Saturday 1 October 2016

ExxonMobil sued for decades-long cover up of climate change

Oil giant ExxonMobil is being sued for allegedly polluting a Massachusetts river and violating federal water laws. The suit also charges the company with knowing of climate change’s adverse affect, but hiding it.
Last year it was revealed the company started to conceal its own findings as early as 1977 that fossil fuels cause global warming.
“Communities were put in danger and remain in danger, all to cut costs from one of the most profitable corporations in the world,” said Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservative Law Foundation, in a released statement about the lawsuit filed on Thursday in the Massachusetts District Court.
CLF is a 4,000 member organization dedicated to protecting New England’s environment.
The lawsuit said ExxonMobil’s terminal outside Boston is leaking stormwater and industrial pollution into the Mystic River beyond what is allowed under the facility’s permits.
The suit further alleges the company made no provisions for storms brought on by extreme weather that could damage the facility and put waterways and communities there at greater environmental risk despite its knowledge of climate change.
“It’s time to make Exxon answer for decades of false statements to the public and to regulators and ensure that its Everett facility meets its legal obligation to protect thousands of people and the Boston Harbor estuary from toxic water pollution,”said Campbell. “For more than three decades, Exxon Mobil has devoted its resources to deceiving the public about climate science while using its knowledge about climate change to advance its business operations.”
According to the complaint, “the Everett Terminal is vulnerable to sea level rise, increased precipitation, increased magnitude and frequency of storm events, and increased magnitude and frequency of storm surges due to its location, elevation, and lack of preventative infrastructure. ExxonMobil has not implemented needed actions to address and eliminate these vulnerabilities.”
Exxon said in a statement it would it would "fight this in court,” and called the suit “yet another attempt to use the courts to promote a political agenda," according to the Hill. 
In an interview with WBUR in May the facility had passed recent pollution prevention inspections from federal and state agencies.
The suit’s allegations come amid intense scrutiny of Exxon’s work studying climate change. Last year, InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that for decades, beginning in 1977, Exxon concealed its own findings that fossil fuels cause global warming, altered the climate and melted Arctic ice.
Exxon has denied the allegations.
A handful of Democratic attorneys general have launched investigations into the company’s climate science, including Massachusetts’s Maura Healey.
The company has disputed attacks on its climate science, as well, saying it worked on research with the Department of Energy, the United Nations and others. 
“To suggest that we had reached definitive conclusions, decades before the world’s experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development, is not credible,” the statement said.
https://www.rt.com/usa/361243-exxonmobil-sued-river-pollution/

posted by Satish Sharma at 04:48 0 Comments

Don’t Believe What You Read: People Really Do Care about Free Trade

is a frequent contributor to The Progressive. The former editor of The Racine Labor for 14 years, he teaches labor studies at Illinois and the Cornell Workers’ Institute.s
President Barack Obama is apparently dead set on a last-minute passage of the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership that would enhance the power of gigantic globalcorporations.    His strategy appears to be to push it through during the lame duck session after the election, relying heavily on votes of anti-worker Republicans and a small handful of conservative Democrats.  
Bill Clinton pulled a similar maneuver in 1993, ramming through the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement despite nearly 2-1 opposition among Democratic House members, 64 percent opposition among independents, and an evenly divided Republican caucus.
As it did with NAFTA, The New York Times has provided a steady platform promoting the TPP—in editorials, through pro-corporate columnists like Thomas Friedman, and even in its news articles. Most recently, a prominent article in the Times claimed that the vast majority of American voters were either in favor of the TPP, or utterly uninterested.
Author Jackie Calmes described opposition to the deal as limited to vocal, extremist minorities on the left and right.  Drawing misleading conclusions from a few selective polls, Calmes suggested that readers, presumably including members of Congress, should feel free to ignore the noisy chatter against the TPP.
“The level of support for trade agreements in general, and the pending Pacific pact in particular, stands in notable contrast to the toxicity of trade in an election season largely defined by anger among working-class voters,” she wrote in her front-page news analysis piece in the Times.
But Calmes relies on shallow polling that asks only superficial questions, such as whether respondents approve of trade in general, to reach this conclusion. The polls she cites neglect to probe meaningful questions such as whether “countries that are part of international trade agreements should be required to maintain minimum standards for working conditions.” An astounding 93 percent of Americans agree with this position.
The bitter experience of the past two decades of “free trade” means that critiques of the TPP are resonating  in the current context of extreme economic inequality and precarious lives for tens of millions of Americans. America has lost 5.7  million manufacturing jobs from 1998 to 2013 and 56,000 factories. “U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers . . . cut their workforces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million,” theWall Street Journal reported. America’s 500 largest corporations now produce nearly half of their output in their overseas plants.
The substitution of an economy based on financial transactions rather than job-creating factories has caused deep suffering in Rust Belt “factory towns” and Southern mill towns. Aremarkable study authored by Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton and Anne Case found an unanticipated rise of nearly 500,000 deaths among working class whites aged forty-five to fifty-four, a 22 percent increase from 1999 to 2013. Opioid abuse, alcoholism, and suicide contributed to these tragic early deaths.
Deaton commented on his findings: “These are the people who used to have good factory jobs with on-the-job training. These are the people who could build good lives for themselves and for their kids. And all of that has gone away. The factory is in Cambodia, the factory is in Vietnam, the factory is in China, wherever.”
The proposed TPP has only heightened the broadly shared anxieties of many Americans brought on by NAFTA. Working people, both blue-collar and professional, fear further downward pressure on U.S. wages from American corporate operations encouraged by trade deals to move jobs overseas. They are particularly concerned about the TPP’s token labor protections in nations like Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and Vietnam, persistent violators of worker rights.
Further, the TPP  will only further consolidate the power of global corporations to sue national governments over protective laws like those holding down drug prices and safeguarding the environment. Such features have drawn the opposition of distinguished economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Krugman, as well as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (and Donald Trump as well) and the vast majority of House Democrats.
Since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994,  “NAFTA opposition is the majority positionacross every demographic,” according to a recent poll. “Hispanics were among the most anti-NAFTA, as were progressives, liberals, Democrats and internationalists.”
But opposition to “free trade” deals has become much broader in terms of party preference, education, and income.  By 2010, after witnessing the impact of NAFTA’s cost (about850,000 jobs) and the entrance of China into the World Trade Organization (resulting in about  3.2  million US job losses since 2001),  college-educated professionals and Republicans have become much more inclined to oppose “free trade” than in pre-NAFTA days.
By 2010, Republican pollster Bill McInturff had detected a profound shift in attitudes among college-educated professionals and GOP voters, concluding, “The important change is that very well-educated and upper-income people compared to five to ten years ago have shifted their opinion and are now expressing significant concern about the notion of . . . free trade.”
These shifts were long ignored by Republicans who continued to promote unregulated globalization, tax cuts for the wealthy, and slashing Social Security and Medicare, catering to corporate CEOs and other members of the top 1 percent.  But resentment among non-affluent, economically troubled Republicans kept building. By 2016, opposition to “free trade” became a key driving force motivating non-union white workers lacking college degrees—the Republicans’ most dependable source of votes—to stage an uprising.  
Donald Trump stepped into the breach, claiming the anti-globalist and anti-TPP causes as his own—as well as inflaming xenophobic and white-nationalist sentiment. Trump  has thundered against the TPP, WTO and NAFTA, but has only occasionally mentioned that his chief “solutions” to corporations offshoring jobs involve further reducing workers’  wages andcutting already-low corporate taxes to encourage firms to stay in the United States. (Despite her overall strong debate performance, Hillary Clinton stepped back from confronting Trump’s hypocrisy on trade and outsourcing.)
More than at any point in our history, fervent disapproval of “free trade” and the massive offshoring of U.S. jobs to low-wage, high-repression nations reaches across the political spectrum and up and down the income ladder.
If President Obama persists with his ill-considered crusade for the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the post-election lame-duck session, both he and the New York Times are likely to be stunned by the ferocity of the public’s opposition.

http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/09/188971/don%E2%80%99t-believe-what-you-read-people-really-do-care-about-free-trade

posted by Satish Sharma at 04:41 0 Comments

Striking Prisoners Are Bending the Arc of the Moral Universe Closer to Justice

by
Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan


The national scope of the prisoner strike, with actions in 40 to 50 prisons around the U.S., is truly historic. (Photo: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA via AP)
Grass-roots organizing, the hard work of building movements, can be grueling. Pay is often low or nonexistent. Success is never assured. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But it doesn’t bend itself. Right now, under some of the most repressive circumstances that exist in the United States, a national movement is growing for prisoners’ rights. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This movement is rippling out from a solitary-confinement cell inside the Holman Correctional Facility in rural Atmore, Alabama.

“These strikes are our method for challenging mass incarceration. The prison system is a continuation of the slave system,” a man named Kinetik Justice told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour last May. He was using a contraband cellphone from inside solitary confinement in Holman, where he was being held as punishment for his organizing. He and fellow prisoners around Alabama launched a 10-day strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day, refusing to engage in prison labor. “The reform and changes that we’ve been fighting for in Alabama, we’ve tried petitioning through the courts. We’ve tried to get in touch with our legislators. ... We understood that our incarceration was pretty much about our labor and the money that was being generated through the prison system.”
  
Kinetik Justice co-founded the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), to organize prisoners against exploitative prison-labor programs. Despite having no access to the internet, they have a website with a downloadable book by FAM co-founder Melvin Ray that details their plight in the Alabama prison system and how they are organizing. Ray, also incarcerated, opens the book with the lines: “FREEDOM ... Make no mistake about it ... That’s the business of Free Alabama Movement. At some point, we (prisoners) have got to get to the point where not only have we had enough of the inhumane and unconstitutional living conditions that we are confined in, but we also have got to get to the point where we are ready, willing, and able to do something about it. This ‘something’ is a statewide shutdown on Free Labor in the form of a Non-Violent and Peaceful Protest for Civil and Human Rights.”
  
Their organizing continued after the May Day strike, and went national. On Sept. 9, prisoners in at least 24 states participated in a coordinated strike, marking the 45th anniversary of the 1971 prison uprising at New York state’s infamous Attica prison. Today’s striking prisoners are protesting long-term isolation, inadequate health care, overcrowding, violent attacks and slave labor.

Pastor Kenneth Glasgow of Alabama founded T.O.P.S., The Ordinary People Society, which supports prisoners and ex-convicts. An ex-prisoner himself, he told us: “Those who are incarcerated are looking at the fact that people that have paid taxes for them to be rehabilitated, for them to be educated, for them to be trained, in order to come out into society—because 98 percent of the people in prison are coming out, and in order for them to come out and be able to be productive citizens, they need to have these skills and education and all. ... And yet, the taxpayers are paying anywhere from $31,000 to $80,000 per year, depending on what state you’re in, for them to get this rehabilitation and education, and they’re not getting it. What they’re getting is being used for free prison labor.”

Last Saturday night, the Holman prisoners were joined in their strike by some unlikely allies: the prison guards themselves. Almost all the guards refused to show up for their 12-hour shift. On Sept. 1, Alabama Corrections Officer Kenneth Bettis, 44, was stabbed at Holman. He died two weeks later. Kinetic Justice spoke out on “Democracy Now!” again this week: “For weeks we’ve been communicating back and forth. This administration really has no regard for human life. And [the guards] are beginning to see that it’s not just directed at the men that are incarcerated here, that the violence that they’ve created actually spills over to the officers, as well. And a lot of them are terrified of what’s going on.”  
  
The national scope of the prisoner strike, with actions in 40 to 50 prisons around the U.S., is truly historic, as is the solidarity demonstrated between the prisoners and the guards at Holman this week. Shut behind walls, denied access to the internet and even telephones, and prevented from easily communicating with media outlets, these prisoners are leading their own movement, with solidarity from thousands outside. “Slavery dies hard in the South,” Melvin Ray writes in his book. Through their organizing, though, these striking prisoners are bending that arc of the moral universe, ever closer to justice.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
Denis Moynihan is a writer and radio producer who writes a weekly column withDemocracy Now's Amy Goodman.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/09/30/striking-prisoners-are-bending-arc-moral-universe-closer-justice

posted by Satish Sharma at 04:06 0 Comments