Who runs the country?

Judge Robert Summerhays of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana—an appointee of then-President Donald Trump—concurred with 24 Republican-controlled states’ assertion that the Biden administration’s decision to terminate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rule “violates the Administrative Procedures Act” because it “failed to consider the effects of a Title 42 termination on immigration enforcement and the states.”

The injunction blocks the administration of Biden from lifting Title 42, a Trump-era public health order that both presidents have invoked to deport around two million asylum-seekers under the pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic. First implemented by the Trump administration in March 2020 at the pandemic’s onset, Title 42—a provision of the Public Health Safety Act allowing the government to prohibit entry into the U.S. of people who could pose health risks—was continued by Biden. More Title 42 removals have occurred during Biden’s tenure than Trump’s.

Blame the Republicans?

 Last month a bill by Sen. James Lankford (D-Okla.)—and co-sponsored by right-wing Democrats including Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas)— was introduced to codify Title 42.

“If Congress locks Title 42 into law, what we’re really talking about is creating an asylum system that selectively doles out protection for certain groups, while keeping out Black and Brown people,” Helena Olea, associate director of programs at Alianza Americas, said in a statement. Olea contended that “Title 42 was never about protecting public health. It was about eliminating the possibility of asylum for people who cross the border by foot, fleeing instability and violence resulting from multiple factors, including U.S. policies.”

Tami Goodlette, director of litigation at the immigrant legal aid group RAICES, called the judge’s decision “both infuriating and unlawful.”

“President Biden could have ended Title 42 and all of Trump’s inhumane and immoral policies as soon as he took office in January 2021 with the flick of a pen,” she continued, “but instead, he surrounded himself with centrist advisers who coddled his fears on immigration reform and embraced deterrence as their central priority on immigration.” Goodlette then added, “Now, the anti-immigrant right-wing agenda continues to fly forward unchecked and immigrants seeking safety and asserting their legal right to asylum will continue to pay the price.” 

“Beyond the devastating humanitarian impact of Title 42, the court’s ruling also fails to recognize well-established domestic and international law,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. “Seeking asylum is a legal right, and yet this bedrock of the American legal system is quickly eroding at a time of unprecedented need.”

‘Arbitrary, Racist, and Unfair’: Judge Blocks Biden From Ending Title 42 (commondreams.org)

Expanding drought conditions, coupled with hot and dry weather, extreme wind and unstable atmospheric conditions, have led to explosive fire behavior in the south-western US, federal officials warned.  The climate crisis has set the stage for increasing and intensifying heatwaves in the coming decades, and models indicate that there could be between 25 and 30 extreme events a year by mid-century – up from an average of between four and six a year historically. They are also expected to cover wider swaths of land regionally than before.

Wildfires have broken out this spring earlier than usual across multiple states in the western US, where climate change and an enduring drought are fanning the frequency and intensity of forest and grassland fires. The nation is far outpacing the 10-year average for the number of square miles burned so far this year. Nationally, more than 5,700 wildland firefighters were battling 16 uncontained large fires that had charred over a half-million acres (2,025 sq km) of dry forest and grassland, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The largest fire currently burning in the US has blackened more than 300,000 acres.  In New Mexico,  the country’s biggest blaze – and the largest in state history – continues to burn.

Dozens of states across the US are bracing for historically high spring temperatures this weekend, as a scorching heatwave moves east. The early onslaught of sweltering weather, before what’s expected to be another hot, dry summer, is forecast to break or tie roughly 130 heat records for this time of year, with temperatures between 20F and 30F above average in the mid-Atlantic and north-east.

More than 120 million Americans are expected to be affected by the punishing heat, raising fears of health risks for the most vulnerable, outdoor workers and those who do not have access to indoor cooling. The National Weather Service issued a special statement cautioning residents to remain vigilant for signs of heat illness, take breaks inside when possible, and stay hydrated. Heat is a silent killer, often responsible for more deaths than higher-profile disasters like floods, hurricanes or tornadoes, and the rising toll is expected to worsen as the world warms.

Records are expected to be broken in large swaths of the east, including in Washington DC, forecast to hit 96F on Saturday, and in Boston, which could get up to 93F. Already, Texas has been pummeled by the heat, which delivered Dallas’s hottest May in history, and the south-west has cooked as strong winds fanned wildfire risks throughout the drought-stricken region.

Meanwhile, India’s heatwave also continues.  Last weekend, as temperatures in some parts of India’s capital Delhi hit a record-breaking 49C. 

“In a warming world, I would expect a place like India to experience these types of events as the norm rather than as an extreme,” said Luke Parsons, a climate researcher in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. “As we warm the globe, not only do the midday temperatures rise, but also the heat exposure in the early morning hours and evenings, times when outdoor workers traditionally do more labour intensive tasks. Therefore we will see more people exposed to extreme and unsafe labour conditions.”

Farmers across north India began to harvest their wheat crop in mid-April, amid temperatures that were regularly above 40C, they were confronted with damaged, shrivelled grain. Unseasonable winter rain and then a scorching summer heatwave that arrived two months early – both markers of climate change – had stunted crop growth and laid waste to grain and their livelihoods. The wheat harvest losses, which occurred across India, have left the farmers in terrible debt, having loaned money from a middleman to pay for seeds and fertiliser, but all found themselves with at least 50% less grain to sell. Profits from the harvest were not nearly enough to cover the money owed, and now interest on those debts is rising.

The low wheat yield had meant that the government’s own supplies have dipped to a 13-year low, and the shortage – exacerbated by alleged hoarding of wheat by private traders – led to prices in wheat and flour soaring by 40% in recent weeks. The Indian government announced it was putting a ban on all wheat exports, due to the heatwave decimating India’s expected harvest. 

 German agricultural minister Cem Özdemir warned that “if everyone starts to impose export restrictions or to close markets, that would worsen the crisis”. The United States said it hoped “India would reconsider” its decision to ban wheat exports which “will make the current global food shortage even worse”. 

Historic heatwave poised to hit dozens of US states this weekend | US weather | The Guardian

India’s wheat farmers count cost of 40C heat that evokes ‘deserts of Rajasthan’ | India | The Guardian

 The World Food Programme estimates about 49 million people face emergency levels of hunger. 

About 811 million go to bed hungry each night. 

The number of people on the brink of starvation across Africa’s Sahel region, for example, is at least 10 times higher than in pre-Covid 2019.

The total number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent food assistance has nearly doubled since 2016, according to the Global Network Against Food Crises, a joint UN and EU project. 

 “An absolute crisis is unfolding before our eyes,” the World Food Programme’s director, David Beasley, said following visits to Benin, Niger and Chad. “We’re running out of money, and these people are running out of hope.”

Apocalypse now? The alarming effects of the global food crisis | World news | The Guardian

The deadly bacteria outbreak in baby formula which resulted in the ongoing formula shortage arose from what some economists characterize as “rot” in the nation’s economic system: prioritization of shareholder wealth and consolidation. 

Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act to speed production of infant formula and authorized flights to import supply from overseas, while the FDA approved a deal with Abbott to bring the Sturgis plant back online within several weeks.

The baby formula producer Abbott used windfall profits to enrich investors instead of replacing failing equipment that was likely injecting the dangerous bacteria into its infant nutritional products, financial records and whistleblower documents show. 

The tainted product triggered a February recall of three popular Abbott infant formulas, including Similac, when batches likely tainted with the rare Cronobacter bacteria killed two infants and sickened two more. The FDA and CDC reported the babies “consumed formula produced at the Sturgis, Michigan” facility before they got sick, and the bacteria “may have contributed” to their deaths.

Abbott detected bacteria eight times as its net profits soared by 94% between 2019 and 2021. And just as its tainted formula allegedly began sickening a number of babies, with two deaths reported, the company increased dividends to shareholders by over 25% while announcing a stock buyback program worth $5bn.

“Abbott chose to prioritize shareholders by issuing billions of dollars in stock buybacks instead of making productive investments,” said Rakeen Mabud, chief economist for the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic advocacy group. “We need to make sure children can get the nutrients that they need – I think we can all agree on that – and these giant corporations … need to be held to account for the vulnerabilities that they’ve created and the quality of the product that they put on the market,” Mabud said.

The federal whistleblower complaint alleged some of the Sturgis plant’s equipment that caused the bacteria to get in the product “was failing and in need of repair”, and company management was aware of the issue for up to seven years ahead of the outbreak.“A number of product flow pipes were pitting and leaving pinholes. This allowed bacteria to enter the system and, at times, led to bacteria not being adequately cleaned out in clean-in-place washes,” the report reads. “This, in turn, caused product flowing through the pipes to pick up the bacteria that was trapped in the defective areas of the pipe.”

The problems are not limited to ageing equipment, according to the whistleblower. Management at the plant also falsified records, improperly trained employees, and successfully hid health and safety risks from the Food and Drug Administration auditors in 2019.

Companies like Abbott are “using every product as a personal ATM” by cutting corners to maximize profits, said Moe Tkacik, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project.  

Buybacks were illegal until 1982 because they were considered a form of manipulation. Annual buyback program expenditures among S&P 500 companies are often exceeding research and development or other investment, Tkacik said.

Baby formula crisis: Abbott enriched shareholders as factory needed repairs, records show | US news | The Guardian

Further background reading

Baby formula and breastfeeding – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)

Some in the environmentalist movement have succumbed to ideas that are promoted by the far-right and eco-fascists that population control and immigration restrictions are a solution to the effects of climate change. The attorney general of the US state of Arizona cited environmental protection when he sued the Biden administration for loosening immigration laws, claiming that migrants would use up resources, cause emissions and pollute the environment if they weren’t kept out by a wall with Mexico. Eco-fascists use racist theories to conflate the degradation of the natural environment with the degradation of their culture and their people, added Thomas. They believe that white people, along with the environment, are threatened by non-white overpopulation. Marine Le Pen has invoked climate change and environmental protection in her nationalist campaigns, while the youth wing of Germany’s far-right climate-sceptic AfD party called on the party to embrace climate change as an effective recruitment tool. 

Treating people as the problem isn’t just misguided — it’s dangerous. When concern about population becomes central to environmental policy, “racism and xenophobia are always waiting in the wings.” said Betsy Hartman, former director of the population and development program at Hampshire College and author of ‘Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: the Global Politics of Population Control,’ 

“In this ideology of ‘too many people’ it’s always certain people who are ‘too many,’ ” Hartman said. “It just shifts the discourse away from the real problem of who has power and how the economy is organized.”

 Climate change isn’t caused by population growth. It’s caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

“But doesn’t having more people on the planet lead to more fossil fuel consumption, which leads to more emissions?” some over-populationists respond.

Not so, Princeton University environmental engineer Anu Ramaswami, an expert on sustainable cities and contributor to the United Nations’ Global Resources Outlook explained. A small minority of wealthy people produce the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions — their consumption habits have a much greater impact than overall population numbers. It’s true that the planet can’t support unlimited population growth, Ramaswami said. But if people can figure out how to moderate our consumption and meet our needs without fossil fuels, experts say, it is possible for all of us to live sustainably and well — even if there are more of us.  Ramaswami said. “Fixating on population decrease doesn’t make much of a difference.” People in the world’s richest countries emit 50 times more than those in the poorest, despite having much slower population growth.

Over-populationists ignore the enormous inequality of wealth existing within every nation, whether thickly or thinly populated. They also ignore that much of the population between 16 and 60 are not engaged in producing wealth at all, but are either idle or are carrying on purely wasteful services called into being by the capitalist system. For them, there are no class divisions in society. They dismiss our contention that nature, contrary to some claims, is sufficiently bountiful for our needs. Many assert that over-population is the cause of modern wars. It is, of course, nonsense. The urge to find markets and sources of raw materials affects every capitalist country, irrespective of population. Is it a “natural” or a “man-made” law which prevents millions of workers from taking possession of the wealth which they create but do not possess? What natural law prevents the workers from enjoying the food and housing reserved for the propertied classes? The amount consumed by members of the capitalist class depends on their ownership of the means of production, which in turn depends on their control of the political machinery of society. There obviously are problems of population, but the problem of working-class poverty is not one of these. That problem cannot be solved by the workers until they have taken possession of the political machinery and re-organised society on a socialist basis.

We all need to eat. We all need homes that are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We all require to travel. But the economic system can change.

Adapted from

Eco-fascism: The greenwashing of the far right | Environment | All topics from climate change to conservation | DW | 19.05.2022

 Argentina has found the state guilty of the massacre of more than 400 indigenous people nearly a century ago. The Qom and Moqoit peoples had been protesting inhumane living and working conditions on a cotton plantation when authorities shot them dead in 1924. Until now, no responsibility had ever been officially acknowledged. A judge has now ordered historical reparations to be awarded to the communities.

The Indian sub-continent is enduring a scorching heatwave that is breaking all records.

Europe also is suffering the heat. 

Temperatures of “extraordinary intensity” in parts of southern Spain are forecast to exceed 42C on Saturday. 

The state meteorological agency, Aemet, warned that Spain was facing “one of the hottest Mays in this country in recent years”.

Aemet said a mass of hot, dry air is blowing in from Africa, carrying with it dust from the Sahara and “exceptionally high” daily temperatures that are between 10C and 15C above the seasonal average.

Spring heat records have also been broken in France as the country enters its 38th consecutive day of above-normal temperatures, with parts of the south already exceeding 33C and some models predicting temperatures will rise locally to 37C or even 39C by the end of the week, around 17C hotter than the seasonal average.

In Paris, the overnight temperature from Wednesday to Thursday did not fall lower than 20C, the first time that has happened so early in the year in the century and a half since records in the capital began. At 3am, the mercury was still close to 22C.

Météo France said such episodes of extreme heat are likely to become longer and more severe, start earlier and recur more frequently as global heating advances 

Spain braces for heatwave of ‘extraordinary intensity’ | Spain | The Guardian

Although not surging as high as in other countries at 5.1%, Australia’s inflation rate is outstripping wage growth (2.3%) meaning people have less money in their pockets every month.

Australia’s Reserve Bank (RBA) increased interest rates (by 0.25% to 0.35%) for the first time in more than 11 years.

 It is estimated that 300,000 Australians could default on their mortgages as repayments increase.

Australia election 2022: Cost of living worries voters – BBC News

There were a record 177 billionaires in the UK – six more than in 2021 – according to the Sunday Times Rich List, as the wealthiest figures in the UK grew their combined fortunes by 8% to a record £710billion in just 12 months.

In the 2022 Sunday Times Rich List, billionaire brothers Sri and Gopi Hinduja taking the top spot who run the Mumbai-based conglomerate Hinduja Group, are worth a staggering £28.47billion – an increase of more than £11billion on their fortune last year.

These are the 20 richest people in the UK according to the Rich List:

Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family – £28.47 billion

Sir James Dyson and family – £23 billion

David and Simon Reuben and family – £22.26 billion

Sir Leonard Blavatnik – £20 billion

Guillaume Pousaz – £19.26 billion

Lakshmi Mittal and family – £17 billion

Christoph Henkel and family – £15 billion

Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family – £13.5 billion

Kirsten and Jorn Rausing – £12 billion

Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho – £11.42 billion

Michael Platt – £10 billion

Alisher Usmanov – £10 billion

The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family – £9.73 billion

Barnaby and Merlin Swire and family – £9.6 billion

Marit, Lisbet, Sigrid and Hans Rausing – £9.49 billion

Anil Agarwal – £9.2 billion

Denise, John and Peter Coates – £8.64 billion

John Fredriksen and family – £8.31 billion

Mikhail Fridman – £8.22 billion

Moshe Kantor – £8 billion

 According to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), under current U.S. law, unrealized capital gains from stocks and other assets are not taxed, allowing billionaires such as Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to accumulate massive fortunes tax-free. And even when assets are sold and gains are “realized,” the long-term capital gains tax rate is significantly lower than the top marginal tax rate of 37%.

 ATF estimates that 26 of the richest people in the U.S. paid an average federal income tax rate of 4.8% between 2013 and 2018 when wealth gains are counted as income.

Some prominent billionaires—including Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Bezos—paid tax rates of less than 2% during the six-year period, ATF found. The average U.S. taxpayer pays a 13.3% tax rate on their income.

“Teachers, plumbers, firefighters, and other working Americans can already pay higher tax rates than billionaires—and that’s just counting the small part of billionaire income that is now taxed,” Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement. “When you include their untaxed wealth growth in the calculation, many billionaires pay almost nothing.”

Analysis: 26 US Billionaires Paid Average Tax Rate of Just 4.8% in Recent Years (commondreams.org)