April, 23 2020, 12:00am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jesse Bragg, Corporate Accountability, jbragg@corporateaccountability, +1 978 621 2619
Sara Shaw, Friends of the Earth International, sara.shaw@foe.co.uk, +44 7974 008270
Global Coalition: COVID-19, Climate Crises Linked, Must Be Addressed as One
In global sign-on, more than 150 groups demand COVID-19 response also address climate, justice issues.
WASHINGTON
As the full public health, societal and economic fall out of the COVID-19 pandemic just begins to be realised around the world, an coalition of more than 150 organisations released the first of its kind global set of demands, launched on Earth Day, to guide the international pandemic response.
The coalition, convened by the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, issued the demands as means of addressing both the pandemic and the interlinked climate crisis. While there have been many national demands and subsequent political responses, this is the first set of global demands that sets forth a collective vision of how all governments, locally to globally, can respond to both crises.
The first of its kind sign-on letter calls for "a bold response to the COVID-19 pandemic that simultaneously helps address the wider climate crisis, and transform the unequal economic system that has led to both."
The demands to national governments and international policymaking bodies include:
- Prioritise the health and wellbeing of people. People must always be valued over profit, for an economy is worthless without its people. Fully fund and resource health services and systems, ensuring care for all. Prioritise robust investment in other essential public services, such as safe shelter, water, food and sanitation.
- Guarantee the protection of marginalised populations. Provide aid, social protection, and relief to rural populations and the families that compose them, who are at the forefront of feeding our world. Special protection must also be guaranteed for the social and human rights of those in situations of homelessness, people in prison, refugees and migrants, elders in home care, orphans, and especially environmental defenders.
- Issue immediate economic and social measures to provide relief and security to all. Protect labour rights and guarantee protections for all workers, from the formal to the informal economy, and guarantee a universal basic income. Stop subsidies for fossil fuels and reorient public funds to ensure access to clean energy, water, and important utilities and public services. Immediately cancel debt payments by Southern countries due in 2020 and 2021 with no accrual of interest nor penalties. Transform tax systems, abolishing fiscal holidays for multinational corporations which undermine revenues, and abolish value-added tax and goods and services taxes for basic goods.
- Support a long-term just transition and recovery out of this crisis, and take the crisis as an opportunity to shift to equitable, socially just, climate-resilient and zero-carbon economies. We cannot afford bailouts that simply fill corporate pockets or rescue polluting industries incompatible with a living planet. Rather, we need an economic recovery that builds resilience, dissolves injustices, restores our ecosystems, and leads a managed decline of fossil fuels and a justice-oriented transition towards a fair & sustainable economy.
- Reject efforts to push so-called "structural reforms" that only serve to deepen oppression, inequality and impoverishment, including by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, who may use the pandemic to push schemes in the Global South under the guise of "shortening the time to recovery."
- Bolster international cooperation and people to people solidarity. Transferring technology and finance from the richest to the poorest countries is crucial. Facilitate instead of hinder the efforts of people's movements, citizens groups, Indigenous peoples and civil society organizations to link up across borders and countries for mutual support. We also call on governments to honor their historical responsibility and stop using tactics that dismiss that responsibility and delay a strong international response, such as withholding funding from the WHO and other institutions in a time of crisis.
- Collaborate on the development of and unrestricted access to vaccines and any medical breakthroughs of experimental therapy drugs, led by principles of international cooperation and free distribution. We need to ensure that any COVID-19 vaccine will reach all and that no country will be able to become a monopoly buyer, and no entity a monopoly producer.
- Immediately cease extractive projects, from mining to fossil fuels to industrial agriculture, including extraterritorial projects undertaken by corporations, which are accelerating ecological crises, encroaching on Indigenous territories, and putting communities at risk.
- Reject any and all attempts to waive liability of corporations and industries. The actors that are responsible, in so many ways, for this multifaceted crisis and the broken system absolutely cannot be granted loopholes that allow them to escape responsibility for their abuses at home and across the world.
- Governments must not take advantage of the crisis to push through draconian measures including the expansion of police and military powers that undermine workers' rights, repress the rights of Indigenous peoples, restrict public participation in decision-making, restrict access to sexual and reproductive health services, or institute widespread surveillance under cover of the crisis.
The demands will be used as a basis for organizing and pressure at the local, national and international levels in the weeks and months to come. Below, are quotes from participating organizations, with those based in the Global South listed first.
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"The COVID-19 crisis is clearly showing us the enormous inequalities that are causing the majority of the population to suffer. It is also clearly showing us the complicity of states that, to protect the interests of corporations and financial elites, are promoting policies that only benefit big business and criminalize local activities. We are facing a dangerous moment of the emergence of facist states. The solution to climate crisis and this pandemic can only come from the power of the people." Martin Vilela, Head of Climate Change, Extractivism and International Advocacy, Plataforma Boliviana frente al Cambio Climatico/Bolivian Platform on Climate Change
"The impacts of the pandemic as well as responses to it are exposing the gross inequalities of our societies and the global system. Amidst intensifying challenges to survival, we are reminded that we need a profound transformation of the system if we are to have a better world for our families and communities. The current system does not offer hope. In this moment, when our interdependence and connection to each other and to nature could not be any clearer, we must realize that justice-based solutions led by movements are the only way forward. Hope lies in the power of people." --Lidy Nacpil, Coordinator, Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development
"The Covid-19 crisis clearly lays bare the injustices that Africans have already been facing as a result of the colonial and neo-colonial economies, climate change and other prolonged social and economic crises, constructed by the racist patriarchal capitalist system. Africans did not cause the Coronavirus crisis, as we did not cause the climate crisis, but, just as with the climate crisis, our people will likely be severely impacted. Africans have the least access, globally, to basic services such as water, electricity, healthcare which are necessary to shelter them through these crises. Working class and peasant women in Africa carry the burden of all the crises because they are the primary household food producers, caregivers and harvesters of water, energy and other basic goods needed for the reproduction of life and the well-being of people. But these roles also place them at the frontlines of the defence of nature and its right to exist, without which the survival of all beings would not be possible." -- Trusha Reddy, Programme Head: Energy & Climate Justice, WoMin African Alliance
"The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing what the global majority has known all along: that the dominant economic system prioritises profits over people and planet. With each new day of infections, deaths and destroyed livelihoods, the pandemic is exposing the gross injustices of our existing systems. But the pandemic has also shown our enormous collective strength, and the possibilities that emerge when a crisis is taken seriously, and people join together.- Sara Shaw, Climate Justice & Energy Program Coordinator, Friends of the Earth International
"This pandemic, just like the climate crisis, knows no borders and no justice. Only a response that is beyond borders and centers justice can address either crisis. But corporate interference has contributed to the inexcusable failure of governments to respond with the urgency and people-first mentality required. We are at a crossroads where systems change is the only way forward. The demands released in unity by more than 150 global organizations make clear how we can rise to the occasion of this moment, address the broken system, and do right by people, not the corporations that have contributed to systemic injustice in countless ways." - Rachel Rose Jackson, Director of Climate Research and Policy, Corporate Accountability
"The impacts of the corona pandemic have further exposed the existing inequalities of neoliberal capitalism and climate injustice which the poorest and most vulnerable are already paying the price for. But amidst these multiple crises the call for justice is ringing louder and louder from every corner of the world. The rich can no longer be allowed to sacrifice the global South or the poor in the global North in the name of their economic recovery. At this pivotal moment in history we must do more than tinker around the edges. We must seize this moment to dial the world forward and ensure that we have both a just recovery and a just transition that guarantees everyone the right to a dignified life."-- Asad Rehman, Executive Director, War on Want
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Grand Jury Indicts Top Trump Aides, 11 Arizona Republicans Over 'Fake Electors' Scheme
Had it succeeded, said the state's attorney general, the scheme would have "deprived Arizona's voters of their right to have their votes counted for their chosen president."
Apr 25, 2024
A grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday charged seven aides to Donald Trump and nearly a dozen Republican officials over a "fake electors" scheme in the state that aimed to keep the former president in power after his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.
Trump, who is currently facing nearly 90 charges across four criminal cases as he runs for another White House term, was described as "unindicted co-conspirator 1" in the 58-page indictment, which was announced by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.
"The people of Arizona elected President Biden," Mayes, a Democrat, said Wednesday. "Unwilling to accept this fact, the defendants charged by the state grand jury allegedly schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency. Whatever their reasoning was, the plot to violate the law must be answered for."
The indictment names former Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward, sitting state Republican Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, former U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, and seven others as the "fake electors" who sought to declare Trump the rightful winner of the state's presidential contest.
The names of other individuals indicted by the state grand jury are redacted, but the document's descriptions make clear that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and top Trump legal strategist Boris Epshteyn are among those facing felony charges—including fraud, forgery, and conspiracy.
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Mayes said Wednesday that had the fake elector scheme succeeded, it would have "deprived Arizona's voters of their right to have their votes counted for their chosen president."
"It effectively would have made their right to vote meaningless," said Mayes.
A state grand jury, made up of everyday, regular Arizonans, has handed down felony indictments in the ongoing investigation into the fake elector scheme in Arizona. pic.twitter.com/Nu8GcD4ZqJ
— AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes (@AZAGMayes) April 24, 2024
Alex Gulotta, state director of All Voting Is Local Action Arizona, said Wednesday that "the indictment of the eleven fake electors is one of the first steps required in holding these election deniers accountable for their alleged attempts to take power away from voters by disrupting our free and fair elections."
"Arizonans deserve to trust the election officials responsible for administering our elections and preserving our democracy," said Gulotta, "and this is a positive step forward as we continue to strengthen the foundations of our democracy and restore faith in our elections."
The Arizona Republicreported Wednesday that "several of the Arizona electors have previously claimed they were merely offering Congress a backup plan, though nothing in the documents they sent to Congress and the National Archives backs up that assertion."
"The indictment includes several statements the false electors made on social media that contradict those claims," the newspaper observed.
Jenny Guzman, director of Common Cause's Arizona program, said the indictment "marks the start of a new chapter for the fake elector scheme that has plagued Arizona."
"Arizonans are still dealing with the fallout from the false electors and the Big Lie about the 2020 elections," said Guzman. "We are relieved that the investigation by Attorney General Mayes has concluded and Arizonans can now know that what comes next is accountability. These efforts by these fake electors to undermine the will of Arizona’s voters have had implications far beyond their failed attempt to overthrow the 2020 election."
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A campaign finance watchdog on Wednesday filed a Federal Election Commission complaint accusing former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, affiliated political groups, and an accounting firm of violating U.S. law in a scheme "seemingly designed to obscure the true recipients of a noteworthy portion of Trump's legal bills."
The Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center (CLC) said that "evidence appears to show an illegal arrangement between several Trump-affiliated committees and a compliance firm named Red Curve Solutions that is designed to obscure the identities of those providing legal services and how much they are being paid."
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CLC alleges that the Trump campaign, Trump's political action committee (PAC) Save America, and three affiliated organizations "violated federal reporting requirements based on a scheme in which the committees reportedly paid over $7.2 million—described as 'reimbursement for legal' costs or expenses"—to Red Curve.
The watchdog also said that Red Curve appears to be "making or facilitating illegal contributions that violate either federal contribution limits or the prohibition on corporate contributions."
According to CLC:
Red Curve is a domestic limited liability company that offers compliance and FEC reporting services but does not appear to offer any legal services. It is managed by Bradley Crate, who also serves as the treasurer for each of the five Trump-affiliated committees concerned in this complaint, as well as over 200 other federal committees.
According to filings with the FEC, Red Curve appears to have been fronting legal costs for Trump since at least December 2022, with Trump-affiliated committees repaying the company later. This arrangement appears to violate FEC rules that require campaigns to disclose not only the entity being reimbursed (here, Red Curve) but also the underlying vendor. By not disclosing the vendors that actually provided legal services, the Trump-affiliated committees effectively blocked the public from knowing which attorneys and firms are being paid—and how much they are being paid—through this arrangement.
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Trump—who is the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee—faces 91 federal and state felony charges related to his role in the January 6 insurrection and his organization's business practices. He is currently on trial in New York for allegedly falsifying business records related to hush money payments to cover up sex scandals during the 2016 election cycle. The twice-impeached former president has been open about his use of campaign donations to pay his legal costs.
The new CLC filing comes a day after the watchdog filed separate FEC complaints urging investigations into a pair of Trump-affiliated "scam PACs," which "pretend to fundraise for major candidates or issues while secretly diverting almost all of their donors' money back into fundraising or the fraudsters' own pockets."
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"With a total ban still set to take effect June 8, the Arizona Abortion Access Act is needed now more than ever," one state campaigner said of a November ballot measure.
Apr 24, 2024
Three Republicans in the Arizona House of Representatives on Wednesday joined with Democrats to advance legislation that would repeal an 1864 ban on abortion—a development rights advocates welcomed while stressing that the fight is far from over.
The 32-28 vote on House Bill 2677—with GOP Reps. Tim Dunn (25), Matt Gress (4), and Justin Wilmeth (2) voting in favor—was the third attempt in as many weeks to pass repeal legislation since the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the ban.
"The state Senate could vote on the repeal as early as next Wednesday, after the bill comes on the floor for a 'third reading,' as is required under chamber rules," according toNBC News. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on Wednesday toldThe Washington Post that "I am hopeful the Senate does the right thing and sends it to my desk so I can sign it."
Applauding the House passage of H.B. 2677, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona president and CEO Angela Florez said that "today, Arizona is one step closer to repealing the state's Civil War-era total abortion ban. While the repeal still must pass the Senate, this is a major win for reproductive freedom."
"We must celebrate today's vote in support of abortion rights and harness our enthusiasm to spread the word and urge lawmakers in the Senate to support this necessary repeal bill," she continued. "Despite this step forward, Arizonans cannot stop fighting."
Florez noted that "even with the repeal of the Civil War-era ban, the state will still have a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy that denies people access to critical care. And lawmakers continue to attack Arizonans' ability to access reproductive healthcare. Our right to control our bodies and lives is hanging on by a thread."
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The Arizona Abortion Access Act is a proposed state constitutional amendment that would prevent many limits on abortions before fetal viability and safeguard access to care after viability to protect the life or physical or mental health of the patient.
The coalition supporting the amendment, Arizona for Abortion Access, highlighted on social media that the House-approved bill "did not include the emergency clause required to stop the 1864 ban from taking effect on June 8," meaning H.B. 2677 wouldn't apply until 90 days after the end of the legislative session.
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