Little more than seventy years after the British settled Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) in 1803, the indigenous community had been virtually wiped out. Yet this genocide at the hands of the British is virtually forgotten today.

 ‘The Last Man’ is the first book specifically to explore the role of the British government and wider British society in this genocide. It positions the destruction as a consequence of British policy and ideology in the region. Tom Lawson, Professor of History at Northumbria University shows how Britain practised cultural destruction and then came to terms with and evaded its genocidal imperial past. 

Although the introduction of European diseases undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the indigenous population, Lawson shows that the British government supported what was effectively the ethnic cleansing of Tasmania – particularly in the period of martial law in 1828-1832. By 1835 the vast majority of the surviving indigenous community had been deported to Flinders Island, where the British government took a keen interest in the attempt to transform them into Christians and Englishmen in a campaign of cultural genocide.

Lawson also illustrates the ways in which the destruction of indigenous Tasmanians was reflected in British culture – both at the time and since – and how it came to play a key part in forging particular versions of British imperial identity. Laments for the lost Tasmanians were a common theme in literary and museum culture, and the mistaken assumption that Tasmanians were doomed to complete extinction was an important part of the emerging science of human origins.

 By exploring the memory of destruction, ‘The Last Man’ provides the first comprehensive picture of the British role in the destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population.

The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania: Tom Lawson: I.B. Tauris (bloomsbury.com)

 There are currently 341,419 homes across England, Scotland and Wales that have been vacant for at least six months. 

The vast majority of vacant properties can be found in England, with 268,385.

Scotland and Wales have 47,333 and 25,701 long-term vacancies respectively. Scotland counts the highest proportion of vacant homes with 19 long-term vacant properties per 1,000 houses.

The majority of vacant houses in Britain have been empty for at least a year with the City of London having the highest proportion of empty houses in England – 42.4 in every 1,000 empty for at least six months. 

As many as 42,021 houses have sat vacant for two to four years in England, 13,785 houses for five to nine years and 7,580 properties for more than 10 years. 

Over third of a million homes are long term empty… (estateagenttoday.co.uk)

 Few have ever claimed that this capitalist system is fair and the vaccine gap between the global rich and poor is a prime example of its inherent inequality. The coronavirus pandemic has created nine new billionaires, six are linked to the successful mRNA vaccines.

It’s like a famine in which “the richest guys grab the baker,” said Strive Masiyiwa, the African Union’s envoy for vaccine acquisition. 

“This was a deliberate global architecture of unfairness,” Masiyiwa told a Milkin Institute conference. “We have no access to vaccines either as donations or available for us to purchase. Am I surprised? No, because this is where we were with the HIV pandemic. Eight years after therapeutics were available in the West, we did not receive them and we lost 10 million people.”

Inequity is everywhere. Haiti received its first delivery July 15 after months of promises — 500,000 doses for a population over 11 million. 

Canada has procured more than 10 doses for every resident yet Sierra Leone’s vaccination rate was just 1% on June 20.

Christian Happi, a professor at Nigeria’s Redeemer’s University and a member of CEPI’s scientific advisory committee, explained, global health experts soon came to realize that rich countries “could sign a piece of paper saying they believe in equity, but as soon as the chips are down, they will do whatever they want.” 

 European and American officials deeply involved in bankrolling and distributing the vaccines against coronavirus have told  Associated Press there was no thought of how to handle the situation globally. Instead, they jostled for their own domestic use.

There was a global purchase plan to provide vaccines for poorer countries, but it was so flawed and underfunded that it couldn’t compete in the cutthroat competition to buy. Intellectual property rights vied with global public health for priority. Rich countries expanded vaccinations to younger and younger people, ignored the repeated pleas of health officials to donate their doses instead and debated booster shots – – even as poor countries couldn’t vaccinate the most susceptible.

 Wealthy nations expected a return on their investment in the development of the vaccine.

On April 30, 2020, AstraZeneca took sole responsibility for the global production and distribution of the Oxford vaccine and pledged to sell it for “a few dollars a dose.” Over the next few weeks, the U.S. and Britain secured agreements totalling 400 million doses from AstraZeneca. They were home to the pharmaceutical companies with the most promising vaccine candidates, the world’s most advanced production facilities, and the money to fund both,

On May 15, 2020, Trump announced Operation Warp Speed. The idea of including clauses to ensure that vaccines would go to anyone besides Americans wasn’t even considered.  The U.S. repeatedly invoked the Defense Production Act — 18 times under the Trump Administration and at least once under Biden. The moves barred exports of crucial raw materials as factories were ramping up production of the as-yet-unapproved vaccines — and eventually, of the vaccines themselves. It meant those materials would run low in much of the rest of the world. 

COVAX had the backing of the World Health Organization, CEPI, vaccines alliance Gavi and the powerful Gates Foundation. What it did not have was cash, and without cash it could secure no contracts.

 “Operation Warp Speed signed the first public deals and that started a chain reaction,” said Gian Gandhi, UNICEF’s COVAX coordinator for supply. “It was a like a rush on the banks, but to buy up the expected supply.”

Many global health authorities hadn’t fully grasped the extent of pandemic nationalism and found it unimaginable that the country would block vaccines when the world was counting on them.  The World Health Organization created a technology-sharing platform to expand vaccine production. It foundered as not a single company agreed to share its blueprints, even for a fee — and no government pushed them to. The U.S. and other countries could have pushed companies harder to share their knowledge, if only for the duration of the pandemic.

The one organization that could have pushed for more technology sharing was the Gates Foundation, whose money to WHO nearly matches that of the U.S. government. Instead, Bill Gates defended stringent intellectual property rights as the best way to speed innovation. His foundation poured money and influence into the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, which also failed. Initially resistant, the Gates Foundation has changed its position in favor of sharing.

Dr. Clemence Auer, the EU’s lead negotiator for vaccine contracts last summer, said the question of compelling pharmaceutical companies to suspend their vaccine intellectual property rights to increase the worldwide supply of coronavirus vaccines never even came up. 

“We had a mandate to buy vaccines, not to talk about intellectual property, ” Auer said.“The global community should have had this discussion back in 2020 but that didn’t happen,” he said. “Maybe we should have done it last year, but now it’s too late. It is spilled milk.”

“…The governments that had resources went and bought the supplies,” CEPI chief executive Dr. Richard Hatchett told the AP. “COVAX was not in a position to do that.” Months later, when COVAX finally had the money to sign deals for global supplies, they were at the end of the line. The lack of capital available to vaccine makers to boost their capacity outside the small number of existing manufacturing hubs was also “a lost opportunity,” Hatchett said. “We approached the international financing institutions, including the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation about making those investments and they were not willing to do that,” he said. CEPI ended up investing about $1.5 billion, far less than what a major financial institution might have been able to commit.

COVAX finally delivered vaccines on Feb. 24, to Ghana, a load of 600,000 AstraZeneca doses manufactured by the Serum Institute of India and transported by UNICEF planes. By that date, 27% of the population in Britain had been vaccinated, 13% in the U.S., 5% in Europe — and 0.23% in Africa.

Winnie Byanyima, head of UNAIDS says the world has learned little in the decades since the AIDS pandemic was brought under control in the United States, only to kill millions in Africa because treatments were unaffordable: 

“Medicines should be a global public good, not just like a luxury handbag you buy on the market.”

A  push to lift intellectual property restrictions on vaccines and medicines has gone nowhere in the World Trade Organization.

Dr. Ingrid Katz, an infectious disease researcher at the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the key question is whether vaccines and essential medications are a commodity or a right.

“If it’s going to be a commodity, we’re going to keep walking down this road every time we have something like this,” she said. 

And if it is all going to rely on the generosity of rich countries, a lot of people are going to die. Four million have died already.

“It speaks volumes about where we are as a globe when you have the source of decision-making sitting with very few people who have a lot of wealth and are essentially making life and death decisions for the rest of the globe,” Dr Katz said. 

Vaccine inequity: Inside the cutthroat race to secure doses (apnews.com)

 UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council that the world  “hurricane of humanitarian crises” and cited Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria as examples of the “bloody surge in humanitarian crises”, compounded by a “relentless wave of attacks” on humanitarian and medical workers, and the imposition of ever-narrower constraints on humanitarian space, 

Civilians in conflict zones are paying the highest price, Antonio Guterres explained. Around the world, he said, security incidents affecting humanitarian organizations including shootings, assaults, sexual violence, kidnappings and raids “have increased tenfold since 2001.”

The secretary-general said in Yemen 20 million people are in dire need of humanitarian aid, and five million “are face-to-face with famine.”

He depicted a grim picture of civilian executions, arbitrary arrests, detentions, forced displacement and sexual violence against children, on a massive scale, in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

The UN chief spoke of “brutal attacks” in Afghanistan and Syria people are living “face-to-face” with hunger. He said there needed to be greater respect for international humanitarian law that does not “blur the lines” between military operations, political objectives and humanitarian efforts.

Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, echoed Guterres’ concern. Humanitarian budgets are under increasing pressure, he said.

There is “a dire lack of protection and assistance for those who need it most” and humanitarian workers are put “in mortal danger, far too many of them traumatized, missing, maimed or killed.”

This year the UN and its partners are seeking to assist 160 million people – its highest number ever.

World Faces A ‘hurricane Of Humanitarian Crises’, Warns UN Chief | Countercurrents

The AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch report examined compensation at S&P 500 companies, revealing that executives were paid 299 times the average worker’s salary in 2020. 

On average, CEOs received $15.5 million in total compensation last year while the average worker in a non-supervisory role earned $43,512.

CEO-to-worker pay ratios increased from 264-to-1 in 2019, while workers’ pay last year marked an increase of only $957 over the past decade.

“Inequality, the imbalance in our economy, is clear by this report that the pay of CEOs and working people continues to be a major problem in this country,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. “The only reason we’re reaching the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic is because working people stepped up,” Shuler said. “Our first responders, county and municipal workers, food and retail—think about the sacrifices—transportation workers, construction, manufacturing, communication workers… We hear so many business leaders calling those workers ‘essential’ and ‘heroes.’ But words are not enough.” She went on to say, “What every worker deserves is family-sustaining wages a free and clear path to stand together with our co-workers in unions.” 

Chad Richison of the online payroll company Paycom was the highest-paid CEO last year, receiving $200 million in salary and stocks. Kevin Clark, CEO of auto parts company Aptiv, took home compensation that represented the greatest gap between an executive and workers; Clark was paid $31 million last year while the average worker at his company made only $5,906, amounting to a 5,294-to-1 pay ratio. Other companies topping the list of highly-paid CEOs and high pay ratios included General Electric, Nike, Hilton, and Chipotle.

The AFL-CIO’s report was released as Americans for Tax Fairness (AFT) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) unveiled an analysis of Forbes wealth data which showed the collective wealth of the United States’ 713 billionaires grew by $1.76 trillion, or nearly 60% since the pandemic began in March 2020. 

Top CEOs Made Nearly 300 Times More Than Average Employee During Pandemic | Common Dreams News

 The climate crisis is endangering farmworkers around the US who work outside in excessive heat throughout the year without any federal protections from heat exposure in the workplace. The state of Washington recently announced emergency rules to provide heat protection for farmworkers and other outdoor workers, shortly after Oregon issued emergency rules in the wake of a farmworker who died from heat exposure during record high temperatures in the region. California and Minnesota are the only two other states in the US with heat protections for workers, though Colorado has some limited protections.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 53 workers died in the US due to temperature extremes in 2019, and the climate crisis is creating more hazardous conditions for workers, as temperature extremes become more common. Heat stress can cause kidney issues and worsen pre-existing conditions such as asthma and heart disease, as well as cause sudden death on the job. According to CDC data, farmworkers are 20 times more likely to die from heat-related causes than other workers.

Said Tere Cruz, a farm worker for 15 years in Immokalee, Florida, “The first thing in the morning, you don’t feel it as much but then after 11am your body really starts to feel the heat. You feel like all the energy has been sucked out of you and it’s really hard to keep going.’’ Cruz explained workers often will get too hot and vomit from drinking too much water too fast, but they face immense pressure to continue working through heat stress.

An analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Washington in March 2020 found US farmworkers will experience an increase from about 21 days of working in unsafe temperatures per season to an average of 62 days by the end of the century – nearly three times as many. Heatwaves have also become more common and intense over the past several decades, as the US west coast has experienced record-breaking heatwaves this year. 

“It’s extremely hot out there and it’s getting worse every year,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, general coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida. “One of the biggest problems is the way that farmworkers are paid. When they’re paid by the piece rate, that encourages workers to exert themselves even more. When they’re part of a crew, the person who slows down because he has to take a water break or use the restroom, then they become the guy who slows down the crew.”

Reyna Lopez, executive director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), said the organization had been demanding Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) issue heat protection rules ahead of the latest heatwaves in the region. Workers had been expressing concerns about the lack of shade or water while working through blueberry and cherry harvesting.

“There’s a lot of sacrifice that happens from immigrant workers for us to have food on our table,” said Lopez. “We believe fully that any kind of death on the job is absolutely avoidable. This is the first recorded death in Oregon’s Osha fatalities report that’s specific to farm labor and heat.”

Farmworkers and several organizations have been advocating for Osha to enact federal heat safety standards to guarantee basic protections for workers, including adequate shade, water and rest breaks. Advocacy efforts have also pressured states to enact standards and bills have been introduced to Congress to grant workers federal heat protections.

‘We’re not animals, we’re human beings’: US farm workers labor in deadly heat with few protections | Environment | The Guardian

 Americans’ grocery bills reflect only a third of a true cost of food, according to a new report, which evaluated factors including healthcare costs, spending associated with biodiversity loss, and the direct environmental impacts of farming and ranching to determine that the U.S. spends at least $3.2 trillion on food each year.

Officially the cost is believed to be $1.1 trillion, but as the Rockefeller Foundation explains in its report, True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the U.S. Food System, (pdf) “our food system rings up immense ‘hidden costs’ from its impact on human health, the environment, and social and economic inequity.” It continues, “We’re actually getting squeezed. Society pays that balance not out of our pockets but through other means like rising healthcare costs, effects of climate change, and food workers who are often underpaid and undervalued.”

The report reads “And, if we don’t change our food system, future generations will pay those high costs, too.”

“Clinicians should be demanding a transformation of our food system,” tweeted Dr Gaurab Basu, co-director of the Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy.

Including Environmental and Health Costs, True Price of Food Is 3 Times What Americans Pay, Report Finds | Common Dreams News

 Note. Members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, our companion party in the UK, have recently been engaged in discussions with members of the Russian group Left Socialist Action (LSA), whose Russian-language website Is levsd.ru. This is a translation of one of the articles on that website, by Ivan Levchenko, a member of the Petersburg branch of LSA. It was posted on May 1, 2021, at a time when open hostilities between Russia and Ukraine appeared to be imminent. The original is here. –SS

As military equipment is moved closer to the border [with Ukraine–SS], the constant noise of propaganda assaults us from all sides. Pro-government experts and journalists, politicians and TV commentators promise gullible people that the start of a new war will inaugurate a long-awaited new era. Yet again they will present this war as “the will of the people.” As an experiment, however, try asking your friends and acquaintances or simply passersby whether they want it, and I am sure that the overwhelming majority will say no. Yes, there are also quite a few people who still believe in the policy of “ingathering the lands” and “we can do it again” but are convinced that if hostilities begin they will be unaffected and, as Zhirinovsky said, “the whole of your America will end up underwater.” However, the further we get from the tragic turning point of 2014 the less there remains of such enthusiasm. Endless sanctions, a destructive crisis, an isolation that seems everlasting.

But this is not even the most terrible thing. The grimmest and bloodiest images of the past are being romanticized. Parallels, sometimes terrible and sometimes absurd, are drawn between current and past eras. In this way, they try to persuade us that there is no development and no change, no future, no progress, no peace, no democracy, no human beings as independent personalities. There is nothing except eternal state power and eternal war. But when we encounter cruel reality without the mask of sacred mystique, we see that the almost deified “tsar” and “leader” is really no more than a highly placed corrupt bureaucrat. Instead of the materialization of some sort of metaphysical “struggle of good against evil” we find cynical political moves to improve their own ratings. There is absolutely nothing to which they will not resort In order to preserve this illusion. They will imprison scholars and activists; they will corral us into the confines of their senseless laws while themselves violating them; they will impose their obscurantism on absolutely everyone, even school students; they will pervert everything within their reach; but in the final analysis they will deceive themselves. And this will be the cause of their downfall.

Today we not only observe but also sense this agony of the imperial project, which has reached the point of self-negation and inner dissolution. This could have been halted had Putin and his supporters at the top found the strength to withdraw in time and sacrifice their power for the sake of the country’s future. But they have decided to go in the opposite direction and sacrifice the future to the past, the lives, freedom, and happiness of the people to their own ambitions. Of course, eventually this will all end. But least of all do we wish that people – including young people, who will have to build a new country – should again be sacrificed in geopolitical games. 

What then can we say to our generation, as well as to those older or younger than us? Value Life and defend it against those who will try by means of force or deceit to turn you into their tools for use in their intrigues. There are people who will always treat you as equals, share woe and joy with you, and love you as you are. And there are also those whom you have never seen — and are hardly likely ever to see — in the flesh, although they tell you that you must sacrifice your own happiness for the sake of theirs. Neither they nor their sons nor their grandsons will be with you in the same dugout. They will not even remember you. They will betray you, just as their predecessors betrayed the soldiers in Chechnya, because the true essence of this state power, alas, remains the same. And as the Lumen band sing: “Those who send you into the final battle will not die together with you.”

We don’t need this war | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)

 Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to some researchers. The rapidly growing impacts of global heating being seen around the world suggest not, meaning political action will be needed.

An investigation commissioned by the government, explains the damage the current food and farming system inflicts upon the environment, as well as our health. It is the biggest destroyer of nature and a major source of climate warming, it says. The Climate Change Committee report recommends that meat consumption is cut by 30% within a decade. The suggested 30% target can be met by “nudges” to behaviour and replacement of meat by plant-based alternatives. It ruled out a meat tax. Food is deeply embedded in culture, and lecturing people on their diets is the wrong approach. 

 “Our current appetite for meat is unsustainable,” it says. “85% of farmland is used to feed livestock and we need some of that land back.”

85% of land provides only 32% of the calories we eat, it says: “By contrast, the 15% of farmland that is used to grow plant crops for human consumption provides 68% of our calories.” 

The report also tackles the myth that grass-fed livestock is greener, saying: “The more intensively you rear some animals, the more carbon-efficient they tend to be.”

Many other scientific studies have concluded much higher cuts in rich, western nations are needed if the climate crisis is to be halted.

One major analysis concluded Europeans and North Americans need to cut meat eating by 80% for their diet to be both climate-friendly and healthy.

 Another said a 90% cut in beef eating was required to beat global heating. 

Marco Springmann, at the University of Oxford, said: “The report shies away from recommending decisive policies that would help citizens reduce their meat consumption by highlighting the public opposition to meat taxes. However, its own polling indicated that 75% of respondents either supported or were not opposed to taxes on some meats.” He pointed out that “Behavioural science suggests targeted dietary changes are unlikely to be achievable without comprehensive measures, including fiscal incentives and mandates,” he said, alongside clear recognition from policymakers of the damage that meat causes.

Change is happening anyway, with most people already accepting they should eat less meat, be that for environmental, health or animal welfare reasons. Public sector caterers serving billions of meals a year in schools, universities, hospitals and care homes pledged in April 2020 ​​to cut the amount of meat they serve by 20%.

Food strategy for England calls for big cut in meat consumption | Meat industry | The Guardian

 Armin Laschet, the premier of the North Rhine-Westphalia state in Germany, blamed the extreme weather on global warming during a visit to a hard-hit area.