What Happened Today? July 11, 2022
Farmer protests roil Europe; Sri Lankans overtake president's palace; The War In Ukraine Is Not Taking Place
The Big Story
After mass protests last week that pitted farmers against the Dutch government, a fire destroyed a large food-distribution hub in the eastern Netherland city of Almelo over the weekend that was partially funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Dutch authorities have not confirmed the cause of the fire, but media reports in the region speculated about a possible connection to the intensifying resistance against forthcoming agricultural restrictions that government officials said last week will force many farmers out of business. The ruined facility was used by Picnic, a food-delivery startup backed by a $600 million investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates, who is one of the largest owners of farmland in the United States, and a driving force behind the transformation of farmland into an asset class for investments, is also a major proponent of transitioning to what he and other advocates call “sustainable” agricultural practices. Gates recently advocated that “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef” and previously invested 100 million euros through a separate foundation to help accelerate E.U. nations’ reduction of their greenhouse gas emissions.
Even if the protests are unrelated to the Picnic fire, the initial suspicion underscores the heightened stakes of the resistance movement in which Dutch farmers have thus far blocked highways with burning bays of hay and squared off with police while protesting new national policies that seek to dramatically reduce the nation’s nitrogen emissions by 2030 by culling farm livestock and banning certain chemical fertilizers. Protestors warn that rapidly overhauling the agricultural sector could lead to food shortages and destroy the nation’s food supply chain—and put farmers out of business. Some farmers say they’re willing to collaborate on slower solutions that would reduce environmental impact and enable them to stay in business, but those ideas do not appeal to federal officials. “The pace is really what’s problematic. It would jeopardize the livelihood of many farmers. And that pace is being dictated not by economics but really by activists and environmentalists,” Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told The Scroll.
With the Netherlands one of the largest agricultural produce exporters in the world, undermining its output threatens to put the food security of numerous other nations at risk. “We could jeopardize the efficiency of an agri-food sector worldwide—it’s a situation that matters to everyone. But it just seems sometimes that governments believe that food is grown by putting magical beans in the soil with no effort whatsoever. Here, you have an idealistically driven government pushing an agenda without any recognition of the importance of the sector itself,” says Charlebois. In the name of political environmentalism, he adds, the Dutch government is pursuing policies that will “undermine the knowledge and environmental stewardship of farmers who live on the land, raise livestock, and know how to take care of a land.” The irony was not lost on farmers in Italy, Germany, and Poland, who came out over the weekend for demonstrations of solidarity with their Dutch counterparts.
Read More: https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/environment/dutch-farmer-protests-against-emissions-cuts-spread-across-eu
In the Back Pages: The War in Ukraine is Not Taking Place
The Rest
→ Months of fuel shortages, energy outages, and soaring food and medicine prices pushed protestors in Sri Lanka on Saturday to storm the homes of the president and prime minister, resulting in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa saying he would resign from his office. The leadership of the government remains an open question as Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, the next in line to the presidency, is also stepping down, leaving whoever takes over Sri Lanka a collapsed economy and a growing hunger crisis with no obvious solutions of how to provide enough food for the nation’s 22 million people. Government mismanagement of tax policy and finances, supply chain disruptions caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a push in 2021 to move the agricultural sector off chemicals in favor of organic farming—led in part by U.S. NGOs like the Rockefeller-funded advocacy group Food Tank—have devastated the country’s agricultural base and sent its economy spiraling. Even after officials tried to reverse course on its ban of synthetic farming fertilizers, the damage was already done to the farming system, with Sri Lanka’s minister of agriculture, Mahinda Amaraweera, encouraging residents to grow food at home to ride out the crisis.
Read More: https://arcadianideal.tumblr.com/post/136009812011/arcadianideal-the-mediterranean-sea-of
→ Isn’t the point of branding for companies to distinguish themselves from one another? It used to be, but that was before the era of “flatness,” a phenomenon that Tablet’s editor Alana Newhouse described in her 2021 essay “Everything Is Broken.” The overwhelming sameness of modern culture is a product of it being relentlessly flattened—the effect of digital technologies like the internet that allow the near-instantaneous transfer of information across the globe while constantly “demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere.” The result, wrote Newhouse, is a “whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives,” one that is characterized by “frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence.” Of course, that corporations have all seemingly adopted the same font is, in itself, no great tragedy, except perhaps for graphic designers. But now consider that the same pressures that have flattened and merged the brand logos are working on everything else that depends on the internet for its existence, from art and political culture to human beings whose personalities are tailored to fit their social media profiles. — JS
Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken
→ MAP OF THE DAY
Over the weekend, this map circulated across the internet, garnering almost 100,000 likes on Twitter. Depicting what the United States will look like in 2030 if sea-level rise continues apace, the map shows entire swaths of the Midwest washed away entirely, and Kansas very much resembling Italy. Well, it turns out it is Italy: The map is a superimposition of the Mediterranean Sea dropped atop the continental United States—a 2015 “thought experiment” by architect Bret Drager called “The Mediterranean Sea of America.” Think about the children! What kind of country will they inherit if it’s been drowned by the Mediterranean?
→ A supporter of sitting President Jair Bolsonaro shot and killed an official from Brazil’s leftist opposition Workers’ Party (PT), inaugurating what many fear will be a season of political violence. After a “disagreement” between Bolsonaro and PT official Marcelo Arruda, Jorge José da Rocha Guaranho, a federal prison guard who had been heard criticizing the PT and shouting that Bolsonaro is a “legend,” shot Arruda, who died shortly after. Led by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the PT is currently polling ahead of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, but Bolsonora has been claiming, without evidence, that Brazil’s electronic voting system is prone to fraud, raising fears that he will challenge the validity of the coming election.
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: 500%
People earning doctorates in economics are roughly 500% more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree than average Americans, and 78% of graduates from the United States’ top 15 economics programs have a parent with a graduate degree—the latest sign of academia’s increasingly entrenched elitism. While it was always rare to find first-generation college students earning advanced degrees, it is now exceedingly so, with only 6% of economics graduate students being the first in their family to graduate college. The study’s authors noted:
Individuals’ socioeconomic background can affect their knowledge of economic issues, their choice of questions to investigate, and their values. While this may be an issue in any discipline, it seems particularly problematic in the social science of economics—a field concerned with income distribution, inequality, unemployment, access to education, the welfare system, poverty, and myriad other issues that disproportionately affect people who are not at the higher end of the income or education distribution.
Read More: https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pdf
→ A new law signed on Wednesday by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey criminalizes the recording of police activity from within eight feet, making it a Class 3 misdemeanor to photograph or record “within 8 feet of [where] law enforcement activity is occurring.” The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. John Kavanagh, argued that there would be little reason for someone to be within eight feet of an officer, though journalists and activists are arguing otherwise, noting that this would make it difficult to film interactions with police—especially at protests or during tumultuous situations. It is also unclear if the law is constitutional; while the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, many appeals courts have ruled the practice is protected, including Arizona’s Ninth Circuit Court.
→ A state congressman in North Carolina has introduced a bill that requires towns to install free gas and diesel pumps next to the free electric vehicle pumps that already dot publicly owned parking lots. Should towns refuse, the bill allocates $50,000 to destroying those EV pumps. The bill also stipulates that “businesses that provide electric vehicle charging stations to the the public at no charge” must now “include on their receipts the pro rata share paid by each customer for the free electricity” so that patrons can know how much of their money went toward supporting electric vehicles—a logistical nightmare that is sure to make the state’s accountants very unhappy. “I believe in clean, renewable energy solutions that are brought forward by the free market,” Ben Moss wrote in a statement about the bill. “However, I don’t believe that taxpayers should be footing the bill by providing ‘free’ electric vehicle charging stations on state and local government property unless the same locations offer gasoline or diesel fuel at no charge.” The EV charging stations cost less than a dollar per hour while they’re charging cars; diesel and gas prices, meanwhile, are currently at record highs.
→ GRAPH OF THE DAY:
From The Economist, today’s graph plots the catastrophic impact of school shutdowns on the world’s children. “New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected,” The Economist writes. In Latin America, the number of 10-year-olds who can’t read a single word of text has increased by more than 50%, according to data from the World Bank. Since 2019, meanwhile, more than 153 million children have spent more than half of that time learning remotely. With the fallout from these policies still cascading, “business as usual” won’t be nearly enough, says Jaime Saavedra, the leader of the Education Global Practice at the World Bank, as the world faces “the worst educational crisis for a century, and certainly since the world wars.”
→ Overcoming Ons Jabeur, the first North African player to appear in any Wimbledon’s single final, Elena Rybakina took the women’s Wimbledon title on Saturday in three sets. Rybakina was born in Russia but moved to play and train in Kazakhstan, where she’d received better government funding. On the men’s side, the pressure of appearing in his first final proved too much for Nick Kyrgios, who’d managed to take the first set off Novak Djokovic before the Serbian kicked his game into a higher gear to claim his seventh Wimbledon title. Djokovic holds 21 Grand Slams, moving past Roger Federer in the career major race, now just one shy of Rafael Nadal’s 22 titles.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“The [Payment Protection Program] was a very large and very timely fiscal-policy intervention, saving about 3 million jobs at its peak in the second quarter of 2020 and distributing $800 billion well within two years of the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. But it was poorly targeted, as almost three-quarters of its benefits went to unintended recipients, including business owners, creditors, and suppliers, rather than to workers.”
From a recently published report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which found that 75% of the hundreds of billions of dollars set aside for the pandemic-era Payment Protection Program (PPP) never made it to workers, and that American taxpayers spent $4 for every single dollar that did make it to workers’ wallets. The PPP worked by providing up to eight weeks of payroll expenses—workers’ wages and benefits—to those businesses that left their employees on payroll, even if those employees were not working; though the program kept millions of people employed through the worst of the pandemic, it disproportionately aided wealthier workers, with 72% of PPP funds going to households with incomes in the top 20%.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
The following essay comes from an anonymous Twitter user who calls himself Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost. Follow him @ghostofchristo1.
In the pre-dawn dark on December 9, 1992, a small echelon of American Marines and Navy SEALs came ashore near Mogadishu and immediately found themselves besieged by a mass of waiting media personnel. Camera crews followed the elite reconnaissance teams into the surrounding dunes, the whole tableau lit up by TV floodlights. Live CNN footage showed a small cluster of bemused-looking Marines crouched amid the coastal scrub, encircled by a ring of TV camera operators and photographers dipping in and out to get their shots.
The Pentagon had encouraged media coverage of the operation, which was ostensibly aimed at securing the beach and subduing any resistance from local militias as part of the United Nations-mandated humanitarian mission in Somalia. TV networks were informed in advance where and when the insertion would take place and even advised on where to set up their cameras. No one, however, had evidently anticipated the absurdity of the spectacle that would unfold live on TV, as Navy SEALs were filmed hastily rebuffing journalists’ attempts to interview them, still intent on accomplishing what was by then an all too obviously superfluous set of mission objectives. Joking at a press conference after the fact, a Pentagon spokesman quipped, “We probably should have inserted the public affairs officers first.”
In fact, far from being an obstacle, cable television and its real-time global audience were the mission. As the British journalist Ben Macintyre observed in The Times the day afterwards:
Television is not part of the process, it is the entire process: The decision to send troops to Somalia was born out of the emotive footage of starving people and armed bandits, and the grand humanitarian gesture thus launched will be played out for and in front of the cameras.
Although it appeared that the soldiers and journalists in the dunes were operating from different scripts, the event was permeated by the logic of live TV and by what the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin termed a “pseudo-event”—an attempt to “make” rather than simply “report” the news. The first landings lined up neatly with prime-time evening viewing in the eastern United States. The live feed, meanwhile, gave journalists the chance to place themselves front and center, filming the media scrum that formed around the marines as if it were itself the event. Trying with evident desperation to manufacture a momentary sense of danger for its live viewers, CNN at one point crossed to night-vision footage of glowing dots passing near one of the operation’s supporting helicopters and suggested it might be “taking fire,” to which a military spokesperson replied that the dots were just flying insects picked up by the camera’s infrared sensors.
The scenes outside Mogadishu indicated how developed and pervasive the logic of what French theorist Guy Debord called “the spectacle” had become by the early 1990s. By at least the early 20th century, communications media already possessed the ability to synchronize the attention of mass audiences. News percolated through urban communities according to the daily rhythms of the morning and evening newspapers. Submarine telegraph cables carried press-agency stories from one continent to another with near instantaneity. Later, radio and television broadcasts greatly intensified this process of synchronization, bringing viewers and listeners together to focus on the same media events and programming and stamping them, in real time, with a standardized set of views, impressions, and memories.
Combining the powers of the mass media, politics, the military apparatus, and consumer capitalism into one nexus, the spectacle absorbed global citizens through viewership and market participation. Even the postmodern excesses and extravagances of the spectacle—seen here in the farcical collision of military and media agendas on the beach and the admission by news anchors that the media might, perhaps, have gone “too far” this time in their quest for compelling images—simply testified to its power and global reach.
As omnipresent as the 24-hour cable news cycle might have seemed in 1992, its economies of production and reception were still fundamentally limited in space and time. CNN’s news broadcasts relied on bulky camera units and the trained operators and crews who could wield them, while its broadcasts were seen only by cable subscribers (or the transitory audiences exposed to them in bars, hotel receptions, and airport departure lounges). The contrast between those broadcasts and the way both still and moving images from Ukraine have been transmitted worldwide since the February 2022 Russian invasion shows how much more completely and intimately the logic of the spectacle has integrated itself into daily life (and personal consciousness) in the 30 years since 1992. Smartphone screens provide billions of individuals with their own personalized portals into the spectacle, through which they receive images of Ukrainian battlefields and besieged towns and cities (along with their human and material wreckage) anywhere, instantly, and in real time. Moreover, these images are ostensibly unfiltered, uploaded directly from the recording devices of combatants or civilian witnesses onto social media networks rather than being mediated through the editorial slants or agendas of news networks …
C Lasch’s ghost must know McLuhan’s work quite well. And Lasch did too I bet..