“In just the last six months, there have been 12.6 million people internally displaced around the world and over 80% of these forced displacements have been caused by disasters, most of which are triggered by climate and weather extremes,” said Helen Brunt of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

“Asia suffers much more than any other region from climate disaster-related displacements,” noted Brunt, IFRC’s Asia Pacific Migration and Displacement coordinator. “These upheavals are taking a terrible toll on some of the poorest communities already reeling from the economic and social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The new report, entitled Responding to Disasters and Displacement in a Changing Climate (pdf), draws data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. According to the IDMC, about 2.3 million displacements over the past six months are related to conflict compared with 10.3 million due to disasters.

The IFRC has responded to various humanitarian needs across Asia, with case studies about assisting communities affected by drought in Afghanistan; seasonal cyclones and monsoon rains, which lead to flooding and landslides, in Bangladesh; and a dzud, a term for extreme winter conditions that cause mass livestock loss, in Mongolia.

“We are seeing an alarming trend of people displaced by more extreme weather events such as Typhoon Goni, the world’s most ferocious storm last year, that smashed into the Philippines,” said Brunt. “Three storms hit the Philippines in as many weeks, leaving over three million people destitute.”

“Things are getting worse as climate change aggravates existing factors like poverty, conflict, and political instability,” Brunt told Reuters. “The compounded impact makes recovery longer and more difficult: people barely have time to recover and they’re slammed with another disaster.”

An analysis released last year by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics & Peace found that as the global population climbs toward 10 billion by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace about 10% of humanity.

Climate Crisis Displaced Over 10 Million People in Past Six Months: Red Cross | Common Dreams News

The Paris Commune was a radical  and revolutionary movement that took charge of Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871 when the Franco-Prussian War led to the collapse of the Second French Empire. The Commune refused to accept the authority of the new Third Republic government. The Communards controlled Paris for two months, until it was eventually suppressed in “The Bloody Week” beginning on 21 May 1871.

 Marx celebrated the Paris Commune of 1871 on the grounds that it was ‘a Revolution against the State itself’. 

Some so-called Marxists insist that Marx and Engels opinion about capturing the State changed with the Paris Commune and will frequently quote from ‘The Civil War in France’:

“[The Paris Commune]… had shown that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” 

But Engels specifically points out specifically that this quote “is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes.”

This, for instance, is what Marx write about the Paris Commune of 1871:

“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms  . . . Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the official of all other branches of the Administration…Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsive and revocable”

The Commune was an instance of majority control based upon democratic elections. There was no suppression of the newspapers or the propaganda of the minority, and no denial of their right to vote. The Communards, having once obtained control of the State, set about democratising the machinery of legislation and administration. For example, they filled all positions of administration, justice, etc., through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by. their constituents. They also paid for all services at the workmen’s rate of pay. This was an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

 Marx and Engels never possessed any contempt for democracy. They did not wish to destroy it, but on the contrary sought to enlarge and perfect it.



 Engels in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s Civil War in France: it was a ‘new and truly democratic’ form of government. It showed how the ‘transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states’, could be avoided. And the means, it is interesting to note, were:

(i) ‘election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time, by the same electors’ of all administrative, judicial and educational officials;

(ii) ‘an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism’ by reducing the wages of the high officials to the level of those of the workers.

 Reclaiming…

In a blinking moment a life is lost,

Blow struck in anger or calculation

Delivers a blow of devastation

And all must bear some measure of the cost.

The cry goes up, ‘Reclaim the streets!’ But then,

Reclaim the homes where too many blows fall,

Or those police cells when officers fail

To be colour blind. It is also men

And boys and girls of all ethnicities,

When the blow is by bomb, bullet or shell

Dispatching them not to heaven, but hell:

Reclaim villages and towns and cities.

Reclaim a world where all such blows will stall,

Where welfare of one is the welfare of all.

D.A.

 The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations,

The effects of burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas from factories, cars and other sources has long been evident. From the 1960s a mass of historical documents from corporate archives at libraries in the US and Canada, scientific journals and paperwork released in legal cases shows the oil industry had begun to grasp the damage to health caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same playbook – first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and then they delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who has studied the history of fossil-fuel companies and climate change.

In an internal technical report in 1968, Shell went further, warning that air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health” and acknowledging the oil industry “reluctantly” must accept that cars “are by far the greatest sources of air pollution”. 

In 1971, Esso, a forerunner to Exxon, sampled particles in New York City and found, for the first time, the air was rife with tiny fragments of aluminum, magnesium and other metals. Esso scientists noted that gases from industrial smokestacks were “hot, dirty and contain high concentrations of pollutants” and suggested further testing was needed for symptoms including “eye irritation, excess coughing, or bronchial effects”.

By 1980, Imperial Oil had outlined plans to investigate incidences of cancers and “birth defects among industry worker offspring.” Esso experts, meanwhile, raised the “possibility for improved particulate control” in new vehicle designs to reduce the emission of harmful pollution.

Following a further major report in 1993, known as the Harvard “six cities” study, which found air pollution was spurring deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, pressure began to mount on the US Environmental Protection Agency to set pollution limits for the smallest particles, known as PM2.5 as they measure less than 2.5 micrometers across, or about a 30th of the diameter of a human hair. 

Arden Pope, an air pollution expert at Brigham Young University who said he got a “lot of pushback” from industry over his work, which includes the six cities study. “But the evidence has grown dramatically and, boy, it’s just hard to deny now,” he said. It’s overwhelming.”

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a US oil and gas industry group, promptly told a congressional hearing in 1997 the link between air pollution and mortality was “weak”, before Exxon pushed out its own study claiming “there is no substantive basis” for believing PM2.5 was causing more deaths.

This undermining of air-pollution science is likened by some researchers to efforts by tobacco companies to muddy the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer.

“The fossil-fuel industry was sowing uncertainty to maintain business as usual, and in all likelihood they were collaborating with other groups, such as the tobacco industry,” said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law. “When you look at these historical documents in context it becomes clear that the oil and gas industry has a playbook they’ve used again and again for an array of pollutants. They used it around climate change but absolutely we are seeing it around PM2.5 as well. It’s the same pattern.”

Undeterred, oil and gas interests have sought to stymie tighter standards on air pollution while mobilizing an effort to cast doubt over this science. A gathering called by the Heartland Institute, a conservative thinktank, in 2006 on clean-air rules helped set the tone – two speakers were from Exxon and the title of one session was “Uncertainty of NAAQS (National Ambient Air Quality Standards) Health Science”.

Industry-funded consultants published studies disputing the link between emissions and deteriorating health or simply disparaged the work of other researchers. “Their goal is to undermine the scientific method, science itself,” said  George Thurston, an environmental health expert at New York University who co-authored a landmark 1987 study that found the smaller particles were far more deadly than larger fragments that could be coughed out.

“We’ve seen the oil and gas industry’s disinformation campaign come full circle with the renewed attacks on research that tells us what we’ve known for decades – air pollution kills,” said Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center

Exxon has told the EPA that estimating a risk of death from particulate matter is “unreliable and misleading” while, in 2017, API demanded the agency relax standards around nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant linked to asthma in children and higher mortality in adults from heart disease and cancer – claiming there was no proven association with harm and existing rules were “more stringent than necessary.”

The industry’s approach bore fruit during Donald Trump’s administration, where senior executives from Exxon, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and API met the then-US president in the White House. A cavalcade of clean air regulations were scaled back, such as rules to limit pollution from cars and trucks, while a so-called “transparency” rule for science risked invalidating studies based on confidential medical data, which is vital for bedrock air pollution research. Last year, in the midst of an historic pandemic of respiratory disease, Trump’s EPA decided to not strengthen standards around fine soot particles. Under Trump, Tony Cox, a researcher who received funding from API and allowed the lobby group to copy edit his findings, was named as chairman of a key EPA clean air advisory board. Cox, whose previous work has questioned the harm caused by particulates, accused EPA experts of bad science and subjectivity when they found that particles can be deadly even in low concentrations.

Right now, the residents of St James Parish, located in the heart of what is known as “cancer alley” in Louisiana are desperately resisting the operations of a petrochemical complex. In 2019 it was found that the air around the site has more cancer-causing chemicals than 99.6 percent of the country’s industrialized areas. 

Formosa Plastics Group’s director of community and government relations, Janile Parks pleads, “The entire petrochemical industry is under attack by national environmental activist groups opposed to all industrial development.” 

Resident of St James Parish accuse the state’s leading Democrats, specifically Gov. John Bel Edwards and former Rep. Cedric Richmond, of ignoring those in Cancer Alley and refusing to protect them from deadly pollution. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency recognizing there are elevated cancer risks in the area, Louisiana authorities have done little to enforce environmental regulations and elected officials who represent St. James have been largely silent about the deaths and those dying in Cancer Alley.

Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks, files reveal | Environment | The Guardian

 “The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.” – Frederick Douglass 

It is time for workers who oppose capitalism to step up and  speak up.

 Joshua Wilde and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany predicted in October they predicted that by February there would be a 15.2% decline in births. Now they see that slump extending until August. It would be the largest fall in births in more than a century, lasting longer than the effect of the 2008 recession or even the Great Depression in 1929.

 Libya has been embroiled in perpetual conflict for 10 years. Foreign powers have intervened and foreign mercenaries deployed by rival Libyan governments. The country also eventually becoming the second largest base for the so-called Islamic State jihadists. And Libya because of its chaotic condition became the the centre of the migrant route to Europe. Libya became an example of another failed state;

On March 17th 2011, the United Nations voted to intervene to stop Gaddafi killing his own people, with NATO aircraft flying more than 7,000 strike sorties against Gaddafi’s forces over the following seven months. Two senior Norwegian officials were in talks  in the Presidential Palace in Tripoli with Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam,  when the UN resolution was passed in New York. They had to be hurriedly driven across the border into Tunisia for their own safety, with the first NATO airstrikes imminent.

In February 2011 Libya followed other Arab countries into uprising, with tens of thousands taking to the streets demanding an end to Gaddafi’s rule. His security forces cracked down brutally.

 In regard to negotiations, the then-Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Store, who was brokering a deal, accused France and Britain of opposing a negotiated solution. The two sides agreed to a draft text stating that Muammar Gaddafi – who had ruled Libya for 42 years – would step down and leave politics, but keep the institutions of state in place. In the end the talks fell apart and rebels, with NATO’s support, ultimately captured and killed Gaddafi.

Store explains, “Had there been in the international community a willingness to pursue this track with some authority and dedication, I believe there could have been an opening to achieve a less dramatic outcome and avoid the collapse of the Libyan state.”

Norwegian diplomats went back and forth, eventually hammering out a ‘comprehensive plan’ to end the crisis. The first line stated: “Colonel Gaddafi has decided to leave power and step aside and to end the first phase of the revolution.” Store even spoke to Saif al-Islam on the phone to confirm this plan had backing at the highest levels in Libya. 

“People very close to Gaddafi, people in the legal apparatus, in his family, supported what was on the table,” said Staale Wiig, a Norwegian biographer of Store who first uncovered the existence of the negotiations years after the war. 

They took the deal agreed in Oslo to the United States, France and Britain. Store himself accepts that the major Western nations weren’t interested in a negotiated settlement. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was reportedly keen but the other two nations weren’t interested, Store said.

“Had there been a will to do it… one could have imagined some kind of ceasefire in the military campaign to allow diplomats to move in,” Store said. “But the military operation had already lasted for eight weeks, the dynamic on the ground was changing, and frankly speaking the will to rally behind such a process was not there.”

After 2011 Libya slid into a new civil war, which lasted much of the last decade. Barack Obama later described the lack of post-conflict planning as the “worst mistake” of his presidency, with the country becoming a battleground for rival regional powers.

Store said the failure to take the 2011 negotiations seriously was made more tragic by the lost decade that followed it, in which the country became “a theatre for remote battles – other countries fighting it out to the last Libyan.”

The secret talks that nearly saved Gaddafi | The Independent

RPA –  “robotic process automation ” – are not merely robots doing repetitive mechanical tasks but sophisticated automatons armed with artificial intelligence which can substitute for financial analysts, lawyers, engineers, managers and doctors.

 The New York Times reports that a survey of executives last year found that nearly 80% of them have already put some forms of RPA in place, with an additional 16% planning to do so within three years. 

Yes, that’s 96% of corporate employers. 

Sales of the new-age automation software are booming, turning little-known providers like UiPath and Automation Anywhere into multibillion-dollar businesses intent on radically shrinking the job market here and elsewhere. 

 CEOs are speeding up the adoption of highly advanced RPAs to replace employees once assumed to be immune from displacement. As one analyst told a New York Times reporter, “With R.P.A., you can build a bot that costs $10,000 a year and take out two to four humans.”

The nationwide pandemic shutdown of offices and furloughing of employees has caused misery for millions, yet one purveyor of RPA systems approvingly notes that it has “‘massively raised awareness’ among executives about the variety of work that no longer requires human involvement.” His firm advises corporate bosses that half to two-thirds of all the tasks being done at their companies can be done by machines.

McKinsey, the world’s biggest corporate strategy consultancy, calculated in 2019 that the emerging revolution of thinking robotics would displace 37 million U.S. workers by 2030.

Now, seeing the current corporate stampede to impose RPAs on U.S. workplaces, McKinsey analysts have upped their projection to 45 million job losses by 2030.

Opinion | Robots Are Coming for Millions of Blue-Collar Jobs (commondreams.org)

 Britain could be headed for a new era of austerity, the leading tax and spending thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said after its analysis of Rishi Sunak’s budget revealed deep cuts in spending plans for Whitehall departments and local government.

Ben Zaranko, research economist at the Institute, said: “Plans can change but, as things stand, for many public services, the first half of the 2020s could feel like the austerity of the 2010s.” He explained, : “For departments not fortunate enough to be protected by a pre-existing agreement with the Treasury, the chancellor’s spending plans are even tighter than they first appeared. This poses clear and obvious challenges, not least because of the new pressures created by the pandemic.”

The IFS said, public service spending was now set to be roughly £14bn lower than planned pre-Covid. Of that, about £5bn came from lower spending on overseas aid. Some areas of spending – such as the NHS and schools – are ringfenced from cuts, but cash spending for unprotected departments would be £9bn lower than under pre-pandemic plans. After taking inflation into account, this would mean a real cut of 7.5% in 2022-23.

The IFS said Sunak’s plans implied cuts for “perennially squeezed” areas such as the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts system. “It would also mean further cuts for local government – something that would be difficult to reconcile with a coherent ‘levelling-up’ agenda.”

Britain ‘heading for new era of austerity’, thinktank warns | Tax and spending | The Guardian

 The full effect of the pandemic – and ensuing lockdowns – is just starting to become clear as countries take stock

New research focused on Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka where there has been more than 186,000 deaths so far, now adds to that tragic mortality toll, 228,000 additional deaths of children under five in these six countries due to crucial services, ranging from nutrition benefits to immunisation, being halted.