According to research from Amnesty International, there has been a “catalogue of violations” committed by Israeli police against Palestinians in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem.

Arab citizens of Israel have been subjected to unlawful force from officers during peaceful demonstrations, sweeping mass arrests, torture and other ill-treatment in detention, and police have failed to protect Palestinians from premeditated attacks by right-wing Jewish extremists.

Palestinians face a culture of increasing repression and violence from the Israeli authorities and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, said Saleh Hijazi, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“There are always periods where the institutionalised structural violence and discrimination against Palestinians becomes severe, but this is the worst it has been in a long time. There is a complete disregard for civilian life,” Hijazi said.

At least 2,150 people – 90% of them Palestinian – have been arrested, most for allegedly insulting or assaulting a police officer or taking part in an illegal gathering rather than for violent offences, while right-wing Jewish extremists have for the most part continued to organise freely. In Haifa and Nazareth police attacked groups of unarmed protesters without provocation, Amnesty reported. Amnesty also documented the torture of detainees who were tied up, beaten and deprived of sleep at a police station in Nazareth and at Kishon detention centre.

 Palestinians critical of the PA have reported mounting pressure to silence them in recent weeks. Nizar Banat, a well-known critic of the PA, died during an arrest by Palestinian security forces in the city of Hebron. A large demonstration in Ramallah in response to his death, calling for PA officials to resign, was met with teargas and the use of metal batons from Palestinian security forces. Banat had planned to run in cancelled parliamentary elections this year and called on western countries to cut off aid to the PA because of growing human rights violations and endemic corruption. Last month, gunmen he claimed were loyal to the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, attacked his house with bullets, stun grenades and teargas while his wife and children were inside. He had also accused Abbas’s supporters of waging an incitement campaign against him on social media.

Amnesty: ‘catalogue of violations’ by Israeli police against Palestinians | Israel | The Guardian

 The EU is phasing out palm oil biofuels because of concerns over deforestation.  Research also suggests that making biodiesel from palms grown on newly cleared land increases greenhouse gas emissions instead of reducing them. Undeterred, Indonesia is working to increase the palm component in its biodiesel, which it markets as “Green Diesel,” and to develop other palm-based biofuels.

Today there are enough oil palm plantations worldwide to cover an area larger than the state of Kansas, and the industry is still growing. It is concentrated in Asia, but plantations are spreading in Africa and Latin America. Palm oil is everywhere today: in food, soap, lipstick, even newspaper ink. It’s been called the world’s most hated crop because of its association with deforestation in Southeast Asia. Between 2018 and 2020, almost 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of rainforest were cleared in just three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, leading to Indigenous communities losing their land.  But despite boycott campaigns, the world uses more palm oil than any other vegetable oil – over 73 million tons in 2020. That’s because palm oil is cheap. The plant that makes it, the African oil palm, can produce up to 10 times more oil per hectare than soya.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, tropical forest clearing for oil palm plantations threatens nearly 200 at-risk species, including orangutans, tigers and African forest elephants. However, the IUCN and many other advocates argue that shifting away from palm oil is not the answer. Since oil palm is so productive, they contend, switching to other oil crops could cause even more harm because it would require more land to cultivate substitutes.

Instead, there are more just and sustainable ways to make palm oil. Studies show that small-scale agroforestry techniques, like those historically practiced in Africa and among Afro-descendant communities in South America, offer effective ways to produce palm oil while protecting the environment.

Africa: How Palm Oil Became the World’s Most Hated, Most Used Fat Source – allAfrica.com

 Less than 12% of Brazilians are fully vaccinated against the disease, more than 2,000 are dying daily. Experts warn Brazil may be entering its third wave. That is raising concern that those in poor communities will fall even further behind the wealthy.

Brazil has 15 million unemployed. Brazil has 27.5 million poor people, defined as households living on less than one minimum wage ($220). If the federal government ceased its current aid program, that number would go automatically to 34.3 million. That lifeline was first reduced and then suspended at the end of 2020. It was reinstated in April. Bolsonaro announced his administration intends to extend the welfare program for poor and informal workers by at least two months. Economy Minister Paulo Guedes faced accusations of insensitivity after his off-the-cuff proposal to feed the homeless with leftovers.

Some cities have created programs of their own to complement the federal effort. Salvador, the capital of Bahia state in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, has been giving 270 reais ($54) to 20,000 people each month. Sao Paulo state, home to one-fifth of Brazilians, the local government announced on June 17 that it would provide 100,000 needy families with monthly vouchers for cooking gas.

Nestlé donated 500 tons of food and beverages, and brewer Ambev gave $50 to 20,000 street vendors who usually work during Carnival, suspended due to the pandemic. Mining giant Vale announced it would donate a million food kits to 220,000 families in five states by year-end. Rio de Paz, a nonprofit, has delivered tens of thousands of hot meals in favelas.

Central Union of Favelas set out to distribute 500,000 cellphone chips in favelas throughout the country so children can have internet access to online classes. In Paraisopolis, one of Sao Paulo’s biggest favelas, another nonprofit, G10 of Favelas, hired so-called “street presidents” to tutor unschooled children whose parents work.

Brazil scrambles to help the poor, while they barely hang on (apnews.com)

 African Union special envoy Strive Masiyiwa has accused the world’s richest nations of deliberately failing to provide enough Covid-19 vaccines to the continent. Masiyiwa, the union’s special envoy to the African vaccine acquisition task team, said the Covax scheme had failed to keep its promise to secure production of 700 million doses of vaccines in time for delivery by December 2021.

The UK has fully vaccinated 47% of its citizens and the US has vaccinated 45%, less than 1% of Africa’s population have been fully vaccinated. 

“It’s not a question of if this was a moral failure, it was deliberate. Those with the resources pushed their way to the front of the queue and took control of their production assets,” Masiyiwa explained. “Imagine we are in a village and there is drought and there will not be enough bread and the richest guys grabs the baker and they take control of the production of bread and we all have to go to those rich guys to ask for a loaf of bread,” he said.

He continued that if ever there was an inquiry into how vaccines have been distributed, Covax – an initiative by the World Health Organization to enable poor countries to get free vaccines – would be found culpable, “because we were misled”.

“We were led down the garden path…We got to December believing that the whole world was coming together to purchase vaccines, not knowing that we had been corralled into a little corner while others ran off and secured the supplies.” He said that when he met vaccine manufacturers in December, he was told that all production capacity for 2021 had been sold.

“So, the people who bought the vaccines and those who sold them the vaccines, knew that there would be nothing for us,” he said.

Rich countries ‘deliberately’ keeping Covid vaccines from Africa, says envoy | Global development | The Guardian

Billionaires have armies of lawyers and accountants to devise tax circumvention schemes that adhere to the letter (though not the spirit) of the law, allowing them to pay a pittance in taxes compared to the riches they’re reaping.

George W Bush  declared that “most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes” 

He cut the IRS units that audit the wealthy expecting everyone not to realize the connection between the IRS departmental cuts and the tax evasion.

Analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, showed that roughly $380bn of owed taxes goes unpaid every year.

A report from Harvard University researchers showing that about three-quarters of that tax gap is from underpayment by the wealthiest 1%.

The Center for Equitable Growth finding that more than one-fifth of the top 1%’s income is going unreported to tax authorities.

The takeaway: the richest 1.6 million households are pilfering somewhere between $175bn and a quarter-trillion dollars of owed-but-unpaid taxes every single year – and they are apparently getting away with it.

We are told that while their tax avoidance schemes to reduce tax liability may be immoral, the tactics are all perfectly legal. Billionaires may occasionally be depicted as greedy fat cats– but no longer portryed as robber barons.

Why does anyone make such a generous and charitable assumption? The legal presumption of innocence is questionable. The answer is class bias from both government and the media.  White-collar crime is almost never prosecuted, crime is seen by the government as something that only poor people do. Through this lens, grand larceny is presumed to be just shrewd accounting rather than lawbreaking. News outlets quick to convict the poor via sensational headlines are hesitant to do the same to billionaires who can weaponize media law.

 They bankroll the political and media system itself.  They are the owners of television stations and newspapers. They are the benefactors of thinktanks and universities who employ the pundit class. They pay intellectuals for defense speeches. They take cases to court with unlimited resources, bankrupting news outlets that cross them. They are the donors who finance the politicians to get themselves legislative favors .

After using a one-time gift of free tuition to generate positive headlines for himself, the Vista Equity Partners billionaire Robert Smith last year settled a massive criminal case over tax evasion.  Robert Smith was granted a non-prosecution agreement, giving his firm necessary cover to continue managing workers’ pension money. 

 UBS, Credit Suisse, HSBC and KPMG have paid fines to settle justice department cases uncovering their roles in rampant tax evasion – and in the process, some of them have confessed to criminal wrongdoing. Bank executives money-laundering for drug cartels, facilitating dictators looting their state treasuries never entails jail-time.

These schemes were not isolated incidents: as prosecutors noted in the emblematic Credit Suisse case, the bank “knowingly and willfully aided and assisted thousands of US clients in opening and maintaining undeclared accounts and concealing their offshore assets and income from the IRS”.

The banks and accounting firms in the aforementioned tax evasion cases were given deferred prosecution agreements. Both Credit Suisse and UBS were granted government waivers from laws that could have barred them from managing retirees’ money.

For decades,  officialdom has been tough on crime drum for the working class, while actively helping the wealthy cheat the system. Trump preached about “law and order” while gutting the IRS enforcement budget and trying to shield corporations from consequences when they violate foreign laws. 

The IRS now audits low-income beneficiaries of the earned income tax credit at twice the rate as it audits corporations, the IRS audit rate for those making more than $1m has plummeted, and the agency has been referring a record low number of cases for criminal prosecution.

Adapted from here

We’re told billionaire tax avoidance is ‘perfectly legal’. But is it? | David Sirota | The Guardian

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing a report but most of the report will not be published in time for consideration by policymakers at Cop26.

 However, a draft of the report apparently from early this year has been leaked.

Previous work by the IPCC has been criticised for failing to take account of tipping points. The new report is set to contain the body’s strongest warnings yet on the subject. The IPCC draft details at least 12 potential tipping points:

 “The worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own,” the report says.

It warns of a series of thresholds beyond which recovery from climate breakdown may become impossible. 

It warns: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems … humans cannot.”

A decade ago, scientists believed that limiting global warming to 2C above mid-19th-century levels would be enough to safeguard the future. It says that with 1.1C of warming clocked so far, the climate is already changing. Earlier models predicted that Earth-altering climate change was not likely before 2100. But the UN draft report says prolonged warming even beyond 1.5C could produce “progressively serious, centuries-long and, in some cases, irreversible consequences.”

Tipping points are triggered when temperatures reach a certain level, whereby one impact rapidly leads to a series of cascading events with vast repercussions. For instance, as rising temperatures lead to the melting of Arctic permafrost, the unfreezing soil releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that in turn causes more heating. Other tipping points include the melting of polar ice sheets, which once under way may be almost impossible to reverse even if carbon emissions are rapidly reduced, and which would raise sea levels catastrophically over many decades, and the possibility of the Amazon rainforest switching suddenly to savannah, which scientists have said could come quickly and with relatively small temperature rises.

Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said:

 “Scientists have identified several potential regional and global thresholds or tipping points in the climate beyond which impacts become unstoppable or irreversible, or accelerate. They could create huge social and economic responses, such as population displacements and conflict, and so represent the largest potential risks of climate change. Tipping points should be the climate change impacts about which policymakers worry the most, but they are often left out of assessments by scientists and economists because they are difficult to quantify.”

Simon Lewis, a professor of global change science at University College London, said: 

 “…But put together, the stark message from the IPCC is that increasingly severe heatwaves, fires, floods and droughts are coming our way with dire impacts for many countries. On top of this are some irreversible changes, often called tipping points, such as where high temperatures and droughts mean parts of the Amazon rainforest can’t persist. These tipping points may then link, like toppling dominoes.”

Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, commented on that avoiding dire impacts was still possible. 

“It’s important people don’t get the message ‘we’re doomed anyway so why bother?’. This is a fixable problem. We could stop global warming in a generation if we wanted to, which would mean limiting future warming to not much more than has happened already this century. We also know how. It’s just a matter of getting on with it.”

IPCC steps up warning on climate tipping points in leaked draft report | Climate change | The Guardian

 The U.S. Supreme Court decision (pdf) in Cedar Point Nursery vs. Hassid “makes a racist, broken farm labor system even more unequal,” said the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). “SCOTUS fails to balance a farmer’s property rights with a farm worker’s human rights.”

The ruling 6-3 that a California regulation granting union representatives access to farms challenges land-owners private property rights. It dealt a significant blow to the rights of agricultural workers to organize. At issue was a California regulation that allows labor organizers to enter private farms to talk with farm workers during non-working times about joining a union.

Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “the access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers’ property.”  He characterized it as an appropriation without just compensation because it limited the employers’ “right to exclude.”

Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law said, as a result of the decision, Vladeck” states cannot authorize unions (or anyone else) to enter private property, even for lawful activities (like union organizing) without compensating the property owners”—an additional cost the labor movement can ill afford.

“Farm workers are the hardest working people in America,” UFW explained. “This decision denies workers the right to use breaks to freely discuss whether they want to have a union.”

Samir Sonti, assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, described the decision as “an attack on California agricultural workers and their right to organize for better working conditions.”

“The 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA) was a landmark victory for the UFW and others, which at least in one state confronted the historic injustice of farm worker exclusion from federal labor law,” Sonti commented. “That important law has now taken a major hit…Decades of precedents have already undermined the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as it pertains to union organizers’ access to the workplace,” he said. “Only under the most exceptional circumstances are private sector workers attempting to form a union able to speak to an organizer while on the employer’s property.”

Jenny Breen, associate professor of law at Syracuse University, says the decision is setting a judicial precedent with potentially profound consequences.

“Employers continue to wield property rights as forms of their “sole and despotic dominion” (in the words of Blackstone, quoted approvingly by the court) over their employees, with no meaningful check by the court. It is truly incredible that the court interprets a regulation impacting a workplace employing thousands of workers in the same manner it would interpret a regulation impacting your backyard. There is no justification for such an extreme commitment to ignoring reality.” She continued,  “This decision does not bode well for the fate of labor regulations—or any other government regulations that could conceivably impact private property rights—in future cases to reach this court.”

Breen warned of a return to the Lochner era, a pre-New Deal period when the Supreme Court routinely shot down regulations and defended employers’ right to exploit workers without state interference.

Right-Wing SCOTUS Majority Rules Union Organizing on Farms Violates Landowners’ Rights | Common Dreams News

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” ― Warren Buffett

 The latest audio uploads to the Party website –

FAQ What if we had to start the Socialist Party from scratch? – Paddy Shannon, 12th May 2021

Identity politics – the new communalism – Adam Buick, 13th May 2021. (Hosted by the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society).

Daily life in socialism – Paul Bennett, 14th May 2021. (Due to technical problems the discussion wasn’t recorded).

FAQ Are the rich the problem? – Paddy Shannon, 19th May 2021.

What is social progress? – Pat Deutz, 21st May 2021.

Double bill on Authority – Tim Hart and Carla Dee, 31st May 2021.

Coronavirus and vaccination in India – Abhishek Chowdhury, 4th June 2021

 Defender

Which white horse – this one or that – is Russian,

Or does it come under Britannia’s rule?

Perhaps the wave could be Chinese, they feel

Compelled to pursue a global mission,

Though the USA will be duty bound

To claim the oceans as rightfully theirs,

Being de facto governor of world affairs,

Setting the seas on democratic ground.

Time to send a gunboat just to make sure

No competitor’s counter claim persists,

Crewed, of course, by highly trained journalists

To make the news territory secure.

As an exercise in futility,

It’s as sensible as bombing the sea.

D. A.

The government has set “historic” targets on the climate crisis but has failed so far to come up with the policies needed to reach them, the government’s independent advisers on the climate have warned.

The Climate Change Committee published two progress reports showing the UK lagging behind on its key goal of 78% cuts to greenhouse gases by 2035 and making recommendations on how to get back on track.

Lord Deben, the committee chairman, said: “The targets are remarkable and have set a major example to the world. But the policy is just not there. It’s very clear we need to step up very rapidly.” Deben warned that if the UK did not have its own clear roadmap and policies, other countries would not come forward with credible plans. “People are going to judge us by whether we link promises with policy and a programme to deliver. If all we do is promise, other people will not take us seriously … it puts the whole process of Cop26 into jeopardy,” he said.

Greenhouse gas emissions fell last year, but because of the impacts of the pandemic rather than policy. 

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the CCC, said: “The fall in emissions is a real whopper. But progress is illusory. Government strategy on cutting emissions has been late and what has come has almost all been too little.”

The committee found that while emissions from energy generation had fallen sharply in recent years, those from other key sectors – transport, buildings, industry and agriculture – were not coming down in line with the targets. 

The government has been criticised for a series of actions and proposals that campaigners have said run contrary to ministers’ green claims and damage the UK’s reputation ahead of Cop26. These include: the initial go-ahead for a mooted new coalmine in Cumbria, now subject to a public inquiry; new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea; a £27bn road-building plan; slashing incentives for electric cars; airport expansion; cutting air passenger duty on domestic flights; scrapping the green homes grant insulation programme; and cutting overseas aid.

Climate campaigners also said the government’s actions were at odds with its words.

 Mike Childs, the head of policy at Friends of the Earth, said: “With no climate action plan and his government’s support for more roads, runways, and an overseas gas mega-project, Boris Johnson risks being a laughing stock at the UN climate summit he is hosting in Glasgow later this year. The chancellor’s role in delivering net zero is crucial – unfortunately, this year’s budget did little to demonstrate the Treasury’s enthusiasm for building back greener.”

Chris Venables, the head of politics at Green Alliance, a thinktank, said: “It’s becoming clearer than ever that there’s an embarrassing lack of progress at home from the UK government in this crucial year for tackling climate change…”

UK policies will not deliver emission cuts pledge, says climate adviser | Climate Change Committee | The Guardian