Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
Israel and the U.S. are set to launch a pilot program allowing Palestiniand from Judea and Samaria with American citizenship to fly from Tel Aviv without delays.
The U.S. has made it clear that Israel must fulfill this condition in order to be included in the visa waiver program.
The post WATCH: Israel fulfills US condition, allows American-Palestinians to fly from Ben-Gurion Airport appeared first on World Israel News.
In the 1997 Disney animated musical fantasy film, Hercules, there is a particularly catchy number, Zero to Hero, which describes the rise of the star of the film from a clumsy boy into a strong and capable man. In the …
The post Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC Gambit: Failed “Moscow Maidan”. Scott Ritter appeared first on Global Research.
BDS leaders, Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists are distorting the Jewish religion to fit their anti-Israel agenda.
New trick: From the Far Left to the Far Right, antisemites redefine Zionism, Judaism & even Jewish history to fit their political agenda. WATCH BDS leaders, Holocaust deniers & conspiracy theorists lecture Jews about their own heritage. pic.twitter.com/jH1R40uCq7
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) June 24, 2023
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XPRIZE and Bessemer VC’s inaugural XB100 rank the top 100 private deep-technology companies positioned to make a positive societal impact.
By Abigail Klein Leichman, ISRAEL21c
Three Israeli companies — UBQ Materials (plastic alternative made from household trash), Fabric (automated urban micro-fulfillment centers) and Believer (cultivated meat) – appear on the inaugural XB100 ranking of the top 100 private deep-tech companies, published by XPRIZE and Bessemer Venture Partners.
UBQ and Fabric are headquartered in Tel Aviv and Believer in Rehovot.
According to XPRIZE, “The XB100 was launched to celebrate the entrepreneurs who are commercializing scientific research into deep tech and spotlight how they are impacting our society across nine categories.
“The XB100 evaluation process involved ranking companies across four factors: impact on humanity, valuation, scientific difficulty, and commercial traction.”
Bessemer Venture Partners’ Tess Hatch said, “The companies on the XB100 list represent the most valuable and impactful private companies in the deep-tech sector. The XB100 awardees defy imagination and will reshape the human experience.”
“UBQ’s inclusion in this ranking exemplifies how innovation and technology can extend beyond software to break through the norms of our physical world,” commented Jack “Tato” Bigio, cofounder and co-CEO of UBQ Materials.
“UBQ is introducing a sustainable alternative to oil-based plastics, reducing the carbon footprint of thousands of products across industries including construction, logistics and supply chain, consumer goods and even automotive.”
The company’s patented thermoplastic (made from trash that would have been landfilled or incinerated) has been adopted by brands including Mercedes-Benz, PepsiCo and McDonald’s. This year, UBQ will open its new facility in The Netherlands to produce 80,000 tons of UBQ annually from 104,600 metric tons of waste.
Fabric, which was also recently on CB Insights’ Retail Tech 100 list, reports that brands using its robotic urban micro-fulfillment centers have seen a more than 62% reduction in labor costs, an over 71% improvement in storage density, upward of 99% inventory accuracy and a threefold increase in throughput compared to manual fulfillment.
Believer is building its first US commercial-scale lab-grown meat factory in Wilson, North Carolina – which is on track to be the largest facility of its kind anywhere, capable of producing 22 million pounds of cultivated meat annually.
The post 3 Israeli firms are on list of world’s best deep tech appeared first on World Israel News.
The alliance of Iranian-backed terror groups known as the Jerusalem Axis is Iran’s counterweight to the Abraham Accords.
By Baruch Yedid, TPS
Ties between Hamas and Hezbollah are growing stronger and more dangerous in the refugee camps across Lebanon, raising concerns about the security of the UN-administered camps.
The Iranian government has taken advantage of Hamas’ financial difficulties, allowing the terror group to establish itself in southern Lebanon. This access comes at a cost: In return, Iran has demanded that the Palestinian terror group give more deference to Tehran and Hezbollah and essentially end Hamas’s relationship with Egypt.
This alliance gives Hamas strategic depth and influence in the refugee camps, allowing the Sunni Muslim terror group to become part of Southern Lebanon’s “Shi’ite fabric. The volatile Palestinian camps were previously dominated by Fatah. Meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah sees Hamas as his “proxy” against Israel, seemingly enabling him to act without drawing Israeli missiles to Hezbollah’s targets.
The alliance of Iranian-backed terror groups known as the Jerusalem Axis is Iran’s counterweight to the Abraham Accords. This axis finds support in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
However, Hamas is caught in a web of internal and external interests, often conflicting with each other. Tehran dictates the pace of Hamas’ establishment in Lebanon, interfering in its internal affairs and demanding its compliance with the authority of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ senior figures, and particularly Nasrallah.
Last week, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders recently held a meeting with senior Iranian officials. Hamas requested increased financial aid from the Iranians, citing difficulties related to trading in bitcoin.
The meeting was the first marking the first encounter between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Iran since the five-day Israel-Gaza conflict in May. Israel launched “Operation Shield and Arrow” with the targeted killing of three senior Islamic Jihad members in Gaza on May 9, in response to rocket fire from the Strip. Islamic Jihad launched some 1,500 rockets at Israeli civilian centers, to which the Israel Defense Forces responded by striking some 400 terror targets in Gaza.
Notably, Hamas did not mobilize to support Islamic Jihad.
Currently, there are more than 479,000 Palestinian refugees living in 12 refugee camps overseen by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Lebanese law severely restricts Palestinians from working in many professions, owning land, or claiming other rights held by other foreign nationals who live and work in Lebanon.
In Southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Armed Forces are very weak in the face of Hezbollah. UNRWA, which runs the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza and Judea and Samaria turns a blind eye for fear of Hamas, Fatah and other armed groups.
Relations between Hamas and Hezbollah soured in 2011 when Khaled Mashaal, then the supreme leader of Hamas, made statements supporting Syrian rebels, which led Syrian President Bashar Assad to close the terror group’s offices in Damascus.
A Hamas move to Qatar proved short-lived as the Qataris moved to reconcile with moderate Gulf neighbors who did not take kindly to the presence of a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in their region. Turkey has hosted many senior Hamas leaders on its soil, but has since reconciled with Israel.
The Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip has been working to distance itself from the taking sides in the Syrian civil war. Hamas leaders abroad — particularly Saleh Arouri — want to bring the terror group even further into the orbit of Iran and Hezbollah. And both Iran and Hezbollah are capitalizing on Hamas’ vulnerability.
The strained relationship between Hezbollah and Hamas’s current Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, was evident during Hamas’s 2021 elections when Sinwar faced media humiliation and challenges from Hezbollah-backed candidate Nazar Avdalah.
Sinwar has since been cautious in his public statements, praising Iran’s contribution to the Palestinians.
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China wants to replace the U.S. as the sole superpower in the Middle East.
By Israel Kasnett, JNS
President Xi Jinping’s meeting in Beijing last week with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was a signal that China aims to fill the vacuum left by the United States in the Middle East. The meeting came after Xi expressed interest in facilitating peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Xi met with Abbas in Saudi Arabia, saying that Beijing would continue to work on an “early, just and durable solution to the Palestinian issue.”
During a visit to Riyadh in December, Xi conveyed his country’s keenness to help resolve the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This led to five days of intense talks in March in Beijing, resulting in an agreement. This success has encouraged China to pursue more peace deals in the Middle East.
Carice Witte, founder and executive director of SIGNAL—Sino Israel Global Network and Academic Leadership, told JNS that Beijing’s first major diplomatic success with Iran and Saudi Arabia is only part of the trouble China’s Middle East approach could cause for Israel.
There are two key factors behind how China’s involvement poses a problem for Israel, Witte said. The first, she said, “is China’s aim to address the conflict with its new Global Security Initiative (GSI) serving as a pillar of its diplomatic efforts in the region.”
The second challenge for Israel, Witte said, “is China’s stated intention to take the conflict to the UN and international community to be addressed there. China is pushing this agenda in spite of its awareness that the UN is biased against Israel and that Beijing itself has voted 100% against Israel in all international fora until today.”
According to Witte, until recently, China’s policy elite have said that they “did not understand the Middle East and called it a swamp that consumed great powers and that China would not get caught up in that trap. Nonetheless, in 2016, China became the largest investor in this region and [it] has remained so.”
After the Saudi-Iran rapprochement deal, Xi could feel he is at the top of his diplomatic game and want to build on that momentum. He wants to make further inroads in the Middle East and he knows focusing on the Palestinian issue is a great way to garner the attention he seeks.
“Facing unprecedented changes in the world and the new developments in the Middle East, China stands ready to strengthen coordination and cooperation with Palestine and work for a comprehensive, just and durable solution of the Palestinian question at an early date,” Xi told Abbas, according to China’s state-run news outlet CGTN.
Abbas and Xi signed bilateral cooperation documents on the economy, technology and visa exemptions for diplomats, as well as a friendship agreement between the Chinese city of Wuhan and Ramallah.
But it isn’t only Xi who believes Beijing would be a better mediator than Washington between Israel and the Palestinians. A majority of Palestinians view China and Russia as potentially effective mediators for peace talks with Israel, a recent survey revealed.
The survey, conducted by YouGov in May at the request of Arab News, showed that Palestinians’ preferred peace broker was Russia, followed closely by the European Union and China, while the U.S. proved far from popular among respondents.
The fact that the U.S. is a strong supporter of Palestinian human rights makes no difference. In fact, Xi and Abbas issued a joint statement “endorsing Beijing’s domestic and foreign policies and repudiating Western concepts of human rights,” according to an AP report.
While Palestinians run to the UN every time they perceive Israel as having violated Muslim sensitivities, Abbas showed no interest in protecting Muslims living in China. In the statement, the PA parroted Chinese propaganda and said China’s policies towards Muslims in Xinjiang have “nothing to do with human rights and are aimed at excising extremism and opposing terrorism and separatism.”
Witte told JNS that China now has several interests in the Middle East and wants to use the region to reshape the global order, such as by interjecting its suite of initiatives that are aimed at this task: the GSI, the Global Development Initiative (GDI), and the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI)—each of which challenges different aspects of the current global order.
In doing so, China seeks to undermine the image of the U.S. as a superpower while simultaneously highlighting American failures in Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria and demonstrating that it has a better approach to diplomacy, security and development.
Witte noted that the Global Security Initiative “includes the concept of indivisible security whereby no country can advance its own security if doing so impinges on the security of another country. Applying this to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flies in the face of agreements among the U.S., Israel and the PA for decades, predicated on autonomy for the Palestinians in return for security for Israel.”
But Beijing has yet to move forward on any promises to Abbas, and since it has relatively strong diplomatic relations with Israel, it is unlikely to push Israel beyond suggesting mediation.
For its part, Israel has no interest in allowing China to mediate peace talks given its anti-Israel voting history at the UN and because Jerusalem continues to value the United States as the sole potential mediator.
Efraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told JNS that China “displays an anti-Israeli bent in its foreign policy by signing a strategic partnership with an entity of no consequence such as the PA”
China’s growing relationship with Iran indicates its intentions are not beneficial to Israel and that its proposal to the PA is not genuine, he said. “The paper with the PA is worthless, as the Chinese have no real investments in the PA and they have no intention to put any money into the PA, a failing state,” Inbar said.
At the end of the day, China wants to replace the U.S. as the sole superpower in the Middle East.
According to the Paris-based European Union Institute for Security Studies, “In the same vein as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the GDI, and the GCI, the GSI is a label under which China will promote an array of diplomatic initiatives. Through them, China hopes to enlarge a coalition of friendly countries and ultimately shape a post-Western security governance order, in which Russia could play a central role.”
The post Beijing’s overture to Palestinians mainly about filling a vacuum – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.
What Evgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) really wanted to achieve with his short-lived “rebellion” is unclear as of now.
A mutiny – for what? To create havoc in Moscow? To please the West? …
The post Creating Havoc in Moscow: Wagner’s PMC “Short-Lived” Rebellion against Putin. Who Was Behind It? appeared first on Global Research.
Members of Service Employees International Union Local 99, along with support from Los Angeles teachers, strike for a third straight day and march to attend a rally in Los Angeles State Historic Park near downtown Los Angeles. March 23, 2023. (Citizen of the Planet / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In March, a union representing thirty thousand support workers in the Los Angeles Unified School District called a three-day strike to demand higher wages. The action got the support of the teachers’ union, which asked its thirty-five thousand members to honor the strike and not cross the picket line. Members agreed, and for three days sixty-five thousand workers stayed home, shutting down the school district and eventually winning contract victories for both unions.
That strike is only the most recent and widely reported strike among public employees. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that there was a 50 percent increase in strike activity in 2022 over the previous year. Across the United States and indeed the globe, public sector workers are engaging in strikes. Beyond US borders, garbage workers in France and transit workers in Germany have walked off their jobs, and government workers in Cyprus joined a three-hour general strike there. Even the UK’s National Health Service — still popular despite a post-Thatcher turn toward privatization — has been roiled by strikes of nurses and doctors.
Ostensibly, the reasons for these strikes are wages that haven’t kept up with inflation, massive staffing shortages leading to overworked and stressed staff, and constricted resources, for example the lack of school supplies causing teachers to buy their own.
But there’s also something much deeper at play regarding the role of public institutions in thriving democracies and healthy economies. These strikes reflect the tension between what we say we value and what things really cost; the persistent myth that the private sector — propelled by profit-driven, supposedly inherent “efficiency” — can do nearly everything better and cheaper; and the preference for using market mechanisms to provide essential public needs or leaving them to the market as consumer commodities.
In the face of the neoliberal triumvirate of privatization, deregulation, and austerity, public sector workers can put up a much-needed resistance. And they’re beginning to. We leaders across the board can stand up not just to support them as public sector workers, but to defend the very idea that what they do is an expression of who we truly are as a society.
We say that we value education, but the people who educate, transport, feed, and care for our kids can’t make ends meet. We say that we value health, but nurses are leaving in droves, burned out from understaffing — and private equity firms, looking for steady investment returns, are buying up an increasing number of hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes. We know that we need knowledge and innovation, but we are increasingly turning higher education into a market good available to those who can afford access, with skyrocketing tuitions, steady declines in public funding, and a generation burdened with crushing debt.
As recent labor actions in public schools, hospitals, and universities demonstrate, public sector strikes can force our society to put our money where our mouth is.
Some basic ideas that seem to be self-evident, even simplistic, bear constant repeating. These include:
Things cost money.
We all have to pay for the things we value as a society.
The money for those things will come from all of us through taxes, tolls, fees, and the price of things we buy. The only question is how we share the costs — either progressively or regressively; collectively or individually.
But couldn’t the private sector provide public services cheaper and more efficiently? Isn’t the market, unburdened by rules, a more effective way to deliver needed services?
We respond to those questions with another question, drawn from a New Yorker cartoon that shows a smiling mouse in a toy car being pulled by a large cat. “For God’s sake, think!” a nearby cat says to the mouse. “Why is he being so nice to you?”
When the private sector approaches a government entity at any level — federal, state, county, municipal — and offers to take over any goods or services through privatization or public-private partnerships, leaders need to ask themselves what’s really going on. If the private enterprise says it could do more for less money, based on the long-held notion that the private sector is more efficient, then who ultimately bears the additional cost?
Usually it’s workers and consumers who bear the cost for efficiency. And even though the initial price tags often seem lower, efficiency itself is questionable at the end of the day. In addition to being burdened by the need to make a profit for owners and shareholders, the private sector also spends money on higher executive salaries, advertising, and lobbyists (or, in the case of Ohio’s First Energy, money for bribes). That money could be spent on extending the service, or providing more of the goods that privatization took over. Of course, it’s easier to direct the money properly when people aren’t trying to get rich.
It’s also frequently said that government regulations tie services up and slow them down. But government regulations are put into place for public purposes. Curb cuts must be part of sidewalks for those in wheelchairs; food inspection must take place so that burgers don’t arrive with a side of E. coli; safety standards must be followed so that buildings and bridges don’t collapse; labor standards should allow workers time to rest and the right to organize. If these regulations aren’t in place, real people will pay the price down the line.
The neoliberal impulse is both to pare back government regulations and to move as many goods and services as possible beyond government control through privatization. For example, the growth of the charter school sector, a neoliberal success, has reduced standards and increased segregation while also bleeding public school districts of resources, exacerbating the fiscal squeeze on public education. In the end, inadequate enforcement of existing regulations shifts added responsibilities to already-overburdened frontline public sector workers.
We also must understand that, to the extent that public services are insufficient, the main culprit is the corporate sector, alongside its political allies who have pushed a tax-cutting agenda that has decimated public programs. Austerity in recent decades has pushed governments at all levels to constantly curtail what they can do to meet community needs and overcome our challenges — including racial inequity, steep income disparities, homelessness, crime, and providing educations to those living in the most difficult circumstances, among others.
Recent federal investments, pre- and post-pandemic, have made real and important progress in the face of a steady disinvestment in public services, but they still leave large gaps between essential public needs and the resources required to address them. Governments frequently undertake austerity measures that promise short-term gain while masking devastating long-term costs. For example, public assets like parks and water systems have been put on the auction block. Train lines and express lanes have been at least partially turned over to business entities that are less accountable and beyond the reach of democratic control.
Chicago turned over its parking meter system to a private company for seventy-five years, already costing itself more than a half a billion dollars in lost revenue with the contract still in its first decade. Perhaps worse yet, the contract bakes in the costs of meter revenues even if the city decides to remove them for any reason — like street fairs or to make bike lanes. Any attempt to change the streetscape will need to consider those extra costs. City planners seven decades from now will still have to factor this into their actions — the equivalent of being at the mercy today of a decision made in haste in 1948. Few other examples can so clearly expose the myth of private sector efficiency.
One problem with neoliberalism is that its definition of success isn’t whether a problem has been solved, but whether a good or service has been spun off from government and into the market.
But many in the United States and other nations believe that we have a greater responsibility to each other. We believe that when we say we value education, we must value it in practice — with higher pay, with respect for the dignity and expertise of educators and school staff, and by taking appropriate measures to provide education in a universal and sustainable way. Likewise, when we say that we value health care, we must guarantee those who provide it a decent living, and we must make it truly available to everyone.
Underinvestment in what we claim to value is felt most acutely by the workers who staff these public programs. They are located at the point of friction, where the rubber meets the road and our stated values disintegrate. Through withholding their labor, they can force our society to reckon with the discrepancy, and to address it immediately with material changes like higher pay and better working conditions. Ultimately, this is what public sector strikes are really about: aligning our society with its own conscience.
A planted farm field on Kauai, Hawaii. (Jon G. Fuller / VW Pics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
While the large-scale sugarcane plantations that dominated the local economy for more than a century have all been shuttered, agricultural land remains a hot commodity on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Thousands of acres of farms and pastures once held by scions of plantation-era aristocracy are being gobbled up by new-money billionaires and global investment firms. These lands make for appealing additions to an investment portfolio not only for their prime location and skyrocketing value, but because they are eligible for a huge agricultural tax break program that saves landowners millions on their property tax bills.
Recipients of these breaks include Meta billionaire and world’s thirteenth-or-so richest man Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who save upward of $300,000 in property taxes each year on their 1,400-acre north-shore ranch.
On one 560-acre parcel of land purchased for $50 million in 2021, Zuckerberg and Chan (or the LLC that owns the land on their behalf) get a 90 percent discount on their property tax bill, because ranching occurs on the property. On another 110-acre parcel purchased for $17 million, the couple paid only $730 in property taxes last year. (For scale, owners of a neighboring five-acre property, which doesn’t qualify for the tax breaks, owed more than $7,000 last year despite the property being valued at less than $1 million.)
On an island where millionaires and billionaires abound and limited agricultural land tends to be highly consolidated — a vestige of the plantation economy when the “Big Five” sugarcane corporations carved up massive chunks of the territory — Zuckerberg is far from the only member of the superrich club to profit.
The largest beneficiaries by far are the Robinsons, eccentric descendants of a family that, with $10,000 in gold, managed to buy up about one-seventh of Kauai and the entirety of the neighboring island of Niihau during the days of the Hawaiian monarchy. Keith Robinson, a self-described “right-wing extremist” who frequently writes rambling diatribes to the local paper about the encroachment of government “eco-nazis,” is a recipient of enormous government largesse through this preferential tax treatment. In 2022 the Robinsons paid just $1,557 in property taxes on a twenty-four-thousand-acre agricultural property valued at $88 million, and similarly massive breaks are scattered throughout the rest of their patchwork of land holdings.
On the south shore, AOL billionaire Steve Case’s development corporation gets a 50 percent discount on its tax assessment for one 2,882-acre agricultural parcel. Billion-dollar Colorado investment firm Brue Baukol Capital Group cut more than 75 percent off its assessment for one recently purchased 1,500-acre tract.
And these sorts of agricultural property tax breaks are far from unique to Kauai. Every state in the union offers some sort of preferential tax treatment for agricultural land, effectively subsidizing private ownership of farms and ranches.
ProPublica’s 2021 reporting laid out how, through an array of borrowing schemes, deductions, and write-offs, the uber-wealthy manage to pay unconscionably low federal income tax rates — with the twenty-five richest Americans paying a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent. But reporting on state and local property tax breaks, and agricultural tax breaks specifically, remains limited. These huge discounts for agricultural land are yet another piece of tax policy that allows the superrich to hoard more and more wealth at the public’s expense.
Agricultural property tax breaks began appearing in the late 1950s, as rampant suburbanization inflated the values of agricultural land, leading to concern that small farmers would be pressured into selling off to developers. Over the ensuing decades, states and counties steadily began adopting the policy of use-value assessment, which artificially deflates the taxable value of farmland, often by more than 90 percent.
Jennifer Ifft, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, described the push for use-value assessment as collaboration between the environmental movement and pro-farm groups. “The idea was that they would be pro-family farms, and address concerns about green space and urban sprawl,” she told Jacobin.
Whether use-value assessment has been effective at achieving either of these objectives is dubious. A 2015 report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is skeptical, saying that evidence that the policy helps preserve small family farms is “weak, at best.” The report points to the fact that American farms are now often owned by higher-net-worth households as possible evidence that the tax breaks haven’t been saving small family farms, and that farms have instead been consolidating into wealthier hands. Farm-operator households make a higher median income than US households, and their median wealth is more than double — $2,100,879 in 2021, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The Lincoln Institute report concludes: “Policy makers need to ask whether or not wealthy taxpayers with high incomes deserve substantial tax breaks for owning rural land.”
As for preserving green space, researchers determined that while certain programs appear to have slowed the rate of development, that effect is temporary, at best postponing the date when landowners choose to sell or build.
What is clear is that the loss of tax revenue can have a brutal impact on cash-strapped local governments, taking huge bites out of state and county budgets. Public schools, which are often funded through property taxes, are especially hard hit. The use-value appraisal of farm, ranch, and forested lands reduced the property tax base in Texas by more than $2.9 billion in 2013. Unsurprisingly, Texas public schools trail the country in per-pupil funding by thousands of dollars. A Monterey County, California preferential treatment of agricultural land cost the municipality $1 billion in 2011. Kauai’s agricultural tax break program cost $8 million last year, according to the county finance director, and in a small county, the effect of this missing $8 million is clearly visible during the annual budget process. Those lost revenues must be replaced by higher taxes on other (usually poorer) people or cuts to social services. On an island facing a massive housing crisis — the median home price often tops $1 million — affordable housing projects often find themselves wanting for that missing funding.
The numbers are difficult to quantify on a national scale, but Ifft estimated that the total loss of tax revenue is likely comparable to federal farm welfare programs like crop insurance — which pays out about $100 billion each decade. Compare this to the cuts made in this month’s debt ceiling theater piece — the increased age for work requirements for SNAP recipients will save just $6.5 billion over ten years. There’s a lot more money to tap through reforming tax giveaways than by cutting already bare-bones welfare programs.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t spend much time baling hay and tilling fields, of course. Large landowners generally lease part of their land to actual farmers or ranchers, whose work makes them eligible for tax break programs.
About 40 percent of all agricultural land, and a majority of cropland, in the United States is rented, according to a 2014 survey. While agricultural tax breaks can certainly make life easier for the people that actually own their land, for the many farmers who lease land from agricultural landlords, the benefits are less clear. Kauai leasehold rancher and county council member Billy DeCosta said that margins for leasehold farmers are tight, and rents on ranchland have been increasing locally.
“You’re paying 150 dollars (in rent) on three acres, and you can sell a cow for 500 dollars — you’re basically making 350 dollars,” he said. “But that’s not including your medicine, your tags, your branding, your feed, your vaccines. The profit margin is not that great.”
These leasehold farmers will become more common in coming years as agricultural land gains popularity as an investment vehicle for corporations and billionaires. Big investors began taking interest in farmland in the early 2000s, and it became a particularly valuable asset in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as the wealthy scrambled for safe places to stash their money. Agricultural land is sought for its stability and steady increase in value, along with the fact that, due to climate change, it is projected to become increasingly scarce this century. That agricultural property taxes can be next to nothing certainly contributes to the appeal.
Bill Gates began buying up big tracts of land in 2013, and is now the largest owner of farmland in the country, with 270,000 acres. Other billionaires like Bezos, Buffet, and Ted Turner are in on the game as well, each controlling thousands of acres. Though land held by investors doesn’t yet make up a huge percentage of total agricultural land, the amount of investor-owned land has certainly been growing — to the extent that young farmers looking to buy land are being priced out of the market.
Part of the rationale for preferential tax treatment of agricultural land is the hope that tax savings will trickle down to leasehold farmers in the form of lower rents. Does this pan out? Maybe, sometimes. There is no public oversight on those decisions.
Asked about the tax break last year, a Zuckerberg representative pointed to the hundreds of thousands of dollars he does pay in property taxes, his efforts at conservation, and the tens of millions of dollars he has donated to various charities on the island.
It’s true that Zuckerberg’s local donations are probably worth more money than the island could realistically make by fully taxing his property. But relying on charity is an unreliable and undemocratic way of funding social goods and services. More important than the total dollar amount is clawing local funding decisions back from private interests and into the public domain. Whether to fund housing or education or support leasehold farmers are choices that should be made by the people, not millionaires and billionaires that happen to own land.
Gamification is interested far less in affirming our ludic capacities than it is in exploiting the habit-forming and addictive mechanisms of our minds.
(Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
One of neoliberalism’s promises was that it could create a world of creative and fulfilling work, where workers were no longer extensions of factory machinery as they had been under Taylorism. Workers were imagined as artists, and these benefits would no doubt trickle down into everyone’s personal lives as well. The trend of gamification might just be the apex of the neoliberal fantasy rendering work — and everything else — into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.
But gamification is a hollow scheme — offered up by managers, behavioral economists, industrial psychologists, and consultants, none of whom have our best interests in mind — that distracts us from the drudgery of work and endless self-improvement while constraining the human capacities it pretends to develop.
When defining gamification, most academic papers use the same definition: the use of game design features in nongame contexts. But what does this actually look like when put into practice? Everywhere it has been implemented, gamification is more or less the same: a constellation of avatars, usernames, badges, incremental rewards, progress bars, and leaderboards where people are ranked against their peers. Often included is a degree of interactivity. People can progress by pushing buttons, moving levers, connecting dots, pulling up to refresh, or any other fine motor movements suitable for touch screens. Not all these features have to be in place for gamification to make itself known, but they often come together.
However, while “gamification” might be new, the introduction of game mechanics into the labor process predates the proliferation of touch screens and the web by decades. Back in 1979, Michael Burawoy wrote of “The Labor Process as a Game,” describing how workers would turn their factory jobs into games to pass the time and make their jobs more endurable. Burawoy cites Donald Roy, who describes how the introduction of piecemeal rates — in which factory workers were paid based on output, not by a standard daily wage — began an implicit competition among workers not based on quotas or outputs but scores and results. The workers in question could exercise their workplace skills, like dexterity and stamina, and a degree of uncertainty and luck added to the level of excitement. “It is not so much the monetary incentive that concretely coordinates the interests of management and worker but rather the play of the game itself,” Burawoy writes, in a statement that has only become more prophetic with time.
As the above example shows, gamification doesn’t necessarily require internet technology to function, but the introduction of information technology has certainly helped gamification proliferate throughout workplaces. This has less to do with the technology of video games and more to do with the degree to which management can monitor employees’ speed and competence and quantify their actions.
To draw from my history working in supermarkets, every checkout system I’ve ever known has taken note of how many items each worker scans per hour — sometimes per minute — and sometimes an actual leaderboard will be placed in locations visible to employees, letting them know exactly where they stand in competition with each other, similar to various gamified apps.
A comparable system exists in white-collar workplaces, where employees’ productivity can be closely monitored at their desks, whether by Microsoft Viva or by keylogging software installed by management. An open spirit of competition is less prevalent in professional workplaces such as these (with notable exceptions), but the fact that one often receives updates of their own productivity encourages not only an implicit competition against other employees but also against oneself, always looking to improve and optimize.
As was to be expected, gamification has taken the gig economy by storm. TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb have all incorporated consumer ratings into their systems on a scale of one to five stars, usually with some form of demerit or benefit if users drop below or rise above a certain rating, respectively. Taskers with high customer ratings and reliability, for example, are given badges recognizing them as “elite” and preference in customer searches, both of which are benefits in so precarious and competitive a field. Elite taskers also get more active community support from TaskRabbit itself and an invite to an exclusive Facebook group with others like them. Airbnb hosts who rise above 4.8 stars and meet a threshold of ten guests per year get recognized as “Superhosts,” and they also receive preference in customer searches.
On the other side of things, if one’s rating for their services is too low, their search preferences will suffer badly. And in the case of Uber and Lyft, if a driver’s rating remains below 4.6 for long enough, they lose access to the app. For gig workers on these platforms, the consumer rating system is an omnipresent reminder that just because they don’t have a boss in the traditional sense doesn’t mean they are free from surveillance. Far from it, platform apps track workers’ every movement and map their behaviors, and management is largely offloaded onto their customers, with little support from the companies themselves if either a worker or client has an issue.
But these rating systems also give gig workers the sense of reward so crucial to the rhetoric of gamification. In an article in the Guardian, Lyft driver Sarah Mason writes that these customer rating systems prey on “our desire to be of service, to be liked, to be good,” and that whether she’s rated highly or poorly, both keep her more motivated to drive for Lyft all the same.
But gamification doesn’t end at the workplace. It has spread from language learning apps like Duolingo to exercise aides like Fitbit. To paraphrase Guy Debord, who was himself paraphrasing Marx, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of games.
On Duolingo, users are not only subjected to the app’s notorious push notifications; they’re also placed on a leaderboard and ranked among other users. If one’s position on the Duolingo leaderboard isn’t convincing enough by itself, there are also the notifications around one’s streak of using the app every day, points to collect, and avatars to create for oneself. Fitbit encourages its users to connect with people they know personally and compete with them over things like heart rate, hours slept, steps clocked per day, or distance walked, run, or cycled.
Even though the discourse surrounding gamification implies an inherent similarity with video games, there’s frankly not much connecting the two. In fact, gamification represents the worst aspects of video games with little of the positive to be found, or none at all.
The interactivity on offer is usually as minor as clicking a button, watching a progress bar expand, and hearing a sound effect.
Whereas video games have story elements, meaningful choices to be made, and occasionally interesting graphic design choices, the conventions of gamification lack all these things. The only graphic design style to be found is the same “Corporate Memphis” aesthetic permeating everything from fintech startups to public transport advertisements, and the interactivity on offer is usually as minor as clicking a button, watching a progress bar expand, and hearing a sound effect. Gamification is interested far less in affirming our ludic capacities than it is in exploiting the habit-forming and addictive mechanisms of our minds. And rather than allowing us the freedom that video games aim to create, gamification constrains us within a few select motions and processes. Gamified systems fall far closer to slot machines than, say, Red Dead Redemption 2.
Gamification, argues Ian Bogost, isn’t really a style of game design at all. Rather, “it’s a style of consulting that happens to take up games as its solution.” It puts the emphasis much more on the “-ification” suffix than it does the “game.” As a pair of business luminaries from the Wharton School write, gamification is all about giving an otherwise unenjoyable task an intrinsic motivation, a sense of fun that makes us want to do the task for its own sake. The factory workers from Burawoy’s example are more willing to work, and to work harder than usual, if they have a motivation beyond simply earning a paycheck at the end of the week. In the case of voluntarily using a free app like Duolingo, gamification works to ensure that we want to keep giving it our attention, despite genuine criticisms that gamification undermines the app’s stated goals of language acquisition.
And finally, the supposed creativity gamification is supposed to grant us is undermined by the fact that the creativity in question is totally subordinate to utilitarian problem-solving. Sandbox games like Zelda, Minecraft, or the aforementioned Red Dead Redemption 2 allow genuine creativity by giving the player a series of tools and resources and setting them loose in an environment. The most fun to be had in these games almost never comes from story missions but from screwing around in the games’ open worlds. The creativity supposedly produced by gamification, like other specious forms of creativity in economistic neoliberal societies, is that of creative solutions or creative insights into one’s personal or professional life. The implication is that creativity isn’t good unless it’s useful — or, better yet, profitable. This instrumentalization of creativity is by no means specific to gamification — education suffers badly from the same issue — but both are a symptom of the same neoliberal economizing.
It’s clear that gamification falls short in a variety of ways, but where does it succeed? Simply put: in providing us with compelling distractions. Whether we’re at work or in our brief moments of leisure time, gamification is always there to ensure that we never feel negatively about the task at hand.
In the works of notorious pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, negative feelings are a constant existential threat that we must distract ourselves from by any means necessary. (Even the “gamification-from-below” outlined by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Johnson is founded upon distracting workers from the misery of their work. It’s obviously preferable to what they call the “gamification-from-above” offered by Fitbit and our bosses, but it’s nonetheless a distraction.) However, if Schopenhauer’s conception was correct, gamification would give us more than we need to feel satisfied and fulfilled, because mere distractions would be enough to ensure our happiness. All we’d need is a lack of this fundamental negativity. That obviously isn’t the case. What we need, then, is a conception not of negative feelings and their negation, but play and its affirmation.
For a description of play that doesn’t see it as a mere distraction from negativity, we can turn to an essay David Graeber wrote for the Baffler nearly a decade ago. In it, Graeber suggested that “there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality,” from the random movement of electrons to groups of birds flying in complex formations with nowhere to go. “The free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will,” Graeber says, “tend to become an end in itself.” Dogs chasing each other around a yard, children inventing role-playing games utterly inscrutable to anyone supervising them, stoners hypothesizing thought experiments with no real-world application — these are all examples of play undertaken for no reason other than because whatever entity is playing feels like it and has the capacity to do so. Rather than wallowing in Schopenhauerian pessimism, Graeber’s claim gives play an affirmative content, a quality far beyond simple distraction. This is the kind of play that makes life worth living.
Play requires no reason at all other than the player’s ability and enjoyment.
Gamification and play differ in that the former needs to give the employee or self-optimizer a singular purpose. There’s a reason why the person is doing a task that is supposedly so mind-numbing that it requires gamification to render it tolerable, whether it’s learning a language, writing emails at a desk, exercising, or doing menial labor. Play, as we’ve seen, requires no reason at all other than the player’s ability and enjoyment. “Play has only internal purpose,” the German philosopher Eugen Fink reminds us, “unrelated to anything external to itself.” The children’s game of tag has a purpose — the tagger tags others and the others avoid being tagged — but this purpose only makes sense within the process of playing, and it ends when the school bell rings. In a similar fashion, meerkats spend a lot of their time wrestling each other, leading zoologists to the conclusion that there must be a broader physical or social reason for their doing so. But so far studies have ruled out meerkats’ play-fighting as having any effect on their social cohesion, levels of aggression, or their future success in fighting. This seems to suggest that, true to the thinking of Fink and Graeber, the meerkats are playing for the fun of it, and perhaps for that reason alone.
Gamification cannot deliver on its promises of creativity, fulfillment, and fun. By its very nature, it can only distract us from a task that would be unbearable without it, an inadequate solution to a more complex problem. Real play — activity done for no purpose other than to exercise one’s abilities — provides that which gamification promises but cannot deliver.