On September 18, residents of Gordon Plaza were able to break bread together, and exchange experiences with environmental activist Desmond D’Sa, of South Africa. Residents of Gordon Plaza told D’Sa about their decades long struggle for a fully funded relocation off of the toxic soil that the city of New Orleans built their homes on.
D’Sa shared with the residents the many ways in which our struggles are local AND global, and he cited many examples of actual wins that demonstrated people power. The working class people who are organizing and fighting on the front lines in South Africa have been able to shut down over 40 harmful chemical plants and win improved conditions and social services for workers.
D’Sa made it clear that the struggle was not simply about winning single issue fights, but about ensuring that each win was connected to a broader fight for freedom from the cause of the crisis that we contend with. Capitalist exploitation of workers’ labor, and the pursuit of expansion and profits are not concerned with the future or the health of humanity. Why? Because each crisis gets turned into an opportunity for disaster capitalists. For every sickness that exists, there is someone waiting to prey on the sick, to charge a fee for the repair or the remedy. Disaster capitalism feeds on the desperation, trauma and despair of wounded people.
D’Sa also spoke specifically about the ways in which the environmental movement ought to be in full solidarity with the workers movement. Workers have power! He spoke of the necessity to build across geographical lines, and struggles, and rise up to fight collectively. “Don’t fight alone. Go together!”, D’Sa said.
Women in Brazil defend against the invasion of Indigenous territories.
By Nathalie Clarke
Amazonia is the world’s largest tropical rainforest. This 56 million-year-old expanse of forest is home to countless species of life—many of which are still undiscovered. Indigenous Nations have inhabited the land for over 11,000 years and have helped shape the forest as we know it. Capitalist media often depict the Amazon rainforest as a vast, unpopulated expanse of land ripe for the taking. This narrative gives capitalists cover for the rampant deforestation that they’re carrying out to convert the Amazon into farmland, erasing the lives and struggles of its Indigenous People.
Although agribusiness tycoons have been burning the forest for decades, the recent fires in the Amazon dwarf past ones. Since the election of fascist President Jair Bolsonaro, environmental laws have been loosened allowing the big bosses in the mining and farming industries to do what they will. So far in 2019, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reports an 80 percent increase compared to 2018.
“The [fires are] a direct result of each of Bolsonaro’s incentives to deforestation and his actions to make the environmental code more flexible, allowing the rural capitalists who, incited by the president, make the Amazon burn in flames, increasing their massive estates throughout the region. […] The trail of fire visible from space is a result of the expansion of agribusiness, leaving a trail of the indigenous peoples’ blood, as well as decimating the native fauna and flora” said the Brazilian group Movement of Revolutionary Workers.
These fires occurred just after the Waorani people of Pastaza won a landmark victory: half a million acres of their ancestral lands were to be protected from oil drilling. TWO WEEKS LATER we see a drastic increase in fires set to the Amazon by greedy agri-capitalists, backed by their fascist right-wing government. This is no coincidence; it’s colonization and genocide.
The fascist Bolsonaro told reporters in 1998: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”
In Brazil, in Honduras, in Louisiana, and around the world, Indigenous people have led the fight to save the planet—risking their safety and lives. A recent Global Witness report found that 3 environmental activists are killed every week; with Brazil listed as number four on the list of most dangerous places for them. On July 23rd, an Indigenous leader and organizer, Emyra Wajãpi, was found dead in northeastern Brazil. Two men who were members of Brazil’s landless activist group MST were killed in December 2018 in a rural area in the northeast state of Paraíba. The names and stories of Indigenous leaders who have put their lives on the line are innumerable.
But environmental activists don’t just face challenges from logging and mining companies. The capitalist State itself—the police, the government, the law—often criminalizes them because they know that chaining oneself to a pipeline or blocking the path of loggers stops the flow of capital like no protest alone can.
In 2017, 84 members of U.S. Congress suggested that the Department of Justice should be able to prosecute pipeline saboteurs as domestic terrorists according to definitions in the federal criminal code. Bolsonaro’s racist, violent remarks and the criminalization of environmental activists represent a global trend.
We, the global working-class, must understand our role in saving the planet. We, the derrick hands on oil rigs, the foot soldiers in endless imperialist wars, the servers that watch our bosses waste food every single day, the auto-workers and welders, truck drivers and cooks, must see through the lies these fat cat politicians would have us believe. Our neighborhoods and regions are already polluted with toxic chemicals. Our houses get built on toxic soil. Our food sources get depleted. We are demonized for eating meat or for driving a pick-up while the wealthy are allowed to jet off to Europe every other week.
We are condemned for working in oil and gas even though those are the only jobs available in our communities. How have we gotten even the smallest sliver of the pie?
The Guarani people of central-western Brazil said, “We invite everybody to fight alongside indigenous peoples against the genocidal attack which is currently underway, and which has been reactivated by the current government.” Our only answer to the current environmental crisis is ourselves: whether farmers, pharmacists, or food service workers, we are fighters, survivors, hard-workers, and we are infinitely powerful when united.
Barack Obama and close advisor Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris
Dow Chemical
On being named chief of Trump’s National Manufacturing Council, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris said, “the U.S. is not a red tape country, but a red carpet country for businesses.”
Dow Chemical is a massive transnational monopoly—the second largest producer of chemicals in the world.
For much of its history, Dow has profited from the U.S. warfare state at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. Most infamously, Dow manufactured napalm for the U.S. military. Hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm were dropped on Vietnam, and tens of thousands of people were burned alive as a result. With Monsanto, they also produced Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 400,000 Vietnamese men, women, and children as well as 500,000 birth defects. Thousands of U.S. soldiers were also affected.
In 1984, a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide (a subsidiary of Dow) plant in Bhopal, India poisoned more than 600,000 people, killing 16,000 people.
In 2009, a Dow plant in St. Charles Parish leaked 26,720 pounds of vaporized ethyl acrylate (EA), a Class II toxic air pollutant, into the atmosphere. Dow has faced no penalties for this action.
Since 2008 Dow has received $230,028,546 in subsidies from the State of Louisiana.
For cutting safety costs and for shielding the company from lawsuits, shareholders at Dow awarded Andrew Liveris $65.7 million in salary and benefits in 2017.
Former Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant got a $77 million ‘exit package’ from the company.
Monsanto
Like many of the giant monopolies in charge of the global capitalist economy, Monsanto—which was acquired by Bayer in 2018—came to dominate production by war profiteering. Monsanto was a key player in the development of atomic bombs for the Manhattan project which produced the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people and poisoning many more. They also profited from the production of Agent Orange.
In 2018 the German pharmaceutical company Bayer purchased Monsanto for $60 billion. Bayer descends from the industrial monopoly IG Farben, which among other things, produced poison gas for Nazi concentration camps. Bayer-Monsanto now controls more than a quarter of the world’s seed and pesticides market.
Monsanto is among a handful of companies that dictate global agricultural production. For example, Monsanto controls more share of the global production of soy and corn seeds than any other company. These seeds are patented by the company and engineered as “Roundup Ready” crops which are intended to be grown in conjunction with Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide. The UN International Agency of Research on Cancer has recognized an increased risk of cancer among farmworkers who are routinely exposed to glyphosate.
By enforcing its patents on corn, soybean, and cotton seeds, Monsanto has consolidated its market while driving many peasant farmers into destitution. In the past 20 years since the introduction of Monsanto-patented cotton into India, 290,000 farmers have committed suicide due to the loss of their livelihoods.
Since 2008, the State of Louisiana has awarded Monsanto $215,074,865 in tax subsidies.
Nestlé “Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.” —Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, CEO Nestlé
The United Nations predicts that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live with dire water shortages, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under “stressed” water conditions. According to Nestlé, this will only increase the market value of its commodities.
Nestlé is the largest food company on the planet and the world’s biggest bottler of water. Across the world, Nestlé steals precious natural resources from the Earth’s Indigenous inhabitants in order to turn a profit. For example, Nestlé extracts up to 3.6 million liters of water daily from Six Nations treaty land (near the North American Great Lakes) without paying the people of the Six Nations a dime. Meanwhile, at least 63,000 Indigenous people in the region haven’t had drinkable water for at least a year. Similarly, in order to profit from cocoa production, Nestlé has illegally deforested much of West Africa. In the Ivory Coast, the rainforest cover has been reduced by more than 80%.
Nestlé paid Peter Brabeck-Letmathe 5.93 million Euros a year to steal from and enslave workers across the world.
Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is the largest arms manufacturer in the world and chief supplier of fighter jets to the U.S. Air Force, which is responsible for more than half of the emissions from the Pentagon. The U.S. military consumes more fuel than most countries on the planet, totaling almost 270,000 barrels of oil bought every day as of 2017. Lockheed’s F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour.
In addition, Lockheed profits from the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons. The company gets an annual $2.4 billion in tax-payer money to run nuclear weapons complexes in Albuquerque and Livermore for the Department of Energy.
Their F-35 jet program will cost U.S. tax-payers at least $406 billion.
Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was paid $21,516,545 last year to supply weapons to the capitalists’ largest private army, the U.S. military.
Rex Tillerson, seated: “My philosophy is to make money.”
ExxonMobil
A descendant of Rockefeller’s monopoly Standard Oil, ExxonMobil is the second largest company in the United States. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ExxonMobil is among the 5 privately held companies that have alone produced 12.5% of all industrial carbon pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Since 1998, Exxon has given tens of millions of dollars to organizations, ’think-tanks’ and politicians to promote climate change denial in contradiction to the scientific evidence that the company has had since at least the 1970’s. A 1980 corporate report states that the company had “no doubt” of the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change and yet the company has doubled its production of oil and gas in years since. A senior researcher for Exxon even reported in 1992 that “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the melting Arctic Sea.
Rex Tillerson retired as CEO of ExxonMobil to become U.S. Secretary of State for Trump from 2017 to 2018. Tillerson never stopped working for Exxon, attempting to impose an oil embargo on Venezuela with the hopes of ousting the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro. He had orders to regain for Exxon the massive oil reserves that it lost when the Venezuelan government nationalized its oil. Like any other U.S. Secretary of State, Tillerson was only looking out for his fellow capitalists. He made no effort to conceal this.
As of 2019, Tillerson has amassed $350 million from the labor of the thousands of workers that he has exploited.
Since 2012 Exxon Mobil has received $443,892,345 in tax subsidies from the state of Louisiana alone. Since 2000 they’ve received nearly 4 billion dollars in federal awards.
After developing the mortgage-back securities that sent the economy into a nosedive in 2008, billionaire Larry Fink became chief advisor to U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve on the bank bailouts. Now his private firm invests principally in oil, prisons, and arms
BlackRock, Inc.
BlackRock is the “world’s largest asset manager” according to the big business newspaper, the Economist. This corporation is heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, arms manufacturers, private prisons and others to the tune of more than $6 trillion. The firm is among the top three investors in BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. The company holds a 6.72% stake in Lockheed Martin and a more than 10% stake in private prisons corporations GEO Group and CoreCivic.
BlackRock stands to gain from deforestation efforts around the world, most notably in Brazil where Amazonian rainforests are being burned to benefit companies like JBS, the largest animal protein company in the world.
BlackRock is the largest shareholder in JBS who with the help of Brazilian President Bolsonaro has egged on the theft and clearing of land for pasture.
Amazon workers in over 25 cities and 14 countries walked out their workplaces in solidarity with the global climate strike on September 20. More than 1,800 workers participated in the walkout, protesting the company’s contracts with fossil fuel companies, their shareholders’ funding of climate denying lobbyists and politicians, and the continued contracts with ICE and other agencies responsible for the oppression of refugees.
The group that organized the walk out, the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, recognized the leadership shown by tech workers at Google who last year successfully organized to demand the termination of a company contract with the Pentagon. They also emphasized the global reach of Amazon as well as its multinational workforce of 600,000. They pointed to the enormous potential and responsibility of these workers to become leaders in the movement to fight climate change.
Oil workers in West Africa commemorate the 11 workers killed in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS NEED TO FIGHT FOR WORKERS
By Meg Maloney
Workers in the fossil fuel industry feel the effects of polluting industries on their families’ lives, including the threats to their homes due to loss of wetlands & sea level rise, water and air pollution, and the destruction of wildlife habitats. Some unions have put out statements saying they are for stopping climate change but express concerns over the transition to a sustainable energy economy. Will their new jobs be unionized and have good pay? Will their pensions be safe? Will they have access to health care? Society owes a lot to oil workers and their communities who suffer from the ups and downs of the global oil market and who often have dangerous jobs. The environmental movement needs to stand behind a just transition that recognizes oil workers and communities as leaders in the fight for their demands.
We cannot trust the Democrats or Republicans to secure a just transition for workers; we must fight for ourselves. All the benefits or rights that we have—and that we defend from constant attack—have come about as a result of workers and communities organizing.
Both bosses and their politicians seek to increase profits. Neither care about the effect on workers or the environment. We’re nearing the 10 year anniversary of the BP disaster where 11 workers were killed on the job. On top of dangerous work environments, workers face under staffing, and bosses replacing union jobs with independent contractors. With continuous layoffs, increasing climate crisis, and an increasing push towards sustainable energy, workers will have to fight to make sure that the transition is carried out on the workers’ terms, not the bosses.
A just transition could include the following demands:
Fossil fuel companies fully fund workers’ pensions and healthcare funds before anything else
Full unrestricted access to labor unions
Workers must receive the union access, pay and benefits they were receiving at their previous jobs
New workers should have full access to a union, living wages, and benefits
Full reemployment for all workers coming out of dying industries.
Priority to local hiring and paid training for affected communities.
Reparations from the old industries to communities affected by their negligence
Investment in job creation and training for sectors that are needed to address changing climate, such as jobs building infrastructure, wind, solar, environmental research, and wetland and forest restoration
Giant fossil fuel companies take responsibility for funding retraining, retooling, and remediation of polluted land
Demand the state fund initial stages of transition by finally taxing big oil.
For a just transition to happen the environmental movement and the workers must unite to draw up a plan and mobilize to demand its implementation. We cannot put our faith in congress or any politicians to do what is needed. Just like the housing crisis they will bail out the banks before the people, the bosses before the workers. We must organize and unite the labor and environmental movements to demand a just transition that meets the needs of the workers, and fully addresses climate change.
On August 29, 2019 Trump announced the formation of Space Command.By Adam Pedesclaux
In another act of aggression against the whole world but especially the people of Russia and China, Trump recently proposed another thing that is both expensive and useless to working class people: Space Command (SpaceCom). Following closely behind the U.S. withdrawal from the INF treaty in which both the US and Russia agreed to stop developing intercontinental nuclear weapons, Trump undoubtedly has the aim of holding nuclear power over other countries from space. Earlier this year the Trump administration announced that they wanted to squander $14 billion of tax-payer money in order to carry out their plan of weaponizing space. Most of the world is already afraid of the United States and its hellish arsenal of weapons capable of leveling entire countries. If Trump’s plans are carried out, it’s not a far cry to say that the U.S. military would be capable of raining death from the heavens in their quest to force the world into submitting to the will of the capitalists they protect. We must not allow this to happen.
Working people have nothing to gain from this. We still don’t have healthcare, affordable housing or paid vacations, among other things, and yet the government has the audacity to give billions of dollars to morally bankrupt bomb and weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing. People in Flint still depend on poisoned water and people in Gordon Plaza are still living on cancer-causing soil. The workers of this country continue to be trampled underfoot by the rich and powerful while our tax money is being wasted on weapons that threaten and kill innocent people around the world. We must open our eyes to see our real enemies who live lavishly in mansions and yachts that WE pay for.
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.
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.
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.
The Global Climate Strike took place took place from September 20–27. Actions were held around the world. Top to bottom: Indonesia; Australia; Kampala, Germany; Kenya; Puerto Rico.
