This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

At least five Palestinians were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces in the Aqbat Jabr refugee camp near Jericho overnight into Monday following a week of increased Israeli raids and roadblocks on the city.

According to a joint statement by the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Ben Security service, Israeli forces conducted an operation in the camp to arrest a militant cell which had attempted to carry out a shooting attack last Saturday at a restaurant frequented by Israeli settlers just south of the city.

According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the killing of the five Palestinians in Jericho proves that “the new Israeli government continues the series of crimes against the Palestinian people, and challenges any attempts, including those made by the international community, to curb Israeli aggression.”

“Israel’s crimes are only encouraged by the silence of the international community,” Abbas added.

Compared to West Bank cities such as Jenin and Nablus, centers of Palestinian militancy where Israeli raids are the norm, raids in Jericho are much less common. On Monday morning, several Palestinian militant factions warned that Israel “will pay the price,” calling on Palestinian “heroes and revolutionaries” in the West Bank, Jerusalem and within the Green Line to rise up.

A Palestinian gunman opened fire at a restaurant on Saturday during business hours, and managed to escape with a driver. The army arrested several others on suspicion of involvement and launched a days-long effort to find those behind the weekend attack.

Immediately following the shooting on Saturday, six Palestinians were wounded in a gunfire exchange between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in the refugee camp in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

In the last week, the Israeli army had also placed limits on the exits of Palestinians from Jericho in a bid to find the gunman behind the attack, which residents report has made it difficult to leave the city.

The post At least Five Palestinian militants killed in exchange of fire with Israeli forces near Jericho appeared first on The Forward.

courtesy of Dunlap

• Tori Dunlap started her financial-advice blog with $40 and grew it to $4 million in revenue last year.
• Today she teaches customers how to invest, save money, and build startups of their own.
• She shares the most important investments for any business owner and what founders should avoid. 

Tori Dunlap started her business as side hustle in 2016 with just $40. Last year, her business booked $4 million in revenue.

Dunlap has scaled the multimedia platform Her First $100K to also include a podcast, book, and more than 2 million social-media followers. Through her financial-advice platform, Dunlap shares her guidance for investing, saving money, and building a business. 

In a conversation with Insider, Dunlap shared the most important business investments she’s made and what founders should avoid. This is an as-told-to story based on an interview with Dunlap. It has been edited for length and clarity. 

Run a lean team, until you don’t have to

I started the business with very little money, just $20 for the website and $20 for the domain. That low startup cost was crucial for the business, especially because it was a side hustle at first.

Sometimes new founders try to take on too many expenses at once, which can drain your finances. Whether it’s purchasing brand-new equipment to launch or investing in too many ads before the business concept is proven, founders should keep it as lean as possible until their business is earning money. 

Most of my investments were in the form of time and energy for the first few years.

People are the most important investment

While I started the business on my own, outsourcing tasks and bringing people onto the team was the best investment I ever made. In fact, the moment I could outsource, I did: I hired my first freelancer when the blog was still a side hustle. 

They only worked around five hours a week and I couldn’t pay them much because the business wasn’t making a ton of money. But if I wanted it to grow beyond a side gig, I knew I needed the help.

The first tasks I outsourced were email marketing, graphic design, Instagram posting, and calendar management. I realized that anything I didn’t have to physically be there for could be outsourced to save time and energy. 

I get a lot of messages from other entrepreneurs asking how I was able to trust others to help me build my business. There are great people out there with many different skills and strengths, so I relinquished control because I realized I couldn’t do everything alone.

If you can afford to hire somebody and you don’t, you’re actively holding your business back. 

Investing in trends can be a waste of money

Dunlap invested in her podcast after her audience showed interest.

courtesy of Dunlap

Founders should remember their core business goals when making any financial decisions or investments. Decide your own priorities and determine your finances that way. 

I often see founders taking on too many expensive new ventures. For instance, it’s very tempting to go all in on creative projects, like a podcast or a YouTube show. But make sure that whatever you’re investing in will actually help you achieve those core goals.

It can be a waste of money if you’re paying for something just because other business owners do.

So many people want to be entrepreneurs because they look up to other founders online. Social media can make it seem like you need to buy the latest equipment, tools, or products or invest in new branding or expensive marketing tactics. But founders should take a look at their books and determine if any money is being spent just to keep up with a trend or someone else’s business model.

Instead, think about the long-term effects of how that new venture or product will make you money in return.

Rob Kim/Getty Images

• The Fed could pull off a soft landing but the US economy “isn’t out of the woods”, Larry Summers said.
• Investors are debating the possibility of a “soft landing” after a series of aggressive Fed rate hikes.
• Inflation is still too high and a strong January jobs report could make it difficult to ease monetary policy, the Nobel Prize-winning economist said.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says he’s encouraged about the prospect of the Federal Reserve pulling off a soft landing but warned the US economy is still not “out of the woods.”

In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Summers said “it looks more possible that we’ll have a soft landing than it did a few months ago,” while adding that he has a continued fear of inflation. “I’m encouraged but it’s a big mistake to think we’re out of the woods,” he added. 

“We had a set of inflation indicators during 2022 that were very strong and have now come back to earth but are still too high and getting the rest of way back to target inflation may still prove quite difficult,” Summers said. 

Inflation has been moderating since mid-2022, with December’s reading coming in at 6.5%, the lowest level in over a year. That’s boosted investor hopes that the Fed will temper what has been an aggressive monetary tightening campaign, raising the odds of a soft landing – cooling inflation without triggering a recession. 

The central bank has boosted benchmark rates by 450 basis points since last March to ease consumer price pressures. However, it has already slowed the pace of its rate increases – with the latest move delivering a 25-basis-point hike, the smallest since last March. 

But for Summers, it’s not all happy news for the US economy. His comments follow a strong jobs report that saw the US add  517,000 jobs last month, more than double the 188,000 expected by analysts. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to 3.4% – the lowest level in 54 years. 

Such a robust labor market could stand in the way of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s efforts to lower inflation down to his 2% target, as a tight jobs market often leads to higher wage gains. 

Summers previously warned that a US recession was more likely than not because job losses were necessary to quell inflation. The former president of Harvard University recently warned the US economy could see a “sudden stop” later this year, despite January’s strong jobs report.

Last week, the United States and the Philippines reached an agreement to expand U.S. military operations in the Philippines to deter China’s increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. The news was sandwiched between Air Force General Mike Minihan predicting that U.S. confrontation with China may happen as early as 2025 and Secretary Antony Blinken postponing his trip to China after a Chinese surveillance balloon was detected flying over the United States. 

Lawfare legal fellow Saraphin Dhanani sat down with Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, to discuss the likelihood of military confrontation between the United States and China over Taiwan, and whether the United States has exhausted all of its deterrent capabilities to stall China from invading Taiwan.

Many on the Israeli left like to quote a statement by Ahmed Tibi, a longstanding Israeli lawmaker who is also among the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian: “The State of Israel is Jewish and democratic: democratic for Jews, and Jewish for Arabs.” I have often quoted it myself, never quite comfortably, because it’s not accurate. A Jewish state is not truly democratic: neither for Arabs nor for Jews. Democracy depends on the rule of law, and the rule of law depends on complete civil equality, as well as on subjecting everyone—including the sovereign government—to the same law. In democracies, where The People—not a king—is the sovereign, the rule of law thus depends on the principle that the state equally belongs to all its citizens: The People are the sovereign, and defined as the set of all citizens. In Israel, where ‘The People’ designates Jews rather than citizens as such, this principle is not just violated; there’s consensus, at least among Jewish citizens, that it is illegitimate.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Today many of those Jewish citizens are fighting to defend the courts, the rule of law and the separation of powers from assault by a new Israeli government. The battle makes headlines the world over as a fight to save democracy. But we tend to forget that Jewish Israelis have always opposed the rule of law in its genuine significance. The law in Israel never truly ruled over the People’s will. In the state of the Jewish People, the people rule, and use the law to ensure their will—to uphold Jewish sovereignty rather than the sovereignty of the country’s citizens and inhabitants.

Here lies the heart of the issue. When the sovereign can use the law as a tool, the rule of law becomes an empty shell, and the human and civil rights of everyone—Palestinians, Jews, minority, or majority—are in danger. So it is that the newly elected government actually seems to express the people’s will: they want to deepen their rule as more and more Jewish and less democratic, over a population that is partly Jewish and partly Palestinian. (The Palestinian part is about half, if you count, as we should, those in the West Bank, who are controlled by Jerusalem.) The laws and the principles that were originally intended to ensure Jewish-above-citizen’s sovereignty now allow the government to pursue this anti-democratic trend, such that, at this point, “even” the rights of Jews stand to be jeopardized. It has never been clearer that the human and civil rights of Jews and Palestinians are necessarily interdependent. A democratic alternative to the current coalition will only emerge if we form a Jewish-Palestinian solidarity that will be based on this insight, and promote full civil partnership in the state of all its citizens.

Read More: Israel’s New Government Sparks Fear

The deepest threat to this kind of partnership is not the current coalition’s “reform plan,” which in fact aims to release the government from the authority of the courts. It is Section 7a of “Basic Law: Knesset,” which prohibits the participation in elections of candidates who deny the “existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” On first look, the spirit behind this law is the principle of “militant democracy,” formulated in the aftermath of the Weimar Republic, stating that democracy’s enemies must be prevented from using elections to abolish the sovereignty of the citizens—as is well known, the Nazis came to power democratically. Israel at first seems to have adopted the same principle and only extended it to protect not just democracy but the state’s Jewish identity as well. On closer examination, however, the country has actually implemented the exact opposite lesson from the one that democracies learnt from Weimar: the Israeli version of the law is not intended to protect the sovereignty of citizens from the will of the people, but the will of the people from the sovereignty of the citizens. And as if we have not learnt anything from history, we are now surprised when the golem that is called “the will of the people” rises not only against the Palestinians, but also against its creator.

Facing this situation, Justice Esther Hayut, the President of Israel’s Supreme Court, went out of her way to courageously defend the courts. In an unprecedented speech, she warned that if this government’s “reforms” will be implemented, “the country’s democratic identity will be fatally damaged… anyone who claims that the majority chose its representatives and wrote them an ‘blank check’—bears the name of democracy in vain.” No doubt, Hayut speaks out of sincere anxiety for the future of our country, but she should be advised to examine herself, too, when speaking in the name of democracy. Just a few weeks ago, as Supreme Court President she used clause 7a to criticize the participation of a Palestinian-Israeli party ‘Balad’, in Israel’s elections. Whereas Hayut eventually did allow the party to run, she said—in fact, threatened—that the party’s participation in future elections is anything but ensured, since it has dared promoting a bill supporting Israel as a ‘state of all its citizens’. According to the Supreme Court, a party’s willingness to uphold a fundamental principle of the rule of law—not the opposition to this principle—constitutes “gravely serious evidence” against it, and may lead to its disqualification.

It is not surprising that a court that used the law to prevent the sovereignty of all citizens as such permitted, in the same breath, the running of ‘Jewish Power,’ a party that is safely labeled as fascist: it calls on its platform for a “total war” against the “enemies of Israel”—meaning the inhabitants and citizens of the country who do not belong to the Jewish People. In this Weimarean farce, the court has been cast as the tragic hero. After joining hands with the Knesset and using a principle such as 7a; after being willing to use the courts to defend the will of the people from the fact that a democracy must belong to all citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity, they woke up one day and discovered that the people has chosen to crush the courts entirely, as part of their war against their “enemies.”

And the opposition? When its leaders still headed the country, they took pride in the fact that they knew how to put political differences aside in order to uphold the rule of law. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained the rationale in a now-familiar New York Times article, calling it “A Good Will Government”—one that agreed to put the controversial Palestinian issue aside in order to defend Israeli democracy from the prospect of Netanyahu’s return. But it should have been clear from the start that the idea that Israeli democracy can be defended by simply ignoring the main offense against it—the fact that it relegates Palestinian citizens to second-class citizenship and holds three million Palestinians under occupation devoid of citizen and human rights—was not a government of good will but of bad faith. The credibility of their claim to defend the rule of law has to be evaluated by the law the blew the coalition apart.

For decades, Israel has applied its civil law, tax system, social security and universal health insurance to Jews (and Jews only) living in the West Bank, not through official annexation but through “emergency regulations” that automatically expire and require periodical renewal. It’s a legal trick, really, designed to de facto annex the West Bank without offering the Palestinians citizenship while resisting the official labeling of apartheid. When Israeli-Palestinian members of this coalition refused to provide the necessary votes to renew these regulations, the coalition chose to dissolve itself in order to ensure their continuity: once the government became interim only, all regulations were automatically kept rather than dissolved—until the election of the new government, which would have no difficulty renewing them.

In other words, the sovereignty of the Jewish People is the supreme principle. When the “good will” coalition had to choose between civil partnership with Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers who support a democratic rule of law and committing political suicide to ensure its absence, they chose, to no one’s surprise, the second option. Like the Supreme Court Justices, they forgot that citizen’s sovereignty and full equality are not a danger to democracy but in fact its fundamental principle. In its absence, the rights of none of us will be protected.

In order to oppose the coup instigated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, we will have to think and act exactly the opposite of the opposition leaders. The massive protests in Israel are welcome and important, but they will only bear fruit if they will lead to serious soul-searching: to a brave recognition that what has been cannot continue, that our fundamental political assumptions must change; that the constitutional crisis threatening the country does not contradict its Jewish and democratic identity but arises from it. The protests will only be successful if they give birth to a new party or movement, which will allow, at least to parts of the Israeli public, to choose the path of civil partnership between Jews and Palestinians, and fight to create a rule of law in a state that belongs to its citizens, not to protect the political system that leads to its destruction.

AZMARIN, Syria (AP) — A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked southeastern Turkey and northern Syria early Monday, toppling hundreds of buildings and killing more than 1,300 people. Hundreds were still believed to be trapped under rubble, and the toll was expected to rise as rescue workers searched mounds of wreckage in cities and towns across the area.

On both sides of the border, residents jolted out of sleep by the pre-dawn quake rushed outside on a cold, rainy and snowy winter night, as buildings were flattened and strong aftershocks continued.

Rescue workers and residents in multiple cities searched for survivors, working through tangles of metal and giant piles of concrete. A hospital in Turkey collapsed and patients, including newborns, were evacuated from a handful of facilities in Syria.

In the Turkish city of Adana, one resident said three buildings near his home collapsed. “I don’t have the strength anymore,” one survivor could be heard calling out from beneath the rubble as rescue workers tried to reach him, said the resident, journalism student Muhammet Fatih Yavus.

Farther east in Diyarbakir, cranes and rescue teams rushed people on stretchers out of a mountain of pancaked concrete floors that was once an apartment building.

The quake, felt as far away as Cairo, was centered north of Gaziantep, a Turkish provincial capital.

It struck a region that has been shaped on both sides of the border by more than a decade of civil war in Syria. On the Syrian side, the swath affected is divided between government-held territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces. Turkey, meanwhile, is home to millions of refugees from that conflict.

The opposition-held regions in Syria are packed with some 4 million people displaced from other parts of the country by the fighting. Many of them live in buildings that are already wrecked from past bombardments. Hundreds of families remained trapped in rubble, the opposition emergency organization, called the White Helmets, said in a statement.

Strained health facilities and hospitals were quickly filled with wounded, rescue workers said. Others had to be emptied, including a maternity hospital, according to the SAMS medical organization.

“We fear that the deaths are in the hundreds,” Muheeb Qaddour, a doctor, said by phone from the town of Atmeh.

Turkey sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes. Some 18,000 were killed in powerful earthquakes that hit northwest Turkey in 1999. The U.S. Geological Survey measured Monday’s quake at 7.8. At least 20 aftershocks followed, some hours later during daylight, the strongest measuring 6.6, Turkish authorities said.

Buildings were reported collapsed in a wide area extending from Syria’s cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 kilometers (200 miles) to the northeast. Nearly 900 buildings were destroyed in Turkey’s Gaziantep and Kahramanmaras provinces, said Vice President Fuat Oktay. A hospital collapsed in the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskanderoun, but casualties were not immediately known, he said.

“Unfortunately, at the same time, we are also struggling with extremely severe weather conditions,” Oktay told reporters. Nearly 2,800 search and rescue teams have been deployed in the disaster-stricken areas, he said.

“We hope that we will get through this disaster together as soon as possible and with the least damage,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote on Twitter.

Countries from Taiwan to Russia to Germany offered to send help, whether medical supplies, search teams or money.

In Turkey, people trying to leave the quake-stricken regions caused traffic jams, hampering efforts of emergency teams trying to reach the affected areas. Authorities urged residents not to take to the roads. Mosques around the region were being opened up as a shelter for people unable to return to damaged homes amid temperatures that hovered around freezing.

The quake heavily damaged Gaziantep’s most famed landmark, its historic castle perched atop a hill in the center of the city. Parts of the fortresses’ walls and watch towers were leveled and other parts heavily damaged, images from the city showed.

In Diyarbakir, hundreds of rescue workers and civilians formed lines across a mountain of wreckage, passing down broken concrete pieces, household belongings and other debris as they searched for trapped survivors while excavators dug through the rubble below.

In northwest Syria, the quake added new woes to the opposition-held enclave centered on the province of Idlib, which has been under siege for years, with frequent Russian and government airstrikes. The territory depends on a flow of aid from nearby Turkey for everything from food to medical supplies.

The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense described the situation there as “disastrous,” adding that entire buildings have collapsed and people are trapped under the rubble.

In the small Syrian rebel-held town of Azmarin in the mountains by the Turkish border, the bodies of several dead children, wrapped in blankets, were brought to a hospital.

The USGS said the quake was centered about 33 kilometers (20 miles) from Gaziantep. It was 18 kilometers (11 miles) deep.

At least 912 people were killed in 10 Turkish provinces, with more than 5,400 injured, according to Turkey’s president. The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 326 people, with some 1,000 injured, according to the Health Ministry. In rebel-held areas, at least 150 people were killed, according to the White Helmets, though the SAMS medical organization put the toll at 106; both said hundreds were hurt.

In Damascus, buildings shook and many people went down to the streets in fear. The quake jolted residents in Lebanon from beds, shaking buildings for about 40 seconds. Many residents of Beirut left their homes and took to the streets or drove in their cars away from buildings, terrorized by memories of the 2020 port explosion that wrecked a large portion of the city.

Huseyin Yayman, a legislator from Turkey’s Hatay province, said several of his family members were trapped under the rubble of their collapsed homes.

“There are so many other people who are also trapped,” he told HaberTurk television by telephone. “There are so many buildings that have been damaged. People are on the streets. It’s raining, it’s winter.”

___

Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images

• Investors shouldn’t worry about the dollar losing its dominance anytime soon, according to Paul Krugman.
• That’s despite recent currency challenges from countries like China, Russia, and Brazil.
• “The dollar’s dominance isn’t under threat. And even if it were, it wouldn’t be a big deal,” the top economist said Friday.

Investors shouldn’t lose sleep over the recent focus on potential threats to the dollar’s dominance, according to top economist Paul Krugman.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist said Friday that he’s not expecting to see the greenback unseated as the major currency for international trade anytime soon – despite countries like Russia, China, and Brazil all cooking up potential challenges to it.

“No, the dollar’s dominance isn’t under threat,” Krugman wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “And even if it were, it wouldn’t be a big deal.”

The US has applied wide-ranging financial sanctions against Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine last year – prompting Russia and several other countries to work on dollar alternatives to reduce their reliance on the currency.

China is pushing for the yuan to replace the dollar in oil deals, while Russia and Iran are reportedly working together to develop a gold-backed stablecoin that could be used in international trade.

Brazil and Argentina could also team up to launch a joint currency that would serve as a South American equivalent to the euro, although Krugman has previously slammed the so-called “sur”.

“The idea seems to be that some regimes will turn away from the dollar to protect themselves against sanctions in the event they do something America disapproves of,” he said Friday.

“And so we have reports that China is trying to promote oil trade in yuan and Russia and Iran are considering creating a gold-backed cryptocurrency,” Krugman added. “And for some reason Brazil and Argentina are talking about creating a common currency along the lines of the euro, which is a really terrible idea.”

Krugman also noted that some of the chatter about the dollar’s potential decline had come from the rise of crypto.

Digital asset bulls have often proposed bitcoin as a future alternative to the greenback, although the token lost a lot of its shine last year when a combination of rising interest rates and the implosion of high-profile companies like FTX led to its price plunging over 60%.

“Where is the death-of-the-dollar buzz coming from all of a sudden? Some of it is coming from the crypto cult,” Krugman said. “Although cryptocurrencies have been around for many years and still haven’t come to play any significant role in legitimate business — not to mention the astonishing scale of the scandals that have plagued the industry — they’re still being hyped.”

But Krugman isn’t worried about any of those potential challenges to the dollar’s dominance.

He pointed out that when central banks have diversified their holdings away from the dollar in recent years, they’ve tended to favor small currencies like the Swedish krona and South Korean won over potential threats like the euro, Japanese yen, or bitcoin.

Krugman added that the main benefit the US enjoys from the dollar’s dominance is slightly discounted borrowing – which he called “ultimately trivial for what is, after all, a $26 trillion economy.”

“It’s hardly earth-shattering,” Krugman said. “Dollar dominance sounds important if you haven’t thought about it much, but much less so if you have. In fact, in general, the more you know about international currencies, the less important you think they are.”

Read more: King dollar’s worst slump in over a decade is hammering one of 2022’s biggest winners – but the greenback’s dominant run might not be over just yet

Arif Qazi/Insider

Now laid-off employees are paying the price

In an attempt to explain why the company had laid off 12,000 employees, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said executives decided to slash jobs after a “rigorous review” of Google’s internal structures and organization. Pichai suggested that the company “hired for a different economic reality” than the one it faced and that the layoffs were necessary to set Google up for the future.

But while Pichai, who made $280 million in compensation in 2019, said he took “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” he failed to elucidate those choices. He didn’t mention that during his time at the helm Google has been hit with billions of dollars’ worth of antitrust fines, been left in the dust by OpenAI’s ChatGPT despite “pivoting the company to be AI-first,” and seen its core search product get steadily worse. And though Pichai later said at a company town hall that “all roles above the senior-vice-president level will witness a very significant reduction in their annual bonus,” including his own, the vast majority of the pain from his missteps seemed to fall squarely on the shoulders of the 12,000 people who were let go. The employees who were laid off — via email — included several high-performing staff members and longtime employees, such as an engineer who’d been at the company for 20 years and who described the sudden layoff as a “slap in the face.”

This sort of responsibility dodging is running rampant around Silicon Valley. CEOs at companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Meta set their companies on an unsustainable course, investing in boneheaded new ventures and assuming the pandemic-driven tech boom would be a new normal. Now that those expectations have been shattered, rank-and-file tech workers are bearing the brunt of these bad decisions, while the executives most responsible for the messes face little to no meaningful consequences.

Any executive who participates in decision-making that leads to hundreds or thousands of people losing their jobs should be the one leading them out the door. Pichai and other tech CEOs shouldn’t be making $280 million a year or even $1 million a year — they should be fired for poorly managing some of the largest companies in the world.

CEOs made mistakes, workers bear the brunt

In their layoff announcements, pretty much every tech company placed the blame for the cuts on the economy. At Amazon, the cuts were supposedly necessary because of “supply chain difficulties, inflation, and productivity overhang” and economic uncertainty. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff cited the “economic downturn we’re now facing” as the reason for the company’s 10% headcount reduction, and Workday laid off 3% of its workforce based on a “global economic environment that is challenging for companies of all sizes.” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman pinned the blame for his company’s decision to lay off 2,000 employees on the “challenging macro-economic environment.”

But in many instances, the real source of concern at these companies comes down to boneheaded decisions made by CEOs — whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg at the company formerly known as Facebook, who authorized a hiring binge over the pandemic and invested billions of dollars into his metaverse folly before having to cut 11,000 jobs, or Tobi Lütke at Shopify, who laid off 1,000 people based on a bet on the future of e-commerce that “didn’t pay off.”

While many of these companies have made serious strategic blunders, layoffs won’t solve those problems — cutting workers won’t suddenly make the companies more productive or improve their products. And many of these tech behemoths are still eye-watering ly profitable, making the economic case for layoffs questionable. Microsoft’s profits declined by 12% in the last quarter of 2022 from the same quarter in 2021, but it still pulled in a whopping $16.4 billion. Amazon pulled down a profit of $2.8 billion in the most recent quarter, below the online-shopping highs of the pandemic but in line with its historical average. But the company still turned around and laid off 18,000 employees. 

It seems that when profits or even projected future profits slipped a bit, something had to give — and it certainly wasn’t going to fall on the CEOs. When one company chose to lay off thousands of people, it became optically justifiable for other companies to follow suit — a natural way for the CEO to seem “disciplined” or “responsible” despite the brutal cost to employees. 

While they may protect the CEO’s reputation or placate investors, layoffs are immensely damaging for workers, even well-paid tech employees. People who are laid off face long-term career damage and harm to their mental and physical health. Not to mention that layoffs are of dubious value to the company; studies have found that layoffs are a net negative for productivity, that they suppress innovation, and that they can lead to a long-term decline in profits. Studies have also suggested that layoffs make life harder for the employees who weren’t let go, especially since many of these companies cut back on benefits and other services that could help remaining workers. Given the human and business downsides of layoffs, a CEO’s top priority should be to avoid them at all costs.

Some companies have managed to do just that. Apple has managed to cut costs without layoffs in part by reducing Tim Cook’s salary by 40%, to $49 million. While one can’t necessarily applaud a company for paying a CEO “just” $50 million, there’s something to be said for the chief executive willing to slash their own pay before resorting to letting employees go. Similarly, the chipmaker Intel’s CEO took a 25% pay cut and reduced the salaries of his executive team by 15% to avoid broad layoffs. 

For the companies that turned to job cuts, the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of their CEOs. As the sole person in charge, they’re responsible for misjudging the macroeconomy, making terrible investments, and then following along with the industry in a shortsighted attempt to please Wall Street. And yet, despite a smattering of pay reductions, none of them have faced real consequences. By focusing on “broader economic uncertainty” rather than admitting the cutbacks are because of executive mismanagement, CEOs can save their reputation while sidestepping the blame.

With great power comes no responsibility

The blame-shifting of these tech companies and their CEOs is not unprecedented, or even that uncommon. Corporate America has pledged fealty to the almighty executive, applying a totally different evaluation matrix to CEOs than to other employees. Because of this noxious adulation for the most powerful person in the company, companies will contort themselves to try to save money in any way other than cutting the pay of or firing their most responsible and most expensive employee: the chief executive officer. CEO pay skyrocketed by 1,460% from 1978 to 2021, and the ratio of average-worker pay to CEO pay ballooned from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 399-to-1 in 2021. And it’s not as if this staggering rise in pay has made CEOs any better at their jobs. Top executives abandon companies when they anticipate a recession and always treat workers as disposable, even during a hot economy. Analyses have argued that these staggering pay packages are far from justified. 

When high-ranking executives make a serious blunder, they almost always get the benefit of the doubt. The modern executive lacks any actual responsibility or oversight, only occasionally reporting to typically pliant boards. They’re largely insulated from the consequences of their actions, even if they’re performing poorly. If any other kind of worker made a series of decisions that led to a double-digit drop in profitability, they’d be threatened with termination or terminated. Instead, tech CEOs have passed the pain off to people who in many cases were performing well in their roles. And while many employees in tech and elsewhere have received generous severance packages, they pale in comparison to the payouts that failed executives have gotten on their way out the door. Take, for example, the car-rental company Hertz, which let go of 10,000 people in 2020 as it stumbled into bankruptcy, all while paying its executives $16 million in bonuses.

If CEOs are expected — and paid — to be some visionary demigod at the top of an organization, they should be expected to bear that weight and pay a commiserate price when they mess up. At some point, the chief executive has to be held as accountable as the people they employ. There is no reason that the best-treated and highest-paid member of an organization should experience less scrutiny, unless the company does not truly care about operating efficiently.

If companies are wary of firing top executives, then fine, refashion the job of the modern CEO. Instead of trying to be swashbuckling saviors with gobsmacking salaries allowed to operate the company with relative impunity, these top executives should focus on actual management and execution to sustainably grow their companies. Instead of focusing on short-term investor relations and public accolades, CEOs should put in the time to manage their companies and help improve the products they create.

The fundamental problem with corporate America is that it no longer makes any sense. The CEO, the most powerful and influential person at the company, is now a figurehead who receives all the benefits of a company’s success without being endangered by any of its failures.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture newsletter Where’s Your Ed At.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

• Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee moved to Hawaii in 2021 and was shocked by the prices.
• She visited two grocery stores and found that inflation has send some food prices even higher, but not all.
• At Safeway, for instance, a dozen large eggs cost $8.50 — a $4 increase from last year — but beer was cheaper.

Two years ago, I moved to Honolulu, Hawaii to learn more about where my father grew up and explore my native Hawaiian identity.Lee at Lokea Farms, a locally-owned family farm in Haleiwa (North Shore) in O’ahu.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Having previously lived in big cities like Chicago and New York City, I wasn’t completely surprised by restaurant prices in Hawaii. But the grocery-store prices blew my mind.Produce display at Safeway grocery store.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

The state of Hawaii has imported more than 80% of its food for decades, so prices have always been high, but inflation has reared its ugly face in paradise.Imported foods typically have higher prices.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Source: Civil Beat

Global inflation was set to reach 8.8% in 2022, compared to 4.7% in 2021. This year, forecasters predict it will decrease slightly to 6.5%.Shoppers purchasing groceries.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Source: International Monetary Fund

To see how inflation is playing out in grocery stores, I visited two popular grocers: Foodland, a popular local chain; and Safeway, which can be found in 18 states.Safeway and Foodland grocery stores.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Source: Foodland, Safeway

I compared current grocery store prices against February 2022 figures from Numbeo, a database where users from around the world share costs-of-living.Inside the Safeway grocery store.

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Source: Numbeo

In 2022, one gallon of milk was $6.77. Today, it’s regularly priced at about $9 and can be purchased on sale for $7.80 at Foodland.Milk prices have increased by at least $1.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Safeway’s milk is actually cheaper at $7.50, but it still costs almost $1 more than it did in 2022.Milk for sale at Safeway.

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In February 2022, a dozen eggs were $4.50. One year later and the sale price has almost doubled to $8.30 at Foodland.A dozen eggs for sale at Foodlands.

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Safeway carries a dozen large eggs for $8.50 — a $4 increase from 2022.A dozen large eggs at the Safeway grocery store.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Last year, the price of apples ranged from $2 to $4. During this specific trip to Foodland, red delicious apples were about $3.Red delicious apples.

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Safeway’s red and yellow delicious apples go for about $2 a pound, which is comparable to prices from 2022.The apple aisle at Safeway.

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Safeway had a variety of other apples selling at cheaper prices, but the honeycrisp apples were about $5 per pound, which is typical for that type of apple.Honeycrisp apples at Safeway.

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Source: Tasting Table

Bananas seem to be inflation-resistant. In 2022, they cost about $1.80. Now, Foodland sells them for even less at $1.40 a pound.Bananas at Foodland.

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At Safeway bananas cost about $1.50 a pound — 30 cents cheaper than 2022.Bananas at Safeway.

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Local tomatoes at Foodland start at around $3 a pound, which is cheaper than the $3.24 price from 2022.Local tomatoes at the grocery store.

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However, tomato prices can run all the way up to $6 a pound.Tomatoes at Foodland.

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At Safeway, tomatoes range from $4 to $4.50 a pound, up to $1.50 more than they cost in 2022.Tomato display at Safeway.

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A half-liter of domestic beer cost about $3.50 in 2022, but Foodland sells each one for about $4.00.Coors and Bud Light beer sold at Foodland.

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At Safeway, however, beer costs about $3 a can, and members can purchase it for as little as $2.50 — a whole dollar cheaper than in 2022.Beer on the shelf at Safeway.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Behold this watermelon being sold for about $1.60 a pound at Foodland. I couldn’t find how much it cost in 2022, but this is a hefty price regardless.Watermelon display at Foodland.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

It’s not a large watermelon — just 7.5 pounds. Nevertheless, it costs around $12.A 7-pound watermelon costs over $10 at Foodland.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Safeway is selling these for what counts as a steal — about $7 each.Watermelon display at Safeway.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

At Foodland, bread is regularly priced at $5.90 (though you can get it for $1.20 cheaper with a club card) and goes up depending on the brand. In 2022 it cost $5.24.Bread at the Foodland grocery store.

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Safeway sells its sliced white bread for $5.19 or five cents cheaper than the previous year.Bread display at Safeway.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

A head of lettuce was $3.86 in 2022. Right now, Foodland has it for about $4 per pound.Lettuce display at Foodland grocery store.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Safeway is definitely cheaper at about $3.30 per pound, but the price is still kind of discouraging for people who try to eat healthy.Lettuce heads at Safeway.

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During the first quarter of 2022, retail sales increased 26% from the previous year’s sales, though Hawaii Public Radio noted this was likely due to inflation.The self-checkout aisle at Safeway.

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Source: Hawaii Public Radio

By October 2022, Hawaii’s minimum wage increased from $10.10 to $12 an hour, but the staggering cost of groceries still makes it harder to manage money.Grocery store worker stocking produce at Safeway.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Source: Department of Labor and Industrial Relations

It’s probably not a good idea, but I try to avoid looking at how much I spend on groceries — during this grocery store visit, I winced multiple times.Inside a Hawaiian grocery store.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

But all is not lost. Local lawmakers are exploring new subsidies to improve food sustainability for the state to become more independent.Local tomatoes at Foodland.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider

Source: Civil Beat

Still, more native Hawaiians are living outside of the state than in it, due to high rent and food prices. If things don’t change, I’m worried that even more Hawaiians will continue to leave the generational home they love.Lee and friends making a traditional Hawaiian food called pa’i ‘ai, which is made from taro.

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Source: Star Advertiser

I hope economists and lawmakers around the world continue to prioritize slowing inflation, but there’s also much to be done about Hawaii’s generally high food cost.Produce aisle at Foodland.

Morgan Pōmaikaʻi Lee/Insider