August, 27 2020, 12:00am EDT
'Climate Denial Is Not a Victimless Crime' - Greenpeace Response to Hurricane Laura
Early this morning, Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 storm near Cameron, Louisiana, roughly 30 miles east of the Texas border. Officials predicted a massive storm surge that could reach up to 40 miles inland, and more than 600,000 homes and businesses have already lost power.
In response, Greenpeace USA Climate Campaign Director Janet Redman said:
WASHINGTON
Early this morning, Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 storm near Cameron, Louisiana, roughly 30 miles east of the Texas border. Officials predicted a massive storm surge that could reach up to 40 miles inland, and more than 600,000 homes and businesses have already lost power.
In response, Greenpeace USA Climate Campaign Director Janet Redman said:
"The devastation wrought by Hurricane Laura is staggering. Our greatest concern is for the people across the Gulf Coast whose homes, families, and livelihoods will be forever changed by this storm. Hurricane Laura--as well as the climate-intensified wildfires raging in California--is undeniable proof that the climate crisis is here. Trump's utter failure to contain COVID-19 has combined with his administration's dangerous climate denial to create an unprecedented emergency. People across the country are reeling from the health and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, but Trump is rolling back climate protections, defunding FEMA, and bailing out fossil fuel corporations.
"As is so often the case, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and working-class communities will feel the impacts of Trump's failures the hardest. These communities are most likely to live near toxic facilities vulnerable to flooding--like the hundreds of oil refineries and petrochemical plants in the Gulf South that evacuated ahead of Hurricane Laura--and often have the fewest means to rebuild when disasters strike. Long before Trump entered office, oil and gas CEOs predicted this would be the result of their unfettered industry. Climate denial is not a victimless crime, and it's time for the fossil fuel industry to be held accountable. We demand that the oil and gas companies responsible for fueling the climate crisis pay for community recovery from this disaster."
From Houston, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS) Founder and Co-Executive Director Juan Parras said:
"It feels like we're living Hurricane Harvey all over again. Communities from the East End of Houston and all the way down to Baytown, Texas deal with year-round toxic air pollution from refineries and petrochemical complexes, and they're suffering from higher rates of COVID-19 right now. With Hurricane Laura's impact, these facilities are emitting even more life-threatening pollutants. Local officials may have turned off all air quality monitors in the area, arguing that they're 'too expensive' to replace, but we can still smell the chemicals. Fossil fuel and petrochemical corporations are more worried about protecting their profits than our health."
During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, reports filed by companies to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) show that more than 5.7 million pounds of air pollution were released by chemical plants, oil refineries, and industrial facilities in the month after the storm made landfall. Ninety percent of this air pollution was released by just 13 companies.
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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Database Exposes 'Illicit Network Undermining Democracy Around the World'
Yanis Varoufakis hailed the effort as "a treasure chest of well-researched reports on how the reactionaries of the world unite."
Apr 17, 2024
"Coups. Assassinations. Riots. Detentions. Disinformation. We know the tactics that have been deployed to undermine our democracies. But who is behind them?"
Progressive International (PI) asks and answers this and other questions with an extensive new database published Wednesday that connects the dots in what the leftist group calls the "Reactionary International"—a loose global network of right-wing leaders and organizations working to subvert democratic institutions.
PI calls it an "illicit network undermining democracy around the world."
"Today is a mask-off moment for the Reactionary International and the parties, politicians, judges, journalists, foundations, think tanks, tech platforms, NGOs, activists, financiers, and entrepreneurs that comprise it," PI said.
"After a year of preparation, we finally open the doors to our new research consortium, exposing the global network of reactionary forces that corrode our democracies, destroy our planet, and drive us closer to world war," the group added.
"The twin insurrections at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and Brasília's Three Powers Plaza in 2023 left no doubt about the international coordination of reactionary forces," PI argued. "Yet far too little is known about the entities of this network, their sources of financing, and their institutional allies operating inside our political systems."
Ultimately, PI aims to "support democratic systems to become more resilient to their insidious tactics."
From leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and former U.S. President Donald Trump—the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee—to evangelical Christian groups influencing laws in African countries criminalizing LGBTQ+ people and tech companies empowering ubiquitous state surveillance, Reactionary International is a who's-who of the world's right-wing forces.
A cursory search of the database's contents shows users can:
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- Explore the global network of the Falun Gong, its Trump-connected media outlet The Epoch Times, and its traveling dance troupe known as Shen Yun.
Yanis Varoufakis, a PI member and secretary-general of the left-wing Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, called the database "a treasure chest of well-researched reports on how the reactionaries of the world unite."
PI invites the public to contribute to the database.
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Apr 17, 2024
Led by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, Republican leaders in 23 states on Tuesday filed a petition making clear their aim to allow petrochemical companies and other corporations to continue operating pollution-causing facilities without regard for the "disparate impact" they can have on low-income communities of color.
The attorneys general of states including Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas wrote to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan, asking him to amend Title VI under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The law prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating against residents based on race and national origin and allows residents to petition the EPA arguing that state agencies have intentionally discriminated or disparately impacted a particular community.
Title VI has underpinned hundreds of legal cases, including recent EPA investigations into the 85-mile stretch of land in Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, where dozens of petrochemical plants have been built and health experts have observed a disproportionate number of cancer cases and other medical problems among the predominantly Black population.
The attorneys general said they object to the Biden administration's use of Title VI to "advance what it calls 'environmental justice,'" and complained that the EPA aims to create "a condition in which no racially or economically defined group experiences adverse environmental impacts."
Andre Segura, vice president of litigation at the environmental legal group Earthjustice, said Wednesday that the Republican attorneys general aim to "eviscerate civil rights protections just to make it easier for industrial polluters to continue with business as usual."
"Everyone should be alarmed by these outrageous efforts," said Segura. "The fact is, many of the states that have signed the petition have historically allowed these harmful facilities to be placed in predominantly Black and brown communities, without regard for the health and safety of residents."
Manuel Fernandez, president of Miami-Dade County Democrats in Florida, said the effort was "embarrassing" and called on Moody to resign.
The petition was filed three months after U.S. District Court Judge James Cain Jr., an appointee of former President Donald Trump in Louisiana, ruled that Title VI requirements amount to "government overreach."
The EPA halted its Title VI investigation into the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) last year a month after Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, sued the agency over its Title VI regulations. The EPA had been probing whether the LDEQ placed the historically Black town of St. John the Baptist Parish at risk by allowing companies to build petrochemical plants nearby.
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Congressman Greg Casar said the Republicans behind a new joint statement "sound more like corporate lobbyists than governors."
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As Volkswagen workers in Tennessee began voting on whether to join the United Auto Workers, progressive critics on Wednesday continued to call out six Southern GOP governors for jointly saying they "are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states."
Govs. Kay Ivey of Alabama, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Tate Reeves of Mississippi, Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Bill Lee of Tennessee, and Greg Abbott of Texas issued their statement in response to "the largest organizing drive in modern American history," which the UAW launched after major contract wins following a strike targeting the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—last year.
"As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by," the Republican leaders said, claiming that "unionization would certainly put our states' jobs in jeopardy" and the UAW is "making big promises to our constituents that they can't deliver on."
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What actually threatens American workers?\n\u274c Anti-union, anti-worker propaganda like this\n\ud83d\udcb0 Corps that put profits over people\n\u26d1\ufe0f Safety standards not being met\n\n@GovAbbott & @GovernorKayIvey sound more like corporate lobbyists than governors here. @UAW backs American workers!— (@)
The Economic Policy Institutesaid Wednesday that the governors' anti-union statement "clearly shows how scared they are that workers organizing with UAW to improve jobs and wages will upend the highly unequal, failed anti-worker economic development model of Southern states."
Responding to the statement on social media, the Congressional Labor Caucus declared that "we speak up when we see threats to workers' rights. Workers must be allowed to choose whether to form a union on their own—free from influence from their employers or politicians. Shame on these governors for putting out this anti-union propaganda."
After Ivey shared the statement on social media, Nina Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, asked, "Better wages and working conditions are against the values of your state?"
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Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, also took aim at Ivey, saying, "You used Alabama taxpayers' money to have state troopers escort out-of-state scabs to break the strike of YOUR constituents."
Nelson explained that she was referring to the "hardworking" United Mine Workers of America members employed by Warrior Met, "who were fighting for the right to see their families more than a few days a year."
More Perfect Union told Ivey that "unions only threaten your values if you value denying workers a living wage and good benefits."
In contrast with the Republican governors, around two-thirds of the Senate Democratic Caucus in January wrote to 13 nonunion automakers—including Mercedes and Volkswagen—urging them not to illegally block UAW organizing at their plants.
"We are concerned by reporting at numerous automakers that management has acted illegally to block unionization efforts," the senators stressed, citing multiple examples. "These retaliatory actions are hostile to workers' rights and must not be repeated if further organizing efforts are made by these companies' workers. We therefore urge you all to commit to implementation of a neutrality agreement at your manufacturing plants."
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