FEMICIDE

With This Company’s Support, Women Are Escaping Their Abusers

Brazil’s largest retailer takes extraordinary steps to help employees impacted by domestic violence.

By: MaryLou Costa
January 13, 2022

After nearly 10 years of harassment, threats and beatings from her husband — including a blow to the head while she was holding their then one-year-old daughter — Adriana (not her real name) finally mustered up the courage to take action.

But when she did, it wasn’t friends or family she turned to for help. It was her employer, Brazil’s largest retailer, Magazine Luiza, better known locally as Magalu.

Adriana, now a company secretary with Magalu, was the first employee to contact the company’s Canal Mulher (Women’s Channel) hotline. The hotline was set up in 2017 after the murder of 37-year-old Denise Neves dos Anjos, a Magalu store manager who was stabbed to death by her husband.

Few companies have such a hotline, and at those that do, an employee might expect a referral to social services. But Magalu’s model goes far deeper. Upon learning about her case, the company immediately got to work helping Adriana find a new apartment in Sao Paulo so she could get away from her husband. Magalu also took care of Adriana’s rental payments — no reimbursement was expected — and acted as the guarantor for her rental contract. It provided additional mental health therapy and legal support.

“For the first time I felt I wasn’t by myself –– that I would get some help with the whole process of freeing myself from my abusive husband,” the 42-year-old employee told Reasons to Be Cheerful via a translator.

Adriana was the first of nearly 700 female employees that Magalu has helped to extract from abusive relationships over the past four years. During this time, the company has paid to relocate over 100 of these women and supported almost all of them legally, financially and emotionally. It’s an extraordinary level of involvement from a corporate entity in a matter most companies view as too complex and legally dicey to intervene in.

Coordinating these efforts is a dedicated team of specialists led by a senior company officer in Magalu’s compliance division. This rapid-response squad is staffed with psychologists, social workers and other professionals equipped to quickly intervene and support women and their children suffering from domestic violence. As in Adriana’s case, this often means getting involved directly, with relocation assistance, legal guidance, financial help and mental health services. Magalu currently has 100 cases open, 60 of which are considered high risk in that the women are still in close contact with their abusers.

For Adriana, this intervention has meant the difference between life and death.

“Once he knew Magalu was intervening, he knew he was no match for a big company like that, and that played a big role in him stepping back,” she says. “All the support and information I got has stopped me from becoming a femicide statistic.”

Those statistics are indeed grim. In Brazil, a country of 213 million, a woman dies of domestic terror every two hours. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen a two percent rise in women’s suicide rates.

Yet there is no legislation in Brazil compelling employers to provide any form of domestic violence support. In other countries, governments and companies are just beginning to assume a level of responsibility in such situations.

The government of New Zealand mandated paid domestic violence leave in 2018. In neighboring Australia, paid government support is available, and activists are calling for employer mandates as well. In the U.S., at a minimum, most states require employers to provide a period of unpaid leave for employees experiencing domestic violence.

Internal estimates indicate that around two percent of all women working at Magalu suffer from some form of domestic violence, a rate the company feels reflects the wider problem in Brazilian society. Magalu’s chairwoman, Luiza Trajano, has made supporting affected employees a priority, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 for her work in advancing women’s issues.

Trajano and Magalu’s success at creating a public platform for the issue of domestic violence is one of the reasons behind the company’s high intervention rate. Magalu uses its internal television station, TV Luiza, to regularly encourage affected employees and concerned colleagues to come forward. (The company has 50,000 workers, half of whom are women.). After a broadcast, there is usually an uptick in calls to the Women’s Channel as affected employees are reminded they have somewhere to turn, despite Brazil’s highly religious culture where suffering in silence is the norm.

Even with all the resources Magalu has poured into helping domestic violence victims, the company can only do so much, notes its corporate reputation and sustainability manager Ana Luiza Herzog.

“We can do everything and still not be successful,” says Herzog. “We help financially, even moving a victim from one state to another, and when we check in, we might find things are going just fine, or we might find they are moving back in with their abusive partner.”

“And then there’s nothing we can do,” she says. “It’s no easy issue. Let’s not pretend that.”

Adriana’s case illustrates this — and also shows how the persistence of a corporate ally can lead to a positive outcome. She was eventually able to divorce her husband in late 2017, but he continued to follow and harass her for six months afterwards. That was when Magalu’s domestic violence support team threatened to escalate the case to the high-profile Brazilian prosecutor, Gabriela Manssur, known for championing women’s rights. He retreated.

Today, Adriana’s only connection to him is through their two school-aged daughters, who he sees locally on weekends. Adriana doesn’t allow him to take them on long-distance trips and the children must keep their cell phones on at all times.

At Magalu, the death of Denise Neves dos Anjos continues to cast a shadow. An investigation revealed she had been badly beaten by her husband just six months prior to her murder.

“We could have prevented Denise’s death, but at the time, we knew nothing about this issue,” laments Herzog.

Yet there is some solace to be found in Adriana’s success story.

“I might not be here if I hadn’t gotten help from Magalu,” she says. “That could have been me. I’m very grateful.”

Read the UN’s report on the “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence during Covid.

Sometimes stopping abuse requires creativity. One online “cosmetics shop” allows women to report domestic violence.

MaryLou Costa

MaryLou Costa is a freelance writer fascinated by the future of work, especially changes that advance women in the workplace. She also covers sustainability, innovation, technology, startups, marketing and more. Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Observer, Business Insider, Raconteur, Sifted, Digiday, Marketing Week and others, plus she has appeared on Times Radio, BBC and Sky News.

As things fall apart, the super-rich spend $2m on whisky. We need a wealth tax

All that frittered wealth could be used to help with the economic recovery from the pandemic instead

‘It’s not just expensive bottles of whisky attracting the wallets of the thriving mega-rich.’ A selection of vintage Macallan whiskeys. 

Photograph: Rex Features/REX FEATURES

Owen Jones

Thu 13 Jan 2022 

You may need a stiff drink to believe this. Last October, a new record was set: a cask of Macallan 1991 whisky sold for a cool $2.33m. At least this was an entire cask of premium liquor: earlier last year, a luxury case of 30-year-old Irish malt featuring a gold Fabergé egg was auctioned off for $2m, only slightly more than a single bottle of scotch at the end of 2019.

Is whisky really worth 2m big ones? As any economist will tell you, the value of something is determined by how much someone is prepared to pay for it, and all that money sloshing around at the top has to go somewhere. The crises of our time have been kind to the uber-rich: while British workers have suffered a near unprecedented squeeze in their wages, the richest 1,000 people saw their fortunes double in the first seven years after the financial crash. Covid has proved little different: Britain produced a record number of new billionaires in the pandemic, while their US counterparts enjoyed almost a two-thirds jump in their wealth during the first 18 months of the crisis. At $4.8tn, the combined fortunes of US billionaires are almost equivalent to the size of the entire Japanese economy.

It’s not just expensive bottles of whisky attracting the wallets of the thriving mega-rich. When the Chinese billionaire Cheung Chung-kiu snapped up a 62,000 sq ft mansion in Hyde Park for a cool $275m back in 2020, he understandably wanted to make sure it was just right, so last year he commenced a renovation estimated to cost nearly as much as the original asking price. Last year, 11 Picassos were auctioned off in Las Vegas for $100m, while a 1958 Ferrari found a new home in exchange for $6m.

Perhaps such ludicrously expensive items will provoke baffled shrugs.Wealthy people splash their seemingly limitless fortunes on frivolous items with extortionate price tags – so what? Sure, it’s a symptom of the growth in wealth inequality since the 1980s, encouraged by the decline in progressive taxation, the deregulation of finance, the shattered power of trade unions, diluted antitrust legislation, and the rise of large quasi-monopolistic businesses such as Facebook and Amazon. No, a hyperactive work ethic and dazzling entrepreneurial acumen does not explain the explosion in billionaires’ wealth during the pandemic: no-strings government help for businesses and quantitative easing policies that drove up asset prices are more plausible explanations. And, yes, watching the wealth collectively produced by the hard graft of billions of people hoovered up by a select few is undoubtedly a moral affront. But does it matter?

The simple answer is yes. Buying whisky for $2m doesn’t simply underline an inverse correlation between money and sense on the part of the super-rich: it represents the red lights flashing on the dashboard of an entire economic model. Gary Stevenson should know: formerly Citibank’s most profitable trader, he made millions betting against economic recovery after Lehman Brothers detonated in the heart of the financial sector. Among the bigwigs of big finance, the consensus was that near-zero interest rates were an extraordinary measure that would be soon reversed as the economy recovered.

But Stevenson was a dissenter: he believed the continued parlous state of the economy would halt any interest rate hikes. The reason? Because when ordinary people receive money, they spend it, stimulating the economy, while the wealthy tend to save it. But our economic model promotes the concentration of wealth among a select few at the expense of everybody else’s living standards. If working-class people don’t have the money to spend, they won’t; and as they’re plunged into debt simply to cover their families’ cost of living, consumer demand is sucked out of an economy based upon it. In an amusing paradox, Stevenson’s belief that inequality was crippling the economy literally made him millions.

As Stevenson emphasised, the super-rich tend not to invest all that hoovered up wealth into productive parts of the economy: they instead throw it at property or, yes, $2m bottles of whisky, driving up asset prices. “What you have to understand is that saving is not the same as investing,” the chartered accountant Richard Murphy says. “Investment is the creation of new capacity to undertake economic activity, which is almost universally funded by new bank loans. It’s very rarely funded by share capital, except generally with very small microbusinesses.” The entire economy has been designed to funnel wealth generated by the team effort of millions into the bank accounts of a tiny few, whose whims and hobby horses have no social value whatsoever.

While many people have experienced bereavement, loneliness and insecurity during the pandemic, Covid-19 has proved just the latest lucrative boon for billionaires’ wealth portfolios. And that’s why an economic case – rather than simply a moral case – for a wealth tax desperately needs to be made. All that wealth could play a pivotal role in the post-Covid recovery. It could be put towards drastically expanding the capacity of the NHS, ventilating all schools and businesses, and funding the transition to a green economy. Instead, a tiny elite are clocking up many more billions just by sitting on their assets, frittering wealth away on $2m bottles of whisky featuring gold Fabergé eggs. It’s not simply immoral: it’s utterly irrational.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

The Florida Financiers Buying Up Europe’s Soccer Teams

David Hellier, Bloomberg News

Joshua Harris, co-founder of Apollo Global Management LLC, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Monday, May 1, 2017. The conference is a unique setting that convenes individuals with the capital, power and influence to move the world forward meet face-to-face with those whose expertise and creativity are reinventing industry, philanthropy and media. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- European soccer ownership is today just as likely to be thrashed out at a Miami Beach steakhouse as in the plush restaurants of London, Milan or Paris.

Florida’s sunshine and business-friendly policies have been drawing financiers and entrepreneurs, including a group pouring money into the world’s favorite sport. Among them is John Textor, who’s just completed the purchase of 80% of Belgian club RWD Molenbeek through his sports investment vehicle Eagle Football LLC. 

Other soccer-mad investors based in South Florida are Paul Conway and Chien Lee, founders of Pacific Media Group LLC, Josh Wander, managing partner at 777 Partners LLC, and Randy Frankel, co-owner of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team.

“More and more professional investors have moved to South Florida, and they love football,” Lee said in an interview. “Football is an attractive and good asset class investment.” 

Conway, who meets his contacts to discuss the evolution of soccer at Miami Beach spots including celebrity-favorite steak restaurant Prime 112 or nearby Joe’s Stone Crab, also played a part in the RWD Molenbeek deal. 

“He’s acted like a friend,” said Jupiter Island resident Textor. “He’s a terrific resource and even flew to Belgium with me to introduce me to the owners of the team.”

Conway, Lee and Textor champion the multiclub ownership model that’s grown in popularity as a way of developing stars of the game without the need for hefty transfer fees. Pacific Media has spent recent years buying stakes in teams across Europe, while Textor is already invested in Crystal Palace FC of the U.K. Premier League.

“Americans are going to be owning more and more of European football,” said Conway. “A lot will go through a multiclub arrangement, where when one club struggles, the others might be able to help them.”

There are about 60 multiclub groups globally, nearly two-thirds of which have emerged since 2018, according to the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES). Proponents of the strategy point to cost synergies and the potential to strike more lucrative sponsorship deals. Critics, including fans’ body Supporters Direct Europe, say it stifles competition and creates feeder teams with no real prospect of success.

Here’s a closer look at the main U.S. investors buying up European soccer. 

John Textor, founder of Eagle Football LLC

Dubbed a “virtual-reality guru” by Forbes Magazine in 2016, Textor is chief executive officer of digital likeness and human animation company Facebank Inc. He shot to prominence in the European soccer world in 2021 by taking a stake in Crystal Palace. 

The south London team are slowly carving out a reputation for exciting football under the coaching of Frenchman Patrick Vieira, the former World Cup winner installed last summer, and could now stand to benefit from talent developed at RWD Molenbeek.

“If you want to pursue a multiclub strategy you need to have the global footprint for talent identification from a market respected by the U.K.,” said Textor. “There is a very high level of play in Belgium, which is only two hours outside London.”

Named in part for Crystal Palace’s club emblem, Textor’s Eagle vehicle is also in talks to buy a minority stake in Lisbon, Portugal-based soccer giant SL Benfica, said Textor. Outside Europe, Eagle now holds 90% of Brazil’s Botafogo via a $330 million deal that completed this week, he said.

Paul Conway and Chien Lee, co-founders of Pacific Media Group

Pacific Media’s soccer stable includes stakes in AS Nancy of France, Barnsley FC in the U.K., Denmark’s Esbjerg fB, FC Thun of Switzerland and KV Oostende in Belgium.

A former Oppenheimer & Co. banker, Conway advocates the high-pressing style that’s become popular in Europe’s top leagues. Ensuring a common approach to playing this way means it’s easy to move players around his clubs if and when the need arises.

His teams rely heavily on data analysis when recruiting and developing young talent. Billy Beane, the ex-U.S. baseball player who pioneered a similar model during his time managing California’s Oakland Athletics -- a story later retold in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book “Moneyball” -- sits on Barnsley’s board. 

Barnsley qualified for the Championship play-offs last season, taking them to within touching distance of the lucrative Premier League. They were unsuccessful in that attempt and are now in a battle to avoid relegation from the second-tier of English football. Nancy and Oostende have also been struggling, with both in the bottom halves of their respective tables in France and Belgium. 

Conway is being patient. “There are highs and lows throughout each season,” he said. “Our goal is to grow a club in a sustainable way, while also being a good custodian for the local community.”

Josh Wander, co-founder of 777 Partners

Wander’s 777 has built a portfolio of sports assets that includes streaming services and investments in British basketball. The firm targets undervalued businesses with deep connections to fan bases, according to its website, and for soccer bets Wander has so far picked two of Europe’s most historic clubs. 

In September, 777 acquired ownership of Italy’s oldest soccer team, Genoa Cricket and Football Club, commonly known as Genoa. It already held a minority stake in Sevilla FC, one of Spain’s most successful outfits.

Wander knows Conway and Jim Pallotta, the former owner of Italian soccer club AS Roma, from living in Miami. He said he’s having multiple conversations about buying more soccer teams in Europe and elsewhere. 

“Having smart and honest people investing in football globally is good for the leagues,” he said.

Although Ukrainian footballing legend Andriy Shevchenko was appointed coach of Genoa last year, the team has won just one game in the current league campaign and risks being relegated from Serie A at the end of the season.

Randy Frankel, Josh Harris

Miami local Frankel has been dipping into European soccer via investments alongside Conway. Through Partners Path Capital, run by former Tampa Bay Rays executive Michael Kalt, Frankel has been involved in Pacific Media deals including Nancy and Oostende.

“Right now, us and Pacific Media are good partners,” he said. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. alumnus Frankel, who has “no shortage” of people wanting to team up for more European soccer deals, also likes the multiclub model, which he said lets an investor learn things from different countries and their peoples.

Josh Harris, a co-founder of private equity giant Apollo Global Management Inc., bought a $32 million Miami mansion last year. Like Textor, he sits on the board at Crystal Palace. Harris called time on three decades at Apollo in 2021 after missing out on the top job at the firm. He is co-founder of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which he runs with Blackstone Inc. dealmaker David Blitzer.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Indian national charged with money laundering, wire fraud in US

Ravi Kumar of India and Anthony Munigety of Texas have been charged with committing various fraud schemes targeting primarily elderly victims and netting nearly $600,000.

Press Trust of India New York

January 13, 2022


An Indian national has been charged along with a US citizen for committing various fraud schemes targeting primarily elderly victims throughout the United States and netting nearly $600,000 from them.

Ravi Kumar of India and Anthony Munigety of Texas have been charged in a 20-count indictment. Kumar is believed to be in India and considered a fugitive. A warrant remains outstanding for his arrest, the US Justice Department said Tuesday.

Munigety has been taken into custody on charges of obtaining over $600,000 from elderly victims throughout the country, US Attorney Jennifer Lowery.

Munigety and Kumar are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, 13 counts of wire fraud and six counts of money laundering. If convicted, they face up to 20 years on each count as well as a possible $250,000 maximum fine.

According to the allegations, the fraud ring operated out of the Conroe area in Texas and other locations in the United States and India. Munigety, Kumar and others allegedly committed various fraud schemes targeting primarily elderly victims throughout the United States.

The primary objective, according to the indictment, was to deceive victims by telling them a technical support company or other entities were purportedly helping them with their computers.

They would allegedly trick victims into believing they had been erroneously refunded or overpaid and needed to return the overpayment. The indictment alleges they were able to gain access to a victim’s computer which enabled Munigety, Kumar and others to move funds between or wire transfer monies out of their accounts, according to the charges.

Once that occurred, Munigety and others would keep a portion of the money and wire the remainder to Kumar in India, according to the charges.

As a result of their scheme, Munigety and others allegedly received over $600,000 from elderly victims.

BONGBONG MARCOS
Marcos Jr. continues to evade $353-million contempt judgment of US court

JAN 13, 2022 2:45 PM PHT
LIAN BUAN


Bongbong Marcos and mother Imelda settled with the Philippine government in 1992 and 1993, dividing their assets so they could be exonerated. But US courts maintain these violate a standing injunction.

MANILA, Philippines – Presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is yet to face a contempt judgment issued by a United States court in 1995 in connection with a human rights class suit against his late dictator-father, documents obtained by Rappler show. The amount involved for continuous contempt already reached $353 million in 2011.

Records from the United States District Court and Court of Appeals show that Marcos is being held in contempt for “contumacious conduct causing direct harm to [a class of human rights victims].” Based on the exchange rate on Thursday, January 13, the $353 million is already equivalent to about P18 billion.

The contempt judgment specifically names Bongbong and his mother Imelda as representative of the late dictator’s estate. The patriarch died in exile in Hawaii in 1989. His remains were brought home to Batac, Ilocos Norte, in September 1993. Despite protests, President Rodrigo Duterte granted him a hero’s burial in November 2016 – armed with a decision from the Supreme Court that favored the move.

“The judgment is entered personally against Imelda R. Marcos and Ferdinand R. Marcos. Since they served as executors of the Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos, and their contemptuous acts were on behalf of the Estate, the Estate is in privity with them and subject to the judgment herein,” Judge Manuel Real of the District Court of Hawaii said in the judgment dated January 25, 2011.

This was affirmed by the US Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit in October 2012, that said “we hold that the $353,600,000 contempt judgment is properly enforceable by Hilao.” Hilao is Celsa Hilao, mother of student activist Liliosa Hilao, who was tortured and killed during Martial Law, and is the lead in the historic class suit against the late dictator.

In August 2019, a new judge, Derrick Watson, extended the judgment on contempt to January 25, 2031, or nine years from now.

SOURCE. A page from the docket records of the US District Court of Hawaii for the case of Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos Human Rights Litigation

Why does this matter?

Marcos Jr. is running for president in May 2022. At least P125 billion of his father’s estate is still under litigation as part of protracted efforts to recover the Marcoses’ ill-gotten funds and distribute them to Filipinos. The presidential aspirant continues to deny any wrongdoing by his father.

Even the tax of this estate is in dispute and cited by petitioners challenging Marcos’ candidacy before the Commission on Elections (Comelec). The petition of civic leaders, now up for resolution, says: “The failure of the Marcos family to pay the estate taxes is to the detriment of the Filipino people, as it represents once again a ‘Ferdinand Marcos,’ but this time his Junior, depriving the country and its people of money properly belonging to them.”

If Bongbong Marcos becomes president and goes to the US, it would trigger moves to enforce the judgment, even a request for a subpoena to face the court and explain, according to Robert Swift, the American lawyer working to recover assets to distribute to Martial Law victims. The same goes for Imelda.

If they still refuse to pay or snub a subpoena while in the US, “the US Court could hold them in criminal contempt and imprison them until they purge their contempt by answering questions about their assets,” Swift told Rappler in an email Thursday.

Bongbong settled with PH government, in contempt of US court

On November 20, 1991, the US District Court of Hawaii issued a preliminary injunction barring the family from touching their US assets. “The Court entered a permanent injunction on February 3, 1995, as part of the final judgment in the class action,” court records said.

Despite this, Imelda and Bongbong entered into two agreements with the Philippine government in June 1992 to “split and divide with the Republic all assets belonging to the Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos.” Artworks in the United States were sold, and proceeds were divided between Imelda and the Philippine government.

Imelda and Bongbong entered into two additional agreements in December 1993, details of which were discovered by the American attorneys of the human rights victims only because they were disclosed in a Philippine court filing.

The 1993 agreements, the US court noted in its 1995 decision, “delineate with more specificity how the Estate’s assets are to be divided with the Republic of the Philippines and provide that the wife and children of Ferdinand E. Marcos are to receive 25% of the Estate’s assets tax free together with the dismissal of all criminal charges against them.”

“Two agreements were used instead of one in an apparent subterfuge to gain control over more than $365 million located in Switzerland,” said the court.

The agreements were held in violation of the US court’s injunction on the assets. Part of the 1995 judgment says Imelda and Bongbong must pay, renounce their settlements, deposit to the Court the proceeds from the artworks’ sale, and pay a fine of $100,000 per day to coerce them into complying.

The Marcoses appealed the decision to the US Court of Appeals, arguing that the sanctions were coercive and unenforceable.

Affirming the contempt judgment, the US Court of Appeals in 2012 said “even if Marcos is correct that the contempt sanction was coercive, it was also clearly compensatory.”

“Additionally, the district court explained that the $100,000 per day amount was necessary and appropriate because Marcos’s contumacious conduct was causing direct harm to Hilao, including $55,000 per day from lost interest and additional losses due to Marcos’s dilatory tactics,” said the US Court of Appeals when it ruled in 2012 that the contempt judgment was “properly enforceable.”

A Hawaii court had also awarded human rights victims $2 billion in damages, but the Philippine Court of Appeals in 2017 junked the enforcement petition based on lack of jurisdiction.


Rappler.com

The Insidious Ethic of Conscience
by Joan Didion

Joan Didion, who died on December 23, was twice published in the Scholar. In this essay from our Autumn 1965 issue, she attempts to untangle the thorny definition of morality: “I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil.’”

ESSAYS - AUTUMN 1965
The Insidious Ethic of Conscience
By Joan Didion | January 4, 2022

Flickr/aurdur

As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119°. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think in some abstract way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.

Here are some particulars. At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoul­der and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly; his girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock. I talked this after­noon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy’s body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. “You can’t just leave a body on the highway,” she said. “It’s immoral.”

It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant some­ thing quite specific. She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh. Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a senti­mental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes. If we have been taught to keep our promises—if, as Mr. Hallie suggested, our upbringing is good enough—we stay with the body, or have bad dreams.

I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, “wagon-train morality.” In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children: my own childhood was illuminated by graphic litanies of the grief that awaited those who failed in their loyalties to each other. The Donner-Reed Party, starving in the Sierra snows, all the ephe­mera of civilization gone save that one vestigial taboo, the provision that no one should eat his own blood kin. The Jay­hawkers, who quarreled and separated not far from where I am tonight. Some of them died in the Funerals and some of them died down near Badwater and most of the rest of them died in the Panamints. A woman who got through gave the Valley its name. Some might say that the Jayhawkers were killed by the desert summer, and the Don­ner Party by the mountain winter, by circumstances beyond control; we were taught that they had somewhere abdicated their responsibilities, somehow breached their primary loyalties, or they would not have found themselves helpless in the mountain winter and the desert summer, would not have given way to acrimony, would not have deserted one another, would not have failed. In brief we heard such stories as cautionary tales, and they still suggest the only kind of “morality” that seems to me to have any but the most potentially mendacious meaning.

You are quite possibly impatient with me by now; I am talking, you want to say, about a “morality” so primitive that it scarcely deserves the name, a code that has as its point only survival, not the attain­ment of the ideal good. Exactly. Particu­larly out here tonight, in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter, it is difficult to be­lieve that “the good” is a knowable quan­tity. Let me tell you what it is like out here tonight. Stories travel at night on the desert. Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from. Then he drives an­other hundred miles for another beer, and passes along stories from the last place and from the one before; it is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason. Here is a story that is going around the desert tonight: over across the Nevada line, sher­iff’s deputies are diving in some under­ground pools, trying to retrieve a couple of bodies known to be in the hole. The widow of one of the drowned boys is over there; she is eighteen, and pregnant, and is said not to leave the hole. The divers go down and come up, and she just stands there and stares into the water. They have been diving for ten days but have found no bottom to the caves, no bodies and no trace of them, only the black 90° water going down and down and down, and a single translucent fish, not classified. The story tonight is that one of the divers has been hauled up incoherent, out of his head, shouting—until they got him out of there so that the widow could not hear—about water that got hotter instead of cooler as he went down, about light flickering through the water, about fire, about magma, about underground nuclear test­ing.

That is the tone stories take out here, and there are quite a few of them tonight. And it is more than the stories alone. Across the road at the Faith Community Church a couple of dozen old people, come here to live in trailers and die in the sun, are holding a prayer sing. I cannot hear them and do not want to. What I can hear are occasional coyotes and a constant chorus of “Baby the Rain Must Fall” from the jukebox in the Snake Room next door, and if I were also to hear those dying voices, those midwestern voices drawn to this lunar country for some unimaginable atavistic rites, rock of ages cleft for me, I think I would lose my own reason. Every now and then I imagine I hear a rattlesnake, but my husband says that it is a faucet, a paper rustling, the wind. Then he stands by the window, and plays a flashlight over the dry wash outside.

What does it mean? It means nothing manageable. There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any hu­man idea can come. “I followed my con­science.” “I did what I thought was right.” How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers? Klaus Fuchs said it, and the men who committed the Moun­tain Meadows Massacre said it, and Alfred Rosenberg said it. And, as we are rotely and rather presumptuously reminded by those who would say it now, Jesus said it. Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong. Except on that most primitive level—our loyalties to those we love—what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience? (“Tell me,” as Mr. Bell’s rabbi asked when he said that he did not believe in God, “do you think God cares?”) At least some of the time, the world appears to me like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out onto the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood in The Deer Park looking east to Los Alamos and praying, as if for rain, that it would hap­pen: “… let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn.”

Of course you will say that I do not have the right, even if I had the power, to in­flict that unreasonable conscience upon you; nor do I want you to inflict your con­science, however reasonable, however en­lightened, upon me. (“We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most gen­erous wishes,” Lionel Trilling once wrote. “Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coer­cion.”) That the ethic of conscience is in­trinsically insidious seems scarcely a revela­tory point, but it was one raised with any persistence in the Scholar Symposium only by Daniel Bell; the other colloquists exhib­ited a troubling readiness to segue from agreement with Mr. Bell into the quite contradictory position that the ethic of con­science is dangerous when it is “wrong,” and admirable when it is “right.”

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most desultory kinds of conversation. Ques­tions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent pub­lic policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to “believe” in some­thing, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in the New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

Joan Didion, the author of numerous works of nonfiction and fiction, died in December 2021.

A Matter of Emphasis
Not and its many permutations

By Max Byrd | January 13, 2022

Portrait of Samuel Johnson (Wikimedia Commons)

One soft London evening in the spring of 1744, the great bear-like Samuel Johnson, in a playful mood, leaned across the tavern table and wagged his finger with mock sternness at his old friend, the celebrated actor David Garrick.

They were talking about the art of acting, and Johnson was now criticizing, with his usual bluntness, not only Garrick’s most recent performance, but also the general failings of Garrick’s colleagues, one of whom was also at the table: “The players, Sir, have got a kind of rant, with which they run on, without any regard either to accent or emphasis.”

This was too much for Garrick, who sprang to his feet. But, smiling complacently, Johnson threw out a challenge. Recite with correct emphasis, he instructed the actors, “the ninth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’” (Dryly he added under his breath, “with which you are little acquainted.”) They recited, and they failed. Both actors emphasized “false witness.” But the right emphasis, Johnson said—correctly and triumphantly—was “Thou shalt NOT bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

I wish Johnson had enlarged somewhere on that word not. He himself was a master of the complex negative—speaking of Paradise Lost, for example: it “is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first.” But the Great Cham was hardly the only master of not. Every language has negatives, and every writer needs them. They need them for formal logic, for quantum leaps, for the existential gloom of Being and Nothingness. “Without Contraries,” writes the poet William Blake, “is no progression.” Yet the literary effects of these negatives are hard to pin down, even mysterious: What happens really when someone says not? The mystery may be because the very idea of negation is hard in itself, or perhaps because we have not yet got the right emphasis.

Not can be spoken in any number of voices. Johnson shows us the ultimate one. Garrick erred by forgetting that he was to speak in a voice of thunder—this is the voice of God, after all: “Thou shalt NOT!

But in the mouth of a less forceful person than the Almighty or Dr. Johnson, a stern command can weaken into a meek request, a plea. There is no health in us, the General Confession says. “Lead us not into temptation,” says the Lord’s Prayer. Or it can dissolve into a tortured question: “To be, or not to be?” A merely stubborn person, like Melville’s Bartleby, can polish a repeated negation into something like adamant silence: “I would prefer not to.” A royal person like Queen Victoria can, allegedly, simply turn it into ice: “We are not amused.”

Sometimes not is only a good-natured correction: “Look again,” the painter says, “This is not a pipe.” More seriously, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” But very often not starts a downward spiral in which correction becomes, in a larger sense, denial. Here Samuel Beckett corrects himself mournfully, unhelpfully, without actually clarifying anything. “Then I went back into the house and wrote,” says the narrator of Molloy. “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” Beckett’s “not” is in every sense negative. It creates an attitude, an atmosphere, a world of profound, passive negation in which Godot is not coming—he is never coming—a world where not is by far a stronger word than any conceivable affirmation. “Not guilty,” the jury grudgingly allows, the best that we can expect.

Not can also be livelier than this, so to speak, or at least more energetic. When Jonathan Edwards looks down at us miserable sinners, you can feel the air crackle with his anger, hear his fist slam the pulpit in unforgiving rhythm (italics mine): “Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment … the sun does not shine willingly upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the air does not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals.”

Surprisingly, this drumbeat of nots can just as easily be positive, uplifting: “Love envieth not,” Tyndale translates 1 Corinthians 13:4, encouraging us in virtue. “Love doth not frowardly swelleth not dealeth not dishonestly seketh not her awne is not provoked to anger thynketh not evyll reioyseth not in iniquite.” Higher still: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom explains his rapturous dream to the other rustic mechanicals—“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.” Or sputteringly funny, as when Oliver Wendell Holmes tap dances across a minefield: “We had gone, not to scoff, but very probably to smile, and I will not say we did not.”

Repetition is only one of a number of patterns that not can create. Perhaps the best known is antithesis—not x, but y: “not with a bang but a whimper.” It is a pattern that begins with the expectation of an easy or obvious answer, then overturns it to surprise us or shock us or to reveal an unexpected truth. Johnson likes to surprise us—“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” The treacherous Brutus uses antithesis to reveal a self-serving truth: Why did he rise up against Caesar? “This is my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” The semi-gallant Richard Lovelace deserts the fair Lucasta for the battlefield with a condescending wave of the hand: “I could not love thee (Dear) so much, / Lov’d I not Honour more.”

Another pattern is litotes: denial of the contrary; essentially that shibboleth of grammarians, a double negative. Consider a pattern quite often seen in writers trying to hedge their bets: “not-un.” “It’s not unusual,” warbles the Welsh crooner Tom Jones to a lover. Or a variation: “I wouldn’t say no to a pint.” Fowler’s Modern English Usage attributes this kind of thing, unconvincingly, to the modern British habit of modest understatement. But it is a favorite construction of John Milton (Eve was “not unamazed” to find that a serpent could talk). Henry Fielding uses it to administer faint praise: “He was not ungenteel, nor entirely devoid of Wit.” And Johnson himself rebukes some Boswellian fatuity: “Sir … it is not unreasonable.” But litotes is not without critics. It so exasperated George Orwell that he advised aspiring writers to memorize this sentence: “A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”


We can wander a long time in such thickets. There is praeteritio, which is Latin for “I pass over.” Thus, Anthony Trollope in a letter to a publisher: “It is an original novel, but it is not for me to say so.” Or a kind of disjunctive polysyndeton, the addition of negative conjunctions, as in the U.S. Postal Service slogan: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” There is the splendid negative aposiopesis with which Joseph Conrad opens Victory: “Now if a coal-mine could be put into one’s waistcoat pocket—but it can’t!” And the Valley Girl’s cheerful Interjection: “Not!” And even simple paradox. Old Joke—Speaker’s sonorous voice: “A positive word can not be negative.” Rasping voice of Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Yeah, yeah.”

Equally significant, as the last example shows—location, location, location. Place important words at the beginning or end, to paraphrase Strunk and White. English idiom confirms the wisdom of this. We like to begin negation at the beginning, to block suspicion or objection: “not at all”; “not in the least”; “not for nothing” (a nicely truncated litotes). Weaseling politicians know the rule instinctively: “Not that I recall. Not to my knowledge.” So does Shakespeare: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

Less well-known is the hammering thump achieved by placing “not” at the end of a statement. “Man delights not me,” Hamlet says. “No, nor woman neither.” In As You Like It, the mooncalf Orlando asks what are the signs of love? Pert Rosalind answers, “A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not.” English poet Henry Reed’s soldier studies the flowers and then his rifle and “the point of balance, / Which in our case we have not got.” And Tennyson’s soldier Ulysses sets out once more, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” “What General Lee’s feelings were,” Grant writes of Appomattox, “I do not know.” Jonathan Swift’s noble talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, have no word in their language for “lie.” Rather, they say, “The thing which was not.” And the Book of Job (7:8) carries us to the ultimate last place, extinction: “Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.”

All such negative figures of speech are miniature dramas, the briefest possible creations of conflict, of push and pull, reversal and suspense. But they are short, only phrases. In the context of a scene or story, the word not can create a larger drama, or a character, or even a world. In Denmark Hamlet lives at its mercy: “If it be now, / ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be / now; if it be not now, yet it will come.” In Faulkner’s “The Bear,” “not” defines the protagonist and rushes him forward into the dangerous hunt for the bear, an experience “distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit.” And over on the mean streets of noir, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe knows all there is to know about not. The gangster’s moll wants him to leave her house:


“Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.”

“Never the time and place and the loved one all together,” I said.

“What’s that?” She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.”

“Browning. The poet, not the automatic.”

Or finally, in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, Quentin Compson confronts the South, his lost world, and his heart-rending cry carries not to its absolute limit: “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” This is the limit of negation because it conceals—yet makes manifest—an affirmation; as it moves through the passage, negation changes its very nature and meaning, as a larva becomes a chrysalis.

But how could I leave it there? Another book lies open on my desk. And in it, in a world as far as possible from Faulkner’s negation, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom asks Molly to marry him. “I wouldnt answer first,” she tells us coyly. But then we wait. And slowly, before our eyes, the slow constellation of language wheels across the page, and Molly’s denial, her “wouldnt answer,” transforms itself into literature’s most wonderful affirmation:


and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and … I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.


It is a matter of emphasis.

Max Byrd’s most recent novel is Pont Neuf.

Student loans should be repaid based on income, say Georgetown law professors

MARGARET KELLY - ASSISTANT EDITOR •JANUARY 13, 2022

Two professors at Georgetown Law School recommend a new solution to the student loan crisis: rather than delaying repayment indefinitely or forgiving loans outright, Congress should require students to pay only what they can.

Income-based repayment plans could reform a broken system, in which student loans are “the largest body of consumer debt following mortgages, even though it is concentrated among a smaller share of the population,” write John Brooks and Adam Levitin in Politico.

Total student loan debt reached $1.5 trillion in 2020, and about one in eight Americans has a student loan, according to the Brookings Institution.

Additionally, more than 7 percent of borrowers were in default as of 2018, according to the Federal Student Aid Office. Student loans are also delaying homeownership and discouraging Americans from going to college, Brooks and Levitin state.

Brooks and Levitin argue that President Biden’s extended COVID-19 moratorium on student loan repayments doesn’t get to the root of the problem: “What really matters is not the total amount owed by any borrower, but the amount of the monthly payment relative to the borrower’s income.”

“Large debts owed by high-income borrowers are often affordable, while smaller debts of those who do not complete college or attend predatory for-profit schools can pose crushing hardships.”

Progressives’ calls to forgive all student debt also miss the point, and would offer a politically unpopular stimulus to those who do not need it:

Blanket loan forgiveness does not distinguish between borrowers who can easily repay their loans and those who cannot … A Harvard graduate pulling in half a million dollars on Wall Street will get the same relief as a community college graduate working as a barista. That could fuel a sharp political backlash, with Republicans all too happy to argue Democrats are bailing out young elites.

Additionally, an act of blanket loan forgiveness by the president could be viewed as illegitimate spending, particularly by a conservative Supreme Court. Former student borrowers would also feel slighted, as would future ones, who would be neglected under a forgiveness system that could not continue forever.

Federal student loans already allow most borrowers to opt into an income-driven repayment plan, Brooks and Levitin write, which require annual payments no higher than a certain percentage of the borrower’s annual income, as reported to the IRS. The borrower pays this adjusted amount for up to 25 years, and any additional cost is forgiven.

However, income-driven repayment is not the default – borrowers need to know about the system, opt in, and complete new paperwork every year. Borrowers in default, who could benefit most from an income-driven system, face additional hurdles to get into the program.

Congress could easily fix this, the authors write. The solution? Mandate that all federal loans be paid through income-driven repayment, and perhaps collect loan payments through tax withholding, as in Australia and the United Kingdom.

“Moving to a system where all borrowers are in reformed IDR plans would ensure that everyone pays what they are able to pay,” Brooks and Levitin argue.

“It would benefit not only current borrowers, but also future borrowers, ensuring once and for all that student loans cease to be a looming economic policy problem.”

MORE: No, Biden can’t ‘cancel’ student debt

IMAGE: Shutterstock

Here's Why More Than $1.7T Is Owed In U.S. Student Debt

By Andrew Rafferty
January 10, 2022

According to educationdata.org, student loan debt is growing six times faster than the nation's economy.

Education has never been more expensive.

Today, student loans are the second highest category of consumer debt, second only to mortgage debt.

According to educationdata.org, student loan debt is growing six times faster than the nation's economy.

That's mostly because the cost of college has increased faster than housing, child care, and medical services over the last 20 years.

The cost of a college degree is up by more than 600% since 2000.

Right now, the amount of student loan debt in the United States is about $1.7 trillion.

That's 43 million Americans carrying an average of about $39,000 in student loans.

A pause on repayments of federally-held student loans began in March 2020 when the pandemic began.

That freeze was extended several times by former President Donald Trump and now President Joe Biden. But that pause is set to expire in May.

Calls for some — or all — of that student loan debt to be forgiven have continued.

In his campaign for the White House, then candidate Biden made a promise to wipe out $10,000 of student loan debt for every person.

But the White House now says President Biden will sign legislation to do that—putting the burden on Congress to act first.

Supporters of student loan forgiveness say canceling student loans would stimulate the economy.

They argue without the payments, borrowers would have extra money each month which could be spent or invested.

They could also have more financial freedom to get married, start a family, buy a home, save for retirement, or start a business.

It could also cut inequality because Americans with more generational wealth typically need fewer loans.

But not everyone agrees.

That's because most Americans don't have student loans. Out of about 250 million adults in the U.S., 45 million have student loans – meaning 80% of adults either don't have student loans, didn't attend college, or have already paid off their debt.

And they argue that nearly half of borrowers took out loans for graduate school. Those degrees typically lead to professions with higher salaries, making a borrower better able to pay it back.

Any student loan relief would most likely be a one-time solution. And borrowers who already paid off their student loans would not be reimbursed.

Opponents say colleges should instead focus on lowering costs and Americans should opt for less expensive community or state colleges.

The plan to cancel up to $10,000 of student loans for borrowers would cost about $400 billion, according to Forbes.

The plan to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt would cost one trillion dollars.

Hands-on nature of trade degrees led to COVID lockdown male enrollment drop

MATT LAMB - ASSOCIATE EDITOR •JANUARY 13, 2022

Men are far more likely to enroll in community college trade programs that require hands-on learning

The entirety of the gender enrollment gap during COVID lockdowns can be attributed to the difficulty of offering many trade degree courses remotely or with social distancing, according to a new working paper.

Men are more likely to enroll in auto mechanic, welding or other trade programs that are difficult to teach while socially distanced or online, leading to higher costs and fewer course opportunities.

“Community colleges that had relative concentrations of credentials in [assembly, repair and maintenance] fields pre-pandemic experienced relatively large enrollment declines,” Northwestern Professor Diane Schanzenbach and University of Virginia Professor Sarah Turner said.

“The decline in ARM enrollment explains nearly all the difference in enrollment declines by gender during COVID,” the National Bureau of Economic Research paper said.

The professors said that some programs are easier to move online, such as web design and accounting. “On the other hand, courses that require significant capital and ‘hands-on; experiential learning, such as welding or automotive repair, are likely to be least elastic in supply and most difficult to transfer to an online environment.”

A review of enrollment data for community colleges in seven states showed that “enrollment of men was down more than 20 percent in 2020, while the enrollment of women declined by about half as much.”

MORE: Male enrollment drops at four-year colleges

The professors looked at programs in North Carolina for a case study. Classes such as “Engine Repair” and “Basic Transportation Electricity” have some math and theory components that can be taught online, but others are necessarily hands-on. “I can’t ‘teach’ online what things look, sound, feel, smell like,” one instructor said. “[S]hop sessions that are socially distanced are of lower value to tech students,” another instructor said.

The American economy will pay the price for this disruption in trade schools, if it has not already.

“Demand for skills in fields like HVAC repair, welding and auto repair is unlikely to have abated during the pandemic—and in the case of HVAC repair likely grew in response to improved ventilation recommendations—while the flow of new workers has been disrupted,” the researchers wrote.

Free college or “headcount-based appropriations” could also incentivize schools to promote low-cost programs versus capital intensive options, the researchers said.

“The result may be supply-side offerings that are poorly aligned with student demand and labor market needs,” the paper said. “The result may be persistent excess demand in high return fields where capital equipment and on-site training are necessary for skill acquisition.”

Colleges may begin to adapt simulation technologies as one way to address the issues of hands-on learning, the paper said.

MORE: Florida announces millions of dollars in trade school expansion

IMAGE: PavelChernonogov/Pexels.com

Climate, social inequality: the next decade’s major challenges

Online News EditorJanuary 11, 2022

 

Geneva, Switzerland, Jan 11 (EFE).- The climate crisis and social inequality, global issues that have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, are the main risks facing humanity in the next decade, according to a new report by the World Economic Forum, which also warned of failures in cybersecurity and the debt crisis.

The WEF warned that “a divergent recovery” from the pandemic due to uneven distribution of and access to vaccines “risks deepening global divisions at a time when societies and the international community urgently need to collaborate,” managing director, Saadia Zahidi, said in the organization’s 17th report.

“Widening disparities within and between countries will not only make it more difficult to control

COVID-19 and its variants, but will also risk stalling, if not reversing, joint action against shared threats that the world cannot afford to overlook,” Zahidi said.

At a press conference to present the report, WEF chairman Borge Brende warned that the “planet is burning” and urged global leaders to finally and effectively address the biggest challenge of our generation.

“The cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action,” Brende said, while Zurich Insurance Group chief risk officer Peter Giger stressed failure to act could reduce global GDP by 16%.

While tackling global warming is the main priority, the WEF also cautioned against enacting policies that would further entrench global inequalities and leave developing countries behind.

“A disorderly climate transition characterized by divergent trajectories worldwide and across sectors will further drive apart countries and bifurcate societies, creating barriers to cooperation.”

“These divergences will complicate the international collaboration needed to address the worsening impacts of climate change, manage migration flows and combat dangerous cyber-risks,” she added.

Zahidi pointed out that increased migration flows will be the main consequence of these divergences, with migrants facing additional obstacles to entry in many countries with increased economic protectionism and new labour market dynamics due to the lingering effects of the pandemic.

“These higher barriers to migration, and their spillover effect on remittances—a critical lifeline for some developing countries—risk precluding a potential pathway to restoring livelihoods, maintaining political stability and closing income and labour gaps.

The report predicts that humanitarian crises will worsen and that resulting “migration pressures will exacerbate international tensions as it is increasingly used as a geopolitical instrument.”

The WEF also pointed out that the second year of the pandemic had gleaned insights into the distinct resilience of governments, businesses and communities, and called for a reflection that would “help ensure that agendas are aligned in achieving a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to tackling critical risks of any nature.” EFE

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