Linked to the coronavirus pandemic, the number of babies born in France in January fell by 13 percent, the biggest drop in 45 years. 53,900 babies born in January 2021, down from 62,180 in January 2020

National statistics agency INSEE said that the “context of a health crisis and huge uncertainty may have discouraged couples from procreating or prompted them to postpone their parenting project for several months”.

In 2020, the number of births in France fell to its lowest level since World War II, with 735,000 children being born. In 2020, the birth rate in France fell to 1.84 children per woman, compared with 1.86 in 2019.

Covid-19 pandemic blamed for biggest drop in France’s births in 45 years (france24.com)

  10 of the U.S.’s largest cities will spend more on policing than public health during Fiscal Year 2021. Combined, these 10 cities’ policing budgets are 3.6 times greater than public health department budgets.  Public health departments are generally tasked with aiding vaccine distribution, combating foodborne illnesses, homelessness and environmental toxins, and supporting addiction treatment, among other health-promoting activities. In addition, nearly two-thirds of Americans live in counties that spend more than twice as much on policing as they spend on nonhospital healthcare, which includes public health.

Georgia’s COVID data task force was disassembled due to a lack of funds, and the state slashed its Fiscal Year 2022 public health budget by $7 million. Meanwhile, district and county health departments in Alabama were operating at 65 percent capacity in 2019 relative to 2010. Some county health departments in North Carolina offer such low salaries that they are unable to fill vacancies for public health nursing positions.

1,900 people have died from COVID-19 in Houston, Texas, the U.S.’s most diverse and fourth most populous city. Roughly 1.4 million people (19.7 percent of the city’s population) are without health insurance, and multiple hospitals’ ICUs have been at capacity for months. Yet, the city’s police department budget for 2021 is 10 times greater than the Houston Health Department’s budget, with the police allotted nearly $1 billion and the health department $100 million.

Arizona’s health budget is just two-thirds of Phoenix’s police department budget. Phoenix does not have its own health department. 

 Police budgets don’t always reflect the full extent of a department’s power or presence. For instance, the Los Angeles Public Library reimburses the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for millions of dollars in services, which is not reflected in the LAPD’s $1.9 billion budget. 

Rather than cut the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD’s) budget following the Black liberation uprising of 2020, New York City transferred funds for school resource officers — school police — to the Department of Education budget, an act of subterfuge.

The Federal 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, co-authored by Joe Biden and signed by then-President Bill Clinton, allocated $12 billion in state subsidies for prison construction, prioritizing states with the harshest sentencing laws.

10 Largest US Cities Will Spend More on Police Than Public Health This Year (truthout.org)

 “We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.” – Fred Hampton

 Billions of people around the world are being trapped in poverty by systemic tax abuses, corruption and money laundering, according to the UN panel on financial integrity for sustainable development.

It said up to 10% of the world’s wealth could be hidden offshore. Illicit financial flows (IFFs) — from tax abuse, cross-border corruption, and transnational financial crime — drain resources from sustainable development. They worsen inequalities, fuel instability, undermine governance, and damage public trust. Ultimately, they contribute to States not being able to fulfil their human rights obligations.

The Facti report says recovering losses to tax avoidance and evasion could help countries such as Bangladesh expand its social safety net to 9 million more elderly, in Chad it could pay for 38,000 classrooms, and in Germany it could build 8,000 wind turbines.

The panel of world leaders, central bank governors and business and civil society representatives said criminals were laundering assets worth as much as 2.7% of global GDP each year.

The UK has steadily cut the rate of corporation tax to 19%, among the lowest in the advanced world. However, the government is thought to be considering raising the tax rate. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5%. Several UK overseas territories and crown dependencies, including the British Virgin Islands, Guernsey and Jersey, have a zero corporation tax rate.

602e91032a209d0601ed4a2c_FACTI_Panel_Report.pdf (webflow.com)

Tax abuse and money laundering is trapping billions in poverty, says UN | Banking reform | The Guardian

 This week, the Biden administration did the unthinkable. It reopened a Trump-era detention site for migrant children. The detention center, a reconverted camp for oil field workers in Carrizo Springs, Texas, is expected to hold 700 children between the ages of 13 and 17, and dozens of kids have already arrived there.

Rather than seeking out new and better solutions, the Biden administration is instead trying to sell a public image of a kinder, gentler imprisonment. 

Mark Weber, spokesperson for Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency that oversees the welfare of unaccompanied migrant children told the Washington Post that “the Biden administration is moving away from the ‘law-enforcement focused’ approach of the Trump administration to one in which child welfare is more centric”. 

That may play well as a soundbite, but how welfare-centric is it to place children in jail in the first place? And if you don’t think it’s a jail, you should know that the “unaccompanied teens sent to the Carrizo Springs shelter will not be allowed to leave the facility”.

 The camp’s operation will be “based on a federal emergency management system”, where “trailers are labeled with names such as Alpha, Charlie and Echo”, names which are commonly used in military detention practices. (Camp Echo, for example, is a notorious site in Guantánamo Bay.

Staff members will not be in uniform  will “wear matching black-and-white T-shirts displaying their roles: disaster case manager, incident support, emergency management” and that the trailer is at the entrance, has flowers, butterflies and handmade posters.

  In 1997, a class-action lawsuit settlement established standards for the detention and release of unaccompanied minors taken into custody by the authorities. According to the Flores Settlement Agreement, the federal government must transfer these unaccompanied children to a non-secure and licensed facility within days of being in custody. In an emergency, the government can keep the children for up to 20 days while seeking to reunite them with family members or place them with a sponsor.

 The 66-acre Carrizo Springs site is a secure site (the kids can’t leave), is unlicensed by the state of Texas (it’s operated by a government contractor for the Office of Refugee Resettlement), and is expected to hold children for 30 days.  This internment camp is geographically remote and difficult to access.

The Biden administration seeks to deflect the criticism by assuring us their version of childhood detention is thoughtful and humane. The standard of values is now a very low bar, judged by whether something is simply “better” or “worse” than under Trump. Reforms have to go a lot further than merely reversing those of the previous president? The use the term “noncitizen” in place of “alien” when referring to immigrants is paying lip-service to cosmetic changes. Biden’s proposals contain admirable rhetoric about the need to address “root causes” of migration – but recent history shows us how, under xenophobic pressure,  noble-minded language can be used to adorn schemes whose ultimate effect is to keep people out, at considerable human cost.

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies were built upon foundations laid down by previous presidents. From the 1990s onwards, there was an increasing effort to criminalise unwanted migration and accelerate border security measures. In 2014, under Obama’s presidency – in which Biden served as vice president – about half of all federal arrests were immigration-related. 

Biden is locking up migrant children. Will the world still care with Trump gone? | US immigration | The Guardian

A new report published Thursday details United States so-called “counterterrorism” operations by the U.S. military in 85 nations since 2018 as part of its “Global War on Terror.” The report—published by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute and USA Today—features an interactive map showing U.S. military operations on every inhabited continent on Earth, including combat, training, exercises, and bases. 

According to the report, the U.S. has provided “counterterrorism” training or assistance in 79 nations since 2018, with U.S. troops carrying out bombing or ground attacks in 10 countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—over the same period. American forces participated in training exercises in 41 nations over the past three years.

 Additionally, under “Section 127e” programs, U.S. special operations forces have planned, controlled, and participated in missions in numerous African nations. 

Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. still maintains nearly 800 overseas military bases on six continents, according to independent research by Base Nation author David Vine. China—considered by many to be the greatest competitor and threat to the U.S.—has only one official overseas base, in Djibouti.

 $6.4 trillion the U.S. has spent on the never-ending War on Terror.  The report states that more than 15,000 U.S. troops and contractors, nearly 12,500 allied troops, 177,000 national military and police officers, 1,300 journalists and humanitarian aid workers, nearly 260,000 enemy fighters, and nearly 336,000 civilians have been killed.

84% of all shares held by American households are owned by the wealthiest 10%.

84% of all shares held by American households are owned by the wealthiest 10%.

 Black farmers peaked in number in 1920 when there were 949,889; today there are only 48,697; they account for only 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million farmers (95% of US farmers are white) and own 0.52% of America’s farmland. The acreage they have managed to hold on to is a quarter the size of white farmers’ acreage, on average. From 2006 to 2016, Black farmers were six times as likely to be foreclosed on as white farmers.

Biden nominated Tom Vilsack to head the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and it was confirmed by the Senate. Vilsack served two terms in the same role in the Obama administration and in between he held a high-paying job in Big Ag, paid a $1 million by Dairy Management. If Ohio congresswoman Marcia Fudge, a senior member of the House agriculture committee, was selected, as had been anticipated – she would have been the first Black woman to serve as agriculture secretary. 

 George Roberts farms 500 acres with his two brothers. A third-generation farmer, he was hoping for Fudge. “She could have understood what we were up against, she’s walked in our shoes. Pretty sure Vilsack never has,” he said.

Vilsack’s nomination was met with confusion, disappointment and anger. During Vilsack’s eight-year tenure under Obama, fewer loans were given to Black farmers than during the Bush administration, and the USDA foreclosed on Black farmers who had discrimination complaints outstanding, despite a 2008 farm bill moratorium on this practice.

In 2010 Vilsack fired Shirley Sherrod, a longtime Black farmer advocate and civil rights activist who was serving as the Georgia state director of rural development for the USDA, when a deceptively edited clip that made her appear racist towards a white farmer was circulated by the rightwing propagandist Andrew Breitbart. Vilsack later apologized and offered her a different high-level USDA role, which she declined.

At the Senate agriculture committee, Vilsack said in his opening remarks: “It’s a different time, and I’m a different person.” 

George Roberts is familiar with why many Black farmers call the USDA the “last plantation”.

 “Because we are still answering to ‘boss’. Can we do this, can we do that? They still have their hand over us, saying: no, you can’t.”

‘Tired of getting slapped in the face’: older Black farmers see little hope in Biden’s agriculture pick | US politics | The Guardian

 London has overtaken New York as home to the highest concentration of dollar millionaires in the world.

Nearly 875,000 Londoners are dollar millionaires (denoting assets worth more than £720,000).

It means one in 10 people living in London are dollar millionaires, with the data highlighting the yawning inequality gap in the capital. More than 2.5 million (or 28%) of those living in London are classed as “living in poverty”. 800,000 – or 39% – of the capital’s children are living in poverty. 

The high cost of housing in London is the main driver for categorising so many households as being wealthy.  London had the most so-called “prime” homes of any city in the world, with more than 68,000 units valued at more than £2m each. 

Despite the economic destruction wrought by the pandemic on millions of people with modest incomes, those who were already very rich have been able to increase their fortunes. More than 6,000 people joined the ranks of the ultra-wealthy last year as those in the top 0.1% were able to increase their already-vast fortunes despite the coronavirus pandemic. The number of ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs) – those with assets of more than $30m (£21.3m) – rose by 2.4% last year to 520,000. The UHNWI population is expected to swell by a further 27% to 663,483 by 2025, the report estimates, as huge fortunes are being made in China, Indonesia and India. The number of dollar millionaires is expected to soar by 41% in the same period.

 A person living in the UK would need a $1.8m (£1.3m) fortune to join the so-called 1% club of the richest people in the country.

In Monaco, where many of the world’s richest people live to avoid income taxes, a fortune of $7.9m is needed to join the top 1%. In Switzerland it is $5.1m. While in the US it is $4.4m, in Kenya the figure is $20,000.