1 Eurozone joblessness at new high (Graeme Wearden & Katie Allen in The Guardian) The unemployment rate across the eurozone hit a fresh record in May, as the recession continued to affect workers around the region and young people again suffered most. The eurozone jobless rate rose to 12.1% in May, up from 12% in April, according to EU statistics office Eurostat. The youth unemployment rate was almost double that, at 23.8%, as 3.5 million under-25s were unemployed in May. In Spain and Greece the youth unemployment rate was as high as one in two.
The rise in unemployment was driven by increased joblessness in countries at the heart of the crisis, including Spain, Italy and Ireland. As the eurozone languishes in its longest-ever recession, the number of people out of work across the currency bloc rose by 67,000 in May to 19.2 million. Seventeen members of the eurozone have higher unemployment rates than a year ago, and 10 have lower rates.
2 Middle-class revolution (Francis Fukuyama in The Wall Street Journal) The theme that connects recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the 2011 Arab Spring and continuing protests in China, is the rise of a new global middle class. In Turkey and Brazil, as in Tunisia and Egypt before them, political protest has been led not by the poor but by young people with higher-than-average levels of education and income. They are technology-savvy and use social media. Even when they live in countries that hold regular democratic elections, they feel alienated from the ruling political elite.
The business world has been buzzing about the rising "global middle class" for at least a decade. A 2012 report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies predicted that the number of people in that category would grow from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020 and 4.9 billion in 2030 (out of a projected global population of 8.3 billion). Corporations are salivating at the prospect of this emerging middle class because it represents a vast pool of new consumers. Since the middle classes tend to be the ones who pay taxes, they have a direct interest in making government accountable.
Most importantly, newly arrived members of the middle class are more likely to be spurred to action by what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called "the gap": that is, the failure of society to meet their rapidly rising expectations for economic and social advancement. This is not a new phenomenon. The French, Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions were all led by discontented middle-class individuals, even if their ultimate course was later affected by peasants, workers and the poor.
But the middle class seldom represents more than a minority of the society in developing countries and is itself internally divided. Unless they can form a coalition with other parts of society, their movements seldom produce enduring political change. The middle classes in the so-called "emerging market" countries are larger, richer, better educated and more technologically connected than ever before. This has huge implications for China, whose middle-class population now numbers in the hundreds of millions. China produces some six million to seven million new college graduates each year, whose job prospects are dimmer than those of their working-class parents. If ever there was a threatening gap between rapidly rising expectations and a disappointing reality, it will emerge in China over the next few years, with vast implications for the country's stability.
The middle classes have been on the front lines of opposition to abuses of power, whether by authoritarian or democratic regimes. The challenge for them is to turn their protest movements into durable political change, expressed in the form of new institutions and policies. The new middle class is not just a challenge for authoritarian regimes or new democracies. No established democracy should believe it can rest on its laurels, simply because it holds elections and has leaders who do well in opinion polls. No politician in the US or Europe should look down complacently on the events unfolding in the streets of Istanbul and São Paulo. It would be a grave mistake to think, "It can't happen here."
3 NSAgate (Khaleej Times) When Edward Snowden made shocking revelations in the media about the National Security Agency’s extensive spying on US civilians, the Obama administration tried to quickly diffuse the controversy. US President Barack Obama said spying on personal phone records and Internet data was essential in the post-9/11 security environment.
But now, it
seems like the US needs to come up with more explanations, and perhaps more
complex ones that don’t involve the catch-all term of terrorism. With new
revelations about NSA’s spying on EU offices in US territory, the Obama
administration is hit with another scandal that is unlikely to die down soon.
After the German paper, Der Spiegel, published an alleged NSA document from
2010, that clearly stated that the US government snooped on EU officials, The
Guardian has added fuel to fire. The British paper has published another report
claiming that France, Germany and Italy were the “targets” of NSA spying.
If Snowden’s
information is authentic, it shows that the US still retains the posture of the
Cold War security state — one that impinges on citizens’ rights and freedoms
supposedly for the sake of security. It also shows that everything is not hunky
and dory with Transatlantic relations — in fact, there are considerable
insecurities that mar ties between traditional allies.
And now we learn, thanks to Edward Snowden, that governments can see exactly which site you visit, and what you do there. When I was researching my book Fatal Faultlines, I visited many extremist websites, including Islamist and right-wing Christian ones. Perhaps these visits were logged into some NSA or GCHQ server, and will be pulled up at some point in the future. Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid. However, you can be certain that if somebody applies for a sensitive government job in the UK or the USA, his or her whole electronic life will be an open book.
5 Europe’s ‘lost’ generation (Jon Henley in The Guardian) According to data out on Monday more than 5.5 million Europeans under-25s are without work, and the number rises inexorably every month. It's been called the "lost generation", a legion of young, often highly qualified people, entering a so-called job market that offers very few any hope of a job – let alone the kind they have been educated for.
This week, Angela Merkel is convening a jobs summit to address the issue. Yet still the numbers mount up. In Greece, 59.2% of under-25s are out of work. In Sapin, youth unemployment stands at 56.5%; in Italy, it hovers around 40%. Some commentators say the figures overstate the problem: young people in full-time education or training (a large proportion, obviously) are not considered "economically active" and so in some countries are counted as unemployed. That, they say, produces an exaggerated youth unemployment rate.
But others point out Europe’s "economically inactive" now include millions of young people not in work, education or training but who, while technically not unemployed, are nonetheless jobless – and have all but given up looking, at least in their own country. Millions more are on low-paying, temporary contracts. By most measures, the situation is dire.
High youth unemployment doesn't just mean social problems and productivity wasted; it means falling birthrates and intergenerational tension between parents and their thirtysomethings still living at home. "A wholesale destruction," a Bologna University professor says, "of human capital".
6 ‘Life’s like that’ cartoon in Khaleej Times
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