April, 01 2010, 04:36pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Joe Smyth, Greenpeace media officer, 831-566-5647, joe.smyth@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace Polluterharmony Ad Profiles Relationship Between Secretive Oil Billionaire 'Charles' and US Senator 'Blanche'
WASHINGTON
Greenpeace released the latest Polluterharmony ad today on the heels of its new report, Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine. The Koch Report details the role of oil conglomerate Koch Industries and its owners Charles and David Koch in obstructing clean energy and climate policy by funding climate denial organizations, direct federal lobbying, and PAC spending to support candidates for federal office.
The new Polluterharmony ad profiles the relationship between "Charles," a secretive oil billionaire, and "Blanche," a US Senator with an environmental record that is "exactly what [he] was looking for." See the ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtFN8MTjHd0
Since 2009, Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has received $11,000 from Koch's PAC, making her the top recipient of Koch PAC money in the US Senate during this election cycle (1). Senator Lincoln is also the top recipient of campaign contributions from the oil & gas industry, taking $255,650 during the 2009-2010 cycle (2).
Earlier this year, Senator Lincoln supported legislative efforts to protect big polluters like Koch Industries by blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from using the Clean Air Act to address global warming pollution. Koch Industries owns oil refineries in Texas, Alaska, and Minnesota.
More information about Koch Industries Political Action Committee spending is available in Greenpeace's Koch Report at https://greenpeace.org/kochindustries
Other Polluterharmony ads are available at https://www.polluterharmony.com/, including a recent profile of the relationship between another major oil CEO "Rex" and his partner in offshore drilling, Governor "Bob McD."
Greenpeace is a global, independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
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Finnish Unions Extend Strikes to Fight Right-Wing Attack on Labor, Safety Net
"The policies now pursued by the Orpo-Purra government fulfill long-standing dreams of Finnish big business," said one journalist.
Mar 20, 2024
Labor unions in Finland said Wednesday that they would continue their two-week strike wave through the end of March as they fight attacks on worker rights and social programs by the Nordic nation's right-wing government.
The blue-collar union confederation SAK announced the extension after an unproductive meeting with Finnish Employment Minister Arto Santonen of the ruling center-right National Coalition Party (NCP), state broadcaster
Ylereported.
"From our perspective the meeting was a disappointment and obviously we are very worried over the fact that the government is so stubborn and unresponsive even to our far-reaching compromise proposals," SAK chair Jarkko Eloranta told reporters. "We are ready to suspend the strikes if the government shows an understanding of workers' concerns."
"These policies... were straight from the playbook of the employers' organizations, who generously financed the campaigns of the right-wing parties in the election."
Approximately 7,000 Finnish union members including dock and industrial workers are taking part in the work stoppages, which are disrupting exports, imports, and cargo transportation. Last year, the transport workers' union AKT staged a two-week strike that shut down Finnish ports while demanding higher wages as part of a new collective bargaining agreement. The workers ultimately won a 25-month contract with a 6% raise.
Finland's April 2023 general election saw the defeat of former Prime Minister Sanna Marin's center-left coalition government, which was replaced by a coalition including Prime Minister Petteri Orpo's NCP and the far-right Finns Party, led by Deputy Prime Minister Riikka Purra, who is also the finance minister. The new government angered labor advocates by announcing an agenda that includes making it easier for employers to fire workers, slashing unemployment insurance, cutting social security benefits, weakening sick pay, and limiting solidarity strikes.
Orpo's government also says it will pass legislation creating an "export-driven" collective bargaining model that would cap wage increases, hile localizing collective bargaining, effectively empowering individual companies to negotiate their own contracts with workers.
"These policies... were straight from the playbook of the employers' organizations, who generously financed the campaigns of the right-wing parties in the election," Finnish journalist Toivo Haimi wrote for Jacobin. "It is worth noting that these policies received very little attention during the election campaign, and some of them were even directly opposed by the Finns Party."
"The policies now pursued by the Orpo-Purra government fulfill long-standing dreams of Finnish big business," Haimi added.
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Post-Dobbs Abortion Pill Surge Highlights Stakes of Looming Supreme Court Case
"Next week as we hear oral arguments in the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case, remember who will be impacted," said one group.
Mar 20, 2024
As abortion bans and restrictions have taken hold in at least 21 states since the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago, Americans' reliance on medication abortion became increasingly clear—with the use of abortion pills reported in 63% of all abortions that took place within the formal healthcare system in 2023.
Medication abortion represented 53% of all abortions in the U.S. in 2020, signifying a substantial increase since the court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
The Guttmacher Institute released the results of its Monthly Abortion Provision Study on Tuesday, a week before the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Food and Drug Administration, et al., Applicants v. Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine, et al., a case brought by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of anti-abortion doctors.
The group filed the case aiming to revoke the FDA's approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions, more than two decades after it was approved following years of research.
"As our latest data emphasize, more than 3 out of 5 abortion patients in the United States use medication abortion," said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy for Guttmacher. "Reinstating outdated and medically unnecessary restrictions on the provision of mifepristone would negatively impact people's lives and decrease abortion access across the country."
Right-wing Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled last year in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas that mifepristone's registration should be invalidated, a decision that was quickly put on hold by the Supreme Court.
Next week, the Supreme Court will hear the U.S. Department of Justice's appeal of Kacsmaryk's decision with a focus on two issues: whether the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine has legal standing and whether the FDA did adequate research before it expanded access to mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. A ruling is expected this summer.
Guttmacher's research showed a 10% increase in all abortions in the U.S. between 2020-23, with a rate of 15.7 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age last year—the highest rate and number of abortions in more than a decade.
States without total abortion bans saw a 25% rise in abortion care compared to 2020, and the increase was even sharper in states bordering those with bans—37% between 2020-23.
"Next week as we hear oral arguments in the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case, remember who will be impacted," said Whole Women's Health, which runs reproductive health clinics in several states.
Rachel Jones, principal research scientist for Guttmacher, said the group's findings show that "as abortion restrictions proliferate post-Dobbs, medication abortion may be the most viable option—or the only option—for some people, even if they would have preferred in-person procedural care."
Reproductive rights advocates and medical experts including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have long warned that restrictions on mifepristone—adopted by the FDA under pressure from the pro-forced pregnancy movement—are medically unnecessary and aim only to stop people from receiving care.
Advocates fear that the Supreme Court could rule that the FDA's 2021 decision to allow mifepristone to be dispensed via telemedicine and the mail violates the Comstock Act, a law that dates back to 1873 and prohibited the distribution of "obscene" materials through the mail.
"The modern anti-abortion movement wants to reinvent the Comstock Act as an abortion ban," University of California, Davis, law professor Mary Ziegler toldMs. magazine on Tuesday.
If healthcare providers can no longer dispense mifepristone via telemedicine, people seeking abortions would be forced to go in person to get care, "exposing them not only to delays and increased costs but also to harassment, threats, and other types of violence from anti-abortion extremism, which has increased dramatically since the fall of Roe," reported Ms.
Ahead of the Supreme Court's hearing in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine's "groundless case challenging FDA approval of mifepristone," said Guttmacher, "mifepristone is available and the facts remain clear: medication abortion is safe, effective, widely used, and critical to bodily autonomy for all."
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Steven Donziger, Lawyer Targeted by Chevron, Appeals to Biden for Pardon
"A pardon would bring a measure of justice to a prosecution that has been widely criticized as a violation of international law... and as a grave threat to free speech," said 14 attorneys backing the climate justice lawyer's request.
Mar 20, 2024
After exhausting his options in the judicial system, American attorney Steven Donziger on Wednesday launched a campaign seeking a pardon from U.S. President Joe Biden for his misdemeanor conviction—the result of a process that experts worldwide have condemned as retaliatory for his climate justice work and an abuse of the nation's judiciary.
"No matter where one stands on the political spectrum, we should all be able to agree that what happened to me in the United States should not happen to anybody in any country that adheres to the rule of law," Donziger said in a statement announcing a letter to Biden signed by 14 prominent lawyers and a leader at the advocacy group Amazon Watch.
"Corporations should not be allowed to take direct control of a public prosecution from the government and lock up their critics, as happened to me," asserted Donziger, who spent 993 days in federal prison and on house arrest. "It's an outrageous abuse of power that not only wrecked me and my family's life for three years but also embarrassed our country in the eyes of the world."
"As far as we can tell, this was the nation's first private corporate prosecution and is an obvious violation of the rule of law."
Donziger is a Harvard Law School graduate known globally for representing farmers and Indigenous people in a lawsuit targeting Chevron for polluting communities in Ecuador that resulted in a $9.5 billion judgment against the oil giant. After nearly two decades of battling the attorney in Ecuadorian courts, the company went after him directly in U.S. federal court.
The attorneys backing his pardon request detailed in their letter how Donziger endured a "patently biased prosecution by a group of three Chevron-linked lawyers" for refusing to comply with an order from a U.S. judge—an ex-corporate attorney with investments in the oil giant—to turn over his electronics and client communications to the company.
"As far as we can tell, this was the nation's first private corporate prosecution and is an obvious violation of the rule of law," they wrote to Biden. "As a result of the private prosecution, Mr. Donziger, a resident of New York City, spent close to three years in detention at home and in prison even though the maximum sentence under the law for his misdemeanor offense level was 180 days."
"A pardon would bring a measure of justice to a prosecution that has been widely criticized as a violation of international law by respected international and U.S.-based jurists, and as a grave threat to free speech by a multitude of political leaders and over 120 respected civil society organizations including Amnesty International, Global Witness, and Greenpeace," the lawyers argued.
Critics of the process that resulted in his conviction include the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; a team of international trial observers led by Stephen A. Rapp, U.S. ambassador for war crimes under the Obama administration; Judge Steven Menashi, appointed to U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit by former President Donald Trump; and right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who dissented from a decision not to take his case.
"I am inspired by Steven's courage, resilience, and determination," said Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch, who signed the 12-page letter along with the group of attorneys. "That's why Chevron wants to destroy him. Steven's very existence creates enormous financial risk to Chevron and to the oil industry generally. Every fossil fuel industry lawyer in this country fears Steven."
"More broadly, Chevron's outrageous abuse of power and manipulation of the federal judiciary to target Steven should deeply concern every advocate in the country, particularly those who engage in protest," Paz y Miño warned. "What happened to Steven is a central component of the fossil fuel industry's playbook to silence public opposition."
Water Protector Legal Collective director Natali Segovia, one of the lawyers who signed on, similarly condemned legal tactics used by corporations to target environmental campaigners.
"Around the world, human rights defenders like Steven Donziger are targeted and even killed for their advocacy and work on Indigenous rights and environmental justice issues," Segovia said. "Steven's case, however, is emblematic of the weaponization of the law by a powerful corporation against a human rights defender—an attorney, to be exact—and sets a dangerous precedent."
"If it could happen to Steven, a Harvard-trained human rights lawyer, it could happen to anyone on climate frontlines."
"If it could happen to Steven, a Harvard-trained human rights lawyer, it could happen to anyone on climate frontlines," Segovia stressed. "This is what we are guarding against. This is why a pardon for Steven barely hits the tip of the iceberg to reverse course, but is a necessary step in ensuring fundamental rights of due process and human rights in the United States."
The other lawyers supporting Donziger—who hail from prestigious universities and groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights—are Nadia Ahmad, Baher Azmy, Scott Wilson Badenoch, Terrence Collingsworth, Aaron Fellmeth, Richard Friedman, Martin Garbus, Jeffrey Haas, Ronald Kuby, Jeanne Mirer, Aaron Marr Page, Nadine Strossen, and Michael Tigar.
Along with thanking "from the bottom of my heart the many distinguished lawyers who have agreed to represent me in this campaign," Donziger called on the Biden administration to investigate Chevron for abusing the U.S. legal system.
Donziger also said that it remains "critical that people focus on what is of paramount importance, which is the plight of the thousands of people in Ecuador who face a serious risk of death if Chevron does not comply with the rule of law."
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