Wednesday, November 6, 2019
‘Guardian’ of the Amazon Killed in Brazil by Illegal Loggers
Manuela Andreoni and Letícia Casado. New York Times. November 4, 2019
In the months before an Indigenous leader was killed with a gunshot in the face in the Amazon reserve he had spent much of his life protecting, at least two efforts were made to warn Brazil’s government of the risks posed by illegal loggers in the region.
In April, members of the Guajajara Indigenous group went to the capital, Brasília, to plead for protection from loggers invading their land in the state of Maranhão. In August, the state’s head of human rights wrote to the federal police to say loggers were threatening the Guajajara in the Araribóia Indigenous Land.
But those warnings didn’t help Paulo Paulino Guajajara during a hunting trip with a friend in the Araribóia reserve on Friday, when they were ambushed by a group of five loggers working illegally in the area.
Laércio Guajajara, the friend, who was wounded has been released from the hospital. A logger was reported missing.
The murder is one of a string of losses for Brazil’s indigenous communities, as miners and loggers make more and bolder incursions into Indigenous territories and other protected areas. Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has said that Brazil’s Indigenous reserves should be opened up to commercial exploration.
“The Brazilian government is not following its constitutional duty of protecting them,” said Gilberto Vieira, an associate secretary at Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council, which is connected to the Catholic Church.
In June, several dozen illegal miners had invaded the Wajapi Indigenous community, in the Brazilian Amazon, and stabbed and killed one of its leaders.
Mr. Guajajara, 26, left one child. He and Laércio Guajajara were members of the forest guardians, a group the Guajajara created to defend themselves and their land against miners, loggers and others interested in illegally taking resources from the reserve.
In a searing statement lamenting Mr. Guajajara’s death, the association of Brazilian Indigenous peoples said the Bolsonaro administration had “Indigenous blood” on its hands.
“The increased violence in indigenous territories is a direct reflection of their hate speech, as well as their measures against Indigenous peoples in Brazil,” they said in a statement posted on their website on Saturday. “Our lands are being invaded, our leaders murdered, attacked and criminalized, and the Brazilian state is abandoning Indigenous peoples to their fate with the ongoing dismantling of environmental and indigenous policies.”
Brazil’s minister of justice, Sérgio Moro, promised a thorough investigation of Mr. Guajajara’s death by the country’s federal police.
“We will spare no efforts to take those responsible for this serious crime to justice,” he said in a tweet.
The Indigenous Missionary Council had warned in a report published on Sept. 24 that the number of invasions of Indigenous lands by loggers, miners and land grabbers was rising. They documented 160 incursions through September of this year, compared to 109 during the whole of 2018.
The Guajajara people of the state of Maranhão knew they were in danger.
“All indigenous lands in Maranhão are under threat of invasion,” Indigenous leader Rosilene Guajajara said in an interview in April, when several of her community went to Brasília to ask the federal government for protection.
In September, Mr. Moro was warned by the government of Maranhão state of threats to Indigenous land near Araribóia, where Mr. Guajajara was killed, but no measures were taken to protect it or those living there, state officials said.
“In the face of the evident difficulty of federal government bodies to protect Indigenous lands, we will try to help,” Maranhão’s leftist governor, Flávio Dino, wrote on Twitter as he announced a statewide task force to protect Indigenous people.
The murder of Mr. Guajajara comes at a time when a spike in rainforest fires in the Brazilian Amazon drew a global outcry. As deforestation increases, the forest is approaching a tipping point at which it would begin to self-destruct, instead of self-sustain, which could frustrate worldwide efforts to fight climate change.
While a task force that included Brazilian military was able to reduce the number of fires in October to a record low, research shows Indigenous people are some of the most important agents of environmental protection in the forest.
Paulo Moutinho, a senior scientist at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, said that historically Indigenous lands have some of the lowest deforestation levels among conservation units in Brazil.
“If we want to preserve the great benefits the Amazon forest offers us, it is fundamental that we recognize these peoples’ right to land,” he said. “They are providing an invaluable service.”
NYC Opens $500 Million Decoy Subway Station To Catch Turnstile Jumpers
https://www.theonion.com/nyc-opens-500-million-decoy-subway-station-to-catch-tu-1839644052?utm
NEW YORK—In a new effort by the MTA and law enforcement to crack down on fare evasion, New York City reportedly opened a $500 million decoy subway station this week to catch turnstile jumpers.
“This sprawling, state-of-the-art station will have all the sights and sounds of a regular terminal, including turnstiles that will not accept MetroCards regardless of their available balance, increasing the likelihood of attempts to avoid payment,” said MTA project manager Greg Langdon, adding that the act of fare evasion would cause the floor to open up, sending the commuter down a chute connected to a windowless underground holding cell.
“From the outside, there will be signage indicating that the very realistic station serves every train in the system. Upon entry, the station’s 500 security cameras will automatically capture high-definition photographs and videos of travellers and send them directly to the nearest precinct to be referenced against arrest records. A mix of plainclothes police and SWAT officers will also be on hand to help detain and interrogate anyone trying to ride for free. We hope to completely eliminate fare dodgers by adding decoy stations throughout the city.”
At press time, Langdon added that to cover costs for this pilot program, the MTA would be closing 472 stations.
The world is getting wetter, yet water may become less available for North America and Eurasia
Plants will demand more water
in the future making less water available for people
November 4, 2019
Dartmouth College
With climate change, plants of
the future will consume more water than in the present day, leading to less
water available for people living in North America and Eurasia, according to a
new study. The research suggests a drier future despite anticipated precipitation
increases for places like the United States and Europe, populous regions
already facing water stresses.
With climate change, plants of
the future will consume more water than in the present day, leading to less
water available for people living in North America and Eurasia, according to a
Dartmouth-led study in Nature Geoscience. The research suggests a drier
future despite anticipated precipitation increases for places like the United
States and Europe, populous regions already facing water stresses.
The study challenges an
expectation in climate science that plants will make the world wetter in the
future. Scientists have long thought that as carbon dioxide concentrations
increase in the atmosphere, plants will reduce their water consumption, leaving
more freshwater available in our soils and streams. This is because as more
carbon dioxide accumulates in our atmosphere plants can photosynthesize the
same amount while partly closing the pores (stomata) on their leaves. Closed
stomata means less plant water loss to the atmosphere, increasing water in the land.
The new findings reveal that this story of plants making the land wetter is
limited to the tropics and the extremely high latitudes, where freshwater
availability is already high and competing demands on it are low. For much of
the mid-latitudes, the study finds, projected plant responses to climate change
will not make the land wetter but drier, which has massive implications for
millions of people.
"Approximately 60 percent
of the global water flux from the land to the atmosphere goes through plants, called
transpiration. Plants are like the atmosphere's straw, dominating how water
flows from the land to the atmosphere. So vegetation is a massive determinant
of what water is left on land for people," explained lead author Justin S.
Mankin, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth and adjunct research
scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. "The
question we're asking here is, how do the combined effects of carbon dioxide
and warming change the size of that straw?"
Using climate models, the
study examines how freshwater availability may be affected by projected changes
in the way precipitation is divided among plants, rivers and soils. For the
study, the research team used a novel accounting of this precipitation partitioning,
developed earlier by Mankin and colleagues to calculate the future runoff loss
to future vegetation in a warmer, carbon dioxide-enriched climate.
The new study's findings
revealed how the interaction of three key effects of climate change's impacts
on plants will reduce regional freshwater availability. First, as carbon
dioxide increases in the atmosphere, plants require less water to
photosynthesize, wetting the land. Yet, second, as the planet warms, growing
seasons become longer and warmer: plants have more time to grow and consume
water, drying the land. Finally, as carbon dioxide concentrations increase,
plants are likely to grow more, as photosynthesis becomes amplified. For some
regions, these latter two impacts, extended growing seasons and amplified
photosynthesis, will outpace the closing stomata, meaning more vegetation will
consume more water for a longer amount of time, drying the land. As a result,
for much of the mid-latitudes, plants will leave less water in soils and
streams, even if there is additional rainfall and vegetation is more efficient
with its water usage. The result also underscores the importance of improving
how climate models represent ecosystems and their response to climate change.
The world relies on freshwater
for human consumption, agriculture, hydropower, and industry. Yet, for many
places, there's a fundamental disconnect between when precipitation falls and
when people use this water, as is the case with California, which gets more
than half of its precipitation in the winter, but peak demands are in the
summer. "Throughout the world, we engineer solutions to move water from
point A to point B to overcome this spatiotemporal disconnect between water
supply and its demand. Allocating water is politically contentious,
capital-intensive and requires really long-term planning, all of which affects
some of the most vulnerable populations. Our research shows that we can't
expect plants to be a universal panacea for future water availability. So,
being able to assess clearly where and why we should anticipate water
availability changes to occur in the future is crucial to ensuring that we can
be prepared," added Mankin.
Researchers from
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Richard Seager, Jason
E. Smerdon, Benjamin I. Cook, who is also affiliated with NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, and A. Park Williams, contributed to this study.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Dartmouth College. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Justin S. Mankin, Richard
Seager, Jason E. Smerdon, Benjamin I. Cook & A. Park Williams. Mid-latitude
freshwater availability reduced by projected vegetation responses to climate
change. Nature Geoscience, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0480-x
Elizabeth Warren unveils her “Medicare for All” electoral gimmick
By Kate Randall
5 November 2019
5 November 2019
Democratic presidential
candidate Elizabeth Warren released details of her “Medicare for All” plan on
Friday. The senator from Massachusetts has been pressed by her rivals for the
Democratic Party nomination to show how her plan would be financed without
increasing taxes on the middle class. Warren posted a lengthy explanation on
her campaign website, headlined “Ending the Stranglehold of Health Care Costs on
American Families.”
The plan is her version of the
Medicare for All Act, which she co-sponsored with Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont. The act would gradually do away with private insurance and end
employer-sponsored coverage. It would make the federal government the sole
insurer, creating what is called a “single payer” system.
Warren bases her plan’s cost
estimate on an analysis by the Urban Institute, which calculated that a plan
similar to Medicare for All would cost $59 trillion over a decade and require
$34 trillion in new federal spending. She says total costs could be held to $52
trillion and that $20.5 trillion in new funding would be necessary after other
savings are taken into account.
Warren’s plan has nothing in
common with socialism. It would not provide high-quality, universal health
care. The government would take on the role of insurer, but it would not do
away with private health care providers or the giant pharmaceutical industry.
It would not build or run new and upgraded facilities.
Medicare itself is a poorly
funded program that provides substandard care to seniors, who must purchase
supplemental coverage to subsidize office visits, prescriptions and other basic
medical needs. Medicare for All could be expected to be of even poorer quality.
Building on provisions of the
Affordable Care Act (ACA) implemented under the Obama administration, Warren’s
plan would seek to cut costs and ration care for the vast majority of
Americans. While the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare, forced individuals to
obtain insurance from a private insurer or pay a penalty, the insurer would now
be the government, which, at the behest of the ruling establishment and its
political representatives, would be under pressure to slash costs on the backs
of the working families Warren claims to champion.
Warren’s Medicare for All
would be financed through a combination of tax increases and “savings” obtained
by means of cutbacks to health care provision.
The cost estimate for Warren’s
plan was carried out by Don Berwick, a former director of the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama, and Simon Johnson, the former chief
economist at the World Bank. Berwick was an advocate for the Independent
Payment Advisory Board, which was envisioned as a body to cut Medicare costs
and ration care under the ACA.
In the course of a decade,
Warren’s Medicare for All would achieve savings on the following basis:
• Private insurers currently
consume about 12.2 percent for “administrative costs” and profits. Warren
assumes this would fall to 2.3 percent, saving $1.8 trillion.
• Warren proposes cutting
payment rates for brand-name drugs by 70 percent, saving $1.5 trillion.
• All physicians would be paid
at current Medicare rates, and hospitals would be paid at 110 percent of that
rate, saving an estimated $600 billion.
• ACA-era payment “reforms”
would be implemented across the single-payer system, moving away from
fee-for-service. This would save an estimated $2 trillion.
• $1.1 trillion could be saved
by holding health spending growth to 3.9 percent over the next decade.
Additional funding would be
generated by raising taxes, including:
• A financial transactions tax
of 0.1 percent of the value of every stock, bond or derivatives transaction,
raising $800 billion.
• A 35 percent minimum tax on
foreign earnings, bringing in $2.9 trillion.
• A 6 percent wealth tax on
assets over $1 billion, generating $1 trillion.
• Taxing capital gains for the
top 1 percent at the same rate as normal income, and doing so annually, would
raise $2 trillion.
Another major source of
revenue would result from private employers paying to the government the $9
trillion they would have spent on private health insurance for their employees.
There are many other
convoluted details, but it is the proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy that
have generated outrage on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms. The ruling
elite is hostile to any infringement, however minimal, on its ability to
accumulate wealth at the expense of the working class. It will not willingly
relinquish any portion of its wealth. Nor will private insurance companies
voluntarily close up shop, or the pharmaceutical companies accept a cut in their
profits.
An editorial in the Wall
Street Journal, after bemoaning Warren’s plan to “raise the corporate tax rate
back to 35 percent from 2 percent and extend it to income earned worldwide with
no deferrals for foreign taxes,” claims that the scheme “doubles down on her
plans to soak the rich, assuming there are any left after her other tax
proposals.”
Similarly, the New York
Times notes in an article on Warren’s gains in the Democratic race for the
presidential nomination, “From corporate boardrooms to breakfast meetings,
investor conferences to charity galas, Ms. Warren’s rise in the Democratic
primary rolls is rattling bankers, investors and their affluent clients, who
see in the Massachusetts senator a formidable opponent who could damage not
only their industry but their way of life ” [emphasis added].
Warren’s Medicare for All plan
and railing against the corporate elite have also generated opposition from her
fellow candidates and other Democratic Party figures. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi told Bloomberg Friday, “I’m not a big fan of Medicare for All,” adding,
“It’s expensive.” She said, “There is a comfort level that some people have
with their current private insurance.”
Pelosi is well aware that the
private insurance industry is reviled by the majority of the American
population, and that medical bills are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy.
Skyrocketing premiums, deductibles and co-pays are causing people to forgo
medical care, posing grave risks to health and premature death. It is this growing
opposition in the working class to social inequality and the bloated profits of
the rich that strikes fear in the hearts of Pelosi, Warren’s fellow candidates,
and Warren herself.
Elizabeth Warren and her
various plans to supposedly cut taxes, improve health care, and tackle student
debt do not pose a challenge to the ruling elite. She is a highly conscious and
self-declared advocate of the capitalist market economy—“a capitalist to the
bone,” as she told one interviewer—and an opponent of socialism.
She is a solid member of the
top 1 percent, with an adjusted gross combined income with her Harvard Law
School professor husband of $846,394. She espouses economic nationalism and
embraces the national security doctrine outlined by the Pentagon, in which great
power competition with China and Russia has displaced terrorism as the
principal concern of US imperialism.
Warren’s claim that she will
impose tax increases to improve health care for ordinary Americans is a fraud.
She and her fellow Democrats are well aware that her Medicare for All plan has
no chance of being passed by either big business party or signed into law by
any president.
Her hope is that such
proposals will appeal to working class voters and hoodwink them into believing
that she and the Democratic Party represent a genuine alternative to the Trump
administration’s policies.
The reality is that a
genuinely progressive and democratic overhaul of the health care system in
America requires a revolutionary socialist policy, which expropriates the
private health care industry—the insurers, drug companies and giant health care
chains—along with the banks and the parasitic financial industry, and places
health care under the control of a democratically elected workers government as
a social right. Anything short of a revolutionary solution is an empty promise
and deception.
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