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The justice system is broken. Juries still work.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and happy week to you, happy Monday. Just back from Singapore, and of course, I arrive in the United States and political insanity on a whole bunch of things. The thing that really struck me was the Rittenhouse acquittal. Kyle Rittenhouse, this young man who brings an AR-15 to riots and ends up shooting and killing two people, injuring a third, and found not guilty unanimously by the jury on all counts. And the country, as expected in these things... And this is by far the legal case that's gotten the most attention in years, and the response of the country is absolutely polarized, and so depressing to me.
One of the things I will say that I find most impressive about the United States and its political institutions is the jury system. I've served on juries. I'm sure almost every American I've spoken to, am speaking to now, has been called up for juries. It takes some time away from your work, but everyone participates, and it means that you have a jury of your peers. It means that average Americans, whatever that means, educated, not so educated, White, Black, male, female, doesn't matter. They all show up. And they get the instructions from the judge, and they do their best to follow the law as the law is written. And I am extremely confident having, no, not watched every day of the trial, but having read the summaries every day, that the jury ruled found not guilty appropriately.
Now, there are plenty of problems with the underlying self-defense laws, and that is something that the country needs to work on in my view, but that doesn't make the jury verdict inappropriate or illegitimate. If they had found guilty, that would've been illegitimate. I'm seeing a lot of people say, "Well, what would've happened if Kyle Rittenhouse had been Black? The jury would've found him guilty." I personally don't believe that. I actually think that, again, given the instructions the jury was given, they would've found not guilty for anyone. But if he had been Black, and if they had found guilty, that would've been, frankly, a miscarriage of justice. It doesn't happen that often these days in the jury system. I think there are other things you can point to.
Like if Kyle Rittenhouse was Black and brought an AR-15 into that environment, he wouldn't have walked by a bunch of armed police who would've waved at him and walked him through, offered him water. That wouldn't have happened. I mean, reality of structural racism in American police departments, Blacks are treated very differently than Whites are treated. Blacks with AR-15s in a violent environment are treated very differently than Whites with AR-15s. That's pretty clear to me.
It's obviously bad that the Republicans are lionizing him. Some, not all, some, but I mean several members of Congress saying, "We're going to offer the guy an internship." I mean, this is a kid whose parenting clearly is either nonexistent or radioactive horrible, who has taken provocative actions, incredibly stupid and dangerous actions that caused these deaths. And the reality of Tucker Carlson putting him on and members of the Republican Party supporting and promoting him the way they are will encourage more such vigilantism. I think that's a horrible thing, but that has nothing to do with the jury finding Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty.
And I think that for me, this is very similar to the election in 2020, where Biden won. It was clear that Biden won. It was a legitimate election. There was no ability to find any fraud, because fraud didn't exist. And frankly, about the only place that you found a more decisive judgment than the jury found to find Rittenhouse not guilty is the findings of all of the courts throwing out all of the claims of Trump and Giuliani and his supporters that the election was somehow stolen. And yet, we still have a majority of Trump voters, a disturbingly large percentage of the American population, 30%, 35% that still today believe that the election was stolen. And they are encouraged to think so by the former president, by many of his supporters in the Republican Party in Congress, by many of his supporters in the mainstream media on the right. And I have absolutely seen on the left similar sorts of behavior following the Rittenhouse verdict.
People are not going to be enormously comfortable with the fact that I'm saying this. In fact, I noticed on social media when I made the point of this comparison... I heard not just from trolls, but from actual known people, "You're a White man. You should shut up." That's insanity. You don't want a country like that. You want a place where whatever your color and creed or gender, you say what you actually believe. And I do believe that we have an environment that has become so politically divisive and toxic that a lot of people are scared to just articulate their legitimate position. I'm not pretending I have a monopoly on the truth. All I promise you is that whatever I think about a political issue, I'm just going to tell you honestly. If you agree with it, that's fine. If you don't agree with it, that's okay too. I mean, it doesn't define who I am, my political opinion on an issue, any more than my other attributes don't define who I am. We're complicated people, but increasingly we're not treating each other that way.
So anyway, that's my view on Rittenhouse. That's my view on the state of the country. And I hope everyone's doing okay and bringing the temperature down a little bit, and we try to engage a little bit more with each other. That's it. Talk to you soon.
Trouble at the IMF
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and a happy Monday to you. A Quick Take on the scandal surrounding the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and its Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva. Disclosure, full disclosure, she's someone I know very well and am very friendly with actually and have been since well before she got the IMF post. She used to be number two at the World Bank, and that is the origin of the crisis.
A "Doing Business" report, something the World Bank comes out with every year. It is used by investors to assess competitiveness of different governments around the world. And as one might imagine, there's a lot of jockeying and lobbying behind the scenes by these governments to try to show that they're doing a great job. And as a consequence, their rankings should be high.
Now, there's a lot of methodology that goes into this report. There's also judgment into the weightings of the methodology. Anyone that's ever dealt with an index understands how that works out. At Eurasia Group, we've had political risk indices for decades. And it's very clear that although it's quantitative, it's qualitative too, right?
But in this case, the numbers that were expected by the Chinese government, they were ranked number 78 in the 2017 report. They thought that they were doing better, and it turned out that the ranking was going to go down. It was going to be number 85. The Chinese government was quite surprised about this. The World Bank management was quite surprised about this. Chinese government came back and said, what the hell's going on? And according to Kristalina and Jim Kim, and again this was under Jim Kim at the time, they said, okay, go back, take a serious look and make sure that you didn't make any mistakes.
So far, so good. The Chinese ranking eventually came back to number 78, the same as it was the previous year. In other words, after the complaints, the ranking went up seven points.
Now, was there a methodology problem? Was there undue pressure being placed on the analysts? That's the result of an investigation that was ordered by the World Bank under David Malpass, the new leader of that institution. And Jim Kim is gone, but Kristalina Georgieva has gone on to bigger and better things, now running the IMF.
Now, a couple of interesting things about this report. First of all, when the law firm WilmerHale originally went to the IMF, to Georgieva, and this was, I guess, back in July, and wanted to interview her about the report, they explicitly said in the letter they sent her that she was not a subject of investigation, she was just being called in as a witness. And what I find interesting about all of that is Kristalina wasn't worried about her own role at all. She didn't bring in any lawyers. She didn't take any legal advice. She just went and spoke to them immediately, and later became subject of the investigation. And when the report came out, it's blaming her for involvement.
I think the fact that she chose to simply chat with them, number one implies she's not enormously politically savvy in a way that I think that Christine Lagarde, the former head of the IMF, would've been much more careful and cautious. But it also does show motive that she really didn't believe that there was anything she was personally involved in that would be a problem, and so why wouldn't she just answer their questions? In other words, she had no reason to think that this was going to be a problem for her own job or her own tenure.
Second point, this is a report that I would argue normally wouldn't have an awful lot of international impact, except China is massively politicized. Anything having to do with China these days, influence over the World Health Organization, that's nominally why President Trump then decided to leave the WHO in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, any potential sniff that the United States and an appointee in an institution, a multilateral institution where the US has the most votes, the IMF, was helping the Chinese, they're going to run in the other direction.
So it is problematic because it's China. And it's interesting in this regard, that the economic policy makers in the Biden administration like Georgieva, they think that her policies and her tenure so far have been strong, and they're generally supportive of her. But the political types in the White House think that they should run away, because they do not want any ability of opponents to be able to say you guys supported someone who's in the pocket of the Chinese, how dare you.
And again, in these days where there's zero trust between the United States and China, and it's only politically beneficial to be seen as more of a hawk, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you understand why they're doing that. Having said all of that, the Europeans have been supportive of Georgieva, continue to be so after a board meeting where they brought in both WilmerHale, as well as the Managing Director. And certainly if there were a smoking gun, if there were email evidence or other witnesses that were directly involved, and knew that Kristalina had directly and unduly pressured them, that would have come out, and the Europeans wouldn't be supporting her at this point. It's not like they're in her pocket.
So the Americans are backing off of her. The Japanese are with the Americans. It's a new Japanese government. They don't particularly have a dog in the fight, and they tend to line up with the Americans when things are important to the US. That being the case, I would say it's damaging to her tenure, but she sticks it out. I don't think she's going anywhere.
And so that's where I think we are in a nutshell, presently. It's going to be harder for the United States to be as aligned with her going forward. Very interesting thing, under Trump, despite the fact that Lagarde was seen as a multilateralist, and she's a European, she's French, the Trump administration never had a hard time with the IMF. In fact, the relations between Christine and Trump, and particularly former Secretary of the Treasury, Mnuchin, were actually very strong. And the reason for that was because there was a very warm and personal relationship between Ivanka, Trump's daughter, and Christine Lagarde.
And Ivanka went to the White House and basically said don't do anything to this organization, they're important, they're useful. He didn't really care so he left it alone. So it wasn't politicized under Trump. It's getting a little politicized under Biden because of the China issue, who would've expected that? But that's where we are, that's what I think, and that's your Quick Take today. Everyone be good, I'll talk to y'all real soon.