The only shock about the UK Home Secretary’s decision regarding Julian Assange was that it did not come sooner. In April, Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring expressed the view that he was “duty-bound” to send the case to Priti Patel to decide on whether to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 grafted from the US Espionage Act of 1917.
Patel, for her part, was never exercised by the more sordid details of the case. Her approach to matters of justice is one of premature adjudication: the guilty are everywhere, and only multiply. When it came to WikiLeaks, such fine points of law and fact as a shaky indictment based on fabricated evidence, meditations on assassination, and a genuine, diagnosed risk of self-harm, were piffling distractions. The US Department of Justice would not be denied.
“Under the Extradition Act 2003,” a nameless spokesman for the Home Office stated, “the Secretary of State must sign an extradition order if there are no grounds to prohibit the order being made. Extradition requests are only sent to the Home Secretary once a judge decides it can proceed after considering various aspects of the case.”
Evidently, overt politicisation, bad faith, and flimsy reassurances from the US Department Justice on how Assange will be detained, do not constitute sufficient grounds. But the cue came from the courts themselves, which have done a fabulous job of covering the US justice system with tinsel in actually believing assurances that Assange would not be facing special administrative detention measures (SAMs) or permanent captivity in the ADX Florence supermax in Colorado. “In this case, the UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust or an abuse of process to extradite Mr Assange.”
In such a scatterbrained, and amoral cosmos that marks decision making in the Home Office, no mention has been made of the surveillance operation against the publisher in the Ecuadorian embassy, orchestrated at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. None, either, of contemplated abduction or assassination, or the frail mental health Assange finds himself.
As late as June 10, a letter from the group Doctors for Assange, comprising 300 doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, noted that the Home Secretary’s “denial of the cruel, inhuman treatment inflicted by upon Assange was then, and is even more so now, irreconcilable with the reality of the situation”.
In April, an umbrella grouping of nineteen organisations dedicated to press freedom and free speech urged Patel, in reviewing the case, to appreciate that Assange would “highly likely” face isolation or solitary confinement US conditions “despite the US government’s assurances, which would severely exacerbate the risk of suicide”.
The co-chairs of the Courage Foundation’s Assange Defense Committee, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and Alice Walker, reflected on the depravity of the order in a statement. “It is a sad day for western democracy. The UK’s decision to extradite Julian Assange to the nation that plotted to assassinate him – the nation that wants to imprison him for 175 years for publishing truthful information in the public interest – is an abomination.” As for the UK, it had “shown its complicity in this farce, by agreeing to extradite a foreigner based on politically motivated charges that collapse under the slightest scrutiny.”
Similar views were expressed by Amnesty International (“a chilling message to journalists the world over”) and Reporters Without Borders (“another failure by the UK to protect journalism and press freedom”). There was even concern from Conservative MP David Davis, who expressed his belief that Assange would not “get a fair trial.” The extradition law was, as matters stood, lopsided in favour of US citizens.
All this is consistent with Patel, who seems to relish the prospect of sending individuals to a place where human rights are marginal jottings on a policy paper. The UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Partnership, as it is euphemistically termed, is her pride and joy, albeit one currently facing strenuous legal opposition.
Under the arrangement, individuals crossing the channel will receive one-way tickets to Rwanda to have their claims processed without a prospect of settling in the UK. The Rwandan government, hostile to contrarians, the rule of law and refugees, will be subsidised for their pain and labours.
To this sadistic streak can be added her admiration for the Espionage Act being used to prosecute Assange. This fact should have disqualified her in any country operating under the rule of law. Even as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced a Conservative no-confidence vote this month, Patel’s National Security Bill passed its second reading in Parliament. The bill articulates an offence of “obtaining or disclosing protected information” that includes “any information… which either is, or could reasonably be expected to be, subject to any type of restrictions of access for protecting the safety and interests of the UK.”
In a polite nod of deference to US law, the proposed law states that an offence is committed when a person “obtains, copies, records or retains protected information, or discloses or provides access to protected information” for a purpose “that they know, or ought reasonably to know, is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom” and if “the foreign power condition is met”. The requirement there is that the act is “carried out for or on behalf of a foreign power”, including instances where “an indirect relationship” exists.
Assange has 14 days to appeal this insidious rubber stamping of judicially sanctioned brutality. His legal team are hoping to use the High Court as the route to highlight the political dimension of the case and draw attention back to the way the extradition law was read.
If the defence fail, Assange will be sent across the Atlantic, entrusted to officials, some of whom considered murdering him, to be made an example of. It will be the clarion call to regimes across the world that punishing a publisher is something supposed liberal democracies can do as well, and as deviously, as anybody else.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
The Arctic is turning into a dream come true for doomsayers. It’s heating way too fast! Nostradamus is dancing in the street.
Record-smashing Arctic temperatures may brighten the outlook for those who thrive, actually enjoy, disaster scenarios, but the great majority of people only get off on disasters in a movie theater, not in the wide open spaces at the top of the world. Even Hollywood itself could never possibly capture the moment, the drama, the heightened level of deep concern of flabbergasted scientists, as temperatures in the Arctic skyrocket.
What’s happening?
Indisputably, it’s all about cars, planes, trains, cows, heavy industry, and electric power plants emitting tons of CO2 into the upper atmosphere where it blankets heat. In that regard, there are limits to what works and what doesn’t for nature’s climate system to continue functioning so that humans can live and breathe and survive. Global warming anomalous temperatures, which are beyond the norm of thousands of years, just don’t cut it. It’s at the biggest disruption level in human history, and it’s downright ugly and outright scary.
New studies have discovered: “Extraordinary global heating in the Arctic that’s seven (7) times faster than the global average” in the North Barents Sea region. This is awful news. Scientists are alarmed, viewing it as an early warning sign of what’s in store for the rest of the Far North, and ultimately the planet as a whole. Seven times faster is insane.
Shockingly, average annual temperatures have logged +2.7C per decade and as high as +4C in autumn months. That’s the fastest rate of heat on Earth. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change >2C spells big trouble.
Scientists have responded with adjectives like weird, simply shocking, crazy, chilling while expressing serious concern about a “signal of more abrupt climate breakdown.” Yes, climate breakdown, which unfortunately precedes societal collapse.
According to the prescience of William Ophuls: “Civilization is effectively hardwired for self-destruction… Insuperable biophysical limits combine with innate human fallibility to precipitate eventual collapse.” (William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, 2012)
As for the horrific Arctic discovery: “We expected to see strong warming, but not on the scale we found,” according to Ketil Isaksen, senior researcher at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute: “We were all surprised. From what we know from all other observation points on the globe, these are the highest warming rates we have observed so far.” (Source: Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor, New Data Reveals Extraordinary Global Heating in the Arctic, The Guardian, June 15, 2022)
This is one more example of climate change ahead of schedule. According to Dr. Ruth Mottram, Danish Meteorological Institute: “This study shows that even the best possible models have been underestimating the rate of warming in the Barents Sea,” Ibid.
Of more than passing significance, this is the first public release of “extraordinary high-quality” surface air temperature measurements from 1981 to 2020 demonstrating 5-to-7 times global warming averages, which is off the charts problematic.
According to Ketil Isaksen, PhD: “It’s off the scale.” Regrettably, it represents a “leading signal of global warming.” (Source: Ketil Isaksen, et al, Exceptional Warming Over the Barents Area, Scientific Reports 12, Article No. 9371, June 15, 2022).
The Isaksen study focused on three periods, covering 40, 30, and 20 years beginning from 1981, 1991, 2001 and all ending in 2020. The highest readings “were up to twice as high than hitherto known in this region from reference station series in the western and southern part… we showed that the warming has been strongly linked, both in space and time, to (1) the large reduction of sea ice and (2) increased SST (sea surface temperature)”, Ibid.
The Arctic sets the tone for the rest of the world, which is a horrifying thought based upon this new data. Meanwhile, down south the Doomsday Glacier set another scary record.
Off the charts temperatures in the Arctic are only one-half of the horrific news: “Antarctica’s so-called Doomsday Glacier (Thwaites) is losing ice at its fastest rate in 5,500 years, raising concerns about the ice sheet’s future and the possibility of catastrophic sea level rise caused by the frozen continent’s melting ice.” (Source: Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is Hemorrhaging Ice Faster Than in the Past 5,500 Years, LiveScience, June 15, 2022)
The finding comes from a study of prehistoric sea-deposits found on the shores surrounding Thwaites glacier and Pine Island glacier on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: “Antarctica’s glacial melt is advancing faster than ever before in recorded history.” (Source: Scott Braddock, Relative Sea-Level Data Preclude Major Late Holocene Ice-Mass Change in Pine Island Bay, Nature Geoscience, June 9, 2022)
Alas. with both poles setting new records, the evidence mounts that years of warnings from scientists have been right on target, 100% correct while the consequences have been much, much faster than the models expected.
As such, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to foresee impending disaster brewing on the horizon, especially with current rates of CO2 levels and meaningfully because of grim news: China is Building More Than Half of the World’s New Coal Power Plants, NewScientist, April 26, 2022: “Some 176 gigawatts of coal capacity was under construction in 2021, and more than half of that was being built in China.” (176 gigawatts equal enough power for one hundred twenty-three million (123,000,000) homes).
The China/India news defines human insanity and unbelievable stupidity that’s responsible for repeated failure of climate mitigation efforts. This story is getting very old, way too late, in a perilous climate change cycle. Is it suicidal?
As both China and India ramp up new coal power plants, it’s also a direct assault on their own ports: Port of Shanghai, Port of Shenzhen, Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, Port of Guangzhou, Port of Hong Kong, Port of Qingdao, Port of Tianjin, Port of Daliam, Kkandia Port, Mumbai Port, Chennai Port, Port Blair Port, Kolkata Port, Tuticorin Port, Cochin Port, and Ennore Port.
A Possible Solution: Convert the US defense budget to a worldwide renewables build-out. Otherwise, at current rates of change, there won’t be much to defend anyhow.
Robert Hunziker is a writer from Los Angeles
All the signs are that this summer will break all existing records for heatwaves. It is only the middle of June, and yet large parts of the world are already registering temperatures that in the past were not reached until the height of the season.
The US weather map for June 16 shows almost the whole South and Southwest and much of the Midwest over 90° F (32° C).
The European heatwave, confined so far to Spain, Portugal and southern France but forecast to spread to the rest of Europe, has raised temperatures to 104–109° F (40–43° C). This corresponds to the highest temperatures reached during the European summer heatwaves of 2003 and 2013. This time around, however, temperatures in this range are just the beginning.
Even worse is the heatwave in South Asia, extending from the Gulf (Arabian or Persian, as you prefer) through southern Iran and southern Pakistan and across northern India. In this belt highs of 109–115° F (43–46° C) have been observed; on May 14 a reading of 124° F (51° C) earned Jacobabad, a city of 200,000 people in Pakistan’s Sindh Province, the title of ‘the hottest city on Earth.’
Where is the limit?
The human body is adaptable only within certain limits. At what point do rising air temperatures become incompatible with human survival?
This is a little complicated. Survivability depends not on air temperature alone but on air temperature in combination with humidity. Dry air enables the body to cool itself by sweating; with rising humidity this grows more difficult and finally impossible.
Measures have been devised to take this interaction into account. Most commonly used is the Wet Bulb Temperature (WBT) – the temperature shown by a thermometer whose bulb is wrapped in cloth that has been soaked in water at the same temperature as the air. Evaporation from the cloth cools the bulb, just as perspiration cools the human body.
Human beings cannot survive once the WBT reaches 35° C (95° F). This is the threshold at which a healthy person at rest will die in six hours. WBTs at this level or above have not as yet been recorded in populated areas. Apparently conditions came closest to the threshold of survival during a 2015 heatwave in Bandar Mahshahr in southwestern Iran.
Of course, not everyone can afford to rest indoors or in the shade whenever the weather gets too hot and/or humid. Many do not have enough water to drink and bathe as much as they need to, even though they may spend a fifth of their income on water deliveries.
When will we cross the threshold?
Casualties from excessive heat are already considerable in absolute terms. It is estimated, for example, that the European summer heatwaves of 2003 and 2013 caused 70,000 and 30,000 deaths, respectively. Nevertheless, their impact was fairly minor in relative terms – say, by comparison with the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths did not exceed 0.1% of the populations concerned.[2] Most victims belonged to specially vulnerable groups like the elderly and people with heart conditions.
As global heating proceeds further, an expanding area of the world’s land surface will become uninhabitable by human beings. Heat-related deaths will start to occur on a much more massive scale – not in the thousands but in the millions and eventually billions, in Central America, the Caribbean and Amazonia, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. The implications for human society and international relations are enormous, because whole countries are likely to disappear as organized states, probably including two nuclear powers – India and Pakistan.
These conclusions follow logically from scientific studies, but the journalists who report the studies and even most of the scientists themselves appear unable or afraid to spell them out. I suppose they don’t want to be accused of ‘alarmism’ or ‘apocalyptic thinking.’ Take the study reported by the New York Times on May 4, 2020. The researchers projected that ‘uninhabitable hot zones’ would expand from 1% of the Earth’s land surface in 2020 to 20% in 2070 and noted that about one third of the world’s population now live in those future hot zones. [3] The headline reads: ‘Billions Could Live in Extreme Heat Zones Within Decades.’ The opening sentence again speaks of billions ‘likely to live in areas that are considered unsuitably hot for humans’ (italics mine). But those areas will be uninhabitable. That means that humans will be unable to live there. The former inhabitants will have either migrated to cooler areas or died.
I do have serious doubts regarding the timescale. Many projections made by climate scientists in the past were later found to have underestimated the rate of change. Seeing that we are already so near the edge of the cliff and continue to charge toward it at full speed, why should we need another half century to reach it? On the basis of available evidence, I suspect that the transition to mass heat-related death will occur by the end of the current decade, perhaps by the end of this summer. After another decade, by 2040, I expect that there will be a broad equatorial belt devoid of human (and much other) life.
Climate refugees
Many authors acknowledge that millions and eventually billions of people will no longer be able to live where they live now but envision that they will survive somewhere else. Undoubtedly some, especially professionals and the wealthy, will be allowed to migrate to cooler regions. Global warming is gradually opening up more of Greenland for the settlement of immigrants; later Antarctica will also be able to absorb a few million.
For some time, however, Europe and North America will continue to be the main refugee destinations. These regions have experience of taking in climate refugees: the refugees from Syria were fleeing drought as well as war (moreover, the drought was one cause of the civil war), while the refugees from Central America trudging through Mexico for the US are fleeing drought as well as political and gang violence. The destabilizing political impact of these refugee flows makes it likely that effective – if necessary, ruthless and cruel – measures will be taken to block future flows. It should be kept in mind that Europe and North America will be coping with heatwaves of their own (less severe ones, to be sure).
Finally, many of the areas that will be worst affected – Southeast Asia, for instance – are a very long way from Europe or North America. Would-be refugees will face formidable barriers long before they get anywhere near their destination, such as the wall that India has erected right around Bangladesh.
For all these reasons, most of the inhabitants of ‘extreme heat zones’ will stay where they are and perish. It will be by far the biggest genocide in history – for, after all, global heating could have been halted at an early stage.
What next?
What will the Earth look like once the tropics have turned into a vast ‘dead zone’ or ‘hot zone’?
Remaining human habitation will be concentrated mainly to the north of the dead zone — in Canada and the cooler parts of the United States, Europe (not necessarily the whole of Europe), Russia, northern and central China, Japan and the Arctic (including Greenland). There will also still be scattered settlement to the south of the dead zone – for example, in the southern cone of South America, New Zealand and Antarctica.
There will no longer be a single world society or world economy, because the dead zone will sever most connections between the inhabited zones to its north and south. It will not be safe to steer ships through tropical waters or fly planes through tropical airspace. The future of our species and our planet will depend crucially on the character of the civilization that develops in the North.
Despite the enormous damage global heating will have inflicted on the planet and the immeasurable human suffering it will have caused, it cannot be assumed that ending and reversing the process will be a top priority of the Northern civilization. On the contrary, it is quite likely that the ‘new’ civilization will develop as a mere extension of today’s capitalist economy, based on predatory exploitation of all natural resources, not excluding hydrocarbons. Canada, one of the two leading powers of the new North, stubbornly refuses to abandon even the Alberta tar sands, the filthiest of all known energy sources, while the other leading power, Russia, remains as firmly committed as ever to exploit its Arctic oil and gas deposits.[4]
Unfortunately, it is too late to avert the next stage of global heating. Whatever policies might be adopted, it is built into the climatic system.
But will it still be possible to salvage what remains? Perhaps. But it depends on whether there emerges a popular transnational movement, especially across the global North, strong enough to wrest control over resources from the hands of the capitalist class, halt the capitalist profits machine and establish a humane, democratic and ecologically sustainable way of life.
Notes
[1] Whether it deserves this title is impossible to judge, given the sparsity of weather data for many tropical cities, especially in Africa.
[2] The 2010 summer heatwave killed 11,000 people in Moscow, equal to about 0.1% of the city’s population at the time, but the deaths were caused not only by heat but also by air pollution from forest fires.
[3] Chi Xu et al., Future of the human climate niche, May 4, 2020
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
[4] On Russian interests in the Arctic see Chapter 1 in Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev, Russia in the Arctic: Hard or Soft Power? (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2015).
Laurence C. Smith, currently Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University, has written a book entitled The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future (Dutton, 2010) that exemplifies the attitude of many observers. Although supposedly a specialist on the environment, his evident excitement at the prospects for ‘economic growth’ in the Arctic sweeps away any concern he may have for our environmental future. See also his video ‘The Future is in the North’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuZ6wWESCVg).
Stephen Shenfield ,World Socialist Party of the United States
Activist, filmmaker and bestselling author Raj Patel was dressed as a genetically modified tomato when he met Rupa Marya, MD, more than a decade ago. They were at a protest organized against pesticide use, and Marya—who is a musician as well as a physician—was playing a show at the event with her world-touring band Rupa and the April Fishes. Patel says the two quickly became friends.
Patel is a widely published author, perhaps best known for his New York Times and international bestselling book, The Value of Nothing. He is also a filmmaker as well as a research professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. Marya is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose research investigates the intersections of social structures and illness, and the impacts of the culture of colonialism on health. She is also executive director and board chair for the Deep Medicine Circle, a women of color-led, worker-directed 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the San Francisco Bay Area, focused on decolonizing farming and restoring relationships with nature through food.
Recently, Marya and Patel coauthored the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, published in 2021 through Macmillan.
“We’d been plotting the book for years, and it was picked up by a publisher just as the pandemic was breaking in the U.S. [in spring 2020],” Patel says. “Our lives during the pandemic resonated with the writing. Between us, we experienced wildfires, being climate refugees, long COVID-19, deaths of loved ones due to COVID-19, diseases of the food system, racism and gun violence. We braided that pain and anger through the book.”
Their book highlights the connections between health and structural injustices prevalent in modern societies, and its structure proceeds through different anatomical systems of the body as a framework to discuss not only health crises facing society but also injustices in food, racism, climate, the medical industry and beyond.
“The vision was to have a book that subverted the way that the body is taught, as individual segregated systems within the body,” Patel says. “As you move through the book, it becomes increasingly clear that you can’t understand, say, the gut without understanding the brain and the complexity of systems within systems.”
The connective thread throughout the book is inflammation, and the many interconnected ways in which our bodies, societies and planet are all “inflamed.”
Patel says the conversation about inflammation began between Marya and him after a “powerful” talk Marya gave at the University of Texas that he attended.
“As I drove her to the airport, it became clear that my work on food systems and peasant/working class struggles in the Global South resonated with hers on the front lines of the fights for Indigenous and racial justice, and [both our works] were knitted together by inflammation,” he says.
Patel explains that inflammation is the body’s natural response to the threat of damage, which is a necessary start of the healing process—that is, until the causes of inflammation become a constant.
“When the damage—and its threat—comes every day, then the body never gets a chance to heal,” he says. “Damage and the danger of damage aren’t distributed evenly. Social injustice—the fear of losing your car, home or life to powerful people for any infraction, real or perceived—is something that working-class communities, women and communities of people of color can feel daily. That threat does as much real harm as the exposures to pollution, extreme weather and daily physical workplace harm that such folk face. The attendant inflammation sets the bodies of people in those communities to a lifetime of poorer health than the wealthiest white men on Earth could ever conceive.”
As the book’s subtitle suggests, the book delves into the idea of “deep medicine,” which Marya explains is a way of seeing and relating to how larger social structures contribute to illness, and then working with that understanding to redesign those structures.
The concept of deep medicine, Marya says, is opposed to “shallow medicine,” which tends to focus on the cause of illness stemming from within a single individual. She says in working on the book, she and Patel were able to combine their insights and research from years of working with communities around the globe into “a discussion of food systems and land use, medicine and biology and histories and cosmologies.”
With her band, Marya has toured 29 different countries over the course of decades. She says in returning to the same communities many times again through the years, she was able to see certain patterns emerge related to how people were getting sick, and who was or was not getting sick. She says these observations became the groundwork that eventually led to the concepts covered in Inflamed.
“The book came about because of these insights while traveling,” she says. “[About 18 years ago] I began to notice that all these different groups who were marginalized or socially oppressed, or from communities that had endured colonization, were suffering. The people were suffering in very similar ways. I started to call it ‘colonized syndrome.’”
She says the communities she and Patel have each had the chance to witness and work with informed the story they told in the book, “which is that our bodies, our societies and our planet are being damaged through the same cosmology that has severed our relationships with each other and to the web of life that keeps us healthy.”
Patel says that once the two coauthors realized inflammation was like a connecting cord between physical health and the many injustices of today’s socioeconomic systems, the problem was figuring out what to include and what to leave out of the book, because they began to notice evidence everywhere “linking bodily inflammation to that of the planet, and the machinations of colonial capitalism.”
“Once you see inflammation, its pathways and causes and effects, you can’t unsee it,” he says. “The New York Times ran a piece on the race to steal the microbiome of Indigenous communities in the Amazon to treat those in the Global North whose guts have been denuded by living in the cities,” Patel adds. “That kind of colonial plunder is exactly what we’d predicted in the book.”
Patel says he enjoyed learning from Marya about the ways in which the body “carries the insults of capitalism down through the mind to the cellular level.”
“To learn how payday loans are associated with higher rates of inflammatory markers, and that the best medicine isn’t an anti-inflammatory pill but to ban payday loans, is something I’m surprised I was surprised by. It seems obvious now, but it was a surprising thing to find out while we were writing [the book].”
Since its publication, Patel says Inflamed has been used and quoted in movements around the world. If he could leave readers with a single takeaway from the book, he says it would be to “organize!”
“There’s nothing in the book that you can really do alone,” he says. “Sure, eat healthily, turn your phone off at night, sleep well, exercise and spend time connected to the web of life. These are all things that, if you can do them, you probably already are. The problem is that the ability to do this isn’t distributed evenly. Until everyone is safe, no one is. And capitalism won’t let everyone be safe. So the medicine [to cure this situation] is to move beyond capitalism. That’s not something that can happen through the individual will. Only through collective power. So, organize!”
April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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