‘In China, a politician was revealed to have established an offshore firm to trade U.S. stocks away from prying eyes…. Feng’s company held $2 million in assets and was registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but is currently inactive.   In 2019, Feng recommended “stricter laws to prevent corruption and white-collar crime involving private companies”‘   (yahoo.com, 4 October).   The only thing surprising about this revelation fro the Pelican Papers is the paltry sum involved.   Consider, the ‘..estimated net worth of the 153 members of China’s Parliament and its advisory body amounts to $650 billion (consortiumnews, 28 July 2020)!  Clearly, ‘China is now an integral and irreplaceable part of global capitalism’ (consortiumnews, 28 July 2020) and in competition with other countries, such as the US, over trade routes, resources and areas of domination. ‘

A new analysis has found prominent companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are backing business groups that are fighting landmark climate legislation, despite their own promises to combat the climate crisis.  Corporate lobby groups and organizations have mobilized to oppose the proposed $3.5tn budget bill put forward by Democrats, which contains unprecedented measures to drive down planet-heating gases.

Most large US corporations have expressed concern over the climate crisis or announced their own goals to cut greenhouse gases. Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people, has said that the climate crisis is the “biggest threat to our planet” and the company he founded, Amazon, has created a pledge for businesses to cut their emissions to net zero by 2040. Microsoft has promised to be “carbon negative” within a decade from now and Disney is aiming to use only renewable-sourced electricity within the same timeframe.

But these leading companies, and others, either support or actively steer the very lobby groups that are attempting to sink the bill that has ambitions to tackle the climate crisis, threatening one of the last major legislative efforts that will help decide whether parts of the world plunge into a new, barely livable climatic state. If enacted, the bill would establish a system to phase out emissions from the US electricity system, provide payments to prop up carbon-free nuclear energy and support the adoption of electric vehicles.

“Major corporations love to tell us how committed they are to addressing the climate crisis and building a sustainable future, but behind closed doors, they are funding the very industry trade groups that are fighting tooth and nail to stop the biggest climate change bill ever,” said Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, which compiled the analysis. “Hiding behind these shady groups doesn’t just put our environment at risk – it puts these companies’ household names and reputations in serious jeopardy,” Herrig said.

The US Chamber of Commerce has vowed to “do everything we can to prevent this tax-raising, job-killing reconciliation bill from becoming law”. The leading business lobby group’s board includes executives from companies including Microsoft, Intuit, United Airlines and Deloitte, which have all expressed concern over climate change – Deloitte even includes teaching the climate crisis to employees in its staff training – and have made various promises to reduce emissions.

 The Business Roundtable, has said it is “deeply concerned” about the passage of the bill, largely because it raises taxes on the wealthy. The organization is made up of company chief executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, who has called for stronger action on the climate emergency from governments and businesses. Other members include Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon, Sundar Pichai, who heads Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Darren Woods, chief executive of the oil giant Exxon.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group that includes Bayer and AstraZeneca among its members, has run adverts attacking the proposed bill.

The Rate Coalition, another lobby group that has Disney, FedEx and Verizon as members, is also planning an advertising blitz to help kill off the legislation.

The National Association of Manufacturers – backed by Johnson&Johnson, Dow and Goodyear – has said it is attempting to upend the bill “in every way you can imagine”.

Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill | US political lobbying | The Guardian

  Lebanon’s spiralling economic meltdown continues and the UN is calling for urgent reforms as extreme poverty deepens and starvation becomes a “growing reality” for thousands of people.

“The situation remains a living nightmare for ordinary people, causing unspeakable suffering and distress for the most vulnerable,” United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon Najat Rochdi said. “Starvation has become a growing reality for thousands of people,” Rochdi said. “Today, we estimate that more than one million Lebanese need relief assistance to cover their basic needs, including food.” Rochdi said Lebanon’s fate lies in the political will to make its economy viable again, and that humanitarian interventions are not the solution.

“Humanitarian action is meant to be by nature short-term, temporary and unsustainable,” she said. “It is not meant to solve the root causes and drivers of a crisis.”

 78 percent of the Lebanese lives below the poverty line – some three million people – with 36 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. Almost a quarter of the population was not able to meet their “dietary needs” by the end of last year, the UN said.

The Lebanese pound has lost 90 percent of its value against the dollar amid Lebanon’s economic meltdown over the past two years. Buying power has dwindled as millions are locked out of their savings in the country’s stricken banks. A fuel crisis has paralysed much of Lebanon over the past few months, causing large-scale power outages and crippling hospitals. Life-saving medicines have been missing from pharmacy shelves, including cancer treatments. Families have had to dig deeper into their pockets to buy them at inflated rates through the black market if they can afford to do so.

“We’ve never seen these growing needs among the Lebanese population before,” World Food Programme spokeswoman Rasha Abou Dargham told Al Jazeera. The organisation now provides food assistance to one in four people in the country, with demand for food assistance at an all-time high.

UN urges Lebanon to implement reforms as extreme poverty grows | United Nations News | Al Jazeera

 Friday 1 October 19.30 BST (GMT + 1)

  The average national house price was hitting between NZ$937,000 and $1m, nearly eight times the annual household income. 

Real Estate Institute data shows there was a 31% increase over the year to July.

Wellington and Auckland have some of the least affordable property markets in the world – homeownership rates in New Zealand have been falling since the early 1990s across all age brackets, but the drop is especially pronounced for people in their 20s and 30s.

 A spokesperson for Consumer NZ, Gemma Rasmussen,  said that with house prices rising so quickly, even high-income millennials will struggle to save for a deposit without the benefit of intergenerational wealth.

 “We’re heading for a place where there are two New Zealands: the people who have property, they’re secure and their capital gains will continue to grow, and then there are people who are locked out.”

‘Haves and have-nots’: how the housing crisis is creating two New Zealands – a photo essay | New Zealand | The Guardian

The World Socialist Party (New Zealand)

P.O. Box 1929

Auckland, NI, New Zealand

Email: moggiegrayson@gmail.com

 Food policies across the North Africa region was geared towards the expansion of large-scale, commercial agriculture, attracting foreign investment and big agribusiness, export orientation, and a reliance on imports for domestic food needs and production inputs. 

This came at the expense of broad-based rural development and traditional food systems and cultures. The result has been the impoverishment of rural populations and mass migration to urban areas and abroad.

The North African region could be an area for cooperation and solidarity among its peoples. But this will not be brought about by states and local elites that profit from the continuation and expansion of the current agro-food model, with its “free” trade and liberalization of local markets dramatically undercutting small-scale producers.

A new study by the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the North African Food Sovereignty Network (NAFSN) shows how traditional farming and local food production deteriorated and how food dependency intensified with communities increasingly reliant on imports. More than 50 percent of calories consumed daily in the Arab region are from imported food, with the region spending around $110 billion annually on food imports. The takeover of land, water, and seeds by domestic and foreign capital continued. 

The TNI-NAFSN study argues, this food dependency is a result of market-based policies dictated by global financial institutions (the IMF, World Bank and WTO), reinforced by UN organizations (UN Food and Agriculture Organization, UN Development Programme, UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia), and translated into guiding policy frameworks by regional organizations (Arab Organisation for Agricultural Development/the Arab League). National regimes, in turn, followed these prescriptions. This brought prosperity to a few but left many others facing considerable hardship as markets, resources and policies are increasingly dominated by a handful of powerful corporate actors. 

The economic dislocation wrought by the pandemic has led to a surge in the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition in a region in which, even prior to Covid-19, a significant share of the population experienced food insecurity.

According to the TNI-NAFSN study, small-scale food producers have been among the hardest hit by the closure of food markets (as in Morocco or Tunisia), declining sales of food and agricultural products, and difficulty accessing key production inputs.

Governments and institutional actors across the region have responded to the health and economic crisis in a number of ways, including intervening more assertively in the trade of key foodstuffs, extending emergency aid to various sections of society. However, these measures did not address the root causes of the crisis.

International and regional institutions recommended more or less the same policies as before, with minor adjustments to mitigate negative effects, rather than transforming food systems for social justice and sustainability. Essentially, they recommended perpetuating dependency on global agro-food markets and private capital as key mechanisms to deliver food security in the region. This business-as-usual approach continues to tie people’s food supply to the market mechanisms that prioritize profit for private corporations and the delivery of hard currency to cover the state’s debt obligations.

The TNI-NAFSN study argues the severity of the crisis requires a change of direction — one that is geared towards the rights and agency of laborers and small-scale producers, agro-ecology, and the complete elimination of the structural causes of food dependency and the lack of food sovereignty. By politicizing food systems and putting issues around democratic control at the heart of decision-making, food sovereignty thus offers a radically different pathway out of the current crisis.

COVID-19: A Just Recovery for North Africa’s Food – Consortiumnews

 “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises. Of course, we need constructive dialogue. But they’ve now had 30 years of blah, blah, blah and where has that led us?” 

Greta Thunberg in a speech to the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy. 

 There has long been a deep divide between vegetarians and meat-eaters, originally based on the ethics of protecting animals from cruelty and promoting the welfare of livestock. In recent years the issue has become a crucial one in the climate change debate as the rearing of livestock to meet the demand of meat-eaters has been found to have serious implications for carbon emissions. However, too often those who work in the meat industry have had their well-being neglected.  

A Guardian investigation has found meat companies across Europe have been hiring thousands of workers through subcontractors, agencies and bogus co-operatives on inferior pay and conditions. Europe’s £190bn meat industry has become a global hotspot for outsourced labour, with a floating cohort of workers, many of whom are migrants, 

with some earning 40% to 50% less than directly employed staff in the same factories. The Guardian uncovered evidence of a two-tier employment system with workers subjected to sub-standard pay and conditions to fulfil the meat industry’s need for a replenishable source of low-paid, hyper-flexible workers with unions estimating that thousands of workers in some countries are precariously employed through subcontractors and agencies. These precarious workers often have undefined working hours, zero-hours contracts, bogus self-employed status and no sick pay. Workers describe living in an extremely precarious state in countries where they do not speak the language and therefore struggle to understand their agreements and legal rights.

“The system is sick everywhere across Europe. It’s based on cheap prices for meat, on the exploitation of labour,” said Enrico Somaglia, deputy secretary general of the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions. “You have workers elbow to elbow doing the same work, but under different conditions.”

In the Netherlands – one of Europe’s largest meat exporters with sales worth €8.8bn (£7.5bn) last year – the labour inspectorate said migrants, primarily on precarious contracts, make up to 90% of the workforce.

“They can fire you instantly and you can lose everything,” said a Romanian worker in the Netherlands.

“Migrant workers in the meat industry are an invisible group,” says Martijn Huysmans, assistant professor at Utrecht University School of Economics. “In Dutch stores you can see what kind of life an animal has had – we have a star system for animal welfare. But ironically, you can’t see what conditions people in the slaughterhouse were working under.”

‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry | Meat industry | The Guardian

Revealed: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe | Meat industry | The Guardian

 On 13 September the ex-Maoist guerrilla leader Abimael Guzman died in a prison in Peru where he had been for nearly thirty years. He has been portrayed by the Peruvian and world capitalist press as one of the most criminal and brutal ‘Marxist’ leaders in the world, blamed for the death of more than 80,000 people and the destruction of private and government property

He was the founder of ‘Gonzalo thought’ (like Mao Tse Tung thought) and he created his own cult of personality, seeing himself as one of the ‘four swords’ of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He travelled to China in 1966 and 1967 during the Cultural Revolution and was part of the split of the Communist Party of Peru (Red Flag). Mao’s Little Red Book became his Bible. When he returned to Peru, he formed a guerrilla group along called Shining  Path with some of his professors and young students who came from peasant families,

The name Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) was taken from José Carlos Mariategui, a Peruvian Marxist-Leninist who had founded Peru’s first Communist Party in 1928 and who advocated a peasant/indigenous peoples ‘socialism’. His maxim was: ‘El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución’ (‘Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution’). Many political movements were inspired by his writings including the Tupamaros in Uruguay and Evo Morales’ indigenous people’s movement in Bolivia. Three ex-leaders of these guerrilla movements became presidents in Latin America and allies of the ruling class and the corporations.

Was Guzman really a communist, or a Marxist? Were Mao and Lenin genuine Marxist and socialists? Are Leninism and Maoism socialist/communist currents? Can the crimes that were committed by him be blamed on Marxism and Socialism?

The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement have indicated for decades that neither Leninism, Stalinism or Maoism have ever been Marxist or socialist conceptions; that, instead, they were representative of an economic current named by Engels as State Capitalism; that the concept of a violent uprising was a tactic created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government of Russia; and that idea was borrowed from the Blanquists. It was not a Marxist conception.  Shining Path’s first action was to attack a polling station and burn it down, rejecting Marx political view of the political education of the working class, and the revolutionary use of the ballot and universal suffrage by the working class.

In Latin America, Maoism was a complete failure from the first time that it was adopted by several organizations that had abandoned Castroism. It sacrificed the lives of many young people who became members of the urban guerrillas and infiltrated themselves in the workers’ unions or went to the mountains or jungles of several countries in Latin America and were assassinated by the police or the armed forces, as were many peasants and members of the workers’ unions, university teachers, and young professionals.



Maoism’s failure in Latin America is a clear indication that a minority group of individuals will not liberate the working class and humanity. It proves that Marx was correct when he wrote that only the working class can liberate itself. Maoism was a case of what Engels criticised as a conscious minority acting in the name of an unconscious majority. But socialism cannot be established without a class conscious working class



Mao Tse Tung thought attracted many young peoples in different countries in Latin America including the Caribbean islands as an ideological replacement for Castroism, but in essence, it was the same adventurist movement advocated by Regis Debray who fought in Bolivia with Che Guevara. The main attraction was the concept of ‘anti-revisionism’ started by China and Albania against the Khruschevites. It claimed to be a restoration of true socialism and true Marxism, but it was only a variety of Leninism and Stalinism. Maoism was Chinese nationalism like Castroism was Latin American nationalism.



Latin American Maoism was basically a nationalist/patriotic movement, and all the so-called Communist parties that were created were nationalists’ parties of the countries where they were formed. None of them had a socialist programme; their programme was for reforms, statism and the nationalization of natural resources.



It was mainly a movement among young people and university students. It never had any incidence within the industrial working class. Although many Marxist-Leninist parties sent their best cadres to work with the peasants, it never became a peasants’ movement; it was some capitalist governments that provided the peasants with what they wanted – land reform, agricultural equipment and supplies. They confronted a force that was stronger than them, the forces of the capitalist state, and suffered the consequences.



When China openly opted for state-run capitalism and collaboration with the Western powers and Western corporations all these organizations collapsed, and they disbanded themselves. Some of their leaders were killed or deported; others later became government ministers. The USA wanted them to leave and provided visas for them to emigrate, but they were no threat to capital and to the capitalist society; they were anti-imperialists, but they were not anti-capitalists.



The new government of Peru did not want to bury Abimael Guzman’s body, claiming, like any other capitalist country, so-called national security. So his body was cremated and the ashes scattered at a secret location.  Maoism and the Shining Path are no longer popular within any section of Peruvian society or a threat to security. In the beginning, they had some support within the peasant class, but then the peasants were caught in the cross-fire between the Maoist guerrilla fighters and the government’s armed forces and many peasants were killed. Maoism is a dead movement in Peru today, and most of the members of Guzman’s group became part of some gang and of the drug traffic.

Many of the deaths blamed on Shining Path and Guzman were not committed by them. The police, the paramilitary and the armed forces should be blamed for most of the killings, like most of the killings committed in Colombia in the fight with the Maoist/Castroist guerrillas known as the FARC. Another group is not a socialist or Marxist either, as the media has propagated. Being related and armed by Cuba does not turn a group into a socialist one. Nor were the Tupamaros in Uruguay socialist or Marxist movement (one of their ex-leaders later became president) but were like a Robin Hood movement of taking money from the rich to give it to the poor



Maoism in Latin America showed its terrorist and anti-working-class nature, and it is a total negation of the revolutionary nature of Marxism and socialism  It is the capitalist press and the anti-communists who labelled Guzman and those like him ‘Marxist’, just as they have the Colombian FARC.



Maoism could not have been applied in large capitalist developed countries like the USA, Britain, and Germany. It was basically the theory for a peasants’ movement, similar to the Russian populists (Narodniks) who, too, did not have any incidence within the peasants and ended up using terrorist tactics. It could only be applied in Third World countries, but despite that, it was a complete failure in all the economically backward countries where it tried to take control of the nation and the state apparatus. It turned out to be not at all a shining path

MARCOS

 The Tory Party Conference is taking place in Manchester at the start of October, and the People’s Assembly are organising a number of related events. See https://thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/#1631293744982-db7503aa-c080 .

 There will be a big march and demo on Sunday 3 October at 12.00, assembling on Oxford Road near Whitworth Park, M14 4PW (this is just past the main University of Manchester buildings, and next to Manchester Royal Infirmary). Members who already have plenty of leaflets and back issues of the Standard can go straight there if they wish.