Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. June 8, 2021 A Chance for Change in Israel? As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears likely to lose power after 12 consecutive years, analysts have noted that a government headed by right-wing politician Naftali Bennett is unlikely to change the big picture for Israel. But The Economist writes that there's room to take things in a different direction on matters other than Palestinian statehood, from "depoliticizing the police" to "splitting the job of attorney-general, so that one person is not both chief prosecutor and legal counsel to the government."
At The New York Times, Isabel Kershner writes that the new coalition is significant in that it won't include parties aligned with Israel's ultra-Orthodox community, or Haredim as they are known, whose "political representatives have sat in most, though not all, governments of Israel since the late 1970s, when the right-wing Likud party upended decades of political hegemony by the state's socialist founders." As Kershner notes, state subsidies allow Haredi men to study the Torah full time, rather than work in paid jobs, and many Haredim avoid military service; leaders in the new governing coalition have signaled they won't target the Haredim directly, but Kershner suggests Israeli society could liberalize, including through the recognition of same-sex civil marriages, if Haredi influence declines. Mexico Votes, Harris Visits In elections held Sunday to select national-legislative seats, local posts, and nearly half their country's governorships, Mexicans delivered a half-rebuke to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO, as he is known) and his Morena party, ending its legislative supermajority (but still leaving it with the most seats). The Wall Street Journal's editorial board writes that voters have put a "check" on AMLO's left-leaning populist agenda, heading into the final years of his presidency, which will hit a term limit in 2024.
Americas Quarterly notes concurring analysis, including from Goldman Sachs Investment Research, but Martin Castellano of the International Institute of Finance tells the publication he expects Mexican "policies to become more interventionist in the second half of AMLO's term," given the President's leanings and his party's enduring clout.
Two days after the vote, US Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Mexico City as part of her first official foreign trip as VP. At CNN, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda argued the timing was odd, given the likelihood of post-election controversy, while calling on Harris to engage with a broad set of groups and address issues beyond immigration. The Tools We'll Need to Beat Covid-19 Over the Long Haul Though some argue that world governments should seek to deliver a knockout blow to Covid-19, at Foreign Affairs, a group of six doctors, scientists, and public-health experts echo a prediction more observers seem to be making: that the virus will stay with us for the long term.
But luckily, there are ways to sustain a nimble, ongoing response to Covid-19, according to the essay by Larry Brilliant, Lisa Danzig, Karen Oppenheimer, Agastya Mondal, Rick Bright, and W. Ian Lipkin. "The key lies in treating vaccines as transferable resources that can be rapidly deployed where they are needed most," they write: "to hot spots where infection rates are high and vaccine supplies are low. … Meanwhile, governments should exploit new technologies to get better at identifying and containing outbreaks. That means embracing exposure notification systems to alert people to their possible infection. And it means enhancing capabilities to sequence viral genomes, so that researchers can rapidly determine which variant is where and which vaccines work best against each. All this needs to happen as quickly as possible."
The authors view the arrival of more-dangerous variants as a likely outcome: "More than half a million new cases of COVID-19 are reported every day," they point out. "Each infected person harbors hundreds of billions of virus particles, all of which are constantly reproducing. Each round of replication of every viral particle yields an average of 30 mutations." Adapting current vaccines—which, for now, are holding the line—with booster shots, or developing new vaccines altogether, may need to be part of the solution, they suggest. Waiting and Seeing on a Global Minimum Corporate Tax After G7 finance ministers agreed to the outlines of a new system for taxing multinational companies—including a global minimum corporate-tax rate of 15% and a new practice of taxing companies where they do business, rather than where they claim their home bases—The Wall Street Journal's Richard Rubin, Paul Hannon, and Sam Schechner remind us that the plan is still far from a reality, given that domestic politics could prevent countries like the US from implementing it.
Mulling the US-championed reform proposal before the weekend agreement, The Economist wrote that such a deal could spell the end of corporate-tax havens, as it would obviate the benefit to large, multinational corporations of stashing profits in the Caymans, Ireland, or other low-tax countries. In another article, the magazine noted that "[p]erhaps the biggest complaint" against what it sees as a likely set of changes "is that rich countries may get the bulk of taxable profits being grabbed back from havens, while poor ones are left with the scraps." |
