Jordan has surpassed Indonesia to have the highest smoking rates in the world. Including e-cigarettes and other “smokeless” products, more than eight in 10 Jordanian men are nicotine users. Surveys show tobacco use is still growing, on the back of a rise in women taking up the habit and the popularity of water pipes, which doctors say can be equivalent to consuming approximately three packs of cigarettes over a 45-minute session. Analysts suspect smoking rates may be just as high in countries such as Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – Jordan is just advanced and stable enough to be able to measure its problem.
“In Jordan we consider someone who smokes a pack a day to be a light smoker,” Firas al-Hawari, a physician who directs an anti-smoking clinic says. “We have people who smoke three, five, seven packs a day.” Often their offspring have been exposed to so much secondhand smoke that they have become addicted, too. “For every four cigarettes their parent has smoked, the child has smoked one.”
The impacts of so much smoking are already stark: tobacco use is linked to one in eight deaths in the country, compared with one in 10 deaths worldwide, and costs Jordan’s GDP an estimated three times the global average. The true scale of the problem will be known in about 2030, when a bulk of the country’s disproportionately young population reaches 40 – the age at which tobacco-related illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer, start to manifest.
“It’s going to cause an enormous surge in non-communicable diseases that we won’t be able to handle,” Hawari says.
Smoking used to be endemic in wealthier countries such as the US, Australia and many in Europe. But decades of aggressive public health campaigns and restrictions on the ability of tobacco companies to advertise and lobby have succeeded in dramatically cutting their smoking rates. Many of those corporate tactics have now migrated to countries in the Middle East and Africa, where regulations are more lax and poorly enforced. The majority of the world’s smokers now live in middle- and lower-income countries.
Raouf Alebshehy, a monitoring coordinator in the tobacco control research group at the University of Bath, explains, “One of the important factors we have found in this region is that the multinational companies started to invest and expand here. They started to shift work from developed markets to emerging markets here and in Africa where tobacco demand is still growing, and they bought up local manufacturers.”
Jordan has the most tobacco company interference in policymaking in the world after Japan, according to a 2019 analysis by a civil society group.
“Big tobacco is preying on our countries, wanting to really own the lungs of our youth,” says Dina Mired, the president of the Union for International Cancer Control. “And they are doing so successfully.”
Those who push to implement the same anti-smoking laws that have been effective overseas say they are warned of the financial impact in a country where tobacco taxes make up 18% of annual revenues (pre-Covid figures)
“Members of parliament tell me: ‘This is an economic matter, you are affecting the Jordanian economy and threatening the jobs of people working in the industry’,” says Mervat Mheerat, the deputy manager for health in Greater Amman Municipality. “They correlate tobacco with the economy. And that’s the message they get from the tobacco industry.”
Stealing your vote (2)
A Republican group is spending millions of dollars in funding from major US corporations such as CitiGroup and Chevron to protect their conservative strongholds on the country.
Bruce Freed, Center for Political Accountability president, said, companies don’t consider the consequences of their political spending. “Corporations either turned a blind eye or they didn’t pay attention, but they’re responsible through their spending.”
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which held the key to the GOP’s political takeover a decade ago – launched the Right Lines 2020 campaign last September, taglined: “Socialism starts in the states. Let’s stop it there, too.”
Dave Abrams, the RSLC deputy executive director, said the RSLC and its supporters were leading the fight against “radical leftists”.
It’s hoping to meet a $125m investment goal in an effort to retain 42 state legislature seats that the group says are key to holding power in the House of Representatives in battleground states including Wisconsin, Texas, Florida and New York. The group recently appointed party strategist Karl Rove and ousted White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to its board.
The RSLC’s goal is to get Republicans elected in down-ballot races. This can mean funding state candidates and campaign materials, including attack ads. For corporations, funneling their money through the group is a simple way to support lawmakers sympathetic to their bottom line and exert political influence.
The RSLC has gone to extreme lengths to undertake its mission, changing the political landscape in the process. In the run-up to the 2010 midterms, it led an unprecedented strategy, the Redistricting Majority Project, or Redmap, to flip legislatures in competitive states. Once in charge, Republicans manipulated district maps to their advantage, a tactic known as gerrymandering. “He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” Rove famously said in 2010. While both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, Redmap changed the game.
In 2012, Democrats won 1.4m more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans maintained a 33-seat margin in the House. A 2019 USC study found that 59 million Americans now live under minority rule, where the party that receives the minority share of the vote in a state election controls the majority of seats in the subsequent state legislature.
“Redistricting historically was something that occurred behind the scenes in smoke-filled rooms and the people didn’t pay attention,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center. “Now it’s something that angers people.”
Rigged maps and their corrosive effects on democracy have drawn fierce protests in states like Wisconsin and Michigan over the past decade. Crowds came out once again last year after the supreme court’s influential ruling drawing a line between political and racial gerrymandering, putting even more pressure on the parties to win control of the redistricting process.
Over half of the RSLC’s $17m contributions at the end of 2019 came from public companies and trade associations, according to an analysis by The Center for Political Accountability (CPA), which tracks corporate political spending. The largest single donor, however, was the conservative dark money group the Judicial Confirmation Network with $1.1m, the same group behind the nomination of conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Police Shootings – “State-sanctioned violence.”
Researchers in a new study from the University of Chicago law school put the lethal use-of-force policies of police in the 20 largest US cities under the microscope. America’s police forces lack legality, the study finds, because they are not answerable to human rights compliant laws authorizing the use of lethal force.
They found not a single police department was operating under guidelines that are compliant with the minimum standards laid out under international human rights laws. The Chicago study underlines how far policing in America is adrift from international norms, making the US a lonely outlier on the world stage. Across Europe, policing policies are much more closely aligned with human rights directives. In Spain, for instance, officers have to use verbal cautions and fire warning shots before they are permitted to aim at anybody. Chokeholds have been banned in Europe for many years.
Among the failings identified by the law scholars, some police forces violate the requirement that lethal force should only be wielded when facing an immediate threat and as a last resort. Some departments allow deadly responses in cases of “escaping suspects”, “fugitives”, or “prevention of crime” – all scenarios that would be deemed to fall well outside the boundaries set by international law. The researchers from the law school’s international human rights clinic discovered that none of the 20 police departments were operating under state laws that were in accord with human rights standards.
“The fact that police forces in the biggest US cities don’t meet very basic human rights standards is deeply concerning,” said Claudia Flores, the clinic’s director.
The Chicago researchers conclude too much deadly discretion is given to police officers in the US. The use of force, they say, is a form of “state-sanctioned violence.”
When things go wrong, the Chicago study also found that police use-of-force policies fall woefully short on accountability. All 20 city forces were found to have internal systems for reporting the deployment of lethal force, but only two – Los Angeles and Chicago – require independent external investigations to be carried out in tune with international standards. Houston, San Antonio, San Diego, Austin, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Seattle and El Paso had no external reporting requirements.
Of the 20 cities, Indianapolis, in terms of the degree to which they comply with human rights laws, is at the bottom. The Indianapolis PD ranks so badly because it breaches international standards on numerous counts. It allows the use of lethal force to prevent a felony being carried out – without specifying what kind of felony. Its rules carry no mention of the need for force to be proportional to the danger. It also makes no requirement on police officers to apply an escalating set of measures before they reach the point of lethal force – Indianapolis only talks about issuing a “verbal warning, if feasible”.
The need for restrictions on police power has been recognized in international law for 40 years. Two basic human rights are involved: the right to life and personal security, and the right of freedom from discrimination. Those rights have also been enshrined in core United Nations standards. All 193 member nations of the UN, including the US, have signed up to a code of conduct for law enforcement officials adopted in 1979.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/22/us-police-human-rights-standards-report
PM Johnson Wrong On UK Poverty
The Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England has ruled that Boris Johnson made misleading claims about supposedly falling child poverty levels at prime minister’s questions.
Researchers for the commissioner, Anne Longfield, concluded that Johnson was wrong to claim that there were 400,000 fewer families living in poverty now than there were in 2010 and that it was “generally false” for him to say overall poverty levels were falling.
The fact-checking report by her office found that it was correct to say 600,000 more children now lived in relative poverty compared with 2012, and the total number of children in poverty was forecast to rise steeply.
Researchers for the commissioner, Anne Longfield, concluded that Johnson was wrong to claim that there were 400,000 fewer families living in poverty now than there were in 2010 and that it was “generally false” for him to say overall poverty levels were falling.
The fact-checking report by her office found that it was correct to say 600,000 more children now lived in relative poverty compared with 2012, and the total number of children in poverty was forecast to rise steeply.
A report by another government body, the Social Mobility Commission, which found child poverty was rising, the prime minister disputed this, saying there were 400,000 fewer families in poverty than in 2010. The children’s commissioner’s report noted that while there was no source for what Johnson meant by this, government data suggested an extra 800,000 people in families lived in relative poverty in 2018-19 compared with 2010-11.
Johnson also claimed at PMQs that “absolute poverty and relative poverty have both declined under this government”, something the report said risked being “not specific enough to be verified”. However, it concluded the claim was “generally false”, as there were no government statistics showing declines in both measures. There had been a handful of years where one of the gauges fell, but it would be “a very selective reading of the data” if Johnson relied on this for his claim.
In contrast, the researchers said official statistics did back up Starmer’s claims that 600,000 more children live in relative poverty compared with 2012, and said it was credible to cite a claim that the total number of children in poverty was projected to rise to 5.2 million by 2022. The latter figure comes from the Social Mobility Commission report, which in turn cites calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank.
In Australia Too
A Western Australian police officer who dragged a handcuffed Indigenous boy on to the ground, causing his head to hit the pavement, escaped any sanction over the incident after an internal investigation found the level of force used was “necessary and not excessive.” The internal police investigation into the incident found the officers involved had no case to answer.
Amid a spate of incidents raising concerns about heavy-handed policing against Indigenous people in Australia, footage obtained by the Guardian highlights what critics say is the flawed process by which investigations into alleged misconduct made against officers are handled internally.
A witness to the incident, who heard the boy cry out in pain, was also arrested for obstructing police. The charges were later dropped after the CCTV footage seemed to contradict statements filed by police. Perth solicitor Nick Terry obtained the CCTV footage, which he said was “difficult to reconcile” with the statements made by the officers.
The footage shows the officer then using his forearm to press the boy’s face into the pavement for about a minute. A second officer then pulls the boy’s leg up behind his body and also leans on him. The boy remains pinned to the ground while handcuffed for about five minutes.
“It’s excessive force,” Nicholas van Hattem, the president of the WA Law Society, told the Guardian.
The case highlights what critics say is a lack of transparency and accountability in the way police in Australia investigate alleged excessive force by officers, and reveals concerning details about the way some police treat bystanders who speak out against what they see as unnecessary force.
Neither the CCTV footage nor the internal investigation which followed would have come to light were it not for the fact that police also arrested the witness to the incident, Tanya De Souza-Meally.
Prof Thalia Anthony, an expert on Indigenous criminalisation at the University of Technology, Sydney, said many Aboriginal people felt it was pointless to make complaints about excessive use of force.
“Overall the problem with internal investigations is that even if complaints are lodged through an ombudsman or third party, they ultimately go back to the police to undertake the investigation so there’s no outside body to conduct the process and then no outside body to see how the investigation is conducted,” she said. “What this means is that Aboriginal people, who are disproportionately affected by the police force, are further alienated from any investigation process because it is both intimidating and unlikely to achieve an outcome in their favour.
Home Ownership and Racism
In the 1930s, the federal government decided to get into the business of promoting homeownership and created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to guarantee home loans. But the FHA drew up maps divided the country into green, yellow, and red neighborhoods to determine which areas would be eligible for federal loan guarantees. Greenlined areas received the best credit ratings and easy access to loans while redlined areas, often legally segregated Black neighborhoods, were considered “hazardous.” The FHA explicitly refused to back loans to Black people or even other people who lived near Black people. The practice was outlawed under the Fair Housing Act in 1968, but its legacy continues to devastate redlined neighborhoods to this day. Though the practice has long been outlawed, housing discrimination continues to this day. About 74% of white families own a home compared to just 44% of Black families. Black people also continue to face a lack of access to credit and have 10 times less wealth than whites.
“Homeowners in redlined neighborhoods have earned 52% less in home equity than those in greenlined areas over the last 40 years,” according to researchers at Redfin, a real estate firm. The average homeowner in a neighborhood that was redlined has gained about $212,000 less in property value over that time.
“Redlining policies kept black Americans from homeownership, and that created more segregation in the country, which has been difficult to break and rebuild from,” Redfin senior economist Sheharyar Bokhari, who authored the study, told Yahoo Finance. “It has been a difficult process of catchup for black Americans.”
“The expanding homeownership gap between Black and white families can in part be traced back to diminished home equity due to redlining, as it’s one major reason why Black families today have less money than white families to purchase homes either as first-time or move-up homebuyers,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather. “It’s important to note that other factors play a role in lower homeownership rates for Black families, too. For instance, employment discrimination has prevented Black workers from earning equitable income.” He continued, “More than half a century after it was abolished, redlining continues to dictate the racial makeup of neighborhoods and Black families still feel the socioeconomic effects of such a racist housing policy. Black families who were unable to secure housing loans in the neighborhoods where they lived have missed out on one of the major ways to build wealth in this country. And even families who were able to buy homes in their neighborhood after redlining ended haven’t earned nearly as much home equity as people who bought homes in neighborhoods that were considered more valuable.”
“Owning property is one of the main ways Americans accumulate wealth and the main way they pass on wealth to the next generation,” Kirsten Delegard, the co-founder of the Mapping Prejudice Project at the University of Minnesota whose data was used for the Redfin study, told Salon. “So by making it impossible for a whole group of people in the city to own property or to own property in a part of the city where property values actually go up, that really laid the groundwork for the racial wealth gap that we see… around the country.”
Redfin’s analysis looked at 41 metro areas and found that Black homeowners were 4.7 times more likely than whites to own a home in a neighborhood that was redlined. The study found that the average homeowner in a redlined neighborhood earned $196,050 in home equity since 1980 compared to $408,073 among families in “Type A” neighborhoods or the best, greenlined areas. The average home value in Type A neighborhoods has increased by 292% over those four decades compared to 204% in redlined areas. In some areas, the disparities were even wider. In Warren, a suburb of Detroit, the average Type A home grew by 1,309% more than the average redlined home. In Jacksonville, Florida, the average Type A home value grew by 836% more. In Memphis, Tennessee, the average Type A home value grew by 663% more.
Some areas had even more stark disparities. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, just 14.8% of black families live in Type A areas compared to 75% of white families. In Fresno, California, just 2.5% of black families live in Type A neighborhoods compared to 62.6% of white families. In Greensboro, North Carolina, the homeownership rate for Type A areas for Black families is 9.3% compared to 67.7% for white families.
The 2008 housing crisis contributed to the disparities. Black families with mortgages were nearly twice as likely to lose their homes to foreclosures between 2007-2009 as white families, according to data from the Center for Responsible Lending. Black mortgage applicants are also twice as likely to be rejected as white applicants, according to data from the analytics firm ComplianceTech.
“Credit history is one of the most important reasons why those mortgages are rejected for black Americans,” Bokhari told Yahoo Finance. “Why is that? The financial crisis hit black homeowners a lot harder and ruined their credit history. It is still affecting their ability to buy a home.”
As a result of redlining and continued inequality, the disparities that existed decades earlier have been passed down through multiple generations.
“That has had a lingering effect on their children and grandchildren, who don’t have the same economic opportunities as their white counterparts,” Fairweather said. “Not only are Black parents less likely to have the resources to pay for higher education and help with other expenses, but studies show that children of homeowners are about 7.5% more likely to become homeowners than children of renters.”
“Relatively low homeownership rates for Black families means landlords are the ones reaping the benefits of increasing home equity in formerly redlined neighborhoods,” Fairweather said. “Black families are mostly renters in those neighborhoods, which means rising home values leads to increased rent payments and possibly being pushed to less desirable, albeit more affordable, parts of town.”
Original source
Forests Are Not The Cure
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Previous studies have indicated that trees have enormous potential to soak up and store carbon, and many countries have established tree planting campaigns as a key element of their plans to tackle climate change. Over the past few years, the idea of planting trees as a low cost, high impact solution to climate change has really taken hold.
However, rather than benefiting the environment, large-scale tree planting may do the opposite, two new studies have found. One paper says that financial incentives to plant trees can backfire and reduce biodiversity with little impact on carbon emissions. A separate project found that the amount of carbon that new forests can absorb may be overestimated.
One new study have looked closely at the financial incentives given to private landowners to plant trees. These payments are seen as a key element of increasing the number of trees significantly. Chile subsidised 75% of the costs of planting new forests. While it was intended not to apply to existing forests, lax enforcement and budgetary limitations meant that some landowners simply replaced native forests with more profitable new tree plantations. Their study found the subsidy scheme expanded the area covered by trees, but decreased the area of native forest. The authors point out that since Chile’s native forests are rich in biodiversity and store large amounts of carbon, the subsidy scheme failed to increase the carbon stores and accelerated biodiversity loss.
“If policies to incentivise tree plantations are poorly designed or poorly enforced, there is a high risk of not only wasting public money but also releasing more carbon and losing biodiversity,” said co-author Prof Eric Lambin, from Stanford University. “That’s the exact opposite of what these policies are aiming for.”
A second study set out to examine how much carbon a newly planted forest would be able to absorb from the atmosphere. Up until now, many scientists have calculated the amount of carbon that trees can pull down from the air using a fixed ratio. Suspecting that this ratio would depend on local conditions, the researchers looked at northern China, which has seen intensive tree planting by the government because of climate change but also in an effort to reduce dust from the Gobi desert.
Looking at 11,000 soil samples taken from afforested plots, the scientists found that in carbon poor soils, adding new trees did increase the density of organic carbon. But where soils were already rich in carbon, adding new trees decreased this density. The authors say that previous assumptions about how much organic carbon can be fixed by planting new trees is likely an overestimate.
“We hope that people can understand that afforestation practices are not one single thing,” said Dr Anping Chen, from Colorado State University and a lead author on the study “Afforestation involves many technical details and balances of different parts, and it cannot solve all our climate problems.”
AFL-CIO for the police?
Most trade unions don’t try to shield their members from accusations of murder. Unions do not tolerate racism among its members. Police unions do. Police unions have a history of protecting violent police. The leaders of the labor movement remain hesitant to rebuke and expel police unions.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka spoke out against the idea of kicking police unions out of the coalition.
Trumka defended the police as “community friendly.”
He argued that if unions could learn to work with employers to handle contentious issues, they should be able to do the same with cops and their unions.
The Writers Guild of America, East, an AFL-CIO member union, passed a formal resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Associations.
The leadership of the AFL-CIO received the resolution unenthusiastically. They immediately put out a statement saying that they “take a different view when it comes to the call for the AFL-CIO to cut ties with IUPA. …We believe the best way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them.”
Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, Trumka’s second-in-command, advocated instead developing “codes of excellence” to encourage police unions to change from within.
Mark Dimondstein, the head of the American Postal Workers Union, raised the issue, saying that the AFL-CIO would eventually have no choice but to deal with the issue head on. Citing the WGAE’s resolution, Dimondstein said that the AFL-CIO needed to grapple with “irreconcilable differences” between police unions and other union members, because the role of police is to protect corporate power, not the power of working people. He called for Trumka to distribute the resolution to the Executive Council for further discussion at a future meeting, and then voiced his own opinion that any police who beat union members could not be his “brother or sister.”
SEIU leader Mary Kay Henry, the head of the most powerful union outside of the AFL-CIO, said that disaffiliation “must be considered” if police unions don’t reform.
The King County Labor Council expelled the Seattle police union last week.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22616/afl-cio-richard-trumka-black-lives-matter-police-unions
We Demand Transformative Social Change
Across the world, working people are engaged in civil disobedience, protests, and resistance, not just for one issue. Communities are beginning to imagine what our world can look like without capitalism. The unprecedented turbulent events occurring around the globe now demand solutions. Poverty is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. The Socialist Party say we have that solution. The dehumanizing darkness of capitalist profit is a structural defect. We have an economic system built for profits over human lives. It keeps working people of all colours scrambling for the bare basics of subsistence living. If we don’t stop capitalism in the next decade or two, it is questionable whether humanity will see the 22nd Century
The ruling class seeks to blame the poor people for their circumstances. The capitalists want us to believe that we are the problem. More and more working people no longer buy into the narrative that poverty is our fault. The Socialist Party is calling for a radical revolution of political and economic power. Everybody is deserving of our planet’s abundance. The worst mistake we have made is to demand too little. The profit system does not value human life nor ecological harmony. Instead, it has prioritizes private, corporate and state interests over our precious natural resources. Until we have a people that understands how capitalism works, how and why class systems exist, societal poverty will persist. The necessities of life – water, food, healthcare and housing chief among them – having been commodified, the capitalist system guarantees that there will be winners and losers, and the “two-party” system guarantees that the winners will never allow the losers to change this. We will never rise to our full human potential until the necessities of life are freely available to all as a birthright. To create real security, we must meet everyone’s basic human needs. Our security will not come from the muzzle of a gun, but from the combined voice of an united movement.
A just functional society is impossible when the vast majority of its wealth is in the hands of a privileged few, while poverty remains rampant. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison now hold a combined fortune worth nearly half a trillion dollars, $493.9 billion to be exact and have added a combined $101.7 billion to their net worth since March. Existing governments are designed to facilitate economic growth, they are all capitalist growth enhancers by design and cannot be reformed.
Dividing working people is a tried and true strategy of our masters. It was President Johnson who said in 1960:
“if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pocket for you.”
Speed the day that is not too distant when the voiceless, the vulnerable, the poor and the subjugated will succeed in their struggles.
Stealing your vote (1)
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Trump launched a fresh attack on mail-in voting, making a series of false allegations to suggest the 2020 election will be tainted by fraud, fueling concerns he is laying the groundwork to contest the results of the 2020 election. He put forward a new theory, claiming that foreign countries would print millions of mail-in ballots and mail them to voters. The idea was previously advanced by US attorney general William Barr.
Experts have said that it would be nearly impossible for a foreign country to orchestrate the kind of fraud Trump and Barr are hyping. Trump pointed to the fact that Americans have voted during times of war to suggest that Covid-19 was merely being used as an excuse to “cheat”. But members of the military have long voted by mail and there is a long history of expanding access to the ballot because of war, Alexander Keyssar, a historian who has studied elections, told NBC News in April.
“There are many checks and balances in place to ensure that nobody could just print ‘millions’ of ballots and vote them,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials across the country.
“It’s ridiculous. You can’t just print ballots. There is a specific process with vendors or internal to election offices. Ballot tracking is a way that you can add security,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute and a former election official in Denver. “If either Barr or Trump had toured an election office or had advisers that know the process, they would know this is not feasible.”