A Spanish power company drained two reservoirs during a heatwave and drought in order to profit from exceptionally high electricity prices.

Both reservoirs are now a desert, according to Javier Aguado, the mayor of San Cebrián de Castro. In another, San Pedro de la Nave-Almendra, the water level is so low the pumps that extract drinking water have become clogged with mud and the filters have to be cleaned twice a day.

Iberdrola, the country’s second-biggest producer, drained the dams in Zamora and Cáceres provinces in western Spain over a period of a few weeks to produce cheap hydroelectricity while the price to consumers is at a record high.

Electricity prices in Spain are fixed on a daily basis through what is effectively an auction as power generators bid for their slice of the market based on expected demand. A base price is set by the cost of nuclear power and renewables such as wind and solar because they are the cheapest, and then the rest – hydro and fossil fuel generators – make their bid. The net effect is that the higher the demand, the higher the price, with fluctuations making it almost impossible for consumers to budget for their electricity bills.

 Spain remains in the grip of a heatwave and recorded its highest ever temperature on Saturday, 47.2C (117F), in Córdoba in Andalucía. Air conditioners and fans are running flat out. With the heatwave expected to continue for several more days, most of the country faces temperatures ranging from 30 to 44 degrees.

The minister for ecological transition, Teresa Ribera, described Iberdrola’s actions as scandalous and said, “Water is a scarce resource which is just as important for the wellbeing of families and the economy as it is for generating electricity.” Ribera said Iberdrola’s actions as irresponsible, but that they were not illegal because the company was allowed to use a fixed quantity of water a year whenever it wished and regardless of climatic conditions.

Spain launches inquiry after dams drained for profit during drought | Spain | The Guardian

 Fewer than a quarter of UK companies struggling to hire staff after the easing of pandemic restrictions intend to increase the wages they offer to lure new recruits, according to a report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

When employers with hard-to-fill vacancies, which are most common in sectors such as hospitality and healthcare, were asked how they would deal with the gaps, however, as few as 23% said they would raise wages. 

The CIPD’s survey indicated that employers’ pay intentions were little different from pre-pandemic plans.  It showed the median employers’ expectation of basic pay settlements remained at the 2%reached last quarter, after four consecutive quarters at 1%.

 81% of employers planned a pay review between now and June 2022. Among them, 33% expected a pay increase, 12% a freeze and 1% a decrease. Thirty-seven per cent said it was “hard to tell” and 17% that they did not know.

Few UK firms facing staff shortages plan to raise pay, survey finds | Work & careers | The Guardian

  Approximately $25 billion to provide vaccines to these countries by “scaling-up production in the United States and in regional manufacturing centers around the world.” This could vaccinate billions of people, many of whom live in countries with current vaccination rates as low as 2 or 3 percent. 

$25 billion is 1/280th—or roughly one-third of one percent—of the estimated $7 trillion we’ve spent on lethal and counterproductive wars that have killed more than a million innocent civilians. 

A Harvard study estimates the USA is on track to spend $2 trillion on the Afghanistan war alone. 

$25 billion could be used to save lives instead of taking them around the world.

The current US defense budget is $753 billion. That’s 30 times more expensive than the $25 billion proposed pandemic plan.

Opinion | Trillions Spent on Disastrous Afghan War vs. Just $25 Billion to Vaccinate World’s Poor | Richard Eskow (commondreams.org)

 As many as nine million British households are on green tariffs, with more than half of all new deals launched by energy providers now claimed to come with environmental benefits.

However, firms are currently able to advertise their tariffs as “green” even if some of the energy they supply comes from fossil fuels, which industry figures have warned risks misleading consumers.

Suppliers can use several ways to achieve green status under the current rules, including committing to use 100% of the income from their customers to invest in developing renewable energy or by striking a deal with an existing wind farm or solar array to buy the electricity they produce.

Under a government scheme, energy firms buy certificates known as Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin, which are designed to show consumers how much of the electricity they sell has been acquired from clean sources.

When a supplier claims that its 100% renewable energy tariff is backed in this way, it means it will match each megawatt of electricity its customers use with certificates representing the same amount of renewable energy.

However, experts have warned the system is open loopholes that risk “double counting” the UK’s renewable energy supply use or even claiming foreign renewables as its own.

The company Good Energy is one of those that has been a vocal critic of greenwash tariffs. In April this year it said energy suppliers had for some time been able to “mislead” customers who were trying to do the right thing in choosing green.

Richard Neudegg, the head of regulation at Uswitch.com, the comparison service, said: “More and more people are purchasing green tariffs but it’s been difficult for bill payers to know exactly what’s under the hood of these deals.”

 Germany is forecast to record its biggest rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 this year as the economy rebounds from the pandemic-related downturn, according to a report by an environmental thinktank.

The increase means Germany’s emissions will be about 37% lower than in 1990. It had aimed to cut emissions by 40% by 2020, and met the target last year but only due to the economic downturn.

It also shows a significant increase in consumption of fossil fuels across the building, industrial and transport sectors. 

Germany ‘set for biggest rise in greenhouse gases for 30 years’ | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

 Canada faces a federal election with 20th September as the day our Canadian fellow workers cast their vote.

Sadly, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) will not be able to contest any seats but hopefully, its members will still make their presence known and be able to express the socialist cause in the heightened political atmosphere. 

The SPC is unique among political parties for not advancing a platform of reforms to entice votes. If the electorate is satisfied with capitalism and its insecurity and misery then it doesn’t want your support.  But if you wish to see an end to this exploitative social system, your support must come to us.

Our political goal is simply to place the productive apparatus of the earth into the hands of all society.

We don’t mean government ownership where the wealth produced by the workers will still belong to the capitalists. Nothing is basically changed. Capitalists merely exchange shares for interest-bearing government bonds.

We mean social equality, a condition in which people are not divided into owners and producers, but where there are no classes and production is organized to provide for the needs of all at all times.

This is not an idle dream. It is the logical and necessary outcome of society’s evolution.

 60 years ago in August 1961, the Berlin Wall was constructed. The aim was to prevent people from fleeing the then German Democratic Republic (GDR). At least 2.6 million people had already done so since its founding in 1949. They sought better lives across the border in West Germany, which was officially known as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

Between 2000 and 2021, the number of completed, started or announced border walls or fences in the world more than quintupled, from 16 to more than 90.

 Studies are divided on whether walls can prevent irregular migration.

 “There’s no scientific consensus, which means that walls are not universally effective at deterring immigration,” Sergi Pardos-Prado, a political scientist at the University of Glasgow, wrote to DW in an email. “Sometimes migration finds alternative routes ­— sea or alternative, indirect land connections. Walls are slow and expensive constructions, sometimes you prevent access in a specific area but you incentivize access in a different area still under construction or less robust. It is rare to find a perfect, massive, solid, impenetrable block covering the whole length of the border.”

Economist Klaus Zimmermann wrote in an email to DW that most social scientists working in the migration field “think that it is not a reasonable instrument.” Border barriers are “mostly a political showcase for policymakers to impress voters in the short term,” Zimmerman concluded.

 The left-wing will heed the Human Rights Watch report that highlights Israel’s war crimes on Gaza but they will give less attention when HRW calls out Hamas for their war crimes.

More than 4,360 unguided rockets and mortars were fired, Israel says, killing 13 people there. Many fell short, killing Palestinians in Gaza. One misfire above the city of Jabalya which it investigated killed seven civilians including two children and injured 15.

A few days ago Ben Wallace, the UK Defence Minister, said Afghanistan was “heading towards civil war” as he deployed 600 soldiers to assist in the evacuation of foreign nationals and officials. Days later and the Afghan National army has melted away into the civilian population and the whole Afghan government including its president has disappeared into neighbouring countries leaving the Taliban to take effective control of Afghanistan.

“This is manifestly not Saigon,” the US secretary of state Antony Blinken told the media. “We went into Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission in mind, and that was to deal with the people who attacked us on 9/11, and that mission has been successful.”

Back in July when Biden announced US withdrawal he was directly asked about a comparison with American retreat from Vietnam he answered, “None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken. The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

How wrong the Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America was.

This is exactly a repeat of the fall of Saigon, even if the images might differ. 

America, the greatest superpower in the World, has suffered a humiliating defeat and the Afghani puppet government, it and its allies spent over $1trillion propping up, no longer exists.

What happens next is all a matter of speculation.

 We cannot be at all confident that the Taliban will not re-impose its fundamentalist Islamic terror upon the populace once again. 

We can be sure, though, that some of the other Great Powers will fill the vacuum of America’s absence to offer the Taliban investment and aid in return for access to its vast mineral ore wealth and vital trade routes.

For ourselves in the World Socialist Movement, we will mourn all the lost lives, the pain of all the crippled, and offer our sympathy and solidarity to all those presently suffering the squalor and disease within Afghanistan and the misery of the millions who uprooted their families and fled to often unwelcoming foreign lands for sanctuary. 

America’s present political, military and diplomatic  “embarrassment” is of no concern to us. They will go on and repeat their invasions and occupations elsewhere. 

Capitalism has no remorse. History will be re-written. 

 COVAX, was an international system to share coronavirus vaccines which were supposed to guarantee that low and middle-income countries could get doses without being last in line and at the mercy of unreliable donations.  So far, the initiative has delivered less than 10% of the doses it promised.

It hasn’t worked out that way. 

In late June alone, the initiative known as COVAX sent some 530,000 doses to Britain – more than double the amount sent that month to the entire continent of Africa. Britain, tapped into the meager supply of COVAX doses, despite being among the countries that had reserved most of the world’s available vaccines. Other wealthy nations that recently received paid doses through COVAX include Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, all of which have relatively high immunization rates and other means of acquiring vaccines. Canada, Australia and New Zealand did as well. Canada got so much criticism for taking COVAX shipments that it said it would not request additional ones.

In the meantime, billions of people in poor countries have yet to receive a single dose.

The result is that poorer countries have landed in exactly the predicament COVAX was supposed to avoid: dependent on the whims and politics of rich countries for donations, just as they have been so often in the past. And in many cases, rich countries don’t want to donate significant amounts before they finish vaccinating all their citizens who could possibly want a dose, a process that is still playing out.

“If we had tried to withhold vaccines from parts of the world, could we have made it any worse than it is today?” asked Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior advisor at the World Health Organization.

Brook Baker, a Northeastern University law professor who specializes in access to medicines, said it was unconscionable that rich countries would dip into COVAX vaccine supplies when more than 90 developing countries had virtually no access. The program is now trying to regain credibility by getting rich countries to distribute their donated vaccines through its own system, Baker said. But even this effort is not entirely successful because some countries are making their own deals to curry favorable publicity and political clout. “Rich countries are trying to garner geopolitical benefits from bilateral dose-sharing,” 

In the meantime, Venezuela has yet to receive any of its doses allocated by COVAX. Haiti has received less than half of what it was allocated, Syria about a tenth. 

Dr. Christian Happi, an infectious diseases expert at Nigeria’s Redeemer’s University, said donations from rich countries are both insufficient and unreliable, especially as they have not only taken most of the world’s supplies but are moving on to vaccinate children and considering administering booster shots.

“If the donors are not stepping forward, the people who continue to die are our people,” Strive Masiyiwa, the African Union special envoy on COVID-19 vaccine procurement, said.

Rich nations dip into COVAX supply while poor wait for shots (apnews.com)