In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)  there is a humanitarian crisis that regional and international powers have allowed to fester. It has led to people abandoning their homes because of fighting between the M23 rebel group and the government last month. According to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, more than 800,000 people have now been displaced by the conflict since last March.

Failed attempts to secure a ceasefire have allowed fighting to continue unabated between M23 and government troops in a region already scarred by the presence of dozens of armed groups.

Angele Dikongue-Atangana, the UNHCR’s representative in DRC explained, “We need peace so that civilians stop being collateral damage of the conflict, and so that forced displacement in eastern DRC ends.”

Emmanuel Lampaert, the DRC coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in central Africa, said the conflict has created a heavy humanitarian burden.

“It’s the same places, the same filthy conditions. Families living in self-made small settlements, unworthy, inhuman,” Lampaert said. “…Suddenly, after one year, they’re saying they want to stop this crisis being forgotten. My question is, where the hell have you been?” he said.

 Thomas Fessy, a senior DRC researcher for Human Rights Watch, said M23 had left behind a “trail of war crimes”.

“We’ve documented horrific crimes that M23 rebels committed against civilians, including summary executions and forced recruitment,” he said. “The warring parties have increasingly appealed to ethnic loyalties, putting civilians in remote areas of Masisi and Rutshuru at a heightened risk, and pitting communities against each other.”

Jean-Mobert Senga, a researcher for Amnesty International in DRC, said the violence could worsen this year. “No one seems concerned with addressing the real causes and drivers of the conflict, including widespread impunity for serious atrocities committed in the DRC for nearly 30 years, endemic corruption, or poor governance in the DRC.

“The focus on the M23, which is just one of hundreds of armed groups that kill, rape and loot every day, is proof of the cynical approach in eastern DRC that only prolongs the suffering of millions of men, women and children on the frontlines of the conflict.”

UNHCR has asked for $233m (£192m) to support its work, but only 8% has been pledged.

‘Trail of war crimes’ left by DRC rebel group as recent attacks leave 300,000 displaced | Global development | The Guardian

 In the Irish Republic there were 307 anti-migrant protests in 2022, while in 2023 there have already been 64 demonstrations. The far-right protest outside asylum reception cases, scaring and intimidating the people inside, including families.

Niall McConnell, leader of the Irish Nationalist Catholic Party, claims “The indigenous Irish are being racially discriminated against.” In reference to England’s colonisation of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries, where land was seized and settlers were brought in to ‘anglicise’ the local population, McConnell asserts, “History is repeating itself. The blood of our holy martyrs seeps the Irish soil. The indigenous Irish will continue in our ancestors’ footsteps. We will oppose this new plantation as they did in the past. God save Ireland.” he continued, “Any resources available in Ireland should be given to the indigenous Irish people first,” suggesting free housing, social welfare, health care and education should be taken away for migrants.

Aoife Gallagher, an analyst at ISD Global thinktank pointed out that, “The far right has been able to rally support by tapping into people’s very real grievances”. Anti-migrant protests have been most common in “ignored and deprived” areas, says researcher Aoife Gallagher – which also happens to be where asylum-seekers are disproportionately housed. “The far right is a mixture of the reactionary forces in response to these liberal changes in the country… and the old school Catholic conservatives,” she said. The far-right is ultimately a byproduct of Ireland’s failed political system that has failed to get to grips with the multi-pronged crisis gripping the country, claims Gallagher.

Brian Killoran of the Immigrant Council, links the growth of the far right to several crises gripping Ireland, including a housing emergency and crumbling health services, traced back to the 2008 recession and the period of austerity that followed.

“The far right is a lightning rod,” he explained. “They are harnessing dissatisfaction in communities and blaming migrants when actually there are much bigger structural problems.” He said the movement was losing sight of the “bigger picture” and proposing “simplistic and short-term solutions”.

Attitudes towards immigrants in Ireland are among the least positive in Europe. Among Irish-born adults, some 58% support white foreigners moving to the country, but only 41% for Muslims and 25% for Roma people, according to a study by the Economic and Social Research Institute.

‘Keep Ireland Irish’: Say hello to Ireland’s growing far right (yahoo.com)

 Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite

UK Power Networks, the National Grid power distributor made £1.3bn pre-tax profit. Billions in profit, bonanzas for the executives and shareholders, while there are only real pay cuts on offer for workers.

The profiteering crisis isn’t just a few “bad apples” like UK Power Networks: it’s systemic. In the first half of 2022, FTSE 350 companies saw their margins up by an average of 89% on the same period in 2019. 

In 2021, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda doubled their combined profits compared with 2019 to £3.2bn. Likewise, big brand food manufacturers such as Nestlé and Unilever have seen their corporate profits soar. From energy to food, hikes in our bills are seen in these soaring profits.

 2021 saw the four giant agribusiness corporations, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, reaping profits of $10.4bn(£8.6bn) – up on pre-pandemic levels by an astonishing 255%. In petrol pump supply chains, refineries and oil companies are smashing corporate profit records. Last year, BP recorded the biggest profits in the company’s history – £23bn.

Between 2019 and 2022, the container industry boosted its profits from $7bn to $210bn (£5.8bn to £174bn). 2022 is set for an even bigger bonanza. Port owners, such as DP World and CK Hutchison, have also seen huge profiteering gains, and the biggest road freight operators were on the same page as their profits zoomed by 149%.

 Market pricing systems have allowed some companies, such as energy firms, to reap massive windfalls while their real production costs haven’t changed. State-licensed monopolies have handed historic profits to North Sea oil extractors, electricity grids, privatised water operators and transport companies.

Big retailers or suppliers have exploited their “market power” to push up prices in circumstances of high demand and a limited supply of products. But we have also seen “price gouging” when crises create opportunities for what amounts to price fixing across sectors.

We are confronted by this cost of profiteering because of the stark inequalities in wealth and power that govern Britain. Capital, boosted by favourable governments, has managed to win enormous power that in turn allows it to set the rules of the economy and reap the rewards accordingly. 

The system isn’t only broken, it is rigged.

Why are we talking about Britain’s cost of living crisis? The real culprit is bosses’ ‘greedflation’ | Sharon Graham | The Guardian

 A SONG OF REVOLUTION

You toilers of the world, arise!

To bravely speed the day,

When all your forces organise

King Capital to slay,

And from the master class you’ll wrest

The Powers of the State,

Which, wielded in your interest,

Your class emancipate.

There sounds above the class war din

The battle-cry we use:

Unite! you have a world to win,

Your chains alone to lose.”

Your lot in life is darkest gloom;

You sow and others reap.

And want and mis’ry are your doom,

While idlers treasures heap.

Why have they riches, you distress,

Though you all wealth have wrought?

It is because the few possess

The earth, while you have nought.

There sounds above the class war din

The battle-cry we use:

Unite! you have a world to win,

Your chains alone to lose.”

While you an idle class maintain

For pittances you’ll toil.

To own your products you must gain

Possession of the soil

And of all means the workers need

To found the Commonwealth,

And thus enable all to lead

Full lives of peace and health.

There sounds above the class war din

The battle-cry we use:

Unite! you have a world to win,

Your chains alone to lose.”

Arise! the message to proclaim,

The message full of cheer:

That Labour’s freedom is your aim,

That brighter days are near.

To men exhausted by the fray,

To women in despair,

To children wanting food and play,

To all the message bear

There sounds above the class war din

The battle-cry we use:

Unite! you have a world to win,

Your chains alone to lose.”

 Words & Music by H. J. Neumann

 Saudi oil giant Aramco has announced a record profit of $161.1bn (£134bn) for 2022.

 There’s a good explanation of why the Silicon Valley Bank failed here:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-00086586

“Silicon Valley Bank has been bleeding deposits as the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised borrowing costs to fight inflation. Higher interest rates bludgeoned many of the tech businesses that had deposited their money with the bank. As venture capitalists retreated from offering companies fresh infusions of capital to sustain their businesses, startups needed to burn through the cash in their accounts to stay afloat. Deposits the bank had on hand have fallen steadily over the last several months, according to S&P Global Ratings. Higher rates also meant more investments offered an attractive yield, leading some clients to pull out their deposits and put them elsewhere.”

To try to compensate for this, the Bank sold off its holding of government and other bonds. Unfortunately for them, rising interest rates meant that the price of bonds went down and they couldn’t raise enough. And they went bust.

“When banks run into trouble, they can be forced to sell off investment assets, typically U.S. government debt and mortgage-backed securities, that they purchased to earn a return on their customers’ deposits. As interest rates climb, the price of those older securities fall — which means the banks sell those investments at a loss.”

If banks could, as some claim, simply create money to lend “out of thin air” and get interest on it, why would losing deposits make any difference? 

If a bank was short of money, all it would have to do would be create some more to lend and get the money as interest on them.

That this didn’t happen shows that banks cannot create money out of nothing but are only financial intermediaries borrowing money at one rate of interest to cover loans at a higher rate.

Our theory of the nature of banking stands confirmed. 

New wealth can only be created by humans applying their mental and physical energies to change the form of materials that originally came from nature, not by banks practising magic or financial alchemy.

ALB

For more see: The Magic Money Myth – worldsocialism.org/spgb

 The appeal is obvious. We can all be “carbon neutral” and offset our CO2 emissions, cancelling out the damage we do to the planet by protecting a threatened rainforest.

The claim is often based on carbon credits approved by Verra, the world’s leading certifier for the $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market. Disney, Gucci and Shell are just some of the names that use them, and they are presented as a “nature-based solution”. However, there are big questions about the ability of offsetting to play even a minor role in climate change and biodiversity loss mitigation.

Verra has said it will phase out and replace its rainforest offsets programme by mid-2025 after an investigation found it was flawed,  potentially allowing tens of millions of worthless carbon credits to be issued and sold to companies in the meantime.

The investigation indicated that many claims based on the rainforest credits, which are generated by predicting deforestation that would have happened in the absence of the conservation projects, were largely meaningless, putting organisations that buy the offsets at risk of greenwashing.

Biggest carbon credit certifier to replace its rainforest offsets scheme | Carbon offsetting | The Guardian

The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon are among nearly 200 signatories to a letter calling on governments to “never again” allow “profiteering and nationalism” to come before the needs of humanity, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The letter urges world leaders to support a pandemic accord that is currently under negotiation at the WHO and treat publicly funded medicines as “global common goods … used to maximise the public benefit, not private profits”.

Current and former presidents and ministers, Nobel laureates, faith leaders, heads of civil society organisations and health experts say Covid-19 vaccines and treatments had been developed with public funding but that pharmaceutical companies had exploited them to “fuel extraordinary profits”. Instead of distributing vaccines, tests and treatments based on need, companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says.

This inequity led to 1.3m preventable deaths worldwide – one every 24 seconds – in the first year of the Covid vaccine rollout alone, according to analysis based on a study published in the Lancet. “That those lives were not saved is a scar on the world’s conscience,” the letter continues.

Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand said even though publicly funded science had contributed to the success of Covid-19 vaccines, they weren’t treated as global common goods. “Rather, nationalism and profiteering around vaccines resulted in a catastrophic moral and public health failure which denied equitable access to all.”

President José Manuel Ramos-Horta of Timor-Leste said: “In the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us in low- and middle-income countries were pushed to the back of the line for vaccines and denied access to the benefits of new technologies. Three years on, we must say ‘never again’ to this injustice that has undermined the safety of people in every country.”

 Even today, many low-income countries cannot access affordable treatments or tests. They say it is reminiscent of the response to the HIV and Aids epidemic, where millions died as expensive treatments were unaffordable for people in much of the world.

The letter calls for the removal of intellectual property barriers that prevent the sharing of scientific knowledge and technology and for governments to support and invest in research and development. 

It also calls on governments to provide support for the WHO’s mRNA hub, which is sharing vaccine technology with producers in 15 low- and middle-income countries.

‘Profiteering’ of Covid pandemic must never be repeated, world figures warn | Global development | The Guardian

The name “Department of Defense” is itself a gross distortion since there is not an inch of American soil that needs to be defended against an external enemy. The US government maintains a global military presence without precedent in history, with more than 700 US bases worldwide.

The USA unveiled a $1 trillion budget for the 2024 fiscal year, the largest ever proposed spending on the military. 

Besides $842 billion for the Pentagon, which will undoubtedly be pushed even higher in Congress, there is $24 billion for the Department of Energy, which maintains the US nuclear arsenal, and $20 billion for military-related programs in the State Department, CIA and other agencies, bringing the total official military spending to $886 billion. The $842 billion requested for this year could rise past the $900 billion mark once Congress and lobbyists for the weapons manufacturers have their say.

To this must be added the real cost of the war in Ukraine, which is listed as only $6 billion for the 2024 fiscal year, which begins October 1. In the previous fiscal year, the Biden administration requested $6.9 billion but ended up spending $114 billion. 

 Having had a devastating fire that destroyed shelters for 12,000, the UN recently cut food aid to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. 

There are about 1 million Rohingya living in squalid refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar on the southeastern coast of Bangladesh.

The World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it would have to cut aid because of a $125 million (€117 million) shortfall. The UN organization said that, starting in March, monthly food vouchers would be reduced from $12 to $10 per person. It also warned that there would probably be more cuts if more funds did not come in imminently.  Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, told DW that the government could not meet the budget gap and urged international donors to keep up their support.

Given that malnutrition, anemia and stunted growth are already rife in the camps, where 65% of the population are children and women, people who work with refugees fear that the cuts in rations could have a devastating impact.

Ambia Perveen, a co-founder of the Rohingya Medics Organisation, which provides medical care in the refugee camps, told DW that the cuts would affect every Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh.

“The food they were provided before was never enough, and now it will affect more, especially children, elderly people, pregnant women and above all the people with chronic diseases,” she said. “There is huge malnutrition among children under five years old, severe cases of hepatitis C and anemic pregnant women.” 

Rezaur Rahman Lenin, a Rohingya researcher based in Cox’s Bazar, told DW that “Given that Myanmar’s government won’t let its people go home and that Rohingya refugees in camps are becoming more vulnerable, it is shocking that the UN is willing to cut these essential humanitarian funds.” 

Bangladesh: Aid cuts stoke fear of violence in refugee camps – DW – 03/09/2023