Thousands of Hungarians have joined the annual Budapest Pride march to support LGBTQ people and protest against a law that limits teaching about homosexuality and transgender issues in schools.

Demonstrators at the march through the streets of central Budapest on Saturday said the legislation was divisive. Organisers said in a statement the rally would show opposition to “power-hungry politicians” and reject intimidation of LGBTQ people.

“Instead of protecting minorities, the Fidesz-Christian Democrat government is using laws to make members of the LGBTQ community outcasts in their own country,” they said.

Populist Victor Orbán owes much of his success to a tough line on immigration but that issue has receded from the political agenda, so his focus has shifted to gender and sexuality.

 Adding to the woes of Lebanon is a report from the United Nations that has warned that more than four million people in Lebanon, including one million refugees, risk losing access to safe water.

“UNICEF estimates that most water pumping will gradually cease across the country in the next four to six weeks.”

The UN agency said that maintenance costs incurred in US dollars, funding shortages and the parallel collapse of the power grid were rapidly destroying the water sector.

UNICEF said that should the public water supply system collapse, water costs could jump by 200 percent a month as water would be secured from private water suppliers.

The UN agency said it needed $40m a year to secure the minimum levels of fuel, chlorine, spare parts and maintenance required to keep critical systems operational.

“Unless urgent action is taken, hospitals, schools and essential public facilities will be unable to function,” UNICEF Representative in Lebanon, Yukie Mokuo, said.

Lebanon’s economic meltdown has propelled more than half of its population into poverty and seen its currency lose more than 90 percent of its value in less than two years. The financial crisis has translated into severe shortages of basic goods such as fuel and medicine as dollars run dry. The Lebanese pound, which for years was pegged to the US dollar, has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the past 18 months. Electricity in most places is barely available an hour a day while the fuel needed to power generators is also in short supply. Basic medicines have been missing from pharmacy shelves for months and private hospitals warned on Thursday they were “hours away” from losing all power supply.

Millions of Lebanese risk losing access to safe water: UNICEF | Middle East News | Al Jazeera

 Is it a coincidence or evidence of a global pattern?

The monsoon season in India lasts from June to September each year.

Torrential downpours have lashed India’s western coast in recent days, leaving dozens missing near the financial capital of Mumbai and causing the worst floods in decades in the resort state of Goa and  Maharashtra.

“People have lost virtually everything,” said Goa’s health minister, Vishwajit Rane, adding the state had not seen such heavy rains in half a century.

In Maharashtra, major rivers are at risk of bursting their banks. Some 90,000 people have been evacuated so far in the state.

Roxy Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said the monsoon flooding was “unprecedented, but not unexpected”. He tweeted: “We already see a threefold rise in widespread extreme rains that cause floods across India.”

The climate crisis is making India’s monsoons stronger, according to a Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research report published in April that forecast dire consequences for food, farming and the economy affecting nearly a fifth of the world’s population.

India floods: rescuers search for survivors among mud and debris | India | The Guardian

 About 9 million Americans are estimated to have lost work due to the pandemic but received no unemployment benefits.

Millions of workers experienced severe problems in receiving benefits throughout the pandemic. Workers across America faced long delays in receiving unemployment benefits as state systems were quickly overwhelmed with the mass influx of applications that caused months-long backlogs. Meanwhile, workers who made errors on their applications had missing records or had their claims flagged had their benefits stopped – and often had difficulty restarting them once problems were resolved.

The impacts were detrimental to workers around the US, who fell behind on rent or mortgage or car payments, experienced utility shutoffs and relied on food banks and assistance programs to feed themselves and their families.

‘My savings were gone’: millions who lost work during Covid faced benefit system chaos | US news | The Guardian

Private equity is also known as the “billionaire factory”, where already super-rich firms have used low-interest rates and their considerable financial firepower to embark on a multi-billion dollar buying spree this year. The money-spinning and highly secretive private equity industry – which buys up companies, often using more debt than stock market investors would tolerate, then floats or sells them on again.

The London firm Bridgepoint floated on the stock market and left 166 of Bridgepoint’s employees sitting on a combined £2.5bn windfall. The firm’s executive chair, William Jackson, sold £7.8m worth of shares, and hung on to a stake worth about £42m. Frédéric Pescatori, Bridgepoint’s head in France and southern Europe, cashed in about £16.5m and still had shares worth almost £85m. The finance chief, Adam Jones, sold £4m worth but retained shares worth £22.8m, following the stock’s 29% surge on its debut on Wednesday.

Bridgepoint also extended its largesse to well-known City figures persuaded to join the board. Archie Norman, chair of Marks & Spencer, received a £1.75m fee to become senior independent director (on top of his annual £200,000 fee for serving on the board). Three other non-execs, including Carolyn McCall, chief executive of ITV, were also handed £500,000 for joining the board.

Bridgepoint –  previously owning Pret A Manger and is now the owner of Burger King UK and the arts and crafts supplier Hobbycraft, and has a minority stake in the food chain Itsu among its £23bn of assets under management – is just one of dozens of private equity firms across the world reporting record-breaking returns as cheap debt and lockdowns, which have forced many companies to seek investment, have created the perfect conditions for deals.

Lord Prem Sikka, emeritus professor of accounting at the University of Essex said private equity firms had “devoured Debenhams, Maplins, Toys R Us, Bernard Matthews, care homes and much more”, adding that high leverage and aggressive tax planning were the industry’s prime tools.

Private equity firms have struck a record 6,298 deals worth $513bn (£373bn) so far this year – the most since records began in 1980. So far this year, PE firms have announced 124 deals for UK companies (both takeovers and minority stakes) with a combined value of £41.5bn.

Ludovic Phalippou, a professor of financial economics at Oxford University’s Saïd business school, accused private equity chiefs of paying themselves vast management fees.

In the paper, entitled An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & The Billionaire Factory, Phalippou said private equity chiefs had paid themselves about $230bn in performance fees since 2006 despite on average achieving about the same return as a simple US stock market tracker.

“This wealth transfer from several hundred million pension scheme members to a few thousand people working in private equity might be one of the largest in the history of modern finance,” Phalippou said. He said the fees, which were ultimately paid by investors into private equity funds such as pensions, had helped turn 19 more private equity bosses into billionaires since 2005, taking the total number of private equity chiefs with nine zero fortunes to 22.

Bonanzas in private equity world spark call for tax relief limit (theguardian.com)

 Six independent experts appointed by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council on Wednesday warned that “hundreds of Venezuelan cancer patients could die” as a result of U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela. The U.S. in August 2017 began to unilaterally impose sanctions on Venezuela in violation of international law as well as the charter of the Organization of American States and other international treaties the U.S. has signed.

U.S. sanctions “killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans in just their first year (2017–18), and almost certainly tens of thousands more since then,” according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The U.N.-appointed human rights experts argued Wednesday that U.S. sanctions negatively affected a program run by the Simón Bolívar Foundation, the charitable arm of Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a U.S.-based refiner owned by PDVSA.

The program “helped cancer patients, including many children, travel abroad for transplants and for other live-saving treatment,” the experts said. “Hundreds of these patients used to be linked to a national transplant program with the Venezuelan government, but their treatment was discontinued” because of U.S. sanctions.

According to the U.N. Human Rights Council, “There are some 190 cancer patients on a waiting list for foreign treatment, and some 14 children, including three toddlers, died between 2017 and 2020 waiting for treatment under the program.”

“Third countries, groups of countries, banks, and private companies have been overly cautious in dealings with Venezuela because they fear unintentionally violating U.S. sanctions,” said the human rights advocates. “As a consequence, money cannot be transferred out of Venezuela, and some patients have been stranded, destitute, in countries where they went for treatment.”

The U.N.-appointed experts said the U.S. and other countries, “must take full responsibility for the effect their actions have on the fundamental rights to life and health of every individual around the world.”

the U.N. special rapporteurs said that “targeting PDVSA as a way to control the political agenda of Venezuela has had devastating consequences for hundreds of people undergoing treatment for transplant rejection, both in Venezuela and abroad.” They added that “people on a state waiting list for transplants have also been informed that their treatments will not continue.”

“States have an obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of every person affected by direct international action, even those outside their jurisdiction or effective control, no matter what their original intent was,” said the human rights experts.

“The right to health and the right to life are fundamental for every individual around the world,” they added. “We call on all states, banks, and private companies to take full responsibility for the effects of their actions on individuals, and to withdraw sanctions, zero-risk, and over-compliance policies affecting core human rights.”

UN Experts Warn US Sanctions Endangering Lives of Venezuelan Cancer Patients | Common Dreams News

 Across Brazil, Latin America’s most populous nation, researchers say 19 million people have gone hungry since the start of a Covid outbreak that has killed more than 540,000. So far only about 16% of citizens have been fully vaccinated.

An additional 117 million people – more than half of Brazil’s population – experienced food insecurity.

There has been soaring unemployment. Nearly 8m jobs have been lost 

Economist Monica de Bolle said the government’s distribution of emergency payments last year had been wise and partly effective, keeping millions of families and many businesses afloat. But the failure to combine that policy, which has now been dramatically scaled back, with an effective public health response had been disastrous.

 “It’s really a terrible, terrible tragedy because we’ve wasted … the opportunity to bring this thing under control – and if we’d done that we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in now.”

 Things are dire. Residents of Rio’s 1,000-plus favelas, home to perhaps 20% of its population, are facing tough times as rising food prices compound their woes.

‘Hunger has returned’: Covid piles further misery on Brazil’s vulnerable | Brazil | The Guardian

The Chinese Communist Party’s inaugural congress was on 23rd 1921although the centennial celebrations began on the 1st of July. It has been a hundred years of delusion with many political commentators still bestowing praise and plaudits upon the CCP for its progress and perseverance.

China’s economic performance belies the inequality across the country. The have-nots still outnumber the haves by a huge margin. 

The very first line of the Chinese Communist party’s constitution declares it is “the vanguard of the Chinese working class” It mentions “revolution” eight times.

The thoughts of Chairman Mao have been devoid of meaning for years.  Instead the concept of “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics” was added to the party constitution in 1992 which became “Deng Xiaoping Theory”. Now it is President Xi’s position that is prominent and prevalent.

With over 1,058 billionaires, according to the 2021 Hurun Global Rich List, China now has more ultra-wealthy than any other country on Earth – including capitalist bastion the United States. China’s ultra-rich added an unprecedented $1.5 trillion to their wealth in 2020 at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The Communist Party maintains a monopoly of power and control. It is a conservative reactionary party bent on preserving the power of state capitalist elites Corruption thrives in areas under state control, such as land sales and infrastructure. The Chinese Communist Party helped to rationalise the existence of the state, wages, dictatorships, patriotism, investments, savings, inheritance, money, taxes and so forth, by apparently bestowing the title “socialist” as an implied prefix to all this evidence that conspicuously characterise a capitalist society.

According to Wikipedia statistics, the CCP currently has 90.59 million members. As of 30 June 2016, individuals who identify as farmers, herdsmen and fishermen make up 26 million members; members identifying as workers totalled 7.2 million. Another group, the “managing, professional and technical staff in enterprises and public institutions”, made up 12.5 million, 9 million identified as working in administrative staff and 7.4 million described themselves as party cadres.

For the Chinese Communist Party and the elites that buttress the political system, calls for more democracy is seen as a threat to their grip on power.

 Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the French luxury retail chain Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, or LVMH for short — has been vying for first place in the global personal wealth rankings all this spring. He currently sits in the second spot, with  $186.3 billion, behind only Jeff Bezos and in front of Elon Musk.

Arnault’s LVMH owns over 70 luxury brands, everything from Tiffany and Givenchy to Christian Dior. Much of those billions will be coming from that narrow slice of humanity that marketers to the super-rich have dubbed “ultra-high net worth individuals,” affluents who hold at least $30 million in net worth. Global wealth researchers at Knight Frank count some 520,000 of these ultras. LVMH, for its part, counts on their profligacy.  The world’s wealthy have found themselves with the wherewithal to buy enough luxury to make Arnault the world’s leading purveyor of nonessential amenities the richest man on the face of the Earth.

 Arnault, naturally, has a yacht. His 333-foot Symphony cost him $150 million a few years back and features a glass-bottom swimming pool on the main deck. Yachts this enormous require a sizeable outlay for annual expenses. Keeping the Symphony afloat, for instance, takes a 27-person crew. Owners of super yachts need to spend 10 percent of their boat’s purchase price on annual operating costs. Arnault is most likely spending $15 million a year to keep his superyacht in preparedness. Well over 99 percent of the world’s population, we should probably keep in mind, will labour their entire lives and not come close to ever amassing $15 million.

Germany’s Bremerhaven shipyard in March launched an eight-deck 476-foot-long superyacht  that set billionaire Roman Abramovich back $610 million. Abramovich has a nearly $20-billion net worth. If his investments return a modest 5 percent this year, he can pay for his 476-footer and still end the year comfortably richer than he rated when the year started.

Living Ever Larger in the Lap of Luxury – Consortiumnews

 The south-west of England will have the highest proportion of low-income workers affected by a £20-a-week cut later this year in universal credit payments, according to the TUC that says there is a widespread culture of low pay from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.  Four in 10 universal credit claimants in the south-west have a low-paid job that qualifies them for benefits, a larger percentage than any other region.

The rate of claimants who had a job in May was 42.1% in the south-west compared with 41.2% in the east Midlands, the next worst affected, and 36.7% in the West Midlands.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said 2.3 million working families, as well as those who rely solely on benefits, would see their incomes drop by more than £1,000 a year if the government presses ahead with a planned £20-a-week cut in universal credit from October. 

The prime minister’s west London Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat has 9,546 UC claimants of whom 3,665 are in work, 38.4% of the total. In the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire constituency of Richmond nearly half, 48%, of people receiving universal credit are in work. The TUC said: “It shows that even in wealthier parts of the UK the cut to universal credit will impact heavily on low-paid workers.”

6 million families claim UC and its predecessor, working families tax credit – twice the figure before the pandemic. More than 500,000 people were forced to file a claim during just nine days in March 2020 as the virus began to spread and the government announced the first lockdown. In the same month, ministers agreed a £20 rise in universal credit and tax credits as a one-year measure to help new claimants adjust to the extra costs of the pandemic. Estimates suggest it helped 700,000 people stay above the poverty line during the pandemic.

 Millions of people will still be in precarious jobs in October and unable to cope financially after a cut in benefits of more than £1,000 a year. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said more than 500,000 people, including 200,000 children, will be plunged into poverty when the government pushes through what it called “the largest single cut to the basic rate of social security since the second world war”.

About 6 in 10 of all single-parent families will experience their income falling by the equivalent of £1,040 per year after the befit cut, it said, imposing “the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the foundation of the modern welfare state”.

Workers in south-west England hardest hit by Universal Credit cut | Universal credit | The Guardian