots
of these measures are yet to be tested
A rainstorm with no umbrella
Hardly surprising, then, that opponents of
these changes, including the federal
gov-ernment, have sometimes struggled to
per-suade courts that they violate the VRA or
are unconstitutional “They’re wasting a
lot of money,” says Christian Adams of the
Public Interest Legal Foundation, which
joined Virginia in a successful defence of
voter-ID; a federal court recently upheld
North Carolina’s law On the other hand,
Texas’s has been judged discriminatory, as,
this week, were Ohio’s cuts to early voting;
several states, including Alabama, face
on-going litigation
Perhaps if the burden of proof fell more
squarely on the laws’ proponents, the
out-comes of these cases might be more
consis-tent—especially if circumstantial evidence
weighed more heavily Exhibit A might be
their incriminating timing
The key date, say activists, was June
25th 2013 That was when the Supreme
Court neutralised the aspect of the VRA
that required nine mostly southern states
with records of discrimination, plus parts
of six others, to clear changes to their
vot-ing practices with the Justice Department
or a federal court before they took effect
Edward Blum, a pro-reform campaigner
who helped bring the suit, argues that,
hav-ing “done what it was designed to do”, the
relevant section of the VRA had become an
infringement of state sovereignty; in
va-rious southern states, he notes, black
turn-out is now higher than in other bits of
America A narrow majority of the court
duly ruled that, while prejudice persisted,
the country had “changed dramatically”,
and that the formula used to apply the
pre-clearance requirement was outdated
Dis-senting, Ruth Bader Ginsburg adduced the
700-odd discriminatory measures blocked
by the Justice Department between 1982and 2006; she likened the decision to
“throwing away your umbrella in a storm because you are not getting wet”
rain-Not all the places now embroiled incontroversy had been fingered for preclea-rance But several were, and their new lawsmight have been rejected—as some appar-ently realised Alabama, recipient of 24 ob-jections by the Justice Department since
1990, passed its voter-ID law in 2011, butheld it back; it announced that it would im-plement it the day after the ruling NorthCarolina’s legislators rushed theirsthrough a month later, one remarking thatthe VRA “headache” had been lifted Tex-as’s law was blocked, then revived Thattelling opportunism lies behind Mr Bar-ber’s view that black voters now have “lessprotection than on August 7th, 1965”, theday after the Voting Rights Act was signed
Exhibit B in the circumstantial caseagainst the new laws is the ropey rationalefor passing them The main reason cited forthe ID requirements is the need to combatfraud That sounds reasonable, except thatthe kind of impersonation they prevent isvanishingly rare In Alabama, argues theNAACP’s Legal Defence Fund, there wasone documented case of voter-imperson-ation in the 12 years before the ID law waspassed The laws’ supporters, such as MrAdams, dismiss these quibbles: “Howmuch criminal activity is OK?”, he de-mands Mr Merrill, in Alabama, says thestate should always try to improve, just asits triumphant college football team con-stantly recruits new players
If there were no other cause for cion, that perfectionist argument mightwash But there is, including—Exhibit C—
suspi-the roster of implicated states Several
fea-ture growing minority populations, ening political competition, or both In
tight-2008 Barack Obama won North Carolina
by a whisker; Wisconsin and Virginia, twoother swing states, are also involved Thehistory, like the geography, is fishy As Rich-ard Hasen of the University of Californiarecounts, the tinkering began after the de-bacle in Florida in 2000, which showedthat “in close elections, the rules matter”
Mr Obama’s election gave it another tus; the Republicans’ statehouse victories
impe-in 2010, and then the Supreme Court’s ing, facilitated further spurts This, alleges
rul-Mr Vargas, the Latino advocate, is “the tus quo trying to hold on to its politicalpower for as long as possible”
sta-After the end of history
“Voting in the South,” says Mr Barber, “hasalways been about the issue of race.” If thatremains true, and if election regimes can-not be assessed in isolation from history,practices that are permissible in one part ofthe country—New Yorkhas no early voting,for example—might indeed be deemed dis-criminatory in another Occasional inop-portune comments by bigoted politicians,such as the legislators in Alabama caughtreferring to black voters as “aborigines”,bolster that gloomy analysis A milderjudgment is that, these days, race is a proxyfor partisanship, since minority Ameri-cans mostly vote Democratic, rather than atarget in itself; though as Wendy Weiser ofthe Brennan Centre for Justice says, it isscant consolation for black people to bedisenfranchised for their party allegiancerather than simply for their skin colour
At the least, many of these reforms ply a wilful failure to understand the con-straints of poverty, especially the rural,poorly educated sort In Alabama appli-cants for a free voter ID must swear, onpain of prosecution, that they have no oth-
im-er valid kind That, for some, is offputting,
as is the paperwork required, in somestates that provide such loopholes, to votewithout an ID Early voting, same-day reg-istration and out-of-precinct voting areuseful to people leading hard-pressed,sometimes disrupted lives
In truth, though, as some activists knowledge, these hurdles are not the onlybarrier to greater minority influence Na-tionwide turnout was already low amongLatinos and black youngsters—a disen-gagement that, in down-at-heel placessuch as Bullock County, is at once tragicand understandable The possible closure
ac-of a nearby prison is a bigger tion in Union Springs than the election
preoccupa-“We don’t have any industries trying toknock the door down,” laments SaintThomas, the mayor “You just about got tobeg ‘em.” Mr Poe of the NAACP offered freerides to Montgomery for anyone keen toget their ID there No one, he says disconso-lately, has taken him up on it 7
Still marching
Trang 30The Economist May 28th 2016 United States 31
AS THE likely presidential nominee of
the Libertarian Party, Gary Johnson
has a lot to be modest about; and he is
“Everybody I meet seems to like me,” says
the two-term former Republican governor
of New Mexico “But I’m a Libertarian, so
doesn’t that denote there are some loose
screws out there?” He leaves the question
hanging
Tiny, electorally trifling and obsessed
with guns and weed, cherished emblems
of its 11,000 members’ freedom, the party
has never mattered in national politics It is
by some measures America’s
third-big-gest—yet not flattered by that comparison
In 2012 Mitt Romney crashed to defeat with
61m votes; Mr Johnson, who ran for the
Libertarians after failing to be noticed in
the Republican primaries, won 1.3m Yet he
could be about to improve on that
Mr Johnson and his running-mate, Bill
Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts,
are expected to emerge from the
Libertar-ians’ convention in Orlando on 30th May
with the party’s ticket If so, he could
feasi-bly launch the biggest third-party run since
Ralph Nader won almost 3% of the vote for
the Green Party in 2000—including
100,000 votes in Florida that may have
cost Al Gore the presidency Or he could do
better; a poll by Monmouth University put
Mr Johnson on 11% in a three-way race with
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton That
was especially creditable given how little
he is known; he figured in almost no
na-tional polls in 2012 It has encouraged Mr
Johnson to think he could register the 15%
vote-share that would guarantee him
in-clusion in this year’s televised debates
With publicity, he could catch on Hehas the accomplishments of a chest-beat-ing conservative hero—he is a self-mademillionaire, triathlete and razor-beakeddeficit hawk; he vetoed 750 spending bills
in New Mexico He is also a sometimedope smoker (he resparked his youthfulhabit in 2005 to manage the pain from a pa-ragliding accident), who comes across asalmost goofily unaffected He speaks inhorror of the disdain many Americansshow for Mexican immigrants—whom hecalls “the cream of the crop”—as if it wereborne of some crazy misunderstanding,rather than embedded nativist resentmentand economic anxiety Voters sick of politi-cal polish might like the mix: he really is au-thentic Yet Mr Johnson’s main cause forhope is the unpopularity of the likely Re-publican and Democratic alternatives
Around 60% of voters dislike DonaldTrump and 55% Hillary Clinton Thatshould encourage more Americans to vote
as freely of the old duopoly as they ingly claim to be; 42% say they are indepen-dent voters, up from 30% a decade ago
increas-And the Libertarians’ voguish message offiscal conservatism, social liberalism andanti-interventionism has something forthe disaffected of both big parties Com-pared with a straightforward Trump-Clin-ton match-up, the Monmouth poll suggest-
ed Mr Johnson could take 6% of the votefrom Mrs Clinton and 4% from Mr Trump.The particular unease of many Republi-cans with their presumptive candidate—along with their failure hitherto to launch aconservative rival to him—explains a surge
of interest in the Libertarian confab in lando After Mr Trump sewed up theirnomination in Indiana this month, Googlereported a 5,000-fold increase in onlinesearches for Mr Johnson He is not to all Re-publican tastes; Mr Trump’s most outspo-ken critics in the party tend to hold neo-conservative views on security Yet eventhey hope he might bring disenchanted Re-publicans to the polls in November, andthereby retain their support for Republicancandidates in the coterminous congressio-nal contests
Or-Mr Johnson rejects Or-Mr Trump utterly:
“There’s nothing about Donald Trump that
The Libertarian Party
Guns, weed and
relevance
WASHINGTON, DC
Gary Johnson could launch the
Libertarians on a big third-party run
The campaignsHeard on the trail
Lindsey Graham (Senator from South
Carolina)
“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic,
reli-gious bigot.” December 8th 2015, CNN
“We talked about national security, andtold some jokes [Trump’s] very cordial,he’s a funny guy, and he’s from New York
He can take a punch.” May 12th 2016
John McCain (Senator from Arizona)
“I think he may owe an apology to thefamilies of those who have sacrificed inconflict and those who have undergonethe prison experience in serving their
country.” July 20th 2015, MSNBC
“You have to listen to people that havechosen the nominee of our RepublicanParty I think it would be foolish to ignore
them.” May 7th 2016, CNN
Bobby Jindal (former governor of
Louisiana)
“But you know why [Trump] hasn’t read
the Bible? Because he’s not in it.”
Septem-ber10th 2015
“I think electing Donald Trump would bethe second-worst thing we could do thisNovember, better only than electing
Hillary Clinton.” May 8th 2016, Wall Street
Journal
Chris Christie (Governor of New Jersey)
“A crisis for Donald is when his favouriterestaurant on the Upper East Side isn’t
open.” January 30th 2016
“There is no-one who is better prepared
to provide America with the strong ership that it needs both at home andaround the world, than Donald Trump.”
lead-February 26th 2016
Rand Paul (Senator from Kentucky)
“Donald Trump is a delusional narcissist
and an orange-faced windbag.” January
25th 2016, The Nightly Show
“I took a pledge when I ran for president
to not run as an independent candidateand to support the Republican nominee I
stand by that pledge.” May 17th 2016,
Breitbart.com
Rick Perry (former Texas Governor)
“Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer
on conservatism, and it must be clearly
diagnosed, excised and discarded.” July
22nd 2015
“I`m going to support him and help himand do what I can He is one of the mosttalented people who has ever run for
president I have ever seen.” May 5th 2016,
CNN
1
Trang 3132 United States The Economist May 28th 2016
1
COULD Hillary Clinton’s bid for the
presidency be undone by her unusual
e-mail arrangements as secretary of state?
A report by an internal watchdog of the
State Department, the inspector-general,
into her use of a private e-mail account for
official business, suggests it could be The
report, which was released on May 25th,
does not allege Mrs Clinton broke any law:
that would have stoked fears of a
cam-paign-ending indictment by the FBI, which
is also investigating the matter Yet it raises
concerns about her conduct and uncandid
response to the scandal—upon which
Do-nald Trump, her unconscionable can rival, will now feast
Republi-Ever since Mrs Clinton’s e-mail serverbecame a matter of public debate last year,she has said she broke no rules To the con-trary, the State Department report says shewas under an “obligation” to seek clear-ance for her e-mail system, did not, and itwould have been denied if she had done,due to “security risks”
Her e-mail rig was not a secret, exactly
The report notes “some awareness” of itamong senior diplomats It points instead
to the impunity with which Mrs Clinton’saffairs were handled When two IT whiz-zes expressed fears that her e-mails mightnot be preserved, their boss “instructed thestaff never to speak of the secretary’s per-sonal e-mail system again.”
In Mrs Clinton’s defence, the reportnotes that the department has “longstand-ing, systemic weaknesses” in its record-keeping Colin Powell, Mrs Clinton’s pre-decessor but one, also used a private e-mailaccount and broke record-keeping rules
Yet the report suggests he had more of anexcuse; it was hard to send e-mails outsidethe State Department’s system in his time
He also sent fewer e-mails than Mrs ton, for whom secrecy—not mere “conve-nience”, as she has claimed—seems to havebeen a motivating factor E-mails included
Clin-in the report show her fear that, if sheadopted an official e-mail account as anaide had advised her to, her personal e-mails could be published: “I don’t wantany risk of the personal being accessible”
On the evidence available, that says alot about the origins of this scandal Out of
a neuralgic concern for confidentiality, MrsClinton overrode rules that her advisersconsidered to be less important than theywere She was no doubt motivated byyears of political smears (which Mr Trump,who has already suggested she may be amurderer, is now dredging up); her staffwas lulled by the State Department’s his-
tory of laxity and supplication to its boss.Yet if it may be possible to take a toler-ant view of how this started, there is no ex-cusing the mess Mrs Clinton has made of
it A more agile politician would ately have recognised the scandal’s poten-tial to exacerbate the poor trust ratings thatare her biggest weakness She would thenhave taken urgent measures to confess hercarelessness, express remorse and make afulsome display of handing over whatevermaterials the investigators required In-stead Mrs Clinton obfuscated, denied andwatched the scandal grow The most signif-icant indictment to arise from it may wellconcern her skills as a politician But withthe latest polls giving Mr Trump a narrowlead, that is not at all reassuring.7
immedi-Hillary Clinton’s e-mails
Already indicted
WASHINGTON, DC
The Democratic front-runner is mired in
can go awry, consider Title III of theAmericans with Disabilities Act (ADA).Passed by Congress in 1990 with the laud-able aim of giving the disabled equal ac-cess to places of business, it has been sup-plemented with new Department ofJustice standards (in 2010, for example, theDOJsaid that miniature horses can qualify
as service animals) The hundreds of pages
of technical requirements have become so
“frankly overwhelming” that a good 95%
of Arizona businesses haven’t fully plied, says Peter Strojnik, a lawyer in Phoe-nix He has sued more than 500 since start-ing in February, and says he will hitthousands more in the state and hire staff
com-to begin out-of-state suits
Businesses that brave court instead ally lose Lawyers need only show that aviolation once existed—a bathroom mir-ror, stall partition, or sign improperly posi-tioned can be enough, as is having handi-capped parking marked with faded paint.Violators must pay all legal fees Mr Stroj-nik uses the money taken in to pay helpers,including testers who hunt for infractionsand serve as plaintiffs, and puts the re-maining proceeds into his charity, Advo-cates for Individuals with Disabilities Peo-ple should give attorneys like him whoenforce the law a break, he says, and in-stead “be grumpy at Congress”
usu-The money machine has sped up in thepast couple of years, with some plaintiffsnow filing more than two dozen lawsuits aweek, says Richard Hunt, a Dallas lawyerwho defends businesses and teaches dis-ability law at Southern Methodist Univer-
Disability lawsuitsFrequent filers
SANTA BARBARA
Laws meant to help the disabled have had unintended consequences
appeals to me.” Yet he sounds most
hope-ful of picking up support from disaffected
Democrats, especially followers of Senator
Bernie Sanders, whom he says he agrees
with on almost everything—including the
evil of crony capitalism and virtues of
pot—except the economy Yet how would
he woo them?
Mr Johnson’s suggestion is
unconven-tional On the basis that, he argues, with
some support from surveys, Americans
are more libertarian than they know, he
would point them to an online quiz,
“Iside-with.com”, to help them work out where
they stand “I say, “Take the quiz, and
who-ever you pair up with, I think you should
knockyourselfout over them.” His own
ex-perience with the quiz, he sweetly relates,
suggest he agrees with 73% of Mr Sanders’s
proposals, 63% of Mrs Clinton’s and 57% of
Mr Trump’s.7
2
Trang 32The Economist May 28th 2016 United States 33
2
Soccer flourishesKick turn
DESPITE its name, the Copa Americahas never been played north of theRio Grande before On June 3rd the inter-national soccer tournament kicks off inSanta Clara, California Games will takeplace in ten cities across the country overthe next four weeks It is the latest effort
to cement the sport into the mainstreamconsciousness. Soccer still lags behindAmerica’s four leading sports: baseball,basketball, hockey and American foot-ball But several measures suggest thatthe game is gaining ground
Much of the hard running took place
in the 1990s, when the successful hosting
of the World Cup coincided with a surge
of young players and the formation ofMajor League Soccer (MLS) According to
a poll for ESPN, soccer has become thesecond-most popular sport for12-24 yearolds, after American football, and is thestandout leader among Hispanics of thesame age Last year soccer-playingamong boys in high school grew morethan any other sport, according to theNational Federation of State High SchoolAssociations (perhaps capitalising onfears over the safety of American foot-ball, where numbers fell)
The success of the national teams, inparticular the women’s side, has been aboon Last year, the Women’s World Cupfinal attracted a domestic TV audience of27m—roughly the same as the record-setting college American football cham-pionship game in 2015 Until recently, thechallenge had been to keep people inter-ested between World Cups A rise in thenumber of games from other countriesthat are broadcast live has helped Ac-cording to Stephen Master of Nielsen,which measures such things, there isnow more live soccer available on Ameri-can TV than in any other country
Partly as a result, average attendances
at MLS games have grown by 56% since
2001 In the past five years they have risen29% More people go to MLS games than
go to an NBA games or National HockeyLeague ones (though both basketball andhockey are played in smaller stadiumswith higher ticket prices) When it comes
to revenue, soccer is still a minnow: MLSgenerates just half the revenue of Japa-nese baseball and a tenth of what theNBAdoes
There is also depth to this growthamong fans In May FC Cincinnati, afreshly minted team playing in the thirdtier (the United Soccer League, or USL),registered one crowd of more than23,000 In 2015, newly formed New YorkCity FC sold 15,000 season tickets beforethey had kicked a ball The league is set togrow from 20 to 24 teams over the nexttwo seasons, and one of the youngest,most eclectic fan bases of all Americansports—52% of MLS fans are aged 18-34,the highest proportion of any profession-
al sports league
Viewing figures for MLS also have along way to go before they can competeregularly with the big four But TV audi-ences are growing (tying domestic fix-tures in with English Premier Leaguegames, which attract larger audiences,has worked well) and networks see thepotential, signing a $90m-a-year deal to
2022 for broadcasting rights
Still, MLS has still not fully dispelledits image as a retirement home forclapped-out European stars Only Sebas-tian Giovinco, a player for Toronto FC,can be considered a foreign star in hisprime With a new surge of spending onsoccer in China, it may become evenmore difficult to attract stardust Americachurns out more world-beating athletesthan any other country, but none of themplay soccer Yet
NEW YORK
More and more Americans like watching people kick round balls
sity Small businesses typically settle for
$3,500 to $7,500 That’s a bargain
com-pared to the cost of a court fight, Mr Hunt
says, and, for the lawyer and plaintiff, good
money for a few hours’ work
California offers a bigger bonanza The
state’s Unruh Act awards a disabled
plaint-iff up to $4,000 for each time he or she
vis-ited, or wished to visit, an offending
busi-ness This increases the cost of losing a
lawsuit, so California’s small businesses
typically pay settlements of $15,000 to
$20,000, says Tom Scott, head of the
Sacra-mento branch of the National Federation
of Independent Business
Nearly all California businesses have at
least one violation, perhaps of a state
building code, says Marejka Sacks, a
para-legal at Moore Law Firm in San Jose Her
team cuts businesses slackfor “the little
mi-nutiae stuff,” she says, but has still sued
more than 1,000 since switching from
criminal law to ADA infractions in 2009
Proving that a violation has caused a
handicapped person difficulty, discomfort,
or embarrassment is “not a difficult
thresh-old”, she says Nineteen of every 20
busi-nesses paid up to avoid trial
Serial filers say they provide a valuable
service because Congress did not fund a
dedicated enforcement bureaucracy Why
do businesses think it’s OK to risk our
safe-ty for profit?, asks Eric Wong of the
Disabili-ty Support Alliance, himself a wheelchair
user He says that those who think there
are thousands of wasteful lawsuits share
“the delusional rationalisations of serial
ADAviolators”
What’s next? Omar Weaver Rosales, a
Texas lawyer, has sued about 450
business-es in the past two years; more than 70%
paid up to avoid a trial But even more
lu-crative pastures are coming into view In
March a California judge ordered
Colora-do retailer Bag’n Baggage to pay $4,000 indamages and legal fees thought to exceed
$100,000 because its website didn’t commodate screen-reading software used
ac-by a blind plaintiff Mr Rosales says ing ADA rules to websites will allow him tobegin suing companies that use colourcombinations problematic for the colour-blind and layouts that are confusing forpeople with a limited field of vision
extend-The DOJ is supporting a National ciation of the Deaf lawsuit against Harvardfor not subtitling or transcribing videosand audio files posted online As such
Asso-cases multiply, content may be taken line Paying an accessibility consultant tospot the bits of website coding and meta-data that might trip up a blind user’sscreen-reading software can cost $50,000for a website with 100 pages Reflecting onthe implications of this, Bill Norkunas, aFlorida disability-access consultant whowas struck with polio as a child (and whohelped Senator Ted Kennedy draft theADA), says that removing videos that lacksubtitles would deprive wheelchair usersand the blind, who could at least listen tothem Mr Norkunas hopes that won’t hap-pen, but reckons it very well might.7
off-Paralegal paradise
Trang 3334 United States The Economist May 28th 2016
SOME weeks ago Oklahoma’s teacher of the year for 2016,
Shawn Sheehan, dined in Washington, DC, with counterparts
from California and Washington state The mood was jolly until
the high-flyers, all finalists for national teacher of the year,
com-pared salaries When Mr Sheehan—a young teacher of
mathe-matics and special education—revealed his pay, his table-mates
“sort of went silent” For in state rankings of teachers’ pay
Okla-homa comes 48th Washington’s teacher of the year has since
been urging Mr Sheehan to move to the West Coast “He’s been
sending me house listings,” he says, ruefully
Oklahomans dislike such stories They are sternly
conserva-tive: God-fearing, tornado-lashed prairie folk, so proud of their
mineral wealth that an oil well stands next to the State Capitol,
where feebler types might plant flowers They scorn big
govern-ment—the state is in the bottom third for tax revenue per person
But Oklahomans care about their public schools, which educate
the vast majority of their kids, and which (notably via sport) are
social anchors for many towns So they wince when good
teach-ers are lured elsewhere Even now, as slumping oil and gas prices
have been followed by a deep budget crisis, the Republican
go-vernor, Mary Fallin, says she wants to give teachers a raise, an
am-bition echoed by legislators from both parties A poll last year
found 98% of Oklahomans back higher classroom pay, dividing
only over whether to raise salaries across-the-board, or on merit
That consensus makes raising teachers’ pay a good test of
ba-sic governance Alas, legislators negotiating a new budget have
spent May failing it Democrats blocked a scheme involving
high-er cigarette taxes, because they wanted some of the revenues for
health care Republicans introduced and withdrew a proposal to
increase teachers’ pay while cutting their other benefits Worse,
with days left to fill a $1.3 billion hole in the budget, Republicans
devoted long hours to further loosening gun laws, to arguing
about transgender pupils in school bathrooms and to passing a
law that sought to make performing almost all abortions a felony
That attempt to criminalise abortion was certain to be struck
down as unconstitutional in the courts Governor Fallin vetoed
the law, calling it ambiguously worded The only doctor in the
state senate, a Republican who personally opposes abortion, was
crisper in his diagnosis, calling the proposal “insane”
Budget negotiations ended without a pay rise for teachers(and indeed resulted in a 16% cut to higher education), so the mat-ter is now in the hands of voters A bipartisan group wants to askthem to increase education funding by adding a penny in the dol-lar to state sales taxes in November Their ballot measure, StateQuestion 779, is backed by a former Democratic governor, DavidBoren, and a group of business bosses and former members of
Ms Fallin’s cabinet It aims to raise $615m, enough for a $5,000 crease per teacher Even supporters admit that sales taxes are aclumsy way to raise money, because the poor spend a larger share
in-of their incomes on day-to-day shopping Mr Boren, an ioned centrist who is now president of the University of Oklaho-
old-fash-ma, calls sales taxes “regressive” and would have been “thrilled”
if lawmakers had acted Mr Sheehan, another backer of the tive, worries about the impact on low-income families, though heargues that schools are often their best ladder out of poverty Theballot initiative amounts to voters telling legislators: “you guysare not doing your job,” says the teacher, who is running as an in-dependent for the state senate in November
initia-Mr Boren sees a problem of political culture For 25 years bothDemocrats and Republicans have won elections in Oklahoma bypromising tax cuts In the 1990s voters amended the state consti-tution so the legislature can only increase taxes if super-major-ities of three-in-four members agree, or if voters say yes in a refer-endum After living through three boom-and-bust commoditiescycles, the 75-year-old ex-governor fretted as he saw Republicanscut state income taxes twice, against a backdrop of surging oil pro-duction and revenues “Oklahomans got sold on a free lunch,”says Mr Boren Businesses wanted a free lunch too, he adds: de-manding tax breaks and subsidies, while still expecting a well-trained workforce Republicans do not wholly disagree SenatorRob Standridge represents the district that Mr Sheehan is contest-ing, near Oklahoma City Though Mr Standridge defends low taxrates, he laments that states get into bidding wars to woo employ-ers: “We spend way too much on incentives.”
Bound and gagged
The campaign behind the ballot initiative polled voters to ask ifthey would tolerate higher income, property or sales taxes to in-vest in education Income taxes divided voters along partisanlines, with Republicans rejecting rises As for property taxes,Oklahomans like them low—Mr Boren links this to their history
as land-rich, cash-poor homesteaders Most backed higher salestaxes People tell Mr Boren that they like sales tax because “every-body pays it,” unlike fiddlier taxes that the rich can dodge.The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a smaller-govern-ment group that tried to block the measure in court, says Oklaho-
ma cities could end up with some of the country’s highest salestaxes It points to polls showing an option that Oklahomans likebetter: paying teachers by cutting tax credits for wind and renew-able energies, and other corporate subsidies But that risks clash-
es between special interests: scrapping tax breaks for wind
ener-gy is a priority for Oklahoma’s mighty oil and gas industry
A narrow question of public policy—how to stop Texas andother neighbours pinching Oklahoma teachers—has exposedbroad, not very cheering truths about democracy Elected politi-cians have prospered by urging voters to distrust them Votersduly bound legislators’ hands to limit government mischief NowOklahoma is struggling to deliver a policy with near-universalsupport Hope that someone learns a lesson from all this.7
Oh, Oklahoma
What happens when voters distrust their politicians so much that they bind their hands
Lexington
Trang 34The Economist May 28th 2016 35
1
VERACRUZ calls itself “four times
hero-ic” to commemorate the occasions in
the 19th and 20th centuries on which it
re-sisted foreign assaults The election
cam-paign taking place in the port city on the
Gulf of Mexico, and in the surrounding
state of the same name, is less edifying
Héctor Yunes Landa, the candidate of the
ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) for the governorship of the state, calls
his rival, Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, “a
pervert, sexually sick” He warns voters to
“take care of the safety of your children.”
Mr Yunes Linares, who leads a coalition
that includes the conservative National
Ac-tion Party and the left-wing Party of the
Democratic Revolution, denies reports
that he belonged to a paedophile ring He
says his opponent, who is also his cousin,
is waging a “dirty war”
With 8.1m people, Veracruz is Mexico’s
third most populous state Its mix of cities
and rural settlements, indigenous and
non-indigenous folk—and its oil, farming
and manufacturing—make it a microcosm
of the country as a whole It is also among
the most troubled of the 12 states that will
elect new governors on June 5th (most are
also holding municipal elections, as is a
13th state) Veracruz’s economy has grown
the least over the past five years (see chart)
It has a reputation for corruption A federal
auditor found irregularities in the use of 14
billion pesos ($1 billion) of federal money
transferred to Veracruz in 2014, the highest
level of suspect spending in Mexico
Although the state is not especially
viol-nomic performance may bring to an end
80 years of unbroken rule by the PRI ManyMexicans would see in that result a harbin-ger of the country’s presidential election in
2018 Mexico’s president, Enrique PeñaNieto, belongs to the same party as MrDuarte and, like him, is widely blamed forcorruption and lawlessness (though he isnot quite as unpopular)
In Veracruz, voters may opt for neitherofthe brawling cousins and choose insteadthe candidate of the hard-left Morenaparty, Cuitláhuac García Jiménez Thatwould give hope to Morena’s populistleader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, atwice-defeated presidential candidatewho plans to run again in 2018 Those with
a stake in Mexico’s stability will worry.The state elections will not be a straight-forward referendum on Mr Peña’s presi-dency The PRI, which governed Mexico as
a one-party state for most of the tury, runs nine of the 12 states being con-tested, some of them, such as Chihuahua,much better run than Veracruz The party’snational leader, Manlio Fabio Beltrones,expects the PRI to win nine governorships,though perhaps not the ones it has now Infour states besides Veracruz the PRI hasnever been out of power Regional issueswill matter more than national ones inmost places But that does not mean that
20th cen-Mr Peña, who cannot run again in 2018, or
Mr Beltrones, who may try to succeed him
as president, will be able to shrug off losses
in Veracruz or the other states where thenow rules
ent by Mexican standards, it is perilous forjournalists who inquire into allegations ofcorruption and ties between the govern-ment and organised crime An estimated 18reporters have disappeared or been mur-dered during the tenure of the current go-vernor, Javier Duarte, who accuses jour-nalists in turn ofconsorting with organisedcrime Many are afraid to do their jobs
Mr Duarte is loathed; his disapproval
rating among veracruzanos stands at 83%,
by one poll Mr Yunes Linares has pledged
to throw him in jail if he wins Althoughthe governor cannot run for re-election hisunpopularity and the state’s poor eco-
Mexico’s regional elections
The view from Veracruz
VERACRUZ
An electoral contest in a troubled state is a test for the country’s ruling party
The Americas
Also in this section
36 Bello: Chávez’s little blue book
Quintana Roo Chihuahua Hidalgo Tlaxcala Puebla Zacatecas Oaxaca Durango Sinaloa Tamaulipas
Veracruz
Current governor, party
PRI PRI PRI PRI PRI PAN PRI
MC †
PRI PAN PRI PRI
Trang 3536 The Americas The Economist May 28th 2016
1 2
TIME was when Hugo Chávez was
im-mensely proud of the new
constitu-tion he gave Venezuela in 1999, at the start
of his 14 years of rule He had it printed in
a little blue book, and would hand out
copies to everyone he met Now the
gov-ernment of Chávez’s chosen successor,
Nicolás Maduro, is tearing it up
That process began after an election in
December in which the opposition won
control of the National Assembly with
7.7m votes (56% of the total) That is a
big-ger (and fresher) mandate than Mr
Madu-ro’s own The regime has illegally
neu-tered the assembly The supreme tribunal,
packed with chavista puppets, threw out
an amnesty law for political prisoners
ap-proved by the assembly, which has the
constitutional right to grant one The
as-sembly has twice used its constitutional
power to reject Mr Maduro’s decrees
granting himself emergency powers The
president has pressed on regardless “It’s a
matter of time” before the assembly
“dis-appears”, he said this month
Article 72 of the constitution declares
that all elected officeholders are subject to
recall via referendum after the halfway
point of their terms This article is part of
Title 4, on political rights Yet this month
Mr Maduro, who won a narrow and
dis-puted victory in a presidential election in
April 2013, said that the recall referendum
against him, which the opposition
de-mands, was merely “a constitutional
op-tion”, not an “obligation” “There won’t
be a referendum” this year, insisted
Aris-tóbulo Istúriz, the vice-president The
tim-ing matters If the president is recalled in
year four of his term, a new election
fol-lows; if it is later, the vice-president, who
is appointed by the president, serves out
the term The electoral authority, which in
practice acts as a branch of the
govern-ment, is stalling the referendum process
Why is Mr Maduro ripping up Chávez’slittle blue book? Venezuela is in desperatestraits, because of the fall in the oil priceand years of mismanagement As it strug-gles to avoid a debt default, which wouldcut off credit to the oil industry, Mr Madu-ro’s government has applied a pythonsqueeze to imports Coca-Cola this weekannounced it would halt production in thecountry because of sugar shortages ManyVenezuelans spend hours queuing for thescarce food available at officially con-trolled prices Patients are dying needlesslybecause of shortages of drugs
The government knows it would most certainly lose a referendum Datana-lisis, a pollster, finds that 64% want Mr Ma-duro to go Electoral defeat would destroy
al-the founding myth of chavismo: that it
em-bodies a popular revolution Mr Madurowould prefer to be pushed out by a mili-tary coup, which would make him a vic-tim, argues Henrique Capriles, the opposi-tion presidential candidate in 2013 Manyanalysts believe that the regime’s strategy
is to hang on until 2017, in the hope that theoil price will continue its recent partial re-covery and/or with a view to replacing Mr
Maduro but keeping power
In ignoring the demand for politicalchange the regime is “playing with fire”,Margarita López Maya, a Venezuelan po-litical scientist, told Prodavinci, a website
On the streets, desperation is mounting.Incidents of looting rose in March andApril, to more than one a day Althoughthe security forces usually react swiftly,
on May 11th a wholesale market in cay, about 80km (50 miles) west of Cara-cas, was looted for three hours
Mara-Mr Maduro’s strategy depends on itary support Many officers are involved
mil-in busmil-iness, legal and illegal They and thepresident are “hostages to one another”,says Ms López Some in the army are wor-ried Two retired generals who were close
to Chávez recently called for the dum to take place
To deny Venezuelans a recall dum in 2016, wrote Luis Almagro, the sec-retary-general of the Organisation ofAmerican States (OAS), in an open letter
referen-to Mr Maduro this month, “would makeyou just another petty dictator” Changes
of government in Argentina and Brazilhave deprived Mr Maduro of allies Sever-
al countries in the region are calling for alogue in Venezuela But Mr Maduro hasshown he is not interested in talks he can-not control A diplomat from the Vaticanthis month cancelled a trip to Venezuela.According to a source in Caracas, that wasbecause Mr Maduro rejected a five-pointplan for mediation by the pope
di-Mr Almagro has proposed invokingthe OAS’s Democratic Charter, whichcould lead to Venezuela’s suspensionfrom the organisation He may not havethe votes to make that happen But absent
a referendum, it is the right course LatinAmerica’s tacit acceptance of unconstitu-tional government in Venezuela sets adangerous precedent
Chávez’s little blue book Bello
Outsiders should push Nicolás Maduro to hold a recall referendum this year
The mud-fight in Veracruz shows why
some voters are disenchanted with
main-stream parties, but also why those parties
continue to win elections As its long rule
of Veracruz suggests, the PRI remains a
for-midable machine, sometimes
steamroller-ing legal norms as well as political
oppo-nents A functionary in Veracruz of
Prospera, a federal social programme,
re-signed on May 10th after he was caught on
tape discussing how to buy votes for the
PRI “Normal democratic politics are not in
place in the likes of Veracruz,” says Jesús
Silva-Herzog, a political scientist at
Tecno-lógico de Monterrey, a university
The same can be said of some otherstates In Oaxaca a tip-off led to the discov-ery this month of a warehouse packedwith fridges, children’s bicycles and gro-ceries, along with PRI campaign literature,apparently intended for distribution tovoters In Tamaulipas 52 candidates formunicipal office have quit, saying theywere threatened by gangs that back rivalcandidates Such episodes help explainwhy, according to Latinobarómetro, a poll-ing group, just19% of Mexicans are satisfiedwith democracy, the lowest level amongthe 18 Latin American countries surveyed
Mr Peña is not a bruiser like Mr Duarte
The president has taken big steps towardsmodernising Mexico, including openingenergy and telecoms to competition andraising standards for state schools And yet
he cannot divorce himself entirely fromthe sleaze in Veracruz and other states As aPRI man, he profits from the sharp-el-bowed electoral tactics of its operatives In
2018, the machine will work just as hard forthe party’s presidential nominee as it has
in the state elections
Mr Peña’s standing with voters hasbeen hurt by his mishandling of the mur-der of 43 students in September 2014, acrime that shocked Mexicans; by a recent
Trang 36The Economist May 28th 2016 The Americas 37
2double-digit rise in the number of
homi-cides; and by a conflict-of-interest scandal
related to the building of his wife’s house
The PRI’s failure to approve a draft
anti-cor-ruption bill in Congress in April has
opened him, and the party, to accusations
that the PRI is blasé about graft
In the state of Nuevo León last year
Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, better known
as “El Bronco”, became the first governor to
be elected without the support of a
politi-cal party Next month veracruzanos may
elect Mr García, the left-wing Morena
can-didate, who rails against corruption in the
parties backing the Yunes cousins In 2018
voters may turn on the same parties’
can-didates in the presidential election That
could let in mavericks, such as El Bronco, or
even provide Mr López Obrador with an
opportunity to carry out his dangerous
programme of left-wing anti-reform
Vera-cruz, Mexico’s microcosm, may prove to be
a model for its future politics as well.7
WITH its green bell tower and royal
coat of arms, the Torre Monumental
in Buenos Aires would not look out of
place in a British market town The
60-me-tre (200-foot) Palladian clock tower was a
gift from the city’s British community to
mark the centenary of Argentina’s 1810
rev-olution (though it was completed in 1916)
On May 24th this year around 200 people
gathered to commemorate its centenary
The celebration comes at a rare
mo-ment of warmth in Anglo-Argentine
rela-tions Argentina’s newish president,
Maur-icio Macri, has reasserted his country’s
claim to the Falkland Islands (known in
Ar-gentina as the Malvinas), which belong to
Britain But, unlike his pugilistic
predeces-sor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, he
wants to co-operate with Britain on such
areas as trade and fighting drug-trafficking
Argentina’s foreign minister, Susana
Mal-corra, met her counterpart in London on
May 12th, the first such meeting since 2002
Flights to the Falklands may resume after a
13-year interruption
A hundred years ago Britain and
Argen-tina were complementary economic
superpowers Britain built Argentina’s
rail-way, which helped make Argentina one of
the world’s ten richest countries, and
bought 40% of its exports, mainly beef and
grain In 1914 Harrods, a fancy department
store, opened its first overseas branch in
Buenos Aires
Signs of this former commercial raderie are everywhere Red post boxes ap-pear on street corners Football, the nation-
cama-al sport, is an English invention, as aresome Argentine teams The original New-ell’s Old Boys, Lionel Messi’s first club,were the pupils of a Kent-born teacher
Posh porteños (Buenos Aires residents)
play cricket at the Hurlingham Club
The Falklands war, triggered by na’s invasion of the islands in 1982, endedthe bonhomie Signs of Britishness wereexpunged Bar Británico, once frequented
Argenti-by British railway workers, changed its sign
to read Bar tánico The Torre de los Inglesesbecame the Torre Monumental
Diplomatic relations were restored in
1989 but Ms Fernández and her late band, Néstor Kirchner, who was presidentbefore her, interrupted the rapproche-ment In 2012 Argentine veterans brokeinto the tower Now the city governmentwants to repair the damage Mr Macrihopes to do the same for Argentina’s bat-tered relationship with Britain 7
hus-Anglo-Argentine relations
Ending
estrangement
BUENOS AIRES
A new start for an old relationship
Don’t chime for me, Argentina
BRAZILIANS delight in Portuguesewords that seem to have no equivalent
in other languages Saudade is yearning for
an absent person or a place left behind
Ca-funé is the act of running one’s fingers
through a lover’s hair More newsworthy is
jeitinho, a diminutive of jeito (“way”) It is a
way around something, often a law or rule
The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, anunpopular president who has not perso-nally been accused ofserious wrongdoing,
is a jeitinho around the constitution (Many
of the politicians who voted to impeachher are themselves indefatigable explorers
of such byways, for example around
cam-paign-finance laws.)
Jeitinho, which has connotations of
in-genuity as well as illegality, is a marker ofnational identity, says Livia Barbosa, ananthropologist Two-thirds of Braziliansconfess to seeking out such shortcuts, ac-cording to a survey conducted in 2006 byAlberto Almeida, a political scientist Dailylife is criss-crossed with them A restaura-teur offers policemen a packed lunch to en-tice them to patrol his street, saving 10,000reais ($3,000) a month in private-security
fees Laranjas (“oranges”) act as cut-rate
shell companies, hiding business activitiesfrom taxmen and investigators
To spare busy students from having toaccept internships, required for many uni-versity courses, professors approve ficti-tious ones, complete with made-up re-ports Brazilians bring along children or oldpeople to jump queues at banks, clinicsand government offices; some parentslend out their children for that purpose
The material world has its own sort of
jei-tinhos, jury-rigged contrivances called gambiarras An iron could serve as a skillet;
a sawed-off styrofoam cup, affixed to afork, becomes a spoon
Keith Rosenn, a legal scholar at the versity of Miami in Florida, points out that
Uni-in the parts of LatUni-in America governed bySpain rule-bending was tolerated Chargedwith executing laws ill-suited to local con-ditions, colonial administrators could tell
the king, obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey
but do not comply), without fear ment Though Portugal’s monarchs offeredtheir Brazilian “captains” no such leeway,
ofpunish-they took it anyway Hence, the resort to
jei-tinho Modern laws are no more sensible.
Brazil passed more than 75,000, many ofthem pointless, in the ten years to 2010.More than half of Brazilians think there islittle reason to comply with many of them Some scholars think that Catholics,tempted to regard confession as an alterna-tive to compliance, are especially prone to
jeitinho-like behaviour Others suggest that mestiço (mixed-race) societies like Brazil’s
are liable to be flexible, about the law asmuch as ethnicity Perhaps inequalityplays a role: the rich and powerful flout thelaw, so why shouldn’t ordinary folk?
That may be getting harder, and not justfor politicians caught up in the judiciary’sunrelenting investigation into the briberyscandals surrounding Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company Nowadays, cam-eras rather than police officers enforcespeed limits E-Poupatempo (e-save time),
an internet portal set up by the state of SãoPaulo, expedites such tasks as filing police
reports It allows little scope for jeitinho
Ro-berto DaMatta, an anthropologist, thinksBrazil may be moving towards Anglo-Sax-
on norms, in which laws “are eitherobeyed or do not exist” If that happens,the satisfaction many Brazilians will feel
may be tinged with saudades.7
Brazilian cultureWay, José
SÃO PAULO
A guide to cutting corners
Trang 37ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
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The artist who taunts the Kremlin BODY POLITICS
Trang 38The Economist May 28th 2016 39
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Economist.com/world/middle-east-africa
1
ABOVE the grimy car-choked streets of
Tehran, Iran’s down-at-heel capital, a
new poster campaign is under way Beside
the brooding black-turbaned features of
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Kha-menei, slogans extol the virtues of the
“re-sistance economy” The regime, it seems, is
not ready to let go ofthe isolationist days of
Iran’s worst confrontations with the West
Anyone who hoped that the signing
last July of a nuclear deal between Iran and
six world powers would strengthen the
hands of the country’s reformists at the
ex-pense of the religious conservatives is
starting to think again The deal, which Mr
Khamenei had been persuaded would
boost a stagnant economy (see chart) by
ending most international sanctions and
reintegrating Iran into the global financial
system, has so far fallen far short of what
was hoped The backlash has begun
Iranian oil exports have, it is true,
grown by 60% since the formal lifting of
sanctions in January Iranian and Western
trade delegations scurry back and forth
But Iran is struggling to repatriate its
earn-ings, and to turn its memoranda of
under-standing into contracts Although John
Ker-ry, the American secretary of state, insists
the way is open for legitimate trade with
Iran, Treasury officials say any dealings
that “touch” America—for instance by
trad-ing with Iran in dollars—risk falltrad-ing foul of
America’s remaining sanctions if they
in-volve entities linked to the army or the
Rev-olutionary Guards Given the opacity of
Iran, that might mean any sizeable firm
to regard it as toxic Few expect any changethis side of the American elections, andperhaps for many months thereafter
Mr Khamenei has seemingly turned onthe government of President Hassan Ro-hani Mr Rohani had reckoned the agree-ment would rapidly attract $50 billionworth of foreign investment, see funds fro-zen by foreign governments speedily re-leased and spur growth to 8% a year “Wethought we would revive relations withthe banks immediately after the deal,” saysthe central bank’s governor, Valliollah Seif.Many businessmen echo the supremeleader’s derision: “How come they didn’tnegotiate the process of financial reintegra-tion—which banks would transfer the fro-zen assets, how much and when?” asks amarket analyst, aghast Mr Khamenei’s ad-visers level accusations of incompetence,and suspect Mr Rohani has fallen into anAmerican trap
The supreme leader is seeking to rein inthe president Some of Mr Rohani’splanned visits abroad, including to Bel-gium and Austria last month, have beencancelled at the last minute “I urge you tocome and see for yourself,” said Mr Seif,wooing investors at a conference in Lon-don earlier this month But Westernerswhom the president’s office has invited toIran find their meetings blocked by the su-preme leader’s men Puncturing publichope of an end to revolutionary isolation,
Mr Khamenei recently criticised the ing of English
teach-Mr Khamenei is also resorting to force
“Don’t be bashful,” he recently exhortedsome 7,000 undercover police mobilised
to uphold puritanical codes—even thoughthe country’s mores are closer to those ofCentral Asia than the sex-segregated Arabworld (“White marriage”—the term for un-married couples living together—is increas-ingly commonplace.) A fresh catch of activ-ists has been put behind bars, includingjournalists, human-rights monitors and
Without cast-iron assurances big banks,spooked by the gigantic fine of $9 billionlevied on BNP-Paribas in 2014, are steeringclear SWIFT, the global bank transactionsnetwork, has been reconnected to Iran, butremains dormant—“a newly built highway
no one is using”, says an Iranian official
Visitors to Iran still have to bring largewads of cash, since international creditcards do not work there
Iran-minded fund managers, jubilant ayear ago when an outline of the nucleardeal was first settled, now lament the lack
of business American investors visitingTehran will not even leave their businesscards for fear ofpossible repercussions De-spite Iran’s stability in a volatile region, itseducated population, its well-developedroad network and its potential as a region-
al hub, most Western companies continue
Iranian politics after the nuclear deal
Who’s in charge?
TEHRAN
The supreme leader is clipping the wings of the reformist president
Middle East and Africa
Also in this section
40 The campaign against Islamic State
41 Avigdor Lieberman returns
41 Tanzania’s impulsive president
42 Africa’s new Jews
Brought to its knees
Sources: EIA; IMF
Iran
0 1 2 3 4 5
10 5 0 5 10 15
+ –
2000 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 15
Oil production
% change on a year earlier
*To October
*
Trang 3940 Middle East and Africa The Economist May 28th 2016
1
2models who had appeared on social
me-dia unveiled “The empire,” says a
dip-lomat in Tehran, “is trying to strike back.”
Mr Rohani refuses to buckle
Embold-ened by the conviction that he represents
the popular mood, the president these
days sounds more like an opposition
leader, for all that he is a former head of the
National Security Council and an Islamic
clergyman Along with his vice-president,
he distances himself from talk of the
“resis-tance economy”; he insists on the virtues
of English and of pivoting towards global
economic engagement This means news
bulletins can be schizophrenic Headlines
celebrate the latest trade deals alongside
the supreme leader’s fulminations against
Western plans for “colonialist inculcation”
It is, however, hardly an even fight
Beyt-e-Rahbar, the supreme leader’s
head-quarters, commands the armed forces, the
128,000-strong Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC), the networks of spies, the
vast state-owned firms that dominate the
economy, the judiciary, the sprawling state
media and the bodies that vet and veto
elected bodies Presidential decisions are
diluted or simply ignored by civil servants
appointed by Mr Rohani’s predecessors
Even the cabinet is a coalition, including
ministers wary of privatisation
Some in Mr Rohani’s camp think little
will change before Mr Khamenei dies or
re-tires (he is 76, and thought to suffer from
prostate cancer) Even then things might
not improve This week came the news
that a veteran conservative from Tehran,
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, has been
ap-pointed as the head of the Assembly of
Ex-perts, which will pick the next supreme
leader when the moment arrives
“Mr Rohani believes in economic
liber-alisation, but it doesn’t percolate down the
pyramid,” says a member of Iran’s
cham-ber of commerce And for all Mr Rohani’s
success in sharply increasing the number
of reformist parliamentarians, the
presi-dent still lacks a majority in the Majlis
fol-lowing elections held in February and
con-cluded with run-offs in April Some 80-85
independents hold the balance of power,
and may bend as much towards Mr
Kha-menei as Mr Rohani When your
corre-spondent visited parliament recently, a
preacher was giving sermons about the
dangers of English spies
Still, there are a few hopeful signs:
three-quarters of the fractious old
parlia-ment lost their seats, including Gholam Ali
Haddad-Adel, a veteran loyalist and a close
relative of Mr Khamenei The clerical
con-tingent collapsed to 6%, half that of the last
election in 2012 and just a tenth of its
strength in the first post-revolution
elec-tion in 1980 For the first time women
out-number clergymen in the Majlis
Mr Khamenei has won every power
struggle he has faced, including with Mr
Rohani’s predecessors as president, the
hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and thereformist Muhammad Khatami (whosename he still bans from appearing inprint) But the leader seems crankier thanbefore Mr Rohani enjoys the support ofAyatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,the veteran kingmaker After the latest test-ing of ballistic missiles, timed to under-mine one of Mr Rohani’s trips abroad, MrRafsanjani tweeted that Iran would be bet-ter engaging in dialogue than conductingmissiles tests “Those who say the future is
in negotiations not missiles are either rant or traitors,” snapped back an irked MrKhamenei
igno-So bad have things become that manyobservers now wonder whether Mr Kha-menei will let Mr Rohani stand for a sec-ond term next year: his hand-pickedGuardian Council could decide to bar him
Mr Khamenei’s problem is that there is noobvious alternative For want of anyonemore like-minded, he is healing his riftwith Mr Ahmadinejad, perhaps hopingthat the ex-president can recover his popu-list touch Although Iran’s middle classblames Mr Ahmadinejad for squanderingthe money that rolled in during the oil-
boom years, poor Iranians remember atime of generous welfare handouts and thereconstruction of Shia shrines, like Qom’sopulent Jamkaran “When he goes walk-about in the provinces, Ahmadinejad isten times more popular than Rohani,” in-sists Hamid Reza Tareghi, a confidant of MrKhamenei who derides Mr Rohani’s sup-porters as counter-revolutionaries
Qassem Suleimani, the head of theIRGC’s foreign legion, the Quds force, hasbeen mentioned as another possible can-didate He is popular among reformists aswell as hardliners, having led the fightagainst the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syr-
ia But entering politics might cost the olutionary Guard its most popular leader.The electorate itself may lose interest.Though Iranians voted in droves in the lastelection, Mr Khamenei’s recent actionsdemonstrate the limits of the ballot box indetermining Iran’s course Nor does theprospect of change from within inspiremuch hope Down an alley of Tehran’s ba-zaar, a wizened peddler sells tea from a cartand compares the Shah’s reign with thecurrent incumbents Forget the people, hesays, this lot struggle to rule themselves 7
Rev-FALLUJAH is a place with bad memoriesfor the American soldiers who served
in Iraq Two battles in 2004, the second ofwhich was the bloodiest of the whole war,confirmed it as the stronghold of the insur-gency that arose to challenge the Americanoccupation It was also the first big city tofall to Islamic State (IS) at the outset of itsrampage across Iraq in 2014 Now there is
to be a third battle of Fallujah On May22nd Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-
Abadi, declared that an offensive to retakethe city, which lies only half an hour’sdrive west of Baghdad, had begun
For the American-led coalition fighting
IS, the decision to go for Fallujah makes tle military sense The priority remainswresting back Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggestcity, which fell to IS two years ago Prepara-tory operations are well under way, al-though few believe that the security forceswill be ready to move in before the end of
lit-The campaign against Islamic StateFallujah, again
Why retaking the jihadist stronghold has become a priority
Will the plan survive contact with the enemy?
Trang 40The Economist May 28th 2016 Middle East and Africa 41
1
2the year The Americans fear that Fallujah
will become a distraction that will delay
the assault on Mosul even further
Though the military logic is dubious,
there are good political reasons for Mr
Abadi’s announcement His feeble
govern-ment has endured an even more than
usu-ally torrid few weeks Twice since the end
of April mobs loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a
turbulent cleric and militia boss, have
breached the heavily fortified “green zone”
and ransacked parliament in protest
against corruption and sectarianism
Meanwhile, the security situation in
Bagh-dad has steadily worsened with a series of
bombings carried out by IS against Shia
ar-eas of the city On May 18th IS boasted that
it had killed 522 Baghdadis in a month
Mr Abadi had to be seen to be doing
something According to Michael Knights,
an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, it is unlikely that the IS
bombing campaign is being orchestrated
from Fallujah, which has been tightly
sealed off for months It is more plausible
that the bombs are being brought in from
Diyala province to the east and from the
south along the Tigris river But Fallujah is
still an irritant that can and probably
should be dealt with
Mr Knights says that the Fallujah
offen-sive ought not to delay the retaking of
Mo-sul The forces in the north will largely be
regular army divisions retrained by the
co-alition, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
The Fallujah operation depends on
so-called Popular Mobilisation Units, mainly
Shia militias, most of which are supported
directly by Iran, and local police The
spear-head, as with the retaking of Ramadi last
December, will be elite counter-terrorism
units backed up by coalition air power
It looks probable that Fallujah will be
back in government hands before long
That its retaking will have any effect on the
ISbombing campaign in Baghdad is less
likely The Americans say that as IS loses
territory, it is inevitably returning to its old
terrorist ways That is not much comfort to
the city’s long-suffering inhabitants 7
Sinjar
Erbil Makhmour
Mosul dam
Mosul
Kirkuk Baiji
Source: Institute for the Study of War
Area of Islamic State control (May 23rd 2016)
Fallujah
100 km
WHEN opening parliament after hiselection last year, Tanzania’s presi-dent, John Magufuli, repeated a campaignpromise: parents would no longer have topay for secondary education “And when Isay free education, I indeed mean free,” heassured MPs This year the governmentstarted expelling foreign workers withoutproper permits, including thousands ofKenyan teachers Schools that were al-ready straining to cope with a huge influx
of new pupils are now at breaking point The president, nicknamed “the Bull-dozer”, has delighted Tanzanians with ananti-corruption drive and public displays
of austerity Within weeks of taking officelast November he had banned all but themost urgent foreign travel for governmentofficials He spent Tanzania’s Indepen-dence Day picking up litter by hand He has
TanzaniaGovernment by gesture
he has held on-and-off talks with theleader of the centre-left Zionist Union, Yitz-hak Herzog But last week, as the negotia-tions hit a snag, the prime minister as-tounded the country by concluding a dealwith Avigdor Lieberman (pictured left), theleader of Yisrael Beitenu (Israel is OurHome), a right-wing nationalist party
The renewed alliance with Mr man, a former foreign minister, who has re-peatedly fallen out with Mr Netanyahuand who recently called him “a liar and afraudster” and accused him of being inca-pable of making decisions, shows thelengths the prime minister is prepared to
Lieber-go to preserve his rule In return for ing his five Knesset members into the co-alition, Mr Lieberman will be appointeddefence minister, traditionally the mostimportant job in Israel after the prime min-ister’s He is also getting 1.4 billion shekels($360m) to boost pensions for low-incomeretirees, mainly immigrants from the for-mer Soviet Union, the Moldovan-born MrLieberman’s core constituency
bring-Another concession to coalition ners agreed upon this month was the deci-sion to continue public funding for ultra-Orthodox schools that do not teach basicsecular subjects, including maths and Eng-lish This move, which by the end of the de-cade could deprive as many as 20% of Is-raeli schoolchildren of basic skills, was ademand by the “Haredi” parties, Shas andUnited Torah Judaism, who together arerepresented by 13 members of Mr Netanya-hu’s coalition
part-The deal with Yisrael Beitenu tated the resignation of the well-respecteddefence minister Moshe Yaalon, not onlyfrom the ministry, but also from the Knes-set, citing “difficult disagreements on mor-
precipi-al and professionprecipi-al matters” with Mr anyahu and attacking the “extreme anddangerous elements that have taken overIsrael and the Likud Party”
Net-Mr Yaalon, a former general, had
recent-ly clashed with the prime minister overmilitary criticism of an increasingly anti-Arab atmosphere in parts of Israeli society
Mr Yaalon has now joined a growinggroup of disgruntled former ministerssworn to removing Mr Netanyahu This
club of rebels, which until recently
includ-ed Mr Lieberman himself, may prove a ger threat than the official opposition to MrNetanyahu’s rule Mr Herzog, who failed toclose a deal largely because of fears that hisparty would not go along with him, is fac-ing calls for an early leadership election
big-Mr Lieberman is hardly a safe pair ofhands In the past he has threatened Egypt(saying he would bomb the Aswan Dam
on the Nile) and called for the beheading
of “traitors” among Arab citizens of Israel
He has said that, if named defence ter, he would order the killing of the Ha-mas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, within 48hours if he did not accept Israel’s demandsfor the return of the bodies of two Israelisoldiers killed in Gaza in 2014 Mr Netanya-
minis-hu may not get the stability he so craves 7
Israeli politicsHe’s back!