#there's many ways to demonstrate how a higher minimum wage will benefit society as a whole in concrete terms | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

berniesrevolution · 7 years ago

Link

Without the electoral revolt on the left inspired by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and carried forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, the socialist movement in the United States would likely be stuck in the same rut it has been in for decades. More than a decade of mobilization and rising class consciousness have laid the groundwork for the renewal of left-wing politics, but Sanders’s campaign was the key spark.

As he gears up for another run in 2020, many in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and those who are following our work expect us to jump all in to this new campaign.

But not everyone agrees. People in DSA who oppose our organized participation in a Bernie 2020 campaign raise three main objections. First, they argue that Bernie’s campaign would be insufficiently socialist and would not move the left forward. Second, they claim that Bernie’s run would actually strengthen the Democratic Party and undermine the potential for independent socialist politics. And third, they contend that DSA can not make a meaningful contribution to such a campaign.

While we respect the contributions of all our comrades to the debate on Bernie, we think that all of their objections can be answered. We’ll take up each in turn, both to rebut them and to lay out what we think is the positive case for a Bernie 2020 campaign. In our view, a Sanders campaign would present the best available means in the short term to raise class consciousness, further develop the socialist movement, intensify the necessary conflict between the leadership and base of the Democratic Party, and build DSA.

DOES BERNIE ADVANCE SOCIALIST POLITICS?

If critics of a Sanders 2020 campaign are right that Sanders’s platform fails to build support for democratic socialist demands, then all other challenges to such a campaign don’t need to be addressed. Socialists can’t support a candidate who doesn’t in some way advance socialist politics.

Advancing socialist politics today, at a time when our views are still marginal (although they’re finally getting a hearing), primarily means building the class consciousness of millions of people.

That’s not because the vision of a better society we want is unpopular. The vast majority of people in the United States today would like to bring people out of poverty, drastically reduce inequality, protect the rights of immigrants, end mass incarceration, guarantee universal health care, protect the environment, and curb the power of bosses. These goals are wildly popular. They do not by any means comprise the whole of the socialist vision of a better world of course, but they are a critical part of it.

The problem lies elsewhere.

First, the solutions socialists know are needed to achieve these goals are still controversial and often poorly understood. They all involve attacking the power of the capitalist class head on, and unless people are prepared to resist the enormous counteroffensive from the rich and powerful when we come for their privileges, there won’t be the popular support or mass mobilizations necessary to win.

And second, many people remain highly skeptical that anything can be done about the rotten situation we find ourselves in. They might even have class consciousness in the sense that they know who the enemy is — the bankers, the rich, the landlords, the bosses — but they are resigned to the situation as it is. A critical component of class consciousness is knowing that the working class has power — if we organize. We have to bring that dimension of class consciousness to working-class neighborhoods all over the country.

Advancing socialist politics in our period depends on tackling these two problems. Can we build real support for redistributive policies, so that people know that it’s the power of the capitalist class we have to confront to build the better society we all want? And can we inspire millions of people to move from resignation to action?

This is why the Sanders campaign was so important in 2016, and why it will be again in 2020 if he runs.

As DSA we have the numbers and resources to make a small impact in raising class consciousness on our own. DSA’s Medicare for All campaign does a fantastic job of popularizing a deeper understanding of what Medicare for All is all about through its “five principles.” Our candidates like Julia Salazar in Brooklyn, Jovanka Beckles in the Bay Area, and Kristin Seale in Philadelphia help us reach thousands of people. And DSA union members bring our socialist politics and our vision of a left-wing, militant, and democratic labor movement to workplaces across the country.

But we’re still far too small, even with allied organizations, to make the qualitative transformation in class consciousness needed today. Setting aside a debate that raged on Twitter a few months back about whether or not Lenin would support Bernie today (he would), Lenin was right when he said: “where there are not thousands, but millions, that is where serious politics begin.”

The best electoral hope we have right now to raise the class consciousness of millions of people is once more through a Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. His platform of ending austerity, passing Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, expanding Social Security, and making public colleges tuition free will speak to the needs of working-class people. His plans to tackle mass incarceration, end cash bail, protect immigrants regardless of their status, and combat climate change speak to and help frame the growing movements to end state repression and the trashing of the environment.

His campaign will popularize this platform while expanding people’s understanding of what it will take to win it. Sanders constantly identifies the capitalist class (which he usually refers to as “the millionaires and billionaires”) as the negative force in society, and he consistently and directly says that he would tax them more to pay for the new social benefits he proposes. He also ties winning these redistributive programs to slashing the defense budget and ending US military interventions.

And his campaign can inspire thousands of activists to take their own initiatives. As the teachers strikes this year in several conservative states demonstrated, many working people were inspired in part by Bernie’s 2016 run to start to organize themselves. Bernie’s campaign played a major role in catalyzing a new round of working-class militancy.

Of course Sanders’s platform is primarily about immediate demands. As socialists we know that it will take more than reforms to change the underlying problems facing society today. Ultimately, the existence of a capitalist class is antithetical to an egalitarian and democratic order, so securing the better society we all want will require abolishing the power of that class entirely. And that will take winning far more ambitious structural reforms, eventually including nationalizing the big banks and the major corporations, putting workplaces under the democratic control of workers rather than bosses, and replacing our antiquated constitution and system of government.

Those aren’t the kind of demands you’ll find in Sanders’s political revolution.

But there is a good reason for that. A precondition for fighting on such an ambitious platform is building a much higher level of class consciousness. And it’s towards that goal that Sanders is moving us, regardless of whether or not he shares our longer term perspective that it’s necessary to break with capitalism.

What matters in a period like ours, when we can’t reasonably expect the socialist movement to take state power, is moving people from resignation into action around the issues they care about right now. In the process, we need to raise awareness that even winning immediate demands like Medicare for All will take a confrontation with the capitalist class. When millions share that common understanding, then opportunities for deeper and more radical challenges to the system will become possible — particularly if there is a strong socialist left contesting elections and organizing in unions and mass movements.

BUT AS A DEMOCRAT?

While some find the critical flaw with a Sanders campaign in his platform, others find it in the way in which he’ll likely enter the race. If Bernie runs in 2020, it will without a doubt be in the Democratic primary. So while some would be willing to concede that Sanders’s platform does in fact advance the socialist project, they argue that the way in which he would run makes it impossible for principled socialists to campaign for him.

This criticism has a better grasp on the process that Sanders has unleashed, though it still lacks a clear understanding of the opportunities it presents.

Let’s start with the question of what ballot line Bernie should run on. We believe that Bernie would be 100% right in the current moment to pursue a presidential campaign through the Democratic Party.

Though we are not advocates for a strategy of lesser-evilism, the fact remains that such a path avoids the pitfalls of being seen as a spoiler in presidential elections which historically has marginalized left-wing challenges. But it also means that Bernie can take his challenge directly to the neoliberal leadership of the Democratic Party and present the country with a choice of how to fight the right-wing politics of Donald Trump. And it means that Bernie can push that challenge starting in the spring of 2019 — when he and other contenders will likely announce — through the summer of 2020 when the Democratic National Convention is held. Of course we’d prefer to have our own independent working-class party capable of contesting presidential elections — and we aspire to build one in the future — but given the conditions we find ourselves in, running in the Democratic primary is the best way Bernie can advance class politics in 2019 and 2020.

But the deeper question about the effects that running on the Democratic ballot line have on class consciousness and the potential for independent politics in the future is more serious.

A whole generation of “Berniecrats,” inspired and supported by Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution, have emerged in the last two years to run in primaries against corporate Democrats. These candidates often invoke a version of the mantra of Paul Wellstone, a Senator from Minnesota in the 1990s: “I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Positions like that can end up bolstering the myth that the Democratic Party is (or could become) a progressive and left-wing party.

From the perspective of building class consciousness this approach is a mistake. It obscures the reality that the leadership of the party has since the 1940s principally been dominated by the liberal wing of the capitalist class (and, for a time, the white supremacist landlords of the Jim Crow South). This group includes internationally-oriented bankers, tech millionaires, urban real estate developers and landlords, and media moguls. The party serves these interests and then tries every two years to drag working-class people out to vote for it with vague promises of concessions — and more and more frequently, invocations of the apocalypse that awaits us if Republicans win.

While Berniecrats partly help refurbish the image of the Democratic Party among voters, Bernie has also breathed new life among activists into hopes for a realignment of the party’s institutions. Sanders has never “formally” registered as a Democrat. But despite a long and principled career as an independent, in recent years he’s been more inclined to engage in intra-party power conflicts, including supporting Keith Ellison’s ill-conceived bid to become chair of the Democratic National Committee.

These kinds of challenges are ill-conceived because they rest on a mistaken analysis of the structure of the Democratic Party. Unlike democratic membership parties in Europe — think of the Labour Party in the UK for example — where members have opportunities to shape the direction and choose the leadership, the really-existing Democratic Party is a complicated and anti-democratic network of organizations, donor alliances, and campaign committees that are unassailable by grassroots movements. The nominally small-d democratic party committees that exist at the local and state level (and find their highest expression in the DNC) are divested of almost all real power. Engaging in intraparty squabbles is not a strategic use of activists’ time. To the extent it does anything, it creates illusions about the progressive potential of the Democrats.

Despite our misgivings about the dalliances of Bernie and his band of Berniecrats with the Democratic Party leadership, that’s hardly been the most important effect of their challenge.

The transformation of consciousness described in the previous section is key. But even among the base of the Democratic Party, they are having a major effect. They have polarized the party between a dominant corporate wing and an insurgent progressive wing. There is now a real ideological struggle within the party between those advocating a continuation of Obama’s neoliberal politics and those supporting a new social democratic politics.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #the call #bernie sanders #election 2020 #progressive #progressive movement #democratic socialism #socialism #DSA #Democratic Socialists of America #democratic party

71 notes · View notes

mattkennard · 7 years ago

Text

African Governments Are Paying for the World Bank’s Mauritius Miracle

Published: Foreign Policy (18 October 2018) w/ Claire Provost

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius—The security guard at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address at an office at the St Louis Business Centre in downtown Port Louis is not sure if we’re in the right place. The staff at the front desk are bewildered by our request to speak to someone from the company. The otherwise modest office block has flat-screen televisions on the walls and glossy magazines with titles like Savile Row and Family Business on a table in a small waiting area.

After about 20 minutes, a woman in a suit appears, bearing apologies—she had been out to lunch. At first, she seems to mistake us for investors in Malawi Mangoes. We jump in to clarify: We’re journalists looking to talk to someone from the company, which in 2014 received a $5 million loan from the private investment arm of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Our interlocutor appears confused, as if she knows little about the business, or why we might be attempting to learn more about it in Port Louis, Mauritius.

She confirms that Malawi Mangoes, a company whose plantations and juice-making operations are located over 1,500 miles away in Malawi, is indeed registered at this address, but she declines tell us anything else. There is no one from the company here to speak to, no one to interview, no pamphlets or brochures we can read.

Mauritius sits 1,200 miles off the eastern coast of southern Africa, in the Indian Ocean. It’s an isolated island, without an endowment of exploitable natural resources like oil or minerals. Simon Springett, the United Nations resident coordinator for the island, told us that when the country became independent from the United Kingdom in 1968, “economists basically said there’s no way Mauritius can survive as an independent nation-state.”

Sugar cane had been the country’s core crop for centuries. Sugar is still produced in Mauritius, but the island owes much of its modern prosperity to the development of another more controversial industry.

In 2018, Mauritius has an international reputation built around extremely low taxes—a flat corporate tax rate of 15 percent and an effective rate as low as zero to 3 percent for offshore companies—as well as high levels of financial secrecy. Global businesses registered in Mauritius have assets valued at more than $630 billion, almost 25 times the country’s own GDP of $26 billion. Its offshore financial industry includes more than 21,000 registered businesses —almost 70 times the number of primary schools in the country. However, these firms don’t take up a lot of space; many of them exist only on paper, set up to benefit from the island’s cut-rate taxes and its “ask no questions” attitude.

Since the early 1990s, Mauritius has remade itself into an African tax haven, where multinational corporations and ultra-rich individuals can stash their cash and profits and minimize their tax bills, away from the prying eyes of other governments and the public.

As the private investment arm of the World Bank, the IFC is tasked with investing in businesses in developing countries to help “end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity,” while also making money to support the bank’s other programs. Despite its mandate to help the world’s poorest people, it seems to have largely turned a blind eye to the controversial role Mauritius plays in the global tax system—and, in some cases, it has likely profited from the country’s remoteness and opaque financial services itself.

The IFC has approved loans and investments in more than 1,600 companies since 2012. According to our analysis of their project disclosures, at least 50 of these were for companies registered in Mauritius but operating elsewhere. Many of these companies, including Malawi Mangoes, are based in sub-Saharan Africa, and their registration in Mauritius may be depriving African governments of much needed-tax revenue.

Last year, the African Business Review reported that nearly 60 percent of investments made by international companies registered in Mauritius were destined for mainland Africa. Mauritius has been accused by civil society groups such as Oxfam of draining public resources from poorer countries by allowing multinational investors to shift their profits here, enabling them to pay much less than their fair share of taxes in the countries where they actually operate. And in 2013, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa criticized the island as “a relatively financially secretive conduit” that facilitates illicit financial flows across the continent.

Malawi Mangoes is one of the companies in which the IFC has invested. It was founded in 2009 by a pair of British entrepreneurs, Jonathan Jacobs and Craig Hardie. From the Salima district in central Malawi, it produces mango and banana puree and fresh fruit for export around Africa, to the Middle East, and to Europe.

When the IFC approved its $5 million investment in Malawi Mangoes in 2014, it was described as an agribusiness project in the soft drink sector, with the loan going to support the company as it tried to establish itself in the country. This would create much-needed rural jobs, the IFC argued, “thus injecting money to the local economy through wages and benefits paid.” Economic growth in poorer countries like Malawi is being held back, the IFC contends, by “the lack of risk capital” needed to “build the dynamic, job-creating companies that drive prosperity.”

To even be eligible for its support, projects must be located in a developing country and “have good prospects of being profitable”—but also “benefit the local economy; and Be environmentally and socially sound.” And though the IFC’s investment location is listed as Malawi, the funds actually go to “Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited.”

Company records in Mauritius and the United Kingdom, where the owners have filed paperwork, reveal that Malawi Mangoes moved its business to Mauritius after it had already started working in Malawi. This is significant because it appears to contradict claims that Mauritius is encouraging investment in Africa that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Malawi Mangoes was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2009, according to financial records filed in London. This U.K. entity was dissolved in 2015. By then, Malawi Mangoes had incorporated two companies in Mauritius (in 2012 and 2013), under the island’s global business system. In other words: Mauritius didn’t facilitate the company’s entrance into Malawi. It had already happened.

This suggests that Malawi Mangoes was attracted to Mauritius by something else: not the chance to move into Africa for the first time, but more likely its low taxes, high secrecy levels, and what the World Bank touts as its “ease of doing business.”

Despite the IFC’s poverty-reducing mandate and its requirement that projects benefit the local economy, the institution, and the World Bank as a whole, has been criticized for years for investing in commercial projects with dubious impacts on poor communities, including five-star hotels, upmarket shopping malls, and even agribusiness projects that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

On its website, the IFC explains how potential investments are reviewed, with proposals that are supposed to contain information such as the company’s finances and expected profits. IFC teams assess whether projects will comply with environmental and social performance standards, which cover issues such as labor conditions, land acquisition, and biodiversity—but not taxation, let alone tax justice.

The IFC’s disclosure explains that Malawi Mangoes is majority-owned by BXR Group, a private investment group in Amsterdam, and that the second-largest shareholder is “well-known fund manager and philanthropist” Stewart Newton. The project’s environmental and social review says Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited is “a holding company that runs an operation in Malawi.” No explanation is provided in the disclosure, however, as to why a company structured like this was deemed a suitable investment for the IFC, or why the entity receiving IFC money would be based on the Indian Ocean island.

Because this company is registered in Mauritius, where such information is not disclosed, we could not determine its annual revenues, profits, or how much tax it pays. However, it was reported locally in Malawi earlier this year that the company had secured 1,700 hectares of farmland near its existing plantations to expand its operations, and that its mango exports so far have already been worth more than $1.4 million.

The IFC’s disclosures also hint at possible problems on the ground in Malawi. In 2014, it said Malawi Mangoes had more than 600 employees, with the lowest-paid workers making just $35 a month. Though this is described as 20 percent higher than Malawi’s minimum wage, the company has also subsidized maize purchases for its workers during periods of the year when they could not afford it. And while the company does buy fruit from small-scale farmers through so-called outgrower schemes, it does not appear that local farmers or the Malawian economy are the main beneficiaries of the company’s activities.

Last year, a report in Malawi’s Maravi Post claimed that a senior chief in the Salima district “made shabby land deals” with Malawi Mangoes for which she allegedly pocketed proceeds and left “affected families” largely uncompensated.

Vigils were reportedly organized for 18 days at Salima District Commission offices to demand her removal as chief. “This land was sold dubiously to foreigners, without consultations but only telling us that it was government which allocated it,” one of the demonstrators, Muhamad Chingomanje, was quoted as saying. “We are not against developmental projects on our land, but … we want to benefit from its proceeds.”

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa says illicit financial flows from Africa could be worth as much as $50 billion per year—double the amount of official international aid budgeted for the continent—with impacts including drained foreign exchange reserves and worsening poverty. Tax havens enable this, it explains, by allowing for the creation of “disguised corporations, shell companies, anonymous trust accounts, and fake charitable foundations.”

The secrecy afforded in places like Mauritius may facilitate illegal practices—though the real story is how tax havens enable aggressive tax practices and legal tax avoidance on a massive scale, with companies taking advantage of gaps and mismatches in tax rules to shift their profits and declare them not where their real business is, but where they’ll pay less. This is part of a larger story about how countries have been sucked into competing with one another to offer the best deal to corporations, regardless of the impacts on their economy and their citizens. Then there is the impact on countries like Malawi, which is even worse for the public purse.

According to the IMF, developing countries’ revenue losses from what’s called “base erosion and profit-shifting” may exceed $200 billion.

This issue has been acknowledged at the very top of the World Bank as well. In 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said: “Some companies use elaborate strategies to not pay taxes in countries in which they work, a form of corruption that hurts the poor. More equitable taxation could easily eclipse official development assistance received by countries.”

Mauritius is an epicenter of this sort of profit-shifting. In addition to its flat tax rate of 15 percent, there is no capital gains tax and no tax on dividends or interest paid to nonresidents. Companies don’t even need to have a direct physical presence with staff on the island: This can also be outsourced to agents of financial services firms, whose employees may act as representatives for many companies at a time—just like those we met in Port Louis, at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address, who appeared surprised to be asked questions about the firm.

Once in Mauritius, it also helps for a business to have more than one subsidiary to take advantage of different incentives offered to different types of companies. Malawi Mangoes’ company records list two businesses in the country: Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited, incorporated in April 2012, and Malawi Mangoes Management (Mauritius) Limited, set up in January 2013. Both are incorporated as offshore companies within the island’s global business system and registered to the same address: “St Louis Business Centre, CNR Desroches & St Louis Streets, Port Louis.”

This is where we went in Mauritius, to ask about the company’s business and why it was running an operation in Malawi from an island so far away. But it’s just a care-of address, at the offices of a financial services firm called Rogers Capital, which helps its customers set up and manage offshore entities, lends its address for their registration forms, and keeps their details under wraps.

That pattern holds for other IFC investments in sub-Saharan Africa, made via Mauritius instead of directly in the countries of operation. In the capital of Port Louis, we had more Kafkaesque experiences. In one small office, on a narrow road in the city’s Chinatown, we found the registered office of CSquared, a broadband internet infrastructure business operating in several countries including Ghana and Uganda that counts Google among its investors. There, the man we spoke to would not even confirm the address of the building we were sitting in.

The IFC says clearly on its website that “tax evasion is unacceptable in any part of a transaction in which the World Bank Group is involved.” It insists that it “exercises due diligence to confirm that the structures in which it invests are chosen for legitimate reasons” and that it’s “committed to advancing the international tax transparency agenda.”

This sounds serious, but the language used also carefully limits the problem to illegal activity. Tax evasion is the illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax. But for multinational companies, there are many strategies to limit tax bills that may be currently legal but still highly questionable—particularly for an institution, backed by the world’s governments, with an explicit mandate to help end poverty and boost “shared prosperity.”

Anti-poverty and tax justice nongovernmental organizations have argued for years that the IFC shouldn’t be investing in companies using tax havens at all, as such structures enable information on money made and taxes paid to be hidden from governments as well as the public. Legitimate reasons for companies to incorporate in tax havens may be a matter of interpretation, but it cannot be publicly scrutinized or debated if businesses’ information is never disclosed.

In 2016, Oxfam accused the World Bank of “turning a blind eye” to the use of tax havens by the companies that the IFC invests in. It also scrutinized IFC disclosure information and found that 25 percent of all of the organization’s investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 were directly allocated to companies incorporated in tax havens, with almost 9 percent of the projects in Mauritius. What’s more, it found that a large majority of firms receiving IFC financing use tax havens, apparently unconnected to their core business, at some point in their corporate structure.

Oxfam demanded that the World Bank “ensure that its clients can prove they are paying their fair share of tax” and confirm that these businesses aren’t taking “advantage of the weakness of the system to reduce their tax bill to the minimum, especially through the artificial shift of profits” to countries like Mauritius. The organization suggested specifically that “responsible corporate tax considerations—beyond legal compliance” should be incorporated into the IFC’s environmental and social performance standards immediately and used to review and monitor their array of investments.

At the time, an IFC spokesperson responded by inaccurately characterizing the NGO’s criticisms as focused on illegal tax evasion, again stressing that “there are legitimate uses for offshore structures.”

This week, an IFC spokesman told Foreign Policy that the organization would only invest in a company if it was “satisfied with the integrity of the client and that the structure of the transaction is legitimate and not designed to be used for tax evasion.” The spokesman reiterated the argument that “Offshore Financial Centers can play a key role in cross-border investment,” especially when a host country lacks certain laws, contract enforcement mechanisms, or shareholder protections. “Appropriate use of intermediate jurisdictions,” he argued, “enables increased mobilization of private capital for investment that helps the poor.”

According to the spokesman, the IFC’s investment in Malawi Mangoes was “to support rural incomes through development of commercial production and processing of mangoes and bananas in a region where poverty is high” and that it was subject to the “policy on use of intermediate jurisdictions” and found to be acceptable. The IFC also pointed out that its performance standards “were developed before some of the public focus on tax and illicit financial flows” and that it was now updating its policies based on new and evolving international standards. It is unclear if Malawi Mangoes would qualify under the new standards.

According to the IFC, Malawi Mangoes has failed to ramp up its production and never generated any profits. This, of course, does not alter the nature of the tax arrangements the company set up for that eventuality.

Malawi Mangoes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last October, the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, revived the old narrative of the island’s dim economic prospects in an interview with the Financial Times. “We are a small island that is limited in many ways. We don’t have any natural resources,” he told the newspaper.

“We need to have an edge over others to be attractive,” Jugnauth added. “I think the advantage in taxation is important.”

At the World Bank office in Port Louis, the argument is much the same. Alex Sienaert, the country representative for Mauritius, said the offshore industry has benefited the island, providing a source of foreign exchange and encouraging kids to stay in school and work hard to get offshore office jobs. He said there is a sense among young people in the country that if “I can qualify as an accountant or a lawyer, there’s a good job for me, an office job, on the island. … That’s been going on for well over a generation now.”

But he acknowledged that “you do hear some concerns.” The offshore industry in Mauritius employs a surprisingly small fraction of the population—just 5,000 workers directly in a country of over 1 million people. And not all boats have been lifted equally by the island’s transformation into a corporate utopia. In March, the World Bank warned in a new 147-page report that inequality among Mauritians has “widened substantially” over the last 15 years, “threatening the standards of living of the poor.”

According to the report, the gap between the incomes of the poorest and the richest 10 percent of households increased by 37 percent from 2001 to 2015. One of the report’s authors attributed this to structural changes, including a “progressive shift from traditional and low-skills sectors to services, notably professional, real estate, and financial services,” which not all workers benefited from. Women, in particular, did not share in the gains, with only 57 percent of them in the labor force by 2015, and women in the private sector have been paid on average about 30 percent less than men.

Sienaert at the World Bank told us, “there’s no question that the tax appeal of Mauritius is an important part of the story,” acknowledging that this is “an increasingly less sustainable way to go.” It would be better for Mauritius to become “a conduit for international companies to come into Africa perhaps for the first time, facilitating new activity that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” he said. “Then you’re in win-win territory.”

“That’s not to say it’s going to be an easy transition,” Sienaert added. Like the March report from the World Bank, he had nothing to say about the IFC’s investments via Mauritius and gave the impression that he didn’t know they existed. And much like the staff at the office where the headquarters of Malawi Mangoes is registered on the island, he appeared surprised by our questions on the topic.

Last weekend, the World Bank brought together country delegations and development experts at its annual meetings in Indonesia. The IFC was there, too. At such conferences, grand statements are made while attendees tend to mill around banners bearing pledges to better the world.

Rather than repeating tired mantras about job-creating companies bringing prosperity to the poorest corners of Africa, these powerful international institutions—whose mandates are built around expanding shared prosperity and alleviating poverty—should be asking about the mango farmers in Malawi’s Salima district, and who profited (or didn’t) from the IFC’s support.’

#mauritius #tax #tax avoidance #tax havens #World Bank #IFC

6 notes · View notes

maybeyoumissthisf-kingpost · 4 years ago

Text

What makes a happy country?

A happy country is one where the people have political freedom, the right to elect a government that the people believe will protect economic freedoms. There, people are freed from the shackles, are free to make their own decisions, pursue their own ideals, pursue cherished dreams, and can live a life that they want. desire.

Prosperity: the first factor that makes a happy country

An unhappy country is a poor, backward country and its people are always limited in political freedom. Poverty breeds all kinds of social evils, poor countries always give birth to all kinds of dictators. To me, a livable country is one where individuals lead a prosperous life and freedoms are not violated.

It is no coincidence that the Nordic countries with the most prosperity are also at the top of the World Happiness rankings; It is also no coincidence that weak economies are always the countries with the lowest happiness indexes in the world [1] . What do you think is a happy country: rich Nordic countries, high standard of living, long life expectancy; or a poor Venezuela eating garbage [2] ?

Each of us has our own view of what makes a happy country, from the simple to the complex. We can write down pages for the things we think are necessary, but the problem here is how to make sure those things are done.

A warm, happy country. Yes, you have to be full first before you think about finding happiness for yourself. Only after solving economic problems can people think of other things. So, in my opinion, prosperity will make a happy country.

And how does a country become prosperous?

Vietnamese often blame their poverty on fate. Okay. If you are too pessimistic about your own abilities. But a poor country is another story, it is no longer a matter of fate, but of policies. When asked, “What makes a country rich?”, many people often answer that it is due to natural resources, geographical location, culture or people. But no, Venezuela has the world’s largest crude oil reserves [3] but it’s not rich, Japan is poor in natural resources and earthquakes all the time but is very prosperous; South Korea and North Korea are two countries that are similar in all aspects, but the South Korean economy is clearly stronger than North Korea’s [4].. Why is that? Anyone who has read The Origin of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith will understand that economic freedom is the key to prosperity, peace, and happiness.

Exercising economic freedom is always a necessary way to revive a country’s economy. Economic freedom is inherently a “stimulant medicine” for all economies. As we all know, during the transition period of the Vietnamese economy, the government implemented a market mechanism (although it was not perfect) and allowed people to participate in business which helped the Vietnamese economy. changed drastically with the rapid growth rate of up to 9.54% (1995) and 9.34% (1996) [5] .

The history of the world also shows that every country that is against the free market has to suffer an economic failure, from the collapse of the mighty Soviet Union, the whole of Eastern Europe, East Germany in the 90s, until the fall of Greece and now Zimbabwe, Venezuela. A country that collapses economically and politically, cannot be a happy country. One thing in common is that these countries all have very low levels of economic freedom.

From that, I would like to affirm that economic freedom will be the core factor to form a happy country for all people.

What is economic freedom?

“Economic freedom, in its highest form, gives people absolute private property rights, the full exercise of the freedom of movement of labor, capital, and goods, and the complete absence of oppression or limit economic freedom except the minimum limits necessary to protect and maintain them that freedom “ [6] .

In a nutshell, economic freedom allows individuals to freely decide all the resources they hold, while respecting the freedoms and resources of others. Economic freedom is a right that allows people to freely develop and prosper without interference from governments or financial authorities. Every individual has the right to protect and be protected for his or her human resources, labor and property. In other words, it is about reducing the government’s hand in the economy and allowing the market to run freely. At this point, many people will wonder what benefits economic freedom will bring. Yes, economic freedom is not a mere theory, it has been applied very successfully in capitalist countries.

Economic freedom will help economic growth and bring prosperity to all

Like the example above, Vietnam, after making progress in economic freedom, has achieved an impressive economic growth index. It cannot be denied that that success is due to the “miracle” that the free market brings. If that’s still not enough to convince you that economic freedom is good for the economy, take a look at the chart below.

In the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, the countries with the freest economies grew twice as fast as those with the lowest degrees of economic freedom. In other words, the higher the degree of economic freedom, the faster the economic growth rate, the more prosperous the people of that country become.

Economic freedom contributes to environmental protection

This may come as a surprise to some, but it’s true. The more protected the right of private property, the more it encourages environmental protection. Simply put, when resources are jointly owned, the incentive for conservation is eliminated. But if the resource is owned by individuals, they will know how to preserve it and voluntarily conserve it because in the future this resource will become more and more valuable. Mr. Richard Lyndell Stroup, environmentalist and professor of economics at North Carolina State University, wrote: “When private property rights are protected, 90% of the population has access to clean water; but in countries with a low level of private ownership, the figure is only 60% “ [7] .

At the same time, the Heritage Foundation also points out that the countries at the top of the environmental report (EPI) from Yale University are also the countries that guarantee the highest level of private property rights [8] .

You can’t be happy in a polluted country, can you?

Economic freedom will reduce the risk of war, help build peace

How can a country with constant war bring happiness to its people? How to bring peace to mankind? Many people often answer simply that: there should be tolerance, giving up greed, giving up fighting for power, taking advantage; or must educate people to love each other, not to dispute, to lose in political and religious ideals, etc. But in fact, the cause of war does not come from ideals, but from stories. economy.

The more economic protection a country is, the more likely it is to increase the risk of conflict for that country. In the 19th century, King Tu Duc banned foreign trade activities with the West [9], then the Franco-Vietnamese war broke out is the most visible historical evidence. Whether nations are in the name of liberal or communist ideals, the two world wars of the last century were inherently meant to divide resources. Later, with the formation of trade organizations, conflicts between countries were gradually eliminated. Countries conduct trade and become partners with each other, tightening friendship. Obviously, it is more difficult to wage war with one’s partner than with a country that has nothing to do with it. Therefore, only the realization of free trade and economic freedom can bring peace to mankind. Only peace can bring happiness to the people.

Political freedom: the second factor that makes a happy country

A market economy is not perfect when it opens only free markets for goods without freedom for ideals. Allowing freedom of thought will make the economy more open and dynamic. I will not analyze whether economic freedom or political freedom should be prioritized in this article because it has been analyzed in the article The relationship between political freedom and economic freedom . However, there is not a country with a high degree of civil liberties and political freedom that does not use capitalism and the private sector as the dominant element in the economic structure [10] . Human history has also demonstrated that the economic collapse of a country will also lead to the collapse of political institutions. Historically and logically, political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom.

The loss of political freedom will restrain the whole nation in all aspects, and the root cause is the dictatorship of the leader. There are many types of dictatorship, even if that dictatorship is derived from the leader thinking that their ideal is the best, it is still not good for development for me. I would like to quote a passage that I really like from Mr. Tran Huynh Duy Thuc’s letter to TBT Nguyen Phu Trong on December 19, 2016:

“I can understand your desire for an ethical government. But the history of the nation and the world has proved that virtue does not create moral states and societies, but also holds peoples back in the backward agricultural economy. The rule of law is characteristic of the Industrial Economic Age. The rule of law is characteristic of the Age of Knowledge Economy. Virtue cannot be used to succeed in this rapidly forming New Age.”

This paragraph Mr. Thuc wants to talk about the role of the rule of law, but I will use it to talk about the issue of morality. Ethics and its standards are inherently set by people, using their own moral standards to judge is also an imposition of their thinking on others. Therefore, in my opinion, virtue rule is also a form of dictatorship.

I am an opponent of cult of personality, so I also believe that no single outstanding individual can make decisions for all the rest. Perhaps, the achievements of great people are always exaggerated to serve some purpose, and education is always used as a tool to produce children who are loyal to what is taught.

When people have the freedom to think, discuss and raise their voices, there we can live; Without those basic freedoms, we are no different from the inanimate animals that exist in this world. I believe that pluralism and conflict are also a driving force for development, political freedom is what frees people to pursue their own happiness without being constrained by laws and regulations.

Conclude

But it would be naive if the people hoped for a good government, for the people, for the country; people can only use their political freedom to choose a government that is less evil and interferes with people’s lives less.

Therefore, a happy country is one in which the people have political freedom, the right to elect a government that the people believe will protect economic freedoms. There, people are freed from the shackles, are free to make their own decisions, follow their own ideals, pursue their cherished dreams, and can live a life they want.

All credit goes to trantuansang.com.

0 notes

foodreceipe · 5 years ago

Photo

'Secret Life Of Groceries' Shines A Light On Bounty's Dark Side

November 7, 2020 John Henning Schumann

A pre-pandemic Seattle supermarket boasts row after row of prepackaged snacks. Even before the coronavirus pandemic put extra stress on grocery workers, keeping shelves stocked with the variety that Americans have come to expect took a hidden toll on producers, distributors and retail workers, says author Benjamin Lorr.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly heightened our awareness of our food supply — and the grocery stores we visit to stock up. Grocery workers became even more essential in March and April, as many of the rest of us were sent home to work or were laid off.

But how much do most customers know about what really goes on behind the scenes in our local supermarkets — now or before the coronavirus pandemic? What's gained and lost as all that food makes its way to the shelves?

Author Benjamin Lorr spent five years looking into that as he studied all aspects of American supermarkets — from the suppliers, distributors and supply routes to the workers in the retail outlets themselves. In the reporting for his new book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, Lorr met with farmers and fieldworkers and spent 120 hours straight driving the highways with a trucker as she made her multistate rounds. He worked the fish counter at a Whole Foods Market for a few months and went to trade shows to learn about entrepreneurs who were trying to break into the industry. He also traveled to Asia to learn about commodity fishing — finding human rights violations along his journey.

The result is an intense, immersive, humorous and sometimes shocking portrait of the modern American supermarket, which for all its abundance and convenience leaves the reader with concerns about the insatiability of American appetites and how the markets can be a force for good and bad.

Shots interviewed Lorr from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your book is subtitled The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket. For all their plentitude, our giant grocery stores mask a great deal of human and animal suffering.

Yes! Here is this institution we spend 2% of our lives in, so routine we often take it completely for granted. And yet, if you stop to think for even a moment, you realize it is completely unprecedented in the human experience. The grocery store is a miracle. It offers a continuous, dreamlike bounty of products at prices that get lower each year, even as the quality gets higher and higher. And as a customer, this bounty all appears completely frictionless, like some suburban American birthright. Of course, from the inside, it is the opposite of frictionless. It requires tremendous power to maintain. And when you scratch the surface of that power, you realize there is something slightly menacing underneath it. And if you scratch further, you get suffering — from our factory-farmed animals to the many workers in our food supply chains.

Far too many Americans suffer from paradoxical afflictions — food insecurity and health conditions related to obesity, like diabetes and heart disease. How do our supermarkets contribute to these problems?

It's a great question. But to answer, I'd almost flip it. Because it's not that the supermarket contributes in a uniquely malevolent way — it merely echoes other structures in our society. So, for me, the question is "What can the supermarket teach us about our responses to these diseases that typically get overlooked?"

And, again, I think this starts with what the supermarket does really well. Rather than respond to our mouthed pieties, the industry caters to our actions, working very hard to provide a few key values that we select at the checkout counter again and again: convenience, low price and choice. And by choice, I mean something very particular — food options that allow us to express meaning. That is, food that allows us to demonstrate who we want to be — whether that is worldly and sophisticated, thin and athletic, decadent and indulgent, ecologically virtuous, connected to our ancestors, distinct from our kin, etc., down the line of human aspiration.

Now, to circle back to your question: We know that food insecurity, noncommunicable disease and poverty track closely. But our public health responses could benefit by mimicking the grocery store, focusing less on a predetermined idea of what people should do and more on what they actually need and want. Poverty is multidimensional. There is financial poverty, i.e. the lack of wealth we are all familiar with. But there is also poverty of time. And poverty of choice. And rather than being distinct, all those different forms of poverty compound. And they parallel the very things grocery excels at serving.

So simply offering cheap vegetables from a CSA is not enough. Nor is pummeling food-insecure folks with "education" about the "right" foods going to flip a switch. Very often that switch has long been flipped, but there are other barriers getting in the way.

To get more concrete, I'd say that means supermarkets are going beyond merely offering affordable healthy options, into affordable healthy options that are also convenient, grab 'n' go, ready-to-cook, pre-made or in individual servings for a kid left on their own while a busy parent is working a second job. Similarly, it means recognizing that "health food" all too often expresses a value set that doesn't dovetail with people who are actually poor.

I was surprised to learn that food quality and taste are not the leading criteria that supermarket employees consider when stocking their shelves.

Yes! And maybe not even the third or fourth qualities! Again and again, when talking both to food entrepreneurs working to get their product on the shelf or supermarket buyers evaluating a product to add to their mix, they'd say things like, "Stop focusing on taste — rookie mistake," or "Stop thinking about this as food — this is a 'food product.' " And they didn't mean that in a sneering, holier-than-thou, "Velveeta is not cheese" sense. They mean that a grocery item needed to excel as a retail product before its identity as food even mattered to them. So qualities like gross margin, stability of the underlying commodities in its ingredient list, shelf life, packaging, availability in a continuous manner — these are what got a buyer's attention. Far more important than knockout flavor.

Health certifications for food, like "gluten-free" or "non-GMO," are laden with compromises that consumers are not likely aware of. How can we be better, more informed shoppers?

The audit process that undergirds most food certifications — from "non-GMO" to "fair trade" — is deeply flawed. I think the simplest answer here, from a consumer perspective, is not one people want to hear: Shrink the supply chain. These problems accumulate from lack of visibility in a supply chain that has grown enormous and complex from serving the needs of a supermarket. Buying from sources you implicitly trust, not ones you need dubious proof of that trust, is the way to go. That means local, direct from the farm.

And let me say, farmers are ready to set up these relationships. I get my pecans from a single family farm, New Ground Orchards, that I trust. Do I need to see a list of their certifications? No.

Though we profess to care greatly about the provenance of the foods we eat, price seems to be the main driver of our choices. This can have deleterious effects on laborers like farmhands or fishermen.

Yes, again and again, labor is the place where the industry can extract "efficiencies." It really fits together with what we have been talking about previously. To become a global commodity, you need to meet all sorts of certifications and standards just to gain entry — safety standards, environmental standards, packaging, shipping and volume standards — and a lot of these can be tracked empirically in ways that are much more difficult with labor. Then, once you are trapped by these fixed costs, every few years your buyer comes and asks for a lower price, as that buyer is competing with other outlets back home. If you are a producer looking at your cost structure, trying to meet your buyer's demands, labor is often the place where you have control. And so it is the place where cuts occur.

The result, of course, when translated into human lives, is devastating. Humans are adaptable and can adapt to misery when they are desperate. For me, a key part of the book is helping readers see the connections on a human level, elevating the "out of sight, out of mind" voices at the bottom of the chain into a visible place.

As part of your research, you worked as a "team member" at the Bowery Whole Foods in New York City. You relate difficulties among your fellow workers in feeling valued as team members.

I was really surprised by the ways these minimum-wage jobs have changed. I've worked a lot of minimum-wage jobs over the years, but I worked them 20 years ago or more in high school and right after college. So I had a memory of them that was almost tinged by nostalgia. But just like everywhere else in the chain, labor in retail has become more "efficient." Industrywide practices like variable scheduling, on-call scheduling, just-in-time scheduling — where employees don't have a fixed schedule, but rather one that varies week to week by up to 40% or who only receive their schedule a few days in advance — have devastating effects. You can't get a second job, because there is no schedule to schedule around. You can't arrange child care, and your take-home pay swings wildly with the changes in hours worked.

And, of course, given our growing wealth divide, these jobs are no longer "high school" jobs but careers for middle-aged adults. So the nostalgia I and many people hold can be actively harmful when grappling with the reality and empathy for others.

You also embedded with a long-haul trucker to see what it's like to bring food to market. The freedom seemingly offered by life on the road made me think more of Sisyphus endlessly rolling a boulder uphill. And it's even tougher for women drivers.

Yes. Trucking is this enormous profession — 10.7 billion tons of freight per year, the No. 1 form of employment in the majority of states — that serves as a literal circulatory system for our economy. And yet, the life of the trucker has been systematically degraded. In the 1970s, trucking was this true middle-class profession — blue-collar, outlaw maybe, but also deeply stable. Over the last decades, that has all changed. Truckers now work to create twice the output at 40% less in wages. Many are caught in a debt peonage they call "sharecropping on wheels," a descriptor that seems overblown until you hear the stories.

And you can see the effects of everything we've talked about here in their lives. The trucker I rode with for the book was racked with health problems, suffering from many of the noncommunicable diseases we started off talking about. Yet this was not the result of lack of education. She knew what it meant to eat healthily and talked about wanting to "go paleo." Yet in the book it almost reads as a joke. The demands of her job, the extremely variable scheduling, the sedentary nature of the profession, the lack of food options at the truck stops — it all conspired to make health an impossible bar for her.

My friend makes his own barbecue sauce — we like to say he should bottle it and sell it. But getting shelf space in our local supermarket is a lot harder than any hobbyist can imagine.

I'd say, "Good luck," but then suggest that before investing any of his own money, he do a real gut check about how important this is to him. And maybe read my book. The entrepreneur I followed, Julie Busha, who was marketing a delicious condiment called Slawsa, disabused me of any idea this was to be easy. Julie was one of the hardest-working, most intelligent people I've ever met, and yet as a small-business woman, she was extremely vulnerable to an industry geared to dealing with much bigger players (or those with easy access to venture capital). Most people don't know that supermarkets make a significant amount of their profit directly from these entrepreneurs — i.e., extracted through direct fees, like a landlord leasing space. And so at every stage, Julie was met with demands for payments — for shelf space, for free product, for advertising, for demos. Julie kept moving forward, but it was like watching a hurdler.

Do you see ways supermarkets could do better by their customers?

In the book, I talk with a retail architect, a brilliant guy, Kevin Kelley, who talked about the intricate ways he helps stores create meaning for customers. But this is rarely — if ever — applied to people who are food insecure. What does a consumer in the South Bronx or San Joaquin Valley want to express? How can we craft messages around healthy food that will speak to their cultural values, as opposed to a Marion Nestle/Michael Pollan paradigm? If you provide all that, I am sure they will get snatched off the shelves. And I am sure people will become healthier for it.

John Henning Schumann is a doctor and writer in Tulsa, Okla. He hosts StudioTulsa's Medical Mondays on KWGS Public Radio Tulsa. Follow him on Twitter: @GlassHospital.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/07/931348023/secret-life-of-supermarkets-shines-a-light-on-bountys-dark-side?utm_source=pocket-newtab

#Groceries #supermarkets

0 notes

googlenewson · 5 years ago

Link

The end of June brought with it seemingly good news: 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy—the largest one-month increase in U.S. history. People returning to work is a good thing, but any victory lap based on these jobs numbers is not only premature, it is misguided as well.

Our goal should not be a strong recovery. It should be a redesign, so we can have an economy that works for the millions of workers who had been left behind even before the pandemic. To start, we need to correct two fallacies in our labor market that are hidden by jobs and unemployment numbers: that wage equals value and that more jobs equal more opportunity.

The first fallacy is founded on the philosophy that wages are set by supply and demand. The assumption is that low-wage jobs are the ones that the widest pool of people can do, thus they must be low-skilled. But the formula is backward: Workers are often labeled “low-skill” because they are compensated with a low wage.

We can see this when we compare two jobs: a customer service representative and a human resources specialist. Both require critical thinking, persuasion, and active listening, often under stressful situations. Despite their skill similarities, the customer service representative in Washington, D.C., earns approximately $16 an hour while an HR specialist makes $28 an hour in the same metro area. This overlap between low- and higher-paid jobs is common. In fact, our recent research on the 71 million workers without college degrees (a population we call STARs, for skilled through alternative routes) found that all of them have skills that could translate to higher-wage work.

The misconception that wage equals value is further exposed when you consider the importance of low-wage jobs. Low-paid farm and factory workers ensure that the rest of us get essential supplies every day, even during a pandemic. Childcare workers—who are critically needed to support working parents—earn $10 per hour on average. And if you think taking care of kids is low-skill work, talk to a parent trying to homeschool their child.

Meanwhile, some of our most valuable work is done as an act of love or charity for no pay. A recent study estimated that if women in America were paid minimum wage for the unpaid work they do, they would have made $1.5 trillion more last year.

From grocery store workers and home health aides to parents and community volunteers, salaries rarely reflect necessity or social good, and conflating them with value denigrates essential work and the workers who do it.

Wages must reflect the value that workers add to our economy and the values we hold as a society.

Caught up in this idea that low-wage workers earn the salary they deserve is the view that people would find jobs that pay more if they were capable. This brings up the second fallacy: that more jobs equal more opportunity.

Pre-COVID, we had the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. Yet, in that period, we saw real wages decline for millions of workers. The Black unemployment rate was the lowest ever, but median wealth for Black families has remained largely the same for two decades. Police violence is only one face of systemic racism, and there is no video to expose the injustice of lost opportunity.

In 2019, 53 million Americans earned a median wage of just $18,000 annually. Many were also in “go-nowhere” jobs. And the majority of workers in the bottom 20% lacked the most basic safety nets: health insurance, retirement, paid sick leave, or other benefits. Almost everyone had jobs, but few had prosperity. Today, millions of workers face an economic downturn without any savings or wealth from when the going was supposedly good.

Moreover, opportunity pre-COVID was exclusive. Between 2008 and 2017, three out of four jobs created required college degrees to apply, but 60% of workers don’t have them. Put another way, nearly two-thirds of the workforce had access to fewer than one-third of the new jobs created. We have antidiscrimination employment laws, but hiring based on degree requirements and privileged networks are legal, accepted, and often preferred practices. Ability doesn’t count for much if you’re screened out before you can demonstrate it.

If we follow the path of the last recovery, opportunity will also be concentrated. While all parts of the country lost jobs in the 2007–09 Great Recession, the gains disproportionately went to 25 megacities. Many zip codes lost jobs that never came back.

A look at the past and the insecurity we see now suggests we should aim for a redesign that goes deeper than headline numbers—one that rewards workers for their contribution to society. We need to focus on economic mobility, not just growth. We need to create good jobs, not just more. We need these jobs everywhere, not in a few hotspots. And we need to create broad access to opportunity so that going to college or having connections are not the only pathways to a meaningful career.

We cannot let good jobs numbers blind us to the reality that we have a labor market that does not work for a majority of workers and especially for people of color. Now is the time to leave behind a broken and biased past, and to build something new: an economy that values workers and a nation that lives up to our values.

Karan Chopra is cofounder of Opportunity@Work and a former New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

More opinion in Fortune:

These 5 numbers tell you everything you need to know about racial disparities in health care

In the COVID-19 vaccine race, nobody wins unless everyone wins

Overstock CEO: How blockchain can help pull us out of the coronavirus recession

A guide for companies that want to fight the stigma around opioid addiction

The case for going all-in on remote work

from Fortune https://ift.tt/3elRHcc

#World News

0 notes

imjuzzsaying · 5 years ago

Text

Monochrome Blues

An introspection into the hope for future and freedom

Yves Klein, Untitled Blue Monochrome, 1959

The title of this essay has been inspired by this painting. The artist attempts to break color free from what he considers the prison of line. The paint is free-flowing with no boundaries defined. I identify with this expression of freedom. Though not an artist myself I can claim to be continuously attempting to break free from the lines drawn by culture, society, and norms invading the idea and existence of freedom and equality in my personal life. After all, the personal is political!

Does Freedom have a Future? Well, indeed it does! At least I would like to believe so. Just as we rose above a horrendous past involving the gravest demonstrations of slavery, freedom indeed has a future. Several aspects of freedom that we exercise today were once only a dream. However, like most things that lie in the future we are uncertain of the forms of freedom that would exist in the future. The question of freedom is primarily also a question of being ethical and believing in liberty for all.

An observation of the various contemporary uproars for freedom from around the world would help us believe that the idea of the existence of freedom in the future is not simply sheer imagination but an undeniable reality. People across countries, communities, and cultures are constantly striving to attain freedom of various kinds from various oppressive regimes, systems, and structures. Some from dictatorial Governments, some others from patriarchal cultures and many more who strive to free themselves from poverty, homelessness and war. Around the world, people are demanding freedom of varying kinds and varying degrees.

It is rather easier to advocate for shared duties and responsibilities, but there would always be a group who is able to afford not to do menial jobs even for themselves and would choose not to do it. Even if it means paying a higher price for it because they would be able to afford it. Veblen’s theory of leisure class explains how leisure would be held dear by the elites not simply as a way of life, but also as a way of showing off how elite they are, and how they can afford not to work. This could affect the rest of the population as the work the elite ignores would have to be carried out by others.

The planet has enough for everyone but the greedy might always claim more, which results in a vast proportion of inequality. Neoliberalism has led to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, which has thereby led to unequal access to resources, which in turn affected the freedom. Capitalism and freedom do not seem compatible unless egalitarianism is kept out of the picture. But then again, when we are looking at the question of ‘does freedom have a future,’ we are also looking at whose freedom. An egalitarian society continues to be a utopian concept. However, there are societies that are doing better than the others in terms of equality and we are constantly in the pursuit of moving forward, which is hope for the future.

Historically, religion has helped achieve freedom at many levels. The Prophet Mohammed had abolished slavery in the Middle East, Christian missionaries had provided an opportunity to get freedom from caste hierarchies in India, Budhism had helped free oneself from the materialistic life. However, the absence of religion has also helped many attain freedom, atheists and agnostics seem to be on the rise, especially in institutions of higher education.

The gender debate on freedom that began years ago is continuing even today and looks like it will go on for a long time. However, on the brighter side, over the years several transitions have happened. Women who were once not allowed to gain an education, several sports were restricted only to men, several occupations were reserved for men, and women were deemed unfit for roles involving leadership and power. Today, we have a different scenario. Spaces of higher education are occupied by several women, though not in the same numbers as men, there is still hope. Has equality been achieved? No. But, there is a significant improvement in the condition as compared to what it used to be and we are constantly engaged in dialogue regarding achieving true equality. This is certainly an optimistic condition in that sense, but on the downside, one can also argue that even after all these years we have not achieved true gender equality. But, one could also choose to side with the optimist and work at making things better. However, in the gig economy, a persistent gendered difference has been observed with men benefited the most in this regard, with 50% willing to undertake highly skilled tasks against just 25% of women (Wood, et al., 2019).

Another debate when it comes to talks of freedom is that of the worker. There is an increase in part-time job opportunities, work at home options, employers are contributing to training and education of their workforce which not only benefits the company but also the employees in their skill development. But, the improvement is perhaps only in the case of workers in blue-collar jobs. In the case of the workers engaged in the lowest level continues to be difficult, rights are seldom acknowledged and companies often boast of how they ensure minimum wages when that is the least they can do. The capitalist holds the reigns in most cases. Demands are being made for there to be a more equitable distribution of wealth. Even a slight increase in taxes is frowned upon by the capitalists.

The question of how technology would mold freedom or the idea of freedom is worth pondering upon. Technology is changing every sphere of life as we know it. The development is driven towards making life easier by making goods and services more accessible. However, at what cost are we achieving this is a question of great relevance in the current age. The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposes how many services that we identify as free actually cost much more than what we realize. In a time when every act of yours, every word you say, every message you send, every place you visit is being recorded in real-time, there arises a question of how free we really are.

Freedom is after all, like Yves Klein’s blue painting, like the sky and the sea - an abstract. It holds in itself vast depths, layers, and intricacies, many of which we strive to uncover in our earthly lives. As much as this essay holds arguments in favor of a future without freedom, I urge you to believe in a future filled with freedom. For the dialogue, debate, discussion, and protest for freedom happening today is a hope for the freedom that would be a reality tomorrow.

References:

Veblen, T. (1973). The theory of the leisure class (p. 56). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Wood, A. J., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., & Hjorth, I. (2019). Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy. Work, Employment and Society, 33(1), 56–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018785616

#essay #ReMA #freedom #liberty

0 notes

bountyofbeads · 6 years ago

Text

Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren Are Democrats’ Top Choices for President https://nyti.ms/2G7RM4i

INTERESTING choice by the New York Editorial Board, I DOUBT that it will make ANY difference. Though it's GREAT they CHOSE TWO WOMEN!! Our time is way OVERDUE!! From my perspective, I like Warren's ideas but I fear that Republicans( NEVER TRUMPERS), Independents and moderate Democrats think she is way to radical and combative. Whereas, Klobuchar is known for working across the isle and (with her support in the Midwest) is known to have support of Republicans, Independents and Democrats. ULTIMATELY the GOAL SHOULD be to DEFEAT Donald J. Trump, as our Nation CANNOT AFFORD another 4 years of #TrumpCrimeSyndicate and I will support the candidate best suited to DEFEAT Donald J. Trump. "MAY THE BEST WOMAN WIN." 💙💙💙💙

THE DEMOCRATS’ BEST CHOICES FOR PRESIDENT

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD | Published January 19, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 20, 2020 |

American voters must choose between three sharply divergent visions of the future.

The incumbent president, Donald Trump, is clear about where he is guiding the Republican Party — white nativism at home and America First unilateralism abroad, brazen corruption, escalating culture wars, a judiciary stacked with ideologues and the veneration of a mythological past where the hierarchy in American society was defined and unchallenged.

On the Democratic side, an essential debate is underway between two visions that may define the future of the party and perhaps the nation. Some in the party view President Trump as an aberration and believe that a return to a more sensible America is possible. Then there are those who believe that President Trump was the product of political and economic systems so rotten that they must be replaced.

The Democratic primary contest is often portrayed as a tussle between moderates and progressives. To some extent that’s true. But when we spent significant time with the leading candidates, the similarity of their platforms on fundamental issues became striking.

Nearly any of them would be the most progressive president in decades on issues like health care, the economy and government’s allocations of resources. Where they differ most significantly is not the what but the how, in whether they believe the country’s institutions and norms are up to the challenge of the moment.

Many Democratic voters are concerned first and foremost about who can beat Mr. Trump. But with a crowded field and with traditional polling in tatters, that calculation calls for a hefty dose of humility about anyone’s ability to foretell what voters want.

Choosing who should face off against Mr. Trump also means acknowledging that Americans are being confronted with three models for how to govern this country, not two. Democrats must decide which of their two models would be most compelling for the American people and best suited for repairing the Republic.

The party’s large and raucous field has made having that clean debate more difficult. With all the focus on personal characteristics — age and race and experience — and a handful of the most contentious issues, voters haven’t benefited from a clarifying choice about the party’s message in the election and the approach to governing beyond it.

It was a privilege for us on the editorial board to spend more than a dozen hours talking to candidates, asking them any question that came to mind. Yet that exercise is impossible for most Americans, and we were left wanting for a more focused conversation for the public. Now is the time to narrow the race.

The history of the editorial board would suggest that we would side squarely with the candidate with a more traditional approach to pushing the nation forward, within the realities of a constitutional framework and a multiparty country. But the events of the past few years have shaken the confidence of even the most committed institutionalists. We are not veering away from the values we espouse, but we are rattled by the weakness of the institutions that we trusted to undergird those values.

There are legitimate questions about whether our democratic system is fundamentally broken. Our elections are getting less free and fair, Congress and the courts are increasingly partisan, foreign nations are flooding society with misinformation, a deluge of money flows through our politics. And the economic mobility that made the American dream possible is vanishing.

Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it.

That’s why we’re endorsing the most effective advocates for each approach. They are Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

AT THE DAWN OF 2020, some of the most compelling ideas are not emerging from the center, but from the left wing of the Democratic Party. That’s a testament to the effectiveness of the case that Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren have made about what ails the country. We worry about ideological rigidity and overreach, and we’d certainly push back on specific policy proposals, like nationalizing health insurance or decriminalizing the border. But we are also struck by how much more effectively their messages have matched the moment.

Senator Sanders has spent nearly four decades advocating revolutionary change for a nation whose politics often move with glacial slowness. A career spent adjacent to the Democratic Party but not a part of it has allowed him to level trenchant criticism of a political party that often caters more to rich donors than to the middle class. Many of his ideas that were once labeled radical — like paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, universal health care and limits on military intervention — are now mainstream, and may attract voters who helped elect Mr. Trump in 2016.

Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern. Then, there’s how Mr. Sanders approaches politics. He boasts that compromise is anathema to him. Only his prescriptions can be the right ones, even though most are overly rigid, untested and divisive. He promises that once in office, a groundswell of support will emerge to push through his agenda. Three years into the Trump administration, we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.

Good news, then, that Elizabeth Warren has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic left.

[ WATCH A SPECIAL ENDORSEMENT EPISODE OF “THE WEEKLY” ON FX HULU]

Senator Warren is a gifted storyteller. She speaks elegantly of how the economic system is rigged against all but the wealthiest Americans, and of “our chance to rewrite the rules of power in our country,” as she put it in a speech last month. In her hands, that story has the passion of a convert, a longtime Republican from Oklahoma and a middle-class family, whose work studying economic realities left her increasingly worried about the future of the country. The word “rigged” feels less bombastic than rooted in an informed assessment of what the nation needs to do to reassert its historic ideals like fairness, generosity and equality.

She is also committed to reforming the fundamental structures of government and the economy — her first commitment is to anti-corruption legislation, which is not only urgently needed but also has the potential to find bipartisan support.

She speaks fluently about foreign policy, including how to improve NATO relations, something that will be badly needed after Mr. Trump leaves office.

Her campaign’s plans, in general, demonstrate a serious approach to policymaking that some of the other candidates lack. Ms. Warren accurately describes a lack of housing construction as the primary driver of the nation’s housing crisis, and she has proposed both increases in government funding for housing construction, and changes in regulatory policy to encourage local governments to allow more construction.

She has plans to sharply increase federal investment in clean energy research and to wean the American economy from fossil fuels. She has described how she would reduce the economic and political power of large corporations and give workers more ability to bargain collectively. And she has proposed a sweeping expansion of government support for Americans at every stage of life, from universal child care to free public college to expanded Social Security.

At the same time, a conservative federal judiciary will be almost as significant a roadblock for progressive change. For Ms. Warren, that leaves open questions — ones she was unwilling to wrestle with in our interview. Ms. Warren has proposed to pay for an expanded social safety net by imposing a new tax on wealth. But even if she could push such a bill through the Senate, the idea is constitutionally suspect and would inevitably be bogged down for years in the courts. A conservative judiciary also could constrain a President Warren’s regulatory powers, and roll back access to health care.

Carrying out a progressive agenda through new laws will also be very hard for any Democratic president. In that light, voters could consider what a Democratic president might accomplish without new legislation and, in particular, they could focus on the presidency’s wide-ranging powers to shape American society through the creation and enforcement of regulations.

As an adviser to President Barack Obama, Ms. Warren was the person most responsible for the creation of a new regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In her interview with the editorial board, she demonstrated her sophisticated understanding of the different levers of power in an administration, particularly in the use of regulation in areas such as trade, antitrust and environmental policy.

When she first arrived in Washington, amid the Great Recession, Senator Warren distinguished herself as a citizen-politician. She showed an admirable desire to shake off the entrapments of many Washington interests in favor of pragmatic problem-solving on behalf of regular people. In her primary campaign, however, she has shown some questionable political instincts. She sometimes sounds like a candidate who sees a universe of us-versus-thems, who, in the general election, would be going up against a president who has already divided America into his own version of them and us.

This has been most obvious in her case for “Medicare for all,” where she has already had to soften her message, as voters have expressed their lack of support for her plan. There are good, sound reasons for a public health care option — countries all over the world have demonstrated that. But Ms. Warren’s version would require winning over a skeptical public, legislative trench warfare to pass bills in Congress, the dismantling of a private health care system. That system, through existing public-private programs like Medicare Advantage, has shown it is not nearly as flawed as she insists, and it is even lauded by health economists who now advocate a single-payer system.

American capitalism is responsible for its share of sins. But Ms. Warren often casts the net far too wide, placing the blame for a host of maladies from climate change to gun violence at the feet of the business community when the onus is on society as a whole. The country needs a more unifying path. The senator talks more about bringing together Democrats, Republicans and independents behind her proposals, often leaning on anecdotes about her conservative brothers to do so. Ms. Warren has the power and conviction and credibility to make the case — especially given her past as a Republican — but she needs to draw on practicality and patience as much as her down-and-dirty critique of the system.

Ms. Warren’s path to the nomination is challenging, but not hard to envision. The four front-runners are bunched together both in national polls and surveys in states holding the first votes, so small shifts in voter sentiment can have an outsize influence this early in the campaign. There are plenty of progressives who are hungry for major change but may harbor lingering concerns about a messenger as divisive as Mr. Sanders. At the same time, some moderate Democratic primary voters see Ms. Warren as someone who speaks to their concerns about inequality and corruption. Her earlier leaps in the polls suggest she can attract more of both.

THE LACK OF A SINGLE, powerful moderate voice in this Democratic race is the strongest evidence of a divided party. Never mind the talented, honorable politicians who chose to sit this fight out; just stop and consider the talents who did throw their hat into the ring and never got more than a passing glance from voters — Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, Michael Bennet, Deval Patrick, Jay Inslee, among others.

Those candidates who remain all have a mix of strengths and weaknesses.

Pete Buttigieg, who is 38 and who was elected mayor of South Bend, Ind., in 2011, has an all-star résumé — Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, the first serious openly gay presidential candidate. His showing in the lead-up to the primaries predicts a bright political future; we look forward to him working his way up.

Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, is an engaging and enthusiastic candidate whose diagnoses are often thought-provoking. He points to new solutions to 21st-century challenges rather than retrofitting old ideas. Yet he has virtually no experience in government. We hope he decides to get involved in New York politics.

Michael Bloomberg served three terms as New York’s mayor (and was endorsed twice by this page). A multibillionaire who built his namesake company from scratch, he is many of the things Mr. Trump pretends to be and would be an effective contrast to the president in a campaign. Mr. Bloomberg is the candidate in the race with the clearest track record of governing, even if that record has its blemishes, beginning with his belated and convenient apology for stop-and-frisk policing.

Still, Mr. Bloomberg’s current campaign approach reveals more about America’s broken system than his likelihood of fixing it. Rather than build support through his ideas and experience, Mr. Bloomberg has spent at least $217 million to date to circumvent the hard, uncomfortable work of actual campaigning. He’s also avoided difficult questions — going so far as to bar his own news organization from investigating him, and declining to meet with The Times’s editorial board under the pretext that he didn’t yet have positions on enough issues. What’s worse, Mr. Bloomberg refuses to allow several women with whom he has nondisclosure settlements to speak freely.

Few men have given more of their time and experience to the conduct of the public’s business than Joe Biden. The former vice president commands the greatest fluency on foreign policy and is a figure of great warmth and empathy. He’s prone to verbal stumbles, yes, but social media has also made every gaffe a crisis when it clearly is not.

Mr. Biden maintains a lead in national polls, but that may be a measure of familiarity as much as voter intention. His central pitch to voters is that he can beat Donald Trump. His agenda tinkers at the edges of issues like health care and climate, and he emphasizes returning the country to where things were before the Trump era. But merely restoring the status quo will not get America where it needs to go as a society. What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77. It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.

Good news, then, that Amy Klobuchar has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic center. Her vision goes beyond the incremental. Given the polarization in Washington and beyond, the best chance to enact many progressive plans could be under a Klobuchar administration.

The senator from Minnesota is the very definition of Midwestern charisma, grit and sticktoitiveness. Her lengthy tenure in the Senate and bipartisan credentials would make her a deal maker (a real one) and uniter for the wings of the party — and perhaps the nation.

She promises to put the country on the path — through huge investments in green infrastructure and legislation to lower emissions — to achieve 100 percent net-zero emissions no later than 2050. She pledges to cut childhood poverty in half in a decade by expanding the earned-income and child care tax credits. She also wants to expand food stamps and overhaul housing policy and has developed the field’s most detailed plan for treating addiction and mental illness. And this is all in addition to pushing for a robust public option in health care, free community college and a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour.

Ms. Klobuchar speaks about issues like climate change, the narrowing middle class, gun safety and trade with an empathy that connects to voters’ lived experiences, especially in the middle of the country. The senator talks, often with self-deprecating humor, about growing up the daughter of two union workers, her Uncle Dick’s deer stand, her father’s struggles with alcoholism and her Christian faith.

Ms. Klobuchar promises a foreign policy based on leading by example, instead of by threat-via-tweet. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she serves on the subcommittees responsible for oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the nation’s borders and its immigration, citizenship and refugee laws. In 13 years as a senator, she has sponsored and voted on dozens of national defense measures, including military action in Libya and Syria. Her record shows that she is confident and thoughtful, and she reacts to data — what you’d want in a crisis.

All have helped Ms. Klobuchar to be the most productive senator among the Democratic field in terms of bills passed with bipartisan support, according to a recent study for the Center for Effective Lawmaking. When she arrived in the Senate in 2007, Ms. Klobuchar was part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers that proposed comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for 12 million undocumented immigrants, before conservative pundits made it political poison. Her more recent legislative accomplishments are narrower but meaningful to those affected, especially the legislation aimed at helping crime victims. This is not surprising given her background as the chief prosecutor in Minnesota’s most populous county. For example, one measure she wrote helped provide funds to reduce a nationwide backlog of rape kits for investigating sexual assaults.

Reports of how Senator Klobuchar treats her staff give us pause. They raise serious questions about her ability to attract and hire talented people. Surrounding the president with a team of seasoned, reasoned leaders is critical to the success of an administration, not doing so is often the downfall of presidencies. Ms. Klobuchar has acknowledged she’s a tough boss and pledged to do better. (To be fair, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump — not to mention former Vice President Biden — also have reputations for sometimes berating their staffs, and it is rarely mentioned as a political liability.)

Ms. Klobuchar doesn’t have the polished veneer and smooth delivery that comes from a lifetime spent in the national spotlight, and she has struggled to gain traction on the campaign trail. In Minnesota, however, she is enormously popular. She has won all three of her Senate elections by double digits. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried nine of Minnesota’s 87 counties. Ms. Klobuchar carried 51 in 2018. And it’s far too early to count Ms. Klobuchar out — Senator John Kerry, the eventual Democrat nominee in 2004, was also polling in the single digits at this point in the race.

THERE HAS BEEN A WILDFIRE BURNING in Australia larger than Switzerland. The Middle East is more unstable at this moment than at any other time in the past decade, with a nuclear arms race looking more when than if. Basket-case governments in several nations south of the Rio Grande have sent a historic flood of migrants to our southern border. Global technology companies exert more political influence than some national governments. White nationalists from Norway to New Zealand to El Paso use the internet to share ideas about racial superiority and which caliber of rifle works best for the next mass killing.

The next president will shape the direction of America’s prosperity and the future of the planet, perhaps irrevocably. The current president, meanwhile, is a threat to democracy. He was impeached for strong-arming Ukraine into tampering with the 2020 election. There is no reason patriotic Americans should not be open to every chance to replace him at the ballot box.

Yet, Mr. Trump maintains near-universal approval from his party and will nearly certainly coast to the nomination. Democrats would be smart to recognize that Mr. Trump’s vision for America’s future is shared by many millions of Americans.

Any hope of restoring unity in the country will require modesty, a willingness to compromise and the support of the many demographics that make up the Democratic coalition — young and old, in red states and blue, black and brown and white. For Senator Klobuchar, that’s acknowledging the depth of the nation’s dysfunction. For Senator Warren, it’s understanding that the country is more diverse than her base.

There will be those dissatisfied that this page is not throwing its weight behind a single candidate, favoring centrists or progressives. But it’s a fight the party itself has been itching to have since Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in 2016, and one that should be played out in the public arena and in the privacy of the voting booth. That’s the very purpose of primaries, to test-market strategies and ideas that can galvanize and inspire the country.

Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren right now are the Democrats best equipped to lead that debate.

May the best woman win.

*********

The Big Ask of Black Voters: Trust the Government

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are trying to woo older black voters with policy. Those policies may be why they’re struggling to win their support.

By Astead W. Herndon | Published Jan. 19, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 20, 2020 |

DANVILLE, Va. — Ten minutes into a small community meeting between black farmers from Southern Virginia and regional campaign staff for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, an aide took the floor.

He was the only white person to speak in a room of older black voters seated in an old beauty salon. He stood, delivering an off-the-cuff pitch for Ms. Warren’s plan to help rural black America: proposals for new access to funding for black farmers, and to address discrimination in the United States Department of Agriculture. She understood the challenges black farmers faced, he said.

But he was cut off midsentence, before he could finish his appeal for their support. Instead, the black farmers had a message for him, and for Ms. Warren’s campaign. Plans and rhetoric are one thing, but to trust a candidate to deliver — or the government at all — is entirely another.

In a community all too familiar with legal discrimination and unequal access to public services, believing in “big, structural change,” as Ms. Warren likes to call it, is a gamble.

“No disrespect,” called out Lauren Hudson, a 62-year-old hemp farmer, “but there’s a whole different avenue when we go for funding versus when a white family goes for funding.”

Democratic candidates have come to understand that they need policies that target racial inequities, especially to win over black voters — a vital force in the Democratic primary. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont says single-payer health insurance will close disparities like the higher infant mortality rate in black families. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., released his Frederick Douglass Plan, which calls for overhauling the criminal justice system, health care equity, and education funding.

In addition to her proposals for black farmers, Ms. Warren has aimed to design her health care and education plans so that they take corrective steps to address historical inequality.

Still, even as the plans add up, black voters have largely not shown enthusiasm about these candidates, and the polling numbers have barely budged. According to a recent nationwide poll of black voters from The Washington Post and Ipsos, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a significant edge, with the support of nearly 50 percent of respondents. Among black voters 65 and older, poll showed Mr. Biden ahead by 60 percentage points.

Mr. Sanders had 20 percent support, driven largely by his popularity with black voters under 35 years old. Ms. Warren was third in The Post’s poll, with 9 percent.

Over the course of her campaign, at events geared toward black voters, Ms. Warren often cites policy proposals such as investment in historically black colleges and new housing in formerly redlined communities. Crowds generally respond positively.

“I want a world where the color of your skin doesn’t matter, you get the same opportunities,” Ms. Warren said at an event over the weekend hosted with groups including the Iowa chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We do not fix a system like this by pretending that race doesn’t matter.”

Mr. Sanders’s progress with black voters has been a mixed bag; he is beloved among younger voters and viewed with some suspicion by older ones, who largely supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found his insurgent campaign to be harmful to her in the general election. Late last year, Mr. Sanders replaced his South Carolina state director, a sign of the campaign’s desire to shift his strategy for winning over black voters.

Mr. Biden’s candidacy is helped by several factors, including his widespread name recognition, public proximity to former President Barack Obama, and close relationship with black community leaders dating to his years in the Senate.

But in interviews with dozens of black voters in Virginia and South Carolina, another theme emerges: Mr. Biden is also ahead because his leading rivals have yet to wrestle with how their promises of structural change must overcome historical distrust of the government in black communities.

Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who studies race and electoral politics, said black skepticism in government stretches back decades, citing Booker T. Washington and his early 19th century argument for black self-help, rather than a focus on systemic discrimination. Black voters are often described as “moderates,” but Mr. Johnson said the voting choices are more nuanced than straightforward ideological choices.

Racism “contributes to black people’s lack of support for mass federal programs,” Mr. Johnson said. “There’s a sense that, if you prefer federal programs, that can be an admission that you can’t make it without white people or government.”

In “Medicare for all,” free college and other signature progressive proposals, like the cancellation of student loan debt or housing equality, candidates are asking black voters to trust that government can correct the same systemic inequalities that government helped create. But there is often no plan to undo the cynicism that decades of governmental failure have created among older black voters in particular.

“No matter who is in office, the government has not been our best friend,” said Samuel Crisp, 73. He is part of the Piedmont Progressive Farmers Group, which focuses on egg production, and attended the Warren campaign event in Virginia.

“They all have programs that work against us,” he added. “And they don’t seem to understand that.”

There is some precedent for selling older black voters on the promise for structural change. In 2004, the populist campaign of Senator John Edwards of North Carolina won the South Carolina Democratic primary contest. The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 succeeded in bringing a message of systemic upheaval to black voters — winning 11 contests in 1988, including in Virginia and South Carolina. In an interview, Mr. Jackson urged the current crop of left-wing candidates like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren to get better at working to relate to and understand black communities.

“I earned the trust of the people. I worked with them on the ground. I wasn’t just an election candidate. I served with them,” Mr. Jackson said. “I was at their restaurants. I played football. I stayed in their homes.”

Mr. Jackson acknowledged that forming those connections is a different challenge for white candidates, who could risk appearing “pretentious and not genuine,” but he said he believed there were authentic and effective approaches.

He said that his personal politics precluded him from voting for Mr. Biden in the Democratic primary, but that Mr. Biden was boxing out the progressive candidates among some vital black communities.

“Bernie and Warren are on the right side of history — Biden is a moderate and our needs are not moderate,” Mr. Jackson added. “You must build a coalition and you do it through new relationships.”

[ STATE OF THE RACE: Which Democrats are leading the 2020 presidential race? ]

In the farming meeting, the difficulty of the task was evident.

Attendees mostly said they agreed with the substance of Ms. Warren’s farming proposal, which had been updated after dozens of black farmers said her initial policy did not adequately address racial bias. They said that they personally liked Ms. Warren. But they did not support her.

The reluctance to back her candidacy stemmed from forces that predate 2020 or modern politics itself: a general belief that big change promised by elected officials, and white candidates in particular, never reaches black communities.

“They make promises that are not going to be kept,” said Selena Thornton, 45, who works in nearby Caswell County in North Carolina. “Discrimination has been around how long? Since the beginning of time. And just inviting black people to events is not the answer to that.”

Bryant Hood, a 46-year-old resident who helped organize the event with Ms. Warren’s team, said he thought the candidates who are pitching enormous change and government involvement in people’s lives had not adequately wrestled with what they’re asking black votes to believe in.

Presidential candidates “hit the church, they hit the community’s leaders, and they think that’s all they need to do,” said Mr. Hood, who sat out the last election after voting twice for Mr. Obama.

“I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to do more,” he added, “they don’t know.”

Earning the support of black voters with policies that require real faith in what the government can fairly provide amounts to what may be the most significant challenge for the candidates seeking to beat Mr. Biden after Iowa and New Hampshire. That’s when the contest moves to states where the Democratic electorate is less dominated by white voters.

Mr. Crisp, of the progressive farmers group in Piedmont, is undecided in the Democratic primary. He said Mr. Biden was among his top choices, though he acknowledged that on the issues he prioritizes most, Ms. Warren’s plans better target racial inequality.

Mr. Biden “has a history, and a lot of them don’t have a history,” Mr. Crisp said.

Ms. Hudson, the hemp farmer, said that as a black voter, placing her trust in an unknown quantity was a risk. Referring to Mr. Obama, she said: “I didn’t vote for him because he was black. I voted for him because of what he said and I believe what he said.”

She has not found a comparable candidate in 2020.

“It’s hard to trust white politicians,” she said.

*********

#2020 presidential election #2020 candidates #2020 election #us politics #politics #politics and government #democratic party #democrats #presidental election #2020 presidential candidates #presidential candidates #u.s. news #u.s. politics #nyt > top stories

0 notes

brassring2020 · 7 years ago

Text

AYA Analytica financial health memo October 2017

As of October 2017, this regular podcast is available on our Andy Yeh Alpha fintech network platform.

Tech titans from Apple and Amazon to Microsoft and Google can benefit from the G.O.P. tax reform. Large multinational tech firms such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon can benefit much from the G.O.P. tax reform. A recent stock research report assumes the effective U.S. corporate income tax rate declines from 35% to 21%-22% in January 2018 with no subsequent changes in international taxes and all other aspects of the U.S. tax legislation. Specifically, Google will receive tax benefits of more than $2 billion in 2018, Facebook expects to attain tax cost reductions of $1.5 billion, and Amazon will enjoy about $1 billion in tax credits. Also, these tech firms plan to expand their capital expenditures with preferential tax provisions in the Trump administration's current tax reform. Overall, these tech firms can expect to achieve hefty tax benefits in the range of $4.5 billion to $5 billion in the 5-year period from 2018 to 2022. Harvard macrofinance professor Greg Mankiw entertains a key policy question. How much would the average real wage rise for each $1 decrease in the typical firm tax outlay ceteris paribus? The answer is likely to be $1.5 to $2 in real wage terms for each $1 tax cut, or equivalently $4,000 to $ 9,000 per capita per year. Several eminent economists such as Brad DeLong, Larry Summers, and John Cochrane suggest that if we take into account positive externalities and positive returns to the scale of capital usage, the resultant real wage increase can turn out to be higher. An open controversy clouds the fundamental view of whether these massive tax cuts may exacerbate fiscal inequality in America. ?

Public sentiment turns quite a bit against Facebook in light of the public issues around fake news. Sean Parker, Napster founder and a former investor in Facebook, has become a "conscientious objector" on Facebook. Parker says Facebook exploits human psychological vulnerabilities through positive validation that induces its users to constantly post to get more likes and more comments. This instant gratification is quick and easy but offers very few substantive insights and deep relationships. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former vice president for Facebook user growth, points out that the short-term "dopamine-driven feedback loops" may destroy how our modern society works in practice. When millennials push the iconic "like" button, comment on specific posts, and share them on Facebook, these users reinforce their own views and opinions in virtual echo chambers. Palihapitiya says Face-book may erode "the core foundations of how people behave" in reality. He feels "tremendous guilt" about helping create social network tools and programs that may be "ripping apart the social fabric". Public sentiment turns quite a bit against Facebook in light of the public issues around fake news and pervasive Russian posts on the U.S. presidential election in 2016. However, Mark Zuckerberg has refined the social mission of Facebook in order to give its active users the power to build interdependent communities so that the world becomes closer together. On this brighter side, social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on play an important role in connecting all global citizens to better serve the key valuable purpose of life.

Dr Kai-Fu Lee praises China as the next epicenter of artificial intelligence, smart data analysis, and robotic automation. With prior IT careers at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, Dr Kai-Fu Lee discusses economic inequality as the primary threat of artificial intelligence in the modern era of digital technology. In a recent issue of New York Times, his op-ed article suggests that the key to success for most algorithmic machine learners is the sheer volume of smart data. Computational strength begets better smart data analysis, which then attracts more talents and funds that flow into the subsequent smarter data analysis with a larger network of active users and hot spots. This virtuous cycle amplifies the computational strength of artificial intelligence. As both income and wealth gravitate toward the most productive use of human capital and computer equipment, economic inequality concentrates both power and money in the hands of a few elites and oligopolies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon (FAMGA) in America and Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT) in China. For this reason, we need to rethink economic inequality on a global scale.

Carl Icahn mulls over steps to shake up the board of SandRidge Energy after it adopts a counter poison pill. The octogenarian billionaire and activist investor Carl Icahn mulls over steps to shake up the board of SandRidge Energy after the oil-and-gas company adopts a poison pill that aims to prevent him from scooping up more shares. Icahn became the company's largest shareholder after he personally disclosed a 13.5% equity stake in SandRidge in November 2017. He has taken issue with the board's strategic plan to buy Bonanza Creek Energy for $750 million in cash and stock. From Icahn's perspective, this irrational deal demonstrates executive exuberance and overvaluation that would ultimately erode shareholder value. In response, SandRidge introduces the poison pill in order to stop blockholders such as Carl Icahn and Fir Tree Partners from buying more equity stakes above the 10% threshold. Fir Tree has complained that the Bonanza deal would depart substantially from SandRidge's 2016 exit from bankruptcy because the current bid is way too high and so makes little business sense. In addition to this highly controversial poison pill, SandRidge's directors may or may not have breached any triads of fiduciary duty (good faith, loyalty, and due care) in a way that would be commensurate with the business judgment rule. Although it is difficult to anticipate how the poison pill and its concomitant board fight will unravel over time, Icahn's race toward the top can be long and arduous. Time will tell whether his board battle proves worthy and enhances sustainable shareholder wealth creation.

It may be illegal for institutional investors to buy-and-hold large equity stakes in a less competitive industry with high market concentration. Is it anti-competitive and illegal for passive indexers and mutual funds to place large stock bets in specific industries with high market concentration? Harvard law professor Einer Elhauge suggests that it is illegal for a passive institutional investor to buy-and-hold large equity stakes in a less competitive industry with high concentration, such as the U.S. airlines industry with 4 or fewer key players. In contrast, passive indexers would be safe from antitrust concerns if most other institutional investors stop buying multiple public companies in a specific sector with high market concentration. The basic rationale relates to the fact that if institutional investors such as index funds and mutual funds hold shares of multiple companies in a specific industry, these oligopolistic firms would tend to compete less vigorously with one another. When senior executives make business decisions in the best interests of their institutional investors, this logic suggests less fierce product market competition and greater price discrimination for consumers in addition to the private benefits of portfolio diversification. The net result would be more stable share prices and more favorable rents and returns to these passive indexers and mutual funds. Although key critics may disagree with this novel thesis, it is quite controversial to judge whether it is legal for institutional investors to retain major equity stakes in oligopolistic firms in a given industry with high market concentration.

Mario Draghi declares the ECB agreement on a thorny set of revisions to Basel 3. Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, heads the international committee of financial supervisors and has declared their landmark agreement on a thorny set of revisions to Basel 3. Many bankers and pundits refer to these revisions as Basel 4. While many banks prefer to standardize their equity capital calculations under Basel 3, several multinational banks apply their own internal risk models to gauge appropriate common equity capital ratios. Now the primary concern relates to the unfortunate outcome that the minimum regulatory capital results would become lower for a given large bank if one chose to apply another bank's internal risk models. This discrepancy might arise from the fact that each bank exhibits different exposure to specific risk types such as commercial real estate default risk and operational risk. Due to this concern, Basel 4 revisions can fill the gap between fact and fiction to help circumvent regulatory arbitrage. Large banks would need to incorporate loan-to-value ratios into the internal risk models of residential mortgage default risk. On balance, the overall capital floor is 72.5%, which reaches a healthy middle ground between the U.S. preference for 75% and the European tendency toward 70%. Proponents of U.S. financial deregulation suggest that substantially lifting the average capital ratio from 7% to 12%-15% would likely increase the prohibitively high cost of capital for banks, insurance companies, credit unions, and other financial institutions.

Is Bitcoin a legitimate (crypto)currency or a new bubble waiting to implode? Is Bitcoin a legitimate cryptocurrency or a new bubble waiting to implode? As its prices skyrocket, bankers, pundits, and investors increasingly take sides. In accordance with Warren Buffett's intrinsic value philosophy, Bitcoin should not be viewed as a valuable asset because Bitcoin cannot yield future cash flows. Further, several bankers and experts such as Brian Moynihan (Bank of America CEO), Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase CEO), Bill Dudley (New York Fed CEO), and Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Laureate) emphasize that Bitcoin cannot be a stable store of value in light of its volatile price movements and technical impediments for Bitcoin to be a long-term viable legal tender. Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller regards Bitcoin as the modern epitome of a speculative asset bubble. In contrast to this rather pessimistic view, many other proponents suggest that Bitcoin can serve as an alternative virtual currency in addition to legal tender in the current global payments system (especially for many emerging economies with weak legal rules, institutions, and unstable currencies). These proponents include Christine Lagarde (IMF Executive Director), Mark Cuban (VC billionaire), Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder and VC billionaire), Bill Gates (Microsoft founder and philanthropist), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet chairman), Richard Branson (Virgin Group founder), Mark Carney (Governor of Bank of England), and so forth. Time will tell whether Bitcoin will become a successful cryptocurrency!!

Jim Cramer provides 5 key reasons against the purchase and use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. As the TV host of Mad Money, Jim Cramer provides 5 key reasons against the purchase and use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. First, no one knows the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin. Second, no one knows how much the creator has reserved for himself or herself. There are several other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, and NEM as well. Third, there is no transparency in the virtual system for Bitcoin. Fourth, there no explicit or implicit government guarantee or lender of last resort to back up the virtual system for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. Despite the virtual protection of Blockchain for secure Bitcoin transactions, it is possible for aggressive hackers to game this software technology. This latter rationale suggests substantial risk that each Bitcoin investor inevitably needs to address. Although many investors are now abuzz about Blockchain and Bitcoin etc, it is important for each rational investor to acknowledge the hard and solid fact that U.S. stocks continue to offer the highest average excess return than non-equity securities such as bonds, futures, commodities, currencies, and so on over the long run. For this reason, it is safer to earn an annual 6%-8% average excess return on U.S. stocks with a canonical buy-and-hold passive portfolio strategy. More aggressive active asset management may help boost this average excess return to double digits at the margin.

Elizabeth Warren warns of Trump financial reforms that shake up the 5 key pillars of bank regulation. In 2000, a former law professor at Harvard proposed establishing the Financial Product Safety Commission in order to protect consumer rights in the provision of financial products and services. A decade later, that law professor, Elizabeth Warren, witnessed the congressional approval of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and the resultant new regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which aims to restore trust in financial institutions with 5 major pillars of financial regulation: capital adequacy rules, leverage limitations, liquidity requirements, macroprudential stress tests, and deposit insurance constraints. "It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a 1-in-5 chance of bursting into flames and burning down a house, but it is possible to refinance a current home with a mortgage that has the same 1-in-5 chance of putting the family out on the street," Warren wrote in the first paragraph in her influential Democracy article. Maybe a toaster or a financial product or service is so defective that consumers should not be thrown back on themselves to avoid it. Conversely, consumers with more confidence in financial products or services are more likely to purchase them. These paternalistic considerations offer insights into the Trump administration's plan to dismantle much of the Dodd-Frank Act, especially the bank capital rules and stress tests. The law of inadvertent consequences counsels caution.

Trump garners support from Senate and House of Representatives to pass the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul. The Trump administration garners congressional support from both Senate and the House of Representatives to pass the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul (Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017). With Republican majority in both congressional chambers, this current fiscal reform represents President Trump's first landmark economic policy legislation. The typical supply-side macroeconomist welcomes this fiscal overhaul and expects tax relief to trickle down to most U.S. households as well as corporations. Each American household will expect to benefit from this fiscal legislation in the form of tax cuts from $4,000 to $9,000 per annum. Also, most U.S. corporations face a substantial decrease in the effective corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%. Furthermore, large U.S. multinational corporations can enjoy tangible tax credits for offshore cash repatriation during the indefinite Trump tax holiday. The Trump administration suggests that this tax overhaul is likely to help boost wage growth, job creation, and labor and capital productivity. However, some market observers fear that the resultant tax cuts offer key U.S. corporations such as Cisco, Pfizer, and Coca-Cola etc to distribute cash to their shareholders in the form of near-term dividend payout and share buyback.

Andy Yeh Alpha (AYA) AYA Analytica financial health memo (FHM)

AYA Analytica is our online regular podcast and newsletter about key financial news, market insights, economic issues, and stock investment strategies on our Andy Yeh Alpha (AYA) fintech network platform. With both American focus and international reach, our primary and ultimate corporate mission aims to help enhance financial literacy, inclusion, and freedom of the open and diverse global general public. We apply our unique dynamic conditional alpha investment model as the first aid for every investor with profitable asset investment signals and portfolio strategies. In fact, our AYA freemium fintech network platform curates, orchestrates, and provides proprietary software technology and algorithmic cloud service to most members who can interact with one another on our AYA fintech network platform. Multiple blogs, posts, ebooks, analytical reports, stock alpha signals, and asset omega estimates offer proprietary solutions and substantive benefits to empower each financial market investor through technology, education, and social integration. Please feel free to sign up or login to enjoy our new and unique cloud software services on AYA fintech network platform now!!

Please feel free to follow our AYA Analytica financial health memo (FHM) podcast channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvntmnacYyCmVyQ-c_qjyyQ

Please feel free to follow our Brass Ring Facebook to learn more about the latest financial news and stock investment ideas: https://www.facebook.com/brassring2013

Free signup for stock signals: https://ayafintech.network

Mission on profitable signals: https://ayafintech.network/mission.php

Model technical descriptions: https://ayafintech.network/model.php

Blog on stock alpha signals: https://ayafintech.network/blog.php

Freemium base pricing plans: https://ayafintech.network/freemium.php

Signup for periodic updates: https://ayafintech.network/signup.php

We create each free finbuzz (or free financial buzz) as a blog post on the latest financial news and asset investment ideas. Our finbuzz collection demonstrates our unique American focus with global reach. Each free finbuzz provides deep insights into numerous topical issues in global finance, stock market investment, portfolio optimization, and dynamic asset management. We strive to help enrich the economic lives of most investors who would otherwise engage in financial data analysis with inordinate time commitment.

Please feel free to forward our finbuzz to family and friends, peers, colleagues, classmates, and others who might be keen and abuzz to learn more about asset investment strategies and modern policy reforms with macroeconomic insights.

Do you find it difficult to beat the long-term average 11% stock market return?

It took us 20+ years to design a new profitable algorithmic asset investment model and its attendant proprietary software technology with fintech patent protection in 2+ years. AYA fintech network platform serves as everyone’s first aid for his or her personal stock investment portfolio. Our proprietary software technology allows each investor to leverage fintech intelligence and information without exorbitant time commitment. Our dynamic conditional alpha analysis boosts the typical win rate from 70% to 90%+.

Our new alpha model empowers members to be a wiser stock market investor with profitable alpha signals!! This proprietary quantitative analysis applies the collective wisdom of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Carl Icahn, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, and Nobel Laureates in finance such as Robert Engle, Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen, Robert Lucas, Robert Merton, Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, William Sharpe, Robert Shiller, and Christopher Sims.

Andy Yeh Alpha (AYA) fintech network platform serves as each investor's social toolkit for profitable investment management. AYA fintech network platform helps promote better financial literacy, inclusion, and freedom of the global general public. We empower investors through technology, education, and social integration.

Andy Yeh AYA fintech network platform founder Brass Ring International Density Enterprise (BRIDE)

We should not conform to this world, but we should allow the renewal of our minds to transform us, so that we can prove what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. Romans 12: 2

#stock market

0 notes

tuesday5econlive · 7 years ago

Text

10 Principles of Economics

How People Make Decisions

Principle 1: People Face Tradeoffs

Society faces trade-offs between equity and efficiency. Efficiency is defined by society getting the most from its scarce resources. Equity is defined as distributing economic prosperity fairly among the individuals in society. Students face making decisions all the time. A student faces a tradeoff between studying for an exam or to watch a newly released movie that they have been dying to watch.

Principle 2: The Cost of Something Is What You Give Up to Get It

When making decisions, you have to weigh the costs and benefits of the alternative choice. Opportunity Cost is a core term which means whatever must be given up to obtain some item. In the cartoon show above, it can demonstrate how students such as myself or anyone with a job can contemplate calling in sick on days of work in order to sleep in or reserve the day for something much more enjoyable. Although, if you do go into work and avoid calling in sick, your check will come out much more bigger which is also very desirable. You must give up one to obtain the other. I’ve called in sick, in the past, in order to sleep in, it was worth it.

Principle 3: Rational People Think at the Margin

A rational decision maker takes action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost. The marginal changes in costs or benefits motivate people to respond. When a student considers whether to go to college for an additional four years, they compare the fees and foregone wages to the extra income they could earn with the extra four years of education.

Principle 4: People Respond to Incentives

An initiative is something that induces a person to act. In this case, as shown above, a student found out that economics majors have better chances of getting well-paid jobs after graduation. This cause the student to act on the information, and then became an economics major for the future benefits that it can have in terms of salary. I actually am going to declare in economics, and this is a partial reason I acted on going to the major.

How people Interact

Principle 5: Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off

Trade allows each person to specialize in the activities he or she does best. By trading with others, people can buy a greater variety of goods and services. My roommate is a better cook than I am, and I clean more quickly than my roomate can. Therefore, we divide each task based on the task we specialize in. By doing so, I reduce the total amount of time spent on chores.

Principle 6: Markets are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity

The Market Economy is an economy that allocates resources through the decentralized decisions of many firms and households as they interact in markets for goods and services. In the picture above, it can be seen how each household and firms think. Such as the household being able to decide on which firms to work for and what to buy with their income. As I would spend my entire check in Sephora. Similarly, firms decide what they want to produce and who to hire. Such as last summer when Ross decided to choose and hire me. The last one shows the end-goal of overall economic well being which can be directed by the “invisible hand” whom leads to desirable market outcomes.

Principle 7: Governments Can Sometimes Improve Market Outcomes

When a market fails to allocate resources efficiently, the government can change the outcome through public policy such as setting regulations against monopolies and pollution. A dry cleaning factory pollutes water when they dispose of the chemically polluted water. The government has the task of regulating and auditing the activities of the market. Hence, the government can implement regulating policies to protect the environment.

How the Economy as a Whole Works

Principle 8: A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on its Ability to Produce Goods and Services

Around the world there is staggering differences in the standards of living which is solely based on the country’s production levels. Production is the quantity of goods and services produced from each unit of labor input. Therefore, the higher the level of production, the better the standard of living is for the country as a whole. My picture can depict a person, in this case me, starting to work a minimum wage job here in the United States, and because of the good amount of pay in comparison to other counties, I was able to put a down payment on a car in a timespan of a couple months. But in the last picture, it can depict a boy who cannot afford food. We can predict that this country has very low levels of production which cause this low standard of living.

Principle 9: Prices Rise When the Government Prints too Much Money

When a government creates large quantities of money within the nation, the value of the money falls resulting in the increase of prices, requiring more of the same money to buy the goods and services. The faster the government creates money, the greater the inflation rate. One example of the effects of inflation can be seen by comparing the prices of gas 30 years ago and now. 30 years ago, the cost of a gallon of gas used to be $1.28. Now, the cost of a gallon of gas is $3.87.

Principle 10: Society Faces a Short-Run Tradeoff between Inflation and Unemployment

As a society we try to avoid both inflation and unemployment but that isn’t possible. But what does a short-run tradeoff mean? Well it’s means that over a course of a year or two, many economic policies push inflation and unemployment in opposite directions. Therefore, we are stuck with trade offs between the two. As depicted in the first square, these two problems are on a teeter totter. The but following square shows policymakers trying to come up with solutions to this problem. An example can be when Obama set in policies that reduced taxes and increasing government spending to pick up the economy from the economic turndown in the housing markets. Personally, this did affect me and my family by not being able to obtain a house as easy due to the exceeding high prices in the market, these high numbers can also be seen in rent today, such as the monthly pay for housing here on campus.

Krystal Chavez (ID# 67208797)

Jessica Pineda (ID# 89151998)

#econrocks

0 notes

ibloggingkits-blog · 8 years ago

Text

New Post has been published on Blogging kits

New Post has been published on https://bloggingkits.org/reliance-capital-to-list-its-housing-finance-arm-in-h1-fy18/

Reliance Capital to list its housing finance arm in H1 FY'18

Reliance Capital plans to list its housing finance unit — Reliance Home Finance — at the bourses in the first 1/2 of the modern-day monetary, a flow expected to free up the cost for the existing shareholders of the firm.

“Reliance Domestic Finance could be indexed within the first half of-of the current monetary year (2017-18),” Reliance Capital Government Director Anmol Ambani said in his first earning name with buyers.

Reliance Capital, that is gift across insurance, mutual fund and a bunch of other economic services sectors, stated its core businesses have carried out double-digit boom in profitability in phrases of running overall performance over the past monetary.

“We assume each of our corporations to continue the fashion of worthwhile increase on a regular foundation,” he stated.

As on March 31, 2017, Reliance Capital’s corporate structure fully conforms to the guidelines for a middle Investment Agency repute, Ambani said.

As a part of the listing inspiration of Reliance Domestic Finance, forty-nine percent stake in the Corporation might be allotted to all shareholders of Reliance Capital inside the ratio of one percentage freed from the value in Reliance Home for every one share held in Reliance Capital.

Reliance Capital will preserve a 51 percentage stake in Reliance Home, and the Employer can be appropriately capitalized to grow the lending e-book multi-fold in the subsequent 18 months.

The thought is expected to unlock good sized cost for all existing shareholders and could gain almost 1,000,000 shareholders of Reliance Capital a good way to be getting one unfastened share of Reliance Home.

Reliance Home Finance, a one hundred per cent subsidiary of Reliance, provides a huge variety of loan answers like a Domestic loan, a mortgage against belongings, creation finance and cheap housing loans.

Reliance Mutual Fund NFO Reliance Mutual Fund is the most important asset control Agency of India. It is also one of the pinnacle fund groups of India. Furthermore, it is a part of Reliance Capital. RMF has introduced New Fund Offer. For the primary time, it has introduced a Small Cap fund. It has also decided to spend money on 65% of equity and fairness related groups and units. They’ll the increase percent even up to a hundred%. This NFO has two options. It has increase as well as dividend choice. traders can take care of the dividends in methods. It can be obtained as coins or may be reinvested.

Access and Go out Load:

As per the rules of Inventory Change Board of India, the Access load is nil. The Exit rule varies in line with the maintaining duration. If the preserving period is less than one year, then the Go out load is two%. If the maintaining length is more than twelve months and within 24 months, then the Exit load is 1%. After that, the burden is nil.

Special Facility:

The new fund Provide has a Unique vehicle switch facility. The traders can switch from Reliance Liquid Fund – Treasury Plan to this new fund. The performance of this new scheme might be benchmarked towards BSE Small Cap Index. The minimal Funding required is 5000 rupees. In addition, Funding may be in multiples of 1 rupee. There are three schemes in this Small Cap Fund category. The minimum Funding is 5000 rupees handiest for all of the 3 schemes.

Entrepreneurial Capitalism – Abilities Acquisition, Network Empowerment, and Microfinance What is the strategic hyperlink among abundant resources, human improvement, and financial development? What’s the essential and strategic connection among human capital and financial development? Why does income inequality persist regardless of the widespread monetary boom? What are a few certain paths to social mobility? What are some positive paths to the middle magnificence-the maximum essential stabilizing pressure in all societies? a few solutions to those nagging coverage questions loom huge and tell modern-day debates on prudent coverage alternatives to deal with the intractable trouble of high unemployment of graduates from institutions of higher learning in growing countries in trendy and in Sub-Saharan Africa especially.

A meta-analysis of extant academic literature suggests income inequality is chronic in both advanced and developing international locations no matter demonstrable and vast economic growth. There are many theoretical, structural and empirical reasons for the widening hole among go back to capital and hard work on one hand, and repayment to control and people on the other. As an instance, capital has a tendency to be more effective, greater cell and get hold of very favorable tax treatment than labor in many jurisdictions.

In addition, international opposition, innovation, slower productiveness increase, and marginal fee of technical substitution may be depressing wages even in developed countries. Moreover, the benefits of globalization preserve to accrue greater unevenly to particularly professional labor than to low skilled labor. In the end, durations of economic growth tend correlate with increasing income inequality because distinctive economic sectors as well as individuals do not grow on the identical tempo.

As we’ve already explained in many courses on this subject matter, human capital evaluation deals with acquired talents which can be developed via formal and casual education at faculty and at Domestic, and thru on the job training, revel in, and mobility and sturdiness inside the labor market. Please notice that nations as well as individuals are portfolios of different skills that derive from resources and skills. Many countries within the developing countries have masses of assets however lack talents-the capacity to position them to effective uses.

Honestly, mere possession of assets by myself is a essential but now not a sufficient situation for financial development. Purposeful human capital that manifests in improved productivity and innovation is the crucial and strategic hyperlink among resources and economic development. A initial analysis of macroeconomic statistics shows that the trouble of economic stagnation is not extraordinary to developing countries nor restrained there. Indeed, for decades in growing countries which includes Nigeria, huge percentage of all graduates from establishments of higher mastering are underemployed, have contract jobs with out a employment blessings or no jobs in any respect even after the Countrywide Service and certification.

Many labor market professionals and social observers are apt to factor to the evident lack of considered necessary expertise and employable Competencies in high call for. Even as this can be true, loss of Purposeful education that results in employment is most effective part of the trouble. There may be substantial and collecting empirical proof suggesting that a number of the employed university graduates in Nigeria go with out pay or normal repayment for prolonged durations of time and still others are on settlement employment with meager earnings and no employment advantages or guaranteed ongoing employment.

Before you postulate that Abilities acquisition is neither a panacea nor the fastest way to employment, please notice that employable knowledge and Competencies are important however no longer sufficient circumstance for social mobility. This explains in component why many graduates from Colleges of schooling and Technical Colleges in very high demand in tightening labor markets do not fare substantially better than the ones from Liberal Arts or even Business and Engineering Faculties.

Consequently, the reason of Competencies Acquisition projects adopted by the Okwelle Abilities Acquisition Middle (OSAC) is to help graduates and entrepreneurs take powerful steps toward Practical training, understanding and Talents acquisition, self-employment, self-reliance and monetary independence. As positive paths to the center class and upward social mobility, any knowledge and Abilties acquisition assignment must awareness on producing entrepreneurs-a crop of graduates with burning choice for self-employment, self-reliance and economic independence. The graduates ought to no longer most effective have requisite know-how and Talents in their unique exchange but must be marketers who’re Business savvy with demonstrable draw close of Business management understanding and Abilties. Please notice that each one marketers are Enterprise proprietors but not all Commercial enterprise owners are marketers.

entrepreneurs are Unique breed of Enterprise proprietors that anticipate every risk in pursuit of profit and monetary freedom. with out the entrepreneurial elegance different elements of manufacturing-land, hard work and capital along with generation stay dormant and are categorized in our profession-financial engineering as non-appearing property. As some professionals aptly put it, as soon as making a decision to work for yourself you in no way go returned running for a person else. Generally, people don not plan to fail, they definitely fail to plan. Additionally, freedom whether or not non secular, financial or political is indivisible and should be pursued relentlessly. The passionate power in the direction of financial freedom is the important difference that sets marketers aside.

The Okwelle Competencies Acquisition Middle Model:

The concept of Abilities Acquisition as a automobile for Network empowerment and development isn’t always new. The standards, concepts and challenges are properly hooked up inside the relevant academic literature. Please see a textbook on same topic for an entire ancient cartoon on Abilities Acquisition standards that knowledgeable many alternate Faculties and Technical Schools, Apprenticeship packages, and so on Earlier than the Nigerian Civil Conflict. The Okwelle Abilities Acquisition Center (OSAC) concept is centered on sensible and generation-oriented applications of have a look at.

0 notes