Category: reason

Voters in Italy rejected a referendum on constitutional reforms advanced by the government of Matteo Renzi, on whose rule the referendum became a referendum, and who announced his resignation in the wake of the results.

Various Italian governments in the last decades have pushed the issue of constitutional reform—in 2011, voters rejected an effort by then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to, among other things, make the prime ministership stronger at the expense of the presidency. Like the present effort, it was framed as a way to make governing Italy easier. Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina advised the pro-yes effort (he also worked on David Cameron’s re-election and the Brexit Remain campaign), and Renzi visited the White House for a state dinner in October. The U.S. ambassador to Italy warned that a no vote could make it harder for Italy to attract foreign investment from places like the U.S.

One of the key points in this reform effort was reducing the size and power of the Senate. The two chambers of the Italian legislature are currently considered ‘perfectly symmetrical’—members of both chambers are elected at the same time for the same length terms, and both chambers have to pass the same piece of legislation for it to move on. The legislation passes from chamber to chamber until the two have passed the same bill, a process known as the “parliamentary shuffle,” which can go on indefinitely. The proposed reforms would cut the Senate out of the process for a whole set of legislative issues, shrink the chamber, and fill it with regional assembly members and mayors. The reform would also award extra seats to the best performing party in the chamber of deputies, making it easier to put together stronger governments.

The reforms were opposed by a cross-section of Italian political life, from the Northern League’s Matteo Salvini to economist Mario Monti, who was selected to replace Berlusconi as prime minister, and previously served on the European Commission from 1995 to 2004, as well as members of Renzi’s Democratic party. The Economist recommended a no vote. Meanwhile, opponents framed a “no” vote as another signpost on the road to populism, because of a perception that populist parties could benefit most from the prime minister’s resignation, the consequent uncertainty, and a potential snap election.

After the results were announced, Salvini tweeted “Viva Trump, viva Putin, viva la Le Pen e viva la Lega!” Beppe Grillo, a comedian who helped start a left-wing populist party, the Five Star Movement, meanwhile, called the vote a victory for democracy. The mentions of President-elect Trump, Russia President Vladimir Putin, and France’s Marine Le Pen are a reference to the apparent confluence of interests of anti-globalist, populist and nationalist-type movements across the West. Like the attempt by some to connect Brexit to Trump, these kind of exercises don’t work. While UKIP’s Nigel Farage became a fast friend of Trump’s, the Conservative Daniel Hannan, another pro-Brexit British politician, called Trump’s rise a danger to the Republican party and American democracy and rejected parallels between Trumpism and Brexit as “absurdly overdone.”

Salvini’s attempt to align the no vote with Trump, Putin, and France’s National Front, , also illustrates the danger of opponents of reflexive anti-establishmentarianism who themselves reflexively lump disparate political movements and forces into one basket of deplorables. Last month, the Washington Post ran a story about “fake news” as part of a massive Russian propaganda effort, based in large part on a report by PropOrNot, a group that has kept the identity of its members a secret and has been accused itself of being a Ukrainian propaganda effort, that identified more than 200 websites as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.” As The New Yorker‘s Adrien Chen noted last week, for PropOrNot “simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream [was] enough to risk being labelled a Russian propagandist.”

This kind of “you’re either with us or against us” approach to a (bigger government) “political mainstream” that is increasingly no such thing doesn’t earn that position any more credibility. Voters in Italy were, by a margin of almost 20 percent, not interested in changing their constitution to make governing easier for the ruling party. This despite the usual economic doom and gloom that accompanies a vote outside of, in Europe’s case, the Euro-integrationist mainstream. In Italy, the threat is argued to be because a “no” vote makes eventual departure from the Eurozone more plausible (though still unlikely), which in turn would make it more difficult to bail out Italian banks now seeking them.

At its most basic level, it’s a similar argument made in the 2008 fiscal crisis—that if the government didn’t intervene aggressively there would be catastrophe. It’s also similar to arguments deployed wherever there’s a case being made for more government intervention—that inaction is too dangerous, and the government has to “do something.” It’s a dangerous conceit, and one that becomes less persuasive the more government, as it is wont to do, fails, and the more that the world get better despite big government’s best efforts.

On gay rights, America has come a great distance in a short time. Remember the days, not so long ago, that gays stayed in the closet, sodomy was a crime, same-sex marriage was banned and people could be fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation?

Actually, you don’t have to try to remember that last. It’s still the case in 28 states, including Mike Pence’s Indiana, that holding hands with your same-sex partner in public can mean losing your livelihood. A bigoted boss can cashier a good employee for loving someone of the wrong gender.

This unprotected status is an anomaly under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids employment discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” African-Americans and other racial minorities are protected, Catholics and Muslims are protected, women are protected and immigrants are protected. Gays are not. Steve Chapman asks if it’s time for a change.

View this article.

Just three months after the Rio Olympics ended, the $19 million golf course built for the games is rarely used, and the company responsible for its upkeep has not been paid by the government for two months. Few Brazilians golf, but organizers of the games said building the course could help make the game more popular there.

The apparent decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to not grant an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe was announced via a tweet from the Standing Rock protesters in North Dakota. Evidently, the Corps has decided to conduct an additional environmental assessment seeking alternative routes. From the New York Times:

In a statement on Sunday, the Army’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Works, Jo-Ellen Darcy, said that the decision was based on a need to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.

“Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” Ms. Darcy said. “The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.”

The consideration of alternative routes “would be best accomplished through an Environmental Impact Statement with full public input and analysis,” Ms Darcy said in a statement.

This decision may address the expressed concerns of the Standind Rock Sioux Tribe about protecting drinking water sources and sacred sites, but it does not mean that the pipeline will not get built. It is worth noting that the land through which the pipeline was routed is privately owned and the easements were reportedly acquired without the exercise of eminent domain.

Want to support Reason during this, our webathon week, but also want to spend all your money on a bunch of junk from Amazon? We’ve got you covered! When you go to Amazon, either for Christmas gift hunting or just for everyday stuff acquisition, start at reason.com/amazon and your favorite magazine gets a little kickback when you shop.

While we have no idea who bought what (don’t worry my sweet, paranoid brethren, your anonymity is secure), we do know what products people are picking up using our codes at any given time. And I have to say, you guys are an eclectic bunch.

Men’s large space cat t-shirt. Check!

At least some of you are getting invited to parties and/or getting married, since there are cummerbunds and bowties in the mix. well played.

And to the reader who bought not one, but two kinds of liquid smoke: I salute you. Are you the same person who ordered that campfire scented incense and the paleo cookbook?

I’m seeing a fair amount of carpal tunnel prevention, so I’m assuming the commenters are working overtime demanding edit buttons this time of year. Kudos on being proactive about your wrist health. That’ll pay off later when you need smooth wrist action to lift your It’s on Motherfuckers! pint glass.

Now that I’m thinking about it, The Little Mermaid IS a cautionary tale about rebellion in response to an unaccountable hereditary monarchy. Show your solidarity with Ariel’s mutiny by picking up one of these mermaid tail crochet blanket.

If you’re doing Christmas shopping, a Captain America: Civil War ornament might be a good idea for the superheroic skeptic of central control in your life.

Most of the purchases are actually books, digital or otherwise: A few copies of The Declaration of Independents and Radicals for Capitalism, plus quite of few of you who are considering home gun manufacture. Elsewhere, someone is enjoying their new hardcover copy of Crap Taxidermy. There’s also history, biography, polemic, and much more.

Finally, confidential to the person who ordered a case of Pepto-Bismol chewables: I, too, am concerned about a Trump presidency, but there are limits to these things, my friend.

Of course, you can always do both. One for Reason, two for you. One for Reason, two for you.

Presidents tend to treat the news media warily, sometimes even with outright hostility. But there’s something different about the way President-elect Donald Trump deals with the press. As Trevor Thrall explains in a new column for Reason, “the deeper danger is that Trump’s war will undermine the media as an effective forum for debate and deliberation.”

Thrall adds:

By avoiding engagement with journalists and by stifling media critics through public shaming and other strong-arm tactics, Trump will weaken the ability of the press to play the role of watchdog and critic envisioned by the Founders and embodied in the First Amendment. By attacking the media’s objectivity and credibility, the Trump administration will weaken what’s left of public confidence in the public sphere and, by extension, in the entire project of democratic self-governance.

View this article.

From November 29 to December 6, we are asking Reason readers to give tax-deductible support for our annual Webathon, with the audacious goal of raising $250,000, or around $4,000 more than we did in 2015. We do this not just out of greed (though greed is good, obvs.), but because the very best and most stable model for producing opinion journalism is creating a nonprofit foundation with the maximum number of donors. That way the fortunes of the editorial entity (and surrounding community) you value will not be subject to the transitory whims of individual rich weirdos. Please help us make Reason safe for your grandchildren.

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In roughly 30 minutes, beginning sometime after 8 a.m. ET, I will be doing what Reason staffers also do in return for your generous donations: Represent you the best I can in a non-libertarian broadcast venue consumed by tens or hundreds of thousands of people. In this case it will be on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, a program I have been going on about once a month for the past year or so, and where today I’ll be talking with fellow panelists Joan Walsh and Yamiche Alcindor about President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments. Why subject myself to such punishment? Because it ain’t punishment, silly, it’s a privilege! Where large conversations about politics and policy are taking place, Reason intends to be there, speaking candidly for the truth as we see it, while advocating for Free Minds and Free Markets. I’ll also being going on MSNBC in the noontime (ET) hour to provide political analysis, and Katherine Mangu-Ward is also scheduled for the 4 o’clock hour, to deliver more of the same. We mangle our weeknights and Sundays so you don’t have to!

In the past week, for example, Anthony Fisher appeared on Fox Business Network’s Kennedy (a show we played at least a small role in incubating) to talk about good and bad reactions to Fidel Castro’s death, I went on FBN’s Intelligence Report With Trish Regan and The Blaze’s The Dana Loesch Show and Buck Sexton Show to do the same, Peter Suderman went on Kennedy to talk about the Obamacare ramifications of nominating Tom Price to secretary of Health and Human Services, I did a half-hour on flag-burning politics for SiriusXM Insight’s Stand Up! With Pete Dominick, and hey look, if it isn’t our old friend Kennedy hosting me and other Party Panelists on Carrier, Goldman Sachs, and weed:

But for some reason you people enjoy us in more hostile environments. Such as minutes 7-11 or so of this appearance on Red Eye w/ Tom Shillue, in which Lou Dobbs starts barking at me over space policy (!), saying “This is the great thing about libertarians—they don’t know half the time what they’re talking about!”

Nick Gillespie over the years has had some memorable scraps on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, including with Rachel Maddow, Donna Brazile, and Braddock, Pennsylvania, Mayor John Fetterman:

And no trip down Reason staffer media-appearance memory lane is complete without Bill O’Reilly trying desperately to defend his own children from the scourge of Jacob Sullum:

Is there a new PBS show trying to channel the spirit of Bill Maher and Intelligence Squared? We’re on the pilot (and subsequent episodes). Some independent and libertarian-friendly content burning up the ratings on CNN? We’re all over it. That rare newish medium that Reason hasn’t totally leaped into? We’ll totally leap into it. Our job is to insert ourselves into conversations that are already happening, wherever they’re happening, in addition to bringing as many of the happenings as possible right here to reason.com.

Do you derive value, satisfaction, or at least some enjoyable schadenfreude in watching our familiar faces and listening to our strange speech patterns in far-flung broadcast venues? Then please consider a tax-deductible donation, to make it easier on us.

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We are on Day Five of Reason’s annual Webathon, in which we ask our page-refreshingest readers to help us extend and protect this gloriously unsafe space for libertarian journalism, commentary, and comments-section hijinks. We have already at this just-after-halftime point sailed through our giving levels of every year from 2008-2012, and when that orange box to the right gets to 637 we’ll be in third place all-time for number of Webathon donations in a single season. We thank you, we pray toward your birthplace, and we hope we can convince you to meet our crazy-ass goal of $250,000 in 2016.

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A funny thing happened when Donald Trump won the Indiana Republican primary on May 3, thus knocking Ted Cruz out of the race and removing the last obstacle on his improbable glide path to the GOP presidential nomination: Google searches on “Libertarian Party” and “Gary Johnson” skyrocketed. The same libertarian political-watchers who’d been wandering around mumbling to themselves ever since Rand Paul dropped out of the race three months earlier suddenly snapped back to life, and became excited about third-party politics to an unprecedented degree. “Basically for the last three weeks I haven’t been off the phone,” Libertarian National Chair Nicholas Sarwark told me three weeks after the primary. “Membership is up about 12 percent just since the Cruz dropout. Daily memberships have doubled or tripled, and revenue we’ve quadrupled what we normally bring in in a month.”

One of the benefits to having an active comments section, and maintaining multiple other channels through which our customers can communicate with us, is that we can tell pretty much straight away when a WHOLE BUNCH OF PEOPLE want us to start covering X topic a lot more. “X” this year, in a way that hasn’t been true since at least before I was a teenager, was the Libertarian Party moment. It was the electric cattle prod that got me out of the editor’s chair and back into reporting.

We were already all over L.P. politics before the Indiana primary, especially historian-of-the-libertarian-movement Brian Doherty, who covered the characters, debates, and surprisingly nasty controversies of the primary campaign, handicapping the race in a great magazine feature. I (along with our good friend Kennedy) provided color commentary to the two-part L.P. debate broadcast on Fox Business Network’s Stossel, and wrote a widely reprinted column in the L.A. Times titled “Meet the Libertarians.” On the eve of the party convention in Orlando at the end of May, Jesse Walker wrote some cautionary expectations about how the L.P. might fare in an extraordinary political year.

At the Libertarian Nation Convention, amid the man-boobs strippers and MegaCon trolls, we conducted Reason TV interviews with candidates Gary Johnson, William Weld, Austin Petersen, John McAfee. I gave six reasons why Libertarians were skeptical of Weld, Brian Doherty gazed into McAfee’s dark afternoon of the soul, Nick Gillespie and I reported from the convention floor for CNN and MSNBC, and on the way to the inevitable, Doherty wrote the definitive accounts of the politicking behind presidential and vice presidential picks. Zach Weissmueller and Joshua Swain captured the action quite well:

In the ensuing campaign, through the double-digit polling highs to the self-inflicted Aleppo lows, we were right there, as often as not in the same room as the Libertarian candidate. I was in a hotel room with Johnson just prior to his crucial CNN townhall appearance with Weld, gave on-air reaction just after to CNN International, wrote up a critical take here on the ticket’s kid-gloves treatment of Hillary Clinton (which we would go on to grill them about in a half-dozen subsequent interviews), and offered a longer view for CNN.com. Remember when Johnson lost his iPhone and freaked out on Facebook Live in front of a near-mob in Cleveland just outside the Republican National Convention? That was during our interview. Or when he flipped out on a Bloomberg reporter the night of the first presidential debate? That was my shaky camphone footage (150,000 views on YouTube and nearly 2 million partial views on Facebook).

We conducted Facebook Live interviews with Johnson and Weld at the Democratic National Convention, with both just before the first presidential debate, with Johnson the morning after, Johnson again the morning of Election Day, and Nicholas Sarwark that night (my morning-after session with Sarwark for Reason TV is best watched with a blindfold, given the hangovers involved). Reason TV was at the Johnson party on Election Night, and filed this report:

Bill Weld, of course, had been a controversial pick since even before the Libertarian Convention (see Jesse Walker’s May 19 post titled “William Weld Isn’t a Softcore Libertarian—He Just Isn’t a Libertarian At All“), and we followed his idiosyncratic twists and turns throughout the campaign—his odd comments (including to Nick Gillespie) about Supreme Court picks, non-libertarian views on guns, the recurrent speculation that he might drop out to support Hillary Clinton, his urging of Republicans to vote against Trump, and finally his “vouching” for Clinton on The Rachel Maddow Show one week before the election, which was the final straw for many. Yet we also reported on how many of even Weld’s critics give him props for exposing the party to new voters, funders, and especially media attention. And who has two thumbs and was the first journalist to interview Weld on Election Night after it became clear that his nightmare scenario of Donald Trump winning was taking place? This guy! (“I think in eight to twelve years the Libertarian Party could become the number-one party in the United States in terms of size,” he told me, strangely buoyant).

The next issue of the print magazine features more reporting and analysis from Brian Doherty and myself as to what this whole year meant—best year in history? Most disappointing? All of the above? Regardless of our (tentative) conclusions, we gave you more than enough raw reporting material to come up with your own. This is what happens when enough of you ask us to cover something. Tell me in the comments, oh dear readers, what you want me and us to cover in the political arena during the next 12 months.

AND PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF FREEDOM, DONATE TO REASON RIGHT NOW!

HBO should get a little trophy from the television industry for giving executives something to talk about at holiday parties besides falling ratings and the specific level of Hell that should be reserved for whoever invented this internet thing. Instead, they can ponder over the question: Is HBO’s documentary division the most genius outfit in television, or just the luckiest? Months ago, HBO acquired two unheralded documentaries on Cuba, then booked them for the very moment when Fidel Castro would head off to the great workers’ collective in the sky. Water-cooler buzz galore, Latin American Policy Wonk Department.

And if that department had an Emmy, Patria O Muerte: Cuba, Fatherland or Death would win it right now. First-time director Olatz López Garmendia is better known as a model and a fashion designer, but she must have had a career in operating heavy construction equipment, too, because Patria O Muerte takes a merciless wrecking ball to the Potemkin Village imagery of Cuba promoted by most of the American chattering class. The desolation and despair of Castro’s Revolution—its actually existing socialism, as Marxist theoreticians of the 1950s would have called it—has never been on such devastating display for American audiences. Television critic Glenn Garvin examines the documentary, along with Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution.

View this article.

Two weeks ago, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected on a platform of market reforms, out of the blue launched a scheme called demonetization that declared 85 percent of India’s currency null and void. Within hours of his announcement, India’s highest currency bills Rs. 500 ($7.50) and Rs. 1,000 ($15) ceased to be legal tender. He announced that they would be replaced by new Rs. 500 and Rs. 2,000 bills that people could swap at designated banks with proof of ID.

The ostensible purpose of the move is to flush out untaxed “black money” and modernize India’s cash economy into an electronic one. But the actual result, writes Shikha Dalmia, will be further impoverishment of the poor, economic retrenchment, and, above all, an end to India’s liberalization.

View this article.