Four-year-old Yasmin, a Rohingya, has lived a life of uncertainty, unsure where she belongs. Born in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, living in India’s Delhi she is unable to return to t family home in her ancestral village in Myanmar.

  Empty office space in London is estimated at roughly 2.88m sq metres (31m sq ft).

 That’s about 2.88 sq km (712 acres), and it’s 50% more than the mere 1.8m sq metres available in the capital in 2019.

British workers are at breaking point, with anger over the cost of living crisis reaching a level not seen since the poll tax riots of the 1990s, Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, said. The frustration at pay failing to keep pace with soaring inflation was spilling over into a wave of strike action that would extend from a summer of discontent into the winter. Graham said a groundswell of unhappiness over living standards was sweeping the country.

She was speaking from the picket line outside the port of Felixstowe, where thousands of dock workers are striking over pay this week, and compared the situation to widespread national anger over Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, more than three decades ago. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in towns and cities around Britain in March 1990, in a rebellion that culminated in clashes with mounted police in Trafalgar Square, central London. It was regarded as a key event in bringing about the end of Thatcher. 

Asked whether she felt the country was facing a moment with clear parallels to unrest over the poll tax, she added: “I think we could be, without a shadow of a doubt. I actually think there is a moment where people could rise to doing exactly the same thing again,” Graham stated.

Dismissing speculation that union leaders are coordinating industrial action to exert maximum pressure on employers and the government, Graham pointed out that, “It’s the other way around. There is a coordination of workers, who are saying: ‘I’m not taking this any more’. That is happening organically, which is what happened with the poll tax. Yes, there are leaders of things. But collectives make change, not individuals.”

Workers’ anger at cost of living as strong as time of poll tax riots, union boss says | Industrial action | The Guardian

 Emmanuel Macron has warned the French they are facing sacrifices.

Macron said France and the French felt they were living through a series of crises, “each worse than the last”.

“What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval … we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance … the end of the abundance of products of technologies that seemed always available … the end of the abundance of land and materials including water.” 

“This overview that I’m giving, the end of abundance, the end of insouciance, the end of assumptions – it’s ultimately a tipping point that we are going through that can lead our citizens to feel a lot of anxiety. Faced with this, we have a duty, duties, the first of which is to speak frankly and clearly without doom-mongering,” he said.

Philippe Martinez, the secretary general of the powerful CGT union, said Macron’s comments were “misplaced” and that many in France had never known abundance.

“When we talk about the end of abundance, I think of the millions of unemployed, the millions of those in a precarious situation. For many French people, times are already hard, sacrifices have already been made,” Martinez said.

The leader of the French Communist party, Fabien Roussel, a presidential candidate earlier this year, expressed astonishment at Macron’s speech. “Unbelievable! It’s as if the French have had no worries and been over-indulging themselves. We have 10 million poor in France because of President Macron’s carelessness and the predatory behaviour of the rich,” Roussel tweeted.

Macron’s speech came as it was revealed that the dividends paid out by major French companies reached a record €44bn in the second quarter of 2022, as a result of what was described as exceptional profits in 2021. The dividend payout was almost 33% up on the previous year.

Macron warns of ‘end of abundance’ as France faces difficult winter | France | The Guardian

  A new report  by Yale Law School, the number of prisoners subjected to “restrictive housing”, as solitary is officially known, stood at between 41,000 and 48,000 in the summer of 2021. They were being held alone in cells the size of parking spaces, for 22 hours a day on average and for at least 15 days. 

This is in breach of minimum standards laid down by the United Nations which considers such isolation a form of torture.

More than 6,000 prisoners have been held in isolation for over a year. They include almost a thousand people who have been held on their own in potentially damaging confined spaces for a decade or longer.

The new solitary study, Time-In-Cell: A 2021 Snapshot of Restrictive Housing, extrapolates its findings from the reported figures of 34 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Studies have shown that even short periods of solitary can bring on severe mental health problems including depression, aggression and suicidal thoughts. Its destructive harm was highlighted by the death earlier this month of Albert Woodfox who, before his release from Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison in 2016, was the longest-standing solitary confinement inmate in the country. He was cooped up for 43 years almost without break in a 6ft by 9ft cell. In his 2019 book Solitary, Woodfox described the impact of decades of isolation on him. He had regular terrifying bouts of claustrophobia which forced him to sleep sitting up to avoid the sensation of the walls closing in on him.

Nearly 50,000 people held in solitary confinement in US, report says | US prisons | The Guardian

 Rising food prices are causing widespread suffering in developing countries, and even in the rich world, the combination of high food and fuel prices threatens hardship for millions. Food prices have surged by about 20% this year and about 345 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, compared with 135 million before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Food price rises around the world are the result of a “broken” food system that is failing the poor and concentrating power and profits in the hands of a few, food experts have said.

Alex Maitland from Oxfam explained the current crisis was “the latest in a long series of failures in the global food system”, which has been made even more fragile recently owing to extreme weather and the impacts of the climate crisis, economic upheaval and the pandemic. He said: “The war in Ukraine has caused massive price volatility and disruption of food supplies globally, but this is just the latest blow facing a global food system that was already broken. Global food chains are dominated by a small number of multinational corporations. It’s unsurprising that these corporations can squeeze such massive profits.”

Consumers are not the only victims: farmers, too, struggle to make a living when big companies abuse their dominance. 

Maitland said: “The people who produce and buy food are the ones who suffer from a system that puts shareholder profits over people. Half of the world’s undernourished are smallholder farmers and their families. The poorest spend far more of their income on food than the richest.”

Vicki Hird, head of sustainable farming at Sustain, a coalition of civil society groups in the UK, said: “Farmers have no control over setting prices and are ever poorer for it. It’s estimated that 25% of farm households in the UK are living under the poverty line.” She added: “The current food crisis is not a new one, just accelerated due to the Ukraine invasion, and unless governments recognise this and act to tackle the real causes – the corporate profits at the expense of farmer incomes, workers’ wages, consumers and the environment – we will just lurch from this crisis to the next.”

Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City, University of London, said both developed and developing countries were seeing the impacts of years of increasing distortion in food markets.

“We need to rethink the food system. People can’t afford a healthy diet, and this is a very serious problem. A lot of people are making a huge amount of money out of food, but food producers get about 8% of the £250bn a year we spend on food,” he said.

Food price rises around the world are result of ‘broken’ system, say experts | Environment | The Guardian

There are observable differences in such things as skin color and hair texture, as well as some patterns in predisposition to disease based on ancestors’ geographic origins, but the idea of separate races was created by humans and is not found in nature.

There are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations from different regions of the world. There is individual variation within any human population in a particular place (obviously, individuals in any society differ in a variety of traits). But there are no meaningful biologically based differences between populations in the way people are capable of thinking, feeling, or making decisions. We are one species. We are all basically the same animal.

Although we are one species, there are obvious cultural differences among human populations around the world. Those cultural differences aren’t a product of human biology; that is, they aren’t the product of any one group being significantly different genetically from another, especially in ways that could be labeled cognitively superior or inferior. So why have different cultures developed in different places? The most obvious answer is that it is the result of humans living under different material conditions.

We conclude that the type of living arrangements that groups of humans develop arise from the differences in geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Absent any other credible explanation, we assume that the different material realities under which humans have lived have shaped the variations in human culture. People make choices to build cultures in specific ways, but if all people are basically the same animal, then the differences in those choices around the world are most likely the product of those different conditions.

We are not suggesting that we have no control over our lives but simply that we likely don’t have as much control as many people would like to believe. This is true of us individually and collectively. The conditions under which a culture emerged may have led to ecologically sustainable living arrangements, but those living arrangements would have been different if initial conditions had been different. If Culture A created an ecologically sustainable way to live and Culture B created an unsustainable system, it is important to highlight the differences, endorse Culture A, and try to change Culture B. Geography shapes people, and people act to shape the meaning of geography, making choices along the way. But not all people throughout history and around the world have been presented with the same choices by the landscapes on which they have lived. 

We want to be clear about how we understand racial and ethnic differences in the context of political and economic history. Europe is not rich because Europeans are racially superior. Europe is rich because it developed on a different trajectory from that of the Americas, Africa, and Asia as a result of geographic and environmental differences. That trajectory made it possible for Europeans to conquer and exploit the people and resources of those other continents. At one point, Europeans believed themselves intellectually and morally superior because of racial differences that were assumed to be immutable. We know that to be false. But if that’s false, then so is any other claim by any other group to be intellectually or morally superior on any criteria by virtue of a racial or ethnic identity.

If history was not shaped by the minor genetic differences that are associated with our ancestors’ region of the world, that leaves us with geography, climate, and environmental conditions, unless we want to argue that history is directed by gods. Geography shapes people, and people act to shape the meaning of geography, making choices along the way. But not all people throughout history and around the world have been presented with the same choices by the landscapes on which they have lived.  All organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, their places. There is no reason that humans should be exempt from that observation. While it’s true that humans’ physiology and cognitive capacity allow us to live almost anywhere on land on Earth, that doesn’t mean that geography has no relevance in how we have organized societies and developed new technologies.

Taken from here

We are One Species – CounterPunch.org

 “Putin’s war is funded through money from fossil fuels and these fossil fuels are causing climate breakdown as we speak,” said Svitlana Romanko, director of the Ukrainian NGO Razom We Stand.

Carbon bombs are fossil-fuel extraction projects identified by researchers to contain at least 1bn tonnes of climate-heating CO2, triple the UK’s annual emissions. Russia is a hotspot, with 40 carbon bombs, 19 of them operated or developed by Russian companies backed by foreign finance. The companies are Gazprom, Novatek, Lukoil, Rosneft oil company and Tatneft. More than 400 foreign financial institutions had provided $130bn (£109bn) of support to the Russian companies – $52bn in investment and $84bn in credit. 

Financial institutions in the US hold almost half the foreign investment in Russian carbon bomb companies, with 154 institutions holding $23.6bn. The largest combination of investment and credit – $10bn – was provided by JPMorgan Chase.

The biggest single investment in the Russian carbon bomb companies was the $15.3bn in Rosneft held by the Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The UK was third in the list of investing nations, with 32 financial institutions holding $2.5bn in investments. HSBC had the largest investment and credit total, at $308m.

 Financial groups in Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands also held significant investments, while Chinese and Italian institutions provided $45bn in credit between them.

 Kjell Kühne, at Leave it in the Ground Initiative (Lingo), said: “This war has made really clear that, when you don’t care who you’re doing business with, it does translate into human suffering and lives lost. It’s also clear we should not be investing in new fossil fuel projects, as the International Energy Agency has confirmed. Anybody involved in these projects should be really questioning what they’re doing.”

 Lingo said some financial institutions may have reduced their support for the Russian companies since the war started, but that many seemed to have adopted a wait-and-see approach.

UK and US banks among biggest backers of Russian ‘carbon bombs’, data shows | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

Members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), have now been 500 days on strike against Warrior Met Coal, (previously known as Walter Energy.)

The miners went on strike in April of 2021 over a host of grievances: little-to-no raises, long working hours, cuts to healthcare, and cuts to their retirements. They accepted many of these concessions in 2016 to bring the company out of bankruptcy, at a cost to the miners of around $1 billion over the term of the contract, according to the union. 

The workers simply wanted something approximating a restoration of the pre-bankruptcy status quo. Warrior Met instigated the strike by refusing these modest demands.

Republican politicians have responded to this long-term work action with characteristic indifference, or overt support for the company. On the state level, Republicans are openly siding against the workers. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has mobilized state troopers to escort scabs crossing the picket line. On October 27, 2021, a Republican Tuscaloosa County Judge issued an injunction telling Alabama coal miners that they are not allowed to protest their employer. For several months, striking workers were limited in the number of picketers they could have on the line, and for a few months they could have none at all. The lack of support from Republicans is both typical, shameful but to be expected.

But the strike has also been largely met with silence from Democrats, including at the federal level, despite the Biden administration’s claim to stand with unions. While local rank-and-file Democrats have helped by donating to the strike fund and collecting donations, Democratic Party office holders have been totally absent. Some have spoken at rallies, yet only one elected Alabama Democrat, Tuscaloosa State Representative Chris England, has been to a picket line, and asked how he can help.

Lacking political power in the state, the federal leaders of the party could be doing far more. Yet, the White House and the Labor Department have both been mostly silent. Why hasn’t Labor Secretary Marty Walsh been loudly commenting on the Warrior Met strike?

The workers have been complaining that none of the politicians care. What these workers are left with in terms of material support from political leaders is virtually nothing, and at a time when the need could not be more urgent. The company is trying to shake the union down for millions in reimbursements for ​“unlawful strike activity,” including lost production. And with the skyrocketing price of steel, even operating the mines at a lower capacity has allowed the company to turn a profit (even though it is missing out on $1 billion dollars in potential revenue, according to UMWA). 

It is unconscionable that the ​“most pro-union president in history” and nearly the entire political party that he leads has allowed this strike to go on this long without strong support.

500 Days Into the Warrior Met Coal Strike, Where Are Joe Biden and the Democrats? – In These Times

From Yorkshires socialist discussion group comments about old age and social care

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Socialist-Voices-episode-1.mp3