Category: Business – Finance

China’s rapidly dwindling future will shape the world for decades to come

Business Insider

China’s rapidly dwindling future will shape the world for decades to come

Linette Lopez – January 21, 2024

2024 is the year of the incredible shrinking China.

The country’s growth has been treated like an inevitability for decades. Everything was getting bigger — its cultural influence, geopolitical ambition, population — and seemed poised to continue until the world was remade in China’s image. The foundation for this inexorable rise was its booming economy, which allowed Beijing to throw its might around in other areas. But now China’s economy is withering, and the future Beijing imagined is being cut down to size along with it.

The clearest sign of this diminishment is China’s worsening deflation problem. While Americans are worried about inflation, or prices rising too fast, policymakers in Beijing are fretting because prices are falling. The consumer price index has declined for the past three months, the longest deflationary streak since 2009. In the race for global economic supremacy, deflation is an albatross around Beijing’s neck. It’s a sign that the Chinese economic model has well and truly run out of juice and that a painful restructuring is required. But beyond the financial problems, the sinking prices are a sign of a deeper malaise gripping the Chinese people.

“China’s deflation is the deflation of hope, the deflation of optimism. It’s a psychological funk,” Minxin Pei, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College, told me.

The fallout won’t be contained to China’s shores. Because the country’s growth sent money stampeding around the globe over the past few decades, its contractions are creating a seesaw effect in global markets. The foreign investors who helped to power China’s rise are running to avoid catching the funk on their balance sheets, and governments the world over are starting to question the narrative of China, the dauphin. What Beijing does — or fails to do — to fight this malaise will determine the course of humanity for decades to come.

Flirting with disaster

It may seem counterintuitive, especially given the Western experience of the past few years, but deflation is in many ways scarier than inflation. Inflation occurs when there’s too much demand for too few products — people want to buy things, but there simply isn’t enough stuff to go around. By contrast, deflation happens when there are plenty of goods and services available but not enough demand. Businesses are then forced to slash prices to entice consumers to come out and spend. Every economy sees recessions or downturns — periods of declining demand and sinking confidence that force companies to put their wares on sale — but sustained deflation is what happens when those maladies make themselves at home and decide to stay.

China’s deflation worries started in earnest in the summer. Consumer prices contracted 0.3% in July compared with the same month a year before — something that hadn’t happened since the depths of the pandemic. While other advanced economies were taking off too fast, China was showing signs that it might be getting stuck. Prices seemed to stabilize in August — until pork prices started to decline dramatically, pushing down the aggregate price index in October, November, and December. There was some hope for policymakers, though, since much of the deflation was driven by pork prices, which are extremely volatile in China. But recent data shows that core inflation, which excludes more volatile categories such as food and energy, is similarly anemic, rising just 0.6% year over year in December.

Charlene Chu, senior analyst at Autonomous Research

Charlene Chu, a director and senior analyst at Autonomous Research, said the major question for Beijing was whether the price declines would continue into 2024 or whether the country could reignite some demand. She wasn’t hopeful for the latter.

“I lean toward deflationary pressures continuing to build, but the data continuing to go back and forth through the year,” Chu told me via email.

China’s primary problem, though, is debt, particularly in the real-estate sector, which makes up 25% to 35% of the country’s GDP. Years of overbuilding — by about double the population, according to some estimates — and slowing population growth caused prices to collapse. The real-estate trouble has ravaged the balance sheets of Chinese households — many of which have sunk a massive proportion of their savings into property — and cast a pall on the rest of the economy.

“Chinese people have 70% of assets in housing, so you can imagine the effect on confidence,” Wei Yao, the chief economist at Société Générale, told me. “This is the factor why this deflation could be long-lasting.”

Seeing their investments tank has led many people to stop spending. Fifteen years ago, Wall Street assumed that the Chinese consumer would ultimately become the dictator of the global economy. Now they’re in hiding. Even as the country emerged from the deep freeze of its “Zero COVID” policy, retail sales growth was disappointing compared with some analysts’ projections.

“I think it is unrealistic to believe that deflationary pressure will disappear when there is still so much pressure on property prices and consumers are in savings mode,” Chu said.

Now I’m trapped

In 2002, Ben Bernanke, who went on the chair the Federal Reserve, gave a seminal speech about how to combat deflation. As an economic historian, he spent his academic career studying the Great Depression — the mother of all deflationary events — and based on his research, he had come to a few conclusions. I’ll give you a few that are relevant to China’s current situation:

  1. Deflationary events are rare, but even moderate deflation — “a decline in consumer prices of about 1% per year,” as Bernanke put it — can zap growth out of an economy for years.
  2. In a deflationary economy, debt becomes more onerous to pay back because money is scarcer, a situation known as “debt deflation.”
  3. The “prevention of deflation is preferable to having to cure it.”Xi JinpingXi Jinping refuses to try the policies that could help pull Chinse out of its national economic malaise.Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via Getty Images

Japan is a more-recent example of the deflation trap. Japan is maybe, just maybe, getting out of a 25-year dance with the deflation demon. After decades of supercharged growth, the country’s economy collapsed in the 1990s because of heavy debt and an aging population. Together, those forces pushed the country into deflation, kept wages suppressed, and dampened consumer spending. Sound familiar?

What we learned from Japan’s years of stagnation is that once deflation sets in, the only way out is through a painful restructuring of debt. Société Générale’s Yao told me that if Beijing quickly embarked on such an anti-debt campaign, it could prevent the funk from setting in. The problem is we have yet to see evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is willing to do that.

Fire? What fire?

Of course, if the Chinese Communist Party asked Bernanke what to do about deflation, he’d probably tell them to take dramatic action yesterday. Spray the money gun, start dropping cash from helicopters, get people spending again. Deflation can only be slayed by boosting demand. But the CCP’s unwillingness to directly help Chinese households, even in the depth of the COVID-19 crisis, makes this kind of support unlikely.

“China gave no fiscal support during the pandemic,” Yao reminded me during our talk. “Every other large economy gave some kind of stimulus.”

Sure, Beijing has taken measures over the past year to loosen financial conditions for banks and state-owned businesses. It has also cut interest rates a little bit and given a $140 billion lifeline to struggling local governments. But wonky supply-side mechanisms take time to make their way into the lives of normal people and spur demand — if it happens at all. At best, they can keep deflation from taking hold, but they can’t turn it around to growth.

“Any true acceleration next year will require either a major global upside surprise or more active government policy,” analysts at China Beige Book, a surveyor of the Chinese economy, said in a recent note to clients.

It’s not as if the CCP is in the dark about the economy’s struggles. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, even made mention of the reality that Chinese people were suffering financially during his New Year’s speech — a first for him. And while the party’s apparatchiks may seem stoic as they announce that China’s GDP growth is meeting expectations, their softer tone and more aggressive courting of international business belies their concern. The question is, if Beijing knows how bad things are getting, why aren’t they doing more?

Analysts are split on why there’s been no fiscal support to households. In a research note published in August, Logan Wright, an analyst at Rhodium Group, argued that China’s ability to deliver fiscal stimulus was greatly overestimated. Beijing’s levers “are far more impaired than commonly understood,” Wright told me in a recent phone interview. “The problem is that China doesn’t collect much tax outside of its investment-led growth model,” he added. Up to its eyeballs in debt obligations and without a robust fundraising mechanism, Beijing doesn’t have the cash bazooka it once did.

But there’s another, perhaps bleaker, possibility. It’s not that Beijing can’t deliver stimulus, it’s that it simply won’t do it. Xi doesn’t believe in direct cash payments to people. And now, since all of China is run by a one-man band, that’s all that matters.

“I reached the conclusion that there is a bit of ideology,” Yao told me. “In a sense, Xi Jinping wants to develop his own economic order. He’s trying to avoid making the same mistake as the West, which is wasting money and spending things that don’t generate long-term returns. In that perspective, sending checks to households doesn’t generate long-term returns.”

Maybe it’s a little of both. There have been times in the history of the Chinese Communist Party when different factions — reform vs. anti-reform — had the space to debate and change the government’s course on policy. In Xi’s China, that space is gone, shrunk into whatever can fit in the palm of his hand.

It’s not just the economy

Under Xi, all kinds of spaces in China have gotten smaller. (OK, it’s not his fault that the population is shrinking.) But his government has led to the narrowing of any space beyond the reach of the CCP. That includes the arts and intellectual life, a variety of forms of individual expression, and private business. China before Xi was a place learning to handle a plurality of voices — as long as they weren’t brazenly attacking the country. China during Xi is a place where people online speak in code to express even their minor dissatisfaction, only to watch CCP censors rub their words away.

“Chinese people have to shrink their ambitions,” Claremont’s Pei told me. “People in the government should have their ambitions scaled dramatically.”

This ideological shrinking is taking many forms: Beijing’s nominally anti-corruption drive is back in full swing, ensnaring officials from all over the government who strayed from the Xi line. Billionaire businesspeople are on notice that their wealth will no longer protect them from the CCP’s harsh gaze. Foreign investors are running for the hills. Even China’s flagship One Belt One Road infrastructure loan program has been pared down. “They’re not bestriding the world anymore,” one former US diplomat posted in East Asia told me.

This doesn’t necessarily mean China poses no adversarial challenge to the US. It just means Beijing is prioritizing where it invests in that competition. Xi will not back off from investing in the military because reunification with Taiwan remains his paramount goal. The central government will continue to invest in technology and in advancing industries where it thinks it can press any first-mover advantages. Think: electric cars, batteries, and solar panels.

“We don’t think the US faces a growth challenge from China anymore at this stage,” Rhodium Group’s Wright said. “The concern from the US and Europe are the spillovers from excess capacity.” In other words, China will pick its fights more selectively and defend its economic advantages more fiercely. A world built larger through global financial connections will disconnect and disperse into smaller nodes.

Do not expect a shrinking China to be a shrinking violet. Outside loaning money, magnanimity has never been Beijing’s strong suit. The slights that smarted when it was a growing superpower will only hurt more in shrunken stature. Xi will never let go of saving face. That’s the nature of a one-man reign.

The Farmers Had What the Billionaires Wanted

The New York Times

The Farmers Had What the Billionaires Wanted

Conor Dougherty – January 21, 2024

Jan Sramek, the CEO of California Forever and Flannery Associates who has bought up over 60,000 acres of nearby farmland with plans to build a new city, in Solano County, Calif. on Dec. 21, 2023. (Aaron Wojack/The New York Times)
Jan Sramek, the CEO of California Forever and Flannery Associates who has bought up over 60,000 acres of nearby farmland with plans to build a new city, in Solano County, Calif. on Dec. 21, 2023. (Aaron Wojack/The New York Times)

RIO VISTA, Calif. — When Jan Sramek walked into the American Legion post in Rio Vista, California, for a town hall meeting last month, everyone in the room knew that he was really just there to get yelled at.

For six years a mysterious company called Flannery Associates, which Sramek controlled, had upended the town of 10,000 by spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy every farm in the area. Flannery made multimillionaires out of some owners and sparked feuds among others. It sued a group of holdouts who had refused its above-market offers, on the grounds that they were colluding for more.

The company was Rio Vista’s main source of gossip, yet until a few weeks before the meeting no one in the room had heard of Sramek or knew what Flannery was up to. Residents worried it could be a front for foreign spies looking to surveil a nearby Air Force base. One theory held the company was acquiring land for a new Disneyland.

Now the truth was standing in front of them. And somehow it was weirder than the rumors.

The truth was that Sramek wanted to build a city from the ground up, in an agricultural region whose defining feature was how little it had changed. The idea would have been treated as a joke if it weren’t backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who included Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, an investor and co-founder of LinkedIn; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They and others from the technology world had spent some $900 million on farmland in a demonstration of their dead seriousness about Sramek’s vision.

Rio Vista, part of Solano County, is technically within the San Francisco Bay Area, but its bait shops and tractor suppliers and Main Street lined with American flags can feel a state away. Sramek’s plan was billed as a salve for San Francisco’s urban housing problems. But paving over ranches to build a city of 400,000 wasn’t the sort of idea you’d expect a group of farmers to be enthused about.

As the TV cameras anticipated, a group of protesters had gathered in the parking lot to shake signs near pickup trucks. Inside, a crowd in jeans and boots sat in chairs, looking skeptical.

Sramek, 36, who is from the Czech Republic and had come to California to try to make it in startups, was now the center of their economy. Flannery had become the largest landowner in the region, amassing an area twice the size of San Francisco.

Christine Mahoney, 63, whose great-grandfather established her family’s farm when Rutherford B. Hayes was president, said that, like it or not, Sramek was now her neighbor. Mahoney had refused several offers for her land, and Flannery’s lawsuit — an antitrust case in federal court — described her as a conspirator who was out to bilk his company.

But she had never met the man in person, so she came to say hello.

“You might be asking yourself, ‘Why is this guy with a funny accent here?’” Sramek began the meeting.

He spent about 20 minutes pitching his plans before submitting to questions and resentments. People accused him of pushing small farms out of business. They said Flannery’s money was turning families against each other.

“Good neighbors don’t sue their neighbors!” one man yelled to applause.

Sramek, who is tall, intense and practiced in the art of holding eye contact, stayed up front after the meeting to glad-hand.

When Mahoney and her husband, Dan, 65, approached him, Sramek said, “Hi, Christine!” as if they had met several times before and he wasn’t currently suing her.

“I’d like to welcome you as our neighbor, but it’s kind of difficult,” Christine Mahoney said.

She talked about how much stress the lawsuit had put on her family.

Sramek nodded, as if she were talking about someone else, not him. Then he asked the couple to dinner. The Mahoneys agreed.

Going to the Ballot

One key difference between building an app and building a city is that a city requires permission. On Wednesday, Sramek’s company officially filed a proposed ballot initiative that would ask voters to buy in. Specifically, the measure aims to amend a long-standing “orderly growth” ordinance that protects Solano County’s farms and open space by steering development to urban areas.

Solano’s residents have consistently backed the city-centered-growth laws, so Sramek’s project is bound to be controversial. To overcome resistance, the initiative includes a long list of promises like new roads, money to invest in downtowns across the county and a $400 million fund to help Solano residents buy homes.

Sramek also revealed that he hoped to build directly next to Rio Vista, with a half-mile-wide park separating the old farming town from the new tech city. Renderings that his company released this month portray a medium-density community that is roughly the opposite of a subdivision, with a grid of row houses that lie a short walk from shops and have easy access to bike lanes and bus stops. He said the first phase of building could accommodate about 50,000 people.

Even if the measure gets on the ballot and passes, it will be one step on a path requiring approval from county, state and federal agencies — a long list of ifs that explains why large projects are usually measured in decades, not the few years that Sramek seems to imagine.

It’s a crucial step, however. Beyond amending the ordinance, a win would pressure county officials to work with Sramek, so opponents are already lining up. A group called Solano Together, a mix of agricultural and environmental organizations like Greenbelt Alliance, recently created a website that characterizes the project as harmful sprawl that would destroy farms.

The fight is something of a throwback. Whether it was paving over San Fernando Valley orange groves to build out Los Angeles or ripping out apricot farms in what is now Silicon Valley, California became the nation’s biggest state and economy largely by trading open and agricultural land for population and development.

That shifted in the 1960s and 1970s, when a backlash against the growth-first regime and its penchant for destroying landscapes helped create modern environmentalism. In the half-century since, this turn has been codified in laws that aim to restrict development to existing cities and their edges. It has protected farms and open space, but also helped drive up the cost of living by making housing scarcer and more expensive to build.

Sramek framed his proposal as a backlash to the backlash, part of an ideological project to revive Californians’ appetite for growth. If the state is serious about tackling its dire affordable housing problem, he argued, it doesn’t just have to build more housing in places like San Francisco and its suburbs — it also has to expand the urban footprint with new cities.

As a matter of policy, this is hard to dismiss. This is politics, however, so the bigger question is whether voters share his desire to return California to an era of expansion. And whether — after six years during which Sramek obfuscated his role in Flannery’s secret land acquisition, along with the company’s billionaire backers and true purpose, all while pursuing farmers with aggressive tactics and lawsuits — they find him trustworthy.

The Golden Boy vs. 1877

Christine and Dan Mahoney’s house looks onto a barn that says 1877, the year Christine Mahoney’s great-grandfather built it.

When I met the couple for an interview at their house last year, Christine Mahoney had decorated the dining table with black-and-white pictures of relatives in button dresses and bonnets. Later we drove along roads named for her ancestors.

Winding through the hills, Christine Mahoney ticked off parcels that belonged to the family, others that were owned by neighbors and more owned by Flannery. When I asked how she discerned the lines of ownership in an expanse of yellow grassland, she said: “You live here a hundred years.”

Sramek, meanwhile, talks about growth in moral terms, as if progress and wealth are simpatico and the most consequential people are those who build big things and a fortune along the way.

Driving near the Mahoneys’ ranch recently, through the same yellow hills, he posited that the mix of wealth and innovation that has exploded in the Bay Area has happened only a handful of times in history. (Florence, Paris, London, New York, Chicago and “maybe LA” were some others.) We were 60 miles from San Francisco in a place where the tallest structures are wind turbines, but his message was that the region could be an economic sun, and that bringing more people in the orbit was worthy of the trade-offs.

An immigrant and striver who at 22 was a co-author of a book called “Racing Towards Excellence,” Sramek got his first spurt of publicity at Goldman Sachs, where the financial press hailed him as a “Golden Boy” trader and considered it newsworthy when he left, after two years of employment, to chase a bigger dream in startups.

His tech career was less sparkling. After Goldman, he moved from London to Zurich and started a corporate education company called Better. It operated for two years and prompted a move to San Francisco, where he founded a social media company, Memo, in 2015.

Memo was billed as a higher-minded version of Twitter and won praise from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. That praise was delivered on Twitter instead of Memo, which was pretty much the story: Memo failed to rack up users and shut down after a year.

His failures aside, Sramek was smitten with the Bay Area’s culture of creative capitalism. He was less enamored with the actual place.

The mythical Silicon Valley was in reality a bunch of office parks and cul-de-sacs where subdivision-grade homes went for $2 million. The more picturesque and urban San Francisco was being consumed by rising rents and their attendant homeless problems.

Complaining about the cost of living, and the region’s inability to fix it, had become something of a side hustle for many Bay Area CEOs. And after Memo, Sramek started looking for a big disruptive idea for them to fund.

“If we go back six or seven years, the popular hit in the press was ‘Silicon Valley is not doing enough in the real world,’” he said. “And I was sitting there working on this.”

Flannery Associates

Sramek likes to fish. The way he tells it, around 2016 he and his girlfriend (now wife) started making the one-hour drive from San Francisco to Rio Vista to catch bass on the Sacramento River. One of those trips, driving past pastures and grazing sheep, sparked an idea.

“What if you could start from scratch?” he said.

In a state whose agricultural bounty has historically been a function of moving water great distances, the area is something of an anachronism. For generations, families like the Mahoneys have practiced “dryland farming,” which means they rely on rain, not irrigation.

The Mahoneys talk about this the same way they talk about their land and family: with an emphasis on tradition and the romance of continuity. Sramek described the land as “not prime.”

The phrase angered several farmers at the Rio Vista town meeting, but in dollar terms it’s accurate. At the time of Sramek’s first fishing trip, land in the area was trading around $4,000 an acre — a pittance compared with a Central Valley almond orchard (about $10,000 to $55,000 per acre) or a Napa Valley vineyard (anywhere from $50,000 to more than $500,000 per acre), according to the California chapter of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers.

Sramek starting doing research and soon found himself immersed in zoning policy and poring over old development maps dreaming of a startup city. Investors were initially reluctant, he said, so he borrowed $1 million from friends and banks to put a deposit on a handful of properties, then hired consultants and land-use lawyers to assess what it would take to build there.

By now Sramek was well networked. He had done a fellowship at Y Combinator, a startup incubator. He was in a book club with partners at Sequoia Capital. He was friends with billionaires like Patrick and John Collison, the sibling founders of the payments company Stripe.

The Collisons became two of Flannery’s first investors. Andreessen and Chris Dixon, also of the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, joined soon after, along with Moritz, who was Sequoia’s chair. All of them helped Sramek solicit others.

In a 2017 note to potential investors I obtained, Moritz wrote that if “done right” the project could help relieve congestion and housing prices in the Bay Area, and mused about the potential to experiment with new kinds of governance. It could also be spectacularly profitable, he said: Moritz estimated that investors could make 10 times their money even if they just got the land rezoned, and far more if and when it was developed.

Flannery Associates was named for Flannery Road, which borders the first property Sramek bought. Aside from that detail and its Delaware incorporation, residents and public officials could find almost nothing about its shareholders or intentions. Just that it wanted a lot of land, didn’t care about the price and was willing to strong-arm owners when money didn’t work.

In addition to working their own land, many farmers in the area lease parcels where they grow crops and graze animals. As Flannery consumed more and more property, people like Ian Anderson found themselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to rebuff its offers for parcels they owned — while at the same time farming land they rented from Flannery.

Anderson learned how vulnerable he was after a local newspaper quoted him saying that the company had begun insisting on short-term leases and that this made it increasingly difficult to farm. Later, Flannery’s lawyer sent him a letter informing him that it was terminating multiple leases covering thousands of acres.

“The Andersons have made it clear that they do not like Flannery,” according to the letter. “The Andersons are of course free to have their opinions, but they cannot expect that Flannery will continue to just be a punching bag and lease property to them.”

Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat from the area, characterized moves like this as “mobster techniques.” The bigger concern was that Flannery’s holdings had grown into a giant mass that butted against Travis Air Force Base on three sides.

The proximity to the base alarmed both the county and the Department of Defense, which prompted local officials and members of Congress to call for investigations. The investigations elevated the mystery of Flannery Associates into a mainstay on local TV news.

“The FBI was investigating this, the State Department was investigating this, the Treasury Department was investigating this — all the local electeds were trying to get information and calling their legislators,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, another Democrat from the area.

The company remained silent.

Sramek said Flannery had operated in secret to prevent landowners from jacking up prices, and defended the lawsuits as just. He argued that while some farmers didn’t want to sell, most had done so willingly — at prices no other buyer could offer.

“We paid way over market value, and created hundreds of millionaires in the process,” he said. “We are glad that we have been able to settle most of our disputes, and we are open to settling the remaining ones.”

A Simple Case of Wealthy Landowners?

By 2023, Sramek and his investors were in deep. Flannery had spent some $900 million buying 60,000 acres. The first two rounds of funding, at about $10 million each, had ballooned to several more rounds at $100 million each. (Sramek said the company had now raised “more than $900 million” but would not be more specific.)

Big investors begot bigger investors, and the list expanded to a roster of Silicon Valley heavyweights including Hoffman and Powell Jobs.

The company’s offers became so generous that many farmers decided they couldn’t refuse.

The Mahoneys sold Flannery a few hundred acres early on. (Their land is owned by several different entities and hard to tally overall, but in the 1960s Christine Mahoney’s father told a newspaper that he had 16,000 acres in the area.) But as Flannery gobbled more of the land around them, Christine Mahoney said, she realized that something big was happening and that their entire farming business could be at risk. So the family stopped selling to Flannery. The company persisted with more offers, however, improving terms and increasing prices to levels that would have netted tens of millions of dollars. The family continued to say no.

Flannery arrived while the Mahoneys were in the midst of transition. Over 150 years, the family’s company, R. Emigh Livestock, had expanded from two dozen lambs to one of largest sheep farmers in California. Christine Mahoney’s father was in his 90s (he died last year) and she was passing leadership to her son Ryan, who said his wish was to stay there until he was in his 90s, too.

You wouldn’t know it from her jeans or penchant for nostalgia, but Christine Mahoney had spent her career running a corporation, one whose business was raising lambs and cattle. She was, like Sramek, a CEO.

And after years of back and forth, one thing Flannery’s entreaties had made clear was that there was one property the Mahoneys owned that it coveted above the others: Goose Haven Ranch. But Goose Haven was the one the family was most protective of. It had been the center of the lambing operation long enough that the road leading up to it was designed for wagon traffic.

Elsewhere in the county, Flannery had started buying into farms by acquiring shares from family members who wanted out, then becoming what amounted to unwelcome partners with the ones who remained. Two of these arrangements led to lawsuits between Flannery and the other owners. Both settled, but one of them netted a trove of emails and text messages among several neighbors including the Mahoneys.

In May, Flannery used those messages to file an antitrust suit against the Mahoneys and several holdouts. The suit contended that the farmers were colluding to raise prices, describing them as “wealthy landowners who saw an opportunity to conspire, collude, price fix and illegally overcharge Flannery.” It asked for $510 million in damages.

The complaint describes the messages (like Christine Mahoney writing to a neighbor, “That’s great that we can support each other!”) as “a smoking gun” proving that the defendants did want to sell but at even higher prices than Flannery was offering.

In a joint motion to dismiss, lawyers for the Mahoneys and other defendants described Flannery’s lawsuit as “a ham-fisted intimidation technique” designed to smother them with legal fees.

Even after being sued, the Mahoneys still had no idea who Flannery actually was.

The Campaign Apology Tour

In August, The New York Times broke the news of who was behind the purchases. Sramek confirmed his role, and soon topped his LinkedIn profile with a new title: CEO of California Forever, the company’s new name.

He has been in campaign mode ever since, meeting with elected officials, union leaders and environmental groups. California Forever has opened four offices across the county, and Solano’s freeways are now plastered with California Forever billboards.

In a state where it can take years to get a duplex approved, Sramek seems to have calculated that his project is too big to fail. Developers, planners and lawyers I spoke to all expected the project to either never happen or take at least 20 years. Whether out of bluster, delusion or confidence, Sramek, who recently bought a house in nearby Fairfield, said he had promised his wife that their infant daughter would start school in the development he wanted to build.

He didn’t find some secret hack that can make California an easier place to build. Rather, he believes the state’s attitude toward growth is changing. Californians, he thinks, have grown frustrated — with punishing housing costs, with homelessness, with the state’s inability to complete projects like the high-speed rail line that was supposed to connect the Bay Area and Los Angeles but has stalled. So just maybe his will, and gobs of money, can create a new posture toward growth.

“There’s a cultural moment where we realize the pendulum has gone too far,” Sramek said. “We can’t say we are about economic opportunity and working-class Californians are leaving the state every year.”

Last year’s event in Rio Vista was held at the end of lambing season in December. Before the meeting, I dropped by a barn with the Mahoneys where a group of “bummers” — lambs born weak or to overburdened ewes — were in sawdust pens drinking milk. They would be chops in less than a year, and Christine Mahoney cooed to them between my questions.

I asked her a crass but obvious one: why the money from Sramek, those tens of millions, wasn’t enticing.

“Everybody has their price, right?” she said. “I’ve heard that so many times. ‘Everybody has their number — what’s your number?’ I guess I haven’t found it yet.”

“When God calls us home, that’s our number,” Dan Mahoney joked. “Totally different philosophy.”

On Wednesday, Sramek returned to the American Legion post in Rio Vista. This time he had arrived as part of a kickoff event for the ballot initiative. Neighbors and protesters had returned but were prohibited from going inside, where slides of maps and renderings were presented to the press, and details about design were discussed.

The maps had a curious detail: On the edge of the proposed community’s downtown, was Goose Haven Ranch.

The night before the meeting, the Mahoneys sold it. They got about $23 million.

The US is struggling to handle an immigration surge – here’s how Europe is dealing with its own influx

The Conversation

The US is struggling to handle an immigration surge – here’s how Europe is dealing with its own influx

Tara Sonenshine, Tufts University – January 19, 2024

Workers from the Spanish nonprofit Open Waters rescue 178 migrants from different countries, off the coast of Italy in September 2023. <a href=
Workers from the Spanish nonprofit Open Waters rescue 178 migrants from different countries, off the coast of Italy in September 2023. Jose Colon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

As record-high numbers of undocumented migrants cross the United States-Mexico border illegally, one key question is how the U.S. got into this situation, and what lessons can be learned from how other countries respond to border security and immigration problems.

Having worked both inside the U.S. government and in the private sector, I have observed the growing importance of welcoming foreign citizens to one’s country for improving economic growth, scientific advancement, labor supply and cultural awareness.

But migrants entering and staying in the U.S. without visas or proper documentation can create problems – for the migrants themselves, and for overtaxed governments that lack the ability to quickly process asylum cases in immigration courts, for example, or to provide temporary shelter and other basic services for large numbers of arriving migrants. These strains are happening now in many places in the U.S.

Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island in 1923, one year before Congress reformed immigration laws in the U.S., making it harder to enter the country. <a href=
Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island in 1923, one year before Congress reformed immigration laws in the U.S., making it harder to enter the country. Underwood & Underwood/Underwood Archives/Getty Images
U.S. immigration trends

In 1924, after decades of the U.S. welcoming foreign-born citizens to its shores, Congress passed the Immigration Act, restricting the numbers and types of people who could legally enter and stay in the U.S.

That legislation ushered in even more xenophobia and division in the U.S. over the ethnic origins of immigrants – cutting off large-scale immigration, especially from Europe and Asia, until jobs needed to be filled – and there weren’t enough people in the U.S. to fill them.

In the 1960s, immigration laws were reformed again, ushering in waves of immigration from Asia because the U.S. needed people to work at unfilled jobs.

Today, once again, some U.S. politicians are pushing for new ways to restrict immigration. Much of their work focuses on making it harder for migrants to get asylum – meaning legal permission to remain in the U.S. if they have a legitimate fear of persecution in their home countries.

Overall, U.S. border officials encountered more than 1.1 million people illegally crossing the U.S. border from April 2022 through March 2023 – a sharp rise from previous years, when the number of people illegally crossing each year hovered at less than 300,000.

U.S. authorities are now stepping up deportations, quickly sending more undocumented people back to their home countries.

A shifting response to immigration

Globally, international migration to rich countries reached an all-time high in 2022.

So, how do other countries, including Canada and Germany, respond to migrants crossing their borders without a visa or proper documentation?

One answer has been to reform their immigration systems to make deportation easier.

Germany, for example, has been wrestling with increases in undocumented immigration.

Germany Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced at the end of 2023 that he supports large-scale deportations for migrants who are rejected for asylum.

Germany deported close to 8,000 people, many of them fleeing the war in Ukraine, in the first part of 2023. In total, an estimated 92,119 immigrants entered Germany illegally from January through September 2023.

New German government reforms will increase that figure and no longer require officials to announce deportations in advance.

Italy, which is also battling a huge influx of undocumented migrants from North Africa, recently doubled the amount of time that it can detain undocumented migrants, rising from three months to at least six months. This decision is seen as an effort to deter more migrants from illegally entering Italy.

In November 2023, Italy signed an agreement to build two new immigration detention centers across the Adriatic Sea in Albania.

This allows Italy to skirt a European Union policy that requires its member countries to consider and process all asylum applicants’ requests within a year of their arrival. Since Albania is not part of the European Union, it could quickly deport the migrants that Italy sends there.

In December 2023, the European Union’s 27 countries also voted on a major overhaul of asylum laws. These changes will make it easier for countries to deport migrants who fail to get asylum. They also direct the European Union to give money to countries that allow more asylum seekers to stay in those countries.

Other approaches

Right now, Italy and Greece bear much of the brunt of migration in the EU.

More than 31,000 undocumented migrants, mainly from Syria, crossed into Greece in 2023, up from 18,000 undocumented people who entered the country in 2022.

The parliament in Greece is considering new laws that would enable the country to issue tens of thousands of undocumented migrants residence and work permits to address labor shortages.

Greece is also pushing the European Union to slap economic sanctions on countries, like Pakistan, that refuse to take back the undocumented migrants that Greece deports to their home countries.

Closer to home, Canada is also experiencing a surge of undocumented migration into Quebec and other places, prompting some Canadians to feel growing anxiety, in part because of perceptions that the sudden population growth is also raising the country’s already-high housing costs. Canada deported 7,232 undocumented people in the first six months of 2023 – a rise compared to the 7,635 deportations Canada carried out in the entire year of 2021.

Canada also announced in December 2023 that it is planning to allow people who entered the country with valid, short-term visas, and who continue living in Canada after these visas expire, to apply for permanent residency. This would mainly affect foreign students and temporary workers.

A Canadian officer speaks to migrants as they arrive in Quebec in March 2023. <a href=
A Canadian officer speaks to migrants as they arrive in Quebec in March 2023. Sebastien St-Jean/AFP via Getty Images

An uncertain way ahead

Back in the U.S., the fight over immigration continues, with Republicans eager to crack down and Democrats who generally want to avoid harsh new standards that could lead to more deportations and mass roundups of undocumented immigrants.

Traditionally, Democrats have been supportive of immigration and the rights of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

But the wave of migrants who arrive in cities like New York and Chicago without any money, jobs or places to live is severely straining city governments’ capacity and budgets. Local leaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams are pleading with the federal government to help with a crisis that, as Adams said in September 2023, has no clear end in sight.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.

It was written by: Tara Sonenshine, Tufts University.

Read more:

Tara Sonenshine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

These voters will pick the next president. They’re frightened about American democracy.

Politico

These voters will pick the next president. They’re frightened about American democracy.

Zach Montellaro – January 17, 2024

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 12: Members of the U.S. National Guard arrive at the U.S. Capitol on January 12, 2021 in Washington, DC. The Pentagon is deploying as many as 15,000 National Guard troops to protect President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, amid fears of new violence. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) 

NAZARETH, Pennsylvania — Earlier this month, 15 voters in this closely contested area of Pennsylvania convened to discuss the state of American democracy.

To say they were discouraged as the 2024 election gets underway would be an understatement.

Three years after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, half of the voters in the focus group immediately started nodding when asked about the possibility of violence around the election.

Sitting around folding tables in an arts center just off of the small town’s Rockwell-esque Main Street, the voters painted a bleak picture over the next hour: A largely negative view on everything from trusting that their votes and their neighbors’ votes will be fairly counted, the speed it takes to get results and that those results will be accepted by the losers.

“I almost feel numb to it,” Jackie, a younger voter in the focus group, said of the violence on Jan. 6. “We’re going to have another election, could that happen again? I probably won’t even react the same, because I’m like ‘this is what happens.’ … Something’s probably going to happen.”

The focus group was brought together by Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that seeks to educate the public about strengthening the democratic system. It was convened in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, a swing county in one of the most important swing states in the nation.

The participants’ pessimism encapsulates one of the most pressing challenges in American politics right now — the loss of public trust in democracy itself and the electoral infrastructure that supports it. It is a problem that stretches far beyond just Nazareth; a Gallup poll released the day after the focus group found that a record low 28 percent of American adults are satisfied with the way democracy is working in this country.

Their distrust comes at a moment of intense polarization in America — and after former President Donald Trump has spread constant lies about the security of American elections in the three years since the Capitol riot.

“Everybody agreed on one thing: That there’s a very good chance there’s gonna be violence in the next election,” said former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), who sits on the state advisory board of Keep Our Republic. “There’s a heightened sense of, or concern about, civil disorder in the next election.”

The voters in the focus group are, in a literal sense, the mythological “Main Street” swing voters that politicians talk about in their stump speeches. Christopher Borick, a pollster and professor at nearby Muhlenberg College, selected them from his neighbors who lived on or near the town’s Main Street.

The group was overwhelmingly white, like both the town of Nazareth and Northampton County more broadly, but was otherwise emblematic of the voters who will decide 2024. They were all registered voters — and those who said how they voted in 2020 during the focus group seemed evenly divided between Trump and President Joe Biden.

Borick asked them to participate because he never saw a political sign pop up on their front lawns. POLITICO observed the focus group under the condition that voters would be identified by their first names only.

The focus group came just a day before Biden gave a speech near Valley Forge, about an hour’s drive away, on the state of the country’s democracy. There, the president cast the 2024 election as a referendum that will decide “whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause.”

But the focus group made clear that much of the distrust in the democratic system is rooted in the broader political polarization of the moment.

Borick often tried to steer the conversation away from the politics of the 2024 election to the mechanics of it, but participants consistently returned to their displeasure in another Biden-Trump rematch.

Almost to a person there was a wariness — and in some cases an outright distrust— of the democratic process in the county. Two voters, distinctly in the minority, repeated conspiracy theories popularized by Trump about mail ballots being used to steal the election from him. And roughly a third of participants said they believed unregistered people were casting ballots.

But more broadly, the participants were confused by the process, with complaints especially about the time it takes to know the winner. Pennsylvania did not allow for election officials to pre-process mail ballots in 2020 — a significant cause of the state’s elongated vote count — and is now an outlier state that hasn’t updated its laws to allow for it in 2024.

“America’s Got Talent can tally 50 million votes in 15 minutes,” Mike, a middle-aged engineer, joked during the focus group. “How can we not elect officials effectively, and not feel confident? Across the board, I don’t feel a lot of confidence here that all of our votes are getting counted properly.”

Northampton voters’ suspicions are fueled by a string of recent election administration failures. In recent municipal elections, election machines have faltered twice: In 2019, initial vote totals showed a candidate who would go on to narrowly win their contest only initially get less than 200 votes across some 55,000 ballots. And just last year, the printout of a person’s ballot would in some cases display the wrong selection on judicial retention elections.

In both cases, election officials stressed that the final outcomes were correct. A paper trail backup was used to count the votes in 2019, and election officials said last year’s erroneous printouts were due to human error when programming the machines and that they were able to correctly tally the final count as voters intended.

“If they tell me they’re working, I am hoping they’re working,” Jimmy, another participant in the group, said of the voting machines. “I try to be optimistic.”

But election officials and groups like Keep Our Republic face a tough climb ahead, even in counties that did not have demonstrable problems like Northampton did.

Keep Our Republic’s theory is that the group can reverse — or at least slow — the declining trust in the democratic process by working with local leaders in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The group has hosted legal education classes for attorneys in Pennsylvania about the state’s election laws, and meetings with local election officials and their community in Wisconsin. The goal of the group, in the words of the group’s executive director Ari Mittleman, is to educate the local “chattering class” — local attorneys, community leaders and regular voters.

“If you look at the climate, I think we should assume that it’s going to be incredibly, incredibly tumultuous,” Mittleman said in an interview over a plate of pierogi and beer at a local brewery. “All we can do is put up speed bumps. And our hypothesis is … who is turned to in these communities in purple America, in these three states? It’s not the president. It’s not the politicians.”

The hope, he said, is that instead of turning to national pundits or politicians, voters turn inward to their community with questions. The theory is that another parent on a child’s Little League team or a church elder would be a more effective messenger about the democratic process than a prominent politician or expert parachuting into the community. And when there are questions over things like election litigation, or problems that do occur, community leaders would be inherently more trustworthy.

“I’ll be the first to say, it’s a total hypothesis that might be proven wrong. People might tune into national news, talking heads and experts who’ve never been to Northampton County or Kent County, Michigan, or whatever,” Mittleman said. “But I have a feeling they’re going to go and say to people in their community, ‘What’s this all about?’”

George Washington’s Farewell Address provides stark warning for Americans Today

Portsmouth Hereld – Opinion

Opinion: George Washington’s Farewell Address provides stark warning for Americans Today

Jeff Frenkiewich – January 17, 2024

On September 19, 1796, George Washington published his Farewell Address. In it, America’s “founding father” announced his retirement and explained his reasons for not seeking a third term as president. Nervous about the upcoming election that threatened to tear apart the country he loved, Washington also offered his fellow citizens, “some sentiments which are the result of much reflection.” With New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary less than a week away, and a divisive general election later this year, we would be wise to consider George Washington’s advice, as it is just as relevant today as it was 228 years ago.

Washington’s America, much like today, was a nation divided by regional differences and sectional interests. Our first president could have predicted a time when politicians openly call for a “national divorce” based on regional differences, and state legislatures would feel empowered to debate the idea of secession.

Rebutting those who look to divide America, Washington argues that a unified country brings us, “greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value!” He states, “your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.”

Washington acknowledges that regional differences exist between the North and South, East and West, but he is urging us to consider that the whole is greater than the sum of our parts; a break up of our union will only damage the liberty and prosperity that we have worked so hard to secure.

Washington is not shy in identifying the cause of animosity between regions of the United States – political parties. Washington states, “One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.” Foreshadowing a media saturated with disinformation, Washington says, “You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart burnings which spring from these misrepresentations. They tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” Again, our unity provides us strength, and only those who wish to weaken the United States look to exploit the perceived differences amongst our people.

For Washington, the end result of political parties stoking regional divisions is despotism – a dictatorship. He states, “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty… It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” In this election cycle, we have one candidate who actively created jealousies and false alarms when he tried to overturn the last presidential election with lies. He kindled animosity urging his followers to march on the Capitol as lawmakers were certifying that election, and he fomented an insurrection, watching idle as his followers attempted to overthrow our democracy. That same candidate, when asked if he would be a dictator if elected president, replied, “No, no, no, other than day one.” Most recently, this candidate endorsed the claim that a president, “could sell pardons, could sell military secrets, could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” We must take these threats to our democracy seriously.

In his Farewell Address, a letter that runs just over 6,000 words, George Washington uses the pronouns “you” or “your” 75 times (he used “yourselves” twice). Washington is speaking directly to us, the American people, making clear that despite the cult of personality that surrounded him, he was only one of many responsible for the nation’s welfare; it is “We the People” who are the stewards of our republic.

Washington knew that we would be challenged in preserving our Union; he knew that sectional divisions would promote a spirit of party and that these factions would produce a want-to-be despot surrounded by his own cult of personality. We the people are the only guards against such a dictatorship; we must heed Washington’s warning and do everything we can to preserve our union. We must protect our democracy from those who wish to put their own self-interests above the interests of our Union. Please vote in this upcoming election.

Jeff Frenkiewich teaches social studies at Milford Middle School and he is an adjunct professor of education at the University of New Hampshire. (The views expressed here represent those of the author, not Milford School District or UNH.)

Trump posts all-caps rant telling people they ‘JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH’ presidents who ‘CROSS THE LINE’

Business Insider

Trump posts all-caps rant telling people they ‘JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH’ presidents who ‘CROSS THE LINE’

Grace Eliza Goodwin – January 18, 2024

  • Donald Trump said people “JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH” presidents who “CROSS THE LINE.”
  • He posted the lengthy all-caps rant on Truth Social early Thursday morning.
  • A DC appeals court is weighing whether Trump should have criminal immunity.

Donald Trump is once again claiming that presidents should have total immunity from any crimes they commit while in office — this time, with an all-caps rant posted to Truth Social.

And he says that people need to just accept it.

“A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION,” Trump wrote on his social-media platform in the early hours of Thursday morning. “ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END.

“EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD,” he continued.

Trump compared his situation — he’s facing more than 90 felony charges across four criminal cases — to the debate around police misconduct, saying guarding against the “OCCASIONAL ‘ROGUE COP’ OR ‘BAD APPLE'” isn’t worth it.

“SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT,'” he added.

A DC appeals court is weighing whether he has immunity from criminal prosecution for his actions while in office.

Trump’s lawyers argue that unless Congress had already impeached and convicted him of a crime, then he is immune.

Trump’s lawyers previously argued the opposite in his 2021 impeachment case, saying that a former president should answer to the courts, not to Congress.

Trump’s current lawyers went so far as to argue that a president couldn’t be charged, even if he ordered the assassinations of his rivals.

Tax Us, Daddy?

Reason

Tax Us, Daddy?

Liz Wolfe – January 18, 2024

Davos
Andy Barton/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

Taxes are the only way to get rid of excess money? “We ask you to tax us, the very richest in society,” reads an open letter to the world leaders assembled in Davos, Switzerland, penned by 250 millionaires and billionaires who seem to be gluttons for punishment.

“We’d be proud to pay more,” declares their website, which is thusly named. “This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.” Signatories include Disney and Rockefeller heiresses, as well as actor Brian Cox.

Currently, nobody is forcing them to keep their earnings. They have full freedom to do whatever they’d like with their money—including giving it away to charity or coordinating with other similarly rich people to pool money together to tackle specific issues that might be too large for just one billionaire to handle.

“Inequality has reached a tipping point, and its cost to our economic, societal and ecological stability risk is severe—and growing every day,” reads the letter, which in no way substantiates how “inequality” has reached this “tipping point” or what exactly happens if inequality continues to grow. (Absolute wealth is infrequently mentioned in these types of calls to action. It’s always relative wealth, which allows signatories to ignore the vast standard-of-living gains that have been made over the last century.)

“If our elected officials refuse to address this concentration of money and power, the consequences will be dire,” warned Cox.

Speaking of concentrations of power: The impetus for the open letter is the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, which is happening now and drawing leaders from across the globe—frequently arriving on their private jets. (“Private jet emissions quadrupled during Davos 2022,” reads a Guardian headline from last year, which put the total number of private jet flights at 1,040. Fascinating that those who are so concerned with climate change still feel comfortable flying private.)

The bright spot, amid the calls for coercive wealth redistribution, was undoubtedly the speech given by newly elected Argentine President Javier Milei, who is so full of fiery takes that he might just singe your eyebrows off.

“Today I am here to tell you that the Western world is in danger, and it’s in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty,” said Milei. “Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the desire to belong to a privileged class, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.”

But Argentina knows firsthand, he warned, just how bad of an economic situation can arise from state intervention: “We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, rather they are the root cause.”

“Today’s states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the life of individuals,” he continued. “With tools like printing money, debt, subsidies, control of the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.”

And, later on: “They say that capitalism is evil because it’s individualistic and that collectivism is good because it’s altruistic, of course with the money of others.”

You couldn’t engineer a better response to the taxation-hungry billionaires mentioned above if you tried. People are always free to give their own money away, but it takes a special breed to favor coercion.

“Do not be intimidated either by the political caste nor by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender yourself to a political class that only wants to perpetuate itself in power and keep their privileges,” Milei added, closing with a forceful defense of value creators: “You [entrepreneurs] are social benefactors, you are heroes, you are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we have ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral.”

After all, “the state is not the solution, the state is the problem itself.”

It’s about time someone went into the lion’s den and forcefully defended free market capitalism.

Oh, and Milei? He flew commercial, saving taxpayers an estimated $392,000.

Hundreds of millionaires, billionaires urge politicians at Davos to tax their wealth

UPI

Hundreds of millionaires, billionaires urge politicians at Davos to tax their wealth

Darryl Coote – January 17, 2024

Actor Simon Pegg is among the millionaires urging world leaders congregating in Switzerland for The World Economic Forum to tax their wealth, warning of rising economic inequality. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
Actor Simon Pegg is among the millionaires urging world leaders congregating in Switzerland for The World Economic Forum to tax their wealth, warning of rising economic inequality. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI

Jan. 17 (UPI) — Nearly 270 millionaires and billionaires urged world leaders congregating in Switzerland for The World Economic Forum on Wednesday to tax their wealth, warning that if their elected representatives don’t address the drastic rise in economic inequality, the consequences will be “catastrophic.”

“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society,” the letter signed by 268 millionaires and billionaires from 17 countries and published Wednesday.

“This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”

The World Economic Forum is being held this week through Friday and will be attended by political leaders as well the world’s rich and powerful in the Swiss resort town of Davos where they will discuss global, regional and industry goals.

In their letter to the congregated world leaders, the hundreds of rich signatories said they are surprised their previous calls to be tax have yet to be heeded, stating they are not seeking drastic changes, only financial policies that will prevent society from further degradation.

Actor Brian Cox, who famously plays a wealthy media mogul in "Succession," is among the real-life millionaires urging world leaders congregating in Switzerland for The World Economic Forum to tax their wealth amid rising economic inequality. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI
Actor Brian Cox, who famously plays a wealthy media mogul in “Succession,” is among the real-life millionaires urging world leaders congregating in Switzerland for The World Economic Forum to tax their wealth amid rising economic inequality. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI

“Inequality has reached a tipping point, and its cost to our economic, societal and ecological stability risk is severe — and growing every day. In short, we need action now,” the letter states, adding that philanthropy and one-off donations will not fix the issue.

“Not only do we want to be taxed more but we believe we must be taxed more. We would be proud to live in countries where this is expected, and proud of elected leaders who build better futures.”

The letter’s signatories include filmmaker and Disney heir Abigail Disney, actors Simon Pegg and Brian Cox and Valerie Rockefeller of the U.S. Rockefeller family.

“We need our governments and our leaders to lead. And so we come to you again with the urgent request that you act — unilaterally at the national level, and together on the international stage,” they said.

The letter comes as a new poll published Wednesday shows that 74% of wealthy people support higher taxes on their fortunes, while 75% support the introduction of a 2% tax on billionaires, as proposed by the European Union Tax Observatory.

The poll by Survation on behalf of the nonpartisan Patriotic Millionaires surveyed more than 2,300 people from G20 countries who hold more than $1 million in investable assets, excluding their homes, making them the richest 5% of society.

A majority of respondents at 58% said they also supported the introduction of a 2% wealth tax for people with more than $10 million.

“Throughout history, pitchforks were the inevitable consequence of extreme discontent, but today, the masses are turning to populism, which is on the rise throughout the world,” Disney said in a statement.

“We already know the solution to protect our institutions and stabilize our country: it’s taxing extreme wealth. What we lack is the political fortitude to do it. Even millionaires and billionaires like me are saying it’s time. The elites gathering in Davos must take this crisis seriously.”

The World Economic Forum kicked off Monday, which is when Oxfam published its Inequality Inc. report that warned inequality has worsened since 2020, with the world’s richest five men seeing their fortunes double while the planet’s poorest 60% became poorer.

Cancer incidence rising among adults under 50, new report says, leaving doctors searching for answers

CNN

Cancer incidence rising among adults under 50, new report says, leaving doctors searching for answers

Jacqueline Howard, CNN – January 17, 2024

Josh Herting was on a business trip in Vermont when he received a phone call from his doctor that would change his life. On that cold winter day — a decade ago this week — his doctor told him that he had colon cancer.

After hanging up the phone, Herting wanted to keep working.

“I was very focused on work, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to finish this work trip, and then I’ll be home,’ ” he said. “I didn’t understand the seriousness of it.”

But moments later, he picked up the phone again and called his girlfriend, Amber. When he told her the news, she said it was time to come home.

Herting drove five hours to Boston. He arrived home at 2 o’clock in the morning and had medical appointments beginning six hours later.

“I was 34 years old, in what I would consider incredible health. I worked out five to six days a week, very low body fat, ate really healthy, and was in no pain or anything, but I noticed some clotted blood in my stool on a few different occasions,” said Herting, who is now 44 and married to Amber. He added that his father was diagnosed with stage I colon cancer in his early 50s but said he had no other known family history of the disease.

Herting’s journey of battling early-onset cancer is an experience shared by a growing proportion of young adults.

Cancer patients are “increasingly shifting from older to middle-aged individuals,” according to a report released Wednesday by the American Cancer Society.

Among adults 65 and older, adults 50 to 64 and those younger than 50, “people aged younger than 50 years were the only one of these three age groups to experience an increase in overall cancer incidence” from 1995 to 2020, says the report, which was published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Even though the overall US population is aging, “we’re seeing a movement of cancer diagnosis into younger folks, despite the fact that there are more people that are in the older populations,” said Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society.

“So cancer diagnoses are shifting earlier,” he said. “There’s something going on here.”

Herting’s diagnosis came after a gastroenterologist recommended that he get a colonoscopy due to the blood in his stool.

Herting had surgery, about a week and a half after his diagnosis, to remove the tumor and a foot of his colon. After the surgery and further testing, he said, his medical team at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute estimated that the cancer had been in his system for about eight years and was stage IIIA. Stage III colon cancers are likely to have spread to nearby lymph nodes, but they have not yet spread to other parts of the body, according to the American Cancer Society.

Herting then had chemotherapy, and after five years of monitoring his recovery with CAT scans and blood work, his team declared him cancer-free. Amber remained by his side during his cancer treatments.

Josh Herting says he hopes cancer screenings are less intrusive by the time his children are grown. - Courtesy Josh Herting
Josh Herting says he hopes cancer screenings are less intrusive by the time his children are grown. – Courtesy Josh Herting

“But you’re never the same person,” Herting said of his cancer journey. He still has some fatigue and numbness in his fingertips and toes from chemotherapy, and he gets colonoscopies every three years – unless his doctor says otherwise – to make sure the cancer has not returned.

“Colonoscopies – I’ve had way more than I’d like to admit – they’re not fun. But at the same time, colon cancer and chemotherapy are a million times worse,” Herting said.

“There’s this stigma about colonoscopy. For people that have never had cancer, it’s kind of this taboo topic, and you’ve got to go through this process to prep for it, and that’s not fun,” he said. “But I can tell you firsthand, it is definitely worth doing.”

Among adults younger than 50, colorectal cancer has become the leading cause of cancer death in men and the second-leading cause in women, behind breast cancer, the new report says. In the late 1990s, it ranked fourth in both men and women younger than 50.

“It’s just different now than it used to be,” Dahut said. “This young adult trend is the thing that has me scratching my head the most.”

‘A call to arms’

Even though the rising cancer incidence among younger adults has been
“poorly understood” and raises more questions than answers, Dr. Scott Kopetz says he has seen the trend firsthand at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“In our clinical practice, we’re seeing patients presenting younger and presenting before ages of screening for many cancers, so it’s certainly a continued concerning trend in the field,” said Kopetz, an associate vice president for translational integration and a professor of gastrointestinal medical oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

For instance, it’s recommended that all adults start screening for colon and rectal cancers at age 45, but more cases are emerging among people at even younger ages.

“When one looks at the totality of the data, it really is a call to arms to really better understand the changing epidemiology of cancer,” Kopetz said.

“Colorectal is the most prominent one, but we’re also seeing that in cancers that don’t have as clear-cut screening guidelines – so things like pancreas, gastric cancer – are also seeing trends towards earlier ages,” he said. “Pancreas cancer, and to some extent gastric cancer as well, are ones that we just don’t have good screening methodologies currently, but we’re seeing a lot of the same trends occurring.”

Kopetz worries that the rising incidence of cancer in young adults will grow into a rising incidence of cancer in older age.

“There’s a concern that, as the population ages, that what is currently an increase in young-onset disease will turn into increases in mid-onset and late-onset disease as well. So if the epidemiology of this is changing, this could be the beginning of a wave of increased cancers that may persist or may continue to increase over the next decades,” he said.

The new American Cancer Society report projects that there will be about 2 million new cancer cases in the United States this year, equivalent to more than 5,000 diagnoses each day. It’s also projected that there will be about 600,000 cancer deaths in 2024.

“This is a call to better understand what’s driving these increases,” Kopetz said. “And a call also to accelerate efforts for early detection approaches that may provide screening for multiple different tumor types.”

Herting, who now has a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter, hopes that when his children are young adults, screening for cancers will be less intrusive, especially for colorectal cancer.

“I hope for the future that it’s made to be less invasive,” Herting said. “If we could find a way to make it less invasive, more and more people would be willing to do it, and most likely insurance might be more apt to cover it for more people.”

Other data has showed that the share of colorectal cancer diagnoses among adults younger than 55 in the US has been rising since the 1990s. Signs and symptoms of colorectal cancer include changes in bowel habits, rectal bleeding or blood in the stool, cramping or abdominal pain, weakness and fatigue, and unexplained weight loss.

A report released last year by the American Cancer Society showed that the proportion of colorectal cancer cases among adults younger than 55 increased from 11% in 1995 to 20% in 2019. Yet the factors driving that rise remain a mystery.

Some of the things known to raise anyone’s risk of colorectal cancer are having a family history of the disease, having a certain genetic mutation, drinking too much alcohol, smoking cigarettes or having obesity.

“People point to exercise, diet, types of food,” Dahut said, but there’s probably more than just one cause — and sometimes, younger people diagnosed with early-onset colorectal cancer are otherwise healthy, with a history of working out and eating healthy diets, and don’t have a family history or genetic mutations.

Some scientists have been looking into whether a woman’s obesity during pregnancy may be associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer in her offspring and whether that association could contribute to increasing incidence rates in younger adults — but more research is needed.

“The continuous sharp increase in colorectal cancer in younger Americans is alarming,” Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, senior vice president of surveillance and health equity science at the American Cancer Society and senior author of the new report, said in a news release.

“We need to halt and reverse this trend by increasing uptake of screening, including awareness of non-invasive stool tests with follow-up care, in people 45-49 years. Up to one-third of people diagnosed before 50 have a family history or genetic predisposition and should begin screening before age 45 years,” Jemal said. “We also need to increase investment to elucidate the underlying reasons for the rising incidence to uncover additional preventive measures.”

Cases climb as deaths decline

Overall, the number of people dying from cancer in the United States continues to decline, but the incidence rates for several types of cancer — including breast, prostate, uterine corpus, pancreas, oropharynx, liver in women, kidney, melanoma, and colorectal and cervical in young adults — remain on the rise, according to the new American Cancer Society report.

Cancer deaths continued to fall in the United States through 2021, leading to an overall drop of 33% since 1991, the report says, largely due to fewer people smoking, more people detecting cancer early and major improvements in treatments for cancer, such as immunotherapies and targeted therapies.

“We’re encouraged by the steady drop in cancer mortality as a result of less smoking, earlier detection for some cancers, and improved treatment,” Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “But as a nation, we’ve dropped the ball on cancer prevention as incidence continues to increase for many common cancers — like breast, prostate, and endometrial, as well as colorectal and cervical cancers in some young adults.”

The report adds that “progress is lagging in cancer prevention,” as six of the top 10 cancers in the United States have had increases in incidence.

The cancers with red bars are increasing. - American Cancer Society
The cancers with red bars are increasing. – American Cancer Society

Among the top 10 cancers, based on cases projected in 2024, those that are increasing are breast, prostate, melanoma of the skin, kidney and renal, uterine corpus and pancreas.

The new report says that incidence rates increased from 2015 through 2019 by about 1% each year for breast, pancreas and uterine cancers and by up to 3% annually for prostate, liver in women, kidney and HPV-associated oral cancers and melanoma. Incidence rates also increased up to 2% annually for cervical cancers in ages 30 to 44 and colorectal cancers in adults younger than 55, according to the report.

The report also highlights that racial disparities in cancer incidence and deaths continue, as people of color still face increased risks, and the report says this has “hampered” progress.

“Progress is also hampered by wide persistent cancer disparities; compared to White people, mortality rates are two‐fold higher for prostate, stomach and uterine corpus cancers in Black people and for liver, stomach, and kidney cancers in Native American people,” according to the report. “Continued national progress will require increased investment in cancer prevention and access to equitable treatment, especially among American Indian and Alaska Native and Black individuals.”

Colon cancer is killing more younger men and women than ever, new report finds

NBC News

Colon cancer is killing more younger men and women than ever, new report finds

Erika Edwards and Jessica Herzberg – January 17, 2024

Report shows colorectal cancer is deadliest cancer for men under age 50Scroll back up to restore default view.

Colorectal cancer is the deadliest cancer for men under age 50 — and the second deadliest cancer among women in the same age group, behind breast cancer.

The incidence of colon cancer has been rising for at least the last two decades, when it was the fourth-leading cause of cancer death for both men and women under 50.

Among men and women of all ages, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death. Prostate cancer is second for men, and breast cancer is second for women. Colorectal cancer is third, overall, for both sexes.

The diagnosis of late-stage colorectal cancer was a shock to Sierra Fuller, 33. (Courtesy Sierra Fuller )
The diagnosis of late-stage colorectal cancer was a shock to Sierra Fuller, 33. (Courtesy Sierra Fuller )

Even as overall cancer deaths continue to fall in the U.S., the American Cancer Society is reporting for the first time that colon and rectal cancers have become leading causes of cancer death in younger adults. The finding was published Wednesday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Cancer is traditionally a disease among the elderly, although the percentage of new cases found in people 65 and older has fallen from 61% in 1995 to 58%. The decrease, attributed mainly to drops in prostate and smoking-related cancers, has occurred even though the proportion of people in that age group has grown from 13% to 17% in the general population.

In contrast, new diagnoses among adults ages 50 to 64 have increased since 1995, from 25% to 30%.

Rates of breast and endometrial cancer, as well as mouth and throat disease, have been on the rise. The report did not break down those diagnoses by age.

The findings reflect what cancer doctors have observed for years.

“For a couple of decades now, we have been noticing that the patients coming into our clinic seem to be younger and younger,” said Dr. Kimmie Ng, the director of the Young Onset Colorectal Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “What this report now cements for us is that these trends are real.” Ng was not involved with the new report.

Dr. William Dahut, the chief scientific officer at the American Cancer Society, said younger people tend to be diagnosed at later stages, when the cancer is more aggressive.

“So it’s not only having a colorectal cancer — it’s colorectal cancer that’s more difficult to treat, which is why we’re seeing these changes in mortality,” Dahut said.

The diagnosis of late-stage colorectal cancer was a shock to Sierra Fuller, 33, of Acton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.

It was around Christmas 2021 when Fuller noticed blood in her stool when she went to the bathroom. With no family history of colon cancer, she figured the problem was most likely an annoying hemorrhoid.

Weeks later, the blood deposits worsened, and she started having abdominal pain.

Sierra Fuller and her husband. (Courtesy Sierra Fuller)
Sierra Fuller and her husband. (Courtesy Sierra Fuller)

“It was a month from when I got the symptoms to when I sought help, and I realize that I was pushing it,” she said. Tests revealed she had stage 3b colorectal cancer. That usually means the cancer has started to spread through the colon and possibly to nearby lymph nodes, but not any farther, according to the American Cancer Society.

It was a blow to Fuller and her husband, who had just started talking about whether to try for a baby. They decided to freeze embryos before Fuller’s treatment protocol, which would include radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.

It is an example of how cancer uniquely affects young patients.

Sierra Fuller. (Courtesy Sierra Fuller)
Sierra Fuller. (Courtesy Sierra Fuller)

“People younger than 65 are less likely to have health insurance and more likely to be juggling family and careers,” Dahut said in a news release announcing the new report. “Also, men and women diagnosed younger have a longer life expectancy in which to suffer treatment-related side effects, such as second cancers.”

Just over a year later, Fuller is cancer-free but must get regular scans and blood tests. She said that she feels good but that she is “always going to have that worry” that her cancer will return.

“If I have to go through this again, whatever that looks like, I’ll cross that bridge if it comes,” Fuller said.

Why is cancer rising in younger people?

Doctors do not know why cancer, especially colorectal cancer, is becoming more common in younger adults. Some hypothesize that increasing obesity rates, sedentary behavior and unhealthy diets could be playing roles.

“But honestly, the patients we’re seeing in clinic often do not fit that profile,” said Dr. Kimmie Ng, the director of the Young Onset Colorectal Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “A lot of them are triathletes and marathon runners. I mean, super healthy people.”

Ng suspects something in the environment may be behind the rise.

“What we suspect may be happening is that whatever combination of environmental factors is responsible for this, that it’s likely changing our microbiomes or our immune systems, leading us to become more susceptible to these cancers at a younger age,” Ng said.

How to protect against colorectal cancer

Colonoscopy screening is generally recommended starting at age 45. People with family histories of the illness may need to begin screening earlier.

A person whose parent was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 50, for example, would need to start screening at age 40, Dahut said.

However, only about a third of people diagnosed with colon cancer have some kind of family history or predisposition to the cancer.

Maintaining a healthy body weight and minimizing red meat in the diet may help reduce risk, Ng said.

Signs that could signal a problem, Ng said, include blood in the stool, abdominal pain, unintentional weight loss and changes in bowel habits.

“If it’s getting worse, if it’s not going away, you know, that’s when somebody really needs to start paying attention and talk to their primary care doctor about what’s happening,” she said.