Author: ajohnstone

Lest we forget

Uncategorised No Comments
On July 29, 1910, citizens in the small, predominately African American town of Slocum, Texas were massacred in an act of terror designed to maintain economic white supremacy.

That morning, hundreds of white citizens from the surrounding community converged on Slocum. Over the following days terror reigned for the African American citizens as individuals were gunned down working fields and seeking shelter in their homes.
Even those who tried to leave town were not safe. Many bodies were found shot in the woods, with their travel packs at their sides. While there has never been a clear figure of how many died, estimates range from 8 to 25. Many suspect the toll was much higher.
This was one of many towns, such as Rosewood and Tulsa, where a successful, self-sufficient African American community was the subject of a terrorist attack designed to maintain economic white supremacy.
In each town, the incident that sparked the attack was relatively insignificant and often fabricated. In Slocum, there were various trigger incidents such as a disputed debt between a well-regarded black citizen and a white citizen as well as anger from some whites when an African American man was put in charge of local road improvements.
The aftermath? As E.R. Bills explains in The Dissident Voice:
[After the massacre], the personal holdings of many Slocum area Anglo citizens fortuitously increased.
The abandoned African-American properties were absorbed or repurposed as the now majority white population saw fit. The standard southern Anglo-centric world order was restored, and this order has endured, even to the present day.
According to recent demographic statistics, most of the communities around Slocum have an African-American population that ranges between 20-25%. Grapeland’s is 35%, Rusk’s is 30% and Palestine’s and Alto’s is 25%. Slocum’s African-American population is just under 7%.
Today, Slocum is still an unincorporated community and that’s probably wise. If there was an elected civic leader or assembly in Slocum, they might be asked to apologize for the massacre or explain why there are no placards acknowledging the event or the American citizens who were slaughtered there and covered up in unmarked graves in the woods and creek bottoms.

More information “A Forgotten Slaughter of African-Americans in Texas: The Slocum Massacre” – in Dissident Voice “Town’s 1910 racial strife a nearly forgotten piece of Texas past” -in the Statesman The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas, a book from History Press “Burned Out of Homes and History: Unearthing the Silenced Voices of the Tulsa Race Riot” by Linda Christensen. – teaching aid

hat-top to Libcom

Masked Workers

Uncategorised No Comments



 Unite, the GMB and Community trade unions have all said that where masks are believed to be helpful at work, they should be provided employers and workers should not have to foot the bill themselves. Surgical-grade face masks must be provided for all workers who need to wear them including those on the daily commute.



 “The government should provide proper masks and finance it. If this can be done in other countries successfully it should be done here,” said Rob Migeul, Unite’s health and safety adviser. The surgical-grade three-layer mask should have a waterproof outer layer, Unite said, inline with the WHO guidelines. “If you’re going to say use face masks, there must be a standard for them,” he said.



 Head of research, policy and external relations at Community, Kate Dearden, said: “If employers need their workforce to re-enter the workplace then they need to be providing them with the necessary PPE for all activities related to their work.



 A spokesperson for the GMB said: “Most people have no idea about face-mask standards. They should be the WHO backed ones, of three layers. It is the responsibility of the employer to provide the mask. Something that explains what employers are meant to do would be beneficial when it comes to protective equipment.”



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/unions-call-for-face-masks-to-be-provided-for-free-to-all-workers

Myanmar and Women’s Rights

Uncategorised No Comments
Myanmar is soon to see the latest version of its Prevention of and Protection from Violence Against Women (PoVAW) introduced in parliament. Legislation that aims to protect women against violence in Myanmar is  long overdue, but it is raising concern among human rights advocates about the inadequate definition of rape, vague definition for “consent”, and anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rhetoric.



 The Global Justice Centre (GJC), an international human rights and humanitarian law organisation focusing on advancing gender equality, has pointed out that the legislation falls short of addressing violence against women.

According to GJC, the language used in the law borrows from colonial Myanmar’s 1861 Penal Code and thus perpetuates antiquated understandings of rape, such as; considering rape as violence committed only by men, the definition of “rape” constituting only of vaginal penetration, and no acknowledgement of marital rape.
“The Myanmar government has long shown a lack of commitment to breaking the cycle of impunity for widespread sexual and gender-based violence, a problem that is exacerbated by broader structural barriers with respect to Myanmar’s military justice system, and a lack of robust domestic options for accountability,” the GJC analysis has claimed.
Khin Ohmar, an exiled human rights advocate from Myanmar and founder and chairperson of the advisory board of Progressive Voice — a participatory rights-based policy research and advocacy organisation rooted in civil society, with strong links to grassroots and community-based organisations throughout Myanmar  —  shared how sexual violence in the country is used in a “systematic pattern to target ethnic women and girls”.
Ohmar was speaking at the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in Conflict, where she further reiterated how the military in Myanmar has carried out “unspeakable crimes” against ethnic minorities in the country.
 Akila Radhakrishnan, president of GJC explains:
“We’re really talking about laws that haven’t been updated so with the political transition there was a moment when women in civil society saw the opportunity to think it’s time we had a comprehensive law on violence against women, updating progressive positions in the penal code and bring in things like protective orders or a more robust categorisations of kinds of sexual and other types of violence. And in some ways, the military continues to perpetrate mass sexual violence. Some of the key things that civil society has been pushing for is bringing the military under a mandate of the law, which is antithetical to the military’s interest as well.”
 Radhakrishnan continued, “Aung San Suu Kyi is no feminist. She has certainly in the past made stronger statements on sexual violence than she currently takes on but she’s very much seen certain types of political reform as her priority. If you look at the trajectory of the laws that were initially passed through the transition, most of the laws were really wound around issues that enabled foreign investment, for example. There were certain laws that were due to be changed around issues such as certain types of press freedoms, many of which have been regressing in recent times in any case. There was never kind of a feminist priority set from the leadership.”

Philanthropic Foolery

Uncategorised No Comments
MacKenzie Scott, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife and the second-richest woman in the world,  says, “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others,”



 Scott  married Bezos a year before he founded Amazon and was one of the firm’s first employees, received a 4% stake from the divorce settlement, shortly after announcing she had signed the Giving Pledge which commits the super wealthy to give away much of their fortunes to charity. Bezos has not joined the Giving Pledge.



 Scott has donated  more than $586 million to racial justice organisations and $399.5 million  to groups aimed at advancing economic mobility. Other causes included gender equality, global development and LGBTQ equality. The list of organisations includes the labour advocacy group One Fair Wage, and other non-profits such as Black Girls Who Code. The $20m gift to Tuskegee University, a historically black college, is the largest in the school’s history. In total, MacKenzie Scott says that she has given $1.7bn (£1.3bn) in philanthropic funding.



 Brian Mittendorf, a professor at Ohio State University, who researches charity finances, explains, Scott’s approach differs from that of many other high-profile billionaires. He said announcements are often built up in advance, with new organisations that can be slow responsible for distributing funds.

“If the goal of doing this was to generate publicity, you wouldn’t have done it the way she did,” he said. “If the goal was to generate impact…this looks like a pretty good way of doing it.”
The list of recipients suggests Scott is trying to address root causes of inequality and racial injustice – priorities that are “more typical” of female than male donors, said Una Osili, a professor of economics and philanthropic studies at Indiana University’s Lily School of Philanthropy. The effort to promote a diverse group of organisations – both big and small, led by people of colour and women, also stands out, she said.
 The Socialist Party is frequently perceived as stingy scrooges for we criticise the idea of giving to charity and we scold philanthropy. We do not doubt the sincerity or compassion of those who donate to charities. But what is fostered is the dangerous illusion that, either through charitable alms-giving, the many problems of capitalism can be solved by good-will and kind gestures. The  Socialist Party is not indifferent to human suffering but it points out that society is well capable of solving the problems of poverty, hunger and homelessness. What does not exist is the social system of production and distribution can be matched to people’s need. Capitalism is a world of deliberate scarcity, in order to pursue the aims of competition and profit.

The fate of land defenders

Uncategorised No Comments
A new report reveals a spike in the murder of global land defenders, especially in Latin America. The failure to combat climate change is forcing the most vulnerable to the frontlines, and to pay with their lives. According to NGO, Global Witness, 212 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 alone, a 30% rise from the 164 killed in 2018. Around 40% were indigenous people and traditional land owners.



  Mary Menton, a research fellow in environmental justice at University of Sussex who co-authored the report, told DW that she “would not be surprised” if the real figure were double due to the failure to report and even investigate killings. 



  Menton says only 10% of perpetrators are prosecuted. 



 The overall rise in murders is part of a broader trend. Astudy published in Nature in 2019 showed that in the 15 years between 2002 and 2017, more than 1,558 environment defenders were killed, doubling from two to four per week over that time. 



 Increasing conflict over scarce land resources in a time of rising global consumer demand is forcing indigenous and traditional community leaders to protect their territories, says Rachel Cox,  a campaigner at Global Witness. 

“Indigenous people are disproportionately vulnerable to attack,” she says of minorities resisting mining, logging and the agribusiness projects encroaching on the frontiers they call home. But the killings are only the tip of the iceberg. “Many more defenders were attacked, jailed or faced smear campaigns because of their work,” said Cox

.

1. The Philippines

The deadliest country for environmental activists in 2018, at least 46 environmental defenders were murdered last year in the Philippines, a 53% increase and a return to the high murder rate during the first years of the Duterte regime. Twenty six murders were related to agribusiness, the highest in the world. Leon Dulce, the national coordinator of Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, says “we are bracing for more spates of violence” due to government efforts to expand mining and logging “under the guise of a COVID-19 economic recovery.” President Duterte is also using draconian anti-terror laws to suppress activists by labeling them as criminals.  



 The southern island of Mindanao remains a hotspot with 19 environment-related killings in 2019 due to ongoing opposition to palm oil and agribusiness fruit plantations. In the photo top, a family from the island’s Bukidnon region, are from the KADIMADC community whose ancestral lands have been grabbed and illegally sub-leased.

Attacks are prevalent on the territory of these indigenous or Lumad people, Dulce explained, because it forms “the last forest corridors of the island.” Indigenous communities “continue to stand in the way of mining, dam, and agribusiness tenements,” he said. 

The Philippines’ high vulnerability to climate change, especially typhoons, has further necessitated this resistance, according to the report. 



 2. Brazil

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to expand large-scale mining and agribusiness in the Amazon has forced indigenous peoples further into the frontlines of the climate crisis, especially as deforestation on indigenous land increased by 74% from 2018 to 2019. Of the 24 murders of land defenders in Brazil, 90% occurred in the Amazon. The uptick in violence in the resource rich region that is also the planet’s largest carbon sink, comes as the Bolsonaro government introduced a controversial bill in 2019 that calls for the legalization of commercial mining on indigenous land. In June last year, it was reported that dozens of miners dressed in military uniform invaded the Wajapi community in the Brazilian Amazon, stabbing and killing one of its leaders.



 3. Mexico

Eighteen land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 in Mexico, a rise of four. They included Otilia Martínez Cruz, 60, and her 20-year-old son, Gregorio Chaparro Cruz, who were found dead outside their home in the town of El Chapote in north-west Mexico on May 1, 2019. The indigenous Tarahumara defenders were allegedly killed by assassins in retaliation for their efforts to stop the illegal deforestation of their ancestral land in the Sierra Madre. Two months earlier, Samir Flores Soberanes was shot dead outside his home on February 20, 2019. An Indigenous Nahuatl farmer and environmental activist from Amilcingo, Morelos, Samir publicly spoke out against the Morelos Integral Project (MIP) to develop coal and gas energy infrastructure the day before he was killed.



 4. Romania

Europe has rarely witnessed deaths by environment defenders, but two rangers fighting illegal logging were killed in 2019. Romania has over half of Europe’s remaining old-growth and primeval forests that have been dubbed the “lungs of Europe.” But according to Greenpeace, some 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of this pristine forest is degraded every hour in Romania, much of it by the “wood mafia” that the two forest rangers opposed. The Global Witness report notes that there were hundreds of threats and attacks against the rangers before they were killed. Despite the thousands who marched in Bucharest and across Romania in late 2019 to oppose illegal logging and to demand an investigation into the attacks, no one has been charged.  



 5. Honduras

Killings rose from four in 2018 to 14 last year in Honduras, making it the most dangerous country per capita for land and environmental defenders in 2019. Lethal attacks against activists were especially prevalent against women, continuing the upward trend since Honduran activist and indigenous leader Berta Caceres was brutally murdered in 2016, months after winning the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, for opposing dam construction in her region. “Women have an important leadership in the fight against extractive companies and criminal groups that want to take away their land,” said Marusia Lopez of the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders, which documented 1,233 attacks against these women defenders between 2017-18.   Afro-indigenous Garifuna people living on the east coast were especially targeted in 2019, with 16 killed for defending their lands, mostly from palm oil and tourism development. Criminal groups have long attacked Garifuna communities with impunity.



 6. Columbia

More than two-thirds of killings took place in Latin America, with Colombia topping the list with 64 murders due to the failure to implement the 2016 peace agreement with FARC and protect farmers transitioning from coca to cocoa and coffee to reduce cocaine production. 



 https://www.dw.com/en/5-deadly-countries-for-environmental-defenders/a-54298499

Vaccine Nationalism Warning

Uncategorised No Comments
Global health agencies are planning a scheme to bulk-buy and equitably distribute vaccines around the world. They are watching with dismay as some wealthier countries have decided to go it alone, striking deals with drug-makers to secure millions of doses of promising candidates for their citizens.
The deals – including those agreed by the United States, Britain and the European Union with the likes of Pfizer, BioNtech, AstraZeneca and Moderna  – are undermining the global drive, experts say.
“Everybody doing bilateral deals is not a way to optimize the situation,” said Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI alliance which co-leads the scheme called COVAX designed to secure rapid and fair global access to COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer said this week it was in concurrent talks with the EU and several of its member states on supplying them with its potential vaccine. Britain announced a deal on Wednesday to secure advanced supplies of potential COVID-19 vaccines from GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi.
This, according to health charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), will further fuel “the global scramble to hoard vaccines by rich countries” and feed “a dangerous trend of vaccine nationalism”.
The concern is that vaccine supply and allocation in this pandemic will echo the last – caused by the H1N1 flu virus in 2009/2010 – when rich nations bought up the available supply of vaccines, initially leaving poor countries with none.
“There is a risk that some countries are doing exactly what we feared – which is every man for himself,” said Gayle Smith, former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and CEO of the One Campaign, a non-profit aimed at ending poverty and preventable disease.
The United States, China and Russia are not among countries expressing interest in COVAX, according to GAVI. And an EU source said last week that the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive arm and leads EU talks with drug-makers, has advised EU countries not to buy COVID-19 vaccines via COVAX.
“I am worried,” said Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What is happening with the handful of nations that are locking up supply of vaccine competes with the multilateral supply deals. At the end of the day, vaccine manufacturing is a finite resource. You can expand it, but only so much.”
Experts estimate the world can reasonably hope to have around 2 billion doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines by the end of next year. Berkley of GAVI said, however, that if self-interested countries or regions snapped those up to cover their entire populations – instead of sharing them across nations and protecting the most at-risk people first – the pandemic could not be controlled.
“If you were to try to vaccinate the entire U.S., (and) the entire EU, for example, with two doses of vaccine – then you’d get to about 1.7 billion doses. And if that is the number of doses that’s available, there’s not a lot left for others.” If a handful, or even 30 or 40 countries have vaccines, but more than 150 others don’t, “then the epidemic will rage there” Berkley said.
“This virus … moves around like lightning. So you’ll end up in a situation where you will not be able to go back to normal. You won’t be able to have commerce, tourism, travel, trade, unless you can get the whole pandemic to be slowed down.” He and Smith and other health experts said ending the pandemic meant ending it globally.

A Free Lunch for Workers?

Uncategorised No Comments
A government-commissioned review into food and healthy eating by the National Food Strategy warns that the country’s eating habits are a “slow-motion disaster”. It warns of the toxic connection between poor diet and child poverty. It calls for many more children to be eligible for a free meal at school, as “only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional standards of a school meal”.
The review says they should be available to a further 1.5 million children, in addition to the 1.3 million already eligible – so almost one in three children would get free meals. The extension of free school meals, at a cost of £670m per year, would bring them in reach of all children in families claiming universal credit. Such a move would aim to stop pupils being hungry at school. It also proposes making a long-term commitment to feeding more families over the summer holidays, by making another 1.1 million children in England eligible for the “holiday activity and food programme”. Included as well is the expansion of the Healthy Start fresh fruit, milk and vegetables voucher scheme for pregnant mothers, increasing its value and encouraging supermarkets to supplement the voucher with free fresh produce.
The review issued warnings about “misleading packaging” of unhealthy products and the report challenges the “false virtue” of how the food industry presents itself. Behind the ethical ambitions, the report suggests there is still a culture of “unhealthy multi-buy offers”. Report author Henry Dimbleby said a nutritious diet was the “foundation of equality of opportunity”. He spoke of some apparently healthy fruit snacks that are “clothed in a veneer of goodness and might not be better for you than a Mars bar”. Dimbleby was scathing of brands and supermarkets that mislabelled sugar-filled products as healthy sweets. This practice was rampant, he said, though he singled out popular M&S sweets for particular criticism, saying: “I have had a bugbear about Percy Pigs for a while. Percy Pigs are a sweet that is marketed on the front with all-natural fruit juice and it’s right by your kids’ little fingers, and on the back [of the packet], if you understand calorie labelling, the first four ingredients are forms of sugar. I just think that is not right.”
There are serious consequences, says the review, with one in seven deaths in the UK attributable to poor diets.
“A nutritionally poor-quality diet is the leading risk factor for ill-health in the UK, yet we do not treat it with the same seriousness afforded to other risk factors. That has to change,” said Susan Jebb, Oxford University professor of diet and population health, who worked on the report.
The Socialist Party does not oppose reformism because it is against improvements in workers’ lives. The current proposal to introduce increased free school dinners is a more noble aspiration than could scarcely be imagined – an attempt to eradicate poor diets and consequent poor health of children.
However, any subsidised services that falls into our laps becomes an opportunity for those that live off our labour to lower their costs, and increase their profits.  Free school dinners would be an example of this process in action. Working people with children would be relieved of the cost of providing those meals to their children. This would result in a decline in the monetary cost of maintaining themselves and their family, and thus a decrease in the upwards pressure on wages. The typical wage would then tend to fall towards something nearer to living costs of those of a childless worker. This would thus benefit the employing class, both through cutting the overall direct cost of wages, but also through ending the situation in which childless workers were paid unnecessarily from the point of view of the employers. The employer could be prevented from gaining from this process by an increase in taxation – whether nominally on the workers’ wages or directly on employers’ profits; this would serve to cream off the difference between the old and the new prices of labour power. In this way, the free school dinners scheme could be made to pay for itself. This would, though, merely represent a redistribution of poverty for the working class, the intervention by the state into the labour market to ensure a more efficient allocation of the workers’ ration, so that children get a protected share. 
Our criticism is, then, that by ignoring the essence of class, it throws blood, sweat and tears into battles that will be undermined by the workings of the wages system. All that effort, skill, energy, all those tools could be turned against class society, to create a society of common interest where we can make changes for our common mutual benefit. 

Breaking the Trust

Uncategorised No Comments
America’s Congress has an opportunity, a real chance, to cross-examine the powerful men in charge of the tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook and Apple. But whatever happens on Wednesday, this won’t be end of the story. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s anti-trust panel said it would hold a hearing in September to discuss Google’s dominance in online advertising.
 These corporations apply shrewd and ruthless Copy/Acquire/Kill strategies. Copy others’ ideas, buy a company that threatens you – and even potentially kill it off.
Their practices has been difficult to police. Traditionally, anti-competition, anti-trust law has been focused on consumer pricing. In a typical monopoly or cartel, there’s a simple test. Are consumers paying more because of a lack of competition?
The US “trusts” of the early 20th Century were found to be driving up prices. Companies like Standard Oil and railway companies used their dominant position to harm consumer’ interests.
That’s much harder to prove with hi-tech companies.
For example Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are free. Amazon often drives down prices to beat competition. Google’s search engine is free. YouTube – owned by Google – is free. And apps on iPhones can often be downloaded for free.
Critics say that these companies hurt consumers in a more subtle way, killing off smaller companies and strangling other businesses. The charge is that they are in fact damaging the economy. That’s what legislators are looking to examine.
The corporate bosses have already lost one battle before the hearing even begins. They wanted to be grilled one by one. But that’s not going to happen. They’ll be questioned together and the hearing will – perhaps aptly – be virtual.
“We want to leave as little room as possible for them to hide behind each other,” Sarah Miller, from the American Economics Liberties Project, told me last week.
With companies like TikTok and Huawei attracting the ire of the Trump administration, one defence will go something like: “Break us up, over–regulate us, and you give Chinese tech companies more power.”

Germany Wants Immigrants

Uncategorised No Comments
Petra Bendel, chairwoman of the Expert Council of German Foundations for Integration and Migration (SVR), said that Germany would continue to rely on migration for the foreseeable future, even in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Bendel said migration was the key to solving the problem of “demographic shrinkage of the population.” 
Despite rising slightly in recent years, Germany has consistently had one of the world’s lowest birth rates since the end of the second World War.
The share of people with a migrant background in Germany rose to 21.2 million last year, the Federal Statistical Office said in a report on Tuesday. They represent roughly 26% of Germany’s population. The figure represented a 2.1% increase from the previous year, but it was the slowest rise in people with a migration background since 2011.
In Germany, a person is considered to have a ”migration background” (Migrationshintergrund) if they, or at least one of their parents, were born without German citizenship. Being born in Germany is not an automatic qualification for citizenship as in some countries, although in the majority of cases, eight years residence will suffice. Of the 21.2 million people with a migrant background, just over half were born as German citizens, meaning at least one of their parents had become or was a German citizen.
Some 65% of all people with a migrant background came from another European country. Of these, roughly, 7.5 million (35%) people with migrant background came from a fellow EU member state. Asians accounted for 4.6 million people or 22% of all inhabitants with a migrant background. Some 3.2 million (15%) came from the Middle East and just under 1 million people (5%) had roots in Africa. A little over half a million people (3%) came from North, Central and South America and Australia. The largest single group, forming some 13% of people with a migrant background, originated from Turkey. Those from Poland and Russia followed respectively.

Germany’s Fertility Rate Falls

Uncategorised No Comments
The number of children born in Germany in 2019 sank by more than 9,000 compared with the year before. Some 778,100 babies were born in Germany in 2019, a drop of 9,400 compared with the year before.

Germany’s total fertility rate (TFR), also sank from 1.57 to 1.54.

The average number of children per woman also dropped, with the capital, Berlin, registering the lowest rate. Fourteen of Germany’s 16 states recorded a drop in the TFR, with only Bavaria and Bremen remaining at the same level. Bremen and Lower Saxony, both in the northwest of the country, had the highest TFR at 1.6, while Berlin had the lowest at 1.41.



  Germans had a TFR of 1.43, only marginally below that of 2018 (1.45). The figure sank more significantly, from 2.12 to 2.06, among non-Germans in the country.



 The TFR is the average number of children that would be borne per person of child-bearing age and ability if the person’s birth pattern resembled that of everyone capable of giving birth and who was between 15 and 49 in a particular year.



 https://www.dw.com/en/number-of-births-in-germany-sank-in-2019/a-54362168

Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

All content on this website CC BY-ND 4.0 with additional translation permissions

MENU

Navigation