As anger met the government’s announcement to reduce UK foreign aid spending on poorer nations to 0.5% of national income, it was revealed that it has already reneged on the Tory manifesto pledge by cutting primary and secondary education funding as part of £2.9bn of cuts made by Dominic Raab in July.  The overseas aid budget for education was slashed by more than a quarter by the government this year.

There has been a 26% reduction in spend on education, according to analysis of data from the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Other areas of health funding that are critical for children – such as basic nutrition, family planning and reproductive healthcare – have also been cut.

Richard Watts, a senior adviser in development finance at Save the Children, said: “Primary and secondary education were the focus of these education cuts. While they have maintained projects specifically related to girls’ education, the cuts to primary and secondary education will have an important impact on girls’ education.”

Kevin Watkins, the CEO of Save the Children, said: “Government promises on international development are a meaningless currency at the moment. You can’t cut the aid budget by a third, and over and above the existing cuts, without pushing many vulnerable children over the edge. On heath, on education, on vaccines. To simultaneously cut the aid budget by a third and tell the world you can lead on education. That is chutzpah. They have cut a quarter from the education spend. Even if you were to protect spend on education, girls can be robbed of education by household poverty, which means they go hungry, or are taken out of school. If girls are hungry they are not going to learn, if their families are poor they will be taken out of school for child labour or child marriage.”

Overseas aid budget for education cut by a quarter this year, data shows | Aid | The Guardian

A senior executive at Kingspan, Philip Heath, a technical manager at the company, which made combustible insulation used on Grenfell Tower, said a builder who questioned its product’s fire safety should “go fuck themselves”, the public inquiry into the fire has heard. He also said of a contractor trying to check what turned out to be misleading claims about the safety of its foam boards: “If they are not careful, we’ll sue the arse off them.” He also told friends that builders asking questions were mistaking him for “someone who gives a damn ”.

Kingspan Kooltherm K15 was one of two types of insulation used that turned out to be combustible. The inquiry has already heard from a former executive that the firm was involved in a “deliberate and calculated deceit”, which involved marketing the product without solid test evidence. Kingspan sold its insulation on the basis of testing carried out on an older version of the product that caught fire more slowly and emitted less heat.

Kingspan’s sister company, Kingspan Off-Site, also asked Heath about the fire performance of K15, and he did not divulge that it had performed worse in more recent tests than previously. He shared with a colleague what he was saying to Kingspan Off-Site to try to justify its use of the material, commenting: “I’m spinning so much I’m dizzy.”

Kingspan manager belligerent over fire concerns in 2008, Grenfell inquiry hears | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

 It is now more common for people using food banks to be in debt to the government than to family and friends or payday loan companies, the Trussell Trust has said. The UK’s biggest food bank network said half of all households visiting food banks struggled to afford essential goods such as food and clothes because they were repaying universal credit debts. The organisation said monthly deductions taken from claimants’ payments – in most cases to pay back a universal credit advance loan – could reduce household incomes by up to a third.

The most common deduction made by the Department for Work and Pensions is made in repayment of advance loans issued to tide claimants over during the minimum five-week wait for a first universal credit payment. Deductions are also made for benefit overpayment errors.  About 1.3 million new claimants were issued with advances between March and June.

“Our welfare system should increase people’s security, not suffering. But right now the government is taking money from the benefit payments of many people using food banks,” said the trust’s chief executive, Emma Revie. “Taking money off payments to repay these debts makes it much harder for people to afford the essentials and can impact on people’s mental health – this isn’t OK.” Revie continued, “With the pandemic continuing to hit people’s incomes, the government must pause taking money from benefit payments over the winter months until a more responsible and just system that offers security and support is in place. This would help people on the lowest incomes to keep every penny of their benefits to help afford the absolute essentials, instead of needing to turn to a food bank for help.”

UK food bank trust says half of users repaying universal credit debts | Universal credit | The Guardian

  “It is legal to cross the Channel to seek asylum. The Home Office is trying to get around that legal right by pretending that the refugee who happens to have their hand on the tiller when a drone flies over is actually a smuggler.” said Chai Patel, legal policy director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

The Home Office has been accused of a “truth-twisting smear” after selectively quoting a judge to support its claims that asylum seekers who steer dinghies to Britain are people smugglers – despite the judgment making clear that the defendant had not been “acting as part of a trafficking gang”. Eight people have been jailed so far this year for piloting dinghies from France after the government intensified efforts to criminalise Channel crossings, with the Immigration Enforcement criminal investigations unit using drone footage to identify migrants at the helm, then referring them to be prosecuted for assisting unlawful immigration. Priti Patel, the home secretary, and other ministers have branded them “people smugglers” and vowed to “hunt down the criminals who are risking migrants’ lives”. The offence of assisting unlawful immigration could be applied to asylum seekers who steer boats because they have “facilitated” a journey.

 Judge Rupert Lowe found that those who piloted boats did not organise Channel crossings, may be coerced and threatened, and are ultimately “one of the trafficked”. But the Home Office later left out that excerpt when it cited the judge’s remarks, in order to support its assertion that its approach had been “upheld by the courts”. It only quoted Judge Lowe saying that an asylum seeker who steered a boat “still has responsibility for deliberately breaching immigration law” and would be jailed.

Bella Sankey, the director of Detention Action, said, “This is a truth-twisting smear against someone unable to defend themselves…”

 Judge Lowe made his findings while sentencing Assad Abdulgany, a 30-year-old Iraqi man who was jailed for 16 months in October. 

“The pilot-migrant in the type of case under consideration here is not in any realistic sense acting as part of a trafficking gang,” he said. “He is one of the trafficked.” The judge told a hearing at Canterbury Crown Court that asylum seekers are “entirely beholden to gangs of people traffickers” for their place in boats and have no organisational role. “The people traffickers who exploit these people’s desperation cannot pilot the RHIBs [rigid-hulled inflatable boats] themselves … so they have to arrange for one of the migrants to pilot the boat,” he added. “The reality for a pilot in these cases is that he is one of a boatload of migrants who are effectively indistinguishable from one another, except for that fact that he happens to have agreed to steer.” A Home Office press release on the case labelled Abdulgany a “people smuggler” and a “reckless offender”, but Judge Lowe said it was “wrong to assume that getting other people into the UK is any part of the motivation”. “The number of people in the boat is not a choice of the pilot-migrant; indeed, if he had any choice in the matter he would take fewer passengers or none,” he added, saying steering a boat was not “remotely equivalent” to smuggling migrants in a lorry or vehicle for payment. Judge Lowe said that while in some cases, smugglers may offer a discount to someone who agrees to steer, they “may also issue last-minute threats, to the effect that if the pilot returns the boat to France he will be beaten or even killed”.

Chai Patel explained, “Everyone on these boats is a victim of our deadly policy of shutting down safe routes, and forcing people to risk their lives to reach safety and it’s disgraceful that they are being prosecuted in a way that suits a fake Home Office narrative painting refugees as criminals.”

Channel crossings: Home Office ‘twisted judge’s remarks’ to defend branding migrants as ‘people smugglers’ | The Independent

 The world is fast losing farms and farmers to the rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations.

In 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, are eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class. Financial returns are what matter to these entities, not food security. The September 2020 report on the grain.org website ‘Barbarians at the barn: private equity sinks its teeth into agriculture’ shows that there is no morality where capitalism’s profit compulsion is concerned. These funds tend to invest for a 10-15 year period, resulting in handsome returns for investors but can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food insecurity.

Private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – are being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world. This money is used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. The article outlines how offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has targeted Ukraine.

Consider Ukraine. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. The organisation Grain found that in 2014 small farmers operated 16% of agricultural land in that country, but provided 55% of agricultural output, including: 97% of potatoes, 97% of honey, 88% of vegetables, 83% of fruits and berries and 80% of milk. It is clear that Ukraine’s small farms were delivering impressive outputs. Reforms mandated by the EU-backed loan to Ukraine in 2014 included agricultural deregulation intended to benefit foreign agribusiness. Natural resource and land policy shifts were being designed to facilitate the foreign corporate takeover of enormous tracts of land.

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, stated at the time that the World Bank and IMF were intent on opening up foreign markets to Western corporations and that the high stakes around the control of Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector, the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat, constitute an overlooked critical factor. He added that in recent years, foreign corporations had acquired more than 1.6 million hectares of Ukrainian land. In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine. According to the Brettons Wood Project website, the government committed to lifting the 19-year moratorium on the sale of state-owned agricultural lands after sustained pressure from international finance. The World Bank incorporated further measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine approved in late June. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”

 Frederic Mousseau recently stated:

“The goal is clearly to favor the interests of private investors and Western agribusinesses… It is wrong and immoral for Western financial institutions to force a country in a dire economic situation amidst an unprecedented pandemic to sell its land.”

The world’s biggest companies, Cargill, which is involved in almost every aspect of global agribusiness. Still run as a privately held company, the 155-year-old enterprise trades in purchasing and distributing various agricultural commodities, raises livestock and produces animal feed as well as food ingredients for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. This includes Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities.

A recent article on the Unearthed website accused Cargill and its 14 billionaire owners of profiting from the use of child labour, rain forest destruction, the devastation of ancestral lands, the spread of pesticide use and pollution, contaminated food, antibiotic resistance and general health and environmental degradation.

The web that global capitalism weaves in a quest to seek out new profits, capture new markets and control common resources  is destroying farmer livelihoods, the environment and health under the bogus claim of ‘feeding the world’. Those farmers who survive the profiteering strategies of dispossession are to become incorporated into a system of contract farming dictated by global agri-food giants tied to an exploitative food regime based on market dependency and corporate control. A regime that places profit ahead of biodiverse food security, healthy diets and the environment.

From an article by Colin Todhunter on the Countercurrents website

Dispossession and Imperialism Repackaged as ‘Feeding the World’ | Countercurrents

 With the costs of an ageing population rising, China is to raise its retirement age. In 2018, nearly 250 million of China’s 1.4 billion people were aged 60 or over. That is 17.8% of the population and it may exceed 33% by 2053

China’s retirement age has remained unchanged for more than four decades at 60 for men and 55 for female white-collar workers, even as life-expectancy has risen. In places like Japan and Taiwan, most men and women can retire and start drawing a pension at 65. The global average was 62.7 years for men and 61.3 years for women, according to an analysis of 70 countries by insurer Allianz SE.

Top among the complaints were from those closest to retiring, expressing anger over the prospect of delayed access to their pensions. Younger people argued that an increase in older workers would reduce their employment opportunities.

 With the costs of an ageing population rising, China is to raise its retirement age. In 2018, nearly 250 million of China’s 1.4 billion people were aged 60 or over. That is 17.8% of the population and it may exceed 33% by 2053

China’s retirement age has remained unchanged for more than four decades at 60 for men and 55 for female white-collar workers, even as life-expectancy has risen. In places like Japan and Taiwan, most men and women can retire and start drawing a pension at 65. The global average was 62.7 years for men and 61.3 years for women, according to an analysis of 70 countries by insurer Allianz SE.

Top among the complaints were from those closest to retiring, expressing anger over the prospect of delayed access to their pensions. Younger people argued that an increase in older workers would reduce their employment opportunities.

Biden is really the tool of Wall St. And it is why did so many of the bankers and industrialists and the big business media endorsed him. They regarded Biden as a more tractable tool, not a different but a better instrument for their designs than Trump. Biden has proved supreme in the art of deception. His liberal camouflage often appeared so realistic that it has even frightened some capitalists further on the right. Biden’s ability to make people think they are getting something has been his greatest contribution to the preservation of capitalism. For his primary objective is to save the capitalist system. He attempts to do this by reconciling the workers to the interests of the bosses. Biden may loathe inequality but he loves capitalism more.

 Biden may well sit at the desk in the Oval Office but behind him stands the CEOs of Wall St. They will carry out their strategic aim – saving capitalism.

What makes a businessman tick? The lust for profit that means a callous disregard for the education structures and the health system. This present system twists and distorts the capitalists until they become monsters.

 Wealth flows into the hands of an ever narrowing circle of corporations completely dominated by a handful of capitalists who perform, no function in production whatsoever. At the same time the industrial machine becomes so complex, involves such an intricate organization, requires such a vast number of workers for its operation, is so highly productive, that it is completely ripe for the next stage of society’s development, the socialist system of production for use instead of profit. 

The purpose of the World Socialist Party is to assist our fellow-workers in taking control over our lives away from Big Business and vest it in ourselves. Future generations will wonder why we took so long to act. Not a day passes but what the WSP charges against the profit system is supported by new examples of the inefficient operations of this Big Business-controlled society. Quite naturally, Big Business believes capitalism is the best of all possible systems. It is – for Big Business. But it is hell for the people. Or haven’t you had enough yet? If you have bad enough, and are looking for a program to fight capitalism intelligently, join the World Socialist Party of the United States.

Billionaire owners  of superyachts often spend £200m or more on what is essentially a floating palace on the ocean. Three young British people died on superyachts, and their families never provided with compensation or even an apology from anyone. It’s complicated, not least because the yachts can operate in international jurisdictions, so coroners are prevented from calling people as witnesses, and it’s incredibly hard to hold anyone to account.

There’s been a big rise in the purchasing of Downton Abbey-style estates, costing upwards of £25m, where people who formerly lived in Mayfair or similarly expensive urban locations have relocated to get more space, more land, in order to escape the pandemic and house more family members. 

The very richest people have benefited financially – in fact, it’s been a very good year for the super-rich. That group – including people such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk of Tesla – are able to take financial risks. Tech firms are doing brilliantly on the stock market. We’re all at home using Zoom, Google, Amazon and so on, so they are sitting pretty. The market value of Zoom is up over 500% this year!

A recent UBS report talked about how the super-rich’s fortunes have almost doubled in the last three years, and by more than a quarter during the recent market turmoil. Wealth is as concentrated now as it was in the US Gilded Age, when a few billionaire families – the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, etc – had monopolies on the biggest industries.

While whole families who would previously have been decidedly ‘middle-class’ are queuing up for food banks, the average pay of chief executives has surged far beyond that of the average worker. Just before lockdown, there were a number of chief executives who forewent their pay, but they’ll recoup it elsewhere, whereas their employees certainly won’t.

Reporting on wealth: ‘The virus isn’t a leveller. It has made the rich richer’ | Investment funds | The Guardian

Economists talk of a “K-shaped recovery” where the well-off bounce back on the upward tick of the K while the less fortunate slide further into poverty on the downward leg.

Stock markets are at record highs. And the very rich have done very, very well. America’s billionaires have added $1tn to their wealth over the pandemic.

Yet 20 million Americans are currently unemployed.  About 778,000 people filed for unemployment last week alone. For many hunger has become a major issue. Government figures show that the week before Thanksgiving – America’s biggest feast day – 5.6m households struggled to put enough food on the table. Huge lines have formed at food banks across the country and years of neglect and underfunding of the systems to help those in need have worsened their plight.

According to the Century Foundation, 12 million Americans will be cut off from their jobless benefits on 26 December. Anew round of stimulus have stalled and stalled again. The extra payments have stopped, the cash has been spent. Republicans, happy to run up record debts under Trump, are now talking about the need for “austerity”.

“It’s borderline criminal that nothing has been done,” said William Rodgers, former chief economist at the US Department of Labor, and an informal adviser to the Biden transition team. “They rammed through a supreme court nominee but have done nothing to help American families.”

A disproportionate number of those people will be women and Latino or Black and young, the groups hardest hit by the economic downturn. only one in four US workers have a job that allows them to work from home. 

Janet Yellen, the next treasury secretary of the United States, said that the African American unemployment rate in particular was too high but argued that the central bank was ill-suited to address the issue. 

 She told Reuters: “There really is a new kind of recognition that you’ve got a society where capitalism is beginning to run amok and needs to be readjusted in order to make sure that what we’re doing is sustainable and the benefits of growth are widely shared in ways they haven’t been.”

The US is on ‘inequality autopilot’ – how can Biden’s treasury pick help change course? | US income inequality | The Guardian