Honduras will choose a new president on November 28.

The current Honduran government headed by President Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States, despite fraud and violence marking his second-term electoral victory in 2017, an illegal second term but for an improvised constitutional amendment, testimony in a U.S. court naming him as “a key player in Honduras’ drug-trafficking industry” and, lastly, his designation by U.S.  prosecutors as a “co-conspirator” in the trial convicting his brother Tony on drug-trafficking charges.

Some 200 U. S. companies operate in Honduras. The United States accounted for 53% of Honduras’s $7.8 billion export total in 2019. U.S goods, led by petroleum products, made up 42.2 % of Honduran imports.

Honduras’s Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDE) reflect planners’ exuberant imagination. They envision privately owned and operated “autonomous cities and special investment districts” attracting foreign investment and welcoming tourist and real estate ventures, industrial parks, commercial and financial services, and mining and forestry activities.

Banks and corporations active in the ZEDEs will appoint administrative officers,  mostly from abroad and many from the United States. They, not Honduras’s government, will devise regulations and arrangements for taxation, courts, policing, education and healthcare for residents.

The first ZEDEs are taking shape now. Meanwhile.

Honduras’s poverty rate is 70%, up from 59.3% in 2019. Of formally employed workers, 70% work intermittently; 82.6% of Honduran workers participate in the informal sector.  A severe drought over five years has decimated staple crops. Nearly half a million Hondurans, many of them small farmers, are struggling to put food on the table. The UN humanitarian affairs agency OCHA reports that as of February 2021, “The severity of acute food insecurity in Honduras has reached unprecedented levels.” The Covid-19 pandemic led to more than 50,000 businesses closing and almost half a million Hondurans losing their jobs. Some 30,000small businesses disappeared in 2020 owing to floods caused by hurricanes. Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narcotraffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished.  Honduras was Latin America’s third most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third highest murder rate. 

For the sake of survival, many Hondurans follow the path of family and friends: they leave. Among Central American countries, Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration to wherever between 1990 and 2020. The rate increases were: 530%, 293%, and 154%, respectively. Between 2012 and 2019, family groups arriving from Honduras and apprehended at the U.S. border skyrocketed from 513 in 2012 to 188,368 in 2019.

Department of Homeland Security figures show that between 2015 and 2018 the yearly average number of Hondurans apprehended at the border was 63,741. Recently the number has increased – 268,992 Honduran refugees.

Defense spending for 2019 grew by 5.3 %; troop numbers almost doubled. For Hernández, according to one commentator, “militarism has been his right arm for continuing at the head of the executive branch.”  The military forces, like the police, are corrupt, traffic illicit drugs, and are “detrimental” to human rights.

According to Amnesty International, “The government of Hernández has adopted a policy of repression against those who protest in the streets. The use of military forces to control demonstrations across the country has had a deeply concerning toll on human rights.”

The U.S. A. has provided training, supplies, and funding for Honduras’s police and military. Soto Cano, a large U.S. air base in eastern Honduras, periodically receives from 500 to 1500 troops who undertake short-term missions throughout the region, supposedly for humanitarian or drug-war purposes.

US Intervention and Capitalism Have Created a Monster in Honduras – CounterPunch.org

 A major survey by the housing charity Shelter has revealed 1.9m households could be suffering physical and mental problems as a result of poor housing conditions as well as uncertainty caused by struggles to pay the rent and repeated evictions.

A quarter of all renters said they were affected by damp and mould and by being unable to heat their homes.

 Almost one in four renters said their housing situation had left them feeling “stressed and anxious” since the start of the pandemic.

“The cost of poor housing is spilling out into overwhelmed GP surgeries, mental health services, and hours lost from work…millions of renters are living in homes that make them sick because they are mouldy, cold, unaffordable and grossly insecure.”” said Shelter’s chief executive, Polly Neate. 

Poor housing harms health of 20% of renters in England, says Shelter | Housing | The Guardian

 For many, the threat of annihilation from global nuclear war has been replaced by the global warming crisis and the protestS of the past to eliminate nuclear weapons have all but disappeared. All the nuclear-armed nations are modernising their capacity to wage nuclear war.

According to a report entitled Profiteers of Armageddon: Producers of the next generation of nuclear weapons, authored by William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy, US decades long “nuclear modernization” plan will cost up to $2 trillion. The U.S.A. is embarking upon a plan to build the next generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines as well as warheads.

 The modernization plan “ignores the fact that building a new generation of nuclear weapons at this time will make the world a more dangerous place and increase the risk of nuclear war while fueling the new arms race,” Hartung explains.

The U.S. nuclear weapons budget has climbed in recent years to over $43 billion in the Biden administration’s proposed budget for  2022, and warns that “this figure will grow dramatically,” pointing to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate that parts of the Pentagon’s plan “will cost tens of billions each over the next decade, including $145 billion for ballistic missile submarines, $82 billion for the new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), and $53 billion for the new nuclear-armed bomber.”

“And the costs will not end there,” the report continues, noting that “the estimated lifetime cost of building and operating the new ICBM is $264 billion.”

 “A handful of prime contractors” are the initial recipients and main beneficiaries of public money spent on bombers, missiles, and submarines, “the funds trickle down to subcontractors” that often include other prominent companies. The report names firms such as Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

From 2012 to 2020, campaign contributions from contractors mentioned in the brief topped $119 million, more than a quarter of which was in the 2020 cycle alone. They also spent $57.9 million on lobbying last year, employing 380 lobbyists, over two-thirds of whom “passed through the ‘revolving door’ from top positions in Congress, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy to work for nuclear weapons contractors as executives or board members.”

“And it should be noted that the revolving door swings both ways,” the report adds, noting that “three of the past five secretaries of defense worked as lobbyists or board members of major nuclear weapons contractors before taking up their positions in the Pentagon: James Mattis (General Dynamics); Mark Esper (Raytheon); and Lloyd Austin (Raytheon).”

 “It’s long past time that we stopped allowing special interest lobbying and corporate profits stand in the way of a more sensible nuclear policy,” Hartung says.

‘Profiteers of Armageddon’: Report Reveals Who Benefits From US ‘Nuclear Modernization’ Plan (commondreams.org)

  The International Energy Agency has said in its annual World Energy Outlook carbon emissions would decrease by just 40% by the middle of the century if countries stick to their climate pledges.

That will fall 60% short of their 2050 net zero target.

The IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol explained, “We are witnessing an unsustainable recovery from the pandemic,” he said, pointing to sections of the report that show coal use growing strongly, contributing to the second-largest increase in CO2 emissions in history.

The IEA estimates that 70% of the $4tn investment required to reach net zero must flow into emerging markets and developing economies and for organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to prioritise clean energy projects in those countries, acting as a catalyst for private capital.

Carbon emissions ‘will drop just 40% by 2050 with countries’ current pledges’ | Cop26 | The Guardian

 About half of the world’s population will suffer from water insecurity by 2050, found The State of Climate Services 2021: Water , a new report from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO).



The report said:

“More than 2 billion people are living in countries under water stress and 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least one month per year. Meanwhile, water-related hazards have increased in frequency for the past 20 years. Since 2000, flood-related disasters have increased by 134%, most deaths and economic losses occurred in Asia, where warning systems require strengthening, the number and duration of droughts also increased by 29%, and most deaths were in Africa, again indicating the need for stronger warning systems.”



The report said:



”    In 2018, some 3.6 billion people globally had inadequate access to water for one month per year, which is expected to surpass five billion by 2050.

    In 2020, more than 20% of the world’s river basins had experienced either rapid increases in their surface water area indicative of flooding, a growth in reservoirs and newly inundated land; or rapid declines in surface water area indicating drying up of lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, floodplains and seasonal water bodies. Rapid changes in surface water extent and availability are contributing to elevated disaster risks and potentially negatively affecting water-dependent sectors, e.g. agriculture, energy. More than 80% of wetlands are estimated to have been lost since the pre-industrial era. Despite an average of 58% of countries’ transboundary basin areas having an operational arrangement for water cooperation, only 24 countries reported that all their transboundary basins are covered by such.

    Globally, 56% of household wastewater flows was safely treated in 2020, with regional values ranging from 25 to 80%, indicating that progress remains uneven across the globe. Data from 42 countries reporting on the generation and treatment of total wastewater flows indicate that less than a third received at least some treatment in 2015. The situation is similar for industrial wastewater flows, although here data are only available for 14 countries. In all world regions, and in low-, medium- and high-income countries alike, many water bodies were still in good condition; in 2020, 60% of water bodies assessed in 89 countries had good ambient water quality. However, water quality data are not collected routinely in a majority of countries; especially lower income countries rely on relatively few measurements from relatively few water bodies and lack suitable environmental water quality standards. 

Therefore global status and trends cannot be completely assessed.”

  Lebanon’s spiralling economic meltdown continues and the UN is calling for urgent reforms as extreme poverty deepens and starvation becomes a “growing reality” for thousands of people.

“The situation remains a living nightmare for ordinary people, causing unspeakable suffering and distress for the most vulnerable,” United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon Najat Rochdi said. “Starvation has become a growing reality for thousands of people,” Rochdi said. “Today, we estimate that more than one million Lebanese need relief assistance to cover their basic needs, including food.” Rochdi said Lebanon’s fate lies in the political will to make its economy viable again, and that humanitarian interventions are not the solution.

“Humanitarian action is meant to be by nature short-term, temporary and unsustainable,” she said. “It is not meant to solve the root causes and drivers of a crisis.”

 78 percent of the Lebanese lives below the poverty line – some three million people – with 36 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. Almost a quarter of the population was not able to meet their “dietary needs” by the end of last year, the UN said.

The Lebanese pound has lost 90 percent of its value against the dollar amid Lebanon’s economic meltdown over the past two years. Buying power has dwindled as millions are locked out of their savings in the country’s stricken banks. A fuel crisis has paralysed much of Lebanon over the past few months, causing large-scale power outages and crippling hospitals. Life-saving medicines have been missing from pharmacy shelves, including cancer treatments. Families have had to dig deeper into their pockets to buy them at inflated rates through the black market if they can afford to do so.

“We’ve never seen these growing needs among the Lebanese population before,” World Food Programme spokeswoman Rasha Abou Dargham told Al Jazeera. The organisation now provides food assistance to one in four people in the country, with demand for food assistance at an all-time high.

UN urges Lebanon to implement reforms as extreme poverty grows | United Nations News | Al Jazeera

A new analysis has found prominent companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are backing business groups that are fighting landmark climate legislation, despite their own promises to combat the climate crisis.  Corporate lobby groups and organizations have mobilized to oppose the proposed $3.5tn budget bill put forward by Democrats, which contains unprecedented measures to drive down planet-heating gases.

Most large US corporations have expressed concern over the climate crisis or announced their own goals to cut greenhouse gases. Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people, has said that the climate crisis is the “biggest threat to our planet” and the company he founded, Amazon, has created a pledge for businesses to cut their emissions to net zero by 2040. Microsoft has promised to be “carbon negative” within a decade from now and Disney is aiming to use only renewable-sourced electricity within the same timeframe.

But these leading companies, and others, either support or actively steer the very lobby groups that are attempting to sink the bill that has ambitions to tackle the climate crisis, threatening one of the last major legislative efforts that will help decide whether parts of the world plunge into a new, barely livable climatic state. If enacted, the bill would establish a system to phase out emissions from the US electricity system, provide payments to prop up carbon-free nuclear energy and support the adoption of electric vehicles.

“Major corporations love to tell us how committed they are to addressing the climate crisis and building a sustainable future, but behind closed doors, they are funding the very industry trade groups that are fighting tooth and nail to stop the biggest climate change bill ever,” said Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, which compiled the analysis. “Hiding behind these shady groups doesn’t just put our environment at risk – it puts these companies’ household names and reputations in serious jeopardy,” Herrig said.

The US Chamber of Commerce has vowed to “do everything we can to prevent this tax-raising, job-killing reconciliation bill from becoming law”. The leading business lobby group’s board includes executives from companies including Microsoft, Intuit, United Airlines and Deloitte, which have all expressed concern over climate change – Deloitte even includes teaching the climate crisis to employees in its staff training – and have made various promises to reduce emissions.

 The Business Roundtable, has said it is “deeply concerned” about the passage of the bill, largely because it raises taxes on the wealthy. The organization is made up of company chief executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, who has called for stronger action on the climate emergency from governments and businesses. Other members include Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon, Sundar Pichai, who heads Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Darren Woods, chief executive of the oil giant Exxon.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group that includes Bayer and AstraZeneca among its members, has run adverts attacking the proposed bill.

The Rate Coalition, another lobby group that has Disney, FedEx and Verizon as members, is also planning an advertising blitz to help kill off the legislation.

The National Association of Manufacturers – backed by Johnson&Johnson, Dow and Goodyear – has said it is attempting to upend the bill “in every way you can imagine”.

Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill | US political lobbying | The Guardian

 Friday 1 October 19.30 BST (GMT + 1)

  The average national house price was hitting between NZ$937,000 and $1m, nearly eight times the annual household income. 

Real Estate Institute data shows there was a 31% increase over the year to July.

Wellington and Auckland have some of the least affordable property markets in the world – homeownership rates in New Zealand have been falling since the early 1990s across all age brackets, but the drop is especially pronounced for people in their 20s and 30s.

 A spokesperson for Consumer NZ, Gemma Rasmussen,  said that with house prices rising so quickly, even high-income millennials will struggle to save for a deposit without the benefit of intergenerational wealth.

 “We’re heading for a place where there are two New Zealands: the people who have property, they’re secure and their capital gains will continue to grow, and then there are people who are locked out.”

‘Haves and have-nots’: how the housing crisis is creating two New Zealands – a photo essay | New Zealand | The Guardian

The World Socialist Party (New Zealand)

P.O. Box 1929

Auckland, NI, New Zealand

Email: moggiegrayson@gmail.com