The home secretary, Priti Patel, has been accused of inciting racial hatred.

Patel, in a Zoom meeting with Jewish leaders, said she was determined to stamp out the “criminality that takes place and that has happened through Traveller communities and unauthorised encampments”. She said, “We have seen criminality, violence taking place. We saw one particular Traveller criminal – I can’t go into the details of this – but, basically, we saw a police officer that was effectively murdered through a robbery that took place by a Traveller family,” she said.

Lord Woolley, condemned the comments as “wrong, reckless and at worst dangerous, because this type of language easily stirs up racial hatred”. Woolley, who was adviser to Theresa May’s Racial Disparity Unit, told The Independent that the crime rate among Travellers was “lower than the national average”.

“So to demonise a whole community as the home secretary has done is simply wrong, reckless and at worst dangerous, because this type of language easily stirs up racial hatred. This is a community which, along with the Roma community, is perhaps the most abused and demonised in society and which most needs respect and protection under the law. I hope that, on reflection, the home secretary will see that this potentially stirs up racial hatred and will be humble enough to apologise.”

80 leading academics, race equality organisations, and politicians  have signed a letter to  Patel, urging her to retract her “hate speech”. The protest letter reads: “We consider your comments during this meeting to constitute hate speech as it brands an entire ethnic group as criminal and violent. You have a duty as a public figure to eliminate unlawful discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and encourage good relations between all groups.” It adds: “We call for an immediate retraction of these comments, and a public apology made directly to all Traveller, Gypsy and Roma people.”

The killing, and the teenagers’ lack of remorse, was condemned by leading members of the Traveller community, but immediately provoked fears that it was being exploited to stir up longstanding prejudices.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/priti-patel-pc-andrew-harper-death-racial-hatred-irish-travellers-b596251.html

You young ones will tell us when you get older,

You wish you’d seen clearer, you wish you’d been bolder.

Received opinion’s not what it seemed,

Now you know it’s not what you dreamed.

Study long, work hard and get a good job Get into the system, don’t be a slob. Students? No problem, get a loan for your fees, Pay us back later, take as long as you please.

Into the workforce, at last you’ve got money But at the end of the month it doesn’t seem funny With 2.4 children, mortgage and car You worked such long hours but it didn’t go far.

Some of you enrolled for training schemes, Improved your skills, enlarged your dreams. Then you found the skills weren’t needed Here, at home – to overseas the jobs were ceded.

In the majority world where life is cheap Production’s a doddle and profits are steep, No cares about pensions; health and safety is crude, Fourteen hours a day keep the workforce subdued.

You joined the union, showed your grit, Even that wasn’t the end of it. Agreements signed were soon annulled, The union’s teeth had all been pulled.

“Make Poverty History” became the new call, By 2010 we could end it all If we all pulled together to finish the trouble. In fact the same year we saw poverty double!

“Democracy’s the thing, let’s spread it worldwide” With scant regard for the numbers who’d died Worldwide in previous wars of attrition. Is there really no end to imperial ambition?

Pit man against man and sect against sect, No regard for the numbers of lives that are wrecked If your name is Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney or Blair. Makes no difference; in politics, nothing is fair.

The nations’ police forces – for public protection! –Have been used more and more for casual selection Of ordinary folk seeking simply a voice For issues not covered by brute market force.

It’s clear what you young ones need now, not later, Is exposure to values which are somewhat greater, Like production for use and access for all, No second-class citizens with backs to the wall.

Freedom in all things, isn’t that what you want?

Freedom to say, do and go where you want?

Give us a call or look on the net

The Socialist Party’s the name, check out what you’ll get –

 JanetS

 Oliver Healey writes in flowery terms (Letters, September 10).

Capitalism is not the product of a financial conspiracy, and workers have always supported and voted for the continuation of capitalism. By contrast, communists such as Karl Marx sought capitalism’s overthrow, and also rejected the reformist half-measures of his contemporary, Eduard Bernstein. So much so, the Communist manifesto concluded – in what Healey might consider oppositional and confrontational terms – that the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to win. This means defending tariffs and high wages are protecting the crumbs when Marxists want to capture the whole bakery.

In the here and now, collective organising can achieve better conditions, but it will be workers organising for themselves, not tariffs (or even particularly Marxists), let alone the coercing of foreign states. Ruling classes of imagined communities of ‘nations’ (all existing states, which are sort of a monopoly themselves) are part of the problem.

Jon D White

email

https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1316/letters/

 Kentucky’s climate is changing quickly. The Bluegrass State is the ninth most threatened state in the country by long-term climate change impacts, according to a recent study  based on data from Climate Central. That puts it ahead of even California, where wildfires recently have wreaked havoc. Erratic weather, exceptional heat, drought, wildfires and flooding all threaten Kentucky.

Kentucky is a microcosm of the nation’s climate dilemma: the effects of the climate crisis are clear here, but legacy interests and the forces of change are at an impasse. “There’s a lag between where we need to be and where we’re at right now,” said Lane Boldman, who directs the Kentucky Conservation Committee, a nonprofit environmental policy group. “And there really isn’t a lot of time.”

 According to a study this month by Yale and George Mason universities, Kentucky is one of only four states in the country where a majority of adults do not believe global warming is caused by humans.

Coal industry ties run deep, however, and, for many, talk of change is anathema. The state legislature has mostly avoided the climate issue. And US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, by far the state’s best-known politician, has been a dedicated opponent of climate action. McConnell has accepted more than $3m from the coal, oil and gas industries over the course of his career. Critics say he’s returned the favor with handouts – tax breaks and regulatory cuts – to keep the dying industry aloft. In 2017, McConnell joined the Trump administration in urging America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate Agreement. In 2019, he engineered what he admitted was “a show vote” intended to kill the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, McConnell sits on the Senate agriculture committee but has seemed indifferent to how climate change threatens Kentucky’s sizable agricultural sector.

Similar apathy reigns in the state legislature, where Republicans hold a lock on both houses. The chair of the House Natural Resources and Energy committee, Jim Gooch, for example, told Louisville’s WFPL radio station recently that the science on climate change remains unsettled. Other legislators seem still beholden to the coal industry, reform advocates say, and to utility companies.

The coal industry employed some 38,000 Kentuckians when McConnell took office in 1985; it’s below 4,000 today. Workers in the mountainous eastern part of the state have found themselves laid off and uncompensated for their work by coal bosses. And deregulation has led to one of the worst black lung epidemics on record. Eastern Kentucky counties are among the poorest in the nation, with poverty rates around 40%. The water in some of those counties is either undrinkable or unaffordable.

Three of the five wettest years on record in the state have been in the last decade, and this summer saw the most rain of any two-month period on record going back to 1895. More rain can boost crops, but in many parts of Kentucky rain now comes in unhelpful torrents. In both the eastern mountains and urban areas, excessive rain has contributed to severe and frequent flooding. In Louisville, this year, rain has turned neighborhoods into swamps and devastated businesses. The precipitation uptick is “very much consistent” with scientific projections for how climate change will play out in the state, Stuart Foster, Kentucky’s state climatologist, said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/24/kentuckys-climate-is-suffering-can-the-state-slip-the-industry-ties-that-prevent-change

Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, has the highest-rated show on the network. 

Carlson was recently taken to court for defamation of character by Karen McDougal who was paid for her silence about an affair she said she had with Donald Trump. To defend Carlson Fox News made a damning admission. Tucker Carlson cannot be trusted.

 Federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found: 

“This “general tenor” of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”…Fox persuasively argues…that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer “arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism” about the statements he makes.”

Fox TV concedes that this number one show presenter cannot be reasonably expected to be taken seriously and “reasonable” viewers will be skeptical that his claims are not “actual facts.”

The fact is, Carlson is a liar, and he often intentionally lies to his audience so to get them to buy into his biased ideological view of the world.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fox-news-was-forced-to-make-a-damning-admission-in-a-tucker-carlson-lawsuit/

 EU member states’ reluctance to provide refuge to displaced people and the new proposed migration rules putting an end to asylum quotas is a victory for the nationalists. The  new migration proposals are an admission of failure. 

What is missing completely is humanity. The bureaucratic management of migration has totally triumphed over compassion.

Amnesty International said the pact was “designed to heighten walls and strengthen fences” and would do nothing to alleviate the suffering of people in camps on Greek islands or in Libya.

“The commission has bowed to pressure from EU governments whose only objective is to decrease the number of people granted protection in Europe, “said Marissa Ryan, head of Oxfam’s EU office.

“The far right has captured EU migration policy,” said Dutch MEP Sophie in’t Veld

There are many reasons that can explain the influx of migrants coming to Europe – climate change, a lack of economic opportunity and war all among them. Perhaps not every country in the EU has contributed to all of these root causes, and they might be justified in believing they shouldn’t have to bear the responsibility for others’ problems. But they surely have a duty to not exacerbate these root problems if they wish to complain about their responsibility for migrants. 

Judith Sunderland, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, tweeted the “flexible option” means that “countries who refuse to accept responsibility for migrants and asylum seekers” will “deport people found to have no right to stay. It’s like asking the school bully to walk a kid home,” she added.

 The worst wildfires in 18 years have raged across California since August. They have been responsible for more than 30 deaths and driven thousands of people from their homes. The researchers say that the conditions for wildfire are likely to continue to grow into the future, and according to Dr Jones, the resulting fires will likely get worse.

Climate change is driving the scale and impact of recent wildfires that have raged in California, say scientists. Their analysis finds an “unequivocal and pervasive” role for global heating in boosting the conditions for fire.

California now has greater exposure to fire risks than before humans started altering the climate, the authors say. Land management issues, touted by President Donald Trump as a key cause, can’t by themselves explain the recent infernos.

The cause of the fires have become a political football, with California Governor Gavin Newsom blaming climate change for the conflagrations. President Trump, on the other hand, has dismissed this argument, instead pointing to land management practices as the key driver.

A review of scientific research into the reasons for these fires suggests rising temperatures are playing a major role.

Earlier this year, the same research team published a review of the origins of Australia’s dramatic fires that raged in the 2019-2020 season. That study showed that climate change was behind an increase in the frequency and severity of fire weather – defined as periods of time with a higher risk of fire due to a combination of high temperatures, low humidity, low rainfall and high winds.

The new review covers more than 100 studies published since 2013, and shows that extreme fires occur when natural variability in the climate is superimposed on increasingly warm and dry background conditions resulting from global warming.

“In terms of the trends we’re seeing, in terms of the extent of wildfires, and which have increased eight to ten-fold in the past four decades, that trend is driven by climate change,” said Dr Matthew Jones from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who led the review. “Climate change ultimately means that those forests, whatever state they’re in, are becoming warmer and drier more frequently,” he told BBC News. “And that’s what’s really driving the kind of scale and impact of the fires that we’re seeing today.”

The authors of the review conclude that “climate change is bringing hotter, drier weather to the western US and the region is fundamentally more exposed to fire risks than it was before humans began to alter the global climate”.

“It’s pointing towards increases in fire weather that become increasingly intense, widespread and dramatic in the future,” he said. “And the more that we can do to limit the degree to which temperatures rise, is fundamental to how frequently we see dangerous fire weather in the future.”

The researchers acknowledge that fire management practices in the US have also contributed to the build-up of fuel. Normally, fire authorities carry out controlled burnings in some areas to reduce the amount of fuel available when a wildfire strikes – but these have also suffered as a result of rising temperatures.

“When you do prescribed burns, you can only do it when the conditions aren’t too hot and dry, because you need to be able to control the fire,” said Prof Richard Betts from the UK Met Office in Exeter, who was part of the review team. “But once you’ve passed the point where you’ve got hot, dry conditions for much of the year, you’ve lost your opportunity to do lots of prescribed burnings. So that makes matters worse and makes the land management challenge even greater.”

Another factor in California has been the encroachment of human settlements into forested areas. This has put many more homes at risk of these blazes. Between 1940 and 2010, there was around a 100-fold increase in the number of houses built in dangerous fire zones in the western US.

“It’s like building on floodplains as well, you know, people are putting themselves in harm’s way, based on past statistics, which are no longer true,” said Prof Betts. “The past is no longer a guide to the future, for flooding and for fire and lots of other ways in which climate change is played out.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54278988

 The Iowa Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued the citation to the Iowa Premium Beef Plant in Tama, where 338 of the facility’s 850 employees tested positive (40%) for Covid-19 during an April outbreak that produced one of the state’s first “hot spots.” 

The result was that Iowa regulators levied a $957 citation for a minor record-keeping violation by a subsidiary of one of the nation’s biggest beef processing companies. The fine was originally meant to be an equally derisory twice as high. However, Iowa OSHA Administrator Russell Perry approved a settlement with the company cutting the amount in half.

The fine comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Labor Department fined JBS Foods which, with over $50 billion in annual sales, is the world’s largest meat processing company—a paltry $15,615 for failing to adequately protect workers against coronavirus.

The fine also follows the revelation earlier this month that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the meatpacking industry collaborated to downplay and disregard risks to worker health during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/24/derision-disbelief-after-iowa-meatpacking-plant-where-hundreds-caught-coronavirus

 Democrats are using Trump’s fascistic tendencies as electoral extortion and offering us grandfatherly Biden as an alternative. Working class anger is also growing. Biden is raising the expectations of working class people with plenty of promises in order to win the election. The Democrats are part of the problem and not even a temporary solution. We aren’t claiming that the Democratic  and Republican parties are exactly the same; just that the Democrats are no answer to the Republicans. Both parties are inextricably tied to the capitalist system and must defend it at home and abroad. Both have long records of handouts to the corporations. They defend the system in different ways.

At home, the Republicans are the “hard cops,” the Democrats softer. The liberals’ job is to pretend they are on the side of beleaguered workers, the racially oppressed, the unemployed and the overburdened poor. When people protest, the Democrats offer some concessions meant to contain and detour workers, not at all to meet their increasingly desperate needs. They are just as big liars as the Republicans. Supporting Democrats to stop Republicans isn’t using fire to stop a fire; it is fuelling a growing blaze. Their function is to demobilize potential mass unrest, not encourage them. And the function of progressives is to cover for them.

No candidate in his election offers anything close to what working people need and want. That is because this society, its pseudo-democratic elections included, in no way serves the working class. It is a capitalist society, run by and for the capitalist ruling class. By means of the presidential campaign, the ruling class is demanding popular ratification of its legitimacy. The facts are plain. The two major presidential candidates agree almost 100 percent on all the basics.  It means mobilizing the U.S. population for the sacrifices required. to  policies that will lead to both cuts in social spending at home and increases in U.S. military manpower abroad. The problems American working people face will not be solved by this election, by the capitalists or within the capitalist system. The only alternative is socialist revolution. The “lesser” evil is an enemy who defends this system of worsening horrors. 

If the policy is “Anybody but Trump,” before you know it, you’ll be calculating how to win over swing voters; then you’ll worry that mass protests should wait for a better time. That’s how the moderates and centrists leaders and party bureaucrats figure—stay calm, make sure “our” side wins in November. If you want the Democrats to win at all costs, then you had damned well do all you can to keep struggle out of the picture. The Democratic Party is a death-trap for the struggles of the exploited and oppressed. It has eliminated the fundamental principle of socialism, that the independent working class must re-create its own revolutionary party and put an end to class collaboration. A genuine socialist party would tell the truth about the system. Anyone who rightly hates Trump should be equally sick of the Democrats. What is the difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Trump and the parsimonious sermons of Biden? There is none. Come November, who will get your vote? Coke or Pepsi? 

 Volkswagen says it will pay $6.4m (£5m) in compensation to former workers at a Brazilian factory who sued the company for collaborating with the country’s military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship.  400 people were killed and around 40,000 people were tortured during Brazil’s dictatorship.