Daily Archives: February 8, 2021

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This article focuses on the processes, mechanisms and legitimating discourses used to roll out changes in legal structures and state policy relating to land acquisition, development projects, and setting up of business ventures. It points to the moral force of a discourse of development in furthering the agenda of capital accumulation. The ideological character of the mainstream notion of development can only be challenged by articulating a counter-hegemonic conception of development that demands peoples needs are met through a system of production that places their needs at the centre and not that of capital.

The draft Environment ImpactAssessment notification, 2020 (EIA2020) has caused a stir in civilsociety and amidst people threatened by forcible land acquisition and displacement in the name of national development. The notification is the latest in changes to state policy to facilitate the smooth functioning of businesses and corporations, removing bureaucratic hurdles along the way that allegedly slow down and complicate the establishment of new industries. Introduced during theCoViD-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) released the draft on its website on 23 March 2020, a day after a nationwide lockdown was announced by the central government. It gave the public a span of just over three months to read and respond to the draft notification, raising questions over the governments willingness to enable citizen participation in discussions on the proposed changes. The notification was widely criticised for its pro-business bias.

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Development and the Neo-liberal Agenda | Economic and Political Weekly - Economic and Political Weekly

Time to talk about peasants, who I claim in Chapter 3 of my bookA Small Farm Futurewill soon be returning to tend (or create) a small farm near you. Or may in fact include you or your descendants.

This claim is at odds with most of whats been written about rural trends over the past century or so, along two dimensions. The first is historical: peasants will be liquidated by the march of progress. As Karl Kautsky (quoted on page 246 of my book) famously put it in his agrarian question in 1899: In what ways is capital taking hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, smashing the old forms of production and of poverty and establishing the new ones that must succeed?

The second dimension is sociological: internal tensions among small-scale farmers destabilize any coherent notion of the peasantry as an enduring entity an argument usually framed in relation to the separate class interests of upper, middle and lower peasants. So in the standard view, for reasons both external and internal, peasants are on their way to being something else.

Theres no denying that recent history furnishes evidence for this. Capital has certainly done its share of revolutionizing and smashing peasant agriculture since Kautskys day, and plenty of rural class conflict has accompanied the process. But most people heralding the demise of peasantries have been enthusiastic cheerleaders for the process rather than disinterested observers, and its possible theyve enthused a little too much.

On the one hand, Marxists like Kautsky have generally tried to divvy up peasantries into the more comfortable terrain of Marxisms Ur-conflict between free-flowing capital and free-flowing labour, making landless or land-poor lower peasants over in the image of their preferred revolutionaries, the proletariat. On the other, market liberals have seen peasants as frustrated would-be capitalist entrepreneurs, waiting only for the right moment to escape the stasis of rural society and launch more lucrative careers. Given that the clash between Marxism and liberal capitalism was among the biggest historical scripts of the 20thcentury, and that peasantries were among the biggest demographic element in the period, its hardly surprising that both these forms of peasant-hustling were pretty successful in the short-term. All the major communist regimes of the period were built on the back of peasant participation, and so was a good deal of capitalist development.

Yet while few truly autarkic, pre-capitalist peasantries like the Finnish swiddeners I mentioned in myprevious posthave survived this 20thcentury politics, nevertheless small-scale farmers oriented to producing a livelihood directly from the land using low-energy, labour-intensive methods (lets call them peasants) still havent been as comprehensively eradicated as the likes of Kautsky anticipated. Why this is so remains a matter of debate. Perhaps because of a residual peasantness, a grit in the gears of modernization or a light from the past that grimly refuses to die. Or perhaps because modernization has never been quite as successful at organizing economic life as its proponents claim, leaving people to make do with peasant forms of livelihood-making. Or because modernization has been alltoosuccessful, extracting what surplus it can from impoverished rural people and then abandoning them to take care of themselves as best they can. Or because impoverished people hedge their bets in the global economy, striving to retain a footing on rural land in case other livelihood strategies fail.

The last three of these four possibilities are basically variants of the same idea, each with a particular political spin. Modern scholarship in the peasant studies field has largely devoted itself to charting this exact terrain, inking the fine detail of the encounter between peasants and capitalist development in any number of specific times and places. Yet for all its achievements, I cant help feeling that much of this scholarship will become increasingly irrelevant with the profound changes now occurring from climate change, energy descent, nature loss and political-economic crisis. These changes demand an update to Kautskys agrarian question, that Id put like this: in what ways is capital losing control of agriculture and other spheres of production, and failing to revolutionize itself adequately with the result that its smashingitself and what are the new forms of agriculture and production that will follow?

A dissident strand of agrarian populism within peasant studies has kept alive the notion that these new forms might look a lot like older ones rural, low-capital, labour-intensive, small-scale peasant production as the necessary corrective for a waning urban industrialism. This is often dismissed as mere nostalgia for the past in the face of modern progress, or an ahistorical (essentialist) romanticization of the peasantry as a kind ofsui generiscategory. The sometime editor of theJournal of Peasant Studies, Terence Byres, criticized peasant populism on these grounds in a 2004 article, along lines that are still prevalent within the discipline: To be ahistorical is to run the risk of failing to see history changing before ones very eyes . One also has a sense of circumstances being addressed, which, if they ever existed, are clearly in the past.

Yet this becomes its own epitaph. A generation ago it might have been reasonable to dismiss the relevance of peasantries to the economic future, but history has indeed been changing before our eyes. This, as people often say, is the 21stcentury and in the 21stcentury its likely that peasantization will become a major trend. This is not, it must be repeated, out of a desire to go back to an idealized past but out of a desire to go forward to a realistic and tolerable future.

But what exactly is it about peasant lifeways that makes them relevant again? Not some essence of unchanging peasantness, but basically three other things. First, rich local traditions in how to farm renewably with little capital or exogenous energy, from which much can be learned today as we face a future with similar constraints. Second, similarly rich local traditions especially where aristocratic power has been weaker in the forms of social organization conducive to a thriving agrarian society, from which we can also learn.

On this second point, for all the dismissiveness dished out to we agrarian populists for romanticizing peasantries, ironically its precisely theunromanticnature of these peasant traditions that commends them. As described in my book, numerous local farming societies thrashed out social arrangements for optimizing land use, sharing and husbanding resources, delivering welfare and managing intergenerational succession. Typically, these were hardbitten, long-term, real-world arrangements not based in the airy generalities of modern meta-theories like the markets invisible hand or the collectivization of the means of production. For sure, peasant social arrangements, like all social arrangements, werent perfect. And they were often offensive to modernist conceptions of the good life, whether capitalist, socialist or liberal an issue I wrestle with in Part III of my book.

But whatever else they were, these arrangements are informative for the issues we will face in weathering the small farm future to come more informative, at any rate, than the dubious verities of capitalism and communism weve inherited from modernist thought, as for example in these words of V.I. Lenin:

the peasantry dreamed of equal land tenure and no power on earth could have prevented them, when freed from landlordism and from the bourgeois parliamentary republican state, from trying to realize this dream. The proletarians said to the peasants: We shall help you to reach ideal capitalism, for equal tenure is the idealizing of capitalism from the point of view of small producers. At the same time we will prove to you its inadequacy and the necessity of passing to the cultivation of the land on a social basis1

Theres much in this rich passage to which I want to return in later posts. But for now Ill just suggest that the proletarians of 20thcentury communist regimes signally failed to prove the necessity of cultivating the land on a social basis (as opposed to mixed peasant economies of common and private tenure), and little now remains of their efforts on this front a point that I think needs more serious analysis than it typically gets from those on the left who still herald the virtues of collective production and the vices of private property. At the same time, profit-oriented private capitalist farming has been ecologically and socially disastrous, and it seems clear that it cant continue much longer.

Which is why I proclaim the return of the peasant in my book. Possibly I should have avoided the p word altogether in view of its heavy historical baggage. But ultimately the baggage must be confronted, whatever words we use. And this brings us to the third relevant aspect of peasant societies, namely their status ordering.

The classical question animating so much of peasant studies, especially its Marxist versions, is how peasantries differentiate into separate status groups or classes in circumstances of capitalist economic integration. But the most urgent agrarian question before us today is the reverse: how non-peasants might aggregate into unified peasantries in circumstances of capitalist economic disintegration. Im not suggesting there will be no class or status differentiation among future peasantries. On the contrary, Im anxious to identify ways to prevent it and a good deal of Parts III and IV of my book is devoted to that task, as Ill outline in later posts. But here, Ill just reiterate a simpler point made on page 95 of my book which is a necessary prior assumption for those posts: some people do actually want to be peasants, and in the future their numbers are likely to increase.

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The awkward class - Resilience

This Junes Democratic primary is only the third time since 1969 that Bronx voters get an open competition for borough leader.

Adi Talwar

In a borough with the highest COVID-19 death rate in the city, with an unemployment rate a third higher than any other county in the state, where shootings are up 20 percent this year, one might ask: Does anyone care who the Bronx borough president is? Does an office of limited powerwith no control over agencies, no decisive land-use power and a small budgetreally matter?

The people running for the post argue, not surprisingly, that the answer to both queries is yes. If nothing else, the BP is a cheerleader, champion, ambassador, and spokesperson for the Bronx.

So, who should speak for the Bronx? Should it be Councilmember Fernando Cabrera, Councilmember Vanessa Gibson, or Assemblywoman Nathalia Fernandez, who are considered the front runners? Or State Sen. Luis Sepulveda, who is facing a court date later this month over allegations he beat and choked his wife? Or ex-cop Sammy Ravelo or long-shot candidate Victor Gutierrez, who are also in the mix?

Maybe the Bronx has no need for an elected spokesperson at all. It survived the ravages of planned shrinkage in the 70s, and crack wars of the 80s, thanks to the courage and smarts of community activists. Yet the disparate interests of wealthy Riverdale, middle-class Morris Park, low-income Hunts Point and points between argue for a person in government to advocate for the borough that, lets face it, is different from the others: With its high poverty rate and 25 percent parkland, rich culture and association with urban blight, the Bronx has unique needs and its own story.

A rare open seat

Borough presidents have been part of that tale. Over the past 34 years, there have only been three beeps in the Bronx.

From 1987 through 2001, Fernando Ferrer helped shape the rebuilding of the borough, especially under Mayor Kochs Ten-Year Plan for housing. Adolfo Carrion, BP from 2002 into 2009, steered controversial development projects like the new Yankee Stadium and Bronx Terminal Market. And over the past 12 years, Ruben Diaz, Jr., has been a relentless cheerleader for investment: According to his most recent development report, $23 billion in investment and 55,295 residential units (about half of them government subsidized) have taken root in the Bronx during Diazs tenure.

Diaz came to power in a special election in 2009 after Carrion left early for a post in the Obama administration. Ferrer was appointed to the office in 87 upon the resignation of Stanley Simon, who himself was appointed to the job when Robert Abrams became attorney general in 1978.

That means this Junes Democratic primaryand since the Bronx has a 13:1 Democratic registration advantage, thats tantamount to electionis only the third time since 1969 that Bronx voters get an open competition for borough leader, and only the second time on a regular election timetable.

Sizing up soft power

Borough presidents used to wield more power in New York City, sitting on the Board of Estimate that controlled the budget and land use, but a Supreme Court case and charter revision changed that in 1989. Now borough presidents have an advisory voice on land-use applications, appoint community board members, monitor the delivery of city services and control a small portion of the citys capital budget. They can propose legislation to the City Council. The Bronx beeps annual budget of $6.5 million is more than the public advocates or Independent Budget Offices bankroll, but only about 4 percent of the budget for the mayors office.

Despite the limitations of the post, there are substantive ideas in the 2021 race. Most revolve around the idea that the borough president wields substantial soft power as a spokesperson for a borough of 1.4 million peoplemore than live in Dallas or San Francisco.

Fernandez4NY

I see the office as certainly a powerful place of influence, Fernandez says. While we dont have that voting power, we still have a loud platform, a strong voice. She sees the BP as a mini public advocate office bringing light to issues, presenting solutions, and working with partners in government to get solutions enacted.

A former aide to Mark Gjonaj in Assembly, Fernandez won a special election in 2018 to fill Gjonajs seat when he moved to the City Council. Shes been re-elected twice. Shes passed two standalone bills, but other proposals she authored have worked their way into omnibus legislation, including a measure aimed at avoiding deaths of people in custody. Sen. Elizabeth Warren endorsed her 2018 reelection, and Assemblymembers Michael Blake, Kenny Burgos and Chantel Jackson are backing her BP bid. Asked about her relative newness on the scene, she says, Ive been working in the state Assembly and state government my entire career. Ive certainly had great experience in government and Im ready to build on my experience. I dont think its too early.

Fernandez says simply winning the office would reflect progress for Bronx leadership since she would be the first woman and first Latina to be elected borough president. Beyond that, one of the things we have to really address is the job loss weve experienced. We need to do everything we can to make sure small businesses rebuild, including potentially using the BP office to connect small businesses to bank loans.

She also feels remote learning is, to some degree, going to be part of student life for the next couple years. So I want to look towards getting free Wi-Fi for the borough through public-private partnerships, she says. We see it a necessity, not a luxury.

Fernandez also says she would put pressure on the feds to fully fund repairs to public housing.

The pastors record

Emil Cohen/NYC Council

Cabrera, a pastor, is in his third term on the Council, where he has passed 30 pieces of legislation, including measures on video conferencing for youth in secure detention facilities, reporting on environmental data in schools and measures affecting the for-hire vehicle industry. Hes gotten more notoriety for other moves, however, like threatening to scuttle the Kingsbridge Armory plan if developers didnt commit $100,000 to a defunct nonprofit Cabrera once ran, his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and comments in 2014 that appeared to endorse anti-gay policies in Uganda.

Cabrera now says he accepts Roe v Wade and gay marriage as the law of the land, and points to his voting record in the Council on LGBT issues: He voted yes on bills banning conversion therapy, calling for a study on the health needs of LGBT youth, and adding gender pronoun questions to official city forms. In 2014, he did vote against measures permitting gender marker changes on birth certificates.

In recent months, Cabrera has criticized the restrictions the state imposed on restaurants during the pandemic, and has advocated for 50 percent indoor dining occupancy instead of 25. He has also faulted the city for not putting more money into helping small businesses, especially those in the Bronx.

If elected, Cabrera says hell push for science labs in every school, more vocational and technical schools, an all-girls school in the Bronx and a harbor high school attached to SUNY Maritime College. He wants to site wellness centers in schools and to create year-round farmers markets. A supporter of community land trusts in the past, he pledges to continue to foster them.

Cabrera says things like a salsa museum could revive tourism to the Bronx. Noting that the borough presidents $17 million annual capital budget is not a small amount of money, he promises to put capital funds behind more fully accessible senior housing, as well as more bus shelters and bus timers.

One of the earliest champions of the Cure Violence approach to shootings, Cabrera says that approach will be key to reducing violent crime in the Bronx. But it wont be enough to defeat gang violence. Were going to have to be very creative and very intentional in helping people in the Bronx create businesses and create jobs and that will have an effect on crime, he says. Whenever you provide jobs and an educational pathway for those young people to bounce back, they dont go back to the life.

He is not a supporter of defunding the police. This city is under constant threat from the outside. We want to make sure we have protection. Ive seen what happens when we dont have that level of protection we need, he says, in reference to the September 11 attacks. The people of the community are saying no to defunding.

A focus on health

An Assemblymember for four years before being elected to the Council in 2013, Gibson has been the primary sponsor on 18 bills that became law. One established a school siting task force, while others required the city to formulate a 10-year food policy plan and cracked down on tenant harassment. Shes taken flak for endorsing breakaway Democrat Jeff Klein in 2014 and for the $5,000 fine she paid the Conflict of Interest Board for trying to get out of a traffic ticket in 2014. But she recently nabbed the endorsement of the stalwartly LGBTQ-friendly Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, despite her voting against gay marriage in Albany because, a club leader said, she had evolved on the issue.

Gibson says her blend of state and city government experience equips her well to run borough hall. Shes focusing on health issues.

William Alatriste/NYC Council

I am always reminded that the Bronx has the highest death rate because of COVID-19. The vaccination is here. We have to make sure there is an equitable distribution, she says. But there are longer term issues, she adds.

We have to deal with access to affordable and low-cost healthcare, especially for the underemployed, and she says shell work to create partnerships that connect families with insurance and primary care. Gibson also connects health to food access, with an expanded healthbucks program, year-round farmers markets and more intensive use of the FRESH program to encourage supermarket development.

I really want to achieve universal heathy food. No matter what ZIP code youre in, your neighborhood, how much is in your bank account, you should have healthy food for your family, she says. That means the development of more urban farming and leveraging the food distribution infrastructure in Hunts Point. I want to find a way where produce at the Terminal Market does stay in the borough. Theres a lot of creative things we should do with our own treasures here in the Bronx.

The connection of health to housing is also important, she says: Many in the Bronx live with mold and lead paint and asbestos and that leads to heath problems, too. She backs community land trusts and expanded home ownership, and wants to adjust the term sheets that govern existing housing subsidy programs, as well as push the feds and Albany to calibrate the value of housing vouchers to the Bronx market.

The ULURP process really has to be revamped, Gibson says. Theres not much civic engagement, and the community board really only has an advisory voice. We need to find them new tools.

A former chair of the Councils public safety committee, Gibson supports the crisis management system approach to reducing violence. Its too easy to get a gun. But the fact that so many of our young people are able to use a gun is equally as troubling, she says.

On the calls for a smaller NYPD budget, she says: I get it and I really understand but I was not a fan of the defund phrase because decimating the NYPD budget is going to hurt communities of color that need a cop present, although she adds, we cant keep relying on the cops to save us from ourselves.

Gibson and Cabrera both played a leading role in one of the biggest public policy decisions in the Bronx of recent years: The 2018 Jerome Avenue Rezoning, which affected parts of both their districts. The pair negotiated with the city to improve the deal, then voted for it, against some opposition in the community.

A more conservative voice

Ravelo, a Dominican immigrant, served in the Gulf War and then joined the NYPD, where he did undercover work for more than 25 years, served on the fugitive enforcement unit and reached the rank of lieutenant. He ran in the 16th Congressional district Democratic primary last year, placing fourth in the race where Jamaal Bowman unseated Rep. Eliot Engel.

When you take the diaphragm bill, the city budget taking funding from the police department, the Bronx being last in every major issueeducation, housing, public safety, healthcare outcomes, Ravelo says, he feels that theres ample reason to reject people whove been in power. The career politicians that are running right now are part of the reason that we are always last.

Ravelo says education is his top issue, but he has strong opinions on public safety: He attributes 70 percent of the violent crime spike over the past year to what he deems misguided police reforms. When you dial up the temperature and the anti-police rhetoric in any neighborhood, the criminal element knows this. And what happens now is they go out knowing the police are going to be restrained a certain extent. He also believes that police-community relations were on the mend in New York City before George Floyd was killed in Minnesota.

SammyforBx

Ravelo is also concerned that the Bronx is going to become the homeless hub of New York City. He says, Thats where theyre going to dump all the homeless people. His education plan calls for more trade schools, tuition-free community college and the cancellation of student debtthough the latter two ideas would be tough for a borough president to pursue. Asked if he might run in the general election as a Republican, Ravelo was not definitive; Right now I am concentrating on the Democratic primary. I am not looking ahead to the general election and staying in the race. Thats the answer I am giving.

Sepulvedas campaign did not respond to a request for an interview. He faces a Feb. 24 court hearing on charges on misdemeanor assault, criminal obstruction of breathing and second degree harassment stemming from a Jan. 9 incident involving his wife. Sepulveda joined the State Senate in 2018 after five years in the Assembly and has championed progressive causes, including Sen. Bernie Sanders 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

The sixth candidate in the race, Gutierrez, has raised little money. His Twitter profile promises that he will be The First Bronx Borough President to Create The Most Jobs in The Bronx And Make It The Best Place to Live in The World.

The X factors

The borough presidency is sometimes described as a stepping stone. The record is mixed. David Dinkins was Manhattans BP before becoming mayor; his two successor beeps, Ruth Messinger and C. Virginia Fields, ran for mayor but fell short. A current president, Brooklyns Eric Adams, and a former Manhattan beep, Scott Stringer, are leading candidates in this years mayoral election.

Ferrer ran for mayor three times, and was the Democratic nominee in 2005, gamely challenging the majesty of the very deep-pocketed Mayor Bloomberg but losing decisively. Hes now the vice-chairman of the MTA. Carrion served as the first director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, a cabinet-level post, then ran for mayor in 2013 as a Republican and then as an Independent; he finished third with less than 1 percent of the vote. Diaz abandoned his 2021 campaign months ago, and its not clear what the future holds for him.

What the future holds for those running to replace Diaz probably doesnt only hinge on their vision for the office. With the Bronx Democratic organization promising to remain neutral in the contest, endorsements from big-name pols and unions will matter a lot. So will money, and on that count, Cabrera has a large advantage: hes outraised all his rivals and underspent a couple of them, and has $120,000 in the bank, more than twice as much as anyone else. If the Campaign Finance Board honors all the matching-fund claims filed by the field, everyone should have enough to wage a legitimate campaign, but Cabrera will still have the most firepower. A quarter of his money has come from outside the city (about 20 percent of Gibsons has) and Cabrera has accepted cash from both city and statewide landlord lobbying groups and from landlord Ved Parkash, a notorious evictor.

Its impossible to ignore the role identity might play in the race. The Bronx is 30 percent Black and 56 percent Latino. Gibson, who is Black, is the only non-Latino in the race. Dominicans are the largest Latino group. Ravelo is Dominican. Sepulveda is Puerto Rican. Cabrera has mixed Dominican-Puerto Rican heritage and Fernandez is Cuban and Colombian.

Ravelo suspects his Dominican heritage will be a boon to his candidacy: Im not going to be the Dominican candidate but there will be a lot of support in that sense. He also believes ranked-choice voting could lead to surprising outcomes in the race. The first point is debatable. The second is almost certainly true.

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In the Bronx, a Rare Open Seat for the Next Borough President - City Limits

The Nova Scotia government says it plans to establish up to 20 new parks and protected areas, a pledge it says will achieve the government's goal of protecting 13 per cent of the province's land.

Environment Minister Gordon Wilson made the announcement today, adding that Canada's second-smallest province has become a leader in conserving unique habitats, coastline and biodiversity.

Wilson issued a statement saying the next step is a 60-day online consultation process.

Twelve of the sites will be subject to the formal consultation process, while the other eight sites were listed as "intended for protection."

The announcement came less than a week before Premier Stephen McNeil is expected to step down at a weekend leadership convention that will select a new party leader.

Since 2013, the province's Liberal government has protected more than 150 sites, including areas that provide habitat for Atlantic salmon, the endangered mainland moose and many species of migratory birds.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2021.

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Nova Scotia government poised to add 20 sites to its list of parks and protected area - CTV News Atlantic

A small plot of land tucked away between Rover Way, Cardiff, and the Severn Estuary has a dirty history.

The land behind the Celsa steelworks in Splott is also set to have a dirty future as the planned home of a power plant burning wood chippings.

Developers Parc Calon Gwyrdd recently received renewed planning permission to build a biomass plant on the 16.5-hectare site, potentially burning 75,000 tonnes of virgin timber shipped from Latvia each year, and generating 9.5 megawatts of energy.

But before that can be built, the developers need to carry out an extensive clean up job, removing 1,000,000 tonnes of rubble and old car parts stripped of steel. The work is needed to prevent harmful chemicals from the landfill leaking into the estuary.

The dirty history of the site was revealed in documents filed as part of the original planning application in 2017. An environmental statement, written by planning agents Geraint John Planning on behalf of the developer, details how the site was used as a dumping ground.

The site was reclaimed from the estuary in the 1970s, according to the environmental statement, with eight metres of blast furnace slag from the neighbouring steelworks. Old cars stripped of their scrap metal by the steelworks were then dumped on the land for decades.

But the cocktail of hazardous chemicals from the old car parts created two risks: pockets of gas underground exploding, and water seeping through the landfill, running off and polluting the estuary.

At the turn of the century, work was done on the site to make it safe. This included a passive gas venting system to stop pockets of gas building up, and a site-wide MDPE membrane to prevent the water running off to the foreshore.

But a few years later, rubble from the construction of the St Davids 2 shopping centre was also dumped on the site, blocking off the gas vents and potentially rupturing the protective plastic membrane.

The design statement, submitted in the original planning application for the power plant, explained the problem: A large amount of uncertified fill from sites such as St Davids 2 was deposited on the site, rendering a substantive amount of the remediation ineffective.

Around this time Cardiff council which owns the land built a motocross track on the site. The Foreshore Motocross Club works with troubled teenagers, to prevent illegal off-road motorbiking, and helps them stay in education and get into work.

Cardiff council did not respond to questions about whether an alternative site would be found for the club, now that developers want to build a power plant there.

Documents from the Land Registry show Cardiff council entered into a lease agreement with the biomass developers Parc Calon Gwyrdd in 2019. However, the council said the decision to lease the land was first taken in 2014.

The decision to lease the land for a wood-burning power plant has been questioned by opposition councillors, given the councils commitment to reducing carbon emissions and air pollution. Campaigners claim burning wood emits more carbon than burning coal.

Liberal Democrat Cllr Emma Sandrey said: We would urge the council not to lease the land for this. Your actions have to align with your words. But they say one thing and do another. Its going to be feeding demand for trees to be cut down in other parts of the world.

Conservative Cllr John Lancaster said: Cutting down forest in Latvia to burn over here isnt quite so environmentally friendly. The fact the council owns the land makes it a more of a political question rather than a planning decision.

If they wanted to use it for something else, they clearly could do. They could put solar panels there, or small industrial units for start up businesses. If they wanted to take that position, they could do it.

There was nothing in the One Planet strategy about this idea. They dont mention it, which suggests to me that they realised how controversial it would be, so they kept it out of the consultation.

Cardiff councils One Planet strategy sets out how the city can get to carbon neutral by 2030, including plans to plant thousands of trees which absorb carbon dioxide and air pollution.

While burning wood for energy legally counts as renewable, doubts are mounting about how green woody biomass is. Several recent investigations link rising demand for woody biomass subsidised by the UK government with deforestation in eastern Europe.

Gareth Ludkin, of Friends of the Earth, said: The woody biomass which is to be shipped in from Latvia and burned in this plant is not a clean or green form of energy. We should be protecting forests and planting more trees rather than cutting them down.

The Drax power plant in Yorkshire already burns more wood than the UK produces in a year and this plant will only fan the flames of greater deforestation in Europe and beyond without regulation.

Science already tells us that burning wood produces more CO2 than burning coal, and at a time when we are supposed to be phasing out coal alongside plans to restrict or ban the use of wood burners and open fires at home, it's absolutely crazy that government policy continues to allow the burning of wood for profit under the guise of green energy.

A Cardiff council spokesman said the decision to sell the lease on the land was made in 2014, prior to the election of the current administration. This is documented through an officer decision report at that time.

The spokesman said: The council is scheduled to meet with the developer, Parc Calon, in the near future to discuss the developers detailed proposals going forward.

However, it is important to point out that any renewable energy plant, whatever the technology proposed, is strictly regulated both through the planning process and by the regulator, Natural Resources Wales.

Parc Calon Gwyrdd has no online presence and no contact details could be found for the company. Emails sent to architects and planning agents involved in the plans, asking for contact details of Parc Calon Gwyrdd, were not answered.

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The dirty history of the Splott land proposed for a power plant - Wales Online

Migrants from Haiti stand near the Zaragoza-Ysleta International Bridge after being deported from the United States in Ciudad Jurez, Mexico, on Feb. 3, 2021.

Photo: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

The celebratory clamor surrounding President Joe Bidens 100-day deportation moratorium was short-lived, as a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause on deportation within a few days of its announcement. Even though the court order did not require the Biden administration to proceed with deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement swiftly deported hundreds of people to Guatemala, Honduras, and Jamaica anyway.

Marking the start of Black History Month, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an advocacy group, blasted Bidens refusal to stop ICE and tweeted, Nothing about this admins values + actions give us confidence that Black people will be prioritized in the new national agenda. Continued detention & hastened deportations are a sounding alarm for whats to come. They and other immigrant rights organizations point out that the moratorium does not mandate the release of detainees from ICE prisons, and one person has already died in ICE custody under Bidens watch. As organizers withMijente,a grassroots organization made up of Latinx and Chicanxpeople, have said, Joe Bidens current plan a de facto return to the Obama years would mean more desperation, more deportations, and more death.

That community pressure seems to have workedfor now. Following the outcry from the immigrant rights community, the Department of Homeland Securityhalted deportation flightsto Haiti, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The immigrant rights movement will inevitably find itself in an ongoing battle with Biden and his ilk of liberal-centrists, especially when the administration attempts to force through future compromises over who gets to stay and under what conditions, and who is disposable and deportable. To effectively confront those state efforts at divide and rule, movement activists must understand how central Democrats have been to shaping abhorrent U.S. border policy and must refuse to sanitize the Democratic Partys shameful record.

While former President Donald Trumps overtly malicious policies of separating families, caging children, banning Black and brown Muslims, and building the border wall garnered international condemnation, cruel policies of immigration enforcement are a pillar of Democrats governance. The rhetoric of productive and legal immigrants, with the simultaneous demonization of criminal and illegal immigrants, has been the cornerstone of the partys immigration platform for three decades. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, an entire immigration enforcement apparatus bent on expanding detention and deportation, criminalizing migration through prosecutions, militarizing the border, and imperialist outsourcing of border enforcement was cemented.

A boy on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border watches as U.S.Army engineers extend the border wall on the outskirts of Nogales, Ariz., on April 10, 1995.

Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The Clinton years normalized the most severe consequences of border militarization and mass detention. In 1994, as Clinton was signing the North American Free Trade Agreement to ensure the free movement of capital, the Army Corps of Engineers was fencing the border to constrict the movement of the very people displaced by this latest iteration of neoliberal capitalist warfare. Border Patrol tripled in size to become the second-largest enforcement agency at the time, and operations such as Hold the Line in Texas, Gatekeeper in California, and Safeguard in Arizona militarized the border under the official strategy of prevention through deterrence. Within six years of funneling migration toward the more dangerous Sonoran Desert, Arizona uplands, and southern Texas brush, border deaths what we should more accurately label as premeditated border killings increased by 509 percent.

Clintons tough on immigration strategy converged with his tough on crime policies. In 1996, Clinton passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. These statutes mobilized the dehumanizing rhetoric of crime, drugs, illegals to expand the category of aggravated felony convictions and widen the net for detention and deportation of legal permanent residents with minor convictions stemming from stop-and-frisk policing and the war on drugs. The laws also fast-tracked deportation, mandated detention for many, and imposed criminal penalties for unauthorized border crossings. Within a few years, average daily detentions tripled, and deportations shot up to an average of 150,000 annually.

Decades later, tough on crime and tough on immigration policies continued to have devastating impacts. By 2009, about half of the people ICE detained had come on its radar through the Criminal Alien Program, which uses collaborations between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement as a pipeline for expulsion.

Crossesrepresenting some of the thousands of migrants who died attempting to cross into the U.S. between 1998 and 2004 as Operation Gatekeeper was enacted are seen on the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, on Jan. 29, 2006.

Photo: Omar Torres/AFP via Getty Images

Clintons punitive crime and welfare laws also intensified neoliberal impoverishment. The 1994 crime laws expanded police and prisons and mandated harsher sentences while the 1996 welfare laws barred many people with drug convictions from accessing benefits and slashed welfare, especially for single teenage mothers. The war on crime, like the war on drugs, pathologized Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Indigenous and other racialized cultures as the cause of poverty, whenstructural inequality was actually an inevitable consequence of racial capitalism.

As Naomi Murakawa explains on the long arc of the carceral crisis, The US did not confront a crime problem that was then racialized; it confronted a race problem that was then criminalized. The particular association of Black communities with both welfare benefits and crime gave legitimacy to policies of austerity thatshrank the welfare state while policies of law and order expanded the carceral state. The simultaneous production and policing of precarity is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment alongside organized violence. The prison industrial complex exploded to enforce both poverty and confinement on deliberately gendered and racial lines,a modern method of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous genocide, giving the U.S. the shameful honor of having the worlds highest incarceration rate.

Police, prisons, and borders all operate by immobilizing the people caught in their crosshairs.

It was this expanding neoliberal carceral state, including the largest immigration detention system on the planet, that provided the material foundation for Trumps horrific immigration concentration camps and, subsequently, thousands of mobilizations to demand their closure. At the same time, abolitionist uprisings in response to the cold-blooded police murders of Black trans and cis men and women George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery exposed the irreformable brutality of carceral institutions.

Police, prisons, and borders all operate by immobilizing the people caught in their crosshairs. Notably, the word mob, a criminalizing vocabulary used to link large groups of poor, racialized people to social disorder in inner cities and at the border, derives from the word mobility. Angela Davis and Gina Dent write, We continue to find that the prison is itself a border. Drawing on Davis and Dent, we can say that the prison is a border and the border is a prison. Indeed, the U.S.-Mexico border was formed between 1846 and 1850 by annexing over 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory, capturing Indigenous lands, and punishing Black movement through the Fugitive Slave Act. The violent transformation of land and people into racial property sanctioned global white citizenship; meanwhile, racialized migration was scrutinized and controlled. The border is thus at once domestic and global, and a world without police, prisons, private property, militaries, and borders is a necessarily interconnected abolitionist horizon of freedom.

Dozens of U.S.-born children from across the country traveled to the White House with their undocumented parentsto call on President Barack Obama to keep his campaign promise of comprehensive immigration reform on July 28, 2010, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A decade after Clinton, Obama also spent billions of dollars securing the border, and during his tenure, border and immigration enforcement budgets began to outpace the budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. In 2010, Obama ordered more than 1,000 troops to the border before signing legislation to increase the number of Border Patrol agents and expand the borders virtual surveillance systems. Private contractors making a killing through war contracts were also granted billions of dollars to build the virtual wall with their promises of infallible high-tech drone surveillance.

Depictions of domestic and foreign threats merged.Unmanned aerial vehicles were first tested on the U.S.-Mexico border beforethey were used in drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan. Obama dropped 26,171 bombs an average of three bombs every hour mostly through air strikes and drone warfare on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan in 2016. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Defense acquired the largest drone fleets of all state agencies; thus boomeranged the war at home and the war abroad.

Obama earned the moniker of deporter-in-chief for overseeing 3 million deportations, which he accomplished by weaponizing good immigrants against bad immigrants. Like Clinton, his administration prioritized deporting noncitizens with criminal records. Before introducing his much-lauded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, knownasDACA, protections, Obama signaled his intention to increase enforcement against undesirables with the Secure Communities program: Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom whos working hard to provide for her kids.

Obama turbocharged the Secure Communities initiative until 2014, under which over 1,000 local law enforcement jurisdictions were linked to ICE and FBI databases, nearly doubling deportation rates. By 2014, about half of all federal criminal arrests were immigration-related. That same year, following a surge of unaccompanied minors at the border, Obama laid the foundation for incarcerating migrant families by detaining them in camps on military bases, which then escalated to forced family separation and hundreds of missing children under Trump. In fact, several of the photographs of children in cages that went viral during Trumps presidency were actually taken during the Obama years.

Obama laid the foundation for incarcerating migrant families by detaining them in camps on military bases, which then escalated to forced family separation and hundreds of missing children under Trump.

Similarly, the groundwork for the terror of Trumps Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as the Remain in Mexico program a program that allows U.S. border officials to return asylum-seekers back to Mexico as they await their hearings, which has trappedtens of thousands of Central American and African migrants in teeming tent camps was laid by Obamas imperial outsourcing of border enforcement. Though Biden has directed Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to review the MPP protocols, he has made no mention of the extensive network of migration prevention protocols that predate them.

Initiated by President George W. Bush and vastly expanded under Obama, the multibillion-dollar U.S.-Mexico Mrida Initiative provides funding to Mexican police and border agents and has created a battery of police and migration checkpoints beginning all the way in southern Chiapas and ending at the U.S.-Mexico border. Mrida and its counterpart, the Central American Regional Security Initiative, paramilitarize the entire landscape through the triad of the war on drugs, the war on Indigenous lands, and the war on migrants.

The U.S. also funds immigration enforcement in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico through the Grupo Conjunto de Inteligencia Fronteriza. Shortly after the U.S. launched the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize Border Region Program, Homeland Security officials declaredthat the Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border, thus solidifying this new frontier of U.S. border militarization.

Biden has announced that he will halt border wall construction, but theoutsourcing of borderpolicy, a system perfected by Obama, will allow the Biden administration to strengthen an entire fortress stretching far beyond the symbolic border wall itself. Just as Biden took office, thousands of migrants from Honduras headed toward the U.S. were blockaded and tear-gassed by Guatemalan soldiers and police. Instead of condemning the crackdown or implicating the long arc of U.S. dirty colonial coups, enforced capitalist trade agreements extracting land and labor, or climate change causing displacement and migration, a senior official in the Biden administration warned the caravan against making the journey.

Though less visible than the horrific images of immigration raids and overflowing detention centers within the U.S., borderoutsourcing is a more sophisticated and dangerous enforcement method aimed at preventing migrants from even reaching the southern U.S. border. Immigration diplomacy through the soft power of aid agreements or outright threats of trade war has compelled various Latin American countries to accept outsourced migration controls. Imperialism is already a root cause of global migration, and now the management of global migration through outsourcing the enforcement of the border is also becoming a means of preserving imperial relations and outsourcing U.S. policies of migrant repression.

Activists listen to a speaker during a protest calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 3, 2020.

Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Under Biden in the coming years, the catastrophic effects of climate disasters displacing one person every two seconds will likely escalate talk of refugee invasion or border crisis. Climate migrants and refugees will be declared the new migration crisis, and the U.S. border will hypocritically be positioned as a victim. Languagelike migrant crisis depicts migrants and refugees as the cause of an imagined crisis at the U.S. border while conveniently erasing the role of the U.S. as a primary driver of the actual crises of global capitalism, conquest, and climate change.

The far right will feed us eco-apartheid drivel about migrant and refugee swarms ruining our environment, stealing our jobs, draining our services, infecting our neighborhoods, and tainting our values. This dangerous nationalist and ruling-class ideology will deflect responsibility from the underlying systems producing mass inequality in our warming world by conveniently scapegoating foreigners. In response to revanchism, the Biden administration will peddle tired old liberal centrism. We will be offered the shallow politics of humanitarianism, such as Welcome refugees, or liberal multiculturalism proclaiming, We are all from somewhere, or commodifying platitudes such as Immigrants build our economy.

But our movements must refuse Bidens banal liberal center. Calls to abolish ICE, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection,and all immigration enforcement must replace assimilationist calls for immigration reform that rely on white supremacist and cisheteronormative distinctions between good and undeserving migrants. Criminality and illegality are both political constructions within which proving ones innocence or respectability is a frustrating and inherently impossible political stance.

Just as migrant justice must not endorse categories of desirable or undesirable, we must also refuse gestures of charitable humanitarianism, tropes of grateful refugees migrating to modernity, the commodification of immigrant labor to benefit capital accumulation, and carceral regimes as legitimate institutions of governance. Instead, we must make clear: not one more detention, not one more deportation, and immigration status and labor protections for all.

We must also go further and reject the normalization of the colonial border that casts racialized people as perpetual outsiders, erases Indigenous nations, reproduces an anti-Black social order, fortifies the West against the rest, deflates labor power, and is the ideological basis for all immigration policies. After all, the borders of settler states are illegal; human beings are never illegal.

This article is adapted from Harsha Walias forthcoming book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, February 9, 2021), with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley and an afterword by Nick Estes. Excerpts are included here with permission of the publisher.

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Confronting the Long Arc of US Border Policy - The Intercept

Last year, your writer noted that the federal Liberals were committed to closing the BC salmon farming industry. Three weeks ago, they began the process and closed down 19 fish farms near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. That follows the closure of salmon farms on Broughton Inlet on the west coast of the island. In both cases, the feds never bothered to consult with the industry and workers affected by the closures. The feds stated that closures resulted from consultation with seven First Nations, most of whom are not involved in the fish farming business. There is no surprise there; federal Liberals are infamous for consulting only with folks who agree with their predetermined policy decisions.Such major closures have an inevitable impact on the remaining industry as it makes processing plants, fish transportation and related service industries uneconomic and subject to closure. That makes remaining open-net fish farms unviable, so they too will likely close. The federal Liberals want the entire industry gone by 2025. Also gone will be the 7,000 jobs and close to a billion dollars in economic activity. The feds coldheartedly refer to those job losses as a transition and try to deflect the consequences by throwing out smokescreens of delusions. Those include the usual pie in the sky promises of more green economy jobs. The other cruel deception is that sustainable land-based salmon farms will be built in BC coastal communities that lost all those jobs and revenue. I suspect even economics-ignorant federal Liberals and NDP know that will not happen in any impacted areas. The only reason open-net salmon farms are located in remote BC coastal areas is that the open net production process is the cheapest way to raise farmed salmon. Once you remove the only economic advantage to being there, the operators will quit and not return. They will move to other coastal areas in the world where governments welcome the jobs and economic activity. Federal Liberals, in their duplicitous political machinations, stated that they want to transition the industry to locally-based land-based fish farms. Virtually anybody connected to the fish farming business knows that there is no economic business case to be made for any land-based fish farming anywhere in BC. High tech massive land-based fish farms are being built, but in Indiana, Florida and California, even one is being considered for Ontario. They are in those areas because they are closer to main consumer markets and are being built in jurisdictions that are much more business-friendly than eco-socialist NDP BC. Global fish farming businesses are investing up to $100 million for each high-tech facility. They are the future and involve closed water systems, GE salmon, more favourable climates, plant protein feed sources and outstanding economies of scale. They are more expensive to operate than open-net farms, but technology will mitigate that over time. New open-net fish farms are opening in Chile, but they are far from major consumer markets. In true political hypocrisy, the federal Liberals are trying to encourage new open-net salmon operations in Atlantic Canada, but severe winter weather conditions make that a most difficult alternative.What is astonishing is that the BC and federal NDP party support the closure of the open-net fishery and the subsequent loss of 7,000 jobs on Vancouver Island. Neither has condemned the federal action and job losses. Amazingly the area affected by this economic devastation is represented by the NDP federally and provincially what were these voters thinking. Lest we forget, the NDP still self-righteously claims to be the workers party just not open net fishery workers or any resource worker for that matter. BC commentators state the closure situation is a victim of the crossfire between federal Liberal and NDP political-strategic maneuvering to garner votes in Vancouver and Victoria. Both parties are trying to out-green each other to capture urban eco-socialist votes. How callous and brutal can governments be that they are prepared to sacrifice the livelihoods of thousands of workers in the name of green political correctness and political power. Of course, we in Alberta know all about the political ruthlessness of federal liberals and their NDP allies. Both national parties are determined to wipe out our resource-based economy to appease the sacred privileged elitist voters of urban eastern Canada. To those folks on Vancouver Island now being hung out to dry by the ruthless federal Liberals and NDP welcome to the club.

Will Verboven is an ag opinion writer and ag policy advisor.

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Trudeau government moves to destroy another resource industry BC and Federal NDP silence is deafening - Brooks Bulletin

During the coming two weeks, the maximum temperature in Urbana, Illinois, will be minus 2 degrees Celsius. Thats the projection. The minimum will go down, it seems, to minus 22. Other places in North America will be even colder.

These readings are a prod for not forgetting the kisans protesting on Delhis borders: Their nights and days spent in the open, close to menacing spikes, ditches, barbed wire and concrete blockades, many of them denied water, most of them barred from the internet.

Even if ameliorative attempts are made, this picture of inhumanity will haunt for decades the leaders and supporters of Indias current government. It will paint them in hues of shame in history books. In due course, some members of the current regime will try to explain that they privately tried to soften the regimes response. It will be too late for their reputations.

Here in the US, at least some leaders of the Republican Party have spoken up in time, and openly, against the excesses of Trump and his hardcore supporters. Two of Americas strongest conservative voices, Kentuckys Mitch McConnell and Wyomings Liz Cheney, have led the way. McConnell, the Senates majority leader until the other day, is the man most responsible for turning the Supreme Court conservative. Cheney is the daughter of Dick Cheney, George W Bushs well-known vice president and a core architect of the Iraq War.

Because she had voted to impeach him, Trump and his henchmen did everything in their power to remove Liz Cheney from her third position in the Republican Partys hierarchy in the House of Representatives. Putting on direct pressure, Trump made multiple phone calls to members, but the bid was overwhelmingly defeated, 145 to 61, thanks in part to secret balloting.

The partys Trumpist base is large, loud and intimidating, but its anti-extremist and pro-democracy wing seems finally to be finding its spine.

Those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 enjoy considerable support across this land. Trumpism has become a cult with fanatical members believing that liberal Americans are traitors who, in alliance with Jews and foreigners, will destroy this country. White supremacy is the cults unconcealed purpose, even when the words are not pronounced. Its symbols are the cross, the American flag, the Confederate flag, and the gun all four joined to one another!

The seeming silence of leaders of Americas popular churches in face of this cult has been a curious element in the American scene. While Black pastors and progressive White clergy have spoken out strongly against Trump and against White supremacy, the strong support for Trump from men like Frank Graham, son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, does little for American Christianity.

In less than two years, the US will have congressional elections, where the usual pattern is for the party controlling the White House to lose seats. While this may well be repeated in end-2022, the Republican schism that has occurred could work in favour of the Democrats.

How Biden will negotiate the old progressive versus moderate divide in his own party is another obvious question, but the pandemic with its troubling variants and Trumpisms dangers should be two powerful unifying forces for the Democrats and indeed for the US as a whole.

The political impact of the Senates trial of Trump is not easy to predict. There are suggestions that Trumps obsession for re-litigating the electoral verdict will hurt the main defence argument, which is that the legal provision for impeaching the president cannot apply to a former president.

While strongly criticising Trumps refusal to accept his loss and also the insurrection of January 6, McConnell has so far held that an ex-president cannot be impeached, which is also the position taken by the vast majority of Republican senators. Since it requires 67 votes in a 100-member senate, impeachment looks unlikely.

A formal failure to impeach may not necessarily rehabilitate Trump, and a re-enactment during the trial of his hostility towards the democratic process could weaken Trumpism.

While waiting and watching, all of us will keep a steady eye on Delhi, the farmers and the regime. An obvious question is: Who in the BJP or the Hindutva parivaar are the counterparts of McConnell and Liz Cheney? Quiet disapproval of Modi-Shahs policies and responses must exist within the parivaar. Common sense tells us that. Competitive human nature ensures that.

In due course, whenever that may be, we will find out about the ones secretly questioning.

Meanwhile, as we return our gaze to the borders of Delhi and to the farmers in whose face the doors of humanity and respect have been slammed shut, another question may be asked. It is similar to the one about voices for democracy within Americas churches.

Where are the voices of conscience from exponents of the Hindu faith?

This article first appeared in the print edition on February 8, 2021, under the title Hindutvas conscience keepers.The writer is currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Like Republicans against Trumpism, dissenters within BJP must speak up - The Indian Express