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The Social Democrat Prime Minister announced an initiative called ‘Sweden Together’ (‘Sverige tillsammans’) on Thursday morning.
He said that municipalities, religious groups, sports associations, unions and public sector employers would all be invited to a major conference in October to discuss how to help refugees better integrate into Swedish communities.
The Prime Minister told Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio that he wanted a more even distribution of refugees across all 290 municipalities in Sweden, a policy that has been pushed by Sweden’s integration minister Ylva Johansson in recent months.
At a press conference in Stockholm at midday, ahead of cross-party talks on the refugee crisis, Löfven said there would be a large focus on getting refugees into schooling and the work force.
“This is about them having a speedy entrance into our society and getting a job, education, and housing,” Löfven told reporters.
“For us to be able to get through this demographic challenge, we need to get more working. This means we need to quickly get those who have newly arrived into the work force. This is what our investments are aiming for.”
One concrete change that was announced at the press conference was an increase in the compensation for municipalities per refugee, which will be raised from 83,100 kronor ($9,867) to 125,000 kronor ($14,873).
The government said it would earmark 1.8 billion kronor for the entire package to be spent over the next year. 870 million kronor of this will go into helping refugees find work quicker, offering speedier translation and validation of foreign education
The leaders of Sweden’s centre-right Alliance parties which made up former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s previous government are set to attend discussions with Löfven later in the day, along with the leaders of the government’s coalition partners the Greens and the Left Party. The nationalist anti-immigration Sweden Democrat party has not been invited.
“We must have a political gathering, both about what we’re doing here at home in Sweden, but also what Sweden stands for in the EU,” said Löfven, adding that it was currently “unhelpful” that Sweden and Germany were currently sharing the bulk of responsibility for new arrivals.
Sweden’s Prime Minister met Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin earlier this week. Both leaders told a press conference that they backed the introduction of new quotas to force other European countries to take in more refugees, as is being proposed by the European Commission.
The Nordic nation currently takes in more refugees per capita than any other EU member state.
Sweden’s Migration Board (Migrationsverket) received a total of 11,743 applications for asylum last month, up from 6,619 in June and 8,066 in July, as an increasing number of refugees headed for Scandinavia over the summer.
According to friends and business partners Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz, who decamped to Puerto Rico from Brooklyn for the tax benefits and live in a 6-bedroom house with several girlfriends apiece, there actually might be.
Zeines and Hurwitz made their money in a field that’s now called merchant cash advance. It’s a legal way to lend money to small businesses at interest rates higher than Mafia loan sharks once charged. Completely unregulated, last year it surpassed the U.S. Small Business Administration as a source of loans for less than $150,000, according to the industry newsletter DeBanked, one of the few places with reliable information. The business was developed a decade ago in a boiler room full of ex-Lubavitcher Jewish teenagers in downtown Manhattan. They figured out how to hook people such as florists and pizzeria owners with promises of fast cash and discovered just how ridiculous the profits could be—even if it meant driving their borrowers into bankruptcy.
Zeines was one of these guys… a curly-haired 33-year-old with a cockeyed grin, he dresses like a tourist, in flip-flops and T-shirts, and speaks with a Brooklyn Yiddish accent that turns -ing into -ink. Zeines knows all the players and all the tricks to separate people from their money, but he styles himself an outsider, someone who appreciates the absurdities of Ivy League-educated financiers getting in on a seedy business.
Zeines kept telling me he was going to sell his company to a hedge fund for tens of millions of dollars. I didn’t believe him, but I told him if it ever happened it would make a good story. Then, one day this spring, I was shown a copy of a letter from Goldman Sachs. It was addressed to Zeines’s company. The bank was offering him $100 million.
Mas. Shabbath 31b
On the house of the Goy [Goy means unclean, and is the disparaging term for a non-Jew] one looks as on the fold of cattle.
Libbre David 37
A Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks if our books contain anything against them.
Tosefta, Tractate Erubin VIII
When a Jew has a Gentile in his clutches, another Jew may go to same Gentile, lend him money and in turn deceive him, so that the Gentile shall be ruined. For the property of a Gentile, according to our law, belongs to no one, and the first Jew that passes has full right to seize it.
Sanhedrin 59a
To communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all Jews, for if the Goyim knew what we teach about them, they would kill us openly.
Ibid:
With no competition, Second Source could charge whatever it wanted. The standard deal it offered small businesses was to borrow $9,000 and pay back $120 a day for six months, or a total of $14,500, equivalent to an interest rate of 250 percent a year. That’s 10 times the legal limit in New York state, which made it a crime in the 1960s to charge more than 25 percent. To get around that, merchant cash-advance companies argue they aren’t actually charging interest—they’re buying the money businesses will make in the future, at a discount. As long as nobody uses the word “loan,” it usually holds up in court, says Robert Cook, a lawyer who advises the industry. Another no-no is chasing down an individual to collect if the business fails. Merchant cash advance is a supercharged version of “factoring,” the age-old practice of trading the right to collect unpaid bills in exchange for cash upfront.
At Second Source, the best customers were the most desperate
Cash advance was no longer a secret. Lots of former colleagues from Second Source were opening brokerages, and venture capitalists and private equity funds were discovering the trade. In February 2011 a lender called OnDeck Capital, which uses algorithms to identify the best borrowers and undercut companies such as Pearl, raised $25 million from Silicon Valley venture firms. CAN Capital, another competitor, raised $30 million in 2012 from early Facebook investor Accel Partners. Others raised tens of millions of dollars more.
Competition brought out Zeines’s ingenuity. Instead of building his own boiler room, he became a wholesaler. He told brokers to send him their shakiest customers. He also came up with ways to squeeze even more money from businesses that already had advances. He offered them a second loan, making it due in just two or three months, so it would get paid off before their existing debt. Other funders would lend only against credit-card sales, but Zeines would fund anyone with a bank account from which he could automatically withdraw payments.
The strategy worked so well, Zeines and Hurwitz say, they were doubling their money a few times a year. They started Pearl with $1 mil and earned $8 million in 2012, their first full year. Profit doubled in 2013, and loan volume reached $100 million.
Ibid:
The borrowers included people like Dermot O’Hare, a 60-year-old immigrant from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who ran an Irish pub with his wife in Susquehanna, Pa. As he was tending bar one day in 2013, worrying about how to get through the winter, a broker called. O’Hare took out one cash advance at about 500 percent, and then another one from Pearl at 400 percent. The daily payments turned out to be unmanageable. O’Hare filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, and a bank foreclosed on the bar. He moved to Ohio to live with his in-laws and took a job at a Lowe’s store. “It broke our hearts leaving the joint, but what can you do?” O’Hare says. “Shame on me for falling for it.”
Introducing Kenneth Griffin, a blue eyed White guy who funds no civil rights or anti-defamation league for Whites:
The billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin is known as an aggressive trader who waits for prices to fall before buying. But when it comes to personal real estate, Mr. Griffin appears to be less price-sensitive.
Over the last two years, Mr. Griffin, the chief executive of the investment firm Citadel, has gone on a multicity real estate shopping spree. He has spent nearly $300 million and set new price records in three cities, according to people familiar with his buying. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the deals.
The buying binge includes the purchase last year of two full floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago, the city where Citadel is based and where Mr. Griffin, 46, has his main residence. He paid $13.3 million for the 37th floor and $16 million for the 46th floor, totaling just under $30 million. If combined, the deal would be the most expensive real estate purchase in Chicago.
In New York this year, Mr. Griffin agreed to purchase three full floors — totaling over 18,000 square feet — at 220 Central Park South, the condo tower under construction in Midtown. According to people familiar with the deal, the purchase includes a main residence as well as several other apartments that could be used for staff or guests. Mr. Griffin paid around $200 million for the space — a price that brokers say is a record in New York.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 03 October 2015 16:27.
Even where not required by EU quotas, Ireland’s Catholic bishops are calling for Irish parishes to accept and settle refugees who “will be arriving for months and years to come.”
Prelates seek reform of direct provision for asylum seekers to avoid two-tier system
The Catholic bishops have called on parishes throughout the island to mobilise resources to help with the resettlement of migrants who come to Ireland.
They have also called for urgent reform in direct provision for asylum seekers to avoid the emergence of an unjust two-tier system.
In a statement on Thursday afternoon, the bishops encouraged “all members of our parish communities to explore how they might offer their services, talents, time and commitment to supporting the resettlement of refugees through practical parish actions such as friendship and welcome schemes, English language classes, trauma counselling and medical services, as well as legal advice services”.
Demanding solidarity
They noted how “local communities across the island of Ireland have reacted to the worsening refugee crisis by mobilising to demand greater solidarity from European political leaders. The swift and enthusiastic response to Pope Francis’s appeal to parishes shows a ready willingness to help and a recognition that our parishes need to be places of welcome to all.
“Bishops are working with clergy and other diocesan personnel, as well as faith-based organisations, to assess our capacity to contribute to the national and international response.”
They said that “given the magnitude of the current crisis, refugees will be arriving for months and years to come, and it will be some years before they can safely return to their country of origin. Co-operation and clear sharing of responsibility across relevant Government departments, to address different types of need, is a necessary foundation for strategic planning.”
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 18 September 2015 07:31.
Word has it that Juncker is socially conservative and therefore does not relish the migrant crisis; but he is a businessman who is looking after business interests for himself, business constituents and to maintain his position as an EU representative of those interests.
That is why he felt constrained to put across a plan to try to preserve the Schengen zone by diffusing responsibility among its members and (in his theory) that might dilute the impact of the migrants.
An additional aspect to the psychology of his position is that he is from Luxembourg, one of the smallest European nations. One can imagine business persons from small countries finding the delay and tedium of having to go through border controls as they move in and out of a Luxembourg every 15 minutes an insufferable handicap.
Nevertheless, from a WN/ethnonationalist perspective, particularly until such time as the borders of the entire zone are secure from non-European imposition and those who are already here are drastically reduced in number by means of repatriation, the Schengen zone will have to give way to tighter national border controls.
From an ethnonationalist point of view, in any event, there has to be more national accountability to their own and to European people as a whole.
Sep 16 2015: In last week’s State of the Union speech, European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker referred to the Schengen Area – a border-free travel zone made up of 26 European countries – as “a unique symbol of European integration”. After Germany’s recent announcement that it would be “temporarily reintroducing border controls”, some say that unique symbol is in jeopardy.
A look back at the past 30 years since the agreement was signed can help clarify what exactly is at risk.
What is Schengen?
The Schengen Area is made up of 26 European countries that have removed border controls at their shared crossings. The agreement was signed in 1985 by five members of the EU, and came into force 10 years later. Following the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, the Schengen agreement became part of European law. That meant all new EU members had to sign up to it, although Britain and Ireland had already been given the right to opt out. As the map below shows, four non-EU countries – Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein – are also members of the area.
Why are people talking about the end of Schengen?
We are experiencing a global refugee crisis. Around the world, 60 million people have been forced to flee war, violence and human rights abuse – levels not seen since World War II. Hundreds and thousands of those people have attempted the often perilous journey to Europe in search of a better, safer life.
Some of them haven’t made it – while the image of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a beach in Turkey shocked the world, many more have died trying to get to Europe. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration, 2015 could end up being the deadliest on record.
Of those who do make it over, the majority have been heading to Germany. The country expects to take in 1 million asylum seekers by the end of the year, more than all other EU countries collectively received in 2014. It is in response to these huge numbers that Germany decided to re-impose its internal border controls. The country’s interior minister said the move aimed to “limit the current inflows to Germany and to return to orderly procedures when people enter the country”.
Some have been quick to emphasize the temporary nature of this decision. But with countries such as Austria and the Netherlands now following suit, others think Schengen’s days are numbered.
Has anything like this happened before?
The option for a country to temporarily reinstate border controls was actually built into the original agreement, as the European Commission pointed out last weekend: “The temporary reintroduction of border controls between member states is an exceptional possibility explicitly foreseen in and regulated by the Schengen Borders Code.”
In the past, countries have chosen to exercise that right. For example, in 2006 Germany reinstated border controls when it hosted the FIFA World Cup. France did the same in 2005, following the terrorist attacks in London. In what was perhaps a precursor of the troubles to come, during the post-Arab Spring mass migration of 2011, politicians in France and Italy called for deep reforms to the agreement.
So what’s different this time?
Even in Schengen’s early days, critics pointed to one big flaw: freedom of movement within the Schengen area only works if the common external borders are fortified. With many frontline countries such as Greece already experiencing crises of their own, the task of strengthening those external borders has become even tougher.
The stakes were raised this summer after a heavily armed terrorist suspect was apprehended on board a train travelling between three Schengen countries. The ease with which he had moved around the area prompted some to refer to Europe’s open-border policy as a terrorist’s paradise.
Perhaps more importantly, people’s attitudes within the area are starting to change. This recent crisis is just one in a long line of turbulent events for Europe these past months and years. Whether they are right to do so, some blame the union for these developments. While Schengen and the free movement of people might be at the core of the European project, for some that no longer seems worth fighting for. A poll back in July showed that the majority of western Europeans would like to see Schengen scrapped, and last year former French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for it to be “immediately suspended”.
But with so many people now displaced by conflict and violence, others argue that the European project – which has brought peace to a continent previously locked in war – has never been more important.
As plans to share out asylum seekers more equitably across the European Union make little progress, many will be closely watching the developments for hints of what it means for Schengen.
