A Human Rights Watch in a report released on Tuesday, has accused Israeli officials of  apartheid and persecution, claiming the government enforces an overarching policy to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians”.

It became the first major international rights body to level such allegations, saying that after decades of warnings that an entrenched hold over Palestinian life could lead to apartheid, it had found that the “threshold” had been crossed.

“This is the starkest finding Human Rights Watch has reached on Israeli conduct in the 30 years we’ve been documenting abuses on the ground there,” said Omar Shakir, the group’s Israel and Palestine director. Shakir said his organisation had never before directly accused Israeli officials of crimes against humanity.

Human Rights Watch compared policies and practices towards nearly 7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and within Israel with those concerning roughly the same number of Jewish Israelis living in the same areas. It concluded there was a “present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government … methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.”

Human Rights Watch said that inside Israel – where about a fifth of the 9 million citizens are Palestinians – and in the occupied territories, authorities had sought to maximise the land available for Jewish communities and concentrate most Palestinians in dense population centres.

“The authorities have adopted policies to mitigate what they have openly described as a demographic ‘threat’ from Palestinians,” it said, referencing concerns expressed by Israeli politicians that a majority Palestinian population would endanger the Jewish state. “In Jerusalem, for example, the government’s plan for the municipality … sets the goal of ‘maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city’ and even specifies the demographic ratios it hopes to maintain.”

It said Israeli authorities “systematically discriminate against Palestinians”. This was most extreme in the occupied territories, it said, including the West Bank. Several hundred thousand Israeli settlers now live there as citizens while about 2.7 million Palestinians are not and live under military rule.

Human Rights Watch’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, said this was not simply “an abusive occupation”. “These policies, which grant Jewish Israelis the same rights and privileges wherever they live and discriminate against Palestinians to varying degrees wherever they live, reflect a policy to privilege one people at the expense of another,” Roth said.

Regarding the occupied West Bank, Israel points to agreements signed in the 1990s that afforded Palestinians limited self-rule there. However, Human Rights Watch says the Israeli government still “retains primary control over many aspects” of their lives, including borders, natural resources and movement of people and goods. Meanwhile, about 2 million Palestinians live under a strict blockade in Gaza. Israeli forces pulled out of Gaza in 2005 but still maintain control of its borders, sea and airspace.

The report reflects similar findings by Israeli rights bodies, including a January announcement by B’Tselem that claimed the country was not a democracy but an “apartheid regime”. One other domestic group, Yesh Din, published a legal opinion last summer in which it argued that apartheid was being committed.

Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, rights watchdog says | Israel | The Guardian

 In a devastating report running to 188 pages, human rights experts from eleven countries hold the US accountable for what they say is a long history of violations of international law that rise in some cases to the level of crimes against humanity.

The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to should be investigated and prosecuted under international law with a for the International Criminal Court prosecutor to open an immediate investigation.

They point to what they call “police murders” as well as “severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution and other inhuman acts” as systematic attacks on the Black community that meet the definition of such crimes.

The commission’s report puts the human impact of systemic discrimination against African Americans in stark terms. It says that the US is operating two systems of law.

“One is for white people, and another for people of African descent,” it said.

Hina Jilani, president of the World Organisation Against Torture, one of the 12 commissioners who led the inquiry, told the Guardian. “We examined all the facts and concluded that that there are situations in the US that beg the urgent scrutiny of the ICC.”

Among its other findings, the commission accuses the US of:

1. violating its international human rights obligations, both in terms of laws governing policing and in the practices of law enforcement officers, including traffic stops targeting Black people and race-based stop and frisk;

2. tolerating an “alarming national pattern of disproportionate use of deadly force not only by firearms but also by Tasers” against Black people;

3. operating a “culture of impunity” in which police officers are rarely held accountable while their homicidal actions are dismissed as those of just “a few bad apples”.

 The US saw a total population growth of 7.4% over the last decade, the second slowest change in US history.

 The previous slowest was 7.3% from 1930 to 1940. 

 

Global military expenditure last year rose by 2.6% to $1.98 trillion. 

The five biggest spenders in 2020, which together accounted for 62% of military spending worldwide, were the United States, China, India, Russia and Britain in that order.

“We can say with some certainty that the pandemic did not have a significant impact on global military spending in 2020,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute investigator, Diego Lopes da Silva.

As a share of GDP reached a global average of 2.4% in 2020, up from 2.2% in 2019.

U.S. military expenditure reached an estimated $778 billion last year, 4.4% than in 2019. With the world’s biggest defence budget, the United States accounted for 39% of total global military expenditure in 2020. It was the third consecutive year of growth in U.S. military spending.

China’s military expenditure, the second highest in the world, is estimated to have totalled $252 billion in 2020, a rise of 1.9% from the previous tear. Chinese military spending has risen for 26 consecutive years

 Eileen Munro, a former government adviser, one of the UK’s foremost child protection experts has accused the government-commissioned review of children’s social care in England of ignoring the key role of poverty in driving the dramatic rise in youngsters being taken into care.

“If you are truly trying to help children have a better childhood you have to link it to a levelling up on child poverty,” said Munro, who is emeritus professor of social policy at the London School of Economics. She said the terms of reference of the review only focused on services for children whose families were already in crisis, and while they mentioned domestic abuse, mental illness and substance abuse, they “do not show curiosity” regarding the root causes of those problems.

The review could not ignore poverty, poor housing and job insecurity, all major causes of poor parenting and poor child development, demonstrated by the increased incidence of social stress during Covid and the disproportionate numbers of children taken into care in poorer areas she said.

 “A truly ‘bold and broad’ review needs to look at these root causes. Even the best of services cannot neutralise the harm of poverty.” She added: “It bothers me that the government draws attention to parental problems without seeing how poverty is such a big factor in those problems. It’s limiting the responsibility to parents instead of to how we function as a society.”

She continued, “What worries me most is the [children’s services] system is totally underfunded, families are under huge strain, and wanting to make things better without guaranteeing any money – actually, explicitly saying you can’t assume there will be any more money – just seems to tie our hands around our backs.”

The Department for Education contract explicitly states that the review’s recommendations must be affordable and that the DfE “cannot assume any additional funding from the exchequer”.

The number of children in care in England rose from 65,520 in 2011 to more than 80,000 at the end of March 2020, while the number of children on child protection plans increased by more than half. Councils say English children’s services departments now face a funding shortfall of £800m. Latest official figures show 4.3 million children – equivalent to about 31% of all UK children – were in poverty in 2019-20, with hundreds of thousands more expected to have fallen below the breadline during the pandemic.

Review of children’s social care in England ignores role of poverty, says expert | Poverty | The Guardian

A number of the constituent parties of the World Socialist Movement have adopted the ‘One World, One People’ logo, sometimes in a slightly varied form, as their emblem.

The graphic representation shows a woman and a man, depicted as both black and white, hand in hand, in unity and harmony, with the world globe behind them

What it signifies is much more than a mere slogan.

1. No identity politics

Socialism incorporates the liberation of women as part of its project of human emancipation. A political organisation whose object is socialism cannot permit sexism within its membership. For a political party to be credible, it must embody the attitudes, values and practices that it seeks to build in society at large. The World Socialist Movement heartily endorses Eleanor Marx’s position:

“It is a truism, and therefore it is constantly repeated, that no social movement is worth much until it has enlisted the sympathies, aesthetic and practical, of women. The Socialists are constantly preaching this obvious doctrine. They are constantly appealing to women, not on the basis of woman’s rights as against man’s, but of the rights of men, women, and their children of the working classes as against the capitalists. That is the essential difference that marks off the women’s rights movement on the one hand, and the socialist movement of men and women together on the other.” 

2. There is no race except the human race

Socialists hold that the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or nationality. Humanity is one species, so claims of skin tones reflecting ‘superiority’ only reveal ignorance.

President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

3. One family

“We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish as fools and buffoons” Martin Luther King explained, echoing the sentiments of Robert Burns poetic words

“It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.”

4. A world with no borders.

Nor any state or government. The world is a “global village”. Each region may have its own unique traditions and distinct customs, but they are part of a greater system of society that is world-wide. Diversity of cultures shall be a celebration of the imagination and inventiveness of humankind.

Socialism cannot be a cooperative oasis in the desert of capitalism, but a global system of society that will replace capitalism.

“The poor have no country, in all lands, they suffer from the same evils, and they, therefore, realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be the more thoroughly to enslave the people must fall’,  stated the International Working Men’s Association.

As Marx emphasised:

“The nationality of the toilers is neither French nor English nor German; it is toil, free slavery, sale of the self. His government is neither French nor English nor German; it is Capital. His native air is neither French nor German nor English; it is the air of the factory. The land which belongs to him is neither French nor English nor German; it is a few feet under the ground.”

 Capitalism always has been, is now, and always will be different competing interests along national, religious and ethnic lines. But all such differences are artificially created.

Only world socialism can finally put an end to this sordid fight for resources that, in order to present a semblance of legitimacy, sings national anthems and salutes flags.

As the Indian author, Arundhati Roy, points out:

“Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the ‘Nation,’ it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry”

The World Socialist Movement does not put forward any detailed blueprints of the future. Our task is to organise and mobilise our fellow-workers for the dismantling of the profit system which robs them of the fruits of their labour. That is our only purpose.

We advocate common ownership, which can be defined as a situation in which no person or group has the right to exclusively control productive resources. When we transfer to all members of the society the power to direct and manage production, there will be no one excluded from the opportunity of controlling and benefiting from  access and use of the means of production. The very concept of property becomes meaningless. We are all members of the same humanity and share an interest in working together to establish a world without frontiers, in which the resources of the planet will be the common heritage of all its peoples and used for the benefit of all. 

The only way to meet the needs of the world’s population is on the basis of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’, freed of private ownership by the few and their rule of ‘no profit, no production’, this is the only framework within which problems such as global warming, growing inequality and constant conflicts can be ended for good.

There will be no possibility for any elite group to subject another to subjugation. Men and women can be free to arrange their personal lives according to their individual choice.

We can share with Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave, when he observed:

“…to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.”

 Oman’s dictator, Sultan Qaboos, who ruled the country for 50 years from 1970 to 2020, was advised by a secret privy council right up until his death last year. Sultan Qaboos wielded absolute power, banning political parties and independent media.

He spent billions of pounds on British weaponry and surveillance equipment to fortify his regime, which is located on a key oil supply route between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Britain has around 90 troops on loan to the Sultan and three GCHQ spy stations are located in Oman. In the last years of his rule, Qaboos also agreed to let Britain build two military bases in the country to project its power in the Middle East.

It has emerged that his top advisers included seven current and former heads of MI6 and the U.K. military, a foreign office minister, a British oil executive, the ex-governor of the Bank of England, a special adviser to Princes William and Harry and one of Queen Elizabeth’s closest aides. 

Six of the group are members of the House of Lords. None of them appear to have publicly registered their role on Oman’s privy council. The House of Lords code of conduct requires members to register “all relevant interests.” financial and non-financial. Several of the British privy councillors were involved in deciding Whitehall policy towards Oman whilst secretly conferring with Sultan Qaboos. 

Nabhan al-Hanashi, chairman of the Omani Centre for Human Rights, told Declassified:

 “Qaboos was always trying to pretend that he was an independent ruler, when in fact he was an agent of the British empire.”

Khalfan al-Badwawi, who was arrested and tortured after participating in Arab Spring protests in 2011, said:

 “This is proof that British colonialism never ended. Omanis have long suspected that MI6 treats our country like it’s their back garden. These British privy councillors need to get out of Oman.” Al-Badwawi added: “It shows we are not only fighting the sultan’s regime. If we are complaining of repression or unemployment in Oman, the U.K. has a role in that. The sultan, with his British advisers, looted the wealth of Oman and we don’t have a say on anything.” 

Oman’s privy council only came to light when the diary of millionaire Alan Duncan, a former Conservative MP, was published last week. Duncan secretly attended at least 14 sessions of Oman’s privy council from 2001, including while working for the British government as a foreign minister. Duncan did not declare in any of his parliamentary or ministerial registers of interests, travel, hospitality, gifts or meetings that he had attended Oman’s privy council. Instead, he listed his trips to the country as “strategic seminar[s] with the Government of Oman,” sessions on “inter-governmental relations” or saying he was a “guest of the Government of Oman.” The costs of Duncan’s flights and accommodation, worth thousands of pounds, were paid by the Sultan. Sometimes he received watches, cufflinks or a “traditional Omani coffee pot and incense burner” in reward for his advice. In the early 1990s, Duncan made millions of pounds as an oil trader and advised clients in Oman.  He also entered parliament as an MP in 1992 and since 2000 has visited Oman at least 24 times. Prime Minister David Cameron appointed Duncan as a special envoy to Oman in 2014, a brand-new position.  He was effectively in charge of U.K. relations with Oman and another Gulf dictatorship, Bahrain, due to his strong “personal relationships” with the rulers of those regimes.

Yet in his diary he describes the events explicitly as the “annual Privy Council in Oman, a one-day event at which senior officials from the U.K. give the Sultan privileged briefing on hot topics around the world.”

In 1995, The Sunday Times hinted at the existence of a privy council, describing Sir Erik Bennett as “one of Oman’s (and Britain’s) best-kept secrets: the key figure in a group of elderly former military and intelligence officers who help the Sultan to run his rich, strategically vital country at the mouth of the Gulf.” Bennett had continued advising Sultan Qaboos in some capacity until at least 2012, when the pair attended a lunch at Buckingham Palace with the queen and Foreign Secretary William Hague. 

Stuart Laing, former U.K. ambassador to Oman says, although Bennett was working for Qaboos, the former Air Vice Marshall “was really quite patriotic actually in lots of ways and thought very strongly about British interests” – a comment which again indicates the extraordinary degree of British influence over Oman post-independence.

Former senior MI6 officer Alec McDonald was seconded from MI6 to run the Sultan’s vast internal security service from 1985-93. 

The British Cabal Behind a Gulf Dictatorship – Consortiumnews

 In the United States, more than one-fourth of the population — nearly 90 million people — has been fully vaccinated and supplies are so robust that some states are turning down planned shipments from the federal government.

Honduras has obtained a paltry 59,000 vaccine doses for its 10 million people.

More than one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, according to a tally, with more than half given in just three countries. Some 12 countries have yet to begin vaccinating – seven in Africa (Tanzania, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Chad, Burundi, Central African Republic and Eritrea.)

The U.S. has also faced criticism that it is not only hoarding its own stockpiles, but also blocking other countries from accessing vaccines, including through its use of the law that gives Washington broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of the national defense. The U.S. has used the Defense Production Act to secure vital supplies for the production of vaccine, a move that has blocked the export of some supplies outside the country.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ 2020 annual report also raised eyebrows for a section titled “Combatting malign influences in the Americas,” which said the U.S. had convinced Brazil to not buy the Russian vaccine.

Marco Tulio Medina, coordinator of the COVID-19 committee at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, explained, “There’s a lack of humanism on the part of the rich countries,” he said. “They’re acting in an egotistical way, thinking of themselves and not of the world.”

From scarcity to abundance: US faces calls to share vaccines (apnews.com)

 “No politician, no matter how demagogic or potent or capable they are, is going to be able to change what the market is doing,” – John Kerry

The U.S. is back on climate. Now what? – POLITICO

  The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine will likely exceed $30 billion in 2021 alone. Pfizer shares its profits with its partner company—which means they are expecting at least $15 billion this year, bumping their total revenue next year to around $60 billion—one quarter of which will be accounted for by the vaccine. These sales will bring in a substantial profit for the company

According to one financial journalist “That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug anytime, anywhere.”

 Pfizer has sold very small quantities to the global distribution body Covax and African Union “at cost,” which it claims to be about $6.75 per dose. They’ve sold more than three times the amount to high income countries (1.6 billion) as they have to the rest of the world (560 million), while tiny quantities have been sold to low income countries. The international distribution network Covax has managed to secure a mere 40 million.

In fact, experts have suggested these types of vaccines could cost as little as 60 cents to $2 per dose to make. However, Pfizer is selling to most countries at $19.50 per dose, supposedly a special pandemic price, but clearly one which allows the corporation to make a large profit. It seems clear prices will rise steeply once they decide the pandemic is “over.” A senior executive has suggested $150-175 per dose would be more “normal” pricing for a vaccine of this sort.

Their accounts last year shows that the corporation returned a whopping $8.4 billion to shareholders in dividends and reported a profit of $8.7 billion.

Pfizer and its lobbying body PhRMA were the top spending lobbyists in the US healthcare sector in the last 2 decades. They use the power lobbying gives them to promote and extend their rights of secrecy (‘data exclusivity’) over medical development and their monopoly protection which allows them to charge astronomical prices. They support the US government including higher levels of monopoly protection in new trade deals.

Pfizer and its British distributor hugely hiked the prices of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin which 48,000 NHS patients relied upon. NHS expenditure on the drug rose from £2 million a year to £50 million in a single year, with the cost of 100mg packs rising from £2.83 to £67.50. Overall, UK wholesalers and pharmacies faced price hikes of between 2,300% and 2,600%.

In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion in a set of complex suits which included the company’s illegal marketing of arthritis drug Bextra, as well as giving kickbacks to doctors.

 A whistleblower claimed that sales staff were incentivised to sell Bextra to doctors for medical conditions for which the drug wasn’t approved and at doses up to eight times those recommended.

 “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that,” he stated.

 The price of Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccines were 68 times more expensive in 2015 than in 2001. While Pfizer did reduce prices for the lowest income countries, MSF said the cost to vaccinate remained “roughly US$9 for each child to be vaccinated in the poorest countries, and as much as $80 per child for middle-income countries”. 

MSF claimed Pfizer and GSK have earned over $50 billion for the drug, but “Today, 55 million children around the world still do not have access to the pneumonia vaccine, largely due to high prices.”

Opinion | The Pandemic Has Shown Pfizer Is Obsessed With Profits—Not Saving Lives (commondreams.org)