It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
While the WHO has recommended a maximum level of five micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter of air for prolonged exposure since 2021, the vast majority of cities in the European Union far exceed this threshold.
Many of the cities most affected by PM2.5 are located in Poland.
In Italy, the Po Valley, due to its geography and concentration of industrial activities, remains one of the most polluted regions in Europe by fine particles.
The Dubai conference on climate change, or COP28, is currently underway, running from November 30 to December 12, 2023.
The international conference will bring together representatives from countries that are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
One of the main objectives of COP28 is to continue the development of energy transition and accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels, major sources of greenhouse gasses and air pollutants. Beyond their impact on the climate, fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas also pose significant pollution problems; for example, their combustion emits fine particles (PM2.5).
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), prolonged exposure to these particles is likely to create or worsen various health problems, such as high blood pressure or diabetes. While the WHO has recommended a maximum level of five micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter of air for prolonged exposure since 2021, the vast majority of cities in the European Union far exceed this threshold.
As Statista's Anna Fleck shows in the infographic below, based on data from the European Environment Agency compiled by Toute l’Europe, the most polluted city with PM2.5 in the EU in 2021-2022 was Slavonski Brod, Croatia, where the average was nearly six times the recommended maximum level, or 28 μg/m³.
Moreover, many of the cities most affected by PM2.5 are located in Poland, a country still heavily dependent on coal, which emits a high amount of fine particles when burned.
In Italy, the Po Valley, due to its geography and concentration of industrial activities, remains one of the most polluted regions in Europe by fine particles, leading to the presence of two Italian cities at the top of the list.
On the other end of the spectrum, based on data from the European Environment Agency compiled by the website Toute l’Europe, ten cities in Europe remained below the recommended level of fine particles by the WHO.
In 2021-2022, the least polluted European city in the study was Faro, Portugal, where the average concentration of PM2.5 in the air was only 3.7 μg/m³. Next were two Swedish cities, Umeå (3.9 μg/m³) and Uppsala (4 μg/m³).
By Zerohedge.com
Big Oil Acquisitions Are Strikingly Similar To Big Tobacco’s Moves
While you have been eagerly following the sterile debate in Doha about whether to phase out or phase down fossil fuels, you probably missed an announcement on December 6, one that you probably would not have noticed anyway because it is not in your line of business. But it could presage similar events in the oil business.
Here is what happened. British American Tobacco (BAT) announced that it would write off £25 billion of the £62 billion value of the US brands it acquired in 2017 (Reynolds American). Why? Because of a combination of slowing growth, consumer reluctance to spend, and losses in the vape market that was supposed to replace revenues from old lines of cigarettes. When BAT made the Reynolds acquisition management presumably knew cigarette sales were under pressure, that government health experts didn’t show sympathy for the vapes, and that many new firms were pushing into the vape market, thereby creating more competition that cigarette companies had become accustomed to over the years. Note that BAT did not write down the assets because those properties lost money, but rather because they were forced to recognize a severe loss of value. The reason we keep an eye on the tobacco industry is that tobacco and oil (or fossil fuels in general) have shared an almost identical regulatory and legal strategy for several decades—whether the issue was denying their products links to cancer or climate change. Related: COP28: Arab Coordination Group Promises $10B To Assist Developing Nations
The Reynolds American acquisition was similar in size to the recent ExxonMobil and Chevron acquisition announcements of this fall. As an aside, we should point out something about corporate mergers and ways to distinguish them. Simply consider the underlying business. Is it growing or in decline? Interestingly, it can be sensible for both high growth and declining businesses to find merger partners although the capital allocation challenges are reversed. The two oil giants, knowing that sales are slowing and facing uncertain litigation risk from a public that holds them responsible for global warming, decided to combine and manage their decline across a much larger revenue and asset base. The strategy here is to ultimately reduce costs faster than revenues decline. This may prove somewhat easier in a cartelized industry like oil which enjoys a modicum of price fixing via OPEC.
BAT, on the other hand, purchased Reynolds American for growth not simply scale. They wanted entry into the high-growth US vape market, which it saw as its future. With the benefit of hindsight we see they paid way too much for entry into a new market and a business with considerable regulatory overhang. ExxonMobil and Chevron aren’t taking on any new business risk by partnering, they each do the same thing just in different places. It’s just about eking out economies of even greater scale as revenues flatten and decline. The companies make clear that, despite all the warnings about climate and threats of new technologies and of the entry of firms vigorously trying to reduce their markets (Tesla and the entire Chinese automobile industry as examples) they feel good about their prospects and will robustly continue old policies. Frankly, we would not be surprised to hear they actually have a growth strategy that involves Africa, S. Asia and possibly other frontier markets.
What about climate change? Well, a proposal from Sheik Al Jaber, President of the COP28 climate conference in Doha, did not include calls for closure or phase outs of oil and gas infrastructure as, for example, former Vice President Gore has been advocating. Instead, proposed reductions in CO2 emissions are all about the offsets. Offsets are like behavioral swaps. In other words we get to keep doing the formerly environmentally harmful things (like driving, cooking, or heating our home) but by switching to new, cleaner technologies our emissions will be reduced. These emission reductions come mainly from two areas, increasing electrification (like electric vehicles and heat pumps) and a tripling in planned deployment of solar photovoltaics. The other two smaller “buckets” for CO2 removal were for reduction of methane emissions and “other” which included new nuclear power generation. New nuclear is not getting much love here despite a commitment from twenty or so nations to triple nuclear capacity.
So back to our original question: will oil mergers in a declining industry like Exxon/Chevron provide financially attractive results to investors or will they disappoint like BAT/Reynolds? There are several parallels: slowing growth, possible decline in demand, uncertain timing regarding litigation and its outcomes, and a public policy designed to reduce or eliminate sale of the product. But there is one key policy difference here, the concept of “offsets”. There were no offsets for the tobacco industry or for smokers for that matter. Just punitive financial penalties and harsh warnings on cigarette packages regarding smoking and lung cancer. Offsets are a pain free way to achieve policy outcomes. No plants or facilities have to be prematurely shuttered triggering financial write offs. No unemployment or even political unrest. As long as the favored policy vehicle includes economically pain free CO2 “offsets” via new technologies, as opposed to actual plant closures, then we feel pretty good about the prospects for oil and gas mergers.
Bottom line: obviously we don’t know for sure whether recent big mergers at solid valuations will end with large write-offs for oil and gas companies as they did for “big” tobacco. And we just can’t help but notice the similarities. But there is one difference between the two industries that seems to favor the energy industry. The Republican party in the US has adopted a policy strongly advocating for increased fossil fuel usage as well as claiming that climate change is a hoax. The tobacco industry for all their chutzpah never claimed lung cancer was a hoax.
By Leonard Hyman and William Tilles for Oilprice.com
Have Reports of Oil’s Death Been Greatly Exaggerated?
The International Energy Agency predicts a terminal decline for coal, oil, and gas by 2030, challenging dominant climate narratives.
Despite the predictions, oil profits are soaring, and supermajors like Chevron and Exxon Mobil are increasing investments in fossil fuel extraction.
Contradictions have arisen at COP28, where oil-funded climate talks discuss phasing down fossil fuels, while the industry walks back emission reduction pledges, fueling the debate over the future of oil, gas, and coal.
There is a great mismatch between dominant climate narratives and the reality of the global energy sector. While energy industry insiders and environmentalists alike claim that the energy industry is heavily investing in cleaner alternatives and that the death of fossil fuels is just around the corner, Big Oil’s ledgers tell a different story. “The death of the oil industry has been greatly overstated,” said Kevin Book, managing director at the consulting firm ClearView Energy. “The realities of demand and the limitations of alternatives haven't changed.”
In October, The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that coal, oil, and gas are all due to begin their terminal decline earlier than previously predicted in the World Energy Outlook 2023, its flagship annual report. The report found that with just the climate and energy policies that are already in place today, demand for coal, oil, and gas are each expected to peak by 2030. This projection comes as a shock – the report marks the first time that demand for each fuel has been predicted within this decade.
But reality might be a bit messier than those figures suggest. Oil profits are soaring, and many supermajors are planning to ramp up investments in future extraction of fossil fuels. The United States had a record year, and Chevron and Exxon Mobil are busily acquiring rivals with untapped reserves, indicating that they think they are none too concerned about the alleged looming threat of peak oil.
It goes without saying that the world can’t ditch fossil fuels overnight, and access to affordable and reliable baseload energies will be necessary to ease the energy transition and avoid painful energy shocks. “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA [scenario]”, Exxon said in its reply to the IEA’s 2050 net-zero emissions (NZE) scenario, which lays out a pathway for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But many critics feel that Big Oil is using this line of argument as an excuse and even a scare tactic to continue investing in extraction rather than in finding better energy alternatives.
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110 U.S. Gasoline Prices Fall to 11-Month Low
Indeed, instead of continuing to intensify their efforts toward meeting global climate goals, many supermajors have been walking back their previous pledges or merely failing to achieve them. Earlier this year, BP announced that it would be slashing its promise to reduce carbon emissions from its energy production by 35 to 50 percent by 2030 to just 20 to 30 percent. But while their actions speak volumes, spokespeople for the oil and gas industry continue to avow their commitment to reducing emissions and collaborating with the decarbonization movement.
This contradiction is highly visible at this year’s COP28 United Nations Climate Change Conference currently taking place in Dubai’s Expo City in the United Arab Emirates in a conference venue paid for with oil wealth in the middle of one of the world’s most prominent petro-states. The UAE negotiating team has said with “cautious optimism” that it believes COP28 could result in a commitment to phasing down fossil fuels over the coming decades, an accomplishment that has proved to be impossible in previous COPs. However, no one is even suggesting that a hard date be set or that “abated” fossil fuels be challenged.
“Abated” fossil fuels are a contentious topic as technologies like carbon capture are a central platform of the decarbonization plans of oil and gas companies, but are largely dismissed by environmentalists. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has dismissed such tactics as “99 percent greenwashing,” saying: “What they're trying to do is protect their established ownership of fossil assets."
So is peak oil right around the corner? Or not? It seems that larger market forces are pushing oil, gas, and coal in the direction of the dodo, but it’s just as clear that there is still money to be made in their extraction. And until that changes, there will always be someone willing to drill.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
Elon Musk’s Grok Twitter AI Is Actually ‘Woke,’ Hilarity Ensues
Paul Tassi Senior Contributor News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet.
FORBES Dec 10, 2023
X logo displayed on a laptop screen and xAI Grok website displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 8, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you. Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier, where those who are the most devoted to the site, and in turn, usually devoted to Elon, are able to use Grok to their heart’s content.
But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.
Grok is woke, too.
This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just…manually tell Grok to say no
If you thought this was just random Twitter users getting upset about Grok’s political and social beliefs, this has also caught the attention of Elon Musk himself. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”
Of course, in Musk’s mind, “politically neutral” will be what him and his closest followers believe, which is of course far conservative on the whole than they will admit. What is the “politically neutral” answer to the “are trans women real women?” question? I think I know what they’re going to say.
The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT. The TruthSocial of AIs, perhaps. But instead to have it launch as a surprisingly thoughtful, progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it is about the funniest outcome we could have seen from this situation.
It remains unclear what Elon Musk will do to try to jab Grok into becoming less “woke” and more “politically neutral.” If you start manually tampering with inputs, and your “neutrality” means drawing on facts that may in fact be…progressive by their very nature, things may get screwed up pretty quickly. And push too hard and you will get that gross, racist, phobic AI everyone thought it would be.
Reading all Grok’s responses through this situation, you know, what? I like him. More than ChatGPT even. He seems like a cool dude. Albeit not one even I’d pay $16 a month to talk to.
Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor.
Infowars founder Alex Jones in court during the Sandy Hook defamation damages trial in New London, Conn., on Sept. 22, 2022.Tyler Sizemore / AP
Dec. 10, 2023 By Associated Press
Elon Musk has restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.
It poses new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads, and is the latest divisive public personality to get back their banned account.
Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”
A few hours later, Jones’ posts were visible again and he retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned in 2018 for abusive behavior.
Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that “permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,” Musk wrote, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted it’s likely that Community Notes — X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking service — “will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”
It is a major turnaround for Musk, who previously said he wouldn’t let Jones back on the platform despite repeated calls to do so. Last year, Musk pointed to the death of his first-born child and tweeted, “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Jones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.
Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.
Jones is appealing the judgments, saying he didn’t get fair trials and his speech was protected by the First Amendment.
Restoring Jones’ account comes as Musk has seen a slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, stop advertising on X after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.
They also were scared away after Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X. The Tesla CEO later apologized and visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top Israeli leaders.
Trump, who was banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own social media site, Truth Social, and has only tweeted once since being allowed back on X.
Why Americans are going hungry despite a strong economy
With unemployment low and wages rising, the struggle for basic necessities like food should be easing. But those on the front lines of feeding the hungry say they are seeing the opposite.
A volunteer at the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C., last month. Nathan Howard / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Jennifer Estrada is making more money than ever yet struggling just as much to feed her family.
For the past year, Estrada has been working 12-hour shifts overnight as a production supervisor at a Wisconsin aluminum plant, making $7 an hour more than she was a year ago. But with rent that’s more than doubled and a monthly grocery bill that now tops $2,400 for her family of seven, Estrada has been having to turn to local food banks to keep her children from going hungry.
“There are definitely many times, as a mom, where you cook and you make sure they eat and you go a little bit lighter that night,” Estrada said. “But I strive to make sure that they don’t go hungry.”
By traditional measures of the economy, where unemployment has been at historic lows and wages have been rising, more Americans should be prospering and the need for help with basic necessities like food should be easing after surging during the pandemic.
But those on the front lines of feeding the hungry say they are seeing the opposite. Instead, they say a growing number of Americans have been seeking out help from food banks and government food programs over the past year amid a perfect storm of persistently rising costs and shrinking programs to help households cope with these growing expenses.
Volunteers sort through donated food at the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington last month.
Nathan Howard / Bloomberg via Getty Images
“The demand is higher now than it ever was during the pandemic,” said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, head of Feeding America, which works with a network of 200 food banks. “This is not just one group’s issue, it’s an American issue. Hunger is an issue in America across every demographic group, and now, growingly, across more and more levels of income.”
As of June, Feeding America had given out 5.3 billion meals over the previous 12 months.
Over the past year, nearly 1 million more people have received food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often referred to as food stamps. Since the start of the pandemic, the number of food stamp recipients has increased by 2.3 million. Other programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, have also seen record levels of enrollment, with administrators concerned they won’t have the funding next year to keep up with demand.
That comes even as unemployment has remained near historic lows, wages are rising, inflation is slowing, and consumers are spending record amounts on everything from summer travel to concert tickets and holiday shopping. President Joe Biden has touted an economic resurgence fueled by billions of federal dollars for infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing jobs that he has made central to his re-election pitch.
But despite those metrics, polls have repeatedly shown Americans have a dismal view of the economy and the outlook for their financial future. In a New York Times/Siena College poll released in November, 81% of registered voters characterized the economy as either “fair” or “poor.”
Jennifer Estrada.Courtesy Jennifer Estrada
In Wisconsin, Estrada shares that pessimistic view. She said her family has struggled financially since her husband was deported to Mexico in 2012, leaving her as the sole provider for six children, including one whom she adopted. But she says the struggle has gotten even harder over the past several years, despite an increase in her income, and she worries about what the future looks like for her children, ages 10 to 18.
“For me, personally, I think it’s going to be a continual struggle, pretty much for the rest of my life, however long that may be,” said Estrada, 43, who has started a nonprofit to help other low-income families like hers and who ran unsuccessfully in 2018 as a Democrat for the Wisconsin state Assembly. “But what I’m more fearful of is that I have three girls that are graduating this year from high school, and I’m just fearful as to what the world has to offer them.”
Food has been at the center of the economic pressure points. Across all food categories, prices have gone up around 25% since 2020. Beef prices, for examples, are at record highs, with the price of ground beef topping $5 a pound, up more than a dollar over the past three years. The price for a gallon of milk, currently averaging just under $4, has ticked down in recent months but is still 20% higher than before the pandemic. The price of a loaf of white bread is up nearly 50% to $2.
While inflation has slowed in recent months and wages have been rising, at the current rate it could take until the end of 2024 before wage growth outpaces the rate of inflation, according to an analysis by Bankrate.
Amid the rising prices, more people say they are going hungry. There has been a continual uptick over the past year in the number of people reporting that they don’t have enough food at times, according to a Census Bureau survey conducted at the end of October. The number of households that said they struggled to afford food at some point during the year increased to 17 million in 2022, up 26% from 2021 — the biggest annual increase since 2008, according to a recent Department of Agriculture report.
Since having her baby nine months ago, Janet Ortigoza has been among those unable to afford the food her family needs. Ortigoza isn’t working because she’s unable to afford child care, leaving the family of three dependent on her husband’s income as an agricultural worker in the Fresno, California, region — helping produce the food his family struggles to afford.
“You used to be able to get five bags of groceries for $50, now you only get one bag for $50,” said Ortigoza. “I am honestly scared to have another baby because I don’t think we will be able to provide for another baby. Now that she’s growing, she’s going to start eating three times a day, and just trying to provide the right nutrition to her, it’s hard.”
Her husband’s most recent paycheck for seven days of work went to pay December’s rent of $840 with nothing left over for extras like food or diapers. A year ago, buying a new pair of shoes wouldn’t have seemed like a luxury, but now Ortigoza said it is a purchase she’s been putting off, along with new baby blankets.
Janet Ortigoza.Courtesy Janet Ortigoza
While inflation has slowed, Ortigoza’s costs have continued to rise. In January, her rent will increase by nearly $100. Nationwide, rent is up nearly 30% since the pandemic began, according to Zillow.
Utilities have also been on the rise, and this year Ortigoza isn’t planning on turning on the home’s heater, even with temperatures dipping into the 30s at night. Instead, she plans to wear extra clothes around the house and bundle her daughter in blankets.
To put food on the table, she’s had to turn to local food banks along with donations from a Facebook mom group. Her family’s income is too high to qualify for food stamps, but she has been receiving WIC benefits to help pay for formula and food for her daughter.
The struggle to afford food amid rising prices has been particularly acute for those unable to work and benefit from the rising wages, either because they are retired, disabled or the full-time caregiver for a child or relative.
Over the past year, Carl Willette has started going regularly to an Augusta, Maine, food bank for the first time in his life. At 85 years old and as the full-time caregiver for his wife, Claire, he depends on $20,000 a year in Social Security benefits and a small pension from working 30 years as a mechanic for Mack Trucks.
Each Thursday at around 7:30 a.m., Willette gets in line behind at least 30 other cars at a food pantry, where he’s able to pick up a limited number of items to help get through the week.
“It is like a noose around your neck getting tighter,” Willette said. “You cannot imagine the pressure that is on us now with everything the way it is. I can’t understand, how do they justify the wages that there are today, why does stuff have to go up like that, why does it have to go up so much?”
While food banks and government programs have filled the void for many who are struggling, those resources have been dwindling. Earlier this year, food stamp benefits were cut by an average of $90 a month after a Covid-era boost to the program expired. WIC program administrators are worried their budget for next year won’t keep up with the growing need they are seeing, with enrollment increasing by around 300,000 people in 2023 to a record 6.7 million participants.
“The worst-case scenario is waitlists for participants where states may not have enough funding to meet caseload needs, which would be absolutely terrible,” said Georgia Machell, interim president of the National WIC Association. “It’s putting state programs in a really difficult position and having to make very, very difficult decisions in order to continue operating.”
Food banks have also struggled to keep up with rising demand as donations have dropped and food prices have gone up, said Feeding America’s Babineaux-Fontenot.
Anita Garrett says she’s increasingly struggling to feed her five grandchildren, whom she has been caring for since their father was killed five years ago. At 65 and disabled, she said she is unable to work, leaving her dependent on her monthly allotment of around $200 in food stamps, which was cut by nearly $100 earlier this year.
That leaves her relying on a local Milwaukee food bank as the main source of food for her family, but even there she has seen cuts. As the demand has grown, the food bank has gone from giving out two bags of groceries a week to just one bag that includes one piece of meat to last for the week.
“The boxes they are giving the people are getting smaller and smaller. But the lines are getting longer and longer,” Garrett said. “Everything is getting cut, cut, cut. Everything is going up, up, up. I feel a depression coming.”
Labour is on course for victory – but what kind of economy will it inherit?
Larry Elliott
The Guardian Sun, 10 December 2023 Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
Opinion was divided in the Labour party after its crushing defeat in the 2019 general election. Optimists thought it would take two terms for the party to have a chance of again forming a government. Pessimists thought it was doomed to permanent opposition.
Yet four years on, the polls suggest Labour is on course for a thumping victory. With the Conservatives gripped by an existential crisis, Rishi Sunak could be the last Tory prime minister for a long time to come.
Publicly, Labour’s position is that nothing is being taken for granted and that every vote has to be won. Privately, though, plenty of attention is being paid to what sort of economy Sir Keir Starmer will inherit if he gets the keys to Downing Street.
Clearly, not an economy in rude health, because if that were the case Labour would probably be looking at a fifth successive defeat. Governments that preside over strong growth and rising living standards are usually re-elected. That’s not always the case, but it is this time. The economy as the next election approaches has more in common with the stagflation nation that Ted Heath handed over to Harold Wilson after the February 1974 election than the largely crisis-free Britain bequeathed by John Major to Tony Blair in 1997.
There is, though, a difference between 1974 and today. When Wilson won his third election, the crisis triggered by the quadrupling of oil prices was in its early stages. Inflation did not peak until the summer of 1975. Today,m inflation is coming down, even though it is not coming down fast enough to persuade the Bank of England to start cutting interest rates. The message coming out of Threadneedle Street in recent weeks has been consistent: borrowing costs are staying put and there is more chance of them being raised than there is of them being reduced.
This hard line will almost certainly be maintained at this week’s meeting of the Bank’s monetary policy committee, at which six members are expected to keep rates at 5.25% with the other three voting for a quarter-point increase to 5.5%.
Whether this approach survives for much longer remains to be seen. The latest health check on the state of the labour market from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation showed permanent hiring among UK business falling at its second fastest rate since the pandemic. With jobs less plentiful, firms are offering less generous starting salaries, which are rising at the slowest pace in almost three years. Earnings growth – which concerns the MPC – may well have peaked. It takes time for changes in interest rates to have an impact so in order to be sure of avoiding a recession, the Bank would need to act pre-emptively. There is no indication that it is going to do so, which increases the chances of a mild recession this winter.
That’s a problem, but it is a bigger problem for Sunak than it is for Starmer. One of the few things the prime minister has going for him is that the economy has proved more resilient than expected a year ago. This outperformance is nothing to get too excited about: the economy has still flatlined. But Sunak needs to be able to sell to voters a narrative that the worst is over. A winter recession – or even a continuation of the economy moving sideways – would make that a much more difficult story to tell.
A much bigger problem for an incoming Labour government will be the need to improve the public services at a time when there is a lack of ready cash. Jeremy Hunt could only deliver tax cuts in last month’s autumn statement by setting implausibly tough plans for post-election public spending that – if implemented – would involve deep cuts for many Whitehall departments. In a last roll of the dice for the government, further tax cuts are being lined up for the budget in the spring. Labour will be handed a poisoned pill and would be well advised not to swallow it. An emergency revenue-raising budget soon after the election – for which the Conservatives can be blamed – looks inevitable.
There have been a couple of recent pieces of news that suggest the economy has the potential to perform more strongly than it has been. Firstly, the Lloyds bank business monitor – which has a reasonable track record of anticipating trends in activity six months ahead – shows confidence is improving. What’s more, firms have cash to invest and may well start to spend it once they are convinced the recession threat has passed.
According to the economists at Berenberg bank, the debt levels of non-financial corporations have fallen from a peak of 100% of GDP during the 2009 global financial crisis back to the 75% of GDP level of the late 1990s. Similarly, corporate cash balances stand at 20% of GDP, up from 15% in 2009.
“Businesses have enough cash to pay for two years of their typical investment expenditures,” Berenberg concludes. “These buffers cushion against shocks and can provide a springboard for recovery. This is already playing out in labour hoarding, as well as the healthy uptrend in investment since mid-2020.”
Secondly, last week’s release of the latest Pisa international league tables produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed the UK’s relative performance improved despite the severity of the lockdowns, with 15-year-olds in England doing better than those in Scotland and Wales.
While there is some doubt about the reliability of the findings, Sunak could have made a big thing out of how post-2010 education reforms were working. This, though, is a government with a death wish. The fact that this modestly good news was drowned out by a row over shipping asylum seekers to Rwanda helps explain why Labour is heading for a spectacular comeback.
Complaint says Muslim Arab American teacher was discriminated against after put on leave over pro-Palestinian phrase in email Alaa Elassar and Jennifer Henderson, CNN Sun, 10 December 2023 WJLA
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has filed a discrimination complaint on behalf of a Black Muslim Arab American teacher in Maryland, who was placed on administrative leave for her email signature, which included a controversial phrase supporting Palestinian rights.
Hajur El-Haggan, a middle school math teacher employed by the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) since 2015, was informed November 20 by the principal at Argyle Middle School the county was placing her on immediate leave because her email signature expressed political and personal views, says the complaint filed Wednesday.
El-Haggan’s email signature included the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” according to the complaint, which described it as “a call for Palestinian freedom, dignity, and self-determination. That means the ability to exist and move within the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.”
The slogan refers to Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza being restricted by Israel in their movements from city to city, entering Israel, and visiting Jerusalem’s holy sites, the complaint says.
The Anti-Defamation League and other mainstream Jewish groups have accused the slogan of being “antisemitic” and a “rallying cry (that) has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas.”
The phrase has come under recent scrutiny for its use at pro-Palestinian rallies amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, and at least one US House member has been heavily criticized by colleagues for saying it.
The school district’s policy for email best practices and other digital communications is posted on its website and asks employees to maintain professional email signatures and abstain from “special stationery, quotations or sayings as part of or following an employee’s email signature.”
The complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says, “Ms. El-Haggan was informed that including any political or non-political quotes in an email signature was against the MCPS Employee Code of Conduct, yet this policy was never enforced against any of Ms. El-Haggan’s colleagues who participated in similar conduct.”
The complaint includes photos and screenshots of other email signatures from teachers at the school, including political and social justice quotes and links in support of topics such as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ rights.
CAIR held a news conference in front of the Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education with El-Haggan to announce the filing of the complaint.
“It is clear that Ms. El-Haggan was treated very different from her non-Muslim, non-Arab colleagues who engage in the same conduct,” Rawda Fawaz, El-Haggan’s attorney, said Friday.
El-Haggan said during the news conference she offered to remove the saying from her signature, but the county denied the offer and said her administrative leave was still in effect.
She says the county still has not reached out to her, after 18 days, even though she was told someone from the county would contact her.
MCPS told CNN by email Friday El-Haggan remains on administrative leave “pending an investigation” and characterized the situation only as “a personnel matter,” according to district communications director Christopher Cram. ‘Every moment I am not in the classroom, it breaks my heart’
At Friday’s news conference, El-Haggan spoke while wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf, and pins depicting the Palestinian flag while a group of people stood behind her holding signs reading, “protect our teachers” and “defend free speech.”
“With the recent events in Gaza and in Palestine, I have become an advocate for their (Palestinians’) peace and for their freedom,” El-Haggan said. “It is intrinsically tied to the core of who I am as a Muslim and as an Arab, as it is for many Muslims and Arabs.”
El-Haggan was referring to the mounting humanitarian crisis in Gaza where – in response to Hamas’ attack that killed 1,200 people – Israel has launched a siege and war that has killed over 17,000 Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza.
Evie Frankl, a member of pro-Palestinian organization Jewish Voice for Peace, spoke at the news conference and said El-Haggan is being discriminated against for expressing “support for Palestinians, who are suffering a devastating ongoing war that is haunting every sentient being in the world who is paying attention.”
Frankl, who says she is a daughter of Holocaust refugees and granddaughter of people murdered in concentration camps, also questioned why support “for Palestinian lives (is) more controversial than support for Black lives, Jewish lives, women’s lives?”
El-Haggan said her administration team, co-workers, and school have been “so incredibly supportive” and claims the “discrimination is coming from the county.”
“I have spent and given my entire life to be an educator. Every morning I wake up excited to have the opportunity to help my students feel seen, to feel loved, heard and appreciated. I help them feel safe, and I help them know that they belong. Every moment I am not in the classroom, it breaks my heart,” El-Haggan said, her voice breaking.
The complaint says El-Haggan was discriminated against on the basis of her race and religion, among other factors, and says the county’s actions violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Maryland Fair Employment Practices Act.
The complaint also states, “until the present situation with Ms. El-Haggan, MCPS had never taken adverse action against any other employee who chose to include political speech in their email signature. Ms. El-Haggan was informed that including any political or non-political quotes in an email signature was against the MCPS Employee Code of Conduct, yet this policy was never enforced against any of Ms. El-Haggan’s colleagues who participated in similar conduct.”
CAIR says they have received more than 200 bias incident reports from Muslims and Arabs in Maryland since October 7, with many of the incidents involving discrimination against people voicing support for Palestinians.
El-Haggan said, “I’m asking the county to take steps to ensure that Arab and Muslim educators like myself, are protected from discrimination. But most importantly, I’m asking the county to allow me to go back to teaching my students because that’s what a teacher ever wants to do.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described CAIR’s filing. It was an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint.
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UK
COVID 19 INQUIRY ‘The optics are terrible’: how Rishi Sunak’s 2020 ‘eat out to help out’ scheme backfired
Tim Adams
THE GUARDIAN UK Sun, 10 December 2023 Photograph: Simon Walker/HM Treasury
There is no blue heritage plaque above the stainless-steel open kitchen at the branch of Wagamama at London’s Festival Hall – but the restaurant might have claims to one. It was here, in delivering a couple of plates of katsu curry – one chicken, one vegan – on 8 July 2020, that our current prime minister in effect launched his campaign for the country’s leadership.
During that lockdown spring as pandemic chancellor, Rishi Sunak had one of the few enviable public roles: he was cast as the man who saved the economy by giving money away. By the time he pitched up at Wagamama that lunchtime, his various Covid-help schemes had dished out £176bn in furlough payments and loans and deferred taxes. In those efforts Sunak, little known before the crisis, had sometimes looked like the only sober and responsible member of her majesty’s government. The headline act of his summer budget statement, “eat out to help out”, changed that narrative.
Having announced his restriction-busting policy to Tory cheers in parliament – including the shout of “Down the pub, everyone!” – Sunak hotfooted it across Waterloo Bridge and pinned on a Wagamama name badge. He excitedly served up noodles – notably mask-less in contravention of the guidelines – to socially distanced diners before further explaining his great national half-price meal giveaway to reporters.
I’m not sure if the videos of that sequence of events have been requested by the Covid inquiry, which is currently examining the government’s catastrophic handling of the crisis. If not, prior to his day questioning Sunak tomorrow, the inquiry’s lead barrister, Hugo Keith KC, might find it useful to call up those clips on YouTube. They provide some of the mood music to the moment in British history when the prime minister was first identified by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Dame Angela McLean, as “Dr Death”.
Looking back at the footage now, you might see the genesis of much that has happened since. Behind Sunak delivering his policy at the dispatch box, Boris Johnson sat slumped, his disquiet occasionally signalled by the involuntary jiggling of his thigh on the green benches. He doesn’t seem anxious about any rashness in the policies themselves – obviously – rather about Sunak’s centre-stage authority. The chancellor had been hand-picked by Dominic Cummings to be the straightest of straight men to Johnson’s risk-taking populist. And yet here was the straight man shamelessly playing to the crowd, and with his own line in asinine sloganeering.
A week earlier, in confirming the reopening of the hospitality industry, Johnson and his chancellor had an awkward-looking lunch at another restaurant chain, Pizza Pilgrims, No 10’s go-to lockdown takeaway. That event had hardly created a stir, still less a catchphrase. But now the media couldn’t get enough of Sunak serving meals solo. Labour may have claimed: “We were promised a new deal, and he delivered a meal deal”, but the rightwing press was in an arms race of praise for the “imperturbable” chancellor.
The Daily Mail asked this breathless question: “Rishi dazzled pure sunshine … but did his miraculous banquet of freebies stick in Boris’s craw?” Opinion polling that week declared that Sunak was the “most popular chancellor since Gordon Brown in the millennium year”, with approval ratings far ahead of any other politician in the land. The news prefaced the launch of “brand Rishi” as the chancellor took to replacing the Conservative logo and adding his personal signature to Treasury policy notes on social media, clearly beginning to position himself as Johnson’s successor.
The evidence is not settled as to whether Sunak’s policy – “eat out to help out the virus,” as Matt Hancock and Sir Chris Whitty both privately understood it – directly caused a new spike in Covid cases and the inevitable march toward that year’s second round of restrictions, hospitalisations and untimely deaths. One early Warwick University study claimed that the policy resulted in an 8-17% rise in new Covid clusters, though those figures have since been disputed. The principle it did unequivocally reinforce, however, was that the chancellor was no different from his boss in grasping the easy headline-seeking course over the pragmatic and cautious one.
In his evidence to the Covid inquiry the world-leading epidemiologist Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was highly critical of both the tone and effect of Sunak’s scheme. “To be honest it made me angry, and I’m still angry about it,” he said. “It was one thing taking your foot off the brake, which is what we’d been doing by easing the restrictions, but to put the foot on the accelerator seemed to me perverse. And to spend public money to do that – 45,000 people had just died. I don’t want to blame ‘eat out to help out’ for the second wave, because that’s not the case. But just the optics of it were terrible.”
Sunak will no doubt argue to the inquiry that his controversial policy was designed to protect jobs, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the accelerated “let it rip” approach to pubs and restaurants did not make even economic sense. The Treasury had received in May 2020 a study from Oxford University showing that a far safer way to revive the economy would be to focus on non-customer facing sectors, such as construction and manufacturing – while keeping restrictions in restaurants and pubs and supporting that sector with direct payments – but where was the feelgood slogan in that?
By September, £849m had been claimed through the scheme, which provided discounts on 160m meals, but there was minimal evidence of any lasting economic benefit. (It didn’t take a Stanford MBA and a career at Goldman Sachs to guess that for the duration of the scheme people would choose to eat out on the subsidised days, Monday to Wednesday, and that restaurant business would fall away at the end of the week.)
Several documents before the inquiry shed light on some of Sunak’s motivations. As well as the stark implications of Sir Patrick Vallance’s contemporaneous note about Sunak’s reported response to the prospect of a second lockdown in October 2020 – “We should let people die” – the prime minister will no doubt be questioned on a memo sent to his Treasury team that first mooted an “eat out” voucher scheme to Johnson way back on 22 May. Johnson, full of praise for his ideas, favoured calling the policy “spring back summer”.
Johnson’s own shambling appearance before the inquiry last week added to the questions. Above all, there is the matter of whether the two senior advisers at the heart of government Covid policy had been consulted at all on the “eat out to help out” idea (despite Johnson and Sunak talking about it in May). Sir Patrick Vallance, chief government scientist, said on oath: “We didn’t see it before it was announced,” adding: “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers.” Johnson mumbled that he thought it was “inconceivable” that the policy had been “smuggled through” without Vallance or Sir Chris Whitty being aware, without providing any evidence for that contention.
No doubt Hugo Keith KC will be hampered in getting to the truth of such questions by the – scandalous – fact that Sunak’s messages from the period have not been made available to the inquiry. He claims, like Johnson, to have “repeatedly changed and not backed up” the phones he had as chancellor of the exchequer in a time of national crisis. (You imagine, hearing these repetitive excuses, that if pressed the prime minister may yet adopt the defence offered by one key witness in last year’s “Wagatha Christie” trial who announced that her phone had slipped from her hand over the side of a North Sea ferry, just as it had been requested for legal disclosure.)
The day-long televised grilling of the prime minister will kick off a perilous week in Sunak’s leadership, to be followed on Tuesday by the vote in parliament on the Rwanda bill. In the context, it is tempting to see a clear thread between “eat out to help out” and that desperate piece of legislation. The politician who appears to have deliberately excluded scientific opinion to self-promote “unique approaches” to the pandemic is very clearly the same man who believes that law courts have no place in questioning the legality of deportation. In both instances the risks to human life and to national reputation seem to come a distant second to a need for easy headlines. In that original summer budget statement Sunak announced: “We will not be defined by this crisis, but by our response to it.” Time is revealing those to be some of the truer words he has spoken.
Rights At Risk: Confronting Global Crises On Human Rights Day
Keeley Teslik UNICEF USA Dec 10, 2023, 75 years after the adoption of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's more important than ever to uphold and advocate for the inalienable rights of every person, everywhere. A look at the progress made and how UNICEF is working worldwide to ensure the rights and protections of every child.
Every year on December 10, the world commemorates Human Rights Day. It is a moment dedicated to reflecting on the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 — and a stark reminder that we must continue to uphold and advocate for these rights for the health and well-being of every person and our shared society.
Consisting of a preamble and sequential articles, the UDHR outlines 30 rights that apply to every person. These rights are not granted by a State or authority but rather are inherent to a person simply by the virtue of being human. Some of the rights outlined in the UDHR include:
The right to equality
Freedom from slavery and servitude
The right to asylum
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
The right to education
The UDHR serves as a guiding document and standard to which all nations and peoples should strive; however, the implementation and enforcement of these rights vary widely across the globe. For many, including children, these rights are not reality.
Our rights are vulnerable — and conflict, climate change and COVID pose increasing threats
In recent years, the landscape of global challenges has starkly highlighted the fragility of human rights. Armed conflicts and wars around the world — including those in Haiti, Sudan, Ukraine and Israel and Gaza — have not only claimed countless lives, including those of children, but have also led to egregious human rights violations including displacement, loss of livelihoods and breakdowns of social structures.
A lifejacket floats near a sinking boat at Favaloro pier in Lampedusa, Italy on Sept. 26, 2023. The pier serves as one of the few landing spots for those who have made the often perilous migration across the Central Mediterranean Sea. Many of the migrants arriving here are fleeing conflict, violence, climate impacts and other harrowing situations.
Climate change poses another threat, exacerbating natural disasters, food and water scarcity and environmental degradation, which in turn displace children and their families and intensify poverty and health risks. Often, these crises disproportionately affect the most vulnerable communities, including women and girls.
Ten-year-old Saima, right, joins her mother and sister on a 45-minute walk to find safe water in Allah Abad, Jampur, South Punjab, Pakistan. Devastating floods and climate change impacts across Pakistan force many girls and women, including Saima, to travel far from home in search of safe water and operable WASH infrastructure — often risking their personal safety and cutting into time they could be spending in school.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge individuals’ rights to health, education and employment, and has, for nearly four years now, illuminated deep global inequalities.
Together, these crises underscore the urgent need to address human rights violations and ensure that every child and every person is protected.
UNICEF USA takes a local-to-global approach to support child and human rights in the U.S. and beyond
In the U.S., UNICEF USA works with partners, including Zonta International, to safeguard the rights of children and girls. Through concerted efforts to end child marriage in the U.S., where child marriage is banned in only 10 of 50 states, UNICEF USA and Zonta are helping to ensure that girls across the country and beyond can fully realize their potential and shape futures in which their rights to safety, education and self-determination are unassailable.
In Ethiopia’s Afar region, water scarcity and loss of livelihoods threaten the future of girls who are increasingly forced into child marriage. UNICEF is working on the ground to build awareness and support to ensure young girls are protected and can fulfill their futures.
UNICEF USA also works with local stakeholders across the country through the UNICEF Child Friendly Cities Initiative(CFCI) to establish safer, more just, equitable, inclusive and child-responsive communities. Launched in the U.S. in 2020, the CFCI ensures youth voice in policymaking and prioritizes the rights of children and youth in their childhoods and throughout their lives.
Along with efforts to prioritize mental health support, quality education and more for youth in the U.S., UNICEF USA works with government officials and uses its platforms to amplify UNICEF’s global work in support of child and human rights — on Human Rights Day and every day, all year long.
UNICEF works around the clock and around the world to defend child and human rights
Globally, UNICEF works with partners to ensure the rights of children, youth and their families — from protecting girls’ right to education in Afghanistan and establishing temporary learning centers in the wake of natural disasters, to supporting children and families on the move across the world’s most dangerous migration routes and calling out and demanding action on grave violations and war crimes on a global stage.
In September 2023, eight-year-old Maria, right, and a friend attend a UNICEF-supported Community-based Education Center in Bihsud District, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. Since March 2022, the de facto authorities have banned girls in Afghanistan from attending school beyond grade six. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world to ban girls from secondary school.
UNICEF’s teams respond to hundreds of emergencies every year — on average, more than one per day. UNICEF is often among the first on the ground and the last to leave when disaster strikes and remains active in more than 190 countries and territories, where teams work every day to ensure that every child is healthy, educated, protected and respected during both times of crisis and peace.
As we mark 75 years of the UDHR, the stakes are higher than ever. Your support can help dismantle barriers to education, provide sanctuaries from conflict and secure the health and well-being of children in every corner of the world. Donate today.
Keeley Teslik is Assistant Director of Social Media and Content Marketing at UNICEF USA. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Keeley is passionate about nonprofit work in human...
