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For Immediate Release
November, 24 2008, 11:00am EDT
Contact:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
The Economy and Transition
WASHINGTON
CRAIG HOLMAN
Holman is government ethics lobbyist for Public Citizen. He said today: "Bolstered with enthusiastic public support, Obama has a great opportunity for breaking the grip of special interests over Washington. But his transition to the White House -- marked with the appointment of several lobbyists and big-money bundlers -- is cause for concern. Public Citizen will be monitoring his appointments on a web site and uncovering any links that may exist between special interests and the new Obama administration."
MARK WEISBROT
Lawrence Summers and Timothy F. Geithner were named to Obama's economic team today.
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Weisbrot said today: "Geithner and Summers are credited with expertise in crisis management, but we better hope they don't manage the current crisis like they did in East Asia, Russia, Argentina or any of the other countries that Treasury was involved in during the 1990s with their help. They helped bring on the East Asian crisis in 1997 by pressuring the governments in the region to de-regulate international financial flows, which was the main cause of the crisis. Then they insisted that all bailout money go through the IMF, and delayed aid until most of the damage was done. Then they attached damaging conditions ... to the aid, leading Jeffrey Sachs to call the IMF under their watch 'the typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country.'"
MAX FRAAD WOLFF
Wolff, an instructor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University, is a frequent contributor to Huffington Post, Asia Times and The Indypendent. He said today: "The economic team taking shape alongside Obama represents the return of enterprise moderate Clinton era folks selected by other Clinton-era folks. Lawrence Summers and Timothy F. Geithner are Robert Rubin mentees and are emerging as the leading lights of yore as well as of tomorrow. Ivy League backgrounds, stints at Bretton Woods institutions IMF and World Bank and activity in or on the cusp of private sector banking define the group taking shape. All are friends, all have worked together and all have been actively involved in shaping the global financial architecture with which the world grapples today. Geithner comes over from the IMF, Council on Foreign Relations and the New York Fed. He has been more involved in charting the course for financial markets of late than either Rubin or Summers. His work in the Bear Stearns, Lehman, AIG and TARP activities/inactivities is well established and has attracted much and well-deserved controversy."
More Information
A nationwide consortium, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) represents an unprecedented effort to bring other voices to the mass-media table often dominated by a few major think tanks. IPA works to broaden public discourse in mainstream media, while building communication with alternative media outlets and grassroots activists.
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Big polluters led by the fossil fuel industry—which knowingly caused the climate crisis—are expanding their outsize presence and influence at the key event meant to tackle the planetary emergency, a report published ahead of this month's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil revealed.
The report, published Friday by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, notes that "over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations in just four years, with 90 of the corporations they represent responsible for nearly 60% of all global oil and gas production."
The analysis sounds the alarm on the "staggering scale of fossil fuel industry presence at the very negotiations that must urgently phase out their products" in order to meet the goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C as promised in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.
The world is failing to deliver upon that promise, and according to the report, "the primary reason for this failure is no secret—big polluters continue to be granted outsized presence, access, and influence at the very negotiations meant to address the crisis they knowingly caused."
"COP30 is set to proceed with effectively zero protections against interference in place."
"Among the world's largest fossil fuel corporations, Shell sent a total of 37 lobbyists to COP26-COP29, BP sent 36, ExxonMobil sent 32, and Chevron sent 20," according to KBPO. "These figures do not account for additional lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry's associated trade groups."
"As a result, they maintain a carefully orchestrated stranglehold on climate action, which consequently continues to fall way short of the strong and just global response we know we urgently need," the report states.
KBPO warned: "Despite the scale of fossil fuel industry presence revealed by this data, COP30 is set to proceed with effectively zero protections against interference in place. Ahead of COP30 happening in Belém from November 10-21, more than 225 organizations and networks around the world wrote to the COP30 presidency asking them to commit to a polluter-free COP by ensuring no fossil fuel ties or sponsorship and by advancing an Accountability Framework that protects the integrity and legitimacy of the [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].
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The footage Hegseth released on the social media platform X on Thursday was purported to show “a vessel operated by a designated terrorist organization" that was "trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean." Three people were killed in the strike.
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As with previously released footage of some of the boat bombings, part of the boat that was struck was not visible in the surveillance video.
Latin American officials and the families of some victims have insisted that the people killed have not been involved in the trafficking of drugs. Venezuela's ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, is among those who have called the bombings "extrajudicial executions" of people who have never been proven to be a threat to the US.
The latest boat strike came as the Associated Press published an investigation into the identities of at least four people who have been killed in the bombings.
The victims, the AP reported, have included Robert Sánchez, a 42-year-old fisherman who made about $100 a month and hoped to eventually purchase his own fishing boat. Economic pressures in the impoverished Sucre state where Sánchez lived pushed him to help cocaine traffickers navigate the Caribbean.
Another man, Juan Carlos “El Guaramero” Fuentes, was struggling to feed his family after he lost work as a transit bus driver, which he had been for several years before his bus broke down. He turned to smuggling to make ends meet, and was one of many novices hired by high-level cocaine traffickers, who typically stay ashore while the impoverished "drug runners" travel through the Caribbean by boat.
One relative of a person killed in one of the boat bombings told the AP that the US government “should have stopped" their family member's vessel instead of striking it and killing those on board.
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This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) summit comes on the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate agreement, in which nations committed to adopting policies intended to keep global temperature increases below the threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, considered a tipping point at which many of the worst ravages of climate change will become irreversible.
Ten years later, progress has fallen far short of the mark, with leaders scrambling to keep the deal’s goals intact—an aim that is likely untenable without the cooperation of the US, the globe’s largest historical emitter of carbon.
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