“They always find something more important. Whether it’s in Germany, whether it is in France, or in the United Kingdom. Give me one European country whose government is known for taking a principled vocal position on human rights? The examples are too few and far between.”
Agnès Callamard, former special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings at the United Nations and now newly appointed secretary general of Amnesty International
The media was full of headlines about Bristol rioters protesting the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill who were using the slogan ‘Kill The Bill’.
As always the case, the news reporting was slanted and one-sided.
For those who wish to know what really happened from the side of the demonstrators, the blog recommends this link for an account of what actually took place.
What actually Happened in Bristol – and How a Narrative is Built (libcom.org)
The Court of Appeal has overturned the convictions of 14 men sentenced for their involvement in pickets in 1972. Two dozen trade unionists who picketed during the national builders’ strike were charged with offences including unlawful assembly, conspiracy to intimidate and affray.
The actor Ricky Tomlinson was convicted and jailed for two years. He said: “Whilst it is only right that these convictions are overturned, it is a sorry day for British justice. My thoughts today are with my friend and comrade Des Warren.”
Six of the 14 who brought the action have since died, including Dennis Warren, who was jailed for three years.
Arthur Murray, who was convicted of affray and unlawful assembly and sentenced to six months, said: “We were innocent all along, yet it has taken us nearly 50 years to clear our names.” He added: “Serious questions need to be asked about the role of the building industry bosses in our convictions and the highest offices of government who all had a hand in our trial and conviction. Make no mistake, our convictions were a political witch-hunt.”
Tomlinson echoed his remarks, saying: “We were brought to trial at the apparent behest of the building industry bosses, the Conservative government and ably supported by the secret state. This was a political trial not just of me, and the Shrewsbury pickets – but was a trial of the trade union movement.”
Terry Renshaw said: “The police and the prosecuting authorities used every trick in the book to secure guilty verdicts, even if it meant trampling over our rights and manipulating the evidence.”
In June 1972, trade unionists called the UK’s first-ever national builders’ strike in protest against pay, unjust employment practices and dangerous conditions on sites. Trade unionists travelled to demonstrate from one site to another and in September six coach-loads of strikers demonstrated in Shrewsbury and Telford. Police arrested none of the demonstrators that day but five months later the picketers were charged and subsequently convicted.
The numbers of young people out of work in the UK have reached new highs – with young people accounting for nearly two-thirds of job losses since the pandemic.
437,000 fewer 16- to 24-year-olds were in paid employment, a 10% fall in 12 months. In all, more than half of under-25s have been furloughed or lost their jobs.
“There’s nearly half a million fewer young people in work than a year ago,” said Laura-Jane Rawlings, the chief executive of Youth Employment UK. “The pandemic has simply raised the barriers and put the hopes of thousands of young people on hold.”
It would take 1,000 new jobs and training places a day to get back to pre-pandemic levels by October 2021 and avoid a 50% rise in the numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training.
“The government needs to be honest with young people. We simply cannot create enough job opportunities,” said Leigh Middleton, the chief executive of National Youth Agency. “Without concerted action, we fear youth unemployment could rise to over 1 million when furlough ends.”
Students who would normally have worked in the hospitality sector have not signed on as unemployed, they have disappeared from the employment register altogether. This has the effect, along with other young people who give up trying to find a job, of bringing down total participation rate to 79% in the three months to January. Then there are the number of workers not being paid while their job is on hold.
Tony Wilson, the head of the Institute for Employment Studies, explained that new hiring by companies outside the very largest firms is continuing to fall back and all of the improvement is being driven by fewer people leaving work rather than more people getting new jobs.
“This is proving to be a disaster for young people, who now account for nearly two-thirds of the fall in employment and none of the recent growth,” he said.
The lockdown and government support schemes mask a weakening labour market and when the furlough scheme ends in September, a spike in unemployment will follow.
Almost two-thirds of people who lost jobs in UK pandemic are under 25 | Unemployment | The Guardian
Water is the basis of all life. Without water we have no health, wealth, equality, or education. But, do governments adequately prioritize clean water? The answer, in far too many parts of the world, is a resounding no.
Globally, there are still 2.2 billion people without access to safe drinking water and 4.2 billion who don’t have a safe place to go the toilet.
Girls and women are forced to continue the time-consuming, back-breaking work of fetching water, and are left exposed to the indignity and dangers of going to the toilet in fields and streets.
As many as one in four — 24% — of health care facilities lack basic water services,
One in ten — 10% — have no sanitation service, and one in three — 32% — lack hand hygiene facilities at points of care.
Data has shown that even where there is adequate washing facilities, frontline health care workers can be 12-times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 compared with individuals in the general community.
Why Water & Sanitation Systems are Vital for the Economy | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was “shocking” how little had been done to avert an entirely predictable “catastrophic moral failure” to ensure the equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide.
The gap was “growing every single day, and becoming more grotesque every day,” he told a press conference.
“Countries that are now vaccinating younger, healthy people at low risk of disease are doing so at the cost of the lives of health workers, older people and other at-risk groups in other countries,” Tedros said. “The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage. It’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.”
He continued, “Some countries are racing to vaccinate their entire populations — while other countries have nothing.”
Tedros said rich countries were giving themselves a false sense of security. The UN health agency chief said the more transmission of the virus, the more variants are likely to emerge — and the more of those that spring up, the more likely they are to evade vaccines.
Tedros said countries were in a race against time to bring down transmission and wealthy nations needed to match their promises of solidarity with action on getting vaccines to poorer nations.
“Unless we end this pandemic as soon as possible, it can keep us hostage for more years to come,” he warned.
56 percent of the doses have been administered in high-income countries accounting for 16 percent of the global population. Just 0.1 percent have been administered in the 29 lowest-income countries, home to nine percent of the global population.
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan said nations were grasping at straws, thinking that simply administering lots of vaccine doses would be a “golden solution” to end the crisis.
“I’m sorry: it’s not,” Ryan said. “The disease is on the march again in countries where we have an opening up, natural fatigue, low vaccination coverage, poor surveillance and control measures in place,” he said, calling the combination “a recipe for larger outbreaks”.
“I’m afraid we are investing way too much in this (vaccines) as the only solution to fix our problems,” he said.
Covid-19: Growing global vaccine inequity ‘grotesque’, says WHO (france24.com)
Don’t be fooled by crocodile tears about the reduction of army numbers and other cuts. The UK is beefing up its military forces for a global role, not defence of these islands.
As part of the military restructure, the Royal Marines will be transformed into a new Future Commando Force, taking on many of the traditional tasks of the special forces – the SAS and SBS (Special Air Service and Special Boat Service).
The force will receive more than £200m of direct investment over the next decade to carry out maritime security operations and to “pre-empt and deter sub-threshold activity, and counter state threats”.
Space is another area of investment with the Ministry of Defence to prioritise more than £6.6bn for research and development over the next four years.
A £2bn investment in the the Tempest Future Combat Air System over the next four yearsAn increase in drones. Sir Mike Wigston, the head of the RAF, predicted that by 2040, 80% of “planes flying on operations” in combat zones such as Syria and Iraq would “not have a human in them”. Air chiefs also want to develop “high energy” weapons – a form of laserWhile a third of the army’s Challenger tanks will be scrapped, the remaining 148 will be upgraded, at a cost of £1.3bn. £1.5bn to be invested over the next decade to build a “digital backbone” to share and exploit vast amounts of data and the creation of the National Cyber Force.
A new analysis by IRS researchers and academics published Monday morning estimates that the richest 1% of U.S. households don’t report around 21% of their income, often using complex tax avoidance strategies that allow them to outmaneuver the federal government’s increasingly rare audits of the wealthy.
Led by two IRS researchers as well as Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, the new paper (pdf) finds the richest households’ unreported income “correspond to undetected sophisticated evasion” such as offshoring, pass-through businesses, and other avoidance tactics.
The authors write. “We estimate that 36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1% and that collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually.”
When the IRS actually conducts random audits they “do not capture most tax evasion through offshore accounts and pass-through businesses, both of which are quantitatively important at the top,” according to the new analysis. As a result, the paper’s authors note, the incomes of the wealthiest people in the U.S. and the country’s overall inequality are significantly underestimated.
Reck told the Wall Street Journal ahead of the paper’s official release that the findings show “there is more revenue than you might have thought at the very top.”
Half of British workers had a real-terms pay cut in the year to autumn 2020, despite official figures showing the fastest earnings growth in almost two decades, research by the Resolution Foundation suggests. The thinktank said official figures on average weekly earnings had been “hugely disrupted” by the large number of workers furloughed, and that the headline rates were “too good to be true”.
Data showing average weekly earnings growth of 4.5% in late 2020 – its highest level since 2002 – did not reflect how pay packets had changed, it said, and was distorted by changes in the makeup of the workforce, with many in low-paid work losing jobs during the pandemic.
Hannah Slaughter of the Resolution Foundation said:
“Sadly, the story of bumper pay packets from official headline data is too good to be true. In reality, half of all workers experienced a real-terms pay cut last autumn, with pay growth deteriorating most among those who have been hit hardest by the pandemic – the young, the low-paid and those working in social sectors like hospitality.”
The foundation said its research indicated that the median annual pay rise was 0.6% last autumn, which once inflation was taken into account meant half of workers had experienced a 0.2% pay cut over 12 months.
The median pay rise did improve, increasing to 1.8% in the final quarter of 2020, but this was still the second lowest rise since mid-2013, and worth just 1% after inflation according to the study.
The research found sharp falls in pay growth for young workers, and said this was particularly concerning as it could damage their earnings prospects for years to come. Among 18- to 24-year-olds annual pay growth fell from 12.3% in 2019 to 6% in 2020, the researchers said, while for 25- to 34-year-olds the drop was from 4.9% to 1.4%. On top of this young workers were more likely to have been affected by furlough and job losses, they added.
“The economy experienced its biggest recession in over 300 years last year, with a third of private sector workers put on furlough at its peak, and yet somewhat implausibly pay growth reached its highest level in almost 20 years.” Hannah Slaughter explained.
Half of British workers had real-terms pay cut in 2020, study says | Pay | The Guardian
A new analysis published in Ambio, a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, explains:
“We now know that society needs to be viewed as part of the biosphere, not separate from it. Depending on the collective actions of humanity, future conditions could be either beneficial or hostile for human life and wellbeing in the Anthropocene biosphere. Whether humanity has the collective wisdom to navigate the Anthropocene to sustain a livable biosphere for people and civilizations, as well as for the rest of life with which we share the planet, is the most formidable challenge facing humanity.”
The new report focuses on the unprecedented environmental degradation on the one hand and a situation in which vast economic inequality has created a political situation in which taking the necessary steps to alter humanity’s trajectory has proven almost impossible.
The study consider:
“The Anthropocene is characterized by a tightly interconnected world operating at high speeds with hyper-efficiency in several dimensions. These dimensions include the globalized food production and distribution system, extensive trade and transport systems, strong connectivity of financial and capital markets, internationalized supply and value chains, widespread movements of people, social innovations, development and exchange of technology, and widespread communication capacities.”
“In a single human lifetime, largely since the 1950s, we have grossly simplified the biosphere, a system that has evolved over 3.8 billion years. Now just a few plants and animals dominate the land and oceans,” said lead author Carl Folke, director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and chair of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a statement Monday. “Our actions are making the biosphere more fragile, less resilient and more prone to shocks than before.”
According to Line Gordon, co-author of the report and director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, “This is a decisive decade for humanity. In this decade we must bend the curves of greenhouse gas emissions and shocking biodiversity loss. This means transforming what we eat and how we farm it, among many other transformations.”
Co-author Victor Galaz, deputy director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said: “As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so too does the hope that technologies such as artificial intelligence will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. That will only happen however, if we act forcefully in ways that redirects the direction of technological change towards planetary stewardship and responsible innovation.”
Scientists Say Humanity Now at ‘Dawn of What Must Be a Transformative Decade’ | Common Dreams News
And that is the sad thing in the view of our blog. Despite insights into the reality of climate change and the toll upon humanity and nature, the experts, the scientists, those who should know better, still think in terms of capitalist solutions. They dare not suggest that socialism and its steady-state, zero-growth sustainable mode of production is the alternative.
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