Residents of Mexico City suburb are anxious after living over a month in black sewage water

AP |

Sep 14, 2024

With the receding liquid now down to her ankles, Salazar waddled into her furniture-less bedroom, where only a water pump hummed in the corner. Large black blotches stained the once white walls.

Sewage-infused floodwaters have invaded streets, homes and businesses in Salazar’s Culturas neighborhood of Chalco for over a month.

The low-lying area at the edge of what was once an ancient lake has long been plagued by seasonal flooding, but residents say this year has been worse, a combination of unchecked growth and failing infrastructure.

According to Chalco’s government, more than 2,000 homes and over 7,000 residents have been affected. The water was as deep as 5 feet in some areas.

Over the past several weeks, Salazar has used four pumps running around the clock to clear water from her home. Her hands and legs are stained with black and gray streaks from coming into contact with the tainted floodwaters.

“Day and night we couldn’t sleep, the water just rose and rose,” she said.

“I’ve been saying for years that the drain systems have collapsed,” said Salazar. “I haven’t been able to work because I have to take care of my things, my daughter hasn’t been able to take her son to school … we’re just surviving.”

Omar Arellano-Aguilar, a biologist and expert in environmental toxicology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the combination of drainage failures and the geological structure of the area makes it more vulnerable to floods.

“All of these urban areas have grown haphazardly over the last 50 years,” he said.

A city of more than 400,000, since the late 1980s Chalco has grown to become one of the largest cities in the State of Mexico, but it still lacks basic water and power infrastructure.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has downplayed the crisis in Chalco and said he wouldn't pay the disaster zone a visit.

“It's being taken care of,” he said during one of his daily press briefings last month. “It's the same reason I didn't go to Acapulco,” referring to the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Otis that killed at least 48 people. “It's like vulture season,” he said regarding the press asking him about it.

State Gov. Delfina Gómez has visited the neighborhood a handful of times. The governor and Chalco’s government did not respond to requests for interviews from The Associated Press.

Local, state and federal officials have been working in the area, using massive pumps to lower the water, vaccinating residents and providing potable water.

Outside of Salazar's home, the sun pounded on the neighborhood as the acidic stench of the sewage water and silt stretched for miles.

A block away, Oscar Martínez Hinojosa, 49, adjusted the hose for one of his water pumps.

Martínez said that when the flooding started they weren’t given any boots or protective clothing by the government. “They didn’t give us anything, no food, not a single pair of overalls ... and we asked for them," he said.

Martínez lives with his five family members crowded into a top floor room where there is no damage. Downstairs, the courtyard and other bedrooms are swamped with ankle-deep water.

Another resident, Guadalupe Sarai Islas García, 32, said health problems have abounded from the sewage water. Her baby was throwing up and experiencing diarrhea for over a week when the flooding persisted.

“None of the politicians know what it’s like to live like this,” she said. “They get to go home, have a shower, dine in peace and sleep without a care in the world.”

Since her home flooded weeks ago, she sent her kids to stay with her mother so they wouldn’t be exposed to any more filth. Other residents have taken similar precautions and even started renting rooms in neighboring Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.

However, the dozens of trucks from the state and local governments lined up on Chalco's main street pumping tons of water from the neighborhood have helped reduce the water.

Residents who have managed to lower their water levels are now removing debris and silt from their homes.

As of last weekend, authorities reported there were no flooded streets remaining and that they had removed 245 tons of silt. They have also extracted more than 264 million gallons of water. They also began cleaning and disinfecting 28 streets affected by the flooding.

At a primary school located off the main intersection, Principal Maria Luisa Molina Avila said she felt positive about the latest renovations they had done to the grounds after flood damage to the school. The flooding delayed the start of the school year by two weeks for thousands of students.

“This has been like a rollercoaster, however fortunately many of the streets are now dry,” she said. Along with her daughter and son they drained, swept and cleaned the school to prepare for students' arrival.

“It's a relief for the kids they get to go back to school,” said resident García. “Now that our stress has been at an all time high.”

Back across town, Salazar made her way to a street corner accompanied by her dog “Oso” or “bear” to attend a neighborhood meeting. She gathered with others waiting for further updates about the construction of a drainage pipe that was set to start that morning.

As the afternoon rain started to sprinkle, a crowd of residents grew frustrated at the officials leading the construction. “Where’s the solution to this?” one person said. “We want you to start working! Look it’s already raining,” another yelled.

Standing patiently at the edge of the crowd with “Oso,” Salazar took in the scene silently. Like many of her neighbors, she’s patient for a solution.

But Arellano-Aguilar doubted retroactive fixes would work in the ever-sinking terrain. “For all the pipes they add, nothing is going to change," he said. "On the contrary, all the infrastructure that's put in now will suffer the effects of subsidence.”

Besides investing in more capable drainage systems, Arellano-Aguilar said stakeholders need to think about areas in the basin where they can redirect rainwater.

“We need to start learning how to live alongside the water and accept that there are areas that have to be flooded,” he said.

'Astonishing' study shows infant deaths rise in U.S. when bat populations fall

Edward Carver, Common Dreams
September 7, 2024 

BAT (Greg WOOD AFP/File)

Bat die-offs in the U.S. led to increased use of insecticides, which in turn led to greater infant mortality, according to a "seminal" study published Thursday that shows the effects of biodiversity loss on human beings.

Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, authored the study, which was published by Science, a leading peer-reviewed journal.

Bats can eat thousands of insects per night and act as a natural pest control for farmers, so when a fungal disease began killing off bat populations in the U.S. after being introduced in 2006, farmers in affected counties used more insecticides, Frank found. Those same counties saw more infant deaths, which Frank linked to increased use of insecticide that is harmful to human health, especially for babies and fetuses.

The study was greeted by an outpouring of praise from unaffiliated scientists for its methodology and the important takeaways it offers.

"[Frank] uses simple statistical methods to the most cutting-edge techniques, and the takeaway is the same," Eli Fenichel, an environmental economist at Yale University, toldThe New York Times. "Fungal disease killed bats, bats stopped eating enough insects, farmers applied more pesticide to maximize profit and keep food plentiful and cheap, the extra pesticide use led to more babies dying. It is a sobering result."

Carmen Messerlian, an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard University, told the Times the study "seminal" and "groundbreaking."

The study shows the need for a broader understanding of human health that includes consideration of entire ecosystems, said Roel Vermeulen, an environmental epidemiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "It emphasizes the need to move from a human-centric health impact analysis, which only considers the direct effects of pollution on human health, to a planetary health impact assessment," he toldNew Scientist.

Reporter Benji Jones echoed that sentiment in Vox, calling Frank's findings "astonishing" and writing that such studies could help us fight chemical pollution by corporations.

"When the link between human and environmental health is overlooked, industries enabled by short-sighted policies can destroy wildlife habitats without a full understanding of what we lose in the process," Jones said. "This is precisely why studies like this are so critical: They reveal, in terms most people can relate to, how the ongoing destruction of biodiversity affects us all."


Frank, who said he started the work after stumbling on an article about bat population loss while procrastinating, happened upon an excellent natural experiment. The spread of white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease, was well tracked on a county-by-county level, leaving him with high-quality data that is hard to find for researchers who study the intersection of human and animal life.

The benefits of biodiversity on humans, and the drawbacks to its loss, are normally very difficult to quantify.



"That's just quite rare—to get good, empirical, grounded estimates of how much value the species is providing," Charles Taylor, an environmental economist at Harvard Kennedy School, toldThe Guardian. "Putting actual numbers to it in a credible way is tough."

Taylor himself is the author of a somewhat similar study that showed that pesticide use and infant mortality rose during years in which cicadas appeared; the insects do so at 13-17 year intervals.

David Rosner, a historian based at Columbia University, said the new bat study joins a large body of evidence dating back to the 1960s that links pesticide use with negative human health outcomes. "We're dumping these synthetic materials into our environment, not knowing anything about what their impacts are going to be," he said. "It's not surprising—it's just kind of shocking that we discover it every year."

Frank's claim about the cause of increased infant mortality should be taken with some caution, said Vermeulen, the Dutch researcher. He said the loss of agricultural income caused by bat die-offs could be connected to the increased deaths in complex ways.

The exact causal mechanism isn't known, Frank told media outlets, but the data shows the rise of infant mortality didn't come from food contamination by insecticides—rather, it's more likely it came via the water supply or contact with the chemicals.

Frank's other research extends beyond pesticide use. He and another researcher recently estimated that hundreds of thousands of human beings have died in India due to the collapse of the country's vulture population, as rotting meat increased the spread of diseases such as rabies.

Frank is not the first to study the impacts of white-nose syndrome on humans. Other studies have shown a reduction in land rents in counties hit by the bat plague and documented the billions of dollars that farmers have lost as their natural pest control disappeared.

The syndrome attacks bats while they hibernate. It was first identified in New York in 2006 and has since spread to much of North America. It's believed to have been brought over from Europe. It doesn't affect all bat species, but it's killed more than 90% of three key species, and bats also face a myriad of other threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and the dangerous churn of wind turbines.

Frank's bracing study should be a call to arms, experts said.

"This study estimates just a few of the consequences we suffer from the disappearance of bats, and they are just one of the species we're losing," Felicia Keesing, a biologist at Bard College, told The Washington Post. "These results should motivate everyone, not just farmers and parents, to clamor for the protection and restoration of biodiversity."

UK

Time to rebuild union power – social justice unionism today #TUC2024

6th September 2024Leave a Commenton Time to rebuild union power – social justice unionism to

“This is a renewal of ideas, an exploration of industrial relations, unions and their role in the next five to ten years.”

By Henry Fowler, Head of Education, Campaigns and Organising at the General Federation of Trade Unions

We have all heard it at that staff day, “We are being strategic,” “here is our ‘Strategic plan”, as strategy is often the preserve of the managerial class, the ‘buzzword’ of Human Resources. 

However, it doesn’t have to be like this. 

Strategy is not just a word. Strategy is about how we all within the trade union and wider labour movement build the power and capacity to improve workers’ lives. The employers have strategy, the managers have strategy, and it is vital that as a united labour movement we build our own.

That is why we have spent time speaking with, developing and reaching out to different thinkers across our movement, to develop the GFTU Educational Trust new ‘Strategy Series’. This six part webinar series is FREE for the whole movement, a chance for you to get up close with strategic leaders, and discuss the key ideas around how we renew our movement together. This is not renewal in the sense of a younger workplace rep replacing the retiring one, but a renewal of ideas, an exploration of industrial relations, unions and their role in the next five to ten years.  

This series will include discussions from leading thinkers on: reviving the trade union movement, how we build union strategy, the role of women and feminist approaches to our unions, strategies for developing activists and the capacity to win campaigns big and small.

We are delighted that our first event will be in person with the visiting President of the United Teachers Los Angeles, Cecily Myrat-Cruz on 16 September co-sponsored with the National Education Union, and Strike Map, register your place here. 

Our sessions will be led by a variety of speakers including; Joe Burns, Marshall Ganz, Grace Blakeley, Alice Martin, Hahrie Han, Bill Fletcher Jnr. 

Below is the schedule for the rest of the series which are all online via Zoom at 7pm UK time, unless otherwise stated, we hope you can join us: 

• • 16 September, 6pm- Social Justice Movement unionism today (in person in London)
  • 17 September- Reviving the Trade Union Movement, Defying Anti-Union Laws, and Building Power 
  • 22 October- Unions Renewed Building Power in an Age of Finance
  • 19 November- Strategies for Activist Development
  • 21 January- Strategic Capacity
  • 19 February- What Does ‘Vulture Capitalism’ Mean For Organised Labour?
  • 19 March- Union Strategy and the Crisis in Organised Labour

You can find the full programme for the GFTU Educational Trust 2024-2025 here.

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• Henry Fowler is Head of Education, Campaigns and Organising at the General Federation of Trade Unions.
• You can follow GFTU on x/twitter here. 
• You can find the full programme for the GFTU Educational Trust 2024-2025 here.

 

Like people, vultures get set in their ways and have fewer friends as they age

Older birds tend to have more selective friendships with stronger bonds and may know better where to find food

University of California - Los Angeles

Key takeaways

• Young griffon vultures move frequently between sleeping sites in different locations, interacting with many friends.
• They get set in their ways as they age and roost in the same spots with the same individuals; older vultures follow the same paths.
• Roosts act as information hubs; older vultures may have a more thorough knowledge of where to find food resources and less need to learn about them from other vultures.

If you’d rather be watching TV on your couch than dancing at the club, you might have something in common with aging griffon vultures. New research shows that young griffon vultures move frequently between sleeping sites in different locations and interact with many friends but get set in their ways as they age, roosting in the same spots with the same individuals. As moving between roosts becomes a grind, older vultures follow the same path, establishing movement routines, that are not seen in young vultures.

Younger vultures shy away from the most popular roosts, suggesting they might be intimidated by the older ones or that there’s a vulture equivalent of “Hey you kids, get off my lawn.”

The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that like many people, older vultures tend to have fewer, more selective friendships with stronger bonds. They may also have a more thorough knowledge of where to find food resources.

Eurasian griffon vultures, or Gyps fulvus, are large vultures that live in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India. With wingspans up to 9 feet, they’re much larger than North American turkey vultures and bigger than bald eagles.

Finding food can be tricky for vultures because it depends on locating animal carcasses — an unpredictable and ephemeral source. When griffon vultures find a carcass, they tend to sleep or roost nearby and feed on it over a period of days. Roosting sites can thus be ‘information hubs,’ where vultures that recently fed signal to others about food sources; they then follow each other to carcasses and form friendships that help them stay in the loop about food.

The researchers wanted to know if an individual griffon vulture’s movement patterns and social behavior changed over the course of its life. They used GPS data from 142 individually tagged birds in Israel gathered over a period of 15 years to cross-reference the vultures’ ages with their movement and social interactions at roost sites.

“What we found was as they age, their loyalty to certain roost sites increases,” said co-author Noa Pinter-Wollman, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Young vultures check out many different roosts but in middle age, they start going repeatedly to the same places.”

The study showed young vultures sometimes returned to the same roost but usually chose different ones, rarely spending two nights in the same place. From young adulthood at around 5 years old through middle age, they spent about half their nights at the same “home” site and half elsewhere. In old age, they became true homebodies.

“When they are old, from the age of 10 onward, they no longer have the energy to be ‘out and about’ and return consistently to the same site,” said corresponding author Orr Spiegel of Tel Aviv University. “Those who were adventurous at the age of 5 became more sedentary by age 10.”

As the vultures grew older, the strength of their social bonds decreased as well for at least part of the year. The number of individuals they interacted with didn’t change with age — if they had five friends when young, they still had five when older. But the amount of time they spent with vultures outside of their close friend group plummeted. Older vultures spent most of their time with and roosted mostly with these close friends. Their movements also became more routine, eventually following a predictable pattern.

The study is unique because the researchers were able to track the movements and social behaviors of the same vultures for up to 12 nearly consecutive years over a 15-year period.

“We are able to show that the trends of individuals becoming more loyal to the same sites with age is not because the more exploratory individuals die earlier and live shorter lives, and the older, more sedentary individuals live longer lives,” said first author and Tel Aviv University postdoctoral fellow Marta Acácio. “Individuals actually change their behavior with age, and this has rarely been shown in nature for long-lived birds due to the difficulty of tracking individuals for such a long time.”

The research backs up findings from studies in other species that, with age, animals become more faithful to their known sites and routines — and potentially become more selective in their social relationships. These behaviors are commonly attributed to aging in humans and can help improve understanding of how animal populations move about in their environments and relate to other members of their species, as well as identify better ways to protect them from threats. For griffon vultures, this could mean better protection of important roosting sites and using knowledge about their social interactions to reduce the risk of poisoning.

“It looks like they just get set in their ways,” Pinter-Wollman said. “They’ve gathered information over the years, and they might as well use it. Carcasses are hard to come by and roosts are information hubs. Some roosts become popular for a reason; for example, they tend to be closer to reliable food sources and older vultures potentially monopolize these roosts.”

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

A terrible system: now what’s the alternative?

Labour Hub Editors

AUGUST 26, 2024

Mike Phipps reviews The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neolberalism (and How It Came to Control Your Life), by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, published by Allen Lane.

Is there anything new to say about neoliberalism? It depends, of course, on how you define the capitalist mode of production that it’s based on. Monbiot and Hutchison have a distinctive definition:

“Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting. It operates on a constantly shifting and self-consuming frontier, on which both state and powerful private interests use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property and to transform natural wealth, labour and money into commodities that can be accumulated.”

The rest of the chapter illustrates this process, beginning with Portuguese colonisation and exploitation from the 15th century onwards.

Global looting allowed countries to stoke their own industrial revolutions at home. One analysis suggests that Britain, over 200 years, extracted from India alone an amount of wealth equivalent to $45 trillion in today’s money. The process continues today in different forms: an estimated trillion dollars a year flows out of poorer countries, through tax evasion and the transfer of money within corporations.

Monbiot and Hutchison take us through the history of neoliberalism from its origins to its global hegemony from the 1980s on. For all the attempts of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to articulate a ‘Third Way’, this was “little more than a rhetorical device to justify and disguise the capitulation of the left.” Deregulation, privatisation, the weakening of organised labour and the welfare state have continued with little interruption since. In many countries, these ‘reforms’ have been imposed by force.

With increasing privatisation, the opportunities for getting unearned income – rent – have soared. This process reinforces itself, which the authors illustrate with the example of the ending of student grants in many countries. Instead, reliance on loans and the accumulation of debt forces students to restrict their career options, turning to the corporate world for higher salaries, rather than considering public service.

Governments – Keir Starmer’s is the latest example – are in thrall to powerful wealthy elites and shun redistribution, hoping to fund public services through growth. Not explored here are the compromises – environmental, especially – that such a strategy entails.

The impact of neoliberalism on democracy is also a huge cause for concern. The shift in power from elections and parliaments to corporate lobbyists, trade treaties and offshore tribunals has created a crisis of representation, opening the path to cynicism and authoritarianism. Economic and political liberalism are increasingly in conflict.

Trump may have promised to “drain the swamp” of political lobbyists in 2016, but in office he became their tool, particularly of ‘dark money’. In fact, neoliberalism has a history of finding populist figures – even clowns, such as Italy’s Berlusconi, Argentina’s Milei or our own Johnson – to whip up a smokescreen for its ruthless agenda.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, unpopular lobbies increase their power. One feature of this is the ‘polluter’s paradox’, whereby the most damaging anti-social companies invest most in political lobbying, because they are the ones most likely to face the heaviest regulation in a democratic system; in the process, they come to dominate politics. This helps explain the  “sustained failure by wealthy and technologically advanced governments to prevent our rush towards disaster.”

Neoliberalism’s extreme individualism also attacks our mental health. It undermines community and social connection, reducing relationships to transactions, increasing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and alienation. In 2021, 100,000 people in the US died by drug overdose, a fivefold increase in a decade.

Unsurprisingly for someone of Monbiot’s background, it’s the ecological impact of neoliberalism that gets the strongest condemnation. The book is excoriating on the global exploitation and destruction of nature, the outsourcing of pollution to places where political resistance is weakest and the way the richest countries have poured money into closing their borders to people fleeing climate breakdown.

When neoliberalism fails, it fails big. An example is the 2008 financial crash, fuelled by the commodification of risk, specifically in the US sub-prime mortgage market. But when the system crashes, it turns inexorably to the state for bailouts.

Neoliberalism has been failing for some time: the problem is there is no clear alternative. The authors are right to counterpose cooperation and community to selfishness and atomisation, but that’s a bit abstract. As long as the core feature of the current economic system is the generation of economic inequality, then political democracy and social solidarity will continue to be subverted. Small steps in the right direction, like participatory budgeting and other ideas mentioned in my review of Grace Blakeley’s Vulture Capitalism, are welcome, but they fall well short of constituting a genuine alternative.

Society is ripe for change and this book tries to end on a hopeful note. But I couldn’t help feeling that a lot more work needs to be done on alternatives to neoliberalism if we are really to move in the right direction.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

UK

What the Anti-Immigration Riots Tell Us About Starmer’s Labour  Government

Labour strongly condemned the riots, but can Starmer’s faction confront its own dark history of race-baiting?

By Brian Chikwava

August 22, 2024

Source: African Arguments

The anti-immigration riots in Southport, UK, 5 August 2024. Courtesy: By StreetMic LiveStream, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151177179



What we know is that the far-right riots in the UK were not a legitimate outpouring of anger about the stabbing of children because, even after their reasoning justifying their violence had collapsed in the face of facts, something else continued to drive the rioters to attack mosques, Muslims and black people.

It did not matter that the 17-year-old boy who stabbed the children was not a recent foreign arrival, as they had believed. It also did not matter that the boy was not a Muslim, as they had believed. Something else was driving them, but the British political and media classes could not name it.

The riots cannot have been about the raw deal that the average Brit has got out of the neoliberal settlement because, as ex-Labour MP Laura Pidcock noted, these bearers of “legitimate” anger were notable for their absence at sites where communities were fighting hardships. They don’t help at food banks, aren’t bothered by homelessness, and are absent at campaigns against government spending cuts, by Tories or by Labour. Their issues are not economic.

The riots cannot have been about the immigrant question in general, as the media tried to tell us, because if that were true, we would have seen Ukrainians, Eastern Europeans and Australians under attack. The riots were about a specific kind of immigrant: the Muslim. If you were black or brown, that made you a fair target.

We cannot trust the new Labour government to take an honest position on the problem because its leading lights got where they are by way of a strange relationship with the truth. For a while now, Westminster, Fleet Street and the BBC have operated in ways barely distinguishable from a psyop on the general public. We already saw some of this. When anti-fascist groups organised to meet a planned countrywide march on Thursday, 8 August 2024, Starmer’s government instructed Labour MPs not to join any anti-fascist marches. Yet as soon as it became clear that the anti-fascist groups had successfully deterred the planned countrywide marches by the far right, the government and the media were quick off the blocks to give credit to, erm, the good British people for seeing off the rioters. Neatly skipped over was the political identity of the people who came out on the streets to face down the far right, for they were none other than anti-fascists, pro-Palestine protestors and the usual anti-war groups. In short, the same people that Westminster and mainstream media were calling “hate mobs”, “terrorists”, or “antisemites” at the height of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government will avoid as much as possible answering any basic questions, such as: is Tommy Robinson a fascist? Is Nigel Farage far right? Are we racist? Labour is afraid and incapable of naming things; if it can’t correctly name Islamophobic riots, it cannot hope to find the correct solution. Even when Starmer condemned ‘far-right thuggery,’ it sounded dishonest to frame the people involved as a mindless fringe group of thugs whose appearance on the streets was irrational and puzzling when the evidence of recent years is clear: Islamophobia is Westminster’s last respectable bigotry. Eager to investigate antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Equality & Human Rights Commission has steadfastly refused to do anything about evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. The Forde Report found a racism hierarchy in the Labour Party.

In the aftermath of the riots, New Labour veteran Margaret Hodge came forward to say, ‘We’re too frightened to talk about immigration.’ Yet it’s impossible to find one subject that has consistently been at the centre of British politics as much as immigration. In 2005, Tony Blair was panicking over what to do with the high numbers of migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq and how that would impact Labour at the ballot box. In 2007, Hodge earned the applause of the far-right British National Party after talking about the “fear” triggered in her constituency by the sight of “different” faces in schools. Prime Minister Gordon Brown resurrected the National Front slogan “British jobs for British workers”; Labour’s 2015 election campaign featured explicitly anti-migrant coffee mugs, and in the most recent election campaign, Labour was competing with Tories over who could be the most horrible against immigrants. Talking about immigrants, particularly the sort that Boris Johnson called “letterboxes,” helped the Brexit campaign over the line in 2016.

Hodge is one of the reactionary Labour Party grandees who want a Labour Party that is essentially the Conservative Party Light. At the height of Blairism, these are the folks who claimed that everyone was middle class: “We’re all Thatcherites now”.

Blair is famous for “modernising” the Labour Party by dropping clause IV of the party’s constitution. This clause obliged it to represent the interests of working people. Labour is now ideologically incapable of offering working people a path to a place where their first point of identification is social struggle. Lacking a genuine political offer, Labour has chosen to follow Tories’ who are not shy to encourage people to identify along racial lines. A party that once belonged to working people but is now a vehicle of political careering by a group of liberals who can operate the party with a vanishing membership because they don’t need membership fees if the party can be funded by corporate lobbyists, city bankers and vulture capitalists presently waiting for Labour to start yet another round of stripping away public assets for a song. Starmer’s government is available to the highest bidder. And racists bid the highest in this country.

UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer exuberant about Labour’s landslide, on 5 July. Courtesy: Keir Starmer social media.

Starmer’s clique came into government on the back of extraordinary duplicity, with the support of the liberal mainstream media, likely looking for the first opportunity to slip out of the sham and pretend they were not at all involved. The liberal commentariat for years encouraged people to “vote for the lesser evil.” They soon forgot that they chose evil, started defending evil, while self-describing as “sensible moderates.” Paid to mis-represent the world and how power shapes it, they threw their support behind the right wing of the Labour Party when it sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s party leadership. They pretended not to see the difference between people supporting Westminster’s most notable anti-apartheid campaigner and a far-right bloke who is eager to murder in order to assert preferred racial hierarchies. So, Jeremy Corbyn was routinely compared to a Nazi prison guard; the BBC broadcast General Sir Nicholas Houghton in full uniform saying the Army would be ‘worried’ about a Corbyn win, and no one raised an eyebrow; the BBC’s premier news programme, Newsnight, depicted Corbyn as Lord Voldemort, and army squaddies did target practice on an image of Corbyn.

If Brexit and its obsession with coming swarms of foreigners took the country halfway to where it is now, the political assassination of Jeremy Corbyn completed the journey. The signals were loud, public and unmistakable: the British voter had had enough of the foreigner, and the land’s rulers would not tolerate a redistributive agenda. A senior Labour figure allied to Starmer felt obliged to scream racist and sexist language at the first Black female MP, Diane Abbott, intent on breaking her.

Starmer’s Labour government is ill-suited for the task not because it lacks ability but because the party leadership earned its place by distortion and disinformation. They had to be really ugly to thwart Corbynism and the threat it posed to capital; if naked racism and sexism were required, that was fine. Eventually, they found the perfect weapon to decapitate Corbyn: antisemitism.

Here, they really shone as political ghouls. For their efforts they have been rewarded with a thundering parliamentary majority despite fewer people voting for them than did for the supposedly unpopular Corbyn-led Labour.

After the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s report over the Labour Party’s antisemitism row, when Corbyn failed to apologise for saying claims of rampant antisemitism levelled at the party under his leadership were exaggerated, Starmer and his mob leapt at the opportunity to start kicking Corbyn out of the party. It is worth remembering that in the purge that followed, Starmer’s Labour expelled left-leaning Jewish party members at such a blistering rate, that it became statistically more likely to be kicked out if you were Jewish.

Starmer claimed to be cleansing the party of the scourge of antisemitism. All the clever political editors, conduits of the antisemitism outrage, displayed a wonderful collective incuriosity about the satirical nature of what was unfolding. When the party was done processing a backlog of 10,000 antisemitism cases inherited from Corbyn and 183 party members were rightly expelled, the media again excelled with their disinterest.

187 individuals is, of course, 0.03% of peak membership during the Corbyn years. Way before Corbyn was party leader, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s own political party surveys going back years had estimated antisemitism in the party to be at about 23 – 32% of the membership – an estimate still lower, it should be noted, than the figures for the Conservative Party. In fact, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s survey had shown antisemitism going down under Corbyn. But since the antisemitism row was hardly a search for the truth, hard facts did not count.

The political and media figures behind the duplicity over ‘rampant antisemitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party have never had to account for anything. The media has responded to Al Jazeera’s shocking documentary, Labour Files, with mind-boggling silence. Everything they told us was true about Corbyn turned out to be the opposite. That is not a story the establishment is interested in. It’s also not a story that Starmer’s political outriders are interested in, and they most certainly will not want to be reminded about the Forde Report, commissioned by Starmer but now buried, its recommendations ignored because it gave the wrong answer.

Martin Forde KC found a racism hierarchy where he was expected to launder the antisemitism row. Look, a black barrister has said it: the Corbyn gang were irredeemable racists. The BBC unsuccessfully pressured Forde to change the report before publishing it to make it look more favourable. When the report finally came out in July 2022, the media ignored it entirely. The blackout perplexed Forde: by March 2023, he had not heard anything from the Labour Party. Neither had a single media outlet spoken to him.

Only when Forde spoke to Al Jazeera about the report, did he hear from the Labour Party: a legal threat saying he was “acting against the party’s interest.”

And this is why the Labour government will struggle to address the riots: it cannot tackle Islamophobia and racism in the country when it resolutely refuses to face up to the same poison within its own party.

The late David Graeber did not foresee Labour’s Islamophobia problem, but did predict that Starmer was going to lose the progressive left and fail to win over the right vote. This is already evident from the last general election. He also noted that when fascists start marching on the streets and the police vanish, as they often do in that hour, the people that Starmer’s Labour was eager to call antisemites will be the lot having running battles against the fascists.

As with Brexit, which was driven by Etonians and billionaires styling themselves as the resistance, we saw the riots being fanned by the same figures: Tories on various levels and even Elon Musk. As for Starmer’s lot, they are at home cutting deals with the establishment, avoiding the hard work of developing an intellectual framework against the beasts.

At this moment, luck favours the devil.

Brian Chikwava is a London based Zimbabwean writer.

How loss of India's vultures might have led to half a million deaths

Near extinction of the invaluable carrion eaters in 1990s left cattle carcasses piled up and disease spreading widely


Vultures performed a crucial public health service by clearing away carrion but a drug used to treat livestock poisoned most of the birds
(Image credit: Pascal Deloche / Godong / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

BY HARRIET MARSDEN, THE WEEK UK

Vultures have long evoked images of death, hovering over ailing animals and feeding off their rotting corpses.

But the near extinction of the scavenger birds in India during the 1990s led to the spread of disease-carrying pathogens – and may have killed half a million people, according to a new study.

The working paper, due to be published in an upcoming issue of the American Economic Review, estimates that the related public health crisis between 2000 and 2005 cost the Indian government nearly $70 billion a year.

'Nature's sanitation service'

In India, vultures are a "keystone species", said Science, "essential to the functioning of many of the country's ecosystems".

Unlike mammal scavengers, vultures do not also hunt. They only feed on carrion – and in a country with more than 500 million livestock, they perform a crucial duty of removing disease-ridden carcasses. That also helps to "reduce the populations of other scavengers, such as feral dogs that can transmit rabies".

The birds were once widespread in India, acting as "nature's sanitation service", said The Economist. They are also highly efficient. "A group of vultures can polish off a cow's carrion in 40 minutes."

But in 1994, farmers began giving their livestock a painkiller called diclofenac. When they disposed of dead livestock, the vultures who fed on the carcasses were poisoned by the anti-inflammatory drug, dying within weeks.

In one decade, India's vulture population fell from 50 million birds to just a few thousand: the fastest population collapse of a bird species in history. The worst-hit species, the white-rumped vulture, "declined by a dreadful 99.9%" between 1992 and 2007", said Bird Guides.

Cattle bodies piled up around tanneries and fields "became carcass dumps" for feral dogs and rats, said Science, leading to the spread of disease. The government also forced tanneries to use chemicals to dispose of the carcasses, which caused toxic substances to "leach into waterways used by people".

The vulture wipeout was later attributed to diclofenac, and India banned the use of the drug in 2006. Pakistan and Nepal followed suit. But India's vulture population is unlikely to ever completely recover.

The human cost of vulture wipeout

Anant Sudarshan, an environmental economist at the University of Warwick, witnessed the crisis growing up in India. Sudarshan, and Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago, co-authors of the upcoming American Economic Review paper, compared maps of vulture habitats to health records for more than 600 Indian districts between 2000 and 2005.

In districts that were "highly suitable to vultures", there was an average increase in human deaths of 4.2%. That implies about 104,386 additional deaths each year, or half a million in total. Previous research had calculated that India would spend roughly $665,000 to save one life. The economic damage, according to the team's estimates, was about $70 billion per year.

"This [upcoming paper] will be a classic in the field," said Atheendar Venkataramani, a health economist at the University of Pennsylvania. It could also convince lawmakers to "push forward policy and conservation measures", said Andrea Santangeli, a conservation scientist at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies.

"Scientific evidence suggests the Earth is undergoing a mass extinction of species, caused by human activity," said Sudarshan and Frank. "Evaluating the social costs of losing non-human species is necessary to manage biodiversity and target conservation resources."

Traditional Zoroastrian burial rites are also becoming "increasingly impossible to perform" because of the decline in vultures, said The Guardian. Parsi communities in India and Pakistan have for thousands of years placed their dead on top of dakhma, or "towers of silence", built above the soil to prevent contamination. Vultures "eat the flesh on the bones", which are later collected in an ossuary pit.

Offering the body to the birds is "the devout Zoroastrian's ultimate act of charity", one Karachi resident told The Guardian. The vulture's eye is believed to help the soul's transition. But there are only two remaining towers of silence in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. "We've lost a way of life, our culture," said one resident.

This year, there are "signs of stabilisation" among India's critically endangered vultures, said Bird Guides – but they are "still in a precarious situation".

Images of their "blood-splattered bills" tend to "evoke less sympathy" than "majestic tigers, adorable pandas" or other staples of wildlife conservation campaigns, said The Economist: animals that "tug at human heartstrings".

But "conserving these animals should be a priority. They may not be cute or cuddly, but they are important."

Anti-racists crash Nigel Farage and Reform UK victory party

The racist, far right Reform UK party won five seats in the general election

By Arthur Townend
Friday 05 July 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER 

Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader, wasn’t happy with anti-racists (Picture: Guy Smallman)

Campaign group Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) disrupted Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s press conference in Westminster on Friday.

Some eight SUTR activists took on Farage on the day he won a seat in Clacton, Essex. Reform UK won five seats with around 14 percent of the total vote. Richard Tice, chair of Reform UK and recently elected in the Boston and Skegness, also attended the event.

The first protestor immediately heckled Farage as soon as he began to speak. “You want to sell off the NHS. You’re racist,” he shouted. After security forcibly removed the protester, the second activist instantly continued the barrage.

As Farage quipped, “This is good preparation for the House of Commons I suppose,” the third protester stood up to slam Farage’s racist politics.

Farage asked, “Anymore for anymore?” as the crowd booed the demonstrators. The fourth protester announced, “Actually yes! Nigel, you’re a fraud!”

One Reform supporter can be heard to ask, “What is going on?” amid the consecutive interventions from the floor.

Some SUTR protesters spoke to Socialist Worker after their intervention. Raj, an anti-racist activist, said, “It’s important to show that there’s a resistance, and give people the confidence to resist as well.

“We’ve already seen how toxic the debate has become, how the focus has shifted onto migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

“This has been a long time coming. The centre ground is offering no solutions to the problem. In fact they are the problem, and that leads people to looking for alternatives.”

Jo, an SUTR activist in London, said, “I think it’s important that people know this is a man that can be challenged and should be challenged.

“Everywhere he goes, he should face resistance for the division he is trying to sow into our communities.”

Protester Sue from Manchester agreed. “It’s important that we put a marker down and say that Farage isn’t welcome here,” she said. “He’s a rich conservative, he’s a racist, he’s here to attack the NHS and divide us.

“If we don’t do anything, there is a strong chance of racism and fascism growing in Britain. But that is not inevitable, and it does depend on what we do. And we can do something to stop it.

“We have to build a really broad based campaign. It has to go into the unions, into the colleges, into the schools, into the estates and everywhere.”

Jo agreed, saying, “What’s important now is that we are a part of anti-racist resistance. We have to galvanise those people together.”

The anti-racist movement must escalate to challenge Farage and the rise of the far right.

Mainstream media blamed for Nigel Farage’s win and surge of support for Reform

‘I can only imagine how much airtime they will give him now.’

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

6 July, 2024 
Left Foot Forward

Nigel Farage has been elected as MP of Clacton-on-Sea. The Reform leader’s victory came on a night that saw support for the far-right party surge. Its chair Richard Tice, who stepped aside as leader so Farage could take the reins midway through campaigning, won Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire. Tory defector Lee Anderson successfully defended his seat in Ashfield, and former Southampton FC chair Rupert Lowe won his seat in Great Yarmouth, which had been held by the Conservatives since 2010. After a recount in the Basildon South and East Thurrock constituency, James McMurdock won the seat with a majority of just 98 votes.

A jubilent Farage boasted that “this is the beginning of the end of the Conservative Party”, and claimed his anti-immigration party was “coming for Labour” next.

As the reality of Reform’s success sinks in, the media’s coverage of Nigel Farage during the election campaign, even before it was announced he was standing as a candidate and had taken over as leader, has been called into question.

Despite having no MPs at the time, the Reform leader received significantly more airtime and column space than the leaders of other smaller parties. This was the finding of research by Loughborough University which composed a series of reports on UK-wide television and print media reporting in the 2024 general election.

The analysis found that Reform UK earned 10 percent of overall press quotations compared to 2 percent for the Lib Dems, and ‘the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru collectively accounting for less than 1 percent of quotation time.’

Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, described how the ‘media’s obsession with Farage,’ has ‘only served to normalise right-wing arguments on immigration and the economy and to further marginalise candidates with progressive ideas.’

The media’s disproportional devotion to Farage during the last six weeks did not go unnoticed by the public.

“Who did most to enable Reform? Probably the media, who relentlessly and disproportionately plugged Farage and his minority party and their toxic politics of misinformation and fake fear of foreigners,” Alex Morss, ecologist and children’s author wrote on X.

Conservationist Stephen Barlow agreed, saying: “Without the media, the Farage/Reform bubble would never have happened. Firstly, the BBC repeatedly, unnecessarily platformed, Farage even though he’s only just become an MP. Plus, Farage has been parasitic on the right-wing propaganda in the Tory press.”

“Nigel Farage won thanks to billionaire owned media. Jeremy Corbyn and 4 Green MPs won thanks to OUR movement – which runs on people’s passion, commitment and solidarity alone. No wonder they’re so scared of us,” said Grace Blakeley, a political journalist and commentator.

“The media pretending to be shocked about Reform winning so many seats / coming 2nd After they gave Farage wall-to-wall in-depth coverage for weeks amplifying his hateful message day after day after day,” was another comment.

But Farage’s hogging of the media limelight, and, more importantly, the media allowing him to hog the spotlight, is nothing new.

In 2018, he reportedly set the record in achieving the joint most Question Time appearances this century by making his 32nd appearance on the BBC show. The tally was matched only by former Chancellor Ken Clarke. Analysis at the time showed that since 2010, UKIP had appeared on almost one in four Question Time programmes in the last seven years, despite never having more than two MPs. The Greens, meanwhile, who unlike UKIP had consistently had a MP for years, had only appeared on 7 percent of the shows.

Question Times’ panel this week also raised eyebrows for failing to have a representative from the Green Party, despite having figures from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, and Reform.

“Question Time has constantly showcased Nigel Farage and other far-right creeps and crooks,” wrote lecturer and writer Tom Scott in response to the July 5th show.

Following Farage’s win in Clacton, concern has also been expressed about how much airtime he will get now that he is an MP. As Christian Christensen, a Professor at Stockholm University said:

“So, Farage won. Since the BBC gave him massive coverage allowing him to promote his bigotry when he wasn’t even an MP, I can only imagine how much airtime they will now give him.”

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward

AND EDITOR OF RIGHT WING WATCH

 

What is the real threat from Reform UK? – Diane Abbott

3rd July 2024Leave a Commenton What is the real threat from Reform UK? – Diane Abbott

“The far right were the big winners in the recent elections in Germany, France and Italy. In the US Joe Biden’s centrism is both capitulating and losing to Donald Trump. British politics fits into that pattern.”

With far-right parties making major gains recently in Europe, it’s worth paying close scrutiny to Farage’s party and taking the threat it poses seriously, writes Diane Abbott.

There are only two people who can realistically be prime minister on July 5. One of them is Rishi Sunak and the other is Keir Starmer. For innumerable reasons, I would far rather it was Keir Starmer and fervently hope that is the outcome.

But this is a very strange election. The traditional polling is highly consistent (the MRP polls are a different matter). They generally show the Labour party polling in the low 40s, while the Tories are stuck around 20 per cent. That is around half of their vote recorded in the 2019 general election.

All other parties, bar one, are showing very modest gains or losses except one. That is Reform UK. (Of course in Scotland, the picture is quite a bit different, but that is a separate story).

The Labour vote has undoubtedly recovered from 2019. We may even exceed our vote share of 2017. We shall see.

But the largest and most dramatic change has been the slump in the Tory vote and the rise of Reform UK. If we compare the current poll-tracker average of votes to the outcome of the last general election, the Tories have lost 22.8 per cent in vote share, and Reform has gained 13.8 per cent.

So, the Tories have lost votes to some combination of parties (possibly including Labour). But the vulture that is feeding on the Tory carcass is a Reform one.

We should put aside the nonsense that in its various incarnations, Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform UK has taken votes equally from Labour and the Tories. They do not and never have. The Tory commentariat is forced to admit the truth now only because the Tories are in catastrophic crisis. They are being routed by Reform UK.

This matters for the future of British politics for a number of reasons. Across the G7 countries we are seeing the parties of the traditional centre and centre-right giving political ground and losing votes to the far right.

The far right were the big winners in the recent elections in Germany, France and Italy. In the US Joe Biden’s centrism is both capitulating and losing to Donald Trump. British politics fits into that pattern.

There is already a close political and even organisational relationship between the Tory Party and Reform UK and its predecessors.

One previous Tory minister complained that both his Conservative Association treasurer and secretary were ex-Ukip (having returned under Boris Johnson). Tory figures such as Suella Braverman have called for an alliance with Reform UK and Farage has boasted that he will take over the Tories. Politically, he may already be close to achieving that among the Tory membership base.

Given these circumstances, and if the consistent polls are to be believed, the Reform UK phenomenon is not about to fade away any time soon. This is especially true unless there is a rapid turnaround in the fortunes of the British economy, which is not at all in line with the consensus view among economic forecasters.

There will be no tears shed for the possible decimation of the Tories. At the same time, we have to understand Reform UK if we are to tackle it and defeat it.

If we want to characterise a party we must examine its programme, its personnel, its policies and its alliances. In short, who does it stand for?

Reform UK is not known for its economic programme, which is a pity. Because its manifesto (which it claims is a “contract”) alone clearly outlines the character of the party.

Let me list some of those policies. Reform UK would scrap income tax under £20,000 (which of course is a far bigger benefit to someone on £50,000 than someone on £16,000 a year). It would abolish inheritance tax altogether. It would also abolish all tax on profits under £100,000 a year and abolish IR35 for sole traders. It would also lift the VAT threshold to £150,000 a year and abolish business rates for small companies.

We should not neglect its social-economic policies, which include introducing an NHS voucher scheme along with tax relief on private healthcare. It would cut or abolish stamp duty even on homes worth over £1.5 million, cut foreign aid by 50 per cent, cut government departmental budgets by 5 per cent across the board (except the military, the police and other arms of the state) and scrap Net Zero climate targets altogether.

This is so obviously a programme for the well-to-do middle classes it is almost a stereotype. It has nothing to say about growth, about tackling climate change, the cost-of-living crisis, the failures in our public services, rising inequality, except how it will add to them.

Workers or workers’ rights? Forget it. The poor and the oppressed? They can go to hell.

This is reinforced by a look at its policies. Because, as far as ordinary voters are concerned, it only has one policy, to “stop the boats.”

This is the only policy that it is popularly associated with. In fact, as the manifesto says, their policy is to freeze all immigration, except in parts of healthcare.

This not simply a party of the middle class, but of the angry middle class. They are angry because banks were bailed out in the banking crisis, while many of them went bust. They are angry because lockdowns were completely mishandled and many more suffered or went bankrupt. They are angry because the big business profiteers then kicked them when they were down in the inflation crisis.

But they direct their anger at people who look like me, black and Asian people, and Muslims. And at anyone they think is a foreigner.

A glance at their list of candidates confirms this pattern. Many are former City traders, failed businesspeople, property developers, small business owners, grifters and charlatans. And failed politicians from other parties.

Some of them are so angry they are friends on Facebook with a fascist or say that Hitler was praiseworthy.

By far their most important sponsor and ally was Trump, who engineered Farage standing aside for Boris Johnson in 2019, after Trump had a string of public clashes with Theresa May. That was their big moment. Until now.

So, whatever the outcome of the two elections in July and November, we must clearly understand the threat of Reform UK and treat it with all seriousness.

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• You can follow Diane Abbott on on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 
• This article was originally published by The Morning Star on 29 June 2024.