Dirty air is the world’s biggest environmental killer, responsible for at least 4m early deaths a year.  Air pollution kills more people than HIV/Aids, malaria, and tuberculosis combined

Governments around the world gave 20% more in overseas aid funding to fossil fuel projects in 2019 and 2020 than to programmes to cut the air pollution they cause.

When compared in terms of years of life lost, HIV/Aids projects received 34 times more funding, while malnutrition programmes received seven times more. Increasing funding to similar levels to tackle air pollution would save many lives, experts said.

Jane Burston, at the Clean Air Fund explained, “We’re not saying malnutrition, water and sanitation, and HIV/Aids projects should get less money. Deaths from these are absolutely dropping off as a consequence of large amounts of funding being spent well, but air pollution just isn’t on the same scale at all,” adding: “When you see the incredibly and chronically low levels of funding on the one hand, and the chronically high levels of public health impacts on the other, it becomes quite obvious that more funding is needed.

Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said air quality funding did not match the scale of the problem: “Our relentless burning of fossil fuels pollutes our air, costing the global economy billions of dollars each year. Ending the financing of fossil-fuel development and instead investing in growing clean, carbon-free economies will bring immediate benefits. It will save many lives.”  Unep found that one third of the world’s countries have no legal limits in air pollution and that, in those nations that do, the limits are often weaker than WHO guidelines.

More global aid goes to fossil fuel projects than tackling dirty air – study | Air pollution | The Guardian

Sneek is a digital surveillance platform that every minute or so would capture a live photo of home-workers via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you caught someone not working as he or she should be, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack.

Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that…”

 It is part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance known as “tattleware” or “bossware” and one that’s poised to become a standard feature of life on the job.

“There’s no real sign of this trend slowing down,” says Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne. “No sign of legislative change in any jurisdiction I can name, and no sign of pushback from employees, even when they’re aware of it happening.”

 If an employee uses a spy-enabled, work-sponsored computer outside of hours, their employer could easily access their personal data, down to internet banking passwords and Facebook messages.

In April last year, Google queries for “remote monitoring” were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they’d continued to surge by another 243%.

ActivTrak, Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff have all seen similar growth from prospective customers. FlexiSpy offers call-tapping; Spytech, which is known for mobile device access; and NetVizor, which has a remote takeover feature.

In April 2020, Zoom quickly backtracked on a short-lived “attention tracking” setting, which alerted a call host when a participant was focused away from the meeting for more than 30 seconds. And in December, Microsoft bowed to tech experts’ outcry over the release of a “productivity score” feature for its 365 suite, which rated individuals on criteria that included email use and network connectivity; the tool no longer identifies users by name.

Elizabeth Lyons, an associate professor of management at the University of California San Diego, suggests that “In other studies we’ve looked at, the workers were essentially saying, ‘If the manager is going to watch everything I do, then I’m not going to do anything above and beyond what they expect of me,’” 

Bosses turn to ‘tattleware’ to keep tabs on employees working from home | Technology | The Guardian

 While the FBI, CIA, police and the newly created Department of Homeland Security scoured the country and the world for radicalized Muslims, an existing threat was overlooked – white supremacist extremists already in the US, whose numbers and influence have continued to grow in the last two decades.

In 2020 far-right extremists were responsible for 16 of 17 extremist killings, in the US, according to the Anti-Defamation League, while in 2019, 41 of the 42 extremist killings were linked to the far right. Between 2009 and 2018 the far right was responsible for 73% of extremist-related fatalities in the US, while rightwing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, when a bomb planted by an anti-government extremist killed 168 people in a federal building in Oklahoma City.

 A gunman killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas, after allegedly posting a manifesto with white nationalist and anti-immigrant themes online. In it, he wrote that he planned to carry out an attack in “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.

In February 2019, a US Coast Guard lieutenant who was a self-described “white nationalist” was arrested after he stockpiled weapons and compiled a hitlist of media and government figures. 

Nine black church members were murdered in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2017, by a 22-year-old who confessed to the FBI that he hoped to bring back segregation or start a race war.

Despite the statistical dominance of far-right and white supremacist killings in the US, America’s intelligence agencies have devoted far more resources to the perceived threat from Islamic terror. Successive governments have spent most of the last two decades putting the majority of their resources towards investigating Muslims, both in the US and abroad. In 2019 the FBI said 80% of its counter-terrorism agents were focused on international terrorism, with 20% devoted to domestic terrorism.

Between 2005 and 2009 an average of fewer than 330 FBI agents were assigned to domestic terrorism investigation, out of a total of nearly 2,000 counter-terrorism agents.

“There was a lack of attention from authorities – resources – but some of the actual interventions that authorities made were Islamophobic. And so they fostered some of this Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment,”  Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right and a professor at American University, where she runs the school’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, said.

Michael German, a former FBI special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations, said the influence of money and big business had a role, as industries lobbied lawmakers and even the FBI itself to instead pursue anti-capitalist and environmental protest groups.

“The FBI needs resources. And to get resources, it needs to convince members of Congress. And Congress works most effectively when there are wealthy patrons who contribute to their campaigns,” German said. “So the FBI has to cultivate a base of support in the wealthy community, and how can they do that? Well, by going to corporate boards, and telling them, you know, the FBI needs more resources.

“And then of course, that gets the corporate boards a lot of influence over what the FBI does. And what those corporate boards were saying wasn’t that there are minority communities in the United States that are being targeted by white supremacists, what are you doing about it? They were saying: ‘Hey these [anti-corporate or environmental] protesters are a real pain and you know, there’s a potential they could become violent.’”

German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program further explains, “Giant corporations hold a lot of private information about Americans, and getting access to that information became important to the FBI, so pleasing those corporations became part of the mission.” Alongside that issue is the fact that there are “lingering racism problems within the FBI”, German said, with the agency still a predominantly white and male organization. “So that’s one end of the spectrum, the people who are either explicitly racist or implicitly racist. Because white supremacists don’t threaten their community so they don’t see it as a threat. The white male agent who goes home to a white suburban community doesn’t really see a lot of white supremacist skinheads causing problems in his community. So it becomes a lesser threat.”

Close to home: how US far-right terror flourished in post-9/11 focus on Islam | US news | The Guardian

 A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years’ worth of taxes the company did not pay. 

The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits.

Between 2008 and 2014, Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report.

 In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. 

The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75.

 Roma communities driven from Romania’s booming city of Cluj-Napoca say the authorities treat them like human garbage.  Pata Rat is the country’s biggest landfill and long one of its most glaring environmental sins. For decades, pollution leached from untreated waste and garbage fires blazed. Under pressure from the European Union, the city began work on closing the site in 2015. Some 2.5 million metric tons (2.8 million US tons) of waste, accumulated over 70 years. Two “temporary storage” landfills set up beside the old one in 2015 are still growing steadily, and experts say the old waste was never properly dealt with.

 1,500 Roma people are still living here with  the environmental hazard on their doorstep.

This was not an ecological landfill; it was not built in line with European standards,” said Ciprian-Valentin Nodis, a researcher from northern Romania and founding member of the Interethnic Association of Dumitrița.

“All these toxic substances went into the soil, into the groundwater. Everything in the area is polluted.”

The Roma residents of Pata Rat began to arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were driven by poverty to move to the landfill and work as waste pickers, but most have come in successive waves of evictions since Cluj-Napoca began to see a real estate boom in the 2000s. The last was in 2010, when local authorities evicted 350 inhabitants from Coastei Street near the city center. Their new home was to be a complex of small, modular units nestled between Pata Rat’s existing camps. 

The Roma community on Coastei Street was well integrated. They had been there for generations, they paid rent and utilities on their publicly owned homes, and their children attended local schools and kindergartens. Yet suddenly they were being dumped on the city’s trash heap. “They considered us garbage, not humans,” said Linda Greta Zsiga, “and they thought we deserve to live there.”

Seven out of ten Romanians said they don’t trust the Roma. 

Between 20% and 30% said Roma people have too many rights, that the state should be allowed to use violence against Roma, or that discrimination and hate speech against the Roma should not be punished.

Such attitudes are not unique to Romania. Across Europe, racism against the continent’s largest ethnic minority results in denial of basic civil rights, exclusion from employment and public services, and — perhaps most strikingly — the marginalization of Roma communities to areas that lack adequate water, sanitation and waste management. 

 A study published last year by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) on “”environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe” found that the Roma were “disproportionately exposed to environmental degradation and pollution stemming from waste dumps and landfills, contaminated sites, or dirty industries.”

The EEB study describes one of the major factors in environmental racism against the Roma as forced eviction from “places with high economic value.” 

The Coastei community wasn’t given a reason for their eviction. But Zsiga has no doubt why they were moved. “They wanted to ‘clean’ Cluj of Roma,” she said. “Now very few Roma still live in the city.” 

A 2012 report by the UN Development Program found that 22% of adults living at Pata Rat suffered from chronic disease or some form of disability. Researchers documented a high incidence of skin infections, asthma, bronchitis, high blood pressure and heart and stomach problems, and a report by the European Roma Rights Centre found that over two years following their eviction, reported health problems more than doubled among the Coastei community. 

An NGO worker in the area said respiratory diseases remain common, including among children. And economically, the closure of the dump has made life in Pata Rat even harder. 

Residents had been taking matters into their own hands. In 2012, Zsiga and others from Coastei camp set up an association that’s working with other NGOs to campaign for housing solutions for Pata Rat, and suing the authorities over the evictions. They are currently awaiting a decision on their case from the European Court of Human Rights.

Living in a sea of trash: Roma fight environmental racism in Romania | Global Ideas | DW | 05.09.2021

 A feeling of being away from industrial pollution has encouraged a sense that climate change is not an urgent and crucial issue for New Zealanders. How wrong that it is not a priority.

New Zealand has recorded its warmest ever winter, and scientists say that climate change is driving temperatures ever higher. 

The underlying warming trend could be tracked through carbon dioxide concentration, which had increased in New Zealand from 320 parts per million 50 years ago to about 412 parts per million today.

Snowfall at lower elevations was well below average this winter as it was often replaced with rain, which could make for lower river levels later in the year because there would be less snowmelt. That could impact irrigation for farms.

There were also more extreme weather events, Fedaeff said, including severe flooding in some places and dry spells in others.

Prof James Renwick, a climate scientist at the Victoria University of Wellington, said the changes were also putting pressure on natural ecosystems and that over time more species would face extinction. It was imperative for humans to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. 

“If we don’t get on top of warming soon, there is going to be grief for large sections of the world.”

Prof. Renwick said New Zealand had talked a lot about climate change but had so far done little to curb its emissions. He said there were plenty of natural resources like wind, sun and water that could provide renewable power for the nation’s energy needs.

“New Zealand could become world-leading in green energy and a green economy.”

New Zealand records its warmest ever winter with average temperature of 9.8C | New Zealand | The Guardian

Why not investigate the World Socialist Party (New Zealand), a global party for the elimination of global problems.

World Socialist Party (New Zealand) P.O. Box 1929

Auckland, NI, New Zealand

E-mail: moggiegrayson@gmail.com

 Countries facing crises frequently do not appear on the radar of the world media. The suffering of those living in Lebanon, a small nation of six million, is one example of the neglect of the news outlets.

According to the World Bank Lebanon Economic Monitor, the economic and financial ranks in the top 10, possibly top 3, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century.

Lebanon, the host of a great many refugees from neighbouring conflicts, is sinking deeper into poverty. Many Lebanese blame the ruling class for the devastating, multiple crises plaguing the nation, including a dramatic currency with inflation growing to 281% between June 2019 and June 2021. An alliance of assorted religious and political factions have captured power among themselves and has come to govern almost entirely in their own interests, through a system of patronage and cronyism, enjoying years of state funding while public services fell into a state of disrepair.

There are severe shortages in medicine and fuel. Poverty has drastically increased over the past year and is now affecting about three-quarters of the total population according to the  “Multidimensional Poverty in Lebanon: Painful Reality and Uncertain Prospects” report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). An even higher figure of 82% lives in multidimensional poverty, which takes into account factors other than income, such as access to health, education and public utilities. 

The country has also now been drawn into breaking the sanctions imposed against Iran with its fuel shortages requiring Iranian oil supplies to be delivered. Lebanon’s security agencies have been raiding petrol stations and suppliers allegedly hoarding fuel. Lebanon’s central bank subsidises medicines, fuel and wheat to keep them at the country’s official pegged rate of $1 to 1,500 Lebanese pounds. However, with its reserves is running dry.  Fuel shortages and power cuts have paralysed businesses such as restaurants, shops and industry as well as vital services like hospitals. UNICEF’s executive director, Henrietta Fore, said that ‘more than four million people face the prospect of critical water shortages or being completely cut off from safe water supply in the coming days’. The reason for the acute water shortage was that there was no longer sufficient power to run Lebanon’s pumping stations and wells. 

Lebanon has also now entered into an agreement with another diplomatic pariah, Bashar al-Assad, to facilitate the transfer of energy through Syria.

ESCWA last year, proposed for the richest 10 per cent in Lebanon, who held nearly $91 billion of wealth at the time, to fund the gap for poverty eradication by making annual contributions of 1% of their net wealth. Alas, a forlorn hope although it did not stop ESCWA Executive Secretary, Rola Dashti, repeating her call for the establishment of a social solidarity fund.

 President Michel Aoun confessed that “The foiling of every plan proposed for financial and economic recovery, or the failure to devise it in the first place, means one thing, which is that the corrupt system that is still controlling the country and the people fears accountability and penalization.” He added,  lamented that “the people are robbed and are being robbed on daily basis.”

Naturally enough, he exempted himself from his own condemnation.

 From Extinction Rebellion’s Twitter

“Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement. We do not trust any single ideology, we trust the people, chosen by sortition (like jury service) to find the best future for us all through a #CitizensAssembly A banner saying ‘socialism or extinction’ does not represent us”

XR sees talk of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ as politics while they see themselves as ‘beyond politics’ urging all people to bring pressure on governments to do more to tackle climate change.

 This means that they are basically a pressure group employing direct action and civil disobedience tactics to get capitalist governments to adopt a particular policy.

Leaving the way out to citizens assemblies is a cop-out. For all the merits of such assemblies and their potential usefulness in decision-making in a socialist society, today, most citizens will have the same ideas as they express in elections, i.e that they see no alternative to capitalism and so would come up with proposals to be implemented under capitalism.

President Xi Jinping of China intends to start regulating excessive wealth to ensure “common prosperity” within the country. 

In 2020, the richest 20% of China’s population earned more than 10 times the poorest 20%. 

 In 2018, the country’s richest 10% earned 41% of income, while the poorest 50% of the population earned only 14.4% of total income.

In 2020, the country of 1.4 billion claimed that it had achieved that goal in eight years, lifting nearly 100 million people out of extreme poverty. But experts dispute the truth of this claim, given, in part, that China’s definition of the poverty line is $1.69, compared to the World Bank’s $1.90.