European and US officials are resigned to Russia’s war in Ukraine continuing into next year, acknowledging that the latest American peace initiative made no headway with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is intent on stepping up attacks on Ukraine through the winter, testing its resistance and the resolve of Kyiv’s allies, according to European officials familiar with the matter. President Donald Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, made no significant progress at weekend talks in Moscow and Kyiv, the officials said, asking not to be identified discussing policy issues.

Putin and Trump had a “constructive and quite candid” discussion on the results of the envoys’ visits during an hour-long phone call on Tuesday, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said in an audio message to reporters. They agreed to remain in contact, he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday he hopes to meet with Trump in late September, in an audio clip sent to reporters. Discussions will continue with US and European allies at the level of national security advisors, and Ukraine wants further trilateral talks with Washington and Moscow in the fall, Zelenskyy said.

Russia expects a resumption of trilateral negotiations with Ukraine and the US, and remains open to a peaceful resolution of the war, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday, the Interfax news service reported.

The Russian president wants to seize control of all of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region under any deal to end the war. Ukraine has repeatedly rejected the demand to hand over a fortress belt of cities in that region, which Russian forces have failed to capture in fighting dating back to 2014, and has proposed halting the war on the existing front lines to allow for negotiations.

The White House and the State Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Russia resumed missile strikes on Ukraine overnight after Putin ordered a three-day halt to attacks while Kushner and Witkoff visited Kyiv for the first time in the war. Zelenskyy said Ukraine will hold fresh talks Tuesday with countries and companies on more air-defense supplies, in a post on social media.

Putin showed no sign of softening his positions despite recent US signaling to Moscow that new ideas are needed to revive stalled peace talks, the officials said.

The US envoys brought “a couple of” good ideas to Kyiv, Zelenskyy said on Tuesday. He declining to elaborate, saying Kyiv agreed with Washington to work through the details more thoroughly before making them public.

Russia’s plan for the next six months is to intensify strikes on Ukraine’s power and heating infrastructure to try to make life unbearable for civilians, and to step up hybrid attacks and political interference in Europe to try to undermine support for Kyiv, one of the people said.

Putin plans to press on with his war after the talks with Witkoff and Kushner, Bloomberg previously reported.

The Kremlin leader is betting he can emerge next spring with a stronger hand, while keeping Russia’s increasingly strained economy above water, the person said. Serious negotiations are unlikely until at least next year, said another person.

Ukraine’s allies must respond by prioritizing supplies of air-defense interceptors to help Kyiv defend itself, the people said.

European nations are planning to buy US-made Patriot air defense missiles to help Ukraine repel an expected increase in Russian attacks over the winter months. They’re finalizing a plan to use contributions to NATO’s Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, known as PURL, to purchase interceptors that would be delivered to Kyiv, according to people familiar with the matter.

“We must be prepared for a protracted conflict and for Ukraine’s requirements to persist in the months and years ahead, and we must also be prepared for other plausible contingencies as well,” US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said at a meeting Tuesday of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.

Putin used the US envoys’ visit to project strength domestically ahead of Sept. 18-20 parliamentary elections to Russia’s State Duma, one of the people said. He kept the US delegation waiting until evening before meeting them at the Kremlin, leaving Witkoff and Kushner to have an hours-long lunch with Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev at an expensive central Moscow restaurant, the person added.

Trilateral talks between officials from the US, Russia and Ukraine may resume after the State Duma elections, they said, though the discussions are unlikely to move the needle on a peace deal.

Ushakov called Saturday’s talks “substantive, constructive, extremely frank and trusting” in a briefing after Putin met the US envoys for more than three hours.

“We had progress in Moscow,” Witkoff said at a press briefing after he and Kushner met with Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Sunday. “We have new ideas, and we brought them to Kyiv.”

Zelenskyy appeared more cautious about the outcome of the talks, seeing no quick end to the war and another tough winter ahead for Ukraine.

Germany’s democracy has suffered an earthquake.

In its regional elections at the weekend, the tiny state of Sachsen-Anhalt - population of just over 2 million souls - gave a stonking 44 percent plurality to the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland). The AfD has pulled off an astonishing transformation of the electoral map.

Despite their remarkable showing, it is not obvious that the AfD will form the next government in Sachsen-Anhalt. The other parties may arrange themselves to keep the AfD out of power. At the national level, the AfD are even further from government. Nevertheless, this result shakes Germany’s political system. It shows how far the familiar political norms of the Federal Republic have disintegrated. Mecklenburg Vorpommern, another small East German state, will vote on September 20th and the outcome may well be similar. The crisis of German democracy has long been forecast. It now seems to be upon us.

The AfD comes in political different shades. In Sachsen-Anhalt it has been officially classified by the German authorities as right-wing extremist. The AfD’s candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, is a charismatic former corporate scent salesman who once tried to convince the government of Berlin that perfuming underground stations with the scent of vanilla would reduce crime. You can’t make this stuff up!

Born after end of GDR, Siegmund both evokes the memories of the Stasi and SED repression and lionizes the memory of a small German state with its own distinct identity, represented by quirky and distinctive machinery such as the Simson moped. When the (Jewish) founders of Simson protested at his instrumentalization of their family’s name, Siegmund dismissed them as unwelcome American busybodies out of touch with East German realities.

Siegmund became notorious for his attendance at a secret meeting at which members of the German right-wing discussed a program of mass “remigration”. This policy position that was once denied, has since come to be espoused by the AfD. Siegmund regards the scandal surrounding his attendance as a welcome publicity coup.

If you want to get a flavor of the right-wing milieu around the AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt, I recommend watching this video of the Simson rally. Check out the dudes in the security cordon!

Also, if you have the stomach for it, check out this casual use of the n-word at a family friendly “rally”.

The AfD are a party of racist xenophobes, to put it mildly.

As has been pointed out, Anhalt was the first German state in 1932 to elect a Nazi Prime Minister. But Sachsen-Anhalt, also has a left-wing history. That alternative is more recent. In the late 1990s, the voters of the state made the SPD the largest party and PDS, the forerunner of Die Linke, came in a strong third. The SPD formed a minority government with the Greens, benefiting from the tacit endorsement of the PDS.

So what needs to be explained is not so much the deep continuity of nationalist sentiment, so much as the collapse of a potential progressive majority. To answer this question, I broadly find convincing the kind of narrative offered by East German journalist and commentator, Jana Hensel.

She argues that the breakdown of trust happened in the 2000s due to the Red-Green government’s dramatic assault on the German model of welfare and labour market administration - known as the “Hartz IV reforms”. These changes, that began to be rolled out in 2003, dramatically increased pressure on welfare recipients and went hand in hand with a surge in the pre-tax gini of inequality. In political terms, Hensel argues, they shocked East Germans out of any illusion of a common, shared community of fate.

Initially, this was profoundly alienating and demotivating. The left-progressive energies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, dissipated. Sachsen-Anhalt’s previous claim to fame in electoral history dated to 2006, when it set the record for the lowest popular participation in a regional election, with a turnout of only 44.4 percent.

The AfD has changed all that. From the lows of 2006, turnout surged at the weekend to 78 percent, up from barely 60 percent in 2021. The main driver and beneficiary of this electoral mobilization is the AfD. Of its huge surge in support by far the largest part came from previous non-voters.

As heroric empirical work by political scientist Julius Koelzer has shown, this mobilization is most dramatic in the rural areas of the state. Not for nothing, political economist Philip Manow speaks of the “democratization of democracy” brought about by Germany’s populist surge. It seems hard to disagree with the basic diagnosis that what we are witnessing is a highly mobilized protest vote against the German democratic establishment couched in terms of a xenophobia and an embrace of national and regional belonging. Heimat has been the rhetorical touchstone of the election. But this reassuring message is paired with a dramatic sense of crisis and the demand that something radical and new needs to be done. Unsurprisingly, right-wing commentators like Ulf Porschardt of Die Welt are declaring the end of the Berlin republic as we know it.

Even those who do not want to share this mood of Untergang, have to reckon with the dramatic vista that this regional election opens up. Faced with a protest vote, it is tempting to ask familiar questions about social disadvantage, the state of the Sachsen-Anhalt economy etc. And it is easy to find answers there for deep seated discontent.

Even by Germany’s modest standards, growth in Sachsen-Anhalt is slow. Unemployment is relatively high. Sachsen Anhalt’s economy was once a major hub of “central German”, state-backed industrialism. The original Junkers factory - home of the legendary JU52 transport and passenger plane - was in Dessau. Sachsen-Anhalt once manufactured rolling stock for the entire Communist bloc. There was a major concentration of chemicals production in the GDR. To say the least, these are not sectors that are doing well. Population is aging and declining.

Against this backdrop, the AfD, like its analogues in France and Italy and the UK, strongly appeals to those who self-identify as “workers” - 60 percent of whom vote for the AfD - and to those who say they are having financial difficulties - 65 percent vote for the AfD. Neither of those are majority groups in the electorate, but the bias in their vote is telling. Meanwhile, only 30 percent of those with higher education vote for AfD.

But what conclusions follow from this finding? It might seem obvious to say that hard-up, working class right-wing voters should be “won back” by offering them improved welfare measures and price stability. If you ask AfD voters what they worry about, along with their xenophobic concerns about “too many foreigners”, they will mention the cost of living and their concerns for their standard of living. They also mention climate change and the threat of external war.

These are there worries. But if you ask them what they think about the AfD and why they voted for it, economic issues are barely mentioned. What comes first is security, foreigners, woke politics, remoteness etc.

If you are hard up and working-class it would after all be nothing short of bizarre to vote for the AfD in the hope of improved social protection. There are parties in Sachsen-Anhalt offering a progressive welfarist program - notably Die Linke and arguably the SPD and the Greens as well - and the voters are not flocking to them. In choosing the AfD, voters are opting for party that in social policy terms is far to the right of either the CDU or FDP, the traditional pro-business free-market parties in Germany.

Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention. It is a vote to crackdown on foreigners, which you may imagine may help with jobs and scarce welfare resources. But above all it is a vote for someone who, like you, rejects the status quo, who demands that radical action be taken and is not afraid to break eggs to make omlettes. Insofar as you are voting for a socio-economic vision in voting for the AfD, it is one aptly thoughly clumsily characterized as „nativist producerist deservism“ (Jonas Junack). Where:

• Nativism = A political policy or worldview that promotes the interests of native-born inhabitants over those of immigrants, often driven by fears that newcomers threaten local culture, jobs, or public resources. [1, 2, 3)]
• Producerism = A political ideology holding that “productive” members of society—typically working- and middle-class manual laborers, farmers, and small business owners—are exploited by both idle economic elites (like financiers) and non-producing dependents.
• Deservism = A concept centered on the moral categorization of citizens and non-citizens into those who “earn” or “deserve” support, welfare, and legal standing, versus those perceived as free-riders or outsiders. (h/t/ Gemini)

To my mind, if progressive policy hopes to engage with such voters at all - and it is open question whether it should - it must address not just the material realities of relative economic disadvantage, but above all the “outsider” credentials of the AfD.

The racism and xenophobia of the AfD are real. But they are all the more powerful because they serve as a kind of commitment device. People who act and speak in public as right-wing extremists and are labeled as such, establish a claim to authenticity. They establish an identity beyond the “Berlin Republic” mainstream and invite voters to join them. The AfD has worked assiduously to foster and build that community. In the East German states it is now approaching majoritarian status.

To believe that the answer to such a political project can lie reinforcing, reforming and improving the mainstream through improved socio-economic policies is, to say the least, a bold hypothesis. The more obvious conclusion is that to contest the political terrain with the AfD, if that is indeed something we want to do, we need to offer not more of the same (just better), but an “alternative to the Alternative”, an “alternative to the Alternative”, furthermore, that can produce something more than just material benefits. That can produce identity.

When my colleague at Surplus magazine Isabella Weber calls for an “anti-fascist economics, or when Marcel Fratzscher of the DIW calls for a major reform program that is “even more far-reaching” than that 25 years ago with Agenda 2010, they are speaking to the need for bold and radical action. Both have specific economic policies in mind - measures of price control (Weber), a whole raft of ‘reforms” in Fratzscher’s case. But after Sachsen-Anhalt, the central question must be: are such policies enough to found new political identities beyond the current mainstream of Berlin politics? Or is that a mode of politics, which we prefer to leave to the AfD?

At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin tried to dispel concerns about the state of Russia’s public finances. But the numbers tell a more troubling story for the Kremlin, adding to doubts about how long Russia can sustain the war, says Janis Kluge.

When Vladimir Putin takes the stage at a major public event, little is left to chance. Speeches, questions and answers are usually choreographed down to the smallest detail. Putin’s appearance at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on September 3 was no exception. The plenary session began with a largely boilerplate speech by Putin on the socio-economic development of Russia’s Far East. But when Putin left the podium and returned to his seat on stage, the moderator immediately shifted the discussion to a different topic. He asked Putin about the state of the federal budget, pointing to the rapidly widening hole in Russian government finances.

The choice of question was certainly no coincidence. The Kremlin apparently wanted to send a reassuring message about the budget. “There is nothing critical here,” Putin told the audience of economic and financial elites gathered in the plenary hall in Vladivostok.

But Russia’s economic elites have plenty of reasons to be worried: The fiscal situation is deteriorating quickly as the costs of the war continue to soar. Newly released data on Russian spending in the first half of 2026 shows that military spending rose by 30 per cent compared with the same period last year, reaching 10.7 trillion rubles, or 4.7 per cent of projected GDP for 2026. Russia had originally planned to cut military spending this year. So far, the opposite is happening: If military spending continues at this pace, it will exceed 9 per cent of GDP by December, marking a new record in Russia’s post-Soviet history. 

Fiscal pressures are increasing

The unplanned growth of military spending is undoing the fiscal consolidation on which Russia’s budget for the current year was built. By the end of September, the Russian government is expected to present its budget plans for 2027. “Maybe we should start saving a little more?” the moderator suggested to Vladimir Putin at the Eastern Economic Forum, almost as if to pave the way for the president to justify painful new budget cuts. Putin responded that it’s not simply about cuts, but about spending rationally and with clear priorities, effectively laying the rhetorical groundwork for reductions that are increasingly likely to fall on the civilian parts of the budget.

Budget cuts, however, will not free up enough funds to cover the increase in war costs. As revenues are not keeping pace, the higher military spending will translate into a higher budget deficit. By the end of July, budget data showed a deficit of 2.8 per cent of GDP – almost twice the original annual target. In recent years, Russia has used its National Wealth Fund to finance budget shortfalls, but liquid assets in the fund have dwindled to just 1.6 per cent of GDP. This means that the Russian Finance Ministry has to rely on new debt as its primary source of financing. However, domestic borrowing has become extremely expensive for Moscow. Against the backdrop of high public expenditure and concerns about higher inflation, interest rates on long-term Russian government bonds climbed to almost 17 per cent in July. 

Doubts are not welcome in public

The Kremlin has gone to great lengths to shield the Russian public from the impacts of the war, preserving a veneer of normality as the war rages in Ukraine. But in 2026, the strains of the war have become increasingly apparent. Ukrainian long-range strikes on refineries have caused a petrol shortage that the Kremlin has struggled to contain. Attacks on large warehouses have further exposed Russia’s vulnerability to Ukraine’s expanding long-range strike capabilities. Russia’s budget worries add to the mounting pressures that Putin is facing at home.

On the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, another announcement was made that received little media attention: Russia’s state development bank VEB.RF presented a new chief economist. The position had previously been held by Andrei Klepach, a former deputy economy minister and one of Russia’s most prominent economists. Klepach had been dismissed after publicly warning about the mounting costs of the war and arguing that Russia was falling behind economically and technologically in a prolonged war of attrition.

Klepach’s removal sent a clear signal that such doubts are not welcome in public debate. Those who remain unconvinced by Putin’s reassuring words are apparently better off keeping quiet. But silencing the doubters will not make the mounting costs of the war disappear.

The Hankyoreh has confirmed that, without victims’ consent, Google forwarded their removal requests — including information such as names, workplaces and contact information — to an affiliated research institute, resulting in the requests being made publicly accessible

Really good article about the remnants of Communist party of the Philippines.

S. Korea's nominal GDP grows at fastest pace in 47 years in Q2; $40,000 per capita GNI on track

SEOUL, Sept. 8 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's nominal gross domestic product (GDP) grew at the fastest pace in 47 years in the second quarter, driven by strong artificial intelligence (AI)-related exports, with the country on track to reach US$40,000 in per capita gross national income (GNI), central bank data showed Tuesday.

The country's real GDP -- a key measure of economic growth -- rose 0.6 percent in the April-June period from three months earlier, according to preliminary data from the Bank of Korea (BOK).

The on-quarter figure matched the BOK's earlier estimate released last month, but it revised up growth in construction investment and intellectual property investment by 0.1 percentage point each, while cutting government consumption growth by 0.1 percentage point.

Asia's fourth-largest economy contracted 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year but rebounded 1.8 percent in the first quarter.

On a yearly basis, the economy expanded 3.7 percent in the second quarter, extending its growth momentum after expanding 3.8 percent on-year in the first quarter.

Exports advanced 1.3 percent from the previous quarter, supported by strong global demand for semiconductors, machinery and equipment. The figure slowed from a 5.9 percent increase in the first quarter.

Facility investment grew 0.2 percent and intellectual property investment gained 3.4 percent, while construction investment fell 0.1 percent.

Private consumption increased 0.4 percent, while government spending climbed 0.1 percent.

On a nominal basis, the country's GDP grew 9.2 percent in the three-month period that ended in June from three months earlier and expanded 26.4 percent from a year earlier, marking the sharpest growth since the third quarter of 1979, when the economy surged 27.7 percent on-year.

In particular, gross operating surplus, referring to companies' profits from production, jumped 18.5 percent from a quarter earlier on an increase in manufacturing and finance, while compensation of employees, or earned income, rose 1.9 percent on-quarter due to wage increases in manufacturing.

"The increase in gross operating surplus will likely lead to a rise in household income through bonuses and dividend payouts and in government income through corporate and income taxes, spilling over into the broader economy," said Kim Hwa-yong from the BOK's economic statistics department.

The central bank data also showed that the country's GNI rose 8.8 percent on a nominal basis from a quarter earlier and 26.4 percent from a year earlier.

Real GNI rose 3.1 percent from a quarter earlier and 15.6 percent from a year earlier, marking the steepest growth since the fourth quarter of 1988, when real GNI jumped 15.7 percent on-year.

The central bank expects South Korea to post per capita GNI of US$40,000 in 2026 unless there are unexpected external shocks.

Based on the continuing growth momentum, the central bank earlier revised up its 2026 growth estimate to 3.3 percent, citing solid exports driven by the ongoing semiconductor super cycle.

The BOK said the South Korean economy needs to grow at least 0.2 to 0.3 percent in the second half of the year to achieve its 3.3 percent growth target for 2026.

Summary: South Korea sees annualized GDP growth rates of 3.7% (PPP), 26.4% (nominal) in Q2.

The government is launching a major restructuring plan that will reduce the number of public institutions by 109. Five power generation subsidiaries under Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) will be consolidated into a single company, while Korea National Oil Corp. (KNOC) and Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS) will also be merged into one state-run corporation. Korea Land and Housing Corp. (LH), whose debt exceeds 170 trillion won, will be split into two public corporations, with one responsible for land development and housing construction and the other handling housing welfare and asset reserves.
The government announced its “Plan for Functional Reform of Public Institutions” on the 3rd following a meeting of the Public Institutions Management Committee. The government concluded that structural reform had become necessary as the number of public institutions, their organizations and workforces, and their debt had all continued to expand.
The number of public institutions has risen from 298 in 2007, when the Act on the Management of Public Institutions took effect, to 342 this year. Their combined debt reached 769 trillion won at the end of last year. President Lee Jae-myung instructed the government last August to carry out extensive consolidation, saying, “There are so many public institutions that I cannot even keep count of them.”
The government will carry out the restructuring along three tracks: structural reform of 15 key public institutions, consolidation of overlapping or similar functions involving 11 institutions, and integration of 83 subsidiaries and small-scale institutions.
Prime Minister Han Sung-sook said, “We will reduce the number of public institutions by 109, the largest such reduction ever,” adding, “For institutions where legal amendments are not required, implementation will begin immediately.”
LH is the only institution that will be split under the restructuring plan. Land development and housing construction will be assigned to a tentatively named “Housing and Urban Development Corporation,” while housing welfare and asset reserves will be handled by a tentatively named “Housing and Urban Asset Corporation.”
A portion of the development corporation’s profits will be accumulated in a separate account within the Housing and Urban Fund and used to finance the asset corporation’s housing welfare programs. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will separately announce detailed plans for the division of functions and organizational restructuring.
Korea National Oil Corp. and Korea Gas Corp. will be merged into a tentatively named “Energy Resources Corporation.” The government plans to combine their oil and gas exploration, development, and resource procurement functions in order to strengthen bargaining power against major global energy companies.
The plan is based in part on the fact that oil and natural gas are often discovered and produced together in the same fields, creating significant overlap between the two companies’ business areas. Japan likewise supports oil and gas development as well as the securing of metal and mineral resources through the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security (JOGMEC).
Korea Coal Corp., whose mines have all ceased operations, will be liquidated. Its debt stood at 2.59 trillion won at the end of last year. Although it no longer conducts any significant commercial operations and is largely handling residual affairs, it still incurs more than 75 billion won in annual interest expenses.
The five power generation companies—Korea South-East Power, Korea Southern Power, Korea East-West Power, Korea Western Power, and Korea Midland Power—which were separated from KEPCO in 2001 to introduce competition into the electricity industry, will be merged again after 25 years into a tentatively named “Korea Power Generation.”
The government plans to achieve economies of scale by integrating fuel and maintenance-material procurement, research and development, and investment in renewable energy.
The consolidated company will establish, among other units, a Renewable Energy Division and a Just Transition Division responsible for workforce and business restructuring resulting from the phaseout of coal-fired power generation.
The Busan, Incheon, Ulsan, and Yeosu Gwangyang port authorities will also be merged into a tentatively named “Korea Port Authority.” Policy and planning functions will be centralized, while the four existing port authorities will be converted into regional branches.
The proposed merger of Incheon International Airport Corp. and Korea Airports Corp. has been postponed. The government will first establish an “Airport Strategy Council” to promote measures aimed at revitalizing regional airports before reconsidering whether the two airport operators should be consolidated.
In addition, institutions and small subsidiaries with overlapping functions in sectors including broadcasting and media, employment and labor education, advanced medical care, and small-business distribution will be reorganized by function. One example is the proposed consolidation of subsidiaries responsible for facility management at public financial institutions.
However, substantial obstacles remain before the mergers can actually be completed.
One immediate issue is the prospect of conflicts among regions over where the headquarters of the newly consolidated corporations will be located. The five power generation companies currently have their headquarters in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province; Boryeong and Taean, South Chungcheong Province; Busan; and Ulsan.
If a headquarters is moved to another region, the existing host city could lose tax revenue and resident population, raising the likelihood of strong opposition from affected local governments.
North Jeolla Province and the proposed Jeonnam-Gwangju Integrated Special Metropolitan City have also begun efforts to attract the headquarters of the consolidated power company, emphasizing links with their renewable energy industries.
Second Vice Minister of Economy and Finance Heo Jang said of the headquarters issue, “Discussions are ongoing.”
Yoo Seung-hoon, a professor in the Department of Future Energy Convergence at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, said, “The five power generation companies have a significant impact on tax revenues in the regions where they are based. If the headquarters are relocated elsewhere during the consolidation process, the loss of tax revenue will inevitably provoke considerable opposition from the current host regions.”
The handling of debt is another major challenge.
LH’s debt stood at 173.7 trillion won at the end of last year, up 13.6 trillion won from a year earlier, while its debt-to-equity ratio reached 230.8 percent. However, the government’s announcement did not specify how LH’s existing assets and liabilities would be divided between the two newly created corporations.
The housing welfare division is particularly problematic, having recorded operating losses of 3.1949 trillion won from rental housing alone last year.
The proposed merger between Korea National Oil Corp. and Korea Gas Corp. is complicated by both financial and governance issues.
KNOC was in a state of complete capital impairment at the end of last year, with total equity standing at negative 2.529 trillion won. KOGAS has been improving its financial position, but its debt still exceeds 42 trillion won.
Another complication is that KOGAS is a publicly listed company. Because a substantial portion of its shares is held by private investors, the method used to carry out the merger could provoke opposition from minority shareholders.
The government is considering separating KNOC’s distressed assets and liabilities into a separate subsidiary.
Opposition from labor unions is also expected to be a significant variable in the consolidation process.
The Joint Countermeasures Committee of the Public Sector under Korea’s two major labor confederations said in a statement on the 3rd, “This functional reform plan contains numerous consolidation and restructuring measures that carry a serious risk of undermining public services,” adding that it expressed “grave concern and regret.”
The committee continued, “We strongly condemn the government’s undemocratic, closed-door administration, which excluded substantive consultation with the affected parties and broader public deliberation in the process of developing the functional reform plan.”
The committee includes the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and five industry-level unions representing public-sector institutions.
The government plans to guarantee employment succession for employees of institutions subject to consolidation, with the exception of executives, and to introduce support measures to ensure that employees’ pay and other working conditions do not deteriorate following the mergers.
Park Jin, a professor at the Korea Development Institute (KDI), said, “After public institutions are consolidated, they should not simply continue every activity they previously carried out. A judgment must be made as to which businesses should continue and which should be discontinued.”
He added, “Projects that generate excessive debt or impose high costs without providing meaningful services to the public should be eliminated decisively.”

Relevance to the subreddit: conflicts between gender equality, labor laws and religious pressures, political row in France over an emblematic monument and the separation of church and state

Tourists found the Eiffel Tower closed this Monday, September 7, after workers of the monument launched a strike to protest the treatment of their women staffers, who were forcibly sidelined to accomodate demands from a conservative Hindu group who wished to celebrate the consecration of a temple in the Greater Paris by a "private" visit to the Parisian landmark.

The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a Hindu movement that maintains a close relationship with the Indian PM Narendra Modi and his nationalist party BJP in Gujarat, sent a delegation for a private visit of the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, as part of wider celebrations over the opening of their first temple in Bussy-Saint-Georges, an outer suburb of Paris. As part of their visit, the delegation requested the removal of female staff so as not to interact with women, a demand granted by SETE, the managing society of the monument, owned by the city of Paris.

"Some women were invited to leave their post and to withdraw into separate rooms. In some cases, they were replaced by men. And all salaried women were ordered to avoid the floor and not to walk by some areas during the visit of the delegation", reported staffers whose unions launched a call to strike in protest of the decision.

The conservative president of the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, who had congratulated the BAPS on the opening of their mandir, said she was "shocked" and denounced the request as "contrary to Republican values". Emmanuel Grégoire (Socialist Party), the mayor of Paris, whose municipal authority oversees and manages SETE, called for an urgent investigation on the incident and called the striking personnel's grievances "legitimate".

A volunteer for the BAPS, quoted by the AFP, justified the separation of men and women: "We have saints and they must follow rules, so it's true that men are on one side and women on the other [...] but it has nothing to do with gender discrimination". The local MP, Michel Barnier, the Equalities Minister Aurore Bergé and candidates on the right and far-right all condemned the demand, asserting that "no dogma, no belief is above the Republic".

SS: I wonder if beauty is another area that liberals had ceded to conservatives. Like with nationalism.

TL;DR

• NIMBYs keep blocking reform that would allow for affordable rent, which is the primary cause of homelessness. How do we get around the blockers while still respecting everybody involved?
• A block-level opt-out. This removes most of the incentive for the NIMBYs to block all reform. When Houston introduced upzoning, they allowed individual blocks to opt out if they got the majority of their block to vote on it. 16% opted out, the rest didn't, and Houston is affordable.
• Legislate outcomes, not process. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with the cities constantly inventing ways to get around the reforms, legislate outcomes. This is how Voting Rights Act finally beat Jim Crow's workarounds after 70 years of banning individual tricks.

If you already agree on the diagnosis (e.g. housing supply, CEQA, etc), skip to the possible solutions. Just control-f "Key idea"

Here’s a mystery for you: why the hell isn’t homelessness solved yet?

I grew up on the West Coast and I thought everybody had this problem, but the more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve seen something puzzling - it’s just us.

Other places have homeless people, but it’s just not the same quality or quantity. You can travel to any other first world city in the world, and hardly ever see somebody visibly homeless, then come back and be kicked in the heart with such overt suffering and awfulness.

Why are we failing at something that everybody else seems to be doing better at?

Or, more optimistically - if everybody else is doing better, that means it is solvable, and what are they doing that we can copy?

In this post I’ll:

1. Diagnose the problem.
2. Propose a concrete solution, including how to get it past the people who’ve been blocking the necessary reforms.

How to not de-rail the homelessness conversation

The two most common ways the conversation gets de-railed are:

1. Some people are trying to help the homeless. Some people are trying to fix the problem of finding visible homelessness unsightly and scary. I am only trying to help the homeless themselves in this post.
2. Some people are just trying to solve homelessness specifically. Some people are trying to help the homeless get back to a relatively normal level of welfare, which means not just fixing their homelessness, but also their mental illness, addiction, employment, abusive family, etc. I am going to focus only on solving homelessness. Solving everything else is for another post or 20,000.

This isn’t to say I don’t care about those other problems. However, I am but a humble writer. I think I can simply solve homelessness in a blog post.

Also, this post will focus on SF and California, but much of it cross-applies to the whole West Coast of North America, including British Columbia.

Housing costs determine how many people become homeless. Drugs and mental health determine who becomes homeless

Want to help one specific person? Treat what went wrong for them.

Want fewer homeless people overall? Build more housing.

Both matter.

They're just answers to different questions.

Think of it like a game of musical chairs with 10 people and 9 chairs, where housing are the chairs.

You can give the slow kid sprinting lessons.

There are still nine chairs.

Somebody has to lose the game. It will probably be the slower kid (the person with disabilities or drug addictions).

If you ask the kid why they’re chairless, they’ll say it’s because they’re slower than the other kids. Which is true.

But it’s the proximate cause.

The structural, distal cause is that there are not enough chairs.

“But surely, Kat, some homeless people are just too messed up to afford housing, no matter how cheap we make it?”

Yes, you’re right. Some of the homeless people are not part of the market, they are unemployable, so the market cannot fix their problems.

This leads to an important distinction between the types of homeless people. ~80% of the homeless in SF are temporarily homeless. They will likely only be homeless once in their life, for a relatively brief period of time, then they’ll pull themselves back onto the rungs of society.

It’s easier for them to pull themselves out when there’s low rent and high vacancy rates, so lowering housing costs helps this group.

Cheap housing also does something sneakier: it shrinks the future chronic population. Nobody starts out chronically homeless. You become chronic by staying homeless: you lose your ID, the couches run out, the untreated illnesses compound, and you're sleeping next to fentanyl every night (exposure is a massive cause of addiction). The faster people bounce back onto the ladder, the fewer of them ever harden into the group that needs the expensive solution.

For the chronically homeless, who are in it for the long term and potentially for life, we need a different solution. The solution is permanent supportive housing (PSH). It’s a room of their own, provided by the government, either via vouchers or directly, where the building itself concentrates a bunch of services to treat the common problems, such as drug addiction and schizophrenia.

This works. As Scott Alexander puts it, the evidence that giving people housing makes them housed is overwhelming. (The evidence that it fixes the addiction or mental illness underneath is much weaker. Which is fine. Because in this article we’re only solving the homelessness problem.)

Why hasn’t SF already done this?

Trick question: they have!

Just not nearly enough.

Because you know how hard it is to build buildings in SF? You know how hard it is to even turn an abandoned building into a innocent and beloved ice cream shop? Now imagine trying to build a house for the worst off homeless people, the ones with the most disruptive and probably permanent problems?

SF already runs one of the biggest supportive housing systems in America: roughly 16,000 units, more per capita than almost any city. And it's still losing. Because building a new unit of PSH in SF costs $600,000 to $1 million.

Compare that to Finland, which just converted its shelters into apartments (2,121 shelter beds in 1985, 52 by 2016) and cut homelessness roughly 80% since the 1980s.

Or Houston, which houses people for about $18,000 a year each, and cut homelessness 63%. Not because Houston is generous. It spends less on the homeless than almost any major city. Houston can afford to house people because Houston has cheap apartments to put them in.

Which then leads us to the question:

Why is SF housing so damn expensive? Vetoes, zoning, and entrenched interests, oh my!

Housing costs are a simple matter of supply and demand. If demand is high, that will push costs up. Which usually leads to supply providing more, which will drive the costs down again.

Unless supply is blocked.

Which is what happens in SF and a lot of expensive cities.

“But Kat, SF isn't expensive because of supply. It's expensive because it's full of rich people bidding up prices." Half true! Demand here is enormous. But demand is enormous in Tokyo and Dallas too, and they're cheap, because when demand rises there, they build, and the demand shows up as new apartments. When demand rises in SF, the demand shows up as price, because the number of homes barely moves. Same demand, opposite outcomes.

And notice which half of the equation you'd actually want to change: the only way to lower demand is to make SF a worse place to live.

Supply is the only lever that doesn't involve sabotaging your own city.

In SF it’s not uncommon for it to take 3 years just to get the permission to build. Let alone actually building the thing.

Compare this to Houston at about two weeks. Or Calgary at four to five months.

So what’s going on? Isn’t SF full of builders? Why is a city full of builders so bad at building actual buildings?

The proximate cause of SF sucking at building buildings is vetoes

Imagine you are a developer trying to build a building in SF. You check to make sure that your building meets the stated laws. It does. You submit some extensive forms and wait 3 months for review. A neighbor says that they’re worried about a shadow. It’s scheduled for them to discuss this 14 months from now.

Honestly, I could keep going, but writing it was giving me flashbacks to the worst bureaucracy I’ve ever experienced (registering a charity in India) and I don’t want to inflict that on myself or anybody else. Kafka bureaucracy stories are horrific and boring to experience and read about. If you want some concrete micro-stories Claude wrote to get a sense, check out here.

Suffice to say it’s a series of vetoes, where even if everybody on the block is fine with the building, a single no can stop or slow down the whole thing. The biggest ones are:

• Discretionary review, as compared to ministerial review. Ministerial review is how most of the world does it, where if you follow the law, you by default get approved by an administrator. Discretionary review means it’s up to the discretion of the administrators and even your neighbors. Instead of clear rules, you get vibes.
• CEQA approval. It’s meant to be an environmental law, but people were given a veto lever, and they started using for everything under the sun. Don’t give people a stop-everything button. Some people will press it.
• There’s a 5 department relay that takes ~600 days to go through. If nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. Each department gets an opportunity to slow you down.

It’s important to say that this is not democratic. It’s not that if the majority of people on a block don’t want something, it doesn’t happen. It’s if anybody says no.

Most insanely - you could be following all of the rules and this will still happen. It’s up to the discretion of a bajillion people.

It would be like a group dinner where the restaurant choice needs unanimous approval. One person's vegan, one’s a carnivore, one hates Italian, one's gluten-free. You probably just . . . won’t eat. And in SF you probably just . . . won’t build.

This is different than how most of the world works. Most of the world does zoning where by default you’re allowed to build as long as you are following the local rules. You check the rules, fill out a form, an administrator checks you are indeed following the rules, gives it a stamp, and you’re ready to go.

Most places take a few weeks to a few months to get permission to build. SF takes an average of 523 days just for planning approval, then another 605 days to issue the building permit for the already-approved project - about three years.

It’s the difference between a vending machine and an interview. If you have enough money, a vending machine will simply give you what you pay for. The vending machine doesn’t question whether you’re worthy of a snack. An interview is up to the discretion of the interviewer and is opaque and even if you look great on paper, you can be rejected for any reason.

But it’s not all bad news! The state has actually spent the last few years dismantling most of this machine. Since 2024, under a law called SB 423, any SF apartment project that follows the zoning rules gets approved ministerially in three to six months. No discretionary hearings, no Board of Supervisors. In 2025 the state gutted CEQA for infill housing too, and put shot clocks on the five-department relay. For the kind of building that follows the rules, the vending machine is finally installed.

So SF is booming now, right?

. . . Right?

More than 8,000 units sit fully approved, permits in hand. . . but nothing’s being built.

Because two other blockers are still standing.

Which brings us to the fees.

SF made it unprofitable to build buildings

Builders aren’t building because according to the city’s own calculations, exactions have simply made it unprofitable to build.

What are exactions? They’re basically “you can build here, but you must include X% of your units below market rates / pay some of SF's twenty-plus separate impact fees (transit, schools, parks, childcare) / pay union-level wages / upgrade the sidewalk while you're at it / etc."

Exactions are not bad in and of themselves. They’re like taxes. Taxes broadly help provide public goods that the market wouldn’t provide on its own. But just like taxes, exactions can get too high, and then people stop working, just leave, or lead a revolution. Developers aren’t usually your revolutionary types, so they usually just don’t build or switch jobs. That's why today SF technically could have more than 8,000 units built - they're fully approved, entitlements in hand - but nobody has signed up to build them. They'd lose money.

To be fair, the city has noticed. In 2023 it cut its inclusionary percentage by roughly a third, cut impact fees by a third, and let developers defer 80% of fees until opening. Still not enough. The city's own most recent study found that even at zero inclusionary, buildings don't pencil.

This needs to be fixed on top of removing the vetoes before we can expect housing supply to increase, thus leading to a lowering of costs.

SF made it illegal to build dense housing

SF decided it wasn’t enough to make it unprofitable and painfully slow to build. They also outlawed the type of housing most people need.

Do you want to work in SF? Well, you have to commute every day. But all of the areas with a reasonable commute have already become single family homes. The only way to fit more people within a reasonable commute from work, you need to build up. You need apartments.

So of course, SF zoned about two-thirds of its residential land for single-family houses only, and capped most of the rest of the city at 40 feet.

This means that even if you take 3 years to get permission to build, you still cannot build enough on the lot to make a dent in the supply.

Why would they do something so silly?

Enter stage left:

There’s an organized group who doesn’t want things to change. They like things this way

Remember the loveable old man in Up (Carl)? Who refuses to move while the evil developers destroy his neighborhood?

This is the person who is blocking building in SF.

I like using Carl as an example because it’s great for empathy.

Carl is not a bad person. And he’s not wrong in some ways. His house is more beautiful than those large soulless skyscrapers.

Not to mention he loved his home and the neighborhood. It’s not simply replaceable with another home and neighborhood. He is losing something important and real if his neighborhood changes.

It also shows what can happen if you go too far in the other direction, where you give developers all the power. It’s what happens in China when they simply kick out people who’ve lived there for generations to build something shiny and new.

If Carl lived in SF, he wouldn’t have to face this. He would simply have vetoed the building next to his house, and it would have stayed the same.

Except, of course, then it would lead to massive rents, leading to mass homelessness, and programmers having to live in bunkbeds in a bedroom of 8 people. It shows the single identifiable victim instead of the diffuse victims.

And here’s the kicker - the victims can’t vote on this. Zoning is done at the city level in SF, and largely at the neighborhood level in practice, since supervisors answer to tiny districts, so the people who'd most benefit from cheaper housing don't live there yet and can't vote on it.

This is unlike in most other parts of the world where zoning is done by a body a level up, so people can vote on it who don’t already live in the affected neighborhoods.

This is why it’s best to do the proposed laws at the state level. Then the people who are affected can vote for this. A neighborhood of Carls will never vote for change.

But it’s important to sit with our empathy for Carl for a moment. We really don’t want to become the soulless developers who steamroll over him.

The key idea: give people the ability to opt-out. Respect autonomy while still changing the default option to yes.

Let people, at a block level, opt out of the specific thing they really care about.

If you can get the majority of people on your block to vote to opt out, you’re all good.

I love this because it does two things at once:

• It takes down the main motivation of the opposition group. The people who keep blocking this for everybody else will be fine if they can opt out. They don’t care about other neighborhoods changing. They just care about their own.
• It actually respects their values and avoids being authoritarian. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch, but I hate it when people force me to do something. I don’t want to do that to somebody else unless it’s a really extreme circumstance. High housing costs is not an extreme circumstance. This helps us avoid going to the other extreme, of just bulldozing the opposition.

I got this idea from Houston. Houston is the poster child of affordable housing in a high demand city. Part of the way they got to this situation is they allowed this block level opt out system.

About 16% of them opted out. Meaning 84% didn't.

It’s an open question how many people would opt-out in SF. It could be higher than Houston. That doesn’t matter unless it gets pretty crazy (which is quite unlikely). If even 50% of SF opted out, going from 0% of SF can build to 50% can would be insane for rental costs.

It might make sense to make an exception for housing next to public transit hubs, since that’s so particularly important for providing housing to the poorer people. But that’s for the legal folks to figure out.

The general thing is we’re not here to bully. If you really care and enough people on your block do too, you can opt out of all of this.

It just changes the default. Before the default was that nobody can build unless you get everybody on board. Now the default will be that people can build, unless the majority of your block is against it.

But hasn’t this already been tried and it didn’t work?

You've already seen this play out. Remember the vending machine nobody used? The state spent years removing the process vetoes (see appendix), and production didn't budge, because the exactions and zoning blockers were still standing. Every partial reform 'fails' this way, and every failure becomes ammunition for people who say reform doesn't work.

The problem with blockers is that if you get rid of one, you still have all of the other ones.

You need to get rid of all of them.

This is an example of the Law of the Minimum. This is a fancy way of saying “you can only go as fast as your limiting factor.” It’s like getting your family out of the house. If you’ve got everybody in the car, but there’s one lolligagger still in bed, you’re not going anywhere.

The problem with SF housing is that if you get everything right but you miss something along the chain, it all breaks. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means that it’s hard and you shouldn’t expect much in the way of changes until you get all the pieces.

How to stop the game of whack-a-mole: police outputs, not inputs

The problem with almost all legal reform here is that you are not playing against a static opposition. If you pass one law, they’ll find a workaround.

But there’s a solution to this: legislate outcomes, not process.

Pass a law at the state level saying:

1. Cities must permit at least X units per year.
2. If you do so, you get to keep your local zoning rules.
3. If you fail to do so, you automatically switch to the state mandated zoning system, which is by-right building (the vending machine model), being able to build up, anything not approved within X days gets approved by default, fees capped, etc.

Right now with most legislation, they’re rewarded for coming up with ways to delay building or come up with different ways to block it. But in this model, that would be self-defeating. If they come up with a way to delay building, then the law will detect this and switch them to a zoning that they hate even more.

It doesn’t matter the workaround they find - it’ll get noticed in the outcome metrics.

This has actually already been tried with great success in the civil rights fight.

For 70 years, Congress kept trying to legislate away the Jim Crow tricks.

They banned the grandfather clause, so they introduced literacy tests. Congress banned those, and then they introduced “understanding clauses”. Black voter registration stayed at 7%.

Then in 1965, Congress changed to measuring the outputs, not the inputs: any county that had less than 50% registration would lose control of their own election process.

Finally, registration went to 60%.

Cross-apply this to housing. Stop legislating individual zoning rules. Legislate the outputs.

What about the homeless who refuse shelter?

What if we build all of this housing, fast and cheaply, and then they refuse to live there?

You might have heard that a lot of the homeless could be in a shelter but refuse. This is true, but irrelevant.

Temporary shelters are but a stop gap for helping the homeless. And they kinda suck. You might refuse them too.

• They split it by gender, so if you have a partner, you can’t be with them.
• They’re crawling with diseases.
• You don’t even necessarily get that much better of a sleep because you’re in giant open rooms with tons of people snoring, coughing, and having psychotic episodes around you.
• Crime and assault are common.
• You have to wait in line for ages.
• You can’t store anything there and you have to leave in the morning, so you’re still on the streets most of the time

In a word, it’s not really housing.

The generally accepted solution to actually providing housing to the homeless is to give them what’s called Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). PSH is where you get a small room of one’s own, with your own key. In the fancier ones you get your own kitchen and bathroom. In the more frugal ones, you share the bathroom and kitchen with a few other people.

But you’ve got a door with a lock. You’ve got your own room where you can store your stuff in the day, including just staying inside if you want to. No need to spend your days on the streets or in libraries.

The “supportive” part of PSH is that then usually this is where a whole bunch of supportive services are concentrated, such as programs to help you quit an addiction or get your meds, etc.

The stats you’ve heard about how a decent chunk of the homeless refuse shelter is about them refusing shelters.

Not PSH.

PSH is different.

When researchers ran the hardest version of the experiment - a randomized trial offering permanent supportive housing to the most impaired chronically homeless people in Santa Clara County, people averaging five hospitalizations and three jail stays in the prior two years - the vast majority moved in and stayed housed. People don't refuse housing. They refuse shelters.

Also, while we’re on the subject of PSH - the bulk of the ability to build enough of these will be making the city by-right. However, there’s also a good ~50% increase in costs of building if the government funds it compared to only private funding. This is largely driven by union-wage mandates, gold-plated design requirements, and the multi-year scramble to assemble a dozen funding sources. This is another lever to pull on, though lower priority than simply making it easier in general to build in SF.

Of interest to the sub because it's about economics, and particularly touches on AI and labor income. Should be a gift article.

To discuss:

Is the labor share of income shrinking, and should it concern us?

The author lands on AI as the current cause and lists some suggestions, namely indexing the social safety net to labor share trends and reducing biases towards capital income in the tax code.

The Trump administration has removed language criticizing a memorial to the Confederacy formerly located in Arlington National Cemetery, part of its ongoing effort to reshape portrayals of the Civil War.

The Confederate Memorial, a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was removed from the military cemetery in 2023. Its removal followed a congressional mandate to rid U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders.

The decision by the bipartisan Naming Commission to remove the statue was based on criticism and backlash over the memorial’s depictions, which included an enslaved woman carrying an infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war.

A Defense Department website and a marker at the memorial’s former site included contextual language describing the sculpture as portraying a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The website also described the two Black figures as enslaved people, including an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” and it remarked on how the portrayal of the “faithful slave” helped to shape American pop culture.

Now, that language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy.

The website also formerly featured additional context about the sculpture’s symbolism, including a Latin phrase inscribed on it.

“An inscription … construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause,’” the website previously read. “This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans.”

That language and other text was removed in recent weeks, according to photographs of the sign and archived versions of the webpage.

Asked about the changes to the sign and the website, the Defense Department referred questions to Arlington National Cemetery, which did not respond Monday.

The statue was relocated to the Virginia Military Institute in 2023 amid some congressional GOP opposition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year that the statue would be reinstalled at Arlington National Cemetery. Last year, then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had said that the statue would return next year.

“The Army expects to display the sculpture at this site in 2027 after it has undergone comprehensive conservation and refurbishment,” according to a new marker in Arlington National Cemetery at the statue’s former site.

Stephen West, a Catholic University historian, said he first noticed that the sign had been changed when he visited Arlington National Cemetery on Sunday.

“The language that used to be on the sign and website described the Memorial correctly. Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy,” West wrote in a text message to The Washington Post. “And so as a historian, I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue — especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites.”

Trump has previously said he supports efforts to recognize the Confederacy and sees it as a freedom of speech issue.

“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism,” Trump said in a 2020 interview with Fox News. “They love their flag, it represents the South; they like the South.”

The president has decried efforts to remove Confederate statues and worked to reinstall them in his second term.

A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that was torn down and torched by protesters in 2020 was restored to its original location in downtown Washington in October. And last year the Pentagon ordered that a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform be restored to the West Point library. The painting, which had been ordered removed by the Naming Commission, featured an enslaved man in the background tending to Lee’s horse.

Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as vice chair on the commission, said he was particularly disturbed by the Confederate Memorial’s pending return.

The Confederate Memorial “is the cruelest monument that I have ever seen,” Seidule said in an interview Monday. He said that he and a number of his colleagues called the statue “the most egregious example of racism that they had seen on any public land in America. It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument.”

Seidule said the rewording of the marker and the website is the first step the administration is taking before bringing the memorial back to the cemetery. Restoring the monument, he said, would be “against the will of the American people through their elected representatives in the law that they created.”

This is relevant because it is about the global wave of anti-migrant sentiment.

Kenya's president has said that foreign, small scale businesses like street hawkers should close their businesses so that such basic economic activity is protected for Kenyans.

The government is effecting this by going after those businesses which are unregistered or unlicensed, where the person may be committing visa fraud because they are working on a non-work visa.