Parts of London look like a dump. But that hasn't stopped the UN from giving Mayor Sadiq Khan an award for "improving urban life". It's all very incestuous, says Charlotte Gill: the UN is just rewarding its cronies.
The post Why Was Sadiq Khan Given a United Nations Award? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The warning was delivered in Brussels on 12 October by Kata Tüttő, President of the European Committee of the Regions, during the opening of the European Week of Regions and Cities.
Her intervention comes as EU leaders prepare to negotiate the 2028–2034 budget, with disagreements over agricultural funding, regional development, defence, industrial competitiveness and the distribution of financial responsibilities among member states.
The Committee of the Regions warned that greater centralisation could concentrate economic opportunities in already prosperous areas while limiting other territories’ capacity to attract investment and develop essential infrastructure.
The concern goes beyond money allocated to regional development. It addresses who controls spending decisions and whether local authorities retain a meaningful role in determining how European funds are used.
EU cohesion policy has traditionally sought to reduce disparities between richer and poorer regions through investment in transport, infrastructure, education, business development and public services. While national governments administer considerable funds, regional and local authorities are frequently involved in identifying priorities and delivering projects.
The Committee argues that restructuring which concentrates decision-making at national level could weaken this arrangement. National governments may favour country-wide industrial or infrastructure programmes, while regional authorities identify specific problems arising from local conditions.
A national infrastructure strategy could prioritise major transport routes and industrial centres. Regional administrations might instead emphasise connecting smaller communities, maintaining local services or developing specialised economic activities.
The dispute concerns whether the next EU budget will maintain flexibility for regional priorities. In Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy, regional institutions possess important responsibilities across economic development, education and infrastructure. Changes to EU spending governance could alter established relations between European, national and regional institutions.
Ireland’s rotating Council presidency has proposed reducing the Commission’s original seven-year budget plans by approximately €141 billion while largely protecting agriculture and cohesion compared with other expenditure categories.
The proposed financial framework would nevertheless remain substantially larger than the current budget. The distribution of resources remains contentious, and an overall cut does not necessarily translate into the same reduction for every region.
Effects will depend on allocation formulas, national spending plans and programme governance. Meanwhile, European institutions face demands for stronger investment in defence production, digital infrastructure, competitiveness and support for Ukraine while maintaining agricultural and regional commitments.
The Committee presented its seventh annual assessment of Europe’s regions and cities during the European Week of Regions and Cities, held in Brussels from 12 to 14 October.
The assessment examines competitiveness, resilience, public services, democratic governance and financial conditions. Regional disparities remain a significant feature of the EU economy despite decades of common investment programmes.
Large metropolitan areas often benefit from concentrations of universities, research institutions, advanced industries and capital. Less densely populated territories may struggle with demographic decline, shortages of skilled workers and the cost of maintaining infrastructure.
These differences can reinforce themselves over time. Businesses invest where suitable workers, transport networks and customers are already concentrated. Younger workers moving towards metropolitan economies may further reduce the economic prospects of communities they leave behind.
The increase in European defence expenditure introduces another dimension. Regions containing defence manufacturers, engineering firms, research institutions and military installations could benefit substantially from new spending, while others may receive little direct economic advantage.
If industrial investment concentrates in already advanced manufacturing centres, geographical disparities could widen. Conversely, procurement programmes and infrastructure investment could bring opportunities to weaker regional economies with suitable facilities and labour.
The Committee of the Regions has limited formal authority over the EU’s long-term budget. National governments will negotiate the framework, and the European Parliament must consent to the final agreement.
Regional leaders are seeking to influence those negotiations before political compromises are established. Their central argument is that aggregate European economic growth alone does not capture the distribution of investment, employment and public services across the Union.
The approaching European Council negotiations will indicate whether governments intend to preserve regional influence over EU spending or concentrate greater authority over investment decisions at national level.
Russian forces struck the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on the morning of 8 October, hitting two route buses carrying residents and killing dozens of civilians. The Donetsk Oblast prosecutor's office opened a war-crimes investigation.
Russia has turned everyday movement in frontline Donetsk Oblast into a lethal risk, striking city buses, ambulances, and cars in places its army has not been able to capture.
The attack came at around 10:00, catching two route buses in the impact zone. The prosecutor's office said the attackers likely used a UMPB D-30SN. HUR, Ukraine's military intelligence, describes it as a guided glide bomb that can fly up to 100 km when released from an altitude of 12–15 km and carries a warhead equal to a FAB-250 aerial bomb.
30 people were killed and 18 injured after a Russian bomb hit two passenger buses carrying civilians in Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast.
— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) October 8, 2026
The buses caught fire, and the force of the attack also damaged nearby homes and cars. Some victims were so badly burned that police had to recover… pic.twitter.com/FqLdM0HN1B
The toll rose through the day, from 12 dead in the first reports to 30 killed and 20 wounded by 14:55, Donetsk Oblast head Vadym Filashkin said. Across Donetsk Oblast, Russian attacks killed 33 people that day, including the 30 in Kramatorsk and three in nearby Bilenke, the State Emergency Service said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the strike would not go unanswered.
Filashkin ordered the Kramatorsk and Sloviansk city military administrations to suspend public transport, citing the sharp deterioration in security. Buses had become an attractive target for Russian forces, he said, and the authorities could not risk the lives of passengers and drivers. He also urged everyone still in Donetsk Oblast to leave for safer parts of Ukraine. Kramatorsk is a frequent target of Russian attacks. Russia had not commented on the strike as of publication.
The city has been under daily fire. On 5 October, Russian FPV drones hit ambulances and an apartment block in Kramatorsk, killing a woman and wounding four, the prosecutor's office reported. Over the previous day, Russian forces shelled Donetsk Oblast settlements 31 times and 256 people left the front line, Filashkin said.
“Air and water have traditionally been regarded as ‘free’ goods, but the enormous costs to society of past and present pollution show that they are not free… The policy question is how and by whom they will be paid, not whether.” — Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), 1987¹
“Where ground-water use exceeds the recharge capacity of local aquifers, regulatory or fiscal controls become essential.” — Our Common Future, 19872
“Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international resources required.” — The Earth Charter, 20003
“Politicians tend not to run for office on promises of making the price of goods reflect their real (higher) costs for the sake of sustainable development; consumers tend not to demand to pay such higher costs.” — World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 20024
“…the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water… should have a market value.” — Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of Nestlé, 20055
“Governments should establish and scale up integrated water resource management schemes, bearing fully in mind that water plays multifaceted roles, including for drinking, sanitation, agriculture, industry and energy.” — UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, 20126
“By 2030, implement integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate.” — Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda, SDG 6.5, 20157
“Water and energy prices need to be adjusted to incentivise the recycling of treated waste water.” — German Development Institute (DIE), 20168
“Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025.” — Report on the Food & Water Watch study, October 6, 20269
Water is the most basic resource there is. Every person, farm, factory, and city depends on it, and nothing replaces it. Whoever controls water controls everything downstream of it, including food, energy, housing, and population settlement. That is why water has been in Technocracy’s crosshairs since 1932.
Technocracy is a resource-based economic system. It replaces the free market’s price mechanism with the scientific management of resources by unelected experts. The original Technocrats of the 1930s said so openly. Their modern heirs are more careful. They speak of “sustainable development,” “integrated water resources management,” “full-cost pricing,” and “natural asset” valuation. The goal has not changed. They want an inventory of every resource on the planet, a meter on every faucet or pipe, and a central authority deciding who gets what and at what price.
This paper follows that goal in the documents from 1987 to today. It ends with the price shock American households are now absorbing. A 62 percent rise in water bills over ten years is not a random market event. It is what policy produces when it was designed for exactly that result.
The Technocracy Study Course, first published by Technocracy Inc. between 1934 and 1936, set out the intellectual foundation.10 In its analysis of the Price System, it explained that value has nothing to do with how important a thing is to human life. It comes only from scarcity:
“Both air and water are completely indispensable for the maintenance of life. Air is so abundant that one need not exchange any commodity for its use. It is accordingly without value… In a region of heavy rainfall and abundant water supply… water has no value; it cannot be bought or sold. In arid regions, however… due to its scarcity, [water] is bought and sold or traded in, and accordingly has value.”11
The Technocrats of that day understood that you can only control and monetize water by making it scarce. Water that is plentiful cannot be managed through price. Scarce water can be. The policy implication follows: declare scarcity, real or manufactured, and control follows.
The Study Course also treated water as one of the engineered systems of the planned city. Its list of design requirements includes “a system of water supply, of heat, gas and electric power” and “trunk connections for traffic, supplies, water, energy, and so on, between the city and the world outside.”12 In the Technate, water is not owned. It is routed.
The same document demanded total registration of all assets, continuous inventory and the specific registration of each individual’s consumption.13 In the 1930s, the technology to do that did not exist. It does now.
The modern revival of Technocracy came through the doctrine of sustainable development. Its founding document is Our Common Future, published in 1987 by the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development. The Commission was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a member of the Trilateral Commission. In 1991, James MacNeill wrote Beyond Interdependence for the Trilateral Commission, a book that “extends the Commission’s analysis of the issues of global change” in support of the Brundtland report.14
Brundtland set three things in motion on water that still govern policy today.
First, it took away water’s status as a free good. In the report’s words, air and water “are not free,” and “the policy question is how and by whom they will be paid, not whether.”15 It said costs can be “internalized” by enterprises, which may then “pass the costs along to the consumer.”
Second, it called for regulatory and fiscal controls. Where groundwater use exceeds recharge, “regulatory or fiscal controls become essential.”16 For agriculture, it prescribed “the regulation of water quantities, and more rational water charges.”17
Third, it tied water pricing to energy pricing. The report praised “energy pricing policies” after the 1970s oil shocks and noted “the potential of similar pricing policies for other raw materials.”18 It urged countries to see “how far real energy costs can be passed on to the consumer.”19
The report also cast water as a source of international conflict. It cataloged river disputes from the Rio Grande to the Nile and the Euphrates.21 That framing laid the groundwork for “transboundary” management. Once a resource is defined as a cross-border problem, national control can be called inadequate.
The Brundtland report “provided the momentum for the landmark 1992 Rio Summit that laid the foundations for the global institutionalization of sustainable development.” Agenda 21 set out 40 chapters, including the “conservation and management of natural resources.”21 As I have written elsewhere, Agenda 21 was created and scripted by the Trilateral Commission from start to finish. It was modeled after historic Technocracy, a resource-based economic system.22
The Earth Charter, written by Steven C. Rockefeller, followed in 2000. Its language looks humanitarian. It pledges to “guarantee the right to potable water… allocating the national and international resources required.”23 But a right that is guaranteed by allocation is not a right. It is a ration. Whoever does the allocating holds the power.
In 2002, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development complained that “politicians tend not to run for office on promises of making the price of goods reflect their real (higher) costs,” and that consumers do not ask to pay those higher costs.24 Here the plan is stated plainly. Prices must go up, and the political process is the obstacle.
Nestlé’s Peter Brabeck-Letmathe went further in 2005. He called the idea that people have a right to water “an extreme solution” and said water “should have a market value.”25
The Earth Charter’s “right to water” and Brabeck’s “market value” look like opposites. They are not. Both put water under managed allocation, one through government and one through the corporation. In Technocracy, the public-private partnership merges the two.
What happens when the plan meets the people was shown in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2000. The city’s water utility went to a consortium, Aguas del Tunari, partly owned by Bechtel Engineering. Residents found that the contract terms gave the consortium rights even to rainwater. Protests and violence followed where one civilian died and hundreds were injured. The mayor and the prefect resigned, and the contract was abandoned.26 Bechtel later sued Bolivia for $25 million in losses. The claim was settled in 2006 for $0.30.27
Cochabamba was not an isolated case. The UN-Habitat World Cities Report 2016 records that the population served by private water operators grew from 6 million in 1991 to 94 million by 2000, and to over 160 million by the end of 2007. Water and sanitation privatization took place in 90 countries and 504 local governments between 1990 and 2011.28 The report admits that “experience with the hybrid model of privatization among low-income countries has been disappointing.”
By 2012 the language had matured. The UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability defined sustainable development as “seeing the whole picture — such as the critical links between food, water, land and energy.”29 It told governments to “establish and scale up integrated water resource management schemes.”30 It also told them to shape “investor calculations” with targets, including for “water conservation.”31
This is the “nexus” doctrine. Once water, food, land and energy are defined as one integrated system, they need one integrated manager. That is the Technate under a new name.
The 2030 Agenda, adopted in 2015, wrote this into the Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 6.4 calls for “sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater.” SDG 6.5 calls for “integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation.”32 Paragraph 33 declares the UN “determined to conserve and sustainably use… freshwater resources.” As I noted in Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, the first cost of this Utopia is “nothing less than turning over control of all natural resources to the UN.”33
The German Development Institute’s 2015–2016 report shows how the doctrine works on the ground. It states that “water and energy prices need to be adjusted” to change behavior. It also cites Zambia’s 2011 Water Resources Management Act, which introduced “an approval procedure and a water extraction tax” to “manage resource consumption.”34 Price, permit and tax are the tools. Consumption is the target.
The New Urban Agenda, adopted in 2016, brought the program into the city. Member states committed to “integrated water resources planning and management, considering the urban-rural continuum,” and to “water reuse.”35 Water infrastructure is to be “climate resilient” and part of “integrated urban and territorial development plans.”36 Water policy becomes land-use policy, and land-use policy becomes control over where and how people live.
Pricing needs measurement. The Smart Grid initiative, which I documented in Technocracy Rising (2015), was designed from the start to include gas and water metering. It uses digital meters with “continuous two-way communication between the utility and the consumer’s property.”37 By the time I wrote The Evil Twins of Technocracy, about 115 million smart meters had been installed across America, close to 70 percent of the market.38
Water rights are also being redefined. Technocracy Rising covers the move to replace private property with government control of rights and resources that will be “licensed” in certain situations.39 A licensed right can be revoked, metered, conditioned, and priced.
The last step is financialization. In Crucible of Tokens, I documented a 2026 Goldman Sachs paper that explains how water rights can be turned into “traceable tokens” tied to flow meters, with tradeable conservation credits on the carbon-credit model.40 The United Nations University has declared a global “water bankruptcy” and calls for enforceable limits and centralized accounting. Dubai’s commodities center signed an agreement in June 2025 to launch a token backed by verified freshwater reserves. California flies electromagnetic surveys over its aquifers. Oracle processes data from more than 100 million utility meters with software that can detect a single household’s irrigation in real time.
I summed up the sequence as “Map it, meter it, ticket it… water is three-quarters of the way down.”41
Look at the whole picture. In 1934 the Technocrats said water has value only when it is scarce. In 1987, Brundtland said water is no longer free. In 2026, Wall Street is building the ledger to trade it. A scarcity declared by the UN plus a meter on every pipe produces a tradable asset. The people who hold the deeds gain from scarcity. The people who pay the bills get gouged.
A study by Food & Water Watch recently uncovered that, between 2015 and 2025, American household water bills rose 62 percent while consumer prices rose 39 percent. Water rose 1.6 times faster than inflation! Water also outpaced groceries (30 percent) and eggs (28 percent). Bills rose 19 percent more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024.42
The average household using 60,000 gallons paid $531 in 2025, with a range from $133 to $1,416. New Hampshire bills jumped 177 percent, Oregon’s 114 percent, and West Virginia’s 95 percent.
The corporate gap is the most telling finding. Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year against $494 for public systems, a 67 percent difference. Corporate systems were just 11 percent of the 500 systems studied but 44 percent of the 25 most expensive. Seventy percent of the top 10 were for-profit. All 25 of the least expensive systems were publicly owned.43
Bills exceeded the study’s affordability threshold for the poorest fifth of households in 93 percent of systems. Water costs consume about 11 percent of low-income household income in West Virginia and about 20 percent in Puerto Rico.45
This is the result Brundtland called for in 1987: costs “passed along to the consumer.” It is the result the WBCSD wanted in 2002: prices that “reflect their real (higher) costs.” It is what Brabeck asked for in 2005: water with “a market value.” The documents said it would happen, and it has.
The record from 1987 to 2026 is consistent. Water was redefined from a free good into a priced resource. Then it became a regulated resource, an integrated “nexus” resource managed at all levels, a metered resource, and finally a tokenized asset. Each step was published openly in UN, NGO, and corporate documents. Each step moved control further from the household and the local community and toward unelected managers and financial institutions.
The 62 percent rise in water bills is definitely not the end of this process.
Technocracy’s rule in 1934 was that water has value only when it is scarce. Sustainable development has spent four decades supplying the scarcity and the flow meters. American households are now paying for it.
Beyond all the pageantry, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a strategic goal for his Washington visit – to undermine the American relationship with Japan. Xi succeeded, perhaps beyond his expectations. Japanese policy makers saw this coming. They arranged a brief meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly between Prime Minister Takaichi […]
The post How China deploys wartime history against Japan appeared first on Asia Times.
The European Commission calls it the Affordable Housing Act and says it can “truly bring a change in people’s lives”. But how much will it actually do to make housing more affordable, asks Catherine Feore?
The tension at the heart of the proposal is that Brussels is making ambitious claims about tackling the housing crisis while simultaneously making clear that it is not imposing new housing policies on governments or cities.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the measure fulfils a promise to tackle housing affordability, describing it as “one step in this direction” and declaring: “Today, we are delivering for all Europeans.” Housing Commissioner Dan Jørgensen went further, saying the Act gives governments and cities tools to “make more affordable homes available”.
Yet the proposed legislation itself is considerably more cautious.
The Commission acknowledges that insufficient housing supply is the structural cause of the affordability crisis. Short-term rentals, second homes and other non-primary uses are not the root problem, although they can exacerbate shortages and push up prices in already constrained markets.
Housing stress test
The Act principally delivers a common legal framework for authorities that choose to intervene.
Central to this is a new EU test for housing stress. An area would normally qualify where an average home costs at least eight years of disposable per-capita income, that ratio has increased over the previous decade, and pressures are unlikely to ease over the next three years. At a ratio of ten or more, the historical deterioration test is dropped. Population dynamics, housing supply and demand must also be assessed.
Authorities could then restrict short-term rentals outside a host’s primary residence or tackle second homes, prolonged vacancy and certain other non-primary uses. But there is no obligation. They must also demonstrate that the activity has significantly harmed housing affordability or availability for at least three years, and any restriction must be targeted, necessary and proportionate. This seems to set a high bar of evidence for most local authorities.
Currently, local authorities must notify the Commission of short-term rental restrictions under the Services Directive. That notification requirement will no longer be required. Cities can use the new framework without seeking prior Commission approval, although measures must be published and remain open to legal challenge. Officials argue this will remove a burdensome procedure and make intervention easier.
But the Commission is equally explicit about what it is not doing. The Act does not regulate rents, harmonise housing policy, give Brussels new housing competences, dictate taxation, inheritance or planning, or require, recommend or encourage authorities to impose restrictions. Housing policy choices “remain national, regional and local”.
Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera says that when markets fail to provide affordable homes, “public authorities have a responsibility to act”. But the Act does not compel that action; it provides a stronger legal framework if authorities choose to act independently.
Its impact could be real in tourist hotspots where non-primary housing use is demonstrably worsening shortages. But it cannot itself build a home or lower a rent. The question is whether a clearer legal toolbox matches the expectations created by the Commission’s promise to tackle Europe’s housing crisis. When asked to quantify how much of a difference the new provisions could make, the Commission couldn’t give precise figures, saying that it would depend on the measures adopted.
PHOTO CREDIT: Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, and Dan Jørgensen, European Commissioner for Energy and Housing, give a press conference on the affordable housing Photographer: Jennifer Jacquemart © European Union
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