Two days after the Grenfell Tower fire, the UK government mounted a public relations rebuttal operation to counter potentially damaging reports that building regulations had allowed the use of combustible cladding. 

Brian Martin, the official in charge of fire safety building regulations at the Ministry of Housing, Local Government and Communities, rebutted press claims that the plastic-filled panels that fuelled the inferno were allowed in the UK but not abroad. Martin contacted Diane Marshall, now operations director at the National House Building Council (NHBC), which provides building control services, asking her to “say this (or something similar) in public” to counter critical reporting that the government’s building control system had allowed the west London council block to be wrapped in combustible materials.

Housing ministry ‘started rebuttal operation two days after Grenfell fire’ | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

 Starbucks on Tuesday reported a 31% increase in profits during the final three months of 2021, but the massive Seattle-based coffee chain nevertheless announced plans to further raise its prices this year. 

Starbucks’ revenue grew to $8.1 billion at the tail-end of 2021, a 19% jump compared to the previous year.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson saw his compensation soar by 39% to $20.4 million in 2021.

Starbucks employees are increasingly fighting back against their low wages and poor working conditions by launching union drives.

Historian Andy Lewis argued that Starbucks’ explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than “word salad to hide corporate greed.”

Starbucks Profits Soar by 31%—But It’s Raising Prices Anyway (commondreams.org)

Loopholes in the U.S. tax code have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy.” Over the next 24 years, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, while passing $21 trillion on to heirs. 

The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation – details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy” and thereby accelerate the “accumulation of dynastic wealth.”

“Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes,” the report explains.

Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents.

The lobbyist group, Patriotic Millionaires, said, “There’s no denying our economy and democracy are rigged in favor of the ultra-wealthy. When the richest 100 Americans have 60,000 times more political power than the bottom 90% of people— it’s time to get dynastic wealth under control.”

Tax-Dodging Billionaire Dynasties Could Cost US $8.4 Trillion: Report (commondreams.org)

 With the Blessing of the State

O bless the British bourgeois state indeed

For its many benefits and largesse,

There are so, so many hardships and distress

As profit taking triumphs over need.

Government employs executive power

To mitigate the very worst effects,

But whichever party the voter elects

Prospects for many are reduced and dour.

There are honest politicians for sure,

With such good intentions, trying their best,

Yet for all their reforms, what isn’t addressed

In this rich world, why do the poor stay poor?

The fiscal blessings the state arranges,

Aim to ensure nothing really changes.

D. A.

 Myanmar’s annual employment losses in 2021 amounted to an estimated 8%, or 1.6 million jobs lost, indicating a sizable decrease from employment of 20.5 million in 2020, the International Labor Organization (ILO) stated in its January 2022 report. The estimates cover the whole labor force of Myanmar, including formal and informal economy workers. The country’s construction, garment, tourism and hospitality industries were among the hardest hit, according to the report, as were rural farmers.

25 million people (almost half Myanmar’s population) were living in poverty by the end of 2021, and 14.4 million people are now in need of humanitarian assistance, the ILO reported. The number of people living in poverty in Myanmar is expected to have more than doubled from before the pandemic, according to the World Bank.

The World Bank, meanwhile, said in its January report that Myanmar’s economy is about 30% smaller than it might have been in the absence of the pandemic and the military coup. International sanctions, a halt in foreign aid and the withdrawal of foreign investors have all pushed Myanmar to the brink of economic collapse.  Businesses all over Myanmar are facing bankruptcy.

Myanmar on brink of economic collapse one year after military coup | Asia | An in-depth look at news from across the continent | DW | 01.02.2022

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), an independent think tank, shows the growing gap between productivity and worker pay since 1979, during which productivity grew 3.5 times as much as pay.

 If wages had kept pace with productivity, then the median hourly wage (adjusted for inflation) in 2017 would have been $33.10. The actual median hourly wage in 2017 was $23.15, a gap of $9.95 per hour.

In 2017 alone, then, the average worker lost $17,385 — because wages have not kept up with productivity.

This means — in 2017 alone—the total amount of income lost to all production and nonsupervisory workers was $1.78 trillion.

 Total household debt has increased as workers take out loans to cover the wages they used to get.

Labor’s average share of GDP in the 1950s was 63.6%. In the 2010s, that share was 59.4% — a downward shift of 4.2 percent, about $1 trillion of lost labor compensation each year. 

 Corporate profits have been soaring. Companies have been paying employees an increasingly smaller share of the value their labor produces. they increased dividend payments to shareholders.

In 2017 alone, dividends paid by U.S. businesses totalled $1.5 trillion. Between 1979 and 2020, domestic corporations paid shareholders $27 trillion.

The wealth workers should have received has, arguably, instead been given to shareholders through dividends — a mechanism which functions like an upward distribution of wealth. 

Of the $1.8 trillion not paid to workers in 2017, $1.5 trillion went to shareholders instead. The richest 10% of Americans own 84% of the value of shares of stock.

For the 2017 tax year, aggregate data from the IRS shows that 83% of dividends went to filers with an adjusted gross income of more than $100,000 — roughly the top 18% of filers.

What’s more, 37% of all dividend income went to the top 0.3% of filers — those who took home more than $1 million. These individual tax filings don’t account for the dividends given to institutional investors — the primary shareholders of publicly traded companies, which include financial management companies and pension funds.

 In a Single Year, $1.78 Trillion Was Taken From the Working Class – In These Times

Almost daily, the pledges made at COP26 are being broken or bent. 

A politician linked to wide-scale deforestation in the 1990s and his Panama Papers-named associate, a Singaporean shell company, and the owner of an agricultural consultancy in Australia are among the figures behind a carbon trading deal worth an estimated $80bn in Borneo.

The Nature Conservation Agreement (NCA) ostensibly protects 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of jungle in the Malaysian state of Sabah from logging for the next 100 years.

But the deal was made in absolute secrecy and without credible due diligence, a tender process or public consultation, according to Indigenous leaders, activists and NGOs.

The NCA gives 30 percent of Sabah’s revenue from carbon credit sales – estimated to be $24bn over the life of the contract – to a company in Singapore, Hoch Standard, with no history in carbon trading.

An estimated 25,000 Indigenous people live in forest reserves in Sabah, with an undocumented number living on the fringes of reserves making up 39 different ethnic groups. Yet Indigenous leaders in the state, where about 60 percent of the population belong to native ethnic groups, say they were kept in the dark about the deal.

“The whole thing was very hush-hush,” Adrian Banie Lasimbang, a former Malaysian senator and Indigenous activist.

A whistleblower with firsthand knowledge of the deal told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

“ Sabah could become the world leader in the monetisation of natural capital and carbon credits. But instead, we created a template other countries can use to pilfer and abuse the system.”

‘Very hush-hush’: Borneo’s $80bn carbon deal stokes controversy | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera

PDF version SS FEBRUARY 2022

Amnesty International joins Human Rights Watch and B’tselem in describing  Israeli laws, policies and practices against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories amount to apartheid.