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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
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June 14, 2020
On Today’s Show
On GPS, at 10 a.m. ET on CNN:
First, Fareed gives his take on the second phase of the Covid-19 pandemic: its spread through the developing world.
“Eleven of the top 12 countries with the largest number of new confirmed infections are now from emerging economies, led by Brazil, India, Russia, Pakistan, and Chile,” Fareed points out. After the last few decades saw staggering improvements in quality of life in some poor countries, Covid-19 threatens to undo those gains.
“Now the work of decades is being undone in months,” Fareed says. “Various studies estimate that somewhere between 100 and 400 million people will be pushed back into extreme poverty. In this most crucial measure of human progress, we are moving backwards—and fast.”
Next, while Italy has been one of the world’s preeminent Covid-19 hotspots and its epicenter in Europe, another southern European country has fared quite differently. While Italy approaches 240,000 cases, Greece only recently topped 3,000. Fareed talks with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis about why his country has had such success against the virus.
Police shootings are far more common in the US than elsewhere: In 2018, police fatally shot roughly 31 people per 10 million in America; in Germany that number was one, and in the UK, it was even less. Fareed asks Georgetown law Prof. Rosa Brooks and Rutgers sociology Prof. Paul Hirschfield why policing in the US is so different.
After that: Is policing in America systemically racially biased? Many people say yes, as do polls of Americans. Fareed digs into the evidence with Center for Policing Equity President Phillip Atiba Goff, who has studied the topic in depth.
Finally, how is the rest of the world viewing the killing of George Floyd, the protests and unrest that have followed it, and the response by the Trump administration and local police? As America’s rivals seem to rejoice in the chaos, Fareed asks Natalie Nougayrède, the former editor of Le Monde and now a columnist for The Guardian, and global strategic adviser Parag Khanna, a managing partner of the advisory firm FutureMap, how recent events have influenced how the world sees the US.
Will Covid-19 Be Worse for Climate Activists, in the Long Run?
A drop in global carbon emissions has been a silver lining amid the pandemic, but as The Economist noted recently, it’s only a fraction of what’s needed to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Still, the magazine argued, Covid-19 may prompt a global tipping point against oil, as that industry teeters, and could be a moment to seize for climate activists and anyone looking to finance green infrastructure with low interest rates.
At the World Politics Review, however, Frida Ghitis throws a bit more cold water on the Covid–climate kumbaya. In Europe, for instance, the pandemic seems to be helping centrist, ruling parties and sapping support from green parties in the process, Ghitis writes. Meanwhile, “green parties will have to contend with the uncomfortable fact that politicians and many of their constituents tend to be more willing to fight for the environment when they are enjoying a measure of economic security and prosperity and feel they can afford to make changes that could increase their cost of living.” That is certainly not the case now. And in the US, Ghitis writes, “President Donald Trump has used the pandemic to keep bulldozing through environmental regulations,” issuing an executive order that directs federal agencies to waive them in light of the economic crash.
“The initial impression that the devastating coronavirus pandemic might have one silver lining, if it proved to be a boon for the environment, looks more like a temporary phenomenon,” Ghitis writes. “If anything, the pandemic has created new political challenges for those seeking to make long-term changes to the way human beings interact with the planet.”
George Floyd’s Killing: The View From Europe
To Europeans, British journalist Gary Younge writes in The New York Review of Books, the killing of George Floyd represents something about the US and its current moment: “It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office,” Younge argues, writing of a continent where President Trump is already viewed with harsh skepticism in many corners. “It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.”
Conversations about race work differently in Europe, Younge writes, and Europeans often look more actively at cases of police violence against black people in America than on their own continent; Floyd’s killing has resonated more strongly across Europe than did murders in Italy and Norway in past decades, for instance. Europe’s colonial history has something to do with it, Younge writes: “One of the central distinctions between the racial histories of Europe and the United States is that, until relatively recently, the European repression and resistance took place primarily abroad. Our civil rights movement was in Jamaica, Ghana, India, and so on. In the post-colonial era, this offshoring of responsibility has left significant room for denial, distortion, ignorance, and sophistry when it comes to understanding that history.”
Metrics of inequality show the same trend on both sides of the Atlantic, Younge points out—“[l]evels of incarceration, unemployment, deprivation, and poverty are all higher for black Europeans”—which gives the Black Lives Matter movement an impetus to gain traction. Still, Younge writes, Europe seems a bit blind to its own sins: “When I left the US in 2015, after twelve years as a correspondent living in Chicago and New York, I was constantly asked whether I was leaving because of the racism. ‘Racism operates differently in Britain and America,’ I’d reply. ‘If I was trying to escape racism, why would I go back to Hackney in London?’ But racism is worse in America than here, they’d insist. ‘Racism’s bad everywhere,’ has always been my retort. ‘There really is no “better” kind.’”
Australia Isn’t Giving Up on America Just Yet
Despite flaws exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, Australia hasn’t lost hope in the American project, writes Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Australian foreign-policy think-tank the Lowy Institute, in a Washington Post op-ed. It’s tempting, he writes, as President “Trump’s America was already self-isolating before the coronavirus pandemic, sloughing off allies and stepping back from the world. The coming of covid-19 made the United States look seriously unwell … During the pandemic, Trump has flailed around like a fool.”
And yet, China’s rise means the US is still valuable for Australia as a military ally, and what’s more, Fullilove writes, Australians still want to believe in American ideals: “They admire the land of Lincoln, Roosevelt and King, the nation that sins and falls short but ultimately redeems itself. And unlikely as it seems, perhaps these times of plague, recession and civil unrest provide some hope that America will indeed find redemption. ... Scales have fallen from many Americans’ eyes, revealing the truth about racial discrimination but also about Donald Trump. All this dysfunction, violence and division has taken place on the president’s watch, and surely that will count in November. Perhaps this ghastly fever dream is nearly over.”
China Still Seeks ‘Moderate’ Prosperity Amid Covid-19
For the world’s second-largest economy, one that has grown at a rapid clip to emerge as a global heavyweight, “moderate prosperity” may sound like a meager goal. But that’s what China has been pursuing since 1979, when former leader Deng Xiaoping set a goal for his country to attain the status of xiaokang shehui, translated into English as a “moderately prosperous society,” Montijn Huisman writes for The Diplomat. After current President Xi Jinping doubled down on that aim, 2020 was the year in which China was supposed to finally reach it. “Gross domestic product (GDP) and disposable income would be double what they were in 2010,” Huisman writes, “and no Chinese citizens would be living under the national poverty line of 2,300 RMB per year at 2010 prices ($340).”
Enter the pandemic. China will struggle to meet those benchmarks, Huisman writes, noting the complexity of China’s sprawling economy. (For instance, some critics say government employment efforts focus too heavily on urban areas and neglect the country’s rural poor, Huisman writes; China offers cash transfers to the poor, but “research suggests that in reality, less than 15 percent of eligible rural households actually receive the benefits.” Among 290 million Chinese migrant workers, Huisman notes, 170 million are rural residents, and they’re hard to count in national statistics.)
Pandemic circumstances regardless, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang nonetheless declared that China would reach the long-held goal this year. As Huisman writes, China has made massive economic gains in this century, and while GDP will slip this year—2020 will be an odd one for Chinese economic goals, as the government will not announce a GPD-growth target—Beijing may be transitioning toward judging itself against other measures of economic well-being for citizens. “Either way, the government will doubtlessly find a way to declare victory this year,” Huisman writes.
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