According to research into a staffing crisis that has left thousands of vulnerable people suffering inadequate care half of care workers employed in independent care homes would earn more if they took a new starter job in a supermarket. In June nearly 400,000 care staff earned less than the minimum wages paid in most of the major supermarket chains, while a third of workers would have received an immediate 6.3% pay increase, plus staff benefits, by moving to the best-paying supermarkets. For social care, the minimum rate for staff over the age of 23 in June 2022 was £9.50 – the statutory minimum set by the “national living wage”. It has been estimated that about 50% of care workers earn within 30 pence of the national living wage level. In June 2022 nine of the 10 largest supermarkets were paying more than this.  In 2012-13 retail assistants were on average paid 16p an hour less than care workers. But by 2020-21 they were being paid 21p an hour more.

There are about 165,000 vacancies in England’s social care. Inspectors found staff shortages were a key reason for inadequate care at dozens of homes, including people being left in their rooms 24 hours a day, denied showers and left wet in their own urine. Pay is a key reason for the social care workforce crisis.

Half of care workers in England earn less than entry level supermarket roles | Care workers | The Guardian

 State-sanctioned violence is part of everyday life for many Brazilians. This is true, especially for those who are unlucky enough to be poor, live in a favela and have “the wrong skin colour”. Indeed, poor Black and brown people living in precarious situations are the preferred victims of the Brazilian police – a force that is seemingly committed to eradicating not poverty, but the poor.

Brazil’s first favelas appeared in the 19th century in Rio de Janeiro and they grew exponentially after the end of slavery. Over time, poor migrants escaping armed conflicts also joined the former slaves and their descendants in these communities. Soon, similar favelas started to emerge and expand in other parts of the country. And the police forces, which had served to protect the elites, their property and lifestyles from dangerous “plebs” from the very beginning quickly focussed their attention on favelas.

In Brazil’s favelas, residents live with a constant fear of “police operations” – or to be more accurate, indiscriminate shootings across narrow residential streets involving automatic weapons and helicopters. They know that if a police officer happens to approach them – regardless of what they may or may not have done – they could be threatened, beaten up, jailed, killed or simply “disappeared”. They know that their house can be invaded any minute, their possessions confiscated, their lives turned upside down – all with the complete support of their country’s government and other state institutions.

On May 24, 25 people were killed during a police operation in the Vila Cruzeiro Favela in Rio de Janeiro. On July 21, 2022, yet another police raid claimed 18 more lives in Complexo do Alemao in the same state. These massacres were only a few in a much longer chain. According to a study conducted by Federal Fluminense University researchers, 182 people have been killed in at least 40 separate police operations in Rio de Janeiro alone between May 2021 and May 2022.

These deadly operations have the full support of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who regularly praises bloody police action in favelas and proudly claims all those who were summarily executed were “criminals” and “thugs” who have been “neutralised”. Of course, activists and international organisations emphasise that only a small percentage of those who have been killed in these operations have had arrest warrants in their names. And favela residents often talk of people being “hunted down” by police, and at times executed even after they surrender. But in the eyes of the Brazilian state, these details do not seem to matter.

In Brazil racialised police brutality is an inevitable consequence of a deep-rooted culture of criminalisation of poverty and the poor. Coupled with a failure to adequately train security forces and reluctance on the part of authorities to even acknowledge the problem, this culture of criminalisation turns police officers into willing and eager perpetrators of state-sanctioned violence.

Brazil’s security forces are spreading terror in the favelas and brutally murdering vulnerable Black citizens during traffic stops because that is what they were designed to do – and because they are not being trained, equipped or encouraged to police these communities in any other way. The main reason why the Brazilian police are acting the way they are – and seemingly waging a deadly war against the poor – is that the force was created to do just that. Historically, police forces were first formed in Brazil not to ensure public safety as we understand it today, but to control, repress and intimidate slaves. 

Brazil’s ruling class have always perceived the favela as areas to be controlled, places where the poor must live and be watched. And the police, as the protectors of the elites, took it upon themselves to keep the favelas in check through intimidation, abuse and violence.

The culture of policing the favelas – and generally the poor – with violence continues also because of the fact that there is no enforcement against poor performance and abuses by law enforcement. 

“The Public Prosecutor’s Office does not fulfil its function of overseeing police activity, the judiciary does not fulfil its function of protecting victims of abuse who resort to the courts, the state government does not regulate its agents,”  Cecilia Oliveira, a journalist specialising in public security once explained. “It is a whole system that allows the police to be what they are. The lives of Black and poor people are palanquin for those who sell cheap solutions to a complex problem.”

Brazil’s never ending war on the poor | Opinions | Al Jazeera

“Oligopoly in action” was how Kartick Raj, a Human Rights Watch researcher focused on poverty and inequality in Western Europe, responded news that the world’s four grain giants were raking in record profits. 

Using a term coined by author Naomi Klein, U.K. climate scientist Bill McGuire declared in response to Harvey’s article: “Disaster capitalism at its worst.”

“As 345 million people suffer from acute food insecurity,” McGuire continued, “the four corporations that control virtually all grain trade stuff their pockets with cash, pop the champagne corks, and laugh all the way to the bank.”

Nick Dearden, director of the U.K.-based group Global Justice Now, said that “food monopolies rake in bumper profits as speculation drives up food prices. We have enough food for everyone, but the financial markets dictate more and more people must go hungry to fill the coffers of the super wealthy.”

“Workers wages aren’t causing our #CostOfLivingCrisis. Profiteering is. Want proof?” UNI Global Union tweeted.

The U.K. group Plan B Earth took aim and stated, “Bonanza for fossil fuel companies, while people can’t pay their bills. Soaring stocks for defense companies on the back of war. And while famine stalks East Africa and Afghanistan, food companies make record profits.”

‘Disaster Capitalism at Its Worst’: Profits of Grain Giants Spark Global Criticism (commondreams.org)

Well, this blog has got news for all those commentators. It is not disaster capitalism, it is not a dysfunctional aberration. What’s happening is capitalism is operating just as it should and behaving perfectly normal, just as the market profit system intended it to.

And the World Socialist Movement have been pointing this out for years, highlighting the hunger amid capitalist prosperity so we ask why have these informed experts not been listening.

 São Paulo is a symbol of inequality. The wealthy enjoy incredible luxury while the poor are neglected. São Paulo is a dystopia. Society here has failed miserably in making a dignified life possible for everyone. The resulting dissonance has produced a radical form of dehumanization. It is estimated that almost half of the people in the São Paulo metropolitan region live in precarious conditions. Millions aren’t connected to the sewage system.

With more than 22 million inhabitants, São Paulo is the largest metropolis in the southern hemisphere and the wealthiest city in South America. At the end of the 19th century, São Paulo was a city of 200,000 residents, full of picturesque, colonial-style homes. By the 1950s, it was already home to 2 million people, and in the 1960s and 1970s, it began growing like a tumor – rapidly, uncontrolled and exponentially. Today, large parts of it are a concrete desert of high-rises, stinking rivers and multilane, raised highways known as viaducts. They spread throughout the city like the tentacles of a giant octopus, yet there is no coherent connection between them, a situation that results in daily traffic chaos.  In São Paulo, people rarely ever honk, even in the worst traffic jams, out of fear that they might get shot. São Paulo has some of the worst air pollution in the world, and the environmental degradation is so advanced that even the wealthy, who try to isolate themselves in their penthouses can’t escape it. 

It is also one of the most unequal cities in the world. There is hardly any other place on the planet where squalor and luxury exist in such monstrous proximity to each other – where the desperation of the poor and the hubris of the wealthy clash so brutally. 

Helicopters take off in São Paulo by the minute. The city is said to be home to the largest fleet of private choppers in the world, reserved for those important people who have to quickly get from A to B. Michelin-rated restaurants are located next to the leafy neighborhoods full of mansions, where the streets are called Alemanha, Luxemburgo and Áustria and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces are a common sight. 

The life expectancy in the rich, white neighborhood of Pinheiros is more than 80 years, while in the poorest black quarters, it is just 58.

“There has never been consistent city development in São Paulo,” says Barbara. “Instead, it has been a continuous state-of-emergency, where improvements are only made where things are especially bad.” She walks across a bridge toward the historic market hall, beneath her is a canal filled with polluted, brownish water full of trash. “But the greatest hurdle standing in the way of São Paulo’s transformation is the extreme inequality,” Barbara says. If the problems on the periphery aren’t solved, she says, the city can never become healthy and livable – for anyone.

The Dystopia of São Paulo Holds the Key To Brazil’s Transformation – DER SPIEGEL

There is something hugely hypocritical in the way that American political leaders and media pundits denounce the imprisonment of American citizens abroad, while staying silent about mass incarceration for similar offences in the US. 

Quite rightly, general outrage was expressed when basketball star Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years imprisonment on drug charges in a Russian labour camp earlier this month.

Vice-President Kamala Harris was swift to the moral high ground, demanding that Griner “should be released immediately. POTUS [President Biden] and I, and our entire Administration, are working every day to reunite Brittney …with loved ones.”

Nothing wrong with protests over what looks like a nasty bit of Russian hostage-taking, but not a word about an equally appalling case closer to home. 

This took place in Mississippi where the Supreme Court upheld in June a life sentence without parole for a man called Allen Russel who was convicted of possessing 43.71 grams of marijuana. 

On any given day, 374,000 Americans are in prison or jail for drug offences, often of the most minor kind.

John Ehrlichman, former long-time senior lieutenant of President Nixon, about Republican strategy 50 years ago, explained the rationale.

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about?” Ehrlichman said. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

The Age of Hypocrisies – CounterPunch.org

 Socialists are naturally concerned about whether or not political democracy exists under capitalism. The existence of some political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be by the class structure of capitalism, is central to our case for the peaceful propagation of socialist ideas culminating in the peaceful establishment of socialism by democratic political action based on majority socialist understanding. Freedom of discussion is the ideal, even indispensable, condition for the development of socialist ideas since it is only out of a full and frank discussion of their experiences under capitalism that the working class can come to acquire the majority socialist understanding necessary before capitalism can be replaced by socialism.

In the years since Russia followed Western advice from free marketeers to start privatising the state assets, a small number of people with links to officialdom became phenomenally rich. Having achieved power, Putin has sought to strengthen the Russian state and reassert Kremlin control of its regions and republics, where nepotism, corruption and crime abound. This increased militarisation of society, authoritarianism, and centralising of power, bonding with a tendency to see others as being either state or anti-state—just as in the USSR era when everything was categorised as Soviet or anti-Soviet. Putin’s desire is to return to Stalinist-style oppressive rule.It is because governments compete economically to help their own nation’s businesses (keeping wages, taxes and welfare low, weakening trade unions etc), so they must compete if they are to avoid others obtaining easy commercial advantages through armed intimidation and attack. Putin can also gain some domestic political advantage from nationalistic prestige and pride engendered in the population, but the overriding purpose of military expansion is to assist the possessors of productive assets. Because there are groups of oligarchs all over the world, populations are encouraged to see one another as “us” and “them”, or “the enemy”. The Russian people will continue to suffer from exploitation, poverty, deprivation, early deaths and assorted other troubles—including further dead sailors, soldiers and pilots. 

Ukraine is one of the artificial “nation-States” set up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, containing within its borders not only people whose mother-tongue is Ukrainian but a considerable minority whose first language is Russian.

A mere glance at the map of Europe shows why, for strategic reasons, Ukraine could never hope to pursue an independent foreign policy for any length of time. One end of the country points into central, the other leads into Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was motivated mainly by strategic considerations, the fear that the political changes begun in Maidan 2014 coup would lead to it to increasingly break away from the Russian empire.

In the post-war struggle between East and West to establish spheres of economic and political influence, global networks of alliances have been sealed with aid in the form of arms and supportive technology. The foreign policies of the two major powers have been essentially nothing more than preparations for war. It has continued despite the fall of the Iron Curtain. The barbarism of the war in Ukraine cannot be explained in terms of conflicting ideologies of malevolent leaders and nothing is more fallacious than the idea that increases in knowledge and the progress of what is called civilisation bring with them increased social harmony. The sterility and waste of capitalism are laid bare in its wars — men fall in their millions that shares might rise.

By disempowering all the presidents, the admirals, the generals, the ministers, the tycoons and any other minority who wants ownership and control of resources and people, choosing instead to possess and run these means of living ourselves. No more propertied class. No more leaders. No more us and them.

 At the Ukraine Accountability Conference in The Hague last month the international criminal court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, urged world leaders: “In all situations across the world where international crimes are committed, we should feel the same urgency for action and for cooperation.”

A few days ago the head of the World Health Authority, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has suggested that racism is partly to blame for the lack of international interest in the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray state.

Social justice must be for all – not just for whites.

The ICC has only targeted “anti-western” African leaders while brutal UK- and US-backed leaders in Africa continue to kill and maim with impunity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, has been fuelling some of the world’s bloodiest and nastiest killings. The slaughter and the raping, looting and displacement has not stopped.

In 2003, at the UN general assembly, the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, called for the creation of an international criminal tribunal for the DRC to hold perpetrators to account. The appeal, echoed by Congolese civil society groups, was ignored, with the UK, US and a host of western governments looking the other way while giving Kagame guns and money to operate as he pleased.  So far it has targeted only “low hanging fruit” including Thomas Lubanga, the ICC’s first ever conviction in March 2012, then Germain Katanga and Bosco Ntaganda. What then is the ICC’s purpose in Africa if it cannot investigate a president over “aiding and abetting” some of these crimes?

By 2008, when UN investigators arrived in the DRC to look into crimes committed before 2002 – when the ICC has no mandate – more than 5.4 million Congolese people had died in the 10 years since a rebel group called Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) was formed to loot the Congolese minerals.

In 2010, the UN published a 550-page report calling for the creation of a Congo tribunal to try 617 international allegations involving, among others, troops under President Kagame’s command in the DRC. That recommendation was ignored.

There are 5.6 million Congolese people internally displaced across the country. Another 27 million people, including 3.4 million children, are “acutely food insecure”. A 2011 US study estimated that 48 women were raped every hour. In 2017, UN investigators discovered 80 mass graves in the diamond-rich Kasai province. In 2019, the UN unearthed another 50 mass graves in Bandundu.

Where the victims of war are white, the ICC has already opened its own probe, its chief prosecutor has visited frontlines and sent its largest-ever field deployment and an international Ukraine war crimes tribunal to put Vladimir Putin in the dock is already in the pipeline.

Why then are the US and UK refusing to back the creation of an international criminal tribunal for DRC?

Justice should be colour blind. So why is it served for Ukraine but not the Congolese? | Vava Tampa | The Guardian

 The world’s top four grain traders, which have dominated the global grain market for decades – have seen record or near-record profits or sales.  The record bonanza amid soaring food prices around the world, raising concerns of profiteering and speculation in global food markets that could put staples beyond the reach of the poorest.

Food prices have surged more than 20% this year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. About 345 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme, compared with 135 million before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Olivier De Schutter, a co-chair of IPES-Food (the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems) and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said: 

“The fact that global commodity giants are making record profits at a time when hunger is rising is clearly unjust, and is a terrible indictment of our food systems. What’s even worse, these companies could have done more to prevent the hunger crisis in the first place.” Four companies – the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, known collectively as ABCD – control an estimated 70-90% of the global grain trade. “Global grain markets are even more concentrated than energy markets and even less transparent, so there is a huge risk of profiteering,” said De Schutter.

He said this year’s food price surge happened despite what are thought to be abundant global grain reserves, but there was insufficient transparency from the companies to show how much grain they hold and no way to force them to release stocks in a timely way. “We need to be looking at the grain giants and asking what they could have done to avert the crisis, and what they could be doing now,” De Schutter said.

Cargill reported a 23% increase in revenues to a record $165bn (£140bn) for the year ended 31 May, while Archer-Daniels-Midland made the highest profits in its history during the second quarter of the year. Sales at Bunge surged by 17% year on year in the second quarter, though its profits were affected by previously incurred charges. Louis Dreyfus reported profits for 2021 up by more than 80% on the previous year, as revenues rose by nearly a quarter to $1.62bn.

An NGO analysis suggests some food companies may be increasing their margins too.  Archers-Daniels-Midland increased its profit margin to 4.46% in the first quarter of this year, up from 3.65% in the same quarter in 2021, and Cargill’s margin increased from 2.5% last year to 3.2% this year.

Sandra Martinsone, a policy manager at Bond, a network of international development charities, said, “[The big agrifood companies] are clearly capitalising on the reduced supply and increased demand, further exacerbated by commodity trading,” she said. “When supply is significantly lower than demand, it gives space for price increase. But this is also exacerbated by speculative stock markets, since wheat and other commodities are traded on stock markets and therefore prices fluctuate.”

Alex Maitland, a senior adviser at Oxfam, said: “There are fears that speculation could be a driver in food price rises. Anything that causes hunger and starvation is immoral.”

Natalie Bennett, a UK Green party peer, explained, “…the handful of companies, with significant cross-ownership from hedge funds, that from seeds to supermarkets are major contributors to the inflation that’s driving the cost of living crisis to new heights.” 

Vicki Hird, the head of sustainable farming at the UK food coalition Sustain, pointed out,  “While farmers, consumers and food workers are suffering in the face of spiralling food and fuel prices, those sitting in the middle of the food chain – a small number of huge, dominant grain traders – are raking in vast profits.”

Despite rising input prices in the form of energy and fertiliser, all four of the ABCD companies profits look secure.

De Schutter said: “Ultimately, we need to break up the monopolies that have a stranglehold on the food chain. A handful of companies control global seed and fertiliser markets, animal genetics, the global grain trade, and food retail. They are making huge profits at the cost of farmers, consumers and the environment.”

Record profits for grain firms amid food crisis prompt calls for windfall tax | Food | The Guardian

Between February 24 and August 10, at least 942 children were killed or injured in Ukraine – an average of five children every day — with 356 children losing their lives and 586 wounded, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

The UN has said that the total number of casualties is likely to be much higher than those currently verified and the exact ages of all child casualties are not all known.

 Most of the verified child casualties were due to the use of explosive weapons in populated, urban areas.

Children in parts of the country are growing up on the frontlines of brutal warfare as urban areas are used as battlefields, leading to deaths and life-changing injuries, and destroying infrastructure needed to guarantee access to life-saving food and water.

Millions of children from Ukraine have fled their homes, with an estimated 3.1 million children living as refugees in neighbouring countries. About 3 million children are believed to be internally displaced inside Ukraine.

Save the Children’s Country Director in Ukraine, Sonia Khush, explained,  “Although children in Ukraine have nothing to do with the causes of the war, they are the ones most affected by it. They are growing up to the sound of bombs and shelling, and to the sight of their homes being destroyed, their schools damaged and their friends and family members being killed or injured.” Khush continued: “Children need more than humanitarian aid, they need hope: hope that this war will end; hope that they can return home; and hope for a bright future. Without meaningful support and an immediate cessation of hostilities, Ukraine will not only become a graveyard for even more children but also for children’s hopes and dreams.”

Save the Children is calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities as the only way to protect children from violence and other violations of their rights. The aid agency condemns attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, and the use of ballistic missiles and other inaccurate explosive weapons, which are causing civilian casualties, and violate international humanitarian law.

At least 16% of children killed in six months of war in Ukraine aged under 5 – Ukraine | ReliefWeb

 At one time, the plight of the Rohingya was headline news but now there is scarcely a mention in the media of the problems that they still face.

Nearly all of the approximately 730,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar in the second half of 2017 remain in sprawling refugee camps in southern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. The total number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh – including both those displaced by the 2017 atrocities and the several hundred thousand who sought refuge earlier – is close to one million. To date, not a single refugee has returned to Rakhine State through the formal repatriation mechanism that Myanmar and Bangladesh set up in 2017.  The Myanmar government showed no sign of addressing refugees’ concerns on key points, such as citizenship, security and livelihoods, failing to provide proper information on even the most basic questions, such as where the refugees — many of whom came from villages that the military razed to the ground after the 2017 exodus — would be sent after arriving at transit camps on the Myanmar side of the border. Myanmar shows little inclination to do more than pay lip service to repatriation efforts.

Living conditions for the refugees are poor and worsening. Most live in Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp in the world. They have few job opportunities and little access to formal education, while crime and violence, including killings of Rohingya community leaders, are on the rise. Factions within the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which launched attacks in Rakhine State in 2016 and 2017 that the Myanmar military used to justify its crackdown on the Muslim minority, have been fighting with rival groups for control of the camps. 

This development was foreseeable: for a country that still has high levels of poverty and unemployment, hosting over a million refugees is clearly an enormous challenge, particularly for the communities hosting them in Cox’s Bazar. 

Bangladesh is also making life more difficult for the refugees. It has progressively placed greater restrictions on their movement, including by fencing off the camps, and closed some private schools and businesses that were being run inside. There has also been little progress on delivering formal education using the Myanmar curriculum, something that many refugees say they want and Crisis Group has advocated for. 

For the estimated 600,000 Rohingya still in Myanmar, nearly all of whom live in Rakhine State, the situation remains bleak. The military regime has tightened restrictions on movement in some areas — and the country’s economic collapse over the past eighteen months has further worsened their plight. Around 120,000 live in displacement camps that were set up following an outbreak of communal violence in 2012. They are almost entirely dependent on international aid. The remaining Rohingya are also often caught between the military and the Arakan Army — sometimes having to pay taxes to both sides or wrestle with duplicative administrative requirements. Many would likely be caught in the crossfire if war were to resume. Not surprisingly, some are trying to leave the country through risky and expensive overland journeys, mainly to Malaysia. 

The coup also appears to have triggered something of a shift in the way at least some within the broader Myanmar population view the Rohingya. The vast majority among the country’s Burman majority population had accepted the military’s claims that its 2017 operations against the Muslim minority were a legitimate response to a terrorist attack, in part because the immensely popular Aung San Suu Kyi had also propagated this narrative. After the coup, though, many experienced or witnessed for the first time the military’s capacity for inflicting extreme violence on civilians, something that had until then been largely confined to ethnic minority regions. The junta’s brutality against Burman communities appears to have prompted some to reassess the events of 2017, concluding that the military did indeed commit atrocities against the Rohingya.

The National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel administration formed by ousted lawmakers and operating mostly from abroad, has also adopted a policy toward the Rohingya that guarantees their right to citizenship and commits to ending other discriminatory policies against them. Although these promises have not been tested, because the NUG is not in control of the state, they are nevertheless notable given that the NUG is largely an offshoot of Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, which did little to dismantle repressive policies against the Rohingya when it was in power.

Q&A: Five years on, Rohingya refugees face dire conditions and a long road ahead – Bangladesh | ReliefWeb