The richest one-tenth of Americans owned more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Fed data through the end of March, the latest period for which data are available.
The top 1% owned 31%.
A Grouse about the Grouse
Ministers have been accused of deliberately stalling plans to ban the environmentally damaging process of burning peat bogs, in a further sign of government support for people who enjoy shooting grouse on moorlands.
After a week in which it emerged that people who shoot grouse had been exempted from the “rule of six”, which limits gatherings in the fight against Covid-19, activists believe the environment secretary, George Eustice, who is from a farming family, is blocking moves to ban peat burning. It is also understood that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, whose Richmond constituency is close to moorlands in north Yorkshire, is sympathetic to those who run grouse estates and shoots.
Campaigners have long opposed the practice of burning peat bogs to encourage new heather shoots – a source of food for grouse. In January, government advisers on the committee on climate change said it should ban peat burning this year, but a new strategy is not expected for months, until well after autumn burning has taken place.
Peatlands in the UK hold about 400m tonnes of carbon, double the amount of all the UK’s forests put together, and are vitally important to helping tackle climate change. The process of burning peat to create better conditions for rearing grouse can severely damage the ability of peatlands to lock in carbon. Environmentalists believe there are tensions in the department and that Eustice is blocking an outright ban.
Friends of the Earth campaigner Guy Shrubsole said the government was stalling and had to act before burning starts again next month: “Moorlands lock up millions of tonnes of climate wrecking gases and give important habitats for wildlife. Despite their key part in fighting climate breakdown and protecting nature, we’re still yet to see a ban on them being burned. “The government has been promising to ban destructive moorland burning for the past year, but has failed to step up and do it. Enough is enough. The environment secretary, George Eustice, must ban moorland burning now, before the burning season starts again on 1 October, and stop another cycle of destruction.”
Australia’s Population to Fall
Australia’s National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation’s study found that population growth could be cut by 214,000 between 2019 and 2021, a 0.8% decline only surpassed by the first world war and the unwinding of the 1971 baby boom. This is the result of international border closures that have effectively shut down net overseas migration, which has accounted for 59% of population growth since 2007.
It could cut demand for housing in Australia by between 129,000 and 232,000 dwellings over the next three years
International students account for 50% of migration and the study notes Covid-19 hotspots such as India and Brazil are large contributors to Australia’s pool of students.
Forgotten Workers
Spain’s Mar del Plastico (Plastic Sea), the 31,000 hectares (76,600 acres) of farms and greenhouses in the region of Andalucía known as “Europe’s garden”. El Barranquete is one of the poorest of 92 informal worker slums that have sprung up around the vast farms of Almería and which are now home to an estimated 7,000-10,000 people. Many of El Barranquete’s inhabitants don’t have electricity, running water or sanitation. The tens of thousands of migrant workers working in the province are vital to the Spanish economy and pan-European food supply chains. In two weeks, the greenhouses of Almería will be at their busiest as the high season for tomatoes, peppers and salad begins.
Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, says the situation facing migrant workers in southern Spain is a human tragedy. For decades, the exploitation and abuse of migrant workers in Spain has been widely condemned by UN officials and human rights campaigners, but to little effect.
When he first arrived in Spain, Hassan was stunned by how the workers were treated on the farms. Like other workers in El Barranquete, Hassan says he earns only about €5 (£4.50) an hour, well under the legal minimum wage. “The working conditions are terrible,” he says. “Sometimes we work from sunup to sundown in extreme heat, with only a 30-minute break in the whole day.” Now, as Almería faces a wave of Covid-19 infections, workers say they have been left completely unprotected. “We pick your food,” says Hassan. “But our health doesn’t matter to anyone.” Hassan knows that his work and living conditions make him vulnerable to becoming infected with Covid-19. When asked whether he is supplied with PPE at work, Hassan laughs. “Gloves and face masks in the greenhouse? Temperature checks?” he says. “They don’t give you anything.” Like many of the people living in the settlements, he say he is more scared of not being able to work than they of becoming ill. If he can’t send money home, his children don’t eat.
A joint supply chain investigation by Ethical Consumer magazine has linked many of these workers to the supply chains of UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Lidl and Aldi. All claimed to be facing systemic labour exploitation before and throughout the pandemic such as non-payment of wages and being kept on illegal temporary contracts. Many described being forced to work in a culture of fear and intimidation. Some of those who complained about conditions said they had been sacked or blacklisted.
Workers employed by Spanish food companies linked to UK supermarkets also claimed that throughout the pandemic they have been denied access to adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) that under Spanish law they are entitled to as essential workers. Many said they were not given enough face masks, gloves or hand sanitiser and have been unable to socially distance at work. One man employed at a big food company supplying the UK says that he has only been given two face masks in six months. Spain is experiencing the highest numbers of new Covid-19 infections in Europe, with the province of Almería recording more than 100 new cases a day. There have been multiple outbreaks on farms across the province and in the cortijos, the dilapidated housing blocks near the farms in which workers live.
“The pandemic has exacerbated the unacceptable conditions facing migrant workers and the Spanish government must urgently act. But two-thirds of all fruit and vegetables consumed across Europe and the UK come from these greenhouses and all the companies and retailers up these supply chains have a responsibility to these workers as well,” Olivier De Schutter says.
As Covid-19 infections rise, medical charities such as as Médicos del Mundo are supplying masks, gloves and temperature checks in the settlements in scenes more reminiscent of a disaster zone than one of the richest countries in the world.
“People want to protect themselves, but they cannot”, says Almudena Puertas from the NGO Cáritas. “They are here because there is work and we need them.”
One groups of workers say that they lost their jobs after testing positive for Covid-19 and quarantining at home. Muhammad, a farm worker from Morocco, said that when he and others had recovered and returned to work, some of them were told there was no work for them.
“When I contracted Covid-19, I’d already spent two years working for this company without papers and two years on a temporary contract, but when I came back they said there is nothing for me here,” he says. He says he and the other workers who did not get their jobs back also did not receive the sick pay they were entitled to as essential workers.
The Soc-Sat union, which represents agricultural workers across Almería, says the failure to provide farm workers with basic PPE speaks to the culture of impunity that surrounds the mistreatment of Spain’s migrant workforce.
“Around 80% of fruit companies in Almería are breaking the law,” says José García Cuevas, a Soc-Sat union leader. The union says that across the region, widespread fraud is being perpetrated on the farm workers. “People will work 25 days but their employers will only count 10,” he says. “Or when you look at the payslips, it says €58 a day, which is minimum wage but that’s not what the worker is receiving.” He says that according to figures from the General Union of Workers, workers lose out on up to €50m of wages every year. “If, under normal conditions, health and safety regulations are not followed, you can imagine what’s happening in the current situation with a pandemic,” says García Cuevas.
“If you complain, they will say: ‘If you don’t want to work here then go home,’” Ali, a farm worker says. “Every worker here has a family, a wife and children, but the only thing that matters is that we work to get the vegetables to Germany or the UK. It’s like they have forgotten we are also human beings.”
The Banksters at Work
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HSBC allowed fraudsters to transfer millions of dollars around the world even after it had learned of their scam. Its role in the $80m (£62m) fraud is detailed in a leak of documents – banks’ “suspicious activity reports.”
The investment scam, a Ponzi scheme, started soon after the bank was fined $1.9bn (£1.4bn) in the US over money laundering. It had promised to clamp down on these sorts of practices. Duped investors say the bank should have acted sooner to close the fraudsters’ accounts. The fraudsters used Christian imagery and targeted poor communities in the US, Colombia and Peru. There were also victims in other countries, including the UK. HSBC did spot suspicious transactions going through its systems. But it was not until April 2014, after US financial regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges, that the WCM777 accounts at HSBC in Hong Kong were shut. By that time there was nearly nothing left in them.
Another revelation was the suggestion one of the biggest banks in the US may have helped a notorious mobster to move more than $1bn. JP Morgan, provided banking services to a secretive offshore company called ABSI Enterprises between 2002 and 2013, even though the firm’s ownership was not clear from the bank’s records. ABSI’s parent company was associated with Semion Mogilevich – an individual who was on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list”.
The Greatest Show On Earth
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The Donkey and the Elephant are now preparing for the dress rehearsal of the greatest puppet show, the last act of which is scheduled for November 3rd. How long can this illusion be sustained with the puppet show becoming more and more unconvincing?
We need a steadfast political party willing to stand up and be crystal clear about its allegiance to the interests of the working people and to oppose the corporate controlled parties. Most working people will not even vote in November’s election circus. And those who do will vote for the lesser evil and against whomever they consider the greater evil, not for someone they believe will improve their lives. Working people need our own political party. We need to rely on our own actions to defend past gains and to win new ones. We have no friends or allies in either of the two major capitalist parties.
It is a conscious deception to characterize this order of things as the “lesser evil”. Because the “lesser evil” Biden is being tolerated by the Left and not fought by it, he becomes an ever “greater evil” himself and is enabled thereby to prepare for the “greatest evil”.
Trump blaming immigrants for capitalism’s economic problems as a whole helps prevent class–wide resistance. It is not just words. The vast federal bureaucracy such as ICE that oversees immigration control, as well as the state and city police forces, have as one of its chief duties the intimidation of immigrants to show who is boss and inevitably results in brutality and sadism.
For labor, there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. They both believe in capitalism and are defenders of the profit system and the rights of capitalists to exploit labor. Sure the two parties differ to some degree in the details of their schemes for managing the business of exploiting the people. Nevertheless, the difference here also is largely on the surface. And also for sure the electoral contest between these two parties is not without social significance. For one thing, the business of government has become the biggest of all businesses, and there is a genuine rivalry in determining who shall have the right to its profits.
But of more importance is that the presidential election is a major means for spreading illusions among the population, for preventing working people from understanding what the true issues of modern society actually are. Exaggerating the appearance of differences between the two candidates aids the bosses in sustaining the belief on the part of the people that it is a vital question for them whether the next president is Republican or Democratic. Thus we are all hindered from learning that the only political struggle of real importance for them is the struggle not against one or another of the parties, but against the system and the state itself in its entirety, for the overthrow of capitalism.
Why do so many minorities support Biden and even see him as an ally under attack by racists? It is not out of stupidity or ignorance. It is always which candidate will do us the least damage and maybe some good. The lesser evil. Biden is seen as a friend because of the forces attacking him: opponents of every gain won by the civil rights movement. The Democrats have turned to a new strategy to stave off the growth of apathy and cynicism.
The fusion of economics and politics in present-day capitalist society makes it evident that labor cannot fight a merely economic battle, defensive or offensive, for its rights. The increasing intervention of the capitalist state in the economic life of the country has shown how archaic is a purely “bread and butter” struggle, since the economic gains of a generation of workers can be wiped out overnight by a single legislative act. “Bread and butter” struggles are insufficient; they have to be linked with broader social and political concepts. Labor need to declare its political independence. It needs to organize a party of its own and to break, once and for all, with capitalist politics. If it is to win the support of the disillusioned workers it will have to challenge the economic and political power of capitalism and truly represent the interests of the working people. Liberal and progressives to-day endorsing the candidates of the Republican or Democratic parties, will ever mean the betrayal of labor to-morrow.
For us there’s no choice between the Republocrats and the Demopublicans. In politics, we don’t believe in choosing the “lesser evil” over a greater evil, when such a choice exists But these two parties are both monstrous evils for the working people. We choose instead something good for working men and women: A SOCIALIST PARTY!
Our attack must be against capitalism; our struggle must be for socialism! The class-conscious development of the working class will then begin.
A Hospital Desert in Chicago
Founded 168 years ago as the city’s first hospital, Mercy survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 but is succumbing to modern economics, which have underfinanced the hospitals serving the poor. In July, the 412-bed hospital informed state regulators it planned to end all inpatient services as soon as February. Fifty-five percent of Chicagoans living in poverty and 62% of its African American residents live within Mercy’s service area, according to Mercy’s 2019 community needs assessment, a federally mandated report. The neighborhoods served by Mercy are distinguished by higher rates of death from diabetes, cancer and stroke. Babies are more likely to be born early and at low weight or die in infancy.
“You’re going to have this big gap of about 7 miles where there’s no hospital,” Ansell said. “It creates a health care desert on the South Side.”
While rural hospitals have been closing at a quickening pace over the past two decades, a number of inner-city hospitals now face a similar fate.
“We’ve had three hospital closures in the last year or so, all of them Black neighborhoods,” said Dr. David Ansell, senior vice president for community health equity at Rush University Medical Center, a teaching hospital on Chicago’s West Side. He said the decision to close Mercy “is really criminal in my mind, because people will die as a result.”
By the nature of their mission, safety-net hospitals, wherever they are, struggle because they treat a large share of patients who are uninsured — and can’t pay bills — or are covered by Medicaid, whose payments don’t cover costs.
Mercy is following the same lethal path as did two other hospitals with largely lower-income patient bases that shuttered last year: Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, and Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C., which ended its inpatient services. Washington’s only public hospital, United Medical Center — in the city’s poorest ward — is slated to close in 2023 as well, and some services are already curtailed.
So far, urban hospital closures have remained infrequent compared with the cascading disappearance of their rural counterparts. But the closing of a few could portend problems at others. Even some of those that remain open may cut back crucial specialties like labor and delivery services or trauma care, forcing patients to travel farther for help when minutes can matter.
Today only 498 of 5,230 general hospitals in the country are owned by governments or a public hospital district. Instead, many hospitals in low-income urban neighborhoods are run by nonprofits — often faith-based — and in some cases, for-profit corporations. In recent years owners have unloaded safety-net hospitals to entities with limited patience for keeping them alive.
In 2018, the for-profit hospital chain Tenet Healthcare Corp. sold Hahnemann to Joel Freedman, a California private equity investor, for $170 million. A year later, Freedman filed for bankruptcy on the hospital, saying its losses were insurmountable, while separating its real estate, including the physical building, into another corporation, which could ease its sale to developers.
In 2018, Tenet sold another safety-net hospital, Westlake Hospital in Melrose Park, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago, to a private investment company. Two weeks after the sale, the firm announced it would close the hospital, which ultimately led the owners to pay Melrose Park $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging they had misled local officials by claiming before the sale they would keep it open.
Some government-run hospitals are also struggling to stay open. Hoping to stem losses, the District of Columbia outsourced management of United Medical Center to private consulting firms. But far from turning the hospital around, one firm was accused of misusing taxpayer funds, and it oversaw a string of serious patient safety incidents, including violations in its obstetrics ward so egregious that the district was forced to shut the ward down in 2017. Earlier this year, the district struck a deal with Universal Health Services, a Fortune 500 company with 400 hospitals and $11 billion in revenues, to run a new hospital that would replace United, albeit with a third fewer beds. Universal also operates George Washington University Hospital in the city in partnership with George Washington University. That relationship has been contentious: Last year the university accused the company of diverting $100 million that should have stayed in the medical system. In June, a judge dismissed most of the university’s complaint.
Dr. Maya Rolfe, who was a resident at Mercy until July, said, “Mercy serves a lot of high-risk women…People put their money where they want to,” said Rolfe, the former medical resident at Mercy in Chicago. Noting that the city has no qualms about spending large sums to beautify its downtown while other neighborhoods are in danger of losing a major institution, she said: “It shows to me that those patients are not that important as patients that exist in other communities.”
The Boss Elections – We the People Can Win
We are living in a time of unrest and disorder, a time of great upheavals. Politicians and parties are flailing around in panic and despair. This is not the time for complacency.
The dyed-in-the-wool reformists, careerists and opportunists have remained committed to the Democratic Party. We are all told “now is the time for action to get Trump out of office.“ So Biden has a program of reforms, watered down as not to scare away any fence-sitting Republican voters. The Democratic Party has never actually been a working-class party (except in rhetoric), and has always been controlled by an entrenched, corporate leadership.
“The state is the executive Committee of the ruling class.” This elementary teaching of Marxism has been freshly confirmed by the electoral sham. Capitalist politicians, whatever their pretensions, cannot act other than in the service of their capitalist bosses. Neither of the two major parties has any serious program for the reconstruction of American society. All their talk has no meaning in the face of the economic and social crisis which lies ahead.
Trump’s autocracy is all too real. He is the barbarian who is now no longer at the White House gate but sitting at a desk in the Oval Office. Not that barbarism is anything new in this world of ours.
The United States remains divided along racial lines. Biden is seen as the continuation of the Obama presidency. African–Americans more than any other ethnic group understand white supremacy, racism and class exploitation. African–Americans live with state-sanctioned violence and and prejudice. The problems facing-African Americans are class and racial.
Working-class whites who back Donald Trump, see themselves as the victims of reverse discrimination for the lack of income fairness and jobs. They for the most part see Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants as threats. They fear that these groups could wreak “revenge” for what segregation did to them and demand reparations and believe it will come out of their pockets. White fear has always been a tool of the ruling class. They use race-baiting and fear–mongering to get these same whites to circle their wagons around their “white (nationalist) communities”, against black, brown and yellow people. Both parties are indentured to the moneyed interests of Wall St. Of course, the U.S.A is a democracy, the people are free to vote for whomever they like as long as they vote for a capitalist.
Republican voters have decided that it’s better to be poor, sick and bigoted than prosperous, healthy and open-minded, just as long there is another group of people with a lower status beneath them.
Trump’s victory was not an aberration but instead represent the false consciousness of many white working class because he “identified” with their alienation. We should not underestimate the extent of white supremacist indoctrination. He is redefining the parameters of “legitimate” political discourse. Some have described the Trump’s authoritarianism as “friendly fascism.”
Is there another option that offers a way forward? Isn’t it time now to initiate a wide-ranging popular discussion of an alternative.
The World Socialist Party fully believes that the whole is greater than the part, wastes no time advocating this or that reform, but spend their energies in educating the workers in the fact that in socialism alone lies their emancipation. One reason our membership is so small and does not increase as rapidly as that of some other parties is that we dangle no “red herrings” before our fellow- workers. The fate of those whom a political or economic bait can allure is one to be pitied and abolished and not one to make political capital out of. We denounce leaders because they advocate reforms to prolong the system, and because while capitalism lasts, workers have not the power either to allay those evils, which grow worse with the growth of the system. Above all we oppose these leaders because they urge the workers to place political power in the hands of the masters.
The World Socialist Party of the United States, alone in this country adopts the correct attitude in this respect. We expose the evils and point the only way to remove them. Those who believe that the present system of society is essentially an evil, who condemn private enterprise root and branch, their business is to join with those who are seeking to destroy it
The Socialist Party of the United States was formed in 1916 in Detroit from a group of comrades who seceded from the Socialist Party of America together with some members of the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America. They afterwards took the name of the Worker’s Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS), During the 1920s, the WSP operated under the title Socialist Educational Society (SES) adopted during the Palmer era repression against revolutionaries. The SES returned to the WSPUS again in 1927 which was obliged to later call itself the World Socialist Party due to confusion with another of a similar name. It has conducted study classes, and promoted political education, but admittedly it still lacks anything like a prominent political presence. That sad state of affairs, the WSP intends to change.
American Nativism
EUGENE DEBS
“… our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness…” declared Thomas Jefferson in his “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.”
Yet the United States has exhibited a shameful history of xenophobia.
Erika Lee in ‘America for American, traces the vitriol that greeted each set of newcomers. First, it was Germans (“strangers to our laws and constitutions,” “the most ignorant . . . of their own nation”); then Catholics (“mass of alien voters,” “foreign criminal or pauper”); Chinese (“moral and racial pollution,” “filthy, vicious, ignorant, depraved, and criminal”); Jews, Irish, Italians, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans (“as bad as Negroes,” “moral cripples”); Mexicans (“low-grade Spaniard, peonized Indian, and negro slave mixe[d] with negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels, and some sorry whites”); Japanese (“enemy within our gates”); then Muslims (“the greatest Trojan horse,” adherents to “a religion that promote[d] the most murderous mayhem on the planet”); and finally, Mexicans again (“criminal aliens”).
Eighteenth-century German migrants, for instance, initially faced a torrent of abuse. But Anglo settlers came to recognize them as uneasy partners in continental conquest. Westward expansion served as a “safety valve” for the “social problem” of increased European immigration and helped lessen the scourge of wage dependency in favor of the pastoral independence mythologized by Jefferson. In fact, recruiters “directly encouraged and facilitated migration with promises of free land, economic opportunity, religious toleration, and political liberty.” The political imperative to turn a continent peopled by native nations into a laboratory of white self-governance, then, permitted the transformation of Germans into equals.
The bulk of early German migrants may have been perceived as lesser whites, but their Protestantism made them white enough. Chinese men, on the other hand, had both the wrong skin and a deviant culture. Settlers saw them simultaneously as covetous of white women and as sexually transgressive for engaging in “women’s work” (like cooking and laundry).
Lee doesn’t shy away from describing the illiberal deeds of liberals, but one emerges with the impression that their xenophobia was not a feature, of their politics. Yet Bill Clinton drastically militarized the border patrol, expanded the grounds for deportation, and passed legislation that deprived immigrants of social services. Bill Clinton’s senior advisor Rahm Emanuel stressed that the president could “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” Whenever liberals complain of Trump’s treatment of immigrants, remind them that formal removals of undocumented immigrants increased dramatically under Obama.
Daniel Denvir’s ‘All-American Nativism’ provides a useful complement to Lee’s book. Denvir focuses on the1965 Hart−Celler Act which although provided some opening of immigration from places like Asia and Africa by allocating roughly 20,000 visas per Eastern Hemisphere country each year, but for the first time put a cap on and effectively criminalized long-standing Western Hemisphere migration patterns from places like Mexico that had much higher rates of entry (the earlier bracero program had allowed as many as 400,000 guest workers from Mexico into the United States each year). Denvir calls particular attention to the pivotal role played by liberals in creating these immigration restrictions.
In his telling, liberals’ genteel embrace of nativist policy comes from a fundamental contradiction—the desperate need for exploitable labor and the impossibility of undocumented labor’s political freedom. Self-interested U.S. citizens recoil at the thought of not just increased migration but potential immigrant power. Democratic leaders attempted to outflank Republicans in hopes of gaining approval from “moderate” constituencies and cooperation from recalcitrant congressional colleagues. Even at the moment of the passage of Hart−Celler, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy accepted nativist framings of racial order, promising that the “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”
Centrists have joined the nativist wing of the GOP to rail against illegal immigration as a way to make the case for legal migration. Looking right, liberals have seen a faction of business elites clamoring for cheap labor and a faction of nativists barely concealing their call for ethnic cleansing. Rather than fighting for the rights and liberties they supposedly hold dear, liberals have mostly sided with the business class. The liberal embrace of conservative positions hasn’t led to compromise but has allowed the right to push for even more.
Denvir astutely draws on the history of the Great Migration to explain the development of nativist logic in the twentieth century. The massive movement of black Southerners to Northern and Western cities “created a model for resisting immigration: a template of white identity politics organized for territorial defense against the fiscal, criminal and demographic threats posed by racial others.” Under formal (which is to say legal) American apartheid, white Americans required the labor of black workers but rejected their political freedom. That tension has carried on into the postindustrial present: the United States cannot function without undocumented immigrant labor and it cannot function with their freedom either.
In the United States and around the world, in other words, billions are compelled to sell their labor power at an unsustainable price. These are the social conditions that produced the recent politics of popular revolt against established elites. They are also the root of the precarity that often drives migration.
Full article at
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-nativist-tradition
Climate Colonialism
As of 2015, the United States bore responsibility for 40% of “excess global carbon dioxide emissions,” finds the analysis, authored by Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, author and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. The Group of Eight (the United States, the European Union, Russia, Japan and Canada) is responsible for 85% of such emissions. And the Global North (defined as the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) is responsible for 92%.
In contrast, the Global South — which is by far bearing the brunt of climate droughts, floods, famines, storms, sea level rise and deaths — is responsible for just 8% of excess global carbon dioxide emissions.
A study released by Oxfam International in 2015 found that the poorest half of the world’s population — roughly 3.5 billion people — are to blame for just 10% of “total global emissions attributed to individual consumption,” yet they “live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change.” In contrast, the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for roughly 50% of global emissions.
A 2015 paper published in Scientific Reports identifies “free rider” and “forced rider” countries. It explains, “‘Free rider’ countries contribute disproportionately to global [greenhouse gas] emissions with only limited vulnerability to the effects of the resulting climate change, while ’forced rider’ countries are most vulnerable to climate change but have contributed little to its genesis.”
The fact that the United States and Global North bear disproportionate responsibility for driving the climate crisis does not let China off the hook for cutting emissions.
Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, explains “If China does not reduce emissions, and fast, then we are all doomed.”
“We know that the Global South suffers more than 90% of the costs of climate breakdown, and 98% of the deaths associated with climate breakdown, due to fires, floods, droughts, famine, disease, displacement and so on,” says Hickel. “So, just like under colonialism, the North is benefitting at the expense of the South.”
The leadership of the Democratic Party shows reluctance to curb the fossil fuel production driving the crisis — and hostility to radical solutions like the Green New Deal. The United States has contributed only $1 billion to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, meant to help “developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and enhance their ability to respond to climate change”