Paraguay, a country with one of the highest inequalities of land ownership in the world.

 Just 2% of people own over 80% of farmland.

 Mario Abdo Benítez, Paraguay’s conservative president, approved a law doubling jail sentences – to up to 10 years – for those found guilty of illegally occupying private land.

And this November alone, five indigenous and small farmer settlements were destroyed by police, leaving hundreds homeless.

More than a hundred human rights campaigners gathered in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, branded such evictions an “express violation” of Paraguay’s constitution and international treaties.

Agriculture is Paraguay’s largest single contribution to global heating – accounting for about half of the country’s emissions of gases like carbon and methane – followed by deforestation.

“The people who deforest and emit greenhouse gases are the big landowners,” Achucarro added. “Most of them are soybean planters and cattle ranchers. They’re the same people that control the police and use them to kick out indigenous and campesino communities.”

Paraguay’s delegation to Cop26 included several agribusiness representatives but no indigenous people. Along with Venezuela and Bolivia, Paraguay was initially among the only Latin American countries not to sign the historic agreement to end deforestation within a decade. It then backtracked amid a public outcry.

Indigenous community evicted as land clashes over agribusiness rock Paraguay | Global development | The Guardian

 “When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer controls its borders, people came in from the east and all over the place,” Boris Johnson said in an interview on the eve of COP26.

Mixing ecological disaster with fears of rampant immigration is a narrative that has flourished in far-right fringe movements in Europe and the US and is now spilling into the discourse of mainstream politics, in many cases, echoing eco-fascist ideas that themselves are rooted in an earlier age of blood-and-soil nationalism.

In the US,  the Republican attorney general of Arizona has demanded the building of a border wall to prevent migrants coming from Mexico as these people “directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”. 

In Spain, Santiago Abascal, leader of the populist Vox party, has called for a “patriotic” restoration of a “green Spain, clean and prosperous”.

 The far-right British National party has claimed to be the “only true green party” in the country due to its focus on migration. 

And in Germany, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany has tweaked some of its earlier mockery of climate science with a platform that warns “harsh climatic conditions” in Africa and the Middle East will see a “gigantic mass migration towards European countries”, requiring toughened borders.

France’s National Front, once a bastion of derisive climate denial, has founded a green wing called New Ecology, with Marine Le Pen, president of the party, vowing to create the “world’s leading ecological civilization” 

“Environmentalism is the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness,” Le Pen said in 2019, adding that “if you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist. Those who are nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.” 

 Le Pen’s ally Hervé Juvin, a National Rally MEP, is seen as an influential figure on the European right in promoting what he calls “nationalistic green localism”.

The response to this trend on the right has led to what academics Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call “ecobordering”, where restrictions on immigration are seen as vital to protect the nativist stewardship of nature and where the ills of environmental destruction are laid upon those from developing countries.

Turner, an expert in politics and migration at the University of York, said the link between climate and migration is “an easy logic” for politicians such as Johnson as it plays into longstanding tropes on the right that overpopulation in poorer countries is a leading cause of environmental harm. More broadly, it is an attempt by the right to seize the initiative on environmental issues that have for so long been the preserve of center-left parties

“The far right in Europe has an anti-immigration platform, that’s their bread and butter, so you can see it as an electoral tactic to start talking about green politics,” Turner said, adding that migrants are being blamed in two ways – first, for moving to countries with higher emissions and then adding to those emissions, as rightwing figures in Arizona have claimed; and secondly for supposedly bringing destructive, polluting habits with them from their countries of origin. The far right depict migrants as being “essentially poor custodians of their own lands and then treating European nature badly as well”, Turner said. “So you get these headlines around asylum seekers eating swans, all these ridiculous scaremongering tactics. But they play into this idea that by stopping immigrants coming here, you are actually supporting a green project.”

A mixture of this Malthusian and ethno-nationalist thinking is being distilled into political campaigning, as in a political pamphlet described in Turner and Bailey’s research paper from SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s federal assembly, which shows a city crowded by people and cars belching out pollution, with a tagline that translates to “stop massive immigration”. A separate campaign ad by SVP claims that 1 million migrants will result in thousands of miles of new roads and that “anyone who wants to protect the environment in Switzerland must fight against mass immigration”.

 In an analysis of 22 far-right parties in Europe, the academics found this thinking is rife among rightwing parties and “portrays effects as causes and further normalizes racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe”.

 According to a research paper co-authored by Fieschi, this has led to a situation where “detractors are taking up the language of freedom fighters”.

“We are seeing the growth of accusations of climate hysteria as a way for elites to exploit ordinary people,” Fieschi said. “The solutions that are talked about involve spending more money on deserving Americans and deserving Germans and so on, and less on refugees. It’s ‘yes, we will need to protect people, but let’s protect our people.’”

 Fieschi said the right’s interaction with climate is far more than just about borders – it is animating fears that personal freedoms are under attack from a cosseted, liberal elite.

“You see these quite obviously populist arguments in the US and Europe that a corrupt elite, the media and government have no idea what ordinary people’s lives are like as they impose these stringent climate policies,” said Fieschi.

“The right is reclaiming that older Malthusian population rhetoric and is using that as a cudgel in green terms rather than unpopular racist terms,” said Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, an educational and research body. “It’s weird that this has become a popular theme in the US west because the west is sparsely populated and that hasn’t slowed environmental destruction,” he added. “But this is about speaking to nativist fears, it isn’t about doing anything to solve the problem.”

Taylor further explained, “We will see weird theories that will spread blame in all the wrong directions,” Taylor said. “More walls, more borders, more exclusion – that’s most likely the way we are heading.”

Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 The UK’s most vulnerable families and pensioners face an 18-month-long squeeze on incomes as benefits fail to keep pace with a surge in the cost of living, economists have warned.

The speed of price growth is set to peak at close to 5 per cent in spring next year and remain high for the next two years according to the Bank of England and government spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility.

It means people on benefits will have to wait for the lagging state pension and universal credit to catch up with surging inflation.

 Baroness Altmann, the Conservative peer and former pensions minister, said the pressure would be felt disproportionately by the less well-off.

“I do worry that the lives of older people who don’t have huge wealth don’t seem to matter,” she told The Independent. “Policies have been introduced that seem to favour those older people who are already well-off and have taken money away from those who can least afford it.” She added that pensioners were especially exposed to inflation, as poorer retired people spend a greater share of their income on “basic essentials” which have shot up in price.

Mike Brewer, chief economist and deputy chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, said, “We’re also in a for a year or several months of stagnating real wages too.”

 Last month a House subcommittee report found that workers at the leading US meatpacking plants experienced cases and deaths that were up to three times previous estimates.  The investigation, opened in February by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, said not only had JBS USA, Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods refused to take basic precautions to protect their workers, but they had also “shown a callous disregard for workers’ health”. In September the committee’s chair, Jim Clyburn, added Cargill and National Beef Packing Company (National Beef) to its investigation.

For nearly a month, JBS did not do enough to protect its employees, many of them low paid refugees or migrants.

“You just have to look at the conditions in plants to understand the way that folks were crowded without masks was an epicenter of transmission,” said Melissa Perry, chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University.

Worker representatives recalled that when some people brought masks from home, human resources ordered them removed.

 “JBS was concerned that people were going to get scared or excited about mask use,” said Celestino Rivera, the United Food and Commercial Workers union representative.  “We felt there were instances where supervisors, because they were short-handed, were trying to convince individuals to continue working,” Rivera said.

There was immense pressure felt by employees to keep working as staffing shortages raised the specter of a temporary shutdown. The company even resorted to cash and steak incentives to keep workers on the line. 

Considering the blood-drenched environment of a slaughterhouse it should come as little surprise that the industry relies heavily upon, and the government is complicit in providing, foreign-born workers to fill jobs that most American citizens won’t do.

 Though traumatic injuries from ultrasharp knives and bone-crushing machines are common, the gradual wear and tear of the job can also break a body. Existing protections simply do not account for the physical toll of disassembling thousands of animals into their saleable parts for a living. Ultimately it took the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic to fully expose the vulnerability of the nation’s meat processing workers.

From the start of the pandemic until September nearly 60,000 slaughterhouse workers at the major firms have contracted the coronavirus, and at least 298 of them have died. An exact accounting of the virus’s toll may never be known, in part, because of what has been described as weak oversight and a hands-off approach to workplace inspections that were features of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforcement under the Trump.

Debbie Berkowitz, a former Osha chief of staff, now a fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University said. “The meat industry has not been held accountable for their failure to adequately protect workers,” Berkowitz added, “a true travesty.”

 “The pandemic opened a window to the working conditions inside these plants,” said Celeste Monfronton, workplace safety expert, “but the attention has not really extended to the underlying causes.” Large multinational companies dominate the $227bn market and before the pandemic about eight workers died annually, while coronavirus has claimed at least 30 times that number.

Industry critics say foreign workers are particularly susceptible to exploitation, and the US refugee resettlement system funnels refugees to slaughterhouse jobs. Nearly 40% of the US meat industry workforce is foreign-born and in Texas the number is closer to 56%.

“Our government has partnered with the meat industry to bring refugees so that they have a workforce that is vulnerable and scared,” Berkowitz said. “And they get away with it because the industry is hidden from public view.” 

Advocates say the Biden administration has shown no indication that it will take on the social conditions and policy environments that endanger the lives of workers, such as requiring that the industry engage in health and safety research. Critics say the business model of meat processors is designed to sustain the health of the industry, not its employees. Injured and sick workers are looked after by a pool of company-approved doctors who, critics say, send them back to work so that production won’t suffer, and the company can avoid reporting lost workdays to Osha. Rather than strengthen worker protections, Texas lawmakers made it even harder to challenge negligent employers when it passed Senate Bill 6 this June. The law shields businesses from lawsuits that ostensibly acted in good faith during the pandemic. Plaintiffs must gather evidence, which in some cases, such as Covid exposure, is practically impossible

The disposable US workforce: life as an ‘essential’ meatpacking plant worker | Meat industry | The Guardian

 Tens of thousands of nurses, technicians and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California staged a walkout Thursday in sympathy with about 700 engineers who have been on strike for two months, calling on the company to offer the employees a fair contract and to demonstrate the power of labor unions and solidarity between workers.

The company “is putting its drive for profits over people, hurting our patients and union co-workers,” Ethan Ruskin, who works at Kaiser San Jose, told The Mercury News.

‘Solidarity Forever’: 40,000 Kaiser Workers Set to Strike to Defend 700 Fellow Union Members (commondreams.org)

 Tens of thousands of nurses, technicians and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California staged a walkout Thursday in sympathy with about 700 engineers who have been on strike for two months, calling on the company to offer the employees a fair contract and to demonstrate the power of labor unions and solidarity between workers.

The company “is putting its drive for profits over people, hurting our patients and union co-workers,” Ethan Ruskin, who works at Kaiser San Jose, told The Mercury News.

‘Solidarity Forever’: 40,000 Kaiser Workers Set to Strike to Defend 700 Fellow Union Members (commondreams.org)

 In Lebanon, in the past year, poverty has tripled, and one in every four children in the country are skipping meals. 

The Lebanese pound (LP) has witnessed a devaluation exceeding 90%, dropping from 1,500 LP to the dollar to over 22,000 LP to the US dollar. 

At least half of the population is suffering in extreme ways because of this situation, experts say.

In Beirut, the UNICEF office reported that three out of 10 children go to bed hungry or skip meals.

The World Food Programme (WFP) estimated that food prices have gone up by 628 percent in just two years. According to Nassib Ghobril, chief economist for Lebanese Byblos Bank, the CPI rose by 144% in September 2021 compared with the same month in 2020, while it registered its 15th consecutive triple-digit increase since July 2020.

The prices of fresh or frozen cattle meat in Lebanon jumped by 118.6% in the period, constituting the highest increase in the price of this item in the region, reported Ghobril. In parallel, the price of bread and other manufactured articles sold went up by 32.8%, representing the third-highest increase in bread prices among MENA countries.

“The cumulative surge in inflation is due, in part, to the inability of authorities to monitor and contain retail prices, as well as to the deterioration of the Lebanese pound’s exchange rate on the parallel market, which has encouraged opportunistic wholesalers and retailers to raise the prices of consumer goods disproportionately,” Ghobril says. He adds that the smuggling of subsidised imported goods has resulted in shortages of these products locally, which also contributed to price increases. “Further, the emergence of an active black market for gasoline during the summer has put upward pressure on prices and inflation.”

Economist Kamal Hamal Hamdan explains that while there are no credible governmental statistics, at least 55% of the Lebanese population live under the poverty line.

“However, estimates actually point to 75% of the Lebanese population falling under the poverty line. This number goes up to 85% in extremely poor areas such as North Lebanon or the Baalback Hermel area,” points out Adib Nehme, a Lebanese development and poverty consultant.

Before the crisis, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owned almost 70 percent of total wealth. Nehme underlines that around 73% of the Lebanese population earned 2.4 million LP per month before the crisis.

“If these people managed to keep their jobs despite Lebanon’s meltdown, this means that around three-quarters of the population earns around $120,” says Nehme. “One has to keep in mind that around 963 depositors own $23billion, that is not considering these people’s wealth in land and investments. There is growing polarisation because of concentration of wealth, with Lebanon’s economic collapse,” says Nehme.

Additionally, Hamdan underlines that around 60% of wage earners in the pre-crisis era contributed to 25% of the Lebanese GDP, which has worsened.

The financial crisis plaguing Lebanon has created further inequality. The richest and politically connected have been able to transfer their funds despite the unofficial capital control imposed by Lebanese banks.

Hunger, Desperation in Lebanon as Food Prices Rocket | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday put out a report, titled Tax Dodgers: How Billionaire Corporations Avoid Paying Taxes and How to Fix It,  that shows how 70 of the richest corporations in the U.S. “have rigged the tax code in their favor, employing armies of lobbyists and accountants to write and abuse the rules so they can avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”

FedEx paid $483 million in taxes last year—a 7.2% tax rate

DISH $0 in tax but instead collected a $223 million tax refund from the federal government despite raking in $2.6 billion in profits in 2020.

Amazon paid $2.8 billion in federal and foreign income taxes in 2020, its effective tax rate was just 11.5% on global profits totalling $24.3 billion, while the company handed out $118 million in executive bonuses.

Elizabeth Warren Releases Blueprint to End ‘Free Ride’ for Tax-Dodging US Billionaires (commondreams.org)

COP which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’ intended to bring together almost every country for global climate summits. Others suggest that COP  really refers to the “Conference of Polluters” and “Conference of Profiteers.

COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995 in Berlin in recognition that issues related to the climate could not be addressed by an individual county and that it required an international response. 

Now, a quarter-century later, carbon dioxide emissions are 14 billion tons higher and the giant oil companies – e.g., Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon — have made profits totalling nearly $2 trillion.

 A 2017 study from Carbon Majors Report revealed that only 100 companies were responsible for 71 percent of worldwide industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

At Glasgow’s COP26 over 100 fossil fuel companies were represented with 30 trade associations and membership organizations. 

At least 503 (some estimates said 600-plus) fossil fuel lobbyists attended. 

 In addition, 27 official country delegations were registered fossil fuel lobbyists, including from Shell, Gazprom and BP.

Capitalism turns everything – everything! – into a commodity.  In the same process that it turns human work into labor power, of enabling people to sell themselves as they would sell any other object, capitalism turns nature into yet another commodity.

One can only wonder how many more COPs we will have to suffer through until the corporations executives, government bureaucrats and their lobbyists and lackies give up short-term profit for long-term viability … if not for themselves but their children and grandchildren. 

Without addressing the capitalism’s core value of the commodity – one reproduced for centuries and in every current transaction – the global environmental crisis will not be addressed let alone solved.

Taken from here 

COP26: Capitalism = Death – CounterPunch.org

 Millions of people in poorer countries, where the risk of drug-resistant infections is highest, are still missing out on key antibiotics. 5.7 million people, mainly in low- and middle-income countries, die from treatable infectious diseases, owing to a lack of access to antibiotics.

 Access to Medicine Foundation, an Amsterdam-based non-profit group, shows that only 54 of 166 medicines and vaccines assessed are covered by an access strategy to make them available to low- and middle-income countries.

Jayasree Iyer, the foundation’s executive director, said: “Those facing the highest risk of infection and the highest rates of drug resistance have the hardest time getting the antibiotics they need.”

Poorer nations still lack access to world’s key antibiotics | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian