The highest deforestation rates since 2009. The third most active hurricane season on record. Extreme rainfall, floods, and landslides displaced tens of thousands of people. Rising sea levels. Glaciers in Peru lost more than half their size. 2021 was a challenging year for Latin America and the Caribbean. That’s according to the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean 2021 report 

 the second most disaster-prone region in the world,

 It states that “sea levels in the region continued to rise in 2021 at a faster rate than globally.

The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season brought 21 named storms that included seven hurricanes and was the sixth consecutive above-average season.

 extreme rainfall led to tens of thousands of homes being destroyed or damaged and hundreds of thousands of people displaced

The record-setting drought in Chile continued in 2021, marking the 13th consecutive year of the “Central Chile Mega-drought,” which placed the country at the center of the region’s water crisis.

Climate Change Impacts Threaten Latin America and the Caribbean | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 A fifth of UK households now have an average shortfall of £60 a week between what they earn and what they need to cover essentials such as energy bills, rent, transport and food, as the rising cost of living leaves people with the lowest amount of spare cash in almost five years.

Living costs, up 11% year on year in June, led to a record 18% drop in average household disposable income of £175.80 a month.

The average household had £200 a week left after paying tax and essential bills last month – a figure that has fallen for eight consecutive months.

The squeeze on cash is leading people to cut back on non-essentials.

Those on the lowest incomes were hardest hit. Those in north-east England and Northern Ireland fared worst.

Mark Nalder, head of payments at Nationwide building society, said: “Following a peak in spending during May, our data suggests households have started to cut back across the board and where they can. This is happening as we enter the summer period where customers will want to enjoy themselves, so it will be interesting to see how these often conflicting interests are balanced.

“As we head into the holiday season, we expect budgeting to continue being a feature as the nation prepares for even higher costs with inflation continuing to climb and the energy price cap rising again this autumn.”

Fifth of UK households now have ‘negative disposable income’ | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 The total value of £10m-plus London homes changing hands so far this year has topped £1bn 

Anthony Payne, managing director of property service LonRes, said there was “a hell of a lot of money around chasing very few properties, and of course that is pumping up prices”.

He said the drop in the value of the pound, which has fallen by 11% since the start of the year to $1.20, had attracted overseas buyers looking for “a deal”.

“The rich have a lot of money at the moment,” he said. “Governments have thrown in huge liquidity, and whilst a lot of people are in pain financially, a lot of rich people have a lot of money to spend. They want to put it into property, and lock in while interest rates are low. Buying agent searches for super-prime properties, registered on LonRes, are at their highest level ever, which would all point to continued momentum in the immediate months ahead.”

Record number of £10m-plus London properties sold as pound falters | The super-rich | The Guardian

 Spiralling inflation, volatile financial markets and the soaring cost of living are leading to the “great unretirement”.

According to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) analysis shows there was an increase in economic activity (people working or looking for work) of 116,000 among the over-50s in the past year. More than half the total increase is among men aged over 65 – whose economic activity levels increased by 66,000, or 8.5%, in a year – with 37,000, or 6.8%, more women over 65 in or looking for work. Experts say in-depth research indicates the increase is driven by former people in retirement returning to work, rather than people working longer. 

“People who thought they could retire comfortably during the pandemic are having to unretire and find work again to bring in extra income and top up their pensions while they still can,” said Stuart Lewis, the chief executive of Rest Less, a digital community for the over-50s. “Increasing numbers of retirees are feeling poorer than they’ve felt before, with consumer confidence at a record low and purchasing power eroded on a monthly basis,” he added. “All this is driving the trend of unretirement.”

Caroline Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK, said it was no wonder that significant numbers of retired people were “scrambling to return to work in an effort to shore up their finances against the storm…Carefully laid retirement plans, which looked economically sustainable a year ago, are now shot to pieces…”

Ros Altmann, the former pensions minister and Conservative peer, said, “The fear of inflation has caused huge anxiety and driven some to return to work even if their health may not be up to it.” 

Britain’s ‘great unretirement’: cost of living drives older people back to work | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 Elizabeth Warren warn that the Federal Reserve, the American central bank’s approach to tackling inflation “risks triggering a devastating recession” without directly addressing many of the key drivers of recent price surges.

Warren argued that aggressive rate hikes “are largely ineffective against many of the underlying causes of this inflationary spike,” such as gas and food prices. Last month when asked whether the Fed’s rate hikes are expected to bring down gas and food costs, Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Fed, admitted  forthrightly, “I would not think so, no.” Nevertheless, Fed officials appear poised to stay the course with another 75-basis-point rate hike.

Warren noted that “when the Fed raises interest rates, increasing the cost of borrowing money, it becomes more expensive for businesses to invest in their operations.”

“As a result, employers will slow hiring, cut hours, and fire workers, leaving families with less money,” the senator wrote. “In the bloodless language of economists, that’s referred to as ‘dampening demand.’ But make no mistake: If the Fed cuts too much or too abruptly, the resulting recession will leave millions of people—disproportionately lower-wage workers and workers of color—with smaller paychecks or no paycheck at all.”

Warren went on to directly criticize former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, pointing to his recent claim that the U.S. needs “five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.” The current U.S. unemployment rate is 3.6%.

“If Messrs. Powell and Summers have their way, the resulting recession will be brutal. As in past downturns, Republicans in Congress will press for austerity—tax cuts for giant corporations and the rich, weaker regulation on big businesses, and little economic support for the most vulnerable.”

Elizabeth Warren Accuses Fed Chair of Fomenting ‘Devastating Recession’ (commondreams.org)

 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains more than 100,000 people annually. That translates to 20,000 detainees held on any given day in the roughly 200 immigrant detention facilities overseen by ICE. More than 80% are held in facilities run by private prison companies, and about 60% by GEO Group and CoreCivic

On Jan. 2, 2018, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wrote Congress, imploring it to investigate suspected labor abuse at immigrant detention centers. The independent, bipartisan federal agency cited detainee complaints of being pressured to clean and maintain facilities for $1 a day — a pay rate that allows private prisons to hold down their costs and boost their profits.

“The commission is concerned with the added pressure to coerce detainees to perform necessary labor in order to maximize profits,” it warned.

Four years later, Congress has yet to hold the hearing. And the $1‑a-day pay persists, which has enabled some prison companies to save tens of millions a year over what they would otherwise have to pay outside workers.

“Nothing has changed,” says Andrew Free, an Atlanta-based civil rights lawyer ​“Forced labor is still going on throughout the [immigrant detention] system. There’s been no federal decision to stop it.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2019, said, ​“Washington works hand-in-hand with private prison companies, who spend millions on lobbyists, campaign contributions and revolving-door hires — all to turn our criminal and immigration policies into ones that prioritize making them rich instead of keeping us safe.”

 In 2019 and 2020 GEO and CoreCivic spent about $3 million and $3.4 million, respectively, on lobbying, and another $212,700 and $159,500 on campaign contributions via their PACs — 88% to Republicans .

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat and chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, unsuccessfully pushed for a detainee pay hike. ​“These people are washing floors, cleaning toilets, for $1 a day,” she says. ​“That’s ridiculous. I’d like to see anyone [who opposes a pay hike] work for $1 a day.”

A Democratic proposal to increase detainee pay died when it failed to have enough support to be included in a massive fiscal 2022 spending bill.

 A federal jury found the GEO Group, a private prison company, in violation of the state of Washington’s minimum wage law. GEO appealed. It contends detainees are volunteers, not employees entitled to minimum wage protection. The trial heard evidence that detainees ​“volunteer” to work under pressure, as they have no other means to earn money. Other lawsuits accuse prison companies of threatening detainees with solitary confinement.

At an immigrant detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a plaintiff in a suit against another private prison testified it gave him an ​“impossible choice: either work for a few cents an hour, or live without basics things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food” and be unable to afford to call his family back home in Guatemala. he was made to work eight to nine-hour shifts in the kitchen, seven days a week. He stated that guards twice threatened him with solitary confinement because they thought he and others were planning a work stoppage.

The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 after the Civil War, banned slavery and involuntary servitude — except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. Immigrant detainees — who include asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants whose status is under review — are not held on criminal charges. Instead, they are in civil detention where they wait weeks, months or even years for a federal court to decide if they can stay in the United States or will be deported. Many lawmakers don’t seem to see or recognize the distinction between criminal conviction and civil detention.

Heidi Altman, policy director for the National Immigrant Justice Center, which supports ending immigration detention, says, ​“Members of Congress who say they stand with immigrant communities should be yelling and screaming … to ensure that in the next [federal] spending bill, not one taxpayer dollar goes toward enriching private prison companies. But instead, we’re hearing a lot of silence.”

​“What’s going on is obvious,” says Paul Light, a political science professor at New York University. ​“Those benefiting from the alleged forced labor make campaign contributions. Those working in the substandard conditions don’t have any political clout.

GEO Group CEO George Zoley wrote that if detainee pay was increased to the prevailing local wage, it would cost his company as much as $38 million annually. 

GEO and CoreCivic use of detainee labor rather than hire outside help has succeeded to together save $265 million since 2018, at an average of more than $66 million a year. Those figures are likely conservative. In a 2015 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal paper, Professor Stevens calculated that in 2012, the two companies’ labor-cost savings totaled between $63 million and $149 million.

That’s money lost to the local host communities — money that would have been used to hire and pay janitors, cooks, dishwashers, barbers, beauticians, painters, plumbers, librarians, clerks and other non-security posts. Those jobs would generally be under mandate to pay the federal contractor minimum wage, which in 2018 was $10.35 an hour, plus $4.48 in benefits. It is now $15 an hour (raised in January by a Biden executive order), plus another $4.60 an hour in benefits.

While Congress and private prison companies have declined to raise detainees’ pay floor, annual appropriations from ICE to GEO and CoreCivic have soared more than 500% — from $101 million in 2018 to $626 million in 2022 — for a five-year total of nearly $2.5 billion. 

Andrea Carcamo is the policy director at Freedom for Immigrants, an advocacy group devoted to eliminating immigration detention. ​“Private prison companies operate under the incentive to maximize their profit, and as such, it’s not surprising they cut corners at the expense of dehumanizing people in detention.”

[The blog would also add it highlights the hypocrisy of those American politicians who condemn China’s forced labor of Uighurs but permit the forced labor of migrants]  

Raising a $1-a-Day Wage Seems Like a No-Brainer. Not to Congress. – In These Times

Disputes over state laws that manipulate ballot access have become endemic in American politics. 

Laws like the one adopted in Texas in 2021 restrict election policies, such as allowing drive-through voting or mailing out absentee ballots automatically, that are thought to give Democrats a slight advantage—and Democrats are overwhelmingly the party of the voters of color who were systematically excluded from Texas politics for generations through a series of creative and invidious devices, including such bizarre measures as a private, whites-only Democratic primary developed to avoid desegregation laws. 

In closely fought North Carolina, 2 percent of Black voters were registered as Republicans in 2020, and the Republican Party has engineered large majorities in the state legislature through expert gerrymandering and voting laws that a federal court in 2016 described as “laser-targeted” at the Black vote.

The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States is between 10 and 12 million and they are deprived of the vote. But even the 12 million who are legal but non-citizen immigrants cannot vote. 

State laws disenfranchises 5 million people with felony convictions, and deny the ballot to one out of every sixteen Black citizens of voting age. That figure was recently more than one in seven Black voters in seven states. 

 “We’re seeing this global emergency play out and it’s getting worse more quickly than was predicted… things are gonna get a lot worse…and the survival of our civilization is at stake.”- Al Gore, who was vice-president to Bill Clinton between 1993 and 2001.

 The health of all people is being sacrificed to Big Pharma profits.

In advance of the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place in June, the UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima appealed that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. 

Byanyima said, “In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death.” 

The WTO blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostics to the world. 

After two years of the WTO “postponing” the India-South Africa proposal for a waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, the EU, the US and the UK ensured that no worthwhile patent waiver measure was passed. Big Pharma profits once again trumped the lives and health of the people.

In vaccine manufacture, it is not the formula of the vaccine that matters but rather manufacturing it at an industrial scale and ensuring the production process of replicates complex large molecules accurately. This know-how is guarded not under patents but under trade secrets. It is possible to duplicate these trade secrets or secure them by giving somebody who knows the process the job. But this opens companies that try to do this to costly legal action. And there is also the threat of unilateral sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK.

The upshot is that Big Pharma companies will continue to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives, even if this leads to new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging and causes the continuation of the pandemic.  We have the vaccine production capacity to immunize the entire global population, thus saving countless lives and reducing the possibility of new, dangerous variants emerging. But doing so is not in the interest of Big Pharma, for whom profits matter far more than human lives.

Why is immunizing the global population important? Simply put, the more people that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infects, the more the chance of new variants emerging. There is a misguided belief among some people that the more the virus mutates, the more benign it is likely to become. This used to be a common opinion among a section of the medical community. However, today evolutionary biologists hold that there is no evidence that viruses mutate to become more benign. The longer we live with a pandemic that continues to infect around half a million to a million people every day, the more we are dicing with the possibility of a new variant emerging that can be as transmissible as omicron and can also lead to larger case fatalities than we have seen before. 

 Pfizer’s profits roughly doubled in 2021 from 2020, with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contributing to a significant part of those profits. If Pfizer were a country, its earnings of $81 billion last year would have placed it ahead of the GDP of countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya.

Why don’t countries that have the capacity to manufacture advanced vaccines—India, China, Russia and South Africa—come together to offer technology and supplies to the rest of the world? Why don’t countries collaborate with Cuba, a potential biological powerhouse, to produce vaccines locally? Cuba has already developed five such vaccines, two of which are already under large-scale production.

The answer lies with the “rules-based international order” and intellectual property laws.

How the World Trade Organization chose profits over vaccinating Earth’s population against COVID-19 – Alternet.org