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Good morning and thank you, Donna (Lienwand). I am delighted to be
here at the National Press Club. I want to thank the officers of the
Press Club for the invitation to be with you today, especially
President Lienwand and speakers' committee member Bob Carden.
Ten
days into the new decade, and one year into the Obama Administration,
our nation remains poised between the failed policies of the past and
our hopes for a better future. This is a moment that cries out for
political courage - but it is not much in evidence.
Good morning and thank you, Donna (Lienwand). I am delighted to be
here at the National Press Club. I want to thank the officers of the
Press Club for the invitation to be with you today, especially
President Lienwand and speakers' committee member Bob Carden.
Ten
days into the new decade, and one year into the Obama Administration,
our nation remains poised between the failed policies of the past and
our hopes for a better future. This is a moment that cries out for
political courage - but it is not much in evidence.
I spent
the first week of this year traveling on the west coast. In San
Francisco, I was arrested with low-wage hotel workers fighting to
protect their health care and pensions from leveraged buyouts gone
bad. In Los Angeles and San Diego, I talked with working Americans
moved to tears by foreclosure and unemployment, outsourcing and benefit
cuts.
Everywhere I went, people asked me, why do so many of
the people we elect seem to care only about Wall Street? Why is
helping banks a matter of urgency, but unemployment is something we
just have to live with? Why don't we make anything in America
anymore? And why is it so hard to pass a health care bill that
guarantees Americans healthy lives instead of guaranteeing insurance
companies healthy profits?
As I travelled from city to
city, I heard a new sense of resignation from middle class Americans,
people laid off for the first time in their lives asking, "What did I
do wrong?"
I came away shaken by the sense that the
very things that make America great are in danger. What makes us
unique among nations is this: In America, working people are the
middle class. We built our middle class in the 20th century through
hard work, struggle and visionary political leadership. But a
generation of destructive, greed-driven economic policies has eroded
that progress and now threatens our very identity as a nation.
Today,
on every coast and in between, working women and men are fighting to
join the middle class and to protect and rebuild it. We crave
political leadership ready to fight for the kind of America we want to
leave to our children and against the forces of greed that brought us
to this moment. But instead we hear a resurgence of complacency and
political paralysis. Too many people in Washington seem to think that
now that we have bailed out the banks, everything will be okay.
In
2010, our elected leaders must choose between continuing the policies
of the past or striking out on a new economic course for America--a
course that will reverse the damaging trend toward greater inequality
that is crippling our nation.
At this moment, the voices of
America's working women and men must be heard in Washington--not the
voices of bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be the
best of times, but the voices of those for whom the New Year brings
pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out health care, foreclosures and
pension freezes- the roll call of an economy that long ago stopped
working for most of us.
Today I want to talk to you about the labor movement's vision for our nation.
Working
people want an American economy that works for them--that creates good
jobs, where wealth is fairly shared, and where the economic life of our
nation is about solving problems like the threat of climate change
rather than creating problems like the foreclosure crisis. We know
that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation - by
squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and
consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure.
If
we are going to make our vision real, we must challenge our political
leaders, and we must also challenge ourselves and our movement.
Workers
formed the labor movement as an expression of our lives-- a chain of
responsibility and solidarity, making millions of people here in
America and around the world into agents of social change - able to
accomplish much more together than as isolated individuals. That
movement gives voice to the hopes, values and interests of working
people every day. But despite our best efforts, we have endured a
generation of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits--a generation where
the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense,
where our horizons are shrinking rather than growing.
But
the future of the labor movement depends on moving forward--on
innovating and changing the way we work, on being open to all working
people and giving voice to all workers, even when our laws and
employers seek to divide us from each other. And that is something we
are working on every day.
The AFL-CIO is building new ways
for working people to organize themselves, and new models for
collective bargaining. We have created Working America, a 3 million
member community-based union growing in working class
neighborhoods--that is one of the signal accomplishments of my
predecessor John Sweeney, who I'm so happy is here today.
We
are very proud of our alliance with the workers' center movement that
links the unions of the AFL-CIO with hundreds of grassroots
organizations. We are also working with community allies to strengthen
the voice and bargaining power of low-wage workers in Los Angeles' car
washes - some of the worst-paid and worst-treated workers in this
country.
Next week, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene
Holt Baker will lead the labor movement's commemoration of the 50th
anniversary of the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina
- continuing the great work she has done over so many years on behalf
of the most vulnerable in our society. Not far from Greensboro, we
have been working with unemployed African American day laborers and
their workers' center, desperately trying to keep alive the dream
launched in those sit-ins.
In San Diego last week, I visited
a pre-apprenticeship program formed by the local labor movement to
create career paths for at-risk youth. In Los Angeles, I saw a
remarkable community-based labor-management training program created by
the Electrical Workers that is focused on green jobs. These programs
demonstrate the tremendous benefits that are possible when labor and
business come together to solve problems jointly.
I met
people who had been homeless who were about to become journeymen
electricians. A young man named Nakayah said to me, "The union gave me
a chance to go from no life to the hope for a middle-class life. It
didn't just teach me to get a job, it taught me how to be a man."
As
I talked to hotel workers--members of Unite Here, many of them
immigrants--on strike to keep hotel jobs from falling back into poverty
and to union members with PhD's fighting to prevent California's budget
catastrophe from cratering not only their jobs but the education of
their state's children, I thought of my father on strike in the coal
fields when I was a boy. And I was reminded of this basic truth: A
job is a good job because workers fight to make it one--it doesn't
matter if the job is in a coal mine or a classroom or a car wash. And
that is why unions are needed today, more than ever. I grew up in
a small town in western Pennsylvania, and I was surrounded by the
legacy of my parents and grandparents. My grandfather and my father
and their fellow workers went into mines that were death traps, to work
for wages that weren't enough to buy food and clothes for their
families. They and the union they built made those jobs into middle
class jobs. When I went into the mine, it was a good job. A good job
meant possibilities for me--possibilities that my mother moved heaven
and earth to make real--that took me to Penn State and to law school and
to this podium.
What is our legacy--the legacy of those of
us who are shaping the world our children and grandchildren will
inhabit? Is our government laying the foundations young people need?
Do workplaces offer hope? Do they even offer work? Are we building a
world we will be proud to hand over to our children? Are the voices of
the young, of the future, being heard?
In September, I was
elected President of the AFL-CIO together with Secretary Treasurer Liz
Shuler and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, both of whom are
here today. Liz Shuler is the youngest principal officer of the
AFL-CIO in our history, and I asked her to lead a program of outreach
to young workers. As part of that effort, the AFL-CIO conducted a
study of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34, comparing their
economic standing, attitudes and hopes with those from a similar survey
conducted 10 years ago. The findings are shocking. They reveal a lost
decade for young workers in America. Lower wages. Education
deferred. Things are so bad that one in three of these 18-34-year-olds
is currently living at home with their parents.
The
desperation I heard in this survey and in the voices of proud,
hard-working Americans fills me with an enormous sense of urgency, an
urgency that should be shared by every elected official here in
Washington and across this country.
As a country and a
movement, our challenge is to build a new economy that can restore
working people's expectations and hope. If you were laid off because
of what Wall Street did to our economy, it's not your fault. A dead
end job with no benefits is not the best our country can do for its
citizens.
What went wrong with our economy? You could say
it is as simple as we built a low-wage, high consumption economy and
tried to bridge the contradiction with debt. And there's a lot of
truth in that simplicity. But if we are going to understand what is
wrong in a way that will help us understand how to fix it, we need a
little more detail.
A generation ago, our nation's
policymakers embarked on a campaign of radical deregulation and
corporate empowerment - one that celebrated private greed over public
service.
The AFL-CIO warned of the dangers of that path --
trade policies that rewarded and accelerated outsourcing, financial
deregulation designed to promote speculation and the dismantling of our
pension and health care systems. We warned that the middle class could
not survive in such an economy, that growing inequality would
inevitably shrink the American pie, that we were borrowing from the
rest of the world at an unsustainable pace, that busts would follow
bubbles and that our country would be worse off in the end.
These
policies culminated in the worst economic decade in living memory--we
suffered a net loss of jobs, the housing market collapsed, real wages
fell and more children fell into poverty. And the enormous growth in
inequality during that decade yielded mediocre growth overall. This is
not a portrait of a cyclical recession, but of a nation with profound,
unaddressed structural economic problems on a long-term, downward
slide.
Our structural problems pre-date the crisis that hit in 2007 and they are not going to go away by themselves in 2010.
First,
we have underinvested in the foundations of our economy--including the
transportation and communications infrastructure that are essential to
a middle-class society and a dynamic, competitive high-wage economy.
But the most important foundation of our economy is education and
training. We simply cannot continue to skimp on the quality of
education we provide to all of our children and expect to lead in the
global economy. Likewise, we need to provide opportunities for
lifelong skills upgrading to workers - through both private and public
sector initiatives.
Second, we have failed over a long
period of time to create enough good jobs at home to maintain our
middle class - and we have allowed corporate hacks to whittle away at
workers' bargaining power to undermine the quality of the remaining
jobs.
Finally, the structural absence of good jobs means a shortage of sustainable demand to drive our economy.
We want an entirely different kind of economy. Let's talk about what we need to do.
We
must directly and immediately take on what is wrong-- by creating
millions of good jobs now, rebuilding our economic foundations and
giving working people the freedom to form a union again and make all
our jobs good jobs.
We must pass genuine health care reform
and reregulate our financial system--so that finance is the servant of
the real economy, and not its master; so that we have an independent
Consumer Financial Protection Agency; and so that we never again take
the public's money and use it to rescue bank executives and
stockholders. I'd like to commend President Obama's leadership in
insisting on a viable, strong and independent consumer protection
agency - which is crucial to real financial reform.
The
AFL-CIO's five-point program will create more than 4 million
jobs--extending unemployment benefits, including COBRA; expanding
federal infrastructure and green jobs investments; dramatically
increasing federal aid to state and local governments facing fiscal
disaster; direct job creation where feasible; and finally, direct
lending of TARP money to small and medium sized businesses that can't
get credit because of the financial crisis.
And we need to adopt a tax on financial speculation so that we can fund the jobs effort as the economy recovers.
Some
in Washington say when it comes to jobs: Go slow--take half steps.
These voices are harming millions of unemployed Americans and their
families -- but they are also jeopardizing our economic recovery. It
is responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation over time.
But it is bad economics and suicidal politics not to aggressively
address the job crisis at a time of double-digit unemployment. In
fact, budget deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if we
allow the economy to slide into long job stagnation -- unemployed
workers don't pay taxes and they don't go shopping; businesses without
customers don't hire workers, they don't invest and they also don't pay
taxes.
Our economy does not work without good jobs, so we
must take action now to restore workers' voices in America. The
systematic silencing of American workers by denying our right to form
unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America.
We must pass the Employee Free Choice Act so that workers can have the
chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can reduce the
inequality which is undermining our prospects for stable economic
growth. And we must do it now--not next year, not even this summer.
Now.
Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a
crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor. But today, as I
speak to you, something different is happening with health care. On
the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the small part of our
country that has prospered in the last decade--the richest of the
rich--to pay a little bit more in taxes so that most Americans can have
health insurance. And the House bill reins in the power of health
insurers and employers by having an employer mandate and a strong
public option.
But thanks to the Senate rules, the
appalling irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power of
the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill instead drives a
wedge between the middle class and the poor. The bill rightly seeks to
ensure that most Americans have health insurance. But instead of
taxing the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by taxing
workers' health plans--not just union members' health care; most of the
31 million insured employees who would be hit by the excise tax are not
union members.
The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits
working Americans who need health care for their families against
working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families.
This is a policy designed to benefit elites--in this case, insurers,
hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the
expense of the broader public. It's the same tragic pattern that got
us where we are today, and I can assure you the labor movement is
fighting with everything we've got to win health care reform that is
worthy of the support of working men and women.
These great struggles over health care, good jobs, the freedom to organize and financial reform are just the first steps.
Beyond
the short-term jobs crisis, we must have an agenda for restoring
American manufacturing--a combination of fair trade and currency
policies, worker training, infrastructure investment and regional
development policies targeted to help economically distressed areas.
We cannot be a prosperous middle class society in a dynamic global
economy without a healthy manufacturing sector.
We must have
an agenda to address the daily challenges workers face on the job - to
ensure safe and healthy workplaces and family-friendly work rules.
We also need comprehensive reform of our immigration policy -- based on shared prosperity and fairness, not cheap labor.
And
we must take on the retirement crisis. Too many employers have
replaced the system of pensions we used to have with underfunded
savings accounts fully exposed to everything that is wrong with Wall
Street. Today, the median balance in 401K accounts is only $27,000 -
nowhere near enough to fund a secure retirement. We need to return to
a policy of employers sharing responsibility for retirement security
with employees, while also bolstering and strengthening Social
Security.
President Obama campaigned on a platform of
boldly taking on these challenges. He has spoken often about the need
to refound our economy on doing real things, rather than dreaming of
financial pots of gold. He has asked Vice President Biden to lead the
effort to restore the middle class. For the first time I can recall,
we have an Administration that sees manufacturing - making things here
-- as central to America's future and that speaks clearly about the
positive role for workers and their unions in that future. President
Obama has laid out an aggressive agenda for structural change and has
appointed people like Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis who believe in
that vision.
Of course, President Obama inherited a terrible
mess from his predecessor--a journey of stolen elections, ruinous tax
cuts for the rich, dishonest wars, financial scandal,
government-sponsored torture, flooded cities and finally, economic
collapse.
President Obama's administration began - out of
necessity and vision -- with an act of political courage--the enactment
of a broad and substantial economic recovery program. Despite
Republican opposition, the stimulus was big enough to make a real,
positive impact on our economy, saving or creating more than a million
jobs already.
But the jobs crisis has escalated, the
foreclosure crisis continues and Wall Street appears to have returned
to its old ways. This is Bonus Week on Wall Street - watch and see how
much discipline they show, with the nation watching.
Now
more than ever, we need the boldness and the clarity we saw in our
president during the campaign in 2008, when he outlined the scope of
the economic problems facing our nation -- unencumbered by the
political cross-currents weighing us down today. One year into the
Obama Administration and one year into a Congress with strong
Democratic majorities, we need leadership action that matches the
urgency that is felt so deeply by working people.
Too
often Washington falls into the grip of ambivalence about the
fundamental purpose of government. Is it to protect wealthy elites and
gently encourage them to be more charitable? Or is it to look after
the vast majority of the American people?
Government in the
interests of the majority of Americans has produced our greatest
achievements. The New Deal. The Great Society and the Civil Rights
movement -- Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and the
forty-hour work week, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
This is what made the United States a beacon of hope in a confused and
divided world.
But too many people now take for granted
government's role as protector of Wall Street and the privileged. They
see middle-class Americans as overpaid and underworked. They see Social
Security as a problem rather than the only piece of our retirement
system that actually works. They feel sorry for homeless people, but
fail to see the connections between downsizing, outsourcing, inequality
and homelessness.
This world view has brought Democrats
nothing but disaster. The Republican response is to offer the middle
class the false hope of tax cuts. Tax cuts end up enriching the rich
and devastating the middle class by destroying the institutions like
public education and Social Security that make the middle class
possible.
But no matter what I say or do, the reality is
that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will
not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for politicians who think
they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed
economic policies of the last 30 years.
Let me be even
blunter. In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on
jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised
health care reform. Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street -
and not much more. We swallowed our disappointment and worked to
preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the
alternative was. But there was no way to persuade enough working
Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the difference
between the two parties. Politicians who think that working people
have it too good - too much health care, too much Social Security and
Medicare, too much power on the job - are inviting a repeat of 1994.
Our country cannot afford such a repeat.
President
Obama said in his inaugural address, "The state of the economy calls
for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new
jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth." Now is the time to make
good on these words - for Congress, for President Obama and for the
American people.
These are big challenges. But it is long
past time to take them on. And for those members of Congress who think
maybe taking on big challenges is not their job, and who want to keep
offering working people tokenism while they govern in the interests of
the people who trashed our economy, I have a suggestion for how to
spend your weekends.
Go sit with the unemployed. Talk to
college students looking at tuition hikes, laid-off professors, and no
jobs at graduation. Talk to workers whose jobs are being offshored.
Ask what these Americans think about their future. Ask them what they
think of Wall Street, of health insurance companies, of big banks. Ask
them if they want a government that is in partnership with those folks,
or a government that stands up for working people.
Then
think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have
inherited. Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can
deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, "more
schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more
learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and
less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our
better natures."
This is the American future the labor
movement is working for. Our political leaders have a choice. They
can work with us for a future where the middle class is secure and
growing, where inequality is on the decline and where jobs provide
ladders out of poverty. Or they can work for a future where the
profits of insurance companies, speculators and outsourcers are
secure. There is no middle ground. Working America is waiting for an
answer. We are in a "show me" kind of mood, and time is running out.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) works tirelessly to improve the lives of working people. We are the democratic, voluntary federation of 56 national and international labor unions that represent 12.5 million working men and women.
"It's not often that we see such a mass mobilization," said leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Hundreds of thousands of enraged workers across France walked off the job and hit the streets Tuesday to protest President Emmanuel Macron's unpopular plan to raise the nation's official retirement age from 62 to 64.
It marks the second time this month that French workers have mobilized against Macron's attack on the country's pension system. Nationwide strikes and marches on January 19 brought out between one million and two million people, and labor unions aimed to match or exceed those numbers on Tuesday, with roughly 250 demonstrations planned around the country.
Longtime leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon predicted Tuesday morning that "a historic day" of protests would help defeat Macron's proposal once and for all, as massive crowds rallied in cities and towns outside Paris—prior to a major march that shut down the French capital on Tuesday afternoon.
“It's not often that we see such a mass mobilization," Mélenchon said from the southern city of Marseille. "It's a form of citizens' insurrection."
On the small western island of Ouessant, about 100 people gathered early in the day for a protest outside the office of Mayor Denis Palluel.
In a phone interview with The Associated Press, Palluel noted that the threat of having to work longer to qualify for a full pension dismayed mariners on the island who have grueling ocean-based jobs.
"Retiring at a reasonable age is important," he said, "because life expectancy isn't very long."
"Retiring at a reasonable age is important because life expectancy isn't very long."
Despite widespread opposition to pushing back France's retirement age—approximately three-fourths of the population is against such a move, according to recent polling—many lawmakers remain determined to fulfill Macron's election pledge to overhaul the nation's pension system.
On Monday, Macron described his effort to hike the retirement age as "essential." Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, for her part, asserted this past weekend that raising the retirement age to 64 by 2030 is "no longer negotiable."
"Strikers and protesters intend to prove otherwise," Agence France-Pressereported Tuesday. "Labor unions and left-wing legislators fighting in parliament against Macron's plans are counting on protesters to turn out massively to strengthen their efforts to kill the bill."
As they did earlier this month, strikes on Tuesday upended multiple aspects of daily life, including electricity production, transportation, and education.
"TotalEnegies says between 75% and 100% of workers at its refineries and fuel depots are on strike, while electricity supplier EDF said they're monitoring a drop in power to the national grid equivalent to three nuclear power plants," Euronews reported.
According to AP: "Rail operator SNCF reported major disruptions, with strikes knocking out most trains in the Paris region, in all other regions, and on France’s flagship high-speed network linking cities and major towns. The Paris Metro was also hard hit by station closures and cancellations."
France's Education Ministry, meanwhile, reported that around a quarter of the nation's teachers were on strike Tuesday, down from 70% during the first round of protests.
Macron's proposed pension reform, the text of which Borne presented to the National Assembly earlier this month, faces an uphill battle.
For one thing, the New Ecological and Social People's Union (NUPES)—a coalition of four left-wing parties recently formed by Mélenchon—won 131 seats in last June's parliamentary elections, helping to prevent the neoliberal alliance Ensemble from securing the absolute majority it needed to ram through Macron's unwanted austerity agenda.
According to AFP, even the president's own allies from his ruling alliance have expressed concerns about some aspects of the legislation.
"We can feel a certain nervousness from the majority as we begin our work," Mathilde Panot, head of the left-wing France Unbowed party in the National Assembly, told the news outleton Tuesday. "When we see this opposition growing, I understand why they are wavering."
However, journalist Marlon Ettinger, citing French Communist Party MP André Chassaigne, warned recently that "the government might try to pass the reform through a social security financing bill (known as PLFRSS), which would allow for a series of constitutional delays that would significantly limit the amount of time deputies can discuss the bill. It would also block the possibility for the opposition to present their own counterproposals."
In addition, "although Macron has no popular assent, nor a parliamentary majority for his reform, he does have constitutional tools he can use to push the package through," Ettinger explained in Jacobin. "One, known as 49.3 (after the article of the Constitution which grants the president this power), essentially lets him bypass the National Assembly. The constitution of the current Fifth Republic grants the president these authoritarian powers to hedge against any popular sentiment that might make its way into the lower house. The use of 49.3 would suspend the debate in the National Assembly, then send the bill directly to the Senate, which is controlled by Les Républicains."
Aware that such anti-democratic maneuvers are on the table, Mélenchon and other opponents of the assault on France's pension system have called on Macron to withdraw his proposal for good.
"We're taking action today because when Shell extracts fossil fuels, it causes a ripple of death, destruction, and displacement around the world."
In an effort to call attention to the company's planet-wrecking drilling projects, several Greenpeace International campaigners on Tuesday boarded and occupied a Shell-contracted platform in the Atlantic Ocean as it headed toward a major oil and gas field in the U.K. North Sea.
Greenpeace said in a press release that the platform is "a key piece of production equipment that will enable Shell to unlock eight new wells in the Penguins North Sea oil and gas field," an extraction effort that the climate group has attempted to block in court.
Four Greenpeace activists—Carlos Marcelo Bariggi Amara from Argentina, Yakup Çetinkaya from Turkey Imogen Michel from the U.K., and Usnea Granger from the U.S.—managed to board the Shell vessel using ropes after reaching the platform in three boats deployed from Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship.
Greenpeace Southeast Asia executive director Yeb Saño, who tried and failed to board the platform, said in a statement that Shell "must stop drilling and start paying."
"We're taking action today because when Shell extracts fossil fuels, it causes a ripple of death, destruction, and displacement around the world, having the worst impact on people who are least to blame for the climate crisis," said Saño, the former lead climate negotiator for the Philippines.
"We won't stop until we get climate justice. We will make polluters pay."
A Shell spokesperson claimed in a statement that the Greenpeace campaigners' demonstration is "causing real safety concerns, with a number of people boarding a moving vessel in rough conditions."
But the spokesperson signaled that the company has no intention of altering its development plans in the North Sea, despite warnings from the scientific community that continued drilling will usher in catastrophic climate outcomes.
"Shell and the wider fossil fuel industry are bringing the climate crisis into our homes, our families, our landscapes, and oceans," Saño said Tuesday. "So we will take them on at sea, at shareholder meetings, in the courtroom, online, and at their headquarters. We won't stop until we get climate justice. We will make polluters pay."
Greenpeace's latest direct action came days before Shell's earnings report, which will follow the banner profit announcements of competing oil and gas giants such as Chevon and ExxonMobil.
On Tuesday, Exxon said it raked in a record $56 billion in profits in 2022.
"Thousands of Alaskans and over a million Americans from across the political spectrum have called for protection of Bristol Bay's one-of-kind salmon resource from massive open pit mining and today, the EPA delivered."
Environmental advocates in Alaska and across the United States on Tuesday applauded what one Indigenous campaigner called "historic progress" in the fight to protect Bristol Bay's ecosystems from the developers of Pebble Mine, a proposed open-pit copper and gold mine that would have led to the dumping of waste in the world's largest sockeye salmon run.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Tuesday its long-awaited "Final Determination" regarding protections for Bristol Bay, following more than a decade of litigation and campaigning by Alaska Natives and advocates.
Under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act, the agency said, the EPA will prohibit "certain waters of the United States in the South Fork Koktuli River and North Fork Koktuli River watersheds from being used as disposal sites," and "prohibits future proposals to construct and operate a mine to develop the Pebble deposit."
"Today is a new day for Bristol Bay," said Earthjustice.
\u201cBREAKING: Today is a new day for Bristol Bay. After years of advocacy & litigation, @EPA has issued a Clean Water Act veto to ensure the proposed Pebble Mine won't destroy the Bristol Bay watershed, an Alaskan treasure & home to the world's largest remaining salmon runs.\u201d— Earthjustice (@Earthjustice) 1675175188
The decision is the outcome of a 2019 lawsuit filed by Earthjustice on behalf of tribal organizations and the advocacy group Earthworks, and follows "a fierce, decades-long battle waged by the people of Bristol Bay and so many others," said Earthjustice senior attorney Erin Colón.
"EPA today followed the law and science to establish enduring protections for the Bristol Bay watershed under the Clean Water Act," said Colón in a statement. "This is a major victory worth celebrating, but we cannot rest until even more permanent protections are in place. The Bristol Bay watershed is one of the world's great ecosystems, and the way of life and the abundant future it supports is worth the fight."
Advocates first challenged Pebble Limited Partnership's plan for the mine in 2010, when six tribes in the Bristol Bay area called on the EPA to protect the watershed, which is home to a 37.5 million salmon annually, supports a $2 billion commercial fishing industry, and has provided sustenance for Alaska Natives for generations.
The EPA restricted parts of the watershed from being used by the mining company in 2014, but the developers challenged those protections. In 2017, the agency withdrew them in a settlement with Pebble Limited Partnership.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also denied a key permit for the project in 2020—a decision that is now under appeal by the company.
Dyani Chapman, state director for Alaska Environment Action, said the previous restrictions and Tuesday's determination are in line with what Alaska Natives and environmental advocates have known for decades: "The headwaters of Bristol Bay are, quite simply, a really bad place for a mine."
"The region is home to an incredible range of wildlife and remains healthy because it's been spared a lot of the harsher touches of industrialization," said Chapman. "Over the past 20 years, scientists, the local Indigenous communities, fishermen, and broader public have asked repeatedly for strong and permanent protections for Bristol Bay. This EPA determination is a long-awaited win for sockeye salmon and the entire Bristol Bay region."
Advocacy group SalmonState noted that with two out of three Alaskans opposing the Pebble Mine, the EPA's decision "may be the most popular thing the federal government has ever done for Alaska."
"Thousands of Alaskans and over a million Americans from across the political spectrum have called for protection of Bristol Bay's one-of-kind salmon resource from massive open pit mining and today, the EPA delivered," said executive director Tim Bristol. "This is a victory for every single person—from Bristol Bay's tribal citizens, commercial fisherman, sport anglers, business leaders, chefs, scientists, and so many more—who [has] spoken out over the years, and we thank the EPA and the Biden administration for this well-considered, heavily documented, overwhelmingly popular move."
While celebrating the EPA's determination, advocates said they will continue pushing for congressional protections for the Bristol Bay watershed and acknowledged that the Biden administration's decision could be overturned by a future president. Pebble Limited Partnership also said it will likely appeal the decision.
"Today is a great day for Bristol Bay, and one that many thought would never come," said Bristol Bay Native Corporation CEO Jason Metrokin. "While the immediate threat of Pebble is behind us, BBNC will continue working to protect Bristol Bay's salmon-based culture and economy and to create new economic opportunities across the region."
Verner Wilson, senior oceans campaigner at Friends of the Earth, called the action "a positive step forward" but expressed concern that "it doesn't go far enough."
"Given that Bristol Bay is the largest wild salmon fishery on the planet," said Wilson, "Congress and the state of Alaska must work together to protect it permanently."