Delaware Evicts Mississippians

This year, Delaware authorities withdrew the residence permits of 1,224 US citizens. In a year's time, this number climbed to over 2,000. The people involved have to leave the state. Under Interstate legislation, a state can decide to expel a person if they pose a burden to the social security system.

Within the US, the free movement of persons applies. However, it is stipulated that people moving to another state should also have the means to pay for their own living.

Since 2004, US states have the right to refuse certain citizens if these should pose "an unreasonable burden" on the state's social security system.

In Delaware, it goes like this: when a citizen has been receiving financial support from the social services for three months, the Delaware Immigration Department looks into the situation. If it turns out that the person in question abuses the system, the Delawarian state can ask them to leave the state. In a year's time, there have been over 2,000 of these cases. Counting from 1 January, there have been 1,224 new cases so far.

It's mostly immigrants from Mississippi who are asked to leave the state. The Mississippians are followed by citizens from Idaho, West Virginia, South Carolina and New Mexico.

Or not. In fact, this is a story about the EU member state Belgium monitoring citizens from other EU countries, published by Flanders News. But how different would the US look if states controlled interstate immigration more strongly than they already do? Maybe something good. Maybe something bad. We'll never know. Except that we get to watch how the EU plays out over time. 

The states were not chosen randomly: Delaware has the highest per capita GDP of the 50 official states of the US at $69,667 per person per year, while Mississippi has the lowest of the same group at $32,967 per year, according to US Government Revenue, as cited by the good folks at the Wiki (followed, as you might guess, by Idaho, West Virginia, South Carolina and New Mexico). 

Belgium at $42,630 per person per year has neither the highest nor the lowest per capita GDP in the EU. The highest EU per capita GDP annually award goes to Luxembourg at $108,832, but Luxembourg, with its tiny population, is an outlier in this category; the highest non-outlier is Denmark at $56,147. The lowest annual per capita GDP for a member state is Bulgaria at $6,334. All these numbers are from the Wiki, where they are cited from the International Monetary Fund. The EU, with vastly different economies in member states, generally reports GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Standards. By this calculation, Bulgaria has 45% of the EU average for purchasing power per person, while Luxembourg has 274% of the EU average purchasing power and Netherlands (#2) has 131%. These numbers are reported by Eurostat here. 

For comparison, Eurostat throws in the US and Japan here. They didn't do calculations per US state, but the US as a whole averages out to 148% in 2011, climbing from its low point in 2009 at 146%. Japan is on par with the EU average at 105%. But while the average for the US as a whole is high, the US also tolerates the highest internal income disparity: In Japan and Germany the ratio of pay for CEOs to pay for workers is 11:1 and 12:1, respectively. In the US, that number is 319:1, as reported by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, here.

Just things that make me ponder.

Your Money is My Money

This brilliant piece is a translation of a Dagblad article that appeared 20 July 2012, written by Frits Bloemendaal [http://byhans.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/jouw-geld-is-mijn-geld/]:

How is it possible that one broker can bring down a bank? That one money trader can bring entire countries to the edge of disaster? And that one director with a penchant for gambling can reduce a corporation with many tens of thousands of homes to beggary?

It happens because it can.

At the tops of businesses, and at the moment in public and semi-public institutions, a culture change has arisen in which self-interest, narcissism and unscrupulousness have become the most normal things in the world. That began around 30 years ago in countries such as the US and England, and spread thereafter to our own regions.

One of the worst examples is the American energy company Enron, where managers set up an enormous fraudulent network and filled their own pockets, with the eventual result of the demise of the billion-dollar company. Many thousands of employees and investors were left destitute. In the Netherlands it began with Aegon, where executives like Kees Storm enriched themselves with options worth billions, while their clients were squeezed dry with extortionate policies.

Since then the examples have piled up. The real estate fraud of the Bouwfunds and the Philips pension funds, laid out in the book De Vastgoedfraude [The Real Estate Fraud] by journalists Vasco van der Boon and Gerben van der Marel, mercilessly exposed the mentality of anyone managing the savings of others. Your money is my money, it comes down to that.

It is so much that I can only skim the surface. But no one takes note.

Theft, or gambling with other people's money, has long since ceased to be taboo in financial institutions. Unscrupulousness and shamelessness are virtues rather than sins. In the play "De Prooi" ["The Prey"], about the collapse of ABN AMRO (also such an example), one of the lead characters says, "At Goldman Sachs they choose people who were teased as children." These people want revenge against the world and show no pity.

Journalist Joris Luyendijk, who writes a column about London's financial world for the British newspaper The Guardian, recently quoted a psychologist who coaches banking sector executives. The owners of the banks, he says, are looking for "a psycopath" to transform the organization into "a merciless, money-making and soul-stealing organization." That is the secret of their wealth.

That exploitation has become the norm has everything to do with the nearly boundless freedom of the financial sector.

For years, no one dared to place obstacles in the way of the money machine. Precisely in a sector where so much money literally is up for grabs, there is very strong control needed: checks and balances. Only in the last few years has that realization begun to dawn, but that took a banking crisis that cost the Dutch people alone some 200 billion euro in stalled economic growth.

Whether politicians have the ability to turn the management culture the right way is the question, because for the time being the countries are still dancing to the pipes of the financial sector, and not the other way around.