The motives for the Myanmar military coup so far has been far from clear but this report from Al Jazeera may help to enlighten us. 

 Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, are fully integrated into the country’s economy. The key to their wealth are Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (MEHL) and Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) through which the military has been able to gain a monopolistic control over core sectors of the economy, including some of the country’s most lucrative industries. Their influence and holdings represented an elaborate system of patronage that the army generals uses to maintain power. When privatisation of nationalised businesses happened with the asset sales in 2011  senior generals and their families were able to take advantage of the opening of the economy to secure ownership over many of Myanmar’s companies. The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission, set up in the wake of the Rohingya crackdown, detailed the military’s business interests in a 110-page report that was published in August 2019. The report laid bare the extent of the armed forces’ involvement in the economy – exposing 106 MEHL and MEC-owned businesses as well as 27 close affiliates to the military – and the armed forces’ domination of Myanmar’s natural resources, including jade mining.

The Tatmadaw’s web of commercial interests enabled it to “insulate itself from accountability and oversight,” the UN said. “Through controlling its own business empire, the Tatmadaw can evade the accountability and oversight that normally arise from civilian oversight of military budgets.”

“During the NLD period, the military’s businesses empowered them and enabled their campaign of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The military is able to use funds from business to support military units, including those committing atrocity crimes, and it meant they were not reliant on the defence budget allocation from parliament.” explained Justice for Myanmar, an activist group.

However, in 2019, the NLD managed to secure civilian control of the general administrative department, which oversees key bureaucratic appointments, and had also introduced changes to the law on gemstones and jade. The military had been forced to relinquish much of their control.

Htwe Htwe Thein, an associate professor at Australia’s Curtin University, said, “It was a sign of the weakening grip of the military over the government administration and patronage – which had been at the heart of its ability to accumulate and protect its wealth.”

“The military’s tentacles spread across the board,” said Montse Ferrer, the business and human rights adviser at Amnesty International, which published a report last year estimating the military enjoyed dividends from MEHL alone of some $18bn  in the 20 years until 2011.

The Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, which tracks transparency and standards of corporate governance in Myanmar through its annual Pwint Thit Sa report described MEC as a “military owned enterprise controlled by the Tatmadaw”, subject neither to civilian control, or the oversight. MEHL had seven directors, and one alternate director, all of whom were active or retired military personnel. About one third of shares were held by battalions, with individuals owning the rest. The company’s constitution, it noted, also showed the existence of a “Guiding Board” – to oversee the Board – headed by Min Aung Hlaing.

 Anna Roberts, executive director of the Burma Campaign UK, pointed out that concerning some sanctions upon individual generals, “Min Aung Hlaing led a genocide against the Rohingya and the international response has been almost nothing really. He’s probably calculated that there will be a small response, but that it will be a price worth paying.” Roberts continued, “He feels he will get away with it. That’s why the international response needs to be strong; stronger than he was calculating.”

 For foreign governments, it is time to get tough with Min Aung Hlaing and his generals.  Campaigners say efforts to identify military revenues – from legal and illicit sources – and investigate the way in which the military’s money passes through the global financial system must be stepped up in order for sanctions to work effectively.

“What we’re calling for in parallel with targeted sanctions is an effort by the countries imposing sanctions to investigate the revenue flows to the military and uncover the identities of unknown shareholders and the banks that have their money,” said  Clare Hammond, Global Witness’ London-based researcher on Myanma. “That’s pretty crucial because we need to understand exactly where the military is making and keeping their money to effectively put pressure on those sources of funding.”

Others have suggested targeting the military’s banking and financial links. In a recent report on how the world should respond to the coup, Crisis Group stressed there could also be pressure on the military’s preferred financial centres in the Asian region “notably Singapore” including asset freezes and denying the generals’ financial services.

 Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, warns that the impending fertility crisis poses a global threat comparable to that of the climate crisis.

“The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” she writes in Count Down.

Sperm counts in the west had plummeted by 59% between 1973 and 2011. Now, Swan says, following current projections, the median sperm count is set to reach zero in 2045. 

 Such is the gravity of the threats they pose, she argues, that humans could become an endangered species. “Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered,” Swan writes, “only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.”

Between 1964 and 2018 the global fertility rate fell from 5.06 births per woman to 2.4. Now approximately half the world’s countries have fertility rates below 2.1, the population replacement level.

Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’, expert warns | US news | The Guardian

 Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, warns that the impending fertility crisis poses a global threat comparable to that of the climate crisis.

“The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” she writes in Count Down.

Sperm counts in the west had plummeted by 59% between 1973 and 2011. Now, Swan says, following current projections, the median sperm count is set to reach zero in 2045. 

 Such is the gravity of the threats they pose, she argues, that humans could become an endangered species. “Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered,” Swan writes, “only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.”

Between 1964 and 2018 the global fertility rate fell from 5.06 births per woman to 2.4. Now approximately half the world’s countries have fertility rates below 2.1, the population replacement level.

Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’, expert warns | US news | The Guardian

 Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, warns that the impending fertility crisis poses a global threat comparable to that of the climate crisis.

“The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” she writes in Count Down.

Sperm counts in the west had plummeted by 59% between 1973 and 2011. Now, Swan says, following current projections, the median sperm count is set to reach zero in 2045. 

 Such is the gravity of the threats they pose, she argues, that humans could become an endangered species. “Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered,” Swan writes, “only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.”

Between 1964 and 2018 the global fertility rate fell from 5.06 births per woman to 2.4. Now approximately half the world’s countries have fertility rates below 2.1, the population replacement level.

Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’, expert warns | US news | The Guardian

 Elizabeth Campbell, the leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC)  has said sorry for putting profits before people in a series of deals that leased out public property for commercial gain.

It related to the sale of leases on a public library, a teacher training centre used by council staff working in family, children and educational services, and a building housing a Citizens Advice bureau, to private school operators including Notting Hill preparatory school, which charges £21,000 a year per pupil. The assets were all in the more deprived north of the borough and part of a wider property strategy for the area aimed partly at boosting revenues to the council.

“Before 2017 the council did not find the right balance between financial benefits, and social benefits,” Campbell said. “Too often the council put the narrow goal of generating commercial income above the broader aim of delivering benefits to our wider community We fell below the bar on consultation, transparency, scrutiny, and policy. We cannot say hand on heart that residents were involved every step of the way, or that the council put their interests first and foremost, and for that we apologise.”

Ed Daffarn, a Grenfell survivor who questioned several of the property deals before the fire, said, “This report goes some way in capturing the culture of a local authority that had metamorphosed into an agent for property development; an organisation that treated the North Kensington community with contempt while playing it’s perverse game of monopoly with our public assets. “

The council’s chief executive, Barry Quirk, set the council’s failures in the context of the 2010 austerity policies of David Cameron’s coalition government, which required local authorities across the country to find new ways of raising funds.

“The period from 2010 established new orthodoxies in local government as the then government’s approach to fiscal consolidation led to substantial reductions in central government or national taxpayer-financed support for local government,” he wrote. “In the period from 2010 to 2017, councils’ ‘core spending power’ was dramatically reduced. Across London, the ‘spending power’ of councils was reduced by an average of 32%.”

Grenfell Tower council apologises for putting profits before people in borough | Grenfell Tower fire | The Guardian

 In the war against poverty, the Chinese government claims success.

 Over an eight-year period, nearly 100 million people have been lifted out of poverty, 832 poverty-stricken counties as well as 128,000 villages have been removed from the poverty list.

 This week, the Biden administration did the unthinkable. It reopened a Trump-era detention site for migrant children. The detention center, a reconverted camp for oil field workers in Carrizo Springs, Texas, is expected to hold 700 children between the ages of 13 and 17, and dozens of kids have already arrived there.

Rather than seeking out new and better solutions, the Biden administration is instead trying to sell a public image of a kinder, gentler imprisonment. 

Mark Weber, spokesperson for Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency that oversees the welfare of unaccompanied migrant children told the Washington Post that “the Biden administration is moving away from the ‘law-enforcement focused’ approach of the Trump administration to one in which child welfare is more centric”. 

That may play well as a soundbite, but how welfare-centric is it to place children in jail in the first place? And if you don’t think it’s a jail, you should know that the “unaccompanied teens sent to the Carrizo Springs shelter will not be allowed to leave the facility”.

 The camp’s operation will be “based on a federal emergency management system”, where “trailers are labeled with names such as Alpha, Charlie and Echo”, names which are commonly used in military detention practices. (Camp Echo, for example, is a notorious site in Guantánamo Bay.

Staff members will not be in uniform  will “wear matching black-and-white T-shirts displaying their roles: disaster case manager, incident support, emergency management” and that the trailer is at the entrance, has flowers, butterflies and handmade posters.

  In 1997, a class-action lawsuit settlement established standards for the detention and release of unaccompanied minors taken into custody by the authorities. According to the Flores Settlement Agreement, the federal government must transfer these unaccompanied children to a non-secure and licensed facility within days of being in custody. In an emergency, the government can keep the children for up to 20 days while seeking to reunite them with family members or place them with a sponsor.

 The 66-acre Carrizo Springs site is a secure site (the kids can’t leave), is unlicensed by the state of Texas (it’s operated by a government contractor for the Office of Refugee Resettlement), and is expected to hold children for 30 days.  This internment camp is geographically remote and difficult to access.

The Biden administration seeks to deflect the criticism by assuring us their version of childhood detention is thoughtful and humane. The standard of values is now a very low bar, judged by whether something is simply “better” or “worse” than under Trump. Reforms have to go a lot further than merely reversing those of the previous president? The use the term “noncitizen” in place of “alien” when referring to immigrants is paying lip-service to cosmetic changes. Biden’s proposals contain admirable rhetoric about the need to address “root causes” of migration – but recent history shows us how, under xenophobic pressure,  noble-minded language can be used to adorn schemes whose ultimate effect is to keep people out, at considerable human cost.

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies were built upon foundations laid down by previous presidents. From the 1990s onwards, there was an increasing effort to criminalise unwanted migration and accelerate border security measures. In 2014, under Obama’s presidency – in which Biden served as vice president – about half of all federal arrests were immigration-related. 

Biden is locking up migrant children. Will the world still care with Trump gone? | US immigration | The Guardian

 Billions of people around the world are being trapped in poverty by systemic tax abuses, corruption and money laundering, according to the UN panel on financial integrity for sustainable development.

It said up to 10% of the world’s wealth could be hidden offshore. Illicit financial flows (IFFs) — from tax abuse, cross-border corruption, and transnational financial crime — drain resources from sustainable development. They worsen inequalities, fuel instability, undermine governance, and damage public trust. Ultimately, they contribute to States not being able to fulfil their human rights obligations.

The Facti report says recovering losses to tax avoidance and evasion could help countries such as Bangladesh expand its social safety net to 9 million more elderly, in Chad it could pay for 38,000 classrooms, and in Germany it could build 8,000 wind turbines.

The panel of world leaders, central bank governors and business and civil society representatives said criminals were laundering assets worth as much as 2.7% of global GDP each year.

The UK has steadily cut the rate of corporation tax to 19%, among the lowest in the advanced world. However, the government is thought to be considering raising the tax rate. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5%. Several UK overseas territories and crown dependencies, including the British Virgin Islands, Guernsey and Jersey, have a zero corporation tax rate.

602e91032a209d0601ed4a2c_FACTI_Panel_Report.pdf (webflow.com)

Tax abuse and money laundering is trapping billions in poverty, says UN | Banking reform | The Guardian

 “We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.” – Fred Hampton

  10 of the U.S.’s largest cities will spend more on policing than public health during Fiscal Year 2021. Combined, these 10 cities’ policing budgets are 3.6 times greater than public health department budgets.  Public health departments are generally tasked with aiding vaccine distribution, combating foodborne illnesses, homelessness and environmental toxins, and supporting addiction treatment, among other health-promoting activities. In addition, nearly two-thirds of Americans live in counties that spend more than twice as much on policing as they spend on nonhospital healthcare, which includes public health.

Georgia’s COVID data task force was disassembled due to a lack of funds, and the state slashed its Fiscal Year 2022 public health budget by $7 million. Meanwhile, district and county health departments in Alabama were operating at 65 percent capacity in 2019 relative to 2010. Some county health departments in North Carolina offer such low salaries that they are unable to fill vacancies for public health nursing positions.

1,900 people have died from COVID-19 in Houston, Texas, the U.S.’s most diverse and fourth most populous city. Roughly 1.4 million people (19.7 percent of the city’s population) are without health insurance, and multiple hospitals’ ICUs have been at capacity for months. Yet, the city’s police department budget for 2021 is 10 times greater than the Houston Health Department’s budget, with the police allotted nearly $1 billion and the health department $100 million.

Arizona’s health budget is just two-thirds of Phoenix’s police department budget. Phoenix does not have its own health department. 

 Police budgets don’t always reflect the full extent of a department’s power or presence. For instance, the Los Angeles Public Library reimburses the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for millions of dollars in services, which is not reflected in the LAPD’s $1.9 billion budget. 

Rather than cut the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD’s) budget following the Black liberation uprising of 2020, New York City transferred funds for school resource officers — school police — to the Department of Education budget, an act of subterfuge.

The Federal 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, co-authored by Joe Biden and signed by then-President Bill Clinton, allocated $12 billion in state subsidies for prison construction, prioritizing states with the harshest sentencing laws.

10 Largest US Cities Will Spend More on Police Than Public Health This Year (truthout.org)