Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein review – across the great divide


The writer’s enjoyable obsession with the ‘other Naomi’ (Wolf), a conspiracy theorist, becomes a deeply insightful inquiry into the way technology fuels the polarisation of society

Down the rabbit hole: Naomi Klein. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian


Review
Tim Adams
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 17 Sep 2023 

The first time it happened, Naomi Klein was in a public lavatory just off Wall Street in Manhattan. She heard two women discussing something she had said about the Occupy movement, which was then camped outside. Klein emerged from her cubicle to put the women right: it wasn’t her who had said those things, but she knew straight away who had. It must have been the “other Naomi” – Naomi Wolf. After that, the misunderstanding started happening more and more, particularly online.

It was true the pair of them had things in common, beyond the name. They had both written generation-defining bestselling polemics. In 1991, Wolf’s The Beauty Myth promoted the idea that eating disorders were by-products of the cosmetics and fashion industries; while Naomi Klein’s No Logo, nearly a decade later, had become a global rallying cry against the exploitative working practices of multinationals and their billionaire owners. They both (for the purposes of author photos at least) had big hair and broad smiles. They both were children of Jewish parents with alternative lifestyles. They both even had partners called Avi.

Her quest is not only the roots of Wolf’s journey to the ‘other side’ but for the blind spots in her own self-awareness

But while these similarities persisted, over the past 20 years the political journeys of the Naomis could hardly have been more distinct. Naomi Klein developed her original anti-corporate message into a critique of the environmental catastrophe of global capitalism that argues for a green New Deal. Naomi Wolf, meanwhile, made a strange journey from beauty myths to a full diet of conspiracy theory, pro-Trump activism and anti-vaccine extremism.

Even so, during the pandemic, the confusion became so pointed that one Twitter user even came up with a handy rhyme, to tell the two women apart:

If the Naomi be Klein
You’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

This book begins as an enjoyably obsessive investigation into that doppelganger relationship, touching on famous precedents: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. It broadens into a deeply insightful inquiry into the ways in which the technology that drives our lives increasingly demands mirror-image doubles, tribal combatants to fuel a divided culture. This process, Klein argues, was accelerated by the restrictions and anxieties of the pandemic when “the [real] world was disappearing and so was I”.

In that enforced isolation, the activist-author found herself spending more and more time following her accidental nemesis down internet rabbit holes. Wolf, banned from Twitter for her crazy views, had by now become a star turn in the mirror world of “alt-right” YouTube and podcasts. Klein describes how she would occasionally emerge from this “doomscrolling” to inform her baffled husband of the latest outrage she had discovered: “She just wrote that ‘vaccinated people’s urine/faeces needs to be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways until its impact on unvaccinated people’s drinking water is established’.” By now Klein did not have to identify the “she” in question.

That proposition for an alternative water system might stand as a useful metaphor to describe the extremes of contemporary “us and them” that the story of Klein and Wolf comes to illustrate. Friends with a knowledge of her project keep asking Klein to explain exactly how Wolf came to “fall off a cliff” from liberal and scientific orthodoxy; but Klein is too good a writer to fall for that diagnosis. She is appalled and fascinated by her shadow principally because she wants to understand the motivations behind Wolf’s world view if not its unhinged conclusions. Wolf’s “Covid rollercoaster ride…” is, Klein comes to argue, if nothing else, a response to “what it increasingly feels like to be at the mercy of omnipresent technologies that are governed according to opaque algorithms… outside of existing laws”. The problem, she suggests, is that the explanation for that feeling is ascribed to “the wrong c”: conspiracy not capitalism.

Her quest in all of this is not only the roots of Wolf’s journey to the “other side” but for the blind spots in her own self-awareness. Like a rival general, Klein listens hard to Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room – on which Wolf has become a fixture with her own mass following (the “Wolf Pack”) – and identifies exactly the strategic political ground they seek to colonise; that new coalition between “the far right and the far out”. The unlikely crossover, for example, between the “wellness industry” and gun-loving libertarians, around the issue of vaccination. Campaigning with her husband, who is running as a New Democratic party candidate in Canada, she confronts insistent evidence of this on the doorstep – women with telltale “internet eyes”, one-time liberals who now spout received nonsense about global elites and casually suggest that the pandemic was sent to cull the weaker members of society.


Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality

Klein’s instinct is not only to condemn. She makes the important case that the very nature of polarity now means that crucial journalistic questions go unanswered. There should, for example, have been legitimate scepticism about the UN acceptance of China’s story of the origins of the Covid virus, or about Bill Gates’s defence of the drug companies’ insistence on patents for their vaccines. But the mere fact that the conspiracists on Wolf’s side amplified those issues meant that such arguments were ignored or under-investigated. “Once an issue is touched by ‘them’ it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else,” Klein observes of what is a growing and dangerous trend.

Her book is a powerful antidote to such instincts. In articulating and examining some of the darker forces of the world her “double” inhabits, Klein never forgets that the primary purpose of mirrors is actually self-reflection; to understand the other, you first have to know yourself.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is published by Allen Lane (£25). 

GREENWASHING

Rainforest carbon credit schemes misleading and ineffective, finds report

System not fit for carbon offsetting, puts Indigenous communities at risk and should be replaced with new approach, say researchers


Patrick Greenfield
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 15 Sep 2023

Rainforest conservation projects are not suitable for carbon offsetting and a different approach should be used to effectively protect critical ecosystems such as the Amazon and Congo basin, a report has concluded.

New research by UC Berkeley Carbon Trading Project looking into rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra, which operates the world’s leading carbon standard, found that the system is not fit for purpose.

It generates highly inflated environmental impacts and some projects fail to provide safeguards for vulnerable forest communities, according to the report, making them unsuitable for companies to use for carbon offsetting claims as they are not equivalent to fossil fuel emissions.

Halting the destruction of the world’s rainforests is an urgent task for meeting UN climate and biodiversity targets, and supporters of carbon markets say they could direct billions to climate change and biodiversity mitigation if they work as intended.


Through offsetting, companies and people say their own emissions have been cancelled out by paying for greenhouse gas removal or reductions elsewhere, often in developing countries.

But a new assessment by a team of 14 UC Berkeley researchers, funded by the NGO Carbon Market Watch, found that the current system of generating rainforest protection carbon credits was not fit for purpose and was open to exploitation.

The researchers assessed five quality factors of Verra’s rainforest carbon credit system, known as Redd+ projects: their durability, forest carbon accounting, community safeguards, deforestation leakage and baselines, finding widespread shortcomings in all areas.


Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

They found that the majority of credits did not represent a positive impact on the climate, that projects had routinely underplayed the risk of displacing deforestation elsewhere, and that auditors often failed to enforce Verra’s own rules on generating credits. The report said some Redd+ projects had led to the displacement or dispossession of vulnerable communities, despite safeguards that were meant to prevent harm.

“Our research shows that the project type with the most credits on the voluntary carbon market, avoided deforestation, generates highly inflated credits that put forest communities at risk. An entirely different approach is needed to reduce deforestation and cut emissions,” said Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading project who led the report.

The report recommended that governments and businesses should focus on curbing the drivers of deforestation around the world, support plans designed to help Indigenous communities conserve forests, and said companies should support a contributions approach to supporting rainforest conservation instead of buying offsets.

In response, Verra said it welcomed the scrutiny of the scientific and environmental community on its work, saying that many of the issues highlighted in the report would be dealt with in the new methodology for generating carbon credits, which it will be publishing in the next few weeks. It has published a technical response to the study.

“We are committed to transparency, and have built an ecosystem of processes and relationships to develop consensus standards and methodologies that support climate action,” Verra said in a statement. “It is important to note that the vast majority of findings and recommendations from this research align with extensive and systematic work to update the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program that has been carried out by Verra over the last two years,” it added.

Earlier this year, the Guardian published an investigation that found that a vast numbers of rainforest carbon offsets were worthless. Several large companies have moved away from claims based on offsetting in recent months.

“The research shows that the current rules governing Redd+ projects seriously lack credibility and cannot be trusted to generate high quality carbon credits. Businesses are offsetting their emissions on the cheap by buying low-quality carbon credits connected to forest protection projects in the Global South,” said Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch.

Carbon Market Watch said it would be writing to Verra highlighting projects they thought were issuing illegitimate credits.

“Biodiversity, the climate and Indigenous people or local communities are losing out on what should have been a system to drive meaningful financial flows to the forest conservation projects that so desperately need it,” said Gilles Dufrasne, policy lead on global carbon markets for CMW.

“Offsetting should be axed. It cannot work in its current form, and carbon markets must evolve into something different. The focus should be on getting money to the right place, rather than getting as many credits as possible,” he said.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

Diverse mix of seedlings helps tropical forests regrow better, study finds


Malaysia trial shows quicker recovery compared with areas replanted with four or just a single native species

An area of cleared land and an oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysia. Tropical forests cover 6% of the planet’s land surface but are home to about 80% of species and are major carbon sinks. Photograph: Christian Loader/Alamy

Patrick Barkham

THE GUARDIAN

Fri 15 Sep 2023 

Replanting logged tropical forests with a diverse mixture of seedlings can help them regrow more quickly than allowing trees to regenerate naturally, a study has shown.

Satellite observations of one of the largest ecological experiments in the world in the Malaysian state of Sabah have revealed how lowland rainforest recovered over a decade.

After trees were felled in the 1980s, the publicly owned Malua Forest Reserve was dedicated to learning how best to restore tropical forests. A 500-hectare (1,235-acre) study site was divided into 125 experimental plots that, in 2002-03, were either left to recover naturally or planted with a mixture of one, four or 16 native tree species.

By 2012, the plots replanted with a mixture of 16 native tree species showed a quicker recovery of canopy area and total tree biomass, compared with areas replanted with four or only a single native species. But even plots replanted with just one tree species recovered more quickly after 10 years than those left to naturally regenerate.

A river runs through a rainforest in Sabah, Malaysia.
Photograph: Genevieve Vallee/Alamy

Prof Andrew Hector, of the University of Oxford, who set up the experiment more than 20 years ago as part of the South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership (SEARRP), said: “Our new study demonstrates that replanting logged tropical forests with diverse mixtures of native tree species achieves multiple wins, accelerating the restoration of tree cover, biodiversity, and important ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration.”

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Science Advances, said that the probable reason for the better recovery was that different tree species occupied distinct niches within the forest ecosystem and so diverse mixtures of planted species complemented each other and increased the effective functioning of the whole ecosystem. For instance, some tropical species were more tolerant of drought because they produced more protective chemicals, giving the forest resilience during periods of low rainfall.

Hector added: “Having diversity in a tropical forest can be likened to an insurance effect, similar to having a financial strategy of diverse investment portfolios.”

Tropical forests cover 6% of the planet’s land surface but are home to about 80% of the world’s documented species and are major carbon sinks. Between 2004 and 2017, 43m hectares of tropical forest were destroyed, an area the size of Morocco.

Restoring forests that have been logged is a crucial part of tackling the climate and extinction crises but it is debatable whether this is best achieved through allowing forests to restore themselves via seeds in the soil or through active replanting.

The Sabah biodiversity experiment planted nearly 100,000 trees, including several endangered species and the world’s tallest tropical tree, Shorea faguetiana or yellow meranti, which can reach more than 100 metres in height.

The recovery of the plots was assessed by applying statistical models to aerial images captured by satellites.

Ryan Veryard, the lead author of the study, said: “Importantly, our results show that logged forest can recover so long as it is not converted to agricultural uses like oil palm plantation. They also emphasise the need to conserve biodiversity within undisturbed forests, so that we can restore it in areas that have already been logged.”

‘People feel unprotected’: Greeks lose faith in state after Storm Daniel and a summer of wildfires

Before the catastrophe in Libya, the cyclone brought devastation to Thessaly – and there are fears the climate crisis will bring more

Floodwaters cover a plain in Thessaly on 8 September; at least 17 people died and the clean-up operation is continuing. 

Photograph: Dimtiris Papamitsos/AP

The Observer Greece
Helena Smith in Athens

Sat 16 Sep 2023 

The whiff of death permeates the once fertile plain of Thessaly. Thirteen days may have elapsed since Storm Daniel pummelled Greece – a prelude to the fatal descent it would make on Libya – but even now, as the flood waters slowly recede, families bury loved ones and the authorities begin to catalogue the scale of the destruction, it is clear the agricultural heart of the country has been devastated beyond recognition.

What remains is a broken land, rain-sodden and bruised, covered with the detritus of all that fell foul of the storm, animate and inanimate, fish, birds, bees, dogs, cats, livestock, buildings, bridges and roads.


This weekend, Greek soldiers in masks and protective suits were frantically collecting carcasses for mass incineration. More than 200,000 animals perished in the storms, officials say, and with fears of outbreaks of infectious disease, there is a race against time to remove putrefying remains from farms and pens in areas frequently described as impassable.

“The stench is unbearable,” one reporter told viewers on state-run television. “And it hangs over Thessaly.”

At least 17 people lost their lives in floods whose waters continue to submerge fields of cotton and corn, villages and towns in a thick layer of mud and sludge.

After Daniel’s devastating impact on Libya – where the death toll has surpassed 11,000 – Greeks are counting their blessings. But anger is also mounting. In a region hit by a ferocious Mediterranean cyclone, or “medicane”, named Ianos, exactly three years ago on Monday, fury is widespread that almost no flood prevention measures had been taken even if most accept that this month’s storms, energised by a summer of unprecedented heat, had not occurred in several hundred years. The downpours unleashed by Daniel were the worst since records began in the 1930s.

“You could call it the perfect storm,” Greece’s leading climatologist, Prof Christos Zerefos, told the Observer. “Locked between two meteorological systems it stood still, unable to move from west to east, taking its energy from the ever-warmer sea and [dumping] the equivalent of a year’s rain on Thessaly in two days.”

At 80 years old, Zerefos has long been studying changing weather patterns at the Academy of Athens’ research centre for atmospheric physics and climatology. He is the first to say that Daniel was “a very rare” extreme weather event, a storm whose magnitude he did not think he would ever see.

But what worries Zerefos is with the atmosphere so destabilised by a changing climate Ianos may not be a one-off. “The Ianos medicane cost about one fifth of the damage [predicted from] Daniel,” he said. “What frightens me is that we’ll have more events like Ianos, say every four or five years, which would not only be highly destructive but very costly.”

With so many in Greece’s agricultural heartland facing financial ruin – livestock recovery alone is expected to take years – the centre-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been put on the defensive.

After a summer of devastating wildfires – including a blaze described as Europe’s biggest after ravaging an area the size of New York City in the north-eastern region of Evros – there are growing public concerns that state authorities are ill-equipped to deal with natural disasters in a part of the world already singled out as a climate emergency hotspot. The sight of hapless residents in Thessaly being rescued by volunteers before civil protection units could get to them has reinforced the image of official incompetence.

On Thursday the polling company Metron Analysis, releasing its first survey of public opinion after the floods, noted that 61% of respondents had a negative opinion of the government’s work, versus 57% in May. For the first time since Mitsotakis, who won a second four-year term in June, assumed power, analysts have begun to speak of the nation resembling a “failed state”.

“There is a prevalent feeling that Greece is a failed state, that it cannot meet our expectations or [global] challenges,” said Maria Karaklioumi, a political analyst at the polling company Rass. “When Mitsotakis first came to power [in 2019] he promised that the country and state would work better and that hasn’t happened.”

Likening Greek sentiment to the backlash against US president George W Bush, whose reputation was badly hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she added: “People right now feel unprotected and abandoned. After the floods and fires, any sense of security that the state should offer has evaporated.”

Late on Saturday, in his first annual keynote economic speech since re-election, Mitsotakis emphasised that he would not only highlight challenges posed by the climate emergency – announcing local and EU-funded relief measures for those hit by the floods – but forge ahead with structural changes to a system that has clearly laboured under the pressure of dealing with successive disasters.

With the wildfires and floods expected to weigh on an economy otherwise doing well in the aftermath of Greece’s near decade-long debt crisis, the climate, more than any other potential foe has, after Daniel’s passing, clearly become the leader’s public enemy number one.

Bernie Sanders: workers should reap AI benefits in form of ‘lowering workweek’

Vermont senator says technology should benefit ‘not just people on top’ as he cites financial stresses confronting most Americans

Ramon Antonio Vargas

Sun 17 Sep 2023

If the US’s ongoing artificial intelligence and robotics boom translates into more work being done faster, then laborers should reap some of the gains of that in the form of more paid time off, the liberal US senator Bernie Sanders said Sunday.

“I happen to believe that – as a nation – we should begin a serious discussion … about substantially lowering the workweek,” Sanders remarked on CNN’s State of the Union.


Citing the parenting, housing, healthcare and financial stresses confronting most Americans while generally shortening their life expectancies, he added: “It seems to me that if new technology is going to make us a more productive society, the benefits should go to the workers.


“And it would be an extraordinary thing to see people have more time to be able to spend with their kids, with their families, to be able to do more … cultural activities, get a better education. So the idea of … making sure artificial intelligence [and] robotics benefits us all – not just the people on top – is something, absolutely, we need to be discussing.”

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with congressional Democrats, delivered those comments after State of the Union host Jake Tapper asked him about the four-day work week sought by the United Auto Workers. About 13,000 workers from that union went on strike Friday against the nation’s three biggest carmakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler-parent company Stellantis – after walking away from negotiations to renew a contract that expired at the end of the previous day.

Tapper asked Sanders, who appeared Friday at a rally in support of the strike, whether the concept of a shortened work week may simply be a negotiating tactic that the UAW would abandon when some of its other demands were met. But Sanders defended the validity of the demand while also seizing the moment to reiterate criticisms of the gaudy salaries collected by the car manufacturers’ executives.

Sanders – the chairperson of the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee – alluded to how the CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis had pocketed hundreds of times more than their workers’ median wage. Their pay jumped by 40% between 2013 and 2022 while their workers’ real hourly earnings fell by about a fifth since 2008, according to the Economics Policy Institute.

According to the UAW, the disparity has shown how workers were never fully compensated for the sacrifices their bosses asked of them after the 2008-09 financial crisis, when they agreed to numerous cuts in the name of bailing out the auto industry. Demands from the union’s striking members include a 40% wage increase, better retirement benefits and job security protections – in addition to the 32-hour work week.

Seventy-five percent of Americans support the striking auto workers, according to a recent poll from Gallup.

Nonetheless, the sheer scale of the strike could unsettle the US economy as a whole and may eventually mean higher car prices for already distressed commuters.

Meanwhile, the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, told MSNBC and CBS on Sunday that progress had been mostly slow in the talks between his union and the carmakers.

Speaking to Tapper before Sanders’s appearance, former Republican US vice-president Mike Pence sought to blame the Joe Biden White House for auto workers’ dissatisfaction.

“All those hardworking auto workers are living in the same reality every other Americans live, and that is wages are not keeping up with inflation,” Pence said.

But Sanders contended that the car industry’s top executives are solely to blame for the strike.

“American people are sick and tired, in my view, … of corporate greed, in which the very richest people are becoming richer,” Sanders said. “What you’re seeing in the automobile industry, in my view, is what we’re seeing all over this economy – greed on the top, suffering on the part of the working class, and people are tired of it.

“You people on top – you’ve never had it so good. … So UAW is standing up against corporate greed. And I applaud them for what they’re doing.”

1933

Tim Peake backs idea for solar farms in space as costs fall

Beam me down: can solar power from space help solve our energy needs?


Sophie Zeldin-O'Neill

THYE GUARDIAN

Sun 17 Sep 2023 

Tim Peake has backed the idea of solar farms in space, saying the concept is “becoming absolutely viable”.

Astronaut Maj Peake said the falling cost of launching heavy cargoes into orbit means that complex structures, such as solar power farms, could soon be launched into space, and had the potential to provide significant power.

Peake – the first European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut from Britain to visit the International Space Station – said: “It boils down to hard numbers at the end of the day. Launching thousands of tonnes of hardware into low Earth orbit is becoming absolutely viable.”

The ESA has been exploring the idea of space-based solar power plants, and commissioned two “concept studies” this year. It is hoping to present a business case to the EU by 2025.


Peake said the agency had calculated that solar farms in space would be financially viable when cargoes could be launched at a cost of $1,000 (£807) per kg or less.

“So far, the actual costs have been about $2,700 per kilo,” he told an energy tech summit last week, but he said two rockets designed by SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, could cut this. “Launches using the Falcon Heavy can reduce that to about $1,500 and the so-called Starship brings that down by an order of magnitude to about $300 per kilo.”

The Falcon Heavy is already transporting cargo such as satellites into space, while the Starship is in development. An unmanned test flight in April exploded minutes after lift-off.

Unlike previous launchers, they are programmed to return to Earth intact and are reusable. This means there is no need to construct a completely new rocket for each launch, bringing the overall cost down.

ESA’s Solaris programme aims to launch solar panels into space, each programmed to robotically link up with others to build a solar farm.

While Earth-based solar farms are unable to generate electricity during times of darkness, such as at night or when the weather is bad, space-based panels are able to harvest the sun’s energy continuously.

Peake said: “If you can build solar farms in space, then you can beam that energy down to ground stations via microwaves. It means clean, limitless energy from space becomes an absolute possibility.”

This year, it was announced that UK universities and tech companies were to receive £4.3m in government funding to develop space-based solar power.

It followed a 2020 UK government-commissioned report into space-based solar farms which said the systems had the potential to provide energy equivalent to a large power station, up to a quarter of the country’s electricity needs, and, in time, to become an unlimited and constant zero-carbon power source.

Such developments, though, would take many years and are unlikely to help solve any of the world’s urgent energy challenges.

STILL WHACKADODDLE

Liz Truss: economic consensus since 1997 to blame for UK woes – not me


Former prime minister to make remarks in speech on Monday almost a year since mini-budget that led to her downfall


Kiran Stacey

Political correspondent

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 17 Sep 2023 

Liz Truss will blame the UK’s economic problems on “25 years of economic consensus” as she doubles down on the policy proposals that helped trigger financial turmoil and caused her to be ousted from Downing Street after just 49 days.

The former prime minister will give a speech at the Institute for Government on Monday, almost exactly a year since her government’s “mini-budget”, which caused the pound to crash and ultimately led to her downfall.

Speaking days after it emerged that the UK economy shrank by 0.5% in July, Truss will say the UK’s current economic problems are not her fault.

“I believe that the reason for the problems we have is the 25 years of economic consensus that have led us to this period of stagnation,” she will say, according to extracts from her speech briefed in advance. “And I believe it is vital that we understand that and shatter that economic consensus, if we are to avoid worse problems in the future.”

TORY'S IN POWER FOR OVER A DECADE

Truss will add: “Some say this is a crisis of capitalism – that free markets are responsible. But that’s not borne out by the facts. Quite the opposite is true. The fact is that since the Labour government was elected in 1997, we have moved towards being a more corporatist social democracy in Britain than we were in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Truss has spent the past few months attempting to rehabilitate her political reputation after her turbulent time in No 10 – the shortest ever term for a prime minister.

Last week she gave an interview to the Mail on Sunday in which she accused the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility of being part of “an orthodoxy that was gradually moving to the left”. In her speech on Monday she will say: “Free market economists went off to lucrative jobs in the City, allowing academic institutions and thinktanks to be captured by the left.”

Truss’s opponents reacted to news of the speech by renewing their criticisms of her premiership. Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, likened the speech to “an arsonist giving a talk on fire safety”, while Labour urged her successor, Rishi Sunak, to block her planned resignation honours list.

The former Bank of England governor Mark Carney said Truss created “Argentina on the Channel” not “Singapore on Thames”. Carney was in Montreal on Saturday at the Global Progress Action Summit, and made the comment in a reference to Argentina’s history of being unable to services its debts and Truss’s mini-budget of unfunded tax cuts.

Truss is writing a book about her period in office entitled Ten Years To Save the West, which is due to come out next spring. But further details about that time emerged over the weekend in extracts from a forthcoming book by the Telegraph’s political editor, Ben Riley-Smith.

According to the book, senior officials at No 10 and the Treasury had to intervene to persuade Truss to abandon many of her policies after being warned by City executives that the UK would enter a financial crisis within days if she did not.

Extracts revealed that several people at the top of government – including the incoming Treasury permanent secretary, James Bowler, and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case – were brought in over the course of a single day last September to warn her of the potential consequences of her policies.

NATO NATION BUILDING;HOW'S THAT GOING

Libya floods: warlord using disaster response to exert control, say observers

Khalifa Haftar and Libyan National Army militia said to be overseeing humanitarian relief arriving in city of Derna

Ruth Michaelson

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 17 Sep 2023 

As search and rescue teams continue to hunt for bodies trapped underneath the mud and rubble of their homes in the Libyan coastal city of Derna, observers say the warlord Khalifa Haftar and his sons are using the disaster response as a way to exert control rather than ensure vital humanitarian relief reaches civilians.

At least 11,300 people have died and more than 10,000 are missing, according to the Libyan Red Crescent, after two dams burst during a powerful storm last week.

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‘Towns were erased’: Libyan reporters on the ‘horrifying, harrowing’ aftermath of floods

The resulting floods have completely destroyed almost 900 buildings in Derna, according to the country’s National Unity government, based in the north-western city of Tripoli. More than 200 buildings were partly damaged and almost 400 others were completely submerged in mud, it added, meaning that a quarter of all buildings in Derna had been affected by the flooding.

Desperate rescue efforts continued in an attempt to find any remaining survivors as bodies continued to wash up on the shoreline. First responders on the ground often worked while surrounded by militants from the Libyan National Army, a sprawling military coalition loyal to Haftar, amid what observers described as efforts to keep an iron grip over vital assistance arriving in the crisis-stricken city.
An aerial view of the devastation of Derna, Libya, 17 September 2023. Photograph: Halil Fidan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Public access to the centre of Derna, worst-affected by the flooding, has been shut off, and the city has been officially declared a disaster zone. Derna’s citizens are struggling to survive without access to electricity, safe drinking water or food.


‘The waters carried my son away in front of my eyes’: anguished Libyans mourn lost loved ones

Late last week, the head of Libya’s parliament based in the east, Osama Hamad, said the authorities were considering sealing off the entire city, which once housed 100,000 people, fearing the spread of water-borne diseases.

“Essentially there is a military presence that is creating bottlenecks rather than being conducive to the provision of relief,” said Emadeddin Badi, an analyst on Libya with the Atlantic Council. “The main thrust of relief efforts was not facilitated by the military leadership, which had a vested interest in appearing in control while skirting responsibility and victim-blaming, but instead by volunteers, medical teams, Red Crescent, boy scouts and foreign search and rescue teams.”

Haftar, who has spearheaded a military campaign to unilaterally control much of eastern Libya since 2014, toured Derna on Friday. He praised the actions of first responders as well as members of the LNA, a coalition of militias overseen by the ageing former CIA asset and US citizen, whom critics accuse of running areas under his control akin to a military dictator.

“On the public relations side, they are leveraging their pre-existing propaganda channels to appear in control, while being the main interface for administering crisis relief and being the custodians of the city,” said Badi. “But again, that’s creating bottlenecks everywhere. Haftar’s visit was a microcosm of this issue, everything was frozen for an hour for a PR stunt.”

Khalifa Haftar (right) met the chief of staff of the Egyptian armed forces, Lt Gen Osama Askar, in Benghazi on 12 September. Askar arrived with a military delegation and emergency disaster relief aid, according to the Egyptian defence ministry. 

Photograph: Egyptian defence ministry/AFP/Getty Images

Haftar’s sons, each of whom also controls their own broad networks of financial and sometimes military interests in eastern Libya, have responded to the humanitarian crisis in Derna by seeking to further exert control over the disaster response. On the same day that disaster struck Derna, Khalifa Haftar’s eldest son, Elseddik, declared his interest in running for president of Libya in long-delayed elections.

Observers said 32-year-old Saddam Haftar, often seen as the likely heir despite his brothers’ efforts, quickly used his role as the head of Libya’s disaster response committee to legitimise his international standing while keeping a tight grip on aid.

Saddam Haftar heads the Tariq Ben Zayed brigades, a militia that is part of the LNA and was recently accused by Amnesty International of “inflicting a catalogue of horrors, including unlawful killings, torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and forced displacement – with no fear of consequences”.

Jalel Harchaoui, a specialist on Libya and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, pointed to Saddam Haftar’s efforts to demonstrate control over international aid teams arriving in Derna and how this has slowed vital disaster response in a time of crisis: “Everything is concentrated in the hands of the Haftar family. I wish I could tell you that there are other power centres in eastern Libya, but there’s no such thing.”

For much of the past decade Libya has remained fiercely divided between eastern and western factions with their own patchwork of military interests, after a military intervention by Nato forces to support an uprising against the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Harchaoui said the Haftar clan’s control over response efforts, particularly the prominent role of Saddam Haftar, provided little hope that any domestic or international investigation into the loss of life in Derna could fully scrutinise their roles as the officials in charge, as well as any others responsible.

The Libyan prosecutor general, al-Sediq al-Sour, promised to investigate the collapse of both dams in Derna, as well as the allocation of millions of dollars in funding intended to maintain the structures, which were built in the 1970s. While pledging to investigate local authorities in Derna and previous governments, al-Sour also met with Saddam Haftar. Local television reported that Derna’s mayor was suspended pending investigation on Saturday.

“Saddam is positioning himself as the boss. You need to physically access victims and the city, and to do that they depend on his goodwill,” said Harchaoui. “Slowly things are orienting towards one conclusion, which is that only mid-level officials can be blamed. A large part of the conclusion is excluded from the start, it’s not an open investigation.”

Marxists.org

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/murder.htm

Murder of the Dead by Amadeo Bordiga 1951 

Murder of the Dead. First Published: Battaglia Comunista No. 24 1951; Source ... death, as in Diodorus Siculus. The appetite for surplus labour (Capital Vol ...

Populists are bad for our economic health, yet they’re still a hard habit to break

They are annoyingly good at politics but terrible at economics – GDP and living standards plummet in countries led by them

Torsten Bell
Sun 17 Sep 2023 

Global politics might not feel quite as grim as it did a few years back, but there’s still a lot of populism around: about a quarter of countries are led by populists. Silvio Berlusconi may be dead, but Giorgia Meloni is running the show in Italy. Donald Trump wants back into the White House (it’s cosier than jail), and are we really confident that arch-centrist Emmanuel Macron in France won’t be followed by Marine Le Pen? Even the pope is worried about a libertarian former sex-coach taking power in Argentina.

I raise this because it should encourage anti-populists to focus on addressing the bad economic outcomes that help drive populism. If you need further encouragement, it should come from recognising the scale of bad economic outcomes that follow populists actually coming to power.

Fascinating/depressing German research tracked 51 populist presidents/prime ministers from 1900-2020 in 60 countries. They are defined as those whose central argument is one of the “true people” v “dishonest” elites, and the bad news is their number has been on the rise for three decades. Worse, once they get into office they tend to stay for twice as long as non-populists. They are annoyingly good at politics, but very bad at economics. The researchers find that having a populist leader hits a country’s GDP per capita and living standards by about 10% over 15 years as the economy turns inward, institutions are undermined and risks are taken with macroeconomic policy. And there’s a specific warning for the likes of the US: once you’ve had one in power, populist leaders repeat on you (Argentina and Ecuador have had on-off populist leaders for decades). So populists are like cigarettes. It’s not the first one that does you in, but getting addicted to them that kills you.

Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org

Who lives and who dies in the world’s next pandemic should not depend on where they live

Aids and Covid had the worst impact in poorer countries and communities; a new health accord must address this

Michael Marmot
THE GUARDIAN 
Sun 17 Sep 2023 

The Covid pandemic was an equivocator with global unity – to misquote the porter in Macbeth. We were united in being affected by the pandemic but both its effects and the responses to it were grossly unequal. More, inequality worsens pandemics, not only current pandemics such as Aids and Covid but those yet to come.

Governments are looking to address one side of this equivocation through their negotiations on a pandemic accord that will be discussed during the UN general assembly in New York this month. Such a development is welcome and much needed. It is the other side, inequality, that is missing from the draft pandemic treaty and from governments’ pandemic preparedness plans. If lessons are learned, the next pandemic can be made less tragic in its effects.

It is to bring the lessons from the Aids response and other pandemics that UNAids took the initiative to convene a Global Council on Inequality, Aids and Pandemics. I am co-chairing it with Monica Geingos, first lady of Namibia, and Joseph Stiglitz, the economist and a professor at Columbia University in New York, with a diverse group of leaders from civil society, academia, government and international organisations, to review the evidence and propose new action.
The greater the inequality within a country, the higher the death rate from Aids and Covid

The global council will seek to influence pandemic preparedness efforts by showing the evidence of three ways in which inequality can be considered: how it drives pandemics; in access to diagnostics, vaccines and treatments; and exclusion of marginalised communities from engagement in designing their own welfare. Solutions must be found to all three.

Say the word “health” in the context of action and a common reaction is to think of the healthcare system. But social determinants are crucial in driving health inequalities. A new paper, led by John Ele-Ojo Ataguba, executive director of the African Health Economics and Policy Association, building on work on income inequalities and health, examined the relation between income disparities and HIV incidence and Aids mortality in 217 countries, and excess deaths linked to Covid in 151 countries.

In Africa, where HIV prevalence and Aids deaths are particularly high, and in the rest of the world, there was a link between income inequality and health: the greater the inequality within a country, the higher the HIV incidence, Aids mortality and Covid excess deaths. It is important to understand how this link comes about. One possibility is that the greater the inequality, the greater the deprivation, covering the spectrum from nutrition to education to life chances. Second, greater inequality is linked to lower social cohesion and trust, which make social action to deal with pandemics much more difficult. Third, inequality is linked to a politics that serves special interests against the interests of the whole population, especially marginalised communities.

More generally, we want the treaty to address the social determinants of health. Countries that are taking the social actions necessary to reduce health inequalities are likely to be those that are better prepared to handle the pandemic. In the US and the UK, for example, Covid mortality was higher in subgroups of the population that already had higher risk of ill health. Covid amplified these pre-existing inequalities.

A second major strategy to address inequality between countries is to make commitments to fix the vastly unequal supply of treatments and vaccines available globally. Among the most important of these commitments would be for the governments of the powerful states to attach conditions to the public financing they give pharmaceutical companies for research and development so the resulting technology can be shared around the world. Without these conditions, we are likely to repeat history: a situation in which a government invests more than $10bn in Covid vaccine research, resulting in the development of vaccines that are the private monopolies of pharmaceutical corporations, which are then neither shared with the world, nor even priced fairly for those who paid for them. Actions by governments to limit pharmaceutical monopolies have saved millions of lives in the Aids pandemic by requiring that technology and generic medicines be shared around the world. Following this model could ensure that it is not the geographical location or the fiscal capacity of a state that determines who lives and dies in a pandemic.
Lower-income countries, already deep in economic crisis from the pandemic, could be even less prepared for the next

Financing pandemic preparedness and response is a key factor in a world where countries have highly unequal resources, whether for buying tests and vaccines or for the upgrades in health infrastructure that can deliver them to people. We are in a world in which lower-income countries, already in deep economic crisis from the pandemic, could be even less prepared for the next, with no plan to address their levels of debt, let alone access more funds to strengthen their health systems and tackle Aids and tuberculosis. Two serious efforts are needed: a clear commitment to a pandemic response fund that would be triggered when a pandemic is declared; and a major effort to address unequal access to financing – in the short term to remove the massive debt burden hampering many countries’ ability to invest in preparedness and in the long term so that lower-income countries have equal access to affordable credit in times of crisis.

A third part of a strategy to deal with inequalities is to learn from the Aids pandemic the importance of including marginalised communities in responses; and to engage everyone in decision-making. It is important to fund community-led services to reach populations that the state cannot. Key commitments should include ending punitive laws including criminalisation of marginalised groups and developing strategies for greater equity related to gender, disability and sexual orientation.

We have a real challenge to global cooperation. High-income countries may be reluctant to make the financial guarantees necessary and their pharmaceutical industries reluctant to do what is needed. In the absence of such commitments, low- and middle-income countries may be reluctant to cooperate in sharing vital data that is necessary for managing a global pandemic. Addressing inequality is an opportunity to make real progress. This pandemic treaty is an opportunity for tangible steps towards a fairer world, with potential benefits for the health of people everywhere.

Michael Marmot is professor of epidemiology at University College London, director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, and past president of the World Medical Association