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Occupy Economics and the Economy


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Thursday, November 27, 2014

If Every Rich Person Were Like This Multimillionaire, The World Would Be A Better Place


If You Only News



If Every Rich Person Were Like This Multimillionaire, The World Would Be A Better Place




Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuihua bulldozed all the ramshackle huts in his poverty-stricken hometown, and what he did next is amazing.

The Daily Mail reports Xiong Shuihua spent millions building luxury condos for everyone in the village he grew up in, so all 72 families in the Xiongkeng village in the city of Xinyu would have a place to live. The multimillionaire also promised to feed elderly and low income residents three times a day.

The project began five years ago and was completed last spring.

What was Xiong Shuihua’s motivation? Gratitude. In the original Chinese language news footage posted on  YouKu, he told reporters that people in his village were kind and helpful towards him and his parents during his hard-scrabble childhood. Xiong Shuihua first began building his fortune in the construction business, then made profitable investments in the steel industry.
“I earned more money than I knew what to do with, and I didn’t want to forget my roots. I always pay my debts, and wanted to make sure the people who helped me when I was younger and my family were paid back.”
Xiong Shuihua also built large villas for 18 families who had been particularly kind to him. That part of the construction project alone cost over $6.3 million.


Photo of Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuihua in office reading newspaper.
Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuihua made his fortune in the construction and steel industries, and wanted to give something back to his childhood village. Photo: Video screen grab/YouKu.



Photo of the luxury condos Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuihua bought for his former neighbors in the village of Xiongkeng.
Xiong Shuihua bulldozed the ramshackle wooden huts and dirt roads in his childhood village, and replaced them with luxury condos. Photo: Video screen grab/YouKu



Photo of people walking through Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuiha's childhood village carrying umbrellas.
Xiong Shuihua spent over $6.3 million building homes for all 72 families in the village of Xiongkeng in southern China. Photo: Video screen grab/YouKu


Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuihua also promised to feed elderly and low-income villagers three times a day.
Xiong Shuihua also pledged to feed elderly and low-income villagers three times a day. Photo: Video screen grab/YouKu.

Chinese multimillionaire Xiong Shuihua builds luxury condos for 72 families in his former village.

Here’s the video from the original news report that got posted on YouKu, Unfortunately, there are no English subtitles.

Featured image: Composite with video screen grabs from a Chinese news report via YouKu.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Paul Krugman destroys arguments against Obama’s immigration plan






RAWSTORY


Paul Krugman destroys arguments against Obama’s immigration plan

                 
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman smiles during the World Business Forum in New York (AFP)



Now, that Obama has taken his much-needed and way overdue executive action to shield millions of undocumented families from heart-rending deportation, the fact that it was simply the right thing to do is abundantly clear. It also gives columnist Paul Krugman an opportunity to wax lyrical about his own family’s immigrant roots, and one of his favorite tourist attractions in New York City, the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. “When you tour the museum, you come away with a powerful sense of immigration as a human experience, which — despite plenty of bad times, despite a cultural climate in which Jews, Italians, and others were often portrayed as racially inferior — was overwhelmingly positive,” he writes in his Friday column. “I get especially choked up about the Baldizzi apartment from 1934. When I described its layout to my parents, both declared, “I grew up in that apartment!” And today’s immigrants are the same, in aspiration and behavior, as my grandparents were — people seeking a better life, and by and large finding it.”

President Obama’s new immigration initiative, Krugman says, is “a simple matter of human decency.”

Krugman goes on to parse the issue, and to point out that supporting the humane treatment of children born in this country to undocumented immigrant parents is not the same as supporting completely open borders. Under F.D.R., he points out, “Once immigration restrictions were in place, and immigrants already here gained citizenship, this disenfranchised class at the bottom shrank rapidly, helping to create the political conditions for a stronger social safety net. And, yes, low-skill immigration probably has some depressing effect on wages, although the available evidence suggests that the effect is quite small.”

Yes, it is normal to be conflicted about immigration issues, Krugman allows. What is not normal is the desire to punish innocent children, who are already here, for their parents’ decision to bend the rules to give them a better life. Predictably, as we all know, there are far too many right-wing zealots and haters in politics and the media who are quite happy to exact this punishment. Krugman:
Who are we talking about? First, there are more than a million young people in this country who came — yes, illegally — as children and have lived here ever since. Second, there are large numbers of children who were born here — which makes them U.S. citizens, with all the same rights you and I have — but whose parents came illegally, and are legally subject to being deported.
What should we do about these people and their families? There are some forces in our political life who want us to bring out the iron fist — to seek out and deport young residents who weren’t born here but have never known another home, to seek out and deport the undocumented parents of American children and force those children either to go into exile or to fend for themselves.
Krugman gets downright sentimental about the issue, stating his belief that Americans are simply not “that cruel.” And anyway a crackdown on these families would cost money, which Republicans don’t want to spend.  (One hopes.) The real question is how they should be treated, he asks. his answer is not only humane but economical.
Today’s immigrant children are tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and neighbors. Condemning them to life in the shadows means that they will have less stable home lives than they should, be denied the opportunity to acquire skills and education, contribute less to the economy, and play a less positive role in society. Failure to act is just self-destructive.
But more importantly, it’s the humane thing to do.