Links - 21st September 2024 (2 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023: College Campuses)

Bizarre moment Suella Braverman is blanked after confronting masked pro-Gaza activists who set up camp at Cambridge - as US-style protests force university to move graduation ceremonies - "The former Home Secretary was filmed walking around the camp trying to engage with the protesters about what 'their message is'. In the clip Ms Braverman introduces herself to one group of three masked protesters and says she is 'keen to understand your views and what you are protesting about.' But when the camera pans around all three stand with their arms crossed staring blankly ahead, in complete silence. She presses on with a new group, who are all also masked, this time asking specific questions: 'What's your message to Israel? To Hamas? Do you think the hostages should be released now?' Yet again all her questions are met with blank stares and silence and she is forced to move on."
Clearly, the activists are brave and stunning and believe deeply in their cause and understand it greatly

$1M gone — Donors desert UWindsor after pro-Palestinian protester deal - "Large donors are abandoning the University of Windsor following its controversial deal with pro-Palestinian protesters — including business magnate and philanthropist Barry Zekelman, who withdrew a $1-million gift and future support. The Star has learned that once-faithful donors have withdrawn pledges to help, or stopped donating to, various initiatives, ranging from addressing the housing crisis to renovating the university’s law school.  Jay Kellerman, a prominent Toronto lawyer and UWindsor alumnus, has withdrawn a pledge to donate “tens of thousands of dollars” over time to the law school... Stephen Cheifetz, a Windsor lawyer and president of the Windsor Jewish Federation, also pulled funding for a law school bursary over the university’s encampment deal... The Star could not reach two other donors who reportedly withdrew donations."
On reddit, people were only talking about Zekelman and bashing him for being a Trump supporter. And that's how they continue subsisting in their delusions

Meme - Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby: "Breaking: The UW Madison SJP issues a threat against the Jewish community.   They state organisations such as Hillel and the Jewish Federation will be “treated accordingly” and students will be prohibited from "walking around our campus."   SJP is a modern day Hitler Youth."

Meme - David Frum: "The revolution will be catered"
The Post Millennial @TPostMillennial: "Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall: "It seems like you're saying, 'we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food'"

Campus Reform | Columbia University anti-Israel group says they're 'fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization' - "An anti-Israel group at Columbia University said they’re fighting to “eradicate” Western civilization.  Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Columbia University’s Bengali Student Association made the statement in an Instagram post discussing the uprising in Bangladesh.  ”We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an internationalist one-we are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people. We reject every genocidal, eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized,” the organizations wrote.  ”As the fascism ingrained in the American consciousness becomes ever more explicit and irrefutable, we seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South, who have been on the frontlines in the fight against tyranny and domination which undergird the imperialist world order,” they added."
Left wingers will pretend that these people are just criticising their country because they want to improve it, because they love it, when they openly proclaim that they want to destroy not just their country, but Western civilisation as a whole

Australian Jewish Association on X - "Student, Freya Leach bravely speaks at the University of Sydney. Terrorist-supporting students were cheering for the atrocities of Hamas and laughing. A Motion calling for the destruction of the Jewish state passed.  The University of Sydney has fallen. It is no longer safe for Jewish students.   The weakness of Vice-chancellor Mark Scott has caused this."

Judge rules Harvard must face lawsuit over antisemitism claims - "A federal judge told Harvard University it will have to face a lawsuit over claims it did not protect Jewish students against antisemitism. On Tuesday, Aug. 6, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns denied Harvard’s motion to dismiss the suit from six Jewish Harvard students."

Princeton Poised To Promote Professor Who Occupied Campus Building - "Princeton University is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests... The university has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees. Peralta already has tenure, but the promotion would make him eligible for university leadership roles, including deanships... The promotion comes as Princeton’s peer universities have taken a soft-on-crime approach to the unlawful and at times violent protests that have rocked campuses since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. The Harvard Corporation this month reversed its decision to withhold degrees from 11 students who led an encampment in Harvard yard, one of whom is a Rhodes Scholar set to attend Oxford University next year. Other schools, including Northwestern and Middlebury, ended their encampments by negotiating with protesters and acceding to many of their demands.  At Princeton, Peralta played a leading role in the most disruptive protest the campus had experienced in years. He and another professor, sociologist Ruha Benjamin, joined 13 students in occupying Clio Hall, the home of Princeton’s graduate school administration, as 200 additional protesters cheered them on from the outside.  Police eventually warned the occupiers that they would be arrested if they did not exit the building. Peralta and Benjamin did so, but the students did not.  After a chaotic effort to stop the police—at one point the crowd surrounded a bus where two of the protesters were being held—all 13 students were arrested while the professors who had encouraged them escaped without sanction...   A classicist who argues that "whiteness" is inseparable from classics, Peralta is perhaps Princeton’s most prominent scholar-activist.  He spearheaded a faculty letter in 2020 that called on the university to give minority professors extra pay and sabbatical time—compensation for their "invisible work," the letter said—and is a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which calls for an economic boycott of the Jewish state...   Unlike Harvard, which promised harsh sanctions before walking them back, Princeton was lenient from the get-go: A university spokeswoman announced in May that the students were unlikely to get more than probation."
At some points, universities are going to collapse under the weight of their excesses

Joanna Baron: Sorry, Palestine protestors. You can’t just hold universities hostage forever - "Justice Koehnen did not find that UofT had persuasively proven the worst of its insinuations against the encampment: he did not find there was evidence that the encampment was violent or antisemitic. There are reasons, though, to be skeptical of the judge’s conclusion. Guidelines posted at the entry to the encampment dictated that “All messaging should be pro-the right to resist,” which presumably encompasses the view that the October 7 pogroms were justified resistance. The encampment was also widely decorated with inverted red triangles, evoking target symbols from the Al-Qassam Brigades’ radar footage indicating a human target about to be killed, as well as signs exhorting Zionists to go back to Poland. The protestors posted an image of UofT’s Jewish president depicted with contorted, bloody hands, evoking blood libel tropes. None of these examples rely on hearsay evidence to prove. Justice Koehnen waved these disturbing incidents away by calling the protestors “young idealists,” but I’m not sure their arrogance and ignorance ought to be countenanced.   Conversely, the judge found that speech directly outside the perimeter of the encampment, and clearly connected to its spectacle, “no doubt” rose to the level of hate speech. A small sampling of comments accepted into evidence included “[w]e need another holocost [sic]” written in chalk on sidewalks, “Death to the Jews, Hamas for Prime Minister,” “Itbach El Yahod” (”slaughter the Jews”), and “You dirty f*cking Jew. Go back to Europe.” Even if none of these statements were attributable to encampment residents, as the judge found, it’s clear the encampment had become a moral hazard and the university properly had a reasonable basis to act to curtail it.   Ultimately, though, it was not the abhorrent speech that formed the basis for the decision. Justice Koehnen decided to grant UofT an injunction on the basis of property rights and under the ordinary statutory power of the Trespass to Property Act. Protestors, without lawful excuse or permission, appropriated the university’s front campus and prevented others from accessing it, whether for their own expressive purposes or simply to enjoy the beautiful enclosed green space surrounded by the majestic stones of Convocation Hall, Knox College, and University College in the centre of downtown Toronto that is King’s College Circle. Evidence showed that the protestors had implemented a gate marshal system whereby encampment representatives screened would-be visitors, asking them where they were from and how they heard about the encampment. This policy was allegedly to reduce the risk of altercations by screening out visitors who were judged to be adversarial, but UofT argued, and Justice Koehnen agreed, that this begged the question of why UofT could not enforce its own standards and rules to prevent violence on its own campus if a group of interlopers could. Indeed, permitting protestors to seize the front campus by some sort of adverse possession would set a precedent for allowing what Justice Koehnen called a “brutal free-for-all” where no principle could prevent a stronger group from coming and deciding to seize the area for themselves.   The protesters argued that the considerations under the Trespass Act did not apply where the property in question was public property or where there were free expression issues. The judge rejected both claims: UofT was the legal title holder of King’s College Circle, and no legal precedent could establish a claim where a court allowed someone to appropriate either public or private property for extended periods of time in order to exercise the rights of expression... In the current cycle of the culture wars, many progressives are clamouring for the Charter to apply to universities to cloak the pro-Palestine encampments in the rights to peaceful assembly and free speech, over and above whatever property rights or other functions of university space the institution might claim. Lawyers for the encampment called the university quad a “quintessentially public space.”... if he was wrong and the Charter did apply, the university’s request for an injunction constituted a reasonable limit on the protestors’ rights, particularly because the protestors were still permitted to gather and protest on campus freely, with the caveat of not protesting between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. and not occupying campus. And in any event, a Charter claim could not surpass a strong prima facie case of trespass.  Indeed, the encampment had the effect of undermining the free speech rights of everyone besides its residents. Justice Koehnen noted that the university “is not preventing the protestors from expressing their views on campus; it is preventing the protestors from silencing other voices on Front Campus.”...  the encampment’s righteous indignation hung like a spectre over the entire hearing, as though their cause and moral clarity should allow them to supersede property rights, reasonable limits on expression, the interests of others in the university community, and even the need for their fellow students to get some sleep."
Of course, the Freedom Convoy protests, which were in 100% public spaces, were unacceptable, because they threatened the left wing agenda

Michael Geist: The University of Windsor ends its pro-Palestine campus encampment—but violates antisemitism and academic freedom standards - "The University of Windsor recently reached an agreement with protesters in a campus encampment that raises serious concerns of antisemitism and infringement on academic freedom. While most universities across Canada were relying on the University of Toronto court ruling that the encampments were unlawful trespass in order to clear them, the University of Windsor instead reached an agreement that has sparked alarm among many groups.  Indeed, given evidence at the House of Common Justice committee of harassment, antisemitism, and hate speech on the Windsor campus, it is astonishing that the university has ignored those threats and instead concluded a discriminatory agreement that fuels fears that Jews are no longer welcome on campus.   There is much to criticize in the agreement, notably including one-sided political statements that sacrifice the university’s position as a neutral forum for discussion, debate, and learning. But it is the creation of unique double standards for Israeli institutional agreements when compared to other countries that constitutes a textbook example of antisemitism according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition that has been adopted by both the federal and Ontario governments... As Jeffrey Sachs notes in his informative X thread on the issue, the full list of current Windsor academic partnerships can be found here. The university has five active exchange partnerships with Chinese institutions alone. While some are on hold, does it plan to end all of the exchanges based on the standards it identifies? Does it plan to cancel its exchanges with Turkey or India, which have also faced concerns on some of these issues? Further, in considering whether to conclude or cancel an agreement, there is only one country that it now identifies as requiring specific United Nations-approved determinations: Israel. No other country faces similar requirements, a double standard that falls within the examples provided by the IHRA definition of antisemitism.   In addition to the institutional double standards, the agreement raises serious academic freedom concerns for both students and faculty. From a student perspective, the law faculty has featured social justice internships with multiple Israeli NGOs that serve Arab-Israeli communities, including Adalah, Al-Marsad, and ICAHD... The implications for faculty academic freedoms are potentially even more extensive"

China's state media support protests on US campuses but not at home - "State media in China, where social protest is strongly discouraged or punished, have been vocally supporting the pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses while decrying what they describe as a heavy-handed crackdown on free speech by authorities.   "Can blindly using violence to suppress students be able to quell domestic dissatisfaction with the government?" wrote Jun Zhengping Studio, a social media account operated by the News Broadcasting Center of the People's Liberation Army, in an April 26 commentary... Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying echoed that comment and implied the U.S. government was cracking down on protests at home while supporting protests abroad... Critics were quick to point out Beijing's double standard when Chinese state media backed U.S. college protesters.  Sean Haines, a British man who worked for Chinese state media from 2016 to 2019, told VOA that Chinese state media's extensive coverage of Western demonstrations is a consistent policy.  "At Xinhua, when we chose the running order for news, foreign protests were always promoted," he said, "especially if it was around election times. 'Look how scary foreign democracies are, aren't you glad China doesn't have this?'"  He said footage of protests is easy to find in places with a free press, such as the United States and the West, while there are almost no images of protests in China, a one-party authoritarian state where public demonstrations are quickly stopped.  "It's ironic." he said. "China is using [the] West's free speech, openness, right to protest — against itself."   Although Chinese authorities have not declared support for any side in the Israel-Hamas war, they were reluctant to condemn the militants' October attack and repeatedly blamed Israel and the U.S. for the conflict in Gaza.  At the same time, antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiments, including conspiracy theories, have been allowed on China's highly censored social media.   A popular claim is that U.S. support for Israel is not because of history and democratic values but because a Jewish cabal secretly controls U.S. politics and business."

Columbia staff removed from positions after mocking Jewish student concerns - "Three Columbia University staff members who had mocked the concerns of the Jewish student body in leaked text messages were permanently removed from their positions... Former vice dean and chief administrative officer Susan Chang-Kim, associate vice dean for student and family support Matthew Patashnick, and dean of undergraduate student life Cristen Kromm had been suspended in late June after an audience member had photographed their text message exchange at the May 31 “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present, and Future” panel"

'Racist': York University pro-Palestinian protesters demand president, administration resign - "Pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at York University’s Keele Campus Thursday where they accused the university’s president, Rhonda Lenton, and her administration of being “racist.” York Federation of Students Vice President of Campaigns & Advocacy, Somar Abuaziza, said “We have seen the extreme rise of anti-Palestinian racism on-campus in the last eight months. But these actions did not start in 2023. In fact, in 2019, the university allowed for the invitation of the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) on our campus.”"
Interesting. Other people literally existing is racist. This is the polar opposite of equally unhinged trans rhetoric about rejecting any of their demands meaning denying their existence

Opinion: Court's dismissal of antisemitism at U of T encampment a slap in the face - "Judge Koehnen admitted that, “There can be no doubt that some of the speech on the exterior of the encampment rises to the level of hate speech.” Among many examples, he cited comments like, “We need another holocost (sic),” “Death To the Jews, Hamas for Prime Minister” and “you dirty fu–ing Jew. Go back to Europe.’ ” Despite the encampment fostering this hate speech, the judge took a more sympathetic tone towards those occupying the encampment, stating that, “None of the named respondents and none of the encampment occupants have been associated with any of these statements.” Judge Koehnen claimed that the “automatic conclusion that those phrases are antisemitic is not justified.” He appeared to dismiss key antisemitic indicators, including “a photograph of the university president (who is Jewish), which was described as depicting the president as a devil with the caption ‘blood on your hands’ in bold letters beneath,” the “inverted triangle” which Hamas uses to mark its targets, along with the phrases “intifada,” “Free Palestine by any means necessary” and “From the river to the sea,” which is often condemned as a call for the genocide of the Jewish people."

Chris Selley: What's coming after the anti-Israel U of T encampment looks even worse - "the result must be somewhat bewildering for the university: If all it took to disperse this crowd was a court injunction, it becomes all the crazier that it took this long. (“We refuse to give the Toronto Police Service any opportunity to brutalize us,” encampment organizer Mohammed Yassin told reporters earlier in the afternoon, explaining their capitulation. “We are leaving on our own terms to protect our community from the violence the University of Toronto is clearly eager to unleash upon us.” You almost have to admire the chutzpah.) On the other hand, if the protesters are as good as their word, it’s possible the university will soon find itself looking back on the encampment with a degree of nostalgia. When I left the perhaps 500 former encampers and their hangers-on, they had occupied the intersection of Yonge and Bloor streets, having marched for 90 minutes west along College Street, north along St. George, and then east along Bloor. They blocked traffic and transit alike, with police clearing the road for them as they went — while being denounced as racists, naturally — and they vowed there was plenty more of it to come. ”This is not the end,” a protest leader bellowed through a microphone. “Let us be loud. Let us be disruptive. Let us be the nightmare that is in the mind of each one of these (university) administrators who refuse to (divest from Israel).” If the protesters were willing to obey the court’s ruling vis-à-vis King’s College Circle, they were just as eager to insist upon their right — affirmed both by the court and by the university — to protest during daylight hours without setting up camp... Marching in the heat and humidity of summer takes a lot more effort than sleeping in a tent, especially when the university that you utterly despise provides you with toilet facilities and deploys campus security against counter protesters . But if the protesters are true to their word, they could easily make life on campus miserable come September. And if they continue to take their protests off campus, it’ll be a problem for the city at large in a way it never was before... it was a terrible idea to issue deadlines and ultimatums to the encampers, and then not follow through on them. It was a terrible idea to provide the encampers with toilet facilities, while assuring the university community that this “in no way … negate(s) the university’s position that the encampment is unauthorized and constitutes trespass,” Except it does. Of course it does. It was a terrible idea to crack down on that attempted counter-protest encampment, explaining to the university community that it was “smaller,” and thus “on a scale that campus security personnel were able to peacefully remove it without the assistance of (police).” So the right to protest on campus via encampment is dictated by the size of the mob. That’s every bit as bad on principle as outright surrender."

McGill encampment refusing a planned fire inspection : r/montreal - "Why are people downvoting this post?"
"Every post that makes the protestors look in a negative light gets massively downvoted."

OCADU sued for $1M over alleged failure to protect Jewish students - "Kline among other Jewish students were "consistently met with catcalls and written expressions," such as "F–k you Jew," "F–k you Zionist" and "Jews deserve everything that is happening to them.""

FIRST READING: U.S. probes provide clues to where Canada's anti-Israel money is coming from - "a Canadian JVP representative was on Parliament Hill to deliver a press conference stating that the country’s network of pro-intifada campus encampments were not antisemitic. The Canadian branch of the Tides Foundation, notably, was also a key player in the years-long multi-million-dollar activist drive to land-lock Alberta oil. Comer’s letter to National SJP follows on a similar letter out of the U.S. Senate, in which Sen. Josh Hawley petitioned the U.S. Justice Department to probe the “illegal dark money” fuelling anti-Israel encampments on college campuses. “This is not just spontaneous student unrest. It is coordinated and funded by a powerful network of anti-Israel advocates,” wrote Hawley, adding that many of the groups funding the U.S. anti-Israel movement were in direct violation of the terms of their tax-exempt status. “No organization may retain its tax exemption if it backs protests at which members are urged to commit acts of civil disobedience,” he wrote. Similar rules exist in Canada. According to the Canada Revenue Agency, any Canadian organization risks losing its charitable status if it “furthers terrorism” or organizes “against Canadian public policy.”"
Big/foreign/dark money is only a problem when it hurts the left wing agenda

A Boston college blames pro-Palestinian student protests for lower enrollment - "In late April, Emerson students set up a pro-Palestine encampment in a public alley next to Boylston Street... over 100 protesters were arrested at Emerson when the police in riot gear moved in to dismantle the camp. According to the police, the protesters were breaking city ordinances that banned camping on public property... More and more Gen Zs no longer see the value in higher education. A 2023 survey of over 1,800 Americans by Business Insider and YouGov revealed that 46% of Gen Zs surveyed say they don't think college is worth the cost. Additionally, the availability of high-paying jobs that don't require a college degree has also prompted Gen Zs to rethink college. It doesn't help that tuition fees are so expensive that many college graduates find themselves saddled with student debt that they just can't escape."

dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ on X - "University of Toronto jihadists have surrounded a group of Jews with this chant: “Intifada revolution. There is only one solution. Intifada revolution.” If government doesn’t shut down these genocidal, criminal threats, does that mean it supports them?"
Kevin A. Bryan on X - "Followup for people saying "how do I know that many of U of T camp gang weren't students, but just older left folks"? Just look at the ages of the people in video (not mine) today, holding the "Red Review" socialist mag. Of course, students too! But not just "student protest"."

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

This also has yet another definition of wokeness, but this won't stop left wingers continuing to pretend that none of its critics can define wokeness.

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

"Liberals control institutions because they care more about politics, a disparity that grew larger around 2016. This makes attempts to use government (i.e., bureaucracy!) to take back the culture unlikely to succeed, at least in the short term.

What should conservatives do, then? I’m talking about the anti-woke portion of conservatism, which increasingly seems to be the most animated part of the movement. This post is not meant to be advice for gun people, abortion people, or low tax people; those parts of the right have figured out how to have influence and are doing relatively well.

The good news is that there can be an anti-wokeness agenda, just as easily as there is a low tax agenda and a pro-gun rights agenda. 

People have generally misunderstood wokeness as a purely cultural phenomenon. It does have a cultural component, of course, but it is important to also understand wokeness as something that has been law in the United States for the last half century.  

The triumph of this ideology over the last 10 years in public discourse is simply culture catching up to law...

I sympathize with critiques of “cancel culture” (or “PC” or “Cultural Marxism” or “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it). Yet it’s clear to me that the political movement devoted to fighting this ideological matrix is quite short on policy ideas.

This critique has been made mostly by leftists, with one amusing chart showing that, while the Democrats were passing the biggest stimulus bill in history, Fox News gave more airtime to the emasculation of Mr. Potato Head. The “cancelling” of Dr. Seuss led to a similarly hysterical reaction. 

If the left is going on about healthcare, for example, it’s usually because they want some new bill or policy. But it was difficult to see what those talking about Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head actually wanted...

You have a liberal pundit asking a conservative pundit whether those on his side have any plans or ideas regarding how to deal with the animating issue in their party. The conservative pundit responds “no, we really don’t have any ideas, and when I asked a Republican Senator whether he actually knew what to do, he admitted that he really doesn't. And it makes sense because his voters don’t really care either but want someone to say the right words.” 

Before proceeding, it is important to clarify what wokeness actually is. I’d argue it has 3 components:

1) A belief that any disparities in outcomes favoring whites over non-whites or men over women are caused by discrimination (Sometimes wokeness cares about other disparities too, like fat/nonfat, but those are given less attention. I’m putting aside LGBT issues, which seem to be at an earlier stage of wokeness in which the left is still mostly fighting battles regarding explicit differences in treatment rather than disparate outcomes, although the latter does get attention sometimes.) 

2) The speech of those who would argue against 1 needs to be restricted in the interest of overcoming such disparities, and the safety and emotional well-being of the victimized group in question.  

3) Bureaucracies are needed that reflect the beliefs in 1 and 2, working to overcome disparities and managing speech and social relations.Each of these things can be traced to law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race and gender. While most at the time thought this would simply remove explicit discrimination, and many of the proponents of the bill made that promise, courts and regulators expanded the concept of “non-discrimination” to mean almost anything that advantages one group over another. An important watershed was the decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the Supreme Court ruled that intelligence tests, because they were not shown to be directly related to job performance, could not be used in hiring since blacks scored lower on them, and it did not matter whether there was any intent to discriminate. People act as if “standardized tests are racist if they show disparities” is some kind of new idea, but it’s basically been the law in the United States for 50 years, albeit inconsistently enforced. 

Standardized tests aren’t the only target of the doctrine of disparate impact. In 2019 (under Trump), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) settled a suit brought against Dollar General for $6 million for doing criminal background checks that disproportionately prevented blacks from being hired. The Obama administration went after schools for disciplining black and white students at different rates, with predictably disastrous results. Police departments, fire departments, and other institutions use “gender normed” tests to stop the EEOC and private applicants from suing them for gender discrimination.  This is of course completely insane; criminals can’t be relied on to go easier on female cops on account of their sex, but somehow we’ve all come to accept affirmative action policing and firefighting (in 2014, a guy who jumped the White House fence overpowered a female Secret Service agent and made it all the way to the East Room).

As the government invented new standards for what counts as “discrimination,” it was forcing more aggressive action on the part of the private sector. Executive Order 11246, signed by President Johnson, required all government contractors and subcontractors who did over $10,000 in government business to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin." The category of “sex” was added in 1967. In 1969, Richard Nixon signed EO 11478, which forced affirmative action onto the federal government itself. 

Across the federal government and among contractors, affirmative action assumed that “but for discrimination, statistical parity among racial and ethnic groups would be the norm.” 

Government interpretation of the Civil Rights Act also invented the concept of the “hostile work environment.” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has written about how this has been used to restrict free speech...

harassment law potentially burdens any workplace speech that's offensive to at least one person in the workplace based on [protected characteristics] … even when the speech is political and even when it’s not severe or pervasive enough to itself be actionable.

The rise of HR departments can be directly traced to the federal government’s race and gender policies, which involve direct control of the federal bureaucracy, the “carrot” of government contracts, and the “sticks” of EEOC enforcement and lawsuit threats.  

As Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin wrote in Inventing Equal Opportunity, it was civil rights law that revolutionized the American workplace. Corporations started to hire full time staff in order to keep track of government mandates, which were vague and could change at any moment. There was a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses,” in which every company and institution had to be more anti-racist and anti-sexist than the next one, leading to more and more absurd diversity trainings and other programs.

To decide whether an institution had discriminated against a protected group, courts and regulators would often use a “best practices” approach, meaning that if your competitors adopted the latest fad coming out of academia or the HR world, you felt the need to do the same. As I discussed in my podcast with Jesse Singal, this could help explain the success of the now-discredited Implicit Association Test, along with more modern innovations like Critical Race Theory-based training...

The authors questioned 279 public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations on what kind of offices they had. One can see the growth of bureaucracy meant to keep up with government regulations over time.   

While fewer than 30% of organizations had an HR office in 1955, by 1985 that number had grown to 70%. Although no organization in the study had an Equal Employment or Affirmative Action Office/r in 1967, 40% did in 1985. Later, the terminology shifted away from “affirmative action” to “diversity and inclusion,” but the ideas are largely the same. 

Here’s a striking chart from Dobbin’s book showing the growth of personnel management, and the feminization of the profession over time. 

Dobbin and Sutton argue that this is a general feature of American law, where the state is selective in enforcement and gives vague guidance that is subject to interpretation, like improving “safety” or fighting “discrimination.” They compare the US to France, where the government is more inclined to just issue direct mandates to businesses, who spend a lot less time and effort on private sector bureaucracy to keep up with how regulators and courts are thinking. The creation of bureaucracy means that it eventually gains its own power base and becomes able to advocate for its own interests. Ironically, if the US had just mandated gender and racial quotas, compliance would’ve been simpler and there would’ve been no need for permanent bureaucracies within each organization with an open-ended mission to stamp out all forms of “discrimination.” 

This may explain something else I’ve always wondered about. The US seems to elect some of the most conservative politicians in the Western world, but has perhaps the wokest institutions. Civil rights law makes all major institutions subject to the will of left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges at the expense of normal citizens. 

Thus, we see that every one of the main pillars of wokeness can be traced to new standards created by regulators and courts, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s but updated over time. 

1) The idea that disparities mean discrimination is simply disparate impact.

2) Speech restriction is a hostile work environment.

3) The HR bureaucracy was created to enforce (1) and (2), in a world of vague and consistently shifting government standards to root out discrimination. 

Recent controversy over Critical Race Theory training, like the debate about whether standardized tests are racist, misses the larger point that the entire concept of a full-time bureaucracy having to micromanage people’s work lives is a creation of government. 

In September 2020, Coinbase released a statement saying that it did not want its employees engaging in politics on the job. The media lost its mind, and soon afterwards The New York Times ran a series of articles with the tone of “It’s a nice company you got there, would be a shame if something happened to it.” On November 27, they published a story titled “‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups.” The piece included accusations like managers “excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible” and “managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues.”

The next month, someone leaked an employee salary database to the NYT showing that women and blacks were paid less at the company. There was no actual evidence of discrimination, as the article admitted, just the “gaps” that often appear significant until they disappear when you control for a few relevant factors. The author went on to encourage regulators and lawyers to go after Coinbase for its “racism” and “sexism.”...

In other words, the NYT found that Coinbase’s pay gaps “looked worse” than those for other companies, while acknowledging that those companies controlled for other factors, making the accusations against Coinbase completely worthless. Nonetheless, they published the story, and brought out the lawyers to tell the company that it might be in deep trouble. 

Before the story on black employees, Coinbase released a statement saying “We don’t care what The New York Times thinks.” Admirable sentiment, but it has to care what the EEOC, judges, and lawyers think, and they get their information from The New York Times! 

Instead of reforming Google, conservatives might think about how to construct an environment in which places that want to be like Coinbase are free to create their own cultures that are politically neutral, or even God forbid, conservative, without fear of government interference. 

The strange thing about disparate impact is that gaps exist almost everywhere. Practically any criterion or test one develops is going to have gaps between racial groups and the two sexes. In a world where everyone has standards that create a disparate impact, government bureaucrats have a lot of discretion in who they go after. A corporation that stakes out a position as unwoke–or even tries to stake out a neutral position, like Coinbase did–paints a target on its back. Even if you make a real effort to treat women and blacks fairly, under current law you’re always dependent on liberal judges and regulators seeing things your way. 

The “Great Awokening” has been traced to the early 2010s. Since there was no major law passed at the time that coincided with the shift, people have tended to see wokeness as purely cultural. Yet by the time of the Great Awokening, the federal government had been enforcing an extreme form of anti-discrimination law for two generations. Young people have never lived in a world in which every major institution that they interacted with was not assigning them oppressor or victim status and making decisions on that basis. 

If you doubt government can have that much of an effect on culture, consider how we classify people by race. Take the category of “Asian American Pacific Islander.” I don’t think anyone seriously believes that such a thing would exist without federal government race classifications. Yet culturally, it took a while for the concept to take off. Here’s Google Books tracking of the use of the term over time.

Hugh Davis Graham’s book Collision Course discusses how the government came up with its racial classification system. “AAPI” was created in 1977 by the Small Business Administration. Up until 1972, no book in the English language had ever used the term “Asian American Pacific Islander.” There was a slight uptick around the late 1970s, before falling again, with the concept really starting to take off around 1989. We thus see government adopting a term that was practically non-existent, and a slight delay before it comes to have cultural relevance.    

The data end in 2019, but I would bet we’ve seen a major spike in the last year or so. There’s now AAPI Heritage Month (May apparently), and an organization called “Stop AAPI Hate,” which seems to have taken over the media somehow. 

In the book Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American, UC Berkeley sociologist G. Cristina Mora writes that, before government classification, there had been a “consistent empirical finding” that “Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans overwhelmingly considered themselves to be separate groups. They ‘didn’t really identify’ with one another, and they ‘didn’t really know what Hispanic meant!’” While the categories of white, black, and Native American make sense in the context of US history, later arriving groups have had their “official identities” constructed in Washington.   

This demonstrates two points. First, the power of government to shape culture is quite extensive if it can create identities out of thin air. AAPI is a reductio ad absurdum of this idea; I still can’t believe anyone can utter the phrase with a straight face, much less emotionally identify with the category. Second, there can be a delay between a time a policy is enacted and when its cultural influence is felt in full. Like Scott Alexander, I think it’s clear that the proximate cause of the Great Awokening is the rise of the internet and social media. Yet the ground had been set by generations of government bureaucracy making sure that almost every major institution was subject to the rules of disparate impact, hostile work environment, and the HR revolution...

The anti-woke seem unaware that the things they care about have much to do with policy. They treat every cultural outrage as an isolated event, as just another instance of elites deciding to be “woke,” without such decisions being connected to anything government has ever done.   

Getting rid of disparate impact and narrowly defining what “hostile work environment” means or even eliminating the concept entirely will not change the culture overnight. Things have already gone too far, and it took about half a century to go from the color blind ideals most Americans thought they were signing up for with the Civil Rights Act to a world of “birthing parents” and “white fragility.” 

Constantine converted to Christianity, which helped spread the religion across the Roman Empire. Yet the reign of Julian the Pagan couldn’t undo Christianization; just because government helped create or spread a cultural phenomenon does not mean that government can likewise rewind the tape to an earlier point in history. Dobbin points out that when the Reagan administration tried to roll back civil rights enforcement, the business community fought back, as many large corporations had come to be staffed by true believers.  

The hope would be that, just as the original creation of concepts like “disparate impact” and “AAPI” had eventual consequences few would have imagined at the time, reversing past policies could likewise shape the culture in the long term. 

The punchline of all this is that an anti-wokeness agenda would involve, at the very least,

1) Eliminating disparate impact, making the law require evidence of intentional discrimination.

2) Getting rid of the concept of hostile work environment, or defining it in extremely narrow and explicit terms, making sure that it does not restrict political or religious speech.

3) Repealing the executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action among government contractors and the federal workforce.

One reason to be optimistic is that much of this work can be done without having to pass laws, which is almost impossible to do on controversial issues in the current environment, but through the executive branch and the courts. Republican administrations have tried similar things in the past, though usually without making anti-wokeness a real priority.  

In Reagan’s second term, repealing affirmative action requirements for contractors was apparently on the table, but the administration backed down in the face of congressional resistance (see also this). More recently, a Washington Post story reporting that the Trump Administration was thinking about undoing disparate impact was dated January 5, 2021 (yes, “January 5, 2021” as in the day before January 6, 2021). Politics is about priorities, and the Trump administration clearly cared little about this issue, despite the president’s voters being animated by concerns about PC.

In other policy areas over which it had control, the Trump administration largely delivered for its supporters: tougher sanctions on Iran to please the war hawks, lower refugee caps for immigration restrictionists, and undoing Obama era gun regulations.

Yet the disparate impact issue was not even being considered until weeks before Trump left office. The Executive Order banning critical race theory training, similarly coming late in the administration, was only signed because Chris Rufo got on Tucker. Conservatives celebrated, without any of them seeming to notice that Trump could’ve literally signed an EO at any time in his presidency to end affirmative action within the federal government and among all government contractors, not just the most absurd form of “anti-racism training” that exists (ironically, during the 2016 primaries Jeb! bragged about ending affirmative action by EO while governor of Florida, though he was hated by the most strident anti-wokes in his party).

Taking apart disparate impact and repealing affirmative action executive orders should be litmus tests for Republican presidential candidates in the same way taxes and abortion are. 

Why hasn’t this happened already? Probably because the payoff to fighting wokeness is more long term. People seek immediate gratification; you can change the tax rate or how many immigrants you let in immediately, while it’s hard to convince people to have a political fight today in the hopes of having an uncertain effect on culture years or even decades down the line. Moreover, it’s hard work to go to war with an entrenched bureaucracy that has the media completely on its side, especially if you haven’t explained to your voters why doing so is necessary. Nonetheless, I’m convinced there is no short-cut to changing the culture. 

Understanding that wokeness is law may be able to help us get at the question of why conservatives are less motivated to be politically engaged than liberals. It’s not an exaggeration to say that conservative views on race and gender are often of questionable legality in the workplace. Even if conservatives cared as much as liberals, the state is always there with its thumb on the scale, having helped construct bureaucracies inside and outside government that create incentives against expressing certain beliefs or building institutions that are managed in ways that offend left wing officials and activists.

The result has been a kind of learned helplessness. Not only do conservatives feel like they can’t influence institutions, but Republican leaders haven’t even made the argument that they can ever actually change things...

This is one reason I believe QAnon took off. People need to believe victory is possible to be motivated to act. “Trump is secretly controlling everything and will soon execute the all-powerful pedophiles” is at least a theory. For conservatives not crazy enough to believe that, all they get from their leaders is a never ending list of woke outrages without any plausible case of how things might get better."

Links - 21st September 2024 (1 - Left Wing Economics [including Honduras Libertarian Charter City])

Garrison Lovely on X - "Seems like more people should be talking about how a libertarian charter city startup funded by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel is trying to bankrupt Honduras. Próspera is suing Honduras to the tune of $11B (GDP is $32B) and is expected to win, per the NYT 🧵"

TracingWoodgrains on X - "This mindset is as alien to me as it is frustrating.
Situation: some libertarians want to live in line with their ideals. They go to immense trouble to buy some virtually unused plots of land, put in years of effort with the government of a developing country to get permission to build on it, and get to work.
A new "center-left" socialist government comes in. It breaks the contract, aiming to destroy their ability to build a city on property nobody else had cared to use, undoing years of work. What Lovely frames as a city trying to bankrupt Honduras is a group of people doing everything they can to play by the rules, to find a way within the system to live according to their ideals, only to see the rules change ex post facto.   There is an incredibly simple route for the Honduras socialists to avoid losing the lawsuit: they can honor their contract.  Even if you are opposed to the ideals of the people working to build the charter city, you should welcome experimentation. If they fail, they burned their own time, effort, and money to try something, and you get an example of their failure to point to forever after. And if they succeed? You don't have to visit, work with, or pay any attention to their city. Meanwhile, they can provide opportunity to, and investment in, a struggling area.  In the name of anti-colonialism, socialists want the entire world to live by their ideals. In the name of democracy, they want to shut down experiments run by people they disagree with. In the name of fairness, they want to break promises, then cry foul when people try to hold them to those promises.
In a sense, I agree with Lovely here: Interested people should be talking about how socialists in Honduras are trying to shut down a promising experiment ex post facto, and how the charter city is aiming to persist regardless. I'm just not convinced the narrative is anywhere near as flattering for those socialists as he would hope.   Let people experiment. Let them work to build and live in line with their ideals. Let them try.  And for heaven's sake, don't hit them, then cry foul when they hit back."
Governments don't need to honour contracts (at least when the left approves), because power relations means unfavourable agreements can be torn up

Scott Alexander on X - "You can read some of my previous writing about this case at https://astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-9423… , but my impression is you're uncritically buying the Honduran socialists' propaganda version of this conflict.
A more pro-Prospera/balanced version: investment courts are a useful vehicle to prevent countries from inviting international investment, then stealing it as soon as it materializes. Countries voluntarily sign on to these courts to allow them to credibly commit to protecting investors, should those investors pour money into the country.    In 2009, the socialist president was couped by the military after he refused to comply with a Supreme Court order not to try to overstay his term limits. In the process, he had tried to fire the rest of the government when they resigned in protest or wouldn't carry out his orders. The Supreme Court ordered his arrest, and the military couped in sympathy with this. Coups are bad in general but in this case I think just saying "it was a coup so they're evil" is extremely deceptive. Democratic elections were then held (which the socialists boycotted), producing the government that approved Prospera. 78% of Congress approved the law to create charter cities with an explicit guarantee that they would protect it for fifty years. They enshrined this in various bilateral treaties with developed countries doing the investment, and within international investment law, because investors wouldn't invest without this.  Prospera wasn't directly involved in these negotiations, but *after* Honduras had made all these guarantees to other people, they got together and invested about $100 million in building a new city on a greenfield site in Honduras, at the government's invitation. After a few years, the wife of the socialist who got couped was elected, and her government tried to seize the city without compensation. Prospera sued in the exact international court that the agreement which created them said they should sue in. This was one of several (I think 9, but might be wrong) different suits that different people lodged against the socialist government for trying to nationalize their infrastructure projects in Honduras without compensation.  Prospera doesn't actually want the $11 billion, it wants for the socialists to stop trying to seize their stuff and leave them in peace. I believe it has said many times that the second the socialists agree to leave them in peace, they will drop their suit (and I would be disappointed in them if this wasn't true). The socialists have instead announced that they have no obligation to follow any treaties or international law, and they will continue seizing these 9 projects (including Prospera). They refused to send a lawyer to defend themselves in international arbitration, and so the arbitration court ruled against them.  The arbitrators can't actually seize the budget of Honduras, but countries that follow the international treaties that established the international court will now be allowed to take whatever Honduran government money is in their countries in order to pay back their investors.  There are a bunch of people who hate charter cities because they feel "colonialist" and they would rather these countries languish in poverty than touch "polluted" first world market structures. They have dominated the news coverage on these issues. You can reach out to anyone at Prospera and they would be happy to tell you their own side.   Otherwise, I'm not sure what you want - for international investment law not to exist? A world where countries can woo investors by saying "please build infrastructure within our borders, we promise we won't steal it" and then immediately turn around and steal it? Where it's illegal in the court of public opinion to even attempt to create institutions to get around this problem? All this does is ensure that nobody will ever invest in developing countries ever again.  There *are* things in the general vicinity of this that are moral gray areas. If some corrupt dictator promises a foreign country all of his country's oil for cheap, costing the country its most valuable resource, can later governments go back on this? I think international law (and the broader court of public opinion) include some mechanisms for dealing with this, but I admit that if those mechanisms fail it's a really hard problem. But this isn't one of those problems. Prospera hasn't taken any resource except a few hundred acres of previously unoccupied land (which they bought at market price from previous owners). This is the easiest, most slam dunk version of this generally-difficult-sort-of-question you could imagine."

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "Lefty journalist: long viral thread on how evil American libertarian billionaires are trying to bankrupt Honduras
Scott Alexander: *incredibly detailed rebuttal of how that's not true*
Journo: I don't have time to respond to this rn"

Scott Alexander on X - "- Re 1: see my last paragraph. I agree that this is a flaw in the concept of contracts. But not allowing someone to make binding contracts is crippling them pretty hard - see the story of Parfit's Hitchhiker. As I understand it, international arbitration law (the system Prospera sued in) already has provisions that "our country only agreed to that deal because of corruption" is a defense against having to honor a deal. AFAIK Honduras did not try to argue that these provisions applied in the arbitration case we're discussing. I don't know enough about international law to know how good or fair or comprehensive these provisions are. If I were designing a system from the ground up, I would have some group that declares countries too corrupt to deal with beforehand, so that investors can avoid any country sanctioned in this way (and be confident that they could deal in good faith with non-sanctioned countries). I don't know to what degree there are already rules like this. But as I said in my last paragraph, I feel like whatever we think about edge cases, this isn't one of them - since Honduras isn't giving Prospera a scarce resource, but rather letting them build something entirely new.
- Re court packing: yes, AFAICT the court was packed. This wasn't done because of charter cities, it was done because of a police reform law, although it later benefitted charter cities too. Court packing is bad and I am against it. But IIUC, this is the third Honduran court packing in twenty years (possibly second, I can't tell if the 1998 and 2001 ones were parts of the same process), and this isn't even counting the socialists' decision to simply ignore the Supreme Court without even bothering to pack it. Nobody cared about any of this until it resulted in charter cities, at which point they decided that this court packing (but not any of the others, and certainly not the currently-in-power socialist party's defiance of their own inconvenient Supreme Court rulings) was outrageous enough to invalidate the charter cities law (but not any other policy by the relevant court?). To put this in proportion, none of the three Honduran court packings even made it into this recent NPR article on court packing trends in Latin America https://npr.org/2024/08/12/nx-s1-5069716/opinion-supreme-court-packing-latin-america . I'm not trying to excuse court packing, but I think a policy of "you can break your word if there was a packed court somewhere upstream of the decision" means that half of Latin American countries can go back on any policy they've made over the past few decades (and maybe the US can break all international commitments it's made post FDR?)
- I don't know who you mean by the other charter city people who are skeptical of Prospera. I know Mark Lutter from CCI was a bit skeptical, because he believes charter cities need to be based around some sort of very convincing economic thesis (eg a port, or a mine, or something else that will bring them profit right away) and can't just coast on a policy of "well, we'll be safer and less corrupt and have better rule-of-law, and if we build it eventually businesses will come". I'm mostly on his side here, but part of why I'm so upset about attempts to appropriate Prospera is that even though they are trying to do things on Hard Mode, they've succeeded surprisingly well and a lot of people and businesses *have* come to them. I still think there are structural obstacles that will prevent them becoming the Singapore v. 2.0 that Mark wants, but the team is good people and they've done good work and they don't deserve this kind of treatment...
I think the economic consensus is mostly reflecting this idea of "high quality investment good, low quality investment neutral to bad".  So is Prospera high quality investment? I think so! The whole point of the charter city is to make a region where it's easier to start businesses without one million different types of corruption and theft that prevent people from starting or hosting businesses in Honduras. I don't think you can argue this corruption and theft doesn't exist - our whole discussion is about the Honduras government trying to steal a business without compensation, in the context of a court case where they're doing this to eight other businesses. This has already caused universities, hospitals, factories, etc to pledge to relocate to Honduras (some of them might have reneged after the socialists started threatening Prospera, I'm not sure, and one university wimped out for PR reasons after journalists wrote too many hit pieces, but there are still a couple of pledges like this). This is totally different from a casino or some extractive oil thing where they're going to send the oil back to the First World and pay the locals pennies on the dollar. But also, I feel like we're missing the point here even defending it at this level. Yes, you can find a couple of fringe economists who say maybe investment isn't good for the economy. Okay, I can find a couple of fringe economists who say maybe health care spending isn't good for health (I had a debate with one a few months ago... imagine that Honduras paid a US pharma company for drugs and vaccines, and then the US pharma company stole the money and refused to provide the treatments. It is not exculpatory AT ALL to say "Well, a few fringe economists believe health care doesn't work, so if you believe them then in some sense I never really hurt anyone". It's not even exculpatory to say "Well, yes, this kind of theft means nobody will ever provide health care to developing countries again, but in some sense if you believe fringe economists, then that's good, because health care spending doesn't work, so we're actually just saving them time and trouble." It's the right of the people making the buying decisions to decide for themselves whether to bet their people's lives on those fringe economists, not the right of other people to use a fringe position to justify thefts that make it impossible for anyone to try acting according to the consensus position ever again!
- I think talking to Prospera would be helpful... Erick Brimen, their CEO, is a pretty compelling guy. He's from Venezuela, he saw what happened there (the socialists ruling Honduras now are allied with Venezuela's Maduro) and he just has a really principled commitment to trying to save other people/countries from the same fate. I think it's hard to listen to his story and still think that the socialists and hit piece writers here are on the side of the angels...
there's a HUGE difference between accepting the risk - or even accepting the risk and not feeling sorry for the victims - versus actively carrying water for the dictators and supporting what they're doing and trying to justify it to your audience."

Simon on X - "That line about the land being "usurped" is insane lmao. It wasn't even a forced sale. They just went on the market and bought a bunch of land as a private party"
TracingWoodgrains on X - "Right. They didn't usurp anything. They bought land, spent years working through governmental red tape to use it in a creative way, and began using it. Bizarre framing."

theficouple on X - "Unpopular opinion: If you make $150,000 a year but still live paycheck to paycheck? You might have a spending problem, not an income problem. Do you agree?"

united states - Does the average income in the US drop by $9,500 if you exclude the ten richest Americans? - Skeptics Stack Exchange - "A leftist friend of mine shared this meme:
Averages are tricky like that
The average income in the United States is 74,500$.
Excluding the top 10 Americans, it's only 65,000.
Excluding the top 50, it drops to 48,000$.
Excluding the top 1,000, it drops to just 35,500$
It alleges that the average income in the United States drops by $9,500 if you exclude the ten richest Americans, $25,000 if you exclude the 50 richest, and $39,000 if you exclude the 1,000 richest. Is this true?"
"This is false because the "starting" value used by the meme is the median value, not the mean, of household income in the United States (as seen in this chart Real Median Household Income in the United States, showing $74,580 for 2022)  The reductions are made as though that value was an average, not a median. While excluding outliers can change an average substantially, it affects the median only very slightly.  It also appears that the ostensible reductions from excluding the "top" earners are based on counting total wealth, not yearly income-- which is itself at least an order-of-magnitude error. The 10 highest income Americans do not average $95,000,000,000 in annual income.  From the chart Mean Family Income in the United States you can see that mean family income (as opposed to median) is actually 126,500. This is income and not wealth, but even if we are as generous as possible to the original graphic and assume we can just deduct total wealth of the top X, we see that excluding the top 10 reduces the mean to $116,000, and reducing the top 1,000 reduces to $87,000. As percentage reductions, these are much less dramatic-- and the resulting mean is still higher than the (all but unchanged) median. But remember, even these values are comparing apples (income) to oranges (total wealth)-- the total share of annual income going to the very wealthiest is much smaller."
Left wingers don't understand the difference between net worth and income, and mean and median. That's why they're poor

CHARLEBOIS: These are Canada's 'Hunger Games' - "In 2023, while 13.5% of Americans households grappled with food insecurity— characterized by low or very low food security (USDA-ERS, 2024) — the rate in Canada was significantly higher at 22.9% (Proof Toronto, 2024). This suggests that food insecurity in Canada is a staggering 69.6% more prevalent than in the United States — a deeply unsettling statistic. The challenge of affording food in Canada is exacerbated by anemic food sales, particularly stark when compared to the United States, where grocery store sales increased by 1.8% in the last 12 months, according to the Federal Reserve Economic Data. In stark contrast, Canadian grocery store sales have plummeted by a worrying 3.2%, according to Statistics Canada ( see graph on retail sales ). One plausible explanation for this disparity lies in the higher interest rates in Canada, which likely impose a heavier burden on Canadian households than on their American counterparts, given that the average debt per household is considerably higher in Canada. The Bank of Canada’s pathway to achieving a more stable inflation rate without detrimentally affecting Canadians appears much narrower than that of the U.S. Federal Reserve, evidenced by the harsh reality of 10 consecutive rate hikes last year, compelling Canadians to economize particularly on food expenditures. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Canada’s per capita economy is contracting, devoid of the wealth creation observed in the United States. Notably, according to World Bank Data, in 2002, the United States’ GDP per capita was 56.6% higher than Canada’s — a record high during the tenure of another Liberal prime minister, Jean Chrétien. The current gap, at 53.07%, is perilously close to this historical peak ( see GDP Per Capita graph ). The primary drivers of GDP growth in Canada are currently immigration and public spending, with the government undertaking the bulk of economic heavy lifting. The situation is indeed dire. Moreover, the enthusiasm once held for the economic greening championed by the Trudeau administration is showing signs of significant fatigue. The carbon tax, Trudeau’s principal policy for fostering an eco-friendly economy, is increasingly losing traction due to the prevailing economic challenges... The failures of the carbon tax are emblematic of a broader trend in recent policymaking endeavours: The implementation of populist policies devoid of rigorous metrics for evaluating their success over time, all while constructing an expansive communications strategy designed to convince Canadians of the policy’s merits. The federal carbon tax is set to escalate to $95 per tonne by April 2025, marching inexorably towards the 2030 goal of $170 per tonne. Despite the mounting pressure, the Trudeau government has neglected to assess whether the policy meaningfully impacts our climate and emissions or to evaluate how the policy might influence the economy over time, with a particular focus on the ramifications for the agri-food sector — from farm to plate. The design of the rebate system ostensibly allows Canadians to overlook the real costs of this poorly-conceived policy. However, administering this massive program is not only costly, but also fails to leverage the Canadian economy effectively. It is imperative to devise policies that genuinely foster both economic and environmental sustainability for the nation."
Given all the fear-mongering about the US, this is ironic. Presumably Canadian companies and landlords are "greedier" than American ones. But this won't stop left wingers from continuing to demonise the US
This won't stop left wingers from pushing de-growth, since they will continue to claim that the problem is how a shrinking pie is cut, rather than the pie becoming smaller

Are Canadian ready for airport privatization? - "London City has spent tens of millions of pounds to build new aircraft berths and a parallel taxiway, and completed a major upgrade of its departure lounge, boosting its capacity by 30 per cent. In 2021, it replaced its aging 30-year-old analogue air traffic control tower with a fully remote digital tower, a first for a significant international airport. And the adoption of new scanning technology has reduced line-up times for passengers by 50 per cent on average, with the airport boasting in an April 2024 news release that it can get business and leisure passengers “from the entrance to the gate in 10 minutes.” While the airport has clashed with nearby residents and local governments over some of its expansion plans, it has racked up accolades from travellers, including being named the best airport in the United Kingdom by Conde Nast Traveller readers and the Daily Telegraph in 2022... “The highlight of the airport is the seamless security system,” she said, adding that travellers no longer have to remove liquids or laptops from their bags or take off their shoes like they do at other large airports around the world. London City is not the only airport Canadian pensions have taken stakes in over the years. From Sydney to Copenhagen, airports are an investment opportunity they desire, but one they have been unable to replicate in their home market, where a unique not-for-profit ownership model and fears of a public-to-private shift would be a losing political move have stymied previous talks about privatizing... The allure of airports for the pensions is twofold. On one hand, there are the healthy fees collected each time an airplane takes off and lands, not to mention a surrounding near-monopoly constellation of amenities — such as parking and rental cars — that offer steady earnings potential and growth opportunities. They also help the retirement funds satisfy long-term obligations to pensioners. Airports are infrastructure investments, an asset class whose steady returns keep up with inflation and help pensions match their liabilities over the long term. One industry veteran said airport investments are like souped-up real return bonds (RRBs), an asset class gobbled up by pension funds specifically because it matches liabilities — what’s owed to future pensioners — that are indexed to inflation... Canadian pensions are far from the only institutional investors to spot the opportunity. Nearly 20 per cent of airports worldwide are now privately owned and more than 100 of those are owned by private equity infrastructure investors, according to a 2023 study published by the United States National Bureau of Economic Research. None are in Canada, and there is only one — Missouri’s Branson Airport — in the U.S. Most airports in the U.S. remain in state or local government hands, a situation often attributed to the unique tax-exempt treatment of bonds issued to finance public airports. Tae Hoon Oum, a retired professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business who helped create an international database to track airport performance and cost competitiveness, said Canada is late to the party when it comes to recognizing the benefits of privatizing airport operations. “The world has moved to a much better model. People who know airports, how it works in the airport industry, they know that we are falling behind,” he said, noting that airports in Australia were privatized by the early 2000s and that governments in Europe and the U.K. privatized airport operations as far back as the late 1980s and 1990s... Michael Weisbach, a finance professor at Ohio State University and co-author of the National Bureau of Economic Research study that found that airport volumes, efficiency and quality improve substantially under private equity ownership, said resistance to privatization is nevertheless a common response. “When you first hear about privatizing airports, your first reaction is, ‘Oh, my god, they’re going to fire a lot of workers, they’re going to compromise on safety,’” he said. “We looked as hard as we could to see whether there was any increase in safety violations or increase in accidents, or whether there were fewer employees, and we didn’t find any evidence of any of that.” Moreover, the study concluded that the net effect of a private equity acquisition of an airport is a rough doubling of operating income, mostly due to higher revenues collected from airlines and retailers in the terminal rather than cost-cutting. Other things that improved under new private equity management included better compensation for managers and more investments in new capacity and technology. “The facts are that the number of routes and the number of passengers go up, the profitability goes up, the passenger experience goes up,” Weisbach said, adding that “the cancellation rate goes down (and) safety is unaffected.”... Earlier studies have produced mixed results, but the National Bureau of Economic Research study, which used a database of 2,444 unique airports in 217 countries and had rare access to some private equity financial data, found stark differences in passenger traffic patterns, which increased more under private ownership than at government-owned airports. Private equity owners far outperformed even other forms of privatization on this measure. Satellite images showed that private equity owners tend to increase terminal size and the number of gates. Investments in such physical capacity mean an airport can bring in more passengers, who, in turn, spend more money in retail establishments and restaurants and on parking and rental cars. The study’s authors also noted that private equity owners tend to push for deregulation of government limits on fees... the Liberal Party has had a history of objecting to private interests in Canada’s airports. In the early 1990s, Jean Chrétien, while in opposition, called a Conservative government’s attempt to push through a long-term plan to involve private interests in the redevelopment of two terminals at Pearson airport — just ahead of an election —“indecent” and “immoral,” and he threatened to overturn it if he was elected."
Weird. Left wingers keep claiming privatisation always leads to higher costs and worse services. Trusting the science is only when it aids the left wing agenda

All Clear for Takeoff: Evidence from Airports on the Effects of Infrastructure Privatization - "Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization around the world in recent decades. How do these assets perform post-privatization? This paper examines global airports. Our central finding is that the type of ownership matters: Volume, efficiency, and quality improve substantially under private equity (PE) ownership—both following privatization and in subsequent transactions—but there is little evidence of improvement under non-PE private ownership. This remains the case for airports sold in auctions in which PE and non-PE firms bid, mitigating concerns about selection. PE owners invest in new physical capacity and appear to negotiate more effectively with airlines, especially in the presence of a state-owned flag carrier. Higher prices and more retail revenue increase net income, with no evidence of cost reductions or layoffs. We find that improvements are concentrated when there is a competing airport nearby, under longer-term leases, and when the local government is less corrupt. One explanation for the failure of non-PE private firms to outperform government ownership is that they tend to target more corrupt locations."
Weird. I thought private equity just loots and runs

Tackling food insecurity needs more than charity — governments must also act
Naturally, the "solution" is free money and an expansion of government rather than axing policies like that carbon tax that increase the cost of food, or increasing competition in the grocery sector

Links - 20th September 2024 (2 - Women)

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