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)

The prosperity gospel is very profitable and has resulted in great riches going to the mega-churches , the television evangelical movement and individual pastors.

Religious institutions do not pay any income tax at any level of government. Religious organizations are exempt from a variety of taxes that individuals and businesses are required to pay, like income and property taxes. Faith groups can be exempt from paying taxes solely based on their religious work, not for any other charitable endeavors.

Religious organizations also pay no taxes on their investments, whether it be interest they earn on their investments or in capital gains – the increased value of stock from when the stock was purchased. As such, they are able to invest excess revenue in the stock market or other investment instruments but pay no taxes on the corresponding earnings.

Religious organizations pay no sales tax. This means that, when representatives of a religious entity make a purchase – office supplies, cars or travel, for example – they are exempted from whatever the local sales tax is in that area. They also pay no income taxes for businesses they own, if they can show that the business furthers the objectives of the religion. For example, a bookstore that sells religious books would be exempt.

Religious organizations may pay employment taxes for their employees. However, there are exceptions built into the tax code here as well. Clergy and members of religious orders are the only citizens who can opt out of paying Self-Employed Contributions Act taxes, which are 15.3% taxes on income for self-employed individuals that pay for Social Security and other federal benefits. If religious clergy opt out of the SECA tax, they cannot receive Social Security benefits. Clergy can also deduct the upkeep costs of their “parsonage” – their home or apartment – from their taxable income.

Religious organizations pay no property taxes. Property taxes are primarily used in the U.S. to fund local services like firefighting, emergency medical services and police departments, as well as schools and other infrastructure, all of which religious organizations use.

 Churches and religious organizations – which the IRS loosely defines as entities organized for “religious purposes” or for “advancing religion” – are listed separately from other tax-exempt entities and charities and can be subject to different rules. Some religious congregations do engage in relief efforts for the poor and needy, but many do not. And of the ones that do, many give a very small amount of their revenue for such charitable purposes.

Unlike charities, churches and other places of worship are not required to report any financial information to the IRS. And it can be an onerous process for the IRS to gain approval to audit places of worship, requiring prior evidence of abuse of tax exemptions reported by a high-level Treasury employee.

Religious endowments and investment accounts total in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S.. Just how much money religious organizations have is hard to tell, as churches are not required to report such information. However, the net worth of some well-known pastors, like Kenneth Copeland and Pat Robertson, are estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

SOYMB blog can only say that when it comes to taxation and when preachers quote scripture, one verse is ignored, Mark 12:17, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”

Megachurches can be megarich — and the government still gives them a huge break – Alternet.org

 Singapore-based Olam International is one of three food companies being sued by Brazilian state prosecutors for allegedly failing to address labor abuses in their supply chains. The charges stem from a 2018 report by Brazil’s Federal Labor Prosecution Office and the International Labor Organization that showed widespread use of child and slave labor in Brazil’s cocoa industry. The 2018 report uncovered thousands of instances of child labor and found farmers were being forced to work to pay off debts to landowners.

 It has told a Brazilian court investigating child and slave labor it cannot trace its supplies and raising fears exploitation may be going unchecked.

In its statement to the court in April, Olam’s lawyers said cocoa beans that were passed from farmer to middle man before being bought by the company were “not liable to tracking”. Olam said 90% of its cocoa in Brazil came from “indirect suppliers” – farmers who sell their beans to middle men, who in turn sell them to Olam for processing – making it impossible to trace the beans.

“You don’t know the origin, you can’t control the origin,” said the submission, given exclusively to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “There is no way for the buyer of the commodity to know where it came from.” 

The company has previously said it is capable of tracing 100% of the cocoa that it sources directly. Olam’s own website offers a guarantee that customers can buy its chocolate knowing that “it has been produced in a way that supports the most vulnerable people and environments in the supply chain”.

Brazilian prosecutors say they have proof of child and slave labor in Olam’s supply chain, and want the company to be made to take measures including cutting out the middle men, setting up formal contracts with farmers and organising periodic inspections for labor abuse.

Brazil defines modern slavery as debt bondage, degrading work conditions, long hours that pose a risk to a worker’s health or life, or work that violates a person’s dignity.

Margarete Matos de Carvalho, who is prosecuting the case, said buying from middlemen had enabled Olam to evade responsibility for abuses.

“We have abundantly proved the presence of child labor and slave labor (in Olam’s supply chain), but they close their eyes to this reality, while at the same time proclaiming and trumpeting their commitment to these issues,” she said.

Cocoa giant in Brazil slave labour probe ‘can’t trace supplies’ (trust.org)

 Many more people around the world will die of Covid because western political leaders are prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses,  rejecting “their responsibility to the rest of humanity”.

 Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford vaccine group, and Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, say that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.

They write. “Large-scale boosting in one rich country would send a signal around the world that boosters are needed everywhere. This will suck many vaccine doses out of the system, and many more people will die because they never even had a chance to get a single dose. If millions are boosted in the absence of a strong scientific case, history will remember the moment at which political leaders decided to reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity in the greatest crisis of our lifetimes.”

Pollard and Berkley write that while vaccines have brought hope and will likely save millions of lives globally, thousands are still dying of Covid every week and many countries are still in despair, with their hospitals overwhelmed.

“The vast majority of people who will die of Covid this year could have been saved if we had got this right,” they say. “Vaccinating those at risk everywhere is in our self-interest. It may reduce the risk of new variants arising and will relieve pressure on health systems, open travel, resuscitate the global economy and raise the international authority of politicians prepared to take such moral leadership.”

They  stress that the level of antibody or T-cells required to prevent people from getting seriously ill cannot yet be measured. While the yellow fever vaccine, which provides lifelong protection with one dose, the flu jab is given annually. Somewhere in-between is the tetanus vaccine, which requires five to six doses for lifelong protection. Pollard and Berkley say it is unclear where the Covid vaccine sits on the spectrum but – so far – it is clear it is offering protection against severe disease, including that caused by the main variants.

“The focus of vaccination policy cannot be on sustaining very high levels of antibodies to prevent mild infection,” they write. If we focus on antibody levels alone, we could end up vaccinating everyone repeatedly to cope with a virus that keeps mutating. The point of vaccination isn’t to prevent people from getting mild infections; it’s to prevent hospitalisation and death.”

They say that it is not an “all or nothing” argument, with careful analysis of the data required to ensure there are no groups for whom boosters are already warranted. But they add that for those who do not respond well to vaccines – a group which some have suggested should get a booster – “more doses won’t help”.

The pair conclude: “Since we have the two-dose luxury of having time on our side, we should not rush into boosting millions of people, while time is running out for those who have nothing. First doses first. It’s that simple.”

Booster jabs for rich countries will cause more deaths worldwide, say experts | Vaccines and immunisation | The Guardian

SOYMB blog would add that this is evidence for environmentalists to not place too much of their faith and trust in governments when it comes to policies to solve the climate crises.

Just days later, Biden now tells OPEC to increase output to keep prices low in the USA