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Showing posts with label Fleeing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fleeing. Show all posts
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Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Millions Around the World
Fleeing from Neoliberal Policy
By Michael Hudson
June 07, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "TheRealNews" - Economist Michael Hudson says neoliberal policy will pressure U.S. citizens to emigrate, just as it caused millions to leave Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece in search of a better life
June 07, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "TheRealNews" - Economist Michael Hudson says neoliberal policy will pressure U.S. citizens to emigrate, just as it caused millions to leave Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece in search of a better life
A research team from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York estimates 875,000 deaths in the United States in year 2000 could be attributed to social factors related to poverty and income inequality.
According to U.S. government statistics, 2.45 million Americans died in the same year. When compared to the Columbia research team’s finding, social deprivation could account for some 36% of the total deaths in 2000.
“Almost all of the British economists of the late 18th century said when you have poverty, when you have a transfer of wealth to the rich, you’re going to have shorter lifespans, and you’re also going to have emigration,” says Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Many countries, such as Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece, have seen a massive outflow of their populations due to worsening social conditions after the implementation of neoliberal policy.
Hudson predicts that the United States will undergo the same trend, as greater hardship results from the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, changes to social security, and broader policy shifts due to prospective appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court and the next presidential cabinet.
“Now, the question is, in America, now that you’re having as a result of this polarization shorter lifespans, worse health, worse diets, where are the Americans going to emigrate? Nobody can figure that one out yet,” says Hudson.
SHARMINI PERIES, TRNN: After decades of sustained attacks on social programs and consistently high unemployment rates, it is no surprise that mortality rates in the country have increased. A research team from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York has estimated that 875,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 could be attributed to clusters of social factors bound up with poverty and income inequality. According to U.S. government statistics, some 2.45 million Americans died in the year 2000, thus the researchers estimate means that social deprivation was responsible for some 36 percent of the total deaths that year. A staggering total.
Joining us to discuss all of this from New York City is Michael Hudson. Michael is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.
So, Michael, what do you make of this recent research and what it�’s telling us about the death total in this country?
HUDSON: What it tells is almost identical to what has already been narrated for Russia and Greece. And what is responsible for the increasing death rates is neoliberal economic
policy, neoliberal trade policy, and the polarization and impoverishment of a large part of society. After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, death rates soared, lifespans shortened, health standards decreased all throughout the Yeltsin administration, until finally President Putin came in and stabilized matters. Putin said that the destruction caused by neoliberal economic policies had killed more Russians than all of whom died in World War II, the 22 million people. That’s the devastation that polarization caused there.
Same thing in Greece. In the last five years, Greek lifespans have shortened. They’re getting sicker, they are dying faster, they’re not healthy. Almost all of the British economists of the late 18th century said when you have poverty, when you have a transfer of wealth to the rich, you’re going to have shorter lifespans, and you’re also going to have immigration. The countries that have a hard money policy, a creditor policy, people are going to emigrate. Now, at that time that was why England was gaining immigrants. It was gaining skilled labor. It was gaining people to work in its industry because other countries were still in the post-feudal system and were driving them out. Russia had a huge emigration of skilled labor, largely to Germany and to the United States, especially in information technology. Greece has a heavy outflow of labor. The Baltic States have had almost a 10 percent decline in their population in the last decade as a result of their neoliberal policies. Also, health problems are rising.
Now, the question is, in America, now that you’re having as a result of this polarization shorter lifespans, worse health, worse diets, where are the Americans going to emigrate? Nobody can figure that one out yet. There’s nowhere for them to go, because they don’t speak a foreign language. The Russians, the Greeks, most Europeans all somehow have to learn English in school. They’re able to get by in other countries. They’re not sure where on earth the Americans will go. Nobody can really figure this out.
And the amazing thing, what’s going to make this worse, is the the Trans-Pacific trade agreement, and the counterpart with the Atlantic states. There’s news that President Obama plans to make a big push for the Trans-Pacific trade agreement, essentially the giveaway to corporations preventing governments from enacting environmental protections, preventing them from imposing health standards, preventing them from having cigarette warnings or warnings about bad food. Obama says he wants to push this through after the election. And the plan is that the Republicans also are sort of working with him and saying okay, we’re going to wait and see. Maybe Donald Trump will come in and he’ll really do things. Or maybe we can get Hillary, who will move way further to the right than any Republican could, and bring along the Congress.
But let’s say that we don’t know what’s happening after the elections, and the Republicans don’t want a risk. They’re going to do a number of things. They’re going to approve Obama’s Republican nominee to the Supreme Court figuring, well, maybe Hillary will put in someone worse, or even Trump may put in someone worse. They may go along, at this point, with ratifying a trade agreement that’s going to vastly increase unemployment here, especially in industrial labor, turning much of the American industrial urban complex into a rust belt. And they’re also talking about an October surprise or an early November surprise. It’s the last chance that Obama has, really, to start a war with Russia.
Russia policy expert Stephen Cohen, and a number of other site,s have warned that there’s going to be a danger when they put in the atomic weapons in Romania. President Putin has said this is a red line. We’re not going to warn. We don’t have an army. We can only use atomic weapons. So you have danger coming not only from a domestic decline in population, you have a real chance of war. And Obama has stepped things up. Hillary has, I think, almost announced that she is going to appoint Victoria Nuland as secretary of state, and Nuland is the person who was pushing the Ukrainian fascists in the direction of assassinations and shootouts.
This trend looks very bad. If you want to see where America is going demographically, best to look at Greece, Latvia, Russia, and also in England. A Dr. Miller has done studies of health and longevity, and he’s found that the lower the income status of any group in England, the shorter the lifespan. Now, this is very important for the current debate about Social Security. You’re having people talk about extending the Social Security age because people are living longer. Who’s living longer in America? The rich are living longer. The wealthy are living longer. But if you make under $30,000 a year, or even under $50,000 a year, you’re not living longer.
So the idea is how to avoid having to pay Social Security for the lower-income people — the middle class and the working class that die quicker, and only pay social security for the wealthier classes that live longer? Nobody has plugged this discussion of lifespans and longevity into the Social Security debate that Obama and Hillary are trying to raise the retirement age, to ostensibly save Social Security. By saving Social Security she means to avoid taxing the higher brackets and paying for Social Security out of the general budget, which of course would entail taxing the higher-income people as well as the lower-income people.
Michael Hudson is research professor of economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Labels: Fleeing, Millions, Neoliberal, Policy
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
France in ‘economic emergency’ as strikes threaten to ruin economic recovery and eurozone…
More Jews fleeing France over skyrocketing anti-Semitism, locals & researchers say
Submitted by IWB, on May 31st, 2016
VIOLENT protests and crippling strikes across France threaten to dent the country’s economic recovery and plunge the eurozone into crisis.
With just 10 days to go until Euro 2016, the fierce backlash against government labour market reforms are also threatening to cause chaos during the football tournament.
Rail workers today began another nationwide strike and Paris Metro employees have also staged a walkout.
At the same time, oil worker strikes have shut six of France’s eight refineries.
Yesterday Air France pilots also voted to go on strike.
President Francois Hollande is desperately trying to boost France’s stagnating economy by making it easier for firm’s to fire and hire workers as part of employment reforms.
Unemployment across France is stuck at 10 per cent, and President Hollande hopes the changes will incentivise more firms to recruit employees.
But unions and workers across eurozone’s second biggest economy are strongly resisting change.
The leader has refused to back down over the labour bill.
Hollande is desperately trying to claw back stable economy after seeing only a three per cent growth in economy since the financial crash in 2008. This compares with the UK which has grown 10 per cent.
The poor performance led Hollande to declare France was in a state of economic emergency at the start of the year.
More Jews fleeing France over skyrocketing anti-Semitism, locals & researchers say
Jewish families are rapidly leaving France over growing anti-Semitism tensions. Locals and researchers agree that over the last 15 years, half of French Jews have fled the country.
The Seine-Saint-Denis department of Paris is indicative of this trend.
“Until the years 2000-2005, the town was nice and quiet, with 250 to 300 Jewish families and synagogues full on the Sabbath. Now, only about a hundred Jewish families remain,” local resident Alain Benhamou told AFP.
The local Jewish population is increasingly becoming internal refugees or quitting France altogether.
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
EAST OF THE SUN:
Why US companies have started fleeing China
Submitted by IWB, on May 18th, 2016
Apple’s stumbles in China seem emblematic of a broader realization: US companies have less of a future there than many had hoped.For many years, the vast Chinese market — more than 1 billion consumers in a fast-growing economy — sent thrills of excitement up the spines of corporate managers throughout the developed world. Who cares about the stagnation in Europe and Japan, when China has many more people than all of those markets combined?Even as rising labor and energy costs reduced China’s advantage as a low-cost production site, the dazzling lure of the Chinese consumer pushed many multinationals to locate offices and factories in the country.Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be a mirage for many companies.If the Chinese government ever had any intention to step back and let foreign companies compete with domestic ones on a level playing field, it certainly now looks like it has changed its mind. Not long after multinationals showed up in China, they were made to hand over much of their technology to native competitors (almost all of which are directly or indirectly owned by the Chinese government). This was happening as early as 2006, as the Harvard Business Review reported:“These rules limit investment by foreign companies as well as their access to China’s markets, stipulate a high degree of local content in equipment produced in the country, and force the transfer of proprietary technologies from foreign companies to their joint ventures with China’s state-owned enterprises.”Proprietary technology is the most valuable asset owned by many multinationals. So China truly offered a lose-lose choice for these companies — either they could miss out on the Chinese market in the short term, or give away technologies that would allow Chinese competitors to challenge them all over the world in the medium term. Of course, given China’s high rate of industrial espionage, the penalty for operating in China was even higher than official government policy would suggest.Multinational companies often think very short term, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that many chose to make the devil’s bargain. Now the bill is coming due, as China’s government promotes its own national champions, many of which are now equipped with pirated foreign technology.Meanwhile, multinationals’ China operations have become less and less profitable as domestic competition has intensified. The Chinese government, of course, has aided this process by systematically discriminating against foreign companies, enforcing laws and regulations with regard to multinationals while looking the other way when a domestic company commits a violation.There are signs that some multinationals have had enough. Many are closing offices and factories in China, as costs rise and the government shuts foreigners out of the domestic market. Some recent examples include Microsoft, Adobe, Panasonic, Yahoo and Adidas.Between this and the effects of China’s general economic slowdown, foreign direct investment into the country — while volatile — has declined in the past few years.In the short run, this clampdown by China is bad for US companies. They’ll face Chinese competitors armed with transferred or stolen technology. Their supply chains, which had grown dependent on cheap Chinese production costs, may also be disrupted. And they’ll be shut out of one of the world’s largest markets, losing much of the investment that they plowed into expansion there.But in the long run, I suspect China will suffer even more. When foreign companies pack up and leave, it’ll get much harder to steal or force the transfer of their proprietary technologies — and these companies won’t make the same mistake twice.
This happened before…Post 1989, after the first boom died. Companies pulled out and said “never again” to China. Meanwhile, food companies are moving into China in a big way and that is where the next China boom will be…Australia already feeds 100m people in China.
“..For many years, the vast Chinese market more than 1 billion consumers in a fast-growing economy sent thrills of excitement up the spines of corporate managers throughout the developed world. Who cares about the stagnation in Europe and Japan, when China has many more people than all of those markets combined?
Even as rising labor and energy costs reduced Chinas advantage as a low-cost production site, the dazzling lure of the Chinese consumer pushed many multinationals to locate offices and factories in the country….”
Bottom line is that China is not “low cost” anymore and the “45%” tariff fixes a problem that existed 10 years ago. The other movement you want to watch is Chinese firms pulling out of China and buying everything that is not tied down in SE Asia, Africa and South America.
At the moment, the one thing that Trump, Clinton, Sanders and Obama have in common is that they are “fighting the last war” over China. Makes good sound grabs but its a waste of time and counterproductive.
OBC
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