June, 13 2011, 02:03pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Darcey Rakestraw, 202-683-2467; drakestraw(at)fwwatch(dot)org
Council to Help Rural Communities, or Giveaway to Big Ag and Natural Gas Industries?
Statement from Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch
WASHINGTON
"Last week's executive order creating a White House Rural Council is concerning for rural residents and sustainable agriculture. Its creation appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to continue ravaging our U.S. farming communities and substitute dirty energy development for policies that would enable farmers to stay above water. It's a win-win for Big Ag and the energy industry--which is intent on developing its natural gas portfolio thanks to a new and risky technology called hydrofracking.
"For decades, bad policies have put farmers out of business, consolidated the food industry, and made our rural communities vulnerable to recent promises made by the natural gas industry to bring jobs and revitalize local economies. The real promise of natural gas fracking appears to be lower air quality, well contamination, and noisy traffic. The jobs? They tend to go to people already in the energy industry, not residents of the communities where the damage is wreaked.
"This Council pays lip service to rural communities but what they really need is for the government to implement long-delayed rules that would make farming fair. There has been continued obstruction of the implementation of the GIPSA rule (named for the branch of the USDA that would oversee the rules, the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration), which was first proposed in the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act.
"The rule would make it easier for small livestock farmers to get their products to market by giving them a fair price that would let them stay in business. The rule stops preferential contracts granted to factory farms, allows competitive bidding on livestock, and prohibits retaliation against poultry growers who speak out about abuses.
"The best way the White House can help rural communities is to follow through on President Obama's campaign promise and implement these rules to give farmers a chance to stay on the land if they so choose, instead of feeling forced to lease it out for dirty energy production. Rural America should not be a sacrifice zone where the extractive industries, like gas fracking, can replace traditional agriculture."
RESOURCES FOR FAIR FARM RULES/GIPSA:
https://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/BeefConcentration.pdf
https://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/PoultryCompetition-web.pdf
https://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/Antitrust-Pork-web.pdf
RESOURCES FOR NATURAL GAS FRACKING:
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/reports/the-case-for-a-ban-on-gas-fracking
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
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CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said following the passage of the Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2025 (H.R. 5009) that "it should alarm every American taxpayer that we are nearing a trillion-dollar annual budget for an agency rampant with waste, fraud, and abuse."
Jayapal, who was one of 140 lawmakers to oppose the package, emphasized that the Pentagon has failed seven consecutive annual audits.
Despite being the only federal agency to never have passed a federal audit, said Jayapal, the Department of Defense "continues to receive huge boosts to funding every year. Our constituents deserve better."
As Common Dreams reported last month, more than half of the department's annual budget now goes to military contractors that consistently overcharge the government, contributing to the Pentagon's inability to fully account for trillions of taxpayer dollars.
The $883.7 billion legislation that was advanced by the House on Wednesday would pour more money into the Pentagon's coffers. The package includes more than $500 million in Israeli military aid and two $357 million nuclear-powered attack submarine despite the Pentagon requesting only one, and would cut more than $621 million from President Joe Biden's budget request for climate action initiatives.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that the legislation "has some very good things we Democrats wanted in it, it has some bad things we wouldn't have put in there, and some things that were left out," and indicated that he had filed cloture for the first procedural vote on the NDAA.
The vote is expected to take place early next week, and 60 votes are needed to begin debate on the package.
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Jayapal noted that the funding package includes substantive pay raises for service members and new investments in housing, healthcare, childcare, and other support for their families.
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By cutting military spending, she said, the federal government could invest in the needs of all Americans, not just members of the military, "without sacrificing our national security or service member wages."
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The Constitution vests Congress, not the president, with the power to declare war (though presidents have used military force without getting the OK from Congress on multiple occasions in modern history, according to the National Constitution Center).
During the Cold War, when nuclear weapons policy was produced, speed was seen as essential to deterrence, according to Jon Wolfsthal, the director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists, who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post last year that makes a similar argument to Markey and Lieu.
"There is no reason today to rely on speedy decision-making during situations in which the United States might launch first. Even as relations with Moscow are at historic lows, we are worlds removed from the Cold War's dominant knife's-edge logic," he wrote.
While nuclear tensions today may not be quite as high as they were during the apex of the Cold War, fears of nuclear confrontation have been heightened due to poor relations between the United States and Russia over the ongoing war in Ukraine, among other issues. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree lowering the threshold for potential nuclear weapons use not long after the U.S. greenlit Ukraine's use of U.S.-supplied long range weapons in its fight against Russia.
This is not the first time Markey and Lieu have pushed for greater guardrails on nuclear first-use. The two are the authors of the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, a proposed bill first introduced in 2017 that would bar a U.S. president from launching a nuclear first strike without the consent of Congress.
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Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said in a statement that "these four attacks are emblematic of Israel's shocking disregard for civilian lives in Lebanon and their willingness to flout international law."
The September 29 attack "destroyed the house of the Syrian al-Shaar family, killing all nine members of the family who were sleeping inside," the report states.
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Survivor Jinane Hijazi told Amnesty: "I've lost everything; my entire family, my parents, my siblings, my daughter. I wish I had died that day too."
As the report notes:
A fragment of the munition found at the site of the attack was analyzed by an Amnesty International weapons expert and based upon its size, shape, and the scalloped edges of the heavy metal casing, identified as most likely a MK-80 series aerial bomb, which would mean it was at least a 500-pound bomb. The United States is the primary supplier of these types of munitions to Israel.
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The October 21 strike destroyed a building housing 13 members of the Othman family, killing two women and four children and wounding seven others.
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Guevara Rosas said: "These attacks must be investigated as war crimes. The Lebanese government must urgently call for a special session at the U.N. Human Rights Council to establish an independent investigative mechanism into the alleged violations and crimes committed by all parties in this conflict. It must also grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over Rome Statute crimes committed on Lebanese territory."
"Israel has an appalling track record of carrying out unlawful airstrikes in Gaza and past wars in Lebanon taking a devastating toll on civilians."
Last month, the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with Israel's 433-day Gaza onslaught, which has left more than 162,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the embattled enclave.
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Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice is weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel. Last week, Amnesty published a report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The United States—which provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover—has also been accused of complicity in Israeli war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon.
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