Some Datapoints on Global Political Risk

By lambert strether of Corrente.

So, I was trawling the twitter earlier this evening, and I ran across mention of a large, ongoing “protest” (we’ll call it*) in Sao Paolo, Brazil. I’ve been following events in Turkey, of course, which seem to be on scale of Tahrir Square/Puerta del Sol/capitol occupations/Zucotti Park/carré rouge, but the Sao Paolo protest seemed of a similar scale, and yet I hadn’t heard anything about it in our famously free press. So I thought I would do a quick and totally unscientific survey of protests round the world to see what was up. What follows is a quote dump of protests by country; as it turns out, there are rather a lot of them! Note that most of this material comes from official media, and I’m not making any representations as to accuracy or justification; I’m just trying to get a rough idea of scale.

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What Voting Can Look Like

By lambert strether

Last week in Quebec, they held a provincial election. Quebec Liberal Charest lost and claims to have left politics, and Parti Quebecois Pauline Marois won, and formed a minority government. But although the election may turn out to be important to the fortunes of the carré rouge movement, it’s not the subject of this post. Instead, I want to talk about the dry topic of voting systems. You see, in Canada, they use hand-marked paper ballots, hand counted in public. Among other things, that process means that we can actually be sure who won. And if the elections of 2000 and 2008 are any guide, and the race stays as close as the pollsters sat it is, we might, on Wednesday, November 7, not be sure who won.

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Global Political Risk: Surveying the GIPSI

By lambert strether of Corrente.

Here’s another in my series of quote dumps on protests by country; this time, I thought I’d focus exclusively on the GIPSI PIIGS, so-called [See here; here and discussion here]; the southern tier of Europe that is in such distress. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain. Since Europe is about to close down for the month of August — imagine, a month’s vacation! — I thought this would be a good time to take stock. What I’m seeing from my vantage point: Many strikes, some marches and demonstrations, nothing at all like the indignados, and above all no sense of a “European idea” from the ground up. And yet painful austerity is imposed on all from the top down, and the powers that be use the same playbook everywhere. It’s very curious. The grinding down seems relentless and continual, and yet every so often there is a spark, as in the successful, and to an extent European, resistance to the closing of the Greek broadcaster ERT. I’d love to be wrong on this, but I think the lack of coherence is the story right now. Things correlate in a crisis, and the grinding down is not a crisis.

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