Atlantic Sentinel

Category: Analysis

  • Where Is the Party of Middle America?

    United States Capitol Washington
    Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8, 2021 (Victoria Pickering)

    59 percent of Americans believe Democrats will “open the US-Mexico border” if they win the election on Tuesday. 53 percent worry they will cut police funding.

    They won’t. Nor will they step up border enforcement or raise police budgets, and they should: illegal border crossings and violent crime are rising. But only far-left extremists believe in open borders and defunding the police. Few have been nominated by Democrats. Even fewer will win elections.

    The other half of the country sees Republicans as the extremists: 56 percent believe a Republican Congress would ban abortion and overturn democratic elections.

    There is more justification for those beliefs. Many Republican candidates support a federal ban on abortion. Many were complicit or silent when Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. But the party is divided on both questions.

    More than anything, the results of the CBS poll reveal that Democrats and Republicans believe the worst about each other.

    What about the 40 percent of Americans who identify with neither party? (more…)

  • American Midterm Elections Guide

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Orhan Cam)

    Americans vote in midterm elections on Tuesday. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate are contested. President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party is projected to lose its majority in at least one and possibly both chambers of Congress.

    This guide explains how the elections work, why Republicans are up in the polls, why Democrats may yet defend their majority in the Senate, and which states will decide the outcome. (more…)

  • British, Dutch Eat More Plant-Based, But Hardly Less Meat

    Los Angeles California supermarket meat
    Meat sold in a Whole Foods Market in Los Angeles, California, July 7, 2021 (Unsplash/Tommao Wang)

    Increases in the sale of plant-based meat substitutes aren’t leading to one-on-one reductions in meat consumption.

    Studies in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom found that meat consumption is falling slower than the rise of vegetarians and “flexitarians” would suggest. Which puts a heavier burden on farmers to cut emissions from animal agriculture. (more…)

  • Russia Helped Repair American-French Relations

    Emmanuel Macron Kamala Harris
    French president Emmanuel Macron walks through the Elysée Palace in Paris with American vice president Kamala Harris, November 10, 2021 (White House/Lawrence Jackson)

    American-French relations have taken a turn for the better. President Joe Biden has invited Emmanuel Macron to a state visit, his first. At a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States “couldn’t ask for a better partner” than France. Blinken praised the “united and unwavering” allied response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    Compare the kind words to two decades ago, when American lawmakers were so appalled by French opposition to the Iraq War that they changed the name of French fries in their cafeteria to “freedom fries”.

    In part, the restored friendship is a consequence of time having passed and two Atlantic powers remembering their shared interests. But the rapprochement was helped by Russia. Some American and French politicians saw Russia as a useful hedge against the other. They were discredited by Russian aggression against its neighbors and Russian meddling in Western politics. (more…)

  • Support for Legalizing Cannabis, Cocaine Grows

    Karl Lauterbach
    German health minister Karl Lauterbach (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit)

    Germany plans to legalize the sale of recreational cannabis in 2024.

    Germany allows medical use of cannabis, but it is seldom prescribed. Karl Lauterbach, the health minister, wants to license the production, distribution and sale of recreational cannabis. Consumers would be allowed to buy up to 30 grams in specialized stores and they could grow three cannabis plants at home. All criminal cases would be closed.

    There would be quality requirements, but no price regulation. Lauterbach left open the possibility of a cannabis tax on top of sales tax (19 percent), but cautioned that legal cannabis must be competitive with the black market. (more…)

  • Giorgia Meloni Sets Out Her Program

    Mario Draghi Giorgia Meloni
    Outgoing Italian prime minister Mario Draghi poses for photos with his successor, Giorgia Meloni, in Rome, October 23 (Palazzo Chigi)

    Giorgia Meloni has set out her program in an inaugural address to the Italian parliament.

    The far-right party leader, who won the election a month ago to become Italy’s first woman prime minister, was sworn in by President Sergio Mattarella on Sunday. She leads a coalition of three right-wing parties.

    She gave the top posts in her cabinet to centrists:

    • Finance: Giancarlo Giorgetti, a member of Matteo Salvini’s far-right League. Was minister of economic development under Mario Draghi.
    • Foreign Affairs: Antonio Tajani, the former president of the European Parliament and a member of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia.
    • Interior: Matteo Piantedosi, a former civil servant without party affiliation. Salvini had hoped to return to Interior, but was given Infrastructure. (Queue jokes about the far right making the trains run on time.)
    • Justice: Carlo Nordio, a 75 year-old former prosecutor who investigated corruption in Italy’s once-dominant Christian Democracy party in the 1990s. Belongs to Meloni’s own Brothers of Italy.

    Meloni’s speech was also reassuring. In place of the fiery culture-war rhetoric of her campaign came sensible proposals for family policy and immigration, empty gestures on climate policy and the environment, and firm commitments to the Atlantic alliance, EU and Ukraine. (more…)

  • Why the Netherlands Isn’t Building

    Rotterdam Netherlands
    Rotterdam, the Netherlands at night, May 16, 2018 (Unsplash/Stijn Hanegraaf)

    The Netherlands has a housing shortage of 300,000. The government’s ambition is to build 100,000 homes per year to keep up with population growth (which is entirely driven by immigration), but there is doubt it will meet this goal.

    75,000 homes were built last year. Only 33,000 building permits were issued in the first half of 2022.

    For a story in Wynia’s Week, I asked builders, developers, the construction lobby, economists and housing corporations why the going is so slow. They gave me ten reasons.

    Some are Netherlands-specific. Provincial governments, which must parcel in building locations, underestimated population growth. Municipalities, which issue building permits, are understaffed. Judges won’t approve permits if construction causes nitrogen pollution and emissions from farms and industry aren’t reduced. (More on the Netherlands’ farm and nitrogen crisis here.)

    Others are hopefully temporary: high prices of fuel, steel and wood caused by the war in Ukraine.

    The remaining four explanations are relevant to other countries. (more…)

  • What Are Republicans For? The Far Right Knows

    United States Capitol Washington
    The United States Capitol in Washington DC, December 10, 2019 (Unsplash/Julien Gaud)

    Two years ago, Republicans avoided a debate about their party’s principles by copy-pasting their 2016 manifesto and slapping Donald Trump’s name on it.

    I had hoped Trump’s defeat might repudiate what he stood for, and bring Republicans back to the center-right, but that hasn’t happened.

    Worse, the Trump wing is the only one with a plan to move forward. Senate leader Mitch McConnell has resisted outlining a governing agenda for a Republican Congress. House leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” — modeled on Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” that returned Republicans to a majority in 1994 — is a summary of ambitions few could disagree with: create good-paying jobs, curb wasteful government spending, fund border security, lower the price of gasoline, strengthen Medicare and Social Security. But none of McCarthy’s “plans” answer the obvious question: how? Which means they aren’t plans, but slogans.

    Only the Republican Study Committee, formerly a fringe faction in the House of Representatives that has come to encompass three in four members, has made concrete proposals in the form of a counterbudget.

    I read all its 122 pages, so you don’t have to. But first: why Republicans need a plan. (more…)

  • Americans, Dutch See Tradeoff Between Climate and Wildlife

    Netherlands wind turbines
    Wind turbines in the dunes of Holland (Vattenfall)

    Should we sacrifice wildlife to fight climate change? Whether it’s toads being uprooted by geothermal plants or birds being killed by wind turbines, the question vexes politicians in America and the Netherlands.

    So far, the Americans have been more likely to answer “no”.

    West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has angered many in his Democratic Party with a plan to speed up energy permits. He would set a two-year target for environmental reviews and a 150-day statute of limitations on court challenges. (The average review takes four-and-a-half years, costs $4.2 million and is 600 pages long. I’ve argued the reforms don’t go far enough, and the two-year “target” should be made into a deadline.)

    In the Netherlands, the left-liberal climate and energy minister, Rob Jetten, has licensed the construction of 1,700 wind turbines in the North Sea, which would increase Dutch offshore energy generation by a factor of eight. Environmentalists warn the impact of this expansion on birds and marine life is understudied. (more…)

  • Separatist Hardliners to Quit Catalan Government

    Pere Aragonès
    Catalan president Pere Aragonès speaks at a distribution center in Oliana, Spain, July 22 (Generalitat de Catalunya)

    Members of Catalonia’s ruling center-right party have voted to quit the government. Both ruling parties — Together for Catalonia on the right and the Republicans on the left — want independence from Spain. They disagree about how to achieve it.

    56 percent of Together’s 6,500 members voted to end the coalition. 79 percent took part in the vote, which was called after regional president, and Republican party leader, Pere Aragonès fired his Together deputy, Vice President Jordi Puigneró.

    Neither man revealed the details of their dispute, but the Republicans and Together have been at odds for months. The former want to give talks with the Spanish government, which is also center-left, a chance. Together has lost what little faith they had in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. (more…)

  • Dutch Government Wastes €900 Million on Drug War

    Dilan Yeşilgöz
    Dutch justice minister Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius listens to a debate in parliament in The Hague, June 2 (ANP/Sem van der Wal)

    A consortium of Dutch investigate journalists discovered that the country spent €900 million to fight organized drug crime in the last five years without making a single arrest.

    I write for Normaal Over Drugs, a campaign to normalize the drug debate, that the five-year failure is the umpteenth failure of repression, and the more reasonable policy is legalization. (more…)

  • Amsterdam Finds New Excuse to Ban Weed for Tourists

    Amsterdam Netherlands
    View from the Dam Square in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October 15, 2019 (Antonio Molinari)

    Regular readers may remember I wrote in May about Amsterdam’s plan to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists. At the time, Mayor Femke Halsema argued a ban would help reduce drug tourism.

    Studies have since found it won’t, so the mayor has found a new argument: licensed cannabis retailers are linked to organized crime.

    Cannabis expert Nicole Maalsté and I have written a joint op-ed in response for Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam. I’ll summarize our arguments here for non-Dutch readers.

    Maalsté does research into medical marijuana at the University of Utrecht and runs the advisory Acces Interdit. (more…)

  • How the Left Lost the Italian Election

    Enrico Letta
    Italian Democratic Party leader Enrico Letta meets with other European socialists in Brussels, June 23 (PES)

    The votes have been counted in 61,400 polling stations and they confirm what the exit poll told us on Sunday night: Italy has lurched to the right.

    But not by much.

    The four right-parties have 44 percent of the votes. That’s up from 37 percent in 2018, but closer to their historical average.

    The right has become more right-wing. The Brothers of Italy, whose support went up from 4 to 26 percent, didn’t win many new voters; they cannibalized Matteo Salvini’s (formerly Northern) League, which has been reduced to a party of Po Valley homeowners and businessmen who despise the Italy south of the Arno River. Giorgia Meloni would lead Italy’s first right-wing government since Silvio Berlusconi stepped down in 2011, and the most right-wing government since the end of World War II.

    The south, including Sardinia and Sicily, has about a third of the Italian population but not even one-fifth of its industrial base. It stuck with the Five Star Movement, the party of the left-behind Italy.

    Ideologically and geographically, the social democrats are fighting a war on two fronts from their strongholds in Emilia-Romagna (the region around Bologna) and Tuscany (Florence). They did reasonably well in neighboring Liguria, Marche and Umbria, but there was a time when the left could count on working-class support from the south of the peninsula.

    The defection of former party leader Matteo Renzi, and his union with the once-marginal liberals, which got 8 percent, also weakened the Democrats from within. (more…)

  • Italian Election Guide

    Italian parliament Rome
    Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Italian parliament, in Rome (Shutterstock)

    Italians vote in early elections on September 25. All 400 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 200 elected seats in the Senate will be contested.

    The elections were called after Prime Minister Mario Draghi lost the confidence of the populist and right-wing parties in his coalition. Polls predict a victory for the right.

    Here is everything you need to know. (more…)

  • Catalan Separatists March, But Are Divided

    Barcelona Spain demonstration
    Catalans demonstrate for independence in Barcelona, Spain, October 14, 2018 (Unsplash/Külli Kittus)

    Hundreds of thousands of separatists streamed into Barcelona on Sunday. A mass of red, yellow and blue — the colors of Catalan independence — filled the boulevard along the city’s old seaport before crowding Ciutadella Park, where the regional parliament is located.

    Organizers claimed 700,000 Catalans attended this year’s National Day rally. Barcelona police put the figure at 150,000, which would make attendance by far the lowest since demonstrations began in 2010. El Nacional, a pro-independence outlet, argues the low estimate isn’t credible, but 700,000 seems high given this year’s shorter route.

    Whatever the number, it’s clear the separatist movement has peaked. As many as one million (on a population of 7.7 million) demonstrated for independence as recently as 2018.

    The failed breakaway of 2017, that year’s suspension of Catalan autonomy and the prosecution of Catalan leaders (later pardoned) have demotivated many separatists. Polls suggest four in ten Catalans still want their own state. It was close to fifty-fifty in 2019. (Although even then, almost half of independence supporters would have been content with federalizing Spain.) (more…)