First Poll after Cameron’s Off Shore Tax Scandal Puts Leave EU 3 Points Ahead

An opinion poll by ICM for The Times newspaper (subscription), the first poll after the recent Panama Papers revealed that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, had been avoiding paying British tax, puts the Leave EU campaign three points ahead of the Remain camp.

The survey of 2,030 people which was conducted on 8 and 10 April, show Leave on 45% and Remain on 42%, with 13% undecided. The poll also found an 8 point drop in the Prime Minister’s approval rating, and so this is no doubt reflected in the swing towards the out campaign, as Cameron is the best known advocate of staying in the EU. After all, he renegotiated Britain’s membership terms and keeping the country inside the union has become something of a personal crusade.

ICM's previous poll, released on April 6, had found that the in camp were ahead by one point on 43 percent. Speaking about the latest poll on Tuesday, ICM's Jennifer Bottomley said:  

"Most polls continue to suggest that it’s a very tight contest, with neither side able to gain a decisive lead."

As always with opinion polls there is room for scepticism and ICM conducts its polls online, where all of these types of polls have given the Leave campaign higher scores than polls conducted by telephone. At last year’s general election telephone polls proved to be much more accurate than online ones.

I think there are reasons why online polls tend to get different results from telephone polls. Although online polls are usually from larger samples, YouGov recently conducted an EU referendum poll of over 16,000 people, these people may not be typical of the average voter.

People choose to join online voting panels, they are not a random sample like the telephone polls, and I think the people are much more politically engaged than the average person. These people are more likely to have made their minds up a while back, whilst those randomly sampled may well be just coming around to thinking about which way to vote.

All the same, there is a marked shift of four points away from the Remain camp, which must be related to the last week’s reporting of Cameron’s previous tax avoidance antics. This may not last of course, but Cameron’s personal association with wanting to stay in the EU, whilst doing his level best to rip off the British tax payer, plays into the anti-establishment narrative of the out campaign.

This kind of thing has always been the risk, given the general unhappiness with the political status quo, here and across the world. When the Prime Minister set the date of the referendum to be held by 2017 during the last Parliament, this trend wasn’t apparent, and we all know it was about keeping the Tory party together over an issue that has torn them apart for 25 years now. Short term expediency triumphed over a more cautious long term strategy, which rather sums up British politics generally.

The other big risk for the Remain camp is that even voters who are saying that they will vote to stay in the EU, are not generally very enthused about the EU. I count myself in this group, though I will definitely vote to remain, but I wonder how many others in this position will actually get around to voting? Whereas the out voters are well motivated, and much more likely to turn up and vote.

The accusation against the Remain campaign has been that it is too negative, ‘Project Fear’ is the term bandied about the Brexiters, and even people who support staying are calling for a positive campaign about the benefits of our membership.

The problem is, although there some benefits to being in the EU, they are pretty thin gruel, and I suspect that highlighting the risks of leaving is probably the argument that will resonate most with Remain supporters.  

My best guess is that we will vote to stay in the EU, but it is clear that with more than two months to go, everything is still in play.   

Austerity vs. the Planet: The Future of Labor Environmentalism

Written by Trish Kahle and first published at Dissent Magazine

Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks. The ITUC delegation demanded the negotiators go back to the table and make a serious effort to incorporate labor’s demands for a just transition—which, at its heart, is concerned with making sure workers in environmentally unsustainable industries are retrained and put to work building a new, sustainable economy.

The action, even as it generated energy and media buzz, failed to convince the negotiators. The “just transition” clause of the Paris agreement remained stuck in the preamble (not in the body of the agreement itself, as the ITUC members had demanded), more of a hat tip than grounds for international action. But at least it got a mention—unlike the fossil fuels largely responsible for the climate crisis in the first place. Nowhere in the Paris agreement or its preamble do the words fossil fuel, coal, oil, gas, or pollution appear.

As the talks wrapped up and world leaders hailed a “historic turning point” in the world’s relationship to ongoing climate disruption, environmental activist Chris Williams pointed out that “twenty-one years of treaties and negotiations have all been stepping around the main problem, which is the production of fossil fuels.” For all the pomp and circumstance, this agreement was no different.

Meanwhile, the consequences of two decades of inaction become clearer each day. A few weeks after the Paris agreement was signed, scientists confirmed that 2015 was the warmest year on record, with global temperatures approaching 1°C above the twentieth-century average. And those already feeling the worst effects of this climate disruption, predominantly poor people of color, continued to have the least say in how to combat it.

Just as they have been dismissed in international climate negotiations, workers have largely been excluded from the fragile global recovery since 2008. Some 197 million people around the world are jobless, with young people making up over a third of this number. Unemployment in southern and eastern Europe remains particularly high, still hovering at 24.6 percent in austerity-ravaged Greece, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East.

The picture in the OECD economies is not much prettier. In the United States, economic recovery has meant the swapping out of middle-wage jobs, earning between $14 and $21 an hour, for part-time, on-call, low-wage employment with few benefits. Energy-sector jobs, often hailed as the lifeblood of the American economic recovery, have taken a dive as oil prices plunge below $30 a barrel. In 2015 the industry slashed 104,514 jobs, compared to 4,137 the year before. Fracking boom state North Dakota went from ranking first in U.S. job growth to dead last.

All this takes place in the context of a weakened labor movement that has failed to maintain workers’ expected standard of living in the face of ongoing restructuring in the world economy and, particularly in the United States, political backsliding. The degradation of work and the destruction of the environment have proceeded hand in hand. Good jobs keep going away, but fossil fuels haven’t gone anywhere. And yet the industry-propagated myth of “jobs versus the environment” persists.

From the moment Congress debated anti-pollution legislation in the early 1970s, fossil fuel industry leaders promised such regulation would destroy the heavily unionized employment in the industry. In 1971 the Chamber of Commerce warned that the passage of the Clean Air Act could lead to the collapse of “entire industries,” while auto industry lobbyists prophesied “business catastrophe.” Four decades later, the talking points remain the same: the Heritage Foundation claims that Obama’s Clean Power Plan will cost 1 million U.S. jobs, while West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito says that new coal rules threaten to “regulate out of existence” her state’s key industry.

The problem with this story is that environmental regulation never got the chance to destroy whole sectors of “good jobs,” as opponents of pollution regulation promised it would; the fossil fuel companies themselves, with the winds of free-market fundamentalism at their backs, destroyed them instead. A decade after the passage of the Clean Air Act, the United States was producing more cars and fossil fuels than ever, and employing a record number of workers to do so. Another decade later, as the Cold War was ending, U.S. fossil fuel production was still going strong, but the jobs were evaporating.

It wasn’t just fossil fuels, of course. The decline in manufacturing jobs, union density, and real wages wrought by neoliberal restructuring hollowed out the prospects of the entire American working class. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the resulting misery has only been exacerbated by government austerity and anti-union measures, as manufactured scarcity is marshaled to frighten workers into concessions.

In cities like Flint, Michigan, built around the auto industry, the consequences of this restructuring are all too vivid. Globalization and the rise of “lean production” have turned the city, once an industrial powerhouse, into a waking nightmare for the people who remain: forty years of stagnant wages, reduction in public welfare and services, and then a recession that gutted the few middle-wage jobs left. In today’s Flint, the generalized decline of American working-class living standards has turned into a life-or-death crisis. In 2014 emergency city manager Darnell Earley, appointed by Governor Rick Snyder with no democratic accountability to the residents of Flint, funneled untreated corrosive water into residents’ homes in order to cut the city budget. The result? The corrosive water leached lead and other contaminants from pipes. The amount of lead in the blood of Flint’s children doubled in the space of a year. At least eighty-seven people contracted Legionnaires’ disease—nine of whom died—and the residents of Flint, who are overwhelmingly black and low-income, will now face the consequences of irreversible lead poisoning. The situation was so dire that the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah appealed to African nations to “save an American village.” In effect, the governor’s emergency management team poisoned a black working-class city to save a mere $100 a day. Earley could have paid the difference out of his own salary and still taken home $143,500 a year—$102,000 more than Flint’s median income. And yet Flint residents still somehow pay among the highest prices for tap water in the nation.

About seventy miles southeast of Flint, a story different only in the particulars is unfolding in Detroit, where teachers lead a fight against toxic and dangerous school buildings. It’s another story where industrial disinvestment has played out as sheer environmental racism. In photographs posted on social media, teachers showed schools where mushrooms grew from the walls and rats roamed the hallways. The showdown over school safety and budget cuts has also become a labor dispute: teachers have organized at least four sick-outs since the beginning of the school year. On January 20, the largest sick-out to date shut down almost the entire Detroit public school system. By withdrawing their labor to demand safe working conditions (and healthier learning conditions for their students), the teachers of Detroit stand in a long tradition of union activists organizing outside of their contracts and developing a broader vision for society. The sick-outs have built unity among educators and students, between workers and communities, but the state still shows no sign of relenting, instead moving to punish the teachers involved and rule the sick-outs an illegal work action. For Republican governor Rick Snyder and his administration, poisoned water and moldy schools are apparently acceptable side effects of realigning the state budget in the service of private-sector growth.

What the struggles in Detroit and Flint have made clear is that neither neoliberalism nor austerity is only a social or political project—they are ecological projects, remaking our relationships with our (built) environments. Whether through contaminated water or infested schools, ecological degradation goes hand in hand with economic and labor restructuring. And this broad-based assault on the working class has direct implications for the climate. The same aggressive cost cutting, privatization, and deregulation that have resulted in the poisoning of Flint, the charterization of public schools, and new health crises like Indiana’s rural HIV outbreak have also given us the BP oil spill, the deadly explosion at a fertilizer factory in West, Texas, and the recent methane leak in Southern California. Moreover, the state leadership and investment, not to mention global cooperation, that would be required to wean the world energy system off fossil fuels cannot emerge as long as social and fiscal austerity remains the order of the day. Austerity and sustainability are antithetical concepts.

The cases of Flint and Detroit point to a deeper link between neoliberalism and the climate crisis. The same forces that devastated both cities, gutting U.S. manufacturing alongside organized labor and the welfare state, have left workers nationwide desperate for even the dirtiest jobs. In this way, they have heightened longer-standing contradictions in the working-class relationship with fossil fuels.
From the mid-eighteenth century on, the industrial-scale use of fossil fuels that accompanied the growth of capitalism increased the standard of living and life expectancy for a vast swath of people around the world. These gains and improvements were far from evenly distributed, and came with their share of previously unknown ills. Nevertheless, they helped the burgeoning working class secure real social power, and the consolidation of the fossil fuel economy fostered cornucopian visions. Demands for a decent standard of living, rooted in much higher energy consumption than had ever before been possible, translated into working-class mobility and leisure time. In a world where energy was already cheap—and where atomic scientists promised it could be cheaper still, even free—workers’ visions for themselves included not only a greater share of the fruits of their labor in terms of wages, but in terms of the social distribution of energy.

In the 1960s things began to change, as rapidly growing energy use forced a reorganization of production. With energy consumption doubling in the span of two decades, the industry struggled to keep up with demand. Scheduled nuclear plants were slow to come into public use and hadn’t lived up to their initial promise, and anyway, the public remained skeptical of the atom, which, especially during the Cold War, raised the specter of mutual annihilation and nuclear meltdown. The future of energy looked incredibly frightening and uncertain, and the companies took action to protect the energy regime that had made them so fabulously wealthy. Although they would continue to be identified primarily with that sticky black substance, the oil companies bought up coal and gas at a rapid rate, skewing the balance of power between the companies and workers, who remained in unions organized along increasingly blurred industrial lines. Coal miners and oil-rig workers both extracted energy for the same companies but remained organized in different unions without a shared strategy for labor action across the industry.

The destruction of workers’ power went hand in hand with energy-industry efforts to protect profits from other potential threats, including regulation of pollution and greenhouse gases. By 1979 nearly every major American oil company joined in an American Petroleum Institute initiative to share research about the potential impact of climate change. Realizing the gravity of the problem, they buried their data and turned to extensive propaganda campaigns to shape public opinion about emerging climate science. If the planet had to burn to protect the bottom line, so be it.

With energy companies steeling themselves for an uncertain future, the outlook for their workers was decidedly grim. Companies often cited new pollution regulations as the cause of layoffs, and leveraged fears about the future to extract concessions from workers. But the real forces driving down employment were mechanization and strip mining. Over the course of the 1950s, mine mechanization had put nearly two-thirds of the nation’s miners out of work. Employment continued to sink in the 1960s, even as production climbed and profits soared. Since the 1970s another two-thirds of the remaining mining workforce have lost their jobs. As Paul Krugman has noted, the “real war on coal, or at least on coal workers, took place a generation ago, waged not by liberal environmentalists but by the coal industry itself. And coal workers lost.”

Caught in a period of transition, and rightly convinced the energy companies had neither workers’ nor the environment’s interests in mind, some miners took it upon themselves to formulate their own solution to the energy crisis. Known as Miners for Democracy, they were a rank-and-file-caucus of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and their vision (true to their name) tied labor, environmental, and social demands to the need to democratize their union.

The Miners for Democracy emerged from a crucible of tragedy. In 1968, seventy-eight miners were killed by an explosion at the Consol No. 9 Mine in Farmington, West Virginia. The disaster brought long-running grievances over workplace safety to a head, leading one UMWA activist, Jock Yablonski, to mount the first opposition campaign against the union’s autocratic president, Tony Boyle. As deaths racked up from mine explosions and black lung disease, Yablonski charged Boyle with failing to secure a safe workplace for the nation’s miners. But he signaled a problem that extended far beyond the mines. Announcing his campaign platform to “end environmental mayhem,” he argued:

Every union should have a vision of the future . . . Unions represent men and women who are part of communities, are citizens of states and a nation. The public environment affects the well-being of miners and their families. What good is a union that reduces coal dust in the mines only to have miners and their families breathe pollutants in the air, drink pollutants in the water, and eat contaminated commodities?

Yablonski did not have long to put his vision of labor environmentalism into practice. On December 31, 1969, three weeks after losing to Boyle in an election that was widely seen as rigged, he was murdered in his sleep, along with his wife and daughter, by three hitmen. Boyle struggled to maintain control of the union as its members revolted against the sacrifice of their lives, land, and labor to an economy that did little for them in return, and five years later, he was convicted of the Yablonski murders.

In the meantime, the Miners for Democracy built on Yablonski’s legacy to challenge Boyle once again in 1972. “Lives, land, and labor” remained at the heart of their vision. They also embraced Yablonski’s broader goal of environmental protection, particularly in relation to two increasingly prevalent practices: strip mining, which had ravaged the Appalachian hillsides, and coal gasification, a major focus of energy industry research and development. Energy companies presented gasification projects as a way to wean the American economy off of imported fossil fuels. The MFD opposed them—even though they would have created jobs for miners put out of work by mechanization and the rise of strip mining—because the process was environmentally destructive and threatened to contaminate soil and water supplies. Most gasification plants were proposed for the American West, where they would have overwhelmingly impacted poor people and Native Americans who faced massive political barriers to fighting the plants on their own.

In addition, some miners went as far as to call for a national ban on strip mining. In place of expanding their dirty industry, MFD proposed adding jobs to the economy by enforcing anti-pollution laws: reclaiming land that had been destroyed by coal companies and repairing the damage done by strip mining, they argued, could create thousands of new union jobs. “Tough reclamation laws are essential, and we must insist that they are enforced,” Arnold Miller proclaimed as he campaigned for union president on the MFD ticket, “If the state won’t do it, the union will.”

The MFD’s platform carried them to victory in the 1972 election. Their environmentalism, however, faded quickly, as did that espoused by other industrial unions in the 1970s, notably the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) and the United Auto Workers (UAW). Today, the UMWA leads the charge on pro-coal politics, and parrots the industry line that EPA rules necessarily lead to job loss and impoverishment. It’s hard to blame the workers who have accepted this narrative, and continue to stand with employers and politicians against environmental regulation—especially since, at the moment, there are no large-scale jobs programs on the table to replace their current dirty jobs. But history shows that the Faustian bargain offered by their employers is a false one.

The situation in Appalachia today is desperate. In Harlan County, Kentucky, median household income is $18,665, unemployment stands at almost 12 percent (twice the national average), and a third of the population lives below the poverty line. Residents need jobs, and the energy companies (along with affiliated machinery and chemical industries), the largest economic forces in the area, shape the public narrative of how to bring jobs back. Workers must sacrifice to keep the industry profitable, the story goes, or the jobs will go away for good. Private-sector unions, desperate for a boost in membership after a fifty-year decline, do whatever it takes to defend the few jobs that remain. And not just in coal: whether it’s the AFL-CIO announcing its support for the Keystone XL pipeline or unions standing with the American Petroleum Institute to support fracking development, unimaginative union leaders in a hostile environment have chosen to tie the fortunes of workers to those of the energy companies.

This strategy hasn’t exactly paid off for organized labor. Thanks largely to the fracking boom, U.S. fossil fuel production and employment grew steadily over the last decade, and weathered the recession well; altogether, from 2004 to 2014, oil, gas, and mining jobs grew by 60 percent. Over that same period, union membership rates in the industry fell by almost the same proportion, dropping from 11.4 to 4.8 percent. (In 2015 jobs took a dive again along with oil prices, while union density got a slight bump.) This puts union density in the fossil fuel industry even lower than in the private sector overall (6.7 percent).

Clinging to the fossil fuel industry can only lead to a dead end for workers. It is time for a different approach. Already in recent years, several unions have hinted at such a method, echoing the all too short-lived efforts of Miners for Democracy. In February 2015 more than 6,500 oil workers joined in a strike at fourteen refineries and a chemical plant spanning from Ohio to California. The strike, led by the United Steelworkers, was primarily a conflict over workplace safety: USW Vice President Gary Beevers pointed out that workers were being put at risk by “onerous overtime; unsafe staffing levels; dangerous conditions the industry continues to ignore; the daily occurrence of fires, emissions, leaks and explosions.” But it went far beyond that, with the workers positioning themselves as the first line of defense against spills and pollution in surrounding communities. Steve Garey, president of a USW local in Washington, explained that by outsourcing maintenance work to less experienced, non-union contractors who lacked the training and work protections provided by the USW, the industry was also putting communities and the environment at risk.

The workers who took part in the strike would know. Some of them had witnessed a 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed fifteen workers and injured 180 others after management bypassed safety procedures during hasty repairs. Others had witnessed the 2014 oil spill at BP’s Whiting refinery, which dumped as much as 1,600 gallons of oil into Lake Michigan, Chicago residents’ source of drinking water.

In a critical step forward for U.S. environmentalism, several key green groups expressed support for the strike, including the Sierra Club, 350.org, and Oil Change International, as well as smaller grassroots organizations like Rising Tide. In Martinez, California, members of Communities for a Better Environment as well as of the local nurses’ union joined refinery workers on the picket line. At the end of the six-week strike, the USW claimed victory, citing “vast improvements in safety and staffing.” There were signs that the strike could also lead to a more enduring militancy within the union. The USW’s threat of a nationwide strike, if unrealized, was itself notable at a time when this tactic has all but disappeared from unions’ arsenal. During the strike, Beevers said, “Our members are speaking loud and clear . . . If it takes a global fight to win safe workplaces, so be it.”

In the wake of the strike’s success, an article posted on the USW website called for unions to help steer the economy away from profits and toward a system “based not on selfishness, greed, and contempt, but on ethics, on giving people the justice they deserve.” This, at its core, is what a just transition is all about: reframing the economy entirely, placing workers at the center instead of profits. “The successful strike by the oil refinery workers,” the article continued, “is on behalf of that justice and shows that unions still have power.”

Indeed, behind workers’ apparent vulnerability lurks enormous potential. As they extract fossil fuels, load them onto railway cars and into tankers, transport them thousands of miles, refine and process them, package and sell them, workers have a unique ability to bring the industry to a halt. And, thanks to the deep integration of fossil fuel products into the modern economy, if the fossil fuels stop moving, so does the rest of the world.

From teachers to nurses to rig operators, the array of workers confronting the nexus of social and ecological destruction is rapidly growing. But much remains to be done. Environmental politics must become generalized in the labor movement, and vice versa. The language of climate justice has already begun to infuse a sense of class politics into environmentalism, and green groups’ support for recent labor struggles is a promising step forward. Initiatives like the Labor Network for Sustainability, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, and the BlueGreen Alliance are helping to connect the dots. But environmentalists must go further, acknowledging that there can be no real solution to the energy crisis without the input and leadership of the people who already do the work.

Understanding the climate crisis as part of neoliberalism’s larger attack on public welfare and democracy (with the impacts, like all social failings in the United States, experienced more acutely by people of color and particularly by African Americans) can help expand the terrain on which both unions and climate activists struggle.

Ultimately, we live in the world we build. That world is both social and ecological, constantly made and remade through what sociologist Jason Moore has described as “the web of life.” If organized labor—and the climate—are to have a fighting chance, unions must offer real alternatives to the world of “shared sacrifice” and dead zones, of poisoning by austerity, of cheap fuels and cheap lives. What would it take for today’s coal-belt communities, channeling the Miners for Democracy, to fight not against EPA regulations but for jobs restoring lands destroyed by mountaintop removal mining? What would it take for union activists to have a meaningful say at the next international climate talks?

This work is just beginning. But with a shared vision to guide it, labor environmentalism can take us far. Its core demand is simple: to build a world that all of us, not just the rich or white, can actually live in.

Trish Kahle is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago. She is a contributing editor at Red Wedge and has written for Jacobin, Dissent, In These Times, Labor, the Ecologist, and the International Socialist Review.

Changing everything

Put bluntly, writes Gorelick, "renewable energy changes nothing about corporate capitalism'

Written by Steven Gorelick and first published at Common Dreams

Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive demonstrations, legislative fiat or some other strategy, but the goal is generally the same: replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Such a transition is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact on greenhouse gas emissions: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable. In part this is because the fossil fuel corporations – symbolized by the remorseless Koch brothers – will be a relic of the past, replaced by ‘green’ corporations and entrepreneurs that display none of their predecessors’ ruthlessness and greed.

Maybe, but I have my doubts. Here in Vermont, for example, a renewable energy conference last year was titled, “Creating Prosperity and Opportunity Confronting Climate Change”. The event attracted venture capitalists, asset management companies, lawyers that represent renewable energy developers, and even a “brandthropologist” offering advice on “how to evolve Brand Vermont” in light of the climate crisis. The keynote speaker was Jigar Shah, author of Creating Climate Wealth, who pumped up the assembled crowd by telling them that switching to renewables “represents the largest wealth creation opportunity of our generation.” He added that government has a role in making that opportunity real: “policies that incentivize resource efficiency can mean scalable profits for businesses.” If Shah is correct, the profit motive ­– in less polite company it might be called ‘greed’ – will still be around in a renewable energy future.

But at least the renewable energy corporations will be far more socially responsible than their fossil fuel predecessors, right?  Not if you ask the Zapotec communities in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, who will tell you that a renewable energy corporation can be just as ruthless as a fossil fuel one (pdf). Oaxaca is already home to 21 wind projects and 1,600 massive turbines, with more planned. While the indigenous population must live with the wind turbines on their communal lands, the electricity goes to distant urban areas and industries. Local people say they have been intimidated and deceived by the wind corporations: according to one indigenous leader, “They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads. We don’t want any more wind turbines.” People have filed grievances with the government (which has actively promoted the wind projects) and have physically blocked access to development sites.

It seems that a transition to renewable energy might not be as transformative as some people hope. Or to put it more bluntly, renewable energy changes nothing about corporate capitalism.

Which brings me to the new film, This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s best-selling book and directed by her husband, Avi Lewis. I saw the film recently at a screening hosted by local climate activists and renewable energy developers, and was at first hopeful that the film would go even further than the book in, as Klein puts it, “connecting the dots between the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.”

But by film’s end one is left with the impression that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables is pretty much all that’s needed – not only to address climate change but to transform the economy and solve all the other problems we face. As the camera tracks skyward to reveal banks of solar panels in China or soars above 450-foot tall wind turbines in Germany, the message seems to be that fully committing to these technologies will change everything. This is surprising, since Klein’s book flatly contradicts this way of thinking:

“Over the past decade,” she wrote, “many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of green tech…. They paint a picture of a world that can function pretty much as it does now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we can consume away without worrying about the impact.” Instead, she says, we need to “consume less, right away. [But] Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic.”

Overall, Klein’s book is far better at “connecting the dots” than the film. The book explains how free trade treaties have led to a huge spike in emissions, and Klein argues that these agreements need to be renegotiated in ways that will curb both emissions and corporate power. Among other things, she says, “long-haul transport will need to be rationed, reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally.” She explicitly calls for “sensible relocalization” of the economy, as well as reduced consumption and “managed degrowth” in the rich countries of the North – notions likely to curdle the blood of capitalists everywhere. She endorses government incentives for local and seasonal food, as well as land management policies that discourage sprawl and encourage low-energy, local forms of agriculture.

I don’t buy everything about Klein’s arguments: they rest heavily on unquestioned assumptions about the course of ‘development’ in the global South, and focus too much on scaling up government and not enough on scaling down business. The “everything” that will change sometimes seems limited to the ideological pendulum: after decades of pointing towards the neoliberal, free-market right, she believes it must swing back to the left because climate change demands a huge expansion of government planning and support.

Nonetheless, many of the specific steps outlined in the book do have the potential to shift our economic system in important ways. Those steps, however, are given no space at all in the film. The focus is almost entirely on transitioning to renewables, which turns the film into what is essentially an informercial for industrial wind and solar.

The film starts well, debunking the notion that climate change is a product of human nature – of our innate greed and short-sightedness. Instead, Klein says, the problem lies in a “story” we’ve told ourselves for the past 400 years: that Nature is ours to tame, conquer, and extract riches from. In that way, Klein says, “Mother Nature became the mother lode.”

After a gut-wrenching segment on the environmental disaster known as the Alberta tar sands, the film centers on examples of “Blockadia” – a term coined by activists to describe local direct action against extractive industries. There is the Cree community in Alberta fighting the expansion of tar sands development; villagers in India blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant that would eliminate traditional fishing livelihoods; a community on Greece’s Halkidiki Peninsula battling their government and the police to stop an open pit gold mine that would destroy a cherished mountain; and a small-scale goat farmer in Montana joining hands with the local Cheyenne community to oppose a bevy of fossil fuel projects, including a tar sands pipeline, a shale oil project, and a new coal mine.

Klein implies that climate change underlies and connects these geographically diverse protests. But that’s partly an artifact of the examples Klein chose, and partly a misreading of the protestors’ motives: what has really driven these communities to resist is not climate change, but a deeply-felt desire to maintain their traditional way of life and to protect land that is sacred to them. A woman in Halkidiki expresses it this way: “we are one with this mountain; we won’t survive without it.” At its heart, the threat that all of these communities face doesn’t stem from fossil fuels, but from a voracious economic system that will sacrifice them and the land they cherish for the sake of profit and growth.

The choice of Halkidiki as an example actually undermines Klein’s construct, since the proposed mine has nothing directly to do with fossil fuels. It does, however, have everything to do with a global economy that runs on growth, corporate profit, and – as Greece knows only too well – debt. So it is with all the other examples in the film.

Klein’s narrative would have been derailed if she profiled the indigenous Zapotec communities of Oaxaca as a Blockadia example: they fit the bill in every respect other than the fact that it’s renewable energy corporations, not fossil fuel corporations, they are trying to block. Similarly, Klein’s argument would have suffered if she visited villagers in India who are threatened not by a coal-fired power plant, but by one of India’s regulation-free corporate enclaves known as “special economic zones”. These, too, have sparked protests and police violence against villagers: in Nandigram in West Bengal, 14 villagers were killed trying to keep their way of life from being eliminated, their lands turned into another outpost of an expanding global economy.

And while the tar sands region is undeniably an ecological disaster, it bears many similarities to the huge toxic lake on what was once pastureland in Baotou, on the edge of China’s Gobi Desert. The area is the source of nearly two-thirds of the world’s rare earth metals – used in almost every high-tech gadget (as well as in the magnets needed for electric cars and industrial wind turbines). The mine tailings and effluent from the many factories processing these metals have created an environmental disaster of truly monumental proportions: the BBC describes it as “the worst place on earth”.  A significant shrinking of global consumer demand would help reduce Baotou’s toxic lake, but it’s hard to see how a shift to renewable energy would.

Too often, climate change has been used as a Trojan horse to enable corporate interests to despoil local environments or override the concerns of local communities. Klein acknowledges this in her book: by viewing climate change only on a global scale, she writes, we end up ignoring “people with attachments to particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a ‘solution’. This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years… [including] when policymakers ram through industrial-scale wind farms and sprawling… solar arrays without local participation or consent.” But this warning is conspicuously absent from the film.

Klein’s premise is that climate change is the one issue that can unite people globally for economic change, but there’s a more strategic way to look at it. What we face is not only a climate crisis but literally hundreds of potentially devastating crises: there’s the widening gap between rich and poor, islands of plastic in the oceans, depleted topsoil and groundwater, a rise in fundamentalism and terror, growing piles of toxic and nuclear waste, the gutting of local communities and economies, the erosion of democracy, the epidemic of depression, and many more. Few of these can be easily linked to climate change, but all of them can be traced back to the global economy.

This point is made by Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures, who explains how a scaling-down of the corporate-led global economy and a strengthening of diverse, localized economies would simultaneously address all of the most serious problems we face – including climate change. For this reason, what Norberg-Hodge calls ‘big picture activism’ has the potential to unite climate change activists, small farmers, peace advocates, environmentalists, social justice groups, labor unions, indigenous rights activists, main street business owners, and many more under a single banner. If all these groups connect the dots to see the corporate-led economy as a root cause of the problems they face, it could give rise to a global movement powerful enough to halt the corporate juggernaut.

And that really could change everything.

Cameron Must Resign as Prime Minister (and Pay Back the Money he Owes Us)

(Photo credit: 38 Degrees)

David Cameron has failed to draw a line under his financial affairs, which his belated admission on Thursday, of previously owning 5,000 shares in Blairmore Holdings, the off shore tax avoidance company that his late father Ian Cameron was a director of, was meant to do.

Cameron suggested in his usual arrogant way that the shares worth £31,500, which were sold in 2010 just four months before he became Prime Minister, is a trifling sum, yielding only around £19,000 in profit. This was a joint holding with his wife, and as in 2010 the threshold for capital gains tax was £10,100 per person, he did not have to pay tax on the amount. He also promised to make public his tax returns (since he became Prime Minister).

This type of off shore fund is only available to the rich, and Cameron’s claim that anyone can invest in them is untrue. £70,000 was the minimum amount allowed for investment in this fund, and it doesn’t stop there, you also need substantially more in wealth to be allowed to invest.

But all of this still leaves many questions hanging in the air if it is true what Cameron has also said, i.e. he or his ‘immediate’ family did not gain from off shore investments. Clearly, that was untrue, as he has now admitted. It has emerged that his father had investments in at least two other off shore funds, based in Jersey. Did the Prime Minister ever have holdings in these companies, or any other off shore schemes, since he became an MP in 2005?

Then is the question of his £300,000 inheritance from his father’s will. The Times Rich List a year before his death, estimated Ian Cameron’s personal fortune was £10 million, but his estate after his death was valued at only £2.74 million. Why the large discrepancy? It could be that some was given away to family members prior to his death, including David Cameron, or it could be that some is still hidden away in off shore accounts. We need to know with full transparency about what happened to this money.

The £300,000 that we know about was just under the inheritance tax threshold, which is plainly why this amount was chosen. Of this we don’t how much came from off shore investments. The main reason for people using these companies is to avoid paying inheritance, income and capital gains tax, because of the lack of transparency. This of course also contributes to higher profits for these investments, as the bottom line is reduced, so more is gained in profit at the expense of the British taxpayer.

Cameron says he doesn’t know how much of his inheritance came via Blairmore Holdings, but if we get all the figures straight, which looks unlikely admittedly, then we could work it out fairly closely I think.

We have heard nothing of where the rest of even the £2.74 million (let alone the £10 million figure) in Ian Cameron’s estate. It seems likely that Cameron’s two sisters and one brother plus his mother would have inherited this money. So when Cameron talks about not benefitting ‘in the future’ from these off shore holdings, will he refuse the money when his mother passes on? I very much doubt it.

Cameron’s strategy now seems to be make a showing of his financial affairs since he became Prime Minister, which may be relatively clean, but what about before this? As leader of the Opposition, an official post, attracting a publicly funded salary and of course as an MP before this, since 2005, again with a salary paid by British taxpayers. Is it just Prime Ministers that are meant not to benefit from off shore, tax avoiding investments, or should this cover all MPs? I think it should. It can’t be right to be taking honest tax payer's money, while simultaneously avoiding paying tax yourself, if you are an MP.  

Then there is the story that Cameron has been instrumental in stopping the European Union from tightening up on off shore funds, demanding full transparency of monies in these accounts. How can Cameron be trusted as an honest broker in tax affairs after the revelations of this week? His creditability is shot to pieces and he can’t be involved in making the rules again.

The opposition parties in Parliament are united in criticising Cameron and his own party’s MPs are showing signs of rebellion. As The Telegraph reports, several MPs have accused Cameron of hypocrisy, in that only two months after he sold his shares in Blairmore Holdings, he sent a letter to all Conservative Party candidates at the 2010 general election, demanding that they rid themselves of any such investments. Pro-Brexit Tory MPs are planning what is in effect, strike action over Cameron’s use of £9 million of public funds on leaflets for the Remain in the EU campaign, threatening to grind government to a halt by voting down all legislation.

All of which leads me to think that Cameron can’t last much longer, unless he changes the habit of a lifetime and comes completely clean over all of his and his family’s financial affairs (including his mother and father) immediately. Fat chance, me thinks. Just go Mr Cameron and stop embarrassing the country, but pay up what you owe us first.

Cameron is in the Panama Papers Scandal up to his Neck

The Prime Minister is not having good time of it at the moment. What with the ever widening split in the Tory Party over the upcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, now the leaked Panama Papers, show that his late father was a director of a company registered in the Bahamas to avoid paying British tax. The company went as far as making sure all board meetings were held in the Bahamas or Switzerland.

Cameron’s office first issued statements yesterday saying that his family’s financial details were a ‘private matter’. All of which is reminiscent of his attitude to his alleged illegal drug taking past, just don’t talk about it. They followed this up by churning out a load of spin about how the government had tightened up tax avoidance and so forth.

By today, Cameron was forced to make a further statement, and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn should get credit for hounding the Prime Minister on the matter, where Cameron said:

"In terms of my own financial affairs, I own no shares.

"I have a salary as prime minister, and I have some savings which I get some interest from and I have a house which we used to live in which we now let out while we're living in Downing Street, and that's all I have."

Later in the day his office issued another statement which said:

"To be clear, the prime minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds.

"As has been previously reported, Mrs Cameron owns a small number of shares connected to her father's land, which she declares on her tax return."

But this begs the obvious question, where is this money now? In all likelihood Cameron’s mother will have inherited it from his father. It may well be held in Britain now, but has any tax been paid on it? Cameron will have already benefited from this money, and stands to inherit it himself one day. Is this appropriate behaviour for a Prime Minister of this country? I don’t think it is.

I’m sure that Cameron straightened out his financial affairs when he became the Tory Party leader, maybe even before that. But the before that period and what will happen to this money in the future, is surely relevant to the politics of today. A British Prime Minister has gained, and will gain further it seems from dodging paying British tax, which is completely unacceptable.

It could be that more evidence emerges from these leaks, and on other MPs too, it has all makings of a full blown political scandal.

Harold McMillan the Tory Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, when asked what is the most difficult thing about being Prime Minister, famously said. ‘events dear boy, events’. And McMillan knew a thing or two about political scandals, as the Profumo Affair brought about his stepping down from being Prime Minister.

What will tomorrow’s news bring? I think the more this vast amount of information is gone over, more than 11 million documents, the more that will come out. One Prime Minister (of Iceland) has already been forced to resign. It could well finish Cameron along the way as well.

Jewish Chronicle in Attack on Green Party London Mayor Candidate

In an interview piece in the Jewish Chronicle last week, writer Sandy Rashty, launches an astonishing attack on Sian Berry, the Green Party candidate for London Mayor. In the preamble to the interview, Rashty states:

“Siân Berry has very little chance of being elected London Mayor in May.”

“This week, the bookies rated the Green party candidate's chances at just 150-1, leaving her trailing behind Labour's Sadiq Khan, Zac Goldsmith of the Conservatives, George Galloway of Respect and the Liberal Democrats' Caroline Pidgeon - but a margin above Ukip representative Peter Whittle.”

“This, I suspect, may be music to the ears of much of London's Jewish community and pro-Israel contingent.”

“It's not hard to see why many of her party's policies, and the people promoting them, would alienate prospective voters in the community.”

‘Pro-Isreal contingent’ maybe, but that is not the same as the ‘Jewish community’ in London. Whilst it is true that the Green Party in general struggles to gain electoral traction in pretty much all ethnic communities, in London and elsewhere, I know several Jewish people who are members of the Green Party.

There is also a low shot in this piece by likening Berry’s attitude on the campaigning group ‘Cage’, who fight for the rule of law in the context of the War on Terror, to support for Islamic State (IS), with a dubious mention of approval of ‘Jihadi John’. Much of this type of guilt by association has also been heaped upon Sadiq Khan the Muslim Labour candidate for Mayor. It really is the saddest form of negative campaigning and of course it is all bollocks to boot.

We have become used to this type of attack on anybody who is critical of the Israeli government, with a host of attackers summoned on line to accuse the individual (or group) of antisemitism. Perhaps this post will be attacked in this vein, but criticising the actions of the Israeli government is not antisemitic, it is a legitimate concern for some of the human rights abuses perpetrated by Israel and its armed forces.

Rashty broadens the attack to include the Green Party as a whole, with talk of boycotts and disinvestment in Israel and Israeli goods, and somewhat ludicrously the fact that Berry has never visited Israel.

Sian Berry seems to have acquitted herself pretty well in the interview. She says:

“We take a very principled stand on human rights and international law. It isn't our intention to alienate Jewish people. It is very much a focus on the actions of the Israeli government."

On the Tel Aviv festival which will celebrate bilateral trade and social links between London and Israel for the first time next year, Berry says:

"If that particular festival is causing tension, maybe we would be better off supporting something that is more about bringing people together," she muses. "Celebrating London's massive Jewish community in a different way than supporting trade links with companies".

Quite right. London is a diverse city and we should be celebrating that diversity, not partying for the sake business deals with one particular country. The Jewish community is part of that diversity and has a long and rich history in London. The fact that the British favourite of fish and chips was a fusion of Irish immigrants and their love of the potato and Jewish fishmongers.  

She adds: "I don't know if I would or wouldn't cancel the festival. If you've got a limited budget for cultural events, which we do have, I think the thing to be spending money on in London are the things that bring people together, especially when we have such a divided community."

On the current refuge crisis in the middle east Berry states:

"London is one of the best places to bring people. We have the public services to support a highly diverse community, including language services and specialist social workers.

"We are able to help people in their own language with cultural sensitivity," she adds. "Of course we can find temporary space…"

"I don't like anything that links the refugee crisis with the bombings. People fleeing war are desperate people. There's no link between them and the people committing terrorist atrocities. The people carrying out terrorist atrocities are largely settled in the countries already… trying to draw that link is racist."

On recommending a second preference for Mayor, between the likely top two candidates, Goldmith for the Tories and Khan for Labour, Berry says:

"The Greens are largely a left-wing party and Goldsmith does vote with the government most of the time. Even if he agreed to all our red lines, we might well have a debate, but…"

I hope the London Jewish community can see through this blatant and unjustified attack on the Green Party and its candidates in the London elections in May, and vote on the real issues that affect Londoners, like combating air pollution and the lack of affordable housing.

Syria: Kurdish Initiatives On The Rise

Written by Rene Wadlow and first published at Counter Currents

On March 17, 2016, the “federal democratic system of Rojava” (a Kurdish term for northern Syria) was proclaimed officially. Some 150 representatives of Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian (largely Christian) groups met in the city of Rmellane in north-east Syria and voted in favor of the union of three 'cantons' largely populated by Kurds − the cantons of Afrin, Kobani, and Jezireh.

The government as well as a major opposition coalition present in the Syria negotiations which have been going on in Geneva since the middle of March, the Syrian National Coalition, both stated their refusal of a federalist system which they saw as a first step to the breakup of Syria. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said that “Any such announcement has no legal value and will not have any legal, political, social or economic impact as long as it does not reflect the will of the entire Syrian people.” 

There was no indication of how the “will of the entire Syrian people” was to be determined in the war-torn land.

While the Kurdish issues in Turkey have attracted international attention, and the largely autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq is a major player in Iraqi politics, the Kurds in Syria have been less discussed.

The Kurds of Syria have not been as visible a factor until now as other ethnic or sectarian groups. As Michael Gunter, a specialist on the Kurdish world, writes

“On July 19, 2012, the previously almost unheard Syrian Kurds suddenly emerged as a potential game changer in the Syrian civil war and what its aftermath might hold for the future in the Middle East when in an attempt to consolidate their increasingly desperate position, government troops were abruptly pulled out of the major Kurdish areas. The Kurds in Syria had suddenly become autonomous, a situation that also gravely affected neighboring Turkey and the virtually independent Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq. Indeed, the precipitous rise of the Kurds in Syria bid to become a tipping point that might help change the artificial borders of the Middle East established after the First World War following the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement.” (1)

In a hope of keeping the Kurds out of the growing armed conflict, shortly after the March 15, 2011 start of the Syrian armed conflict, in April 2011, Bashaar al-Assad had granted Syrian citizenship to some 220,000 Kurds that had been long waiting to be considered as citizens or who had been stripped of their citizenship in a 1962 census.

However, armed conflict spread, and the Islamic State started to control territory near Kurdish majority areas. Some observers see the Kurds as “objective allies” of Bashaar as they have many of the same enemies.

Working with the regime has largely saved the Kurdish areas from government bombardment and allowed Kurdish leadership to build alternative forms of government. Gunter discusses in some detail the influence among some Kurdish leaders in Turkey and Syria of the writings of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) and his views of ecologically-sound autonomous governance − “democratic autonomy”. (2)

During the current “fog of war” it is difficult to see what forms of cooperation will be developed among the Kurdish areas of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and possibly Iran. There have been recent talks in Switzerland among Kurdish leaders of the four countries. There are those who see all proposals for federal-confederal forms of government in a previously highly centralized state as a step toward the breakup of the state.

However, in the first years of the French mandate of Syria after the First World War, the French had created a form of 'federal' administration, although the French had facilitated the creation of Lebanon which until then had been part of “Greater Syria”. It is difficult to envisage a centralized-one party state such as that under the leadership of the al-Assad – father and son – being recreated when the armed conflict stops. Although the Kurds are not present in the UN-Geneva negotiations (at the insistence of Turkey), the federal proposal is now “on the table,” and merits being watched closely.

Rene Wadlow, President and a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, of the Association of World Citizens.

Notes

(1) Michael M. Gunter. Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War. (London: Hurst and Co, 2014, p.1)

(2) Damian White. Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (London: Pluto Press, 2008)