Last month Boris Johnson claimed any trade deal with Australia would, “include a chapter on trade and environment which not only reaffirms commitments to multilateral environmental agreements, including the Paris Agreement but also commits both parties to collaborate on climate and environmental issues”. The prime minister claimed that “more trade will not come at the expense of the environment”. 

However, the reality was that Liz Truss, the trade secretary, and Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, decided to “drop both of the climate asks” from the text of the UK-Australia agreement in order to get it “over the line”, according to the email from a senior official.

A binding section that referenced the “Paris Agreement temperature goals” was scrubbed from the accord after pressure from the Australian government – which has a notoriously weak record on climate action.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said the government’s actions would signal the start of a “race to the bottom” and accused Boris Johnson of having lied about the issue.

“The UK government pledged to embed the environment at the very heart of trade, including supporting the Paris Agreement on climate and zero deforestation in supply chains,” Sauven said. “Signing an Australian trade deal with action on climate temperature commitments secretly removed is the polar opposite of everything Boris Johnson publicly pledged and rips the heart out of what the agreement stands for.”

UK secretly dropped climate promises for trade deal with Australia, leaked emails show | The Independent

 A scientific study is the first such assessment and lays bare the huge disconnect between the Paris agreement’s climate goals and the expansion plans of the fossil fuel industry. 

The researchers described the situation as “absolutely desperate”. The conclusions of the report are “bleak” for the fossil fuel industry

“The analysis implies that many operational and planned fossil fuel projects are unviable,” the scientists said.

90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves could not be extracted if there was to be even a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C, the temperature beyond which the worst climate impacts hit.

Prof Paul Ekins of University College London, UK, and one of the research team. “We are nowhere near the Paris target in terms of the fossil fuels people are planning to produce.”

To keep below 1.5C, the analysis says:

1. The US, Russia and the former Soviet states have half of global coal reserves but will need to keep 97% in the ground, while the figure for Australia is 95%. China and India have about a quarter of global coal reserves and will need to keep 76% in the ground.

2. Middle Eastern states have more than half the world oil reserves but will need to keep almost two-thirds in the ground, while 83% of Canada’s oil from tar sands must not be extracted.

3. Virtually all unconventional oil or gas, such as from fracking, must remain in the ground and no fossil fuels at all can be extracted from the Arctic.

 The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest insurrection in the U.S. since the Civil War. This was not a group of states seeking to set up shop in their own country. This was labor taking a stand against capital. It was not the only such incident; the Battle of Evarts in Kentucky and the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado featured ownership using horrific levels of violence to quell labor uprisings. 

In August 1921, thousands of rifle-bearing coal miners marched to this thickly wooded ridge in southern West Virginia, a campaign that was ignited by the daylight assassinations of union sympathizers but had been building for years in the oppressive despair of the coalfields. 

The miners’ army was met at Blair Mountain by thousands of men who volunteered to fight with the Logan County sheriff, who was in the pay of the coal companies. Over 12 miles and five days, the sheriff’s men fought the miners, strafing the hillsides with machine-gun fire and dropping IEDs from planes. 

There were at least 16 confirmed deaths in the battle, though no one knows exactly how many were killed before the US Army marched in to put a stop to the fighting.

In 1920, Governor Ephraim Morgan set up an American Constitutional Association to select the textbooks used in West Virginia schools, which excluded any mention of the state’s mine wars. Generations grew up cut off from their ancestors’ struggles because business leaders were afraid. At the Mine Wars Museum, Kimberly McCoy, the museum’s resident guide opened up five different West Virginia history textbooks from the 1930s to the 1980s to the section where ‘the Battle of Blair Mountain should have been,’ 

Kim said, ‘but they’re all empty.

You would not know that U.S. business leaders machine-gunned and bombed workers who only sought a modicum of dignity and safety in their labors. If you know, you may be motivated to act, and that right there is what capital seeks to squash.

Taken from here

Let’s Teach Histories of Left-Wing Rebellion, Like the Battle of Blair Mountain (truthout.org)

The Socialism Or Your Money Back blog is very well aware that we do not possess a monopoly on truth. It has often used sources other than the World Socialist Movement if they presented a supporting case for our socialist ideas. We know many non-members share many of our views and we do not expect them to reflect 100%. Differences in positions will occur even when principles are aligned.

On our constant cyber travels, SOYMB blog has encountered other blogs that are worthy of mention and offer invaluable insights.

This anarchist blog is commendable

This blog-post, in particular, is recommended reading, an appetising  taste offered by this extract:

“…Capitalism is quite literally “rule by capital,” and renders the vast majority of humanity slaves to a machine that only serves itself. As a result, rule of Law is a lie under Capitalism – laws only apply to the working class. Even in those rare cases where the crimes of the capitalist class are so egregious that they cannot be ignored by the State, the penalty is rarely more than a fine – and usually a fine far smaller than the profits of the crime. Individual capitalists are virtually never held accountable.

This article could go on forever. Every aspect of the Capitalist system is designed to bring out the worst in humanity. It is a system designed by sociopaths that breeds sociopaths and normalizes their behavior. It must be utterly destroyed for any of us to have a future…”

 But, as already been mentioned as an important caveat, there are topics where this blog and Bear’s diverge.

 For instance, on his sympathetic impression of Scottish nationalism which indeed welcomes its non-native born residents as full members of society but its separatist driving force can be traced to the belief that Scotland’s potential wealth is being diverted to subsidise poorer regions of the UK, a motivation shared Catalonia’s campaign for independence.

 Fundamentally it is sectionalism and not internationalism.

Whether an individual wishes to become a vegetarian-vegan or remain an eater of meat will be the personal decision of that person. But the food production system serving whatever the diet of society chooses is a social question and it will be one that even in a socialist society will be discussed and debated. 

One thing we can be sure of though, is that the main agenda will not be which is the most profitable and least costly but that what we produce to eat is both healthy for people and the planet.

“Industrial meat farming is fanning the flames of climate crisis and biodiversity collapse while threatening the health of farmers, workers, and consumers—the evidence is resounding,” said Stanka Becheva, food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe.

Meat production is expected to increase by another 40 million tonnes a year by 2029, which would take the total output to around 366 million tonnes a year.

Meat Atlas 2021 (pdf) by Friends of the Earth Europe, its German arm Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz, and the Berlin-based Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, says the food sector is responsible for 21% to 37% of planet-heating emissions, over half of which comes from industrial animal farming. The report explains, “The food and farming sector in industrialized countries, which accounts for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, is far from doing its fair share to reduce them.”

Its findings from 2018 is that “just five meat-and-milk giants, JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, and Fonterra, produce more combined emissions per year than major oil players like Exxon, Shell, or BP. Taken together, 20 livestock firms are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than Germany, Britain, or France.”

More than 2,500 investment banks, private banks, and pension funds poured $478 billion into meat and dairy firms from 2015 to 2020, emphasizing that BlackRock, Capital Group, Vanguard, and the Norwegian government pension fund are among the top investors.

The report explains, “the impacts of industrial-scale agriculture are yet to be regulated across financial and legal platforms.”

More than one billion people around the world earn their living by keeping livestock. Traditional and nature-friendly animal husbandry is coming under pressure from industrialized agriculture.Almost two-thirds of the world’s 600 million poor livestock keepers are women. They face disadvantages because they have limited access to land, services, and farm ownership.Conflicts over land are on the rise, in part because of industrial meat production. More and more people are being killed for defending the right to land.The use of antibiotics in animal husbandry is resulting in more and more microbial resistance. This threatens the effectiveness of antibiotics, one of the most important types of treatment in human medicine.The leading producers of fodder crops are among the largest users of pesticides—which contaminate groundwater and harm biodiversity.

 The wealthiest 1 percent of people in the U.S.A avoid paying a huge amount of the taxes they would normally owe every year, according to a new report from the Treasury Department.

The report found that the top 1 percent avoid paying $163 billion in taxes every year, or about 28 percent of all taxes dodged yearly. 

 The agency notes that it’s difficult to estimate the tax loss from the highest tax brackets, the data shows that the bulk of the $163 billion figure stems from the wealthiest 0.5 percent of Americans who, according to the Treasury Department, dodge $120 billion in taxes annually.

Overall, the amount of taxes that don’t get paid every year by all taxpayers is equal to the entirety of the amount in income taxes paid by the bottom 90 percent of earners, the agency found. More importantly, the top 10 percent of earners are responsible for nearly 53 percent of the gap in taxes owed but not paid yearly.

 Natasha Sarin, the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, said, “The tax gap can be a major source of inequity. Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe.”

“The United States collects less tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than at most points in recent history, in part because owed but uncollected taxes are so significant,” wrote Sarin. “These unpaid taxes mean policymakers must choose between rising deficits, lower spending on important priorities, or further tax increase to compensate for lost revenue—which will only be borne by compliant taxpayers.”

Sarin also pointed out that the IRS simply lacks the resources to chase after all of the lost taxes. And, without the ability to detect the complicated tax-cheating methods used by the wealthy, the IRS’s audit rates for the wealthy have seriously declined over the years, whereas the audit rate for low-income recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit has not been greatly affected.

Treasury Finds Wealthiest 1 Percent Dodge Over $160 Billion in Taxes Yearly (truthout.org)

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

 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

 Millions of India’s poor have been excluded from Modi’s flagship food security scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Ghareeb Kalyan Ann Yojana (PMGKAY). Reason: they do not own a ration card.

The ration card is a document issued by various state governments to households eligible to purchase subsidised food grains from the public distribution system under the National Food Security Act (NFSA).

The PMGKAY, which boasts of being the largest food security programme in the world, aims to feed India’s poorest during the pandemic. It provides five kilogrammes (11 pounds) of free rice or wheat and one kilogramme (two pounds) of pulses per person to each family holding a ration card, in addition to regular entitlements that come with the card.

However, Delhi state has exhausted its quota of the number of people who can be issued a ration card. In 2021, 22 out of 29 states in India had less than 5 percent of their quota remaining. That is because the quota is based on the 2011 census, making it a gross underestimate. The next census, scheduled to be completed this year, has been delayed indefinitely due to the pandemic.

“Such is an underestimate of ration card quotas that almost half of Delhi’s population that needs food security in a pandemic is excluded from the primary food security scheme,” Amrita Johri, a member of the Right to Food campaign, told Al Jazeera. “If this is the condition in the national capital, what would be the state in India’s rural areas?”

Meanwhile, in a decade, there has been a substantial increase in the number of people not covered under the NFSA. The NFSA covers 50 percent of India’s urban and 75 percent of the rural population, providing them subsidised food grains under the public distribution system through ration cards. The distribution of cards by state was last determined by India’s Planning Commission, using National Sample Survey (NSS) Household Consumption Survey data for 2011-2012. More than 10 years have elapsed since the publication of that data, with experts such as Dipa Sinha, assistant professor of economics at New Delhi’s Ambedkar University, calling it “policy blindness”.

“The government is aware of this huge gap on paper and on the ground. They don’t want to increase the subsidy on food grains because increasing the subsidy would directly increase India’s fiscal deficit. This despite surplus grains available in India,” Sinha explained. 

Currently, India’s granaries, controlled by the Food Corporation of India, are overflowing with a record 100 million metric tonnes of grains – about three times the norm for buffer stock.

 India’s Supreme Court acknowledged that most migrant workers suffering from hunger and extreme poverty were excluded from the public distribution system since they did not have ration cards. The government in May 2020 announced that it would provide ration to 80 million people who do not have ration cards, but only for the months of May and June. However, even this was not implemented properly. Data shows that government could identify and distribute food grains to only 28 million beneficiaries.  States such as Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttarakhand distributed less than 3 percent of the food grains sanctioned to them. When a similar situation arose in 2021, the government told the top court that it had instructed states to set up their own schemes according to needs. Some states gave no grain to those without ration cards while some states provided a one-time relief.

In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that food grains should not be denied in absence of a ration card to those who need it. This year, the top court reiterated its order, adding that the quota should be revised to the current estimates of the population. The court also directed all state governments to provide dry rations to the hungry for as long as the pandemic continues in India.

“However, no such scheme has been devised so far by the state governments,” activist Anjali Bhardwaj told Al Jazeera. She said she has sent legal notices to several states, asking why they failed to comply with the direction of the Supreme Court.  The federal ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution said any revision in quota estimates will be possible only after the publication of the next census.

“Most likely, the next census will be published once the pandemic is over. What will these people do during the pandemic? Will they starve?” asked Bhardwaj.

India was ranked 94th in the Global Hunger Index 2020 of 107 countries.

“The government is not accepting that people are starving. There is a general notion that lockdown causes hunger, while all is well after that. There are no jobs, the informal economy is hugely impacted by the pandemic and the government refuses to see it,” Sinha said and added, “The government does not realise that exclusion error is more serious than inclusion error. Often, the poor quality of cereals and grains that are provided under the public distribution system is a fine line between death and life.” 

Bhardwaj commented, “Time and again, the courts have upheld not just a citizen’s right to life but also citizen’s right to live with dignity. What dignity is left when a person is forced to beg for food?”

The refugee crossings of the English Channel continues. 

The official UK government position is reflected by a statement from Dan O’Mahoney, at the Home Office, who said: “This unacceptable rise in dangerous crossings is being driven by criminal gangs and a surge in illegal migration across Europe. We’re determined to target the criminals at every level, so far we have secured nearly 300 arrests, 65 convictions and prevented more than 10,000 migrant attempts.”

Tim Naor Hilton, the chief executive of Refugee Action, said:

 “Refugees feel there is little choice other than to cross the Channel in flimsy boats because the government refuses to open up alternative routes to safety. The shocking images we’ve seen in Afghanistan has shown what forces people to leave their country. That same terror is happening in other countries such as Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and elsewhere.”

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said:

 “The government needs to recognise that while there is war, persecution and violence, people will be forced to take dangerous journeys to seek safety. We are talking about ordinary men, women and children who are forced to flee their home through no fault of their own. The odds are stacked against them but they struggle on to survive.” Solomon added, “This government must change its approach and instead of seeking to punish or push away people seeking safety because of the type of journey they have made to the UK, they must create and commit to more safe routes. As a country we can save lives and empower people, who have already been through so much, to give back to the communities that welcome them.”

Concern for migrants’ safety as hundreds resume Channel crossings | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian