the filthy rich

Climate activists blockade Farnborough private jet airport’s three main gates

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Image: Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion climate activists are blocking access to Farnborough Airport this morning (Sunday 2 June) to protest against the increasing use of highly polluting private jets by the super-rich and to call on the government to ban private jets, tax frequent flyers and make polluters pay.

Today’s blockade is part of a global week of action against private aviation under the banner Make Them Pay with actions in Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the US, and follows Europe’s largest private jet convention EBACE in Geneva this week.

In Farnborough, protesters have barricaded the airport’s Gulfstream Gate with the iconic XR pink boat with “LOVE IN ACTION” painted on the side, Ively Gate has four protesters locked on to oil drums, and the airport’s departure gate has an activist mounted on a tripod blockading the entrance. Police have seized a second tripod.

A fourth group of protesters are playing cat and mouse with the airport authorities, moving between the airport’s other gates to block them. At all three main gates, protesters are releasing colourful smoke flares, chanting slogans and engaging with members of the public, accompanied by the XR Rebel Rhythms band of drummers. 

The activists are supported at all three main entrances to the airport by scores of demonstrators holding banners reading “FLYING TO EXTINCTION”, “PRIVATE FLIGHTS = PUBLIC DEATHS”, “STOP PRIVATE FLIGHTS”, “PRIVATE FLIGHTS COST THE EARTH” and “TAX FREQUENT FLYERS”.

Climate activists are targeting Farnborough Airport in an escalating campaign because it is the UK’s largest private jet airport. Last year 33,120 private flights landed and took off from its runways, carrying an average of just 2.5 passengers per flight, making them up to 40 times more carbon intensive than regular flights. Currently 40% of flights to and from the airport are empty. The airport is now seeking planning permission to increase the number of planes taking off or landing from a maximum of 50,000 a year to up to 70,000 a year.

Farnborough Airport claims to be a centre for business aviation yet around 50% of Farnborough flights headed to the Mediterranean during summer months, rather than business locations, with around 25% heading to Alpine destinations during the winter months. Last year a service was launched specifically to shuttle dogs and their owners to Dubai and back.

The demonstration includes campaigners from Extinction Rebellion, who have joined forces with local residents, Quakers, and campaign organisations Farnborough Noise Group, Blackwater Valley Friends of the Earth, and Bristol Aviation Action Network to voice their opposition to the airport’s expansion plans.

Dr Jessica Upton, 54, from Oxford, a Veterinary surgeon and foster carer said: “I’m here today because private airports are an abomination. Expanding Farnborough would be putting the indulgent wants of the rich minority over the needs of the majority. Local people need cleaner air and less noise pollution, and the world’s population urgently needs rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to survive. Private airports disproportionately contribute to climate breakdown and closing them would boost our chances of sticking to the Paris Climate Accords, the supposedly legally binding international treaty agreed to and signed by our government.“

Daniela Voit, 37, from Surbiton, a Shiatsu Practitioner and Teacher, said: “Last year we hit a global average temperature rise of 1.5oC degrees celsius over an entire year. For decades we were told a 1.5oC rise needs to be avoided to avoid catastrophic changes to our lives due to the planetary warming caused by humanity’s CO2 emissions. We can see the consequences of this temperature rise all over the world – currently immense flooding in Brazil and Afghanistan and temperature of 52C in Pakistan. To carry on flying in private jets, one of the biggest causes for CO2 emissions per person, in a time of climate crisis is reckless. The rich 1% that are flying from Farnborough Private Jet Airport seem to think they are exempt from taking responsibility for what they are doing to our only home. Banning Private Jets is one of the first things we need to do to stop further temperature rises. This is vital to ensure the survival of all life – human, animal and plant – on this planet that we call our Mother Earth.”

Make Them Pay demands:

1) Ban private jets. Flying in a private jet is the most inefficient and carbon-intensive mode of transport. Flights on private jets can be as much as 40 times more carbon-intensive than regular flights, and 50 times more polluting than trains. A four-hour private flight emits as much as the average person does in a year. Private jet use is entirely inappropriate during a climate emergency. There’s strong public support for banning private jets and banning this mode of travel was a key recommendation of the Climate Assembly.

2) Tax frequent flyers. Various citizens’ assemblies, for example in the UK, Scotland, and France, have recommended that frequent flyers and those who fly further should pay more.

They believe this would “address issues of tax fairness, as currently those who don’t fly are subsidising those who do” and that “this would deliver significant behaviour changes across society and have a positive impact on reducing overall carbon emissions caused by flying.”

Taxes on air travel would be a socially progressive way of raising climate funds and have been proposed by the group representing the most vulnerable countries at COP27 as an effective way to raise climate finance and pay for loss and damage, alongside debt cancellation.

3)Make polluters pay. It is only fair that the wealthiest in society and the highest-income, highest-emitters pay for their climate damage, and pay the most into climate Loss and Damage funds for the most affected peoples and areas to mitigate and adapt to the worst impacts of climate change.

The top 1% of the global population by income are responsible for more emissions than the bottom 50% combined. So not only is it a question of morality that the wealthiest in society pay the most, and commit to the most rapid emissions reductions – it’s also a mathematical necessity and a question of practicality and science.

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Rishi Sunak and his wife climb up the list of UK’s wealthiest people while millions struggle

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/05/rishi-sunak-and-his-wife-climb-up-the-list-of-uks-wealthiest-people-while-millions-struggle/

The Prime Minister and his wife are already the richest people to ever live in No.10 Downing Street.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife have seen their wealth increase even further as they rose up the latest rankings of the Sunday Times Rich List.

The Prime Minister and his wife who are already the richest people to ever live in No.10 Downing Street, saw their net worth increase from £529m in 2023 to £651m. As a result, they moved from 275th place in the Sunday Times Rich List to 245th.

Sunak and Akshatha Murty have seen their fortunes rise at a time when millions across the country continue to struggle with the cost of living crisis, with record rises in homelessness and with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown also warning that the country is set to record its worst child poverty figures in living memory.

At present, a total of 4.3 million children are living in poverty, up from 3.6 million in 2010/2011. That is one in three children in the UK living in poverty.

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/05/rishi-sunak-and-his-wife-climb-up-the-list-of-uks-wealthiest-people-while-millions-struggle/

Continue ReadingRishi Sunak and his wife climb up the list of UK’s wealthiest people while millions struggle

Elites in the global North are scared to talk about Palestine

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

FREE SPEECH NATION? Arrests are made as pro-Palestinian students and protesters are pushed off campus at the University of Texas, Wednesday April 24

While people across the world have been taking bold action in support of Palestine, the global North ruling class has used all tools at its disposal to support Israel’s genocide and criminalise solidarity writes VIJAY PRASHAD

ISRAELI BOMBS continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al-Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza.

The former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, Andrew Gilmour, told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

Yet, these facts — according to a leaked memorandum — cannot be spoken about in the “newspaper of record” in the US, the New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory.”

Indeed, over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the US have generally written about the genocidal violence using passive voice: bombs fell, people died.

Even on social media, where the terrain is often less controlled, the axe fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonisation” and phrases such as “From the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

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World’s billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers

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https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2024/apr/25/billionaires-should-pay-minimum-two-per-cent-wealth-tax-say-g20-ministers

A study from the World Bank showed that the pandemic had halted poverty reduction schemes. Photograph: Friedrich Stark/Alamy

The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2% tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise £250bn a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.

In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa and Spain say a 2% tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

They are calling for more countries to join their campaign, saying the annual sum raised would be enough to cover the estimated cost of damage caused by all of last year’s extreme weather events.

“It is time that the international community gets serious about tackling inequality and financing global public goods,” the ministers say in a Guardian comment piece.

“One of the key instruments that governments have for promoting more equality is tax policy. Not only does it have the potential to increase the fiscal space governments have to invest in social protection, education and climate protection. Designed in a progressive way, it also ensures that everyone in society contributes to the common good in line with their ability to pay. A fair share contribution enhances social welfare.”

Brazil chairs the G20 group of leading developed and developing countries and put a billionaire tax on the agenda at a meeting of finance ministers earlier this year.

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https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2024/apr/25/billionaires-should-pay-minimum-two-per-cent-wealth-tax-say-g20-ministers

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Musk Is Consistent in His Opposition to Internet Democracy

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Original article by ARI PAUL republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk has said (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24)—unless, of course, he doesn’t like the government making the laws.

Elon Musk, the right-wing anti-union billionaire owner of Twitter (recently rebranded as X), has cast his defiance of a Brazilian judicial ruling as a free speech crusade against censorship. Such framing is, of course, bullshit. It is instead a political campaign by a capitalist to use social media to reshape global politics in favor of the right. And it’s important that we all understand why that is.

As Reuters (4/7/24) reported, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered “the blocking of certain accounts” on Twitter, prompting Musk to announce that Twitter would defy the judge’s orders “because they were unconstitutional.” He went on to call for Moraes’ resignation.

It isn’t clear which accounts are being targeted, but the judge is investigating “‘digital militias’ that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.” He’s also probing “an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro.”

The AP (4/8/24) then reported that the judge opened up an inquest into Musk directly, saying the media mogul “began waging a public ‘disinformation campaign’ regarding the top court’s actions.”

Musk claimed that he’s doing this in the name of free speech at the expense of profit, saying “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there” (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24). He added that “principles matter more than profit.”

Michael Shellenberger (Public, 4/8/24), an enthusiastic pro-Musk pundit, was less restrained, saying the judge “has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship.” To Shellenberger, it’s “clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.”

‘Par for the course’

Verge (1/25/23): “The documentary’s ban isn’t an example of Musk violating a vocal ‘free speech absolutist’ ethos. It’s a reminder that Musk has always been fine with government censorship.”

Anyone with a memory better than Shellenberger’s will recall that Musk’s Twitter has been all too eager to censor content at the request of the Indian government, including a BBC documentary that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Verge, 1/25/23). India under Modi, who heads the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party, has seen a steep decline in press freedom, worrying journalists and free speech advocates (New York Times, 3/8/23; NPR, 4/3/23; Bloomberg, 2/25/24). At the same time Musk was pretending to defend free speech in Brazil, he was bragging about traveling to India to meet with Modi (Twitter, 4/10/24).

Musk suppressed Twitter content in the Turkish election in response to a request from Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, saying the “choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” This move, he insisted, was “par for the course for all Internet companies” (Vanity Fair, 5/14/23). Turkey, with its laws against insulting the Turkish identity (Guardian, 11/16/21), is a country that is almost synonymous with the suppression of free speech—it ranks 165 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Yet Musk didn’t seem to feel the need to intervene to save democracy through his social media network.

The impact of Musk’s decision to censor Twitter when it comes to Turkey and India isn’t just that it exposes his duplicity when it comes to free speech, but it robs the global public of vital points of view when it comes to these geopolitically important countries. In essence, the crime is not so much that Musk is hypocritical, but that his administration of the social media site has kept readers in the dark rather than expanding their worldview.

Grappling with balance

AP (10/25/22) reported that Brazilian social media posts claimed that Lula “plan[ned] to close down churches if elected” and that Bolsonaro “confess[ed] to cannibalism and pedophilia.”

The context in Brazil is that in the last presidential election, in 2022, the leftist challenger Lula da Silva ousted the incumbent, Bolsonaro (NPR, 10/30/22), who has since been implicated in a failed coup attempt that closely resembled the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol (Reuters, 3/15/24). Ever since, tech companies have bristled at Brazil’s attempt to curb the influence of fake news, such as a bill that would put “the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material” (Guardian, 5/3/23).

Brazil experienced a flurry of disinformation about the candidates in the run-up to the election, inspiring the country’s top electoral court to ban “false or seriously decontextualized” content that “affects the integrity of the electoral process” (AP, 10/25/22).

The Washington Post (1/9/23) reported that social media were “flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to ‘Stop the Steal,’” and demands for “a military coup” in response to a possible Lula victory. And while these problems existed in various online media, a source told the Post that this occurred after Musk fired people in Brazil “who moderated content on the platform to catch posts that broke its rules against incitement to violence and misinformation.”

While Turkey and India are brazenly attempting to suppress opinions the government doesn’t like, a democratic Brazil is grappling with how to balance maintaining a free internet while protecting elections from malicious interference (openDemocracy, 1/3/23).

Despotic future

Brazilian Report (4/9/24): “Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship.”

Lula’s victory, in addition to being a source of hope for Brazil’s poor and working class (Bloomberg, 4/25/23), was seen as a blow to the kind of right-wing despotism espoused by people like Bolsonaro, who represents a past of US-aligned terror-states that use military force to protect US interests and suppress egalitarian movements in the Western Hemisphere (Human Rights Watch, 3/27/19). As Brazilian Report (4/9/24) put it, Musk has joined a “campaign led by the Brazilian far right.”

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal (4/10/24) noted that Musk’s tussle in the Brazilian judiciary was an extension of his alignment with the Brazilian right:

Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit in 2022 to announce plans to install satellites over the Amazon rainforest, have reveled in Musk’s defiance, declaring him a “hero,” as the dividing lines in Brazil’s culture wars deepen.

Erdoğan and Modi represent more successful iterations of neo-fascist ideology over liberal democracy. The dystopian societies they oversee make up the political model that the MAGA movement would like to impose in the United States, where a caudillo is unchecked by independent courts, the press and other civil institutions, while rights for workers and marginalized groups are eviscerated.

Musk isn’t simply displaying hypocrisy when he pretends to fight for free speech in Brazil while Twitter censors speech when it comes to India and Turkey. If anything, he is being consistent in his quest to use his corporate wealth to alter the political landscape against liberal democracy and toward a dark, despotic future.

Original article by ARI PAUL republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Continue ReadingMusk Is Consistent in His Opposition to Internet Democracy