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Global Environmental Crisis: Pentagon Is Biggest Polluter, Army for the Oil Companies

By Gabriel Mangano

The world’s single largest consumer of petroleum—and therefore the largest polluter on the planet — is the US. Department of Defense (DoD).

To secure control over the world’s oil, U.S. capitalists have created the largest, most destructive army in world history. They have used this army to overthrow elected governments and destabilize others, even wrecking whole regions at the cost of millions of lives and untold environmental destruction. Ironically, to seize control of this oil, the capitalists have built an army almost entirely dependent on oil, the energy resource most responsible for global warming.

The DoD is the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases and uses more oil each day than the total usage of 175 countries. It produces more climate pollution than most countries and totals 80% of the US Government consumption. In fact, the DoD burns through more than 144 million barrels of oil annually. That does not include their allies’ forces, military contractors, and fuel consumed to make weaponry, all in pursuit of more oil. This criminal activity has been kept under cover; the US made sure, at the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, that fossil fuel emissions from the military were excluded from regulatory oversight. Add to this the environmental destruction from 18 years of endless war and criminal regime change. The results have been disastrous.

In Afghanistan, 18 years of war have left 111,000 killed including 30 pine nut farmers massacred in a mid-September drone strike which they call “collateral damage”. Besides the release of millions of tons of CO2, environmental devastation includes deforestation and the release of toxic pollutants like arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury from open fire pits for the burning of trash.

In Iraq the situation has been more devastating with 400 millions tons of CO2 released to date. Iraqis have also suffered from the U.S. use of depleted uranium that has created elevated rates of cancer and crippling birth defects. After U.S. attacks in Fallujah, residents suffer “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”. And the U.S. is still using depleted uranium in Syria, despite saying it would desist. The genocidal use of uranium and biological and chemical weapons repeats the crimes of the imperialist war against Vietnam.

We also must consider the environmental destruction caused by the over 900 US military bases around the world from trash burning to defoliates to chemical toxins to drone strikes. Almost nowhere is safe from the destruction wrought by the DoD. The DoD is the largest purveyor of poisonous toxins like Agent Orange, napalm, and nuclear waste. Around 70% of environmental EPA Superfund sites were caused by the DoD.

We are at a significant juncture in human history, and the survival of humanity is clearly at stake. We know the Democratic Party will not save us and that even so-called socialists in Congress voted for the military budget. Workers and environmental fighters are building a movement and learning that the U.S. military was not created to defend us but is in fact the enemy of workers and oppressed people the world over. More and more, we see that to sustain human life on the planet, to foster life in harmony with all living things, it is necessary to fight against the U.S. imperialist army and its allies if we want real environmental justice.

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Global Environmental Crisis: Environmental Movement Must Demand Nuclear Disarmament

While capitalist caused climate change presents unprecedented challenges to the species, nuclear war remains the most dangerous threat to life that humans have ever known.

The U.S. government maintains a nuclear arsenal of over 6,000 nuclear warheads.

The current number of deployed (operational) nuclear weapons would be enough to instantly kill around 647 million people. All out nuclear war could easily spell the end of humanity.

More than 200,000 people were killed by U.S. nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to a report by the news agency McClatchy, more than 107,394 Americans have suffered from cancer or other serious diseases as a result of working at nuclear weapons plants.

Any serious environmental movement must recognize the complete nuclear disarmament of the U.S. military as a top priority.

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Global Environmental Crisis: Out-of-State Oil Barons and Chemical Plant Owners Profit from Destroying Louisiana

A father and daughter attend the climate change protest together on Friday, September 20.

By Jennifer Lin

Energy corporations pillage and destroy the environment for profit, crushing the lives and livelihoods of workers in the process. As the climate crisis worsens, hurricanes and floods will become more destructive. These events have always revealed the intention of rich capitalists to profit from disasters.

After Katrina, the Road Home Program was designed to make it nearly impossible for Black workers to rebuild their homes. Real estate speculators then carried out a land grab.

Even systems that are supposed to protect people from natural disasters are being used against us, because they are the private projects of city officials and land developers based on profit contracts and bank loans. Drainage canals and artificial levees deplete the soil of groundwater and nutrients, causing land to drop below sea level. Worse, the lack of natural outlets for the Mississippi allows pressure to build up around the levees downriver, making the working-class communities that live there particularly vulnerable to flooding.

Of course, this is business as usual for the millionaires on the Sewerage and Water Board, who are now trying to impose a new drainage fee on workers that will push more and more people towards foreclosure and eviction. Meanwhile, the residents of Gordon Plaza continue to wait for a fully funded relocation. They have been struggling to have their humanity recognized for over thirty years since the city colluded with real estate vultures to build their homes on a toxic waste landfill in the Upper Ninth Ward. In Cancer Alley, the highest cancer-causing area in the U.S., people living near industrial plants are protesting the relentless poisoning of Black communities by petrochemical companies.

DEMAND REPARATIONS FROM OIL COMPANIES
Oil and gas extraction account for about 60% of wetland loss and coastal erosion in the Gulf. Louisiana has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of coast since 1930. Most of that land belonged to the Houma people, who have had their lands stolen and their histories erased for centuries, first by colonial settlers and now by oil tycoons.

Few people today mention the Taylor oil spill. Back in 2004, Hurricane Ivan destroyed an oil rig owned by Taylor Energy Co., which continues to leak 100 barrels of oil into the Gulf every day. Disasters like this and the Deepwater Horizon spill pervade the oil industry, which endangers workers’ lives and destroys entire ecosystems for profit.

We cannot stand for the wholesale destruction of our communities and livelihoods by rich capitalists. We must stop corporations from continuing to poison the land we live on, the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the people we love. Under capitalism, only what is profitable is valuable. Until this violent system of oppression and exploitation is completely overturned, the measure of our worth as people and the worth of the planet that shelters us, nourishes us, and sustains us will be dictated by a handful of rich CEOs who will never stop extracting the precious, collective resources of the earth for profit. Calling for an end to capitalist-driven ecological catastrophe is a necessary part of the revolutionary struggle towards liberation. An entire world is at stake, and we have no time to lose.

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Global Environmental Crisis: Capitalism, Imperialist War are the Roots of Crisis

South Africa, September 2019.

Only a global organization of the working class is up to the task of halting the climate and environmental crisis.  We must fight to meet the needs of all peoples of the world equally.

By Gavrielle Gemma

Youth climate strikers have forced the environmental crisis on to the world stage. They have also forced the capitalists and all the governments they control to scramble to come up with plans that sound responsive while they protect the profits of the fossil fuel and weapons industries along with the politicians in their pockets.

We must keep the movement going strong in the streets but to succeed, we need to honestly size up the opposition.

President Trump is an enemy of the planet and the people, but the Democratic Party politicians also personally benefit from the status quo. For decades they’ve been totally bought out by the capitalists in charge of oil, chemical, agribusiness, banking and military industries.

We must recognize that though they rule by different methods—one more openly fascist, the other more deceptive—both uphold the rule of capitalism, private property and oil profits. Hillary Clinton received millions from the oil industry and the Saudi Monarchy.

Why do millions starve when there is a global surplus of food? Why are countries bombed for oil? Why is a trillion U.S. tax payer dollars going to war profiteers every year? Why do we continue to use fossil fuels when clean and sustainable energy alternatives are available?

Because capitalists do not care how many millions die and suffer as long as they prosper.

More than ever the movement needs the leadership of those with the most to lose from the global ecological crisis—the workers, the displaced, and the oppressed nations of the world. That’s why we must fight to end capitalism, imperialism, and racism. We must fight for global economic equality.

United Nations is not the answer.
While 193 countries belong to the United Nations, it is controlled by the security council which is made up of superpowers and is dominated by imperialist countries. The United Nations gave cover to the invasions of Iraq and Libya – both wars for oil.

Were the United Nations a real force for the people, its delegates would have marched out of the UN headquarters to a nearby meeting of oil executives and ordered a mass arrest for crimes against humanity and other species. The oil executives had called this emergency meeting to figure out how to rebrand themselves and co-opt the movement.

“The change that needs to take place—the trillions of dollars of investment—is only going to come from companies with resources and scale,” said Ben van Beurden, chief executive of Shell. In other words, please don’t come after us.
If the climate change movement rose up against the $1 trillion a year U.S. military budget, we would have plenty of resources to be used for all the needs of humanity, other species, and the planet. The obscene profits they are sitting on need to be seized by the masses and used for survival, jobs and the environment. Clean energy, water, air, food and medical care cannot be under the control of private profiteers; it must belong to the people.

The climate struggle must recognize the inequality caused by imperialism in order to build solidarity and strengthen the movement.

We cannot fix the climate disaster with individual efforts or by thinking technology is the problem. Posing less air conditioning or more bike-riding as solutions fosters the right-wing phony claim that the movement is elitist. Air conditioning is a health necessity and should be available free to all people in every part of the world that needs it. Safe bike riding is important, but we need clean mass transportation for all. Poor people here and around the world lack these necessities.

Climate struggle and anti-imperialism are two wings of the same bird.
The U.S. Military is a private army for the oil barons, not for democracy.
The U.S. budget is looted for a trillion a year that could be used for social benefits and earth repair. Politicians that support a “Green New Deal” but vote to increase the military budget are dangerous. We cannot fight for the earth without fighting for peace, against the weapons industry, imperialism, inequality, and racism.

Sheer numbers won’t do. On June 12th, 1982 a million people demonstrated in New York city against nuclear power. But its leaders were silent on nuclear weapons and U.S. wars. On the very day of the protest Israel was using U.S. weapons to bomb people in Palestinian refugee camps. A million voices were ignored easily by the government which said, “Let them march and sing, in the end they support us.” No struggle succeeds unless the rulers feel threatened by economic loss or fear that they may lose the people’s allegiance to their rule.

The movement must understand the root cause of the crisis; this will guide us in knowing where and how to build alliances among communities of all nationalities, and between youth and the working class.

The fight to save the planet must be the fight to uproot the cause of the environmental crisis. To win this fight we have to harness the enormous untapped power of the working class who once they know which side they’re on will be unstoppable. Organized, the working class can decide for itself what we will and won’t produce.

A worldwide day of outreach to the workers is the next step.

Let future strikes be led by youth and workers.
We should fight against pipelines and pesticides, and we should fight to save all species threatened by extinction. By mass action we can force change to some laws and this is important. But to save the planet, the human race and all species, to guarantee a healthy future for all the people of the world, it will take an overthrow of the capitalist system which puts profits above life itself.
Unions are joining the effort against climate change; workers are asking why they can’t have jobs that are safe for their communities and grandchildren. Youth of all countries have taken the lead once again, just like they did in the fight for civil rights in the U.S. displaying great courage and determination.

But a strong movement needs to think ahead, think strategically and understand that only with the workers on their side can we win. We will win.

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Women’s Reproductive Rights Under Renewed Attack

The Trump administration is carrying out an assault on Title X, a law that created programs to provide birth control and other reproductive health services to millions of workers across the United States. Planned Parenthood and other organizations funded through Title X were recently informed that they must comply with a gag rule that will prevent providers from giving birth control or information on abortion to patients. The administration is moving forward with the gag rule in spite of multiple cases in the courts.

While Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of reproductive healthcare in the country, is the primary organization affected, almost all providers of reproductive care will be restricted by this rule. Planned Parenthood alone will lose $60 million in funding, and as clinics who cannot find funding elsewhere shut down, those that are still open are overwhelmed. Some clinics are increasing the number of patients by 70% to make up for the loss. Rates are already going up at clinics as they try to make up for the lack of funding.

The rule is another attack on reproductive rights which attempts to criminalize abortion and miscarriage and prevent the working class from having control of their bodies and lives. By attacking access to birth control and abortion, the ruling class is attempting to prevent women from fully participating in society. The ruling class will still have access to reproductive care, being able to afford providers who do not rely on Title X funding; this gag rule is a specific attack on poor folks, people of color, women, and LGBTQ people.

Though Roe v. Wade has not yet been overturned and the legal right to an abortion still exists, states have been restricting abortion access at an accelerated rate in the past year. Actions around the country have protested each new law, with a coalition of activists in Louisiana even holding a die-in at the state capitol and a major protest that blocked New Orleans’ Poydras St. in midday traffic.

A larger, militant movement is needed to prevent the complete rollback of reproductive rights. Restrictions on reproductive rights not only keep women from participating in society, they also rob women of the autonomy needed to organize for their liberation. Because women’s labor (inside and outside the home) generates enormous wealth for society, capitalists will always have a vested interest in exploiting them. This is why women must step into their revolutionary power and fight back against the capitalists. The path to women’s liberation is bound up in the revolutionary struggle to abolish capitalism.

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Food is a Right— No Cuts to Food Stamps!

By Antranette Scott

Once again capitalist figurehead Donald Trump has continued his assault on the working-class. This time he’s focusing his attack on hungry working class families and students who receive reduced/free lunch. The administration is trying to strip more than 3 million workers of food stamps.

The attack will cut $25 billion from SNAP over the next decade by ransacking the Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility. This important provision helps states streamline SNAP eligibility for families that have applied for certain other assistance programs for low-income people. This key categorical eligibility also gives states the flexibility that they need to smooth benefit cliffs in SNAP that prevent low income families from facing sudden loss of benefits whenever a wage goes up slightly.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gives a concrete example of how the loss of this eligibility is bad for workers. They give the example of a woman earning $12.50 an hour and raising two kids. This puts the family at 125 percent of the federal poverty level, and they receive approximately $161 per month in SNAP. Thanks to the categorical eligibility, if that worker gets a 50 cent raise per hour (an additional $86 per month in earnings), the family’s monthly food assistance benefit will go down by $31, leaving them with a net gain of $55. Under Trump’s heartless rule, that same worker would lose all their SNAP benefits overnight! For making 50 cents more per hour the worker would be losing $75.00 a month.

This sudden loss of benefits also would have devastating effects at school cafeterias across the country. When a family loses SNAP benefits through the gutting of categorical eligibility at home, that immediately makes school children ineligible for a reduced/free lunch. For some students this is the only time in the day that they have access to a nutritional meal.

Here at the Workers Voice we know that the best way to trim the budget is to stop feeding the Pentagon our hard-earned tax dollars. With nearly 1 trillion dollars of OUR tax dollars being allotted to imperialist wars and the highest polluters on our planet, we see where the Trump administration’s priorities lie: in fattening the wallets of war profiteers! Trump and his goons do not care about working people.

We need our tax dollars spent on quality education, access to adequate healthcare, and job development. This resolution to undermine and defund SNAP is not going to benefit the working class. We need to organize to get our needs met. We need to agitate and say NO to defunding SNAP! No to Imperialist Wars! No to politicians that don’t care about workers!!! Only by ending the rule of the capitalist class can the workers see the wealth that our labor generates go to uplifting us ALL!

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Mayor Cantrell’s Affordable Housing Meetings Are a Sham

By Sanashihla

An August 29 meeting in the 9th Ward called by the mayor about the housing crisis was beyond disappointing. One after another city official droned on about proposals mostly benefiting developers, not homeowners or tenants. 9th ward residents were not allowed to speak but merely put a question on a card where the officials could pick and choose. Residents should be allowed to get up at these meetings and the politicians should shut up and listen. What are they afraid of?

Black New Orleanians are being pushed out of homes and apartments all over the city to be replaced by mainly white professionals. The city backs this scheme by granting tax incentives to developers and pursuing code violations that are unimportant but expensive.

The only “relief” offered were loans to fix homes; Mayor Cantrell even threatened homeowners who hadn’t made these repairs. Far from fighting new assessments which are raising taxes in Black neighborhoods like Gentilly or Treme and further pushing people out, Cantrell is actually pushing to get those extra tax dollars out of working class New Orleanians.

When the Residents of Gordon Plaza showed up to the meeting en masse, they were also ignored.

Initially, the mayor didn’t mention anything about Gordon Plaza on her own. It took an audience member’s question/comment card submission for the mayor to mention that the city “might have—but no promises” plots of land that can be considered.

Gordon Plaza was a city initiative, framed as “affordable housing,” promoted toward Black residents as an opportunity, that led to the crisis at Press Park and Gordon Plaza being built on toxic soil in the first place.

The residents are demanding a fully funded relocation, where they can be fairly and justly compensated for their homes in the context of an increased cost of living, increased property taxes, and the fact that their houses could sell for top dollar if the neighborhood that it sits on were not toxic. Cutting checks in the name of the Residents only requires resolve. And considering the Residents of Gordon Plaza are not even seeking restitution for the impact on their health or medical bills associated with living in the second-highest cancer-causing neighborhood in the state of Louisiana, this is a small request.

A fully funded relocation of 52 households would only cost half of what the City of New Orleans spent on installing red and blue flashing surveillance cameras all over the city.

It’s the working-class residents across New Orleans who need the real breaks, not a handful here and there but all. Working class residents can’t keep up with the constant rise in the cost of living, particularly with increases on rent and property taxes.

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Stop Caging Workers!

Photo: Christina Tareq

On Friday, September 27, dozens of hospitality workers and supporters gathered in Congo Square for a Workers Unity Rally called by the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Alliance. Organizers stressed the urgent need for workers to resist police and ICE terror in the workplace. Speakers included Eugene Grant of the Slow Rollas Brass Band who spoke on behalf of street musicians who have been targeted for harassment by the police who take their orders from gentrifiers and real estate developers. From Congo Square demonstrators marched through the French Quarter, calling on their fellow workers to come together to fend off cops and ICE agents who are attacking workers on behalf of greedy, racist bosses. Demonstrators chanted “Lift the wages, no more cages!” Grant summed up the attitude of the marching workers best, chanting “We gotta fight to get it!”

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Louisiana Workers Have No Candidate In Governor’s Race

We Must Build a Workers Party

By Malcolm Suber

The multi-national Louisiana working class finds itself in well-worn and familiar territory as we approach the October gubernatorial election. We are being asked to choose between three rich, conservative, anti-choice white men who are squabbling among their class to see who best represents the interests of the oil and gas millionaires who are the real puppet-masters that run this state.

Neither Ralph Abraham, Jon Bel Edwards or Eddie Rispone have a program that will serve to improve the living conditions of Louisiana workers. All three are pursuing the right-wing goals of more intense exploitation of the workers while promising even more tax cuts for the rich. Rispone and Abraham promise to be the most loyal suck-ups to white supremacist President Donald Trump. Their program boiled down and addressed to the white workers and the white middle class is “if you like Donald Trump, you will love me”.

Meanwhile, the gist of Jon Bel Edwards’ program which is addressed to the white Republican majority is “I have successfully maintained your priorities for four years, why not extend my stay.”

Nowhere are there any promises to move Louisiana from the bottom of the list of places to live and raise your family. New Census Bureau data released in September showed that nearly 1 in 5 Louisiana residents lives below the poverty line. We now have the third highest poverty rate in the U.S. after Mississippi and New Mexico. Nowhere is there a promise to move Louisiana off the list as the most incarcerated state where thousands of working people are held in gulags for minor infractions of the law. Nowhere are there promises to improve the education of our children. Nowhere is there a program to end air pollution from the oil and chemical companies. And nowhere is there a program to lessen the regressive tax burden on the working class, replacing it with progressive taxes on the property of the rich.

Louisiana workers will never get off the bottom until we begin to organize and fight for our class interests, rejecting the program of the capitalist rulers to divide us along race, gender, sexual preference and immigration status. What that requires is for us to realize that the two political parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—are parties controlled by the rich to protect the interests of the rich. We should be working to develop a mass workers party that promotes the interest of the working class in opposition to the program of the capitalists who are hellbent on keeping us from redistributing the wealth created by our labor, which they currently hoard for themselves.

We must engage our fellow workers in discussions about the deceptive role of the Democrats and Republicans whose campaigns lie, lie, lie, proclaiming they represent all classes. We as wage-slaves do not share the same problems as the bosses and rich capitalists. They want to maintain this system of privilege for the rich and forced misery for the working class. We must get clear that we are at war against the rich billionaires and their government. Workers must fight to put political power in the hands of the workers’ political representatives who have no interest in exploiting working people.