Dow Plunges 600 Points as Recession is Declared, or, My Contribution to the American Economy

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's official. We are in a recession.

Since we all know that the best way to improve the economy and contribute to the national well-being is to go out and SHOP, I thought I'd do my patriotic duty and share with you three different brands that I am quite a big fan of.

Exhibit A: Moleskine
Oh, Moleskine. The famous notebook of Picasso, Dali, and everyone else. So pretty. This semester, all of my notebooks were Moleskine; I spent about ten to fifteen dollars more than I would have otherwise, and it was WORTH EVERY PENNY. I also have the calendar, which comes with stickers. Stickers! And I have to admit, I coveted the calendar so violently that I bought the 2009 one in July, and have just written the dates in the notebook section in the back.

(That's right. To buy.)

Exhibit B: American Apparel
Now, although I have always labeled American Apparel as an overpriced hipster store(1), I have secretly always wanted to go shopping there. I finally got my opportunity this past Halloween when I decided to dress up as a grape, and needed a purple hoodie to complete my costume. It was a little hard to part with $40 just for a sweatshirt, but it was not at all hard to put that sweatshirt on. And now I wear it every day. Every. Single. Day.


Exhibit C: Le Creuset
Well, this is a brand that I actually do not own anything of, due to its extremely expensive nature, but one of these days, when the economy recovers, maybe...


(1) HA HA HA. I hope everyone grasps the irony of proclaiming that all of my notebooks are Moleskine and then claiming to avoid Overpriced Hipster goods.

Zeitgeist

On behalf of the World and other Issues...

I cast my vote this fine morning for Barack Obama.

Good luck to all of us. Love you both!!

Can I call you Joe?

how endearing!!!

For the Number Hungry

One of those posts that won't get any comments, because it's not about fashion. Except, wait, no, OMG! Sofie! Today I found the exact same H&M skirt that you got on Colaba Causeway on the way back from project week, that Barbara also had, the peachy colored one, at a thrift store in my neighborhood! It was amazing!

We could also discuss Sarah Palin's outfit at the debate last night, because what I really wanted to talk about was politics.












Check out the garish American flag pin. Ew.

Anyway, the debate last night, my mom and I agreed, was HILARIOUS, especially the part where Palin was like, "OMG, you love Israel? I love Israel too!" No, seriously. The exact quote was, "I'm so encouraged to hear that you love Israel too." Kumbayah, my lord, kumbayah. Unfortunately, she didn't sound quite as dumb as I had hoped, and her blatant untruths make good sound bytes, especially for those not poised at the lap top, madly Googling every exaggeration or outright lie.

This has to be short, but I'll leave you with this chart that my dad put together. Maybe these numbers are more eloquent than any argument I could ever make:

Worries, Hockey, and Arugula

Dear Friends,

There's been some silence from my end on this blog too! I suppose no longer being unemployed in San Francisco has something to do with it. Anyway, it's school time again, but there was a wonderfully full and fun month in New York beforehand, and I'm confident that this year will be just as full and as fun, if a little bit more of the former than the latter.

Anyway, as maybe you know already, I worry a lot. Much of the time, it's unwarranted, but sometimes, it's warranted. I hate it when it's the latter case. These days, I've been worrying quite a bit.

I went to Toronto right before school started, which was lovely; before I left, I planted beets, carrots, arugula, lettuce, and chives in little milk crates in my front yard, a fall vegetable garden! (I planted them in the crates because of the possibility of lead contamination in the soil, which I have yet to send for testing.) When I got home, a mere four days later, they had already begun to come up. As I told you both, and as I wrote on my new Official School Blog (which is exciting but which will never replace Perspective Heaven), I took this as a good omen for the new school year. I think it was, because I biked all the way to school and back the next day without almost getting hit by a car even once.

But these days, Hurricane Gustav has struck quite mightily, and my poor little vegetable sprouts are drowning. I should have just taken them inside, but I didn't think of it in time. And the problem with calling something a good omen is that when it changes, you begin to think of it as a bad omen. As the rain pounded down yesterday, I watched Sarah Palin's RNC speech on Youtube. She's a good speaker; she was sarcastic, funny, and confident. I understand her appeal, to a certain demographic.

She's also a fucking psycho: believes that Creationism should be taught in public schools, is against abortion even if the mother is a victim of rape or incest or both whose life is in danger, supports off, has an environmental policy "so toxic it would make the incumbent, George Bush, blush," is gun-happy and (obviously) pro-war, and promotes converting gay people to heterosexuality through the power of prayer. Et cetera.

It's obviously a very particular demographic she appeals to; the very demographic Obama has so offended with his arugula and bitter comments (the latter of which Palin alluded to in her RNC speech, predictably). I think the question is just how important that demographic is going to be in this election, and that, I suppose, is the million dollar question. It was certainly important in the last election. A little shining hope I have, though, is that it's been very clear from the start that Obama has been mobilizing people to vote who have never voted before, people who have felt so disenfranchised by American society that they didn't consider it worth their time to show up at a polling booth. We have a very low voter turn-out rate, after all, comparable to India's at the time of Independence when something like 70% of the population was still illiterate!! So the demographics of the American voting pool are changing, with this election. I hope they change enough.

Sometimes I wonder if in my worry, I might be committing the same Obama-esque elitism and underestimating a great many people in small towns across America. I mean I'm from San Francisco, I live in New York, and I grow arugula in my own garden! I hope that I am, and come November, the majority of the country will see that this woman, whether you agree with her policies or not, is in no way fit to be one heart attack away from the most powerful position in the world. But I don't know. Unfortunately, Simon Woods agrees with me, and there are also letters like this one, which strike me as particularly ominous:

To the Editor:

Many of us who feel that Hillary Rodham Clinton was treated very poorly by the Democratic National Committee and Barack Obama’s campaign are delighted to see Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as John McCain’s choice for vice president.

And yes, we are voting for Mr. McCain, because even though we are Democrats, we do not feel represented by the Obama-Biden ticket. There are 18 million voters who just might share this thought.

Joaquin Etcheverry

West Palm Beach, Fla., Sept. 1, 2008

We'll see, I guess. I miss India a little bit (like always), so I'm going to go eat Maggi and watch Monsoon Wedding. Love you guys.

Sisters in arms

When you finally sit down to write a blog post to your dear friends, and the world, it is quite disconcerting to discover that you do not have an issue that you are truly eager to put out there. I am apologetic that I’ve been a lousy contributor to our cyber community. I have been thinking that I should write around the issue of the Olympics in Beijing, from my little Amnesty point of view. But then I thought the media covered that in such depth, that I didn’t feel like it after all. And then there are all sorts of issues that you think you could say a word or two about, but no. Well, the truth is that I am not entirely sober in this authoristic moment (world spelling does not approve of “authoristic” but I like it. What do you think?).

My parents are visiting in Tromsø this week. They both lived here in the seventies. 70’s! Tromsø is actually where my parents met each other, and then got engaged and moved to Mandal (my father’s home town. This night he proclaimed the seven reasons why he left Tromsø for Mandal). So, in the occasion of visiting me, my parents are living with their old friends from the days back then. This night, and then night before, we had dinner and wines with these old friends, and I got a deeper acquaintance with my parents youth-life. What comes forth (which I already know) is that my parents were so politically engaged. And so engaged in general! And while sitting there as the little child and bystander (who is about the same age as the one they are reminiscing about), I feel like a vital potential hardly exhausted. Is this because my youth is not taking place in the 60’s and 70’s, or is this because this generation/individual (me!) is dull? I want to be out there on the parole. But can I do better than for example engage in Amnesty international, when the political parties are more and more “catch-all” parties as the political scientist like to call them? I guess I want a discussion going back to the broad lines of how we can make a contribution to changw this ever worsening world (outside from doing our recycling, fair-trade ++ micro scale efforts)! Shall we go political comrades?

speechless.

so, after huge protests in london yesterday, the olympic torch relay has come to a finish in paris, with the torch actually being extinguished and transported though the streets on a bus rather than by foot.

i was sat in my bed yesterday, watching the bbc news from under my array of green, yellow, blue, red and white flags, following the torch on its way from a modest ceremony at some stadium to the streets to stop by gordon brown back to the streets and finally back into some other stadium. i am really torn about this. is it right for the olympics, the ultimate arena for peaceful (though rather sweaty) interaction between nations, to become the ground for political conflict? or is that just what the olympics should be; a way of highlighting relevant issues and pushing for change?

i am excited that the whole world seems to be engaged in this issue (except for inhabitants of beijing, it seems, answering with questionmark-like faces when asked by a bbc reporter yesterday about the protests in london) but also i am sad that the olympics have become an arena for world politics rather than sport.

as an avid olympics fan, who at 11 woke up in the middle of the night for two weeks in february 1998 to catch the action in nagano, i remember when the torch relay passed my house in 1994, how excited i was, and how proud we all were to organize the olympics. lucky for us our government was not torturing and depriving the lapps of their culture at the time.

thank god for the deserved publicity the tibetans struggle is getting.
i'm just upset it took the flame of the olympic torch with it.

My nerves are wracked, or, Last election post for awhile I promise

For those of you who don't obsessively check my Facebook:Just thought I'd put that out there. One last time. And we'll deal with John McCain when the time comes.

Ann Coulter: Hillary is "absolutely more conservative" than John McCain

Okay, so dramarama, brazenly conservative pundit Ann Coulter has come out and said that if it comes down to John McCain vs. Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton is the best choice for Republicans. Why? Because she's "absolutely more conservative" than he is! But what about all of that business about nationalizing health care and pulling out of Iraq? Coulter doesn't thing she actually will -- "she's running in a Democratic primary," after all, so what else would she say? Coulter reminds us of Clinton's Bush-like answer to a debate question as to what she would do if three cities were attacked: "I will find who did it, and I will go after them." (Sound familiar?) So, not only would Ann "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" Coulter vote for Hillary Clinton, she would campaign for the former first lady.

ZOMG. I think this says a lot about Mrs. Clinton and her... broad-based appeal?

Obamarama, or, Shane Comes Out in Support of a Candidate

Well guys, it's time. I'm jumping on the bandwagon. Maybe I'm not quite as high-profile as Oprah, eloquent as Toni Morrison, politically descended as Caroline Kennedy, or Democratically iconic as her uncle, but I'm joining them all in supporting Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. Maybe you would like to know why. Maybe not. Either way I'm going to tell you.

First of all, consider the alternatives. I used to like John Edwards based on what I had read about his past as well as his humility to admit that he had been wrong to support the Iraq war, but he's basically not in the race anymore and in any case, he hasn't said or done anything to particularly impress me since I've begun following the election more closely. I don't trust Hillary Clinton, not one teeny little bit I don't. In my mind, she's two-faced (or maybe more like 18-faced), dishonest, ruthless, and calculating. Of course, this is to be expected: she's a politician's politician, and besides, I hear she hasn't been a bad senator. But as David Brooks pointed out in the NYT last month, a good president has different qualities from a good senator. A good president must not only have political savvy and experience, but she/he must also have character, integrity, optimism, and a certain ability to inspire her/his people. Hillary Clinton's politics of cynicism inspire nothing but the same in me, plus more than a little bit of apathy, and I think I've got enough of those on my own.

On a more sinister note, I also think that a Clinton victory in the primary would be Christmas for the G.O.P. Compared with Obama, she has next to no support from independents, and is far more hated by Republicans. If McCain (who is the only Republican I consider to not be 100% crazy), or even Romney, wins the Republican nomination, I very well imagine many fence sitters hopping over onto the Republican side for the final election. My dad's a case study, and these fence sitters are who will, eventually, determine the next president.

Of course, Obama as a candidate is much more to me than the lesser of two evils. While I certainly do not agree with every one of his ideas and policies and do not seek to deify him (after all, he is not Correa), he seems to me to be wise, dedicated, tenacious and brave. I am impressed by what I see as his humility and integrity in this campaign; his intelligent, eyes-wide-open optimism inspires hope in me as well. Certainly, one should select a candidate based on more than personal virtue, but in many cases, the candidates' proposed ideas are very similar. Therefore, as Caroline Kennedy wrote in her now-famous NYT op-ed endorsement, "qualities of leadership, character and judgment play a larger role than usual."

Ability is also important, and although his detractors often try to paint him as inexperienced and therefore incompetent, I believe that Barack Obama is just as able as Hillary Clinton to function effectively as president, if not more so. Most likely more so, because not do I believe believe him to be more open-minded and ready to take advice (from an impressive team of advisers by the way), I also see him as being less entangled in the often corrupt political mess Washington can be (ie, he has fewer ties to lobbyists, has burned/built fewer bridges, etc.).

Now, as you know, I am, in many ways, a sentimental little bitch (1), but until Obama's speech following his Iowa win, I had never before cried or even gotten teary-eyed at a political speech. I mean come on. But when he thanked the Iowa voters, praising them for believing "in the most American of ideas -- that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it," I have to admit, my eyes got a little misty. I have never been proud of my country, my nationality. I am sure you understand. But I would like to be. I am ready to be. I am ready to support a candidate because I actually believe in him/her, not because I hate him/her less than the rest. I am ready to hope that perhaps someday we will not be a global villain, that we will be more like how we were intended to be -- a city on a hill, a global leader, or at least benign. Just to hope, because that's all I can really do, and I'm optimistic.

I remember right around when this blog got started, I wrote a post about an angel I met on the subway, who told me to follow my dreams, to hope big things; he was very inspirational and etc. But actually what really inspired me was his pragmatism: he told me that if I followed my dreams, I would most likely be disappointed, but that there was a sliver of a chance that I wouldn't be, that I would be delighted and amazed, and that that chance was worth everything. With Obama, I feel like although the odds are so terrible, there is a rather formidable sliver of chance that he'll do something amazing, necessary, and unbelievable for this country, and that chance is worth everything.








(1)Sofie remember that time when we watched A Walk to Remember and we both ended up sobbing and Cookie thought something really bad had happened?

Overgrown Frat Boys

Does this freak anyone else out? The Republican candidates for America's presidency, at a debate sponsored by a Spanish-language TV channel -- essentially their only pro-immigration audience. Anyway, just look at them! Look at the camera angle! We look up at them, their reflections on the shiny floor make their frighteningly uniform be-suited figures look even taller. They look down at us like some sort of malevolent Big Brothers' club, promising to be Tough on Crime and eradicate social evils like gay marriage. Oh dear lord help us...

Six Reasons to Love Rafael Correa

Maybe you guys know that Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, is the love of my life. Maybe you don't. Anyway, he was elected president last year while I was in Ecuador to the great celebration of the people around me and all over the country, minus the rich ones who would have preferred Alvaro Noboa, the wealthiest man in Ecuador and George Bush's wet dream of a presidential candidate. (I suppose there were also some badly deceived ones who voted for Noboa, because he did manage about 44% of the vote, but the point is, Correa won and decisively too.) One of Correa's main platforms was that he would call for a referendum to create a Constituent Assembly to rewrite Ecuador's constitution and reorganize its political system, because the current one obviously wasn't working -- 9 presidents in 10 years, political instability, etc. This referendum passed last April with about 80% support, which leads me to my first reason why we should all love Correa:

1. Everyone else does; at least everyone who matters (the Ecuadorian people).
Not only did the referendum he called and which had been central to his campaign get 80% of the vote, when the elections were held to form the Constituent Assembly, Correa's party, Alianza PAIS, won 74 of the 130 seats. If that is not enough to indicate that everybody loves him, check out his approval ratings: depending on where you look, from 76 to 90%!
2. He speaks four languages. (Our president barely speaks one.)
Right, so how? Born and raised in coastal Ecuador, obviously he speaks Spanish; after college he did a year of volunteer work in Cotopaxi, a Sierra province right near where I was, where he learned Quechua; he got a Master's in Belgium and also learned French; finally, he got a Ph.D. here in the little ol' USA, where English is king.
3. He stood Bush up and called a speech he made retarded.
Back in September, after my illustrious president made some apparently smolderingly offensive comments about Cuba, Correa didn't go to Bush's UN dinner, explaining that he bailed in protest of what Bush had said in his speech, that "[Bush] has no right to give such a base, retarded speech now in the 21st century." Thank you!
4. He's rather dashing.













(Photo stolen from borev.net, as well as, like, everything.)
5. He proposed that Ecuador build a military base in Miami.
Our desperately unfortunate military has been rather outraged that Ecuador is not going to let them renew their lease on an air base at Manta, on the coast, come 2009 when it expires. I mean, ridiculous -- who wouldn't want the US military in their country?! So Correa, in the spirit of compromise, announced in Italy in October, "We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base." Sounds fair enough to me. What do the good people of Miami say? Exactly what I would: "Absolutely YES!!!!"
6. He's way ahead of the Bali Conference.
When last April, Correa suggested that the international community help Ecuador preserve the air we all share by compensating this small, poor, relatively oil-rich country to leave the oil in the ground, we didn't hear much of it up here in Estados Unidos. (Norway, however, expressed interest, another example of how you Norwegians are more enlightened then us boorish Americans.) These days, it would seem that at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, an international carbon-trading plan called REDD is quite the hot topic. REDD is a plan, according to the New York times, that "would involve payments by wealthy countries to developing countries for every hectare of forest they do not cut down." Okay, so it's about forests, not oil, but does it sound at all familiar? Richer countries helping poorer countries save the planet by compensating them for not harvesting their natural non-resources? Too bad Correa's one of those dreadful Anti-American leftists, so he can't be in the New York Times...

About World War III, or, Assorted Memories

It's funny because when I was little, we used to learn about World War II and pantyhose rationing and patriotic women working and the like, and I thought it seemed a little bit glamorous. Of course, it frightened me too: to imagine that my father could be drafted; to imagine that my life could become like Annemarie's in Number the Stars. But war, in general, was a far off and mystical concept, a bit like Queen Victoria. It was just another story. I never would have dreamed that my country would have gone to war within my lifetime.

Then again, it's not like I've really noticed it. It's been more than four-and-a-half years now since the usually-silent television turned on to bring us news we'd been expecting with consternation, reluctance, and dread for quite awhile: that we had finally begun our attack on Iraq. The next day, San Francisco's streets screamed; I left school at lunchtime to add my voice to the choir, to tell whomever could hear that hell, no, I wouldn't go, I wouldn't fight for Texaco. Then I went home to the suburbs for supper, and my life went on. It's been four-and-a-half years and I haven't heard a single air-raid siren, thank god. No one's been drafted; I don't know anyone, closely, who's in Iraq. Much less anyone who's died there. My food has not been rationed, nor has my pantyhose (not that I wear pantyhose), no! On the contrary! We've been told to buy more, more, more: after all, the way the common man can support the war effort is to Keep America Open for Business. Is this wartime life?

I guess if I were from Baghdad and not San Francisco, I'd have a pretty different story. My contributions to this blog would probably be a little bit less along the lines of "so like omg the other day on the elliptical machine..." and a little bit more along the lines of, "We then decided it was time to go out and wait for dad. On our way downstairs we heard a loud explosion, seemed like a close bomb car. We went out and saw the smoke, everybody was saying the explosion was in region A, exactly where I'd usually wait for dad." And maybe if my life were like that I would feel a bit more like the people in this video, and maybe if I felt so invaded and subjugated and angry, I would really resent someone like me.

But that's not the point. (Coherence has never been my forte; anyway this is perspective heaven, not the IB.) The point is that we Americans, even those of us who spend all their time reading the New York Times on the internet, have no real tangible sense of being at war. It's rather unfathomable, so headlines like "Bush: 'World War III' Possible If Iran Goes Nuclear" are more than just slightly surreal. World War III. It sounds like a bad science fiction novel. Listen to my illustrious president: "I've told people that, if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." And how might we prevent that, Mr. President? If weapons of mass destruction can be found, so can "knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon". If war with Iran is deemed opportune, we'll probably find a way to word it.

In a way, I feel like the Iraq war is a bit like a mild urinary tract infection: you know it's there, but it doesn't bother you much, so you go about your business and try not to drink too much coffee in hopes that it will go away soon. The notion that it could become something as serious as a kidney infection is utterly absurd, kind of like a bad version of winning a raffle. One night, you wake up shivering, you can't sleep because you're so cold, you've got a tremendous fever, you try to drink a glass of water and throw up from the effort; the next day the doctor orders a CT scan which shows that your inflamed right kidney is wreaking havoc on your body. Sometimes I feel like I'm sixteen again (I don't mean in that I'm terribly, terribly awkward but that is true too): every now and then I get a sense that something very strange, very unfathomable, very distant, and very sinister is going to happen before too long, but for the most part, all I care about is boys, and Iraq and Iran are just names of places I read about in the news. I hope that the Iraq war will not spread to our kidneys, but I guess it will not be a surprise if it does.

Praise the social democracy

What kind of a professor is this? I think these things we talk about here have more to do with historical development and political priorities as a result of systems or paradigms or something, than human evolvment.

The debate about using taxes for social programmes is intense and will (according to Peter H. Lindert´s ”Growing Public”) continue to be so. He states that ”The future debate seems to follow naturally form the flow of history, the logic of self-interest, and the inevitable help-vesus-incentives quandary.” In the classic economies of Adam Smith and Malthus there wasn't much room for the public sector, the role of the state should be minimal not to mess with the competition of the market. But since 1850 or something like that, the public sector, especially in western Europe, has just kept expanding bit by bit, and than radically after the first and second world war. And it is still on increase. So at least in Norway the role of the state is big, and it keeps getting bigger, and the state is thus dependent on the tax payers (and the oil fund).

The case in norway is that after World War two there was a general wish to ”rebuild the country”, especially encouraged by the labour party wich was in power at the with Einar Gerhardsen as the prime minister. The governance was led by modern social dempcratic thought, with ideals such as welfarism, redistribution and social justice. The father of the social democracy, it is said, is Keynes which developed an idea of social democracy that on a general basis came to be widely accepted after the second world war. There was a desire the ´humanize´capitalism through state interevention.

2. I think then, following on what has previously been said, that the taxing is justified by this genereal celebration of the social democracy. Of course there is a debate, as Sofie says, about how much taxes people should pay and so on, but the most left wing and the most right wing opinions on the matter only vary by a few percentages. There is a general awareness the the system pays you back, and people are willing to invest in that.

3. When in comes to the incentives to work, that is one of the major criticisms from Adam Smith and such, that you have the ”free riders” which will benefit from the welfare system without contributing. But the system is quite good, and even though a few people do it, and it is hard to get economic support if you don't qualify for it.

4. The social differences in his country are in fact not big at all. Poverty, though it does exist, is not prominent. You do have an elite of people who earn lots more than others, but generally we’re just a bunch of middleclass people.

5. The government gives us free education, and yeah.. things I can’t remember right now. I am falling a sleep here. Yes, Sofie mentioned subsidizing on lots of things. And most public services are staterun (was that a pleonasm?), though not entirely free but a lot cheaper than what they would be if they were private. It is true that we send old people to Mediterranean countries for rehabilitation!

6. Yes, I also heard that the northern regions have relatively high suicide rates (not the whole country perhaps, but the region). And I suppose it has to do with the darkness, but probably many other factors as well. On Saturday, when we had a big party, I talked to one guy who lives in my flat, and he was doing research on ‘traumatic deaths’, which are deaths cased by an external factor, in the northernmost province in Norway. Suicide was a big issue but it can be due to the fact that the region has different social problems. There are very few people living there (to tempt people to live there you get to pay less tax if you live in the northern regions, and you get higher vages!!), and a lot of discontent since opportunities in terms of work are few. Okay, I am babbleing on with little grounds for what I am saying, so I think I should say good night. This was a horrible post.

I don’t have one of those lamps by the way. It is not very dark here yet. I think I should get a lamp when it starts being dark 24/7. But they are expensive!!

One more question...

I'm very curious about Scandinavia (Norway, at least) today!

7. So I seem to remember someone implying that you all have composting toilets. This, I know, is not true, although in ten days in Norway I probably peed in as many composting toilets as I have in this country. How prevalent are composting toilets exactly? And what is the story with recycling and compost? In San Francisco, the city comes and picks up our organic waste for us. In New York, recycling is considered revolutionary and if you say compost no one knows what you're talking about. So what is it like in Norway? What about environmental awareness/environmentally friendly lifestyles in general? (Once I told Ola I would drive him wherever he wanted. He said, "Well, I'm not American. I'd rather take the bus." Hehe.)

Answers About Scandinavia (Norway, at Least)

Dear Shane.

I am sitting here with my fellow norwegian and flatmate helene. i read your post out loud for her, and her immediate reponse was; "i don't get the people who don't understand why they have to pay taxes! norwegians i mean!" and i do share her opinion. but, then again i probably wouldn't understand if i wasn't from norway, this country where taxes are just a part of what you have to deal with, and so you do it. i mean, what can we do about taxes? yeah i guess it sucks to pay them, but then again they are the reason why our country was ranked as the no. 1 place to live by the UN (a couple of years ago, i think).

Answers:

1. it might be right that people pay up to 56 % tax, though i'm not entirely sure. you pay taxes based on your income and "general wealth", ie. your shares and money in the bank. (not the ones under your pillow). it works like this; you start paying taxes when you start earning more than about $5000 a year. from then on you pay 10%, but if you start earning a lot more, your taxes get calculated in accordance with this table that shows what income gives what tax level. oh and you don't start paying taxes until a year after you've earned over $5000, because the tax level is based on your income from the year before.

2. as i said, i think the level of taxation doesn't really need justification anymore, because it is such a well run institution, inherent to the norwegian society. so people just have to deal with it. but then again, i am writing this from the point of view of a socialist, and there are plenty of epople in norway who vote for the blue parties, just because part of their agendas are to lower the taxes. and, we all see that taxation works, and everyone does benefit from it, whether they are aware of it or not.

3. well, this sounds slightly shallow, but why did i work? because if i hadn't worked i wouldn't have gotten any money at all. yeah, it sucked to work double the hours of last year, only to receive the same amount of money, but then again, this is just a fact of life that i have to deal with. plus i like working in the fish market.

4. there are rich norwegians and normal norwegians and poor norwegians. there are beggars on the streets. but i guess the standard norwegian would be rich in almost any other country in the world, just because the wages are higher, be it taxated or not. i don't know. but i think that there are so many opportunities in norway. education is free, even university, so maybe that's why most norwegians are normal, not poor. because most of them are well educated.

5. baards civil service was not something he got from the government, it was something he did for the government. what do we get? well, free healthcare, free dentist, (though both of these are only for under 18's) our farmers are subsidised so we don't have to pay $3 for milk, because farming is a dying activity, the government pays them to keep going, and hmm what else do we get. clean(ish) streets, fairly well run communal transport. many things. but there is so much room for improvement.

6. i've never had a sun lamp, but according to my flatmate helene, who's brother lives in tromso' "everyone" sits in front of this sunlight provider about 30 minutes every morning. hmmm... they get the northern ligh sometimes though, maybe that's special enough to keep them going for ages. and, according to wikipedia, the country with the highes suicide rate is lithuania, norway being ranked 44.

ps. i don;t think we are more highly evolved.

pps. even though this post seems to be portraying norway as some kind of heaven, i moved out of the country of a reason.
BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE.

dear shane, i hope you can raise your hand the next time your lecturer speaks about scandinavian greatness.

much love.

oh by the way, i just went to an open mic and i sag john wayne gacy junior (sufjan) with my mate louis. helene said it sounded nice.

Questions about Scandinavia

It seems that everywhere I go these days, someone comments on Scandinavia, and what an amazingly enlightened, developed place it is. The other night someone spoke of Scandinavian environmental habits with almost religious reverence; my social work professor the other day went so far as to imply that Scandinavians are more highly evolved as human beings than Americans(1). Progressive intellectual America has a Scandi-complex; we all want to be like you!

So, I thought I would take advantage of this blog to ask some questions; non-Scandinavian readers, please feel free to chime in with any questions of your own (comments are now available to EVERYONE). And my dear Norwegian cohorts, won't you please enlighten us?

1. First of all, will you please clarify a little bit about the tax law? Up to 56%, said my social work professor (the class bristled). At what point do you have to start paying taxes? I know this was a relevant issue to your summer, Sofie. What are the tax brackets like; ie, who has to pay how much?

2. How does the government justify taxing so much? How do people accept it? Is there a clear general awareness of where exactly the taxes go? Is there a major sense of collective responsibility in Norway? Is it because you are more highly evolved?

3. What, then, is the incentive to work? For example, Sofie, why did you even work the extra hours at Fiskebrygga this summer if you knew that you'd have to work more than double the amount of time for only a little bit more money than you got last summer?

4. It can't be that Scandinavia is without social stratification. There are rich Norwegians and poor Norwegians, right? Or are there just rich Norwegians and richer Norwegians? What is the difference between a rich Norwegian and a poor Norwegian?

5. What exactly do you get from your government? Baard's civil service deal sounded pretty sweet. But Else, are you getting a free education? Sofie, are they giving you money for Glasgow? What about healthcare? Also, is it true that the Norwegian government sends old people on vacation to the Mediterranean in the winter months so that they won't get sick?

6. Finally, Else, I have heard that the Scandinavian countries have the highest suicide rate due to lack of sunlight in the northern regions. Do you have one of those sun lamps up there in Tromso? I certainly hope so.

So, stay tuned for answers to these questions, & feel free to comment with your own!




(1) Or at least that's what I understood. Then I text messaged Ola to ask if it was true, and he replied that it definitely was. Asshole.