Police in Haiti fired tear gas on factory workers for a second day in a row, who are on strike demanding pay increases at an industrial park in the capital Port-au-Prince.

The workers employed at factories that produce textiles and other goods said they make 500 gourdes ($5) a day for nine hours of work and are seeking a minimum of 1,500 gourdes ($15) a day. 

Their demands come as Haiti has seen a sharp rise in inflation.

“Poor people can’t do anything with this miserable salary,” said Similien Luckgelson, one of the workers who joined the protest.

Telemark Pierre, a factory worker, said salaries have not been adjusted in three years. He said that workers spend 200 gourdes ($2) a day on transportation alone and said their salary does not cover basic needs.

Factory workers in Haiti go on strike to demand higher wages | Protests News | Al Jazeera

 Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine. Verso, 2021

In this book Cockburn lays bare the inner workings of the military-industrial complex (MIC). The expression ‘war machine’ in the subtitle is misleading, as the main activity to which the MIC is geared is not warfare but money-making. Even the generals and admirals are not interested in waging war except as a means of enhancing their budgets. So critics who accuse the Pentagon of having no strategy are being unfair. It may have no military strategy, but it has a financial one, namely: Don’t interrupt the money flow; add to it. 

And this means that the concept of an arms race, with each side responding to threats with measures that pose new threats in a never-ending cycle, is also misleading. There is no arms race, because the threats are imaginary and the measures do not work. 

The MIC comprises three types of actors: military bureaucrats (high-ranking officers), arms-manufacturing corporations, and congresspeople.

The military bureaucrats are divided into factions that compete for prestige and budgetary allocations. The most important factions are those corresponding to the armed services – the army, the navy, the air force, and now the space force. The more money in the budget, the more high-level posts and the better the prospects of promotion.

Cost-plus

The arms corporations face no real market competition. They get contracts by cultivating good relations with military bureaucrats, who in exchange obtain highly paid employment with the corporations after they retire. Payment of corporations on a ‘cost-plus’ basis encourages them to maximize profits by maximizing costs, which always vastly exceed initial estimates. This is an incentive to develop systems of great complexity. Huge sums are spent on projects known to be infeasible in principle, such as ‘hypersonic’ missiles. 

The corporations induce congresspeople to vote for astronomical military budgets – this year’s is over $768 billion – by ensuring that each congressional district gets a share of military production and employment. All congresspeople take part in such ‘pork-barrel politics’ — and that includes Bernie Sanders. They even insist on continuing to fund the production of weapons for which the armed forces no longer have any use. 

Cockburn exposes the economic interests underlying decisions that appear to be about ‘national security’ or geopolitics. Thus, the driving force behind the eastward expansion of NATO was ‘the urgent necessity [after the end of the Cold War] to open new markets for US arms companies.’ 

Bombing the right targets

An interesting case study concerns the choice of bomber for air support of ground operations. Lower-level officers, who care more about warfighting efficacy than their superiors do, favor the A-10 Warthog, a relatively cheap plane that flies low and slowly enough for its crew to identify targets visually, ensuring that it bombs enemy troops rather than civilians or friendly forces. However, the ‘institutional prosperity’ of the US Air Force is based on much more expensive long-range bombers that fly high and fast and – despite fancy electronics – often bomb the wrong targets. The top commanders of the air force have long striven to get rid of the Warthog, although thanks to counter-lobbying by its defenders their efforts have not been wholly successful.   

Another example of useless high tech is the $100 million spent by Lockheed on EC-130H aircraft with ground-penetrating radar. A study by military intelligence found that this program had ‘no detectable effect’ on attempts to locate bombs buried underground by insurgents in Iraq. At the same time, provision of basic equipment to US troops on the ground was neglected: ‘American families went into debt to buy armored vests, socks, boots, and night-vision goggles’ for their sons and daughters fighting in Iraq. And the army insisted on furnishing soldiers with helmets from a favored contractor that actually exacerbate the effects of bomb blast.  

Stealing the enemy’s boots

I was astonished to learn that half of all American casualties during the first winter of the Korean War were due to frostbite. Without decent cold-weather footwear of their own, US troops resorted to raiding enemy trenches to steal the enemy’s warm padded boots. 

Producers of boots and socks just don’t have the clout of arms manufacturers!  

We are socialists. We don’t want to fight wars. Nevertheless, it is hard to derive consolation from the inefficiency of the armed forces as a warfighting machine. After all, they still have more than enough overkill capacity to destroy the world anyway. Who will be around to complain that they didn’t do it as efficiently as they could have? And the enormous waste of human effort and material resources is the same in either case, not to mention the hefty contribution they make to pollution and global heating. 

How the military-industrial complex works | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)

The chief financial officer of the oil and gas company BP, Murray Auchincloss, told investors this week: “It’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with.”

Oil and gas companies have reported bumper profits, as the gas crisis raises the price at which they can sell their fossil fuels, without raising the cost of their extraction.

While they are being showered with cash, households in the UK are suffering the biggest fall in income in three decades, with one in 10 households not having enough money for food and food bank use soaring.

This week, BP reported a profit of $12.8bn (£9.4bn) for last year, following Shell’s announcement last week of $19.3bn in profits. 

Little of the money is going to taxpayers: Channel 4 revealed that BP has paid no tax on its North Sea oil and gas for five years.

Bernard Looney, the chief executive of BP, told analysts he was “not seeing increased pressure” for the company to pay more tax, despite calls in the UK for a windfall tax on fossil fuel profits, to ease the burden of energy bills on the vulnerable.

The facts of oil and gas company investment do not bear out the claim that the massive returns are being poured into green projects and the race to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Investment in clean energy by oil and gas companies was about 1% of their capital expenditure in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a proportion likely to have reached little more than 4% for the whole of last year.

Meanwhile, the companies are continuing to invest vast sums in exploration and new fields, which the IEA said last year could not be brought to fruition if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C.

BP plans to invest about £2bn-£3bn in renewable energy by 2025, but its overall capital investment will be £60bn, most of which is likely to go into new production that will raise greenhouse gas emissions. The company is estimated to have spent about $3.2bn on clean energy since 2016, and $84bn on oil and as exploration and development over the same period.

The “green” spending is likely also to include projects such as “blue hydrogen”, derived from fossil fuels, that critics say produces substantially higher carbon emissions than natural gas.

Shell’s plans involve an estimated near-term investment of about $2bn-$3bn in low-carbon activities, which is about 10% of its investments, while spending at least $8bn on upstream fossil fuel production.

Richard Black, a senior associate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, said: “The key point about oil and gas majors arguing that higher profits are needed to invest in greening their operations is: prove it. If they argue that is why high profits are justified, they should pledge publicly that a sizable proportion will be invested in proven technologies like wind, solar and storage, rather than blue hydrogen or carbon capture and storage, which are either of unproven potential or several years off.” He was sceptical of whether oil and gas companies would do so. “Past experience suggests that the oil and gas industry is strong on rhetoric when it comes to cleaning up their act, but investment is still inadequate.

Charlie Kronick, a senior climate adviser at Greenpeace, said: “…There’s no guarantee that any oil company will use the extra cash [from this year’s bumper profits] for the green transition unless they’re forced to do so, yet the UK government continues to talk up new production of oil and gas, which will only make the climate emergency worse.”

Connor Schwartz, the climate lead at Friends of the Earth. “It’s clear that oil and gas companies don’t intend to divert their eye-wateringly excessive profits to fund the green transition we need. They have no profit-based reason to do this, because drilling for oil and gas is more lucrative than investing in cheap, green energy,” he said. “This is partly due to government handouts in the form of subsidies and tax breaks, which reward huge multinationals for exacerbating climate breakdown instead of penalising them.”

He added: “It’s wrong that they are making billions while so many are struggling to eat and heat their homes. People know injustice when they see it…”

Facts give lie to claim record oil money is being poured into green projects | Oil and gas companies | The Guardian

 Kick Off? Kick Out!

Lined up, pliable as troops in trenches,

M.P.s are primed, like supporters who dream

Of their being asked to play for the first team,

To rise as a riot from their benches,

Braying and pointing at their opponents,

Howling in mock anger and screeching dire

Insults – although not liar, never liar:

Pantomime of partisan malcontents.

For all that brash hullabaloo, the aim

Is to leave the illusion unresolved

That spectators are actually involved,

Which suits the very few who own the game.

Such foul play surely deserves dismissal,

Time to seize the game, blow the final whistle.

D. A.

 Four out of five Tongan households receive remittances from abroad.

 The number claiming universal credit has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic to at least 2.3 million.

The TUC said the 1.3 million increase in working universal credit claimants had been caused by households being pushed into financial hardship during Covid.

Low-paid workers, mostly those with young children, are able to top up their incomes by applying for universal credit, and about 40% of all claimants are in work.

The TUC said 12% of workers told researchers that they expected to struggle to afford the basics in the next six months, while 22% said they would find it hard to afford “more than the basics”. The analysis found that a fifth of workers have Christmas debts to pay off this year, a number that rises to more than a quarter for workers with children of school age.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC’s general secretary, said ministers need to urgently raise universal credit payments to 80% of the living wage – which is set to rise to £9.50 in April.

Extra 1.3m workers on universal credit since pandemic began, research finds | Cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 John Allan, the chairman of Britain’s biggest supermarket chain has warned that “the worst is yet to come” on food price inflation, as he predicted it will soon hit 5%.

 He was well aware people on very tight budgets were having to choose between food and heating. He said the idea that this was happening was very troubling.

 Poverty groups have warned about the impending threat to those on the lowest incomes.

“In some ways the worst is still to come – because although food price inflation in Tesco last quarter was only 1%, we are impacted by rising energy prices. Our suppliers are impacted by rising energy prices. We’re doing all we can to offset it … but that’s the sort of number we’re talking about. Of course, 5%,” he said.

Allan said: “I think the combination of increasing energy prices, the impact of national insurance increases on people’s incomes, and to a much much lesser extent increasing food prices, is going to squeeze the hardest-up still harder.”

Tesco chairman warns of food price inflation at 5% by spring | Tesco | The Guardian

 A million UK adults went an entire day without eating over the past month because they could not afford to put a meal on the table.

The Food Foundation thinktank said more than one in five households said they have already faced a ”heat or eat” dilemma, cutting back on the quality or quantity of food to pay energy or other essential bills, while 59% of households fear the cost of living squeeze will leave them with less to spend on food in the future.

 Food insecurity is defined as skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day – because they were unable to afford food.

“There is little doubt that the cost of living crisis is putting very real pressure on the ability of many to afford a healthy diet and is set to widen health inequalities,” the Foundation said.

About 2 million children were living in households that do not have access to a healthy and affordable diet, putting them at risk of diet-related diseases such as obesity, and poor physical growth, the Foundation said.

People with serious disability were five times more at risk than those without a disability. People on universal credit were five times more likely to be food insecure than those not claiming.

“The rapid escalation in disabled people experiencing food poverty is truly shocking. It is disabled people facing the biggest barriers to independence and inclusion that are in the worst situation; how can this possibly be acceptable?” asked Kamran Mallick, the chief executive of Disability Rights UK.

1m UK adults ‘go entire day without food’ in cost of living crisis | Food poverty | The Guardian

 The Traveller Movement, which represents the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, said it had been “surprised” by the government’s promises to better protect the community against hate speech following the backlash to Jimmy Carr’s joke.

It accused the government of hypocrisy after ministers condemned a Holocaust joke by Jimmy Carr while pushing through a raft of legislation hostile to their way of life.

Greg Sproston, policy and campaigns manager for the Traveller Movement, said the government was currently trying to pass three bills – on policing, nationality and borders and elections – all of which will “have disproportionately negative impacts” on the GRT community. He added that a national strategy to reduce inequality in the community announced over two years ago “still has not materialised”.

“If the government is serious about protecting and supporting these communities, they would scrap this discriminatory legislation and bring forward the strategy without delay,” he said.

The policing bill is especially controversial within the GRT community as it would give police powers to move travellers’ camps if anyone complained, regardless of whether a crime had been committed.

A recent survey by University of Birmingham researchers found that 44% of people in the UK had negative attitudes towards GRT people, making them the “least liked group”, nearly double the level for Muslims, who were the second group to receive the most prejudice.

Research by the Traveller Movement in 2017 found that 91% of GRT people had experienced discrimination, which it described as “the last acceptable form of racism”. These attitudes have a profound impact on areas such as employment and education, where GRT people underperform, and the criminal justice system, where they are over-represented.

Rosa Cisneros, a member of the GRT community who researches Romani culture at Coventry University, said she was “sad but not surprised” by Carr’s joke.

“This situation has highlighted that anti-Gypsyism and Romaphobia still exists today. For me, it isn’t about censoring Jimmy Carr or being offended or me being part of the ‘woke’ brigade that I want to just cancel a show or infringe on someone’s freedom of speech and his rights. No, I am utterly horrified that we live in a space where such harmful and hateful speech is accepted and seen as a joke.”

Roma accuse government of hypocrisy over Jimmy Carr joke | Jimmy Carr | The Guardian

 Just 15.5% of the world’s coastal regions remain ecologically intact, according to a study, led by researchers at the University of Queensland, that used satellite data to examine the extent to which human activities have encroached on coastlines around the globe.

It found that up to 2013 – the latest year for which the data was available – few intact coastlines remained.  The situation certainly would not have improved since 2013.

The small areas of the coast that remain undamaged by pressures such as fishing, agriculture, urban development, mining and roads were mostly in Canada, followed by Russia, Greenland, Chile, Australia and the United States.

Very few intact areas and often high levels of degradation were found in island nations, much of Europe, and countries including Vietnam, India and Singapore.

Coastal regions containing seagrasses, savannah and coral reefs had the highest levels of human pressure.

James Watson, of the University of Queensland, said remoteness didn’t guarantee coastlines would remain intact, pointing to mining and particularly fishing as industries causing environmental decline in those places.

He said he had expected Madagascar, Namibia and northern Australia would all retain large areas of intact coastline, but it had not proved to be consistently the case.

“It shocks me how pervasive fishing is. It’s just everywhere. You can’t avoid it,” he said. “These remote places around the world, you’re seeing fishing impacts.”

Barely 15% of the world’s coastal regions remain ecologically intact, study says | Coastlines | The Guardian