#because the town government has been cutting subsidies

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

so turns out youtube is FULL of videos by museums on how to curate/design exhibits which means my day is now fully planned

[richardsphere]

Leverage Redemption Log: The Turkish Prisoner Job

So that name feels like a reference to the "Spanish Prisoner" (the original form of what is now known as the "Nigerian Prince" con). --- 2 crooked cops sitting in a car, complaining that there isnt enough crime for them to hit a quota. One of them is playing hexagordle or whatever its called. Guy name Delgado is leaving the house (that was the cartel from the OG series wasnt it?) Rodrigo is walking to his car like he's got shit in his pants. Cops plant a gun. And Rodrigo is about to be sent to prison cause crooked cops. --- Harry is at a courthouse trying to talk to a runaway prosecutor. Harry is already working Rodrigo's case. Its Golf Job Girl! (i dont remember your name, thats not an insult im just shit with names)

Its Harry's turn to run a con. (he still doesnt know how to steal a catchphrase) --- Parker is clicking a pen in a car. Parker is right, surveilance is boring. Operation Bigger Fish is a go!

Parker has stolen the free smoothie (come on man, not cool. This guy is only trying to prevent himself from getting framed by the cops.) Cops have taken the bait, Sophie is playing the "criminal" to be targeted. Harry is playing himself. (Sophie has brought on 2 understudies as bodyguards), also Breanna, why are you putting so many cuts into your camerafootage. Jumping from cam 1 to cam 3 every other sentence. --- Ok so the plan is to leave the cops alone around a bunch of cash and cocaine and let them "help themselves" while hidden cameras roll. Simple plan.

Oh Romero's family problems just chased him down in prison. Time for an improvised jailbreak! --- Plan has changed, tell the two stooges that the drug deal has been postponed, then kidnap Rodrigo in court. We can get the stooges vengeance for their victims can wait until after we ensure their victims dont die in prison.

Breanna has set up a botnet to astroturf up an anti-hotsauce factory protest. (probably based on the Irwindale Sriracha lawsuit. Yes i had to google the city.)

Quick read of the signs, prop department should be proud of the simple Jalapeno sign. Good work!

GolfGirl catches onto it pretty quickly that Harry is about to do a thing. (DAQ protocol engaged) Elliot is in a shared holding with Rodrigo.

The coffee is smoking. Cops are walking down the staircase, Beardy boy has a concious. Or at least is worried this might bite them in the behind. Woman is clearly the mastermind. "i did it by the book for years, it got me nowhere". Ah, so thats how we're playing this episode. The instruments of state-sponsored violence cant be evil only misguided cause what if the government wont give our production company their subsidies no more. (even the "evil cops" episode is copaganda nowadays)

And we frame the protesters for a chemical attack. Because the solution to innocent people getting their lives ruined by cops framing them for crimes they didnt commit is to frame a bunch more innocents for crimes they didnt commit. --- And the team enters in hazmat suits. Romero is having a panic attack/asthma thing.

Turns out the cops, while evil, are actually good at their job and now we have our victim charged with attempted jailbreak.

Harry has to make a tough call, cant get into a high-speed chase with the foodtruck (not only does it compromise elliots entire food-based Lucille army, the Lucille Legion is also not meant for stealth not speed) --- Sophie shows Harry her Eiffel Tower Salesman Trunk, mentions her mentor. (we're seeding more Sophie Lore) Harry has homework.

Covers arent blown, they're recyclable. (Narco in town on mysterious business, Federal officer in jail.) --- Did these bodies get buried in a tic-tac-toe formation normally, or did Breanna make this entire setpiece from scratch in an actual graveyard?

Sophie arrives to let Breanna and Parker "die" in character now that our cops are hooked. Elliot warns us that another hit is coming in the morning. (we're gonna have to kill this guy and set him up with the Leverage Witness Protection Division) --- Elliot reminds Rodrigo that the real bad-guy here is still theoretically the as-of-yet unidentified housing corpo that is bribing a congressman into presuring the cops. (if these people dont get rounded up at the end of episode, it'll all feel sort of hollow)

Elliot pretends to be a fellow gang-member/hitman angry that Rodrigo isnt actually a delgado.

Huh, using a key as a hilt on a shiv. Creative.

Cops are here to break out Elliot and Rodrigo. --- Old gator-zoo abandoned after Katrina. (turns out you dont need ghosts when you have Gators)

"im not a moron i just have a lot of concussions", His constant references to sportsball. Are we really weaving in a CTE storyline in the middle of this Evil Cops story? If so, its a verry nuanced characterdetail to give our crook of the week.

Billy Brainbash is starting to recognise Elliot from somewhere. --- The un-tied boat (untied as in "was never tied" not as in "has had the tie-ing undone") buys us enough time to fake a gator attack without needing to blank their guns.

Ok even if the guns werent blanks we just unloaded them on the "gators" so Sophie is safe.

Flashback shows Breanna making Gatordroids (i mean didnt even need a flashback. The gators were pretty clearly props by the way Elliot dropped them. Or maybe im just getting too familiar with the show) --- Meanwhile our crooked cops are at (presumeably the prosecutor's) stashhouse. Yup its the Prosecutor (McShane really was the smart one.) --- Harry presures the judge to pressure the prosecutor to investigate the Quota's.

Breanna found the Bagmans house. (turns out, cash money takes up a lot of space and only some houses built in the story-apropriate era have enough space between their walls. Add in his area of operation and it narrows down to 1) --- Harry Wilson, Law Criminal. Has a ring to it. (also the "con artist" line gets a 10/10)

[expression-of-doubt]

john-doe.html

Good morning, truthheads!

News flash: We just got a fresh batch of sweet details on the incidents taking place in The Capital. Never-before-seen stuff coming right up:

As far as our research on the young man goes, there are a lot of unknowns. Nothing really beyond purely biographical information, provided in the police report. Who knows if that isn’t just some made-up John Doe kind of conjecture as well. Our attempts to find any relatives or next of kin have exclusively resulted in dead ends, with our PIMS clearance being denied by almost every institution left in charge of clean-up after the incident.

What we can tell you, based of anecdotal information, is that he had recently moved to The Capital from one of the rural agricultural centres out east. This seems to coincide with the recent news of changes in policy, devaluing a lot of family-owned plots, which the agriculture sector was already seeing complications with keeping competitive, in light of the new “green” requirements. No doubt targeted by unfair competition and cheaper foreign imports, fruit and vegetable producers, and livestock breeders are incentivised to sign unfavourable contracts for land nationalisation, or risk losing hundreds per hectare while they push for fairer subsidies.

It remains unknown whether or not the young man was on the other side of such a deal and with whom. It is also currently unclear what the government plans to do with the newly acquired land. The current press release states that such matters will be “considered after a careful analysis of which ministry has done what”. Typical!

Our sources say he was seen arriving at the train yard a week prior to the incident, which would make it slightly before the public announcement of policy changes. There is speculation as to whether or not the young man was involved in organising the demonstrations and traffic obstruction that followed, with the protests demanding the resignation of the recently appointed minister.

In the ensuing days, the man was seen squatting in a makeshift village with the homeless population of The Capital down by the western parks. After masterfully haggling up the price on this information, the other residents described him as “not particularly talkative” and “seemingly lost in thought”. I wonder what he could have been thinking about so much.. hmm!? Though most seemed convinced that he was highly educated in some way – his alma mater, however, was apparently not discussed. Most of the stories seemed to overlap at the fact that he showed up, sat on a bench for a while, shared a meal, then went to sleep for the night.

The only reason why we even have tertiary biographical information on the guy is because he was flagged for shoplifting the literal day after. Apparently wasted no time getting acquainted with the lowlifes in town. Wonder where you could have met those!

He then goes off the radar for a week before his documents and personal belongings are found on an elderly homeless woman several hundred meters away from where that headless rich guy from last week’s article was found.

Here’s what the editorial team thinks on the matter:

This guy gets handed a rough deal by one of the institutions, and then has essentially no prospects, because parliament is making his life a living nightmare by nuking his business, importing foreign goods at a price and scale that is simply unachievable for the agricultural sector in this country – shitty soil and all. More requirements, more upfront costs, higher prices on goods. The guy is essentially forced out of business or is fired from a larger co-op to cut corners.

As time goes on, the guy is getting a little bit spiteful towards the big man in The Capital, and wants to show him a piece of his mind. He gets on the first train here and lo and behold, turns out he doesn’t know shit about life. Suddenly, he’s a guy, who spend his whole life digging up dirt with a shovel in a town that has more to do with science fiction than whatever reality he had in mind.

Seems like he was desperate too, seeing as he couldn’t find a place to crash for the night. Probably didn’t know anyone here either. His money should have been good around here, considering that he was probably on the other end of a land deal. Guess it mustn’t have been much – the greedy bastards. He then gets to know the lowlifes around town and starts using that fancy education of his to wow them all and get them to get all riled up enough to start protesting, even if they didn’t even plant a seed in their life. Liberals and influencers immediately jump on the band-wagon, because it’s hip to be green, and start spreading the word on social media, leading to last week’s demonstrations. Everyone starts pointing a finger at him, whenever the police start asking who’s responsible for the whole thing, and they flag him for something as innocuous as shoplifting, just so they have probable cause for something where they can detain him.

His new buddies then hide him somewhere in the basements where they grow and multiply, and then he walks out with a new set of documents and probably a makeover as well. Old lady finds his old ID it in a trash can and thinks she can make a buck out of it, if someone needs some inspiration for some other art project.

Who’s to say he isn’t responsible for the suit either! Might have been some minister’s son for all he cares! Real kind of eat the rich behaviour, if we’re being honest. Almost admirable, even.

That’s been all for this week, more truths inbound from The Capital’s favourite devil’s advocates coming your way very soon. Remember to love each other and stick it to the man on the daily!

[antoine-roquentin]

One might reasonably assume that workers are a core part of Putin’s base of support. When protests against falsified election results broke out in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2011–12, with demonstrators calling for a “Russia without Putin,” Igor Kholmanskikh, a factory foreman at the Ural Tank Factory in Nizhniy Tagil, told the president on national television, “If the militia…can’t handle it, then me and the guys [muzhiki] are ready to come out and defend stability.” Putin’s administration played up this event considerably, with Putin later appointing Kholmanskikh, despite his lack of relative credentials, as the presidential representative for the Urals Federal Region. He successfully deflected those earlier protests, as some put it, by pitting “rural and Rust Belt Russia against urban and modernizing Russia.”

Since then, however, Russia’s economy has stagnated, with real wages declining for a number of years. Despite its reliance on oil and gas exports, Russia still has numerous large industrial enterprises left over from the Soviet era, including hundreds of often struggling “monotowns”—one-industry cities and towns reliant on a single factory, many built during Stalinist industrialization. A few years after workers pledged their support for Putin, the Urals Tank Factory was faced with bankruptcy.

Not every Russian (or Belarussian) is willing to go out in the streets in support of abstract political demands. But they have clear concerns about social welfare, and when political demands are combined with concrete grievances about falling wages or cuts in social benefits, they can become explosive. In Belarus, Lukashenko has remained in power since 1994 through what some have called “socialism with Russian subsidies” in the form of below-market prices for oil and gas. With those subsidies now gone, Lukashenko was forced to cut benefits and raise taxes. Presaging the current uprising, in 2017 Belarusians took to the streets in large numbers to protest a new tax on “parasitism”—essentially a tax on underground employment—with demands for Lukashenko to resign. The tax was scrapped.

Recently, Putin has also been forced to cut back on popular social provisions. In 2018 his government unleashed a rollback of pension benefits, leading to widespread protests and a significant drop in his popularity. That made the recent referendum on amending the constitution, which could allow him to remain in office until 2036, all the more challenging. The coronavirus pandemic has only made the situation worse.

Still, why might protests by workers pose a particular challenge? Beyond the economic damage well-placed strikes can impose, working-class symbolism continues to resonate in Russian society even 30 years after the collapse of Communism. The name “Novocherkassk”—a town in southern Russia where protesting workers were shot and killed by Soviet security forces back in 1962—remains synonymous with state repression against workers. Putin certainly remembers the event, because in 2008 he publicly laid flowers at a monument to the workers killed. A few months later, as the global economic crisis deepened, when residents of Pikalyovo protested the shuttering of their factories by blockading a major highway and creating a 400-kilometer traffic jam, Putin helicoptered in to dress down factory owner and oligarch Oleg Deripaska on national television, in a scene that became known as “the bending of an oligarch.” In a prolonged downturn, however, a savior can come to be seen as a villain.

To preempt workers from joining the political opposition, the Putin regime has tried to maintain what some have called a “discursive divide” between legitimate social and economic protest and illegitimate (and often harshly suppressed) political protest. Yet, as economic conditions worsen and the regime imposes austerity measures, that divide can crumble. When the government introduced a road tax on long-haul trucks in late 2015, Russian truck drivers from the Caucasus to the Far East were instantly united in opposition, and while they initially pleaded, “President, help us!,” after little more than a year they were demanding his removal from office.

When protests have become political, the rulers in Russia and in Belarus have sought to portray the demonstrators as feckless youth backed by foreign agents. Putin called the 2011–12 Russian protesters “chatterboxes” in contrast to “the real Russian people, the Russian working man, the man of labor,” while Lukashenko recently complained that the current protests were being led by “the unemployed.” Such rhetoric will fall flat when the protesters are marching in work uniforms out of factory gates. Moreover, while authoritarian rulers might rely on social divisions to encourage riot police to beat college-educated youth, overt repression against workers—the same class from which many police are drawn—could much more easily result in security force refusals and defections.

As with protests generally, strikes are difficult to carry out in such repressive regimes. In both Russia and Belarus, the major unions—holdovers from the Communist era—remain in the pockets of the ruling elite. Independent unions are much smaller and constantly harassed, though they can suddenly become a powerful voice, as they are now proving in Belarus. Large industrial enterprises in both countries are heavily dependent on state support, a dependence that the state and then managers exploit in order to garner votes for the ruling parties come election time. Yet, interestingly, that dependence is now being inverted in Belarus: In some factories, rather than shutting down production, workers are compelling their bosses to publicly denounce the police repression and fraudulent elections, essentially pulling down a crucial pillar of regime support.

Meanwhile, in Russia, protests have continued since early July in the far east region of Khabarovsk. True, the primary grievance there is political—the removal of a popularly elected governor from an opposition party—but they combine with economic dissatisfaction, and the protesters there are learning from their counterparts in Belarus and calling for workplace strikes.

In the short run, it is unclear how all this will end. The protests in Belarus and Khabarovsk may well fizzle out, as others have in the past. But as Putin looks at the events in Belarus, he no doubt sees his nightmare scenario playing out, with workers leaving the factory gates to join protesters in the city square. In the longer run, Russia’s leadership faces a dilemma: To overcome further economic stagnation that can provoke such protest, it will have to wrestle with a sizable Soviet legacy—its many large industrial enterprises, often struggling to be profitable in a global capitalist marketplace.

Yet, should Lukashenko fall, what will happen to the workers of Belarus (and perhaps in the future, to those in Russia)? Could they end up like coal miners at the end of the Soviet Union, providing muscle to bring down a dictatorship, but ushering in neoliberal reforms that threaten their livelihoods? Having now discovered their social power, they may need to keep using it.

[ellmovy]

veganism is a previlege. when my family moved to the us from our third world country we finally had access to meat and milk. i remember how it was a celebration when my town gave itself the luxury to share a pig once in a blue moon. now we can have a balanced diet without sacrificing too much for it. my family has gained some weight which we all needed. how white people actively choose not to consume what billions of people of color would kill for astounds me. so many of us die because of lack of animal products. god gave us animals so we could feed ourselves. it really comes from a position of someone who isn't going through war, drought or poverty to say we shouldn't even eat eggs.

Hi! I wouldn’t suggest everyone in a situation of war/famine/etc., stop eating animal products - I think they have bigger things to worry about, and I’d never want to fault someone for focusing on surviving. It’s great that you and your family are in a better position now, and I’m sorry you had to deal with the stresses of not having access to the foods you needed.

But I do believe that people that can make the decision to stop exploiting animals for their pleasure (not survival), should. I agree I am in a position of privilege, being white and from Australia, but I’m also a student living largely on a government allowance and spending minimal money on food, and have found that a plant based diet is so much more affordable compared to buying meat and dairy, which tend to be some of the most expensive and perishable items at the supermarket. I know this isn’t the same everywhere, and I think this is its own problem that should be addressed - the fact that healthy foods, particularly fresh fruit & veg, are so expensive in many places is something vegans generally want fixed (the animal agriculture industry is massive and usually gets huge subsidies, therefore making these products cheaper, not to mention the corners cut in terms of animal welfare and the environment).

You also mentioned that veganism is a white people thing, and while I can’t speak for them, I know a lot of vegans of colour have complained about these arguments that veganism isn’t for them, or anyone who isn’t rich, white, and able-bodied. Because anyone can go vegan. It’s an ethical decision that people make to cut out animal exploitation in their lives as much as possible. This means if you need a medication that’s been tested on animals or contains lactose, then you have it, and you’re still vegan. You could be in a situation of extreme poverty, and eat whatever is available to you, and still be vegan.

I suppose a large part of where we disagree is that you believe animals are here for us to eat, and that animal products are somehow the best and healthiest food. I don’t believe we’re above animals, I don’t think anything is here ‘for us’, and I wish animal products weren’t valued as some superior kind of food.

Sorry this was a bit of a ramble, I don’t normally talk about this kind of thing here, but I wanted to make my position a bit clearer, and clarify that it’s okay if people need animal products to survive. You can look at @acti-veg‘s account (where I reblogged that post from) for more detailed information & resources, and they might even be able to add something or answer some questions you might have? I think veganism is often misunderstood and I hope you can understand where I’m coming from here, and I’m sorry if I’ve come across as/said anything insensitive.

[encounterthepast]

If you enjoy this please follow @RussInCheshire on twitter for his regular threads on UK politics.

As it’s the weekend, let’s start #TheWeekInTory with a frivolous and jolly story about our own govt deliberately starving hundreds of thousands of children...

1. In May, Boris Johnson promised “nobody will go hungry as a result of Coronavirus”

2. He then denied school meals to the 600,000 poorest children

3. So Marcus Rashford ran a campaign to get the govt to feed children, which - just think about that: he had to *campaign* for it

4. Then Boris Johnson congratulated Rashford on his campaign to overturn the cruel policies of, erm, Boris Johnson

5. And then 3 days later, Boris Johnson refused to feed those kids during school holidays

6. So this week Labour organised a parliamentary vote about it

7. And 322 Tories voted against feeding hungry children

8. Vicky Ford, the Children’s Minister (who you’ll be surprised to hear neither looks nor sounds like a ludicrous Dickensian villain) went ahead and voted against feeding children

9. Tory MP Jo Gideon voted against feeding children. Jo Gideon, in case you didn't think things could get any more unbelievable, is also the chair of "Feeding Britain", a charity that campaigns to end food poverty and hunger in the UK.

10. Tory MP Paul Scully waved away the grumbling parents of kids with grumbling tummies, and said “children have been going hungry under Labour for years”, seemingly forgetting Tories have been in power for a decade

11. Tory MP Ben Bradley, who once had to apologise for suggesting sterilising the poor, said feeding children will simply “increase their dependency”. On food. Yeah, wean the little bastards off it. It’ll do them good in the end, which will be around 3 agonising weeks.

12. At this point, pause to consider that MPs get their food and drink subsidised. A £31 meal in a parliamentary restaurant costs MPs £3.45. In 2018 this subsidy cost the taxpayer £4.4m. I can’t find any record of Tories like Ben Bradley voting against this.

13. Pressing on: Ben Bradley also said “Some parents prioritise other things ahead of their kids. Small minority, yes... but some do”. Yes, and a small minority of Tory MPs have been arrested for rape. Should we send them all to prison?

14. Also, Mark Francois voted (by proxy) to keep kids hungry. Not related to the previous item. Why would you think that?

15. Tory MP Nicky Morgan said the govt voted to starve 600,000 children cos a Labour MP called a Tory MP scum. And that’s not a scummy thing to do at all.

16. Tory MP David Simmonds said Marcus Rashford’s experience of poverty in secondary school “took place entirely under a Labour government”. Rashford was 11 when Tories came into power, making David Simmonds are rare example of an ad hominem attack on yourself

17. Simmonds then said Labour’s parliamentary vote was “all about currying favour with wealth and power and celebrity status”. He might be right – the govt managed to unify Gary Linaker and Nigel Farage in condemnation of their denial of food to kids

18. Brandan Clark-Smith (who voted to starve kids) demanded “more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty”

19. So at once, the govt cut minimum wage for furloughed people. They now get 2/3 of the money the govt says is the absolute minimum it is possible to survive on

20. And then it was revealed that low-paid workers who have to isolate due to Covid can claim £500. Yay!

21. But if they’re told to isolate by the govt’s contact tracing app, they can’t claim anything. Un-yay.

22. Long story short: the govt cannot spend £120m feeding children. But it can spend £522 on the Eat Out Scheme, which its own report said contributed “negligible amounts” to the hospitality economy, and Boris Johnson admitted drove up infection rates – especially in the North

23. Those infection rates caused the govt to move Manchester into Tier 3

24. So the Mayor of Manchester asked for a £90m support package (1/6th of the money the govt spent causing the problem in the first place)

25. The govt said no, £60m

26. The Mayor said, how about £65m?

27. The govt said no, £60m

28. The Mayor said ok, fine, we’ll take the £60m

29. And then govt offered Manchester £22m, and then went to the press and said the Mayor was "being unreasonable"

30. The negotiations were led by Robert Jenrick, who recently set up a fund for the poorest 101 towns, then awarded his town £25m even though it is the 270th poorest, and therefore not even eligible

31. £25m is £237 per person

32. Manchester gets £7.85 per person

33. Robert Jenrick gave Manchester (2.8 million people) £22m

34. Robert Jenrick gave Richard Desmond (1 person) £45m

35. The talks broke down when the govt wouldn’t spend an extra £5m

36. The govt plans to spend £7m vitally rebranding "Highways England" to "National Highways"

37. Manchester Young Conservatives tweeted “Boris has lied about helping us in the North. It’s time for him to go". Don't look - they deleted it. Suspect somebody had a word.

38. Meanwhile the govt said Manchester will get the £60m after all, and chaos continue to reign supreme

39. But that £60m is brief reprieve for the Tories of Manchester, as a govt report said Tory seats in the North of England (the so-called "Red Wall" seats) can expect to lose at least 4000 jobs *each* as a result of Brexit, even if we do get a deal. More if we don't.

40. The govt rushed to begin its first airport Coronavirus testing, a mere 211 days after mandatory airport testing was begun in South Korea

41. South Korea has had 8 deaths per million

42. The UK has had 665 deaths per million

43. More airport news, as the govt finally accepted Brexit will cause “up to 8-hour delays at passport checks” and asked the EU to allow UK citizens to queue at EU-only lanes. Like we did when we were in the EU. But we aren’t now. So tough.

44. A senior diplomat said, “Having grown up in Brussels, Boris Johnson values the ability to travel freely to the continent”. You’d think Boris Johnson would foresee this problem when he led the campaign to stop that freedom.

45. The independent reviewer of Terrorism Legislation said the UK “will be increasingly unable to cope” after Brexit, as we lose access to EU data-sharing agreements

46. And a No-Deal end to UK/EU scientific collaboration will leave London with a £3bn annual deficit

47. In the space of 38 days, the govt announced the £100bn "Operation Moonshot" to solve Covid; then cancelled it; and then re-launched it again after it was found they’d accidentally continued to pay over 200 private consultants up to £7000 a day to work on it.

48. So this week, Boris Johnson said Moonshot would continue, but it’s goals “would take time”, which is the literal opposite of what he said it would do when it first announced it, and makes the entire thing absolutely pointless

49. And now it’s been admitted that Operation Moonshot would be quietly folded into the existing £12bn Test and Trace programme, and the £100bn has vanished. Apart from the bits the Serco consultants took for doing… nothing.

50. But Boris Johnson said the Test and Trace programme was “helping a bit”, and “a bit” is the least you’d expect if you’d spent £12bn

51. And then the £12bn Test and Trace programme fell to its lowest success rate so far, identifying only 60% of at-risk people

52. Local councils, with no additional funding, are tracing 98% of cases

53. A quick sweep though other epic successes you may have missed (or deliberately blocked out): Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch declared that it should be illegal to teach about inequality

54. The Cabinet Secretary said the report into “vicious and orchestrated” bullying by Home Secretary and Dementor Priti Patel “may never see the light of day”, cos if you have a report that vindicates you, you definitely sit on it as long as possible

55. And the appeals court unanimously overturned Priti Patel’s policy of removing people from the UK without giving them access to legal process or justice because – and I’m paraphrasing the judges here – what the fuck, Patel? What the actual fuck?

56. Undeterred, she announced plans to make rough-sleeping “grounds for removal of permission to be in the UK” and "denial of legal aid". So if you’re too poor to have a home, you must pay for a lawyer or she’ll shove you in the sea

57. After an unnamed Tory MP said it “looks bad to be handing top jobs to your friend and old boss”, Charles Moore, Boris Johnson’s friend and old boss, withdrew as next BBC chair.

58. The new favourite is Richard Sharp, the - yep - friend and old boss of Rishi Sunak

59. You’ll be amazed to hear this: Richard Sharp is a major donor to the Tory party. These little coincidences keep on happening

60. The govt decided to prevent EU citizens from having physical proof of their right to live in their own home

61. Grant Shapps threatened to “seize control of Transport for London” to save it from financial ruin at the hands of Sadiq Khan, who – the bastard - achieved a mere 71% reduction in the debts caused by his noble predecessor, Boris Johnson

62. Matt Hancock, facts at his fingertips, told MPs from Yorkshire their constituents could go on holiday abroad

63. But not in the UK

64. And then that they CAN go on holiday in the UK

65. But can't leave Yorkshire

66. He then said “I'll get back to you” about the details

67. A cross-party report found “the UK’s foreign policy is adrift”, that it lacks “clarity, confidence and vision” and that Britain is “absent from the world stage”. All of which is very soothing, as we move into the govt's proclaimed goal of a post-Brexit Global Britain.

68. And we can all relax: the govt is finally supporting culture in the UK, specifically the Nevill Holt Opera, which performs private operas, and is owned by Boris Johnson’s friend (and - jaw on floor! - Tory donor) David Ross, who is worth £700m so really needs the money.

69. The Nevill Holt Opera only functions in the summer, so thank god it has been prioritised with £85,000 to “maintain operations” in October.

And now, in honour of the opera, the fat lady can sing, cos I’m off to drink myself into oblivion. Join me.

We live in interesting times.

[newstfionline]

Friday, May 7, 2021

60 years since 1st American in space: Tourists lining up (AP) Sixty years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, everyday people are on the verge of following in his cosmic footsteps. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin used Wednesday’s anniversary to kick off an auction for a seat on the company’s first crew spaceflight—a short Shepard-like hop launched by a rocket named New Shepard. The Texas liftoff is targeted for July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to kick off tourist flights next year. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That will be followed by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station in January.

The U.S. birthrate is falling; other countries have faced the same problem (Washington Post) With the U.S. birthrate declining for the sixth year in a row and undergoing its largest drop in nearly 50 years, according to provisional data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is facing a dilemma with which many wealthy nations in Europe and Asia have long grappled. Instead of trying to ramp up immigration, some governments have tried subsidizing fertility treatments, offering free day care and generous parental leave, and paying thousands of dollars in cash grants to parents. But there’s little evidence that these policies have been effective on a large scale. South Korea, for instance, spent roughly $120 billion between 2005 and 2018 to incentivize having children, but its birthrate continued to fall. Singapore began offering new child-care subsidies, more-generous maternity leave policies and grants for new parents that today amount to $7,330 per baby. But those interventions didn’t reverse the trend: Singapore currently has the world’s third-lowest fertility rate. And Japan, Russia, Estonia and other nations have similar problems.

Protest road blockades halt Colombian coffee exports, federation says (Reuters) Road blockades connected to anti-government protests in Colombia, which marked their eighth day on Wednesday, have halted shipments of top agricultural export coffee, the head of the grower’s federation said. The protests, originally called in opposition to a now-canceled tax reform plan, are now demanding the government take action to tackle poverty, police violence and inequalities in the health and education systems. Twenty-four people, mostly demonstrators, have died. “We are stopped completely, exports are stopped, there is no movement of coffee to ports nor internally,” federation head Roberto Velez said in a phone interview.

20 dead in Rio de Janeiro shootout (Reuters) At least 20 people, including a police officer, died on Thursday in a shootout during a police operation against drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarezinho shanty town, O Globo newspaper reported on its website. Two passengers on a metro train were also wounded in the shooting in the northern Rio neighborhood, the newspaper said.

Gunboats and blockade threats as U.K., France clash over fishing (NBC News) The U.K. and France were engaged in a naval standoff on Thursday as a long-simmering dispute over post-Brexit fishing rights escalated in the English Channel. France deployed two maritime patrol boats to the waters off the British Channel island of Jersey, its navy said, after the British Navy dispatched two of its own vessels to the area late Wednesday. The dueling moves came as a flotilla of French fishing trawlers sailed to the Jersey port of St. Helier to protest over fishing rights. The French government has suggested it could cut power supplies to the island if its fishermen are not granted full access to U.K. fishing waters under post-Brexit trading terms. Clément Beaune, the French secretary of state for European affairs, told AFP on Thursday that Paris will “not be intimidated” by the British. On the other side of the Channel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged his "unwavering support" for the island after he spoke with Jersey officials about the prospect of a French blockade. Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands with a population of 108,000, is geographically closer to France than Britain. It sits just 14 miles off the French coast and receives most of its electricity from France via undersea cables.

Ukraine wants aid, NATO support from Blinken’s visit (AP) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Ukrainian counterpart in Kyiv Thursday, telling him that he was there to “reaffirm strongly” Washington’s commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.” Blinken also assured Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba that the U.S. was committed “to work with you and continue to strengthen your own democracy, building institutions, advancing your reforms against corruption.” By visiting so early in his tenure, before any trip to Russia, Blinken is signaling that Ukraine is a high foreign-policy priority for President Joe Biden’s administration. But what he can, or will, deliver in the meeting later with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is unclear.

India hits another grim record as it scrambles for oxygen supply (AP) Infections in India hit another grim daily record on Thursday as demand for medical oxygen jumped seven-fold and the government denied reports that it was slow in distributing life-saving supplies from abroad. The number of new confirmed cases breached 400,000 for the second time since the devastating surge began last month. The 412,262 cases pushed India’s tally to more than 21 million. The Health Ministry also reported 3,980 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 230,168. Experts believe both figures are an undercount. Eleven COVID-19 patients died as the pressure in the oxygen line dropped suddenly in a government medical college hospital in Chengalpet town in southern India on Wednesday night, possibly because of a faulty valve, The Times of India newspaper reported. Hospital authorities said they had repaired the pipeline last week, but the consumption of oxygen doubled since then, the daily said.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid gains chance to form government, oust Netanyahu (Washington Post) Yair Lapid, a former news anchor and leader of Israel’s centrist opposition, was picked to negotiate a new governing coalition Wednesday, opening the possibility of Israel getting its first government not led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in more than a decade. President Reuven Rivlin tapped Lapid to make the next attempt to form a government one day after Netanyahu failed to assemble a parliamentary majority after 28 days of effort. Under Israel’s system, Lapid also has four weeks to craft a power-sharing plan. If he falls short, the president could open to the process to any member of the Knesset or call for Israel’s fifth election since the spring of 2019. Lapid will face a stiff challenge in trying to find common ground among the range of anti-Netanyahu parties elected in March. As a bloc, they would control enough seats to secure a majority. But ideologically, they range from the far right to the far left of Israel’s political spectrum. They also include Israeli Arab parties that traditionally play no part in supporting governing coalitions but that may be needed this time.

Instagram fuels rise in black-market sales of maids into Persian Gulf servitude (Washington Post) The advent of Instagram in recent years has helped create an international black market for migrant workers, in particular women recruited in Africa and Asia who are sold into servitude as maids in Persian Gulf countries. Unlicensed agents have exploited the social media platform to place these women into jobs that often lack documentation or assurances of proper pay and working conditions. Several women who were marketed via Instagram described being treated essentially as captives and forced to work grueling hours for far less money than they had been promised. “They advertise us on social media, then the employer picks. Then we are delivered to their house. We are not told anything about the employers. You’re just told to take your stuff, and a driver takes you there,” said Vivian, 24, from Kenya. Domestic servants sold on the platform described encountering threats, exploitation and abuse. The agencies which marketed them, meanwhile, made thousands of dollars. In response to a request for comment last month, an Instagram spokesperson asked for the list of accounts identified by The Post so company officials could investigate. Instagram has since deleted these accounts.

Nonuplets: Woman From Mali Gives Birth To 9 Babies (NPR) A Malian woman has given birth to nine babies, in what could become a world record. Halima Cissé had been expecting to have seven newborns: ultrasound sessions had failed to spot two of her babies. "The newborns (five girls and four boys) and the mother are all doing well," Mali's health minister, Dr. Fanta Siby, said in an announcement about the births. Professor Youssef Alaoui, medical director of the private Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca where Cissé gave birth, said the babies were born at 30 weeks. The newborns weighed between 500 grams and 1 kilogram (about 1.1 to 2.2 pounds), he told journalists. The clinic has deployed a team of around 30 staff members to aid the mother's delivery and care for her nine children.

Nigeria reels from nationwide wave of deadly violence (The Guardian) Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari has come under mounting pressure from critics and allies alike as the country reels from multiple security crises that have claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks. An alarming wave of violence has left millions in Africa’s most populous country in uproar at the collapse in security. Attacks by jihadist groups in the north-east have been compounded by a sharp rise in abductions targeting civilians in schools and at interstate links across Nigeria. Mass killings by bandit groups in rural towns, a reported rise in armed robberies in urban areas and increasingly daring attacks on security forces by pro-Biafran militants in the south-east have also all risen. In April alone, almost 600 civilians were killed across the country and at least 406 abducted by armed groups, according to analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations. The violence has left much of the country on edge and Buhari facing the fiercest criticism since he took office.

[tanadrin]

I’m reading One Long Night, because the interview with Andrea Pitzer on Chris Hayes’ podcast was so interesting; and the book does not disappoint, though the subject matter is in equal measures depressing and infuriating. I want to talk about it at length when I’m through with it, but I was particularly struck today by her discussion of the Soviet gulags and how concentration camps arose in Germany, and how they marked a transition away from how concentration camps had been used before then.

The background is this: the concentration camp as we know it is only a little more than a century old. The individual kinds of violence that all inform the modern concentration camp have plenty of predecessors, some as old as time: internal deportations, native reservations, forced expulsions, detention without trial. But prior to the modern era, the characteristic feature of a concentration camp--the long-term detention of large numbers of civilians not convicted of any crime--would have been prohibitively expensive in manpower and effort. Two major technological innovations altered that calculus, Pitzer argues: the automatic gun and barbed wire. Those two devices permit a small number of guards to contain a much larger number of people; all that was needed was the will to do so.

The concentration camp as we know it was invented during Cuba’s struggle for independence; the advantages enjoyed by the rebels meant that Spain struggled to clear them out of the countryside, and the general in charge of Cuba, Arsenio Martinez Campos, noted that the only way to win the war would be to relocate basically the entire rural population of the island to Spanish-held towns to cut off the rebels’ base of support and prevent them from hiding among the rest of the population. And this he refused to do, considering it unthinkable under the rules of warfare. So Spain replaced him, and his successor, Valeriano Weyler, was all too happy to attempt what Campos would not. The resulting atrocities--including starvation and the spread of disease--were one of the things that spurred the American public to support war with Spain shortly thereafter, and while the Maine provided the immediate casus belli, Spanish conduct in Cuba was, in the public’s eyes, just as important a reason for going to war.

What is so bitterly comedic about that justification, though, is that after the war, when the U.S. found itself in possession of former Spanish colonies like Cuba and the Philippines, it found itself struggling against the very same rebels that Spain had failed to suppress; in the Philippines, the military immediately adopted tactics almost identical to the ones the Spanish had used in Cuba; and when during the Boer War in South Africa, the British likewise rounded up both Boer and black civilians in the Boer republics, it could cite the U.S.’s use of concentration camps as a justification for its own. And so on--each subsequent generation of internment drew on the precedent its predecessors had established, and if you wanted to object to (say) the policy of Germany interning all the British in the country at the start of World War I, you had to contend with the fact that they were doing nothing the British hadn’t done a few years before. (Indeed, it was the British internment of enemy aliens specifically that set off reciprocal treatment all over Europe; Pitzer relates the account of one Israel Cohen, a British man, being arrested in Germany and interned at Ruhleben, who, when the police came for him, was told ‘You have only your own Government to thank for this.’)

In fact, World War I is very important--internment of enemy civilians established not only a general precedent in favor of concentration camps in the eyes of the public, but it created the expectation that if you went into a concentration camp, you would come out again. The conditions in these camps were not good by any stretch of the imagination, but they were not as awful as the camps of Cuba, the Philippines, or South Africa, where famine and disease killed thousands. Concentration camps became decoupled from actual battlefield strategy, arising not “out of the local chaos of warfare, but instead represent[ing] a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself.’ (p. 103)

To this grim precedent, the Soviets added another innovation: the gulag was the first time concentration camps were used in peacetime particularly, and they were integrated into the Soviet state apparatus as a normal part of its justice system. And more than just the semi-punitive labor that, say, German POWs had been forced to perform during the war (and after--Germany had to release the POWs it held when WWI ended, but thousands of Germans continued to be detained long after the war), the Soviets hoped to make gulags profitable to their economy on net. Whatever their original justification, it quickly becomes clear as the labor camp is institutionalized in Soviet society that much of the behavior of the Soviet state around forced labor is shaped by the age-old impulse of conquerers to use conquered peoples to enrich themselves. After Poland was divided with Germany, thousands of Poles were shipped to the gulags and forced to work. And not only was the USSR thus inheriting the system of forced labor that Tsarist Russia had used, it was making it significantly crueler.

The premise of using labor to reeducate problematic citizens to be part of a bright Soviet future gave way to the idea that detainees themselves represented raw materials to be consumed in building that future.

In reality, Frenkel [an administrator at the Solovki camp] did not invent the tiered ration system from scratch. Likewise, the shift from idealized rehabilitation to a more permanent system maximizing forced labor may have been inevitable. Stalin appeared impressed with the possibilities of detainee labor and believed in the profitability of the Solovki endeavor (despite the fact, as Anne Applebaum has noted, that Solovki required a subsidy of 1.6 million rubles--perhaps due to graft). (p. 132)

Under the tsars in previous centuries, Polish insurgents resisting Russian rule or political prisoners convicted for offenses against the tsar were shipped off to remote Siberian katorga, working in mining or logging. Their penal labor had often been brutal, but it had come after conviction in an actual trial. Compared to penal labor under the tsars, Gulag workdays were longer and the rations shorter. A daily quota for earth mined by a single Decembrist prisoner at Nerchinsk under Tsar Nicholas I was 118 pounds; in the Soviet era, the same lone prisoner might be expected to excavate 28,800 pounds. And while tsarist courts had long sentenced political prisoners to labor camps, the Gulag was orders of magnitude larger from its very beginning. The Soviet Union had grafted the worst of Russian penal history onto the extrajudicial detention of internment, creating a vast malignant enterprise. And it would continue to grow. (p.133-34)

The scale of the gulags declines after Stalin’s death, but it never quite disappears.

Neither self-sustaining nor productive in the long run, the system required tremendous resources, and the economic burden of the camps had weighed heavily on the Soviet Union in wartime.

Still, as historian Steven Barnes has pointed out, ‘The Soviet leadership never entertained the notion of dismantling the system.’ The USSR had always had a camp system; its tendrils had grown into agriculture and industry, as well as becoming a key facet of government interactions with citizens. The Gulag was intrinsic to the state itself. (p.155)

And then there’s this passage, about the camp at Solovki, which was almost painful to read:

Prisoners heard from the radio station that [Maxim] Gorky was coming. Detainees could hardly wait for him to tell the world what was happening on Solovki: ‘Gorki will spot everything, find out everything. ... About the logging and the torture on the tree stumps, the sekirka [punishment cells], the hunger, the disease... the sentences without conviction.... The whole lot!’

Before Gorky’s visit, contingents of prisoners were hidden in the forest to lessen evidence of overcrowding. Sick patients were given new gowns to wear ... . Gorky visited the sick bay, a labor camp, and stopped in at the children’s colony that had been formed since Likhachev first encountered the urchins hiding under his bunk.

Gorky asked to speak to one boy privately and stayed with him a long time. Standing outside with the rest of the crowd, Likhachev counted forty minutes on the watch his father had given him. He recounts that Gorky emerged weeping and climbed the stairway to the punishment cell at Sekirka.

Yet when Gorky’s anxiously awaited piece on the trip came out, the section about Solovki was relegated to Part Five of the report, with the devastating conclusion that ‘camps such as “Solovki” were absolutely necessary. ... Only by this road would the state achieve in the fastest possible time one of its aims: to get rid of prisons.’

The German system, of course, did not start out as a program of genocide. It did not even necessarily start out as a program of forced labor (i.e., slavery) like in Russia. Its immediate predecessors, in fact, might be said to be the concentration camps established before the Nazis even came to power to keep Roma away from cities like Frankfurt (cf. p. 183); the Roma were subject to registry before any racial laws about Jews were passed, before the Nazis ever took power, and they were swept up along with the homeless during the Olympics to keep them out of sight of the international press (p. 187). But as the classes of political prisoners and other undesirables swelled, so did the concentration camp system.

Once war broke out, of course, the temptation to use prisoners for war industry was not resisted.

By late 1941, the camps had grown dense and squalid from the flood of detainees arriving from abroad, yet the war placed still more demands on the camps. ... a complex network of labor projects emerged, spread across thousands of sites. Every camp and subcamp used prisoner labor in some fashion. Prisoners working for the I.G. Farben rubber plant lived in a dedicated compound at Auschwitz. Fur linings in the coats of the SS came from hutches of rabbits under the administration of prisoners at Dachau. At Neuengamme, detainees were set to work clearing rubble from the bombed roads and buildings outside Hamburg. ... Both Nazis and Soviets went to war on the backs of their concentration camp prisoners. Forced-labor Gulag efficiency expert Naftaly Frenkel had suggested the system be optimized to get the most out of prisoners in their first three months, after which they were disposable. He would have been ideally placed to appreciate that before the end of the war, average life expectancy at Neuengamme concentration camp had dropped to twelve weeks. (p. 200-201)

What is perhaps the most bitter flourish on the German concentration camp system is that there was a very real possibility it could have been entirely avoided. Pitzer argues that even after the death of Hindenberg and Hitler’s adoption of the title Fuehrer, there was a very real possibility that the Nazi regime might have proceeded along (still cruel, still inhumane, still racist) legalistic lines, keeping continuity with German law, rather than relying on extrajudicial terror. Himmler’s desire to strengthen his position within the government and the purge of Rohm and the SA led to him expanding the concentration camp system further; and this was what ensured that, when the systematic, wholesale extermination of the Jews was decided upon, there was a preexisting infrastructure in place to facilitate it. (see p. 178-179) In the early years, local prosecutors actively sought to arrest and try sadistic guards, and the notion that the concentration camps were sites of abuse or torture was hotly contested.

In his first months as commandant at Dachau, Theodor Eicke flew into a rage, haranguing prisoners about the vicious rumors in the community about conditions there. Reminding them that detainees had already been killed for spreading word about the camp--including Dr. Katz, who had helped so many prisoners--Eicke threatened that more could be executed at any point. He seemed especially offended by any suggested comparison to Soviet tactics. ‘There are no atrocities and there is no Cheka cellar in Dachau!’ he insisted. ‘Anybody whipped deserves to be whipped.’

Even the Nazis, one supposes, would balk at being compared to the Nazis.

Special mention goes to two people in this section of the book: Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist who fled to Russia and, who along with her husband, was arrested and thrown into the gulag. She survived; her husband did not--but survived only to be handed over to the Nazis after the invasion of Poland, as part of a prisoner exchange, whereupon she was shipped to a Nazi concentration camp. She survived the war, at least, and seven years total of internment; she lived until 1989.

Hans Beimler was a Communist elected three times to the Reichstag, the last in May of 1933. He was arrested in April and imprisoned in Dachau, where he was repeatedly beaten and humiliated and encouraged to kill himself. Nighttime beatings and the murder of his cellmates (some of whom were friends of his) made him resolve to escape, since he figured it would be better to be shot trying to break out than to be murdered and have it staged to look like a suicide.

[A] friend who was a prisoner outside the bunker managed to slip him a tool to unscrew the grate over his window and tin snips to help manage the barbed wire. Later reports claimed he strangled a storm trooper and took his clothing, but Beimler simply crawled out of his high window, taking a board with him. He navigated three layers of barbed wire--the middle one electrified--using the wood for insulation, and climbed onto the six-foot wall surrounding the camp’s exterior. Waiting there a moment to make sure he had not been seen, he jumped down the other side and made his way to Munich.

The next morning, Steinbrenner arrived to find an empty cell. Frantic searches were made, prisoners were interrogated. For some time, guardhouse staff remained certain Beimler was hiding somewhere on the grounds. Dogs were used to search, and a hundred-mark reward was posted in the local paper Amper-Bote. But Beimler remained in hiding until he could safely get to Berlin and cross the border to the east.

Once out of the country, he mailed a postcard to Dachau telling the camp commanders to kiss his ass. Some three months after his escape, he was sitting in Moscow writing a searing indictment of Nazi atrocities. It was printed in three languages and circled the globe. (p. 173-174)

It’s important to observe that no system of mass detention ever sets out with the cruelty that (sooner or later) inevitably manifests in mind. From reconcentracion in Cuba to the Nazi crimes, there is never a single point of no return for the countries involved, nor a single moment of moral clarity where the architects of these policies are forced to confront what they are creating. It is always possible for those responsible to hide behind precedent, behind political rhetoric, behind expedient to justify to the rest of the world as to why their camps are not only right but necessary, to argue away any evidence for the gravity of these sins as ‘a few bad apples’ or ‘an unfortunate excess.’

And the corollary to this is that you will never get one moment you can point to and say to the people around you, “Look! There it is! That’s the moral event horizon, and they just crossed it. You can’t possibly support them now.” Because there will always be a way for people to rationalize their support of such policies. I suspect the only antidote, individual or collective, is an ironclad moral will that rejects the dehumanization of others outright--and to fight like hell to shut such evils down when they first begin to appear.

This all has obvious relevance to the present political moment--that’s why Pitzer was on Hayes’ podcast, that’s why I wanted to read this book to begin with. I don’t think that, outside genuine, self-described neo-Nazis, even in the darkest imagination of the most reflexively prejudiced Trump supporter, the desire for Soviet or Nazi-style gulags exists, I really don’t. But things can always get worse. The cruelties build on themselves incrementially--and the only way to prevent that, to actually make sure that kind of thing can’t happen here (or anything like it--there is, after all, plenty of evil that is not outright genocide) is to refuse to permit the creation of the institutions that are its necessary predecessors.

[kh-arch]

Urban Planning & The Tucker Torpedo

The fine folks from Silicon Valley are finally turning their attention to issues of urban planning and affordability. They waited until they’ve built monuments to themselves in the form of suburban office parks or amorphous urban blobs that obstruct the urban fabric. However, at least the warning light has come on and they are now paying attention. This is good.

It puts adherents of New Urbanism, like me, in an awkward but familiar position. I’ll first try to explain that most people are trying to treat the symptoms and not the disease. They’ll ask, rightfully, well what’s your solution? Then off I go to spread the good news of proper urban form. That it can and has lasted throughout the centuries because it creates wonderful human habitats. To this day people still flock to these wonderful places because they were designed for people.

Presentation over and now for the dreaded question.

If New Urbanism is the answer then why, after almost 30 years, hasn’t it taken off?

If you’re a New Urbanist you hear this question frequently. The answers in the guide book range from poor implementation, zoning delays or the referenced projects not actually being “real NU”. These responses suggest an undue amount of fragility surrounding NU.

Is this actually the case? The successful NU projects are actually wildly successful. They’ve even managed, over time, to grow and molt. Which, of course, is the hallmark of proper urban design.

So, if New Urbanism has so many successes then why isn’t it the default form of urban design today?

Well, there is some merit to the responses above. NU has been stymied at every turn by entrenched interests. The fact that plenty of projects have been built around the country and around the world is a testament to the practitioners and the town founders who have taken up the fight.

Yes, as per the title of this post, I feel the entrenched interests have tried to stifle NU in a way similar to how Preston Tucker and his Tucker Torpedo were squelched by the auto industry. The powers that be in the auto industry used every tool in their box, including government influence, to shut him down. In a similar manner, the threat of New Urbanism to conventional suburb developers was such that they made traditional neighborhood development illegal. Thanks to their efforts, cities with existing urban fabric require an overlay zoning code  because nothing that is already built there meets the current zoning code.

Before 1945 the default method of planning in the US was very similar in approach to New Urbanism. It’s part of what inspired New Urbanism in the first place. Now that very same form of development, the kind that was so wonderfully represented in the movie Back to the Future (irony alert), and that inspired Walt Disney’s Main Street, is illegal. In its place was installed a completely foreign form of development, originally conceived in Europe and then implemented in the US as a way of streamlining development processes. This new pattern was deemed necessary to contend with the massive growth of post-war America.

While this new form was very effective in meeting the incredible demand, what it created was a pattern of urbanism that wasn’t self sustaining, required huge subsidies and therefore was – and still is – dependent upon revenues from future development to remain solvent.

While this multi-ring suburb pattern of development has spread across the continent, certain cities have been able to resist. Places like New York City and its boroughs, as well as San Francisco and the bay area, have great urban DNA which is financially self-sustaining and therefore has allowed them to curtail development because they are not dependent on those revenues to remain solvent. The result is increased demand without enough supply.

Towers aren't the solution. If you disagree then show me your math.

How much should each unit cost based on your definition of affordable?

How many square feet should each unit be, on average, to be livable?

What is the current cost per square foot to build new in your zip code?

How much will it cost to demolish and remove the existing structure?

What is the land cost per lot in your zip code?

If parking issues were not a concern and zoning restrictions were eliminated, how many units would you need to build on that lot in order to get down to your predefined cost target for affordability?

Since that’s impossible, what height limit would you impose?

How many floors does that yield?

What is the cost per unit?

If you were to subsidize the development, how much would you need to subsidize each unit to make it affordable?

How many affordable units are needed in your zip code?

Considering the cost per subsidy calculated above, how much money is needed to subsidize the number of affordable units required?

How much money in property taxes would need to be raised in order to pay for these subsidies?

Assuming a 20 year bond issue, what is the tax increase per year per unit in your zip code required to pay for the subsidies?

What if land prices were cut in half?

What if construction prices were cut in half?

Considering 50% of the cost of construction is labor costs, are you willing to pay the workers 50% less? If not, then you need the cost of materials to be free to reduce costs by 50%.

How else would you reduce the cost of construction without shortchanging the labor force?

The above is an extremely short list of the questions that need to be answered to implement an affordable housing subsidy program in areas with extremely high demand.

It’s not San Francisco’s fault that they offer greater economic opportunity than surrounding cities. The issue isn’t that San Francisco or New York City or Boston are doing things wrong. It’s that other cities aren’t doing things right.

The city of Austin, Texas, for instance, is doing more to increase housing affordability in San Francisco than San Francisco can hope to do. This, oddly enough, has a lot to do with Silicon Valley based tech companies increasing their presence in Austin. It’s by increasing economic opportunity throughout the US that we can alleviate the upward pressure on housing prices in areas experiencing great demand.

If you do the little math exercise up above you will see that even if we replaced many great residential neighborhoods in San Francisco with 10 story buildings we would not be able to bring the price point down to anything a sane person would consider affordable. Further, with the current tastes of the architectural profession tending toward dystopian post apocalyptic container trash, the resulting designs would be inhumane. San Francisco would have lost tons of its character and charm while doing nothing to ameliorate housing prices.

I don’t need to guess about the future. I’m living it. I know what happens when high-rise living is promoted above all other typologies. 👈 Click that link and see what the future holds for unit size and affordability.

Then go watch Stewart Brand’s documentary on How Buildings Learn. Read some Jane Jacobs. Then go to Paris before people who dream of high rises ruin it forever.

[argentvive]

Jon’s Resurrection: The Role of Ghost

On the show, Jon was resurrected by Melisandre, with Ghost standing by.

I wrote about this scene a long time ago. 

https://argentvive.tumblr.com/search/solva+et+coagula

 I argued that Melisandre washing Jon and cutting his hair was a solve et coagula ritual.  I also said I thought that the fan theory that Jon warged into Ghost when he was stabbed could well be correct.

Recently, I was going through the emblems in Atalanta fugiens and came across one (XXIV) I have never posted before that may provide a clue to how GRRM intends to write this scene in the next book.

There are two scenes here.  You need to read the emblem like a comic strip, except front to back rather than left to right.

In alchemy, the King is the Philosopher’s-Stone-to-be.  He must be “killed” so he can be resurrected, young and vigorous.  The wolf is a symbol for antimony, the wolf of metals, the universal solvent, the mercurial water. 

(Similarly, the dragon is a symbol for Mercurius at the beginning of the Work.  Jon and Dany are both closely associated with animals that are symbols for the “lower, earthly self which the soul must learn to subdue and train, so that the higher self...may at last reign.” Lyndy Abraham, p. 60)

The caption for the emblem reads as follows:

The wolf devoured the king and after the wolf has been burnt, it returned the king to life. (Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, XXIV)

So in the foreground you see the wolf “devouring” the king--well, taking a little nibble at least.  Then in the background, you see the wolf who devoured the king being burned, and in the process, the king is restored to life, young and whole. 

This leads me to think that Ghost will play a critical part in Jon’s resurrection in the next book.  GRRM can hardly have Ghost eat* Jon, but he can certainly take in Jon’s consciousness, his life force.  The books spend quite a bit of time describing Jon warging into Ghost, so the precedent is there.  

(*If you see a parallel between this Emblem and Little Red Riding Hood, who IS eaten by a wolf, you’re probably on to something.  Notice how the revived King is wearing a cape, which should be red as a mark of his transformation into the Red King, the Philosopher’s Stone.  What I don’t know is much the Grimms added to the folk tales they collected in 19th century Germany.)

But then what about the second scene?  How do we get Jon alive again?  To follow the emblem strictly, you’d have to have the Night’s Watch burn Ghost, somehow forcing Jon’s spirit back into his dead body.   I guess that could work.  But I prefer a scenario where Melisandre is involved, as on the show.  But no matter what, Ghost will be in that room and I expect that  the first clue we will get of Jon’s resurrection will be from the direwolf, as on the show.  

I’m appending the entire discourse for Emblem XXIV, for anyone who can plow through the archaic English translation (the original is in Latin).  I’ve boldfaced sentences that seem to apply to Jon, or might apply to him in the future.  

<The Hunger and Voracity of a wolf is remarkably knowne to be very great, insomuch that when his prey is wanting he will feed even upon the Earth; with which he is likewise said to fill his belly when he is about to set upon large herds of Cattle, that so being made heavier by that burden he may resist more strongly and not easily be shaken off from his hold. When he enters a fold he doth not only kill enough to satisfye his hunger but through greedinesse destroys the whole flock. He is Sacred to Apollo and Latona because he stood by her when she was in Labour, for Latona could not have delivered young unlesse he had been present. Hence likewise the wolf is thought acceptable to Apollo because he celebrated his birthday, as also because his Eyes shine and cast forth light in the midst of the night. Therefore the breathlesse body of the King is thrown to the wolf when he is ravenously hungry, not to the end that the wolf should wholly consume and annihilate the King, but that by his own death the wolf should restore strength and life to him. For there is a certain amatorious Virtue in the Tayle of the Wolf which is infused into the half dead King which makes him very desirable to all men upon the recovery of His former Health and Beauty. The Hyrcanians nourished Doggs for no other Use but that they might cast their Dead Bodyes to be devoured by them, as Cicero tells us. And so the Massagetes give men that dye of diseases as a prey to doggs. But the Philosophers give their King to a Wolf, nor indeed are they pleased with the Custom of the Sabeans, who carryed out their dead in the same manner as dung and threw their King upon the Dunghills; nor that of the Troglodytes of the Red Sea, who tyed the Necks of their dead men to their feet and hurried them along with Jests and Laughter, and so put them into the ground without any Consideration of the place of Buriall. But the Philosophers chose to follow the Custom of the Magi, who did not bury their dead bodyes till they had first been torn to pieces by wild beasts; or of the Indians, who being Crowned and singing the praises of the Gods commanded themselves to be burnt alive, least old age should come upon them. But these customs were imposed upon them all without any hopes of Resurrection or Renewall of Life. Thinges are far otherwise disposed among the Philosophers. For they certainly know that from their King devoured by a wolf there will appear one that is Alive, Strong and Young, and that the wolf must be burnt in his stead. For when the belly of the wolf is so gorged he will easily be slain, but although the King be dead he hath a Martiall or Cygnean Virtue that he can neither be wounded nor consumed. But where is this Wolf to be hunted, or whence this King to be taken? The Philosophers answer that the wolf wanders up and down in the Mounteins and Valleys that he may seize his prey, which must be drawn out of their dens and preserved for Use. But the King being fatigued with the long journey he has taken from the East at length falls down, and his death is then hastened by his grief seeing himself among Strangers, deprived of all his Honours and so little esteemed as for a small price to be sold into slavery. But it is necessary that the Wolf must be taken out of a Cold Region, for those that are bred in Cold Countryes are more fierce than in Libya or Egypt by reason of their greater hunger occasioned by the externall cold. Hence the devoured King revives with the heart of a Lyon and is able afterwards to conquer all beasts. And although he is the meanest in Aspect among his six brothers, being the Youngest of them all, yet after many miseries and tribulations he shall at last come to the most powerfull Kingdom. Hereupon Gratianus in the Rosary saith: In Alchymy there is a certain noble body which moved from Master to Master, in whose beginning there shall be Misery with Vinegar, but in the End Joy with Gladnesse. And Alanus in the same place says: There is one thing to be chosen out of all, which is of a Livid Colour, having a clear liquid metallick Species, and is a thinge Hot and Moist, Watery and Combustible, and is a Living Oyle and Living Tincture, a Minerall Stone and Water of Life of wonderfull efficacy. It is not always safe for Kings to travell out of the Confines of their Kingdoms, for if they endeavour to conceal themselves and yet happen to be known by their Adversaries, they are taken for Spyes and imprisoned; if being known they would proceed without an Army they are in the same manner of danger. And so it has happened to this Indian King, or if he had not been prevented by death it would so have happened. This capture is the first Sublimation, Lotion and Nobilitation which the Philosophers use, that the second and third may be performed with more happy success. For the second and third without the first are of no moment, the King being as yet Pusillanimous, Drowsy and Sick. For He must first require Subsidies and Tributes of his Subjects by which he may purchase himself garments and other necessaryes, and afterwards he will be rich enough and able to new clothe all his Subjects as often as He pleases. For great thinges being generally sprung from small beginnings can afterwards raise up small thinges, or even suppresse great ones if such their pleasure be. As appears by some Cities, which at first were small but were governed by mighty Kings, and so from Villages became populous and Magnificent Towns.>

Source: alchemywebsite.com   

[libertariantaoist]

News Roundup 10/15/19

By Kyle Anzalone

US News

Dallas police shot and killed a woman who was playing video games inside of her home with her nephew. [Link]

FBI data shows 30,500 children under the age of ten have been arrested over six years. [Link]

Trump sparked outrage when he tweeted about a US Green Beret who killed an unarmed Afghan in 2010 and talked about it on Fox News. The soldier is now on trial. In Trump’s tweet, he said US soldiers are trained to be ‘killing machines.’ [Link]

The FBI and CIA changed Wikipedia entries for the Iraq War, Gitmo, and a former CIA Director. [Link]

The US is deploying an additional 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia. The troops’ deployments include air defense and fighter jets. [Link]

South America

Ecuadorian indigenous groups protesting the government have agreed to talks with the president. Five people have died in the protests. [Link] The negotiations resulted in a deal between President Moreno and protest leaders. Moreno will go ahead with fuel subsidy cuts that sparked the protests. However, a new law will be passed to assist the poor. [Link]

Senators Rubio and Cruz push Trump to give Citgo control to Guaido. [Link]

Spain

Twelve leaders of the Catalan independence movement have been sentenced to nine to 13 years in prison for holding an independence vote in October 2017. [Link]

Turkey Invades Syria

Since starting the invasion of Syria, Turkey has arrested the mayors of four Kurdish villages near the Syrian border. Turkey’s Kurdish political party says over 150 of its members have been arrested in the past week. [Link]

US special forces were nearly hit with Turkish mortar fire in northeast Syria. [Link]

Secretary of Defense Esper says the US is preparing to withdraw about 1,000 troops from eastern Syria. Esper said Turkey plans to extend their invasion of Syrian Kurdistan further south. [Link] Erdogan now says Turkish forces will create a 30-35 km safe zone. [Link]

The 1,000 US troops in northeast Syria could withdraw in a matter of days. [Link]

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports Turkish backed forces are executing captured Kurdish fighters and civilians. [Link]

The Syrian Kurds made a deal with Assad to deploy Syrian troops along the Syrian/Turkish border. [Link] Assad’s forces are deploying to towns south of the border as well. [Link] Kurdish sources report Russia brokered the deal with Assad. [Link]

Turkey’s President Erdogan says he will not back down from the Syrian mission. [Link]

Trump said the Syrian Kurds might be intentionally releasing ISIS fighters to draw the US back in. [Link]

France suspends weapon sales to Turkey. [Link]

Trump announced a 50% tariff on Turkish steel because of the invasion of Syria. Trump also said a trade deal with Turkey is dead, and he may impose additional sanctions. [Link]

Sec Def Esper says he will meet with other NATO countries and push them to adopt measures against Turkey. [Link]

[Read More](https://libertarianinstitute.org/news-roundup/news-roundup-10-15-19/

[bug-inmyeye]

In case you didn’t know..

Alaska’s Governor has line item vetoed funding for most of Alaska’s essential functions, putting us into a situation the state has no idea how to handle without laying off thousands of people and going into financial chaos.

From the article from Anchorage Daily News:

EDUCATION

• The University of Alaska has had its budget reduced by $130 million. Atop the $5 million reduction already proposed by lawmakers, the $135 million cut is 41% of the state’s annual support for the university system. All university employees were given 60-day furlough notices.

• A one-time $30 million funding boost for K-12 schools was vetoed. Formally, the governor views that funding — which was passed by lawmakers last year — as illegal. The issue is expected to go to court.

• Funding for Head Start, early childhood education and Parents as Teachers has been eliminated, cutting $8.6 million.

• Advance funding for K-12 schools in the 2020-21 school year was removed.

• Funding for the “Online With Libraries” and “Live Homework Help” programs at public libraries was cut by $800,000, defunding the programs completely.

[Gov. Dunleavy vetoes $444 million from Alaska state operating budget]

HEALTH CARE

• Medicaid dental coverage has been eliminated for adults, a cut of $27 million.

• $50 million has been vetoed from Medicaid services atop a $70 million cut approved by the Legislature. The actual reduction may vary: Because Medicaid is an entitlement program, the state is required to pay the bills that are submitted by providers. The state is seeking to those reduce bills through a variety of efforts.

• The governor vetoed $6.1 million in behavioral health treatment grants, leaving $61.5 million in the mental health budget.

ARTS AND CULTURE

• The Alaska State Council on the Arts has been defunded, cutting $2.8 million, and the governor also vetoed a $1.1 million increase in the council’s budget that would have been funded by private foundations. (The money would have been distributed in grants.)

• State funding for public broadcasting, including TV and radio stations, was cut by $2.7 million.

ENVIRONMENT

• The Ocean Ranger cruise ship pollution inspection program was defunded, cutting $3.4 million. (This program was entirely funded with fees from the cruise ship industry and the veto does not save tax dollars.)

PUBLIC ASSISTANCE

• The state’s senior benefits program, which pays cash to poor elders each month, has been fully eliminated, cutting $20.8 million from the budget.

• Adult public assistance payments to needy aged, blind and disabled Alaskans have been cut by $7.5 million through a veto.

• Vetoes in the state’s mental health budget eliminated $7.2 million for the homeless assistance program run by the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. and another $2 million from the corporation’s special-needs housing program. Less than $1 million remains in the homeless assistance program, and $1.7 million in the special-needs program.

[Dunleavy veto is 'devastating,’ says University of Alaska president]

PUBLIC SAFETY

• The budget for the Village Public Safety Officer program was cut by $3 million. (Another $3 million was vetoed from a supplemental budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30.) The reduction does not reduce the number of VPSOs — the program has been unable to hire enough officers to use its full $14 million budget.

• Money for a prosecutor and assistant in Utqiagvik was vetoed, reducing the budget by $533,000.

• The Alaska Wing of the Civil Air Patrol was defunded, saving $250,000.

• The governor vetoed a 3% cost of living increase for court system employees.

• The entire budget of the Alaska Legal Services Corp., about $750,000, was vetoed by the governor. The corporation is the only organization that provides free help to poor Alaskans in civil lawsuits.

• The governor vetoed about $400,000 from the Public Defender Agency, plus another $180,000 from the agency’s travel budget. That organization defends poor Alaskans who cannot hire an attorney in criminal cases. The agency still has $26.7 million in its budget.

• The governor vetoed $334,700 from the budget of the Alaska Court System in response to repeated rulings by the Alaska Supreme Court that abortion rights are protected by the state constitution. According to the justification for the veto, “The Legislative and Executive Branch are opposed to State funded elective abortions; the only branch of government that insists on State funded elective abortions is the Supreme Court. The annual cost of elective abortions is reflected by this reduction.”

[Dunleavy budget veto guts services to the homeless statewide, hitting Anchorage hardest]

MUNICIPAL ASSISTANCE

• A $30 million appropriation to the state’s community assistance fund was vetoed by the governor. That act will reduce next year’s payments to cities and boroughs by a third, according to the Alaska Municipal League.

• The governor vetoed half, or $48.9 million, of the money required to pay the state subsidy for older school bond debt incurred by cities and boroughs. Under a now-suspended program, the state pays a portion of bonds issued by local governments for school construction and renovation. The veto means local governments now have to pay more of those older bonds.

PERMANENT FUND

• The governor vetoed $5.4 billion of a $9.4 billion transfer from the Permanent Fund’s earnings reserve to the corpus of the fund. The transfer was intended to prevent the Legislature or the governor from easily spending that money. The veto leaves the money in the Permanent Fund’s earnings reserve, where it can be spent.

• The governor vetoed a $5.3 million appropriation intended to pay management fees needed for the fund to meet expected growth in the next fiscal year. A fund spokeswoman said that if the fund grows according to expectations, it will need to request additional funding because of the veto.

AGRICULTURE

• A $1.2 million veto of funding for agricultural development in the Department of Natural Resources eliminates “lower-priority” programs in the Division of Agriculture, including marketing (such as the Alaska Grown program), the state’s agricultural veterinarian, the farm-to-prison program, agricultural inspections, grain seed production, and pest control studies.

• The state’s agricultural revolving loan program, intended to encourage farm growth, has been defunded, saving $319,600. According to a justification for the cut, “The Department of Natural Resources will focus on its core mission and reduce state competition with private-sector lenders.”

• $375,000 has been cut from the budget for the state’s new industrial hemp program.

And why is this happening? Because the current administration refuses to implement any kind of tax (Alaska doesn’t have income or sales tax*) and insists on giving out a $3000 dividend, which is irresponsibly draining the fund for short-term gain. 

*some boroughs and towns have sales tax

I just want people to understand that this is happening to this beautiful state, and it’s going to hurt a lot of people. 

[dendroica]

Jay Inslee has an actual, detailed plan — and there’s more to come. So far, he’s outlined proposals for getting America out of the coal business over the next 11 years (with a “GI Bill” for retraining coal workers), part of a move to an energy grid that relies on renewable energy and zero carbon emissions by 2035. There’s a ReBuild America initiative that aims to make all of our residential and commercial buildings energy-efficient over 25 years (and creating millions of construction jobs in the process), aided by a $90 billion Green Bank for clean energy projects. A President Inslee would look to dramatically boost funding for public transit (this daily SEPTA rider can only say, 'Whoo hoo!"), a Clean Water for All initiative (because Flint, like many other towns, still doesn’t have clean water), a slew of investments in clean-energy manufacturing that would hopefully help America catch up to rivals like China, and of course, moving to all zero-emission vehicles by 2030 with an updated “Cars for Clunkers” to get polluting 4-wheelers off the streets. I’d call this a Green New Deal with some meat, except meat is bad for climate change. Maybe better, a Mueller report for the environment, because (like the Mueller report) you shouldn’t rely on a short summary but read the entire thing. Did I hear you say that there must be a catch? Yes, it’s expensive — a $9 trillion proposal that heavily leverages private investment but would still cost taxpayers an estimated $300 billion a year. And Inslee has been less specific — so far — about the, ahem, funding mechanism. Mann, the Penn State climate expert, told me he believes there needs to be a price on carbon but that Inslee may be a little gun shy after a proposed carbon tax failed in his home state. Jared Leopold, who grew up in Philly’s western suburbs and is now communications chief for the Inslee campaign, told me that the candidate wants to roll back the Trump tax cuts weighted toward big corporations and billionaires, which by itself is about $150 billion a year, and end government subsidies for Big Oil and Gas. “And a big part of this is the investment in the future,” Leopold added, citing the added revenue from creating jobs in clean energy and construction. “Defeating Trump isn’t enough, as a climate policy,” Mann said. “It isn’t enough to just get back to where we were two years ago. In the meantime there has been too much water under the bridge—or, rather, carbon pollution added to the atmosphere—for that to be adequate.”

Jay Inslee has a plan for saving Earth. So why is he at 0.8 percent in the polls? | Will Bunch

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Why We Need Publicly Owned Energy for a Green New Deal

Digital Elixir Why We Need Publicly Owned Energy for a Green New Deal

Public ownership can create hundreds of thousands of jobs in generating energy and in new industry supply chains. There are very few places in the UK where renewable energy can’t happen – wind and solar can be delivered almost everywhere. This creates a huge opportunity to reverse decades of underinvestment in ex-mining communities decimated by Thatcher.

Platform estimates that 40,000 existing oil workers (direct and supply chain) may need to be in a different job by 2030. But their research shows, with ambitious government policies, we can create three to four times as many jobs in clean energy industries.

Right now, government is undermining renewable energy with regressive policies, failing to give vital support to onshore wind and solar – and renewable energy jobs have plunged by a third. This is a disaster. The government needs to reinstate subsidies for solar and deliver an onshore wind boom.

Workers and climate change protestors joined together in an 11 day occupation against the closure of the Vestas wind turbine factory in 2009. (The company has now created some new jobs but not as many as it axed). We could take control over decisions like this – with a publicly owned British company with a long term strategy for turbine manufacture, with workers, citizens and the public on the board.

Offshore wind is touted as a success – but the real story here is that the public is missing out by leaving it to non UK companies (public and private) to pick up the benefits. We should be following the example of countries like Denmark and Sweden – their publicly owned companies DONG and Vattenfall own 32% and 6% of UK offshore wind capacity, respectively. We need our own ‘Waterfall’.

The Labour Energy Forum report ‘Who owns the wind?’ proposes the creation of four major publicly owned offshore wind companies: Scottish Wind, Energy for Londoners, Wind of the North and Floating Cornwall. These would lead the way in investing in and directly operating publicly owned offshore wind capacity. Effectively they would also act as anchor institutions, boosting local and regional economies.

The public sector can build its renewables capacity and expertise and ultimately deliver far more efficiently than the private sector. Modelling work by Frontier Economics for IPPR shows how full public ownership through construction and operation can generate substantial savings for consumers because of the lower cost of capital. In addition, there are the profits coming back to the public purse – Swindon Borough Council has a solar bond that generates £1 million every year.

Connecting Communities to the Grid

The National Grid – which transmits electricity and gas across the country – and the regional distribution companies which distribute energy – were built for an age of coal, oil and nuclear. The future of energy is decentralised and renewable. We need to own this vital infrastructure so we can upgrade it.

The National Grid and regional distribution companies don’t answer to you and me – they answer to often very distant investors. If you’re based in London, your electricity is distributed by UK Power Networks, owned by a Hong Kong company led by one of the richest men in the world. Your gas might well be distributed by Cadent Gas – recently found guilty of leaving residents without gas for up to five months, and putting 775 blocks of flats in danger by keeping no inspection record – owned by a consortium including Macquarie (an Australian investment bank), CIC Capital (owned by China Investment Corporation) and the Qatar Investment Authority.

These private energy monopolies often make it difficult for community groups who want to develop new renewable energy projects, so the process is slower and more expensive than it should be. Communities in Harris and Lewis have been slowed down by National Grid in their effort to develop a wind farm. Communities in Cornwall were told by Western Power Networks (owned by shareholders in New York) that new solar farms would require ‘quite expensive’ investment in infrastructure.

Under public ownership, National Grid and the regional distribution companies would have a duty to work closely with community groups to develop new renewable energy, and to steward public assets and land. In Germany, renewable energy producers have a guaranteed right of access to the electricity grid.

‘Public-Common partnerships’ can be developed – this means councils create shared institutions with cooperatives or community interest companies to manage common resources in a democratic way. In Wolfhagen in Germany, the town’s energy utility is jointly owned by the municipality and a new cooperative. Community energy projects can also be rolled out to power a solar railway (the ‘Riding Sunbeams’project) to help decarbonise transport.

As Andrew Cumbers points out, in Denmark, the government has encouraged local, decentralised wind power on a huge scale, through funding and support for local, collective ownership of turbines. The Danish Wind Turbine Owners Association is an independent, democratically elected membership association set up to represent these small scale, private and cooperative owners. With 5000 members, it provides a strong voice for local communities on energy policy.

Supply Companies That Work for All of Us

Customer satisfaction with the Big Six companies is low. Only 32% of the public trust the energy industry. Tying ourselves in knots to create markets and choice in every sector doesn’t make sense. Energy customers don’t want to switch – 61% of us have never switched company or only switched once – so we pay a loyalty penalty.

Citizens Advice has also shown how we overpay because of the way energy is regulated – this amounts to £11 billion over the past 15 years. The poor are hit hardest, spending 14% of their income on energy and water.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Corporate Watch research suggests each UK household could save £158 a year if energy was publicly owned. Across Europe, bills are around 30% lower when energy companies are in public ownership.

Publicly owned energy supply companies would have a duty to make sure everyone has access to affordable energy. This could include progressive tariffs to tackle over consumption and fuel poverty at the same time by charging high use households more while giving everyone some free energy – alongside a ‘no cut off’ policy.

Forward thinking councils are already created new, inspiring, publicly owned supply companies – with Nottingham-based Robin Hood Energyboldly leading the way and setting up 10 white label partnership agreements with local authorities around the country. Bristol Energyand The People’s Energy Company are also breaking new ground. We need to sign up to get our energy from these companies – then build on these exciting options across the country. Ultimately when we get the privatised energy companies out, regional distribution companies could offer supply to people in the area, but with local companies taking over wherever they exist.

The Green New Deal should also mean we are energy citizens not energy consumers. We’re all part of the war effort against climate change.

Ann Pettifor points out that there are 27 million households in the UK, most built in the Victorian era. We have some of the least efficient housing in Europe, and the highest proportion of fuel poverty – 11% of English households. The Green New Deal is an opportunity to change all that. Every house can become a power station, with double glazing, insulation and solar panels (unless it’s about to be rebuilt).

Trusted, publicly owned companies can create new jobs for advisors to go door to door. Pettifor proposes a ‘carbon army’ of workers, highly qualified, skilled and unskilled workers to retrofit and reconstruct our homes and buildings, advise on cutting energy use and bills and roll out smart meters. This would pay for itself, boosting employment and tax revenue in every region of the UK.

PCS describes the situation perfectly: ‘There is no bailout for the publicly owned climate bank as we’ve already been doing insolvency with the planet for far too long’. We have to ‘remove capital from the driving seat of energy transition.’

Renewable, zero carbon energy. Upgraded infrastructure. Affordable energy for all. And all of it creating new, green, permanent jobs. Let’s do it. Whether you’re a citizen, a worker, part of a community group – or all three – your country needs you.

This article was taken from a recent report published by Common Wealth

Why We Need Publicly Owned Energy for a Green New Deal

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[collapsedsquid]

“Sectoral bargaining creates a free-rider problem even bigger than our current free-rider problem at the enterprise level, because all workers benefit from the higher wages that are negotiated,” Madland says. “So you have a strong disincentive to pay dues.”

But there’s a surprisingly simple plan to get around this, proposed by Dimick, the professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law. Unions could run the unemployment insurance system using subsidies from the government. That, known as the “Ghent system” after the Belgian town where it originated, is a key part of how Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Belgium have achieved the highest union membership rates in the developed world.

The system emerged almost by accident. “Back before there was any unemployment insurance, unions just did it on their own as a mutual aid function,” Dimick says. When the depression hit and unions lacked the funds to keep paying out benefits, “State governments came to their rescue by subsidizing them. It was an easy fix to the problem of unemployment rather than enacting wholesale government insurance.”

The result was that many countries were left with totally voluntary unemployment systems. In the US, unemployment insurance is funded through taxes on employers jointly administered by the federal government and states. Participation is mandatory.

In other countries, you were required to actively walk into a union office and sign up in order to receive benefits if you lost your job. That put workers in close contact with unions and encouraged them to join; in some countries, union members are also given discounts on unemployment insurance. It’s quite rare for people to sign up for unemployment benefits but not join the union administering them.

Over time, a number of countries, like Norway and France, junked this system in favor of mandatory unemployment insurance. But countries that kept it, like Denmark and Finland, have seen extremely high union membership as a result. Their unions have also been able to do sectoral bargaining with less reliance on government; Nordic governments don’t “extend” contracts as happens in France, as unions can just cut deals themselves using their huge membership as leverage.

And the Ghent system really seems to be what made the difference. A simple comparison between Sweden, where unions run unemployment insurance, and Norway, which abandoned this system, shows that in Sweden, union membership rates kept growing for most of the 20th century.

In Norway, they lagged behind. Since Norwegian unions stopped administering unemployment, Western, the Harvard sociologist, writes, "Swedish union density has persistently exceeded the Norwegian by 20 to 30 percentage points.” Oxford political scientist Bo Rothstein, similarly, has found that adopting a Ghent system leads an additional 20 percent of the workforce to join a union.

That number implies that if the US could turn unemployment insurance over to unions, they could see membership triple from 10 percent to 30 percent, a change that would dramatically transform American politics.

There’s no way that could happen at the federal level with Republicans in charge. That’s where Dimick’s cleverest idea comes in: He thinks that progressive states like California could adopt Ghent systems all by themselves.

Once of the concepts of the “Job guarantee“ is to replace “employment offices“ with “unemployment offices,“ it would be an interesting idea to have the unions as one of the managers of the Job Guarantee.

[mariacallous]

Modern governments rely on numbers. They are the lifeblood of departments, used to judge the success or failure of policies. Politicians use them to legitimise their views and ideas and to scrutinise, expose and attack the other side.

While in the past it might have been enough for public policy to be justified on the basis of “because I say so”, governments can no longer rely on blind faith. They are expected, even required, to back their policies with hard evidence – the unease that greeted Liz Truss government’s mini-budget is a case in point – and we tend to view numbers as the most solid form of evidence there is.

The trouble is that numbers can’t always be trusted, even when they come from official sources. Despite the intention to act on good evidence,governments of all stripes have been continually led towards disaster by the problem of what I call “bad data” – official statistics that are patchy and inaccurate.

Sometimes the dismal state of our data is the fault of under-resourcing and a lack of attention to counting what should be counted. For decades, immigration statistics were based purely on a survey of people arriving and departing from UK air, sea and rail ports. Millions of passengers enter and leave the UK each year and picking migrants out of this enormous haystack has in part been a matter of luck. In the early 2010s, for example, these figures appeared to show an alarming situation where half of all international students were overstaying their visas.

Under Theresa May, the Home Office launched a multi-pronged campaign to identify illegal immigrants, which included closing bogus colleges and introducing right-to-work and right-to-rent checks. New statistics in 2017 concluded the original overstaying estimate for students had simply been wrong, a fault of failing to count people properly – and a sign of how unreliable migration statistics were as a whole. But it was too late for one group that fell on the wrong side of the so-called hostile environment policies: people who had come legally from Commonwealth countries in the postwar era but couldn’t provide enough proof of this when questioned. These victims of the Windrush scandal, uncovered by the Guardian, suffered multiple injustices thanks to an imaginary foe in the numbers and a failure of government record-keeping.

In the mid-2000s, the Labour government was keen to be on the front foot when it came to switching the EU’s farming subsidy from one based on what farmers produced to one based on how much land was capable of being farmed. As it turned out, the patchy state of our land records meant the government had essentially no idea how much land this applied to and, when the new system was launched, the civil service was upended by an avalanche of unanticipated claims. Britain was fined by the EU for the delay to payments caused by this backlog, while farmers themselves faced bankruptcy and, in some terrible cases, took their own lives.

Other times, numbers can mislead because there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way of counting something, so we end up with a narrow view based on what we think is important at one point in time. Debates about whether prison “works”, whether grammar schools are a good idea, and even whether crime and poverty are going up or down have been going on for decades – and will go on for decades more unless we find better, agreed-upon ways of measuring these phenomena. Data will tend to offer us solutions based on what we decided was important enough to count and measure in the first place.

The people of Ilfracombe, Devon, know this. In the 1960s their railway station was closed, spelling an end to the harbour town’s tourism industry. This was thanks to a sweeping programme of cuts to the railways on the advice of British Rail chair Richard Beeching, whose main criterion for deciding a railway line’s usefulness was the average cost per passenger, per mile, over the course of a year. The trouble was that a yearly average was a terrible reflection of the importance of the railway to summer holiday destinations such as Ilfracombe, which had substantial railway traffic for only a few months of the year.

Politicians are usually not experts in statistical modelling, which puts them somewhat at the mercy of academics and economists who can themselves promote their ideas with far more confidence than is warranted. In one particularly egregious case, a key economic argument of the 2010 Con-Lib coalition government’s austerity agenda was revealed to have originated in a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff had been recommending lowering the debt to GDP ratio armed with a study in which they claimed to have found that debt of 90% of GDP was bad for growth. Years later, a PhD student discovered that this conclusion only held because the authors had failed to include the last five rows of their data. The authors admitted their mistake – but not before austerity had become a cornerstone of UK economic policy.

Bad data is not something niche or technical; it has real-world costs that can be very serious indeed, no matter which party is in power. The issues that are most important to people are, worryingly, the ones on which we have the worst data: crime, immigration, income, benefits, unemployment, poverty and equality.

Some of our architecture for collecting data is just plain under-resourced and in need of an overhaul, but governments tend to see fixing this problem as a hard sell to the taxpayer. A shift in our political culture would go a long way towards uncertainty no longer being treated as a dirty word. Until then, we the public can keep up the pressure by asking questions, refusing to settle for face value, and demanding explanations. Numbers hold enormous power, but in the end, we must remember that we govern them – not the other way round.

Georgina Sturge is a statistician in the House of Commons Library, and the author of Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers