Red Light

The prime minister’s trading principles,

But, to be a leader of the Tories

He or she must flaunt and sell themselves,

And everyone knows what a whore is.

Perhaps be solicited by Labour?

Their leader might be a better looker,

Yet it’s foolish, surely most would concur,

To simply swap a whore for a hooker.

What seems on offer may look seductive,

Offering a good time in full measure,

Capital pimps the state so you’ll believe

Your satisfaction is their pleasure.

But, look again, there’s no mistaking it,

Whatever they say they are faking it.

D.A.

 Sri Lanka is facing a deepening financial and humanitarian crisis with fears it could go bankrupt in 2022 as inflation rises to record levels, food prices rocket and its state coffers run dry.

It is in part caused by the immediate impact of the Covid crisis and the loss of tourism but is compounded by high government spending and tax cuts eroding state revenues, vast debt repayments to China and foreign exchange reserves at their lowest levels in a decade.

The loss of jobs and vital foreign revenue from tourism, which usually contributes more than 10% of GDP, has been substantial, with more than 200,000 people losing their livelihoods in the travel and tourism sectors,

 Inflation has meanwhile been spurred by the government printing money to pay off domestic loans and foreign bonds. Inflation hit a record high of 11.1% in November and escalating prices have left those who were previously well off struggling to feed their families, while basic goods are now unaffordable for many. 

One of the most pressing problems for Sri Lanka is its huge foreign debt burden, in particular to China. It owes China more than $5bn in debt and last year took an additional $1bn loan from Beijing to help with its acute financial crisis, which is being paid in instalments. In the next 12 months, in the government and private sector, Sri Lanka will be required to repay an estimated $7.3bn in domestic and foreign loans, including a $500m international sovereign bond repayment in January. However, as of November, available foreign currency reserves were just $1.6bn.

Government minister Ramesh Pathirana said they hoped to settle their past oil debts with Iran by paying them with tea, sending them $5m worth of tea every month in order to save “ much needed currency”.

The World Bank estimates 500,000 people have fallen below the poverty line since the beginning of the pandemic, the equivalent of five years’ progress in fighting poverty.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared Sri Lanka to be in an economic emergency, the military was given the power to ensure essential items, including rice and sugar, were sold at set government prices – but it has done little to ease people’s plight.

Rajapaksa’s decision in May to ban all fertiliser and pesticides and force farmers to go organic without warning has brought a formerly prosperous agricultural community to its knees as many farmers, who had become used to using – and often overusing – fertiliser and pesticides, were suddenly left without ways to produce healthy crops or combat weeds and insects. Many fearing a loss decided not to cultivate crops at all, adding to the food shortages in Sri Lanka. The government made a dramatic U-turn in late October and farmers are now struggling to cover the high costs of imported fertiliser without help.

The former central bank deputy governor WA Wijewardena warned the struggles of ordinary people would exacerbate the financial crisis, which would in turn make life harder for them. “When the economic crisis deepens beyond redemption, it is inevitable that the country will have a financial crisis too,” he said. “Both will reduce food security by lowering production and failing to import due to foreign exchange scarcities. At that point, it will be a humanitarian crisis.” Wijewardena said the country was at substantial risk of defaulting on its repayments, which would have catastrophic economic consequences.

The government has resorted to temporary relief measures, such as credit lines to import foods, medicines and fuel from its neighbouring ally India, as well as currency swaps from India, China and Bangladesh and loans to purchase petroleum from Oman. However, these loans provide only short-term relief and have to be paid back quickly at high-interest rates, adding to Sri Lanka’s debt load.

‘There is no money left’: Covid crisis leaves Sri Lanka on brink of bankruptcy | Sri Lanka | The Guardian

At a meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons systems – Terminator-type killer robots – and failed to place restrictive controls on the development of such lethal weaponry. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

The Kargu-2, made by a Turkish defense contractor, is a cross between a quadcopter drone and a bomb. It has artificial intelligence for finding and tracking targets, and might have been used autonomously in the Libyan civil war to attack people.

Proliferation may occur when the militaries developing autonomous weapons assume that they will be able to contain and control the use of autonomous weapons. But if the history of weapons technology has taught the world anything, it’s this: Weapons spread. Market pressures could result in the creation and widespread sale of what can be thought of as the autonomous weapon equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots that are cheap, effective and almost impossible to contain as they circulate around the globe. “Kalashnikov” autonomous weapons could get into the hands of people outside of government control, including international and domestic terrorists.

Already we witness frequent misidentifications by individual human operators of drone attacks such as the recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan.  When selecting a target, will weaponized Artificial Intelligence weapons be able to distinguish between hostile soldiers and children playing with toy guns? Between civilians fleeing a conflict site and insurgents making a tactical retreat? We already have an example of image recognition software used by Google identifying Black people as actual gorillas. AI systems err and when they err, their makers often don’t know why they did and, therefore, don’t know how to correct them. 

Lastly, how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is to blame for a robot that commits war crimes? Who would be put on trial? The weapon? The soldier supposedly at the touch-pad? The soldier’s commanders issuing the instructions? The corporation that manufactured the soft and hardware of the weapon? 

Taken from here

Opinion | Humanity’s Final Arms Race: UN Fails to Agree on ‘Killer Robot’ Ban | James Dawes (commondreams.org)

 Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter and is a vital source of coal supply for power plants in India. India’s Adani Group is preparing to ship the first coal cargo from Australia’s Carmichael mine in outback Queensland state after resisting a seven-year campaign by climate activists and defying a global push away from fossil fuels. 

10 million tonnes per annum of coal will be produced at the Carmichael Mine. The coal will be exported from a terminal at Abbot Point, which Adani bought for $2 billion in 2011 and renamed North Queensland Export Terminal. Analysts said it made sense for Adani to dig the mine to help it make back the massive investment on the coal terminal, which has run nearly half-empty since Adani acquired it.

“It’s about maximising your cash flow returns on the railway line and maximising your profits on Abbot Point,” said Tim Buckley, a director at the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). He said even though the Carmichael mine will become unprofitable as coal prices fall, Adani might have an incentive to expand it to 20 million tonnes a year to keep the port filled when other mines supplying the terminal stop producing.

Meantime, China, has completed the first coal-power 1,000-megawatt unit of the Shanghaimiao plant, the biggest of its kind under construction in the country. China is responsible for more than half of global coal-fired power generation and is expected to see a 9% year-on-year increase in 2021, an International Energy Agency report published this month said.

China has pledged to start reducing coal consumption, but will do so only after 2025, giving developers considerable leeway to raise capacity further in the coming four years. Yhe country is likely to build as much as 150 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity over the 2021-2025 period, bringing the total to 1,230 GW.

India’s Adani nears first coal shipment from Australian mine (trust.org)

China fires up giant coal power plant in face of calls for cuts (trust.org)

In 2019-20 4.3 million children (defined as people under 16, or aged 16 to 19 and in full-time education) were living in households in poverty. 

They accounted for 31% of the UK’s 14 million children.

But there was a wide variation among ethnic groups.

Bangladeshi children are the poorest, with 61% of them living in a poor household. In 2010-11, 61% of Bangladeshi children were living in poor households – exactly the same figure as at the end of the decade.

The figures for the other groups were: Pakistani children (55%); black African or Caribbean or black British (53%); other ethnicity (51%); other Asian (50%); mixed ethnicity (32%); Indian (27%); white (26%); and Chinese (12%).

There are 2.9 million white children living in poverty, making them by far the largest ethnic cohort, comprising 68% of all children living in poverty. 

Black children are the next biggest group: with more than 400,000 living in poverty, they comprise 10% of the child poverty total.

More than half of black children in the UK are now growing up in poverty.

Black children are also now more than twice as likely to be growing up poor as white children.

 The proportion of black children living in poverty went up from 42% in 2010-11 to 53% in 2019-20

Over the last decade, the total number of black children in poor households more than doubled

Halima Begum, chief executive at the Runnymede Trust, said: “These are not cyclical inequalities that are being flagged, but systemic shortcomings that must be reversed quickly.

“But the problems are nuanced. Black children face racism and poverty. But poverty is not defined exclusively by race. So, for more than a decade, the Runnymede Trust has argued that you can’t simply solve the issue of racial inequality without also addressing socio-economic disparities.”

More than half of UK’s black children live in poverty, analysis shows | Race | The Guardian

 Food banks fear they will be forced to turn away hungry families during a “bleak” winter as they face soaring demand and supply shortages.

Charity bosses say they expect the number of people in dire financial trouble to shoot up this year because of rising food and fuel bills, the coming National Insurance hike and October’s cut to Universal Credit.

Food bank managers have told The Independent they may be forced to reduce packages – or even turn away hungry families – as they are uncertain they will be able to meet growing demand with extra supplies.

JANUARY 2022 PDF

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 The charity National Energy Action warned the number of UK households living in fuel poverty could climb to 6 million, the highest level on record.

Around 4 million homes in the UK were already classed as fuel poor before a surge in global energy market prices triggered one of the steepest ever energy bill hikes in October, but campaigners are braced for a record increase in the numbers unable to pay their energy bills following another hike this Spring that could cause at least another 2 million more homes to slip into fuel poverty.

Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action, said “Those on lowest incomes and in less-efficient homes will not just face financial hardship but intolerable living conditions, ill-health and, for too many, a shortened life,” Scorer said. “This is not just conjecture. It will happen and we’ve had enough time to see it coming and act.”

6m UK homes may be unable to pay energy bills after price hike, charity warns | Fuel poverty | The Guardian

 “Revolutions must take place in the mind before they can be carried out on the streets.”

“The new social organism cannot be the work of one single person, nor of a few people…It is the work of everyone…The river thus slowly takes shape from the confluence of a thousand springs, of billions of drops of water.”

“Schools, books, the printed word – these are the real revolutionary agents…teachers are the only true revolutionaries.”

Auguste Blanqui

The continuing pandemic, the endless wars, the persistent poverty and the deepening ecological cataclysms should not offer socialists very much hope that change is coming. But we shall not cease our campaign to end capitalism and bring about socialism. We do still possess hope that working people can build a better world for the common good and the well-being of all. We cannot go on the way we are going. People will eventually come to understand that and will avert the dystopian future scenarios sci-fi writers’ careers have flourished upon.

We are confident that our fellow workers who puzzle over the question of why when our technology can produce so much, how is it that we ourselves get so little? Eventually, workers will ask if we produce a thousand-fold more social wealth than our great-grandfathers could why is it we still suffer from scarcity. 

Socialists are convinced that in due time, the working class will come to the conclusion that the reasons are the world’s great productive system is owned by a handful of people who run it for their own profit and not for people’s use. And it can only operate in the interests of everybody when society as a whole collectively owns and runs it.

Most people know the present system is rotten and harmful by their own experience of economic insecurity. But they still have not arrived at the socialist answer. The answer will not be reached through hopelessness and despair but by mankind’s reasoning process. As the capitalist system continues on its road towards chaos and civilisation collapse, our need for solidarity and resistance will only increase. The means of production will be taken over by the communities and re–purposed for human needs. The enormous reservoir of talent and creativity will be released to build a new world. The knowledge and resources are there to be applied.

For socialists, our future task is largely a question of whether we can begin engaging the union movement, the social movements, and radicals in challenging capitalism. We have to be able to argue that capitalism is bad even when it is working well, that capitalism is now a barrier to human development.  We need to recognise that we’re fighting capitalism. What socialists have to offer is making connections between working people across workplaces, across countries, bringing a class analysis so they understand it’s not just them. We can never win if it’s just a few of us against the State. Fellow workers have to see there’s actually a class and offer them some historical memory, so they see how workers did in the past. Giving them some comparative analysis of what’s going on — how did people organise. Our policy is to be a bridge—responding to practical and immediate things, but putting them into a larger context. Because without that larger context we’re losing and we’re going to continue to lose.

The social revolution we are calling for is a simple thing. It is the devolution of all power into the hands of the working people. It is bottom-up, industrial democracy, with decision-making power being exclusively the prerogative of workers in their workplaces and communities, confederated one to another in such ways as they see fit. The social revolution is the full and final emancipation of labour, all labour. Revolution, real revolution, is affected by the workers themselves.

Given the conscious control of human affairs that a socialist system would implement, people in socialism would be able to take charge of their destiny. What is undeniable is that we are a species with great talents. In science, technology, art, crafts and design we can call upon a wide range of great skills. The point now is to carry out the revolution for the benefit of humanity and a new era for humanity will have begun.