China is to report its first population decline in five decades.

Zhiwei Zhang, the Shenzhen-based chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management explains, “The consensus expects China’s population to peak at 2027, based on the projection made by the United Nations. This would be much earlier than the market and policy makers expected.”

The birth rate has continued to decline. That is partly because urban couples, particularly those born after 1990, value their independence and careers more than raising a family, despite parental pressure to have children. Rising living costs in major cities, where large populations lead to the birth of a huge number of babies, have also deterred couples.

Policymakers will need to come up with family-planning incentives and arrest a falling birth rate, with the world’s most populous country at risk of entering an irreversible population slide if effective measures are not found. Falling birth rates and a fast greying society will add pressure on the working-age population and hit productivity.

“China would likely have to relax the birth control policy completely and put off the retirement age faster,” Zhang said.

“Our projections using the pre-census figures already suggested that the workforce would be declining by 0.5% each year by 2030, with a similar impact on GDP,” Capital Economics wrote.

In 2010, the proportion of the population aged 14 or younger plunged to 16.60% from 22.89% in 2000, an effect of a decades-old one-child policy. Citizens aged 60 and older accounted for 13.26%, up from about 10%. The continuation of those trends will undermine China’s working-age population and weigh on productivity. A shrinking pool of working adults will also test its ability to pay and care for an aging nation.

China to report first population drop in five decades -FT | Reuters

As drought conditions worsen across California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of the  San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand water.

The California Water Resources Control Board, is engaged in a protracted dispute between the bottled water company and local environmentalists, who for years have accused Nestlé of draining water supplies at the expense of local communities and ecosystems. Nestlé has sucked up, on average, 25 times as much water as it may have a right to, according to an environmental group that has been fighting to stop the bottled water company’s pumping in California for years. Strawberry Creek, which Nestlé has been pumping from, is a tributary of the Santa Ana river, which provides drinking water for about about 750,000 residents. The region’s watersheds also provide a habitat for deer, fox and mountain lions

Nestlé has maintains that its rights to California spring water dates back to 1865. But a 2017 investigation found that Nestlé was taking far more than its share. Last year the company drew out about 58m gallons, far surpassing the 2.3m gallons per year it could validly claim. The company’s fight water in California mirrors similar fights in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Maine and Michigan. 

Across the US, conservationists have accused Nestlé of leveraging vast lobbying funds to bend local and federal officials to its will.

“The forests that Nestlé is draining – they’re our forests, supported by every US taxpayer,” said Amanda Frye, an activist who provided state officials with documents and research going back at least a century to show Nestlé did not have the right to the water it was pumping.

State officials sent the company a cease and desist letter .

“We have a limited amount of water, said Julé Rizzardo, the assistant deputy director of the Division of Water Rights. “And as we face our second dry year in a row, it’s important that we use our authority to protect the municipal water supply and the environment.”

Drought-hit California moves to halt Nestlé from taking millions of gallons of water | California | The Guardian

ONLY THE CLASS WAR

IS WORTHY OF FIGHTING

 Australia and the war drums.

One of Australia’s most senior security officials has said liberal democracies must brace for war amid elevated global tensions. Home Affairs Department Secretary Mike Pezzullo said the possibility of war was increasing.

“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again…for the curse of war,” Pezzullo said 

The chance of a conflict involving China over Taiwan “should not be discounted,” but Australia will work with its allies in the region to try and maintain peace, Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.  He said that China had been increasingly clear about its reunification ambitions with Taiwan. “People need to be realistic about the activity. There is militarisation of bases across the region. Obviously, there is a significant amount of activity and there is an animosity between Taiwan and China.”

And Australia beefs up its military

Australia will spend A$747 million ($580 million) to upgrade four military bases in its north and expand war games with the United States, Prime Minister Scott Morrison will say on Wednesday.

“Working with the United States, our allies and Indo-Pacific neighbours, we will continue to advance Australia’s interests by investing in the Australian ­Defence Force,” 

 An airstrip in the Northern Territory will be lengthened to support larger aircraft, firing ranges overhauled and new training facilities set up for defence personnel and U.S. marines. This in addition of earlier increased military preparations.

Biden’s first 100-day accomplishment has been the deportation of 300,000 migrants and refugees since January, largely using a illegal under international law policy called Title 42.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) explained earlier this month:

“The Title 42 expulsion policy has effectively closed the U.S. border to nearly all asylum seekers based on the misapplication of an obscure, 75-year-old public health law.” It continued, “That law, the Public Health Service Act of 1944, was designed to confer quarantine authority to health authorities that would apply to everyone, including U.S. citizens, arriving from a foreign country. Quarantine authority was never meant to be used to determine which noncitizens could or couldn’t be expelled or removed from the U.S.”

According to a report (pdf) released late last month by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and other advocacy groups, the Biden administration used Title 42 to deport more Haitians during its first weeks in power than the Trump administration did in all of Fiscal Year 2020.

 Cynthia Garcia of United We Dream stressed, “President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost.”

Garcia continued, “Reflecting on his time as vice president, President Biden acknowledged that the Obama administration was wrong in deporting over 2.5 million people and vowed to never make that mistake again when he took office. President Biden is well on track to repeat history. Now, he must make a choice: repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration or do everything in his power to end the cruelty of detentions, expulsions, and deportations and show that he is a president of his word.”

National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), a coalition of more than 40 immigrant and refugee rights organizations, echoed United We Dream’s concerns about continued mass deportations during the first 100 days of the Biden administration.

NPNA noted that “there are many changes that the Biden administration can pursue with little to no congressional action, including ending the use of Title 42 expulsions, redesignating [Temporary Protected Status] for Haiti and other countries that are set to expire, and increasing the number of refugees that the U.S. will resettle as part of the presidential determination.”

The group also said, “These are literally life or death decisions that will impact millions of lives. The administration can also take action to expand access to citizenship and justice and to bolster due process protections through an increase of legal representation for those in detention and removal proceedings.”

With 300,000 Deported in First 100 Days, Rights Group Warns Biden ‘Well on Track to Repeat’ Obama Failures | Common Dreams News

 0.0000000000001% of the US population owns 50% of the country’s wealth.

The capitalist system cannot exist without growth, expansion, accumulation of profits, and and these are the fundamental causes of our environmental destruction. The capitalists carry great economic and political power and it is the reason for the  failures of all those previous COP international conferences on climate change. It’s time working people make conscious and collective decisions about our future and our relationship with our environment. 

“Expand or die” is the law of survival in the jungle of the cut–throat market of commodity production where profit counts more than people. It is this logic of capitalism which accounts for the failure to reach agreement to reduce carbon emissions and solve global warming. A business, well-meaning or not, cannot escape market forces. Capitalist competition strangles good intentions. Capitalism is driven by the pursuit for profits and the lucrative returns to be made for particular capitalists will always prevail over the welfare of communities and the countryside. Decisions are made by a tiny handful of capitalists, not in the interests of humanity, but purely to make profit. Capitalism is harming the environment to the verge of catastrophe.

If we want to save the world, we must change the economy of the world. There are no market solutions nor any technological answers.

Capitalism devours nature. It will not be sufficient to substitute fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Production itself must be re-designed to become one where goods are primarily produced not for sale but for peoples actual needs and use in ecologically friendly manufacturing methods.

We’re told green capitalism can save the environment by letting the market work its miracles with its invisible hand  which will bring new technology and futuristic inventions yet it has never been able to  cure preventable diseases or end global hunger when ample food-stocks are already available. Despite many fine words there has been little substantive difference to the world’s worsening environmental situation. Surely every environmentalist must begin to wonder why that is. The reasons are rooted in the economic system.

The vast majority of people want to live in a secure, safe, sustainable world, and enjoy their surroundings in harmony with nature. What the Socialist Party offers is a vision of an alternative society. World socialism is the precondition for a sustainable world. It is neither population numbers nor a greedy human nature but the capitalist mode of production which runs counter to nature. 

 “The erasure of Native people and histories, which existed before and survived in spite of a white supremacist empire, is a foundational sin of a make-believe nation. According to Rick Santorum, the US was founded as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ theocratic state. He might be right about that, but the idea that the first colonizers escaped religious persecution is laughable. Invasion was an economic enterprise for god, glory, and gold.” –   Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe and host of the Red Nation podcast

 The ’Ndrangheta – based in the southern region of Calabria, the toe of the Italy – is reputed to be one of the richest and most feared criminal organisations in the world. A study by the Demoskopita Research Institute in 2013 estimated its financial strength as more than that of Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s combined, with an annual turnover of €53bn (£44bn).

 Its success lies in its ability to connect the underworld with the upper world, where often the “upper world” stands for the financial district of the City of London which they use  as an investment and money-laundering base, according to Nicola Gratteri, the state prosecutor. It has established companies in the UK with the alleged purpose of simulating legitimate economic activity.

A 2019 report from Italy’s Anti-mafia Investigative Directorate claimed that criminal organisations laundered billions of pounds each year through UK banks.

Giuseppe Lombardo, the deputy prosecutor of Reggio Calabria, warned that “in a phase of very scarce global liquidity, the goal of the ’Ndrangheta will be to create a banking system parallel to the legal one”, as all the eyes are on the City.

Bosses of the Nirta clan had entrusted the management of their profits to a man who created companies in Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Romania which after a few years, all of these companies were systematically transferred to the UK. 

 Col Claudio Petrozziello of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, which monitors illicit flows of capital, said ’Ndrangheta clans in the UK had no interest in controlling the local territory, just the exploitation of the financial system.

“It’s not that there are no rules in London,” he said. “The problem is that the risk of mafia infiltration is underestimated.”

The ’Ndrangheta are as a middle-class phenomenon, which took advantage of Masonic lodges to manage the profits generated by international drugs trafficking. The grand master of the Grande Oriente d’Italia (GOI) lodge, Giuliano di Bernardo, claimed in trials in 2014 and 2019 that linked the ’Ndrangheta with terrorism that he had a discussion with the Duke of Kent, the grand master of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE), in the early 1990s over infiltration of the Italian lodges in the south of the country by criminal clans.

UK to come under scrutiny in Italy’s largest mafia trial in decades | Italy | The Guardian

 A Human Rights Watch in a report released on Tuesday, has accused Israeli officials of  apartheid and persecution, claiming the government enforces an overarching policy to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians”.

It became the first major international rights body to level such allegations, saying that after decades of warnings that an entrenched hold over Palestinian life could lead to apartheid, it had found that the “threshold” had been crossed.

“This is the starkest finding Human Rights Watch has reached on Israeli conduct in the 30 years we’ve been documenting abuses on the ground there,” said Omar Shakir, the group’s Israel and Palestine director. Shakir said his organisation had never before directly accused Israeli officials of crimes against humanity.

Human Rights Watch compared policies and practices towards nearly 7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and within Israel with those concerning roughly the same number of Jewish Israelis living in the same areas. It concluded there was a “present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government … methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.”

Human Rights Watch said that inside Israel – where about a fifth of the 9 million citizens are Palestinians – and in the occupied territories, authorities had sought to maximise the land available for Jewish communities and concentrate most Palestinians in dense population centres.

“The authorities have adopted policies to mitigate what they have openly described as a demographic ‘threat’ from Palestinians,” it said, referencing concerns expressed by Israeli politicians that a majority Palestinian population would endanger the Jewish state. “In Jerusalem, for example, the government’s plan for the municipality … sets the goal of ‘maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city’ and even specifies the demographic ratios it hopes to maintain.”

It said Israeli authorities “systematically discriminate against Palestinians”. This was most extreme in the occupied territories, it said, including the West Bank. Several hundred thousand Israeli settlers now live there as citizens while about 2.7 million Palestinians are not and live under military rule.

Human Rights Watch’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, said this was not simply “an abusive occupation”. “These policies, which grant Jewish Israelis the same rights and privileges wherever they live and discriminate against Palestinians to varying degrees wherever they live, reflect a policy to privilege one people at the expense of another,” Roth said.

Regarding the occupied West Bank, Israel points to agreements signed in the 1990s that afforded Palestinians limited self-rule there. However, Human Rights Watch says the Israeli government still “retains primary control over many aspects” of their lives, including borders, natural resources and movement of people and goods. Meanwhile, about 2 million Palestinians live under a strict blockade in Gaza. Israeli forces pulled out of Gaza in 2005 but still maintain control of its borders, sea and airspace.

The report reflects similar findings by Israeli rights bodies, including a January announcement by B’Tselem that claimed the country was not a democracy but an “apartheid regime”. One other domestic group, Yesh Din, published a legal opinion last summer in which it argued that apartheid was being committed.

Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, rights watchdog says | Israel | The Guardian

 In a devastating report running to 188 pages, human rights experts from eleven countries hold the US accountable for what they say is a long history of violations of international law that rise in some cases to the level of crimes against humanity.

The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to should be investigated and prosecuted under international law with a for the International Criminal Court prosecutor to open an immediate investigation.

They point to what they call “police murders” as well as “severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution and other inhuman acts” as systematic attacks on the Black community that meet the definition of such crimes.

The commission’s report puts the human impact of systemic discrimination against African Americans in stark terms. It says that the US is operating two systems of law.

“One is for white people, and another for people of African descent,” it said.

Hina Jilani, president of the World Organisation Against Torture, one of the 12 commissioners who led the inquiry, told the Guardian. “We examined all the facts and concluded that that there are situations in the US that beg the urgent scrutiny of the ICC.”

Among its other findings, the commission accuses the US of:

1. violating its international human rights obligations, both in terms of laws governing policing and in the practices of law enforcement officers, including traffic stops targeting Black people and race-based stop and frisk;

2. tolerating an “alarming national pattern of disproportionate use of deadly force not only by firearms but also by Tasers” against Black people;

3. operating a “culture of impunity” in which police officers are rarely held accountable while their homicidal actions are dismissed as those of just “a few bad apples”.