Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he explained. 

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities

.A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

 These phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS.

 Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital. Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Climate Crisis Exacerbates Urban Inequality in Latin America | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Union members have been on strike since October rejecting a proposed two-tier system, in which transitional employees get lesser pay and benefits compared to longer-tenured workers.

Temporary strike-breakers have already been working at Kellogg’s cereal plants in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, Now they will be placed on permanent contracts.  

“Interest in the [permanent replacement] roles has been strong at all four plants, as expected. We expect some of the new hires to start with the company very soon,” Kellogg spokesperson Kris Bahner said.

Kellogg also said there was no further bargaining scheduled and it had no plans to meet with the union.

  The World Inequality Report, an exhaustive summary of worldwide income and wealth data that shows inequities in wealth and income are “about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.”

“Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between Western countries and their colonies,” the report notes. “In other words, there is still a long way to go to undo the global economic inequalities inherited from the very unequal organization of world production between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.”

In the nearly three decades since 1995, members of the global 1% have captured 38% of all new wealth while the poorest half of humanity has benefited from just 2%.

“In the U.S., the return of top wealth inequality has been particularly dramatic, with the top 1% share nearing 35% in 2020, approaching its Gilded Age level,” states the report, whose contributors include prominent economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. “In Europe, top wealth inequality has also been on the rise since 1980, though significantly less so than in the U.S.”

At present, the richest 10% of the world’s population grabs more than half of all global income, the researchers found. The billions of people in the poorest half of the global population, meanwhile, get just 8% of the world’s income.

“Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities,” the report finds. “The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In contrast, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth.”

 As Lebanon plunged deeper into one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) last week sounded the alarm about a major funding gap that could further cut access to basic services for about 200,000 Palestinian refugees.

The United Kingdom alone cut more than half its funding to UNRWA from 42.5 million pounds ($56.5m) in 2020 to 20.8 million ($27.6) this past year, while Gulf states that once contributed $200m in 2018 only provided $20m this year.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini called it an “existential crisis” and warned the funding shortage could dramatically reduce access to education and basic healthcare services.

  Olivier De Schutter – UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights – said camps in Beirut “suffer from a chronically decaying infrastructure as a result of competing sources of basic service delivery”.

“These communities have been living in the camps for at least three generations, and they deserve better – their right to work, own property, education.”

Refugees in Shatila camp pushed to the brink amid aid crisis | Humanitarian Crises | Al Jazeera

Gasoline prices have hit a seven-year high in the US due to the rising cost of oil, with Americans now paying about $3.40 for a gallon of fuel compared with around $2.10 a year ago.

 Oil and gas companies made a combined $174bn in profits in the first nine months of the year as gasoline prices climbed in the US.

The bumper profit totals show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income.

 From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn.

Exxon alone posted a net income of $6.75bn in the third quarter, its highest profit since 2017, and has seen its revenue jump by 60% on the same period last year. 

The company credited the rising cost of oil for bolstering these profits, as did BP, which made $3.3bn in third-quarter profit.

 “Rising commodity prices certainly helped,” Bernard Looney, chief executive of BP, told investors.

The analysis of major oil companies’ financials shows that 11 of the group gave payouts to shareholders worth more than $36.5bn collectively this year.

 While a dozen bought back $8bn-worth of stock. 

 New oil drilling has made the US awash with oil in recent years, turning the country into a top-level exporter as well as domestic supplier, but this has kept prices low to the displeasure of investors. “A lot of this has been driven by investor sentiment,” said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, of the current reluctance to expand production. “They don’t want them to spoil the party.”

“It’s not the government that is banning them from drilling more,” Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James, told CNN. “It’s pressure from their shareholders.”

 The World Health Organisation(WHO) describes the Total Fertility Rate as the average number of children born to a woman “at the end of her reproductive period”. Replacement level fertility is the level of fertility at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next. One couple replaces two children, if a couple has more than two children then it will lead to rapid population growth. With less than two children, the population will certainly increase, but at a declining rate. 

 According to the recent National Family Health Survey for the first time in India, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement ratio of 2.1. According to the survey, the country’s fertility rate has come down to just 2.0 from 2.2 in the National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-2016) and 2.7 in the National Family Health Survey- 3 (2005-2006). The fertility rate is 1.6 in urban areas while it is still 2.1 in rural areas which is equivalent to the replacement rate. Sikkim recorded a fertility rate of only 1.1 

Only five states of the country, Bihar (3.0), Meghalaya (2.9), Uttar Pradesh (2.7), Jharkhand (2.4), and Manipur (2.2) have recorded relatively high fertility rates and this is also above the replacement rate. The positive side is that it is lower than the last National Family Health Survey.

In 1950, the fertility rate in the country was 5.90 which meant that there was an average of 6 children in a household. 

 According to a study published in the journal Lancet, if India’s fertility rate continues to decline at the current rate, after 80 years from now (by the end of the century) the country’s population might shrink to 1billion, equal to the population of many countries. The study also found that by then, the fertility rate would have dropped from 2.0 to 1.27.

With the declining fertility rate, the percentage of children under the age of 15 in the total population is declining rapidly. According to the first National Family Health Survey (1992-93), the population of children under this age group was 38 per cent which has now come down to 26.5 per cent. This shows that India’s population will continue to grow at a declining rate in the near future.

Declining Fertility Rate And Population In India| Countercurrents

 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in a new report shows that the world’s top 100 arms producers have continued to increase sales — even in the pandemic year of 2020 and despite the global economy contracting. Lockdowns, crumbling supply chains, jittery consumers: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about massive economic slumps around the world. One sector, however, has proved immune to the virus: The arms industry. 

The sales of the top 100 arms manufacturers totalled $531 billion (€469 billion) in 2020, more than the economic output of Belgium. Some 54% of this was accounted for by the 41 US companies in SIPRI’s top 100. The main companies in the industry are US-based: Lockheed Martin alone sold more than $58 billion worth of weapons systems last year —  a sum bigger than the GDP of Lithuania.

Markus Bayer, a political scientist at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC), says arms companies are deliberately exerting influence. He quotes a report by the US NGO Open Secrets: “Defense companies spend millions every year lobbying politicians and donating to their campaigns. In the past two decades, their extensive network of lobbyists and donors have directed $285 million in campaign contributions and $2.5 billion in lobbying spending to influence defense policy.”

SIPRI researcher, Alexandra Marksteiner, explains that the US Department of Defense provided targeted support for the arms industry during the pandemic. “For example, they made sure that employees of defense companies were largely exempted from stay-at-home orders. On the other hand, there were some orders that were set up so that funds could be transferred to the companies a bit earlier, ahead of schedule, so that they would have a bit of a buffer.”

Simone Wisotzki, an arms control expert at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), was especially struck by “the fact that arms companies from the Global South are becoming increasingly important.” Wisotzki mentions India in particular: It has three companies in the top 100, whose combined sales total 1.2% — on a par with South Korea.

However, there are far more weapons leaving the factories of India’s northern neighbour, China. SIPRI has been including Chinese companies in its studies since 2015, despite the many problems with transparency. China’s five companies on the list are benefiting from the Chinese military’s modernization program, and their shipments now account for 13% of the top 100’s sales.

Simone Wisotzki also notes that the boundary between civil and military technologies are becoming increasingly blurred. “Information technology can no longer be separated from weapons technology,”

SIPRI gives the example of a deal between Microsoft and the US Department of Defense worth $22 billion. The company has been contracted to supply the US Army with a type of super-glasses, called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, which will provide soldiers with real-time strategic information about the battlefield.

The US military’s interest in Silicon Valley is easy to explain. “They realize that, in these new enabling technologies, be it artificial intelligence or machine learning or cloud computing, these Silicon Valley companies’ expertise is far beyond what you would see from traditional arms industry players,” says Marksteiner. “There is a chance that some of these companies will actually end up entering the [SIPRI] top 100.”

SIPRI: Global arms industry flourishing despite COVID | World | Breaking news and perspectives from around the globe | DW | 05.12.2021

  Stock prices soared in response to the emergence of Omicron. 

According to a statement by the group. A small handful of investors and executives with Pfizer and Moderna—currently the world’s preeminent makers of Covid-19 vaccines—saw over $10 billion in new wealth, 

Moderna’s shares skyrocketed after the announcement and settled at $310.61/share on Wednesday 1 December, up 13.61% from $273.39/share since Wednesday 24 November, the day before the announcement. Pfizer’s shares rose by 7.41% from $50.91/share to $54.68/share.

Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, personally became more than $824m richer in the week after the announcement, with the value of his shares rising from $6,052,522,978 to $6,876,528,630. He sold off 10,000 shares for $319 each on 26 November, the day after the variant was announced, cashing out $3.19 million.

At the close of business on Tuesday, Bancel’s shares had grown by $1.7 billion since the announcement, before falling after the company lost a legal dispute over patents.

“Pharmaceutical companies knew that grotesque levels of vaccine inequality would create prime conditions for new variants to emerge,” said Tim Bierley, pharma campaigner at Global Justice Now. “They let Covid-19 spread unabated in low and middle-income countries. And now the same pharma execs and shareholders are making a killing from a crisis they helped to create. It’s utterly obscene.”

“At every turn,” he continued, “these companies have obstructed efforts to more equitably distribute vaccines around the world. They have made more than enough money from the pandemic, selling two of the most lucrative drugs in history…”

‘Utterly Obscene’: Just 8 Pfizer and Moderna Investors Became $10 Billion Richer After Omicron Emerged (commondreams.org)

 A 1961 sci-fi short story 

“The destruction was so near complete that plant and animal life crept back over the earth slowly. The soil itself was to a great extent polluted by the fall-out. But that portion of humanity which escaped was truly fit, and brought with it memories, and a resolve never to repeat the fatal mistake of society divided against itself.”



The speaker was Hubert Brodkin, venerable sage and keeper of the archives; the time, the year 1000 A.H. (after the holocaust); the place, Entrada Island, large western neighbor of a country once called Kanata. Professor Brodkin’s listeners, several thousand in number, were gathered on the sea-shore and along the sandy estuaries of two great rivers; yet so near perfect was his voice transmitter that all could have heard had he spoken in a whisper. Behind them lay a lush land and all shared in common those things commonly used. There was plenty for all, with no rich, no poor, a fulfillment of the dreams of ancient dreamers called “Utopians,” whose very names were forgotten.



“Warnings of the impending catastrophe,” continued the professor, “were given about the year 1950, in what was then referred to as the ‘Christian Era.’ But the great mass of people were indifferent, and left all vital matters to those few who held them in complete subjection and who were spoken of as “experts.” The particular economic and social period was described variously as ‘Rugged Individualism,’ ‘Democracy,’ and ‘A Way of Life.’ Five per cent of the population came into control of ninety-five per cent of the world’s wealth, and so well did they command communication and silence opposition that the major portion of mankind was thought-controlled. It was a time of hand-clapping, of slogans, catch-words and phrases. Imitation came to be regarded as talent. Mouth-gurgling passed for music. From talking and thinking alike people began to look alike, to resemble in certain measure a famous dummy of the time called ‘Mortimer Snerd.’ And so tractable had they become that the dominant few, drunk with power and greediness could play with them as an angler plays with a hooked fish. This mass inertia tempted the world’s dictators to lead it on into events so terrible that today’s descriptions are dumb. People and records went down to destruction together, and what little I can tell you was passed on mainly by word of mouth from those few who survived to their descendants.”



Here, onward, Professor Brodkin’s style of speech became broken now and then by a slangy idiom echoing, so to speak, out of some forgotten time with which he alone seemed in tune:



“The circus began in this section of the earth after a number of sailing ships unloaded their razzle-dazzle biped freight. They struck a wild land inhabited by Primitives. Each ship’s company consisted of a small number of Grabbers and a large quota of Goofs. The Grabbers were OK, they were wise cookies. The Goofs were everything else. Unlike Mother Hubbard, they were at once both poor and lacking in ambition. So long as they could eat, sleep, and breathe air in and out they were satisfied. The Grabbers sicked the Goofs onto the Primitives. The Goofs advanced in three columns. Some members of the first unit rode horses. Others bore guns, powder, and lead. Such gentry were described in a future time as ‘Liberators.’ Their combined attack appalled the Primitives who fought back as best they could with stone hatchets, bows and arrows. The front section of the second column carried a huge white cross on which the skeleton of a man was spread — this terrorized the Primitives. Now followed closely a group clad in long black coats, and carrying large books in their hands — these hypnotized the Primitives and softened ’em up for the third company. These sweet-scented gentlemen lugged kegs and jugs filled with a fiery fluid which sent the blood racing through the natives’ veins, causing them to dance and whoop ‘er up in wild fashion.



“Ground had now been broken for the Grabbers, who arrived plentifully supplied with mouse-traps, miscellaneous trinkets, and muskets made of cast-iron that later were to burst in the natives’ faces. The Grabbers had an eye on four-footed animal skins in the possession of the Primitives. Spaniards called the procedure ‘Negocio,’ Englishmen dubbed it ‘Business Incentive,’ which term in after years was to ripen into ‘Free Enterprise.’



“When the process of skinning the Primitives who had skinned the quadrupeds was well advanced and both were all but exterminated, the Grabbers divided the country amongst themselves, drove stakes and built fences around their allotments, then posted signs proclaiming this land is the private property of Grabber So-and-So and trespassers will be severely dealt with by virtue of ‘Constituted Authority.’ This latter sounded awesome to the Goofs, and since it was printed in large capitals they had not the temerity to question matters; especially when a number of the bigger Goofs were dressed in uniforms, armed, and sworn to obey the rules laid down by Constituted Authority.



“A ‘Culture’ period now followed in which the Goofs were taught to sing patriotic songs, and told how lucky they were to be living in Kanata. It was driven home to them how badly the Grabbers of other lands treated their Goofs.



“Then, when the landless, propertyless Goofs had no alternative, they made a deal with their overlords by which they (the Goofs) could live on the lands and do all the work, cut the timber, build the houses, grow the crops, raise cattle, build dams, factories, power plants; in brief, do everything necessary to keep the Grabbers in clover.



“The society developing out of this lopsided partnership became finally an insane mechanism in which the parts operated against the whole. Each family of Goofs desired the elimination of its neighbor. Each group hoped for the misfortune of other groups. Everywhere, individual interest took precedence over public good. The lawyer wanted litigations, particularly among the rich. The physician wanted sickness — he would be ruined if everybody died without disease. The military man wanted wars that would carry off half his comrades and secure him promotion; the undertaker wanted burials; farmers wanted famine to double, or treble the price of grain; the architect, carpenter and mason wanted conflagrations. It was truly each against all. The era was described by a noted philosopher, Bertram Dresser, as ‘Graboofia.’ Indeed it is to Dr. Dresser that we are indebted for much of the information handed down. And it all added up to a survival of the slickest.



“This charming result was affected by the Goofs surrendering to the Grabbers at the point of production their entire product, and receiving wages sufficient merely to restore the energy to work. Surplus values retained by the Grabbers had to be sold in order to provide them with profit, ease and luxury. Fully half the Goofs were now put to advertising and unloading the loot. But due to a world wide expansion of technology the Grabber gangs of most lands had surpluses to sell. Markets shrunk and rivalry between the great robber groups grew bitter. In the frantic search for trade they ferreted out all potential customers. It was at this point that propaganda ran rife and military build up sky-rocketed. It was a carnival of name-calling; when interests clashed the other fellow became a ‘Red,’ a ‘Black,’ a ‘Blue,’ or a ‘Communist.’ Each Grabber group would trot out some new weapon, expecting all opposition to collapse in fear; but instead, some one of them would come up with an even newer and better instrument of destruction. More than half the Goofs’ labours were devoted to this end.



“From early youth Kanatan Goofs had been taught that one of their number could whip any six foreigners. Was not this well proven by that affair with the Primitives? True, the Goofs had stuck knives on the ends of their guns to avoid getting too close to the enemy with his short knife; but all’s fair when glory is to be won!



“As to the Grabbers, they never intended to do any fighting, and had hideouts for themselves prepared in advance. And they planned all along to instruct their principal servants to prepare, in the name of Constituted Authority, documents ordering the Goofs to advance against their foreign counterparts whose own Grabbers had been designated as enemies. So powerful and so few in numbers had the world’s Grabbers become, they could start and stop isolated wars at any time without those who fought knowing who was responsible. Surviving Goofs, returning victorious were rewarded with medals and cement monuments. and ‘Remembrance’ days. And they were a long time complacent. They believed the few in control of the earth were fearful of launching an all out chemical and germ war lest they themselves perish in the process.



“Step by step, many Goofs began to realize the sheer lunacy of Graboofia. They visualized a tomorrow, with a way of life where each against all had given way to a world of one for all and all for one. They realized they outnumbered the Grabbers 1000 to 1 and had the power to change the world, if they had the determination.



“But an effective job of head-fixing had been accomplished by the authorities through their control of the powerful means of spreading ideas; the schools, the church, the newspapers, the movies, the television. Those Goofs striving to change the world were pictured as enemies of individualism, free enterprise, liberty and democracy. Yet there were signs of rumbling and a growing awareness of a better tomorrow. Then somewhere, some one committed a ‘hostile’ act, and the terrible, indiscriminate destruction broke out. Unbelievable secret devices of death came out of concealment. Millions of men, women, and children were killed or maimed, blinded and rendered insane. A creeping death enveloped the entire earth. Almost everything wilted before it. Some of the people found refuge in caverns, others in sheltered nooks near sea-level. Communication, except the more primitive kinds and the printed word were lost as survivors slipped backward toward savagery. But the story of mankind before the holocaust (thanks to story-tellers like Dr. Dresser) was not lost completely, nor was the belief that some tomorrow would bring forth a fuller life.”



As the professor’s voice died away the Islanders rose slowly from the sands and headed homeward. The disappearing sun, seeming also content had painted the horizon a rosy red and bridged the sea-water with a streak of light which now retreated swiftly with the seconds, like the flashing smile of some departing guest — departed until tomorrow.



ROY DEVORE

Socialist Party of Canada