Older people face the prospect of “pensioner poverty” due to the rising cost of living and the falling value of the stock market.

 Interactive Investor show its customers withdrew a quarter more from their private pensions in January as the cost of energy, food and petrol went up. The figures have prompted concern that pensioners will not have enough money to see them through retirement. In January, the average withdrawal from an Interactive Investor pension was £1,944, up 25% on the average for the same month in previous years. In February, the average was £1,910, up 7% on the same month in previous years.

Former pensions minister and campaigner Ros Altmann says these higher withdrawals are a “danger signal for the future”, particularly if they are taking their retirement savings early. “As the cost of basic essentials, such as food and heating have soared, people need higher incomes to cover their bills. Pay increases are far lower than current 30-year record high inflation rates, and people may be searching for other ways to make ends meet,” she says.

“For the over-55s, this could mean being tempted to take more money from their pension funds. This is worrying because private pensions are meant to support people after they finish work, rather than topping up pre-retirement earnings. Higher pension withdrawals now risks rising pensioner poverty in future and lower long-term growth.”

Becky O’Connor, head of pensions at Interactive Investor, says the average monthly withdrawal before the pandemic was £1,782. It then dropped to £1,534 as lockdowns were imposed and people were spending less. The combined pressure of a need for cash to cover higher living expenses, and the falling stock market, leads to a “double depletion” effect on savings, she says, and an anxiety for pensioners. 

“It’s the existential angst perennially faced by retirees on limited means, whose pensions have to last the rest of their lives. But it’s worse now than ever as a result of diminishing stock market returns and high inflation, which both erodes the value of the pot and puts pressure on people to withdraw more,” says O’Connor. “Withdrawing more from a diminishing pot means a higher risk of running out of money later on. You may take the view that you need it now, whereas you might not need it in 10 or 20 years when you reach your 80s. That might turn out to be true, but even when you are 80, there can be unexpected calls on your income that you could need to cover.”

‘Pensioner poverty’ alarm as older people raid pension pots | Money | The Guardian

 In a recent speech, Putin very much parroted the propaganda tool of Herman Goering.

Putin declared, “… the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths, spit them out on the pavement.” 

 Despite all types of asbestos being banned in the UK since 1999, it still kills thousands of people every year.

One of the UK’s biggest manufacturers of asbestos and the industry bodies that it co-founded historically withheld information on risks posed by the carcinogenic material, playing down the dangers while lobbying the government for product warnings to be moderately tempered. 

Asbestos Research Council (ARC), of which Cape was a founding member, from 1966 successfully lobbied the government for regulation of asbestos products to be on a “maximum allowable concentration” basis rather than the “no dust policy” that had been proposed.

Documents also show Cape’s in-house sampling data threw up significantly higher dust counts than industry standards for accepted levels of exposure, but data unfavourable to Cape was withheld. Cape began to label its product in 1976 with a “take care with Asbestos” warning, it said “breathing asbestos dust can damage health”, but made no reference to the risk of mesothelioma. In a 1976 booklet by the Asbestos Information Committee, of which Cape was also a founding member, said: “The normal use of asbestos products should not be a cause for anxiety.”

Harminder Bains whose father died of mesothelioma said she felt “revulsion and anger” when going through the documents. 

“They clearly show that Cape knew of the high risk of fatal disease, yet deliberately withheld information and lobbied the government to protect their profits,” she said. “As a result of their greed, many men and women, including my father, have lost their lives.”

UK asbestos maker withheld information on material’s risks, court papers show | UK news | The Guardian

Russian rapper Oxxxymiron cancelled his upcoming tour in Russia and has instead organised charity concerts abroad – known as “Russians Against War” – to raise money for Ukrainian refugees.

Announcing the postponement of his Russian tour, Oxxxymiron explained that he could not “entertain people while Russian rockets fall on Ukraine, while residents of Kyiv are forced to hide in their basements and the metro, and while people are dying”.

 For many in the Global South it would mean a death sentence or a mass exodus of people but the USA perserveres.

The western United States will suffer “prolonged, persistent drought” for the second spring in a row, government scientists have said. The US National Weather Service (NWS) predicted continuing or worsening drought across a vast swathe of the country from California to Montana down to Texas.

It comes after the southwestern US experienced its most severe drought on record last year, exacerbated by historic high temperatures that a US government report blamed “significantly” on global warming.

Nearly 60 per cent of the continental US will experience minor to exceptional drought conditions. Severe to exceptional drought has persisted in some areas of the West since the summer of 2020 and drought has expanded to the southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley.  Dry conditions would increase the risk of wildfires in the Southwest and the central Great Plains region, following brutal fire seasons in California and Oregon. Southwest states such as California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah have been in drought for two years now, bringing crucial water reservoirs such as the Hoover Dam to all-time lows.

1.5 million is the number of children who have fled Ukraine as refugees since 24 February, and countless others have been displaced by violence inside the country.

 The annual World Happiness report found that Afghanistan came last out of 149 countries examined in the survey.

Should we be surprised?

The pacifists have no answer to this question. What is our attitude to war? We are not pacifists. War is always barbarous and brutal, horribly so. Think of the bombing and the atrocities perpetrated. War is always evil and it generates other evils too. The soldier himself is a slave hired by the ruling class to shoot other slaves. Whoever defends any form of militarism, any arming for wholesale killing, defends the most damnable feature of capitalism and can have no part or parcel in the doctrine or movement of socialism. The socialist revolution, which will put an end to capitalism, must be international. Therefore, the workers must not think so much of their country as of their solidarity with the workers of all countries.

1. Modern wars are part and parcel of the capitalist system.

 

2. Capitalist economy must continually expand or the nation suffers from depression, unemployment and internal revolt.

 

3. Each capitalist nation is continually driven to seek new markets, new sources of raw materials and new areas for investment.

 

4. The capitalist need to expand continually makes each industrially developed power an imperialist aggressor – whether it is Britain, Russia or the United States.

 

5. There can be no end to imperialist wars without an end to capitalism.

 

6. Permanent peace is only possible when planned production for use has taken the place of competitive production for profits. Planned production for use on an international scale means a World Socialism

It is a crude naked struggle for economic power, raw materials, spheres of influence, strategic areas.

“It’s a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight,” was once a common slogan. Our position is one of irreconcilable opposition to any war waged by the capitalist ruling class. The struggle against militarism is the working-class struggle against capitalism itself.

Let the working class be realistic. Let it likewise trust only its own organised power. The international solidarity of labour is the only world organisation that can block new wars. The enemy is the same – vested interests, capitalism, and there will never be peace, freedom, equality, justice until THE SYSTEM is swept away. The only campaign for peace, if it is not to be a Utopia, must consist in the socialist organisation of the workers of the whole world for the overthrow of capitalism. When things are no longer produced for profit, but for the use of those who make them, then there will no longer be any necessity for capitalist armed forces. When millions of workers are set free from making munitions and provisions of warfare, then they will be able to turn their attention to building themselves better houses, producing more and better food and clothing for their families. It is either capitalism and military hell, or socialism and cooperative and peaceful enjoyment of the bounty of the earth. 

The time is here to choose.

 The five largest firms in Switzerland according to annual turnover are not banks or pharmaceuticals but commodity traders. Most of the 900 companies that trade raw materials are based in Geneva, Zug or Lugano.  According to a Swiss government report from 2018, the trade volume reaches almost $1 trillion ($903.8 billion).

 It is one of the most important trading hubs for raw materials in the world. About a third of the oil that is traded globally is bought and sold in Geneva. Two-thirds of the trade in base metals such as zinc, copper and aluminum are conducted in Switzerland, as are two-thirds of the trade in grain.

 Oliver Classen, media officer at the Swiss NGO Public Eye, says that “this sector accounts for a much larger part of the GDP in Switzerland than tourism or the machinery industry.”

Gas and oil exports are the main source of income for Russian President Vladimir Putin. They account for 30 to 40% of the Russian budget. In 2021, Russian state corporations earned around $180 billion (€163 billion) from oil exports alone. This is money now being used to finance the war in Ukraine.

As long as politicians keep debating and Western countries do not impose sanctions on raw materials, Swiss commodity traders will continue making millions from Russian raw materials and help to fill Putin’s war coffers.

80% of Russian raw materials are traded via Switzerland. Russian oil and gas flows largely thanks to deals signed on Swiss desks. Swiss commodity traders continued to turn a blind eye to what the Russian state was doing with this money. 

Angela Mattli, joint managing director at Public Eye, said she deplored the fact that all of this was “quite legal within the framework of Swiss legislation, which had huge loopholes for commodity traders.”

Raw materials are often traded directly between governments and via commodities exchanges. However, they can also be traded freely, and Swiss companies have specialized in direct sales. One important reason is that in Switzerland there is certainly enough of the most important raw material for the commodities trade — capital. 

Depending on the current price of crude oil, a tanker load can cost $100 million — money that most companies do not have to hand. Certain instruments for handling such business have been developed in Switzerland. In raw materials transactions, letters of credits or L/Cs are often used. A bank will give a loan to a trader and as collateral receive a document making it the owner of the commodity. As soon as the buyer pays the bank, the document and thus ownership of the commodity are transferred to him/her. The system gives traders more credit lines without their creditworthiness having to be checked, and the bank has the value of the commodity as security.

This is an example of transit trade, where only the money flows through Switzerland. The raw materials usually do not touch Swiss soil but go directly from the country of origin to the recipient country. Thus, no details about the magnitude of the transaction land on the desk of the Swiss customs authority. The Swiss National Bank publishes certain details but no precise information about the flow of raw materials. What is clear is that everything is unclear.

“The whole commodities trade is under-recorded and underregulated,” said Elisabeth Bürgi Bonanomi, a senior lecturer in law and sustainability at Bern University. “You have to dig around to collect data and not all information is available.”

Who is buying what from whom at what price remains in the dark. The owners of unlisted commodity trading companies in Switzerland are mostly unknown.  “There are quite a few companies that fly under the radar of the authorities and whose actual beneficiaries are not known because, for example, they are managed in opaque offshore holdings,” said Classen. This makes for a good investment opportunity for Russian oligarchs.

The lack of regulation is very appealing to commodity traders — especially because many raw materials are mined in non-democratic countries. “Unlike the financial market, where there are rules for tackling money laundering and illegal or illegitimate financial flows, and a financial market supervisory authority, there is currently no such thing for commodity trading,” financial and legal expert at Public Eye David Mühlemann explained.

Oliver Classen from Public Eye revealed that some commodity traders had become lenders to entire countries. Glencore, for example, had given over $1 billion to Chad as credit in return for access to the country’s crude oil reserves.

Swiss commodities traders help fill Putin′s war coffers | Europe | News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 18.03.2022

 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked significant rises in energy and food prices.

A US think tank – the Center for Global Development – is now warning that the scale of these spikes could push more than 40 million people around the world into “extreme poverty”.

 Russia and Ukraine account for 29% of the world’s wheat. Russia and Belarus account for one-sixth of the world’s fertiliser.

In the past two decades, there have been two significant spikes in food commodity prices, 2007 and 2010. The World Bank estimated the 2007 spike may have pushed up to an extra 155m people into extreme poverty with separate work suggesting the 2010 surge had the same effect on 44m people. 

Food prices are already high, and tens of millions will fall into extreme poverty and go hungry in the coming year. 

Price Spike Caused by Ukraine War Will Push Over 40 Million into Poverty: How Should We Respond? | Center For Global Development (cgdev.org)