Author: ajohnstone

No Homes for Cambodians

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Brand new luxury condominiums are springing up across the capital Phnom Penh, but the average Cambodian cannot afford to live in them.



 Phnom Penh’s  old buildings are rapidly being replaced by new ones. But many of the glistening new condos are sitting empty.



 One of Koh Pich’s condos is on the market for $1,500 (€1,322) per square meter. The total price of the eight-story building is around $1.8 million. Dubbed The Elysee, the street was inspired by French architecture to try and draw in new residents. The neighborhood has even erected a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, in the hopes residents feel they have been transported to Paris.



 Sreynik Seng, who runs a small coffee shop in the area, told DW that most of the property there is owned by Chinese citizens. “Some of them try to rent out rooms. Others only seem to have it purely for the sake of owning it. I don’t think it matters to them when their building is empty,” Seng said. 



 Foreign direct investment (FDI) is considered very important for Cambodia’s developing economy. Last year, the country received around $3.5 billion in FDI. 43% of the investment came from China — making China by far Cambodia’s largest foreign investor.



 Kim Heang, the CEO of Khmer Real Estate, told DW that once construction is completed, many of the Phnom Penh condos are purchased by people from China, Taiwan and Singapore. Many of them don’t live in Cambodia permanently. 



 “Between 2013 and 2017, most buyers were foreigners. But they don’t come to stay here,” Heang said, adding that it leaves many condos seemingly deserted. “2013 to 2016 was a golden time for condos. Some people made a lot of money with profits going up to 300%. Five years ago, the profit went down to about 200%. Now it’s 30-40%,” he said.



 However, supply has grown much faster than demand. In 2016, there were less than 5,000 luxury flats in Phnom Penh. By late 2019, there were over 18,000, according to the CBRE Group, an American commercial real estate investment firm. In a 2019 report, CBRE warned of the risk of saturation in the condominium market. “Whilst supply is accelerating rapidly, the affordability of these segments has not adjusted to fit the local context and hence caused increased dependency on international investors,” the report said.



 Financial crime watchdogs have also raised concerns about how exactly the million-dollar condos are being financed. Fearing that money was being laundered on a large scale, the anti-money laundering organization Financial Action Task Force (FATF) urged the Cambodian government to implement risk-based supervision for real estate and casinos. The European Union also listed Cambodia as a high-risk country for money laundering and financing terrorism. 



 But it’s not only money laundering that has sparked concerns. Non-governmental organizations and labor unions also worry about the quality control of some of Cambodia’s newest buildings. Last year, an unauthorized seven-story building under construction collapsed in the coastal town of Sihanoukville, killing 28 people.



  San Chey, the director for Cambodia of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability, told DW that widespread corruption creates a gateway for illegal and unsafe construction. “It’s not just about money, it’s about ignoring the legality of a project. There’s a failure of monitoring and a failure to take legal actions. It can lead to people getting killed.”



 https://www.dw.com/en/cambodia-foreign-investment-phnom-penh/a-54255280



Over-Population – A Convenient Alibi

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There exists an often unchallenged view that overpopulation is among the primary drivers of the planet’s ecological and climate crises. It is a misconception. “There are just too many people” is simplistic and a misdiagnosis of the problem but it is a widely held analysis, rather than there are too many people it is to the endless pursuit of profit that environmentalists must look in order to save nature. An economic system that prizes endless short-term profit maximisation above all else is incompatible with ecological processes.
 Overpopulation is not responsible for the current devastation of nature. Understanding that would also allow us to focus on the real problem problem. It is both convenient and beneficial to blame overpopulation as the problem instead of the  economic system. Doing so protects the interests of those who benefit from it, the powerful. The use of overpopulation to explain the ills of hunger demonstrate this. There is, in fact, an abundance of food and much of it wasted, yet there is hunger. This contradiction points towards the deficiency in the distribution of food, a result of food being produced for profit. Conveniently for the farming industry and agricultural corporations that profit from food, overpopulation is there to obscure things.
Today’s world is based on the imperative for endless growth through market-based economies. We are talking about capitalism. 
The earth’s resources are finite, they tell us, and we human beings are using them up. The more human beings there are, the more pressure on these resources, and unless population growth is stopped, the planet will be destroyed. But this reasoning is as false. Yes, the earth’s resources are finite. But this does not mean that human activity is anywhere near reaching those limits, either now or in the foreseeable future.
Often arguments by the greens are centred on emissions by individuals, their carbon footprints. This gives the illusion that converting to vegetarianism or using electric cars are somehow going to transform modern industrial society is going to save the world.
The overpopulation argument, historically and as primarily used today makes “the poor” the main culprit for all the problems of the world. In 2015, Oxfam released data should surprise nobody who is familiar with inequality statistics, nonetheless, they are still shocking. The richest 10% of people produce 50% of all emissions, while the reverse is also true, that the poorest 50% produce just 10%. Crudely put, in terms of population, a poor person must reproduce themselves 25 times to account for the emissions impact of one of the richest.
If people are hungry and there are food riots , this is because of the inability of the poor to pay. In other words it is because of capitalist economics and capitalist politics.
We cannot entirely dismiss overpopulation as something that we should not be concerned about. There are 163,000,000 million people living in Bangladesh — half the population of the United States — all crowded on a land area the size of the state of Illinois. How could that ever be sustainable? But it is the manner in which the current economic system operates that requires to be radically challenged to avoid ecological collapse. This will happen when we break from the endless search for profit maximisation towards prioritising the needs of nature and the well-being of people. Capitalism, not population is the main driver of planetary collapse. But if we don’t overthrow capitalism, Nature is going to solve the overpopulation problem in a most unpleasant manner. Those who cite population reduction as a way to stop climate change are really saying they find it easier to conceive of “losing” a few billion of people, rather than contemplate overthrowing capitalism.

Slave-Labour and the Uighur People

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Many of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers are complicit in the forced labour and human rights violations being perpetrated on millions of Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, says a coalition of more than 180 human rights groups.



 “Virtually the entire [global] apparels industry is tainted by forced Uighur and Turkic Muslim labour,” the coalition said in a statement.



  It says many of the world’s leading clothing brands continue to source cotton and yarn produced through a vast state-sponsored system of forced labour involving up to 1.8m Uighur and other Turkic and Muslim people in prison camps, factories and farms in Xinjiang. It says that the forced labour system across the region is the largest internment of an ethnic and religious minority since the second world war.



 Global fashion brands source so extensively from Xinjiang that the coalition estimates it is “virtually certain” that as many as one in five cotton products sold across the world are tainted with forced labour and human rights violations occurring there.



 China is the largest cotton producer in the world, with 84% of its cotton coming from the Xinjiang region. Cotton and yarn produced in Xinjiang are used extensively in other key garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam. Xinjiang cotton and yarn are also used in textiles and home furnishings. 



 The coalition has published an extensive list of brands it claims continue to source from the region, or from factories connected to the forced labour of Uighur people, including Gap, C&A, Adidas, Muji, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.



 The coalition says many more leading clothing brands also continue to maintain lucrative strategic partnerships with Chinese companies, accepting subsidies from their government to expand textile production in the region or benefiting from the forced labour of Uighur people transferred from Xinjiang to factories across China.



 “There is a high likelihood that every high street and luxury brand runs the risk of being linked to what is happening to the Uighur people,” says Chloe Cranson, business and human rights manager at Anti-Slavery International. “This isn’t just about direct supply chain links, it’s about how the global apparels sector is helping prop up and facilitate the system of human rights abuses and forced labour,” says Crason. “There needs to be a deep and thorough interrogation of how brands and retailers are linked to what is happening at scale to the Uighur people.”



 “Global brands need to ask themselves how comfortable they are contributing to a genocidal policy against the Uighur people. These companies have somehow managed to avoid scrutiny for complicity in that very policy – this stops today,” said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. There is mounting global outrage over the atrocities being committed against the Uighur population in the region, including torture, forced separation and the compulsory sterilisation of Uighur women.



 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/23/virtually-entire-fashion-industry-complicit-in-uighur-forced-labour-say-rights-groups-china

The Yemen Crises Won’t Disappear

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Yemen is in danger of an imminent return to devastating levels of hunger and food insecurity, according to new analysis released by the UN agencies, the World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Unicef.
They say that the percentage of the population predicted to face acute food insecurity in southern areas of the country will rise from 25% to 40% by the end of the year.
The escalating problems have been blamed on a combination of economic shocks, conflict, floods, desert locusts and now coronavirus, which Unicef said was “creating a perfect storm” that threatened to reverse recent efforts to stabilise food security in the country.
Areas forecast to experience the worst deterioration over the next six months include Abyan, Aden, Ad Dhale, Hadramaut, Lahj and Taizz, with the number of those affected in the region expected to go from 2 million people to 3.2 million out of a surveyed population of 7.9 million. The survey, carried out in 133 districts in southern Yemen, forecasts an alarming increase in the numbers of people expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity, including IPC phase 3 – “in crisis” – and phase 4 – “emergency” –by the end of the year.
The report says economic issues are one of the main concerns, with local currency in freefall, rampant inflation and rising food prices, and a near depletion of foreign exchange reserves. The country’s continuing conflict is cited as one of the main causes, with coronavirus also affecting food availability, access and market supply, and income-earning opportunities and wages. Compounding all these issues have been the recent swarms of desert locust and armyworm infestations that have hit crops, with cereal production this year forecast at 365,000 metric tonnes – less than half prewar levels.
David Beasley, executive director of WFP, described the situation as “heartbreaking”.
“Unless the international community steps up with an urgent injection of funds, we are going to find ourselves right back where we were in 2018, when we had to fight our way back from the brink of a full-scale famine. The Yemeni people have already been ravaged by years of conflict-fuelled hunger and malnutrition, and now Covid-19 is ratcheting up their misery. The world needs to open its eyes to this unfolding humanitarian disaster before it’s too late.”

Voter Suppression

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It’s well documented that restrictive voter ID laws are ineffective and discriminatory. The type of voter fraud they claim to prevent is a myth, and the burden of showing an ID disproportionately lands on students, low-income voters and African Americans.



 Those restrictive “voter identification” laws pushed by Republicans, and widely regarded to be ineffective and discriminatory, have cost taxpayers at least $36m in just a few states, the Guardian reveals. Yet the $36m price tag may only be the tip of the iceberg. The departments of justice in several states claim that their lawyers don’t track their time, making it impossible to document the bulk of the costs of defending these ID laws. “We want to get you what you need,” said Gillian Drummond, communications director for the Wisconsin DoJ when asked for a breakdown of the agency’s litigation expenses, “but I can’t create something that wasn’t tracked previously”.



  They are  extraordinarily expensive to implement and defend. Based on information obtained through open records requests, the Guardian has found that the partial costs of litigation, free identification cards, public education and other fees amount to tens of millions across the country.



 With many states having to slash their budgets due to the economic crisis, one state, Kentucky, has decided to spend millions implementing a new ID law. While the rest of the state was under “stay-at-home” advisories because of coronavirus, the Kentucky legislature convened in early March and April in order to pass its voter ID bill.  On 15 July, Kentucky became the 19th state that requires voters to present a photo ID at the polls, and voters who apply for absentee ballots must include a copy of their ID. But passing this bill required some expensive tweaks – most significantly, the state would have to offer IDs for free to all residents or the law would probably be ruled unconstitutional, says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan thinktank and public interest law center.  According to the bill’s fiscal note statement, just that provision of the law could cost up to $3.6m a year.



 When Georgia passed its original voter ID bill in 2006, it offered free IDs only to those who swore they could not afford them. According to a report from the Brennan Center, a federal court later blocked that aspect because “many voters for whom a fee would pose a burden might be reluctant to take the oath out of embarrassment or because they do not believe they are indigent”. In fact, the Missouri supreme court found that the state must pay even for the documents required to get the ID, such as a birth certificate. After Georgia passed its ID law, it ran public service announcements on unpopular radio stations during off-peak hours and planned to distribute a letter that, according to the courts, was “not reasonably calculated to reach the voters who are most likely to lack a photo ID”. However, that court went on to add that “if the state undertakes sufficient steps to inform voters of the [law’s] requirements before future elections, the statute might well survive a challenge”.



 Since 1 January 2006, Indiana, which also has a photo ID law, has spent nearly $30.5m to issue roughly 2.7m of these free IDs.



 Meanwhile, in Texas, the process of implementing a strict voter ID law dragged on for almost seven years, during which the state spent at least $3.5m on attorney’s fees, outside counsel, travel expenses and expert witnesses. In addition, the litigation was so time-consuming that the attorney general had to pull in lawyers from other departments. In total, the state invested more than 12,400 hours in these cases. Ultimately, Texas’s ID law survived these challenges – but at a high price. In May, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the plaintiffs’ $6.8m in legal fees.



 During the first three years of its ID laws, Kansas spent at least $430,000 on its public outreach, while Wisconsin spent $631,899 in its first year alone. Even with heavily discounted rates from TV and radio stations, the critical swing state has spent nearly $1.2m on its “Bring It to the Ballot” campaign, which includes radio spots, brochures and TV ads.



 Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, wrote the original decision upholding Indiana’s ID law. However, in 2014, he voted to suspend Wisconsin’s law, writing in a dissent on the 7th circuit court of appeals that legislation like it was “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government”.

Australian athletes abused

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The blog has posted on the abuse of female athletes in the UK and in Japan and now stories are emerging from Australia of similar behaviour. 



 Dozens of Australia’s former top gymnasts have spoken out to allege instances of mental and physical abuse within the nation’s elite programme. Many argued that coaches normalised a “toxic” environment.

Generations of former gymnasts have posted publicly about damaging experiences. Their allegations include:

Pressure over their weight and incidents of food deprivation; some detailed experiences with bulimia Pressure to train and perform through injuries such as broken bones Being coerced to perform stunts beyond their ability Widespread violations of adult-child supervision guidelines A “toxic” environment of criticism and negativity

Chloe Gilliland, a gold medallist at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, said she had felt depressed and anxious at her “peak”, and left the sport for her own wellbeing when she was 17. She said was regularly insulted by her coaches, called stupid and overweight, and isolated from her teammates. She added she had suicidal thoughts.
Olivia Vivian, who began in the sport when she was nine, said she learnt as a child to hide experiences from her parents. She represented Australia at the 2008 Olympics but after reaching that level became “a broken athlete and a broken person,” she wrote.
 Many said they wished to change the environment for other children and teenagers currently in the sport.
“I am scared to share my story, but at some point, someone has to stand up for the athletes,” said Mary-Anne Monckton, who won two silver medals at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. “The abuse (physical, mental and emotional) needs to stop, or at least be stamped out of our sport,” she said.
A young South Korean triathlete has taken her own life after lodging a number of complaints over alleged abuse from her coaching staff.
Choi Suk-hyeon, 22, said she endured years of abuse, but that her complaints to sporting authorities were ignored, reports say. She was selected for the national triathlon team in 2015 as a teenager. A number of sportswomen have reported abuse in South Korea over the years.
All this abuse for the sake of promoting national prestige by gaining medals in international competitions. 

Born to Wealth

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One in 10 of UK adults born in the 1980s will inherit more than half as much money from their parents as the average person earns in a lifetime, according to a new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, one of the nation’s leading economics thinktanks.
It said wealth passed down from one generation to the next was fast-becoming the most important determinant of how well-off people will become.
On average, the inheritances of adults born in the 1980s will be worth as much as 14% of their overall lifetime earnings from work, compared to 8% for people born in the 1960s.
The thinktank found the median inheritance for those born in the 1980s is estimated to be £136,000, compared to £107,000 for those born in the 1970s and £66,000 for those born in the 1960s. This represents a more than doubling in the size of inheritances, at a time when incomes have barely risen for young adults compared to previous generations.
The IFS said people born in the 1980s had accumulated no more wealth than adults born in the 1970s had done by the same age, but that their parents were 40% better-off in comparison.
The IFS said adults born in the 1980s currently earn less than adults born just 10 years earlier had done by the same age. However, it found that while one in 10 of those born in the 1960s would inherit an amount equal to at least 32% of average lifetime earnings, one in 10 of those born in the 1980s will inherit more than 52% of average lifetime earnings.
David Sturrock, a senior research economist at the IFS, said: “So what we see today as differences in wealth between different generations is on course to have important implications for social immobility within younger generations.”
Robert Palmer, executive director of the campaign group Tax Justice UK, said: “This report is further proof of the scale of wealth inequality with inheritances set to grow in coming years.”
Official figures show that the income of the richest 20% of people in Britain was more than six times the poorest 20% in the last financial year.

Canadian Sanctuary for Asylum Seekers

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Canada’s federal court has ruled that a pact with Washington which prevents migrants from seeking asylum when they attempt to enter the country from the US is invalid because it violates their human rights.



 Under the so-called Safe Third Country Agreement between the two neighbors, asylum seekers at a formal border crossing traveling in either direction are turned back and told to apply for asylum in the country they first arrived in. Lawyers for refugees who had been turned away at the Canadian border challenged the agreement, saying the United States does not qualify as a “safe” country under Donald Trump.



 More than 50,000 people have illegally crossed the Canada-US border to file refugee claims over the past four years, with some walking through waist-deep snow and fording icy rivers. Canada sought to stem the number of asylum seekers that flowed into the country starting in 2016, after Trump promised to crack down on illegal immigration into the US. 



 Federal court judge Ann Marie McDonald ruled that the agreement was in violation of a section of Canada’s charter of rights that says laws or state actions that interfere with life, liberty and security must conform to the principles of fundamental justice.

Conservatives and Motherhood

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Around the world there is no shortage of conservatives who want women to bear as many babies as they physically can. They oppose contraception and are against safe, legal abortion. Motherhood is extolled.



 You would think, given obsession with motherhood, thy would have campaigned to ensure childbirth is a safe and positive experience for women. Instead, they have paradoxically left such campaigns to the feminists and global health experts who they vehemently oppose.  Many have attacked the World Health Organization (WHO) – the global health body that is standing up for women’s rights to timely, quality and respectful care in childbirth. Globally, “pro-life” and “pro-family” movements have been busy campaigning – not to protect the rights of pregnant women and new mothers. Their focus has been on limiting women’s choices.



 Many women have endured unacceptable dangers and mistreatment giving birth. The pandemic appears to have made this much worse. The United Nations warned that COVID-19 restrictions and lockdown disruptions could result in seven million unintended pregnancies in just six months. For a heartbreaking number of women, they have had no choice but to continue these pregnancies or seek unsafe abortions.



  Since March, women in at least 45 countries have faced childbirth experiences during the pandemic that defy international guidelines as well as national laws and policies. In countries around the world, women have been forcibly separated from newborns; required to give birth “alone” without support from partners or relatives; denied pain medication. At some hospitals, all women have been subjected to “mandatory” caesarean sections. Those who have arrived at maternity wards to give birth during the pandemic have faced other restrictions that top doctors and lawyers denounced as “unnecessary” and part of an “alarming pattern of women’s health and rights being deprioritised”. 



 A week after the pandemic was declared, the WHO even issued specific guidance on childbirth during COVID-19 – insisting, among other things, that women giving birth be treated with respect and dignity; be allowed birth companions, and; be supported to breastfeed and have skin-to-skin contact with newborns. (Yes, the very same WHO that the “most pro-life president” Trump has sought to savagely defund.)



 In the US, conservative states moved quickly to “ban” abortions by classifying them as non-essential services. Last week, the Supreme Court upheld Trump administration rules allowing employers to opt out of including birth control in an employee’s health insurance plan.



 By not using their power to make a difference for women in childbirth conservatives reveal how their interests actually lie elsewhere – in promoting and defending childbirth as “women’s work”, something that women must do in patriarchal societies, and that they should not “complain” about. This is bad news for women.



 This pandemic should teach us we have more in common than we do not – and help  protect women’s rights and lives.



 https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/pro-life-activists-won-protect-women-childbirth-200720112359653.html

Is this our future?

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“…When business as usual resumes, so does the air pollution that kills more people every year than Covid-19 has yet done, and exacerbates the impacts of the virus. Climate breakdown and air pollution are two aspects of a wider dysbiosis. Dysbiosis means the unravelling of ecosystems. The term is used by doctors to describe the collapse of our gut biomes, but it is equally applicable to all living systems: rainforests, coral reefs, rivers, soil. They are unspooling at shocking speed due to the cumulative effect of “normality”, which entails a perpetual expansion of consumption.
This month we learned that $10bn-worth of precious metals, such as gold and platinum, are dumped in landfill every year, embedded in tens of millions of tonnes of lesser materials, in the form of electronic waste. The world’s production of e-waste is rising by 4% a year. It is driven by another outlandish norm: planned obsolescence. Our appliances are designed to break down, they are deliberately engineered not to be repaired. This is one of the reasons why the average smartphone, containing precious materials extracted at great environmental cost, lasts for between two and three years, while the average desktop printer prints for a total of five hours and four minutes before it is discarded.
The living world, and the people it supports, cannot sustain this level of consumption, but normal [capitalist] life depends on it. The compound, cascading effects of dysbiosis push us towards what some scientists warn could be global systemic collapse…”
Taken from

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

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