The Misery of the Migrants in Mexico

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At the first anniversary of a scheme officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), under which migrants seeking asylum in the United States are sent to Mexico to wait as their cases wind their way through US courts 80% of asylum seekers sent to Mexico to await US court hearings report being victims of violence, according a survey by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).



In one month – September – three-quarters of asylum seekers seen by MSF physicians in Nuevo Laredo reported having been kidnapped for ransom, according to the figures released on Wednesday.



Some 44% of MSF patients also reported having been victims of violence in the week leading up to their consultations.
“The US continues to send asylum seekers back into danger and into the hands of the cartels that control the migration routes in Mexico,” said Sergio Martín, MSF general coordinator in Mexico. “The Mexican government lacks the ability to provide the most minimum of conditions for thousands of people who are being sent to its territory,” he said. Migrants are at risk along the entire border, “but mainly in places like Nuevo Laredo, where there is serious violence – and migrants are ‘merchandise’ for organised crime,” Martín said. Nuevo Laredo is considered so insecure that the US government has issued a Level 4: “Do not travel” alert to its citizens for the city and surrounding state of Tamaulipas – the same as war-torn countries like Syria and Afghanistan.
More than 57,000 non-Mexican asylum seekers have been sent to wait in cities along the border – many of which have been plagued by drug-war violence for years.
Migrants – who stand out because of their appearance and accents – are routinely targeted for abduction outside migration offices and bus terminals, and held until relatives back home wire ransom payments to the kidnappers.
The Cartel del Noreste – an offshoot of the blood thirsty Zetas cartel – “operates a sophisticated kidnapping business that targets asylum seekers – many of whom are women and children – who enter the city,” said Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. “The kidnappers charge several thousand dollars for each kidnapped asylum seeker and operate with almost complete impunity.”



Climate Change and Gender Violence

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Attempts to repair environmental degradation and adapt to climate breakdown, particularly in poorer countries, are failing, and resources are being wasted because they do not take gender inequality and the effects on women and girls into account. Climate breakdown and the global crisis of environmental degradation are increasing violence against women and girls, while gender-based exploitation is in turn hampering our ability to tackle the crises, a major report has concluded.



The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) carried out what is understood to be the biggest and most comprehensive study yet of the issue, taking two years and involving more than 1,000 sources of research.



“We found gender-based violence to be pervasive, and there is enough clear evidence to suggest that climate change is increasing gender-based violence,” said Cate Owren, a lead author of the report. “As environmental degradation and stress on ecosystems increases, that in turn creates scarcity and stress for people, and the evidence shows that, where environmental pressures increase, gender-based violence increases. Gender-based violence is one of the most pervasive but least talked-about barriers that face us in conservation and climate work,” said Owern. “We need to take the blinders off, and pay this concerted attention.”



Six in 10 respondents to a survey by IUCN, with more than 300 responses from organisations around the world, said they had observed gender-based violence among female environmental rights defenders, environmental migrants and refugees, and in areas where environmental crimes and environmental degradation were taking place. More than 80 case studies clearly showing such links were uncovered as part of the research.



Gender-based violence includes domestic violence, sexual assault and rape, forced prostitution, forced marriage and child marriage, as well as other forms of the exploitation of women. The report found human trafficking rises in areas where the natural environment is under stress, and links between gender-based violence and environmental crimes such as wildlife poaching and illegal resource extraction. There have also been numerous examples of gender-based violence directed against environmental defenders and activists, who try to stop the destruction or degradation of their land, natural resources and communities. Sexual violence is used to suppress them, undermine their status within the community and discourage others from coming forward.



Owren found abundant examples of the close links between gender-based violence and the exploitation of women and girls, and the competition for resources engendered by the impacts of global heating and our destruction of the natural environment. For instance, sexual abuse was found in the illegal fishing industry in south-east Asia, and in eastern and southern Africa fishermen reportedly refused to sell fish to women if they did not engage in sex. The illegal logging and charcoal trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo is linked to sexual exploitation, and in Colombia and Peru illegal mines are strongly associated with an increase in sex trafficking.



 Global warming puts pressure on resources, as extreme weather, including heatwaves, droughts, floods and fiercer storms, grows more frequent and devastating. In most parts of the world, women are already disadvantaged and lack land rights and legal rights, so are vulnerable to exploitation. When the additional stresses caused by the climate crises bite, they are the first to be targeted. For instance, in some communities, young girls are married off as early as possible when the family faces hardship exacerbated by the climate. Globally, about 12 million more young girls are thought to have been married off after increasing natural disasters, and weather related disasters have been shown to increase sexual trafficking by 20-30%. Women and girls are also burdened with tasks such as drawing water and finding firewood, which are becoming more scarce in many areas under the ecological impact of our scramble for resources, and which expose them to further dangers of violence.



Grethel Aguilar, acting director-general of the IUCN, said: “Environmental degradation now affects our lives in ways that are becoming impossible to ignore, from food to jobs to security. This study shows that the damage humanity is inflicting on nature is also fuelling violence against women around the world – a link that has so far been largely overlooked.”



The report also provided a timely reminder that “concerted action to tackle inequality can unlock new opportunities for climate action and women’s empowerment”, added Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders. “We need to recognise the unequal effects of the climate crisis on women, but also that women’s participation brings with it creative and sustainable solutions to both the climate emergency and social injustices. Tackling climate change and environmental degradation without the full inclusion of women will not succeed: gender equality is a prerequisite to the collective effort needed to address the climate emergency.”






Another war?

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France is to dispatch war frigates to the eastern Mediterranean as a standoff with Turkey over regional energy reserves intensifies  as the feud over exploration rights has deepened following the discovery of natural gas deposits in waters around Cyprus. Ignoring Turkish anger at not being included, the Greek Cypriot government has been commissioning international energy companies, including the French multinational Total and Italy’s Eni, to explore allocated blocs off the island for underwater resources. Turkey has been sending its own drill ships to the region’s disputed waters in retaliation. Turkey has called for a fair and equal distribution of the energy resources discovered off Cyprus, insisting that they are attempting to exclude and alienate Turkey by striking their own deal without the consideration of both the major regional player and the people of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Therefore, it stresses that the drilling activities that Turkey is carrying out are legal and within territorial waters.



 Greece’s defence minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, recently went as far as to warn that armed forces were “examining all scenarios, even that of military engagement” in the face of heightened aggression from Ankara. Rejecting Turkish demands that Greece demilitarise 16 Aegean islands, he accused Turkey of displaying unusually provocative behaviour.  It follows a dramatic surge in recent months in the number of violations of Greek airspace by Turkish fighter jets. 



Macron pledged France would strengthen its alliance with Greece, accusing Turkey of not only exacerbating regional tensions but failing to stick to its promised course of action in war-torn Libya.

“I want to express my concerns with regard to the behaviour of Turkey at the moment … we have seen during these last days Turkish warships accompanied by Syrian mercenaries arrive on Libyan soil.”
A maritime border agreement between Turkey and Libya’s U.N.-backed government is “unacceptable,” violates international law and flouts the sovereign rights of other countries,  Luigi Di Maio, the foreign minister of Italy,  said. Turkey says the deal grants its economic rights to a large swath of the east Mediterranean sea and prevents any energy-related projects from moving forward without its consent. Egypt has denounced the Turkey-Libya deal as infringing on waters where they claim economic rights. Officials from Libya’s rival government based in the east of the country have also rejected the agreement.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE also seek to cooperate with Greece against Turkey.
Greece, Cyprus, and Israel agreed to build a pipeline harnessing the reserves of natural gas off the southern shores of the island. This pipeline names EastMed, which is estimated to produce a profit of $9 billion over eighteen 18 of the reserve’s exploitation, would be supplying gas from the Eastern Mediterranean region all the way to countries in Europe.

Another regional war for natural resources?



Why the War?

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Some 9.4 million Afghans are in need of basic food and housing this year, up from 6.5 million in 2019.



The United Nations is seeking $730 million in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan this year, an increase on 2019 as poverty surges in a country worn down by war and drought, the U.N.’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan said.



“Afghanistan remains the world’s deadliest conflict, and on top of the lingering effects of the drought in 2018, coupled with growing poverty, the need is up,” Toby Lanzer, the U.N.’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, told Reuters.



Afghan War – Did you think it was over?

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The US dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 than any other year since the Pentagon began keeping a tally.



According to new figures released by US central command, US warplanes dropped 7,423 bombs and other munitions on Afghanistan, a nearly eightfold increase from 2015.



According to UN data, the US accounted for half the 1,149 civilian deaths attributed to pro-government forces in Afghanistan over the first three-quarters of 2019.







The Taliban and other insurgent groups were responsible for 1,207 civilian deaths.
“This is the US military mistakenly thinking that they’re somehow going to change the political dynamics by dropping more ordnance on Afghanistan,” said Laurel Miller, former US acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who is now director of the International Crisis Group’s Asia programme. “The argument that is made in favor what they’re doing is that this will somehow change the political dynamics and in a way that makes the Taliban more likely to come to favorable terms at the peace table, but I have no expectation that this is going to have that kind of effect. It also poses the considerable risk of of blowback in the sense that inevitably this increase in use of air power results in an increase in civilian casualties.”
“The US side is very explicitly hoping to use the ramped-up strikes to gain leverage in the ongoing talks with the Taliban,” said Frances Brown, who was director for democracy in Barack Obama’s national security council and is now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Taliban side is also using their own ramped-up violence to gain leverage; as a consequence, we saw record levels of overall violence in the third quarter of 2019, as both sides thought they were heading toward a preliminary agreement,” Brown said. “The problem here is that the Trump administration lacks the clear political negotiating strategy,” she added. “The US special envoy made some hard-fought progress over the course of 2019, only to have the rug yanked out from under him by the president, with no apparent rationale. The talks restarted a few weeks ago, but the US has now undermined its own hand.”



 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/28/us-afghanistan-war-bombs-2019

Understanding our World

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There is a new mood of resistance and solidarity among working people. But we must move from simply anti-capitalism to socialist revolution. We must envision the formation of a truly global movement capable of challenging the most powerful institutions on the planet without succumbing to either Utopianism or reformism.



Famine, AIDS (and now the emerging coronavirus), anti-immigration populism are being hailed as Malthusian “natural” population control to keep in check the high population growth. But what is regarded as a “natural” system is the capitalist system and multinational corporations. There is nothing natural about them other than they currently dominate trade and production, and hence resource use and consumption. Those concerned with environmental destruction must eventually confront the question of the global capitalist market profit system of production.



 Many environmentalists reject traditional politics, since political differences between liberal and conservative have become, for the most part, indistinguishable in practice. The authoritarianism witnessed in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite countries had discredited socialism. Thus socialist ideas, even eco-socialism, have been marginalised and unable to penetrate the mainstream climate crisis debate. The socialists lack mass influence. The eco-activists have been slow to incorporate Marxist analysis into their views, despite its great potential not only to explain the economic processes leading to environmental destruction, but to change them. A serious critique of capitalism is essential to adequately address the current world environmental crisis. The environmental movement can no longer afford to adapt traditional “liberal” or “conservative” views of the market to its concerns, or ignore the issue altogether by claiming that understanding the market as the central organising principle in modern society is unnecessary. Concepts such as “carrying capacity” clearly must be conceived in their capitalist economic context. The greens must now rethink their vision of a future society. Missing from the eco-activists view of the market is an adequate appraisal of the inherent logic within capitalism that necessitates environmental destruction rather than holding an assumption that the basic system of capitalist production functions more or less efficiently, needing only the enlightened management and regulation by the state to curb its excesses and mitigate its shortcomings. Facing competition from other producers, each firm must minimise or externalise its costs while maximising profit and market share. Like labour, environmental protection appears as a cost in the corporate balance sheet which must be minimised. This fact operates independently of the personal views or ethics of business owners or CEOs. If concerned managers implement costly environmental controls, they either sacrifice profit or lose market share to the competitor who can undersell at a cheaper price in the marketplace. Green tinkering is not enough, nor the best we can hope for. An alternative economic program which serves the interests of the democratic majority is essential.



Socialism’s promises an egalitarian distribution of all the productive wealth capitalism plus a more meaningful democracy, social justice and liberation from alienation. 



 The Socialist Party has put forward a convincing ecological future with a credible vision of potential abundance.



  Environmentalists must  ask themselves what kind of a planet they want to live on and what kind of a society they want to do it.



Under the capitalist system, “production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production” (Marx, Capital). The nature of the capitalist class is to seek fabulous monopoly profits. In exploiting energy resources, the capitalists do not consider the rational use of natural resources but only seek maximum profits.



The current climate crisis while on the surface it may be a question of natural resources, in reality this is absolutely not so. The world’s energy resources, including those of the main capitalist countries, are plentiful. Furthermore, with the development of production and the steady rise of human knowledge, people are discovering and will continue to discover new sources of energy. In essence, the climate crisis gripping the capitalist world is a reflection of the crisis of the capitalist system, an outcome of the sharpening contradictions within the capitalist system, and a result of the capitalists’ ruthless exploitation and plunder of the people.



The decrease and increase of the various energy resources often depend on the amount of profit they give. Capitalism means waste. In the capitalist world, resources are wasted because of anarchy in production and general wastefulness in life. Weapons expansion and war preparations and wars of aggression are bottomless pits in consuming and squandering. They are indeed parasites living on the people of the developing countries. Their wealth comes from their plunder, and the poverty of the developing nations is caused by their exploitation and plunder. The climate crisis is an indication of the great disorder in the world today. It will in turn inevitably make the world situation continue to develop in the direction of upheaval.



Toxic Air

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More than one in 19 deaths in Britain’s largest towns and cities are linked to air pollution – with people living in urban areas in south-east England more likely to die from exposure to toxic air, according to a new study. Air pollution was the UK’s largest environmental risk to public health, it said, producing the equivalent of 40,000 deaths a year nationally. It urged the government to introduce stricter legal guidelines on particulate matter emissions to help tackle the problem.



London, Slough, Chatham, Luton and Portsmouth had the highest proportion of deaths attributable to pollution the study found, with around one in 16 in 2017 caused by high levels of harmful particulates in the atmosphere. By contrast, places such as Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow and Blackpool attributed one in 30 deaths to air pollution, highlighting what the study’s authors, the Centre for Cities thinktank, called a “south-north” divide in air quality.
Although air pollution was a problem in most big cities and urban areas of the UK, it was especially heavily concentrated in the south-east, including places like Southampton, Reading, Oxford, Cambridge, Basildon and Northampton.



The report also found:

In 19 cities and towns – all but one in the south-east of England – monitored pollution levels around every single A-road and motorway exceeded World Health Organization guidelines, potentially exposing 14 million people to pollution.


In Bournemouth, air quality levels scored four out of 10 or above – the level at which adults and children with heart and lung problems are affected – on 62 days in 2018, the highest in the UK, followed by London (56 days) and Southampton (52).



“Politicians often talk tough on addressing air pollution but we need to see more action. Cities should be at the centre of the fight against toxic air and councils should take the steps needed, including charging people to drive in city centres and banning wood-burning stoves,” said Andrew Carter, chief executive of Centre for Cities.



Responding to the report Zak Bond, policy and public affairs officer at the British Lung Foundation, said: “Whilst it’s shocking that more than one in 19 deaths in UK towns and cities can be linked to air pollution, it doesn’t tell the full story in terms of the millions of people whose lives are affected on a daily basis. Breathing in toxic air is bad for everyone and can lead to a wide range of health conditions including lung disease, stroke and cancer.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/27/one-in-19-deaths-uk-cities-air-pollution

‘The wolf in cashmere’.

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French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault briefly toppled Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world. Now relegated back to second wealthiest in the world, Arnault remains the richest person in Europe. Arnault first dethroned Bezos on December 16, 2019. This triumph lasted even shorter, less than five hours, before Bezos returned to the top. It occurred after LVMH acquired luxury jewelry company Tiffany, causing their stocks to rise.



 2019 was a good year for Arnault. The CEO of the LVMH group (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) earned an estimated profit of €35.1 billion over the course of the year. This breaks down as €4,020,307 every hour, or €66,700 a minute. He is one of only three people ever to make it into the exclusive centi-billionaires club, along with Bezos and Bill Gates. 



 Arnault’s story is not exactly rags-to-riches. His father Jean Léon Arnault was a manufacturer and the owner of the civil engineering company, Ferret-Savinel.

The top-end luxury goods brands Moet Hennessy and Louis Vuitton  merged to form LVMH. Arnault started investing in this golden egg in 1987. He soon became its biggest shareholder. Then began one of the fiercest battles in French fashion as Arnault fought to oust first the former chairman Henry Racamier and then many of the top executives. He gained a reputation then for ruthlessness, along with the nickname ‘the wolf in cashmere’.

The company’s portfolio now features 75 brands, including fashion houses Christian Lacroix, Celine, Givenchy, Fendi, Marc Jacobs and Dior. It also involves wines and spirits, including champagne brand Dom Pérignon, cognac makers Hennessy, Glenmorangie Scottish whisky and New Zealand winemakers Cloudy Bay. There is jewelry with Bulgari and watches with Tag Heuer, along with beauty chainstore Sephora. The group extends to the famous Hotel Cipriani in Venice, a range of top hotels with Michelin starred restaurants called Cheval Blanc in Courchevel in the French Alps and the historic Paris department store Le Bon Marche. Their latest major acquisition was last November, when they agreed to buy luxury jeweler Tiffany for approximately €14.7 billion.
He himself own properties across the world and a private island in the Bahamas. He also owns art works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.



Arnault is part of French Prime Minister Sarkozy’s inner circle; he had even been a witness at Sarkozy’s wedding in 1996. 

The Madness of War

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A retired Salvadoran general on Friday acknowledged for the first time that the armed forces were responsible for a notorious 1981 massacre of more than 1,000 people during the country’s civil war.



Juan Rafael Bustillo, a former commander of the Air Force, told a court the elite Atlacatl Battalion carried out the El Mozote massacre in eastern El Salvador in which unarmed villagers, most of them women and children, were slaughtered. Bustillo testified he had had no part in the operation which he said was conducted at the behest of Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the feared Atlacatl Battalion.



“War sometimes gives rise to something in the minds of people that attaches no value to the lives of others.” Bustillo then continued “I think it was on his initiative. That’s my reasoning, it was on his initiative that he gave the order to kill the people of El Mozote, and the other surrounding cantons,” the retired general told the court. “I almost feel it was like a moment, some instance of madness on the part of Colonel Monterrosa…”





According to a U.N. report, soldiers tortured and executed over 1,000 residents of El Mozote and surrounding hamlets in the Morazan department, 180 km (110 miles) northeast of San Salvador, as they searched for guerrillas in December 1981.

Hindutvas Demolish Homes

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 In the major city of Bengaluru, formerly Bangalore, the shanty homes of hundreds of labourers were bulldozed on the pretext that they were housing “suspected illegal immigrants”. The action, taken with police involvement yet seemingly on no official orders, has left hundreds homeless – either forced to share the limited space in those huts that are still standing, or else sleep on the streets. The incident began last Sunday when men in JCB bulldozers, flanked by plainclothes police officers, descended on the 600-home informal settlement of Kariyammana Agrahara, to the east of the city. They declared that all those present were illegal Bangladeshi migrants, and started tearing apart their homes.



It is commonplace in Narendra Modi’s India for senior political figures to speak of Muslim immigrant workers in extremely derogatory terms – usually as “infiltrators”, sometimes as “termites”. The actions has been welcomed by the local branch of Modi’s ruling BJP party, which called it “the right decision”. The incident was particularly concerning because it came just days after the local BJP legislative assembly member (MLA) for the area, Aravind Limbavali, tweeted a video of the settlement, saying it was “without cleanliness … a site of illegal activity” and housing people who “are suspect to be illegal immigrants of Bangladesh”. Only two days after the demolition, the BJP’s most senior official in West Bengal state, Dilip Ghosh, said there were “two crore [20 million] Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators” who had entered India, adding that “we will not allow any to stay here”.

Residents tried to produce their voter ID cards, biometric registration documents known as Aadhaar, and other evidence that they were in fact born and raised in other states of India. But the police continued regardless, later telling a local newspaper that they have neither the time nor the money to verify such documents with other state authorities. A senior police officer at the station local to Kariyammana Agrahara suggested it was up to the slum residents to provide verification for their own ID documents, adding:  “What is the guarantee that these documents are genuine?”
Even if they were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, or third- or fourth-generation migrants, neither the municipal authorities nor the local police has the jurisdiction to act in the way it did – that would be a matter for the federal authorities.

Lekha Adavi, a member of the Alternative Law Forum collective, said there was clearly a link between the evictions in Bengaluru and a broader anti-immigrant “sense across India right now”, with the government recently passing a citizenship law for refugees that excludes Muslims, and the exercise of creating a register of legal citizens (NRC) in Assam state.



“It is very clear that these guys are implementing their [the BJP’s] agenda, there is nothing more or less to it. They want to implement their agenda of persecuting Muslims, and Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants happen to be one pawn in that entire agenda,” she said.



https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-bengaluru-evictions-demolition-slum-shelters-bangladeshi-modi-a9300511.html

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