There are apparently two anthropological camps, dubbed hawks and doves. The hawks argue that war is an evolved predisposition in humans dating back to when they had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Doves, meanwhile, argue that war has only emerged in recent millennia, motivated by changing social conditions.

 Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent more than 40 years researching the origins of war. Ferguson, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, notes that war is not the same thing as interpersonal violence or homicide. War implies organized, armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group. 

Ferguson argues that current evidence suggests that war was not always present but began as a result of societal changes—with evidence of war’s origins appearing at widely varying timestamps in different locations around the world. He estimates that the earliest signs of war appear between 10,000 B.C., or 12,000 years ago.

“But in some areas of the world you don’t see any signs of war develop until much more recently,” he says, noting that in both the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains there is no evidence of war until around 2,000 years ago.

Ferguson has studied the anthropological and archaeological records throughout ancient, and sometimes into more modern, human history. He says there is a lack of evidence of war or large-scale violence, in many places around the world throughout various periods of history. He has spent four decades researching and historically contextualizing the various origin points of war around the world. He has also contextualized incidents of group violence in humanity’s closest ape cousins, chimpanzees. He argues that war is not innate, evolutionary nor inevitable behavior for humans.

Ferguson writes: “Humans, they argue [doves], have an obvious capacity to engage in warfare, but their brains are not hardwired to identify and kill outsiders involved in collective conflicts. Lethal group attacks, according to these arguments, emerged only when hunter-gatherer societies grew in size and complexity and later with the birth of agriculture. Archaeology, supplemented by observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, allows us to identify the times and, to some degree, the social circumstances that led to the origins and intensification of warfare.”

Ferguson concludes: “It’s important for people to see that a world without war is a realistic possibility. Maybe not now, but a world without war is something we can aspire to realistically, and work toward. If you think that’s something that can never happen, well that fatalism is one of the main props that is keeping war going. It’s good to break out of that mindset.”

The full interview can be read here 

This historical anthropologist wants to upend the conventional wisdom about human nature and violence – Alternet.org

 Obama’s  administration made little to no progress in bridging the vast racial wealth divide. The failure to bridge racial economic inequality is not unique to the Obama presidency. Whether under Trump, Clinton, or either Bush, there has been little to no progress in bridging the economic divide for African Americans in wealth, home-ownership, and income.

Over Obama’s presidency, median Black wealth never returned to even its modest $10,700 from before the Great Recession. By 2013, it had dropped to just $1,700 — virtually nothing — even as white wealth rebounded.

The racial wealth divide in the latter half of the Obama presidency was the largest it’s been in the last 30 years. 

Income inequality remained virtually unchanged, too. In 2007, Black Americans earned about 60 percent as much as whites. By 2016, that had fallen to 58 percent.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, homeownership — the key source of wealth for most middle-class families — decreased for most Americans. But new Black homeowners were hit hardest, driving the Black homeownership rate down from 49 to just 44 percent, nearly 30 percentage points lower than the rate for white Americans.

Can we expect Joe Biden be the reversal of all this?

Biden Needs to Make Closing the Racial Wealth Divide a Priority on Day One (truthout.org)

Finally, justice is being served concerning the 2014 lead contaminated water and cases of legionnaires disease that caused deaths and irreparable damage to many in the Michigan city of Flint. The former governor of the state,Rick Snyder, and key members of his administration have been charged…with misdemeanor crimes, not felonies.

 In 2019, a special prosecutor who spent three years leading a criminal investigation of the Flint water scandal, was fired then the state’s prosecutors drop all criminal charges against eight people in the Flint water scandal and pledge to start the investigation from scratch. The state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, assumes responsibility. Whereas unofficial sources claim that the original investigators were seeking that the ex-governor should be charged with more serious crimes, such as involuntarily manslaughter. 

 The Socialist Standard once carried an article on the anti-humanitarian nature of imposing sanctions upon ones perceived enemies and describes such policies as akin to medieval siege tactics that hurt the civilian population rather than those who hold political politics.

Such strategies still persist despite a record of santions failing to achieve their aims. The government of Bashar Al-Assad has endured a decade-long civil war that has created its worst food and economic crisis. Yet the Assad regime still stands. The imposition of international sanctions has failed to bring any resolution.

Joshua Landis is a US-based Syria expert who heads the Center for Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University said it was naive to think that sanctions will merely affect al-Assad and his cronies.

 The lives of ordinary Syrians in regime-controlled territory has worsened immeasurably. The Syrian economy is in tatters. Syrians are grappling with hyperinflation, food shortages and joblessness with no end in sight. Queues outside bakeries and fuel stations have become the new normal while a shortage of electricity has adversely affected local businesses and exacerbated unemployment. When Lebanon went bankrupt last year, many Syrians who put their money in Lebanon’s banks lost their savings, too.

Until 2008, Syria exported wheat to neighbouring nations. But a drought in 2008 and a decade-long civil war turned Syria into a wheat importer. As production fell by half.  Syria needs to import 1.1 million tons (one million tonnes) of wheat a year to meet its requirements, and most of it used to come from Russia. But in 2020, Russia reduced its supplies. The price of bread shot up. Syria’s northeast, the breadbasket of the country that produced 60 percent of the total requirement, is under the control of the Kurdish.  US sanctions may permit limited  types of trade but often deters banks, insurers and shipping companies. NGOs estimate that prices of most daily products have gone up 30 percent due to sanctions

“Syria is a small market and it is simply not worth risking a US government lawsuit,” said Aron Lund, a researcher at the Swedish Defence Research Agency. “By restricting Syria’s fuel supply through oil trade sanctions and by backing Kurdish control over the eastern oil fields, the United States hurts the Syrian economy as a whole,” Lund said. “Tanks need gasoline to wage war, but farmers also need it to run their tractors, factories need the electricity, and civilians on all sides of the war depend on cars, buses and trucks being able to deliver people and goods.” 

US sanctions are intended to obstruct Syria’s reconstruction. Europe Union, too, has banned aid for Syria’s reconstruction. But reconstruction is a matter of the welfare of Syrian citizens. Authoritarian autocrats have never relinquished power for the well-being of their people.

As Lund explains,  pretending like you can wreck the regime’s economic base without simultaneously hurting ordinary Syrians – that’s dumb and dishonest.”

From here

  Many South Korean women are choosing not to have children. South Korean women are shunning marriage and family life. South Korea’s population declined for the first time, with 275,815 recorded births and 307,764 deaths last year. In 2019, the country’s fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has during her lifetime – stood at 0.92, the lowest among OECD countries.

The previous month, data revealed that almost one in five couples who married in 2015 were still childless. According to Statistics Korea, about 18% of the 216,008 couples who married that year had not had children, compared with just under 13% in 2012.

South Korea’s government has had little success in encouraging couples to have more children, despite incentives that include a one-off payment of 1m won [£666] for pregnant women and 6m won to married couples if they each take three months off work to look after their young children. Government incentives for young couples announced by the president, Moon Jae-in, ignore much bigger financial obstacles to starting a family, such as high education and housing costs.

“Since many South Korean women have jobs these days, they are reluctant to have babies because it is extremely difficult to work and raise a child at the same time,” said Kim Seong-kon, a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University. “Besides, pregnant women have to face serious disadvantages at work in South Korea. To make matters worse, many childcare facilities are not trustworthy, and good ones are hard to get into.”

‘Luxuries I can’t afford’: why fewer women in South Korea are having children | South Korea | The Guardian

The Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, added more than $70bn to his net worth during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, which is now nearly $185bn. Amazon’s sales have soared. Profits and stockholder shares have risen through 2020 by billions of dollars, but Amazon has only provided a fraction of those extra earnings in hazard pay and bonuses to workers. Amazon ended hazard pay in June 2020, and instead have provided sporadic one-time bonuses to workers during the pandemic. On average, Amazon workers have seen a $0.99-an-hour pay bump during the pandemic, compared with Bezos’s hourly wealth increase of $11.7m.

Workers at Amazon and Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods have protested against unsafe working conditions and the pressures to keep up with demand. Several workers who participated in or led protests at Amazon over working conditions have alleged they were fired in retaliation and Amazon is fighting federal complaints alleging at least two of the firings violated US labor laws.

“What they considered hazard pay was just for show,” said an Amazon warehouse employee in Baltimore, Maryland who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “We couldn’t see a difference unless we were willing to work almost 60 hours a week. Several of us had no choice because we’re the breadwinners of our family. It’s infuriating that we live in fear every day because of minimal efforts to protect us, while executives take in tons of money while sitting safely at home.”

Jessica Oneto, a Whole Foods employee for four years in Redwood City, California, said, “They gave us hazard pay for maybe a couple months. It was only $2 and they literally took it away as the pandemic got worse. One of the biggest companies couldn’t afford to keep it up?”

Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Motors, saw his wealth surge by more than $140bn during the coronavirus pandemic and surpassed Bezos as the wealthiest person in the world with a total net worth of $195bn. Tesla’s share prices have soared during the coronavirus pandemic, but workers for the company have been subjected to a Covid-19 outbreak at the Fremont, California, plant earlier this year when Musk defied local shutdown orders to reopen the plant and restart production. Musk sent out an internal email to all employees implying they would lose unemployment benefits if they didn’t show up to work in defiance of the order, and at least two workers who took unpaid leave due to coronavirus fears for themselves and at-risk family members received termination notices for not showing up to work. Salaried employees at Tesla had their pay reduced by 10% to 30% from mid-April to the end of June 2020.

“While people in cubicles stay home to work, we can’t do that and we don’t get any hazard pay,” said a Tesla employee at the Fremont plant. “Nothing has changed. Musk can afford to do so much more and he doesn’t. I find it sickening to see how much Elon Musk’s wealth has grown while we take all the risks. All we get is a ‘thank you so much’ email.”

Another Tesla employee in Fremont cited ongoing mistreatment toward Black workers at Tesla amid several lawsuits alleging discrimination at Tesla.

“Musk has not once addressed this issue in his workplace or supported Black Lives Matter,” said the worker. “No hazard pay or bonus. They gave all regular workers their regular raise, but being that I’m maxed out at my position I didn’t get anything.”

Bill Gates has seen his wealth increase by nearly $18bn through 2020, to $131bn. Though his initial fortune stems from co-founding Microsoft, Gates’s net worth has continued to climb through investments; his trust owns significant holdings in companies such as Amazon and his investment company Cascade Investments holds a more than 34% stake in the waste management company Republic Services. During the pandemic, Republic Services approved $2bn in stock buybacks and paid out $387.1m in dividends to shareholders, but the company’s sanitation workers have not received any hazard pay or bonuses.

“They gave us a couple $25 gift cards early in April or May but that was it,” said Yogi Miller, a sanitation worker for Republic Services in the Akron, Ohio, area. “During this time, workers would like to see a little bump in their pay as many people have spouses who have been laid off during this and now they’re a one income family. If we stopped picking up trash for a week or two, people would realize how essential it is the work we do.”

Billionaires add $1tn to net worth during pandemic as their workers struggle | Coronavirus | The Guardian

 The United Kingdom is set to likely have the largest population decline since WWII, according to a new study.

As many as 1.3 million migrants born abroad left the UK in just over a year – from July 2019 to September 2020 and the UK’s Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) think-tank said it was an “unprecedented exodus” driven by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. London had lost nearly eight percent (700,000) of its population in a little more than 14 months.

The study noted a high number of job losses in sectors that rely heavily on workers from abroad, such as hospitality.

“It seems that much of the burden of job losses during the pandemic has fallen on non-UK workers and that has manifested itself in return migration, rather than unemployment,” the study’s authors said. But a number of people who left the UK last year explained the pandemic was not the biggest factor in their decision to relocate. Instead, they said, it was mainly the country’s exit from the European Union.

The ESCoE study’s authors said the exodus may be temporary, suggesting some could return when the pandemic eases.

“But it may not,” they cautioned, noting a permanent drop in London especially would have “profound” implications.

“Big shifts in population trends in London, driven by economic changes and events, are by no means historically unprecedented,” they wrote. “Inner London’s population shrank by fully 20 percent in the 1970s, so the recent picture of sustained growth driven by international migration is relatively recent.”

‘Unprecedented exodus’: Why are migrant workers leaving the UK? | Migration News | Al Jazeera

 The Lancet said in a report toxic air killed 1.67 million Indians, the deaths accounting for 18% of all fatalities.

Air pollution led to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respiratory infections, lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, neonatal disorders and cataracts.

New Delhi is the world’s most polluted capital. Kolkata and Mumbai are also on the list of the world’s 20 worst polluted cities. 

Pollution deaths in India rose to 1.67 million in 2019 -Lancet | Reuters

Biden is Trump with better table-manners, so say some. 

Biden is a proud authoritarian who supports draconian laws.

As he shamelessly boasts himself, “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.”

Biden even claims the credit for the Patriot Act. 

And now after the Capitol riots, he is going to be permitted to draft new laws on protests and access to social media. 

Worker protections enshrined in EU law — including the 48-hour week — would be ripped up under plans being drawn up by the government as part of a post-Brexit overhaul of UK labour markets.  The package of deregulatory measures is being put together by the UK’s business department with the approval of Downing Street. It has not yet been agreed by ministers— or put to the cabinet — but select business leaders have been sounded out on the plan.

The proposed shake-up of regulations from the “working time directive” will likely to spark outrage among Britain’s trade union leaders. The main areas of focus are on ending the 48-hour working week, tweaking the rules around rest breaks at work and not including overtime pay when calculating some holiday pay entitlements, said people familiar with the plans. The government also wants to remove the requirement of businesses to log the detailed, daily reporting of working hours, saving an estimated £1bn.

The move would potentially mark a clear divergence from EU labour market standards but the UK would only face retaliation from Brussels under the terms of its new post-Brexit trade treaty if the EU could demonstrate the changes had a material impact on competition.

“Workers in the UK are the primary beneficiaries of the very positive judgments of the European courts,” said an official at the Trades Union Congress, adding that any attempt to “whittle down and narrow” the interpretation of European law “is a concern because it amounts to a diminution of rights”. A change in the calculation of holiday pay could be “a significant monetary loss” for a low-paid worker often forced into overtime to make ends meet, the TUC official said.

In a call with 250 leading business figures earlier this month, prime minister Boris Johnson urged industry to get behind plans for future regulatory liberalisation after Brexit — to the delight of many free marketeers in his cabinet.

 Matt Kilcoyne, deputy head of the free market Adam Smith Institute, welcomed the proposals — saying the current “one size fits all” 48-hour rule was a “straitjacket on the economy”.

Colin Leckey, partner in employment law at Lewis Silkin, said employers would welcome the UK rejecting new European case law requiring the detailed, daily reporting of working hours. However, any move to overturn recent European case law on holiday pay — which stipulates that sales commissions and overtime must be taken into account in its calculation — would be more contentious. 

UK workers’ rights at risk in plans to rip up EU labour market rules | Financial Times (ft.com)