Countries are losing almost half a trillion dollars through tax abuse by multinationals and the super-rich, enough to fully vaccinate the global population against Covid-19 three times over, a report has said.

Research found that estimated losses had risen from $427bn last year to $483bn (£359bn) in 2021, with the UK alone responsible for almost 40% of the total. Britain facilitates abuse and evasion through a network made up of British overseas territories and the City of London, the report said.

The State of Tax Justice 2021 – jointly published by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and the global union federation Public Services International – said $312bn of the total sum was the result of cross-border corporate tax abuse by multinational corporations and $171bn offshore tax evasion by wealthy individuals.

Alex Cobham, the chief executive of the TJN, said: “Another year of the pandemic, and another half-trillion dollars snatched by the wealthiest multinational corporations and individuals from public purses around the world. Tax can be our most powerful tool for tackling inequality but, instead, it’s been made entirely optional for the super-rich.

The report said the total was calculated based on data self-reported by multinational corporations and banking data collected by governments. Miroslav Palanský, a TJN data scientist, said the figures represented “the tip of the iceberg” and that actual losses from tax abuse were much higher.

The tax revenues lost by lower-income countries would be enough to vaccinate 60% of their populations, bridging the gap in vaccination rates between poor countries and wealthier western nations. However, it found rich countries were responsible for facilitating 78% of global tax losses.

The OECD brokered a deal between almost 140 nations to agree a minimum 15% global tax rate for corporations was expected to recover only a fraction of revenues lost to tax havens and would redistribute most recovered taxes to rich OECD members instead of the countries where the taxes should have originally been paid.

Almost $500bn ‘lost to tax abuse by firms and super-rich in 2021’ | Tax havens | The Guardian

The growing rush of commodities-driven land grabbing is “trashing” the environment and displacing people, says new research by research firm Verisk Maplecroft

Palm oil and cobalt were extreme risks for land grabs according to an analysis of 170 commodities. Alongside cobalt, other minerals used for “clean” technology, including silicon, zinc, copper, were high risk and undermined the sector’s label. The research showed that goods such as coconuts, garlic, tea and cocoa were also high risk for land grabbing.

The demand for more land to produce goods had been accompanied by displacement of indigenous communities and damage to natural capital – “such as clean air and water, pollinating insects, and soil quality” – crucial to battling the climate crisis.

Will Nichols, Verisk Maplecroft’s head of environmental research, said, “There is a lot of money to be made from trashing the environment rather than saving it when you are a landowner or someone looking to invest in these kinds of industries and you’re aware that the government isn’t going to stand in your way.” 

Campaign group Focus on the Global South published a letter signed by 257 organisations last Tuesday rejecting carbon-offsetting pledges from corporations and warning that initiatives such as tree planting will displace indigenous populations while land is still exploited for industrial agriculture.

Despite world leaders agreeing to stop deforestation at Cop26 this month, Ward Anseeuw, at the International Land Coalition, said there was a gap between government pledges and action on the ground. Anseeuw highlighted Madagascar, where he said a new land law voted in this year by parliament actually reversed efforts to allow poorer farmers to secure land rights. He said the law would strip away land rights handed out since 2005.

“It gives government very strong central power over these lands and they can decide unilaterally what can happen. That opens up the door for a huge land grab. More than 3 million households could be affected,” he said. “It really shows the contradiction of what is being discussed, and the actions or decisions being taken at a global level, and what is going on in the field with governments and specific companies.”

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, a programme coordinator at Friends of the Earth, said agribusiness was driving land grabs.

“There is a huge connection. In Indonesia, for example, there are several million hectares that have been grabbed from small-scale producers. Sometimes they do produce some palm oil for their own consumption but the problem is when it becomes needed for high-scale production for export,” said Chandrasekaran. “You see huge lands rights violations, where people are completely thrown off land and or harassed and threatened.”

Chandrasekaran said the increasing production of commodities was driven not by demand but by companies’ desire to lower prices, as well as trade agreements, such as the EU’s proposed deal to import beef from South America. She said this drive for commodities was despite most of the world’s food being produced by family farms, not by big corporations.

“People are still consuming things that are produced locally by small-scale producers. Commodities production can be considered food, but it’s highly processed, not accessible outside urban centres and not very nutritious,” she said.

Palm oil land grabs ‘trashing’ environment and displacing people | Global development | The Guardian

 The government of Kiribati, a collection of islands in the central Pacific,  has announced it will open up one of the world’s largest marine protected areas to commercial fishing, citing economic benefits to its people. The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) spans 408,250 sq km (157,626 sq miles) – an area about the size of California – and was created in 2006 with the entire area declared a “no-take” zone in 2015, meaning that commercial fishing is forbidden. As a sovereign nation, Kiribati has the authority to decide on the future of PIPA

The office of the president of the Kiribati government confirmed it was opening the protected zone citing the huge economic cost to Kiribati, a developing nation, of the ban.

“Similar to any Government, our decisions, as we make them, put the livelihoods of our people at the fore and have been carefully considered and agreed to as a Government,” it said. “Our decision as a sovereign country and Government is people-centric and commensurate with holistic options for marine protection and management, economic diversification, sustainable tourism and fisheries, to promote the growth of Kiribati’s blue economy, and uplift the lives of all I-Kiribati.”

The Kiribati government said that when it established PIPA it was assured it would be able to recoup the revenues lost from fishing licences, which make up more than 70% of Kiribati’s total annual revenue, but that this had not eventuated. The government said years after PIPA’s inception it was not sufficient to meet the present need of the people of Kiribati and the country’s future development needs. The government said that since PIPA’s closure to commercial fishing, there had been an 8% decline in demand for fishing in Kiribati’s EEZ translating to a loss in revenue of up to USD$146m from 2015 to the present.

Kiribati to open one of world’s largest marine protected areas to commercial fishing | Kiribati | The Guardian

 Through very little fault of their own thousands of migrants and refugees are trapped at the EU-Belarus borders enduring freezing weather, have become pawns in a cruel game of diplomacy.

The latest flashpoint finds them trapped in crude camps between Polish guards on one side and Belarusian guards on the other with very little being done to alleviate their suffering. Several have died from exposure. 

Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, runs an authoritarian and corrupt regime resulting in the European Union imposing. Lukashenko has retaliated by arranging the movement of refugees and migrants to enter the EU nations. It is not out of humanitarian concern for their misery but merely to make them an instrument of political pressure.

 In the conflict-torn regions of the Middle East like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan the  Belarus government have relaxed visa rules, providing a safer, easier route to the EU border.

People receive Belarusian visas and can buy tickets on flights run by the state-operated airline, to go to Minsk, Belarus’s capital, where some have been housed in government-run hotels. But far from providing aid and sanctuary to the migrants, the Lukashenko regime is directing them toward the borders of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania in an attempt to pressure the EU to lift sanctions on Belarus, described as Europes last dictatorship.

 Aid agencies and journalists are forbidden to go to the encampments now designated as an exclusion zone yet the distress of the migrants have led local people to try to relieve their suffering. A network nearby people are delivering food, drinking water, warm clothes and provisions for children.

There were  307,000 premature deaths due to air pollution in the EU in 2019.

Half of those deaths could have been avoided with new air quality guidelines, according to a new report published by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Air pollution is the biggest environmental risk factor to human health in Europe. It can lead to heart disease and stroke, the main causes of premature death, as well as lung disease and lung cancer.

The report makes clear that meeting the air quality recommendations from the WHO could have helped the bloc reach its goal of 55% fewer premature deaths from exposure to fine particulate matter by 2030.

WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Henri Kluge welcomed the report and said: “To breathe clean air should be a fundamental human right. It is a necessary condition for healthy and productive societies.”

Air pollution killed over 300,000 in EU in 2019 — report | News | DW | 15.11.2021

More than 300,000 workers in the UK will get a pay rise. Set by the Living Wage Foundation, the nationwide “real living wage” will be raised by 40p to £9.90, while workers in London will see their pay boosted by 20p to £11.05. 

 5 million workers in Britain earn less than these amounts, putting them at risk of severe hardship from rising energy bills and mounting inflation across the UK this winter.

 Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, said “Low pay is endemic in modern Britain. Millions are in jobs that don’t pay the bills or put food on the table.”

Katherine Chapman, director of the Living Wage Foundation, said “There are still millions trapped in working poverty, struggling to keep their heads above water – and these are people working in jobs that kept society going during the pandemic like social care workers and cleaners.” 

Gary Smith, GMB general secretary, said: “Workers are facing a cost-of-living crisis, and employers face a recruitment crisis, after years of politically driven cuts and a race-to-the-bottom by many employers.”

Real living wage rise puts pressure on UK government to raise minimum wage | Living wage | The Guardian

 Greta Thunberg has given her response to the outcome of two weeks of talks, what is now called the Glasgow Climate Pact:

 ‘…beware of a tsunami of greenwashing and media spin to somehow frame the outcome as “good”, “progress”, “hopeful” or “a step in the right direction”. ’

And her words were soon proved true when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told The Associated Press. “It’s a good deal for the world. It’s got a few problems, but it’s all in all a very good deal.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ conclusion was  that the “outcome is a compromise, reflecting the interests, contradictions & state of political will in the world today.” He explained, “Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe.”

Ahead of the Glasgow talks, the United Nations had set three criteria for success, and none of them were achieved. The criteria included pledges to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2030, $100 billion in financial aid from rich nations to poor, and ensuring that half of that money went to helping the developing world adapt to the worst effects of climate change.

“We did not achieve these goals at this conference,” Guterres said 

Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa, said: “The needs of the world’s vulnerable people have been sacrificed on the altar of the rich world’s selfishness. The outcome here reflects a Cop held in the rich world and the outcome contains the priorities of the rich world.” Adow added: “We are leaving empty-handed…”

Lia Nicholson, lead negotiator for Antigua and Barbuda, which chairs the 37-strong Alliance of Small Island States, said they were “extremely disappointed” by the lack of progress on loss and damage – the principle that richer countries, which bear the main responsibility for the global warming, should pay compensation to poorer ones because of climate impacts. She added: “We will express our grievances in due course.” 

 Aminath Shauna, the Maldives minister for environment, climate change and technology said. “I’d like to note that this progress is not in line with the urgency and scale with the problem at hand…The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is a death sentence for us. We didn’t cause the climate crisis. No matter what we do, it won’t reverse this.”

Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s international executive director, stated: “Clearly some world leaders think they aren’t living on the same planet as the rest of us. It seems no amount of fires, rising sea levels or droughts will bring them to their senses to stop increasing emissions at the expense of humanity. The world’s poorest have done the least to cause the climate emergency, yet are the ones left struggling to survive while also footing the bill.”

“It’s meek, it’s weak and the 1.5 C goal is only just alive…” said Greenpeace International Executive Director Jennifer Morgan.

Former Irish President Mary Robinson, speaking for a group of retired leaders called The Elders, said the pact represents “…nowhere near enough to avoid climate disaster. People will see this as a historically shameful dereliction of duty.”

Global Witness Director of Campaigns, Seema Joshi, said:

“Despite the science, the energy, enthusiasm and passion of communities, activists, environmental defenders and NGOs both in Glasgow and across the world, global leaders at COP26 have failed to put people and the planet ahead of profits and vested corporate interests.  The fight to save humanity is on. In the words of Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate, anything above 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming will be a “death sentence” in many parts of the world, with indigenous communities, people of colour and the poorest being hit hardest…”

Once again the words of Greta Thunberg resonates with many

 “The COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah.”

 According to the most comprehensive study of the region ever carried out, more than 200 scientists collaborated on the new report, which finds that the Amazon rainforest more than a third of the world’s biggest tropical forest is degraded or deforested, rainfall is declining and dry seasons are growing longer and an irreversible, catastrophic tipping point threatens. Tipping points may already have been passed in some areas, such as the south-east Amazon and on the border between northern Brazilian states Maranhão and Pará, where more than 70% of the rainforest has gone and once-abundant species are endangered.

Jos Barlow of Lancaster University said the urgency of the Amazon crisis necessitated a change of outlook. “…there is now irrefutable evidence that parts of the Amazon have reached a tipping point, with mega-fires, increased temperatures, reductions in rainfall. The severe social and ecological changes mean that a rethink is urgently needed. We cannot continue business as usual…”

The diversity of plants, insects and animals confers stability and resilience to local ecosystems, plays a critical role in global water cycles and regulates climate variability. The basin produces the largest river discharge on Earth, accounting for 16% to 22% of the world’s river input to the oceans. These globally important functions are weakening as a result of land conversion for cattle ranches and soy plantations, and disruptions of river systems by dams and hydroelectric dams. About 17% of the Amazon has been cleared and more than 17% degraded.

Human destruction is emerging so quickly that there has not been time to include them all in this study. In the past week, the forest has been cleared in Ecuador’s Yasuni national park for an oil road and pipelines. In the Volta Grande stretch of the Xingu River in Brazil, the Canadian mining company Belo Sun is closing in on a deal for an open cast pit that would scar the Amazon landscape and could contaminate water supplies that have already been disrupted by the nearby Belo Monte hydroelectric dam.

The problem is likely to widen unless the current destructive model of development, which only benefits a small minority, is replaced by a more holistic and inclusive approach. 

Transform approach to Amazon or it will not survive, warns major report | Cop26 | The Guardian

34,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers prepare to strike on Monday.

Semanu Mawugbe, a Kaiser nurse in Los Angeles explained, “It’s a slap in the face,” he said, noting that the 1%-a-year offer was well below this year’s 5%-plus inflation rate. “They tell us we’re heroes and we’re much appreciated because of everything we did during the pandemic”, he said. “But their offer shows they don’t mean it. We’re the ones who sustained the hospitals and took care of the sick like it’s a war zone…None of us want a strike, but there are times it has to be done,” he said. “We’re hoping for a last-minute, 11th-hour turnaround.”

The unions say Kaiser is seeking to squeeze wages when the non-profit company is doing well, with $45bn in cash reserves and $6.8bn in operating profits the last three years.

Denise Duncan, president of the United Nurses union, called Kaiser’s offer “totally unacceptable”. She derided the proposal to pay new workers less: “You can’t solve a nursing shortage that way.” She faulted Kaiser’s wage survey, saying it should have been done in cooperation with Kaiser’s unions. She said the survey, comparing Kaiser’s pay levels with those at smaller, less sophisticated medical institutions, often in rural areas, was apples and oranges. 

“Ultimately, we just had to pull our levers for a strike”, Duncan told the Guardian. “Our members were angry. Everyone worked so hard. We feel Kaiser let our principles of partnership go.”

‘A slap in the face’: nurses’ strike signals Kaiser’s end as union haven | US unions | The Guardian

 As the disillusioned environmentalists and disappointed COP26 delegates begin to depart Glasgow, what can we say except that our aim still remains one of achieving the socialist principle, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ – free access – or post-scarcity socialism to reword the title of a Murray Bookchin’s book.

The World Socialist Movement (WSM) has always held that a society of abundance for all is possible and can be quickly turned into a reality. The fact that science and technology have developed to the point where it could be applied to produce enough for everybody to be able to satisfy their material needs strengthens the case for socialism. If the technological preconditions exist in today’s world but what is lacking is the required vast popular movement to bring such a society into being.

How much is too much? Some futurist scenarios are built upon the assumptions that people want luxury and that they detest work. We suggest that neither of these is fully correct and take their reasoning from projecting the capitalist ethos into non-market and not–for–profit economic system.  

Our critics claim that there are no other alternatives for the allocation of resources other than prices calculated by the free market or determined centrally by a command economy.

Our critics remain fixated on what we can call the ‘Lazy, Greedy Hypothesis’ which simply preaches the conventional capitalist wisdom about peoples ‘selfishness’, rejecting a system that abolishes the money, prices and exchange economy on the grounds that a money-free scheme would permit the least social conscious, those without any sense of social responsibility to ‘win’ out because they will take more from society and give less to the community becoming anti-social parasites and free riders. Are some innately selfish and inherently idle?

We say no and don’t share this pessimistic view. We have always thought we left ‘Original Sin’ to the blinkered religious believers, not for the progressive-minded to accept.

People behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Although in today’s world working equates to mindless repetitive drudgery there is much more to hard work than that as demonstrated by the long waiting lists to enjoy the sweat of digging at one’s allotment. Working people develop deep friendships with co-workers when they engage in social production.

Human behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people’s needs are not met and reasonable people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because possession provides some security. People have a tendency to distrust others because the world is organised in such a dog-eat-dog manner. In capitalist society a tendency for individuals to seek to validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions and conspicuous consumption.

As Marx contended, the prevailing ideas of society are those of its ruling class then we can understand why, when the wealth of that class so preoccupies the minds of its members, such a notion of status should be so deep-rooted.

 In socialism, status based upon the material wealth at one’s command would be a meaningless concept. Why take more than you need when you can freely take what you need? In socialism, the only way in which individuals can command the esteem of others is through their contribution to society, and the more the movement for socialism grows the more will it subvert the prevailing capitalist ethos, in general, and its anachronistic notion of status, in particular. How can the status of conspicuous consumption be used as a reward as it is now for a privileged elite when all have equal free access.

In free access socialism, the notion of income or purchasing power would be devoid of meaning. So, therefore, would the notion of status be based upon the conspicuous consumption of wealth because individuals would stand in equal relation to the means of production and have free access to goods and services.

Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating needs. Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a maximum extent. Enterprises, for example, need to persuade customers to buy their products or they go out of business. They would not otherwise spend the vast amounts they do spend on advertising.

Socialism requires that we appreciate what is meant by ‘enough’ and that we do not project onto it the insatiable consumerism of capitalism. Socialism presupposes the existence of a mass socialist movement and a profound change in social outlook. It is simply not reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on what it entails on the part of all concerned, would not influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. Would they want to jeopardise the new society they had helped create? Socialists very much doubt it.

Socialism does not require self-sacrifice and for all of us to become altruists, placing the interests of others above our own. Socialism doesn’t require people to be any more humane than they are today. We will still be concerned primarily with ourselves, with satisfying our needs, our need to be respected and appreciated by others as well as our requirement for companionship and sexual intimacy. No doubt too, we will wish to ‘possess’ personal belongings, and seek to feel secure in accommodation, but this will be just that – our home and not a financial asset. Such ‘selfish’ behaviour will still exist in socialism but the acquisitiveness encouraged by capitalism will no longer exist.

The coming of socialism will not require great changes in the way we behave, essentially only the accentuation of some of the behaviours which people exhibit today (friendliness, helpfulness, co-operation) at the expense of other more negative ones which capitalism encourages. 

A sense of mutual obligations and the realisation of universal interdependency arising from this would profoundly colour people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society. We may thus characterise such a society as being built around mutual aid and a system of generalised reciprocity.