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For Immediate Release
August, 23 2019, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Doug Norlen, (202) 465-1650, dnorlen@foe.org
Patrick Davis, (202) 222-0744, pdavis@foe.org
$5 billion in EXIM Financing for Mozambique LNG Plant Fuels U.S. Contribution to Climate Emergency
The U.S. Export-Import Bank's (EXIM) Board of Directors today voted to approve $5 billion in financing for a liquid natural gas project in Mozambique. The massive fossil fuel project, which EXIM admits will emit at least 5.2 million tons of C02 per year, is one of the first transactions to be approved after EXIM regained its full financing authority from Congress this May.
WASHINGTON
The U.S. Export-Import Bank's (EXIM) Board of Directors today voted to approve $5 billion in financing for a liquid natural gas project in Mozambique. The massive fossil fuel project, which EXIM admits will emit at least 5.2 million tons of C02 per year, is one of the first transactions to be approved after EXIM regained its full financing authority from Congress this May.
Anadarko Petroleum Corp. is set to build Africa's largest single gas liquefaction and export terminal in Mozambique. Despite about 80% of the country lacking access to electricity, the project is designed for the export of natural gas.
"By approving $5 billion in fossil fuel financing, EXIM is accelerating the climate crisis while causing local environmental damage and propelling human rights violations in Mozambique," said Doug Norlen, Director of the Economic Policy Program at Friends of the Earth. "EXIM's irresponsible approval of this project proves the agency can't be trusted to manage billions of dollars in public funds. Either EXIM financing for fossil fuels must be stopped or the agency should not be reauthorized by Congress."
In addition to climate damage, Anadarko's Mozambique LNG project has already caused the loss of land and livelihood of local peoples, while failing to provide promised local jobs. In February, contractors working on the project were attacked by suspected militants, leaving at least one worker dead. Further, the project threatens the delicate Quirimbas Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO protected site.
"If there is a project with serious alarm bells, it's this one," said Daniel Ribeiro of JA!/Friends of the Earth Mozambique. "This dirty project is located in a sensitive world biosphere, embroiled in an emerging extremist armed conflict. It is being pushed by a government that has recently faced one of the biggest corruption cases in Africa. This project will only fuel the numerous local land conflicts, the human rights abuses and infrastructure bottlenecks. It makes one worry about Mozambique's future. Investment from the U.S. will only amplify all of the troubles and conflicts in Mozambique caused by this project and push them out of control."
Mozambique's government has found itself in the midst of a corruption scandal that has ensnared three international banks funding development projects in the country, triggering investigations by the SEC and FBI. At least 20 people have been reportedly been indicted by Mozambique authorities.
The board's approval of financing for Mozambique LNG plant comes as Congress returns to Washington to consider reauthorizing the agency. EXIM's current authorization expires at the end of September.
The transaction will now be referred to Congress for 25 days of continuous session before a board vote on final approval can be made. Voting board members include Chairman Kimberly Reed, and board members Spencer Bachus and Judith Pryor.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400LATEST NEWS
Nearly 80% of Voters in George Santos' NY District Say He Should Resign: Poll
"Talk about buyers' remorse," cracked the director of Siena College Research Institute, which conducted the poll.
Jan 31, 2023
Close to 80% of voters in GOP Rep. George Santos' New York congressional district want him to resign—including 71% of Republicans—according to a poll published Tuesday, the same day the serial liar temporarily stepped down from his House committee assignments.
According to the Newsday/Siena College poll, Santos' overall approval rating is an abysmal 7%, with 83% disapproval. Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said Santos should resign, including 89% of Democrats, 71% of Republicans, and 72% of Independents.
"Talk about buyers' remorse," Siena College Research Institute director Don Levy said in a statement. "Voters elected George Santos by a comfortable margin not even three months ago. But today, the vast majority of his new constituents—including the vast majority of those who voted for him—want him gone."
"Discouragingly, three-quarters or more of voters of every party say that Santos' behavior and now his refusing to resign show that our political system is broken, not that his behavior says little about the state of our politics," Levy added.
The survey of registered voters in New York's 3rd Congressional District was conducted last week.
\u201cSpecial Newsday / Siena College NY 3 Congressional District Poll:\nNY 3 Voters Say Santos Should Resign 78-13%, Including 71% of Reps\n\nhttps://t.co/29pwfP7Tx4\u201d— SienaResearch (@SienaResearch) 1675161006
From intrigue surrounding how his net worth skyrocketed from almost nothing to $11 million in less than two years; to demonstrable lies about his education, employment history, residence, and purported Jewish heritage; to allegations of fraud perpetrated in Brazil and against a U.S. combat veteran and his dying dog, Santos' lies have dominated his short congressional career.
On Tuesday, Santos said he would temporarily step down from the House Small Business Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee amid investigations into his campaign finances. The embattled congressman thanked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for "allowing me to take time to properly clear my name before returning to my committees."
Responding to this, the political action group MoveOn tweeted: "Stepping down from committees is just the start. Santos needs to resign."
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How US Policy Devastated Small Dairy Farms and Boosted Corporate Monopolies
"Corporate consolidation is at the heart of our food system's dysfunction," said one policy analyst.
Jan 31, 2023
Food & Water Watch on Tuesday released an analysis of the U.S. dairy farming industry—the climate and food justice group's third in-depth report on the economic costs of food monopolies—revealing how corporate consolidation has helped push small family farms out of business over the past two decades, while worsening the climate emergency.
In The Economic Cost of Food Monopolies: Dirty Dairy Racket, Food & Water Watch (FWW) explains how factors including the gutting of farm supply management policies and higher production costs have helped cause rapid consolidation in the dairy sector, with 70% of family-scale dairy farms shutting down between 1997 and 2007.
"Corporate consolidation is at the heart of our food system's dysfunction," said Rebecca Wolf, food policy analyst for FWW. "Corporate-directed policymaking is throwing America's dairy industry into crisis. Family-scale dairies are collapsing at an alarming rate, and those that manage to hang on face rising costs, negative returns, and mounting debt, while consumers are sold an illusion of pastoral, sustainable milk products."
Just 30% of U.S. milk is now produced at family farms, while 83% of milk sales are controlled by just three dairy cooperatives: Land O' Lakes, DFA, and California Dairies, Inc.
In addition to forcing small farms to shut down, the consolidation of the dairy production industry has "serious climate implications," said FWW, with the shift to factory farms resulting in the doubling of annual methane emissions from the sector between 1990 and 2020.
"We can and must build better, more sustainable systems that support people, communities, and the environment," the group tweeted.
\u201cIn addition to polluting air and water, our research shows that the growth of megadairies is bad for small farmers. We can and must build better, more sustainable systems that support people, communities, and the environment. https://t.co/BIzjauXfUI\u201d— Food & Water Watch (@Food & Water Watch) 1675191692
FWW traced the loss of family-scale farms back to factors including the loss of dairy price supports in the early 2000s, which caused production prices to rise even more sharply than they previously had for two decades, while sale prices rose far less quickly. This left the average family farm almost entirely unable to turn a profit—doing so just twice between 2000 and 2021—and in many cases, forced them to eventually close.
The "disastrous 1996 Farm Bill" also ended commodity grain supply management policies, allowing oversupplies to flood the market and "ushering in the era of factory farms," with family farms unable to compete with large facilities. Milk production rapidly increased since 1997, further driving down sale prices.
"We need prices that are fair, covering our cost of production and giving us a return to maintain our businesses and make a living. Overproduction and consolidation in the industry are making this increasingly difficult if not impossible."
Wisconsin dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd told FWW that dairy farm families "have our backs against the wall."
"We need prices that are fair, covering our cost of production and giving us a return to maintain our businesses and make a living. Overproduction and consolidation in the industry are making this increasingly difficult if not impossible," said Lloyd. "We need to manage the growth of dairy supply and we can do this with solid dairy policy that looks out for farm families and rural communities and not corporate profits."
The report argues that "there is a clear way forward," making recommendations including "a comprehensive federal supply management program that actively works to match supply with demand and does not use the export market as a dumping ground for oversupply."
"Curbing overproduction can bring a higher price to farmers through the market instead of through taxpayer-funded government payments and bailouts," reads the report. "It will also reduce the pressure to expand herd sizes and thereby avoid more factory farms and the entailing climate emissions."
FWW also called Congress to "stop the megamerger frenzy among agribusiness" by passing legislation to halt agribusiness mergers and ultimately ban factory farms, phasing them out and investing in a "just transition" for factory farm workers by 2040.
"The next Farm Bill is a critical opportunity to reverse course, by restoring supply management and reforming the farm safety net," said Wolf. "Passage of the Farm System Reform Act and Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act will help ensure we stop digging a deeper hole by halting consolidation and factory farm proliferation."
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As Fed Meets, Experts Tell Powell to Stop 'Needlessly Threatening Jobs'
"There's a clear path forward to avoiding a devastating and completely avoidable recession: Chair Powell and the Fed should stop raising interest rates," said one economist.
Jan 31, 2023
As the Federal Reserve kicked off its first policy meeting of the new year on Tuesday, economists and progressive advocates reiterated their now-familiar call for the central bank to stop raising interest rates amid growing evidence that hiring, wage growth, and inflation are slowing significantly.
"Pushing millions of people out of work is not the answer to tackling inflation," Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement. "Additional rate hikes could jeopardize our strong labor market—and low-wage workers and Black and brown workers would suffer the biggest economic consequences."
"There's a clear path forward to avoiding a devastating and completely avoidable recession: Chair Powell and the Fed should stop raising interest rates," Mabud added.
The latest push for an end to interest rate increases came as fresh data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Tuesday showed that wage growth continued to cool at the tail-end of 2022, an outcome that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has explicitly been aiming for even as experts have rejected the notion that wages are responsible for current inflation levels.
According to the BLS Employment Cost Index (ECI)—a measure watched closely by Fed policymakers—wage growth climbed just 1% in the final three months of 2022 compared to the previous quarter, a slower pace than analysts expected.
"The Fed has lost its excuse for a recession," Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, tweeted in response to the new BLS figures. "Over the last three months, inflation has come down exactly as a soft landing would predict, wage growth didn't persist but moderated with the reopening to solidly high levels within late 1990s ranges, and the economy added 750,000 new jobs."
"Too many hard-working families have everything to lose if the Fed stays the course with higher rates that only push the economy closer to a recession."
Though Powell has insisted that Fed decision-making will be driven by economic data, he made clear last month that the nation's central bankers don't think inflation has slowed enough to justify a rate-hike pause or reversal, brushing aside the recessionary risks of more monetary tightening.
On Wednesday, the Fed is widely expected to institute a 25-basis-point rate increase followed by another of the same size at its March meeting, bringing the total number of rate hikes to nine since early 2022.
Even the central bank's own models predict a sharp increase in the unemployment rate—and potentially millions of lost jobs—if Fed policymakers drive interest rates up to their desired range of between 5% and 5.25%.
Recent layoffs across the tech industry as well as data signaling a hiring deceleration have also intensified fears of a Fed-induced economic crisis.
"The Fed has every reason to halt further job-killing interest rate hikes as key indicators show inflation is slowing while the economic recovery remains fragile," said Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power program at Accountable.US. "Too many hard-working families have everything to lose if the Fed stays the course with higher rates that only push the economy closer to a recession."
"Repeated interest rate hikes have done little to curb corporate greed that even Fed economists admit is what's really driving high costs on everything from groceries to gas," Zelnick continued. "The Fed faces a choice: back down and let policy and lawmakers continue to take impactful steps to rein in corporate profiteering—or keep needlessly threatening jobs and an economic downturn with further rate hikes.”
\u201cExperts are warning the @federalreserve against further job-killing rate hikes\u2014it's time for the Fed to stop needlessly threatening Americans' livelihoods while doing nothing to address the rampant corporate greed raising prices on essentials. https://t.co/8S66qwXT5b\u201d— Accountable.US (@Accountable.US) 1675177572
For months, economists and lawmakers have vocally questioned the Fed's aggressive rate hikes and laser focus on the labor market given the myriad causes of the 2021 inflation spike, from pandemic-induced supply chain snags to corporate profiteering to Russia's war on Ukraine to the climate crisis.
Some experts, however, have argued that the Fed's seemingly misguided approach is perfectly understandable when considering that a central goal of the institution is to help the rich "conserve and increase their concentrated wealth."
"Chair Jerome Powell and the Fed are willing to impose significant costs on workers and families in order to reduce inflation," Gerald Epstein and Aaron Medlin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst wrote in The American Prospect earlier this month. "This focus on inflation, by promoting high unemployment, contradicts the dual mandate given to the Fed by Congress."
"Why does the Federal Reserve treat its high-employment mandate so cavalierly when inflation is above 2%?" the pair continued. "The answer stems from the fact that since its founding, Fed officials have seen the world through 'finance-colored' glasses. Financiers do not like high inflation. Like all creditors who lend money today to be paid back in the future, financiers hate getting paid back in dollars that are worth less than the dollars they lent out in the first place."
In a blog post on Monday, Economic Policy Institute research director Josh Bivens noted that the Fed's dual mandate is "meant to balance the risks of inflation versus the benefits of fast growth and low unemployment."
"Right now, the benefits of low unemployment are enormous, and the risks of inflation are retreating rapidly," Bivens wrote. "If the Fed lets the current recovery continue apace by not raising interest rates further at this week’s meeting, 2023 could turn out to be a great year for the economic fortunes of American families."
"The Fed should stand pat on interest rate increases," he added. "If they instead insist on raising rates, this will pose a dire threat to what could be an excellent 2023 for the economic prospects of America's working families."
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