Peoples Temple was a church founded in 1954 in Indianapolis by a man named Jim Jones. In the mid-1960s the church moved to California. In 1974 it leased land in the rainforest of Guyana, near the northern coast of South America, for an agricultural settlement that came to be known as Jonestown. It was there, in November 1978, that over 900 people were poisoned or otherwise killed  – an act that Jones glorified as ‘revolutionary suicide’ but more closely resembled a massacre. 

Although Peoples Temple had the trappings of a Christian church, the doctrine preached by Jones combined Christian and Oriental religious beliefs with political ideas taken from the American Communist Party. Jones claimed to be a reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and Lenin. Other heroes of Jones were Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung. Everything that Jones did from his late teens onward was done in the name of socialism and communism.

Survivors of Peoples Temple have kept in touch and built a partly online community of remembrance. Many have written about and tried to make sense of an ambiguous experience. A key role in this community is played by the Jonestown Institute, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. The institute maintains a richly informative website and publishes an annual report. Both are open to contributions from anyone with something to say about Peoples Temple, regardless of political, religious, or philosophical viewpoint.

Here was an opportunity to offer members of this community a new perspective on Peoples Temple. I submitted four articles to the Jonestown Institute. They are listed with links on the page assigned to me on the institute’s website. They will also appear in the next annual Jonestown Report, scheduled for publication around November 1.

My first article, Jim Jones: an attempt at psychic-political analysis, focuses on Jones as an individual. I suggest that Stalinism, as a system of domination supposedly aimed at ending domination, was well suited to psychic needs rooted in the severe neglect he suffered in early childhood. 

The next article, Peoples Temple and socialism, questions the widely held assumptions that Jones was a socialist and Peoples Temple a socialist movement. I analyze Jonestown as a peculiar kind of class society and conclude that genuine socialism is impossible without democracy. 

The third article argues that even within a highly authoritarian structure there may exist islands of autonomy.

The last article — Was Jonestown sustainable? — argues that the whole project of establishing such a large and permanent agricultural settlement in the middle of the rainforest may have been ecologically unsustainable. 

Stephen Shenfield

Jonestown: in the name of socialism – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)

 Worldwide, 820 million people rely on fishing for their livelihoods, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. In some regions like west Africa, up to a quarter of the workforce are involved in fishing. Fish consumption also accounts for a sixth of the global population’s intake of animal proteins, and more than half in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Gambia, Ghana, Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.

More than 90% of global fisheries stocks are being fully exploited, overexploited or depleted, according to the UN. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a major driver of the marine ecosystem’s destruction and accounts for one-fifth of the global fisheries’ catches, worth up to $23.5bn (£20bn) annually, the third most lucrative natural resource crime after timber and mining. IUU fishing represents around 20% of the global fish catch, according to a 2013 report by the Pew Trust, thus playing a key role in overfishing. The greatest declines in fish stocks are expected to happen in the coastal regions that are most food insecure and more dependent on artisanal fishing for protein.

Developing countries are losing billions of dollars due to IUU fishing, which siphons off revenue through illicit financial flows, according to a new study by the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC).

The study reveals that the top 10 companies involved in IUU fishing are responsible for nearly a quarter of all reported cases: eight are from China – led by Nasdaq-listed Pingtan Marine Enterprise Ltd – one is from Colombia and another from Spain.

The Spanish tuna giant Albacora SA emerges as Europe’s largest alleged IUU fishing company and has received millions of dollars in EU and other subsidies.

“Illegal fishing is a massive industry directly threatening the livelihoods of millions of people across the world, especially those living in poor coastal communities in developing countries already affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and the impact of climate change,” said Matti Kohonen, one of the report’s authors and the executive director of the FTC.

 Global losses due to IUU fishing are estimated to be up to $50bn (£44bn), according to one study.

Africa is the most affected continent, losing some $11.2bn (£9.76bn) in revenue annually from IUU fishing while concentrating 48.9% of identified industrial and semi-industrial vessels involved in the practice, the FTC report found. Of that total, 40% are in west Africa alone, which has become a global epicentre for IUU fishing.

 Argentina loses between $2bn to $3.6bn (£1.74bn to £3.14bn) in terms of IUU fishing catch per year. Chile estimates its losses at $397m (£346m) and Indonesia’s are at $4bn (£3.49bn) annually, equivalent to the country’s annual net rubber exports, it concluded.

Kohonen said, “…vessel owners continue operating with complete impunity, using complex company structures and other schemes to hide their identity and evade prosecution”. Almost no countries require information about owners when registering vessels or requesting fishing licenses, meaning that those ultimately responsible for these activities are not punished – rather, fines are issued to the captains and crews of the vessels. Fishing vessels flagged to Asia represent 54.7% of reported IUU fishing by industrial and semi-industrial vessels, followed by Latin America (16.1%), Africa (13.5%) and Europe (12.8%).  8.76% of identified illegal vessels use flags of convenience such as Panama and the Cayman Islands, which have lax controls and low or no effective taxes.

Pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions will lead to global heating of 2.5C, a level that would condemn the world to catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the United Nations. Only a handful of countries have strengthened their commitments substantially in the last year, despite having promised to do so at the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow. The plans for emissions cuts countries submitted in Glasgow were inadequate to meet the 1.5C goal so they agreed a “ratchet” mechanism to toughen their targets year on year. However, few governments have updated their plans on emissions in line with 1.5C. Deeper cuts are needed to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which would avoid the worst ravages of extreme weather.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said: “This does not go far enough, fast enough. This is nowhere near the scale of reductions required to put us on track to 1.5C. National governments must set new goals now and implement them in the next eight years.” He added, “This is not just about words on paper, this is about getting stuff done.” He continued, “At Glasgow last year, all countries agreed to revisit and strengthen their climate plans. The fact that only 24 new or updated climate plans were submitted since Cop26 is disappointing. Government decisions and actions must reflect the level of urgency, the gravity of the threats we are facing, and the shortness of the time we have remaining to avoid the devastating consequences of runaway climate change.”

Taryn Fransen, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, said: “These reports sound the alarm that progress on climate commitments has slowed to a crawl since the Glasgow climate summit last year…on the whole national climate targets put the world on track to warm 2.4-2.6 C, which is dangerously high.”

Current emissions pledges will lead to catastrophic climate breakdown, says UN | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

One in three children, an estimated 774 million children, across the world are living with the dual impacts of poverty and high climate risk, according to a new report by Save the Children. In addition, across the globe, 183 million children face the triple threat of high climate risk, poverty and conflict.

‘Generation Hope: 2.4 billion reasons to end the global climate and inequality crisis’, found that while 80% of children are estimated to be affected by at least one extreme climate event a year, some are at particular risk because they also face poverty and so have less capacity to protect themselves and recover.

India has the highest total number of children both living in poverty and bearing the brunt of the climate crisis — up to 223 million children in total. It is followed by Nigeria and Ethiopia, with 58 million and 36 million children, respectively, living with this double burden.

The country with the highest percentage of children impacted by this double burden is South Sudan (87%), followed by the Central African Republic (85%) and Mozambique (80%).

A significant number of children – 121 million – experiencing the double threat of high climate risk and poverty live in higher-income countries, with 28 million of them in the world’s most affluent countries. More than two out of five of these children (12.3 million) live in the US or the UK.

The report also shows how these multiple, overlapping risks are linked to and exacerbate the current global food, nutrition and cost of living crisis that is causing 345 million people in 82 countries to face a severe lack of food.

Families across the world battle the worst global hunger crisis this century, fuelled by a deadly mix of poverty, conflict, climate change, and economic shocks, with the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis in Ukraine further driving up food prices and the cost of living. 

One million people are facing famine across five countries, with estimates that one person is dying every four seconds of hunger.

Inger Ashing, CEO of Save the Children International, said, “Across the world, inequalities are deepening the climate emergency and its impacts, most notably for children and low-income households…”

Generation Hope: 2.4 billion reasons to end the global climate and inequality crisis [EN/AR] – World | ReliefWeb

“The climate crisis is killing us,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres, responding to the report. “It is undermining not just the health of our planet, but the health of people everywhere – through toxic air pollution, diminishing food security, higher risks of infectious disease outbreaks, record extreme heat, drought, floods and more.” He added, “The science is clear: massive, commonsense investments in renewable energy and climate resilience will secure a healthier, safer life for people in every country.”

A report, by the Lancet Countdown group on health and climate change, is titled Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels, produced by almost 100 experts from 51 institutions spanning every continent says urgent, health-centred action to tackle global heating could save millions of lives a year and enable people to thrive rather than just survive, with cleaner air and better diets. The health of the world’s people is at the mercy of a global addiction to fossil fuels, according to a study. The report tracks 43 health and climate indicators, including exposure to extreme heat. It found that heat-related deaths in the most vulnerable populations – babies under a year old and adults over 65 – increased by 68% over the past four years compared with 2000-04.

The analysis reports an increase in heat deaths, hunger and infectious disease as the climate crisis intensifies, while governments continue to give more in subsidies to fossil fuels than to the poorer countries experiencing the impacts of global heating. The Lancet report also found that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidising fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019. These subsidies were bigger than national health spending in five countries, including Iran and Egypt, and more than 20% of health spending in another 16 countries.

The climate emergency is compounding the food, energy and cost of living crises, the report says. For example, almost half a trillion hours of work were lost in 2021 due to extreme heat. This mostly affected agricultural workers in poorer countries, cutting food supplies and incomes.

Dr Marina Romanello, the head of the Lancet Countdown and at University College London (UCL), said: “We are seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels. Governments and companies continue to favour the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of people’s health. Heatwaves are not only very uncomfortable, they are lethal for people that have increased vulnerabilities.”

Extreme heat also led to people being unable to work, with 470bn labour hours lost globally in 2021. 

“This is about a 40% increase from the 1990s and we estimate the associated income and economic losses at about $700bn,” she said. About 30% more land is now affected by extreme drought events, compared with the 1950s.

These impacts are leading to growing hunger, the report says. Hot periods in 2020 were associated with 98 million more people unable to get the food they needed, compared with the average from 1981-2010, and the proportion of the global population enduring food insecurity is also rising. 

“​The largest driver of this is the changing climate,” Romanello said.

Prof Elizabeth Robinson at the London School of Economics said: “This is particularly concerning given that global food supply chains have this year once again been revealed to be highly vulnerable to shocks [such as the war in Ukraine], manifesting in rapidly increasing food prices.”

The report also recorded the impact of the climate crisis on infectious diseases, finding that the periods when malaria could be transmitted became 32% longer in upland areas of the Americas and 15% longer in Africa over the past decade, compared with the 1950s. The likelihood of dengue transmission rose by 12% over the same period.

The report says the strategies of the 15 biggest oil and gas companies remain sharply at odds with ending the climate emergency, “regardless of their climate claims and commitments”.

Prof Paul Ekins at UCL said: “Current strategies from many governments and companies will lock the world into a fatally warmer future, tying us to the use of fossil fuels that are rapidly closing off prospects for a liveable world.”

Rapidly cutting fossil fuel burning would not only reduce global heating but deliver immediate health benefits, Romanello said, such as preventing a million or more early deaths caused by air pollution a year.

A move to more plant-rich diets in developed countries will halve emissions from red meat and milk production and prevent up to 11.5 million diet-related deaths a year, the report says.

“…We must change, otherwise our children face a future of accelerated climate change, threatening their very survival,” said Prof Anthony Costello, the co-chair of the Lancet Countdown. 

Global health at mercy of fossil fuel addiction, warn scientists | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 State laws will prevent 4.6 million Americans from voting in 2022 midterms election.

 The Sentencing Project released a new report which found that 4.6 million people, or one in every 50 adults, will be barred from voting in the 2022 midterms due to a felony conviction. 

The report, “Locked Out 2022: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction,” updates and expands on research The Sentencing Project released in 2020 analyzing the scope of felony disenfranchisement, as well as the state-level distribution of laws that ban people with previous felony convictions from voting.

Three out of four of the people disenfranchised are living in their communities, having fully completed their sentences or remaining supervised while on probation or parole.

 “…this report makes it clear that millions of our citizens will remain voiceless in the upcoming midterms,” said Amy Fettig, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project. “Felony disenfranchisement is just the latest in a long line of attempts to restrict ballot access, just like poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements were used in the past. It is time for our country to guarantee the right to vote for people with felony convictions.”

One in 19 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.5 times greater than that of non-African Americans.More than one in 10 African American adults is disenfranchised in eight states – Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia.Although data on ethnicity in correctional populations are still unevenly reported, the report conservatively estimates that at least 506,000 Latinx Americans or – or 1.7 percent of the voting eligible population – are disenfranchised.Approximately 1,000,000 women are disenfranchised, comprising over one-fifth of the total disenfranchised population. 

 At least 559 million children worldwide are already exposed to frequent heatwaves—a number that could hit 2.02 billion by 2050, according to a UNICEF report—The Coldest Year of The Rest of Their Lives: Protecting Children From the Escalating Impacts of Heatwaves. 

 The report calls on world leaders to reduce the threat of heatwaves—or any period of at least three consecutive days when the maximum temperature is in the top 10% of the local 15-day average—by ambitiously increasing action to limit global temperature rise.

In addition to high frequency—an average of 4.5 or more heatwaves per year—the report warns of the rising threat of extreme high temperatures, or at least 83.54 days that top 35°C (95°F), as well as events that are high in duration, meaning they last 4.7 days or longer, and severity, which is when the temperatures are 2°C (3.6°F) or more above the local 15-day average.

624 million children are currently exposed to one of the other three high heat measures—a scenario that UNICEF says will worsen over the next three decades.

“The mercury is rising and so are the impacts on children,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, in a statement. “Already, 1 in 3 children live in countries that face extreme high temperatures and almost 1 in 4 children are exposed to high heatwave frequency, and it is only going to get worse. More children will be impacted by longer, hotter, and more frequent heatwaves over the next 30 years, threatening their health and well-being.” 

“Children in northern regions will face the most dramatic increases in high heatwave severity while by 2050, nearly half of all children in Africa and Asia will face sustained exposure to extreme high temperatures,” the document states, highlighting that “almost every country is experiencing changing heatwaves.”

Vanessa Nakate, a young Ugandan climate activist, explained, “The climate shocks of 2022 provided a strong wake-up call about the increasing danger hurtling towards us. Heatwaves are a clear example. As hot as this year has been in almost every corner of the world, it will likely be the coldest year of the rest of our lives.”

She continued, “The dial is being turned up on our planet and yet our world leaders haven’t begun to sweat. The only option is for us to continue to turn up the heat—on them—to correct the course we are on,” She went on to warn, “Unless they take action, and soon this report makes it clear that heatwaves will become even harsher than they are already destined to be.”

2 Billion Kids to Face Extreme Heatwave Threat by 2050, Warns UNICEF (commondreams.org)

 “Malaysia has become the preferred destination for a number of threatened minority groups from Myanmar, including the Rohingya, the Chin, and the Kachin,” says Phil Robertson from Human Rights Watch. “Those communities and their networks in Malaysia help to protect new arrivals, and support efforts to get refugee status and protection from UNHCR.”

Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Convention and Protocol on Refugees. It also does not recognise the refugee status given to asylum seekers assessed by the UN Refugee Agency as being at risk if returned to their own country.

 Globally, 26,000 square miles of forest—an area roughly equivalent to the Republic of Ireland—were destroyed in 2021. This deforestation decimated biodiverse ecosystems and released 3.8 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, about as much as the European Union.

According to the annual Forest Declaration Assessment, “not a single global indicator is on track to meet these 2030 goals of stopping forest loss and degradation and restoring 350 million hectares of forest landscape.” 

 “It will cost up to $460 billion per year to protect, restore, and enhance forests on a global scale. Currently, domestic and international mitigation finance for forests averages $2.3 billion per year—less than 1% of the necessary total. Funding for forests will need to increase by up to 200 times to meet 2030 goals.”

Experts have long warned that it will be virtually impossible to maintain a habitable planet unless the world stops felling trees to make space for cattle ranching, monocropping, and other harmful practices. Although halting and reversing deforestation by 2030 is key to averting the worst consequences of the climate and biodiversity crises, the world is off course to achieve these critical targets. At COP26 climate summit last November, 145 nations signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration “to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation” by the end of the decade.

“To be on course to halt deforestation completely by 2030, a 10% annual reduction is needed,” the report notes. “However, deforestation rates around the world declined only modestly, in 2021, by 6.3% compared to the 2018-20 baseline. In the humid tropics, loss of irreplaceable primary forest decreased by only 3.1%.”

“Tropical Asia is the only region currently on track to halt deforestation by 2030,” thanks to the “exceptional progress” made by Indonesia and Malaysia, which reduced clear-cutting by 25% in 2021, states the report. “While deforestation rates in tropical Latin America and Africa decreased in 2021 relative to the 2018-20 baseline, those reductions are still insufficient to meet the 2030 goal.”

The authors emphasize. “Achieving the 2030 forest goals is essential for ensuring a livable world in line with the Paris agreement.”

They point out that “most financial institutions still fail to have any deforestation safeguards for their investments,” the assessment points out. “Almost two-thirds of the 150 major financial players most exposed to deforestation do not yet have a single deforestation policy covering their forest-risk investments, leaving $2.6 trillion in investments in high deforestation-risk commodities without appropriate safeguards.”

Fran Price, global forest practice lead at World Wildlife Fund explained, “There is no pathway to meeting the 1.5°C target set out in the Paris agreement or reversing biodiversity loss without halting deforestation and conversion.”

‘Not a Single Global Indicator Is on Track’ to Reverse Deforestation by 2030: Analysis (commondreams.org)

A new Greenpeace USA report,  Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, finds that U.S. households generated an estimated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, only 2.4 million tons of which was recycled. 

Plastic recycling was estimated to have declined to about 5–6% in 2021, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped. 

The report also finds that no type of plastic packaging in the U.S. meets the definition of recyclable used by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy (EMF NPE) Initiative. By EMF NPE standards, an item must have a 30% recycling rate to receive the “recyclable” classification. Two of the most common plastics in the U.S. that are often considered recyclable – PET #1 and HDPE #2, typically bottles and jugs – fall well below the EMF NPE threshold, only achieving reprocessing rates of 20.9% and 10.3%, respectively. For every other type of plastic, the reprocessing rate is less than 5%.  While PET #1 and HDPE #2 were previously thought of as recyclable, this report finds that being accepted by a recycling processing plant does not necessarily result in them being recycled – effectively negating the recyclability claim.

Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA Senior Plastics Campaigner, said, ” The data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable. The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill.” She explained, “It’s simply not possible to collect the vast quantity of these small pieces of plastic sold to U.S. consumers annually. More plastic is being produced, and an even smaller percentage of it is being recycled. The crisis just gets worse and worse, and, without drastic change, will continue to worsen as the industry plans to triple plastic production by 2050.” She added, “It is time for corporations to turn off the plastic tap. Instead of continuing to greenwash and mislead the American public, industry should stand on the right side of history this November and support an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty that will finally end the age of plastic by significantly decreasing production and increasing refill and reuse.”

Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste fails because plastic waste is extremely difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort for recycling, environmentally harmful to reprocess, often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and not economical to recycle.

 99 percent of plastic is made from fossil fuels, and as big brands continue their addiction to this harmful material, they are fueling climate impacts and jeopardizing communities in the name of profits. All over the world, communities face health impacts from the plastics industry, whether through incinerators, landfills, petrochemical facilities, polluted waterways, or the harmful plastic packaging pushed on communities. 

New Greenpeace Report: Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street—Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases | Common Dreams