Anyone outside of Minnesota remember Jesse Ventura?
Some comparisons in comparative politics start out sounding impossible. But then they begin to make sense: Governor Jaime Rodríguez as the Governor Jesse Ventura of Mexican politics.
El Bronco: Blunt, Frequently Vulgar, and Aiming to Run Nuevo León
He goes by the nickname El Bronco, and he aims to buck the political system in Mexico.
For the first time since a constitutional change in Mexico in 2012 allowing independent candidates, one is making a serious run for governor…
[T]he insurgent comes in the form of Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, 57, a cursing former mayor and rancher in cowboy hat and boots who wants to run Nuevo León, a large state along the Texas border that is a hub for big business as well as organized crime.
Mr. Rodríguez, in interviews and on the campaign trail, veers from humility to arrogance, calling himself a simple, unvarnished rancher while making it clear, over and over, that he has the fortitude — he uses an anatomically vulgar synonym — to set things right…
His strong showing in the polls, a campaign built largely on social media exposure and his blunt, obscenity-laced talk… have made people take notice and wonder if the main established parties are under threat.
“Whether he wins or not,” said Miguel Treviño, an anticorruption activist in Monterrey, Nuevo León’s largest city, “this election will go down in history as a case study: the country’s first important election where social media plays a key role in communication strategy…
Recent polls show faith and confidence in the major political parties at an all-time low…
His opponents have taken him to task as a frivolous candidate with few real proposals…
But Mr. Rodríguez presses on.
As for solutions to the state’s economic and crime problems, Mr. Rodríguez keeps it vague, saying he will appoint smart, educated advisers. “We’ll figure it out as it goes,” he said in the interview. “We’ll try new things.”
Many voters seem charmed.
“He comes here and speaks that rudely and cursing, and he shouldn’t do that, but at the same time, who are we kidding?” said Jessica Guzman, 30, who attended a recent rally. “That is the language we really understand.”
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Labels: elections, leadership, Mexico, political parties
Queen's Speech 2015
The BBC offers this summary of the promises the Queen's government is making for this Parliament.
Queen's Speech 2015: Bill-by-bill
- EU Referendum Bill
- Full Employment and Welfare Benefits Bill
- Enterprise Bill
- National Insurance Contributions and Finance Bill
- Childcare Bill
- Housing Bill
- Energy Bill
- Immigration Bill
- Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill
- HS2 Bill [high speed rail]
- Scotland Bill
- Wales Bill
- Northern Ireland Bill
- Psychoactive Substance Bill
- Extremism Bill
- Investigatory Powers Bill
- Policing and Criminal Justice Bill
- Trade Unions Bill
- Education and Adoption Bill
- Armed Forces Bill
- Bank of England Bill
- Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill
- Votes for Life Bill (voting rights for citizens living abroad]
- European Union (Finance) Bill
- Buses Bill
- Draft Public Service Ombudsman Bill
... and what is not in the Queen's Speech?
Although it appears in the Queen's Speech, there is no legislation, either in full or draft form, on a British Bill of Rights. Instead, ministers will consult on the pros of replacing the Human Rights Act with a new legal framework of rights and responsibilities.
There is no mention of any plan to repeal the ban on hunting of wild mammals with hounds, in force since 2005. Ministers have suggested MPs will be given an opportunity to decide on the matter by 2020, and will be given a free vote.
[free vote: "In a Westminster parliamentary system and other democratic systems, a vote by members of a legislative body in which the members are permitted by their respective political parties to vote as they individually see fit, without direction from their political leaders." -Wiktionary]
 |
| Black Rod knocking on Commons door |
"Black Rod is sent from the Lords Chamber to the Commons Chamber to summon MPs to hear the Queen's Speech. Traditionally the door of the Commons is slammed in Black Rod's face to symbolise the Commons independence.
"He then bangs three times on the door with the rod. The door to the Commons Chamber is then opened and all MPs – talking loudly – follow Black Rod back to the Lords to hear the Queen's Speech."
-
UK Parliament web site
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Labels: legislature, political parties, UK
Irony
Maintain Britishness by becoming more European? It's not unexpected. Politics are becoming more global and many people are threatened by that trend: identity politics is on the rise in nearly any country you name.
How Britain Became European
An election holds up a mirror to society, revealing the relationship between the people and the politicians.
The 2015 election in Britain revealed widespread distrust of a political class seen as remote and out of touch by those left behind, by voters who feel disfranchised and powerless to control their own lives. It showed that disquieting trends on the Continent are not without some resonance in Britain…
In Scotland, voters noticed that Mr. Cameron and Mr. Miliband seemed equally committed to austerity and retention of the Trident nuclear deterrent. How was a citizen who rejected this consensus to vote? Those supporting the UK Independence Party believed that, if only Britain left the E.U., there would be no immigration problem. Scottish National Party voters believed that, if only Scotland left the United Kingdom, austerity would come to an end…
These attitudes were felt most strongly among those left behind by social and economic change in the areas of the first Industrial Revolution…
In the past, it had been the Labour Party’s historic task to represent the disadvantaged. Indeed the party has traditionally been a coalition of liberal intellectuals and the working class…
UKIP and the S.N.P. have something in common: They both seek to replace the politics of ideology with the politics of identity. They cannot easily be located on the left-to-right spectrum…
UKIP argues not that Mr. Cameron is insufficiently right-wing but that he is insufficiently British. The S.N.P. argues not that Labour is insufficiently left-wing but that it is insufficiently Scottish.
It is a paradox that, as the world is becoming increasingly interconnected economically, it is also becoming more fragmented politically. UKIP and the S.N.P. have their analogues on the Continent – parties of the Right, more extreme and tainted with racism and Islamophobia…
The European Union was intended to contain nationalism, which was indeed strikingly absent from the Continent during the immediate postwar years… But it has now returned with a vengeance.
The new political conflict in Europe reflects a social cleavage between those who have benefited from globalization and those who have not and it is coming to overshadow the traditional left-right conflict between mainstream parties.
The new ideological cleavage pits internationalist against nationalists — and it exists within as well as between mainstream parties…
Paradoxically, UKIP has made Britain resemble the rest of Europe by helping to transform Britain’s traditional British two-party system into a multi-party system. And both UKIP and the S.N.P. support proportional representation, which also would make Britain more European.
For a long time, pro-European politicians have urged that Britain should become more like the rest of Europe. Perhaps they have succeeded all too well.
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Labels: identity politics, political parties, UK
A voice from the past
A former military dictator has been elected president of Nigeria. Another former military dictator has spoken about the role of Jonathan's concession in that process.
 |
| Gowon |
Yakubu "Jack" Gowon ruled Nigeria during the Biafran war. He has a PhD in political science from the University of Warwick, so he speaks from experience and from academia. He tried to end the Biafran seccession on the principle of "no victor no vanquished," and to some degree succeeded. The massive influx of wealth from high oil prices in the early 1970s created massive opportunities for corruption. While Gowon was not implicated, his government was blamed and overthrown in 1975.
He spent many years in exile in the UK and more recently has been active in NGOs promoting good government and public health.
Jonathan's Concession of Victory Proves Nigeria Has Future, Says Gowon
FORMER Head of State... Gen. Yakubu Gowon (rtd) yesterday, said the uncommon action of President Goodluck Jonathan in conceding victory in the last general election shows that the country has a future…
Gowon… said Jonathan's congratulatory telephone call to his opponent, Muhammadu Buhari brought a sense of relief, not just to Nigeria and Africa but the whole world.
He said by that singular act, Jonathan told the world a bright future lies ahead for Nigeria, even as he called on leaders, past or present to be mindful of their actions and utterances so as not to create tension that could put the peace and future of the nation in jeopardy…
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Labels: leadership, Nigeria, politics
The election's over but not the corruption
Or maybe it's the politics in Nigeria that's not over yet.
Nigeria fuel shortage cripples businesses, banks and flights
Nigeria is being crippled by the fuel shortage that the country has been experiencing for more than a month…
 |
| Waiting for fuel in Lagos |
The party of President-elect Muhammadu Buhari has accused the outgoing government of "sabotage" for failing to deal with the crisis…
Most Nigerian businesses and homes rely on diesel-powered generators because of the poor electricity infrastructure.
The shortage means that Africa's biggest economy is slowly grinding to halt, says the BBC's Will Ross in Lagos.
Three of the country's mobile phone companies… have warned that the fuel scarcity could effect their services as they were finding it difficult to supply diesel to the base stations…
It appears the fuel importers and marketers who operate a multi-billion dollar scam are blackmailing the government into agreeing to one more massive payout as they are not sure how much longer the fuel subsidy racket will go on.
They are literally shutting down the nation saying they are owed $1bn in arrears, but no-one gets to see how that figure is worked out. Many government officials, including employees of the state fuel company, are so intertwined in the fraud it is hard to know who is scamming who.
One thing is clear. Nigerians across the country trying earn a living to feed their families are facing a new level of hardship.
At the heart of the shortage is a row over the payment to wholesalers of the difference between the subsidised pump price and the international market price.
The incoming president is inheriting one hell of a mess…
It is thought that President-elect Buhari, who takes power on Friday, may move to end the petrol subsidy and so the wholesalers are trying to get something from the outgoing administration.
The opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) thinks government inaction is deliberate so that Mr Buhari will take over a "nation in deep crisis"…
The People's Democratic Party of outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan says that it is the opposition which is behind the crisis "to create an impression that the APC is inheriting... a complete system breakdown"…
A 2-minute video report from the BBC:
Why Nigerians are queuing for fuel
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Labels: corruption, economics, Nigeria, politics
Queen's speech 27 May 2015
Program your recorders or write your lesson plans for May 27.
Queen's Speech date announced
The next government will have up to 19 days to come up with a legislative programme following 7 May's general election, Downing Street has announced.
The Queen's Speech will be held on 27 May, a spokesman said.
MPs will meet a week earlier, on 18 May, to formally take their seats in the Commons and to elect a new Speaker…
The polls point to there being no overall winner on 7 May.
If that proves to be the case, as was the situation back in 2010, negotiations will take place between the parties with the aim of forming a government.
The Queen's Speech, on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, is one of the highlights of the parliamentary calendar.
It used to be held in the autumn in non-election years but it was moved to the spring by the coalition government as part of its fixed-term parliaments policy.
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Labels: political culture, politics, regime, UK
Austerity
"Austerity: Likely they will never ask about it again, but I think we teachers like to to be sure if that happens we'd be prepared, and this debate would be an interesting one to assign: Project Syndicate."
Susan Ikenberry
Washington, DC
I'd suggest that austerity is likely to be a more visible issue in coming years. Even though Reagan said everyone was a Keynesian, it's obviously no longer true. Ask Angela Merkel and European and American central bankers.
Also check:
Labels: concepts, economics
in·ter·mit·tent
in·ter·mit·tent Pronunciation: \-ˈmi-tənt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin intermittent-, intermittens, present participle of intermittere
Date: 1601
: coming and going at intervals : not continuous
; also : occasional
— in·ter·mit·tent·ly adverb
Source: Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Intermittent
Retrieved 15 May 2015
The last time I suggested that blog entries might be less than regular, big ideas kept falling in my lap and my postings were pretty regular.
This time, spring has finally arrived I'm pretty sure I'll be distracted and otherwise engaged in things non-academic.
If you find a bit of information that might be useful for teaching comparative politics, post it at the
AP Comparative Government and Politics Facebook page or send me a note with the information.
Also remember, nearly all the over 3,500 entries here are indexed.
Use the search box in the right hand sidebar to find a country or a concept that you're interested in.
And, if your web browser allows it, there's a search box at the top left corner of the blog that will sort through key words. The search box shows up on my Safari and Netscape browsers on my desktop computer but not on my laptop.
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Alert! (Alerta!)
You did know there were elections in Mexico next month, didn't you?
They won't be mentioned in your textbook (even if you get brand new ones).
The results might not change anything significantly. Assassinations might provoke some policy changes. It's all stuff you should be aware of before teaching the course again.
Two candidates slain amid violence ahead of Mexico's June 7 elections
Two candidates in Mexico’s upcoming midterm elections were shot to death in different parts of the country amid a wave of violence and intimidation of candidates ahead of balloting next month…
Territorial disputes involving warring drug gangs, conflicts between armed “self-defense” groups and an increase in the number of police and soldiers on the ground have contributed to growing tensions…
The approach of federal and state elections on June 7 has only turned up the heat…
Security analyst Alejandro Hope said the violence, although nothing new, is a sign of the control that organized criminal groups hope to achieve through the elections. They back the candidates loyal to their interests and get rid of their rivals.
“In states like Guerrero and Michoacan, the violence could reduce how many people vote, and even how people vote and the local results of the poll,” said Hope…
Since 2008, 24 political candidates have been assassinated… and nine kidnapped during the run-up to elections in Mexico, according to the Integralia consulting firm.
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Labels: elections, Mexico, political culture, politics
Challenging in many ways
Nearly all of the 56 SNP MPs are new to Westminster. Therefore, it should be no surprise that they don't act like experienced members of the "Mother of all Parliaments" (to quote one Twitter poster). Some of the posted pictures are great and some of the comments are classic.
SNP MPs flout Commons etiquette with first day tweets
New SNP MPs breached Commons etiquette this week by tweeting photographs of themselves inside the Commons chamber.
Since their arrival at Westminster four days ago, the vastly expanded cohort of SNP MPs has offered an unexpectedly open window into life in the Commons.
 |
| Neil Gray (l), MP and fellow MPs |
All 56 MPs (or #team56 as they are hashtagging their activities) are regular tweeters, and their followers have learned more about the internal working of parliament in the past four days than one would in a lifetime’s study of Hansard…
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Labels: legislature, political culture, politics, UK
Non-representative democracy
When the winners are in charge of choosing a voting system, why would they change what worked for them?
Election result is ‘nail in the coffin’ of first-past-the-post voting system
Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system has been declared broken and unfit for an era of multiparty politics as analysis of general election figures showed that it had delivered the least proportional result in the country’s history…
Data compiled by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) for the Observer… said that 24.2% of seats in parliament were now held by MPs who would not be there if a proportional voting system were in place. The previous record highest figure was 23% in 1983, when the former SDP suffered from first-past-the-post. In 2010 the figure was 21.8%…
Its analysis showed that, of almost 31 million people who voted, 19 million (63% of the total) did so for losing candidates. Out of 650 winning candidates, 322 (49%) won less than 50% of the vote.
Katie Ghose, chief executive of the ERS… “The Conservatives have won a majority in parliament on not much more than a third of the vote. So while the prospect of a hung parliament has receded, the problems with our voting system have remained in the foreground.
“It cannot be right that it takes 26,000 votes to elect an MP from one party and almost four million to elect an MP from another. Millions will have woken up on Friday morning to find their voices effectively haven’t been heard. At a time when more and more people are turning away from politics, our broken voting system is making it worse…
“One of the features of our broken voting system is that it accentuates divides. For instance, those who vote Conservative in Scotland have gone almost unrepresented, as have Labour voters in rural southern constituencies or Conservative voters in northern urban seats. The UK is at a constitutional crossroads, so the last thing we need is a voting system that pits nations and regions against each other…"
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Labels: elections, parties, regime, UK, voting
Pay attention to the man behind the curtain
Alec Luhn, a writer for
The Guardian has a different take on Putin and changes in Russia than Maxim Trudolyubov did in Friday's excerpt. How many differences and similarities can you find?
15 years of Vladimir Putin: 15 ways he has changed Russia and the world
[A]s Putin marks the 15th anniversary of acceding to power on 7 May 2000, Russia has changed beyond all recognition from the chaotic, open free-for-all it was under Yeltsin. Internationally it faces isolation, sanctions, a new cold war even. At home, despite economic decline Putin enjoys perhaps the highest popularity rating of any Kremlin leader – an approval rating that topped 86% in February.
Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Putin has made a huge impact on his country and the world.
Ukraine, Georgia and the ‘near abroad’: The Ukrainian conflict has ruptured relations between Russia and the west over the past year, but in fact it is merely the latest example of Putin asserting Russia’s “rights” in its former backyard…
Opposition to Nato: Putin has insisted that Nato’s eastward expansion represents a threat to his country…
Autocracy: Putin… has consistently moved toward greater consolidation of his own power…
Cult of personality: Putin has given [Russians] something much more in keeping with the macho spirit of the Russian muzhik: a horse-riding, bare-chested, tiger-wrestling, clean living, straight-talking action man…
It’s the economy, durak! When Putin arrived in office, Russia was just emerging from the disastrous market reforms of the 1990s and the 1998 financial crisis… As former finance minister Alexei Kudrin reminded Putin during the president’s annual call-in show in April, the 7% annual GDP growth at the end of his first presidential term fell to just 0.6% in 2014, and the country’s economy is expected to enter recession this year…
Population growth? Putin took over a country whose population was … losing people at a rate of almost a million a year… But the decline gradually bottomed out,… the country now has more than 146 million people, up from 142 million in 2008…
Pivot to Asia: Putin has shifted in recent years toward greater economic and military cooperation with Asian countries, whose growing economies are hungry for Russia’s energy and whose governments are less judgmental of its human rights record…
Crackdown: With the imprisonment of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the assassinations of several prominent opposition voices, Putin’s Russia was already a place where dissent was not particularly welcome… Since Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012, new laws have raised the fines for those taking part in protests not sanctioned by the authorities…
In Putin’s third term, authorities have also tightened the screws on non-governmental organisations that receive funding from abroad…
Once an oasis of free speech, the Russian internet is now subject to vague laws that allow the government’s communications watchdog to block sites deemed to publish “extremist” material or content harmful to children…
‘Moralistic’ vision: Putin’s third term has seen a wave of legislation inspired by his vision of Russia as a bastion of traditional morals…
A multipolar world? The charitable view of Putin’s foreign policy is that he stands up to western hegemony and, with China, acts as a balance to the overweening military and political power of the US...
Londongrad: Under Putin... record numbers of Russians and their cash were flooding west – and London was their favourite second home...
New-found sporting prestige: The Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 were a triumph for Putin…
Corruption: Despite a state campaign against corruption, Putin’s Russia has failed to shake off accusations of being fundamentally dishonest…
Military: Putin inherited an army that was not fit for purpose… While the increased spending and reorganisation has created a force able to react relatively quickly… new equipment – in particular a new stealth fighter and a next-generation tank – are still on the way…
New propaganda: Even as independent media found themselves on the run, Putin appointed Dmitry Kiselyov, a television presenter known for his anti-American conspiracy theories, head of the state news agency Rossiya Segodnya. In this post, Kiselyov has overseen an expansion of Sputnik News and Russia Today, which peddle the Kremlin’s talking points in foreign languages…
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Labels: leadership, politics, Russia
Teenagers!
Even in Iran?
Iran bans 'homosexual' and 'devil worshipping' hairstyles
“Homosexual” and “devil worshipping” hairstyles have been banned in Iran, alongside tattoos, sunbed treatments and plucked eyebrows for men, which are all deemed un-Islamic.
 |
| Tehran teenagers |
The move – aimed at spiky cuts – follows a trend where, each summer, Iranian authorities get tough on men and women sporting clothing or hairdos seen as imitations of western lifestyles…
Religious police and plainclothes basij militia are often deployed on the streets or in public buildings such as big shopping malls where they crack down on men and women who fail to stick to their forced Islamic dress code… Iran’s police and similar forces operate under the direct control of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei…
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Labels: censorship, Iran, leadership
Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain
Maxim Trudolyubov, a Russian journalist (not a fan of President Putin) who writes for
The New York Times thinks that there's some sleight of hand going on in Putin's leadership. Can you find evidence to support or contradict his thesis?
BTW: Do you know what
peristroika was?
Putin’s Grudging Perestroika
There is a widespread view in the West that Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and confrontational policies toward the United States and Europe are an attempt to revitalize aspects of its lost Soviet glory days. But if we look at some of the Kremlin’s domestic policy initiatives, we see a country struggling to become less “Soviet” in its actions and reform its decrepit institutions before it’s too late.
Many of the reforms now underway reflect Moscow’s long-overdue recognition that the Russian state simply cannot afford to maintain costly Soviet-designed structures, such as free higher education for all students or an oversized military based on mass mobilization. Though many of the current changes are forced by dire necessity rather than any grand progressive vision, they are reforms nonetheless…
But now that President Vladimir Putin’s patriotic propaganda has managed to distract popular attention from dismal political and economic conditions, the reforms, haphazard though they might be, are going forward. The irony is that the leaders who have been trumpeting Soviet grandeur on the world stage are presiding over its retreat at home…
Today, a few years into the reforms… the overall picture remains bleak. Moscow has been giving regional governments incentives to close inefficient, duplicative and deteriorating hospitals and health centers, trim the medical work force and improve efficiency in exchange for more funds for modern equipment, renovation and better pay for health workers…
Rural areas are bearing the brunt of the disruption. More than 17,000 towns and villages once served by small health clinics now have no medical services at all. Between 2005 and 2013, the number of health centers was cut from 8,249 to 2,085, and the number of rural hospitals plunged from 2,631 to 124…
Maria Gaidar, head of the citizens’ rights group Social Demand, told me. “They want to avoid public commotion. It’s all being done at the regional level so that in case things go wrong one can blame the governors, not the Kremlin.”…
Education reform has also been haphazard… reformers have introduced uniform exams (not unlike America’s SATs), aligned the higher education system with that of Europe, and started to build new research institutions… as Western sanctions and plunging oil revenues sap the national budget, the Kremlin has announced sweeping cuts in funding that will affect tens of thousands of state employees, from teachers to museum guards to theater ushers.
Efforts to revamp the military are arguably the most successful of the government’s reforms. The Kremlin seeks to replace the unwieldy Soviet structure with smaller, more efficient modern armed forces…
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Labels: leadership, political culture, politics, Russia
Good luck today.
May the facts be with you.
 |
| Stafford HS "Smoke Signal" |
More advice for tomorrow
Five years ago, Mr. Frank Franz, who teaches in Virginia offered a list of great suggestions that will help you write better responses to FRQs.
I posted them then, four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, last year, and here they are once again.
I think these ideas are excellent. The only thing I’d add to the list would be to paraphrase the question as an introduction. In the last few years some rubrics have insisted that responses have introductions that label what is being discussed.
Here's what Mr. Franz wrote:
Here's the strategy I place on every FRQ I give my students. I believe it helps them focus on the questions and will help them earn as high of a score as possible. Some of these ideas are my own and some are from colleagues who have served as readers and table leaders.
Free Response Strategy
• Mark-up the question on the question sheet.
• Count up how many points you are trying to earn. (Look for number references, count the verbs)
• Write as many sentences as there are points.
• Write simple, declarative sentences.
• Answer the question asked.
Nothing else.
• Answer every part of the question.
• Look for time references, patterns, and passage of time.
• Do not argue with the premise of the prompt.
• Skip a line between parts, but do not label.
Go ahead and thank Mr. Franz.
Hint for success
Want a hint for doing well on the FRQs on the exam on Thursday?
I have said it since early in this century.
Students said it was the best advice I offered.
READ THE VERBS!
Pointing out the cleavage
When the boss identifies a problem, savvy underlings will begin finding ways to make things better or cover up the problem. For years, the problem of rural poverty and lack of services has been covered up by urban growth, urban prosperity, and rural isolation. Occasional efforts have been made when things got really bad, but those efforts have been temporary.
Well, the boss is talking again. Will improvements or covering up begin?
Chinese peasants should share fruits of development: Xi
President Xi Jinping said China must strive to make breakthroughs on coordinated development between urban and rural areas to enable farmers to participate in the country's development on an equal footing and share the fruits of economic growth…
The most difficult task for China in building a a moderately prosperous society in all respects lies in its vast rural areas, Xi said…
Development of rural areas should be supported by more advanced urban areas. The target is to gradually let rural residents have equal basic rights and interests and the same public services as urban residents, balancing the income of rural and urban residents, optimizing the distribution of essential factors in urban and rural areas and integrating urban and rural industrial development, according to Xi…
Xi urged advancing agricultural modernization, strengthening the position of agriculture, and ensuring food security and income growth.
Infrastructure and public service facilities in rural areas need to be improved, Xi said, and capital of the society should be encouraged to invest in these projects.
Social care for the left-behind rural population -- mostly children, women and the elderly whose fathers, husbands and sons have left for better-paying jobs in cities -- needs to be improved, Xi stressed.
Reform of the household registration system should be accelerated to ensure rural workers have the same job opportunities as urban workers and to let rural migrants settle down in cities, Xi said.
Governments at all levels should fully understand the importance and urgency of improving institutions and mechanisms for promoting the integration of urban and rural development, Xi said. Specific policies and effective measures should be rolled out to make progress on realizing integrated urban and rural development…
[T]he country aims to build "a moderately prosperous society in all respects" by 2020, but the gap between rural and urban populations remains large, especially between the poorest and most remote areas and booming megacities.
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
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Labels: China, cleavages, economics, leadership, politics
Inequality, corruption, and religion in Iran
The economic cleavages in Iran burst into the open because of a car wreck. Oh, and is corruption exposed too? And how big an issue is religion? Is everything connected?
In Iran, Fatal Porsche Crash Unleashes Middle-Class Anger at Elites
It was 5 o’clock on a recent morning as the canary yellow Porsche raced up the treelined Shariati boulevard in Tehran. The young woman at the wheel, it later emerged, came from the poorer south side of the city. The young man next to her, the nouveau riche grandson of an ayatollah, had bought the car just two days earlier…
To that point, the scene could have passed for normal in North Tehran, where increasing numbers of the children of the well-connected live their lives as if the country’s restrictive Islamic laws were written for someone else. Their luxury cars have become symbols of a growing inequality in Iran, where a new class of untouchable one-percenters hoards money, profiting from sanctions and influential relations, leaving Iran’s middle classes to face the full force of the country’s deepening economic woes…
[T]he first-time Porsche driver, Parivash Akbarzadeh, 20, lost control of the car, slamming into the curb and hitting a tree. She was killed instantly, and the car’s owner, Mohammad Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi, 21, died hours later of his injuries…
Not long after, pictures appeared on social media of the wreckage of the sports car, lying mangled in one of Tehran’s most prominent streets. Almost as quickly, the identities of the two victims were revealed: A young, big-eyed beauty and a grandson of a prominent cleric, who to make matters worse, was engaged to be wed, but not to Ms. Akbarzadeh…
[T]the crash unleashed a storm of comment on social media, the majority of it very nasty.
“Good riddance,” someone wrote on Ms. Akbarzadeh’s Instagram page under a picture of her posing with a ring studded with diamonds in the shape of a dollar sign. “This girl set fire on normal people, now she set fire to herself.”…
What rankled most was the cocktail of double standards that the crash symbolized, particularly the intertwined issues of rising corruption and inequality.
During the tenure of the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a select few, often well-connected, individuals were catapulted into fabulous wealth after having been granted rights to sell oil, dollars and gold. These “middlemen” started venturing into other businesses, often spreading a culture of corruption, economists and government, officials say.
Many of these middlemen continue to sport their three-day revolutionary beards, in a sign of their loyalty to the system. But their children shop in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for designer clothes, and tool around in expensive cars…
Mashregh news website reported in September that nearly 100,000 luxury cars had been imported since 2009, even though the owners have to pay a tax of 140 percent…
Even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who promotes a pious and sober life, felt compelled to comment on the uproar. “Some young people, highly proud of their wealth, take over the streets with their expensive cars,” he said this week, addressing a meeting with police officials. This, he said, “creates psychological insecurity in the society” and called for action by the police…
Mr. Rabbani-Shirazi was mocked for being the grandchild of an important aide to the founder of the Islamic republic… but driving a Porsche…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
Amazon's customers gave this book a 5-star rating, but you can't get it from them anymore. (And I don't know why not.)
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Labels: cleavages, economics, Iran, political culture, politics
