April 20, 2024

Coal Mine Fight Embodies an Economic Struggle in Rural Australia

On Wednesday, a court in the state of New South Wales is set to hear an appeal of a ruling this year that blocked the expansion of a nearby open-pit coal mine. The ruling was on a lawsuit brought by Bulga residents against the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. The state is joining Rio in the appeal, which is being heard in the highest court in New South Wales.

At stake is not just the fate of the village of 300 people. The mining industry and other state governments will be watching the outcome closely as slowing growth in China, the chief consumer of Australian commodities, heightens anxieties over the country’s economy.

If the appeal succeeds, the mine expansion will proceed as approved by the state last year. If it fails, it could set a precedent that favors the environmental interests of local communities over the economic interests of state governments. That would upend a system that has traditionally given primacy to the interests of large mining companies.

“This is a wake-up call,” Leslie Krey, 66, said in an interview at her house near the Bulga town center.

“There’s got to be something other than mines,” said Ms. Krey, whose husband, John, is one of the leading opponents of expanding the mine.

In February 2012, the New South Wales planning authorities approved plans intended to extend the life of the Mount Thorley Warkworth Mine by more than a decade, to 2033. Those plans involved expanding the operation, owned by a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, onto land that Rio Tinto had pledged in 2003 as a permanent conservation zone to shield Bulga from the mine.

Bulga residents feared that the noise and dust from an expanded mine would irrevocably damage the environment and reduce home values that were already low. In addition, Saddle Ridge, a spiny natural buffer between the town and the mine, would be demolished. Also, a large section of the critically endangered Warkworth Sands Woodland would face eradication, the residents argued.

Many environmental studies were conducted, but no one, not even Rio, is disputing that the expansion would destroy the ridge and the woodland. Rio is asserting that the economic benefit outweighs the environmental impact and is offering to set aside land elsewhere. Graham Witherspoon, a spokesman for Rio, declined to comment on any environmental or financial impact the mine may have on the community.

A citizens’ group, the Bulga-Milbrodale Progress Association, filed a suit to stop the expansion, and in April, the state’s Land and Environment Court issued a ruling in the group’s favor, citing “negative social impacts on local community” and threats to its “sense of place.”

Now, Rio Tinto has taken the unusual step of asking the New South Wales court to entirely void the ruling, which was handed down by Judge Brian J. Preston. His ruling in April represented the first time the lower Land and Environment Court had ruled against an approved mining grant of this scope and scale, and it had the potential to significantly expand the court’s authority.

In a 2009 affidavit to the state’s Department of Planning, Rio Tinto argued that an expansion would give it access to an additional 163 million tons of coal over the lifetime of the mine. The decision to expand the mine, it said, was based on a sharp increase in the long-term average price of coal to $53 per ton in 2009, from $33 per ton when the 2003 grant was approved. The represents more than $8 billion in additional revenue for the company over the life of the mine.

Mining, whether for the high-quality thermal coal around Bulga — the kind used to fuel power plants — or the iron and gold in the country’s vast open west, is woven deeply into the fabric of rural Australia, where it provides many of the best-paying and most stable jobs. It has also been the engine powering a decade of robust economic growth that has largely spared the country from the effects of the global downturn.

Rio Tinto says that if the ruling is upheld, production at the mine will begin to slow next year, with the eventual loss of more than 1,300 jobs across the region, the Hunter Valley.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/business/global/in-australia-signs-of-a-tilt-in-economic-equilibrium.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Business PAC Plans a Push in City Council Races

The organization, made up of real estate developers, property owners, banks, insurance companies, investment firms and others, has established a political action committee to direct donations to back candidates in both parties who support pro-development policies.

Called Jobs for New York, the PAC represents an aggressive new involvement in New York’s heavily regulated city elections by a major independent expenditure group. The PAC also has the support of several unions whose fortunes are tied to construction, including those representing carpenters and laborers known as mason tenders.

The effort is focused exclusively on Council races, in part because members tend to have great sway over development in their districts, but also because of the uncertainty surrounding the topsy-turvy mayoral campaign.

The Council will undergo extensive turnover this year with some 21 of its 51 members stepping down, mainly because of term limits.

The infusion of cash from the PAC reflects broader anxieties coursing through New York’s business community as Mr. Bloomberg prepares to leave City Hall after 12 years. The mayoral race has been marked by sharp questions about whether the candidates, especially those in the Democratic primary, are committed to building on the Bloomberg legacy or to dismantling it.

During his tenure, the mayor has championed a pro-development agenda, pushing dozens of rezoning measures through the Council while investing billions of dollars to nurture commercial development and affordable housing — sometimes over the objections of neighborhood residents.

The PAC effort is being spearheaded by the Real Estate Board of New York, which includes some of the most influential figures and families in the industry, including Larry A. Silverstein, the developer of the World Trade Center, Richard S. LeFrak, Daniel R. Tishman, the Speyers and the Rudins.

In an interview, Steven Spinola, the president of the real estate board, called Mr. Bloomberg’s time in City Hall a “wonderful era” and said his organization’s PAC intended to support candidates who would advance a pro-jobs, pro-development agenda similar to Mr. Bloomberg’s.

A memorandum outlining the effort described the coming election as a “transformative campaign that will shape the city’s economic development atmosphere for years to come.”

The group plans to get involved in races in up to 25 Council districts throughout the city, backing candidates who support “an agenda focused on creating good jobs, building affordable housing and improving the city’s economy,” the memo says. It will pay for district-by-district polling, phone banks, direct mail, and television and radio advertisements to support candidates seen as being allied with the interests of business leaders and their supporters in labor.

The focus underscores the enormous role the Council — relatively weak in other areas of city government — has in overseeing development. It tends to defer to individual members’ views on whether to approve, modify or reject projects in their districts.

The effort signals the new electoral dynamic created by recent court rulings that allowed for a proliferation of independent expenditure groups, like so-called super PACs, in presidential and Congressional races around the country. In New York City, campaign regulators are preparing for the participation of outside organizations and putting in place rules that require independent expenditure campaigns to disclose the source of their money and details of their spending.

City campaign regulators said on Thursday that they could not recall an independent expenditure campaign of the financial scale envisioned by the Jobs for New York PAC.

Given the sums the organization is prepared to spend, it could play a powerful role in the local campaigns. In 2009, sitting council members raised an average of $175,000, while challengers raised an average of $125,000, according to an analysis by Citizens Union of New York City, a government watchdog group.

Local races, however, can be unpredictable and hinge on longstanding relationships and grudges; whether an industry PAC can truly influence Council races on a citywide scale is an open question. The organizers have tapped Harry Giannoulis, Maggie Moran and Phil Singer, all veterans of city, state and federal campaigns, to oversee the organization’s activities.

The group said it planned to abide by state contribution limits — $150,000 from individuals and $5,000 from corporations.

The PAC also has the support of several unions: Mason Tenders’ District Council of Greater New York; UFCW Local 1500, which represents supermarket workers; and the New York City District Council of Carpenters.

Mike McGuire, the political director of the Mason Tenders said his members benefited from robust development. “It means jobs,” he said. “Unionized building trades are the last of the good blue-collar jobs in New York City.”

Mr. McGuire also noted that the turnover on the Council was coming at a critical time, suggesting that new members could affect a gradually improving economy, depending on their views. “A pro-development Council would be good for us,” he said.

In an interview, Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, indicated that the multimillion-dollar effort was a significant shift in city politics and might alter the nature of campaigning on the local level.

“The entire point of a City Council race is to reflect the needs of the neighborhoods in a district,” Ms. Lerner said. “This undercuts the neighborhood-based nature of a district and replaces neighborhood concerns with industry concerns.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/nyregion/business-pac-plans-a-push-in-city-council-races.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Hong Kong TV Drama Plays Out Uneasy Ties With China

HONG KONG — In Hong Kong, the tensions between residents and mainland Chinese visitors dominate the headlines of the city’s papers, with mainlanders blamed for a shortage of school slots, bad manners in stores and a hypercharged property market.

So it should come as little surprise that a television show would come along to tap into these anxieties and, perhaps in a gift to the show’s producers, also draw the attention of mainland censors.

“Inbound Troubles” tells the story of two cousins — one from Hong Kong and the other from the mainland — and the tensions in a city whose enviable wealth increasingly rests on a flood of mainland visitors who nevertheless draw scorn for lavish spending and, some say, boorish ways.

In the show, the cousin from mainland China is shown littering, running red lights and parking illegally, while the one from Hong Kong makes his living with a travel agency that specializes in encouraging new arrivals from the mainland to part with more of their cash.

The TVB network show, which has just ended its monthlong run, was aired as the city’s leadership struggled to deal in Whack-A-Mole fashion with the latest supposed peril attributed to mainlanders: a shortage of baby formula said to have been caused by the hoarding of supplies by mainland Chinese who have crossed the border into Hong Kong (apparently out of fear of tainted supplies in China).

Some Hong Kong residents have become so agitated about the formula milk problem that they have asked the U.S. president, Barack Obama, to intervene, using a petition on the White House Web site titled, “Baby hunger outbreak in Hong Kong, international aid requested.”

The petition has already drawn 23,000 signatures.

The show’s candid depictions of mainland-Hong Kong relations — one scene focuses on the formula shortage — have drawn hundreds of complaints to Hong Kong regulators from viewers upset at things like its portrayals of mainlanders and its depiction of the Hong Kong’s tourism industry as predatory. And Chinese officials censored trailers for the program on the mainland, where viewers could see it on TVB’s overseas channel or through video streaming.

China also did some trimming of the version shown on the mainland, once the program began airing there. It snipped out a depiction of a protest outside a Hong Kong clothing store, a scene apparently based on a demonstration against a Dolce Gabbana store that let free-spending mainlanders photograph merchandise while banning Hong Kong residents from doing the same.

Still, the show clearly struck a nerve, becoming the TVB channel’s highest-rated drama so far this year.

To some, the tensions captured in the show are a natural outgrowth of fears about Beijing’s increasing influence in Hong Kong, a former British colony that retained considerable legal autonomy and civil rights after it was handed back to China in 1997.

“Politically, more and more Hong Kongers resent the fact that Beijing is tightening its control over Hong Kong’s political development,” Willy Lam, a scholar on Chinese history and politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in an e-mail.

He added that the current leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, “is seen as a yes-man chief executive bowing to every instruction from the mainland authorities.”

“There is a common feeling that fat cat mainlanders are driving up real estate prices,” he said. “You have witnessed of course the drama over formula milk powder.”

Although polls show that an increasing number of Hong Kong residents hold pessimistic views about the city’s future and Hong Kong-mainland relations, in “Inbound Troubles” the two cousins gradually acclimate to each other, with the one from the mainland adapting to local ways.

Viewers say they appreciate the show’s realistic depictions of the shifting social dynamics of Hong Kong and the growing impact of mainland China and its visitors on the city.

“I have a few bad experiences with mainlanders — most of them have to do with them jumping queues or being rude,” said Tai Wing-yi, a student at Hong Kong Baptist University. “But not all are like that. Some of my classmates are from the mainland, and they are nice to be around, and they work hard. In fact, they are the ones who contribute more than the locals in group projects.”

“The show highlighted the tension between mainland Chinese and locals in a funny way, and got the message across in a light-hearted manner,” she said.

Chen Min, a mainland journalist who has visited Hong Kong many times, said that his social circle in the city included many more-educated and better-off local residents, who were usually polite, but that not all encounters were so smooth.

“Occasionally you run into problems that you didn’t encounter before,” he said. “Like a taxi driver who refuses to take you because you speak Mandarin, although you’re holding a map and address in Chinese.”

On another occasion, Mr. Chen said, he was lugging a heavy suitcase to a taxi. “The driver joked, ‘Carrying cash to buy an apartment?”’

The popularity of the show — there is already talk of a movie — suggests that it could pave the way for treatments with similar themes, much as, in the United States, “All in the Family” started a subgenre of politically tinged situation comedies during the turbulence of the Vietnam War.

In an opinion piece in Global Times, a populist mainland newspaper, Wendy Wang, a freelance writer from Shanghai, noted that mainlanders have long been derided on Hong Kong television, with men often portrayed as mobsters and women as flirty or worse.

But after the 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, “mainlanders’ characters grew wealthier but not wiser,” she wrote.

Chris Buckley and Calvin Yang contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/business/media/hong-kong-tv-drama-plays-out-uneasy-ties-with-china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Europe Now Doubts That Greece Can Embrace Reform

Officials from the so-called troika of foreign lenders to Greece — the European Central Bank, European Union and International Monetary Fund — have come to believe that the country has neither the ability nor the will to carry out the broad economic reforms it has promised in exchange for aid, people familiar with the talks say, and they say they are even prepared to withhold the next installment of aid in March.

Adding to the anxieties in financial markets, talks broke down Friday between the Greek government and private lenders over a plan to reduce Greece’s debt by $130 billion, a “voluntary” default that the troika has demanded before extending more aid. Those negotiations, aimed at forcing hedge funds and other private holders of Greek debt to accept large losses in order to make the country’s debt load more manageable, will resume Wednesday amid rising concerns about the consequences of failure.

The markets have taken into account a voluntary default by Greece, most experts say. But financial experts fear the possibility of an “involuntary” default if the negotiators are unable to reach an agreement. That could unleash violent market reactions that could conceivably produce another market cataclysm like the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and throw the world into another recession.

Fanning those fears is a growing conviction among the Greek political establishment and the country’s lenders that the old dynamic — with Greece pretending to make structural changes and its lenders pretending to save it from default — has become untenable, people close to the talks say.

As recently as November, Greece and its lenders were optimistic that the country’s newly installed prime minister, Lucas Papademos, a well-respected financial technocrat, would stabilize Greece’s soaring debt and help nurse the country back to health.

But since then, his interim government — stocked not with technocrats but with politicians gunning for national elections as soon as March — has been paralyzed. Although it passed the 2012 national budget, it has failed to put into effect most of the unpopular changes mandated by the loan agreement that the previous government made back in 2010, when the country first admitted it was broke.

“The prime minister is a fine personality — he’s educated, he’s honest, he’s the best you can get around. But no one is helping him,” said George Kirtsos, the owner of a weekly newspaper, The Athens City Press. “Those that take the decisions at a national level believe that Greece will not make it.”

There is considerable posturing in these sorts of negotiations, and the troika has threatened to withdraw aid in the past, only to approve the next loan installment. It may do so again despite its misgivings, because the alternative of an uncontrolled default is too risky. But it will do so only if negotiations with private bondholders can be completed successfully.

But, amid a stream of gloomy news from Europe, including the downgrade of the debt of France and eight other countries, the sense that default is inevitable is growing. “When you simply go over the bare figures I can’t really imagine another scenario,” said Michael Fuchs, a leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in the German Parliament.

“Mathematics is mathematics, and one plus one has to equal two and not five,” he said, describing how, even with a significant restructuring of its debt, the Greek government’s deficit would still be too large and its economy not competitive enough to put the country back on a sound footing.

That sense can be self-reinforcing as well, making it even harder for Mr. Papademos to push through the changes Greece needs to survive the current crisis.

Greece’s dire economic condition can hardly be overstated. After two years of tax increases and wage cuts, Greek civil servants have seen their income shrink by 40 percent since 2010, and private-sector workers have suffered as well. More than $75 billion has left the country as people move their savings abroad. Some 68,000 businesses closed in 2010, and another 53,000 — out of 300,000 still active — are said to be close to bankruptcy, according to a report issued in the fall by the Greek Co-Federation of Chambers of Commerce.

Nicholas Kulish contributed reporting from Berlin, and Dimitris Bounias from Athens.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/world/europe/europe-now-doubts-that-greece-can-embrace-reform.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Big City: Did You Give the Doorman Enough?

What this means is that even after you’ve rifled through the data and researched the gratuities administered by your neighbors and friends, you don’t know what you don’t know. Your superintendent could tell you what Mrs. Parsons in 5F gave him, but presumably he won’t. And Mrs. Parsons, if you ask her, is likely to abstain from the truth.

This habit of dishonesty is confirmed in “Doormen,” a generalized but thoroughly convincing book about the relationships between Manhattan doormen and tenants, by Peter Bearman, a Columbia University sociologist. In a chapter devoted to Christmas tipping, Mr. Bearman determines that people frequently understate the amount they are giving for the purpose of driving down the contributions of others, and thus distinguishing themselves as among a building’s more generous residents.

I would argue that people also say they give less to assuage the guilt of others who may not be giving as much (unless they are zealous members of online parenting forums, in which case inducing guilt becomes a mandate of human existence).

If Mr. Bearman were to arrive at Christmas dinner and listen to you fret about whether you tipped your doorman or your super sufficiently this year, he would not quell your anxieties but, instead, tell you that they were utterly justified. Tipping, in this view, is a complicated affair in which it is virtually impossible to establish uniformity. Tipping too little is embarrassing, but so is tipping too much, which can come with distasteful implications of hierarchy and servitude.

This past week, I set out to speak to doormen on the Upper West Side, and I can say that not one of them complained about the indignity of having been handed too much money in recent weeks. At the Austin, on West 79th Street off Columbus Avenue, where Nelson Pacheco has been a doorman for 24 years, tips have gone down over time as more renters have occupied the condominium building, he told me. He was one of the few willing to be quoted by name on the subject of tipping.

The practice of combining apartments is also not welcomed by many doormen, because it reduces the number of tenants adding to the December bounty. There is concern as well about newcomers to the city who are not inculcated in the folkways of tipping. Some years back during the holidays, one porter told me, he received cookies from a tenant who had just moved to New York. “By the next year, she’d learned to do the right thing,” he said.

Tipping is affected by an infinite number of variables, not the least of them personal affinity. Most doormen will tell you that everyone tips something at Christmas, but that’s not quite true.

“My husband used to stiff doormen he was angry at — not pay our sullen, sluggish doorman anything some years,” a Riverside Drive resident said. “I wouldn’t have done it, but I came to feel all right with this. He wasn’t any more sluggish or sullen after he’d been stiffed.”

Geographical distinctions still play out significantly, as well. Another West Side doorman, Guarionex Mendes, suggested that it was more lucrative, and infinitely more pleasant, to work for older people uptown than for younger people downtown. A doorman at the Manchester House for four and a half years now, he previously worked in a building on Park Avenue South.

“Young people are going 100 miles an hour,” he said. “They race past you, ‘Hi, doorman.’ They don’t worry as much.”

Doormen acknowledge that there is still much more money to be made at the end of the year on the East Side than on the West Side, and that getting to Park Avenue is often the goal.

“This, you have to understand, is a working-class neighborhood,” Bruce Madrazo, by all appearances a much-beloved West 79th Street doorman, said.

A doorman new to life in a prewar co-op on the Upper East Side confirmed that Christmastime in the employ of such a place means, as he put it, “horse loads of money.” Although he’d worked at this co-op for only a few months, he’d already received $4,000 in gift money as of last week, and many tips were still to come. As it happens, half the people in the building increase their tips, annually, based on seniority; so, the doorman said, he could look forward to making even more money in the years ahead.

That the city’s economy is so reliant on a culture of mercurially determined generosity, from the absurdities of Wall Street bonuses on down, is, in the end, merely another mark of its extremely shaky relationship to the egalitarian.

At the turn of the 20th century in New York and elsewhere around the country, a movement took hold to abolish tipping. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, thought the practice “unwise,” and other union leaders spoke out against tipping on the grounds that it suppressed wages and turned workers into supplicants.

“I detest this ‘tipping’ custom; it is base, wrong, unjust and degrading,” L. T. Van Fleet, secretary of the barbers’ union, said in the late 19th century.

“It is more manly,” he concluded, “to earn your living than to receive charity or bribes.”

Leaving manliness out of it, the salary cap for unionized doormen in the city is $42,000 a year, making the dependence on holiday tips significant. Surely some doormen are friendlier than others, and some more discreet, but in general it does not require a vastly different skill set to open the door of a building full of $6 million apartments than to open the door of a place where real estate is considerably cheaper. When we reward doormen at a higher rate on East 84th Street than on West 23rd Street, what we are rewarding is simply the ability to get closer to money.

E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=aff63d9411c4cccce7a7e0affd54b2f8

Opinion: John Maynard Keynes: His sunny optimism shaped economists’ approach to depression.

FOR someone who’s been dead for 65 years, John Maynard Keynes has amazing presence. Open a paper, click on a blog or TV, and, voilà, like Waldo, he’s everywhere. The British economic oracle — whose boyhood nickname Snout should tell you that a pretty face isn’t why he’s hot — gets more Google hits than Leonardo DiCaprio. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas apparently got so fed up with the old scene stealer that he interrupted a recent Republican debate to flash his rivals the news that Keynes was, well, deceased.

For some, Keynes is the hero who rescued the West from the Great Depression, for others the villain to blame for the current mess. To me, he’s neither, but rather the Winston Churchill of economics, radiating optimism when things looked bleakest, never so happily engaged as in a national or global emergency.

An emergency is what we’re having now, of course. Unemployment has been stuck around 9 percent for more than two years. Business is treading water. Families have less cash to spend. Markets are in turmoil. All our old anxieties have us by the throat again: the American Dream is dead; the middle class is disappearing; our children won’t live as well as we do. Never mind that similar fears proved groundless in the past. When you’re scared in the middle of the night, it’s almost impossible to imagine morning.

Keynes could, though. He had a surprising ability to see beyond the grim present to better days — especially for someone who famously noted that “in the long run we are all dead.”

Keynes’s sunny optimism was most striking in the midst of one of the darkest chapters of modern economic history. If we think of the recession of 2007-9 as a Category 1 hurricane, the Great Depression would qualify as a Category 5. Income, per person, was one-fifth of what it is today, adjusted for inflation. Unemployment was nearly three times as high. More than a third of the population was destitute. There were virtually no government benefits.

Preachers talked of Armageddon, and pundits contemplated “the possibility that the Western system of society might break down and cease to work.” Keynes, however, reassured fellow citizens, in a silvery, seductive voice that was one of his sexiest features, that what came before “was not a dream. This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning.”

Admittedly, Keynes had no more seen the hurricane coming than his counterparts predicted the crises of 1893 or 1907 or those of the 1990s or 2008. Irving Fisher’s ill-timed pronouncement, just before the crash of 1929, that “stocks have reached a permanently high plateau” will never be forgotten. Keynes was equally surprised and forced to put his two favorite Impressionist paintings up for sale. Still, he wasn’t about to waste time ruing past failures when panic was in the air. Instead, he quickly began reassuring the British public that “we are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism.” Boldly, he predicted that by the time his great-nieces and great-nephews were adults, mankind would have solved its “economic problem.” At least in the West, the material requisites for a good life would be available to all.

He did not dismiss the dangers of 25 percent unemployment, nor advocate that government embrace nature’s cure and wait it out. But he disagreed vehemently with those who called for draconian or dictatorial measures. He insisted that the Western economies were suffering from a mechanical breakdown for which there was a relatively easy fix. (For someone who didn’t drive, he was inordinately fond of vehicular metaphors.)

There was, moreover, a solution. Breaking the vicious circle that deflation was creating for farmers and businessmen was well within the power of governments. All the monetary authorities had to do was lower interest rates by creating more money until business could raise prices and would find it worthwhile to begin investing again.

When the Depression failed to respond to monetary policy but instead deepened and spread, Keynes went back to the drawing board. By 1936 he had worked out a new theory of slumps resistant to the usual cures of easy money and low interest rates, calling it, with his trademark lack of modesty, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.”

What never changed during the Depression and the Second World War was Keynes’s positive mind-set.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=303ededaef04ea206bf281c90a110ac4