The Nationality and Borders Act that allows citizenship to be stripped without notifying the subject.

Frances Webber,  the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) vice-chair and report author, wrote: “The message sent by the legislation on deprivation of citizenship since 2002 and its implementation largely against British Muslims of south Asian heritage is that, despite their passports, these people are not and can never be ‘true’ citizens, in the same way that ‘natives’ are.

“While a ‘native’ British citizen, who has access to no other citizenship, can commit the most heinous crimes without jeopardising his right to remain British, none of the estimated 6 million British citizens with access to another citizenship can feel confident in the perpetual nature of their citizenship.” 

Webber said: “These classes of citizenship were brought in to target British Muslims of south Asian and Middle Eastern heritage. Such divisions act as a constant reminder to minority ethnic citizens that they must watch their step, and reinforce racist messages about ‘undeserving’ racialised groups unworthy of being British.”

The “Citizenship: from right to privilege” report argues the effect is that certain people have a “second-class, disposable, contingent citizenship”. The report describes the criteria for deprivation of citizenship as “nebulous and undefined” and warns of a risk of its use for political purposes.

The report said citizenship-stripping is “just one aspect of measures targeting Muslim communities, in Britain and abroad, in the past two decades, which have helped to turn British Muslims in the UK into a ‘suspect community’”.

British Muslims’ citizenship reduced to ‘second-class’ status, says thinktank | Islam | The Guardian

 An estimated 6.3 million people in Sri Lanka are facing moderate to severe acute food insecurity and their situation is expected to worsen if adequate life-saving assistance and livelihood support are not provided, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned.

Two consecutive seasons of poor harvests led to a nearly 50 percent drop in production coupled with reduced imports of food grains due to foreign exchange constraints.

According to the joint FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM) report immediate food assistance and livelihood programmes – including through existing social assistance mechanisms — are critical to enable households to access nutritious food – particularly moderately and severely acute food insecure ones. 

A severe macro-economic crisis in Sri Lanka has caused acute shortages and spikes in the prices of essential products, including food, agricultural inputs, fuel and medicine, severely compromising the economic activity, with major disruptions to agricultural production.

Production of paddy rice, the main food staple, is forecast at 3 million mt in 2022, the lowest level since the 2017 drought-affected harvest, mostly due to low yields following reduced application of fertilizers, the report finds.

Production of maize, mostly used as animal feed, is about 40 percent below the past five-year average, with negative effects on poultry and livestock production. Likewise, production of vegetables, fruits and export-oriented crops, such as tea, rubber, coconut and spices, is well below average, causing a significant decline in households’ income and export revenues.

Without assistance, the food security situation is expected to deteriorate further, particularly during the October 2022 to February 2023 lean season, driven by poor harvests of staple foods, in particular paddy rice, and the ongoing economic crisis.

“Months into this crippling economic crisis, families are running out of options – they are exhausted. More than 60 percent of families are eating less, and eating cheaper, less nutritious food. This comes at a time when financial constraints have forced the government to scale back on nutrition programmes, such as school meals and fortified food to mothers and undernourished children,” said WFP Representative and Country Director in Sri Lanka, Abdur Rahim Siddiqui.

Prices of most food items have been on a steady rise since the last quarter of 2021 and reached a new record high in August 2022, with the year-on-year food inflation rate at nearly 94 percent.

The total cereal import requirement in 2022 is estimated at 2.2 million mt. In the first six months of 2022, more than 930,000 mt of cereals were imported, leaving an outstanding import requirement of 1.27 million mt. Given the persisting challenges, there is a high risk that the remaining import requirement will not be met.

Food crisis in Sri Lanka likely to worsen amid poor agricultural production, price spikes and ongoing economic crisis, FAO and WFP warn – Sri Lanka | ReliefWeb

Fifty million people around the world are trapped in modern slavery, either forced to work against their will or forced into a marriage, according to new global estimates, marking a significant rise over the past five years.

“It is shocking that the situation of modern slavery is not improving. Nothing can justify the persistence of this fundamental abuse of human rights,” said the ILO’s director general, Guy Ryder.

The number of people trapped in forced labour, including sex trafficking, rose to 28 million, with a further 22 million trapped in forced marriage, says a report published on Monday by the International Labour Organization, International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the anti-trafficking human rights group Walk Free.

10 million more people had fallen victim to forms of modern slavery in 2021 compared with 2016, with women and children the most badly affected.

86% cases of forced labour were found in the private sector in industries including manufacturing, construction, agriculture and domestic work. Millions of people, mainly women and girls, are also estimated to be trapped in commercial sexual exploitation. 

The other 14% of cases are state-sanctioned forced labour.

The main form of coercion used by employers was the deliberate withholding of wages and the threat of dismissal, and that the refugee crisis has fuelled a surge of exploitation in supply chains and commercial businesses and industries.

More than 6 million more women and girls have also been forced into marriage, particularly child marriage affecting girls of 16 and under. 85% of forced marriages were driven by family pressure, with most cases occurring in Asia and the Pacific and across the Arab states.

Slavery is occurring at scale across the world, with more than half (52%) of all forced labour and a quarter of forced marriages occurring in high-income or middle-income countries.

Fifty million people now trapped in modern slavery in a ‘surge of exploitation’ | Slavery | The Guardian

 Speaker: Adam Buick

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/do-human-rights-exist/

 The Royal Family is known for its longevity. The Queen was 96 when she passed away. The Queen’s mother died in 2002 at the age of 101. Her husband was 99 when he died.  Do the blue-bloods just have better genes than the rest of us? Or do the Royals get the best medical care possible while living in comfort?

 A report from the King’s Fund notes that in 2018–20, males in the poorest 10 percent of areas in England died almost a decade earlier than males in the 10 percent wealthiest areas, with an 8-year difference among females. Aren’t these deaths a tragedy, too?

At least 168,000 excess deaths in Britain have been estimated since the Covid pandemic began. How many were from the Royal Family?

 A recent study showed that 90,000 Britons die in a state of poverty every year. More than one in four working-age women die impoverished, a number that climbs substantially among minorities. On a human level, every death is an occasion for mourning. Who mourned the needlessly dead? Instead, the Queen’s prime minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer were attending office parties. 

“God Save the Queen”, “God Save the King”. But who will save working people?

Adapted from here

Opinion | Mourn the Queen, But God Save the People | Richard Eskow (commondreams.org)

 With accession of Prince Charles to the throne, Prince William automatically inherits the Duchy of Cornwall. 

 Thanks to the ownership of a landed estate of more than 52,000 hectares (128,000 acres), which also makes him one of England’s biggest landowners.  The duchy’s net assets were valued at more than £1bn, the bulk of which came from investment property assets.

The Duchy of Cornwall owns land across 20 counties in England and Wales – the majority of it not in Cornwall – stretching from Devon to Kent, and Carmarthenshire to Nottinghamshire. Much of the estate comprises farmland, but it also includes homes and commercial properties, forests, rivers, coastline and about – a third of the Dartmoor national park, which was once used for mining minerals such as tin and copper. Some of the estate’s more unusual holdings include Oval cricket ground as well as Dartmoor prison.

 He also inherits the residential development project at Nansledan, an extension to the town of Newquay in Cornwall, where more than 4,000 homes and a high street are being built in a project expected to last three decades.

Duchy of Cornwall estate worth £1bn passes to Prince William | Monarchy | The Guardian

While millions are living on the brink of famine, there has been a major boon for Wall Street giants, according to new data showing that the world’s 100 largest banks are on pace to smash commodity trading profit records this year.

“The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022,” Bloomberg reported Friday, citing figures from the London-based firm Vali Analytics. “That would be the highest in the data, which goes back 14 years, and exceed the previous high watermark in 2009.”

“The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis,” Bloomberg added.

The prices of wheat and other food staples remain significantly elevated compared to last year, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, leaving millions vulnerable to hunger and starvation.

The World Food Program estimates that “as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night” and “the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared—from 135 million to 345 million—since 2019.”

“People’s misery makes capitalists’ superprofit,” Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, tweeted.

“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Mongabay in July.

“Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” Greenberger said. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”

“It’s too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there’s a supply and demand reason for these prices going up,” Greenberger added. “My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity.”

  Vladimir Putin became one of the first world leaders to congratulate King Charles III.

“Please accept my sincere congratulations on your accession to the throne. I wish Your Majesty success, good health and all the best.” 

Putin also offered condolences when the death of the Queen was announced, offering “sincere sympathy” to the country following her death.

He wrote: “The most important events in the recent history of the United Kingdom are inextricably linked with the name of Her Majesty. For many decades, Elizabeth II rightfully enjoyed the love and respect of her subjects, as well as authority on the world stage. I wish you courage and perseverance in the face of this heavy, irreparable loss. I ask you to convey the words of sincere sympathy and support to the members of the royal family and all the people of Great Britain.”

The Kremlin also said that the wisdom of the late Queen would be missed internationally. The Russian people had “great respect” for Queen Elizabeth II, spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters, singling out her qualities of “wisdom and authority” adding,  “Such qualities are in very short supply on the international stage at the moment.” 

‘All the best’: Vladimir Putin offers congratulations to King Charles III | The Independent

CNN wants to be the new Fox News. 

 Last month CNN suddenly axed Brian Stelter’s Sunday show in a move many commentators considered politically motivated; Stelter had been an outspoken critic of Trump and was reviled by many on the right. Earlier this month White House correspondent John Harwood was fired shortly after calling Trump “a dishonest demagogue” on the air.

Chris Licht the new CEO of the CNN cable network after purging progressive voices, announced John Miller would be joining CNN as the network’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst. Miller isn’t exactly an obvious hire if you’re looking to brandish your new “neutrality” credentials. The former New York police department (NYPD) deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism is an extremely polarizing figure who made headlines in March when he testified to the New York city council that the NYPD did not, in his opinion, inappropriately spy on Muslims after the September 11 2001 attacks. Which is a weird thing to say because Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting has clearly shown that the NYPD used census data to spy on Muslims following September 11 and the department has settled a number of lawsuits related to the illegal spying.

Licht doesn’t seem to mind that his new hire has been accused of lying about the NYPD surveillance of Muslims. He doesn’t seem to find it awkward that even Eric Adams, the current mayor of New York City and a former police officer, said Miller was “wrong” to deny the existence of the program. Instead, the CNN CEO announced, with a seemingly straight face, that Miller “will help deliver on CNN’s commitment to tackle complex issues while presenting audiences with independent, objective news”.

New ‘objective’ CNN appears to be making itself objectively rightwing | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank with a long track record of popularizing research on wage suppression and runaway inequality.

“Everyone’s obsessed with a post-pandemic phenomenon called ‘quiet quitting,'” EPI explained. “It’s basically defined as workers just doing the basic requirements of their jobs and not going ‘above and beyond.’ But the reality is workers have long been going ‘above and beyond’ and not getting paid for it,” EPI continued. “We’re calling this phenomenon ‘quiet fleecing.'”

EPI pointed out that between 1948 and 1979, the nation’s economy and working-class wages grew largely in tandem. Although wages began to flatline during the 1970s crisis of stagflation, a 118% increase in productivity during this 31-year period—when Keynesianism was still dominant—was mirrored by a 107% increase in typical worker pay. 

But ever since former President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal counterrevolution against unions, public goods provided by the welfare state, and other fixtures of the New Deal era—a pro-corporate and anti-labor agenda that became bipartisan and has only recently lost some of its hegemony—the gap between productivity and typical worker pay has widened dramatically. In essence, policy choices made to suppress wage growth prevented potential pay growth fueled by rising productivity from translating into actual pay growth for most workers. 

According to EPI, net productivity rose 61.8% from 1979 to 2020. Hourly pay, meanwhile, increased by just 17.5% during those 41 years, meaning that productivity grew 3.5 times as much as wages over the past four decades, after adjusting for inflation. When employers don’t share the gains of increased productivity, keeping the benefits for themselves, inequality soars and workers suffer.

“Workers are more productive than ever,” EPI noted , “but employers haven’t been sharing the wealth. In fact, they’ve been fleecing workers for 40 years when it comes to having pay rise with productivity.”

“Who’s reaping the benefits if workers are getting quietly fleeced?” the think tank asked. 

At the same time that typical worker pay has remained largely flat despite climbing productivity, the share of income captured by the top 1% has soared. From 1948 to 2019, the top 1% enjoyed a 407% increase in compensation, with the bulk of those gains coming after 1979.

According to EPI’s latest research on the subject, top CEOs in the U.S. were paid 351 times as much as typical workers in 2020. EPI found that the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. Between 1978 and 2020, researchers noted, CEO pay soared by 1,322% while typical worker pay grew by just 18%.

In a more detailed analysis on the topic, EPI noted that the growing gulf between productivity and typical worker pay represents “income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers.”

That wedge of income “went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees,” EPI pointed out, “and it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners).”

“This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in labor’s share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s,” the think tank added.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1567963533094318080

Taken from here

Analysis Shows ‘Quiet Fleecing’ of US Workers—Not ‘Quiet Quitting’—Is the Real Problem (commondreams.org)