#GDP Enforcement

[determinate-negation]

“Prior to October 7th, between 170-200,000 Palestinians worked in Israel (roughly 75% with work permits—with around 90% of these permits going to Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank). After October 7th, nearly all Palestinian workers were fired, their work permits revoked, and their range of movement, already limited, restricted even further. The economic damage has been immense particularly in construction and agriculture, where the majority of Palestinians had been employed (it is an aspect of Zionist cruelty that Palestinians—a highly educated people—should be confined to low-wage manual labor employment in two of the primary economic sectors which have been used to advance their dispossession). To provide the starkest example: the construction industry, which accounts for 6-7% of Israeli GDP was, as of December 2023, operating at only 30% of its pre-October capacity, and fully half of all building projects were on hold.

Although business interests were able to pressure the government to allow a paltry 8–10,000 Palestinians back to work in December, the short- and long-term solutions to the problem of Israeli dependence on Palestinian labor (and, indeed, for the Zionist it has always been a problem) appears to be the increasing importation of foreign workers from Asia and Eastern Europe, particularly Thailand and India. It should be noted that Israel has used debt—the result of exorbitant “placement fees” charged by recruiters in workers’ home countries—to trap many foreign workers in hyper-exploitative working conditions enforced by geographic isolation. This is the paradigmatic form of modern slavery. Even if cheap imported labor were to get the construction industry back on track, the war has also resulted in the downgrading of Israel’s credit rating, a sharp decline in imports and exports, the almost complete pause of its tourism industry, a snowballing cancelation of arms deals the world over and, in the case of Turkey, trade relations as well, yielding an almost 20% contraction of its annualized GDP.

With these numbers, it could be said that Israel’s present genocide against the Palestinians harms both its short-term and long-term economic interests, sacrificed for the drive to extermination. But the enforced economic obsolescence of the Palestinians must be understood as integral to the drive for their extermination. Employing the brute force of siege, Israel has succeeded in cutting many Palestinians off from much of the global economy—now, entirely in the case of Gaza, and increasingly so in the case of the West Bank. Even those who are able to run businesses with international clientele face delays or de facto bans from cash-transfer sites like PayPal, and imports, exports, and access to certain goods are all controlled and restricted by Israel. These restrictions limit access to raw materials, affecting the types of industry Palestine is capable of sustaining, and limiting prospects for economic development.

Palestinians' limited access to the global economy in turn nurtures a dependency on Israeli goods and employment. But this dependency cuts both ways—Israel has grown dependent on Palestinian labor, which renders Palestinians necessary to the functioning of the Israeli economy and also creates barriers against their total social exclusion (not only in the sense that this labor requires social interaction with the Israeli populace). As Bataille writes in The Psychological Structure of Fascism, “money serves to measure all work and makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of homogenous society, each man is worth what he produces.” In capitalist society, productivity becomes the prerequisite to admittance to social life. To totalize race-based social exclusion, then, the target population must be rendered economically obsolete. “As early as 1895,” Fayez Sayegh notes, “Herzl was busy devising a plan to ‘spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment.’”

Nazi Germany understood this as well: the 1938 “Regulation for the Elimination of the Jews from the Economic Life of Germany” completed the work begun three years prior by the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews and other groups of their citizenship and enshrined racial classification and separation into law. “The Jewish middleman,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “fully becomes the image of the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist.” In apartheid society, in which the target population is seen as subhuman, or at least undeserving of rights or consideration, the wage remains one of the last means of verifying their humanity: beasts may be productive, but they do not earn a wage. The attempted elimination of Palestinian labor from the Israeli economy marks one of the final steps on the way to their full dehumanization in the Zionists’ eyes, one that prepared the way for the present mass extermination.

Zionism is not, then, a race-based system of economic exploitation at its core, though it does benefit from such exploitation: it is, first and foremost, a program of land acquisition. We can see the dual attack on Palestinian economic self-determination and land ownership in Israel’s routine destruction of Palestinian olive groves. Settlers, often armed or otherwise protected by armed agents of the state, uproot, burn, or cut down olive trees, with increasing frequency since 2019. The aim is to drive Palestinians from their land by destroying the subsistence produced by the land itself and nurtured over centuries by Palestinian farmers, in an effort to “Judaize” the area. As Palestinians flee from unchecked violence, forced from their land at the barrel of a gun, Jewish settlements appear in their wake, strictly illegal but in practice facilitated by the state until they are eventually recognized and assimilated into the legally regulated regime of property. (The whole cycle of legalizing illegal settlements, in any event, is something of a formality as their existence and proliferation is the entire raison d’être of the Zionist project.) When Palestinians refuse to leave and cannot be forced, they are murdered.”

Jake Romm, Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Zionism in Parapraxis Mag

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The super-rich got that way through monopolies

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Just in time for Davos, here's 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:

https://www.balancedeconomy.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Davos-Taken-not-Earned-full-Report-2024-FINAL.pdf

The rise of monopolies over the past 40 years came about as the result of specific, deliberate policy choices. As the report documents, the wealthiest people in America funneled a fortune into neutering antitrust enforcement, through the "consumer welfare" doctrine.

This is an economic theory that equates monopolies with efficiency: "If everyone is buying the same things from the same store, that tells you the store is doing something right, not something criminal." 40 years ago, and ever since, the wealthy have funded think-tanks, university programs and even "continuing education" programs for federal judges to push this line:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

They didn't do this for ideological reasons – they were chasing material goals. Monopolies produce vast profits, and those profits produce vast wealth. The rise and rise of the super rich cannot be decoupled from the rise and rise of monopolies.

If you're new to this, you might think that "monopoly" only refers to a sector in which there is only one seller. But that's not what economists mean when they talk about monopolies and monopolization: for them, a monopoly is a company with power. Economists who talk about monopolies mean companies that "can act independently without needing to consider the responses of competitors, customers, workers, or even governments."

One way to measure that power is through markups ("the difference between the selling price of goods or services and their cost"). Very large companies in concentrated industries have very high markups, and they're getting higher. From 2017-22, the 20 largest companies in the world had average markups of 50%. The 100 largest companies average 43%. The smallest half of companies get average markups of 25%.

Those markups rose steeply during the covid lockdowns – and so did the wealth of the billionaires who own them. Tech billionaires – Bezos, Brin and Page, Gates and Ballmer – all made their fortunes from monopolies. Warren Buffet is a proud monopolist who says "the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power… if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business."

We are living in the age of the monopoly. In the 1930s, the top 0.1% of US companies accounted for less than half of America's GDP. Today, it's 90%. And it's accelerating, with global mergers climbing from 2,676 in 1985 to 62,000 in 2021.

Monopoly's cheerleaders claim that these numbers vindicate them. Monopolies are so efficient that everyone wants to create them. Those efficiencies can be seen in the markups monopolies can charge, and the profits they can make. If a monopoly has a 50% markup, that's just the "efficiency of scale."

But what is the actual shape of this "efficiency?" How is it manifest? The report's authors answer this with one word: power.

Monopolists have the power "to extract wealth from, to restrict the freedoms of, and to manipulate or steer the vastly larger numbers of losers." They establish themselves as gatekeepers and create chokepoints that they can use to raise prices paid by their customers and lower the payout to their suppliers:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

These chokepoints let monopolies usurp "one of the ultimate prerogatives of state power: taxation." Amazon sellers pay a 51% tax to sell on the platform. App Store suppliers pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make with their apps. That translates into higher costs. Consider a good that costs $10 to make: the bottom 50% of companies (by size) would charge $12.50 for that product on average. The largest companies would charge $15. Thus monopolies don't just make their owners richer – they make everyone else poorer, too.

This power to set prices is behind the greedflation (or, more politely, "seller's inflation"). The CEOs of the largest companies in the world keep getting on investor calls and bragging about this:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

The food system is incredibly monopolistic. The Cargill family own the largest commodity trader in the world, which is how they built up a family fortune worth $43b. Cargill is one of the "ABCD" companies ("Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus") that control the world's food supply, and they tripled their profits during the lockdown.

Monopolies gouge everyone – even governments. Pfizer charged the NHS £18-22/shot for vaccines that cost £5/shot to make. They took the British government for £2bn – that's enough to pay last year's pay hike for NHS nurses, six times over,

But monopolies also abuse their suppliers, especially their employees. All over the world, competition authorities are uncovering "wage fixing" and "no poaching" agreements among large firms, who collude to put a cap on what workers in their sector can earn. Unions report workers having their pay determined by algorithms. Bosses lock employees in with noncompetes and huge repayment bills for "training":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Monopolies corrupt our governments. Companies with huge markups can spend some of that money on lobbying. The 20 largest companies in the world spend more than €155m/year lobbying in the US and alone, not counting the money they spend on industry associations and other cutouts that lobby on their behalf. Big Tech leads the pack on lobbying, accounting for 82% of EU lobbying spending and 58% of US lobbying.

One key monopoly lobbying priority is blocking climate action, from Apple lobbying against right-to-repair, which creates vast mountains of e-waste, to energy monopolist lobbying against renewables. And energy companies are getting more monopolistic, with Exxonmobil spending $65b to buy Pioneer and Chevron spending $60b to buy Hess. Many of the world's richest people are fossil fuel monopolists, like Charles and Julia Koch, the 18th and 19th richest people on the Forbes list. They spend fortunes on climate denial.

When people talk about the climate impact of billionaires, they tend to focus on the carbon footprints of their mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.

The good news is that the tide is turning on monopolies. A coalition of "businesses, workers, farmers, consumers and other civil society groups" have created a "remarkably successful anti-monopoly movement." The past three years saw more regulatory action on corporate mergers, price-gouging, predatory pricing, labor abuses and other evils of monopoly than we got in the past 40 years.

The business press – cheerleaders for monopoly – keep running editorials claiming that enforcers like Lina Khan are getting nothing done. Sure, WSJ, Khan's getting nothing done – that's why you ran 80 editorial about her:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

(Khan's winning like crazy. Just last month she killed four megamergers:)

https://www.thesling.org/the-ftc-just-blocked-four-mergers-in-a-month-heres-how-its-latest-win-fits-into-the-broader-campaign-to-revive-antitrust/

The EU and UK are taking actions that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Canada is finally set to get a real competition law, with the Trudeau government promising to add an "abuse of dominance" rule to Canada's antitrust system.

Even more exciting are the moves in the global south. In South Africa, "competition law contains some of the most progressive ideas of all":

It actively seeks to create greater economic participation, particularly for ‘historically disadvantaged persons’ as part of its public interest considerations in merger decisions.

Balzac wrote, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." Chances are, the rapsheet includes an antitrust violation. Getting rid of monopolies won't get rid of all the billionaires, but it'll certainly get rid of a hell of a lot of them.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

[mengjue]

What's Happening in China? The November 2022 Protests

Hello! I know that there's so much going on in the world right now, so not everyone may be aware of what is happening in China right now. I thought that I would try to write a brief explainer, because the current wave of protests is truly unprecedented in the past 30+ years, and there is a lot of fear over what may happen next. For context, I'm doing this as someone who has a PhD in Asian Studies specialising in contemporary Chinese politics, so I don't know everything but I have researched China for many years.

I'll post some decent links at the end along with some China specialists & journalists I follow on Twitter (yeah I know, but it's still the place for the stuff at the moment). Here are the bullet points for those who just want a brief update:

Xi Jinping's government is still enacting a strict Zero Covid policy enforced by state surveillance and strict lockdowns.

On 24 November a fire in an apartment in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, killed 10. Many blamed strict quarantine policies on preventing evacuation.

Protests followed and have since spread nationwide.

Protesters are taking steps not seen since Tiananmen in 1989, including public chants for Xi and the CCP to step down.

Everyone is currently unsure how the government will respond.

More in-depth discussion and links under the cut:

First a caveat: this is my own analysis/explanation as a Chinese politics specialist. I will include links to read further from other experts and journalists. Also, this will be quite long, so sorry about that!

China's (aka Xi Jinping's) Covid Policy:

The first and most important context: Xi has committed to a strict Zero Covid policy in China, and has refused to change course. Now, other countries have had similar approaches and they undoubtedly saved lives - I was fortunate to live in New Zealand until this year, and Prime Minister Ardern's Zero Covid approach in 2020-2021 helped protect many. The difference is in the style/scope of enforcement, the use of vaccines, and the variant at play. China has stepped up its control on public life over the past 10 years, and has used this to enforce strict quarantine measures without full regard to the impact on people's lives - stories of people not getting food were common. Quarantine has also become a feared situation, as China moves people to facilities often little better than prisons and allegedly without much protection from catching Covid within. A personal friend in Zhengzhou went through national, then provincial, then local quarantines when moving back from NZ, and she has since done her best to avoid going back for her own mental and physical health. Xi has also committed China to its two home-grown vaccines, Sinovac and Sinopharm, both of which have low/dubious efficacy and are considered ineffective against new variants. Finally, with delta and then omicron most of the Zero-Covid countries have modified their approach due to the inability to maintain zero cases. China remains the only country still enacting whole-city eradication lockdowns, and they have become more frequent to the point that several are happening at any given time. The result is a population that is incredibly frustrated and losing hope amidst endless lockdowns and perceived ineffectiveness to address the pandemic.

Other Issues at Play:

Beyond the Covid situation, China is also wrestling with the continued slowdown in its economic growth. While its economic rise and annual GDP growth was nigh meteoric from the 80s to the 00s, it has been slowing over the past ten years, and the government is attempting to manage the transition away from an export-oriented economy to a more fully developed one. However, things are still uncertain, and Covid has taken its toll as it has elsewhere the past couple of years. Youth unemployment in particular is reaching new highs at around 20%, and Xi largely ignored this in his speech at the Party Congress in October (where he entered an unprecedented third term). As a result of the perceived uselessness of China's harsh work culture and its failure to result in a better life, many young Chinese have been promoting 躺平 tǎng píng or "lying flat", aka doing the bare minimum just to get by (similar to the English "quiet quitting"). The combination of economic issues and a botched Covid approach is important, as these directly affect the lives of ordinary middle-class Chinese, and historical it has only been when this occurred that mass movements really took off. The most famous, Tiananmen in 1989, followed China's opening up economic reforms and the dismantling of many economic safety nets allowing for growing inequality. While movements in China often grow to include other topics, having a foundation in something negatively impacting the average Han Chinese person's livelihood is important.

The Spark - 24 Nov 2022 Urumqi Apartment Fire:

The current protests were sparked by a recent fire that broke out in a flat in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province. (This is the same Xinjiang that is home to the Uighur people, against whom China has enacted a campaign of genocide and cultural destruction.) The fire occurred in the evening and resulted in 10 deaths, which many online blamed on the strict lockdown measures imposed by officials, who prevented people from leaving their homes. It even resulted in a rare public apology by city officials. However, with anger being so high nationwide, in addition to many smaller protests that have occurred over the past two years, this incident has ignited a nationwide movement.

The Protests and Their Significance:

The protests that have broken out over the past couple of days representing the largest and most significant challenge to the leadership since the 1989 Tiananmen movement. Similar to that movement, these protests have occurred at universities and cities across the country, with many students taking part openly. This scale is almost unseen in China, particularly for an anti-government protest. Other than Tiananmen in 1989, the most widespread movements that have occurred have been incidents such as the protest of the 1999 Belgrade bombings or the 2005 and then 2012 anti-Japanese protests, all of which were about anger toward a foreign country.

Beyond the scale the protests are hugely significant in their message as well. Protesters are publicly shouting the phrases "习近平下台 Xí Jìnpíng xiàtái!" and "共产党 下台 Gòngchǎndǎng xiàtái!", which mean "Xi Jinping, step down/resign!" and "CCP, step down/resign!" respectively. To shout a direct slogan for the government to resign is unheard of in China, particularly as Xi has tightened control of civil society. And people are doing this across the country in the thousands, openly and in front of police. This is a major challenge for a leader and party who have prioritised regime stability as a core interest for the majority of their history.

Looking Ahead:

Right now, as of 15:00 Australian Eastern time on Monday, 28 November 2022, the protests are only in their first couple of days and we are unsure as to how the government will respond. Police have already been seen beating protesters and journalists and dragging them away in vehicles. However, in many cases the protests have largely been monitored by police but still permitted to occur. There seems to be uncertainty as to how they want to respond just yet, and as such no unified approach.

Many potential outcomes exist, and I would warn everyone to be careful in overplaying what can be achieved. Most experts I have read are not really expecting this to result in Xi's resignation or regime change - these things are possible, surely, but it is a major task to achieve and the unity & scale of the protest movement remains to be fully seen. The government may retaliate with a hard crackdown as it has done with Tiananmen and other protests throughout the years. It may also quietly revamp some policies without publicly admitting a change in order to both pacify protesters and save face. The CCP often uses mixed tactics, both coopting and suppressing protest movements over the years depending on the situation. Changing from Zero Covid may prove more challenging though, given how much Xi has staked his political reputation on enforcing it.

What is important for everyone online, especially those of us abroad, is to watch out for the misinformation campaign the government will launch to counter these protests. Already twitter is reportedly seeing hundreds of Chinese bot accounts mass post escort advertisements using various city names in order to drown out protest results in the site's search engine. Chinese officials will also likely invoke the standard narrative of Western influence and CIA tactics as the reason behind the protests, as they did during the Hong Kong protests.

Finally, there will be a new surge of misinformation and bad takes from tankies, or leftists who uncritically support authoritarian regimes so long as they are anti-US. An infamous one, the Qiao Collective, has already worked to shift the narrative away from the protests and onto debating the merits of Zero Covid. This is largely similar to pro-Putin leftists attempting the justify his invasion of Ukraine. Always remember that the same values that you use to criticise Western countries should be used to criticise authoritarian regimes as well - opposing US militarism and racism, for example, is not incompatible with opposing China's acts of genocide and state suppression. If you want further info (and some good sardonic humour) on the absurd takes and misinfo from pro-China tankies, I would recommend checking out Brian Hioe in the links below.

Finally, keep in mind that this is a grass-roots protest made by people in China, who are putting their own lives at risk to demonstrate openly like this. There have already been so many acts of bravery by those who just want a better future for themselves and their country, and it is belittling and disingenuous to wave away everything they are doing as being just a "Western front" or a few "fringe extremists".

Links:

BBC live coverage page with links to analysis and articles

ABC (Australia) analysis

South China Morning Post analysis

Experts & Journalists to Check Out:

Brian Hioe - Journalist & China writer, New Bloom Magazine

Bonnie Glaser - China scholar, German Marshall Fund

Vicky Xu - Journalist & researcher, Australian Strategic Policy Institute

Stephen McDonnell - Journalist, BBC

M Taylor Fravel - China scholar, MIT

New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre - NZ's hub of China scholarship (I was fortunate to attend their conferences during my PhD there, they do great work!)

If you've reached the end I hope this helps with understanding what's going on right now! A lot of us who know friends and whanau in China are worried for their safety, so please spread the word and let's hope that there is something of a positive outcome ahead.

[robertreich]

The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told

In America, it’s expensive just to be alive.

And with inflation being driven by price gouging corporations, it’s only getting more expensive for regular Americans who don’t have any more money to spend.

Just look at how Big Oil is raking it in while you pay through the nose at the pump.

That’s on top of the average price of a new non-luxury car — which is now over $44,000. Even accounting for inflation, this is way higher than the average cost when I bought my first car — it’s probably in a museum by now.

Even worse, the median price for a house is now over $440,000. Compare that to 1972, when it was under $200,000.

Work a full-time minimum wage job? You won’t be able to afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment just about anywhere in the U.S.

And when you get back after a long day of work, you’ll likely be met with bills up the wazoo for doctor visits, student loans, and utilities.

So what’s left of a paycheck after basic living expenses? Not much.

You can only reduce spending on food, housing, and other basic necessities so much. Want to try covering the rest of your monthly costs with a credit card? Well now that’s more expensive too, with the Fed continuing to hike interest rates.

All of this comes back to how we measure a successful economy.

What good are more jobs if those jobs barely pay enough to live on?

Over one-third of full time jobs don’t pay enough to cover a basic family budget.

And what good are lots of jobs if they cause so much stress and take up so much time that our lives are miserable?

And don’t tell me a good economy is measured by a roaring stock market if the richest 10 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of it.

And what good is a large Gross Domestic Product if more and more of the total economy is going to the richest one-tenth of one percent?  

What good is economic growth if the way we grow depends on fossil fuels that cause a climate crisis?

These standard measures – jobs, the stock market, the GDP – don’t show how our economy is really doing, who is doing well, or the quality of our lives.

People who sit at their kitchen tables at night wondering how they’re going to pay the bills don’t say to themselves

“Well, at least corporate profits are at record levels.”

In fact, corporations have record profits and CEOs are paid so much because they’re squeezing more output from workers but paying lower wages. Over the past 40 years, productivity has grown 3.5x as fast as hourly pay.

At the same time, corporations are driving up the costs of everyday items people need.

Because corporations are monopolizing their markets, they don’t have to worry about competitors. A few giant corporations can easily coordinate price hikes and enjoy bigger profits.

Just four firms control 85% of all beef, 66% of all pork, and 54% of all poultry production.

Firms like Tyson have seen their profit margins skyrocket as they jack up prices higher than their costs — forcing consumers who are already stretched thin to pay even more.

It’s not just meat. Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed companies to become powerful enough to raise their prices across the entire food industry.

It’s the same story with household goods. Giant companies like Procter & Gamble blame their price hikes on increased costs – but their profit margins have soared to 25%. Hello? They care more about their bottom line than your bottom, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, parents – and even grandparents like me – are STILL struggling to feed their babies because of a national formula shortage. Why? Largely because the three companies who control the entire formula industry would rather pump money into stock buybacks than quality control at their factories.

Traditionally, our economy’s health is measured by the unemployment rate. Job growth. The stock market. Overall economic growth. But these don’t reflect the everyday, “kitchen table economics” that affect our lives the most.

These measures don’t show the real economy.

Instead of looking just at the number of jobs, we need to look at the income earned from those jobs. And not the average income.

People at the top always bring up the average.

If Jeff Bezos walked into a bar with 140 other people, the average wealth of each person would be over a billion dollars.

No, look at the median income – half above, half below.

And make sure it accounts for inflation – real purchasing power.

Over the last few decades, the real median income has barely budged. This isn’t economic success.

It's economic failure, with a capital F.

And instead of looking at the stock market or the GDP we need to look at who owns what – where the wealth really is.

Over the last forty years, wealth has concentrated more and more at the very top. Look at this;

This is a problem, folks. Because with wealth comes political power.

Forget trickle-down economics. It’s trickle on.

And instead of looking just at economic growth, we also need to look at what that growth is costing us – subtract the costs of the climate crisis, the costs of bad health, the costs of no paid leave, and all the stresses on our lives that economic growth is demanding.

We need to look at the quality of our lives – all our lives. How many of us are adequately housed and clothed and fed. How many of our kids are getting a good education. How many of us live in safety – or in fear.

You want to measure economic success? Go to the kitchen tables of America.

[vren-diagram]

The Nordic model has been characterized as follows:[16]

An elaborate social safety net, in addition to public services such as free education and universal healthcare[16] in a largely tax-funded system.[17]

Strong property rights, contract enforcement and overall ease of doing business.[18]

Public pension plans.[16]

High levels of democracy as seen in the Freedom in the World survey and Democracy Index.[19][20]

Free trade combined with collective risk sharing (welfare social programmes and labour market institutions) which has provided a form of protection against the risks associated with economic openness.[16]

Little product market regulation. Nordic countries rank very high in product market freedom according to OECD rankings.[16]

Low levels of corruption.[19][16] In Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden were ranked among the top 10 least corrupt of the 179 countries evaluated.[21]

A partnership between employers, trade unions and the government, whereby these social partners negotiate the terms to regulating the workplace amongst themselves, rather than the terms being imposed by law.[22][23] Sweden has decentralised wage co-ordination while Finland is ranked the least flexible.[16] The changing economic conditions have given rise to fear among workers as well as resistance by trade unions in regards to reforms.[16]

High trade union density and collective bargaining coverage.[24] In 2019, trade union density was 90.7% in Iceland, 67.0% in Denmark, 65.2% in Sweden, 58.8% in Finland, and 50.4% in Norway; in comparison, trade union density was 16.3% in Germany and 9.9% in the United States.[25] Additionally, in 2018, collective bargaining coverage was 90% in Iceland, 88.8% in Finland (2017), 88% in Sweden, 82% in Denmark, and 69% in Norway; in comparison collective bargaining coverage was 54% in Germany and 11.7% in the United States.[26] The lower union density in Norway is mainly explained by the absence of a Ghent system since 1938. In contrast, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have union-run unemployment funds.[27]

The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union Confederation 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark being the only nation to receive a perfect score.[28]

Sweden at 56.6% of GDP, Denmark at 51.7%, and Finland at 48.6% reflect very high public spending.[29] Public expenditure for health and education is significantly higher in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in comparison to the OECD average.[30]

Overall tax burdens as a percentage of GDP are high, with Denmark at 45.9% and both Finland and Sweden at 44.1%.[31] The Nordic countries have relatively flat tax rates, meaning that even those with medium and low incomes are taxed at relatively high levels.[32][33]

The United Nations World Happiness Reports show that the happiest nations are concentrated in Northern Europe. The Nordics ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.[34] The Nordic countries place in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report 2018, with Finland and Norway taking the top spots.[35]

x

I think a lot of people are missing that the Nordic model is:

generally very friendly to businesses

composed of largely organically set standards (workers rights secured by collective bargaining and trade-unions, not by a centralized authority) (as opposed to a centralized bureaucracy)

Largely structured to provide citizens with benefits that make workforce participation easier. The ordering of the social safety net and welfare state make it relatively easy to upskill and hold a job.

[mariacallous]

What would Donald Trump’s foreign policy look like, should he win a second presidential term? The debate ranges between those who believe he will abandon Ukraine, withdraw from NATO, and herald a “post-American Europe”—and those who predict he will escalate the Russian-Ukrainian war and continue his fiercely anti-communist policies. Foreign governments have been frantically reaching out to Trump and Republican circles to understand, if not influence, the future direction of his policies; one such visit may have even played a role in Trump’s acquiescence to the most recent batch of U.S. military aid to Ukraine following months of delay by many of his Republican supporters in the U.S. Congress.

One fact is already clear: If Trump regains the presidency, he and his potential advisors will return to a significantly changed global landscape—marked by two regional wars, the threat of a third in Asia, the return of great-power geopolitics, and globalization measurably in decline. While many expect a Trump 2.0 to be a more intense version of Trump 1.0, his response to the dramatic changes in the geopolitical environment could lead to unexpected outcomes.

Trump may now be less eager to abandon Europe given fast-rising European defense spending and an ongoing major war. The strengthening U.S. economy and flux in global supply chains could facilitate a broader decoupling from China and market-access agreements with allies. Expanded Iranian aggression could make it easier for Trump 2.0 to build a large international coalition. An examination of these and other changes of the last four years could yield surprising insights into how a second Trump administration could differ significantly from the first.

Since Trump left office, the U.S.-Mexico border crisis has worsened significantly. In 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection carried out 646,822 enforcement actions, including against three individuals on the Terrorist Screening Data Set. By 2023, this had skyrocketed to 3.2 million encounters, including 172 people on the terrorist list. Under the Biden-Harris administration, there have been some 10 million illegal border crossings, including nearly 2 million known so-called gotaways—illegal crossers who could not be apprehended. The unsecured border, broken asylum process, and overwhelmed immigration courts have enabled significant fentanyl trafficking, resulting in over 200,000 American deaths in the last three years.

For a second Trump administration, sealing the border would be the critical national security issue, overshadowing all others. The Republican platform calls for completion of the border wall, the use of advanced technology on the border, and shifting the focus of federal law enforcement to migration. It also proposes redeploying troops from overseas to the southern border and deploying the U.S. Navy to impose a fentanyl blockade. Americans now see the border as a major problem, and Congress is likely to support significant spending. This reallocation will impact other areas, since the U.S. Army and Navy are already struggling with personnel and fleet size targets. Navigating tensions with Mexico and Central American countries, many of which have free-trade agreements with the United States and receive U.S. assistance, will be challenging.

Facing escalating regional wars and the smallest U.S. military in generations, Trump would likely oversee the most significant U.S. military buildup in nearly 50 years. The U.S. Armed Forces are shrinking, and the defense budget is close to its post-World War II low in terms of both federal budget share and percentage of GDP. The capacity, capabilities, and readiness of the U.S. military are weakening, and the defense industrial base has atrophied. The disastrous defeat in Afghanistan has led to a significant drop in Americans’ confidence in the military.

Trump has long supported a bigger and stronger military, but his administration’s modest budget increases primarily went to personnel, operations, and maintenance, with little investment in capabilities. Under then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, the 2018 National Defense Strategy abandoned the long-standing U.S. doctrine of maintaining readiness to fight wars in two regions simultaneously, focusing instead on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific. Today’s Trump-approved Republican platform pledges a larger, modern military, investment in the defense industrial base, and a national missile defense shield. Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, likely the next chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has proposed a detailed plan to raise defense spending from 3 percent of GDP in 2024 to 5 percent within five to seven years. This plan aligns with Trump’s policies and could lead to a domestic manufacturing boom. Trump could announce the first-ever trillion-dollar defense budget with broad Republican support, determined not to be remembered as the president who let China surpass the U.S. militarily.

Notwithstanding the Biden administration’s climate agenda, the United States’ historic rise as the world’s energy superpower could empower Trump to pursue more punitive policies against Russia and Iran while wielding greater leverage over China. The United States is now producing and exporting more energy than ever, even as its carbon emissions have decreased, largely due to the shift from coal to gas. In 2019, the country became a net energy exporter. Since 2017, total energy exports have nearly doubled, and the country has surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest oil producer. By further ramping up liquefied natural gas exports to Europe, a second Trump administration could reduce Russia’s influence, reshape European geopolitics, and strengthen trans-Atlantic ties. It would also greatly reduce the trade deficit with Europe, something Trump frequently rails about. Expanding energy production would also increase U.S. leverage over China, the world’s largest energy importer. Greater production—as well as closer alignment with Saudi Arabia under Trump—could do much to lower gas prices in the United States and oil prices globally. This, in turn, would allow Trump to pursue more aggressive strategic policies, such as striking Iranian nuclear assets or, should he wish to do so, diminishing Russian oil and gas exports.

The relative strength of the U.S. economy and major shifts in trading patterns would give another Trump administration far greater leverage on trade—including winning a trade war with China and striking new or revised trade deals with others.

Many Americans have a pessimistic view of their country’s economy, but it is far stronger relative to its peers than in 2016 or 2020. This year, the U.S. economy will account for an estimated 26 percent of global GDP, the highest share in almost two decades. It was nearly four times the size of Japan’s when Trump first entered office, and it will be seven times as large by the end of this year. As recently as 2008, the U.S. and Eurozone economies were similar in size. Today, the former towers over the latter, with the U.S. economy almost 80 percent larger. Britain’s relative decline is similar.

The strength of the U.S. economy would give Trump the leverage to strike the fair and reciprocal trade deals he seeks. Japan, facing an ever-aggressive China and urgently needing to boost economic growth, might build on the 2019 U.S.-Japan market access deal. Trump could resume the talks with Britain from the end of his first term with more leverage; a former Trump official indicated that a deal with Britain would be a priority in a second term. Trump might also revisit negotiations with the EU, following up on a market access agreement signed in 2019 following his imposition of tariffs. After eight years on top, the United States has overtaken China to be Germany’s top trading partner again. Trump’s aim to secure better deals is evident, and he may find more willing partners than before.

The same dynamics may lead to a far broader trade war with and decoupling from China. The U.S. economy has grown relative to China’s over the past eight years, with the gap widening in both directions: The U.S. economy is larger and the Chinese one smaller than economists expected. The forecast for when China’s economy might surpass the United States’ keeps sliding further and further into the future and may never happen at all. The International Monetary Fund projects that China’s share of the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP will be slightly smaller in five years than it is today, and it may never become the majority share. Even China’s official, flattering statistics suggest its economy is experiencing a lost decade due to deeply structural challenges, not temporary ones.

Over the past eight years, the U.S. economy has also become less dependent on foreign trade, including with China. In 2016, China was the top U.S. trading partner, accounting for more than 20 percent of U.S. imports and about 16 percent of total U.S. trade. By 2023, China slipped to third place, accounting for 13.9 percent of imports and 11.3 percent of trade. This shift would give greater credibility to Trump’s threats to revoke China’s most-favored nation trading status and impose wide-ranging tariffs. While these measures would have economic costs for Americans, around 80 percent of Americans view China unfavorably today, a significant increase from 2017, and the United States is now better positioned to withstand a protracted trade war with China than a few years ago.

Trump 2.0 would have the potential to lead a broader containment approach toward China. First, Trump and most Americans blame the Chinese government for the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed more than 1 million Americans, forced the U.S. economy into a deep recession, and likely cost Trump his reelection in 2020. Whether through trade measures, sanctions, or a demand for reparations, Trump will seek to hold China accountable for the estimated $18 trillion in damage the COVID-19 pandemic caused to the United States. In parallel, he is likely to end the attempts at partnership made by the Biden administration and Trump during parts of his first term. Issues like climate change, public health, foreign investment, Chinese land purchases in the United States, and Beijing’s role in the fentanyl epidemic will be viewed through the lens of strategic independence from China, as outlined in the Republican platform.

Second, the United States’ major European allies have become much more critical of China than when Trump left office—the result of COVID-19, Chinese “wolf warrior” diplomacy, Beijing’s support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, and mounting issues concerning trade, technology, and supply chains. The references to China in the 2024 G-7 summit statement and NATO summit communique, compared to the last versions under Trump in 2019, make that clear. Europe is following Washington’s lead in imposing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, restricting Chinese telecoms from 5G infrastructure, and exposing and punishing Chinese espionage. A second Trump administration could build a coalition against Chinese behavior.

Third, the United States’ Asian allies are enhancing their military capabilities and cooperation among themselves. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others are increasing their defense spending, and the United States recently negotiated expanded military access to key sites in the Philippines. Improved regional alliances and partnerships, including the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) pact, the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), much improved Japan-South Korea relations, and growing Japan-Philippines cooperation will strengthen Trump’s hand with Beijing.

However, the China Trump will face is more powerful and aggressive than ever before. It has significantly increased its military harassment of Taiwan, the Philippines, and India. It has also deepened its strategic partnership with Russia: The two countries declared a “partnership without limits” in 2022, and Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023 that the world is undergoing changes “we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” China’s navy, already larger than its U.S. counterpart since around 2015, could be about 50 percent larger by the end of Trump’s second term. How would Trump respond if China attacked Taiwan? Washington assesses that Xi has ordered the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be prepared to win a war against Taiwan by 2027, and U.S. war games consistently indicate the U.S. could lose such a conflict. Trump continues to hew to the decadeslong policy of maintaining strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan’s defense, even if he has included Taiwan in his familiar critique of allies not doing enough for their own defense. Nevertheless, the continuously eroding balance of power and rapidly evolving correlation of forces could make Trump less likely to assist Taiwan than one might suspect given his overall China policy. As Trump recently acknowledged in the bluntest of terms, Taiwan is 9,500 miles away from the United States but only 68 miles away from China.

Trump would return as commander in chief with the largest European war since World War II raging in Ukraine, the increased presence of U.S. forces on the continent, and European NATO members ramping up their defense spending. The much-changed situation in Europe could make him far less likely to withdraw U.S. troops, end support for Ukraine, or seek a grand bargain with Putin.

Trump’s persistent haranguing of European allies when he was president, coupled with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has prompted European countries to rapidly increase their defense spending. Whereas only five NATO members spent at least 2 percent of GDP on defense in 2016 and nine did so in 2020, 23 do so now. European NATO nations have increased their collective defense spending by more than half since Trump first took office, far ahead of the United States’ much smaller increase during the same period. Germany has even surpassed Britain as Europe’s biggest defense spender. The burden sharing Trump pushed for is beginning to happen: European NATO allies are now shouldering a greater share of bloc-wide defense spending, and Europe also provides the majority of aid to Ukraine. U.S. companies and workers are benefiting: The U.S. share of global arms exports rose from 34 percent to 42 percent over the most recent five-year period.

In his first term, Trump welcomed both Montenegro and North Macedonia into NATO, even though neither met the 2 percent mark at the time. His inclination to move U.S. forces farther east along NATO’s frontier is now a reality. Today, 20,000 U.S. forces are stationed in the alliance’s eastern frontier states, part of what Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Christopher Cavoli called a “definite shift eastward.” With the addition of Finland and Sweden as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO now has a significantly reshaped posture.

While the 2 percent floor for defense spending is now grossly inadequate, European states are proposing higher benchmarks. The European Union has released its first-ever defense industrial strategy, and many European countries are planning further increases in spending. Were Trump to preside over the June 2025 NATO summit in the Netherlands, he could not only announce “mission accomplished” with respect to the 2 percent target, but that NATO has collectively pledged a higher 3 percent floor.

Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”—but has also threatened to dramatically increase arms support to Ukraine if Putin does not comply. He has never outright opposed military aid to Ukraine, acquiesced to congressional passage of a large supplemental in April, and recently concluded a positive call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Having observed how Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan sunk his presidency, Trump may be determined to avoid a similar loss of Ukraine.

Facing a Middle East with escalating Tehran-backed conflicts and a near-nuclear Iran, Trump 2.0 might also double down and increase U.S. military involvement to douse the fires Tehran has lit.

Trump is likely to end the Biden administration’s pressure on Israel to end the war against Hamas, de-escalate against Iran, and withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank. Trump would end Biden’s embargo on certain U.S. arms deliveries to Israel, halt aid to Gaza, and de-emphasize humanitarian concerns. Trump has consistently supported an Israeli “victory”—a stance repeated by his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance—and called on Israel to “finish the job.” Trump has walked back his previous endorsement of a Palestinian state, suggesting a very different approach to the “day after.” If a major war between Israel and Hezbollah breaks out, Trump’s track record suggests he would support swift Israeli action with less concern for civilian casualties, with full U.S. support but no direct military involvement.

Trump 2.0 would quickly face the choice of whether to take preemptive military action against Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran is now a nuclear breakout state, capable of producing enough weapons-grade uranium for several bombs in less than 10 days, even if weaponization may take several months to a year. Berlin, Paris, and London, antagonists to Trump 1.0’s Iran policy, may be supporters of Trump 2.0’s, as Iran’s growing military alliance with Russia, nuclear progress, and support for the Houthis have shifted European attitudes. Having repeatedly passed the wartime tests by Iran and its proxies, Israeli anti-air capabilities have rapidly improved, as has coordination with Arab partners. Trump will likely recharge his maximum-pressure approach, but he may be more likely to threaten Iran directly than ever before.

Trump 2.0 could also launch a campaign against the Houthis similar to that against the Islamic State during Trump 1.0. He would inherit a 24-nation coalition that is currently failing to restore freedom of navigation through the Red Sea. Despite the most intense U.S. naval combat operations since World War II, Suez Canal transits are still fewer than half of what they were a year ago; so far, over 90 commercial vessels have been hit and more than 100 warships attacked. Just as he declared the defeat and destruction of the Islamic State to be his “highest priority” on the first day of his presidency, he may flip the mission from a defensive to offensive one by hitting Houthi launch sites, targeting critical infrastructure, eliminating Iranian naval support, and directly threatening Tehran. A successful campaign could restore commercial shipping, lower energy and shipping costs, and foster diplomatic cooperation with European, Middle Eastern, and Asian governments.

Even if Trump’s instincts and inclinations remain unchanged, the world’s vastly shifted circumstances could prompt unexpected approaches. If Trump 1.0 was an alliance disruptor and protectionist, a second Trump administration could turn out to be a coalition builder and forger of significant trade deals. Concerns over U.S. abandonment of Europe and withdrawal from the Middle East may prove to have been hasty, with altered circumstances leading to greater stability in Europe and a rollback of Iranian aggression in the Middle East. Dealmaking with China may give way to the best opportunity to build a Cold War-like coalition to blunt aggressive Chinese behavior.

[isaacsapphire]

What parts of modernity must be given up to prop up the birth rate (at least enough to go from precipitous decline to gradual decline)? I fear for the future of feminism. Maybe we can sacrifice child labor laws instead. Or start growing humans in vats, thus finally achieving a sapphic supermajority.

From last to first:

Vats ain’t gonna do it. Sapphics can purchase sperm or hold their noses and think of England for 5 minutes now, and I have known rather a lot of lesbian moms.

Feminism as it currently stands is not really compatible with being a mother and it never embraced and encouraged and held up motherhood as aspirational. The two are not currently compatible, and making them compatible requires being willing to accept a hypothetical 5th wave of feminism with substantial differences from what has come before as still feminism.

Child labor laws are arguably part of the problem, but a smaller one than child safety laws and “laws” enforced by social workers like “wood stoves are forbidden in homes with children” that make children more expensive and a hassle to care for. The housing crisis and the fact that the general economic decline has been papered over by increasing women’s workforce participation (and reducing non gdp labor, like raising the next generation of human capital) is another factor.

The idea that gender is irrelevant is not exactly “part of modernity” depending on how you define modernity, but that’s probably part of what would need to change. Raising children is an extremely huge investment, and someone has to do it.

Ultimately, having kids either has to be “a good deal” or unavoidable. People have kids at the levels you’re looking for pretty reliably IF they feel it’s a good deal for them. Having kids is somewhat rewarding in itself for many people, and remember that we are all descended from generations of people who had kids, so the thumb is on the scale thanks to evolution. Make having kids, or having another kid, a good deal of more people.

[kp777]

By Scientist Rebellion

Common Dreams

Dec 15, 2023

This disastrous COP28 must be the end of vague political promises. The people of Earth are on to the lies.

The United Nations climate summit, hijacked by the fossil fuel cartel, has gifted a blank check to rich countries and Big Oil to kill one billion people and force billions more to flee their homes by 2100. The so-called ‘historic’ outcome of COP28 fails to deliver the most basic and necessary measures which would have prevented societal and ‘earth systems’ collapse, as outlined by the IPCC: eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and halt all new gas and oil projects.

Instead, the new resolution includes numerous loopholes which will allow polluters to greenwash emissions through fictional carbon capture, meaningless carbon credits, and the re-classification of methane (“natural gas”) as a transition fuel. But to remain under 2°C of warming, we cannot afford to burn the fossil fuels we already have in reserve, let alone drill for more.

COP28 has taken a few tentative steps in the right direction, but only thanks to the blood and sweat of many people on the frontline of our climate crisis. The summit’s overall trend to support “business as usual” will result in further delays in meaningful climate action and condemn us to miss “the brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

Wealthy countries have once again manipulated the climate summit in order to advance their ecocidal colonialism. Rich nations have been pillaging the natural resources of poorer ones for centuries and have used their fuels to emit far more than their share of CO2. They bear the lion’s share of responsibility to decarbonize first and fastest and provide much-needed funding to poorer nations, which are already heavily impacted by the escalating climate crisis. Instead, rich countries are racing in the opposite direction: the US, Canada, and just three other countries are responsible for more than half of planned oil and gas expansion.

UN governance failure is also to blame here, however, and urgently needs addressing. Even if COP had succeeded in a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, it could not be implemented without a binding treaty and enforcement mechanisms. Additionally, COP must demand reporting of any conflicts of interest and ban fossil fuel executives and lobbyists from tainting any more climate summits.

The Loss & Damage Fund could be an important first step, but without proper financing, it is condemned to fail. Loss and damage already costs more than $400 billion annually, but COP28 has only pledged $429 million in initial funding—a mere 0.1% of what is needed just for this year. By contrast, governments are using $7 trillion of our money every year to subsidize fossil fuels (despite the 1 in 5 deaths—12 million people annually—caused by air pollution alone) while the oil industry rakes in obscene profits.

That said, even a fully-financed Loss and Damage Fund can never fix a dysfunctional economic system which is fundamentally flawed, is based on endless growth, overconsumption, and extractivism, and is guaranteed to accelerate the global crisis. Studies have demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions are firmly linked to resource exploitation and GDP growth. We have no choice but to create an economic system which aligns with the goals of a fair and equal transition, because the current one has failed both humans and all other 10 million life forms on this planet. Implementing a low-carbon economy is cheaper than sustaining the catastrophic costs of climate change, but the need to maintain and grow profit is preventing any progress. Profit will never fix what profit has created.

1.5°C is dead, and 2°C will be dead by 2050, if not earlier, if we continue down this path. 2023 was the hottest year on record; we passed 2.0°C for the first time in history, and 2024 is projected to be even hotter. Human behaviors inflict massive planetary stress beyond the burning of fossil fuels. “20 of the 35 planetary vital signs are now showing record extremes.”

We cannot entrust the fight for all life to the very politicians, companies, and markets that forced us into this existential crisis in the first place and who are right now brutally marching us off the cliff. This disastrous COP28 marks the end of vague political promises. The people of Earth are on to the lies. It is time to listen to the scientists, hundreds of whom have been driven out of their labs and into the streets to engage in civil disobedience: if we want to avoid condemning both this generation and all that follow to the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, we must all rise together in order to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The time is now.

[stackslip]

The European Union is set to generate millions of euros more from the high rejection rates of visa applications by African visitors with a new increase in non-refundable fees.

Citizens of the 26 member states within Europe’s Schengen area have unhindered borderless access within the area, while most travelers from elsewhere require visas. A 12.5% price hike that takes effect on June 11 increases the cost of a short-term (90 days) visa application to €90.

But while the price hike applies equally to all non-EU residents who require a Schengen visa, it raises the prospect of the bloc making disproportionately more money from its rejection rates for applicants from Africa, analysts say.

Of the €130 million the EU earned in 2023 from rejected visa applications, about 42% of that was from applicants living in Africa, even though the continent accounts for 24% of Schengen visa applications, according to London-based research firm LAGO Collective. Prospective visitors who apply from Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria receive rejection rates of between 40% and 50%, LAGO estimated, based on data from the European Commission’s migration and home affairs office.

“We found a relationship between the GDP of countries and rejection rates for short-term visas,” Marta Foresti, LAGO’s founder, told Semafor Africa. A similar rejection trend in 2024 with the new price would deepen long-standing inequality of outcomes between consumers paying for the same service from high and low-income countries, Foresti said.

While these encourage dangerous attempts to reach Europe across seas and deserts, most African migration is via “regular channels,” the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington DC notes.

Yet Africans applying to visit Europe for short-term stays, such as business engagements or conferences, continue to face a stumbling block.

Average rejection rates for African applicants are generally 10 percentage points higher than the global average, Mehari Taddele Maru, a researcher at the EU-owned European University Institute in Italy, found. Seven of the top ten countries with the highest rejection rates for Schengen visa applications in 2022 were in Africa.

The EU’s more expensive visa and its potentially disproportionate impact on Africans comes as the bloc takes a tougher stance on migration.

New rules approved by the EU Commission in April impose a higher standard for screening non-EU nationals at borders, including the collection of biometric data, and health and security checks. Border fences set up by member states within the Schengen area have become longer in the last decade, stretching from 315 km to 2,048 km as of 2022.

Higher visa prices could be another type of fence, which when combined with high rejection rates, will continue to enrich European consulates at the expense of residents of low income countries who nevertheless have legitimate reasons to be in Europe.

Africa’s high rejection rate is sometimes explained as a consequence of visitors overstaying their visas. But “there is no evidence to suggest that a higher rejection rate leads to a decrease in irregular migration or visa overstays,” Maru argues. In essence, an unexplained bias against Africans is at play.

The costs of rejection to African entrepreneurs, career professionals, artists and other seekers of the EU’s short-term visa calls for a reform of the approval process, Foresti told me. Consulates with high unequal outcomes should review their decision-making to ensure “systematic discrimination” against some countries isn’t an underlying cause.

And should some EU members enforce high rejection for short-term visas to dissuade overstays by residents of particular African countries, more paths to legal migration should be considered, she argued.

[theradicalkanji]

My party pulled off some absolutely buck wild stuff this last session, and I wanted to share. Some quick background. A side plot that has become apparent a while ago and we have been slowly picking at the threads was that the Cleric's dad was in a spot of trouble. We didn't know what trouble at first. We just knew that he had taken up a new job in one of the major cities that our party was now based out of. Throughout the last couple of story arcs, we have been using this city as our base of operations which meant several scenes where Dad would join the party for dinners/celebrations/etc. When it became clear that the Dad was in Some Shit but wouldn't tell us what kind of shit, the cleric asked my psychic storm fairy to start doing some digging. Throughout the next few months of play, whenever there was a lull in the action and Dad seemed distraction, I would stealthily throw up a detect thoughts and try to deep dive for info. (Subtle spell metamagic is a sorely under appreciated skill)

Over the story arcs, my guy slowly pieced together the story. Dad owed A Lot of money to Cleric's "Uncle". Uncle is not related to the family by blood. He had just been a constant fixture in the family life for Cleric's whole life and so Cleric has started to refer to him as Uncle.

Dad took out a loan from Uncle BEFORE Cleric was even born. The juice has been running on that loan for decades, and it's reached a point where the interest has skyrocketed into the GDP of a moderately wealthy nation. Uncle has really been putting the screws to Dad lately to get Dad to pay up resulting in Dad giving away everything he owns as quickly as he can earn it even though he has taken on multiple jobs.

Of course, we weren't gonna let that slide so we start hatching a plan to get Dad out of debt. However, a few more stealthy deep dives later, we realized not just the terms and conditions of the contract, but the enforcement as well. The loan itself is enforced by a group called The Brokers who are a team of demonic lawyers who deal in legally binding contracts. If someone is found in breach of contract, their soul is forfeited in the process. The Brokers are not just like imps in suits doing deals. These are top tier demons working directly under a Lord of Hell so we knew we had to be careful.

Upon learning that Uncle has been extorting money from Dad, we started looking into Uncle's activity. However, Uncle is always wearing a necklace that protects him from any and all mental manipulation. No charm. No detect thoughts. Not even Suggestions. We realized that if we wanted to pull this off, we would need to somehow get more info. The best way to do this would be to get Uncle away from his necklace, but we couldn't let him know that we were acting against him. If he found out we were working to undermine the contract, he could claim we were in breach. In order to pull this off, we had to do it without Uncle OR Dad finding out because if Dad was a knowing accomplice in this and we got busted, he would also get busted. To summarize, we needed to get the necklace off of him, without him knowing we got the necklace off of him.

Thus begins operation Strip Club.

After tracking Uncle a bit, we realized he likes his shows and frequented one of the clubs in town. Our Paladin, who is the team's resident slut (cus all teams need at least one) was more than willing to keep Uncle distracted. Meanwhile, Cleric went with Dad to have a father son bonding moment and keep both of them plausibly deniable if Uncle or Brokers started to ask questions. This left my boi, a Psychic Storm Fairy, and our Fae Patron Warlock to do the actual heist.

A few successful persuasion checks later, Paladin leads Uncle back to the VIP rooms to do the do. When they reach the door, Warlock pulls a spell out that I had never even heard of before. Warlock walks by Uncle and shoulder checks the guy. Uncle turns and starts trying to start shit with the lock. During the altercation, Warlock casts Mislead, leaving an illusory double of himself to continue walking away as if ignoring Uncle while Uncle screams himself hoarse at the asshole who just bumped into him. During this time, Warlock slips through the now unlocked door and waits for the action to start.

A few successful "performance" checks from Paladin give Warlock an opportunity to act. While Uncle is reclining in a seat in a sexual stupor, Warlock sneaks up behind him and undoes the clasp of the necklace. He then holds the chains but leaves the pendant portion still resting on Uncle's chest while Uncle is getting The Sloppy. Since Warlock is now "holding" the necklace, it is no longer equipped by Uncle leaving him open to mental fuckery.

During this scene, my guy was set up in the next room over, keeping a steady pulse of Detect Thoughts active. I was using this spell in Sonar mode. I wasn't listening for thoughts per se. I was just keeping a mental tab on the locations of individuals in the 30 foot radius. The second the clasp is undone, Uncle appears on my minimap, prompting a series of deep dives.

During these dives we were able to discover the location of the contract and the safe codes as well as more of the fine print of the contract itself. Having reviewed the memories of Dad signing the contract, I knew what he had agreed to and compared it to what Uncle had stipulated which gave us an idea of how to annul the contract.

Uncle had been using Dad as a cash cow for decades, but he only recently started bleeding Dad for everything he owns. Turns out, Uncle set it up that he could amend the contract at any time he wanted. All that needed to happen was the physical contract itself had to be changed. Uncle's other investments started to tank and so he changed to loan to Dad to put the squeeze on and recoup his losses.

Warlock reattaches the necklace to Uncle and Misty Steps out without Uncle ever even knowing we were there. While Paladin continued to accrue points of exhaustion and Cleric continued to distract Dad, Warlock and I went to Uncle's place. A very easy lockpicking check later, we were in, and since my fairy already knew the code to the safe, it was just one Tom and Jerry style treadmill on the safe dial to open the safe and get the contract.

Once we amended the contract to void it, a man in a dark suit appeared in the apartment. Warlock, having passive true sight, immediately clocked this "man" as a puppet being controlled by a demon lord. Warlock was super ready to throw down with the demon lord, but we were missing our tank and healer. It was gonna be a messy fight if it came to it, and my boy has no CON stat.

I managed to talk down the Warlock. We had done everything right. Nothing we had done went against the letter of the law, and the demon was not being overtly hostile. Even if the demon was an intensely evil being, that did not mean it was an enemy.

We delivered the contract to the demon who read over it. Nodded. Signed and notarized it, and handed it back and then left with a bow. We then returned the now voided contract to the safe, locked the sade and the apartment, and teleported out without Uncle ever even knowing we were there.

[argyrocratie]

"Waste, Logistical Chains, “Economies of Scale” — and Aesthetics.

My suspicion that Phillips seriously underestimates the degree of waste production in existing capitalism is further confirmed by the fact that a book he co-authors, The People’s Republic of Walmart, celebrates many of the most inefficient aspects of existing capitalism as exemplars of efficiency. In particular he admires Walmart’s and Amazon’s extended logistics networks, a sentiment he also celebrated in a direct tweet to me:

I kinda love those worldwide supply chains. They are deeply humanising and constructing of a global culture. I cannot wait until all of subsaharan Africa is more integrated.

(...)

It’s useful to contrast this with Seymour Melman’s observations, in The Permanent War Economy, on the tendency towards cost-maximization in bureaucracies like the Pentagon and regulated public utilities. Any entity that’s guaranteed a profit under the terms of a procurement contract or regulation has every incentive in the world to maximize its cost, in order to maximize profits that are calculated on a cost-plus basis.

And this is true not only of entities that are formally guaranteed profits, but of entities whose oligopoly power enables them to engage in administered pricing (what Paul Goodman called the “great kingdom of cost-plus”).

According to William Waddell and Norman Bodek, under the rules of the management accounting system developed by Donaldson Brown at Du Pont and General Motors (what Waddell and Bodek call “Sloanist” accounting), overhead and waste is treated as the creation of value — a lot like GDP, in fact. Inventory is counted as an asset “with the same liquidity as cash.” Regardless of whether current output is needed to fill an order (...) In other words, the expenditure of money on inputs is by definition the creation of value. The more bloated and bureaucratic the production process, the greater the total book value of all that inventory sitting in the warehouse. So the large corporations that dominate our economy have an incentive to maximize waste and overhead that’s similar in kind, if not degree, to that prevailing in the Pentagon.

These giant corporations celebrated by Phillips and Rozworski appear “efficient” only because they exist within an ecosystem which has been modified to suit their needs. The state provides subsidized material inputs and socializes risk, and it enforces monopolies and entry barriers and regulatory restraints on competition. Corporate bureaucracies survive because of cost externalization and economic rents.

And that’s built into the basic structure of capitalism from its earliest days. From the beginning, capitalism has pursued a model of growth based on the extensive addition of new material inputs, rather than the more efficient use of existing inputs, because land and natural resources — thanks to enclosure and imperial looting — were artificially cheap.

In Europe peasant land was stolen and consolidated via enclosure and given to the propertied classes. In settler societies like the United States, both Indigenous-occupied and vacant lands were preempted by states, which gave preferential access to capitalists. States subsidize the extraction of fossil fuels and fight wars for access to them, making energy inputs artificially cheap. They subsidize highway transportation and, by making long-distance shipping artificially cheap, make firm sizes and market areas far above the point of diminishing returns artificially viable.

This is why the much-vaunted “efficiency” of factory farming — vaunted by its court propagandists, that is — is in output per labor-hour, not per acre. Soil-intensive techniques like raised bed horticulture are actually more efficient, in terms of output per acre.

In the specific case of logistic chains, Walmart is efficient at minimizing costs within a distorted framework in which transportation inputs are artificially cheap. Walmart’s logistics networks, and its network of offshore suppliers, are both enlarged at the expense of smaller-scale production for local markets, which would be more efficient if all costs were fully internalized. This means that the scale of Walmart’s logistics networks is actually an example of the amount of waste production under capitalism.

(...)

To the extent that Walmart’s just-in-time model is intended to match supply to demand, it is a sub-optimal application of lean principles. Walmart just replaces the warehouses full of inventory (under the Sloanist mass production model that Waddell and Bodek critique) with warehouses on wheels or on container ships. The ideal application of lean principles, in contrast, would be siting production as close as possible to demand, then scaling the flow of production to demand and scaling machinery to the flow of production — something like the high tech job shops of the Emilia-Romagna industrial district, with production oriented even more toward local consumption than is currently the case.

So while Phillips may consider those long logistic chains to be “deeply humanizing,” what they actually are is deeply inefficient. There is nothing “agile” about using many times the transportation inputs that are actually necessary because you’re producing stuff in one place to be shipped to retail shelves on the other side of the planet, when it would be produced much more efficiently where it’s being consumed."

-Kevin Carson, "We Are All Degrowthers. We Are All Ecomodernists. Analysis of a Debate" (2019)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 15, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 15, 2023

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.  

I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.

This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”

Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.” 

It is?

Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.

Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. 

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. 

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people. 

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism. 

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

So why is there a growing debt?

Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. 

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent. 

“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[realasslesbian]

So this will probably have the ASIO agent watching me have a whole heart attack, but tbh I’m kinda on China’s side with whatever tf Australia is trying with them right now. Like, a summary of all the problems the Australian government-controlled media has irt China is: ‘they’re controlling their population, conducting invasive surveillance to enforce their ideals, all media is controlled by the government, people who are non-compliant get locked up or just disappear, they keep throwing up trade sanctions with us for ‘no reason’, they’re threatening small and vulnerable sovereign nations, flying their jets and sailing their ships where they ain’t welcome, etc, etc, etc’ and literally, that’s just describing Australia rn. Australia doing all that shit and more. 

China is just coming into it’s own as a first world country. Ofc they gonna have some more jets and ships and shit around (in fact, in terms of their total GDP they spend far less on military presence than any other first world country). And ofc they’re gonna have a problem with the fact that there ain’t been this many Australian military vessels in their waters since WW2. Can you imagine if China had dozens of ships circling Australia? Everyone would lose their fuckin minds. Imo China is being pretty fucking chill about it.

So until these Chinese mfs start dropping bombs I’m prepared to excuse them. They literally ain’t done shit that any other country (especially Australia) ain’t done. Literally, if China invaded Australia tomorrow that would actually solve most of my life problems, bc my life problems originate in Australian government authoritarianism. So in conclusion, I for one welcome my new Chinese overlords, bc while China might not be perfect, they still better than whatever tf democratic charade Australia is rn.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula pledges to raise minimum wage and income tax threshold

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday pledged to raise Brazil’s minimum wage by 1.38 percent to BRL 1,320 (USD 251) in May. He also promised to raise the income tax threshold by almost 39 percent, to twice the new minimum wage.

Lula told CNN Brasil anchor Daniela Lima that his administration will reinstate the rule by which the minimum wage is adjusted annually according to both inflation and GDP growth. The same rule was enforced during the Lula, Dilma Rousseff, and Michel Temer administrations to make sure minimum salaries would increase above inflation. The custom was struck down by Jair Bolsonaro between 2019 and 2022.

Raising the minimum wage and reinstating a new annual adjustment rule were among Lula’s campaign promises in 2022. Since taking office, he suggested that possibility on multiple occasions but had fallen short of giving himself a deadline until today.

Continue reading.

[vren-diagram]

The Nordic model has been characterized as follows:[16]

An elaborate social safety net, in addition to public services such as free education and universal healthcare[16] in a largely tax-funded system.[17]

Strong property rights, contract enforcement and overall ease of doing business.[18]

Public pension plans.[16]

High levels of democracy as seen in the Freedom in the World survey and Democracy Index.[19][20]

Free trade combined with collective risk sharing (welfare social programmes and labour market institutions) which has provided a form of protection against the risks associated with economic openness.[16]

Little product market regulation. Nordic countries rank very high in product market freedom according to OECD rankings.[16]

Low levels of corruption.[19][16] In Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden were ranked among the top 10 least corrupt of the 179 countries evaluated.[21]

A partnership between employers, trade unions and the government, whereby these social partners negotiate the terms to regulating the workplace amongst themselves, rather than the terms being imposed by law.[22][23] Sweden has decentralised wage co-ordination while Finland is ranked the least flexible.[16] The changing economic conditions have given rise to fear among workers as well as resistance by trade unions in regards to reforms.[16]

High trade union density and collective bargaining coverage.[24] In 2019, trade union density was 90.7% in Iceland, 67.0% in Denmark, 65.2% in Sweden, 58.8% in Finland, and 50.4% in Norway; in comparison, trade union density was 16.3% in Germany and 9.9% in the United States.[25] Additionally, in 2018, collective bargaining coverage was 90% in Iceland, 88.8% in Finland (2017), 88% in Sweden, 82% in Denmark, and 69% in Norway; in comparison collective bargaining coverage was 54% in Germany and 11.7% in the United States.[26] The lower union density in Norway is mainly explained by the absence of a Ghent system since 1938. In contrast, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have union-run unemployment funds.[27]

The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union Confederation 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark being the only nation to receive a perfect score.[28]

Sweden at 56.6% of GDP, Denmark at 51.7%, and Finland at 48.6% reflect very high public spending.[29] Public expenditure for health and education is significantly higher in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in comparison to the OECD average.[30]

Overall tax burdens as a percentage of GDP are high, with Denmark at 45.9% and both Finland and Sweden at 44.1%.[31] The Nordic countries have relatively flat tax rates, meaning that even those with medium and low incomes are taxed at relatively high levels.[32][33]

The United Nations World Happiness Reports show that the happiest nations are concentrated in Northern Europe. The Nordics ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.[34] The Nordic countries place in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report 2018, with Finland and Norway taking the top spots.[35]

x

I think a lot of people are missing that the Nordic model is:

generally very friendly to businesses (low product market regulation, strong enforcement of property rights and contracts, non-corrupt, incentivizes population to upskill and participate)

composed of largely organically set standards (workers rights secured by collective bargaining and trade-unions) (as opposed to a centralized bureaucracy)

Largely structured to provide citizens with benefits that make workforce participation easier. The ordering of the social safety net and welfare state make it relatively easy to obtain skills and hold a job. Child care is subsidized. Elder care is subsidized. Healthcare and Education are subsidized. Unemployment benefits make it harder to fall out of the workforce participation loop.

re: that last point. The Nordic model is not about setting the tax rate really high and then doing redistribution! It actually really really matters how the government spends that money!

[mariacallous]

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act brought a major overhaul to U.S. tax code. The corporate tax rate was slashed to 21% from 35%, individual income tax rates were cut, and the standard deduction was increased.

Now, analysis in 2018 found that the cuts would boost the economy, but the effect would fizzle out quickly. And the price tag would be huge. The bill is expected to add nearly $2 trillion to the deficit by 2028.

Many of the household tax reforms included in the bill expire in 2025, meaning that whoever wins the election will have the opportunity to either fight to extend the legislation or let it lapse.

Trump has shown interest in making his tax rules permanent. Biden would likely preserve some of the tax cuts, namely those benefitting households making less than $400,000 a year.

The cuts have the largest benefits for the wealthy and for small business owners, but there are also provisions that benefit middle-income Americans like the increased standard deduction and Child Tax Credit.

An important effect of extending the 2017 tax cuts is that it’s estimated to cost an extra $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Without significantly cutting services, the federal debt would balloon to 211% of GDP by 2054, compared to about 100% of GDP right now.

Trump has actually pledged to make even more tax cuts – if that happens, obviously the deficit would grow even faster and the debt would be even larger.

Biden’s proposed alternatives include several programs to lower taxes for those making under $400,000 a year while also raising taxes on corporations and wealthier Americans. Efforts to target corporations include raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, increasing enforcement of tax avoidance by multinationals, and quadrupling the stock buyback tax.

His plan would also affect the highest-earning Americans, including a 25% minimum income tax on billionaires. All together, Biden’s policies would raise about $5 trillion in revenue by 2034.

While there is some overlap between the two candidate’s goals, the long-term effects on the federal debt and deficits couldn’t be more different.