Our Plastic World

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Plastic waste flowing into the oceans is expected to nearly triple in volume in the next 20 years, while efforts to stem the tide have so far made barely a dent in the tsunami of waste, research shows. 



 An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic is destined for our environment – both land and water – by 2040, unless worldwide action is taken. If current trends continue, the amount of plastic waste polluting the oceans will grow to 29m tonnes a year by 2040, the equivalent of 50kg for every metre of coastline in the world.



 Dr Ian Kane, from the University of Manchester, who was part of a team that calculated the amount of micro-plastic in the seabed, described the picture the researchers had painted as “horrifying”.



  Simon Reddy, international environment director at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which led the research. “All the initiatives to date make very little difference. There is no silver bullet, there is no solution that can simply be applied – lots of policies are wanted. You need innovation and systems change.” Reddy called on governments and investors to curb the planned expansion of plastic production. “Without this, the supply of large quantities of cheap virgin plastic to the market may undermine reduction and substitution efforts and threaten the economic viability of recycling, while making it even harder to close the collection gap between waste produced and waste collected for disposal.”



 Dr Costas Velis from the University of Leeds said the number was “staggering” but that we had “the technology and the opportunity to stem the tide”.



 More stringent measures could produce a drastic reduction in waste, according to the researchers. These include improving waste collection, particularly in the developing world, and recycling more waste, as well as investing in alternative materials and better product design to reduce the amount of plastic used.  An estimated 2 billion people in the Global South have no access to proper waste management. 



 “They have to just get rid of all their rubbish, so they have no choice but to burn or dump it,” said Dr Velis.



 The 11 million waste pickers – people who collect and sell reusable materials in low-income countries  often lack basic employment rights and safe working conditions.  Although waste pickers and other workers in informal waste management systems are responsible for about 60% of global plastic recycling, “their contribution to preventing ocean plastic pollution has largely gone unrecognised and underpaid”, said Reddy.



 Dr Velis said: “Waste pickers are the unsung heroes of recycling – without whom the mass of plastic entering the aquatic environment would be considerably greater.” He added that policies to support them and make their work safer were a vital part of solving this problem.



 Alice Horton, a scientist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, who was not involved in the research, said reducing plastic waste was cost-effective. “Even the toughest management approaches proposed [in the paper] will still lead to a cumulative increase in plastic pollution with in the environment,”



 Prof Jamie Woodward, from the University of Manchester, pointed out “There are parallels with the climate change problem in that business as usual will be disastrous. We need to radically change our behaviour.”



 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53521001

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/23/plastic-waste-entering-oceans-triple-20-years-research

No Cash for Encouraging the Vote

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The Republican coronavirus stimulus plan revealed it does not propose a single dollar in election assistance funding. The Republican plan obtained by the New York Times Thursday doesn’t mention election funding directly, but it does note that the GOP relief package will propose “no additional money for state/local governments.”

Voting rights advocates say the election assistance money is necessary to help states expand vote-by-mail and ensure that in-person polling places are adequately equipped and prepared to safely hold a general election amid a pandemic. Failing to approve election funding could drive down turnout in November by limiting voters’ ballot options in an environment where it is potentially dangerous to vote in person.

“It is outrageous that this proposal contains not one penny to help states conduct safe elections during a global pandemic,” Sean Eldridge, founder and president of Stand Up America, said in a statement. “Policymakers should be doing everything they can to ensure voters are not forced to risk their health to cast their ballot. Instead,” Eldridge said, “it seems Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to suppress the vote by putting voters in danger.”


“Democrats in both chambers cannot allow Republicans to threaten the foundation of our democracy—and they must use every piece of available leverage to ensure election funding is included in a final brokered deal,” said Eldridge. “Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.”


Stand Up America and other voting rights groups are demanding that Congress approve $3.6 billion in election assistance funding—a fraction of the $21.3 billion the GOP plan proposes handing to the Pentagon on top of the agency’s likely $740.5 billion budget for fiscal year 2021.


Trump’s repeated and baseless attacks on mail-in voting as well as his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the 2020 election have added urgency to ensure a safe and fair contest. 


Voter suppression, electoral roll purges, the closing of thousands of polling places, hindering the postal delivery service, and the fear of the coronavirus  will scare many people away.


It is a woman’s choice

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The Office for National Statistics has revealed a fall of 12.2% since 2012. That’s a replacement rate of just 1.65 children per woman – even lower in Wales.



 The choices women make have always been economically determined – and whatever choices they make are always a reason for blame: they had too many, or too few, babies, they were too young or too old, too poor or too careerist. Women are seen as selfish for having children, or selfish for being childless.



 When times are hard people can afford fewer babies. In this miserable decade when wages fell back, when good jobs were replaced with insecure, disrespected work, young people struggle to pay rent, home ownership falls and many live with parents well into their 30s.



 Birthrates aren’t determined by women’s whims. The social geographer Prof Danny Dorling anticipated that austerity would breed fewer babies. There was a fall in the 1970s and most dramatically in the 1930s depression, when “demographers were so alarmed they predicted the emptying out of the population by 2000”. How serious is a population fall? Dorling notes that immigration often neatly fills the missing cohorts. That’s the likely solution



 In the last decade, spending on children fell, family benefits cut, nurseries are closing, The number of school nurses has fallen by 30% since 2010, with health visitors numbers also reduced.



 Families suffered under the bedroom tax. But most emblematic was the two-child limit in benefits: it had no effect on numbers, it just impoverished families with three children who claimed benefits, as thousands more will now. Many will feed their children from food banks for the first time, and child poverty is well documented.



 Clare Murphy, one of its directors, notes the disapproval of women, whatever they do. If they have babies early, they are “a burden on the state” but if they leave child-bearing until after 40 they are too “ambitious”. The NHS often refuses the three cycles of IVF that Nice recommends because the misery of infertility ranks unjustly low in priorities of suffering.



 The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), a 1968 charity was created “to remove all barriers to reproductive choice”. BPAS is delighted that it has been made possible to order abortion pills by phone within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy during the pandemic, but Christian Concern has been granted a judicial review to try to prevent it. We are still far from believing that every woman is free to control or encourage her own fertility as suits her circumstance.



 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/23/birthrates-tories-child-society-austerity-cuts-parenthood

Israel Against the Palestinians

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The Israeli government’s demolition of a building that was meant to be a badly-needed testing and quarantine center for Palestinians in Hebron, the West Bank. According to Haaretz, the Palestinian Health Ministry was involved in the decision to build the coronavirus center.



 The Israeli Civil Administration demolished the building, on Tuesday, claiming the structure was being erected illegally without a permit. The building was set to open to the public next week. 

The demolition came as Hebron recorded the most coronavirus cases in the West Bank. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Wednesday that there were 154 new cases in Hebron district the day the building was destroyed, including 60 in the city itself. 
Hospitals in Hebron are filled to capacity.


Construction began three months ago, and the family did not apply for a permit from the Israeli government; Israel controls the area in which Hebron lies, known as Area C, where Palestinians are rarely granted building permits. 


“If we applied for a permit, we would not have gotten it,” Maswada who donated his land to the city of Hebron to help the community during the Covid-19 pandemic. told the Middle East Eye. “We thought maybe during Covid-19, there would be some exceptions.”


In March, the Civil Administration confiscated tents that were meant to form a field clinic and emergency housing in the West Bank during the pandemic. 


“There is no humanity in destroying grassroots attempts to support an already deprived health system suffocated by occupation,” tweeted Daniel Lubin, an organizer with the British anti-occupation group Na’amod.






Bezos – The soon-to-be Trillionaire

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 On Monday, shares in the online giant took on some rocket fuel and headed off for Mars, like Bezos presumably hopes his space exploration company will one day do. Having ended last week at $2,962, they finished the day just shy of $3,200, an all time high for the company. Bezos increased his net worth by $13bn in the process. Shares go up and down. But even if Amazon lost half its value Bezos would still be staggering, stupendously rich.



 Amazon started the year with a share price at $1,898, since which time it has gained nearly 70 per cent in the midst of a global economic crunch, by dint of being in the right place at the right time. When other retailers were forced to close, Amazon picked up the slack, busily fulfilling orders and in the process fuelling the vast personal economy of Bezos, who owns 11 per cent of the company and whose estimated $190bn personal fortune is now within sight of the GDP of Greece.



Given that Bezos started Amazon from his garage, there are many people who hold him up as the poster boy for Western capitalism – a shining example of what can be done with entrepreneurship (and an Ivy League education). In reality, he is a prime example of a predator capitalist . Countless businesses have crashed and burned as Amazon and Bezos have grabbed for themselves an ever larger piece of the consumers’ spending.



 Capitalism’s apologists tell us that the creation of people like Bezos means that a portion of their vast wealth will “trickle down” and make life better for the rest of us. But it doesn’t; it trickles up. When you have as much money as Bezos, more inevitably flows in your direction regardless of the economic conditions.



 Defenders of capitalism will not let you forget that he creates employment in a country in which one in every five workers can’t find a job, and where food bank use is booming as a result. True enough, but Amazon jobs are a mixed blessing. The labour issues and the negative media headlines has led to Amazon running advertisements featuring smiling, happy workers.



 And those PR spokespersons remind us of the generousity of Bezos and his charitable contributions. He has yet to sign the “Giving Pledge” in which the world’s mega-rich promise voluntary philanthropy.



 Bezos will never, in his lifetime, be able to spend what he has now, let alone what will be added to his pile by the time he’s done. You could easily double Bezos’ current expenditure bills and he would still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.



 Luxury yachts and private jets are among the pricier purchases for today’s billionaire. But put it this way: Bezos newly acquired  $13bn could buy British Airways owner IAG twice over, with enough left over for a small fleet of yachts.



 https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeff-bezos-amazon-share-price-net-worth-super-rich-billionaires-a9633716.html




Australia’s First Nations Dispossessed of Water

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In Australia, Aboriginal people hold less than 1% of all water licences in Australia, a form of economic and cultural dispossession that needs urgent redress, according to a major study of water rights in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) by researchers from Griffith University. 
They found Aboriginal water entitlements in the New South Wales portion of the basin covered 0.2% of all available surface water, in a region where Aboriginal people comprise about 10% of the population.
These licences, which the researchers said were a “tiny fraction” of the water rights in the region, nevertheless accounted for 75% of all known water licences held by Indigenous organisations across Australia.
“Alarmingly, we also found that the amount of water held by Aboriginal organisations has decreased by 17% over the past 10 years,” the Australian Rivers Institute’s researcher Dr Lana Hartwig said.
The MDB is the world’s biggest water market, worth more than $16bn. Aboriginal holdings across the NSW portion have been valued at 0.1% of that, or $16.5m. Aboriginal water holdings also tend to be insecure, meaning they were not guaranteed allocations every year.
“These results show conclusively that Australia’s system of water governance is inequitable and unjust,” Prof Sue Jackson from Griffith University said. “It has excluded Indigenous people from accessing water and from participating in the water economy.”
The researchers were critical of efforts to allocate water to Aboriginal groups, saying native title and revised water legislation had “so far offered no meaningful means of redistributing water use rights, providing instead mere consultation and tokenistic protection of ‘cultural values’.”
“Given Australian governments committed to improving Indigenous water access under national water policy in 2004, the decline in Aboriginal water holdings of at least 17.2%, plus evidence of ongoing vulnerability, is a significant finding that warrants urgent policy redress,” Hartwig and Jackson said. The lack of access to water was a major limitation on the “political, cultural and socio-economic goals held by Aboriginal peoples”, they said.
More than 40 Aboriginal nations, about 15% of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, live in the Murray-Darling Basin. They manage less than 1% of its land base. The Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) is a confederation of 25 First Nations from the southern part of the basin.
“There’s a fundamental issue of water justice at play here,” the MLDRIN executive officer, Will Mooney, said. “First Nations have inherent rights to water on their country, but as a result of colonisation, the development of water allocation, the water market, and the unbundling of land and water has further dispossessed First Nations from water access. There’s a whole package of reforms needed to give effect to water justice and it’s more than just handing over an entitlement.”
The Gomeroi native title holder and chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority community committee, Phil Duncan, said there were serious questions surrounding how water allocations for Aboriginal people had shrunk 17% in the past decade.
“Having a water allocation affords us to exercise our cultural obligations, to be involved in caring for and repairing our county,” Duncan said. “If we were to be given an economic water allocation, we could use it in this current climate, to look at Indigenous food security and partnerships in the rural sector, so Aboriginal landholders can look at growing specific Indigenous food products, or cropping, organising and creating employment for these rural communities that are struggling.”
Some communities, Duncan said, were “on the precipice of collapse”.

Voter Suppression

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It’s well documented that restrictive voter ID laws are ineffective and discriminatory. The type of voter fraud they claim to prevent is a myth, and the burden of showing an ID disproportionately lands on students, low-income voters and African Americans.



 Those restrictive “voter identification” laws pushed by Republicans, and widely regarded to be ineffective and discriminatory, have cost taxpayers at least $36m in just a few states, the Guardian reveals. Yet the $36m price tag may only be the tip of the iceberg. The departments of justice in several states claim that their lawyers don’t track their time, making it impossible to document the bulk of the costs of defending these ID laws. “We want to get you what you need,” said Gillian Drummond, communications director for the Wisconsin DoJ when asked for a breakdown of the agency’s litigation expenses, “but I can’t create something that wasn’t tracked previously”.



  They are  extraordinarily expensive to implement and defend. Based on information obtained through open records requests, the Guardian has found that the partial costs of litigation, free identification cards, public education and other fees amount to tens of millions across the country.



 With many states having to slash their budgets due to the economic crisis, one state, Kentucky, has decided to spend millions implementing a new ID law. While the rest of the state was under “stay-at-home” advisories because of coronavirus, the Kentucky legislature convened in early March and April in order to pass its voter ID bill.  On 15 July, Kentucky became the 19th state that requires voters to present a photo ID at the polls, and voters who apply for absentee ballots must include a copy of their ID. But passing this bill required some expensive tweaks – most significantly, the state would have to offer IDs for free to all residents or the law would probably be ruled unconstitutional, says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan thinktank and public interest law center.  According to the bill’s fiscal note statement, just that provision of the law could cost up to $3.6m a year.



 When Georgia passed its original voter ID bill in 2006, it offered free IDs only to those who swore they could not afford them. According to a report from the Brennan Center, a federal court later blocked that aspect because “many voters for whom a fee would pose a burden might be reluctant to take the oath out of embarrassment or because they do not believe they are indigent”. In fact, the Missouri supreme court found that the state must pay even for the documents required to get the ID, such as a birth certificate. After Georgia passed its ID law, it ran public service announcements on unpopular radio stations during off-peak hours and planned to distribute a letter that, according to the courts, was “not reasonably calculated to reach the voters who are most likely to lack a photo ID”. However, that court went on to add that “if the state undertakes sufficient steps to inform voters of the [law’s] requirements before future elections, the statute might well survive a challenge”.



 Since 1 January 2006, Indiana, which also has a photo ID law, has spent nearly $30.5m to issue roughly 2.7m of these free IDs.



 Meanwhile, in Texas, the process of implementing a strict voter ID law dragged on for almost seven years, during which the state spent at least $3.5m on attorney’s fees, outside counsel, travel expenses and expert witnesses. In addition, the litigation was so time-consuming that the attorney general had to pull in lawyers from other departments. In total, the state invested more than 12,400 hours in these cases. Ultimately, Texas’s ID law survived these challenges – but at a high price. In May, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the plaintiffs’ $6.8m in legal fees.



 During the first three years of its ID laws, Kansas spent at least $430,000 on its public outreach, while Wisconsin spent $631,899 in its first year alone. Even with heavily discounted rates from TV and radio stations, the critical swing state has spent nearly $1.2m on its “Bring It to the Ballot” campaign, which includes radio spots, brochures and TV ads.



 Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, wrote the original decision upholding Indiana’s ID law. However, in 2014, he voted to suspend Wisconsin’s law, writing in a dissent on the 7th circuit court of appeals that legislation like it was “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government”.

The Yemen Crises Won’t Disappear

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Yemen is in danger of an imminent return to devastating levels of hunger and food insecurity, according to new analysis released by the UN agencies, the World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Unicef.
They say that the percentage of the population predicted to face acute food insecurity in southern areas of the country will rise from 25% to 40% by the end of the year.
The escalating problems have been blamed on a combination of economic shocks, conflict, floods, desert locusts and now coronavirus, which Unicef said was “creating a perfect storm” that threatened to reverse recent efforts to stabilise food security in the country.
Areas forecast to experience the worst deterioration over the next six months include Abyan, Aden, Ad Dhale, Hadramaut, Lahj and Taizz, with the number of those affected in the region expected to go from 2 million people to 3.2 million out of a surveyed population of 7.9 million. The survey, carried out in 133 districts in southern Yemen, forecasts an alarming increase in the numbers of people expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity, including IPC phase 3 – “in crisis” – and phase 4 – “emergency” –by the end of the year.
The report says economic issues are one of the main concerns, with local currency in freefall, rampant inflation and rising food prices, and a near depletion of foreign exchange reserves. The country’s continuing conflict is cited as one of the main causes, with coronavirus also affecting food availability, access and market supply, and income-earning opportunities and wages. Compounding all these issues have been the recent swarms of desert locust and armyworm infestations that have hit crops, with cereal production this year forecast at 365,000 metric tonnes – less than half prewar levels.
David Beasley, executive director of WFP, described the situation as “heartbreaking”.
“Unless the international community steps up with an urgent injection of funds, we are going to find ourselves right back where we were in 2018, when we had to fight our way back from the brink of a full-scale famine. The Yemeni people have already been ravaged by years of conflict-fuelled hunger and malnutrition, and now Covid-19 is ratcheting up their misery. The world needs to open its eyes to this unfolding humanitarian disaster before it’s too late.”

Slave-Labour and the Uighur People

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Many of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers are complicit in the forced labour and human rights violations being perpetrated on millions of Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, says a coalition of more than 180 human rights groups.



 “Virtually the entire [global] apparels industry is tainted by forced Uighur and Turkic Muslim labour,” the coalition said in a statement.



  It says many of the world’s leading clothing brands continue to source cotton and yarn produced through a vast state-sponsored system of forced labour involving up to 1.8m Uighur and other Turkic and Muslim people in prison camps, factories and farms in Xinjiang. It says that the forced labour system across the region is the largest internment of an ethnic and religious minority since the second world war.



 Global fashion brands source so extensively from Xinjiang that the coalition estimates it is “virtually certain” that as many as one in five cotton products sold across the world are tainted with forced labour and human rights violations occurring there.



 China is the largest cotton producer in the world, with 84% of its cotton coming from the Xinjiang region. Cotton and yarn produced in Xinjiang are used extensively in other key garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam. Xinjiang cotton and yarn are also used in textiles and home furnishings. 



 The coalition has published an extensive list of brands it claims continue to source from the region, or from factories connected to the forced labour of Uighur people, including Gap, C&A, Adidas, Muji, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.



 The coalition says many more leading clothing brands also continue to maintain lucrative strategic partnerships with Chinese companies, accepting subsidies from their government to expand textile production in the region or benefiting from the forced labour of Uighur people transferred from Xinjiang to factories across China.



 “There is a high likelihood that every high street and luxury brand runs the risk of being linked to what is happening to the Uighur people,” says Chloe Cranson, business and human rights manager at Anti-Slavery International. “This isn’t just about direct supply chain links, it’s about how the global apparels sector is helping prop up and facilitate the system of human rights abuses and forced labour,” says Crason. “There needs to be a deep and thorough interrogation of how brands and retailers are linked to what is happening at scale to the Uighur people.”



 “Global brands need to ask themselves how comfortable they are contributing to a genocidal policy against the Uighur people. These companies have somehow managed to avoid scrutiny for complicity in that very policy – this stops today,” said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. There is mounting global outrage over the atrocities being committed against the Uighur population in the region, including torture, forced separation and the compulsory sterilisation of Uighur women.



 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/23/virtually-entire-fashion-industry-complicit-in-uighur-forced-labour-say-rights-groups-china

Over-Population – A Convenient Alibi

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There exists an often unchallenged view that overpopulation is among the primary drivers of the planet’s ecological and climate crises. It is a misconception. “There are just too many people” is simplistic and a misdiagnosis of the problem but it is a widely held analysis, rather than there are too many people it is to the endless pursuit of profit that environmentalists must look in order to save nature. An economic system that prizes endless short-term profit maximisation above all else is incompatible with ecological processes.
 Overpopulation is not responsible for the current devastation of nature. Understanding that would also allow us to focus on the real problem problem. It is both convenient and beneficial to blame overpopulation as the problem instead of the  economic system. Doing so protects the interests of those who benefit from it, the powerful. The use of overpopulation to explain the ills of hunger demonstrate this. There is, in fact, an abundance of food and much of it wasted, yet there is hunger. This contradiction points towards the deficiency in the distribution of food, a result of food being produced for profit. Conveniently for the farming industry and agricultural corporations that profit from food, overpopulation is there to obscure things.
Today’s world is based on the imperative for endless growth through market-based economies. We are talking about capitalism. 
The earth’s resources are finite, they tell us, and we human beings are using them up. The more human beings there are, the more pressure on these resources, and unless population growth is stopped, the planet will be destroyed. But this reasoning is as false. Yes, the earth’s resources are finite. But this does not mean that human activity is anywhere near reaching those limits, either now or in the foreseeable future.
Often arguments by the greens are centred on emissions by individuals, their carbon footprints. This gives the illusion that converting to vegetarianism or using electric cars are somehow going to transform modern industrial society is going to save the world.
The overpopulation argument, historically and as primarily used today makes “the poor” the main culprit for all the problems of the world. In 2015, Oxfam released data should surprise nobody who is familiar with inequality statistics, nonetheless, they are still shocking. The richest 10% of people produce 50% of all emissions, while the reverse is also true, that the poorest 50% produce just 10%. Crudely put, in terms of population, a poor person must reproduce themselves 25 times to account for the emissions impact of one of the richest.
If people are hungry and there are food riots , this is because of the inability of the poor to pay. In other words it is because of capitalist economics and capitalist politics.
We cannot entirely dismiss overpopulation as something that we should not be concerned about. There are 163,000,000 million people living in Bangladesh — half the population of the United States — all crowded on a land area the size of the state of Illinois. How could that ever be sustainable? But it is the manner in which the current economic system operates that requires to be radically challenged to avoid ecological collapse. This will happen when we break from the endless search for profit maximisation towards prioritising the needs of nature and the well-being of people. Capitalism, not population is the main driver of planetary collapse. But if we don’t overthrow capitalism, Nature is going to solve the overpopulation problem in a most unpleasant manner. Those who cite population reduction as a way to stop climate change are really saying they find it easier to conceive of “losing” a few billion of people, rather than contemplate overthrowing capitalism.

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