Author: ajohnstone

The Wealthy Dictators

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Dubbed the “Butcher of Hama,” Syria’s Rifaat Assad holds millions in European real estate.  The uncle of Syrian President Bashar Assad is reported to have a European fortune that includes two Paris townhouses — one of them 3,000 square meters (32,000 square feet) — a stud farm, a chateau and more than 500 properties in Spain.







A former Syrian vice president and military leader, Rifaat Assad is also known as the “Butcher of Hama” for allegedly commanding troops to brutally crush a 1982 uprising in central Syria.



On Thursday, a French court will decide whether he diverted at least €90 million ($98 million) of Syrian state funds to buy some of that real estate. In November, Spanish prosecutors accused him of stealing €600 million from Syrian coffers. He has denied both charges.



Several members of the Makhloufs, Bashar’s close cousins and advisers, have sunk $40 million into the glittering glass and steel of Moscow’s “City of Capitals” twin skyscrapers in recent years, according to the UK corruption-focused NGO Global Witness.



The infamously wealthy family is reported to have been key in maintaining Bashar’s violent grip on power and their Russian investment may be a way for them to channel regime funds past EU sanctions, the NGO says.
When Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak regime fell in 2011, his family wealth was estimated to be between $5 billion and $70 billion at the time, including luxury properties across London, Paris and Spain. Some of those were held by his sons through shell companies, according to the Panama Papers investigation.
When  Gadhafi was toppled in the same year, Libyan officials estimated he had $200 billion in accounts, investments and real estate under his personal control around the world. A £10 million (€11.5 million, $12.5 million) London mansion belonging to his son Saadi Gadhafi, was handed back to Libyan authorities in 2012.
The assets of both of their immediate families and some of their entourages remain frozen under EU sanctions. Gadhafi’s close associate Ali Dabaiba, who was part of an elite circle known as “companions of the leader,” reportedly squirreled away $7 billion while on a salary of only £12,000 and a 2018 investigation alleged he invested some of it in prestigious property across the UK. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project said that included Scotland’s most significant stately home still in private hands, Taymouth Castle.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hasn’t been as secretive about his wealth but kept his 2015 purchase of the $300 million Chateau Louis XIV in France. The 17th century replica, featuring a gold leaf fountain and hedged labyrinth amid expansive gardens, was revealed to be owned by the crown prince by the New York Times in 2017.



Qatar’s Al Thani royal family bought Paris Saint-Germain football club in 2012, after already plowing many billions of state funds into property across Europe. That included a 95% stake in London’s The Shard, Europe’s tallest building at the time.

In 2018 former Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani bought what was thought to be London’s most expensive home — a 20-plus-bedroom home near Buckingham Palace for $465 million, after renovations.
That same year, Amnesty International reported that foreign laborers in Qatar, who make up the overwhelming majority of the workforce, worked in abusive conditions on the country’s FIFA World Cup 2022 sites for a minimum wage of $200 a month. 
United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan personally owned $1.2 billion in London property, while deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan owns British football club Manchester City. Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s European portfolio includes a £75 million Surrey Estate and £45 million thoroughbred stud farm. Said to be a close friend of Queen Elizabeth II, Maktoum has faced a storm of controversy in his home-away-from-home. Last month a British court ruled that he had abducted two of his adult daughters and waged a campaign of “fear and intimidation” against his youngest wife, Princess Haya.







Can Capitalism Deliver the Vaccines?

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Nobel laureate and immunologist Professor Peter Doherty said the world needed to change its funding model for vaccine development.
“There is just not enough profit margin in it for pharma companies,” he said. “They live by profits and the rules of capitalism. And capitalism has no interest in human beings other than as consumers.”
Professor Mark Sullivan, managing director of Medicines Development for Global Health, a vaccine development company based in Melbourne, described the vaccine development landscape as a “market failure”.
“The problem is this market failure is our only method of developing medicines,” he said. 



The final study needed for a vaccine to be approved is much more expensive than a similar study for a drug because the study needs to be huge to definitively show prevention of a disease – “tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of participants”, said Professor Sullivan. Three SARS vaccine projects, which may have yielded important insights for a COVID-19 vaccine as the viruses are closely related, stalled at this stage.

And manufacturing a vaccine is much more expensive than making a drug because it often involves modifying yeast or bacteria to produce a vaccine – a difficult and costly process.
Because of all those factors, the enthusiasm of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in vaccines has dropped dramatically in the last 20 years.
Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi which works to distribute vaccines to the poor, said it was very difficult to get funding for research on vaccines for viruses that have not yet become pandemics. “We have enough land-based nuclear missiles to destroy the world. And in case that does not work, we keep air-based missiles and submarines. And that’s to prevent something much less likely than the evolutionary certainty that is a pandemic virus.”
“Without immediate additional financial contributions the vaccine programmes we have begun will not be able to progress and ultimately will not deliver the vaccines that the world needs,” Dr Richard Hatchett,  Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation‘s CEO, said in a statement.







Discord – The solution is still socialism.

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The Socialist Party points out that as a democratic, leader-free socialist party we are committed to the exchange of ideas with others who are interested in changing society. 



The Party has recently introduced Discord, an online tool, with the aim of breaking down the sense of isolation felt by many socialists across the world. If you want to join please don’t delay. And if you know anyone who might want to join, tell them about it.

Details of Discord – See the Party’s website homepage

Talks, meetings, debates – contact Forum Admin for special invite or email H.O.







It is the poor who pay the price.

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Britain’s lowest-paid workers, women and young adults have jobs with the biggest health and economic risks during the coronavirus lockdown, according to a report into the uneven impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.



The Resolution Foundation thinktank said jobs in shutdown parts of the economy were lower paid than average, with as many as one in four of the lowest earners in society working in sectors forced into temporary closure, compared with less than one in 20 of the highest paid.



8.6 million key workers have been putting their health at risk to keep the country running, the study found women were more than twice as likely than men to occupy these roles. Dominated by almost 4 million health workers, as well as education, food and pharmaceutical retail staff, parents are also more likely to be key workers, including as many as two in five working mothers.



The thinktank said key workers, such as nurses, teachers and care workers, typically earn less than employees further away from the centre of the crisis, with the bottom 30% of earners in Britain more than twice as likely to be in such jobs than the top 10%.



As well as health risks facing women and low-income workers in sectors where staff are still going into work, the Resolution Foundation identified 6.3 million people in areas of the economy that have been ordered to shut down, including in hospitality, retail, arts, travel and leisure. It said jobs in sectors that have been effectively forced to close were typically lower paid than average, putting workers in these areas at greater risk of financial hardship as redundancies mount.

One in four of the lowest 10% of all UK earners work in sectors where activity has ground to a halt amid tight restrictions on social and business life across Britain, compared with less than one in 20 of the highest paid.



Young people are particularly likely to work in mothballed sectors, given the higher numbers of young adults in hospitality or retail, where their employers have been forced to close. As the generation to experience the toughest squeeze on pay following the 2008 financial crisis, the report warned that almost a quarter of millennials – born between 1981 and 2000 – currently work in shuttered sectors, compared with 16% of working baby boomers and other older adults born before them.



Although the government is providing billions of pounds of emergency financial support to companies and individuals, millions are still expected to fall through the safety net.

Maja Gustafsson, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation, said, “Women, young people and the low-paid are most likely to be bearing the biggest health and economic risks from the crisis, which has shone a spotlight on the vitality of work that has been undervalued and underpaid for far too long,” she added.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/uks-lowest-paid-most-at-risk-during-covid-19-crisis-report-finds



Lebanon Unrest Mounts

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The crash of Lebanon’s national currency that sent food prices soaring has boiled over into street violence in the northern city of Tripoli  where a man wounded in clashes between protesters and security forces is now dead.



Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, has soaring unemployment and poverty, and protesters hurled petrol bombs at several banks and caused wide damage. Protests also erupted elsewhere in Lebanon. In Beirut,  cash machines were set on fire.  Anti-government protests resumed as authorities began easing the weeks-long lockdown to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in Lebanon, which has reported 710 cases and 24 deaths so far.



Over the weekend, the Lebanese pound hit a record low, with 4,000 pounds to the dollar on the black market, while the official price remained at 1,507 pounds.  The Central Bank of Lebanon instructed currency exchange shops not to sell the dollar for more than 3,200 pounds. On Monday, most exchange shops were not selling dollars, saying clients who have dollars are refusing to exchange their currency at such a low price. The dollar surged on the black market to 4,300 pounds on Tuesday.



Prepare for the worse

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“There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe.” – Noam Chomsky explained,



 Between 1980 and 2013, the number of annual epidemics has gone from fewer than 1,000 to over 3,000. Infectious diseases such as Zika, MERS-CoV, SARS, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, influenza, and Ebola kill millions every year, and their outbreaks have decimated economies and triggered aftershocks and panic around the world.



A few billionaires have contributed to the fight against Covid-19. But Luke Hildyard, Executive Director of the High Pay Centre, says, “Very generous individual grants can obscure the fact that on the whole, wealthy people’s charitable giving is pretty minimal.” In the most flagrant example of disregard for the rest of us, one company has installed private ‘doomsday’ bunkers in New Zealand with “luxury bathrooms, game rooms, shooting ranges, gyms, theaters and surgical beds.”



The richest 5% have an average net worth of over $5 million. They came away with nearly $35 TRILLION dollars in the past ten years, mainly by waiting out the stock market, which has more than tripled in value since the recession. In the ten years from 2009 to 2019, the average member of America’s richest 5% more than doubled his/her wealth from $2.6 million to $5.4 million.



Capitalist leaders have failed us, both in the past and in our current crisis. We’re not “all in this together” when so few people own so much of the wealth.

The future does not bode well

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The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz and Eduardo Brondizio, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned.



“There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.”



In an article with Dr Peter Daszak, who is preparing the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) next assessment, they write: “Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases.”



These activities cause pandemics by bringing more people into contact and conflict with animals, from which 70% of emerging human diseases originate, they said. Combined with urbanisation and the explosive growth of global air travel, this enabled a harmless virus in Asian bats to bring “untold human suffering and halt economies and societies around the world. This is the human hand in pandemic emergence. Yet Covid-19 may be only the beginning. Future pandemics are likely to happen more frequently, spread more rapidly, have greater economic impact and kill more people if we are not extremely careful about the possible impacts of the choices we make today,” they said. “It may be politically expedient to relax environmental standards and to prop up industries such as intensive agriculture, airlines, and fossil-fuel-dependent energy sectors, but doing so without requiring urgent and fundamental change essentially subsidises the emergence of future pandemics.”



Daszak added, “The health of people is intimately connected to the health of wildlife, the health of livestock and the health of the environment. It’s actually one health…Business as usual will not work. Business as usual right now for pandemics is waiting for them to emerge and hoping for a vaccine. That’s not a good strategy. We need to deal with the underlying drivers.”



The biodiversity experts conclude: “We can emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient than ever, by choosing actions that protect nature, so that nature can help to protect us.”



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/halt-destruction-nature-worse-pandemics-top-scientists

The IDPs

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In its annual report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) warns a record 50.8 million people worldwide are internally displaced due to conflict or disaster, with coronavirus posing a new threat. The IDMC says Covid-19 may add further risks to millions of already vulnerable people.
 Over 45 million have been forced to abandon their homes due to violence. A further five million have been displaced by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the IDMC says.



It adds that the number of people internally displaced – those who flee conflict or disaster but remain in their own countries – has now reached a record high. 

The new coronavirus is likely to make the lives of many of these people – some already living in cramped, unsanitary conditions such as makeshift emergency shelters, informal settlements and urban slums – more difficult. Such overcrowded conditions make it hard to implement the physical distancing and hygiene measures required to prevent the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus. The pandemic also compromises their “precarious living conditions by further limiting their access to essential services and humanitarian aid,” the director of the IDMC, Alexandra Bilak, said.
But even without the pandemic, the number of internally displaced people across the globe is a sign, the new report says, of collective failure.



https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52450031

Will COVID-19 Change the World?

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CAPITALISM’S CORONAVIRUS CRISIS How is it possible that countries with the largest economies in the world can’t even organise enough protection to safeguard their nurses and doctors in the frontline? How have food manufacturers and retailers build food supply chains that are so fragile and inadequate that the slightest hint of panic-buying leaves supermarket shelves empty or diminished for weeks or months? How have we allowed ourselves to become so detached from reality and addicted to all sorts of superficial distractions such as Netflix?



 Without transformative change humanity is at risk. Let’s rebuild the new society that we need. Let us construct a fairer and less destructive world. We can build better and stronger. After coronavirus, there should be no return to ‘normal’. When we say no going back to business–as–usual this time, we must really mean it. Whatever happens, our future world must be profoundly different. Communities are helping each other out in this pandemic. At every level, neighbourhood and city, let’s encourage and support this powerful spirit and create funding for communities to rebuild together. A plethora of hard-working community project groups have been created, unlocking stimulus and energy. Greedy capitalists and sociopathic politicians have all the power in the modern world. We can do more to publicise the capitalist and market-driven roots of these issues.Instead we can make life the central raison d’être. Socialists speak of the reinvention of society. Socialists want more equitable future to arrive and a more humane world for ourselves and for others.



It would be simplistic to assume that an outbreak of a pandemic in itself could automatically could propel and produce change but there is no denying that the current crisis has laid bare the numerous fault-lines within the capitalist system. The COVID crisis has magnified a reality of capitalism’s failures. For example, one of many examples of the failure of the profit driven system is health care.  COVID-19 exposes the fact that essential workers who provide food, healthcare, and deliveries to our homes are mistreated and underappreciated. Workers are underpaid and are not being provided with protective equipment or allowed sick leave. The COVID-19 rescue laws have given trillions in funding to investors and Big Business.



We must help mobilise people. When people are in the movement, a union, or an organisation, they are ready to be part of a mass action in achieving change. It’s a stupidity and arrogance that allows us to believe that we can continue to plunder our environment and devour non-renewable resources.



Workers are thrown to the wolves by politicians and an economic system. For those people who live in countries where there is no social security system whatever, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens consequences infinitely worse and condemns a whole families to deprivation, because wages are so low, that daily life is a relentless struggle to survive as it is without the added complications of COVID-19.



UK – “utterly hypocritical” – UN rapporteur on extreme poverty

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The United Nations’ poverty expert Philip Alston said that globally “the most vulnerable have been short-changed or excluded” by official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The policies of many states reflect a social Darwinism philosophy that prioritises the economic interests of the wealthiest while doing little for those who are hard at work providing essential services or unable to support themselves,” Alston said, warning that the pandemic could push more than half a billion additional people into poverty globally. “Governments have shut down entire countries without making even minimal efforts to ensure people can get by,” he said. “Many in poverty live day to day, with no savings or surplus food. And of course, homeless people cannot simply stay home.”
He highlighted how the most vulnerable populations had been neglected, which “forces them to continue working in unsafe conditions, putting everyone’s health at risk.” And he warned that, while some nations were seeing curves flattening, the virus was “poised to wreak havoc in poorer countries”.
“As for the UK,” Alston told the Guardian, “my thoughts of course hark back to the sense of how utterly hypocritical it is now to abandon ‘austerity’ with such alacrity, after all the harm and misery caused to individuals and the fatal weakening of the community’s capacity to cope and respond over the past 10 years. And of course, many of the worst and most damaging aspects of ‘austerity’ cannot and will not be undone. The damage caused to community cohesion and to the social infrastructure are likely to prove permanent.”
“This pandemic has exposed the bankruptcy of social support systems in many countries.” Alston said. “While some governments have embraced far-ranging measures previously dismissed as unrealistic, most programmes have been short-term, stop-gap measures that merely buy time rather than address the immense challenges that will continue well into the future. Now is the time for deep structural reforms that will protect populations as a whole and will build resilience in the face of an uncertain future.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/26/uk-coronavirus-response-utterly-hypocritical-says-un-poverty-expert

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