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? Sign up here. August 15, 2024 |
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Bangladesh's Youth Revolt Takes Charge |
Earlier this month, youth-heavy protests drove Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina to flee after 15 years in power. What began as protests over jobs quotas came to represent broad-based economic and political angst. Now, "the streets of this country of 170 million people are run by students," Mujib Mashal and Saif Hasnat report for The New York Times. "A car carrying New York Times journalists was stopped by a boy who looked no older than 12. He asked to see a driver's license. In another corner of the city where some of the worst violence had taken place, Salman Khan, 17, and two other students manned a roundabout, occasionally pulling aside the fanciest of cars. What exactly were they looking for? 'Black money, black money,' Mr. Khan said, explaining that many of Ms. Hasina's senior officials were on the run."
"Students have not only manned roads," Krutika Pathi and Shonal Ganguly write for The Diplomat, "two who led the charge against Hasina are settling into the interim government" as ministers.
The task ahead is monumental, observers agree. Led since 2009 by Hasina and her Awami League, Bangladesh's economy is in shambles. At Project Syndicate, M. Niaz Asadullah noted in June as protests percolated: "Bangladesh needs to absorb millions of unemployed and underemployed young people into the labor market. Currently, more than one-third of university graduates remain unemployed within a year or two of graduation. Worse, roughly 40% of Bangladeshi youth—twice the global average—are not in education, employment, or training."
Bangladesh's political system is also viewed dimly: The Economist writes that the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, "suffers from many of the problems the [Awami League] does, including dynastic power politics, cronyism and its own record of oppression when in power." The new ministers and the protesters want to reform the whole system before a vote is held, Pathi and Ganguly write for The Diplomat, but the transitional government seems to lack a mandate for that. Fareed will examine Bangladesh's protests and transition in greater depth on Sunday's GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m ET. |
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… Guided by an 84-Year-Old Nobel Laureate |
Guiding this youthful surge for change is a much more seasoned figure: the 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. Known as the "banker to the poor," Yunus helped pioneer microfinance, a way of helping low-income people become entrepreneurs. The military installed him as chief adviser—in other words, leader—of a quickly established interim government soon after Hasina's flight.
"[C]lad in a simple kurta and vest," Yunus flew in from Paris to assume "what can objectively be described as the job from hell," John Reed writes for the Financial Times. He has appealed for calm amid recrimination against the old order. For Yunus, returning to fill this role "is surely sweet vindication," the FT's Reed writes. "Hasina's government had pursued a legal vendetta against him and his operations, slandering him as a 'bloodsucker' of the poor," and a court sentenced him in absentia. Yunus has compared this sea change "to 'a second liberation', referring to Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971," Reed writes. |
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What Should We Make of the US Economy? |
This month, the US economy has seen disappointing jobs numbers and encouraging inflation statistics. So, is the story good or bad?
Last week, The Wall Street Journal's Jon Kamp, Rachel Wolfe, Ruth Simon, and Justin Baer noted US consumer confidence "remains guarded." Times aren't desperate, but Americans are treading lightly. One Houston financial planner said some of his clients had considered working longer before retirement—but pointed out that he "isn't hearing the level of worry that erupted during the 2007-09 recession, the pandemic, or the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, as he talks to clients. 'It's not panic, it's curiosity,' he said." One small business relayed similarly mixed signals: "Nick Vaughn, managing partner of Kitchen & Bath Galleries in Chapel Hill, N.C., said the company will be cautious about extending credit to new customers, and doesn't expect to step up capital expenditures or add to its staff of 18, unless it finds an exceptional candidate. At the same time, Vaughn said the pipeline for design work there has never been stronger."
What does this complicated picture mean, politically? Beneath the topline numbers, The Economist writes, members of a key political constituency—those who've suffered under globalization and deindustrialization—are faring better than they had been. Since former President Donald Trump took office in 2017, the "wage premium" advantaging college graduates "has steadily shrunk. In recent years wage growth among poorer Americans has easily outpaced that enjoyed by richer folk. A man without a high-school diploma, in full-time work, now earns about $40,000 a year on average. And more of them are in a position to do so. In 2022 and 2023 just 5.1% of men without a high-school education were unemployed, in line with the lowest rate since records began in the early 1990s. Labour-force participation is near an all-time high. America's left-behind are still relatively poor. But things are clearly moving in the right direction."
In an election, it's the economy in key battleground states that can influence the result. At Bloomberg Businessweek, Shawn Donnan, Stuart Paul, Nazmul Ahasan, and Christopher Cannon write: "Most battleground states more acutely felt the recent surge in the cost of living. States like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have lagged the nation in their recoveries from the 2020 recession. … Some of the swing-state counties that will decide the election have been among the slowest to recover from the pandemic downturn." |
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New Gender Divides in US Politics |
The gender gap in US politics is nothing new: For a long time, women have skewed to the left and men to the right. On Sunday's GPS, however, Fareed heard from The Atlantic's Derek Thompson that two new developments are worth watching. The gender gap is widening among younger voters, Thompson pointed out, and a different kind of split has emerged, as the parties themselves differ sharply over how they view gender's role in society. |
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Long thought mostly impassable, the Darién Gap—a stretch of thick jungle on the Colombia–Panamá border that separates South from Central America—is now a significant migration route for people seeking to enter the US. In the spring of 2023, CNN's Nick Paton Walsh reported on the harrowing and sometimes deadly journey migrants take.
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Dickerson details the dangerous trek. Following the path herself, Dickerson recounts heartbreaking anecdotes. "We stepped over jaguar tracks and passed a Bothrops, the deadliest viper in South America, coiled around a branch near our ankles," Dickerson writes. "In a ravine, we saw what looked like the scene of a person's bad fall: a tennis shoe, a skull, and the bones of a leg with a bandage wrapped around the knee like a tourniquet."
Dickerson hears from a mother whose son was swept away by a fast-rising river. She hears tales of people who never came out of the jungle or were left behind by others in their hungry, desperate groups. Of one trip through the gap, Dickerson writes: "The next morning, we faced the route's hardest obstacles, a series of rock faces. Ropes had been strung across some of them, but it was impossible to know which were secure enough to hold on to. … When it was an 8-year-old girl named Katherine's turn, she slipped and fell into the rocky river about 15 feet below. Her mother, who had been right behind her, stood frozen while one of the porters jumped into the water after her. Katherine emerged crying but uninjured. We started hiking again almost immediately—no one wanted to contemplate the near miss any longer than they had to." |
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