Sweden’s prime minister on Thursday said that he’s summoned the head of the military to discuss how the armed forces can help police deal with an unprecedented crime wave that has shocked the country with almost daily shootings and bombings.
Getting the military involved in crime-fighting would be a highly unusual step for Sweden, underscoring the severity of the gang violence that has claimed a dozen lives across the country this month, including teenagers and innocent bystanders.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that he would meet with the armed forces’ supreme commander and the national police commissioner on Friday to explore “how the armed forces can help police in their work against the criminal gangs.”
Not really a decent picture anymore. Some handpicked examples: Schools are now the most privatized in the world, in a charter-system where public money gets poured into private companies – one of which the heads of have been giving money to an anti-semitic far-right news paper. This has gentrified schools and ruined the public ones, and inflated the grades. The current government consists of/is supported by a party (~20% of votes) that was formed by literal nazis, not neo-nazis, but literal SS volunteering nazis, the current head of the party joined them just after the peak of the neo-nazi era, in which they, among other things celebrated a racist serial killer. Him and the closest circle of party elites, to this day, party with well a recognized neo-nazi band, calls any association to LGBTQ and pride “pedophilia”, and believes in the same conspiracy that the mass-murderer Breivik did: that there is a conspiracy of “multiculturalists” that have the explicit goal to exterminate the swedish nation and people. Their politics and hate gets next to zero push back from the other governing parties, and a lot of their policies are now being made law or are being prepared to become laws.
All of this is correct. I’d just like to add that, additionally, over the last couple of decades we have also systematically and agressively cut most taxes that mostly hit the very wealthy. Yes, (for now) we still have a somewhat functional wellfare system, but the wealth inequality is crazy high, which causes a lot of social stress and conflict.
For some quick examples:
- We have a uniquely regressive tax on real estate. There is a value cap over which no more tax is added, and that cap is CRAZY low, meaning someone with a mansion is not taxed significantly more than someone with a small house.
- We have insanely low taxes on capital gains, which are a bit complicated to explain but essentially means that on a good year you might pay the equivalent of low single digit percent tax on the value increase.
All of this while the tax on actual work is very high, making it harder for those not already born with capital to aquire it.
