The Duty of Scientists

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Hardly a day passes but some new statement is issued by frantic scientists, urging humanity to realise the threat which the climate emergency represents to its future. While they glumly warn us of the danger; they optimistically urge some sort of international collaboration to prevent global warming. Of this hope under capitalism, it is a waste of time to write about. The notion that the climate crises can become less of a threat if all nations jointly cooperate is quaint. It is as if one believed thieves are more honourable than the other.


The scientist has always been an especially respected and revered figure, Such stereotypes are not undeserved despite the fact that many scientists have sold their services to corporations but regardless there may perhaps still been a higher devotion to humanity among scientists than among most other professional groups. The scientist was supposed to stick to his own field and not be concerned with social problems; and most of them conformed to this pattern. The role of the scientist was simply that of one who made possible by his discoveries great advances for mankind. Whether mankind properly utilised these discoveries was not the scientists’ business.


Discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology could be utilized for construction or destruction, to be utilised for good or evil in accordance with man’s skill at social organisation. And there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the bulk of the scientists hoped they would be used to make man’s life better. The attitude of socialists has been similar. We hailed scientific discoveries as signs of human progress, despite the possibility that such discoveries might later be misused – and we believe they were right, too. for without such discoveries a society of plenty and leisure such as socialists want would be impossible from the very start.


However, today, scientific bodies are NOT engaged in projects which was socially “neutral,” and the value of which would be determined by the use to which it was later put. The time is past when the scientists could divorce themselves from common social concerns; The scientist can no longer remain a folk-hero but become a responsible member of society. Scientists who live up to this standard must learn that the security and well-being of all humanity, depends on the triumph of socialism. Otherwise they will merely be complicit as mankind fall further into an abyss where more terrible things to come. Every human being who desires to put an end to this society of war and starvation, must find his or her place in assembling a revolutionary world socialist movement,

Poland and International Law

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The U.N. Refugee Agency urged Poland to help people fleeing war and persecution after Europe’s human rights court ruled Warsaw had broken an international convention by denying asylum procedures to refugees.



 Critics of the government say it is shirking its humanitarian responsibilities, exploiting anti-migrant feeling in Europe and pandering to populist sentiment at home.



  The European Court of Human Rights, hearing lawsuits brought by a total of 13 Russians, said Poland had violated the European Convention on Human Rights by denying them the possibility of applying for international protection. States have an obligation under international law to protect those who seek asylum by permitting them access to territory and safe reception, the UNHCR refugee agency said in a statement.



 “People fleeing war, violence and persecution need protection,” said Anne-Marie Deutschlander, UN Refugee Agency head for Europe. “Refusal to grant them entry at the border, without properly assessing their claims, is in dichotomy with the country’s obligations.”



 “It seems that after the European refugee crisis, the Polish government decided that acting against refugees will help it in opinion polls, hence such policy was conducted,” Jacek Bialas, lawyer at Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said.



 https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-un-poland-refugees/poland-should-help-those-fleeing-persecution-u-n-says-idUKKCN24P1JG

Pandemic – Red Cross Warnings

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The coronavirus crisis could spark huge waves of fresh migration once borders reopen, the head of the Red Cross has warned. It comes as the WHO’s chief accused the US of making “untrue” and “unacceptable” claims against the global health body.
The head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Jagan Chapagain, said he was deeply concerned about the secondary effects of the pandemic, as border closures and Covid-19 restrictions have driven millions into poverty.



“Increasingly we are seeing in many countries the impacts on the livelihoods and the food situation,” he said in an interview. 
Many people are already faced with the choice of risking exposure to the novel coronavirus or going hungry, Chapagain said, warning that the desperation being generated could have far-reaching consequences.
 “What we hear is that many people who are losing livelihoods, once the borders start opening, will feel compelled to move,” he said. “We should not be surprised if there is a massive impact on migration in the coming months and years.”
Potential migrants could feel that their chances of survival are better “on the other side of the sea,” Chapagain said without indicating any particular destination. People will base their decision to move on “the availability of [Covid-19] vaccines. If people see that the vaccine is say, for example, available in Europe but not in Africa, what happens?”


Chapagain also condemned efforts in some countries to secure vaccines for their own people first: “The virus crosses the border, so it is pretty short-sighted to think that I vaccinate my people but leave everybody else without vaccination, and we will still be safe,” he said.

Our Plastic World

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Plastic waste flowing into the oceans is expected to nearly triple in volume in the next 20 years, while efforts to stem the tide have so far made barely a dent in the tsunami of waste, research shows. 



 An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic is destined for our environment – both land and water – by 2040, unless worldwide action is taken. If current trends continue, the amount of plastic waste polluting the oceans will grow to 29m tonnes a year by 2040, the equivalent of 50kg for every metre of coastline in the world.



 Dr Ian Kane, from the University of Manchester, who was part of a team that calculated the amount of micro-plastic in the seabed, described the picture the researchers had painted as “horrifying”.



  Simon Reddy, international environment director at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which led the research. “All the initiatives to date make very little difference. There is no silver bullet, there is no solution that can simply be applied – lots of policies are wanted. You need innovation and systems change.” Reddy called on governments and investors to curb the planned expansion of plastic production. “Without this, the supply of large quantities of cheap virgin plastic to the market may undermine reduction and substitution efforts and threaten the economic viability of recycling, while making it even harder to close the collection gap between waste produced and waste collected for disposal.”



 Dr Costas Velis from the University of Leeds said the number was “staggering” but that we had “the technology and the opportunity to stem the tide”.



 More stringent measures could produce a drastic reduction in waste, according to the researchers. These include improving waste collection, particularly in the developing world, and recycling more waste, as well as investing in alternative materials and better product design to reduce the amount of plastic used.  An estimated 2 billion people in the Global South have no access to proper waste management. 



 “They have to just get rid of all their rubbish, so they have no choice but to burn or dump it,” said Dr Velis.



 The 11 million waste pickers – people who collect and sell reusable materials in low-income countries  often lack basic employment rights and safe working conditions.  Although waste pickers and other workers in informal waste management systems are responsible for about 60% of global plastic recycling, “their contribution to preventing ocean plastic pollution has largely gone unrecognised and underpaid”, said Reddy.



 Dr Velis said: “Waste pickers are the unsung heroes of recycling – without whom the mass of plastic entering the aquatic environment would be considerably greater.” He added that policies to support them and make their work safer were a vital part of solving this problem.



 Alice Horton, a scientist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, who was not involved in the research, said reducing plastic waste was cost-effective. “Even the toughest management approaches proposed [in the paper] will still lead to a cumulative increase in plastic pollution with in the environment,”



 Prof Jamie Woodward, from the University of Manchester, pointed out “There are parallels with the climate change problem in that business as usual will be disastrous. We need to radically change our behaviour.”



 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53521001

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/23/plastic-waste-entering-oceans-triple-20-years-research

No Cash for Encouraging the Vote

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The Republican coronavirus stimulus plan revealed it does not propose a single dollar in election assistance funding. The Republican plan obtained by the New York Times Thursday doesn’t mention election funding directly, but it does note that the GOP relief package will propose “no additional money for state/local governments.”

Voting rights advocates say the election assistance money is necessary to help states expand vote-by-mail and ensure that in-person polling places are adequately equipped and prepared to safely hold a general election amid a pandemic. Failing to approve election funding could drive down turnout in November by limiting voters’ ballot options in an environment where it is potentially dangerous to vote in person.

“It is outrageous that this proposal contains not one penny to help states conduct safe elections during a global pandemic,” Sean Eldridge, founder and president of Stand Up America, said in a statement. “Policymakers should be doing everything they can to ensure voters are not forced to risk their health to cast their ballot. Instead,” Eldridge said, “it seems Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to suppress the vote by putting voters in danger.”


“Democrats in both chambers cannot allow Republicans to threaten the foundation of our democracy—and they must use every piece of available leverage to ensure election funding is included in a final brokered deal,” said Eldridge. “Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.”


Stand Up America and other voting rights groups are demanding that Congress approve $3.6 billion in election assistance funding—a fraction of the $21.3 billion the GOP plan proposes handing to the Pentagon on top of the agency’s likely $740.5 billion budget for fiscal year 2021.


Trump’s repeated and baseless attacks on mail-in voting as well as his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the 2020 election have added urgency to ensure a safe and fair contest. 


Voter suppression, electoral roll purges, the closing of thousands of polling places, hindering the postal delivery service, and the fear of the coronavirus  will scare many people away.


It is a woman’s choice

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The Office for National Statistics has revealed a fall of 12.2% since 2012. That’s a replacement rate of just 1.65 children per woman – even lower in Wales.



 The choices women make have always been economically determined – and whatever choices they make are always a reason for blame: they had too many, or too few, babies, they were too young or too old, too poor or too careerist. Women are seen as selfish for having children, or selfish for being childless.



 When times are hard people can afford fewer babies. In this miserable decade when wages fell back, when good jobs were replaced with insecure, disrespected work, young people struggle to pay rent, home ownership falls and many live with parents well into their 30s.



 Birthrates aren’t determined by women’s whims. The social geographer Prof Danny Dorling anticipated that austerity would breed fewer babies. There was a fall in the 1970s and most dramatically in the 1930s depression, when “demographers were so alarmed they predicted the emptying out of the population by 2000”. How serious is a population fall? Dorling notes that immigration often neatly fills the missing cohorts. That’s the likely solution



 In the last decade, spending on children fell, family benefits cut, nurseries are closing, The number of school nurses has fallen by 30% since 2010, with health visitors numbers also reduced.



 Families suffered under the bedroom tax. But most emblematic was the two-child limit in benefits: it had no effect on numbers, it just impoverished families with three children who claimed benefits, as thousands more will now. Many will feed their children from food banks for the first time, and child poverty is well documented.



 Clare Murphy, one of its directors, notes the disapproval of women, whatever they do. If they have babies early, they are “a burden on the state” but if they leave child-bearing until after 40 they are too “ambitious”. The NHS often refuses the three cycles of IVF that Nice recommends because the misery of infertility ranks unjustly low in priorities of suffering.



 The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), a 1968 charity was created “to remove all barriers to reproductive choice”. BPAS is delighted that it has been made possible to order abortion pills by phone within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy during the pandemic, but Christian Concern has been granted a judicial review to try to prevent it. We are still far from believing that every woman is free to control or encourage her own fertility as suits her circumstance.



 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/23/birthrates-tories-child-society-austerity-cuts-parenthood

Israel Against the Palestinians

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The Israeli government’s demolition of a building that was meant to be a badly-needed testing and quarantine center for Palestinians in Hebron, the West Bank. According to Haaretz, the Palestinian Health Ministry was involved in the decision to build the coronavirus center.



 The Israeli Civil Administration demolished the building, on Tuesday, claiming the structure was being erected illegally without a permit. The building was set to open to the public next week. 

The demolition came as Hebron recorded the most coronavirus cases in the West Bank. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Wednesday that there were 154 new cases in Hebron district the day the building was destroyed, including 60 in the city itself. 
Hospitals in Hebron are filled to capacity.


Construction began three months ago, and the family did not apply for a permit from the Israeli government; Israel controls the area in which Hebron lies, known as Area C, where Palestinians are rarely granted building permits. 


“If we applied for a permit, we would not have gotten it,” Maswada who donated his land to the city of Hebron to help the community during the Covid-19 pandemic. told the Middle East Eye. “We thought maybe during Covid-19, there would be some exceptions.”


In March, the Civil Administration confiscated tents that were meant to form a field clinic and emergency housing in the West Bank during the pandemic. 


“There is no humanity in destroying grassroots attempts to support an already deprived health system suffocated by occupation,” tweeted Daniel Lubin, an organizer with the British anti-occupation group Na’amod.






Bezos – The soon-to-be Trillionaire

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 On Monday, shares in the online giant took on some rocket fuel and headed off for Mars, like Bezos presumably hopes his space exploration company will one day do. Having ended last week at $2,962, they finished the day just shy of $3,200, an all time high for the company. Bezos increased his net worth by $13bn in the process. Shares go up and down. But even if Amazon lost half its value Bezos would still be staggering, stupendously rich.



 Amazon started the year with a share price at $1,898, since which time it has gained nearly 70 per cent in the midst of a global economic crunch, by dint of being in the right place at the right time. When other retailers were forced to close, Amazon picked up the slack, busily fulfilling orders and in the process fuelling the vast personal economy of Bezos, who owns 11 per cent of the company and whose estimated $190bn personal fortune is now within sight of the GDP of Greece.



Given that Bezos started Amazon from his garage, there are many people who hold him up as the poster boy for Western capitalism – a shining example of what can be done with entrepreneurship (and an Ivy League education). In reality, he is a prime example of a predator capitalist . Countless businesses have crashed and burned as Amazon and Bezos have grabbed for themselves an ever larger piece of the consumers’ spending.



 Capitalism’s apologists tell us that the creation of people like Bezos means that a portion of their vast wealth will “trickle down” and make life better for the rest of us. But it doesn’t; it trickles up. When you have as much money as Bezos, more inevitably flows in your direction regardless of the economic conditions.



 Defenders of capitalism will not let you forget that he creates employment in a country in which one in every five workers can’t find a job, and where food bank use is booming as a result. True enough, but Amazon jobs are a mixed blessing. The labour issues and the negative media headlines has led to Amazon running advertisements featuring smiling, happy workers.



 And those PR spokespersons remind us of the generousity of Bezos and his charitable contributions. He has yet to sign the “Giving Pledge” in which the world’s mega-rich promise voluntary philanthropy.



 Bezos will never, in his lifetime, be able to spend what he has now, let alone what will be added to his pile by the time he’s done. You could easily double Bezos’ current expenditure bills and he would still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.



 Luxury yachts and private jets are among the pricier purchases for today’s billionaire. But put it this way: Bezos newly acquired  $13bn could buy British Airways owner IAG twice over, with enough left over for a small fleet of yachts.



 https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeff-bezos-amazon-share-price-net-worth-super-rich-billionaires-a9633716.html




Australia’s First Nations Dispossessed of Water

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In Australia, Aboriginal people hold less than 1% of all water licences in Australia, a form of economic and cultural dispossession that needs urgent redress, according to a major study of water rights in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) by researchers from Griffith University. 
They found Aboriginal water entitlements in the New South Wales portion of the basin covered 0.2% of all available surface water, in a region where Aboriginal people comprise about 10% of the population.
These licences, which the researchers said were a “tiny fraction” of the water rights in the region, nevertheless accounted for 75% of all known water licences held by Indigenous organisations across Australia.
“Alarmingly, we also found that the amount of water held by Aboriginal organisations has decreased by 17% over the past 10 years,” the Australian Rivers Institute’s researcher Dr Lana Hartwig said.
The MDB is the world’s biggest water market, worth more than $16bn. Aboriginal holdings across the NSW portion have been valued at 0.1% of that, or $16.5m. Aboriginal water holdings also tend to be insecure, meaning they were not guaranteed allocations every year.
“These results show conclusively that Australia’s system of water governance is inequitable and unjust,” Prof Sue Jackson from Griffith University said. “It has excluded Indigenous people from accessing water and from participating in the water economy.”
The researchers were critical of efforts to allocate water to Aboriginal groups, saying native title and revised water legislation had “so far offered no meaningful means of redistributing water use rights, providing instead mere consultation and tokenistic protection of ‘cultural values’.”
“Given Australian governments committed to improving Indigenous water access under national water policy in 2004, the decline in Aboriginal water holdings of at least 17.2%, plus evidence of ongoing vulnerability, is a significant finding that warrants urgent policy redress,” Hartwig and Jackson said. The lack of access to water was a major limitation on the “political, cultural and socio-economic goals held by Aboriginal peoples”, they said.
More than 40 Aboriginal nations, about 15% of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, live in the Murray-Darling Basin. They manage less than 1% of its land base. The Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) is a confederation of 25 First Nations from the southern part of the basin.
“There’s a fundamental issue of water justice at play here,” the MLDRIN executive officer, Will Mooney, said. “First Nations have inherent rights to water on their country, but as a result of colonisation, the development of water allocation, the water market, and the unbundling of land and water has further dispossessed First Nations from water access. There’s a whole package of reforms needed to give effect to water justice and it’s more than just handing over an entitlement.”
The Gomeroi native title holder and chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority community committee, Phil Duncan, said there were serious questions surrounding how water allocations for Aboriginal people had shrunk 17% in the past decade.
“Having a water allocation affords us to exercise our cultural obligations, to be involved in caring for and repairing our county,” Duncan said. “If we were to be given an economic water allocation, we could use it in this current climate, to look at Indigenous food security and partnerships in the rural sector, so Aboriginal landholders can look at growing specific Indigenous food products, or cropping, organising and creating employment for these rural communities that are struggling.”
Some communities, Duncan said, were “on the precipice of collapse”.

Voter Suppression

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It’s well documented that restrictive voter ID laws are ineffective and discriminatory. The type of voter fraud they claim to prevent is a myth, and the burden of showing an ID disproportionately lands on students, low-income voters and African Americans.



 Those restrictive “voter identification” laws pushed by Republicans, and widely regarded to be ineffective and discriminatory, have cost taxpayers at least $36m in just a few states, the Guardian reveals. Yet the $36m price tag may only be the tip of the iceberg. The departments of justice in several states claim that their lawyers don’t track their time, making it impossible to document the bulk of the costs of defending these ID laws. “We want to get you what you need,” said Gillian Drummond, communications director for the Wisconsin DoJ when asked for a breakdown of the agency’s litigation expenses, “but I can’t create something that wasn’t tracked previously”.



  They are  extraordinarily expensive to implement and defend. Based on information obtained through open records requests, the Guardian has found that the partial costs of litigation, free identification cards, public education and other fees amount to tens of millions across the country.



 With many states having to slash their budgets due to the economic crisis, one state, Kentucky, has decided to spend millions implementing a new ID law. While the rest of the state was under “stay-at-home” advisories because of coronavirus, the Kentucky legislature convened in early March and April in order to pass its voter ID bill.  On 15 July, Kentucky became the 19th state that requires voters to present a photo ID at the polls, and voters who apply for absentee ballots must include a copy of their ID. But passing this bill required some expensive tweaks – most significantly, the state would have to offer IDs for free to all residents or the law would probably be ruled unconstitutional, says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan thinktank and public interest law center.  According to the bill’s fiscal note statement, just that provision of the law could cost up to $3.6m a year.



 When Georgia passed its original voter ID bill in 2006, it offered free IDs only to those who swore they could not afford them. According to a report from the Brennan Center, a federal court later blocked that aspect because “many voters for whom a fee would pose a burden might be reluctant to take the oath out of embarrassment or because they do not believe they are indigent”. In fact, the Missouri supreme court found that the state must pay even for the documents required to get the ID, such as a birth certificate. After Georgia passed its ID law, it ran public service announcements on unpopular radio stations during off-peak hours and planned to distribute a letter that, according to the courts, was “not reasonably calculated to reach the voters who are most likely to lack a photo ID”. However, that court went on to add that “if the state undertakes sufficient steps to inform voters of the [law’s] requirements before future elections, the statute might well survive a challenge”.



 Since 1 January 2006, Indiana, which also has a photo ID law, has spent nearly $30.5m to issue roughly 2.7m of these free IDs.



 Meanwhile, in Texas, the process of implementing a strict voter ID law dragged on for almost seven years, during which the state spent at least $3.5m on attorney’s fees, outside counsel, travel expenses and expert witnesses. In addition, the litigation was so time-consuming that the attorney general had to pull in lawyers from other departments. In total, the state invested more than 12,400 hours in these cases. Ultimately, Texas’s ID law survived these challenges – but at a high price. In May, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the plaintiffs’ $6.8m in legal fees.



 During the first three years of its ID laws, Kansas spent at least $430,000 on its public outreach, while Wisconsin spent $631,899 in its first year alone. Even with heavily discounted rates from TV and radio stations, the critical swing state has spent nearly $1.2m on its “Bring It to the Ballot” campaign, which includes radio spots, brochures and TV ads.



 Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, wrote the original decision upholding Indiana’s ID law. However, in 2014, he voted to suspend Wisconsin’s law, writing in a dissent on the 7th circuit court of appeals that legislation like it was “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government”.

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