Meloni won her election in Italy over a year and a half ago. I haven’t noticed anything apocalyptic going on there.
DB2
Yes!
But also no, as “the business sector” has largely controlled immigration policy into the USA by having as the supreme unstated de facto rule:
Have any policy you want but never even speak of enforcement by making employers responsible for verifying that their low wage employees are legal (e.g. requiring green card ID)
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You missed the sequence in “Born In East LA” where Cheech is selling fake USian IDs?
Steve
Hell no I did not miss that! I even went to and enjoyed some of his live performances going waaaay back to his time as part of “Cheech and Chong”, both my homies.
The point being not that IDs are inherently fakeable, but that the USA has crap IDs, also in service of illegal employment. BUT miracle of miracles, nations that actually choose to have and enforce democratic immigration policies do so by having ID systems (you need more than just a hard to fake card) that friggin’ work!!!
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Anytime anyone proposes a national ID card for USians, people get up on their hind legs and start howling about “police state”. So the debate turns to giving immigrants an ID. But, since USians don’t have a “national ID card”, all anyone has to say is they are a USian…unless you fit the “profile”.
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YES, but of course!!! And the funding for that hind leg howling? Oh, from the usual suspects, starting with California Agricultural interests and quickly spread to hotel/restaurant and construction trades… and the alliance of California Ag and construction interests with fundamentalist racist Christians, exemplified by RR, gave birth to much of our political world of today.
I first saw all that in action in California, where in High School I helped organize for Cesar Chavez & the Farm Workers Union when they took on the wealthy might of Gallo Wineries in alliance with other extremely wealthy Agricultural family empires in California.
Amongst other normal sensible stands, the farm workers supported enforcement of immigration law, and the agricultural interests went full scale berserk in response. Chavez and his workers pulled much of the Roman Catholic Church into a soft alliance with the Farm Workers, and in response the Agricultural money went and bought an alliance with Jerry Falwell and other racist conservative protestants. The “(im)Moral Majority” and its ilk were a direct result of an alliance of Ag interests protecting their use of illegal immigrant farm workers and of racists protecting their racist schools via “Christian Academies”. The conjunction of interests at the top got Pat Robertson and Falwell and Dobson and ilk to preach on the angst in the Book of Revelations about the “mark of the beast” as being the same as reliable governmental I.D.
And did they ever hate and fear Robert Kennedy.
To find out why the USA is so psychotic on so many issues you have to revisit the past…
…and Los Angeles born Cheech was there providing very necessary comic relief.
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Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis tweaked his Cabinet on Friday with a focus on cost-of-living and labor policies after his center-right party’s victory in Europe’s parliamentary elections.
Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party easily came first in the June 9 European parliamentary elections, gaining 28% of the vote — nearly twice the left-wing main opposition Syriza party’s 15%.
DB2
Oh there is no doubt humans will vote for the short term pleasure rather than the long term benefit. That’s why, as George Carlin said, “We are a defective species.” Mother Nature has a way of dealing with such. It may take a while, but she always wins in the end.
Zeihan’s take on the election"
Germany has vanished from playing a significant role in European affairs.
Conservative Meloni in Italy has been boosted by the election.
France’s Macron was undercut by election results.
But the European parliament has little power and does make all the decision. It does have the power to valid or toss out the European commission that the executive branch of the EU. It is the president’s and prime ministers that make the decisions.
At the same time, there is something to be said for focusing on cost-of-living and labor policies. On this board we have certainly spent a fair amount of time discussing inflation, labor unions, minimum wages and the like.
DB2
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Bob,
Those are the reasons to go to renewables, create a deflationary energy policy, employ people, source energy for industrial purposes to improve the standard of living.
Germany and France have the strongest economies and have much say in European policy.
EU Pres Von Leyden says that center politics continue to dominate EU. But not without some dispute on policies.
The EU election does indicate an increase in the power of right wing groups. France is likely to see how far this goes in their Snap Election.
There are those who see France’s role as keeping Germany under control. This trend might limit Macron’s role.
Meanwhile Labour seems likely to get control in UK. No longer in EU but a major economic power.
Things are changing. Voters have to decide what they want.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-08/rising-distress-in-germany-signals-a-lot-more-struggles-ahead
Rising Distress in Germany Signals a Lot More Struggles Ahead
The much bigger problem at least for German industry has nothing to do with trade policy, but with China crowding in on previously monopolistic and oligopolistic markets dominated by German firms.
Previously, the partnership between Germany and China was complementary. The Germans built the factories and the Chinese made the consumer products. Or the Germans specialized in fuel-driven cars, and the Chinese in electric cars. China is now challenging Germany in areas Germany dominated previously. These are the largest parts of the German industrial economy: machines, chemical and electrical engineering. The study says that in many segments of the market, the Chinese are more successful than the Germans. Ludovic Subran, the Allianz chief economist, predicts that the China boom will be followed by a China shock.
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Plus Europe must deal with the high cost of energy now that Russian natural gas is no longer available. News i have seen shows German chemical industry most affected but probably across Europe.
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That paper looked at electricity in the G7 and EU. A new paper by Stechemesser et al. is global in scope and found a 4% success rate.
Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl6547
Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale. We provide a global, systematic ex post evaluation to identify policy combinations that have led to large emission reductions out of 1500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents…
We identified 63 successful policy interventions with total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2.
DB2
Labor in the UK radically changed its platform.
Demand side economics build factories and pay workers.
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Including, it seems gas and oil exploration.
New Zealand to push through law to reverse ban on oil and gas exploration
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/new-zealand-push-through-law-reverse-ban-oil-gas-exploration-2024-08-26/
New Zealand said on Monday it would pass laws by the end of this year to reverse a ban on offshore oil and gas exploration, and take urgent steps to remove regulatory hurdles to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) amid energy shortages. The law would end the ban, in place since 2018, on exploration outside onshore Taranaki, an energy-rich region on the country’s North Island…
Natural gas production fell by 12.5% in 2023 and a further 27.8% in the first three months of 2024, triggering a nationwide energy shortage as generators switched to more coal and diesel to power the grid, Energy Minister Simeon Brown said…“The lakes are low, the sun hasn’t been shining, the wind hasn’t been blowing, and we have an inadequate supply of natural gas to meet demand,” Brown said.
DB2
Let’s talk about perceptionware. Perceptionware is technology whose main purpose is to create an impression of action.
…perhaps the clearest example of perceptionware is the repeated unveiling, across the past 25 years, of mumbo-jumbo jets. Throughout this period, fossil fuel and airline companies have announced prototype green aircraft or prototype green fuels, none of which has made any significant dent in emissions or, in most cases, materialised at all. Their sole effect so far has been to help companies avoid legislative action…
Another example is making oil from algae, whose rapid deployment fossil fuel companies trumpeted 15 years ago. Hundreds of millions was spent on advertising this “fuel of the future”. Since then, their research programmes have quietly been shelved…
As for using waste, this promise is repeatedly rolled out to justify disastrous policies. Biodiesel would be made from used cooking oil, but as soon as production increased, new palm oil was used instead. Biomass burners would mop up forestry waste, but soon started taking whole trees and, in some cases, entire forests. Biogas would be made from sewage and food waste, but operators quickly discovered they could produce more with dedicated crops like maize and potatoes. Why? Because waste is generally low in energy, variable and expensive to handle. Already, there’s intense competition for the small portion of waste that might be commercially useful, as companies chase carbon payments: so much so that fresh palm oil has been sold as waste oil, as this attracts a higher premium…
A paper published in Science last month reviewed 1,500 climate policies around the world, and found that only 63 have delivered significant benefits.
DB2
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If climate changes too fast…we can’t adapt.
And, yes, Malthus had it right, he just didn’t have the timing right. He couldn’t foresee our ability through technological changes to come up with short term fixes to long term problems. So we go merrily along refusing to deal with the real long term problems of sustainability.
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DB2