#Immigration Rebalance

[organic-homegrown-boyfriend]

I have never said mothers are spoiled or have jt easy because they objectively dont. However the fact that it is very hard today to afford a child is because theres already so many of us competing for low wage labor and high rent. Under these conditions having fewer kids and reducing the population that way is how you rebalance the scales . Public services like daycares and social services are all largely tax funded so what is the difference? It still means those without kids must be sucked dry to pay for it

Okay, that's alright. Hopefully other anti natalists will also agree that mothers do struggle even with a support system. However, what I disliked about some of the discourses from anti natalists that I've seen is their disgusting and frequently misogynistic language as well as their dismissive comments on the struggles women (and parents in general) face besides using all sorts of demonic language against little children.

I think you need to view taxes a bit differently. The taxes that you are paying which go into public welfare and social services are not a conspiracy to steal money from ordinary citizens (excluding stuff like bail outs for corporates or army funding etc) but an investment that benefits everyone in society. For example if you as a child free adult pay for the social services that benefits parents and children or goes into improving education for children, that will lead to better childhood leading to well adjusted adult citizens which will improve society in turn benefiting you as well. In addition, when you are older and less abled, you will likely depend on old age services which also depend on younger adults (who are now kids or even yet to be born) taking care of you, in a way giving you the returns that you were taxed when you were younger and child free.

And relevant to the last point, I haven't really seen anti natalists talk about the endgame? Like what happens when when you end up with a large ageing population and very few young people to take up the workload? How will society function and how will social services work and who will take care of the ageing population if there aren't enough young people? You can't always depend on immigration to fill up the declining population.

Also, i'm unsure why anti-natalists in relatively well off places are so preoccupied with this whole business and complaining as if they're being forced to serve or are unfairly taxed against parents? Like are there any actual cases of women deciding to have a lot of children in egalitarian societies with strong social support systems which will hit child-free people financially because of taxes etc? Afaik in almost all cases women have fewer children when presented with better opportunities and support systems leading to lower population growth.

One last thing - I sometimes think ideologies that depend a lot on ideas that kind of conflict with human experience are unlikely to succeed on a large scale. Like if your idea depends on people having to stop having children or mixing with and loving and cohabiting with each other, you are unlikely to find a large number of takers for it.

[mariacallous]

Foreign Policy Morning Brief: Russia’s grain deal whiplash

By Christina Lu 

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, where we’re looking at Russia’s grain deal whiplash, a truce in Ethiopia’s civil war, and North Korean-Russian ties.

Russia Rejoins Black Sea Grain Deal

In an abrupt reversal, Russia announced that it would rejoin the Black Sea Grain Initiative on Wednesday, just days after its withdrawal from the landmark deal sparked global criticism and fueled fears about its fate. 

Moscow’s sharp U-turn underscores the extreme uncertainty that has shrouded the fragile agreement ever since it was implemented in July. About 75 percent of Ukraine’s agricultural exports pass through the Black Sea, but Russia’s naval blockade prevented key agricultural commodities from leaving the country, thereby driving up global food prices and intensifying food insecurity.

Enter the U.N. and Turkey-brokered grain deal, which enables exports and has helped relieve pressures on more than 345 million people currently confronting food insecurity, especially those living in import-dependent countries. With the agreement in place, Ukraine has been able to export 9.3 million metric tons of wheat, corn, barley, and other key commodities.

But Russia has long threatened to leave the deal, and Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow of intentionally delaying ships in order to sabotage the agreement. Over the weekend, the Kremlin withdrew from the agreement after accusing Ukraine of targeting its civilian and military ships in the sea; Ukraine has, in turn, accused Russia of launching attacks from its vessels in the Black Sea. 

Moscow’s withdrawal drew sharp criticism and concern from world leaders, who urged it to continue its participation in the deal. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, said the Kremlin was using a “false pretext” to walk away from the agreement. 

“We have warned of Russia’s plans to ruin the Black Sea Grain Initiative,” he tweeted. “Now Moscow uses a false pretext to block the grain corridor which ensures food security for millions of people.”

Even after Russia announced it was withdrawing the deal over the weekend, three ships left Ukrainian ports on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Russian officials said Kyiv had provided sufficient guarantees for it to rejoin the agreement, but warned that it could still leave.

What We’re Following Today

Ethiopia’s diplomatic breakthrough. Negotiators from the Ethiopian government and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a truce to cease fighting on Wednesday, the result of 10 days of negotiations in South Africa. For nearly two years, the brutal war between the two parties has killed as many as half a million people and plunged millions into a dire humanitarian crisis. 

“It is very much a welcome first step, which we hope can start to bring some solace to the millions of Ethiopian civilians that have really suffered during this conflict,” said U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.

North Korean-Russian ties. North Korea has secretly sent “thousands” of artillery shells to Russia, the White House said, as the Kremlin attempts to strengthen its military campaign in Ukraine. To conceal its shipments, Pyongyang reportedly moved the weapons through other nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Our indications are the DPRK is covertly supplying and we’re going to monitor to see whether shipments are received,” said John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesperson.

Keep an Eye On

Canada’s immigration policy. Canada has pledged to add 1.45 million immigrants to its population by 2025 to bolster its labor force. Immigrants now comprise 23 percent of the country’s population, according to census data.

“Look, folks, it’s simple to me: Canada needs more people,” said Sean Fraser, the Canadian immigration minister. “Canadians understand the need to continue to grow our population if we’re going to meet the needs of the labor force, if we’re going to rebalance a worrying demographic trend, and if we’re going to continue to reunite families.”

Tehran’s protest response. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared to soften his rhetoric toward the country’s young protesters on Wednesday, saying that they “are our own kids and we don’t have any dispute with them.” He instead continued to blame Western countries for directing the protests and engaging in acts of “hybrid warfare,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Wednesday’s Most Read

In Northern Kosovo, Tensions Threaten to Boil Over by Ayman Oghanna

Xi’s China Is Good—and Bad—for the United States by Stephen M. Walt

Meet Iran’s Gen Z: the Driving Force Behind the Protests by Holly Dagres

Odds and Ends

In their latest mission to fight crime, Captain America, Spiderman, Black Widow, and Thor united for a drug bust in Lima, Peru, over the weekend. The superheroes—actually four Peruvian police in disguise—uncovered more than 3,000 cocaine paste packages and arrested four people. Since they were dressed like superheroes, the suspects originally believed they were being pranked for Halloween, officials said. 

That’s it for today.

For more from FP, visit foreignpolicy.com, subscribe here, or sign up for our other newsletters.

[thevisibilityarchives]

The Hungry Ghosts (2012), Shyam Selvadurai

BIPOC

Summary: At a young age, a great burden falls upon the shoulders of a young boy named Shivan. To find shelter in a family torn apart by Sri Lanka’s raging Civil War, he is forced to appeal to his grandmother’s good graces, becoming the right hand of a legacy fueled by avarice and cruelty. As he grows, this legacy becomes a part of him, something he cannot separate himself from no matter how far he travels or what journeys he undertakes. In this semi-autobiographical work, author Shyam Selvadurai carves a quest weaving together spirituality, pain, and the journal to rebalance the karmic legacy the Shivan has offset so he may free himself and his family once and for all. 

Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5598790639

Full review: Death: one of the most frightening subjects for human beings to consider. With a sense of dread, we unconsciously (or consciously) invest in ways that extend our longevity, participating in diet regimens, religious rites ensuring afterlife, and avoid discussion of the matter. 

The topic of our expiration date can be so anxiety-inducing that according to psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski “people go to great lengths to seek security; they embrace belief systems that give them a sense of meaning — religion, values, community.” (Vedantam, Cohen & Schmidt). 

What spurs this fear? It’s a complicated question, bearing in mind religious beliefs, political status, and socioeconomic status. Practitioners of certain religions have been associated with heightened fear of death due to anxiety regarding punishment in accordance with their religious doctrine. According to this 2012 study, the afterlife and risks of eternal damnation can strike fear in the hearts of many. Meanwhile, those facing political violence experience fear regarding their manner of impending death, according to Dr. Jade Wu. The seeming absence of fear by macabre-obsessed goth kids and at-peace end-of-lifers? Lacking religious connection or a fear of death, so too lies an absence of fear. 

Yet there remains a final debated fear rooted in the ego–or put in nicer words–the legacy we leave behind. What comes after us, be it in terms of our family, business, or even our species? 

The question of this legacy and its foothold in spirituality is a touchpoint in Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts, titled after the preta of Buddhist and Chinese traditional faith. Voraciously hungry, these ghosts are sired by life that has displayed tendencies towards unfettered greed and cruelty and exist in a state of insatiability that causes relentless misery even in death to their living kindred. It is only good deeds that can resolve their lifetime errs–a rebalancing of their karma, transforming their hungry spirits into ones of peace. 

Selvadurai presents us this journey as a semi-autobiographical reimagining of his life immigrating from Sri Lanka to Canada. The story begins with young Shivan, his mother, and his sister arriving at the doorstep of his grandmother during the Sri Lankan Civil War, a bloody 30-year conflict that only recently ended in 2009.

Previously cast out by her family for marrying a Tamil man, Shivan’s mother has no choice but to return with the death of his father. On the verge of homelessness, it is Shivan who manages to appeal to his grandmother and thaw her cold shoulder, acquiring shelter for the three of them and forging a bond that only grows over the years. 

It’s a relationship but on equal parts manipulation and admiration. Even in his young age, Shivan understands his need to appeal to his grandmother’s every whim to earn his keep, and his grandmother in term knows his complicity extends so far as to acquire housing for his mother and sister. Still, an exceptional bond of love grows between the two, as she dotes on him, and he her, a natural matriarchal love tearing through the iron armor that has shrouded her for years. She uses Shivan as a tool, embracing his soft heart for her business needs as a landlady and business developer while Shivan’s quick wit and clear aptitude gain him more responsibility.

Unknown to both of them, a day comes when Shivan unexpectedly begins to consider his own yearnings and desires and whether they have more meaning than the needs (petty or essential) of his family. Beneath the many burdens he has carried into adulthood, a profound one surfaces: his sexuality. Illegal in Sri Lanka, Shivan’s burgeoning identity as a gay man threatens to break free as he begins to imagine a life where no longer has to accept remaining a secret. With immigration opportunities arising due to the war, he is given the chance to choose: a new life in a country where he can find freedom? Or his commitment to the woman who has given him life, shelter, and a path?

Freedom, it turns out, comes with a significant cost. Upon moving to Canada, Shivan, his mother, and his sister experience the brutality of racism, poverty, and isolation. Within the gay scene, Shivan faces fetishization from people who go so far as to use his status to manipulate and assault him, and discrimination from men who treat him as a plague to be avoided at all cost. 

Racism in the gay community should not come as a surprise in 2023. It was in 2020 that hookup app Grindr announced it was removing its ethnicity filters, a longtime part of a culture in which it was normalized for men to actively promote whiteness to the upper echelons of attractiveness. The central argument of “preference vs. racism” of course can be broken down by two researchers who found:

 “...Despite gay white men’s insistence that sexual exclusion was not racism but rather personal preference, and that these personal preferences have nothing to do with racism… attitudes toward sexual exclusion were related to almost every identified factor associated with racist attitudes in general. More importantly, the authors found that even gay white men who do not actively engage in acts of sexual exclusion were incredibly tolerant of racist behaviors from other gay white men who did.” (Han and Choi, 2018)

Shivan’s experiences are all the more painful as they are unexpected. He comes to Canada expecting acceptance, only to find a community wherein one aspect of himself is accepted (his sexuality but not the rest of him.

During this time, the pull of the hungry ghost he has helped create in his grandmother begins to surface, sucking misery into it year by year. Happiness cannot be attained, and tragedy abounds. It becomes clear over the years that Shivan must make amends for the pain he has caused in conjunction with his grandmother to find peace.

As human beings, we will inevitably cause harm, cruelty, and grief in our lifetime. Yet to sire a hungry ghost goes beyond the norm, and it is this we seek to avoid. And in our age of constant consumerism, greed, and rampant apathy, the book serves as a reminder to stay on the path of karmic balance, seeking balance, and accepting opportunities to remain true to ourselves and others. 

This was a difficult book for me to track down through my local library in the U.S. I advise tracking down The Hungry Ghosts through Shyam Selvadurai’s website here, or trying your luck at your library if you’re in a bigger city (or Canada).

Citations: 

Han CS, Choi KH. Very Few People Say "No Whites": Gay Men of Color and The Racial Politics of Desire. Sociol Spectr. 2018;38(3):145-161. doi: 10.1080/02732173.2018.1469444. Epub 2018 Jul 6. PMID: 30906102; PMCID: PMC6426121.

[iolojones]

I believe that it’s technically impossible for the U.K. to be an asylum nation (unless you’re really pissed off a EU country). Asylum should be achieved at the first stage country an oppressed person reaches and the U.K. should help fund this.

But I also believe that immigrants enrich our country, from the Saxon-Norman English and Indian origin immigrants who now dominate our civic life onwards.

As an aboriginal or a ‘first nation’ Brit on investiture weekend I hope we can rebalance our country and nations.

[iclegalnz]

A significant step in the government's effort to rebalance immigration has been reached with the formal opening of the new Active Investor Plus Visa category, which was established to draw high-value investors.

[newstfionline]

Friday, November 4, 2022

Canada’s immigration policy (Foreign Policy) Canada has pledged to add 1.45 million immigrants to its population by 2025 to bolster its labor force. Immigrants now comprise 23 percent of the country’s population, according to census data. “Look, folks, it’s simple to me: Canada needs more people,” said Sean Fraser, the Canadian immigration minister. “Canadians understand the need to continue to grow our population if we’re going to meet the needs of the labor force, if we’re going to rebalance a worrying demographic trend, and if we’re going to continue to reunite families.”

Alcohol Deaths Claim Lives of Working-Age Americans (NYT) An estimated 1 in 8 deaths of Americans ages 20 to 64 in the years 2015-19 was the result of injuries or illness caused by excessive alcohol use, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open, assessed the effects of alcohol on people of working age, who accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country’s annual average of 140,000 alcohol-related deaths. The rates of excessive alcohol use and related deaths have most likely climbed since the period the CDC researchers analyzed. After the onset of the pandemic, a variety of data showed Americans drank more frequently. Although alcohol takes a progressively heavier toll on older age groups, its effects are more noticeable in younger people who are less likely to die of other causes. Among those ages 20 to 49, 1 in 5 deaths was attributable to drinking, and for those ages 20 to 34, it was 1 in 4, the study found.

Frigid winter? New Englanders will pay through frozen noses for oil and gas (Reuters) This winter the U.S. Northeast faces its highest energy costs in more than 25 years due to tight heating oil supplies and fierce global competition for liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes. Throughout 2022, consumers have been socked with higher costs for everyday items, including groceries and gasoline. The winter could bring more pain, with heating costs nationwide set to soar as much as 28% from last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) winter fuels outlook. During long, cold winters, the U.S. Northeast consumes more oil and gas for heat than most of the country, especially the six-state New England region. Residents of Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island paid about 36% more for gas and 58% more for power than the rest of the nation over the past five years, federal government data showed.

Cartel violence escalates in Ecuador (Guardian) The week began with the discovery of two headless bodies, left dangling from a pedestrian bridge. Then prison guards were taken hostage by inmates, nine car bombs detonated in two coastal cities and five police officers were shot dead. The string of horrifying attacks across Ecuador this week would once have been unthinkable, but this kind of bloodletting is now becoming almost routine in the Andean country, as gang violence escalates to levels never seen before. Late on Tuesday, President Guillermo Lasso announced a 9 pm curfew under a new state of emergency in the affected Guayas and Esmeraldas regions. He called the violent incidents “a declaration of open war” and said he was “prepared to act harshly”.

Bolsonaro asks supporters to cease disruptive protests (Washington Post) Electoral authorities have declared Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva the winner of Brazil’s presidential election. The incumbent he bested, President Jair Bolsonaro, has allowed the transition to begin. The right-wing Bolsonaro emerged from a 45-hour post-election silence on Tuesday to thank his voters and say he would follow the constitution. Supporters of the president have been blocking highways and roads across Brazil since Lula was declared the winner Sunday evening. For months, Bolsonaro had sown doubt in the integrity of the election system, laying the groundwork to contest a loss, and on Tuesday afternoon, he described their action as a righteous expression of “indignation and a sense of injustice.” But by Wednesday night, the president backtracked, urging his supporters to clear the highways and roads, arguing that the blockings are harming the economy and people’s right to move. He added, however, that protests taking place elsewhere were “welcome” as “part of the democratic game.”

Darkness in Kyiv (NYT) The streets of Ukraine’s capital, alight with nightlife only weeks ago, are now shrouded in darkness after sunset. That’s the result of the rolling power outages Ukraine has put in place to prevent a collapse of the national energy grid, after repeated Russian bombardments. Ukraine imposed more power rationing across the country this week. In the capital, residents were told they would need to go 12 hours a day without power, with neighborhoods rotating the times they would have access to electricity. When night falls and darkness descends on Kyiv, the flashlights on smartphones begin to flicker on like fairy lights, leading the way home. Dogs wear glow sticks around their necks, and children are outfitted in reflective clothing for safety.

Russians fleeing to Georgia face resentment, graffiti, loyalty tests at bars (Washington Post) The messages are spray painted across Tbilisi, thousands of them, cursing Russian President Vladimir Putin and telling Russians to “go home.” Many restaurants and cafes, including the ones where Russians hang out, pointedly display signs declaring their support of Ukraine. A few even demand loyalty pledges, saying that Russians should enter only if they first condemn the invasion or denounce Putin as a dictator. For months now, hundreds of thousands of Russians have been spilling into nearby countries, seeking refuge from repression, to avoid the repercussions of broad Western sanctions, and, in the most recent waves, to escape the prospect of being called up to fight. Georgia is one of the most enticing destinations, known for its mild climate, its wine, its food, its nightlife-heavy capital and, crucial to the incoming Russians, its visa-free entry rules. But Georgia is faced with an influx it did not seek and does not know how to handle. The former Soviet republic of 3.7 million people has spent much of its modern existence trying to disentangle itself from Moscow and draw closer to the West.

Pakistan’s ex-PM Imran Khan wounded in shooting at protest (AP) A gunman opened fire at a protest rally in eastern Pakistan on Thursday, slightly wounding former Prime Minister Imran Khan in the leg and killing one of his supporters, his party and police said. Nine other people also were hurt. The gunman was immediately arrested, and police later released a video of him in custody, allegedly confessing to the shooting and saying he acted alone. The violence, which follows Khan’s ouster as prime minister in a no-confidence vote in April, raised new concerns about growing political instability in Pakistan, a country with a long history of political violence and assassinations.

Yearly inflation in Turkey rises to new 24-year high of 85% (AP) Annual inflation in Turkey continued to rise in October, official figures showed Thursday, pushing the price of essential goods higher and amplifying a cost-of-living crisis in the country. Consumer prices rose to 85.51% in October from a year earlier, and by 3.54% from the previous month, the Turkish Statistical Institute said. The inflation rate was the highest in 24 years. Experts, however, maintain that inflation is much higher than the official figures. The independent Inflation Research Group on Thursday put the annual rate at 185%.

North Korea keeps up its missile barrage with launch of ICBM (AP) North Korea added to its barrage of recent weapons tests on Thursday, firing at least three missiles including an intercontinental ballistic missile that forced the Japanese government to issue evacuation alerts and temporarily halt trains. The launches are the latest in a series of North Korean weapons tests in recent months that have raised tensions in the region. They came a day after Pyongyang fired more than 20 missiles, the most it has fired in a single day ever.

Residents told to evacuate as flood waters rise in regional Australia (Reuters) Hundreds of residents in major regional towns across Australia’s most populous state are being urged to leave homes as slow-moving floodwaters push downstream and the country’s fourth major flood crisis this year rolls into a second month. Authorities are urging residents to evacuate from parts of the New South Wales regional towns of Wagga Wagga, Gunnedah, and Forbes, collectively home to roughly 90,000. Flooding at Forbes, roughly 5 hours drive west of Sydney, could hit a 70-year high on Friday. Flood-weary residents across Australia’s southeast are enduring the fourth major bout of flooding this year. Authorities have announced at least A$2 billion ($1.3 billion) in disaster relief to help thousands of residents repair homes and in some cases move from flood-prone areas.

As Israel’s far right parties celebrate, Palestinians shrug (AP) The apparent comeback of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the dramatic rise of his far-right and ultra-Orthodox allies in Israel’s general election this week have prompted little more than shrugs from many Palestinians. “It’s all the same to me,” Said Issawiy, a vendor hawking nectarines in the main al-Manara Square of Ramallah. Over the past month, Issawiy had struggled to get to work in Ramallah from his home in the city of Nablus after the Israeli army blocked several roads in response to a wave of violence in the northern West Bank. “I’m just trying to eat and work and bring something back to my kids,” he said. During his 12 years in power, before being voted out in 2021, Netanyahu showed scant interest in engaging with the Palestinians. Under his leadership, Israel vastly expanded its population of West Bank settlers—now some 500,000—and retroactively legalized settler outposts built on private Palestinian land. The measures have entrenched Israel’s occupation, now in its 56th year since Israel captured the territory during the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians see successive Israeli governments as seeking to solidify a bleak status quo in the West Bank: Palestinian enclaves divided by growing Israeli settlements and surrounded by Israeli forces. “We had no illusion that this next government would be a partner for peace,” said Ahmad Majdalani, a minister in the Palestinian Authority.

Ethiopia and Tigray Forces Agree to Truce in Calamitous Civil War (NYT) After two years of brutal civil war, the Ethiopian government and the leadership of the northern Tigray region agreed to stop fighting on Wednesday as part of a deal that offered a path out of a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions in Africa’s second-most-populous country. Senior officials from both sides shook hands and smiled after signing an agreement in South Africa to cease hostilities, following 10 days of peace talks convened by the African Union. The surprise deal came one day before the second anniversary of the start of the war, on Nov. 3, 2020, when simmering tensions between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and the defiant leaders of the country’s Tigray region exploded into violence.

[odinsblog]

“I haven't seen much evidence to back up their initial claim they want to be fair and just to asylum seekers. It’s just Stephen Miller Lite"

The Biden team has hired a slate of immigration judges initially selected during the Trump era, angering advocates who argue the White House is already failing to deliver in its pledge to push back against the prior administration's shaping of the judiciary.

The first 17 hires to the court system responsible for determining whether migrants get to remain in the country is filled with former prosecutors and counselors for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as a few picks with little immigration experience.

Almost none have made their career representing migrants in court.

The Thursday announcement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) initially perplexed immigration attorneys, advocates and even some former immigration judges who wondered why the group so closely mirrored the jurists favored by the Trump administration.

“The 17 new immigration judges referenced in the notice all received their conditional offers under the prior administration,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Hill.

Critics said the Biden administration has an obligation to fully vet the judges hired under their watch and rebalance a court system heavily shaped by the Trump team.

“This is a list I would have expected out of Bill Barr or Jeff Sessions, but they're not the attorney general anymore. Elections are supposed to have consequences,” said Paul Schmidt, now an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School after 21 years as an immigration judge. That included time serving as the chair of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest administrative body dealing with immigration cases.

“No one on that list is among the top 100 asylum authorities in the country, and that's the kind of people they should be hiring — not prosecutorial re-treads,” he added.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/552373-biden-fills-immigration-court-with-trump-hires

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 13, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released information about the 2020 census, designed to enable states to start the process of drawing new lines for their congressional districts, a process known as redistricting.

Because of that very limited intent for this particular information dump, the picture the material gives is a very specific one. The specificity of that information echoes the political history that in the 1920s began to skew our Congress to give rural white voters disproportionate power. It also reinforces a vision of America divided by race: precisely the vision that former president Trump and his supporters want Americans to believe.

The U.S. Constitution requires that the government count the number of people in the country every ten years so that lawmakers can divide up the representation in Congress, which is apportioned according to population in the House of Representatives. (The Senate is by state: each state gets two senators.)

This matters not just for the relative weight of voices in lawmaking in the House, but also because of our Electoral College. The Electoral College is how we elect the U.S. president. Each state gets the number of electors that is equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. So, if your state has 10 representatives and 2 senators, it would have 12 presidential electors.

Censuses are never 100% accurate. It’s hard to count people, especially if they don’t want to be counted. Censuses also are inherently political, since a corrupt president will not want an accurate count: they will want areas that support their party to be overcounted, while areas that support the opposite party to be undercounted.

The 1890 census is a famous example of both of these problems. Indigenous Americans who were eager to avoid the observance of the federal government out of concern for their lives moved around to avoid being counted. The process itself was notoriously corrupt because in 1889 and 1890, the Republican Party had forced the admission of six new western states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming—that supported the Republicans, and had insisted that the new census would show enough people there to warrant statehood. So they were eager to find lots and lots of people in those new states but very few in the populous territories of Arizona and New Mexico, which they knew would vote Democratic. (I would love to write a whole post about the 1890 census, but I will spare you.)

Today, because of the pandemic, the results of the 2020 census have been delayed, and states are already behind in their schedules to redistrict for the upcoming 2022 election. (I know, I know, but it really is right over the horizon. Some states are already thinking about moving their primary elections because there’s not enough time to redistrict before them.) So yesterday, the Census Bureau released the information states need to begin that process. It released its record of the number of people living in each state and U.S. territory.

But in addition to needing to know the actual numbers of the count, state lawmakers need to know the racial makeup of their states, since there are federal rules about making sure minority votes aren’t silenced in redistricting by, for example, splitting a minority vote into small enough groups among districts that minorities essentially don’t have a voice (this is called “cracking”), or concentrating members of one group into a single district, so they are underrepresented at the state level (this is called “packing”).

So the material that came out yesterday was not the entire information from the census; it was just the material states need for redistricting.

It shows how many people there are living in America today. Population shifts mean that Montana, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida all picked up a seat, while Texas picked up two. Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, California, and West Virginia all lost one. Within those states, cities have grown and rural counties have lost people. For the first time in our history, all ten of the country’s largest cities now have more than a million people in them.

The material released yesterday also shows the nation’s racial makeup. That information is confusing, as all self-identification on a form can be. It says that America’s white population has dropped significantly since 2010. According to the census, people who identify as white now make up 58% of the population while just ten years ago they made up 64%. But the census also shows that people who self-identify as a mixture of races has skyrocketed, climbing from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. It seems likely that some of the drop in self-identification as white is due to people identifying themselves differently than they have in the past.

Urbanization and multiculturalism are not new to our history, and their appearance in the census led lawmakers to create an imbalance in our government in the 1920s. The Constitution says that a state can’t have a representative for fewer than 30,000 people, but it doesn’t say anything about an upper limit of constituents represented by a single representative. In 1912, when the country had 92 million people, the House had grown to 435 members.

But the 1920 census showed that more Americans lived in cities than in the country, at the same time that white Americans were all tied up in knots that those new urban dwellers were Black Americans and immigrants from southern and central Europe and Asia. Aware that continuing to allow more representatives for these growing numbers of Americans meant that the weight of representation would move away from rural white Americans and toward immigrants in cities, lawmakers refused to continue increasing the number of seats in the House. (They also passed the 1924 Immigration Act, which set quotas on how many people from each country could come to America.)

In 1929, lawmakers froze the number of representatives at 435 voting members of the House. While this number would bounce around as new states came in, for example, it has once again settled as the number of voting representatives today, when our population is 331 million.

That cap means that the size of the average congressional district is now 711,000 people, a number that is far higher than the framers intended and that favors smaller, more rural, whiter states in the House of Representatives. It also favors those states in the Electoral College, where they have more weight proportionately than they would if the House had continued to grow.

By identifying everyone by race—as it needed to, for redistricting purposes—yesterday’s census material also engages what sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields have called “racecraft,” which, by artificially dividing people along racial lines, reinforces the idea of race as the most important thing in society. Yesterday’s material does not mention, for example, income or wealth, which are not explicitly factored in when redistricting but which the last census material released on that topic suggested are at least as divisive as race.

The idea that race is paramount is, of course, the theory that the right wing would like Americans to believe, and the idea that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color and Black Americans falls right into the right-wing argument that minorities are “replacing” white Americans.

For a century now, the machinery of redistricting has favored rural whites. With the 2020 census information reinforcing the idea that white, rural Americans are under siege, it seems unlikely that lawmakers in Republican states will want to rebalance the system.

But it seems equally unlikely that an increasingly urbanizing, multicultural nation will continue to accept being governed by an ever-smaller white, rural minority.

—-

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/12/redistricting-census-data-503994

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/08/10/census-race-population-changes-redistricting/

https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/567360-white-population-declines-for-first-time-in-us

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/55/why-435/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/12/politics/us-census-2020-data/index.html

​​https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/coloring-outside-the-lines/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[thaimassagesk]

Adele Therapeutic Thai Therapeutic Massage

Anxiolytic impact of fect of aromatherapy therapeutic massage in patients with breast most cancers. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med, 6, 123-8. Hernandez-Reif M, Ironson G, Field T, et al . Breast most cancers patients have improved immune and neuroendocrine capabilities following massage therapy.

Kindly notice that each one Spa sessions (except a part of physique therapeutic massage & magnificence remedies) includes a 30-minute rest and refreshments time, which contains a welcome footbath and publish-remedy tea time. Awake your physique & soul with stress-free 경기홈타이 Spa remedy at Banyan Tree Spa. With a pleasant range of time-honoured traditions infused with local components, find your getaway at Banyan Tree's luxury spa in Seoul in the coronary heart of the fast-paced city. Imanishi J, Kuriyama H, Shigemori I, et al .

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Home massage for hospice sufferers. Wilkinson S, Barnes K, Storey L . Massage for symptom reduction in sufferers with cancer. J Adv Nur, 63, 430-9. Billhult A, Bergbom I, Stener-Victorin E .

A enjoyable eye masks and a detoxifying face mask folloKRW to hydrate and rebalance the pores and skin. The result's a transparent and shine-free complexion. For the backaches ensuing from lengthy hours spent at the desk, this therapeutic massage serves as a perfect aid to iron out pressure and ache. Be pampered by this delicate to medium therapeutic massage where soothing, long strokes and thumb stress are utilized in tandem to chill out the body.

Auton Neurosci, 140, 88-ninety five. The other part of Thai medicine is medical theory. Medical concept supporting the effectiveness of conventional Thai Medicine appears to be significantly influenced by Chinese Medicine. Sen, probably the most basic idea of Thai Medicine, is similar to the idea of meridian system in Chinese Medicine.

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Delays might occur because of seasonal circumstances and/or the circumstances of the courier service suppliers. According to the Busan Immigration Office, the Korean therapeutic massage parlor operators illegally hired 31 Thai ladies to provide companies for about four months from early this 12 months. A group of Thai ladies have been caught working with out correct visas at massage parlors in Busan, the immigration office stated Friday. The women will be deported soon, the office said. Ramada Plaza Gwangju’s Thai massages are based on traditional Thai treatment of stretching to attune to and steadiness the physique’s internal power area. A Thai therapeutic massage parlor that was working as a prostitution front in Busan has led to the arrest of a 35-yr-old Korean broker and the deportation of nine Thai ladies.

[antoine-roquentin]

The fissuring of the German left after Agenda 2010 opened the door to the CDU’s recovery of power. Though Die Linke and Merkel are radically different expressions of post-reunification politics, they condition each other. Despite her formidable reputation, Merkel is not a successful electoral campaigner. In 2005, at the height of the turmoil and indignation stirred up by Agenda 2010, she managed only to inch the SPD out, 35.2 to 34.2 per cent. Her brand of neoliberalism stirred anxiety among CDU voters as much as Schröder’s did on the left. Only once, in 2009, did she win a vote share large enough to enable a centre-right coalition with the FDP. For three of her four governments, Merkel has relied on a grand coalition with the SPD. The impact on the SPD has been deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, except for the interlude of 2009-13, the SPD has been in government in Berlin for 21 years continuously. On the other hand the loss of identity, already visible under Schröder, has been ever more pronounced.

Governing with Merkel is dangerous. She is no ordinary conservative. Paying relentless attention to opinion polls, she omnivorously absorbs the agendas of her partners and opponents. This gives hardline conservatives little to cheer about. In electoral terms the CDU, like the SPD, has suffered a serious decline. And as conservative strategists have long worried, Merkel’s move to the centre opens space for a hard right alternative, an opportunity that the AfD seized in 2015. But the truth is that given the alignment of German political forces, Merkel simply did not need the right wing. The SPD has supplied her with the votes she needed to govern from the centre. As both parties have discovered, access to power in Berlin today depends less on your absolute share of the vote than on your place in the coalitional algebra.

The SPD was by no means a passive victim of these developments. For 15 years it has chosen to double down on the Schröder agenda. In 2009 the party fought a losing election with Steinmeier, the orchestrator of Agenda 2010, as its Spitzenkandidat. Then in 2013 the party grandees nominated Peer Steinbrück, who as finance minister in 2008 took responsibility for the bank bailouts. He can also claim credit for the Schuldenbremse, the ‘debt brake’ amendment to the constitution which throttles public spending. The notorious ‘schwarze Null’ (the fiscal surplus), popularly associated with Wolfgang Schäuble, is actually a creation of the SPD. Perversely, this fiscal discipline bears most heavily on the weakest Länder, including North Rhine-Westphalia and Bremen, which were once bastions of the SPD. It was not until 2013, after its third consecutive loss, that the SPD made any effort to change direction.

Under the new rules of the Berlin game, losing to Merkel in 2013 didn’t mean the SPD was out of power. It meant that it governed with her. And the social democrats extracted a heavy price. Not only the foreign ministry, but justice, the economy, labour and social affairs, family and youth and environmental policy were all in the hands of the SPD, at least some of whom were now determined to distance themselves from Agenda 2010. Their key demand, in the face of howls of protest from employers, was a minimum wage.

In the heyday of the German model, when wages were set by collective bargaining arrangements, there was no need for such regulations. But in the new era of flexible, low-paid work, the minimum wage of €8.50 an hour brought relief to some four million workers when it was introduced in 2015. Combined with the continued growth of the German economy and other incremental changes to the benefit system, it has lifted the acute economic insecurity of the early 2000s. Nachtwey’s dark vision of social crisis and downward mobility better describes the situation a decade ago than in Germany today. Even in the east, conditions are improving. If the AfD is a conflagration born of the socioeconomic crisis, it is of the slow-burning variety. It’s also clear, however, that the SPD gets no credit for its earnest efforts to rebalance the Agenda 2010 model. The party’s fate will be decided not by its success or failure in delivering specific social policies, but by its ability to tie its identity to a compelling diagnosis of Germany’s current problems and a credible account of its role in the recent past.

For the 2017 campaign, the party apparatchiks plumped for a fresh face – Martin Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament. As described by Markus Feldenkirchen in Die Schulz Story, despite his endorsement of Agenda 2010 in years gone by, Schulz’s rocky personal biography and folksy manner vouched for the authenticity of his commitment to a more egalitarian politics. But rather than giving him a clear mandate on social inequality and Europe, which would have played to his strengths, the party managers decided to pit his personal appeal against Merkel’s. For a delirious few weeks it seemed that it might work. But by the summer his political stock had collapsed. The election was a disaster. Not only was it the worst result in a national election since 1949, there was not a single Land in which the SPD scored more than 30 per cent. Of the voters the party had retained, a quarter were over the age of 70.

The election results in September 2017 were bad for the SPD, but the aftermath was worse. Merkel tried, first, for an unprecedented ‘Jamaica’ coalition – the CDU/CSU (black) with the FDP (yellow) and the Greens. After six weeks the FDP walked away and the talks broke down. That left the options of new elections – unattractive given surging support for the AfD – or another Große Koalition. The SPD was bitterly divided. Kevin Kühnert, the leader of the party’s 70,000-strong youth wing, mobilised against the GroKo. But he was fought to a standstill by a powerful lobby in favour of it, headed by Olaf Scholz, a party boss from Hamburg, and Andrea Nahles, once on the party’s left wing, who became leader in April 2018.

Once again the SPD extracted a steep price for its co-operation with Merkel. To the horror of conservatives and the business lobby, the chancellor turned a blind eye while SPD ministers launched a raft of new social and environmental policies. But once again, the SPD in government with Merkel lacks credibility. This year’s European elections gave the party its worst result in a national ballot since 1887. And the data are worse when broken down demographically. Among voters under thirty, the SPD scores no more than 10 per cent. While Scholz and other senior SPD ministers remain in office, Nahles has resigned from all her party positions. Until the next party conference, scheduled for December, the SPD is without a leader. There are no candidates. It seems inconceivable that anyone who backs the coalition with the CDU could be a candidate. But an anti-GroKo candidate would hasten a new election, which is a terrifying prospect.

*

What is remarkable – the third big story in German politics in the last four years – is who has benefited from the SPD’s collapse. Not the CDU, whose results are by its own standards barely less disastrous than the SPD’s. Outside the east, the AfD seems to have hit a ceiling at around 10 per cent. Die Linke, worried about competition on the right, has impaled itself on arguments about immigration policy. The FDP’s refusal to take a share of power in 2017 has left it sidelined. The great beneficiaries of the upheaval are the Greens.

Immediately after the collapse of the Jamaica coalition talks in 2017, the Greens’ poll numbers surged. In the recent European elections their record result of 20.5 per cent put them in second place for the first time in a national poll. That breakthrough seems only to have increased their momentum. They now regularly poll over 25 per cent, ahead of the CDU. Their leaders, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, are inexperienced but charismatic. They clearly stand for the party’s shift to the mainstream. The Greens have established a business council, frequented by senior management from the chemical giant BASF, Accenture consulting and the reinsurance group Munich Re. The party that once represented the ecofundamentalist fringe no longer shrinks from the project of greening German capitalism.

The most widely discussed option for the future is a Black-Green coalition: a modernised CDU and a moderated Green party in a new-style centrist formation. Something of the kind operates in Baden-Württemberg. But it’s unclear whether the Green base in the rest of the country will tolerate such a conservative deal. On the same day as the European elections, Bremen held a vote, which brought another historic defeat for the SPD. Having ruled the city uninterruptedly since 1945, it took only 25 per cent of the vote. The ‘winner’ was the CDU. But it cannot govern alone, which makes the Greens the kingmakers. To the dismay of the party’s Berlin leadership, rather than talk to the conservatives, the Bremen Greens entered talks for a Green-Red-Red coalition, with the defeated SPD and Die Linke.

Bremen, a heavily indebted post-industrial port, is the smallest state of the republic. But if its coalition model were to catch on in Berlin, it would cause an earthquake. The Red-Red-Green option is the one that the SPD leadership, in better times, refused to countenance. Now it is one of the few possibilities left. And it is all the more significant now that the CDU has to deal with its own split on the right wing. The CDU’s reaction to the news from Bremen was telling. Merkel’s designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, immediately denounced the move, declaring that the Greens had revealed their true left-wing nature, and voters who hoped to bring about a change of government by supporting the Greens were naively opening the door to Die Linke. But this rhetoric cannot disguise the difficulty of the CDU’s position. What options has the retiring Merkel left her party? Given the CDU’s diminished polling, a coalition with the FDP alone is no longer enough. Would the CDU want to pursue an ‘Austrian option’ – a coalition with the AfD? Such a scenario is conceivable at the Länder level in the east. In regional elections in Saxony and Brandenburg later this year, the AfD is likely to consolidate its position as the leading party of the right. But at the federal level there is nothing that would do more to rally a majority for a Red-Red-Green coalition than the prospect of a CDU-AfD connubio.

[bountyofbeads]

Trump Focuses on Economy at Davos, Seeking a Counter to Impeachment https://nyti.ms/36cm7JC

Trump is with his “people” at Davos-the wealthy one per cent who are responsible for crippling recessions and the group who will not put their ample resources to work to make a difference in the huge challenge of climate change. They represent money but not wisdom and responsibility. Davos is a “ see and be seen “ opportunity not a forum for serious solutions to the world’s problems.

Also, what's not to love about Trumpnomics? More subsidies to big industries, less taxes for the rest of us and to social welfare programsw; shifts the federal tax burden from business to their employees and customers; rebalances regulations to favor business over employees, customers and the environment. Never mind that the National Debt grows more than the economy (GDP), even as infrastructure decays and more people are disconnected from the benefits of economic growth. Never mind the cost to society and the planet...

TRUMP TAKES A VICTORY LAP AT DAVOS, CROWING ABOUT THE U.S. ECONOMY AND IGNORING IMPEACHMENT

By Anne Gearan and Toluse Olorunnipa | Published Jan 21 at 7:46 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted Jan 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — President Trump trumpeted what he called "America's extraordinary prosperity" on his watch, taking credit for a soaring stock market, a low unemployment rate, and a "blue-collar boom" in jobs and income, in a presidential turn on the world stage also meant to make impeachment proceedings against him in Washington look small.

Trump ran through economic statistics with a salesman's delivery, crowing about growth during his three years in office that he said bested his predecessors and defied his skeptics.

“America is thriving; America is flourishing, and, yes, America is winning again like never before,” he told an audience of billionaires, world leaders and figures from academia, media, and the kind of international organizations and think tanks for whom his “America First” nationalism is anathema.

Trump is making his second visit to the World Economic Forum, which for its 50th anniversary this year is focusing on climate change and sustainability. A sign at the entrance to the press center notes that paint for this year’s installation was made from seaweed, and carpets from recycled fishing nets.

Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, did not directly address the theme during his 30-minute address here, although he did call for rejecting “the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse” and later said he is a big believer in the environment.

He also made no mention of impeachment or U.S. politics, although he took a swipe at “radical socialism,” his term for Democratic ideas about health care, education and other issues. The Senate impeachment trial was set to open hours after he spoke.

In response to questions from reporters after his speech, Trump called the impeachment trial a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” that has been “going on for years.”

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the forum, thanked Trump “for injecting optimism” into the discussion.

“We have many problems in the world, but we need dreams,” he said.

Trump received a polite but not enthusiastic reception in the hall. A few in the audience slipped out well before he wrapped up.

Even as Trump faces impeachment, his trip to Davos offers him an opportunity focus on his economic message. The U.S. economy has continued to notch solid growth and maintain a low unemployment rate, and the stock market has reached record highs in recent days. Trump signed a partial trade deal with China last week, easing global tensions over his use of tariffs.

But the president faces continued questions about his approach to foreign affairs. His decision to order a strike that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani earlier this month — and his threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on European cars over a foreign policy dispute — have created more tumult in the Middle East and in the transatlantic relationship between the United States and its closest allies. 

Trump was billed as the keynote speaker for the annual business-themed confab in this Alpine ski town, but the main attraction was Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 17, who has sparred with Trump on Twitter.

Last year, Thunberg blamed world leaders at the forum for not doing more to combat climate change. She has since echoed that message while rallying teenagers worldwide to skip school and pressure global leaders to take stronger action to address the existential threat. 

In December, Trump insulted the teenager and Time magazine “Person of the Year” as “so ridiculous” and suggested that she “work on her anger management problem.”

Thunberg was quick to respond, updating her Twitter biography to describe herself as “A teenager working on her anger management problem.”

Trump had not yet arrived in Davos when Thunberg gave her first address Tuesday morning, saying that “without treating this as a real crisis, then we cannot solve it.” He was expected to skip her main speech later in the day.

Trump is an outlier at the forum for his views on climate change. The president has publicly criticized global efforts to combat warming temperatures and has made ridiculing energy-efficient products a key part of his reelection stump speech.

Ahead of Trump’s address, Schwab told the gathering that “the world is in a state of emergency” and that the window to address climate change is closing. Speaking ahead of Trump, he also reminded the audience that “every voice” heard at the forum deserved respect.

Trump was accompanied here by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, and a delegation including his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Also present is adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller, whose hard-line stance on limiting immigration and denunciations of “globalism” infused Trump’s address to the United Nations in September.

“This is the wreckage I was elected to clean up,” Trump said of the “bleak” economic landscape he inherited.

He praised himself repeatedly, saying that his actions saved the global economy from the brink of recession, rescued the American manufacturing industry and reshaped the rules of international trade to reflect a fairer system.

He occasionally strayed from the facts as he tried to paint a picture of an economy in a shambles before he took office.

He described the 4.7 percent unemployment rate before he took office as “reasonably high,” even though it was well below the average unemployment rate in the United States over the past 70 years. He also took credit for additional funding that has been approved for historically black colleges and universities, saying inaccurately that the funding “saved” the schools from ruin.

He took a swipe at the Federal Reserve for its interest rate policies, saying his economic achievements came despite the rate-setting body. Although his attacks on the Fed have become common, the once-taboo practice seemed to startle some in the audience here.

Trump is using his day-and-a-half visit to lobby corporate chieftains for greater U.S. investment and to meet with leaders including Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Iraqi President Barham Salih and Kurdish leader Nechirvan Barzani. 

Although climate change and environmental stewardship lead the agenda here, a survey of chief executives released Monday shows that they do not count climate change as among the top 10 threats to business growth.

The financial services group PwC said climate change and environmental issues are ranked as the 11th-biggest threat to their companies’ growth prospects, the Associated Press reported. Trade conflicts and lack of skilled workers ranked higher.

The survey also found that 53 percent of CEOs predict a decline in the rate of growth this year, nearly double the percentage who said the same last year and a mark of how the trade conflict between the United States and China has soured business confidence.

Trump, however, painted a sunny picture Tuesday and invited global investment in the United States. He suggested that other nations would benefit from his approach to deregulation, but said, “You have to run your countries the way you want.”

He said he had confronted “predatory” Chinese trade practices and asserted that his tariffs, denounced by many of the CEOs and economists in the audience, have worked exactly as intended.

“No one did anything about it except allowing it to keep getting worse and worse and worse” before he took office, Trump said.

He said that the U.S. relationship with China has never been better, and that his personal bond with Chinese President Xi Jinping is a big reason.

“He’s for China, I’m for the U.S., but other than that we love each other,” Trump said to chuckles.

He received louder applause when he announced that the United States will join an initiative begun here to add 1 trillion trees worldwide.

Trump’s 2018 visit to the World Economic Forum came just days after he signed a bill lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent — a move that will save businesses billions of dollars.

He largely steered clear of discussing domestic political issues during his speech to the forum in 2018, instead using his remarks to tout his accomplishments and encourage business leaders to invest in the United States. He did take a brief swipe at “the opposing party,” pointing out that “some of the people in the room” supported Democrats over him in 2016. He also drew a smattering of boos when he attacked the news media as “fake.”

This year, two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), have sparked growing alarm among the global elite with calls for a major restructuring of the economic system that they say has been skewed to benefit the wealthy.

Trump, who has made attacking “socialism” part of his reelection message, could find a receptive audience as he seeks to defend capitalism and tout his economic record to a group of business leaders. The president has regularly credited his administration with boosting the bottom lines of the country’s largest companies, occasionally bragging to top executives that he had made them very rich. More than 100 billionaires are on the official attendee list for the World Economic Forum, and Trump plans to meet with the heads of several multinational companies during his brief stay in Davos.

______

Heather Long contributed to this report.

*********

Climate Change Takes Center Stage in Davos

With businesses under pressure to act, solutions are emerging, but not fast enough, some participants fear.

By Stanley Reed | Published Jan. 20, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 21, 2020 |

Even before catastrophic fires broke out in Australia in late fall, climate change was at the top of the list of priorities at the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

But those fires — preceded by others in California — along with rising sea levels, flooding and supercharged storms, are putting more pressure on the politicians, business executives, financiers, thought leaders and others who attend to show they are part of the solution to one of the world’s most pressing challenges.

In a nod to a younger generation most at risk and demanding action on climate change, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has become a prominent environmental activist, is scheduled to appear. In a column this month in The Guardian that she wrote with other environmental activists, they demanded an end to investments in fossil fuels.

“Anything less than immediately ceasing these investments in the fossil fuel industry would be a betrayal of life itself,” they said. “Today’s business as usual is turning into a crime against humanity. We demand that leaders play their part in putting an end to this madness.”

Daniel Yergin, the oil historian and a regular attendee at the Davos forum, agreed that “climate is going to loom larger than ever before.” And Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the political risk firm Eurasia Group, said: “These issues are becoming more real, more salient every day, whether you are talking about Venice or California or Australia or Jakarta. These are real events with enormous direct human and economic costs.”

But an overriding question as the Davos gathering gets underway is: Will all the talk matter?

Mr. Bremmer, who plans to attend, said the forum could help force change because it brings together big players, like chief executives of banks, money management firms and hedge funds, who are rethinking their investments. Gradually — some say too gradually — financial firms are directing money away from oil companies and others associated with carbon-dioxide emissions blamed for environmental damage.

Financial institutions “see the future coming, and they are changing the way they invest,” Mr. Bremmer said. “That is going to require multinational corporations to act differently; it will lead to new corporations that will do better.”

While thinking on climate change may be shifting, by some metrics the corporate elite that always makes up a large contingent at Davos still has a lot of work to do. According to a study published in December by the Davos organizers, only a quarter of a group of 7,000 businesses are setting a specific emissions reduction target and only an eighth are actually reducing their emissions each year.

If so, they are making a major strategic error, according to Mark Carney, the departing governor of the Bank of England who planned to be in Davos. Companies that work to bring their emissions to zero “will be rewarded handsomely,” Mr. Carney said in a recent speech. “Those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.”

Some people in the financial industry said that environmental issues were being given greater weight in investment decisions despite setbacks like President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change. The president, who shunned the gathering in Davos last year, said he would go this time.

The number of people who are talking about fossil fuels as a real concern “has increased dramatically over the last 12 to 24 months,” said Jeff McDermott, chief executive of Greentech Capital, an investment bank focused on low-carbon technologies. “They are both looking at the risks of high-carbon companies and industries as well as the returns available from low-carbon alternatives.”

Mr. McDermott said that Davos was a good venue for sifting through such ideas. The conference organizers are also pushing an environmental agenda that supports an ecologist’s notion of persuading the world to plant a trillion trees to soak up carbon dioxide and prodding companies to announce ambitious targets for lowering their emissions.

Potentially, enormous sums could be used to influence corporate behavior. For instance, Climate Action 100+ said investors with around $35 trillion in assets had signed on to its program for pushing companies toward greater disclosure and action on emissions.

“I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,”  wrote Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, which has nearly $7 trillion under management, in a letter vowing to put sustainability at the core of the firm’s investment approach.

Many likely targets of investor and environmental initiatives may be available at the gathering at the Swiss resort. Among them are the chiefs of the world’s major oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron and Saudi Aramco, who are expected to attend.

In recent months, some of these companies, especially those based in Europe, have been responding to the concerns of investors and other constituents with commitments to reduce their emissions or make investments in other environmentally friendly technology.

Repsol, the Spanish oil company,  pledged last month to cut its emissions to zero by 2050 through a combination of actions, including more investments in renewable electricity like wind and solar and, possibly, reforestation. And BP, the London-based oil company, said it was forming a business with other companies for recycling a type of plastic known as PET that is used in soft drink bottles and packaging. In the latest of these pledges, Equinor, the Norwegian company, said it would reduce emissions from its oil and gas fields and plants in its home country to near zero by 2050 by using electricity in its operations and other measures.

Mr. Yergin, who is also vice chairman of IHS Markit, a research firm, said that “energy transition” would be the “two most spoken words at Davos” about the sector.

Marco Alverà, chief executive of Snam,  an Italian natural gas company, plans to talk about recent experiments in mixing hydrogen, a fuel that does not produce carbon emissions, with the natural gas that the company delivers to users, potentially lowering their climate impact. Mr. Alverà said he was going to Davos because he thought it would be a “powerful forum” to make his points.

“I don’t think we will solve the climate challenge with taxes or a radical change in consumer behavior,” he said. “I think we can only solve it with business ideas that make business sense.”

The chemical industry, another sector that is integral to modern economies and a target for environmentalists, also plans to make its case at Davos.

A group of about 20 large chemical companies is working on low-carbon technologies, like making chemicals from carbon dioxide and biomass, said Martin Brudermuller, chief executive of the German chemical company BASF.

Mr. Brudermuller also said another large coalition in the sector was working on the plastic waste problem, with BASF turning discarded plastic into raw materials for its plants. Mr. Brudermuller cautioned that such problems, which involve not only new technologies but also organizing the collection and sorting of waste, are so complex and globe-spanning that only an effort of similar scope will succeed in solving them.

“A collaborative effort of companies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations as well as civil society is necessary to address the global challenge of mismanaged waste,” Mr. Brudermuller wrote in an email.

Awareness of these issue may be growing, but with global emissions continuing to rise governments are falling short on tackling them, according to a pre-conference report issued by the World Economic Forum. Many businesses, too, are failing to set effective targets, the report said. In 2006, Nicholas Stern was the chief author of a seminal study for the British government that set out the case for acting on climate change. More than a decade later, as he prepared to attend the 50th gathering in Davos, Lord Stern, chairman of the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, said there were reasons to be encouraged and to worry.

He said that the costs of wind and solar technology had fallen much more rapidly than anticipated. Electric vehicles, he said, were also making more rapid progress than expected, with most automakers talking about the end of the era of the internal combustion engine.

Such advances, he said, are opening attractive opportunities for investors and creating jobs.

He also said the growing activism of young people was crucial in pushing their elders to enact change. “Business people really feel that,” including those who attend Davos, he said, adding that he hoped such pressures would push companies into making commitments on emissions reduction at the meeting.

On the other hand, he said that the world had been slow to act and each report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations agency that tracks emissions, was more worrying than the last.

“I am really optimistic about what it is possible to do,” he said. “But I worry deeply about whether we will.”

*********

IN DAVOS, A SEARCH FOR MEANING WITH CAPITALISM IN CRISIS

By Ishaan Tharoor | Published January 20 at 9:35 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — The World Economic Forum, the most concentrated gathering of wealth and power on the planet, will begin once again amid a natural fortress of snow and ice in the Swiss Alps. President Trump is jetting in for a scheduled address Tuesday. Dozens of other world leaders are in attendance; a who’s who list of CEOs, fund managers, oligarchs and a smattering of celebrities will join the throngs cramming the pop-up pavilions and swanky hotel parties of the otherwise sleepy mountain town.

This year’s conclave will be the 50th since it began in 1971, marking a fitful half century of political turmoil and economic boom and bust. For years, Davos — that is, the conference of global leaders for which it has become synonymous — has represented the apotheosis of a particular world view: an almost Promethean belief in the virtues of liberalism and globalization, anchored in a conviction that heads of companies can become capable and even moral custodians of the common good.

The disruptions and traumas of the past decade have sorely tested Davos’s faith in itself. The archetypal Davos Man — the well-heeled, jet-setting “globalist” — has become an object of derision and distrust for both the political left and right. Financial crises, surging nationalist populism in the West, China’s intensifying authoritarianism and the steady toll of climate change have convinced many that there’s nothing inexorable about liberal progress. A new global opinion poll of tens of thousands of people found that more than 50 percent of those surveyed now think capitalism does "more harm than good."

Each year, the forum is accompanied by an unsurprising airing of cynicism in the media. “It is [a] family reunion for the people who, in my view, broke the modern world,” Anand Giradharadas, an author and outspoken critic of billionaire philanthropy, said in a TV interview last year. Can Davos “keep its mojo?” the Economist asked over the weekend. “Once a beacon of international cooperation, Davos has become a punchline,” the New York Times noted.

Klaus Schwab, the forum’s octogenarian founder and executive chairman, is convinced that the current moment needs more Davos, not less. In the run-up to this week’s meetings, he announced a new “Davos manifesto,” calling on companies to “pay their fair share of taxes, show zero tolerance for corruption, uphold human rights throughout their global supply chains, and advocate for a competitive level playing field.” Such an ethos, Schwab contends, will go a long way to redressing the world’s inequities and may help governments meet the climate targets set by the 2015 Paris agreement.

“Business leaders now have an incredible opportunity,” Schwab wrote in a column published last month. “By giving stakeholder capitalism concrete meaning, they can move beyond their legal obligations and uphold their duty to society.”

Schwab’s extolling of “stakeholder” capitalism — a riposte to the profit-maximizing Western orthodoxy of “shareholder” capitalism — is supposed to be a call to action. Activists, though, may argue that it’s not enough.

In a study timed in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, Oxfam found the world’s billionaires control more wealth than 4.6 billion people, or 60 percent of humanity. “Another year, another indication that the inequality crisis is spiraling out of control. And despite repeated warnings about inequality, governments have not reversed its course,” said Paul O’Brien of Oxfam America in an emailed statement. “Some governments, especially the U.S., are actually exacerbating inequality by cutting taxes for the richest and for corporations while slashing public services and safety nets — such as health care and education — that actually fight inequality.”

And some Davos attendees concur. “The economic pie is bigger than it’s ever been before in history, which means we could make everyone better off, but we’ve chosen as a society to leave a lot of people behind,” Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, told my colleague Heather Long. “That’s not just inexcusable morally but is also really bad tactically.”

Reading from a totally different script, President Trump is expected to wax lyrical about the success of his economic and trade policies. In the past, his bullying measures and fondness for tariffs have ruffled the Davos set.

“Although the president has been inconsistent in how he has carried out his worldview, he has made clear that he has no plans to back away from his strong-arm tactics even as they have increasingly antagonized American friends and foes alike, leaving the United States potentially more isolated on the world stage,” wrote my colleagues Anne Gearan and John Hudson.

Trump is also likely to be challenged in Davos by a growing cohort of climate activists and policymakers. On the same day of his speech, Swedish teen campaigner Greta Thunberg is expected to berate politicians and finance executives who still invest in fossil fuels. Although Trump almost certainly will not heed Thunberg’s call, representatives of major companies attending the forum are desperate to show how they are adapting their business models to accommodate climate concerns.

Two years ago, Schwab drew criticism for what was viewed as an awkwardly ingratiating speech to welcome Trump to the forum. Now, he’s more at odds with the U.S. president, not least on the urgency of the climate crisis.

“We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change,” Schwab told reporters last week. “We do not want the next generations to inherit a world which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable.”

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Trump Focuses on Economy at Davos, Seeking a Counter to Impeachment

President Trump made his first appearance on the international stage since the House sent impeachment articles to the Senate, on the day his trial is set to begin in earnest.

By Annie Karni | Published Jan. 21, 2020 Updated 7:01 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — Before the Senate impeachment trial began in earnest on Tuesday, President Trump was more than 4,000 miles away from Washington, in this glitzy Alpine village, driving a competing narrative — one that had nothing to do with pressure on Ukraine, abuse of power or obstruction of Congress.

In his first appearance on the international stage since Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent articles of impeachment to the Senate, before the senators who will decide his fate even arrive at the Capitol building, Mr. Trump addressed the World Economic Forum, focusing on the success of the global economy — and taking credit for it.

“America’s economy was in a rather dismal state,” Mr. Trump said. “Before my presidency began, the outlook for many economies was bleak.” In fact, the economy’s recovery after its plummet was central to President Barack Obama’s legacy.

But Mr. Trump called the growth under his leadership a “roaring geyser of opportunity,” and proclaimed that “the American dream is back bigger better and stronger than ever before.”

In his 30-minute address in front of a global audience, Mr. Trump did not mention the impeachment trial back home. But he delivered what amounted to a version of his campaign speech minus the red meat to his base, speaking little of international alliances other than touting America’s supremacy in the world.

Mr. Trump highlighted the first phase of his trade deal with China and another with Mexico and Canada, accomplishments he thinks are being overshadowed by a focus on an impeachment trial he is trying to dismiss as a “hoax.” And the audience appeared receptive — to his face, at least — having warmed to him over the past two years because they have benefited from his policies.

“Lev Parnas is not a topic of conversation at Davos,” said Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political research and consulting firm.

Mr. Parnas, an associate of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been on a nonstop media tour over the past week, asserting that Mr. Trump was fully aware of the pressure campaign to force Ukraine to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals. Democrats have not ruled out trying to call him as a witness.

The open question, as always with Mr. Trump, was how much he would stray from his script and the escape offered by the world stage, and vent his grievances about his legal and political predicament at home. But in his morning address, he stuck largely to his prepared remarks, claiming that his approach was “centered entirely on the well-being of the American worker.”

The president also took a swipe at people demanding action on climate change, the lead agenda item at this year’s conference. Mr. Trump announced that the United States would join the 1 trillion trees initiative launched at the World Economic Forum. But he also declared that “we must reject the perennial prophets of doom.”

Former Vice President Al Gore, who attended Mr. Trump’s speech, declined to comment on his remarks.

It was not clear whether Mr. Trump would try to stage a surprise meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who is also attending the international forum, even though officials said the optics of such a meeting would be unhelpful to Mr. Trump.

In Davos, however, Mr. Trump may find the right audience for support if he sticks with efforts to counter the impeachment narrative at home. There was less anxiety rippling through the one percent set about him on Tuesday than there had been when he first arrived at the annual forum two years ago, fresh off an “America First” campaign filled with promises to rip up international agreements and alliances.

This time, there’s more concern about some of the progressive Democrats running to replace him. Through regulatory rollbacks, tax cuts and the success of the global economy, the president who ran as a populist has benefited many of the chief executives gathered here, even those who have taken public positions against some of his policies.

“There are lot of masters of the universe who think he may not be their cup of tea, but he’s been a godsend,” Mr. Bremmer added. “It’s interesting to hear Mike Bloomberg saying he would fund Bernie Sanders’s campaign if he won the nomination. Very few people here would say that.”

Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, who is himself running for president, has said he is open to spending $1 billion to defeat Mr. Trump, whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee.

During Mr. Trump’s colorful career in New York real estate, entertainment and business, he never cracked the Davos set, whose Fortune 500 chief executives dismissed him as something of a gaudy sideshow.

But the balance of power has shifted. And with progressives like Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts emerging as top-tier candidates in the Democratic primary, a crowd that once rejected Mr. Trump is now more willing to consider him one of their own.

Mr. Trump has happily embraced them back. When he signed an agreement at the White House for the United States-China trade deal, for instance, Mr. Trump credited himself with helping big banks and business.

“I made a lot of bankers look very good,” he said, and told attendees to send his regards to Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.

There are however, still major points of contention ahead during the love-to-hate-it conference for Mr. Trump, who plans to spend almost two days here in bilateral meetings with leaders of Iraq, Pakistan and the Kurdish regional government, as well as sitdowns with corporate chieftains. (The forum is also Mr. Trump’s first trip abroad since the drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most important military official.)

Global warming and climate change top the agenda items for the conference. A star speaker on Tuesday, alongside Mr. Trump, is the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has said she wouldn’t “waste her time” speaking to Mr. Trump about climate change.

Mr. Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, and his administration has expanded the use of coal, downplayed concerns about climate change and rolled back environmental protections.

The president mocked Ms. Thunberg, who has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum, after she was chosen as Time magazines  Person of the Year. “So ridiculous,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Greta must work on her anger management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”

Attendees at the conference said they fully expected Mr. Trump to take another whack at her while she was here.

In 2018, Mr. Trump was the first sitting president to attend the forum since President Bill Clinton did so in 2000. Last year, he abruptly canceled his plans to attend, citing a partial government shutdown.

This year, the administration delegation includes Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, as well as Robert Lighthizer, the trade representative. Other members of the administration who were expected to attend the forum were Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary; Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, and Eugene Scalia, the labor secretary.

Mr. Trump was also expected to be joined in Davos by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump, both senior White House advisers.

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Ms. Thunberg is the only adult in the room speaking truth to power. Greta is not an extremist, although her demands will be portrayed as extreme. Unfortunately for all of us, she’s a realist. It’s past time to pay lip service to the problem of climate change and global warming, because, as Greta so often says, our house is indeed on fire.

Greta Thunberg’s Message at Davos Forum: ‘Our House Is Still on Fire’

By Somini Sengupta, Reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos | Published Jan. 21, 2020 Updated 9:45 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 21, 2020 |

DAVOS, Switzerland — Greta Thunberg on Tuesday punched a hole in the promises emerging from a forum of the global political and business elite and offered instead an ultimatum: Stop investing in fossil fuels immediately, or explain to your children why you did not protect them from the “climate chaos” you created.

“I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?” Ms. Thunberg, 17, said at the annual gathering of the world’s rich and powerful in Davos, a village on the icy reaches of the Swiss Alps.

Her remarks opened a panel discussion hosted by The New York Times and the World Economic Forum. The full transcript is available here.

“Our house is still on fire,” she added, reprising her most famous line from an address last year at the forum. “Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour.”

Her remarks came at a time when climate change and environmental sustainability rose to the top of the talking points of many of the executives and government leaders assembled at Davos.

Ms. Thunberg, a climate activist known for speaking bluntly to power, rebuked the crowd for promises that she said would do too little: reducing planet-warming gases to net zero by 2050, offsetting emissions by planting one trillion trees, transitioning to a low-carbon economy.

“Let’s be clear. We don’t need a ‘low carbon economy.’ We don’t need to ‘lower emissions,’” she said. “Our emissions have to stop.”

Only that, she said, would enable the world to keep temperatures from rising past 1.5 degrees from preindustrial levels, which scientists say is necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change. She and a group of young climate activists have called on private investors and governments to immediately halt exploration for fossil fuels, to stop funding their production, to end taxpayer subsidies for the industry and to fully divest their existing stakes in the sector.

Scientists have said emissions must be reduced by half in the next decade to reach the 1.5-degree target. The opposite is happening. Global emissions continued to rise, hitting a record high in 2019, according to research published in December.

Her address began barely an hour after President Trump’s speech at the forum, which barely mentioned climate change, except to implicitly describe climate activists as “heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers.” Ms. Thunberg did not address him directly, except to remind the audience that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement by the end of this year.

Ms. Thunberg took pains to distance herself from politics. “This is not about right or left. We couldn’t care less about your party politics,” she said. “From a sustainability perspective, the right, the left as well as the center have all failed. No political ideology or economic structure has been able to tackle the climate and environmental emergency.”

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[kenyatta]

“Knowing what we know about surveillance, surveillance tools end up being pointed towards the less powerful, in general,” says Thomas, no matter the original intent. In some ways, these emergent forms of reporting technologies have the potential to rebalance that power: Homeowners can fight back against thieves that come to prey on their stuff while they’re at work in the middle of the day; pedestrians and cyclists can exact some vengeance on the hulking vehicles that block and menace them. But once that information is collected, the layers of power get much more tangled. In San Francisco, license plate information collected by law enforcement and private operations was stored in a database that Immigration and Customs Enforcement gained access to; privacy and immigration advocates warned that ICE could easily use it to target undocumented immigrants. What if that car blocking the bike lane belongs to someone whose immigration status is uncertain, and their license plate information—and location—is used to speed their deportation? What if the Ring camera footage that a homeowner shares with police helps them identify the wrong suspect—or Amazon uses it as an ad for thousands of viewers to see? Cellphone footage that can expose the killings of unarmed black men at the hands of police can just as easily be used to shame a D.C. metro employee for eating lunch on the job, Thomas says.

Can 311 Apps Defend Bike Lanes From Bad Drivers? - CityLab

[aptechvisaglobalimmigration]

Recently Announced Categories For New Zealand Permanent Residence

Information about the New Zealand Permanent residence categories that will assist firms in luring workers to fill certain high-skilled, in-demand Jobs in the New Zealand.

Following the Recent announcement of the Immigration Rebalance in May, the New Zealand Government has revealed the specifics of three new resident categories that will make it simpler for firms to recruit and attract immigrants for a variety of high-skilled, in-demand jobs in the New Zealand. Here  are the three new residence categories

Straight to Residence, 

Work to Residence,

 Highly Paid .

                        Get a free New Zealand assessment form

As per the job's minimal requirements at least match the minimum standards, employers are permitted to perform a Job Check for the Accredited Employer Work Visa under the Straight to Residence and Work to Residence programs. These programs are related to the various high demand occupation List. For people making double the median income, there is a new Highly Paid Resident Visa for the New Zealand.

People can start applying for the Straight to The New Zealand’s Permanent Residence pathway on September 5, 2022.

People can apply for the Work to Residence and Highly Paid paths starting on September 29, 2023, but they must have worked for 24 months prior.

This work in the New Zealand can be counted starting on September 29, 2021, which coincides with the eligibility date for the 2021 the New Zealand Resident Visa. This ensures that the few individuals who do not meet the requirements for the 2021 Resident Visa can still have some of their work in New Zealand recognized through these two new pathways. For a New Zealand resident visa, you click here to Check can New Zealand PR Points 

                             Check your eligibility requirements

There are other ways to obtain skilled residency besides these new visas. With the same health, age, and character requirements as the Skilled Migrant Category but a different, easier application process, they are meant to complement it. As part of the Immigration Rebalance, the Skilled Migrant Category is presently halted while the government considers recommendations.

Source Url: https://www.aptechvisa.com/new-zealand-immigration-news/newly-announced-categories-for-new-zealand-permanent-residence

[immigrationnz]

The implementation of immigration rebalance has resulted in certain changes in the case of migrant workers. The changes will affect the employers in both the health and disability sectors.

[leanpick]

Federal Budget 2022: Major WA business groups push for ways to ease skills crunch, fiscal responsibility

Federal Budget 2022: Major WA business groups push for ways to ease skills crunch, fiscal responsibility

WA’s major business lobby is urging a fiscal rebalance and immigration policy changes to help alleviate the skills crunch ahead of next week’s Federal Budget.