Afghanistan today is a devastated country. Given the role European NATO  countries have played in these military interventions, one would think that the fate of the Afghan citizens would be one of the main preoccupations and concerns of European politicians. Video of desperate Afghans clinging on to aeroplanes taking off from Kabul and falling to their deaths shocked many.

European politicians have done relatively little to help Afghans in view of their moral responsibility for their plight.

France and the United Kingdom have gone only as far as proposing the creation of a United Nations-run safe zone in Kabul for those wanting to flee Taliban rule, while Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has said “evacuations, immediate humanitarian aid, longer-term development aid” were discussed at a G7 meeting.

 Afghanistan is facing an imminent humanitarian catastrophe and an exodus of people seeking asylum, so this is by far not enough. 

Worse still, some European politicians have started using the Afghan crisis as an opportunity to score political points.

Nigel Farage was quick to raise the fear of a flood of Muslims. “You can now see a wave of people leaving Afghanistan, and we already have numbers we quite simply can’t cope with,” he said. “How do we know that the Taliban and other extremist groups aren’t using this route to get their operatives into our country?”

Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League and Italy’s former interior minister, echoed Farage in his August 18 tweet, saying: “Humanitarian corridors for women and children in danger, certainly yes. Doors open for thousands of men, including potential terrorists, absolutely not.” 

So much for preserving family values by splitting families up. 

Only those Afghans who directly assisted the German military should receive asylum, the right-wing Alternative for Germany candidate,  Tino Chrupalla, said, and that all other Afghans should be turned away at the German border.

French President Emmanuel Macron said France should “anticipate and protect itself from a wave of migrants” from Afghanistan. 

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has gone as far as suggesting that Europe should keep Europe-bound Afghan refugees in third countries.

The European Union ministers of home affairs made it clear that their main priority is preventing “illegal immigration”. They declared that the EU “remain determined to effectively protect the EU external borders and prevent unauthorised entries” adding that the bloc should “strengthen the support to the countries in Afghanistan’s immediate neighbourhood to ensure that those in need receive adequate protection primarily in the region”.

Such proposals to externalise migration management and humanitarian protection through the creation of “buffer zones” or offshore reception centres are not new.

The EU signed deals with Turkey, Libya and others to stop refugees from entering the bloc, and take back “all migrants not in need of international protection.” Turkey’s Foreign Minister has already made it clear that his country is not willing to agree to a similar, disastrous deal in the aftermath of the US’s exit from Afghanistan. 

Exporting the migration crisis to third countries and adopting anti-migrant rhetoric may provide quick fixes for European leaders. But such strategies, as seen many times in the recent past, will not pay off in the long run. “Fortress Europe” does not keep the EU safe and prosperous, but instead fuels ethnonationalism and hate within the bloc’s borders.

Europe is politicising Afghan refugees instead of helping them | Opinions | Al Jazeera

 Leading European banks are booking around €20bn (£17bn) a year – equivalent to 14% of their total profits – in tax havens, with Barclays, HSBC and NatWest Group among those enjoying the lowest tax rates, according to an analysis, conducted by the EU Tax Observatory, of 36 big banks required to publicly report country-by-country data on their activities.

Banks said to enjoy a particularly low effective tax rate on their profits, of less than 15%, including Barclays, HSBC and NatWest.

The use of tax havens by banks is seen by many activists as particularly egregious since more than €1.5tn in taxpayer money was used to rescue ailing banks in Europe after the 2008 financial crisis.

Tax systems around the world have been increasingly left behind in recent years by the shifting of profits by large multinationals. Tax abuse by multinationals and avoidance by rich individuals is said by the Tax Justice Network campaign group to cost nations $427bn a year in lost revenues. The percentage of profits booked in tax havens has not changed over the last seven years despite hopes that country-by-country reporting introduced in 2014 would lead to a shift in practice.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 130 countries, representing more than 90% of global GDP, backed a global minimum tax rate on multinationals of 15% last July, after an initial attempt by US president Joe Biden to secure agreement on a 21% rate. Parallel measures to limit the shifting of profits into tax havens by the world’s 100 largest companies were proposed by Biden and are now under discussion at the OECD. The proposed treaty would give governments in the countries where multinationals have headquartered the right to apply a top-up levy to ensure the full global minimum rate is paid on all income.

However, reports suggest the list of 100 companies is likely to exclude banks after lobbying by the City of London and other international financial centres.

The research names 17 countries and territories as havens for the purposes of the study: Bahamas, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Macao, Malta, Mauritius, Panama, and Qatar. Of those territories, the highest tax rate is found in Luxembourg (15%), while Bermuda, Panama, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands have a zero rate.

European banks storing €20bn a year in tax havens | Tax and spending | The Guardian

 The US legal system has effectively allowed one of the country’s richest families to buy its way out of accountability for what a White House commission called “America’s national nightmare” of mass opioid addiction. Big money has a powerful and malign influence on many aspects of American life.

A New York bankruptcy court approved a deal for the dissolution of the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, which kicked off the opioid epidemic two decades ago with its illegal drive to sell a high-strength painkiller, OxyContin. Purdue’s owners, members of two branches of the now-notorious Sackler family, are estimated to have made more than $10bn from the drug – even as the opioid crisis claimed more than 600,000 lives, with the toll climbing higher by the year.

 The Sacklers in return for handing over only a small fraction of the money they made from OxyContin still remain one of the richest families in the country, while continuing to deny their responsibility for their role in creating the opioid crisis.

Purdue Pharma’s reputation is little better than that of a Mexican cartel. The company has twice pleaded guilty to felonies, in 2007 and last year, including lying about the risk of addiction from OxyContin, bribing doctors to prescribe it and defrauding the federal government. But that barely scratches the surface of the company’s corruption in pursuit of profit: it used its money and influence to warp the practice of medicine, compromise drug regulators and keep open the doors to mass prescribing of opioids even as evidence of an epidemic grew.

Several members of the Sackler family served on the company’s board and as senior executives, and some were directly involved in the drive to push OxyContin on unsuspecting Americans. And they happily creamed off the profits. Dr Richard Sackler, a former president and chairman of Purdue Pharma, was instrumental in persuading the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve OxyContin on the false grounds that it was less addictive than other prescription opioids. He then promised that “a blizzard of prescriptions” for the drug would bury the competition. When Sackler was asked at the bankruptcy hearing whether he, his family or his firm bore any responsibility for the opioid epidemic, he simply replied: “No”.

 Yet the bankruptcy process has granted them sweeping immunity from further civil lawsuits over the opioid crisis without acknowledgment of wrongdoing. In fact, in exchange for a payment of $4.5bn, less than half of their earnings from Purdue, the Sacklers as individuals won’t have to declare personal bankruptcy.

Georgetown university law professor, Adam Levitin, told Congress in July, the Sacklers have worked the system so that they “will actually emerge from Purdue’s bankruptcy richer than they went into it” because the payments will be spread over nearly a decade during which the family’s assets are likely to grow by more than $4.5bn.

 The agreement deprives those victimised by the Sacklers, who oversaw and profited from Purdue Pharma’s criminal behaviour, of their right to a day in court. Other critics of the decision have wondered how a bankruptcy court can grant legal immunity to people who have not declared bankruptcy.

But that is the practice that has evolved under laws, many written under the influence of corporations, that enable businesses to in effect hand-pick the judges who will handle their bankruptcy cases. The US has 375 bankruptcy judges but, as Levitin told Congress, just three oversaw the majority of cases filed by large companies last year. Purdue Pharma chose to file with one of those three, Judge Robert Drain, to decide the conditions of its bankruptcy. Although Purdue is based in Connecticut, it filed for bankruptcy in White Plains, New York, where Drain is the only bankruptcy judge. It’s unlikely to have gone unnoticed by the Sacklers’ lawyers that Drain had an unusual record of staying lawsuits against third parties who have not filed for bankruptcy.

 of Drain’s first steps was to block efforts to sue individual members of the Sackler family, even though they were separate from the Purdue bankruptcy case. Then he permitted the Sacklers to effectively hold the plaintiffs hostage by offering a stark choice between settling for a cut of the profits of misery in return for wiping the legal slate clean or facing years of court battles. States, municipalities and families desperate for money to cope with the huge social consequences of the epidemic were left with little choice but to agree, although many expressed their distaste.

Washington state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, called the plan “morally and legally bankrupt”. Sackler and other members of his family have spent their time smearing the victims. They have claimed that OxyContin was a legal drug used illegally and that responsibility, therefore, falls on the “criminal addicts” who overdosed. As evidence of a crisis grew and doctors witnessing the devastation sounded warnings, the din of corporate money drowned them out. The quarter of a billion dollars a year the drug industry spends on lobbying bought the complicity of politicians, influenced regulators, weakened investigations by the justice department and stalled action by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Purdue used its political muscle to head off even more serious criminal charges and to keep its executives out of prison.

 No other country has experienced the same scale of opioid addiction and death, in part because corporations in other countries do not wield the same influence over the practice and regulation of medicine. Neither did Purdue act alone in this crisis. Drug distributors and pharmacies jumped on the bandwagon. Other opioid manufacturers, such as Johnson & Johnson, raked in the profits of narcotic painkiller addiction.  The drug industry kept the doors to mass prescribing of opioids open for years not because they were an effective way to treat pain but because they were hugely profitable. Those same firms are now increasingly agreeing to payouts to head off a torrent of lawsuits – but it’s hard to conclude that they regard it as anything more than the cost of doing business. Not least because, like the members of the Sackler family behind Purdue, none of them admits to having done anything wrong.

Opioids have killed 600,000 Americans. The Sacklers just got off basically scot-free | Chris McGreal | The Guardian

President Xi Jinping of China intends to start regulating excessive wealth to ensure “common prosperity” within the country. 

In 2020, the richest 20% of China’s population earned more than 10 times the poorest 20%. 

 In 2018, the country’s richest 10% earned 41% of income, while the poorest 50% of the population earned only 14.4% of total income.

In 2020, the country of 1.4 billion claimed that it had achieved that goal in eight years, lifting nearly 100 million people out of extreme poverty. But experts dispute the truth of this claim, given, in part, that China’s definition of the poverty line is $1.69, compared to the World Bank’s $1.90.

 From Extinction Rebellion’s Twitter

“Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement. We do not trust any single ideology, we trust the people, chosen by sortition (like jury service) to find the best future for us all through a #CitizensAssembly A banner saying ‘socialism or extinction’ does not represent us”

XR sees talk of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ as politics while they see themselves as ‘beyond politics’ urging all people to bring pressure on governments to do more to tackle climate change.

 This means that they are basically a pressure group employing direct action and civil disobedience tactics to get capitalist governments to adopt a particular policy.

Leaving the way out to citizens assemblies is a cop-out. For all the merits of such assemblies and their potential usefulness in decision-making in a socialist society, today, most citizens will have the same ideas as they express in elections, i.e that they see no alternative to capitalism and so would come up with proposals to be implemented under capitalism.

 Countries facing crises frequently do not appear on the radar of the world media. The suffering of those living in Lebanon, a small nation of six million, is one example of the neglect of the news outlets.

According to the World Bank Lebanon Economic Monitor, the economic and financial ranks in the top 10, possibly top 3, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century.

Lebanon, the host of a great many refugees from neighbouring conflicts, is sinking deeper into poverty. Many Lebanese blame the ruling class for the devastating, multiple crises plaguing the nation, including a dramatic currency with inflation growing to 281% between June 2019 and June 2021. An alliance of assorted religious and political factions have captured power among themselves and has come to govern almost entirely in their own interests, through a system of patronage and cronyism, enjoying years of state funding while public services fell into a state of disrepair.

There are severe shortages in medicine and fuel. Poverty has drastically increased over the past year and is now affecting about three-quarters of the total population according to the  “Multidimensional Poverty in Lebanon: Painful Reality and Uncertain Prospects” report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). An even higher figure of 82% lives in multidimensional poverty, which takes into account factors other than income, such as access to health, education and public utilities. 

The country has also now been drawn into breaking the sanctions imposed against Iran with its fuel shortages requiring Iranian oil supplies to be delivered. Lebanon’s security agencies have been raiding petrol stations and suppliers allegedly hoarding fuel. Lebanon’s central bank subsidises medicines, fuel and wheat to keep them at the country’s official pegged rate of $1 to 1,500 Lebanese pounds. However, with its reserves is running dry.  Fuel shortages and power cuts have paralysed businesses such as restaurants, shops and industry as well as vital services like hospitals. UNICEF’s executive director, Henrietta Fore, said that ‘more than four million people face the prospect of critical water shortages or being completely cut off from safe water supply in the coming days’. The reason for the acute water shortage was that there was no longer sufficient power to run Lebanon’s pumping stations and wells. 

Lebanon has also now entered into an agreement with another diplomatic pariah, Bashar al-Assad, to facilitate the transfer of energy through Syria.

ESCWA last year, proposed for the richest 10 per cent in Lebanon, who held nearly $91 billion of wealth at the time, to fund the gap for poverty eradication by making annual contributions of 1% of their net wealth. Alas, a forlorn hope although it did not stop ESCWA Executive Secretary, Rola Dashti, repeating her call for the establishment of a social solidarity fund.

 President Michel Aoun confessed that “The foiling of every plan proposed for financial and economic recovery, or the failure to devise it in the first place, means one thing, which is that the corrupt system that is still controlling the country and the people fears accountability and penalization.” He added,  lamented that “the people are robbed and are being robbed on daily basis.”

Naturally enough, he exempted himself from his own condemnation.

 A feeling of being away from industrial pollution has encouraged a sense that climate change is not an urgent and crucial issue for New Zealanders. How wrong that it is not a priority.

New Zealand has recorded its warmest ever winter, and scientists say that climate change is driving temperatures ever higher. 

The underlying warming trend could be tracked through carbon dioxide concentration, which had increased in New Zealand from 320 parts per million 50 years ago to about 412 parts per million today.

Snowfall at lower elevations was well below average this winter as it was often replaced with rain, which could make for lower river levels later in the year because there would be less snowmelt. That could impact irrigation for farms.

There were also more extreme weather events, Fedaeff said, including severe flooding in some places and dry spells in others.

Prof James Renwick, a climate scientist at the Victoria University of Wellington, said the changes were also putting pressure on natural ecosystems and that over time more species would face extinction. It was imperative for humans to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. 

“If we don’t get on top of warming soon, there is going to be grief for large sections of the world.”

Prof. Renwick said New Zealand had talked a lot about climate change but had so far done little to curb its emissions. He said there were plenty of natural resources like wind, sun and water that could provide renewable power for the nation’s energy needs.

“New Zealand could become world-leading in green energy and a green economy.”

New Zealand records its warmest ever winter with average temperature of 9.8C | New Zealand | The Guardian

Why not investigate the World Socialist Party (New Zealand), a global party for the elimination of global problems.

World Socialist Party (New Zealand) P.O. Box 1929

Auckland, NI, New Zealand

E-mail: moggiegrayson@gmail.com

 Roma communities driven from Romania’s booming city of Cluj-Napoca say the authorities treat them like human garbage.  Pata Rat is the country’s biggest landfill and long one of its most glaring environmental sins. For decades, pollution leached from untreated waste and garbage fires blazed. Under pressure from the European Union, the city began work on closing the site in 2015. Some 2.5 million metric tons (2.8 million US tons) of waste, accumulated over 70 years. Two “temporary storage” landfills set up beside the old one in 2015 are still growing steadily, and experts say the old waste was never properly dealt with.

 1,500 Roma people are still living here with  the environmental hazard on their doorstep.

This was not an ecological landfill; it was not built in line with European standards,” said Ciprian-Valentin Nodis, a researcher from northern Romania and founding member of the Interethnic Association of Dumitrița.

“All these toxic substances went into the soil, into the groundwater. Everything in the area is polluted.”

The Roma residents of Pata Rat began to arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were driven by poverty to move to the landfill and work as waste pickers, but most have come in successive waves of evictions since Cluj-Napoca began to see a real estate boom in the 2000s. The last was in 2010, when local authorities evicted 350 inhabitants from Coastei Street near the city center. Their new home was to be a complex of small, modular units nestled between Pata Rat’s existing camps. 

The Roma community on Coastei Street was well integrated. They had been there for generations, they paid rent and utilities on their publicly owned homes, and their children attended local schools and kindergartens. Yet suddenly they were being dumped on the city’s trash heap. “They considered us garbage, not humans,” said Linda Greta Zsiga, “and they thought we deserve to live there.”

Seven out of ten Romanians said they don’t trust the Roma. 

Between 20% and 30% said Roma people have too many rights, that the state should be allowed to use violence against Roma, or that discrimination and hate speech against the Roma should not be punished.

Such attitudes are not unique to Romania. Across Europe, racism against the continent’s largest ethnic minority results in denial of basic civil rights, exclusion from employment and public services, and — perhaps most strikingly — the marginalization of Roma communities to areas that lack adequate water, sanitation and waste management. 

 A study published last year by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) on “”environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe” found that the Roma were “disproportionately exposed to environmental degradation and pollution stemming from waste dumps and landfills, contaminated sites, or dirty industries.”

The EEB study describes one of the major factors in environmental racism against the Roma as forced eviction from “places with high economic value.” 

The Coastei community wasn’t given a reason for their eviction. But Zsiga has no doubt why they were moved. “They wanted to ‘clean’ Cluj of Roma,” she said. “Now very few Roma still live in the city.” 

A 2012 report by the UN Development Program found that 22% of adults living at Pata Rat suffered from chronic disease or some form of disability. Researchers documented a high incidence of skin infections, asthma, bronchitis, high blood pressure and heart and stomach problems, and a report by the European Roma Rights Centre found that over two years following their eviction, reported health problems more than doubled among the Coastei community. 

An NGO worker in the area said respiratory diseases remain common, including among children. And economically, the closure of the dump has made life in Pata Rat even harder. 

Residents had been taking matters into their own hands. In 2012, Zsiga and others from Coastei camp set up an association that’s working with other NGOs to campaign for housing solutions for Pata Rat, and suing the authorities over the evictions. They are currently awaiting a decision on their case from the European Court of Human Rights.

Living in a sea of trash: Roma fight environmental racism in Romania | Global Ideas | DW | 05.09.2021

 A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years’ worth of taxes the company did not pay. 

The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits.

Between 2008 and 2014, Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report.

 In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. 

The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75.