Tuesday, June 26, 2018

The Real Danger of the Travel Ban Ruling

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Jason Miks.

June 26, 2018

The Real Danger of the Travel Ban Ruling

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision Tuesday upholding President Trump's travel ban sends a troubling message, writes Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. In choosing to effectively overlook Trump's past comments on a Muslim ban, the court has opened the door for plenty more prejudiced policies.

Chief Justice John Roberts "argues, because the order itself doesn't mention Islam, the president's remarks about the travel ban, and his express intent in imposing it, can be safely ignored," Serwer writes.

"Whatever message the Court intended to send, the one that Trump and his administration will take from the ruling is that the president is free to implement any discriminatory policy he likes, so long as his advisers launder the president's bigotries through facially neutral language."

"In addressing the constitutionality of the order, Roberts writes, 'we must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself.' So the president need not even cease to make bigoted generalizations about religious and ethnic minorities publicly—the high court's conservative justices will, in evaluating the policies motivated by such prejudices, disregard them, so long as they can find some other superficial basis for their existence."

What Liberals Need to Know About Turkey's Election Result

The Turkish election result should be a wake-up call to Western liberals, writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Lecturing voters about populist leaders is pointless, self-righteous—and dangerous.

The one way guaranteed to exacerbate the populist trend "is for western Europe simply to hurl abuse at it. As in Donald Trump's America, people do not like being told they are idiots, racists or deluded Nazis when voting for what they see as their interest and their national identity," Jenkins writes.

"The real message of the Turkish election is that there is nothing inevitable about a mature democracy. It needs constant refreshment, everywhere. Parliaments and parties need updating. Local government needs liberating. Media pluralism needs defending. Social media hysteria needs limiting."

The Arms Race We Need to Talk About

President Trump's call for a US Space Force is just the latest escalation in an arms race that has largely gone overlooked, writes Garrett Graff for Wired. Get ready for the satellite wars.

"A secretive, pitched arms race has opened up between the US, China, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, North Korea. The object of the race: to devise more and better ways to quickly cripple your adversary's satellites. After decades of uncontested US supremacy, multinational cooperation, and a diplomatic consensus on reserving space for peaceful uses, military officials have begun referring to Earth's orbit as a new 'warfighting domain,'" Graff writes.

"But if space is indeed becoming a war-fighting domain, it's important to understand the stakes, not just for America's strategic standing but for the species. A Russo-Sino-American space war could very well end with a crippled global economy, inoperable infrastructure, and a planet shrouded by the orbiting fragments of pulverized satellites—which, by the way, could hinder us all on Earth until we figured out a way of cleaning them up."

Is space war inevitable? Fareed discussed President Trump's Space Force announcement and more with Neil deGrasse Tyson on GPS. Watch the full interview from Sunday's show here.

Guess Which Group of Americans Should ♥ Immigration Most?

As its native working population gets grayer, it is increasingly clear that America needs more immigrants to sustain its economy. And there's one group that should be particularly keen to roll out the welcome mat, The Economist says: White Americans.

"Migrants are a particularly important factor in sustaining the size of America's workforce: in 2014, 80% of foreign-born inhabitants were aged 18 to 64 compared to 60% of those native born," The Economist argues.

"White Americans should be reassured by that. Under current Census Bureau projections, they will account for less than half of the total population within the next three decades: 48% by 2050. But they will make up 60% of the population aged 65 or older. The elderly work at considerably lower rates and rely on public support for health care and welfare payments at far higher rates. That means than non-Latino whites would be particularly at risk from the economic stagnation and budget constraints associated with a declining workforce that would result from lower minority birth rates or harsher limits on immigration."

How to Fix Asia's Plastic Crisis

As developing Asia gets richer, the oceans' plastic crisis is going to get worse. There's no magic bullet, but there's an old-fashioned approach that's a lot more effective than banning plastic bags and straws, writes Adam Minter for Bloomberg: Collect the trash.

"Although recycling is common in Asia, plastic presents an often insurmountable challenge: Technical and environmental factors render much of it unrecyclable, especially in developing regions. In fact, only about 9 percent of plastics are recycled globally," Minter writes.

"Yet there's another, far more promising option: Improve regular old trash collection. A recent study by the Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment found that boosting trash collection rates to 80 percent in just five Asian countries—China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam—could reduce ocean plastic waste by a whopping 23 percent over a decade. No other solution can promise such an immediate or lasting impact."

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