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As international climate talks continue, a coalition of 267 organizations - including 36 representing Gulf of Mexico communities - delivered a letter today to President Biden requesting that his Interior Department immediately cancel next week's Lease Sale 257 in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite assurance of strong climate action, Biden's Department of Interior will place more than 80 million acres of the Gulf on the auction block for oil and gas development just days after COP26 in Glasgow.
As international climate talks continue, a coalition of 267 organizations - including 36 representing Gulf of Mexico communities - delivered a letter today to President Biden requesting that his Interior Department immediately cancel next week's Lease Sale 257 in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite assurance of strong climate action, Biden's Department of Interior will place more than 80 million acres of the Gulf on the auction block for oil and gas development just days after COP26 in Glasgow.
Aside from breaking a campaign promise to ban new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, the Biden administration also violated federal law in deciding to open more of the Gulf to offshore drilling. The megasale is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by Earthjustice on behalf of Friends of the Earth, Healthy Gulf, Center for Biological Diversity, and Sierra Club over outdated and insufficient environmental analysis.
The groups challenge the administration's outrageous conclusion that the sale would not contribute to climate change and note its failure to address impacts of drilling activity on frontline communities and protected species. In fact, as stated in the letter, the administration "has existing authority to defer" the megasale, which "will result in the production of up to 1.12 billion barrels and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of fossil fuels over the next 50 years."
Communities in the Gulf of Mexico have suffered a long and fraught history of living in the nation's sacrificial zone to offshore drilling. The groups highlight the irony that the lease sale was announced in August 2021 just as deadly Hurricane Ida made landfall on the Louisiana coast, "wreaking havoc on the same frontline communities the Administration committed to help heal."
According to the groups, reversing course on the climate crisis starts with Biden keeping his promise to end new leases on public lands and waters and finally end deep-rooted injustices perpetrated by the oil and gas industry. "The region's communities are frontline Black, Indigenous and people of color and low-income families who have been living with degraded air, land, and water for decades," the letter states. "It is beyond time that the federal government stops ignoring this grave injustice."
You can read the full text of the letter here.
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) 783-7400
"Demolishing the East Wing is bad enough, but carving the names of corporations and billionaires into the White House walls would mark a permanent scar on the People's House."
Amazon, Apple, Lockheed Martin, Google, Altria, and Union Pacific Railroad are among the dozens of corporations bankrolling US President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to replace the East Wing of the White House—which is now reduced to rubble—with a gaudy, 90,000-square-foot ballroom.
The White House released the list of donors on Thursday as the expected price tag of the project grew to $300 million.
Watchdogs said the ballroom represents yet another way in which Trump is inviting corporate influence peddling. Earlier reporting from CBS News indicated that some donors could have their names etched on the walls of the gold-encrusted ballroom.
"Demolishing the East Wing is bad enough, but carving the names of corporations and billionaires into the White House walls would mark a permanent scar on the People's House," said Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate with Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday.
"Money buys access and influence and, in this case, a long-term presence on the White House wall," Golinger added. "This is easily understood and blatantly disgusting."
Below is the full list of names, including individuals and corporations, provided by the White House:
Economist Paul Krugman wrote Friday that "it may seem like a trivial story, but it's a highly visual metaphor for the way MAGA is tearing down almost everything good about our country."
"In true Trumpian style, this act of vandalism is being paid for by large corporate donors—mostly tech and crypto companies—seeking to buy Trump's favor," wrote Krugman. "I am sure there will be a Trump meme-coin dispenser installed on every table."
The liberal justice accused the majority of turning their back "on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment."
US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was unable to convince the right-wing majority of the nation's highest court on Thursday night to accept a last-ditch petition from a man slated to be killed by the state of Alabama asking that he be put to death by firing squad as opposed to the more brutal and painful method of asphyxiation from nitrogen gas, a torturous process of execution experts have said amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Anthony Boyd, convicted of a 1993 murder and kidnapping, which he maintained until the end that he did not commit, was put to death by the state of Alabama using nitrogen gas after a request for a stay of execution and a review of a lower appeals court ruling was rejected in a 6-3 decision.
In the first four paragraphs of her dissent, backed by Justices Elana Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor departed from the majority by asking people to put themselves inside the death chamber with the mask of nitrogen strapped to their face:
Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.
Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.
That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight. For two to four minutes, Boyd will remain conscious while the State of Alabama kills him in this way. When the gas starts flowing, he will immediately convulse. He will gasp for air. And he will thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological tor- ment until he finally loses consciousness. Just short of twenty minutes later, Boyd will be declared dead.
Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes. The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not. This Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. Because the Court should have instead granted a stay of execution and Boyd’s petition for certiorari, I respectfully dissent.
Last year, a body of experts at the United Nations urgently pleaded with US officials to put a stop to the death penalty by nitrogen hypoxia, calling it "clearly prohibited under international law." The experts cited the killing of Kenneth Smith by the state of Alabama in February of 2024 as the "first person ever to be executed in this way," a death which reportedly took more than 20 minutes as Smith "writhed and convulsed on the gurney."
The wife of another man executed by this method—approved by seven states, but only put to use so far by Alabama and Louisiana—said watching her husband be killed this way was like “watching someone drown without water.”
Citing the seven times the method had been used before Boyd, Sotomayor said there is now a clear record of the intense pain and unnecessary suffering experienced by people put to death in this manner. All the killings, she wrote, resulted in a similar experience: "apparent consciousness for minutes, not seconds; and violent convulsing, eyes bulging, consistent thrashing against the restraints, and clear gasping for the air that will not come."
While the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death," argued Sotomayor, "when a State introduces an experimental method of execution that superadds psychological terror as a necessary feature of its successful completion, courts should enforce the Eighth Amendment’s mandate against cruel and unusual punishment."
She called for Boyd to be spared the excruciating death, given that a less cruel and painful alternative was readily available, and an end to the use of nitrogen hypoxia nationwide. While Kagan and Jackson agreed, the other six justices allowed the execution to proceed.
Before he was killed, according to CBS News, Boyd pleaded his innocence for a final time on Thursday. "I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” he said. “There can be no justice until we change this system.”
If the Trump administration gets its way, "one giant company could control almost everything you watch on TV," warned Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
The Trump administration reportedly wants a rich friend of the president, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, HBO, and other major media organizations.
David Ellison is the son of Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world and a Republican megadonor. Under the younger Ellison's leadership, Skydance recently scored a regulatory green light from the Trump administration to merge with Paramount. Federal approval of the deal was widely seen as a corrupt reward for Paramount's decision to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit that President Donald Trump filed last year against the CBS parent company.
"They're friends of mine. They're big supporters of mine. And they'll do the right thing," Trump said of the Ellisons earlier this month, declaring that CBS has "great potential" under new leadership. CBS has already taken several steps to appease the president.
Now, the Trump administration reportedly favors the newly formed media behemoth, Paramount Skydance, to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which publicly announced earlier this week that it is seeking bids.
The New York Post reported Thursday that Paramount Skydance is "clearly in the catbird seat." Citing an unnamed government official with direct knowledge of the matter, the Post reported that "a number of rival bidders are likely to face stiff hurdles from US regulators in the blockbuster auction."
Paramount Skydance has so far made several offers to Warner Bros. Discovery, all of which were rejected as insufficient.
But Ellison appears confident that his firm will ultimately acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, given his personal relationship with Trump. According to CNN, "Ellison's allies are privately arguing that he is the only buyer who would pass muster with Trump administration regulators."
"Privately, Ellison is exuding the kind of confidence that comes from having tens of billions in cash," CNN reported. "His ambitions are bolstered by his father, Larry Ellison, Oracle's executive chairman, who currently ranks as the second-richest man in the world. Together they are 'building an unprecedented media empire,' as The Washington Post put it earlier this month."
Watchdogs and Democratic lawmakers have voiced alarm over Ellison's efforts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned earlier this week that if Paramount Skydance ultimately purchases Warner Bros. Discovery, "one giant company could control almost everything you watch on TV."
Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, called the Trump administration's reported position on Ellison's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery "wildly corrupt."
The New York Times notes that the potential merger "would combine two of the largest Hollywood studios, Warner Bros. and Paramount, granting huge clout at the box office and putting CNN and CBS News under the same corporate umbrella, which would give the new company enormous sway over the news industry."
"It would combine Paramount+ and HBO Max, two of the biggest streaming services, bringing the company's movies and shows into hundreds of millions of living rooms," the Times added.
The Writers Guild of America, a labor union that represents TV and news writers, spoke out forcefully against the possibility of a Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. merger on Thursday, saying in a statement that "merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth."
“At a time when the country demands, and needs, the broadest possible set of views and stories and voices," the union said, "we have handed over the keys to the media kingdom to giants whose sole motivation is to maximize their short-term investment return, not to inform or enlighten or entertain."