“Our demands most moderate are – We only want the earth!” – James Connolly

Another of those special annual events, a special designated to mobilise public opinion and it was first observed in 1970 – now over half a century ago. Its longevity is a sign of its lack of success. Or planet is not ruled by sentiment nor social  justice but by power. Capitalists control presidents and parliaments. They ignore the opinions of the peoples of the world. They neglect organisations that have been established to protect the Earth. Their end determines their actions; their economic laws supersede all others. We need to recognise that we’re fighting capitalism.

 On this Earth Day and in the year of the upcoming COP26 summit we are faced with perhaps the most serious problem ever to confront the human race and yet most scientists are still continuing to support a system of society which is the basic cause of the problem. If these experts were forced to sit down and apply their techniques of scientific investigation to human society and its evolution. they would come up with only one answer: the establishment of a system of society where production will be for direct use, goods and services will be free to all, and where all will have a direct democratic input because we are all social equals. Yet for them socialism is unthinkable, something utterly impracticable and unjustifiable but placing ones faith and trust and hope in the very agency that created the climate crisis is not at all illusory.

They turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the words of the visionary and humanitarian scientist, the late Carl Sagan:

“Humans have evolved gregariously. We delight in each other’s company; we care for one another. We cooperate. Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?”

The scientific world full understands the consequences of no change and business-as-usual. Climate change will wreak its havoc on the basics of life: vital resources that include food, water, land, and energy. This will be devastating. the future effects of climate change to predict the following with reasonable confidence. Rising sea levels will in the next half-century erase many coastal areas, destroying large cities, critical infrastructure (including roads, railways, ports, airports, pipelines, refineries, and power plants), and prime agricultural land. Diminished rainfall and prolonged droughts will turn once-verdant crop–lands into dust bowls, reducing food output and turning millions into climate refugees. Extreme weather events, severe storms and intense heat-waves will kill crops, ignite forest fires, cause floods, and destroy critical infrastructure. No one can predict for sure how much will be lost as a result of this onslaught. But it is already clear that we are now heading to-wards a world of chaos.

Countless corporations have co-opted Earth Day for their  PR messages. It has become just another marketing opportunity for “ethical capitalism” by “going green.” The sad truth behind this laudable concern for the environment, is it is the only way capitalism can think of doing anything and that is by making loads of money out of it. Green capitalism’s basic idea is that if we just price the environment correctly, traded carbon credits on the stock-exchange — creating new markets for techno-fixes and monetarising “Nature” itself then everyone and the environment will win. Capitalist culture has ridden rough–shod over biological and cultural diversity and has impoverished both people and the environment and yet we are to believe it is the solution to global warming. Pricing something is not the same as valuing it. Monetarising something does not express its use value, only its exchange value. Capitalism is bound to come into conflict with nature. It cannot go green because no business will take action which endangers their profits, just as no government will pass legislation that puts their capitalists at a disadvantage to its foreign rivals. True, it might be argued that international measures have been and can be taken to solve the worst environmental problems, from the banning of the pesticide DDT to the reduced the use of CFCs. However, energy production and global warming are far different, being integrated as closely as they could be in capitalist production in general. Combating them would not be a mere matter of disrupting the manufacture of aerosols or weed–killers, but of changing something which is part and parcel of the capitalist system and on which all companies depend.

Capitalism encourages competition which results in conflict not co-operation. Socialism will ultimately be a steady-state, zero-growth system of production and distribution and therefore can remain more in balance with the natural environment. Production will be for use, not for buying and selling on the market and needs will be determined by people and fulfilled by people.

We want the Earth – and we want it now

 As we have seen so many times climate proposals agreed with by governments are often playing with figures on paper.

After 14 hours of intensive negotiations, representatives of the EU’s member states and parliament  a new EU target of a 55% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 has been agreed and immediately described as a “farce” by environmental groups.

Wendel Trio, the director of Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, an alliance of environmental NGOs, said: “The ‘at least 55% emission reduction target for 2030’ is not in line with the Paris agreement’s ambition to limit temperature rise to 1.5C by the end of the century.” Trio said the target had been “rushed by EU lawmakers to bring something to the leaders’ summit organised by the US”. “This is definitely not the kind of climate law that will help the EU to lead the global efforts to tackle climate change,” he said.

Barbara Mariani, senior policy officer for climate and energy with the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), said the target translated to only a 52.8% cut in actual emissions from polluting sectors as the larger figure took into account emissions that could potentially be absorbed. Under current measures the EU already expects to reduce emissions by 46% of 2030.

“Today’s agreement is not a victory for climate action, it’s a farce,” Mariani said. “We are also baffled to see that the council [of member states] rejected a proposal to extend the EU’s climate neutrality target to all member states, which risks triggering lack of accountability at national level and creating a two-speed Europe in which some countries will inevitably lag behind.”

New EU target to cut carbon emissions by at least 55% disappoints experts | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

According to the report by financial news website Finbold as 2020 ended, the richest 10% of Americans possessed just under 70% of the nation’s household wealth. 

The top 10% of rich individuals accounted for 69.2% of wealth, including real estate, bank accounts, stocks, and other assets.

Nearly half of those assets are concentrated in the wealth of the top 1%, who own a combined $38.91 trillion.

Nearly $47 trillion is owned by the remaining top 9% of rich households. 

The bottom 50% of earners, meanwhile, control a combined $2.49 trillion—or 2% of U.S. household wealth.

“The lower class mainly comprises service workers who don’t have the pleasure of working from home,” Finbold editor-in-chief Oliver Scott wrote. “This group comprised the massive job cuts witnessed amid the pandemic. The middle-class individuals were able to work from home while retaining their income.”

The analysis shows a “staggering difference” between the wealthiest Americans and lower-income Americans which has grown in the last three decades, Scott wrote.

 Between the fourth quarter of 1990 and the fourth quarter of 2020, the collective wealth of the top 1% grew by 675%, from $5.02 trillion to nearly $39 trillion. 

Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom 50% grew by less than $1 trillion to just $2.49 trillion over 30 years.

Analysis Shows Richest 10% Now Own Nearly 70% of All Household Wealth in US | Common Dreams News

Yet another report describing the extreme wealth inequality that exists in the USA. The ‘bottom’ 50% has only 2% of the society’s wealth so it begs the question: what percentage of the society’s wealth does the 10% and the 1%  people produce?

The third issue of the World Socialist is out now!

It feature’s an article on COVID-19’s lab-leak hypothesis, an elaboration on Clause One of our Declaration of Principles, an article on how politicians are bourgeois puppets, a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Kronstadt Rebellion, an explanation of the power crisis that hit Texas in February, an article on the rank class inequality of our legal system, an examination of the immigration myth, another contribution to our ‘How I Became a Socialist’ series, as well as review and funnies!

The PDF version is free here:

World Socialist No. 3 (Spring 2021)

and hardcopies can be bought for $9 from Lulu.com here:

World Socialist No. 3 (Spring 2021)

Feedback’s always appreciated 

 In the three years since large-scale protests in their country triggered a complex social and political crisis, 108,000 Nicaraguans have been forced to flee their country since 2018, with 85,000 of them seeking refuge in Costa Rica. 

“While the needs of the Nicaraguans continue to grow, the world’s attention span seems to shorten,” said Milton Moreno, UNHCR Representative in Costa Rica. ”Without a prompt and adequate response, we risk yet another situation of completely preventable and unnecessary suffering.”

Assessments in the country showed that pandemic-related restrictions have forced many Nicaraguan refugees and asylum-seekers to go hungry, eating only once a day or sometimes not at all. Unemployment has soared, leading many to borrow money or work informally in exchange for food.

However, funding for the response is falling short. UNHCR’s operation in Costa Rica has received only 11 per cent of the US$32 million needed to help refugees meet their most basic needs and support the authorities to expedite processing of asylum claims.

“Costa Rica and UNHCR cannot address these challenges alone. We call on the international community to help us help the refugees,” added Moreno.

UNHCR calls for more support for Nicaraguans forced to flee – Nicaragua | ReliefWeb

In 1994 under the Bill Clinton administration, the annual border and immigration budget was $1.5bn, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In 2020, the combined budget of its superseding agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), exceeded $25bn. That is a 16-fold increase.

Another way to look at the scope of this money juggernaut are the 105,000 contracts, totaling $55bn, that CBP and Ice have given private industry – including Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, G4S, Deloitte and CoreCivic, among others – to develop the border and immigration enforcement apparatus. That is worth more than the total cumulative number of border and immigration budgets from 1975 to 2003. That’s 28 years combined amounting to $52bn. 

The companies can also give campaign contributions to key politicians and lobby during budget debates. And so we have the formula of a perpetual “border crisis”: the bigger the crisis, the more need for border infrastructure, generating more revenue.

Since the 1990s, nearly 8,000 human remains have been found in the US borderlands. The number of actual deaths is almost certainly much higher. 

The “dry corridor” describes a huge swath of territory running from Guatemala to Nicaragua that is getting dryer and dryer as a direct result of global warming. According to an estimate from the World Food Programme, this has left 1.4 million farmers in severe crisis. The back-to-back hurricanes in late 2020, in particular, displaced countless people. 

The United States has produced nearly 700 times more carbon emissions than El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras combined since 1900. You might think the USA would be ethically obligated to help undo the damage. Instead, as with other large historic greenhouse gas emitters, it is at the global forefront of militarizing its borders.

Instead of truly confronting the problems that we face as a planet – such as climate change, wealth inequalities in which 2,000 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, and runaway pandemics where the health of people and peoples across borders become intimately interconnected – the solution somehow always becomes more border walls, more surveillance technologies and more suffering. 

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls worldwide. Now there are 70, two-thirds created since 9/11.

Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign received three times more campaign contributions from the border industry than did Donald Trump’s. While the president has called for a reversal of Trumpian policies, he is far from challenging a border-industrial complex.

A lucrative border-industrial complex keeps the US border in constant ‘crisis’ | US immigration | The Guardian

In an open letter published  to support the UN Call for Action to Avert Famine in 2021, hundreds of aid organisations from around the world said: “People are not starving – they are being starved.”

Warning that “history will judge us all by the actions we take today”, the aid groups added that people were “being starved by conflict and violence; by inequality; by the impacts of climate change; by the loss of land, jobs or prospects; by a fight against Covid-19 that has left them even further behind”.

They said millions of people in Yemen, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Honduras, Venezuela, Nigeria, Haiti, Central African Republic, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Sudan faced starvation and appealed to governments to respond to increasing levels of hunger, stressing that billions of pounds in investment was urgently needed. At least $5.5bn (£3.95bn) is needed in food and agricultural assistance to avert famine, while millions more is needed to provide healthcare, clean water and other essential services. The groups warned, however, that funding had dwindled and would not be enough by itself. 

The organisations including the International Council of Voluntary Agencies and the World Food Programme (WFP) said: “Girls and boys, men and women, are being starved by conflict and violence; by inequality; by the impacts of climate change; by the loss of land, jobs of prospects; by a fight against Covid-19 that has left them even further behind.”

At the beginning of the year, the WFP and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned that up to 270 million people did not have enough food or were at high risk of going hungry.

More than 34 million people were on the brink of starving, they said, and may fall into famine without immediate action. Meanwhile, in Yemen, South Sudan and Burkina Faso, 155,000 people are already living in areas with famine or famine-likely conditions.

The groups said. “It is imperative that we raise our collective voices to secure the international attention this cause deserves before it is too late,” they added.

‘People are not starving, they’re being starved’: millions at risk of famine, NGOs warn | Global development | The Guardian

The SOYMB blog can only ask, what so special about this year? Such inequality and deprivation has been perennial and the letter could have been issued at anytime in the past.

 China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority and other Turkic Muslims in the northwest region of Xinjiang, and is responsible for “policies of mass detention, torture, and cultural persecution, among other offenses”, Human Rights Watch has said in a new report.

“Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots” documents a “range of abuses” that also include enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, separation of families, forced returns to China, forced labour, sexual violence and violations of reproductive rights. As many as a million people have been detained in 300 to 400 facilities, including “political education” camps, pretrial detention centres and prisons, the report said. Meanwhile, children whose parents have been detained are sometimes placed in state institutions. Since 2017, the Chinese government has also “used various pretexts to damage or destroy” two-thirds of mosques in the region.

Since 2017, when Beijing intensified its crackdown, arrests in Xinjiang accounted for 21 percent of all arrests in China, despite the region accounting for just 1.5 percent of the population, the report said. Arrests in the region increased by 306 percent in the last five years as compared to the first five years.

China’s treatment of Uighurs is ‘crimes against humanity’: Report | Human Rights News | Al Jazeera

 Britain’s birthrate is falling.

The Economic and Social Research Council-funded Centre for Population Change is predicting a “decline over the next three years leading to significantly fewer births annually compared to pre-pandemic”. Birthrates were already dropping to “historically low levels” pre-Covid, lower than in the 1930s depression. Without official figures yet, the centre has been counting pregnant women attending 12-week scans. Holding the population steady needs a birthrate of 2.1 babies per woman. That had already fallen to 1.6 last year in England and Wales – but now it’s predicted that it could collapse to 1.45 by 2023.

A rapidly ageing country is fraught with economic problems ahead, where the taxes of fewer people of working age pay for the pensions and care of the old, neglecting the needs of the young. 

The number of babies born in 2019 was down a startling 12.2% on 2012. 

Some expected a Covid baby boom, but the Centre for Population Change is sceptical: parents have been under extreme stress, home schooling while holding down jobs and without other family support – plus there has been fear of catching Covid while pregnant and 200,000 postponed weddings. Young people retreated to live with parents to save rent while working from home or after losing jobs. Without a secure roof and certainty of food on the table, people dare not have babies.

Some other countries face even lower birthrates: Japan, Italy and Spain expect their populations to halve by the end of the century. Immigration has plugged the gap so far, but this government’s policies and Brexit make Britain less attractive.

A dearth of babies is no answer to solving the climate crisis.

Britain’s falling birthrate will damage our society – and it’s not just Covid to blame | Population | The Guardian

There was a “relentless” intensification of the climate crisis in 2020, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

Last year was ranked as the hottest on record, in a tie with 2016 and 2019, despite the cooling effect of the cyclical natural climate phenomenon, La Niña. Without this, 2020 would most likely have been the hottest year yet. The decade 2011-20 was the hottest on record.

The coronavirus pandemic made the accelerating impacts of global heating even worse for millions of people. But the temporary dip in carbon emissions due to lockdowns had no discernible impact on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, the WMO report said.

Extreme weather events broke records across the world, from hurricanes and cyclones in the US and India, heatwaves in Australia and the Arctic, floods in large parts of Africa and Asia, and wildfires in the US.

“All the key climate and impacts information in this report highlight relentless, continuing climate change, an increasing occurrence and intensification of extreme events, and severe losses and damage, affecting people, societies and economies,” said Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary general.

“This is the year for action,” said the UN head, António Guterres. “The climate is changing, and the impacts are already too costly for people and the planet. Countries need to submit, well ahead of Cop26, ambitious plans to cut global emissions by 45% by 2030.”

The report also found that in 2020:

1.

80% of the oceans experienced at least one marine heatwave, while record heat accumulated in the seas, which absorb 90% of heat resulting from human activities.

2.

Sea ice in the Arctic reached its second lowest minimum on record, while hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice were lost in Greenland and Antarctica, helping to push up sea level.

3.

Severe flooding hit large parts of Africa and Asia, helping trigger a locust plague in the Horn of Africa.

4.

Extreme drought affected many parts of South America in 2020, with the estimated farming losses near $3bn in Brazil alone, with further losses in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

5.

The largest wildfires ever recorded burned in the US, while Australia broke heat records, including a temperature of 48.9°C in western Sydney.

6.

The north Atlantic hurricane season had its largest number of named storms on record with 30, and a record 12 made landfall in the US.

7.

Cyclone Amphan hit India and Bangladesh and was the costliest tropical cyclone on record for the north Indian Ocean, while Typhoon Goni which crossed the Philippines was one of the most intense cyclones ever to hit land.