Age UK said it was “deeply concerned” about the plight of elderly people whose needs are not being met. Thousands of older people have died without getting the care they needed. Millions of older people in England awaiting care were “struggling to go to the toilet, eat, get dressed or wash because they can’t do these things unaided”.

 28,890 requests for people aged 65 and over to be given support in 2021-22 were recorded as them having died without any services being provided. The numbers equated to more than 550 deaths a week – or 79 a day.

Age UK’s director, Caroline Abrahams, said: “There isn’t enough social care to go round and so some older people are waiting endlessly for help they badly need. It is heartbreaking that on the latest figures, more than 500 older people a week are going to their graves without ever receiving the care and support to which they were entitled. Nor can the blame for this parlous situation be placed on the pandemic, for while it certainly didn’t help, social care services were struggling to secure enough staff and funding in the years preceding it.” She added, “Since then, all the evidence is that the position has not got any better and, on most measures, has continued to get worse.”

Abrahams said long waits for social care caused “huge distress to older people” and placed “intolerable pressure on their families…We fear there are many tragedies playing out silently behind closed doors.”

Growing old is inevitable but the way we get old is not. 

Older people in England dying without the care they need, says Age UK | Older people | The Guardian

 Women have been harder hit by the cost of living crisis because they tend to earn less.

More than 2 million women are paid below the real living wage, the Living Wage Foundation said, representing 14% of all working women, compared with 1.4 million (9%) men. Overall, 60% of all jobs that pay below the real living wage are held by women.

Katherine Chapman, director of the Living Wage Foundation, said the research “demonstrates the reality that millions of women in the UK – often cleaners, catering staff and care workers – are more likely to be trapped in low-paying, insecure and precarious jobs.”

The level of the real living wage is calculated annually by the foundation, based on the costs of the basics required for a decent standard of living. The rate is currently £10.90 an hour across the UK, and £11.95 in London.

The charity found that women are more likely to be on zero-hours work contracts, representing 13% of female and 9% of male workers.

Women are also less likely to be paid for a shift when it is cancelled. More than quarter of women on such contracts said they were not paid anything for a cancelled shift, compared with 17% of men.

The survey also highlighted the impact of low pay on female workers during the cost of living crisis, where three-quarters of women felt that their pay increased their anxiety levels, compared with 65% of men, while more women than men said their pay reduced their quality of life.

Women in UK ‘more likely than men to be on low pay and struggling’ | Living wage | The Guardian

The East Palestine derailment has prompted a wave of scrutiny into the railroad industry’s record of deregulation and blocking safety rules.

Train-brake rules were rolled back under the Trump administration and have not been restored; hazardous material regulations were watered down at the behest of the railroad industry; and railroad workers have been decrying the safety impacts incited by years of staffing cuts, poor working conditions and neglect by railroad corporations in favor of Wall Street investors.

Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman, explains, “Most railroad workers are fighting against an entire system that only exists as a money-making apparatus to the wealthy. Those trains run through our towns, but they do not run next to rich folks’ homes, nor next to our politicians’ homes. This is a top-down problem.”

 “The railroads have opposed any government regulation on train length; they have sought waivers to eliminate having trained inspectors monitor railcars; and they have pushed back on the train crew staffing rule,” said Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (Blet) national president Eddie Hall in a statement after the NTSB preliminary report on the East Palestine derailment.

“The railroads and their trade association the Association of American Railroads (AAR) employ armies of lobbyists on Capitol Hill who are there not to promote safety regulations but to slow the implementation of federal safety regulations – or attempt to eliminate them altogether.”

Edward Wytkind, who served as president of the Transportation Trades Department (TTD) at the AFL-CIO, which represents the unions in the railroad industry, said that throughout his 25 years at the TTD, the railroad industry blocked all attempts to pass legislation or advance regulation on safety.

“From attempts to address worker fatigue, lack of coherent mandatory safety plans, increasing transparency to the public and first responders about what trains are carrying, the dangers of such long trains, or establishing floors for minimum train crew, the railroads blocked everything,” said Wytkind.

Jeff Kurtz, a retired locomotive engineer of 40 years in Iowa, said the railroad industry talking points on safety in response to the East Palestine derailment have been misleading, as the industry has trended toward adding several more railcars to trains, making them much longer, which can make derailments more damaging when they do occur. Despite safety concerns, this trend has been pursued to further cut costs and increase efficiency. The size of the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio was 150 cars, more than twice the average length of trains operated by major railroads from 2008 to 2017. There is currently no limit imposed by the Federal Railroad Administration on train length.

Leaked audio reveals US rail workers were told to skip inspections as Ohio crash prompts scrutiny to industry | Ohio train derailment | The Guardian

 In 2021, Amazon warehouses had a rate of 7.7 injuries per 100 workers, compared with 4.0 injuries for every 100 workers at all other warehouses. 

Amazon’s serious injury rate was 6.8 per 100 workers, compared with 3.3 for every 100 workers at all other warehouses.

Amazon’s ALB1 warehouse in Castleton, New York had the highest injury rate of any Amazon warehouse in 2021, with 19.8 serious injuries per 100 workers.

Michael Verrastro, who worked at Amazon’s ALB1, commented, “It’s sort of hypocritical for Amazon to claim that safety’s their number one issue. It’s a fallacy that they like to put forth that they’re more concerned about safety, when they clearly are not. They’re more concerned about profit.”

 Union organizer, Brett Daniels, at JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island in New York, said,  “Amazon’s constant disregard for safety is by design. Like many corporations, Amazon prioritizes profit over people.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), delivered alert letters on ergonomic hazards at the Amazon warehouses detailing risk assessments that found numerous jobs at Amazon warehouses exposed workers to “high risk of serious musculoskeletal disorders”.

‘They’re more concerned about profit’: Osha, DoJ take on Amazon’s grueling working conditions | Amazon | The Guardian

 Profits rather than labour costs and taxes have accounted for the lion’s share of domestic price pressures in the eurozone since 2021, according to the European Central Bank.

Europe’s companies are exploiting high inflation to increase their profit margins. Policymakers have repeatedly called for wage restraint but concerns are mounting that a bigger driver of the wave of price rises may be companies using inflation as an excuse to increase profit margins, a trend unions have described as “greedflation”.

A gathering of the ECB council was shown a slide presentation that revealed profit margins had been rising rather than falling – as would normally be expected when the price of raw materials and other business expenses such as transportation and wages rose.

“It’s clear that profit expansion has played a larger role in the European inflation story in the last six months or so,” said Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management.

ECB looking out for price gouging as fears grow over ‘greedflation’ | European Central Bank | The Guardian

 More than 2m households in England fell into fuel poverty last year. 

The number of households in England who spend more than 10% of their income, excluding housing costs, on energy has increased from 4.93m households in 2021 to 7.39m in 2022.

The number of households who have low incomes and live in homes with an energy efficiency rating of band D or below also increased by 100,000, to 3.3m in 2022, figures from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s annual fuel poverty report showed. That figure is expected to increase again to 3.5m this year, official figures showed.

Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said:

 “Today’s data proves that households across England suffered in cold damp homes this winter because the country has failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining and help those most at risk from the energy bills crisis due to poorly insulated homes…”

The data also showed that the government was making little progress in meeting its goal to improve as many fuel-poor homes in England as is “reasonably practicable” to a minimum energy efficiency rating of C by the end of 2030. 

Pressure rises on Hunt as 2m more households fall into fuel poverty | Fuel poverty | The Guardian

Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system, according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab report, published by Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.

The report warns that U.S. lawmakers from both major parties have embraced a “market-based” approach—centered around the buying and selling of so-called “carbon offset” credits generated through minor tweaks to industrial monoculture production—that is likely to tighten Big Ag’s chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise small-scale farmers, all while failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

As the report explains: “The idea begins with granting credits to farmers who adopt certain practices, such as planting more trees and cover crops, that are supposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers then receive compensation for their efforts by selling these credits to other entities, typically large corporations. These corporations, in turn, use their purchases of such credits to justify claims of environmental responsibility.”

Though these corporations “may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have ‘offset’ these emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of asserting that they now have a ‘net-zero’ climate impact,” states the report.

Despite mounting evidence of the ineffective or counterproductive nature of ‘net-zero’ commitments, one-fifth of the world’s biggest corporations have made them, meaning that demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes.

A recent investigation revealed that 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player provided no measurable climate benefits, casting further doubt on the very notions of ‘net-zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ that corporations promote in a bid to maintain or expand their own polluting activities while portraying themselves as green.

“Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions, and corporate greenwashing,” report co-author Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “Such corporate schemes will strengthen the power of the largest agribusinesses, hand over private farm data, and fail to address the climate crisis.”

Report co-author Claire Kelloway, food program director for the Open Markets Institute explained, “Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that’s exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do by locking farmers into their networks, protecting product sales, and stalling meaningful regulation.”

Big Ag Exploiting Carbon Markets to Intensify Grip on Food System: Report (commondreams.org)

Drawing a Line

Draw a line all along the Irish Sea:

On one side the waves are Irish, of course,

Or maybe European, where the source

Of trade remains nominally free.

The other side is where Britannia rules

The waves that lap on her sovereign shore,

Even though sausages in Belfast cost more

Than Westminster’s, where the parliament of fools

Exercises its independence

By braying at each other like asses,

While another act of nonsense passes

In stark contradiction to common sense,

That might well dispense with such disorders,

By choosing to abolish all borders.

D. A.

 Inflation in France will accelerate to reach 10% in March but the state will “break daily prices” to tame the rise, government spokesperson Olivier Veran warned on Wednesday.

The French consumer price index increased to 6.2%, up from 6.0% in January, according to preliminary data from the statistics bureau Insee, issued on Tuesday.

Food inflation edged higher to 14.5% from 13.3%, service prices were up to 2.9% from 2.6%, while the prices of manufactured goods rose slightly to 4.6% from 4.5%, with the end of winter sales, according to the report. Energy prices jumped 14.0% year-on-year in February, Insee said. The EU-harmonized index stood at 7.2% compared to 7% in January.

The French government expects inflation at 10% this month, meaning that food prices will also increase by 10%, according to Veran. He warned that “this is not a one-time price increase; this is an annual inflation between March 2022 and 2023. Obviously, this affects the consumer basket and everyday life” for French households.

“We work with large retailers, with manufacturers, so that, ultimately, when a French person goes shopping, whether in one brand or another, he can go and buy the products he needs on a daily basis at affordable prices,” the official added.

“We want everyone to take their share,” Veran stated, recalling that French President Emmanuel Macron had asked supermarket groups on Saturday to contain their margins to fight soaring food prices.

Earlier, the country’s authorities introduced the so-called “anti-inflation food basket” comprising about 50 basic items and obliged large retailers not to hike prices on these essentials. The measure is due to take effect this month.

RT 2\3\23

Dave C.

 Laos is officially named the Lao People’s Democratic Republic or Lao PDR. Some left-wingers consider the country’s economy  to be “actually existing socialism.”

The UN said says Laos has become a “major transhipment point” for drug traffickers moving their product into Thailand, the wider Mekong region and further afield in the Asia Pacific. 

143 million meth tablets were seized in Laos in 2021 after entering the country from the Shan State of neighbouring Myanmar. In the first month of 2022, Laos authorities seized 36 million pills and almost 600kg of crystal meth. 

“These large seizures point towards organised crime groups increasingly diverting their trafficking operations through Lao PDR,” the UN said.

The one-party state is also to the capitalist spirit of the Kings Romans casino complex in the country’s northwestern Bokeo province. It is a Chinese-owned gambling city. The sky is lit up by light shows and filled with the techno music techno beat from the Kings Romans casino complex. Maseratis and Ranger Rovers are seen alongside bright-red hammer-and-sickle flags while heavy trucks transport building materials and excavate foundations for luxury, multi-storey condominiums being built. Building work is going on in earnest and countless palm trees have been planted along the city’s roadsides, probably in the hope of turning this baking-hot corner of Laos into a tree-lined Macau-style retreat for wealthy gamblers. They mostly come from China, although some come from Thailand, too.  A new airport is under construction. The casino’s operators want the airport to facilitate the arrival of international gamblers.

 Kings Romans casino operates in what is the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ). The growing gambling complex under a lengthy lease bestowed by the Laos government to Zhao Wei, a 70-year-old Chinese businessman. In 2018, the United States Treasury Department described Zhao and his enterprises as a “transnational criminal organisation” that had engaged “in an array of horrendous illicit activities”.

“Since 2014, Thai, Lao, and Chinese authorities have seized large narcotics shipments that have been traced to the Kings Romans Casino,” the Treasury said.

The Treasury also alleged that the “Zhao Wei crime network” engaged in child prostitution, human trafficking and trafficking of endangered as well as vulnerable wildlife.

 The Kings Romans owner Zhao, a former timber trader, who got his start in Macau’s gambling scene said his complex was a “drug-free zone”. Shortly after an Al Jazeera TV team’s visit, police discovered 20 sacks of methamphetamine pills on the grounds of the SEZ valued at $1.6m.

“It has long been implicated in human trafficking and drug smuggling, and caters to a predominantly Chinese high roller clientele seeking out bear-paw soup and tiger-bone wine to go with their rounds of baccarat and call girls,” the South China Morning Post wrote of Kings Romans in October.

“Laos treats the area like an autonomous state, subject to its own rules,” the SCMP added.

What happens in the SEZ, though, is a matter for Kings Romans security. Zhao’s people controlled law and order in the casino city. The Laotian army has a presence of fewer than 30 soldiers to protect the economic zone, which was to cover an area of 3,000 hectares (11.6 square miles) when first given the go-ahead. In October, the Laos government presented Zhao with a medal for bravery owing to his support for public security and national defence in his casino city.

Kings Romans is physically in Laos but everything else is very much Chinese. Chinese is the first language spoken and China’s yuan is the preferred currency in the enclave where an iced coffee at the small Starbucks franchise costs close to $10.

‘Tip of the spear’: Battling the Golden Triangle’s drug lords | Drugs News | Al Jazeera