Posthaste: Now it's the wealthy's turn to worry about the economy squeezing their finances

Story by Victoria Wells • 




After months of belt tightening by low- and middle-income families, it’s wealthy Canadians’ turn to worry about the economy’s impact on their pocketbooks.

People who have assets of $1 million or more say they’re more stressed out about their finances than they were this time last year, according to a new study out this morning from IG Wealth Management. More than three-quarters, or 82 per cent, say they’re worried about the economy, while 72 per cent are fretting about the cost of energy. Close to half, or 49 per cent, are concerned about rising interest rates.

“Much like other groups, high-net-worth Canadians are concerned about where the economy is going and its impact on their personal situation,” Damon Murchison, chief executive of IG Wealth Management, said in a news release.

Economic worries have become universal as inflation and climbing interest rates take a toll on most people’s budgets. Every day expenses such as grocery bills have been especially squeezed. Prices for food bought in stores rose 11 per cent in October from the same time last year, Statistics Canada data show. But the costs of some dinner staples have surged even more, with pasta prices up 44.8 per cent, lettuce up 30.2 per cent and rice up 14.7 per cent on a year-over-year basis. Meanwhile, gas prices rose 17.8 per cent in October from the same month last year. Combine that with higher debt costs from rising interest rates, and many have been forced to take an axe to their spending by cutting back on streaming services , or other discretionary purchases, to pay the bills.



Making ends meet is less of a worry for high-income Canadians. Instead, they’re more concerned with protecting and growing the wealth they already have amid volatile stock markets and a slowing economy. That’s also leading some to think again about what their retirement will look like. Though they’re not worried about having enough money to retire — 85 per cent say that’s not a concern — half say they will likely need to stash away more than they originally thought to maintain a certain lifestyle. Almost half say they’re rethinking their investment strategies as a result.

And not unlike Canadians’ with lower incomes, the wealthy are also making moves to delay their retirement start dates as life grows more expensive. Close to half, or 46 per cent, say they’re changing when they’ll make the leap to full retirement. More than 50 per cent say they’ll need to keep working longer to reach their savings goals because their investments aren’t performing the way they expected.

Still, most wealthy persons have access to professional advice to help them weather a stormy economy, with three-quarters saying they already work with a financial adviser. However, there could be room for improvement. Only 45 per cent have a plan that covers all aspects of their personal finances, such as lifestyle considerations, income and tax and estate planning. And just over half say their adviser gives them the support they need to overcome any negative impacts the economy might have on their investments.

But for high-net-worth individuals, the solution to getting through these “complicated times” financially intact is simple: get a comprehensive plan in place. That’s where a professional can step in and help, IG Wealth Management said.

“With wealth comes increased complexity,” Murchison said. “It’s especially important during these times to not only seek out the help of a qualified financial adviser who can put things in perspective, but also to select one that will work with you to develop a holistic financial plan that’s stress-tested and keeps pace with your evolving situation.”

SIEG HEIL; IKEA

KINSELLA: We increasingly have a problem with extremism
Opinion by Warren Kinsella • Yesterday - TORONTO SUN

- Picture taken on December 3, 2012 shows Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad gesturing prior the inauguration of the Margaretha Kamprad Chair of Environmental Science and Limnology at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Dec. 3, 2012

STOCKHOLM — Extremism comes on tiny feet. You almost don’t see it until it’s too late.

Take this IKEA, for example, on Regeringsgatan, near the old city of Stockholm. Here, tucked between grandiose 16th-century buildings and charming cobblestone streets, is another IKEA.

It’s just like the ones in Canada, found from Vancouver to Halifax. Everything’s the same. Same corporate colours, same stuff for sale, even the same meatballs and lingonberries. (Which are as ubiquitous as they are delicious, by the way.)

IKEA advertises everything from candles to pillows, but it doesn’t advertise one important fact: It was founded by a fellow who was an extremist. A neo-Nazi, in fact.

Oh, sure, IKEA doesn’t completely hide who their founder was. He was a genial-looking fellow named Ingvar Kamprad, who — says IKEA’s website — was “rebel-hearted.” Uh-huh. Ingvar had “a dream to create a better life for as many people as possible — whatever the size of their wallet — (which) is and will always be our driving force.”

Well, not exactly everyone.

Ingvar, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wasn’t too fussy about foreigners, Jews and other minorities. He wasn’t so enthusiastic about “creating a better life” for them, actually. Ingvar was a member of the fascist New Swedish Movement. The IKEA website doesn’t have a whole lot of information about that.

Ingvar joined the New Swedish Movement when he was a teenager, even before he founded IKEA as a mail order company in his family’s backyard. The leader of the far-right group was rabid anti-Semite and Adolf Hitler fan Per Engdahl, who said Hitler was “God’s saviour of Europe.”

Historians record that Ingvar recruited members and raised funds for Engdahl’s pro-Nazi group, even while the Second World War was still raging. And he remained a confidante of Engdahl for many years after that.

When caught, Ingvar insisted his involvement with fascism was “a mistake.” But, in her wonderfully-titled book “Made in Sweden: How the Swedes Are Not Nearly So Egalitarian, Tolerant, Hospitable or Cozy As They Would Like to Have You Think,” author Elisabeth Asbrink wrote the Swedish security service had a bulging file on Ingvar titled “Nazi.”

And, as recently as 2010, when Canadians were still gleefully assembling IKEA bookcases with Allen keys, Ingvar told Asbrink that “Per Engdahl is a great man, and I will maintain that as long as I live.”

So, there you go. We are all sitting on couches that, at one point, funded Nazism. Extremism, in other words.

That’s relevant, these days, because there’s quite a bit of it to be seen just about everywhere you look. Not just Sweden.

Here in Sweden in September, the extremist Sweden Democrats took more than 20% of the vote in the national election, making them the second-largest party in the Riksdag legislature.

The Sweden Democrats trace their beginnings to this country’s neo-Nazi movement. They don’t particularly like Muslims or immigrants, and said during the election they favour giving foreigners “one-way tickets” back to Kabul.

To the extent that the world pays any attention whatsoever to Swedes who don’t play hockey, the huge success of a political party with actual pro-Nazi roots went more or less unnoticed. How come?

Well, because the beast is awake everywhere, pretty much. Extremism is to be seen in a lot of surprising places, these days.

Not, we hasten to say, in the policies of the parties led by Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre or Jagmeet Singh. Not even in Poilievre’s Conservative Party, which may be conservative, but is on record as favouring the admission of more immigrants — and at a faster pace, too.

No, extremism is seen in less-visible ways.

When some people wave around a swastika flag during the Ottawa occupation, for example, and nobody does a damn thing to take it away from them. Or when white supremacist members of Diagolon are caught heading to the Coutts, Alta., border crossing with a cache of weapons, allegedly to murder police, and people shrug.

Or even when the richest man in the world gives a rabid anti-Semite like Kanye West back his Twitter account. After he said he was going to go “Def Con” on Jews. Or how Twitter blithely allows extremist threats against my Postmedia colleagues, and other journalists, all the time. All that.

So, we should probably give the Swedes a break, the fascist leanings of IKEA’s founder notwithstanding. They’ve got a problem with extremism, yes.

And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we increasingly do, too.

POSTMODERN ROBBER BARON

Twitter Reportedly Stiffs Vendors, Cuts Employee Benefits As Musk Tries To Cut Costs

Story by Matt Salter • Yesterday 

In the ongoing saga of Elon Musk's adventures on Twitter, we've seen a variety of business strategies. He's issued ultimatums. He's made commitments to bold new moderation strategies that never materialized. He's even staged open polls on the future of the platform. At the risk of stepping on the man's own joke, he's throwing the kitchen sink at his problems.


twitter hq building dublin seagull© Charles Mcquillan/Getty Images


As of November 22, Musk is trying a truly remarkable new strategy: he's just not going to pay what he owes.

As the New York Times reports, Musk has been desperate to cut costs as his employees have bailed en masse and he struggles to keep the lights on. Sources inside Twitter have reported that Musk is now flat-out refusing to pay vendors for outstanding debts, to the point of instructing them to duck calls from collectors. Those sources also indicate that a major target of Musk's fixation on cutting costs may be the benefits of Twitter employees.

We and the Times agree that Musk will probably pay what he owes. He's likely just playing negotiation hardball, seeking a favorable settlement by dangling the possibility of nonpayment. Twitter is under massive debt pressure: the Times reports $13 billion in debt from the acquisition alone. Musk is likely, and understandably, frustrated over having to service debts from before his tenure, many of them incurred by people who no longer work for him.

A bigger problem might be Musk's desire to cut employee benefits. Per multiple sources, Musk brought in long-term allies Steve Davis, Jared Birchell, who heads Musk's family office, and Antonio Gracias, a friend, and former director of Tesla tasking them to slash expenses and target benefits. Everything from expense accounts and corporate credit cards to food quality in the cafeterias has suffered since.

Musk is playing with fire. Twitter has already shown serious problems with employee retention during Musk's tenure. Making Twitter a less pleasant place to work won't help. Moreover, refusing to pay contractually obligated expenses is "take your company away from you and sell it for scrap"-level illegal. Having already been on the wrong side of the SEC and with a possible FTC investigation looming, Elon Musk has shown a worrying willingness to play chicken with law enforcement. For stakeholders seriously committed to Twitter as a digital public square, antics like this threaten the value of the platform and discourage potential collaborators.

What Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter tells us about the future of social media

Story by Blayne Haggart, 

Associate Professor of Political Science, 

Brock University • Monday,  

Nov. 21,2022

THE CONVERSATION

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been a fast-moving disaster. It has also created a tangible problem for journalists, politicians, activists and academic scholars: Where do we talk to each other if or when Twitter finally collapses or becomes unusable?


Since its beginnings in 2006, Twitter has grown into one of the most important social networks in the world.© (Shutterstock)

It’s a useful question. Contemplating life without Twitter pushes us to look beyond Twitter’s odious underbelly to consider what we liked about it. In doing so, it can help us understand better what social media is, for better and worse, and to consider what we want it to be.

Twitter communities

What I will miss about Twitter is its large scale and reach. It has become the default way for so many groups to communicate with each other and, because it’s basically just one big message board, across groups.

Social media companies regularly argue that this scale is why there is so much hate speech and disinformation on their networks. As harmful as this speech may be, Twitter’s reach has nonetheless been a boon for, say, emerging researchers wanting to easily reach the largest number of their peers.

Smaller online communities are fantastic for any number of reasons. They allow members to share their interests and knowledge. Their smaller size makes them easier to moderate effectively. However, their smallness can also inhibit the serendipity of running into ideas that you wouldn’t otherwise see.

Furthermore, smaller online communities still depend on the benevolence of whoever happens to be in charge of the server. Twitter’s open design somewhat mitigates against the formation of strict hierarchies among groups on the platform, although as we’re learning, commercial social media still leaves us subject to the owner’s whims.

The end of Twitter

Thinking about where to go after Twitter also highlights that social media networks are not substitutes for each other. Well, they are for advertisers, who will go wherever the audience is. But people use different social media for different purposes.

As an academic, TikTok has nothing to offer me in terms of creating and sharing knowledge with my peers. The Twitter-like Mastodon may allow for easier communication among colleagues, but it lacks Twitter’s out-of-community reach.

That there is no equivalent substitute for Twitter highlights that there is a strong public interest in fostering public social media, to provide communities with stable communication infrastructure.

Relatedly, this debacle also confirms that advertising does not provide a sustainable business model for socially responsible social media. Twitter has only turned a profit in two of its 16 years. Advertisers are currently abandoning Twitter in the face of Musk’s content-moderation follies which, combined with Musk’s incompetence, could drive the company into bankruptcy.

Related video: Is Twitter descending into chaos?

View on Watch



Elon Musk demands all Twitter employees email him weekly updates on their work

Most important, however, its ad-based business model is based on the viral spread of content designed to engage our attention at any cost, be it bullying, harassment or hate speech. As journalism professor Yumi Wilson notes, “Twitter was a scary place even before Elon.”

Life after Twitter

All this suggests that we need to think seriously about how to move beyond ad-funded social media. Mastodon on its own offers a decentralized, community-based paradigm. However, depending on the long-term commitment of volunteers and small operators is itself a recipe for instability.

Read more: People are leaving Twitter for Mastodon, but are they ready for democratic social media?

Much more interesting is the proposal that Mastodon-based services could be used by an arm’s length public agency like the CBC to publicly fund stable, well-run social media.



Social media platforms, like Twitter, rely on the attention economy to make profits.

© (Shutterstock)

Searchability

Finally, we need to talk about search engines. Twitter is valuable in part because it allows individuals to broadcast easily to a large audience. Without large-scale social media, we’re back to the problem of how to discover other people’s work and how to get your work in front of an audience.

Search engines have flown under the radar in our discussions about how platforms should be governed. If we want to reduce online platform power and make the best information easily locatable, we need to reconsider whether our current search engines are good enough.

There is cause for concern: Google’s gold-standard search engine has been “getting worse,” in large part because the company has been clogging its results with advertising that makes it more difficult for users to find relevant information. Given that the big online platforms continue to rely heavily on advertising revenues, this is a problem that will worsen.

Let’s not glorify Twitter. It is, in many ways and for many people, a malevolent force. Even pre-Musk, it was a breeding ground for harassment, particularly of women and individuals from marginalized groups. It can enable often life-ruining bullying and disproportionate public shaming of otherwise private individuals, particularly through the quote-tweet function.

Twitter has had a negative effect on the quality of our social discourse, serving as a conduit for mis- and disinformation, designed to encourage outrage rather than substantive conversation.

As bad as it was — and is — you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Twitter pre-Musk was no paradise, but Musk’s rampage allows us to see both the good and bad in social media as it currently exists. And, as a result, to consider what we want (and need) social media to be.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

What the world would lose with the demise of Twitter: Valuable eyewitness accounts and raw data on human behavior, as well as a habitat for trolls

Why it may not matter whether Elon Musk broke US labor laws with his mass firings at Twitter

Blayne Haggart receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is a Senior Fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

The age of the toxic boss is over: Workers aren't willing to suffer for a paycheque anymore

Story by Victoria Wells • Yesterday 


Hundreds of Twitter's employees headed for the exits after Elon Musk issued an ultimatum: get ready to work© Provided by Financial Post

If Elon Musk ‘s disastrous takeover of Twitter Inc. has proven anything, it’s that the time of the heavy-handed boss is well and truly behind us. Workers just aren’t willing to suffer for a paycheque, and they’ll quit to prove it, as Musk found out last week.

Hundreds of Twitter’s employees headed for the exits after Musk issued an ultimatum: get ready to work “long hours at high intensity” or leave with a three-month severance package. People overwhelmingly decided to quit. Before the 5 p.m. Thursday deadline, internal Slack channels were flooded with staffers posting emojis of blue hearts and salutes as they said goodbye. Sensing the impending wave, Musk tried to convince some workers he considered essential to stay on, according to a report in the New York Times . He failed. The employees he had been lobbying in a video meeting all logged off at 5 p.m. while he was still making his case.

The exodus was so great that on Friday, #RIPTwitter started trending as users became certain the platform would crumble with few engineers left to patch the cracks. Twitter’s workforce has been cut to the bone since Musk got the keys at the end of October. He immediately laid off 3,700 workers, or roughly half its workforce, and then fired many more, reportedly getting rid of anyone who dared criticize him.

The mass resignations should have been a wakeup call for Musk, who has often bet on wielding power over his employees by threatening to fire them if they don’t toe the line. At Tesla Inc., he put an end to remote work , ordered staff back to the office and fired those who refused. He issued a similar directive at Twitter, only to later walk it back in an effort to staunch the bleeding of workers.

That could be a sign Musk is beginning to learn what most other bosses have discovered during a time of labour shortages and sky-high job vacancies: don’t underestimate the power of the worker. That power is likely to stay where it is for longer than some expect, because hiring challenges will persist for years, says a workplace trends report from Indeed, a job postings site, and Glassdoor, with an aging population the main driver of shortages in Canada.

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“What is critical for leaders to understand is that these changes and shifts are not temporary. There will be no return to ‘normal’ that many seem to be awaiting,” Svenja Gudell, Indeed’s chief economist, says in a news release .

That means bosses will have to give workers what they want if they hope to avoid more hiring problems. And what they want shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention these past few years: flexibility, higher pay, better benefits, the ability to work from home, workplace well-being policies and diversity strategies.

Employers in Canada seem to be paying attention. Job listings for remote work are on the rise, making up 11.2 per cent of all postings in September on Indeed. That’s four times the pre-pandemic rate, and a sign of things to come. “Remote work is here to stay,” Brendon Bernard, senior economist at Indeed Canada, says in a blog posting .

Meanwhile, employees are finished with toxic work environments. Almost half of employees in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom expect a level of happiness at work, says Indeed’s latest workplace well-being study . Those who are content with their work environment are also much less likely to leave their current employer for greener pastures — just ask any recent ex-Twitter employee.

At this point, no worker with any pride is going to subject themselves to a boss who demands intense overtime, little work-life balance and unnecessary full-time office mandates, especially if their skills are in high demand. There’s a better way, and employees have seen it in action. In many cases, they’ve lived it.

Layoffs have hit some companies, but there are still close to a record million job vacancies in Canada. There’s always another job out there offering better benefits, flexibility or the opportunity to work from home a few days a week. Bosses better figure that out or else they could find themselves holding the reins to the shell of a company, not unlike a certain seemingly oblivious billionaire.

Protest has a woman's face. How Iran's unrest is pushing the regime for real reforms

Nikolai Kozhanov

24 октября 2022

Protests have erupted with renewed vigor in Iran after a 16-year-old Iranian woman, Asra Panahi, died on October 13 after being beaten by security forces for refusing to sing a song praising the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These are the first protests to last this long, have such a wide geographic scope, and draw from such a significant social base, but the main difference is the protesters' demands. Moving away from mere economic grievances, they want serious political change, including the dismantling of the regime. The protests have also stirred up the national suburbs - Iranian Kurdistan (Mahsa Amini, who died after being detained by security forces was of Kurdish descent), Azerbaijan and Baluchistan, forcing the protesters to raise a national issue that is also sensitive to Tehran, and the Iranian authorities to send troops against Kurdish movements both in their own territory and in the lands of neighboring Iraq. The spontaneity of the protest, the lack of a coordinated leadership and the absence of clearly defined goals do not yet allow us to consider it the beginning of a revolution. But even if the Iranian authorities manage to survive the current crisis, it will be difficult for them to regain people's trust, and a major reform of the country is already inevitable.

A New President and a Weak Economy

Iran's economic problems have created an atmosphere and a general backdrop that further encourage and fuel the protesters’ anger. In 2022, the inflation rate exceeded 50%. The lower strata of Iranian society were the most susceptible to its negative effects. Prices continued to rise while the purchasing power of households fell, and GDP growth slowed. Thanks to high oil prices, the Iranian economy has not shown negative growth rates in 2021-2022. At the same time, the government did not do enough to solve the economic problems of the population.


Table 1: Iran's economic performance indicators in 2010-2023 Sources: World Bank, Central Bank of Iran, Parliament of Iran. The 2022 and 2023 data and the 2021-2023 oil indicators are estimated

In 2021 and early 2022, President-elect Ebrahim Raisi's actions in the economic sphere were leisurely and inert. This was largely due to the fact that the new ruler did not have much experience in managing the economy - he had built his career in the judiciary. Raisi's entire managerial career was limited to three years (2016-2019), which he spent at the head of a major religious foundation, Astan-e Quds Razavi. Judging by his statements, he tried to avoid innovation, focusing on the experience of his predecessors. In practice, this meant further implementation of the “resistance economy” model based on the principle of partial self-sufficiency. Raisi's economic program was built on populist statements: he was rightly concerned about unemployment, corruption, environmental problems. However, he had no clear action plan or new ideas for real solutions to the problems.

Raisi failed to assemble a strong economic team of like-minded people in his government. In the mid-summer of 2022, the Iranian press reported on a dispute between Vice President for Economic Affairs Mohsen Rezaei and Minister of Economy Ehsan Khandouzi over the interbank interest rate. The Ministry of Economy asked the Central Bank to lower the interbank interest rate, while the Vice President for Economic Affairs insisted that the interest rate should not be lowered because of high inflation. Such a dispute was far from the only one within the economic bloc. As a result, the ongoing contradictions within the team delayed the implementation of the necessary measures.


Protests in Iran twitter.com/AnisaEftekhari

The difficult situation in the global oil and gas markets and the election of U.S. President Joe Biden in early 2021 did not help the Iranian economy either. Unlike his predecessor Donald Trump, Biden has not been as tough on enforcing the oil embargo imposed on Iran. At the same time, Tehran itself had already developed a scheme to circumvent the sanctions by bringing some of its oil to the world market. Rising oil prices and the fact that exports ensured an almost positive trade balance allowed Iran to generate additional revenues, which it was actively spending to maintain the political regime (see Table 1). This provided an opportunity for Raisi to reconsider his approaches to resolving the issue of the Iranian nuclear program. Despite initial expectations that Tehran would try to conclude a new agreement with international negotiators as soon as possible in order to relieve the sanctions pressure, it did not happen. On the contrary, the president's team chose a strategy of protracted negotiations.

Unlike Trump, Biden has not been as tough on enforcing the oil embargo imposed on Iran

At least a partial easing of sanctions pressure would have moved the Iranian resistance economy from survival to partial growth. This would not mean an immediate improvement of socio-economic indicators, but the lifting of sanctions would have had at least an indirect positive effect on them.

Change “from on high” did not work

By late spring 2022, Raisi put forward a plan for economic transformation that implied significant reform of the subsidy system. Iran abolished the subsidized exchange rate of the Iranian currency against the U.S. dollar, which had been used to buy and import essential goods. Targeted direct payments to the people were also attempted. Iran's population was divided into ten income groups, from the poorest to the richest. The first three low-income categories received a monthly amount of 4 million Iranian rials ($13.5 at the free market exchange rate), while middle-income Iranians in categories 4-9 received 3 million Iranian rials ($10.1). Those in the richest, 10th income group received no payments. Raisi said the money would be paid over two summer months before being replaced by an “e-coupon” system.

The economic reform plan was full of critical flaws, which served as another catalyst for the protests. The abolition of the special dollar exchange rate helped eliminate one source of corruption and embezzlement, but inevitably pushed up consumer prices of imported goods. The decision to restructure the payment of direct subsidies eased the burden on the budget in the long run, but accelerated the growth of inflation. No alternative mechanisms to curb inflation were proposed. On the contrary, the government steadily reduced the annual volume of issued bonds in the absence of demand, while private investment in the Iranian economy shrank under the pressure of public distrust of the government's economic policies. In different circumstances, both factors could have helped absorb the excess liquidity.


Protest in Tehran

The banking sector, too, has found itself in a difficult situation. According to Iranian economists, high inflation and declining revenues have been spurring small businesses' need for more credit. The banks, on the contrary, are either denying financial support to businesses in these conditions, or setting maximum interest rates.

In addition, the very model of “resistance economy” chosen by the Iranian leadership, without amendments, is unsustainable in the long run. Its application was able to stabilize Iran after the initial shock of the sanctions imposed in 2010-12 and 2018. However, this model has failed to solve the problem of their negative impact on the very foundations of the Iranian economy. The sanctions have hit the Iranian economy's ability to effectively develop its production base, attract foreign investment, use long-term foreign bank loans, and enter new markets.

The deterioration of Iran's production base will inevitably become a major obstacle to the country's economic development and stable budget revenues. U.S. sanctions have been one of the main reasons for the slowdown in Iran's oil and gas sector. Since 2017, there has been no direct foreign investment in any of the country’s major hydrocarbon projects, which means that no new foreign technology has entered the oil sector. Moreover, sanctions have partially stalled the development of Iran's natural gas sector, leaving the country, with its vast natural gas resources, a small player in the international market.

Since 2017, there has been no direct foreign investment in any of Iran’s major hydrocarbon projects

The food and textile sectors also reduced production in 2019-2022. It affected the country's foreign trade: Iranian exports have been declining in both value and weight terms, while the trade balance (excluding oil and gas) has been steadily trending negative.

Social background

The inability of Iran's leadership to convert slow economic growth into social development is another long-term structural problem. Since the mid-2010s, the purchasing power and incomes of Iranian households have been steadily declining. Moreover, basic needs expenses have shrunk in favor of housing payments (Table 2). By 2022, 60 percent of the Iranian population was either slightly above or just below the poverty line. Meanwhile, 18.4% lived in absolute poverty.

Young women are the face of the current protests, as they represent two of the most vulnerable groups in Iranian society: women and youth.


Protest in Tehran after the death of Mahsa Amini twitter

Iranian economists estimate that the unemployment rate among women is 13%, and half as much among men (7.2%). These figures are twice as high among young people between the ages of 18 and 35. According to other data, 77% (7.1 million people) of 15 to 24-year-olds are unemployed (diagram 1). There are also gender inequalities in employment. For example, only one in five women participates in the economy.






Loss of faith and violation of tacit agreements

Economic and social problems in Iran have set the stage for the current protests, political reasons serving as a catalyst: the Iranian people are losing faith in the very idea of the Islamic Republic. The historically low turnout in the de facto organized presidential election of 2021 and the number of invalid ballots exceeding the number of votes cast for the other candidates were the first warning signal for the Iranian political system.



Protests in Iran twitter.com/AJEnglish


People reacted negatively to the government's idea of mopping up the electoral landscape to ensure Raisi's victory. His failed socio-economic policies only made matters worse, destroying hope even among those who still believed in the ability of the conservative camp to rectify the situation. Meanwhile, the failure of Raisi's predecessors from other movements to make improvements has raised the legitimate question of whether there are forces within the current political system capable of ensuring development and prosperity.

The conservatives have become hostage to their own slogans that after the 2021 presidential election, they were able to achieve unity between the Supreme Leader of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and all branches of the government. Now the government cannot use Iran's traditional political maneuvering, in which the president acted as a scapegoat whom Khamenei could blame for all the troubles and from whom he could demonstratively distance himself. Today, Raisi and Khamenei are perceived as a solid tandem. Which means that any attack on the president automatically means an attack on the Supreme Leader.

Today, Raisi and Khamenei are perceived as a strong tandem. Which means that any attack on the president automatically means an attack on the Supreme Leader

The final straw was Raisi's decision to deprive the Iranian population of the freedom for women not to wear a headscarf and to have “sinful pleasures” such as participating in noisy house parties, going to music nights in restaurants and consuming alcohol and drugs (both of which are officially forbidden in Iran). This was part of a tacit agreement between the people and the government: the population endured economic hardship but remained loyal in exchange for the right to ignore certain rules. Under the conservative Raisi, however, this arrangement, which served as a kind of safety valve, was broken, and with it the people's patience waned.

So far, the intensity of the protests suggests that Tehran will not be able to simply suppress them. Sooner or later, the Iranian political system will have to change. Moreover, the depth of the current discontent in Iranian society will not allow the political system to get by with minor transformations and reforms in the economic or political sphere alone.

Research Finds It May Be Too Late To Quell Iran Uprising


Young women protesting in Karaj, near Tehran on Nov. 3, 2022

Author: Iran International Newsroom
Iran Politics  Iran Protests

A think tank close to Iran's security council has concluded that protests over the years have become more serious and more frequent as grievances went unanswered.

The research conducted by the National Security Monitor magazine for its September-October 2022 issue, says the current uprising is pluralist, has major objectives to change the bigger picture in Iran, is cyberspace-based, and does not seem to be backed by any institution.

The magazine is believed to be close to the Islamic Republic's Supreme National Security Council.

The research further found that collective reactions to events relating to the protests spread quickly although there seems to be no formal organization and leadership for the movement.

Other findings of the research include the fact that the uprising aims to bring about fundamental changes in Iran's political establishment, is backed by various layers of socio-political groups while also enjoying wholehearted support from the Iranian opposition abroad.

The government policy of suppressing protests by force and then failing to address the underlying problems has led to a worsening situation after each round of unrest and today, it might have become too late to come to peace with the disgruntled masses.

The study also found that although previously major protests occurred almost once in every decade [like the protests by the student movement in 1999 and the post-election unrest in 2009],during the past five or six years the interval between various protests have become shorter and they have occurred every one or two years. Soon, major protests may take place in Iran once in every two to three months, the study predicted.

Protesters in the central city of Arak torch a motorcycle used by security forces. Oct. 29, 2022

The conclusions corroborate the attestations of individual social scientists and political activists who have generally attributed the protest in Iran to promises that have not been met for a long time and demands that have been ignored by several governments during the past 40 years.

Meanwhile the study also observed that the driving force behind the current movement are youngsters born after the second half of the 1990s. This part of the findings also corroborate with what Iranian sociologists and political activists have said or written during the past two months.

The main problem of the new generation appears to be lack of social freedoms within an Islamic system and general hopelessness about the future.

As this study and several Iranian sociologists have observed, the disillusioned new generation of Iranians is fed up with senseless and inefficient bureaucracy and at the same time does not believe in the outdated and meaningless ideology the Islamic Republic has been propagating during the past four decades.

Generally, according to this research, the current movement in Iran is marked by a generation gap, fluctuating at times between activism and mutiny, not being mainly about economic demands, changing mood between anger and hope, using opportunities provided by events, and a horizontal steering structure [lack of formal leadership].

Meanwhile, according to the study the way the Iranian government has been handling the protests have not changed during the past four decade. It is common knowledge that the government's first and only solution to any crisis like the current uprising is handling it violently. At times, such as during the protests against rising fuel prices in 2019, Iranian government forces have killed hundreds to silence uprisings. But this way of handling crises, coupled with failure to address systemic problems is only a temporary solution and protests flare up as soon as another event triggers a new round of protests. What triggered the current wave of protests in Iran was the murder of a young woman in mid-September while she was in morality police custody.

Veils are burning and the regime is cracking down. What is the endgame for the protests in Iran?

From a brutal crackdown to civil war, an expert looks at scenarios for how a current wave of protests might unfold.

Iranian protesters march down a street in Tehran, Iran, on Oct. 1.
Contributor/Getty Images

Roxane Farmanfarmaian
Special Contributor
November 22, 2022

It’s been more than two months. There are daily protests against the regime in Iran in several parts of the country and daily reminders of the regime’s brutality. There is a steady stream of condemnation from the rest of the world and a steady stream of invective from Iran’s leaders.

Increasingly, as the anger rages and the regime shows no sign of giving in, the question in Iran is: How — and when — will it end?

The protests were triggered by the news that Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, had died in police custody. She had been arrested just days prior for not properly wearing her headscarf. As Grid has reported, what began as a protest about Amini has grown to include more general demands for women’s rights. In some cases, protesters have taken things far further — calling for an end to the rule of Iran’s supreme leader.

Meanwhile, all across Iran, individual acts of public disobedience have gone mainstream. Women are walking bareheaded in the streets, burning their hijabs and cutting their hair in a symbolic denunciation of the regime. Images of turbans being flipped off the heads of Iranian clerics have gone viral. Athletic teams are refusing to sing the national anthem — most recently Iran’s national team, at Monday’s World Cup match against England. And disparate ethnic groups — the Kurds in the northwest and the Baluchis in the southeast, who have been harassed for decades by the regime — are making common cause, issuing statements of support for one another and solidarity with the protesters.

Yet the regime shows no sign of buckling or relenting in any way. Its security forces fire live ammunition in the streets. Nearly every day, the number of dead rises. The latest count by the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group stands at more than 340 dead, 43 of them children. Journalists, filmmakers, actors, singers and athletes have been seized, the internet has been tightly restricted, and thousands of demonstrators have been arrested, among them a number of teenagers who have already been sentenced to death.

With no signs of compromise evident on either side, what are the potential endgames in Iran?

Scenario 1: crackdown

There have been ample signs that a large-scale crackdown may be coming.

With a decisive majority, the Majles, or parliament, voted last month to teach the protesters a “hard lesson,” comparing them to ISIS terrorists. Some 14,000 protesters are in custody, according to the Hrana news agency, many of whom have been seen on video being beaten and bundled into police cars.

It’s not clear what was meant by “hard lesson,” and few believe the regime would carry out anything like that scale of executions. The government maintains that many of the detainees have been released. But the regime has already indicted more than 100 of those under arrest, and the judiciary has fast-tracked public trials, which can carry the death penalty. Five protesters have been given death sentences.

And yet thus far, the government’s retaliation, though harsh and often lethal, hasn’t approached the levels of brutality seen in past uprisings. The motorcycle brigades wielding long-bladed knives against tightly packed demonstrators, so effective against the 2009 Green Movement, haven’t been in evidence this time.

Why hasn’t the crackdown been harsher?

One answer probably involves the fact that women and schoolgirls are at the forefront of so many of the demonstrations. For that reason alone, the regime may have made a calculation that the most brutal option was more difficult this time around. Initially at least, the police did not use assault rifles, although more recently videos on social media have shown them using shotguns to fire directly into the crowds.

Another explanation has to do with the sheer breadth of the movement. Demonstrations have erupted in more than 230 cities and towns across the country, in many cases as pop-up gatherings of a few hundred or a few thousand protesters, rather than the organized millions that filled cities in the past. That has made blanket police control more challenging.

Increasingly, Iranian police are using high-tech surveillance to get around the problem. According to parliamentarian Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, Chinese companies have installed millions of cameras capable of facial recognition in more than 20 Iranian cities across Iran. The cameras link to biometric data on identity cards that all Iranians must carry, making it easy for the authorities to find and arrest protesters without confronting them in the streets.

An Iranian political observer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal indicated there was another, more insidious reason the crackdown had been lighter than in the past. The security services, she said, were preparing for the long haul, and holding younger recruits back until they are needed for a more forceful response. A leaked tape circulated on social media suggested military planners were worried the rookies didn’t have the stomach to attack the mothers and girls protesting in their neighborhoods and, therefore, should be kept in reserve. It may also be that a historical memory is influencing the security services’ current tactics. In the revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979, demonstrators appealed to young soldiers to join them, placing flowers in the barrels of their guns; a video currently circulating on social media, showing women handing out red flowers in Tehran to security forces, indicates the protesters are using this tactic again.

Precedent suggests a bigger crackdown is likely at some point. The Islamic Republic has no history of compromise on such matters and has only grown more rigid over time. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has stated categorically that until the country returns to stability and security, there can be no progress. And he and other leaders have made it clear that if the demonstrators don’t stop, they will continue to condemn them as foreign stooges, tools of the U.S. and Israel, and then use the force necessary to dismantle them.

Scenario 2: The protests peter out

In some ways, the protesters have achieved what they wanted. Women all over the country now walk the streets without veils, jog in parks and eat in cafes with men who are not blood relatives. All three activities are against the law, punishable by severe fines or detention, and yet in many places they are going unpunished. For these reasons, some protesters argue that the war has been won and that it would be irresponsible to risk more lives for the sake of other goals.

One problem for the protesters involves a kind of “mission creep” within the movement. While calls to remove the mandatory hijab rule have been popular, fewer Iranians support the demands for regime change. Surveys generally show that only 34 percent of the population support a secular republic, while 28 percent still support an Islamic one; others say they aren’t sure. Iranian reformists, for example, who were behind the 2009 Green Movement and signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the nuclear deal) under former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, believe in change from within and don’t condone a separation of church and state.

What is clear is that since the protests gained steam, attitudes among the population have been shifting. Satisfaction with the ultraconservative Raisi has dropped from 75 percent last year to under 20 percent now, with women expressing the highest rates of dissatisfaction. More than 50 percent of Iranians say they support street demonstrations and civil disobedience in the name of fighting corruption and improving the economy; it’s not clear they want the system overthrown.

Mother Nature may also play a role in the immediate future of the protest movement. Iran’s winters are brutal — snowy, icy and cold — and in many parts of the world and many moments in history, nasty weather has been a deterrent to protest. Things may calm or peter out simply because of the whims of an Iranian winter.

The most compelling argument against a long, drawn-out protest, however, involves the movement’s lack of leadership and organization. Ironically, it’s also part of the reason why it’s hard for the regime to snuff out the protests; there’s no obvious standard-bearer and no headquarters to shut down. Several Iranian analysts, having observed the failures of the leaderless Arab Spring, note that unless the movement develops a clear plan to take power, its decentralized nature may ultimately be its undoing.

Not surprisingly, supporters of the protests disagree. And there are some signs of a loose organization taking shape among youth and activist groups. A recent call for fresh protests was issued from seven cities, representing every part of Iran, each using the same language. “We will start from high schools, universities and markets,” the messages read, “and continue with neighborhood-centered gatherings and then move to the main city squares.”

Given how quickly the protest movement has grown and spread, it’s hard to imagine it will fade away completely and permanently. Instead, the movement may go into hibernation, only to regroup and rise again.

Scenario 3: civil war

So far, the protests have been an internal movement led by Iranians in Iran. No outsiders have been involved. But the diverse ethnic makeup of the country, its religious complexity and the deep ideological divisions between those in power and those in the streets could, with outside interference, devolve into a brutal civil war.

It’s a scenario some observers think is inevitable. So many players over the years, both inside and outside Iran, have advocated for regime change. Now they may see their chance.

Already, arms smuggling to anti-regime elements in the southern oil-rich province of Khuzestan has picked up since the protests began. Long viewed by Iran’s neighbors as a prize ripe for picking, Khuzestan has a large Sunni Arab population with a reputation for restlessness. Saudi and Israeli clandestine funding is supporting separatist movements in the region, according to European court documents. Israel and Saudi Arabia have made no secret of the fact that they would welcome a different government in Tehran.

Then there are the opposition groups outside the country that have spent years offering alternative scenarios for governing Iran, and which may now see a chance to put them into action. These include monarchists, who back the former crown prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, currently living in exile in the United States. Pahlavi nostalgia is high among the successful diaspora living in Los Angeles, and the prince enjoys a following inside Iran, with some calling for the return of the monarchy during demonstrations in 2019.

An utterly different group, the MEK or People’s Mojahedin, is another significant opposition force with activists both inside and outside Iran. Also known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the MEK is a cult-like militia that the U.S. and U.K. governments once branded as terrorists but now view as a useful group to work with. The MEK became best known for leaking Iran’s nuclear plans in 1992 and for its effective lobbying during the Trump years, when aides to then-President Donald Trump, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton, viewed the group as the best alternative to the Islamic Republic.

Viscerally opposed to each other, the monarchists and the MEK both have access to funds as well as to officials in the U.S. and Europe.

Should any of these players get involved with local groups that see the protests as only the first step in a bigger fight, it could ignite a nasty conflict inside Iran.

A clash this weekend in the Iranian Kurdish town of Mahabad gave a hint of what might lie ahead. Riot police drove tanks into the city center and fired at demonstrators, according to eyewitness accounts, prompting Secretary of State Antony Blinken to condemn Iran’s escalating violence. The regime denied responsibility; and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the backbone of the country’s security system, said, “Those who want to dismantle the country are aiming to incite a civil war.” The IRGC is already blaming foreign interference for some of the bloodshed.

So far, the demonstrators have not been seen carrying arms. But Bolton said on BBC Persian over the weekend that arms are being smuggled across the Kurdish border, headed for what he referred to only as “the opposition.”

If that does happen — and handguns and rifles arrive in growing quantities across the borders, then the protests led by young women swinging their hair could be just the first act of a far more significant upheaval in Iran. And if a next act features armed groups, a civil war could turn the country into an inferno.

Scenario 4: wild card — an ailing supreme leader

The protests are coming at an awkward moment for the ruling elite. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most powerful figure in Iran, is 82 years old and rumored to have cancer. Behind the scenes, a competition for succession is already in full swing. Khamenei’s death would unsettle an already tense and dangerous situation.

No obvious leader to Khamenei has emerged, and the likely candidates — Raisi and Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the supreme leader — are both unpopular. Furthermore, according to the Iranian constitution’s requirements, they are also both unqualified. Neither has the religious credentials necessary to lead the Islamic “ummah” or community, and Mojtaba has not filled the requirement of serving in public office. Meanwhile, the idea of hereditary succession is anathema to many of the powerful clerics, who want no whiff of monarchical tradition to reassert itself under the umbrella of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian people don’t like the idea either; in a recent survey, 78 percent of the population opposed hereditary succession. Yet over the three decades he has been leader, Khamenei has ousted his critics and surrounded himself with politically like-minded ultra-hardliners. His handpicked successor, regardless of qualifications, will likely be the one ultimately chosen.

While Khamenei is still alive, the protesters’ demands to terminate the Islamic Republic and remove the supreme leader are putting pressure on the clerics to act. They need to find a solution to the turmoil in the streets, but equally important, they must strengthen their hand against the Revolutionary Guard, which is increasingly threatening their control.

That’s because the Revolutionary Guard is the heavyweight in this brawl, the fiercest of Iran’s security forces, and a group that sees opportunity in capitalizing on the unrest to tighten its hold over the regime. If Khamenei were to die, the Revolutionary Guard would impose a curfew, send tanks into the streets, and ensure the government didn’t devolve into chaos.

Khamenei has always said that a smooth transition would be important to his legacy. One option would be the appointment of a council that would include hard-liners, reformists and other representatives; but the Revolutionary Guard might just seize power and appoint a figurehead as supreme leader, someone to rubber-stamp the the Revolutionary Guard’s rule. That would almost certainly spark a messy and perhaps violent period of transition.

Of course the protesters will also see opportunity in the death of the supreme leader — an opportunity to push their demands and appeal to the international community to help them change Iran’s trajectory. And the hope for Iranians is that with a population that is 96 percent literate, and which has for decades experienced the pitfalls of bad leadership and bad management, the protesters may now be able to win some of those demands. It is no small thing that these peaceful demonstrations have now touched every corner of the country, supported by men but led by women — and that fact alone gives rise to the hope that what ensues is not a bloodbath but a new form of inclusive peace and democracy. The outside world would help by lifting many of the punishing sanctions against the country.

In this scenario, the bravery of those standing up to the regime and their insistence on peace, rather than violence, could transform that hope into a blueprint for a new form of government.

It may be a long shot.

But it is possible.

Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.

Roxane Farmanfarmaian
Special Contributor
Roxane Farmanfarmaian is director of international studies and global politics at the University of Cambridge Institute for Continuing Education and a senior research fellow at King’s College London.

FASCIST ECONOMICS IS KRIMINAL KAPITALI$M

EU anti-fraud agency reports irregularities in the management of 11 million EU funds in Hungary

Story by Daniel Stewart •  News 360

The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) on Wednesday urged the European Commission to recover nearly 11 million euros of European funds that Hungary used to finance a regional waste management system that, far from having a positive impact on the environment, led to serious problems, including fires and dangerous emissions.


Archive - Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary - Christoph Soeder/dpa

The European anti-fraud agency's wake-up call comes in the midst of a debate within the EU over the freezing of funds to Viktor Orban's government over problems of fraud and corruption with the use of EU resources, a matter for which Brussels proposed freezing up to 7.5 billion euros in regional funds.

The decision, which falls on the 27, is on hold while waiting for the community services to re-evaluate whether Budapest has complied with the reforms it promised to avoid this sanction, since the country's authorities had until November 19 to approve and implement the necessary legislative changes.

In any case, the irregularities detected in the investigation by the European anti-fraud agency point to problems in four projects developed over several years, from "planning and design errors" to non-compliance with the established efficiency and environmental protection objectives.

"Problems with the projects led to several fires, with dangerous emissions and a very negative impact on air quality, as well as a terrible smell that has been a nuisance for the inhabitants of the surrounding municipalities for years," OLAF's director general, Ville Itälä, said in a statement.

According to European experts, the projects included the installation of a mechanical-biological waste treatment unit for the production of biofuels, which would then be sold for energy production.

However, due to the poor quality of the fuels much of the production did not find an outlet after treatment and remained in the waste management plant, which later led to two serious fires, the first of which destroyed the EU-funded infrastructure, although the operator later rebuilt it at its own expense.

Another irregularity points to the fact that after the fires and other frequent breakdowns of the available technology led to the destruction of large quantities of biological waste in the same repository without having been previously treated accordingly.

OLAF's analysis also indicates that there were social demonstrations protesting the incidents to the point that the project manager finally decided not to use the treatment plant any more and chose to transport about 60% of the communal waste to another location, contrary to the project's objectives.

Politico: Viktor Orban has taken the EU hostage

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken the EU hostage, essentially demanding billions in exchange for lifting a veto on everything from aid to Ukraine to a global corporate tax deal, Politico writes.

Hungary as a member deserved billions of euros from EU funds, he said. But Brussels has refrained from giving because of concerns about Budapest eroding democratic values, insisting that Hungary make some changes first.

Now both sides are moving toward an agreement: The EU is expected to unblock the money soon after Hungary promised a series of reforms. EU leaders insist that the amendments will reverse the country's declining democratic norms and better protect the bloc's money from falling into the hands of corrupt individuals. Budapest insists that it sincerely delivers on its promise.

Orban is blocking some of the EU's most pressing initiatives, including an urgent €18 billion aid package for Ukraine and a worldwide deal to set a minimum corporate tax rate. His gambit? Getting Brussels to hand over EU money to Budapest.

"This is blackmail, pure and simple," said an EU diplomat.

The stakes are high. In a no-deal scenario, Brussels risks losing face if it can't give Kiev the aid it promised or accept the global tax agreement it advocated. EU officials also do not want to push the Hungarian economy to its limits and do not want to be seen as exacerbating divisions while a war rages nearby.

EU affairs ministers are set to discuss the rule of law in Hungary at a meeting in Brussels on Friday, and their finance counterparts will formally decide whether to allocate money on Dec. 6. But the end result already seems prearranged.

18.11.2022

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Justice Department files charges in alleged $90 million timeshare fraud scheme

Story by Sylvan Lane • Yesterday 

The Justice Department on Tuesday sued five individuals and 11 firms allegedly behind a timeshare fraud scheme that scored more than $90 million from victims.


Justice Department files charges in alleged $90 million timeshare fraud scheme© Provided by The Hill

The suit, filed on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Wisconsin attorney general, accuses the defendants of pressuring customers into buying timeshare exit services without delivering on their promises.

The defendants allegedly promised to help customers cancel their timeshare contracts, claimed fake affiliations with major timeshare companies and warned that potential clients could end up in deep debt without their services. The firms, however, typically failed to cancel the contracts and rarely, if ever, issued promised refunds to customers.

“The defendants used scare tactics and high-pressure sales pitches to coerce seniors into forking over thousands of dollars for timeshare exit services they didn’t deliver,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a Tuesday statement.

The suit accuses the 16 defendants of violating the FTC Act’s ban on “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” and Wisconsin state regulations on direct marketing and fraudulent representation in business. The suit, however, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, where the alleged scam ring was based.

The defendants allegedly targeted potential customers with timeshare contracts, usually seniors, through mail advertisements for sales seminars. During the seminars, the defendants allegedly claimed that they were one of few “authorized” timeshare cancellation companies and the only way to avoid being stuck with a timeshare forever, according to the complaint.

The defendants then asked the potential customers for steep one-time payments in order to break their timeshare contracts while promising to refund their money if they failed to free them from the timeshare, according to the complaint. But the defendants “typically [did] not succeed” in canceling the timeshares and “seldom [made] good on their promise to refund consumers’ fees,” the complaint read.

More than 50,000 people have died on migration routes around the world since 2014

More than 50,000 people have lost their lives while attempting to migrate to other countries since 2014, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which only takes into account "documented" deaths.


Archive - Migrants located in the Nigerian region of Agadez - OIM

More than half of the deaths have Europe as their setting or target, to the extent that at least 25,104 migrants have died in Mediterranean waters alone. These European routes also top the list in terms of missing persons, with the remains of 16,032 migrants reportedly lost in the Mediterranean.

Africa is the second region with the most deaths - over 9,000, although experts assume this is only a small proportion of the total - while the Americas are in third place. Nearly 7,000 deaths have been recorded in the Americas, almost 4,700 of them on routes leading to the United States.

One of the major gaps in data collection is the clarification of the origin of the migrant, since in more than 30,000 cases there is no known nationality. Of the nationalities that are known, more than 9,000 correspond to African countries, more than 6,500 to Asians and some 3,000 to Americans, according to this study, which establishes Afghanistan, Syria and Burma as the main senders.

One of the authors of the report, Julia Black, lamented that, despite the evidence of the data, "very little has been done to address the consequences of these tragedies, let alone prevent them." "Regardless of the reasons that drive these people to move, no one deserves to die in search of a better life," she warned.

MANITOBA

Faculty reports BU for gaps in health and safety rules
Yesterday .


A series of safety incidents involving staff members at Brandon University and the absence of workplace protocols on how exactly to address them have sparked concern among academics.

Last week, faculty association executives informed members they had reported their employer to provincial authorities because of “a significant gap” in the university’s health and safety framework.

“This situation is no longer tenable, nor is it tolerable,” union leaders wrote in a mass email Nov. 17.

Manitoba labour laws require certain workplaces, including public schools and post-secondary institutions, to assess job-related safety risks and enforce a violence prevention policy.

BU does not currently have a specific policy on violence prevention, which is in contradiction to the Workplace Safety and Health Act.

“I was shocked… There’s nowhere that I can go look for something like that; it doesn’t exist,” said faculty association president Gautam Srivastava.

Srivastava said senior administrators have not moved fast enough to enact a policy after they conducted a “gap analysis” of school codes and procedures in the spring of 2021.

There have been several recent incidents during which academics have disclosed they have been subject to a threat of violence from a community member or colleague, he said, noting the union has been pressing administrators to develop a policy for roughly 16 months because accountability is severely lacking at present.

“Without the process and the policy, the union really doesn’t have a place to file a grievance or investigate (the university’s handling of employee allegations of violence),” he added.

Academics and instructors of all kinds typically bring their workplace violence concerns to the union, and it connects them with both a union representative and the human resources department. An “ad hoc process” is then set-up to address a situation, the union leader said.

Srivastava declined to provide details on specific safety incidents, citing member privacy, but he shared some of the situations are ongoing.

A freedom of information request filed by the Free Press indicates Brandon University has been growing its network of panic switches in recent terms.

Thirty-three panic buttons or switches were installed on the campus over the last five academic years. There are 40 active switches in total.

The university reported each device installed between the fall of 2017 and spring 2022 is in an office for “general security reasons.”

When a device is activated, it sends a signal to a monitoring company that facilitates a response — a system that costs approximately $5,000 to maintain annually, per BU.

While Srivastava touted the growing prevalence of this infrastructure, which he indicated is often installed upon employee request, he said a specific policy should determine when the measure and related ones are necessary.

University communications director Grant Hamilton said BU has a wide variety of overlapping policies that deal with appropriate behaviour on school grounds.

“We have developed a standalone violence prevention policy, and have a full draft that is ready for approval. This policy will streamline and help guide our response to any incidents of violence,” Hamilton said in an email.

The document is expected to be presented at the president’s advisory committee Nov. 30, and discussed at the board of governors table in the new year, he said.

The latter group has to approve the policy before it comes into effect.

A spokesperson for Manitoba Workplace Safety and Health confirmed the province received a tip pertaining to violence prevention at BU last week, and an officer has been assigned to probe the matter and ensure a policy is in place.

Maggie Macintosh, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Winnipeg Free Press

CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPITALI$M

Miami-Dade asks for right to remove FTX name from Heat arena

Yesterday 

MIAMI (AP) — Miami-Dade County has asked a federal bankruptcy court for immediate permission to end its naming rights deal with FTX and strip that brand off the arena where the NBA's Miami Heat play.


Miami-Dade asks for right to remove FTX name from Heat arena© Provided by The Canadian Press

In a motion filed Tuesday, the county — which owns the arena and negotiated the naming rights deal with FTX — said continuing to refer to the building as FTX Arena will only add to the “enduring hardships” brought on by the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange.

“It does not appear that the Debtor will suffer harm from a termination of the Naming Rights Agreement," the county wrote in its motion. “On the other hand, Miami-Dade County continues to supply valuable marquee naming rights and other benefits to the Debtor, to the detriment of the County’s ability to seek a new naming partner for the Arena."

A hearing is set for mid-December. For now, FTX signage remains on the building and its name has not been changed.

Tuesday's motion was hardly unexpected. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and the county and the Heat began the process of terminating their relationship with the company that same day.

Related video: Miami Fines FTX $16.5M for Cancelling Arena Sponsorship

Duration 6:03  View on Watch

The FTX collapse has no shortage of ties to the sports world. A number of athletes — Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry, tennis player Naomi Osaka and Heat forward Udonis Haslem among them — were named as defendants last week in a class-action lawsuit against FTX. The suit argues that their celebrity status made them culpable for promoting the firm’s failed business model.

FTX entered into a number of other sports-related deals, including with Mercedes for Formula One racing and a sponsorship deal with Major League Baseball — whose umpires wore the company’s logo this past season. Mercedes has already taken the FTX logo off its race cars.

The building in Miami had been called FTX Arena since June 2021, and a 19-year, $135 million sponsorship agreement between FTX and the county was just getting started. FTX's next payment due to the county is $5.5 million on Jan. 1.

The Heat were to receive $2 million annually as part of the deal.

FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, though it ended up with billions of dollars worth of losses before seeking bankruptcy protection. The Bahamas-based company and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, are under investigation by state and federal authorities for allegedly investing depositors' funds in ventures without their approval.

___

More AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Tim Reynolds, The Associated Press

FTX spent £250m on property in Bahamas: Founder accused of running crypto exchange as his 'personal fiefdom'

By HUGO DUNCAN FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22 November 2022

Stricken crypto exchange FTX was run as a ‘personal fiefdom’ of founder Sam Bankman-Fried and spent £250million on property in the Bahamas, a court heard yesterday.

At a bankruptcy hearing in Delaware following the collapse of the £27billion company this month, a lawyer for FTX said the property empire was largely made up of homes and holiday houses for senior staff.

The revelations came just hours after Reuters reported that FTX, senior executives and Bankman-Fried’s parents bought at least 19 properties worth £100million in the Bahamas in the past two years alone.

Personal fiefdom: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, (pictured) is at the centre of one of the most stunning financial failures in history

FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges where users buy and sell digital currencies, imploded this month.

It has left an estimated 1m creditors facing losses of billions of pounds – with its 50 biggest customers owed more than £52million on average. Some 8pc of FTX users were based in the UK, suggesting 80,000 Britons have lost out.

‘We have witnessed one of the most abrupt and difficult collapses in the history of corporate America,’ James Bromley, a partner at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, told the court.

He said the bankruptcy proceedings ‘allowed everyone for the first time to see under the covers and recognise the emperor had no clothes’.

The scandal is a humiliation for Bankman-Fried – the 30-year-old one-time crypto star known by his initials SBF now at the centre of one of the most stunning financial failures in history.

A Bizarre Fairy Tale: The Story Behind Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison

By Jeffrey Gogo 23 November 2022, 
Updated by Kyle Baird23 November 2022, 

In BriefThe SBF-Ellison love affair raises psychological questions on how this might have fed into the collapse of FTX.

A psychologist argues the fall of FTX was not about money but the "addictively powerful chance to beat the system."

Bankman-Fried and Ellison may have set out to commit crime using charity as a cover.



Crypto swingman Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) presided over the FTX exchange at the time of its collapse, allegedly sinking $32 billion in user funds. While the contours of the fall are yet to settle, FTX’s catastrophic collapse has set off massive contagion in the crypto ecosystem.

Spotlight has now extended from SBF to Ellison, who authorized risky bets with customer funds as co-CEO of FTX’s sister firm, Alameda. Bankman-Fried and Ellison had much more in common than prodigious MIT nerdery.

SBF recently confessed to a boardroom romance with Ellison in the New York Times, saying they were no longer together. A Tumblr post by Ellison, while potentially sarcastic, says her experience of polyamory convinced her “everyone should have a ranking of their partners.”

She believes that “people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.”
FTX: Voyeuristic geniuses addicted to power

The perspective took a voyeuristic turn in a CoinDesk report. It claimed that SBF and Ellison, along with 10 roommates, were intimately involved. But more importantly, it raises psychological questions on how all this fed into the collapse of FTX.

“Psychologically, motivations behind committing a crime such as financial fraud varies and we need to dissect the unfolding situation from a systemic perspective,” psychologist Nadja Bester told BeInCrypto.

She continued:
“Since Bankman-Fried and Ellison are both from educated, higher-income childhood homes, one might consider that the wilful actions leading to the downfall of FTX and Alameda were likely less about financial need than the addictively powerful chance to opportunistically beat the system.”

It’s “a system that positioned them as powerful creationary players due to the scale and influence of their companies’ industry involvement,” added Bester. She is currently writing a book about the psychological drivers operating within the web3 industry.

The idea of a convertible boardroom with risk-driven and mutually intimate executives gels uncannily with Ellison’s view of fiercely competitive polyamory.

A quiet polymath daughter of MIT economics professors, Caroline Ellison became immersed in conventional learning early enough to be bored by the time she got to college.

She dabbled in fringe ethics of the evolutionary sort. This ensured that her corner would not be entirely deserted after her fall from grace. Far-right micro-bloggers who buy into Ellison’s race science and imperialism posts from college have emerged as her overnight loyalists.

According to a recent Forbes report, “some of her defenders, who call her ‘Queen Caroline,’ are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling.” They think Ellison was the ‘fall person.’

In addition, they claim that former co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who they derisively call ‘Sam Tabasco,’ is “behind Alameda’s implosion.”

Organized crime behind effective altruism

Bester also commented that Bankman-Fried and Ellison might have set out to commit crimes using charity as a cover.

“If we consider historical examples of dangerous couples – whether violent or large-scale corporate crime – a clear pathological thread runs through relationships that negatively impact the safeguarding of local or international communities,” she explained.

“While the FTX fall-out has been touted by some as the result of an inexperienced executive team, architecting a crime of this magnitude is far more indicative of organized than disorganized criminal profiles.”

Bester, also co-founder of engage-to-earn investing platform AdLunam, said, “leveraging the philosophy of effective altruism as a Trojan horse to conceal their industry-crippling misdealings is but one such example.”

Continuing, Bester said:
“With limited insight into the respective CEOs’ inner mental and psychological workings, we can only speculate which deviations have led to the callous predatory behaviour with which Bankman Fried and Ellison [acted].”

In the unsigned college-era Tumblr blog, WorldOptimization, Caroline Ellison said, “the sexual revolution was a mistake.” Her opinion is that “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing careers.”

She also believes that there are “scientifically proven (and therefore apolitical) genetic differences between groups of humans.”

Ellison was well on her way to fulfilling her top “cute boy thing” of “controlling most major world governments.” Her on-and-off boyfriend SBF has ranked second on the financiers of the Democrats’ campaign in the last election.

Ellison’s affinity for risk may have become a tendency after her meeting with SBF when she was a Jane Street. The two immediately bonded around their mutual love of a George Soros-like philosophy called effective altruism.

“Over coffee in California, Sam Bankman-Fried…pitched her about joining Alameda, a new digital currency hedge fund he was working on that would exploit the differences in pricing for Bitcoin in different countries,” Forbes reports. “The exchange would help him toward his goal of ‘earning to give’ billions to charity.”

This is one of the pioneer philosophers of effective altruism. It preaches the gospel of using data to amass wealth for good, claims Will MacAskill.

MacAskill joined the Future Fund philanthropic arm of FTX but resigned last week.
Lover-gamblers

Recent events have put a wet blanket around lover-gamblers Ellison and SBF’s claim of effective altruism.

“Their whole goal was to maximize wealth,” a former Alameda employee told Forbes. “They never lived in a world where they weren’t risking a lot.”

And yet, Bankman-Fried has confessed to New York Times that he used the philosophy as a cover for speculative accumulation. His former girlfriend, Ellison, sarcastically renamed her blog “Fake Charity Nerd Girl.”

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried

The demise of FTX has been a huge setback for the crypto market. Even more so that it never fully recovered from the Terra collapse in May. There’s no way of measuring the extent of the damage. Is it possible that, in the future, crypto investors will prefer not to use crypto exchanges for keeping their assets?

“The possibility of this happening [has been] temporarily increased due to the FTX fallout,” Robert Quartly-Janeiro, chief strategy officer of crypto exchange Bitrue, told BeInCrypto.

He continued:
“More broadly, [this is] unlikely as crypto exchanges are the primary gateway through which investors get to enter the digital currency ecosystem. Investors with larger portfolios are likely to embrace more of self custody than hot wallet storages that crypto exchanges offer. Retail holders are more poised to keep assets on exchanges in the long run.”

Nadja Bester said the FTX debacle was a turning point in web3. It signaled that “the business world is in dire need of trustless tech rather than corruptible leaders who, at any given moment, could make the most disastrous of decisions for personal gain, at the expense of millions or even billions of people.”

SBF Letter to Staff: ‘Maybe Still a Chance to Save FTX’

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