It was a disaster waiting to happen. The drowning of 27 refugees who were attempting to reach the UK across the English Channel in a flimsy inflatable was avoidable unnecessary and predictable. The media prefers to describe them as migrants, not refugees seeking asylum and sanctuary.

The British and French governments place the blame on one another and both countries will accuse the gangs of people-smugglers as the direct cause of the tragedy.  And we will watch both nations politicians shed crocodile tears as they prepare stringent plans that will most likely bring yet another calamity with their enforcement.  We heard the sanctimonious fake sympathy in 2020, when a family of five Iraqi Kurds perished crossing the Channel with the body of their 15-month-old baby, Artin, washing up in Norway months later.

“To accuse only the smugglers is to hide the responsibility of the French and British authorities,” said l’Auberge des Migrants, an advocacy group that supports refugees and displaced people.

Describing the latest deaths as “truly heartbreaking”, the British Red Cross called on the UK government to make it easier, not harder, to claim asylum in the UK.

Mike Adamson, the organisation’s chief executive, said in a statement that “nobody puts their life at risk unless they are absolutely desperate and feel they have no other options”.

 Zoe Gardener from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants told the BBC that although the UK is a “compassionate country”, it’s also a rich, powerful and stable place that is “very able to offer protection to lots more refugees than we currently do”.

Clare Moseley of the charity Care4Calais explained that the migrants lost their lives seeking a better future for themselves in the UK.

“Part of the worst thing for us is that every single one of those people who are refugees by definition has already suffered something horrific whether they’ve been through conflict, torture, persecution,” she says. “The thought that somebody could escape from something really terrible, could go through hell, travel an immense journey of thousands of miles, to die at our border,” she adds. “When they’ve come here seeking safety, they’ve come here seeking our help, the scale of the tragedy – that it’s here that they die – is quite overwhelming.”

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “How many tragedies like this must we see before the government fundamentally changes its approach by committing to an ambitious expansion of safe routes for those men, women and children in desperate need of protection? Every day, people are forced to flee their homes through no fault of their own. Now is the time to end the cruel and ineffective tactic of seeking to punish or push away those who try and find safety in our country.”

Tom Davies, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights campaign manager, asked: “How many more times must we see people lose their life trying to reach safety in the UK because of the woeful lack of safe means to do so?”

Beth Gardiner-Smith, CEO of Safe Passage International, said: The tragic truth is that these deaths could – and should – have been prevented. No one should have to risk their life to reach safety. Every day, men, women and children are having to make extraordinary efforts to reach safety, sanctuary and loved ones here in the UK because there is no other way. To prevent a repeat of this tragedy, refugees urgently need safe routes to reach their loved ones, find refuge and have the chance to rebuild their lives.” She continued, “More and more people are risking the freezing, frightening journey across the Channel in small, unstable boats since the Government closed safe routes to the UK last year. Choosing to play politics with people’s lives, the Government has failed to prevent people risking the crossing and this is the result. The Government must act now to save lives by opening safe routes to the UK, and scrap their unworkable plans in the Nationality and Borders Bill which will only make the situation worse.”

Pierre Roques, coordinator of the Auberge des Migrants NGO in Calais, said the Channel risked becoming as deadly for refugees as the Mediterranean which has seen a much heavier toll over the last years of migrants crossing, AFP reports.“People are dying in the Channel, which is becoming a cemetery. And as England is right opposite, people will continue to cross.”

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 One in 10 UK families – about 3m households – are facing a cost of living crisis this winter, unable to cover even basic bills such as food and heating, according to a survey by the consumer charity, Citizens Advice.

One in five of all adults had cut back on their food shopping or turned off their heating.

One in 10 anticipated having to use food banks

Citizens Advice found that even when placed on a strict “minimal budget” – the financial plan used by the charity to support clients through a debt management process – more than 3m households were unable to meet basic living costs. A further 400,000 were left with just £50 a month once bills were paid.

One in 10 UK families will struggle to cover basics this winter, charity finds | Poverty | The Guardian

The 1.3 million-member Teamsters union has a new incoming president, Sean O’Brien. 

He says his top priorities are to unite the rank and file to take on employers, organize Amazon and other competitors in the union’s core industries, and withdraw support from politicians who don’t deliver on union demands.

“Our biggest selling point to potential members is showing in black and white what a union contract can do,” he said. “We’ve got to have a grassroots campaign to engage our members working in similar industries and showcase what Teamsters can do — and that means negotiating strong contracts that people want to be part of.”

In UPS negotiations in 2023, he says, the union must abolish the second tier of drivers, raise the starting pay of part-timers from $14 an hour to $20 and crack down on subcontracting and Uber-like deliveries by “personal vehicle drivers.” He and his running mates have pledged to strike UPS if necessary.

UPS workers have lived out the consequences of a bad deal pushed through by former union leader Jimmy Hoffa Jnr: two-tier wages and another five years of rampant forced overtime and harassment from supervisors. “It doesn’t matter where we went when we were campaigning—that’s what everybody was furious about,” said Eugene Braswell, a New York City Local 804 UPS driver.

Teamsters United Takes the Wheel – Consortium News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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