City Of New Haven Income And Expense Report: Fill & Download for Free

As a techie who has been living here since Bubble 1.0, let me take a swing at it. First, a graph:This is housing prices in the San Francisco MSA, a 5-county area, as measured by the Case-Shiller Index. It's scaled so that Nov 1993 = 1, as that's when the Mosaic browser was introduced.Look at it for a bit. When the dot-com bubble got going, area housing prices jumped substantially. By the peak of the housing bubble, they were more than 3x what they were a decade before. With the latest tech boom (or is it another tech bubble?) house prices are skyrocketing again, up 25% in the last year. And that's for a 5-county area; my impression is that San Francisco itself is substantially worse.With that as background, let me start withItem 1: We're driving the prices up.The Internet is making a lot of money. That money comes from all over, but a lot of it gets spent here. That's pushing prices up. Some residential landlords report raising rents by 40% in a year. Commercial rents are soaring as well as companies jostle for more office space. When space costs more, so does everything else. Tech salaries are keeping up, but that's not true for everybody else.Item 2: We're changing the character of the city.For decades, San Francisco was a haven for all sorts of people: immigrants, beatniks, hippies, artists. It had a rich history of creativity going back at least to Emperor Norton. Many of those people have been driven out by the rising prices. Some to the East Bay, some much further afield. I like tech people just fine, but even I find the suddenness of the shift discomfiting. I sometimes think that it would be nice to go to a cafe and see people doing something, anything other than tech. Imagine how it feels to people not in the industry.Item 3: We're gentrifying many neighborhoods.The departures aren't equally distributed across all classes: the arrival of rich techies is forcing out poor non-techies. Inequality is up substantially; our Gini coefficient has gone from 0.36 in 1990 to 0.51 in 2009, versus 0.43 to 0.47 over the same period for the country as a whole. That means that San Francisco used to be substantially more equal than the US, and now it's substantially less so. The Mission is a great example of the gentrification; you only have to look at the rash of new, expensive restaurants along Valencia Street to see how quickly it's changing.Item 4: We're shifting the racial mix.Black population in SF is down from 11% in 1990 to 6% in 2010. Latino population in the Mission is down 22% from 2000 to 2010. Recent arrivals may not notice, but I promise you that plenty of other people do:Item 5: Tech is fashionable and powerful.Just today the Washington Post wrote an article about ThinkGeek and its journey from niche site to mainstream pop culture vendor while selling basically the same stuff. How? Geek culture has become mainstream. In the 1980s nerds needed revenge; today, we run the world. A lot of people would like a tax break for $55 million, but it's only Twitter that recently got one. If a regular person stops in a bus zone, they get a ticket. But rich Valley tech companies run an entire fleet of fancy private buses, further driving up prices in the city, and nobody says boo. That's power.Item 6: We're privileged, which often makes us oblivious.If you aren't familiar with the technical term "privilege", start with John Scalzi's excellent essay: "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is". The average technology worker is a young, articulate, educated, straight, white male with a fat salary and a promising future. We are not exactly experiencing a ton of adversity. That makes it easy to be clueless about how easy our lives are, and some, like Greg Gopman and Peter Shih amplify that into being total assholes.Summary: I think their anger is reasonable.Note that I'm not saying there's anything wrong with my fellow technology company workers. But I get the point of long-time residents. They didn't ask to have their rents driven through the roof. They didn't ask for a lot of fancy restaurants that they never go to. They certainly didn't ask for large companies in the South Bay to bus in thousands of young millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires. To them it feels like an invasion. And it's not just locals; even many tech industry people think it has gone too far (see, e.g., "Douchebags Like You Are Ruining San Francisco" or "The Year We Broke Everything").Is this uncomfortable? Yes. But I think everybody in the tech industry has to accept that "just living our lives" is screwing up other people's lives. I don't know how to solve that problem, but I think the first step is accepting that there is a problem, and that we are the proximate cause of it. However swell we are as individuals, our arrival is creating a lot of negative externalities, and I think we should own that.[Note: The phrase "just living our lives" is from the original question details; it has since been edited.]

Lots of good answers here. I’ll try to tie everything together. It really was the “perfect storm” of circumstances that caused the surge of violent crime in New York. On it’s own, the city may have been able to weather a few of these. The coming together of these factors within the span of less than 3 decades (1945–1975) is what led to the city’s downfall.Federal Urban Intervention via Title I, Title II, Highway programs and Robert MosesTitle I of the Housing Act of 1949 kick-started the urban renewal program that would reshape American cities. The Act provided federal funding to cities to cover the cost of acquiring declining areas of cities perceived to be slums. According to the act, the federal government paid two-thirds of the cost of acquiring the site, called “the write down,” while the local governments paid for the remaining one-third. Most of the money went towards purchasing the property from the present owners. This process is called ” eminent domain,” or the process through which the government acquires private property for the larger public good. The process of eminent domain requires that the government provide due compensation but does not necessarily require the private property owner’s consent. In the post-war era, after acquiring the properties, the government gave much of the land to private developers to construct new urban housing.The US Interstate Highway program similarly tore down dozens of New York neighborhoods to build expressways (think the BQE, Bronx Expressway, Bridges, etc.) in the 1950’s. This encouraged suburbanization along with the automobile, providing an easy way to commute to and from the city.Robert Moses personally oversaw most of these projects (everything from highways to housing). He had considerable power and influence in the administration of federal funds for these New York City projects.While it would be asinine to say these neighborhoods were without problems, the result of Title I was to densely concentrate poverty in high rises within the same neighborhoods. Title I is widely considered a failure. This is not just because people who had their homes demolished were often never given housing. It is not only because it was willful segregation of disadvantaged minorities into neighborhoods devoid of opportunity. Perhaps Title I’s greatest failure is the hollowing out of neighborhoods that were only partially destroyed.The arbitrary razing of homes and businesses meant that even what remained in these neighborhoods was doomed to fail. Destroying socio-economic connections by removing up to 33% of all businesses and residents from a neighborhood accelerated their decline. Shopkeepers and small businesses that survived found that half or more of their clientele disappeared in the resulting reorganization. Communities that were self-contained and reliant on these social connections found that their lives had been frayed.People think of New York’s decline as beginning in the 70’s. But Robert Moses built his housing and highway projects in the 50’s. By the 60’s, neighborhoods like Mott Haven were already in extreme decline.Title II and SuburbanizationWilliam Levitt pioneered the construction of pre-fabricated homes, the “assembly line” of home-building for the middle class. This meant homes could be built faster and with cheaper materials. Mr. Levitt built the first and most famous suburb in America, Levittown (1947) using these modern methods. Here, he offered returning soldiers and their families homes at affordable prices. A veteran himself he said anyone unable to buy a home could rent first with the option to buy later. Unfortunately, he said, blacks needn’t bother. To this day Levittown remains 95% white.Segregation may be part self-selecting, partly the effect of private enterprise and is difficult to reverse since white neighborhoods are today much more expensive than black neighborhoods.But while it may be difficult to accept, willful segregation post World War 2 was a federal policy. Here is how it trickled down. The VA (US Dept of Veteran’s Affairs) and FHA (Federal Housing Administration) provided subsidized loans to returning veterans from World War 2 to buy homes. Unfortunately, they did not extend the same courtesy to African American families.The concentration of blacks in urban neighborhoods is referred to as redlining. The federal government would draw literal red lines around a neighborhood with a significant black population and refuse to insure loans in those neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of ’68 did create laws at the federal level to prevent such segregation. But laws are only as good as enforcement. The absence of state and local enforcement has perpetuated racial segregation in the United States to this day.Trickling down federal policy till 1968 and state and local policy after created incentives for banks not to lend to borrowers buying homes in this neighborhoods. Without access to credit home values fell. Neighborhoods with significant populations of disadvantaged minorities also began to have less regular garbage pickups, streets would not be fixed properly, crimes would not be solved. Hence places that began to feel like ghettos began to look like slums.To truly understand this you have to study the divergent trajectories of Black and White veterans. Black and White veteran families with similar incomes and family backgrounds still had divergent trajectories after 1945. One group was provided insurance and subsidized loans by the government. The other was forced into public housing in urban ghettos.This has had effects that have lasted till today, Black home ownership rates and the value of those homes remains far lower than that of Whites. Blacks were essentially left out of the main mechanism to build wealth in the United States, the post-World War 2 housing boom.We know today that resilient urban neighborhoods have a large middle class and mixed populations (whether via race or income) thereby providing opportunities for the poor to climb the income ladder.In post-War urban America, many neighborhoods crumbled.Deindustrialization, Disinvestment and Job LossThis process really began during WWII. The wartime economy required the building of “large things”. When you think of huge ships, planes and tanks, rural America was much more suited to industrial wartime production and consequently received a much higher proportion of federal funding. Despite this, New York did benefit from federal funding all the way to the end of World War II peaking at a million manufacturing workers by 1950.However, the long term long shoring (and then off-shoring) of manufacturing jobs continued in the 50’s and 60’s, without the federal dollars to offset a decline in jobs. Labor and rent costs forced many factories to move out of New York.Containerization changed the shipping industry, leading to the need for fewer port workers but more space for shipping containers. This is why much of the port activity in the city moved to Newark, NJ.Between the loss of shipping and manufacturing bases, the city hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of jobs all the way to bankruptcy in the 1970’s.It is important to remember that this was not a unique phenomenon in New York. The entire United States was in recession in the 1970’s. However, New York had unique problems that exacerbated this leading to the highest unemployment rate in the city since the Great Depression.New York City Bankruptcy and Austerity MeasuresNew York City used to be a very working class city. It’s spirit had been and remains one of a place that takes care of people, particularly the poor. Prior to the 70’s New York was famed for its free universities, excellent social services and working for the city was considered an honor.New York City teetered on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975. And while President Ford never explicitly said ‘Drop Dead’, he made clear he would veto any bill providing a federal bailout for the city.However, the failure of New York wouldn’t have been an isolated event. New York’s bonds were held by banks throughout the United States and around the world. By some estimates, New York’s default would bring down at least a hundred banks, and expose others to liability for selling suspect or fraudulent products.Economists warned that New York’s default would hurt the dollar abroad. The Dow dropped ten points at the opening bell, the price of gold began to rise, and, as reported by the United Press International wire service, “trading of bonds of other cities and states slowed to a near standstill, and even the prices of most credit-worthy bonds fell.”Mr. Ford had to eventually make an about turn to prevent the domino effect of bank and municipal failures that New York would have brought about. His bailout package came with strings attached. In other words austerity measures were forced on the city.The effect was to cut vital city services in impoverished neighborhoods. Before the 70’s and since the 90’s the city has always had after school programs to keep kids out of trouble, free college for those who are the brightest to reach their potential and a number of programs that supply everything from food to sports, music and the arts. But the 70’s and 80’s saw the gradual decline of these programs. City University of New York Colleges also begin charging tuition. The #1 reason provided by Americans for not going to college is cost. So this generation ended up undereducated (no college or after school programs) in an economy with no jobs (due to a declining economy) and unable to move (due to redlining). Some ask “where were the parents”. Well, violent crime and drug overdoses killed one in every hundred young men, 8 in every hundred if you were in a gang. Incarceration took one in 3 men from their families. Which is why there were thousands of children on the street, essentially raising themselves.Slightly less shocking is the layoffs. The effects were the same though. Thousands of city workers were fired. Uniformed officers were not spared either. Things that New Yorkers take for granted today (a clean city for example) requires thousands of sanitation workers. Austerity cut sanitation, but also police and fire. During what became known as the War Years or Fire Years, hundreds of buildings would burn and thousands of violent crimes would be committed with an understaffed force of officers and firemen to address these problems.A shrinking police force is a known reason (one of the strongest in fact) in the literature for an increase in violent crime.Vietnam, Civil Rights and the Deterioration of Race RelationsThe real catalyst for the African American civil rights movement was the high proportion of black men killed in Vietnam. In 1965 alone, African Americans represented nearly 25% of those killed in action. At the time, blacks made up less than 13% of the US population. Despite this, black men were more likely to be drafted and deployed in frontline combat positions with a high death rate in a conflict that was increasingly escalating.The thing that particularly angers African Americans (and this continues to this day), is the death of unarmed black men at the hands of police. James Powell’s death led to a surge in violence in the summer of ’64 in the Harlem and BedStuy neighborhoods, prompting a strong police response.To add insult to injury, black soldiers returning from Vietnam often found themselves unable to even get a taxi ride home from the airport, and were called fools for even going off to war.Peaceful leaders like Martin Luther King urged non-violence. But when even he was killed in 1968, and a white man was charged with the murder, the indignation of African-Americans boiled over, and they rioted in several American cities. The response was usually to mobilize the national guard and ironically, returning veterans from Vietnam. Live ammo was handed out and the effects were obviously devastating. MLK said before he died that the worst racism he ever encountered in a march was not in the rural south, but in urban Chicago. Very few whites in urban centers ever accepted the great migration of African Americans to cities. And the automobile and Title I and II programs accelerated white flight.During the blackout of ‘77, widespread looting, arson and crime in the New York City led one resident to describe the outrage in poor neighborhoods like this “When you cannot hit your mom, you hit your brother”. Poorer residents in New York neighborhoods could not express anguish at politicians who had failed them, so they stole from their neighbors and destroyed local stores.Aside from the short term effects of the crime (including arson, injury and death), long term effects lingered on for decades. The resulting white flight to the suburbs devastated New York and further depleted its tax base.The experience of disadvantaged minorities in New York is starkly depressing during this period. Over time, many groups have come to New York and been treated poorly, this includes the Irish and the Jews for example. Fortunately, New York always had jobs for them. But when Puerto Ricans and African Americans from the South arrived in New York in the post-war years, the city was already bleeding jobs.Source-African-Americans In CombatRoger Harris from Marine I Corps on his experience-Vietnam War: 6 personal essays describe the sting of a tragic conflictMartin Luther King, Jr. AssassinationEncyclopedia of American Race RiotsProperty Prices and ArsonFor a long time, the largest industry in the south Bronx was arson. This is a picture that has played out in many cities, most recently Detroit. Essentially, landlords who find themselves underwater (homes worth less than mortgage) burn their homes to make insurance claims. Typically this happens in neighborhoods where so many people have moved away that the landlord knows she/he will never receive enough rent to make up the cost of the property.During this period several fires were set for revenge, or even just for fun. Remember, this was a time where young people had no after school programs. But it was also a time where you had to show you were a “tough guy” to survive on the street. A lot of fires were started by people simply falling asleep while smoking a cigarette.Each arson and foreclosure leads to a domino effect, reducing property prices on a block and in a neighborhood further exacerbating the flight of the middle class.Note: A similar effect was observed with each foreclosure in 2008DrugsOh my god, so many drugs. Frank Lukas sold pure grade heroin out of a high-rise in Harlem in the 60’s and 70’s. I won’t provide sources for this paragraph because this is impossible to make up. Pure, and I mean 98–100% pure heroin was flown in the coffins of dead American soldiers from Vietnam to New York, then taken to the projects in Harlem. Think of how many people you have to bribe to achieve this. Military police, NYPD, Customs, pilots, soldiers, judges, senators. To understand why it was so easy to bribe these people you have to understand that the aforementioned factors meant that nobody was getting paid (not even city workers) in the 70’s and 80’s due to the decimation of the tax base. But there was also a sense of resignation. Everyone had given up on New York, from the federal to the state government. Frank Lucas was eventually arrested due to the investigative work of cops from New Jersey. The reason? Because by 1977, 52 out of the 70 officers who had been assigned to the NYPD’s Special Investigation Unit were either in jail or under indictment. Ok, fine, here’s a source- American Gangster True Story - The real Frank Lucas, Richie Roberts .——————————————————————————————————ViolenceCrack Cocaine ravaged New York in the 80’s. Cocaine is extremely expensive and is the drug of the affluent. Over time, somebody figured out that you could cut cocaine with bicarb. This lowers its boiling point, and reduces the price per pound, converting it into a smokable product that produces a short, intense high. Crack was the “perfect” drug for the blighted communities of New York that had already lost so much. It was cheap, sold in small quantities, got you high quick and had you coming back for more.Drugs don’t cause violence by themselves. Inner cities in America as already mentioned, had ceased to be functioning societies. If a neighborhood is not policed and administered effectively, then people naturally lose faith in their government. What control moves to then is the “biggest thug”. And in fact, it is what people turn to for enforcement of order. Or to put it more formally in political economy speak, “The origins of social order in a state of anarchy derive from scale economies of violence”.In the absence of formal markets and regulatory enforcement, dealing illegal drugs and indeed dealing anything as evidenced by the Italian mafia (in the earlier parts of New York’s history) is a question of controlling neighborhoods and therefore markets within those neighborhoods. Violence is an effective means of control in markets where there is no socio-administrative structure.The other part of the picture is that recruitment was forthcoming. There is research to indicate young men in inner cities had a better chance of mobility working in gangs dealing crack, as opposed to working a minimum wage job in the 1980’s, albeit with a higher death rate. In other words, young men in these disadvantaged communities understood bluntly that their best chance of success in life was joining a gang and then surviving the extreme violence that was part of street life. Young men in inner cities had an extremely high death rate during this era. Within a few years 1 out of every 4 men in gangs had died, mostly in the 15–25 age group. And this is to say nothing of those severely injured, severely crippled and arrested.Source-http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkateshAnEconomicAnalysis2000.pdf

Should the world stand up to China?The world should stand up to injustice, whether the perpetrator is China, USA, Japan, India, UK, France and Western countries or whichever it may be. So, this question is cleverly skewed to only target one country, which is somehow reminiscent of the way bullies like to particularly isolate a single person or minority to impose their threats, hostile intentions, harassment and intimidation. Therefore it is not a fair question. So, I have decided to turn it around.The notion that China is somehow the bully in the playground is about as true as that the Western economies are the true benefactors to the rest of the world now and in the past. It is easy to assume that the divide between rich and poor countries has always existed, that it is a natural feature of the world. But the story, spun by clever webmasters of the rich economies is wrong. In the year 1500, there was no appreciable difference in incomes and living standards between Europe and the rest of the world. In fact, people living in South America, India, and Asia were in many ways better off than Europeans and even in the year 1800, life expectancy in England was between 32 to 34, 15 years for a child born into working class families; about 28 to 30 in France and between 25 to 31 in Germany. The same could be said of the Aztec, Inca and Mayan civilisations although those who lived further out of these communities indeed lived 50% longer as they had better access to food and foraging. Evidence in East Asia suggested that they lived longer and healthier lives than Europeans, such as 40-55 in Japan, 35 – 40 in China and around 42 in South East Asia. In fact China and India were the largest economies in the world in around 1500. How did it all change? The usual story is that the technological innovations jump started the Industrial Revolution that spread through then Europe and the United States, a story powerful in simplicity and ignoring the interaction which occurred in the making of the world order starting around 1500.When Christopher Columbus went to the West Indies and returned, this is what he wrote of the people he met. “ In addition to being open and generous, they are a peaceful lot. They do not bear arms, and do not know them. When I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” And he did, because his second expedition had seventeen ships and 1,200 men, capturing thousands of natives as slaves to be sold in Spain. With his thirst for gold, he virtually engaged in mass genocide. Bartholome de Las Casa wrote: ‘ From 1494 t0 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the gold mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.’ Then came Hernan Cortes who landed in Mexico and Emperor Montezuma was history. Francisco Pizarra went to Peru, entered the Inca capital and decimated Emperor Atahuallpa but not before sacking the Incas of their gold and silver. And in Bolivia, the Spaniards helped themselves to 185,000 kilograms of gold and 100 million kilograms of silver, which if invested in 1800 at just 5 % interest would have amounted to 165 trillion USD today, double the world’s total GDP in 2015. Which went to build up the military capacity of European states to colonise Asia, Africa and much of the world. In doing so, 95% of the population of Latin America and Mexico had been killed.The slave trade began in the 1500s and by the end of the trade in 1853, somewhere between 12 million and 15 million Africans had been shipped across the Atlantic and between 1.2 million and 2.4 million died enroute. The US is estimated to have had 222,500,000 hours of forced labour between 1619 to 1865, probably worth up to >90 trillion dollars if valued at minimum wage today. The sugar and cotton plantations provided the extra calories that Britain consumed, allowing for the reduced need for agricultural production and freed up labour for industry, whilst the cotton was key material for its industries. In the meantime, Latin America became dependent on Europe for manufactured products because they could not develop their own agricultural and domestic industries.Europe’s development couldn’t have happened without colonial loot but the plunder left 70 million indigenous people of Latin America dead in its wake. In India, 30 million died of famine under British rule and in India and China average living standards plunged. “The British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.”“The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and woven at home while their men tilled the fields; suddenly both were affected, and if weather or drought reduced their agricultural work, there was no back-up source of income from cloth. Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions.”― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India.Although the global South, after shedding the yoke of colonialism, wanted to change the rules of the global economy which the West had imposed over the centuries to make it fairer for the world’s majority, and stop the plundering of their resources so that they could take control of their own abundant raw materials to build their industries; the elite powers saw it as a danger to their economic dominance. Between 1950’s to 1970’s the global South tried to pursue their development agenda with trade tariffs, subsidies, social spending on healthcare and education and their incomes grew and poverty rates were falling but the US, Britain, France and other western powers started to intervene and covertly overthrew dozens of democratically elected leaders, installing their puppets and propping them up. The global South still resisted but now the richer powers used their power as creditors to dictate economic policy to indebted countries in the South, effectively governing them by remote control. Leveraging debt, they imposed ‘structural adjustment programmes’ that reversed the economic reforms that these poorer countries had painstakingly enacted.Even under the World Trade Organisation, power would become determined by market size, so the rich countries would be able to enshrine policies to suit their own interests even if it meant actively harming the interests of the South, since these poorer countries would have to abolish their agricultural subsidies, but the US and EU would be allowed to continue paying subsidies to their own farmers, enabling them to undercut the market share of global South producers in the one sector in which they are supposed to have a natural competitive advantage. Today, power imbalances like these, enshrined in the Uruguay Round of the W.T.O are estimated to cost poor countries at least $700 billion each year in lost export revenue.All the while, inequality has been exploding. In 1960, at the end of colonialism, per capita income in the richest country was 32x higher than in the poorest country, already a big gap. Listen to Truman’s inaugural address in 1949 where he sang the story of helping to develop the economies of the Third World: ‘More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. But there is hope. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people. The US is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques, our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and inexhaustible. We must embark in a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. It must be a worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty and freedom.’ The papers went crazy, everybody glowed with approval. But where were the plans? Not even a single document! It airbrushes away the long and fraught history of the entanglement of countries like the US, which had been violently intervening in Latin America since the 19th century; and even as Truman spoke, the US had just finished invading Honduras and Cuba in the 1930s.This development story keeps being bandied around but the actuality is that by 2000, the ratio between per capita income of the richest country to the poorest country is 134:1. At the level of individuals, Oxfam reported in 2014 that the richest 85 people on Earth had more wealth than the poorest 50% of the world’s population, some 3.6 billion people. By 2017, it only needed 8 of these rich billionaires to own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people. The philosopher Frantz Fanon from Martinique, Algeria, recognised that poverty in the global South is not a natural condition any more than is the wealth of the West. Poverty is at its base, the inevitable outcome of ongoing processes of plunder- processes that benefit a relatively small group of people at the expense of the vast majority of humanity. The aid paradigm allows rich countries and individuals to pretend to fix with one hand what they destroy with the other, dispensing small bandages at the same time as they inflict deep injuries, and claiming the moral high ground for doing so.In 2016, the World Bank’s inequality expert, Branko Milanovic published data showing that inequality between countries correct for population had declined dramatically over the past few decades, from a Gini coefficient of 63 in 1960 to 47 in 2013. Charles Lane of the Washington post claimed that it was a result of the free market policies of the western economies. But if you take out China and some East Asian economies which had driven the trend towards better global equality, particularly China, you see that global inequality has been increasing, not decreasing. This is important because China and some of the East Asian economies did not strictly follow the structural adjustment being imposed by Washington and not adopting a one size fits all blueprint for free market capitalism. Instead, they relied on state-led development policies and gradually liberalised their economies on their own terms. So China being the biggest boy on the block in East Asia is being targeted.The Europeans had heated conflicts over their putative colonial domains and particularly in Africa. In Berlin in 1884, they held a conference in which they drew boundaries across the continent to set about which powers could lay claims to which regions, so whilst in 1870 only 10% of Africa was under European control, by 1914, 90% of Africa was under colonisation and only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. In 1991, Goldman Sachs took advantage of new financial deregulations and bundled commodity futures including food, into a single index and traders speculated on this index; which became heated after early signs of the Sub-prime mortgage crisis started to appear in 2005. By 2007, it hit record levels when funds withdrew from the sub-prime to invest in the commodity food futures, and world food prices fluctuated wildly and populations began to be affected. Investors seized the opportunity to buy up millions of acres of land around the world for agricultural production to take advantage of soaring prices. It started a land grab. Britain was the biggest land-grabber in terms of number of deals, but the US was the biggest in terms of sheer size. Even India and China had to participate in order not to be left behind. 66 % of the land grab between 2000 to 2010 was in Africa.What about the Chinese in Africa?Fact: Chinese loans consist of less than 2% of overall African external debt.2018 FOCAC: Africa in the New Reality of Reduced Chinese LendingThe debt trap diplomacy case, however, has never been convincingly argued and its application in Africa is, at best, tenuous. The reality of Africa’s debt to China is not particularly remarkable when taken against the sources of continent’s external debt stock (see figure below). … China’s $115 billion credit to Africa between 2000 and 2016 is still less than 2 percent of the total $6.9 trillion of low and middle income countries’ debt stock. Recent studies have shown that China is not a driver of debt distress in Africa—yet. The language of debt trap diplomacy resonates more in Western countries, especially the United States, and is rooted in anxiety about China’s rise as a global power rather than in the reality of Africa. That other 98% of African debt is almost entirely due to IMF, World Bank and other western banking institutions. So, it seems that China does not play by the same western rules and may need to be taught a lesson.Corruption in developing countries is cited as a major cause of underdevelopment, not entirely without reason but it is important to expand our conception of corruption to include illicit outflows, anonymous companies, secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens to understand how serious the problem of corruption actually is. These practices siphon money out of the global South, contributing to poverty and inequality and yet Transparency International’s narrative does not include them and places the burden of blame on developing countries themselves. The problem of tax havens is that they facilitate the theft of capital, prevent governments from capturing revenues, induce ‘tax competition’ or ‘tax warfare’ and thus set off a global race to the bottom. This constant pressure makes it difficult for governments to make rational decisions about tax legislation or plan budgets. Probably the most important central node in this global tax haven system is the City of London. An estimate of the money stashed away in tax havens suggest the figure is at least 21 trillion USD and probably closer to 32 trillion, about 9 trillion of which is from poor countries. This in turn deprives poor countries from capital needed to develop their economies.The world needs to stand up to injustice, whichever country it is which delivers such unwholesome activity.Thanks for A2A.