Portugal's Democracy Cracks Under Weight Of Austerity

ImageContent(562c0b6ce4b0ec0a3894b4d2,562c069f1900002d00b94cef,Image,HectorAssetUrl(562c069f1900002d00b94cef.jpeg,Some(crop_8_465_3992_2202),Some(jpeg)),PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/Getty Images,Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva appointed a center-right minority government on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015, even though it lacks a parliamentary majority.)

Elections in Portugal this week offered the latest sign that when an individual European nation’s voters challenge eurozone austerity policies, the monetary union -- and the international creditors it represents -- takes precedence.

Portugal’s president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, fueled an ongoing debate about the future of European democracy on Thursday when he reappointed an outgoing center-right prime minister despite election results that gave three left-leaning political parties the majority of seats in parliament. 

Cavaco Silva named center-right leader Pedro Passos Coelho prime minister over the objections of Socialist leader Antonio Costa. Passos Coelho’s Forward Portugal Alliance (PAF) received the largest share of the vote of any single party in the Oct. 4 elections, the president said in a televised speech Thursday, and the party with the best showing has always formed the government since Portugal returned to democracy 40 years ago.

Cavaco Silva made clear, however, that his decision was influenced more by the desire to avoid challenging eurozone fiscal policy than by mere consideration for the country’s political traditions. 

"In 40 years of democracy, the Portuguese governments never depended on anti-European political factions," he said.

Costa, the Socialist leader, has asked to form a cabinet with the support of a parliamentary majority that includes the radical Left Bloc and Communist Party, since together, the three parties received over 50 percent of the country’s votes and have the power to control Portugal’s parliament. The Left Bloc and Communist Party are considered “euro-skeptics,” but the Socialist party, which would control the cabinet, is decidedly committed to remaining in the eurozone.

To be sure, as the president noted, Passos Coelho’s PAF won 38.6 percent of the vote in the country’s Oct. 4 elections -- the largest share of any single political faction. 

In Portugal’s political system, however, a minority cabinet is virtually guaranteed to fail without the support of a parliamentary majority.

"It is incomprehensible to name a prime minister who the president knows in advance will not be able to hold majority support in parliament," Costa told Agence France-Presse Friday.

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Cavaco Silva said he fears that Costa’s premiership would put Portugal on a path to confrontation with eurozone leaders and international creditors. Costa has proposed to end the country’s "obsession with austerity" by, among other things, restoring spending on education and health care.

Observing Portugal's commitments to the eurozone "is decisive, is totally crucial for the financing of our economy and, consequently, for economic growth and job creation,” Cavaco Silva said. 

He fretted that a left-leaning ruling government would jeopardize Portugal’s standing with its international creditors.

“After having completed a demanding program of financial aid, which implied heavy sacrifices for the Portuguese, it is my duty, within the scope of my constitutional remit, to do everything possible to avoid that wrong signals are transmitted to the financial institutions, investors and markets, placing in question the country’s external trust and credibility,” he said.

Portugal exited a 78 billion euro ($116 billion) international bailout program in May 2014, which required unpopular wage and pension cuts. But the country must continue to reduce spending and increase taxes if it is to meet the eurozone's requirement that it reduce its debt to 60 percent of GDP within the next 20 years.

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German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has led the continent’s push for austerity in response to the Great Recession and subsequent eurozone debt crisis, expressed her support for a center-right government. “Given the election results in Portugal, we hope Pedro [Passos Coelho] will be successful in forming a government,” she said on Thursday, in a speech to the center-right European People’s Party in Madrid.

But Passos Coelho’s government may not last long. Costa has said he would back an effort to oust the PAF from power if he can secure support from the other left-leaning parties. Passos Coelho must submit a four-year program within 10 days of taking office, and the Left Bloc and Communist Party have announced plans to reject any program that does not significantly undo austerity policies. If a majority of parliament rejects a prime minister’s four-year program, the ruling government collapses.

In that scenario, it would be up to President Cavaco Silva to tap another leader to form a ruling government. Given his harsh rhetoric, he might still deny Costa the opportunity do so, prompting a political crisis.

Portugal’s political system effectively precludes new elections from taking place until June at the earliest, raising the prospect that the president could be forced to appoint an unelected caretaker cabinet in the interim.

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Critics say the dilemma facing Portugal shows how the eurozone’s economic mandates undermine its commitment to democracy.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a columnist for The Telegraph, compared the situation in Portugal to the one in Greece, where the radical left Syriza party was elected in January to undo austerity policies, but ultimately was forced to agree to even harsher spending cuts and tax increases than were in place before.

“Greece’s Syriza movement, Europe’s first radical-Left government in Europe since the Second World War, was crushed into submission for daring to confront eurozone ideology,” Evans-Pritchard wrote Friday. “Now the Portuguese Left is running into a variant of the same meat-grinder.”

Antonio Costa Pinto, a political science professor at the University of Lisbon, voted for Passos Coelho’s center-right coalition earlier this month, but told The Huffington Post on Saturday that he opposes President Cavaco Silva’s attempt to exclude the radical left political parties.

“The president cannot exclude from Portuguese democracy two parties -- the Left Bloc and the Communists -- that represent 1 million voters and 20 percent of the Portuguese electorate,” Pinto said.

To do so, he added, would mean that “nowadays, especially in the periphery of Europe, parties that do not support the strict policy orientations within the eurozone do not count.”

Related on HuffPost:

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Create Your Own "Social Security"

Take a look at your paycheck. I'm willing to bet there's a huge deduction on every paycheck stub for FICA. And I'm also willing to bet that most people don't know what that is and can't tell you what "FICA" stands for! Yet they allow the company to take that money right out of their take-home pay!

Give it a thought. I ask that question at most of my speeches: "What does FICA" stand for?" And I almost always get an audience of blank faces and wrong guesses.

OK, FICA stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act. And that's the official name of the legislation that established Social Security. Those huge withdrawals from every paycheck are your "contribution" to Social Security.

Not your own Social Security check -- but the money that is being paid out to today's retirees. The time has long passed when people believed there was a "shoebox in Baltimore" with money in it for their eventual retirement. (Yes, ask your grandparents, that's what they thought.) Now we know that the Social Security trust fund is a giant shoebox filled with "special purpose" Treasury bonds.

All of the money that comes into the government from your Social Security "contributions" pays for current beneficiaries, with any excess funds going into the trust funds in the form of government IOUs. But since, for "counting" purposes, the "surpluses" that are supposed to be building up in Social Security for your retirement are co-mingled with the Federal budget deficit, the concept of a trust fund is a bit of a fiction. Even so, according to the latest government projections, the Social Security trust fund is expected to be depleted around 2033.

So where will the money come from for your Social Security check -- the one you expect to start receiving in 20 years? It's a frightening thing to contemplate. And it should make you start thinking about hedging your bets on your future Social Security income. You can do that by creating your own "social security fund."

Matching FICA

In 2015, your employer will take out up to $7,347 during the year for FICA. (And the employer will make an equal contribution, and send it to the government.) That maximum amount is taken out of income up to $118,500 in 2015. If you make less than that amount, the total deduction for your contribution will be proportionately less.

You have no choice. You can't tell the HR department that you "can't afford to contribute this year" because you have other pressing needs, like paying off credit card bills or saving for your child's college. The FICA deduction is the price of employment -- and it's not optional.

But will it be worth much when you retire? And don't you think you owe it to yourself to hedge that bet?

Perhaps your company has a 401(k) plan that is voluntary. The easiest way to hedge your FICA bet is to contribute an equal amount, automatically, to the 401(k) plan as you do for FICA.

That's a tough decision to see that money disappear from your take-home pay. But really, it's no tougher to swallow than the original FICA deduction. And look how much better you could do with that money than the government!

Suppose you take that annual $7,347 "contribution" and invest it in your retirement plan, in an S&P 500 stock index fund. According to Ibbotson, the statistical division of Morningstar, the historic average return of the S&P 500 (or its equivalent), including reinvested dividends and dating back to 1926, is 10.1 percent.

So let's suppose you start work in your early 20s, and invest an amount equal to the current $7,347 annual deduction in that diversified stock market mutual fund. Do it every year -- the same amount -- for the next 50 years, and your retirement account would be worth approximately $10 million!

In fact, if you work for a company that matches your retirement plan contribution dollar-for-dollar, you would have to invest only half that amount out of your paycheck!

Yes, there are a lot of caveats. Inflation will eat away at that nest egg, and your FICA "contribution" is likely to rise each year. And who knows what the United States will look like in 50 years, when today's twenty-somethings retire?

But, still, young workers are letting the government take that FICA contribution out of each paycheck. They have no choice but to hope that it will provide at least a basic retirement income. There will no doubt be changes in Social Security in coming years. Benefits are likely to be "means-tested" -- with those who have done a good job of saving other assets receiving less in benefits. That's all the more reason to hedge your Social Security bet.

The only way the government can "means test" your own savings is to tax it away. And at least you'll get a vote on that! That's the Savage Truth.

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Lawrence Lessig Withdraws 'Totally Stupid' Plan To Resign Presidency

Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor seeking the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has renounced a widely ridiculed campaign pledge in the hopes of reviving his struggling presidential bid.

Lessig said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday night that, if elected president, he will no longer resign after passing a law that would expand voting access, end partisan gerrymandering and reform the country's campaign finance system.

“You said that you were running on this one issue and that when you got elected and fixed it, you would quit,” Maher said.

“Yeah, that’s stupid,” Lessig replied, looking downward. “That was totally stupid.”

“I withdraw that promise,” he said. “I am not going to resign. I am running for president with the commitment to pass legislation that gets our democracy back.”

Lessig said he did not anticipate that his promise to resign would overshadow his message of restoring democracy.

“What’s weird about politics is that you know, you come in and you say, ‘I don’t want all the power,’ you’re a little bit humble about what you want. They’re like, ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re a crazy man,’” he said. 

“They don’t trust you,” when you do that, he added. “And I didn’t quite get that. That was my stupidity.”

Lessig discussed his presidential ambitions on HuffPost's "So That Happened" podcast in August.

Lessig’s decision to stay on as president notwithstanding, he reiterated his belief that campaign finance and electoral reform must come first. He argues that those measures are prerequisites for enacting other progressive priorities championed by his Democratic rivals, which Lessig also supports wholeheartedly -- since even the most enlightened president cannot overcome a corrupt and wildly non-representative Congress. 

He likened Democratic front-runners Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to family members debating different vacation options before fixing the broken-down car they need to get to their destination in the first place.

The other Democratic candidates broadly share Lessig’s commitment to campaign finance and electoral reform, but disagree with his insistence that it come before any other legislation. Sanders’ campaign refuses to accept super PAC money and supports public financing for campaigns. And both Clinton and Sanders have said that they would only nominate someone to the Supreme Court committed to overturning the Citizens United ruling that allowed people and corporations to donate unlimited sums to super PACs anonymously. 

Since officially launching his campaign in September, Lessig has failed to gain traction, rarely rising above 0 percent in the polls. Earlier this month, though, Lessig announced he has raised $1 million for his campaign.

Lessig argues that he has been unfairly sidelined by the Democratic Party, protesting their decision to exclude him from Tuesday’s debate. He has said that if the Democratic Party is not more accommodating, he will consider running as an independent.

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Is Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Telling Us the Truth About His Company?

The following post was excerpted from
RAW DEAL: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism are Screwing American Workers
Reprinted with permission from St. Martin's Press
(c) 2015 by Steven Hill, published on October 20, 2015

*****

The third actor in this passion play is Mr. Brian Chesky himself, Airbnb's 34 year old CEO and co-founder. A former bodybuilder and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Chesky's rise to the ranks of billionaire hospitality mogul has been remarkable. A video floating around online of Chesky's commencement speech that he gave at his college graduation shows, if nothing else, major amounts of chutzpah. The future Airbnb chief struts on stage in full cap and gown to the throbbing bass line of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," and proceeds to rip off his black graduation gown, revealing a white tuxedo underneath. He starts clumsily moonwalking and crotch-grabbing to the beat, egged on by the cheers of his classmates, before delivering his address to the graduates, families and faculty. His speech is more entertaining than profound, mixing quips, funny one-liners and even occasional bodybuilder flexes with a 22-year-old's version of wisdom. The young man in the video is working hard to be liked, is slightly grandiose but also self-aware enough to say that he is uncertain of his future (with an art and design degree, after all). He is confident enough to relish his moment on the graduation stage, and displays definite leadership qualities, kind of like a head cheerleader urging on his homies at their final big hurrah.

That was in 2004, and now in his new role, the chutzpah, leadership and cheerleading have remained and come to the fore. When Chesky spoke at a hospitality conference sponsored by the University of San Francisco in April 2014, he offered no acknowledgement of the complexities, much less the downsides, of his business model. People like Theresa Flandrich and her elderly and disabled neighbors who are being evicted under the pressures of the assault on the San Francisco housing market, which Airbnb's service has greatly contributed to, are not on his radar. Instead, rather unbelievably, he cast his company into another role in this script--that of the blue helmets saving the world.

"[Airbnb] is like the United Nations at every kitchen table. It's very powerful," said Chesky. In the masthead of his company, Chesky has assumed the role of Ideologist-in-Chief. His early interviews as CEO, viewable on YouTube, show an awkward young man, wide-eyed, hands flailing, who scarcely can believe his and his cofounders' good fortune. He has an "aw shucks" charm. But several years later, as the same old questions become more pointed and specific, Chesky's vague responses come off as evasive.

It's not just that Airbnb refuses to be responsive to the increasingly wide path of destruction it is hewing. It's also that Chesky wraps it all into a New Age-y kind of rap about trust, sharing, community and belonging. In early 2014, Chesky and his cofounders took a deep breath from their incredible success story to reconsider their mission. Chesky posted his thoughts about the newly revamped Airbnb, an 1100-word sermon to his public that, like his college graduation speech, was another revealing moment into this young phenom.

"Joe, Nate, and I did some soul-searching over the last year," wrote Chesky. "We asked ourselves, 'What is our mission? What is the big idea that truly defines Airbnb?' It turns out the answer was right in front of us. People thought Airbnb was about renting houses. But really, we're about home. You see, a house is just a space, but a home is where you belong. And what makes this global community so special is that for the very first time, you can belong anywhere. That is the idea at the core of our company: belonging."

Like that young, slightly presumptuous college speaker holding forth at center stage, Chesky then goes on to wrap his company's growing commercial empire in a grandiose vision that he positions as a solution to a civilization gone awry, indeed as a reaction to the wrongful drift of history.

"We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages," wrote Chesky. "Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences. We also stopped trusting each other. And in doing so, we lost something essential about what it means to be a community... Belonging is the idea that defines Airbnb. . . Airbnb is returning us to a place where everyone can feel they belong."

Like a newly converted evangelical, Chesky explicitly tries to tap into a rich, red vein filled with the loneliness and isolation of this modern life. He does this as a bid to position his company as more than simply a hospitality business: it's a vehicle for building a global movement, a community of trust and sharing. But not over religion or to provide humanitarian aid, or to end human rights abuses, as previous visionaries have tried to do - no, Chesky is no Albert Schweitzer. Instead, in a sign of the times, his revolutionary act involves. . . a commercial transaction . . . providing short-term rentals to tourists.

Chesky's Hallmark greeting card homily to his public was brilliant, akin to channeling John Lennon's "Imagine" and merging it with a hotel business. It's even more audacious than Nike's "Just Do It" or Apple's "Think Different." It simultaneously attempts to mine feelings of loneliness and isolation, a longing for community, a sense of history and an economy gone off the rails, as well as the desire for travel to exotic places--and merge it all with a real financial need among Airbnb hosts in difficult economic times to use their own homes to earn income. To "monetize" their lives and their loneliness. It is one of the most audacious marketing pitches ever deployed.

Like any true evangelical, Brian Chesky seems to sincerely believe his newfound faith. But like so many fundamentalists of one kind or another, he is blinded by it. He deletes from his picture whatever fact or story doesn't fit. In his talk at the University of San Francisco conference, Chesky crowed, "For us to win, no one has to lose," and like that college commencement speaker he championed his "on-message" message with such a boyishly good-natured enthusiasm that audience members keyed into the hipness and coolness of his rosy version of the world. Yet sadly, Chesky has rendered invisible all those people like Theresa Flandrich and so many others across San Francisco--across the world--who in fact are not winning because they are being evicted under the housing pressures that Airbnb has helped unleash. He ignores all the upset neighbors who have some pretty strong feelings about the hotelization of their neighborhoods, with complete strangers and their rollaway luggage now traipsing in and out at all hours. He slickly hides the fact that increasingly "regular people" renting spare rooms are not the core of his business -- instead it comes from professional landlords and multi-property agents, some of whom have converted entire apartment buildings into tourist hotels, even if they have to evict elderly and sick people to do it. Indeed he ignores all the disappearing housing stock and rising rents for local residents, not all of it attributable to Airbnb but his company has become a key catalytic factor.

Brian Chesky and the rest of Airbnb's executives and venture-capitalist backers seem to feel little responsibility for upending so many people's lives. Their company is like a rumbling jetliner that flies low overhead, but doesn't want to be blamed for its noise. They are either oblivious to their impact, or they have rationalized it away as the necessary collateral damage for their "sharing revolution."

Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all this is that at the core of Airbnb is a really good idea-it has cleverly used Web- and app-based technology to bust open a global market that connects tourists with financially strapped homeowners. After interviewing some of Airbnb's "regular-people" hosts, I'm convinced that this service legitimately does help some of them make ends meet. But by taking such a hands-off, laissez-faire attitude toward the professionalization of hosting by greedy commercial landlords and multiproperty agents, Airbnb has become its own worst enemy. As the number of victims piles up, it undermines its own "sharing and trust" ethos.

If Airbnb and Chesky really believed in that ethos, the company could partner with local governments and tenants associations to draft laws that take account of this new business model. Chesky could delist the professional landlords and multi-property agents from the Airbnb site, severely limiting their ability to turn badly needed housing into tourist hotels. He could forbid any professional property agency from managing the listing of another person on the Airbnb site, which would crack down on absentee hosts. He could cooperate with cities like San Francisco and Portland, that require hosts to register with local officials, by delisting any unregistered hosts. Airbnb has the data and knows who all of these violators are.

Chesky's company also could pay hotel taxes in all 34,000 cities in which it operates, or collect it from the hosts and hand it over to local authorities. He could stop refusing to supply the data that cities need to enforce regulations and taxation, including the number of rental nights and rates charged by each host. This is not rocket science, all that's needed is the will.

The clear and simple truth is that Airbnb has drifted very far from its origins, and is no longer simply a platform of "regular people" hosts. It has morphed into a giant loophole for professional real estate operatives, allowing them to evade local laws and taxation, evict long-time tenants and convert entire buildings into tourist hotels. Brian Chesky can preach all he wants about sharing, trust and belonging, but he and his investors have shown no willingness to kill their golden goose, despite the damage that greedy professional landlords and multiproperty agents are causing to the very fabric of the cities where they operate. That's not "sharing," it's just raw, naked capitalism.

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This Congressman Thinks We Can Fix The Economy By Drinking Beer

If you want to help the American economy, you should drink more fancy-pants beer, according to Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.).

"One of the great things about drinking craft beer is you're helping deal with our trade deficit," DeFazio told HuffPost. "American-made American product, homegrown, as opposed to all these other beers, which are foreign-owned and you're contributing to our trade deficit every time you drink one."

DeFazio's comments came during an interview with HuffPost's "So, That Happened" podcast, embedded above. The beer talk starts at 47:40.

DeFazio was drawing a contrast between local breweries and the cheap, crappy swill of big-name brands such as Miller and Budweiser. (Cheap, crappy beer is objectively superior to fancy-pants craft beer, your host contends.)

DeFazio -- a founding member of the House Small Brewers Conference -- is, of course, just having some fun. He isn't quite right on the technical merits of his economic case, but he seems to be correct in spirit (pun intended). Even though Miller and Anheuser-Busch are owned by foreign conglomerates, High Lifes and Buds are still brewed and bottled stateside. Those bottles aren't imports, and thus don't affect the trade deficit at all.  

But drinking foreign-owned beer does have an effect on the current account deficit -- another measure of international trade flows. The share of the profits from Miller and Anheuser-Busch that leave the country have a small negative effect on that metric, while domestically owned craft breweries that keep all of their profits in the U.S. do not.

Theoretically, running big current account deficits can harm the economy. Many economists believe doing so can lead to long-term drags on growth and financial dysfunction. If other countries hoard the dollars they receive, it can drive up the relative value of U.S. currency, which sends domestic manufacturing jobs abroad.The U.S. has been running a relatively large current account deficit for decades. But this is mostly an issue with countries that do huge amounts of trade with the United States, such as Japan and China. Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns Budweiser, is a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate, while SABMiller is a South African company. 

To sum up: If you are partial to cheap, crappy beer, then you don't have to feel bad about the trade deficit any more than your snooty craft beer friends. They can, however, troll you on the current account deficit. You're kind of hurting America, even though I toast your taste in beer. 

Lovers of cheap, crappy beer and fancy-pants craft beer can probably find common ground on a looming megamerger between SABMiller and A-B InBev, however. The deal would create a mega-brewer with control of more than 70 percent of the U.S. market for beer, potentially driving up prices of flavorless swill while creating a "beerhemoth" that could lock many craft brewers out of the market.

DeFazio called on the U.S. Department of Justice to force major concessions from the companies before approving any deal. He said the combined company should be forced to sell off the MillerCoors division, which would prevent a single firm from owning Budweiser, Miller and Coors. DeFazio also wants DOJ to bar the firm from owning beer distributors.

"If you take two huge companies that make bad beer and put 'em together, you get one really, really huge company that makes really bad beer," DeFazio joked.

Drink responsibly, folks.

This podcast was produced, edited and engineered by Adriana Usero and Peter James Callahan, with assistance from Christine Conetta.

To listen to this podcast later, download our show on iTunes. While you're there, please subscribe, rate and review our show. You can check out other HuffPost podcasts here.

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Weekend Roundup: Turkey's 'Two Souls' Are Being Torn Apart

The characters in Orhan Pamuk's novels are complex, hybrid identities. They are neither purely Islamic traditionalists nor secular fundamentalists, but, as Turkey's most celebrated writer and Nobel laureate has put it, of "two souls." "To have two souls," Pamuk once told me, "is a good thing. That is the way people really are. We have to understand that, just like a person, a country can have two souls."

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's military-allied, authoritarian and Western-oriented modernization from above bolstered one aspect of that soul in the last century. Over the last 13 years, current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamic-based AKP has bolstered the other aspect through democratic modernization from below. In the process, political space has opened up not only to the influence of conservative rural Anatolia but also for other plural constituencies from Kurds to the gay community.

By trying to close that plural space now through increasingly autocratic tendencies -- in the midst of the Syrian civil war spilling over its borders -- Erdoğan has polarized the "two souls" of Turkey. For Pamuk, "to have democracy is precisely to have a dialogue between these two souls." "I am worried," he says, "because I know that in the end Erdoğan wants to govern alone at all costs. He does not want to share power."

Writing from Ankara in the wake of the horrific terror attack, the Turkish-British journalist Alev Scott reviews Pamuk's new novel, "A Strangeness in My Mind." "This is not an intentionally political novel," she notes, "but if there is a political message, this is it: Turkey needs to recognize its universals, not its differences." Prominent Turkish novelist Elif Shafak says in an interview that the tensions over the civil war in Syria are conjoining with the victim mentality of those in power in Turkey to create "a loss of collective reason" and "the erosion of empathy." Also writing from Ankara, Suat Kiniklioglu, once a spokesman for the AKP, worries that if the November elections don't enable formation of a coalition government we will see the "Pakistanization of Turkey."

WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports from Ankara on the trauma suffered by the victims there. Jo Confino asks activists on the ground in Turkey what they want to create a better world. Dutch journalist Fréderike Geerdink, who was recently deported from Turkey because of her reports on the Kurds, similarly argues that polarization in the country today can only be repaired by "a new Turkey based on pluralistic citizenship." Writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan says that the Ankara bombing suggests Turkey is now paying the price for turning a blind eye to the presence of the Islamic State on its territory. Also writing from Istanbul, Mustafa Akyol sees that the "Syrian civil war is [now] spilling into Turkey."

Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy turns his attention to Putin's role in Syria: "The goal of Russia's intervention is therefore not to contribute to the 'struggle against terrorism,' as the Kremlin's propagandists claim, but to restore political control, at any cost, to the regime that spawned the terrorism in the first place." Sarwar Kashmeri disagrees. "Mr. Putin has made a strategic, well calibrated and thought out move on the Middle East chessboard and will soon reap significant geopolitical rewards from it," he writes. "For Americans and Europeans, the Russian offer will be a lifeline they cannot refuse." In an interview, Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat says the citizen journalist network platform he has set up to geolocate Russian airstrikes in Syria confirms that "Russia is not targeting the Islamic State ... but rather an array of Syrian rebel groups fighting President Bashar Assad, an ally of the Kremlin."

Jeffrey Mankoff writes that Moscow has "calculated correctly" that the U.S. and its allies are not going to commit real forces to the fight in Syria and is thus setting an agenda to which the West must respond. Historian Niall Ferguson scores President Obama's notion of "strategic patience" that is allowing Syria to burn. (Also, watch here the WorldPost conversation between Charlie Rose and Ferguson on his new book, "Kissinger 1923-1968: Idealist.")

Turning to the impact of the Syrian crisis on Europe, German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier write that Germany can't indefinitely absorb refugees and must now "fight the root cause of the refugee crisis" by seeking political solutions in the Middle East and North Africa. In these photo essays, we look inside a refugee center in Germany and see desperate parents carrying their children ashore in Lesbos, Greece. Miguel Urban, a Podemos delegate to the European Parliament, compares Spain's Mellila refugee camp to Guantanamo. We report as well on a "Thank You Concert" in Munich by the so-called Syrian refugee "piano man," Ayham Ahmad, who has played for audiences along his route to Europe. Also from Munich, Sophia Maier describes what it was like to take in four refugees. In an act of "joy without borders" we report on a Jordanian couple who invited over 200 refugees to their wedding feast.

From Athens, Danae Leivada reports on how non-profit organizations are "bringing hope and care" to senior citizens who have suffered years of cuts on social services during Greece's sovereign debt crisis. In a new series, Dominique Mosbergen examines the struggle for LGBT rights across Southeast Asia.

As a new Palestinian uprising seems in the works, Daoud Kuttab writes from Amman that, without a concerted strategy to unify the Palestinians, "there is a real worry that this wave of opposition to occupation will fizzle out." David Polumbo-Liu attributes the spark in violence to the "destruction of religious sites and 'extrajudicial executions' of Palestinian teenagers." Mohammed Suliman argues that "Israel finds itself pitted against no particular Palestinian group or leadership, but primarily against [the entirety of] Palestine's younger generation in the West Bank, inside Israel and in the Gaza Strip." Former Israeli diplomat Josef Olmert asks about the president of the Palestinian Authority, "Why Does Abbas Lie?" World Reporter Charlotte Alfred tells the story of a Palestinian living in Tel Aviv who defused his neighbors' fear of Arabs with a humorous retort that went viral. Amal Clooney protests the "arbitrary arrest" of former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed and calls for his release.

Writing from Moscow, Georgy Bovt hails the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Svetlana Alexievich at a time when the "'Russian world' is standing at the threshold of the deepest crisis of its long history." This week's "Forgotten Fact" looks at the recently released report by a Dutch commission that concluded that the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 shot down over Ukraine was hit by a Russian-manufactured Buk missile -- and how few Russians believe that to be true.

From Qin'an Country in China, WorldPost China Correspondent Matt Sheehan reports how eye exams are improving the prospects of rural schools. Angus Deaton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics this week, writes that poverty is more than the lack of money.

In a beautifully written and illustrated essay on the Zen qualities of Japan, Pico Iyer examines the disappearance of the ego and the relational identity of the person. In a series of stunning images, we present the winners of this year's microphotography contest hosted by Nikon and the winners of the global urban photography contest. Other photo essays this week feature the celebration of Navratri, the Hindu festival this week of nine nights dedicated to the glorification of Shakti, the feminine form of the Divine, a Stalin theme park in Lithuania and the exceptional pictures taken by the celebrated 90-year-old Italian farmer-photographer Ulisse Bezzi.

Fusion looks at the tailgate parties along the U.S.-Mexico border where people gathered together to watch the recent soccer match between the two countries. Our China in Africa Podcast explores the controversy over Niger's Chinese-built oil refinery. Finally, our Singularity series this week shows how a brain scan can tell if you are "naughty or nice."

A fishing boat on a lake near Mount Fuji, Japan, circa 1910. (Photo by Spencer Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Eline Gordts is HuffPost's Senior World Editor. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Steve Ballmer Made A New Twitter Account, And Used It To Make A Surprising Announcement

$TWTR trended upwards almost 2 percentage points Friday following a late-night tweet from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer saying he'd amassed 4 percent of the social media company's outstanding shares.

Good job @twitter,@twittermoments innovation, @jack Ceo, leaner, more focused. Glad I bought 4% past few months. Like @alwaleedbinT move too

— Steve Ballmer (@Steven_Ballmer) October 16, 2015

Ballmer, whose Twitter page says he lives in Washington state, sent the tweet at 10:13 p.m. Pacific time. It was posted on a new account that was not verified as of Friday morning, creating some confusion in the media and among investors. The former Microsoft CEO already had two Twitter accounts, @stevebmicrosoft and @clippersteveb, where he'd share thoughts on the Los Angeles Clippers, the professional basketball team he purchased in 2014. Ballmer had promoted the new account on his existing accounts in recent, which gave journalists more confidence that the account was real.

By day's end, Twitter had verified @Steven_Ballmer, putting the blue check next to his name that lets investors and the public know that it's really him -- or at least someone authorized to tweet in his name.

(It's too bad Twitter didn't save him some characters and make him @Ballmer, which someone created in 2008 and has never used. @Ballmer would be a pretty baller Twitter handle for a basketball team owner.)

The technology billionaire's announcement of his investment, which totals roughly $800 million, amounted to an endorsement of the direction Twitter has taken lately. In recent months, the company has named Jack Dorsey the permanent CEO and laid off 8 percent of its staff, after a summer that saw Twitter stock drop below the price of its initial public offering in November 2013.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on Ballmer's new account or his reported stock purchase. A company representative told Marketwatch that the Securities and Exchange Commission only notifies them if someone owns more than 5 percent of Twitter's shares. 

Ballmer's purchases make him the third-biggest individual shareholder in Twitter, as Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal report. Company co-founder Evan Williams owns 6.8 percent of the company, while Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal owns more than 5 percent. Dorsey holds 3 percent.

It remains to be seen whether the investment will ultimately be wise for Ballmer. If Twitter's new Moments product and the renewed focus on Dorsey attract and retain more users, Ballmer's investment could pay off in the long run.

But the former Microsoft CEO's judgment on consumer and social technology hasn't always been rock-solid. While Ballmer increased Microsoft's revenues and maintained its dominance over enterprise productivity software and operating systems, he badly misjudged the iPhone's potential to reinvent mobile computing. Microsoft made an early investment in Facebook in 2007 that performed, but the companies have ended up parting ways in the years since, after integrating their search and social products. 

Microsoft also acquired Yammer for over $1 billion in 2012, while Ballmer was CEO. Yammer makes social messaging software for businesses that feels not unlike "Twitter for Business." In the years since, Slack has come along and eaten Yammer's lunch in many ways, with businesses and media companies -- including The Huffington Post --rapidly adopting the platform.

Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia did not move the needle on the company's share of global smartphone market, and eventually led to thousands of layoffs under Ballmer's successor, Satya Nadella. Nadella has since reinvigorated the company's fortunes with Windows 10, improved tablets, its first laptop and continued investment in cloud computing.

It's not clear what influence Ballmer will have on Twitter, as Kara Swisher observed, but it's going to be interesting to see how or whether he uses his new account to express his thoughts on the platform.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.