Despite all the talk and solemn pledges deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has hit the highest annual level in a decade, a new report has shown.
Between August 2020 and July 2021, the rainforest lost 10.476 square kilometers.
“Deforestation is still out of control,” Carlos Souza, a researcher at Imazon said. “Brazil is going against the global climate agenda that is seeking to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Guardian carries a story where Israel has smeared a Palestinian individual, one of the largest charities, World Vision and, of course, Hamas.
Mohammed El Halabi, a 38-year-old head of World Vision’s Gaza office, has been under Israeli detention for over five years awaiting his trial for embezzling $7.2m a year, for the past seven years, diverting the money Hamas, which he is also accused of being a secret member of. More than $1m a year had been alleged by Israeli authorities to have been delivered in cash to combat units. In total, Halabi was accused of stealing up to $50m meant for desperate Palestinians and giving it to Hamas to buy rockets and build tunnels. The Israeli government had long accused Hamas of diverting international aid intended for Gaza to fund its wars against the Jewish state. Following Halabi’s arrest many foreign governments, including Australia and Germany, stopped all funding to World Vision’s projects in Gaza. The Australians threatened to cut all funding to World Vision globally, about $40m a year. World Vision’s leaders had seen no evidence of Halabi’s alleged wrongdoings, but the Israeli accusations threatened not just their support to Palestinians but the charity’s entire future. If Hamas had indeed breached World Vision’s systems, it meant all their work was vulnerable to manipulation.
If found guilty, he faces decades in prison. The prosecution rested heavily on secret evidence, some of which even the defence team say they were not allowed to view, prompting a UN special rapporteur to condemn proceedings as “not worthy of a democratic state”. Halabi has been offered a series of plea deals, but he has rejected them all. His current lawyer claims Halabi received offers that would have led to his immediate release with time served, allowing him to return to his wife and children in Gaza. But Halabi insists he is innocent of the charges and has refused to make a deal.
The arguments in court concluded in July this year, but Halabi remains in prison awaiting a verdict, which is expected this autumn.
Israel’s case has been undermined by an independent forensic audit of World Vision’s operations, conducted by one of the world’s largest accountancy firms, which found no funds missing and no evidence of criminal activity.
Aid agencies cannot deal with Hamas for fear of falling foul of sanctions. Large aid organisations have implemented strict processes to try to prevent money being co-opted or stolen – known as aid diversion.
Itay Epshtain, a special adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council, which also provides aid in Gaza, described the rigorous mechanisms charities adopt to prevent aid diversion. “You do repeat monitoring – going back to check multiple times that if you provided a water pump or a hospital bed it is still there and operating as it should be. On top of that you have pre-planned and continuous external auditing to check how every dollar is spent.”
In Gaza there was additional scrutiny as the Israeli government and some monitor organisations routinely make “bad faith” allegations that aid is being stolen by Hamas.
The Israeli charge sheet listed 12 accusations against Halabi. Most are nearly impossible to assess without seeing the secret evidence the Israelis claimed to have. But others were easier to investigate. Halabi was accused of working with two agricultural companies, Al-Atar and Arcoma, which allegedly had ties to Hamas. The charge sheet claimed that, as head of World Vision’s Gaza office, Halabi had rigged the bidding process to ensure the two companies won “nearly all” contracts for providing food aid. Halabi and the companies then allegedly conspired to overcharge World Vision for their services and funnelled the extra cash to Hamas. World Vision total contracts with Al-Atar were worth a little over $30,000 a year for the past decade. The contracts awarded to Arcoma, amounted to about $80,000 a year. Between them, the two companies had won fewer than 50% of the bids for contracts with World Vision they entered, the organisation said.
In March 2017, the Australian government completed a review of its funding of World Vision in Gaza – it had given them $8.1m for Gaza projects between 2014 and 2016, more than 25% of World Vision’s entire Gaza budget, the charity told me. The Australian government concluded that there was no evidence any funds had been diverted.
DLA Piper and auditors from Deloitte conducted a year-long investigation. Between 20 and 30 staff worked full-time, reviewing World Vision’s operations for the five years before Halabi’s arrest.
“We have done a number of other investigations, both corporate and NGO, where we find evidence of malfeasance,” Brett Ingerman, a managing partner with DLA Piper, told me. “We know what we are looking for, we know the ways that people who are trying to divert funds generally operate. I do NGO investigations in difficult parts of the world … and I did not see anything out of the ordinary here from a control perspective,” Ingerman said.
They had “more than sufficient documentation” to complete their investigation. The team carried out more than 70 interviews, including with former and current World Vision employees, and reviewed 280,000 emails. Deloitte reviewed every payment the organisation made over five years. They found no sign of any missing funds, and no evidence Halabi was working for Hamas – in fact, they reported that he consistently sought to distance World Vision from them.
Australia and Germany quietly reinstated funding, on the basis of the report’s findings. World Vision waited for the Israeli court to drop the charges against Halabi. The case drags on.
Almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution, according to a report from Unicef.
The Unicef report said the impacts of the climate crisis were “deeply inequitable” and very likely to get worse. The top 10 countries that are at extremely high risk are only responsible for 0.5% of global emissions.
Nearly every child around the world was at risk from at least one of these impacts today, including heatwaves, floods, cyclones, disease, drought, and air pollution, the report said. But 1 billion children live in 33 countries facing three or four impacts simultaneously. The countries include India, Nigeria and the Philippines, and much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Henrietta Fore, Unicef executive director, said: “For the first time, this report gives a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire. Virtually no child’s life will be unaffected.”
She continues, ”Children are uniquely vulnerable to climate hazards. Compared to adults, children require more food and water per unit of body weight and are less able to survive extreme weather events.”
The report found 920 million children are highly exposed to water scarcity, 820 million to heatwaves, and 600 million to vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which are likely to get worse as suitable climate conditions for mosquitoes and pathogens spread.
A billion children at ‘extreme risk’ from climate impacts – Unicef | Climate change | The Guardian
An estimated £15 billion worth of homes currently sits empty in London. To put it into the perspective, that’s a little bit more than the entire GDP of Jamaica.
Camden had 1,445 homes sitting empty with a collective value of £1,156,000,000. Southwark has the most empty homes (2358) but the average property value is considerably less. The City of London has the highest proportion of long-term empty houses in Britain.
In the last issue of the World Socialist, we elaborated on Clause One of the World Socialist Movement’s Declaration of Principles, which deals with private property and the enslavement of the working class. In this issue, we’ll touch on Clause Two, which states that:
In society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess.
To reiterate from the last article: there have been two main economic classes in every mode of production following the neolithic revolution about 12,000 years ago. One class owns the means of production, along with the surplus product, and lives solely off that ownership, exploiting the labor of the other class by extracting surplus value. In society’s current mode of production — capitalism — the former class is called the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and the latter class is called the proletariat or working class. Of course, some workers can save enough money to live off for a period of time in case they get fired and some may even have relative success investing in the stock market, but if they’re forced to submit to wage-slavery again to cover living expenses once their savings have run out or their stock market dividends aren’t enough to survive on alone, then they’re still a member of the working class.
In order for a worker to continue working, their wage — on average — needs to be enough to survive on and raise children who’ll eventually replace them in the workforce, aside from their working conditions needing to be safe enough for them to survive, too. Of course, workers want much more than the bare minimum to survive, so if wages and/or working conditions aren’t adequate, the most common means for workers to collectively improve them is by forming or joining trade unions, bargaining with employers, and, if necessary, striking. At the same time, for the system to reproduce itself, capitalists — over any considerable period of time — need to recoup the production cost of each commodity — which includes the worker’s wages — as well as extract enough surplus value to reinvest on an increasing scale, as well as cover rent, interest, and profit for the capitalist’s living expenses. Of course, capitalists want their surplus value to be as high as possible and workers want their wages to be as high as possible, too, so this conflict becomes a class struggle that manifests itself in two ways: economically and politically.
The class struggle manifests itself economically through workers’ unions bargaining with employers for better conditions or striking if that fails, as I mentioned earlier, but it also manifests itself politically through the election of representatives to legislatures with jurisdiction over a given area. Election campaigns can be expensive, so much of the average candidate’s funds come directly and indirectly from capitalists, who — by various legal means — exchange funds for political favors and allegiances. This allows our legislatures to act more or less as employers’ unions, with the vast majority of political candidates being subservient to the whims of the capitalist class, even if their allegiances may lie with different factions of it. This has led to most major political parties across the world being filled with representatives who figuratively hold water for capitalists.
Many workers realize this and decide to stop voting because they see no meaningful difference between candidates who are ultimately indebted to the same capitalist minority. I understand the frustration that leads to this decision, but I think the mainly anarchist position of abstaining from voting under all circumstances is fundamentally misguided. Yes, it’s bad for workers that most major political parties across the world are completely subject to their national capitalist classes because that makes it much more difficult to effect any meaningful change for the workers of each country. However, it’s also good in a sense because if a politician claims to stand for the working class and chooses to run as a member of the US Democratic Party, for example, then genuine socialists who want to fight for the emancipation of the working class will know that they’re either delusional or grifting. Yes, an independent socialist party’s bound to face more obstacles, but — just like we unionize for workers alone on the economic field — we need to unionize for workers alone on the political field, only voting for vetted socialists who are part of a genuine socialist party (or writing ‘SOCIALISM’ across our ballot if one isn’t an option) if we ever want to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
In the next issue, we’ll cover Principle Three, which deals with the emancipation of the working class.
Jordan Levi
Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale University, in a series of tweets on Wednesday, pointed out.
“More for me. None for you. America first. This is American Covid-19 vaccine policy now,” Gonsalves lamented. “It doesn’t have to be this way. In a global emergency, you do not hoard resources for yourself, stockpile extra just in case people need a boost, while others die for lack of even one shot, letting variants flourish.”
William Parker and Govind Persad respectively serve as assistant director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics, argue that Biden’s decision to roll out booster shots for the entire U.S. public as soon as next month is a mistake, particularly as just over 1% of people in low-income nations have received at least one vaccine dose.
“Not only does it risk depriving millions throughout the world of the vaccine, but there also is no evidence that additional shots meaningfully reduce death or hospitalization from Covid-19 for healthy Americans.”
To illustrate the massive inoculation gap between rich and poor countries, the pair noted that the 120 million additional mRNA doses the U.S. will likely need for its nationwide booster campaign would be sufficient “to vaccinate the population of Covid-decimated Botswana 26 times over.”
“High-income countries have used bilateral contracts with vaccine manufacturers to achieve vaccination rates as much as 50 times that of low-income countries. A campaign for boosters could lock in that apartheid,” the pair continued. “This profound global inequity would not only be a humanitarian disaster, but also a significant long-term risk for Americans, as scientists agree that accelerating global vaccination is the only way to prevent the formation of deadly new variants.”
According to new research, G7 countries are on track to stockpile nearly a billion extra vaccine doses by the end of 2021. Meanwhile, if current inequities persist, many poor nations may not achieve adequate vaccination rates until 2024 or later.
“Anyone who thinks that vaccinating Americans with a third dose is not going to come at the expense of getting the vaccine to other places in the world—if that’s what you think, you’re just kidding yourself,” Scott Hensley, a vaccines researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Institute for Immunology, explained.
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, said during a news conference on Thursday that “moves by some countries globally to introduce booster shots threaten the promise of a brighter tomorrow for Africa,” which has fully vaccinated just 2% of its population. “As some richer countries hoard vaccines,” said Moeti, “they make a mockery of vaccine equity.”
“Feeling sick like a dog and laid up in bed, but not in the hospital with severe Covid, is not a good enough reason for boosters,” Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center, told the NYT. “We’ll be better protected by vaccinating the unvaccinated here and around the world.”
Experts in public health have stressed that the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly control over vaccine production—made possible by an international patent regime that rich countries are choosing to uphold—has artificially constrained global vaccine supply. When supply is limited, rich countries’ hoarding of vaccines affects the number of doses available to poor nations.
Experts Warn Rich Nations’ Push for Boosters Could Lock in Vaccine ‘Apartheid’ | Common Dreams News
We may not agree 100% with George Monbiot on everything but he often says things that we can agree upon.
… On behalf of commercial interests, governments are all too happy to be constrained…
…It represents an outrageous curtailment of political choice, with which governments like ours are entirely comfortable. I’m not sure how we can escape such agreements, but government lawyers should be all over this issue, looking for a way out. Otherwise, future corporate profits remain officially more important than life on Earth…
…The global emergency requires a new politics, but it is nowhere in sight. Governments still fear lobby groups more than they fear the collapse of our living systems. For tiny and temporary political gains, they commit us to vast and irreversible consequences…
…No government, even the most progressive, is yet prepared to contemplate the transformation we need: a global programme that places the survival of humanity and the rest of life on Earth above all other issues. We need not just new policy, but a new ethics. We need to close the gap between knowing and doing. But this conversation has scarcely begun.
If only George and others could be more visionary when it comes to understanding the limits of capitalism and the urgent and vital need for world socialism.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the toll of the war on terror is tremendous: minimally 801,000 deaths (with more on the way) since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
More than 300,000 civilians across those and other countries have been killed and an estimated nearly 37 million more displaced. Around 15,000 U.S. forces, including soldiers and private contractors, have also died. Untold scores of devastating injuries have occurred as well to millions of civilians, opposition fighters, and American troops. In total, it’s estimated that, by 2020, these post-9/11 wars had cost America $6.4 trillion.
750 American military bases overseas are now scattered across 81 countries.
There are U.S. military bases in every Persian Gulf country except Iran and Yemen: seven in Oman, three in the UAE, 11 in Saudi Arabia, seven in Qatar, 12 in Bahrain, 10 in Kuwait, and those six still in Iraq. Any of these could potentially contribute to the sorts of “over the horizon” wars the U.S. now seems committed to in countries like Iraq, just as its bases in Kenya and Djibouti are enabling it to launch airstrikes in Somalia.
Camp Blaz, the first Marine Corps base to be built on the Pacific Island of Guam since 1952, has been under construction since 2020. Even more new bases are being proposed for the nearby Pacific Islands of Palau, Tinian, and Yap.
1,100 union coal miners in Brookwood, Alabama, have been on an unfair labor practices strike against Warrior Met Coal for over five months. The mainstream media has barely made a mention of the strike.
There is a promise in trade unions. Not just better wages, or better working conditions, but a better society. What unions offer to working people is a vision of the world in which your enemy does not have to be someone of a different race or from another land.
Unable to achieve the media headlines due to Afghanistan news, the earthquake in Haiti has inflicted more pain upon the already suffering Haitian people.
The earthquake killed more than 2,000 people and injured almost 10,000 in Haiti had left the Caribbean nation “on its knees”, Prime Minister Ariel Henry said.
“We need help,” said Roosevelt Milford, a pastor speaking on radio on behalf of the hundreds camping out in soggy fields since the quake destroyed their homes.
Milford and others complained they lacked even the most basic provisions, such as food, clean drinking water, and shelter from the rain.
Quake leaves Haiti ‘on its knees’ as impatience grows over lack of aid | Reuters
