therealnews--2020-08-21--Biden, Harris Feel The Heat Over Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and the vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris had their first face-off with climate activists and other progressives after the Democratic National Committee scrubbed platform language that opposed fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks .
“ Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels , and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy , ” the amendment was added to the ledger of party demands after it was voted in , stated .
The platform statement then disappeared from the final draft of the party platform which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rees of Oil Change U.S. who discovered the missing language , told The Real News .
A DNC spokesperson said in an email that the amendment was “ incorrectly included ” and “ after the error was discovered ” was removed .
To add to the controversy , the sponsor of an amendment John Laesch , a member of the DNC platform committee , reportedly claimed he did not consent to scrapping the language that had been approved , contradicting the DNC ’ s statement .
Jeff Weaver , a long-time aide to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he had spoken to Laesch who had agreed to the amendment being removed .
“ He agreed to the language being taken out in exchange for certain other amendments that he supported , ” Weaver said , adding that it was indeed a “ clerical error ” which was rectified after the statement was scrubbed .
These claims and counter-claims have exposed platform inadequacies and competing agendas at work within the Democratic ranks .
Several nationwide climate groups and activist circles have lambasted the DNC for walking back its commitments to end fossil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drama unfolded as the roll call counted delegates in favor of Biden .
Senior campaigner with Oil Change U.S. Collin Rees called the move a “ betrayal ” and “ unbelievably stupid ” and said , “ ending subsidies is a common-sense position held by the vast majority of all voters , by both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
” Rees added that “ for those of us working to defeat Donald Trump and confront the climate crisis , it ’ s critical that our party ’ s leaders and candidates stand up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s trampling on Indigenous and frontline communities , poisoning air and water , abandoning workers , and wrecking the climate.
” Thanu Yakupitiyage of 350 Action , the lobbying arm of the international environmental organization 350.org , told TRNN the group was in touch with the DNC to get to the bottom of the issue : “ DNC has traditionally been much weaker on issues related to fossil fuels .
The erasing of platform language can not be an accident .
We ’ re concerned and calling on the DNC platform to show @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The absence of tangible steps is climate denial.
” The group released a formal statement on Aug 19 , urging “ the DNC to reinstate relevant language on fossil fuel subsidies into their platform as a necessary and logical alignment with the positions of their nominees.
” Feeling the heat , Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reaffirmed his commitment to counter climate change in his acceptance speech .
Biden referred to “ undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change , ” and said , “ we can , and we will , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s not only a crisis , it ’ s an enormous opportunity .
An opportunity for America to lead the world in clean energy and create millions of new good-paying jobs in the process.
” Although , as TRNN has reported earlier , Biden-Sanders task force recommendations on phasing out fossil fuel and carbon emissions include retrofitting existing electrical grids with Carbon Capture and Sequestration technologies ( CCS ) , which amounts to subsidizing and keeping oil and gas companies in business .
Despite these assurances , the Justice Democrats and the Sunrise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calling on Biden to keep the fossil fuel influence out and termed the scrubbing out platform language “ an outrage.
” The organizers told TRNN they will be following up with “ more public pressure , sign-on letters , in-person actions , petitions , and more to ensure a fossil-free administration that can truly work for climate justice.
” Mark Longabaugh , a Democratic strategist who assisted on Bernie Sanders ’ 2016 campaign , said Biden would not be able to turn back the clock on the importance of climate agenda for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pushing back on progressive agendas including climate and healthcare and there is going to be opposition .
The real question is what kind of a force can Biden mobilize to get his policies into action.
” According to Weaver though , platform language does not matter much after the strong pro-climate policy position articulated by Biden and running mate Kamala Harris .
“ The Vice President has acknowledged in his acceptance speech that he in fact supports the language [ on fossil fuels ] that was added and taken out , ” Weaver @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difficult to get everything done through Zoom meetings and virtual conventions .
So such mistakes can happen .
And the fact that there were 400 amendments and the Biden camp agrees to all of those and there was only one mistake was a pretty well done overall.
” There has not been an official word from the DNC leadership elaborating on the nature of the “ error ” that led to the first public challenge to Biden-Harris duo on the issue of fossil fuels subsidies .
Climate activists have meanwhile agreed to “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ representatives in a Biden administration — people who ’ ve spent the last decades repping Big Oil , Gas , and Coal absolutely can ’ t be put in charge of the nation ’ s climate policy .
”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and the vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris had their first face-off with climate activists and other progressives after the Democratic National Committee scrubbed platform language that opposed fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks.
“Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels, and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy,” the amendment was added to the ledger of party demands after it was voted in, stated. The platform statement then disappeared from the final draft of the party platform which circulated Monday, August 17, Collin Rees of Oil Change U.S. who discovered the missing language, told The Real News.
A DNC spokesperson said in an email that the amendment was “incorrectly included” and “after the error was discovered” was removed.
To add to the controversy, the sponsor of an amendment John Laesch, a member of the DNC platform committee, reportedly claimed he did not consent to scrapping the language that had been approved, contradicting the DNC’s statement.
Jeff Weaver, a long-time aide to Bernie Sanders, told The Real News he had spoken to Laesch who had agreed to the amendment being removed. “He agreed to the language being taken out in exchange for certain other amendments that he supported,” Weaver said, adding that it was indeed a “clerical error” which was rectified after the statement was scrubbed.
These claims and counter-claims have exposed platform inadequacies and competing agendas at work within the Democratic ranks. Several nationwide climate groups and activist circles have lambasted the DNC for walking back its commitments to end fossil fuel subsidies demanding an answer. The drama unfolded as the roll call counted delegates in favor of Biden.
Senior campaigner with Oil Change U.S. Collin Rees called the move a “betrayal” and “unbelievably stupid” and said, “ending subsidies is a common-sense position held by the vast majority of all voters, by both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Rees added that “for those of us working to defeat Donald Trump and confront the climate crisis, it’s critical that our party’s leaders and candidates stand up to the fossil fuel industry that’s trampling on Indigenous and frontline communities, poisoning air and water, abandoning workers, and wrecking the climate.”
Thanu Yakupitiyage of 350 Action, the lobbying arm of the international environmental organization 350.org, told TRNN the group was in touch with the DNC to get to the bottom of the issue: “DNC has traditionally been much weaker on issues related to fossil fuels. The erasing of platform language cannot be an accident. We’re concerned and calling on the DNC platform to show strong commitment to ending fossil fuels. The absence of tangible steps is climate denial.”
The group released a formal statement on Aug 19, urging “the DNC to reinstate relevant language on fossil fuel subsidies into their platform as a necessary and logical alignment with the positions of their nominees.”
Feeling the heat, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reaffirmed his commitment to counter climate change in his acceptance speech. Biden referred to “undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change,” and said, “we can, and we will, deal with climate change. It’s not only a crisis, it’s an enormous opportunity. An opportunity for America to lead the world in clean energy and create millions of new good-paying jobs in the process.”
Although, as TRNN has reported earlier, Biden-Sanders task force recommendations on phasing out fossil fuel and carbon emissions include retrofitting existing electrical grids with Carbon Capture and Sequestration technologies (CCS), which amounts to subsidizing and keeping oil and gas companies in business.
Despite these assurances, the Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement launched a new petition on Wednesday calling on Biden to keep the fossil fuel influence out and termed the scrubbing out platform language “an outrage.” The organizers told TRNN they will be following up with “more public pressure, sign-on letters, in-person actions, petitions, and more to ensure a fossil-free administration that can truly work for climate justice.”
Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist who assisted on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, said Biden would not be able to turn back the clock on the importance of climate agenda for the country: “There are many forces pushing back on progressive agendas including climate and healthcare and there is going to be opposition. The real question is what kind of a force can Biden mobilize to get his policies into action.”
According to Weaver though, platform language does not matter much after the strong pro-climate policy position articulated by Biden and running mate Kamala Harris.
“The Vice President has acknowledged in his acceptance speech that he in fact supports the language [on fossil fuels] that was added and taken out,” Weaver said. “And it was very difficult to get everything done through Zoom meetings and virtual conventions. So such mistakes can happen. And the fact that there were 400 amendments and the Biden camp agrees to all of those and there was only one mistake was a pretty well done overall.”
There has not been an official word from the DNC leadership elaborating on the nature of the “error” that led to the first public challenge to Biden-Harris duo on the issue of fossil fuels subsidies. Climate activists have meanwhile agreed to “ensure there are no fossil fuel industry representatives in a Biden administration — people who’ve spent the last decades repping Big Oil, Gas, and Coal absolutely can’t be put in charge of the nation’s climate policy.”
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-21--Representation Doesn’t Equal Rights

Representation Doesn’t Equal Rights

All donations in the US and Canada are tax deductible .
To make a secure donation by credit or debit @ @ @ @ @ location , or select PayPal .

Close window X
We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site.


therealnews--2020-08-21--The DNC is over. What’s next for progressives?

DNC member Jim Zogby, who helped run Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1984, joins The Real News Network for historical perspective and analysis of Democrats and the future we face.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Joe Biden: The Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, once wrote, “History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave, but then once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.” This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme. United in our love for America, united and our love for each other. For love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear and light is more powerful than dark. This is our moment. This is our mission. May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here, tonight.
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Real News. This is Marc Steiner. Great to have you all with us today after the DNC. And speaking of that, we’re joined today by James Zogby, who has been a leading voice among progressives in the Democratic Party for some time, helped co-managing Jesse Jackson’s campaign, working with [inaudible 00:00:59], and of course, Bernie Sanders, serving on the DNC for the Sander’s coalition. And Jim Zogby is founder and executive director of the Arab American Institute and has joined us numerous times and joins us again today to look at what just happened over these last four days in the virtual Democratic Convention. And welcome Jim, good to have you with us.
James Zogby: Thank you. Thank you, Marc.
Marc Steiner: I am really curious from your perspective. You have been involved in progressive politics for a long time in the Democratic Party. You worked in Jesse Jackson’s campaign as a comanager. I remember that scene in ’84, where you were waving the Palestinian flag and the battles that took place around Progressives. And now we’ve seen ourselves come to 2020 with this super PAC created by a number of environmental and progressive organizations. We saw the campaign of Bernie Sanders in these last two elections. And then we saw this DNC, which was a really mixed bag when it came to the progressive movement, when it came to defining the Democratic Party. Given that perspective from the ’80s to now, how would you analyze what happened in last four days?
James Zogby: Look, I’m a firm believer in the fact that energy grows, it doesn’t dissipate if you keep working and building it. And I think that we’ve made real progress over the last 20, 30 years in the sense that the coalition is broader and deeper than it was, the Progressive Coalition. And I think we’ve gained not only experience, but a foothold. We have more progressive members in Congress today than we had. I mean real progressive members, not people who just say, “I’m a progressive.” We also have control of many more state parties than we ever had.
Look, the very first actual election in the DNC was in 2017, if you can believe it. Before that, in the more than a quarter century I’d been on the Democratic National Committee, we never elected an officer. The first time we had an election of an officer was in ’17 and it was because of the Bernie delegates, who’d entered the DNC and gotten themselves elected in their states. And then we had a fight on the floor or an issue, that was the first time we had a fight over an issue on the floor.
Usually we’re props at meetings. We would go and clap for speeches and then go home. And we were managed so that we wouldn’t get out of control. They can’t keep us in control anymore because we now are in the House and we have significant enough numbers and I think the numbers will keep growing. Look, I learned a long time ago, elections at the end of the day, aren’t about the choices you’d like to have. They’re the choices you really have. And I would love it to be Bernie, but it’s Joe Biden. And I think we have an impact in the Democratic Coalition. And so there’s only one choice for us to make right now, we got to win this election and keep fighting because it’ll be easier for us to fight with a Democrat in the White House than it will be with this nightmare that we’ve got right now.
Marc Steiner: [inaudible 00:04:07] nightmare in front of us and you and I have talked about the danger of what could happen in the United States for this kind of almost Neo-fascism that’s creeping up on us and this racist kind of coalition. It’s a very scary prospect. But having said that, some people think, analyze, I read this morning about what happened last four days was more show than real power, that you had a lot of Republicans and center right folks there who are making the major speeches, that AOC and others were kind of shuffled to the side, that the platform around Israel and Palestine and climate change was altered and didn’t have the effect and impact that people thought it was going to have. What does that portend?
James Zogby: Well, it portends, look, first of all on the Republican speaking, I’m glad that we’re giving them a home. They’re the homeless upper class. Poor guys, they lost their party and they need a place to go. My insistence is welcome into my house. Don’t try to take it over. You already screwed up yours. You come at our invitation, period. That fight doesn’t change because we gave them a place to speak. And frankly, I’m glad that they’re saying they can’t support Trump. That’s a good thing. Will they have an impact on our debate?
In the real sense of politics, look, the problem is right now, nobody has an impact on debate in Congress. I’ve never seen a situation like this before. You can’t pass a bill, according to Mitch McConnell, unless you get more than 50 Republican votes for the bill. In the old days, you’d get 30 Democrats, 30 Republicans, they’d have a majority and you’d win. He will not pass a bill that doesn’t have a majority of Republicans on it. And because of what’s happened with McConnell and what Gingrich did, et cetera, the Republican Party is so polarized. They don’t compromise at all. These guys who are leaving the Republican Party are leaving this authoritarian, dogmatic absolutist control of the party that a few folks have had that have made literally government dysfunctional and or are moving us toward authoritarianism, which Trump is the product of. I’m glad that they’re they’re bolting, but I want them to go back and fight their own damn party and take it over and defeat the beast they created back 20 something years ago.
That said, I am not surrendering the progress that progressives have made. We did shape much of the platform. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we did shape aspects in the platform, even on Israel-Palestine. Look, one of the biggest victories for me on Israel-Palestine was it says, “We oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel, including the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement,” comma, “but we support the constitutional right of every American to free speech.” That’s the same as the Republican Party platform saying, we oppose abortion, comma, but we support every woman’s right to choose. The second clause they added nullifies the first plus, that’s a big victory for us and a huge defeat for them. They’ve been wanting to say, antisemitism. If you support BDS, it’s anti-Semite Semitism. They now say you have the right to free speech. That’s a big victory.
And while we didn’t win everything else, and I didn’t expect us to win everything else, our position within the party is stronger than it was. We got 190 members of Congress opposing annexation, [APEC 00:07:51] had to surrender and give them an okay to do it. We defeated [Eliot Engle 00:00:07:56]. We defeated [Clay 00:00:07:58]. We defeated [Lipinsky 00:07:59]. We won and beat back challenges to Ilhan and Rashida. Frankly, the myth of APEC has been shattered. And I think we’ve got nothing but an upward trajectory right now. So I’m feeling good about it, lot of work to do, but frankly, I think I would’ve liked progress to have been made 20 years ago, but we’re making it now and I’m feeling good about it.
Marc Steiner: Let me just talk a bit about where you see this going, though. If in fact Biden and Harris win, and Bernie clearly is getting older and will probably not be the force that he was, and you have these seven organizations that combine to form this super PAC from DSA to Sunrise and other groups and you were part of the Rainbow Coalition, I’m talking about the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition, and building that. And I was thinking about that because I was working that as well, plus the old Rainbow Coalition of ’68 with the Panthers and Young Patriots. But I’m curious where you think we’re going with all of this? Does this new super PAC become part of a new caucus or movement inside the Democratic Party? This is going to have to take on the kind of central right of the Democrats in terms of climate change and numerous other issues, health care, Medicare-
James Zogby: [crosstalk 00:09:30]-
Marc Steiner: Where do you think this goes?
James Zogby: There is a Bernie delegates network. I’m so impressed with the numbers, with the commitment of folks and the work in DSA and the Progressive Democrats and Roots Action and Justice Democrat, all those groups that are out there, are coalescing. And I think that’s brilliant and I think it’s important. I hope that they coalesce and devise a challenge, how to take over the democratic party. I hope that that’s what they do because frankly, what we don’t need now is to split. I know the party from the inside and I know that there is dark money and there is control of lobbyists and they can be beat. They can be beat. And I’m seeing evidence of their weakness as we go forward, they can be beat. And I want us to commit to going from the 100 or so delegates we’ve got right now to going to 300 delegates and electing a real chair who’s progressive and electing a slate of officers who are progressive and making the party accountable, transparent, and more democratic. That can be done.
And as far as I know, Bernie isn’t going to run for president anymore, most likely he won’t. But my sense is I remember having dinner with him one night in Detroit last summer with Cornell West and with Gus Newport and a few others. And I just got the very distinct feeling this is a transformational person in American political history, who knows that that’s what his role is. It’s almost like he’s Moses. He walks us to the river, but he doesn’t cross over, but he understands that he has made real change possible and mobilized a lot of people who were wandering in the wilderness and he brought us together. And as far as a young bench, we got a big young bench and you don’t have to look further than the squad and a whole lot of other folks who are coming into Congress.
Look, I thought I tweeted that night of the convention that AOC spoke. I can’t imagine in all the years I’ve been going to conventions a minute that was more effectively used. That was a historic minute. There was so much in that minute. She stole the stage and she was just fantastic. We got a good bench out there. And I think there’s folks who are coming up yet and running for a state legislature and city councils and mayoral posts. Randall Woodfin is just a remarkable guy and I’m excited about the future. And look, it’s an old guy, I’m an old guy and I’ve been down this road before. I thought that would happen in the ’80s with Reverend, but we didn’t sink our roots back down into taking over the party. We didn’t do that. I see folks with a very different mindset today and they get the fact that these are institutions that have to be challenged and changed, not ignored.
Marc Steiner: Let me continue playing the jaundice journalist for a while here because I love [inaudible 00:12:42] and the very positive outlook you’re bringing to this conversation, I think is really important. But one of the things we saw in the Democratic Convention was this pitch around basic decency, pitting Biden against Trump in that sense. But the question many people ask is, is that enough to win? Is that enough to move this ahead? Can Biden being a nice guy and Trump being a jerk, win an election? And I think-
James Zogby: Look, number one, well, I think you’re right. This was a pitch for decency and it was a warning about the dangers of another four years. And frankly, progressives need to get it in their heads elections matter. I’ve been also down that road before. Gore didn’t matter, Clinton would have been a nightmare, blah, blah, blah. You cannot tell me that the history of the century would not have been fundamentally different if Al Gore had been president and Hillary Clinton had been president. For all of the flaws that Hillary Clinton may have had, we would be in a very different place today, a much better place today than we are with Donald Trump. And the amount of suffering that this man has brought and the danger he poses, I am convinced that we have not seen the end of him if we beat him in November-
Marc Steiner: What does that mean?
James Zogby: [crosstalk 00:14:06] In the sense that those armed militias that were storming state capitals, he will send them into the streets. I think that the danger will be that we will have an insurrection on the part of the far right. He’s already been setting it up for they rigged the election, it’s a fraud. He’s tweeted it more than 80 times already in the last couple of months. He’s setting it up for a violent response if he loses and he won’t accept the loss. I think there’s a lot of people who worry about that.
And yeah, being nice, it pays off. I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. It’s also about being real. It’s also about being real. When I saw Jill Biden in the classroom, walking down the halls into the classroom, I said, “There are lots of people out there who say, I get that. I know what it’s like right now with my kids here at home and I can’t send them to school. I know what it’s like to be afraid of what’s happening in the street with random gun violence,” when Giffords spoke. There are so many issues that they were talking about that resonate with people in their hearts that I think it was a good thing. I don’t think that’s all that it’s about. I think they’ll come out fighting as well.
But I think that there’s nothing wrong in reminding people, as Michelle Obama and President Obama did that there’s a different tone we can set in America. And look, I tweet something nice about Joe Biden and I lose a hundred followers on Twitter. For God’s sake, folks, for fellow progressives, I’ve been fighting this fight as long as many and maybe longer than most. And I’ve taken my licks. I’ve had my life threatened. I had my office fire bombed. I know what the hell it’s about. And for the sake of my kids and my grandkids, this election has got to go differently than the last one. If people say, “Oh, he doesn’t matter. He’s no good. He’s a nightmare.” That’s what people responded to me in Twitter when I praised Joe Biden last night, he is not a nightmare at all.
He may not be the effective legislator or the effective proponent of progressive politics that these guys want, but he is going to be a hell of a lot better person and president than what we’ve got right now. And right now, there’s only one choice in front of us. It’s not Bernie versus Trump. It’s not Bernie versus Hillary. It is Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. There is no other choice to make. And to me, frankly, you got to go with the one who’s going to get us out of this nightmare.
And will it be perfect? No. Politics is never perfect. Will it be better? Absolutely better. And we cannot stand another four years of what we’ve just been through and I think if people don’t get that, then they are living way too Goddamn comfortable a life. That they can afford to say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. There’s no difference between the two of them.” Who the hell are they to be able to have that amount of arrogance and self-absorption? And one lesson I learned a long time ago, if you get mad and you sit in a corner and lick your wounds, you’re just going to get them infected. That’s all you’re going to do. And so the point right now is we’ve got to heal the wound and not lick it.
Marc Steiner: I can ask many more things, but I think that was a great closing statement and we’ll leave it there for today. And I think that you are right about the dangers that we face in terms of the militias and what could happen after this and progressives have to be prepared for that and people have to be prepare for that in this country. I agree completely. As Eddie Conway, who has spent 40 years as a political prisoner of this country and who now works for Real News, said, “We’re not getting out of this without a fight.” And I think he’s right. And Jim Zogby, thank you so much, once again, for taking the time for The Real News. Look forward to more conversations.
James Zogby: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: Thank you. And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Let us know what you think. We’re looking forward to dialogue [inaudible 00:18:16] with all of you, I’m Marc Steiner, take care.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-21--Black August honors the legacy of militant rebellion

Lumumba and Monifa Bandele talk about the history of Black August , continuing the legacy of freedom fighters and the @ @ @ @ @ .

Lumumba and Monifa Bandele talk about the history of Black August, continuing the legacy of freedom fighters and the Black August Hip Hop project.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. I’m Eddie Conway coming to you from Baltimore. Recently, we were forced to revisit Soledad Prison in California, where over 200 black prisoners taken into a mess hall, handcuffed, forced to sit back to back, shoulder to shoulder with no masks by white and Latinx guards. No black guards participated in this raid. And of course, it was just before the beginning of Black August, and it made us think about Black August itself and the role that Soledad played in that and also about the conditions now 50 some years later. So we wanted to look at Black August what it means to black people, our history and so on. And so joining me today is Lumumba and Monifa Bandele. Lumumba, Monifa, thanks for joining me.
Monifa Bandele: Thank you.
Lumumba Bandele: Thanks for having us.
Eddie Conway: Okay. So I’m going to start off with, what is Black August. I mean, we know about black history month. We know about a lot of different things. What’s Black August?
Monifa Bandele: Yeah. Thanks for asking that question because I think with the popularity of Black August, some people can think it’s just another black history month, but it’s not. It’s a very specific commemoration honoring and continuing the legacy of our freedom fighters. Many of which who found themselves incarcerated because of their activism, were killed by the state or otherwise led militant rebellions for black liberation. And so Black August was actually born in August of 1971 in the wake of the assassination of George Jackson. And he was someone who fought for the human rights of prisoners throughout the prison system and also black people in general. And so that’s the name that we’re finding too often gets lost. And so what happened is that the brothers and sisters who were impacted by his work celebrated his life every August by studying, sacrificing, doing work with each other to improve one another’s lives and found out about all of the other many historic events that had happened in August, the Haitian revolution, the various city rebellions, the birth of Marcus Garvey and created a month long celebration in the tradition of the work of George Jackson, but also encompassing so much of our very militant freedom fighting that had happened over the history.
And so it left the prisons and came out into the community through many of the powerful activists in Oakland who began to have community Black August commemorations, where people fasted throughout the day and studied and worked out and read and dedicated themselves, recommitted themselves to carrying on the work of the freedom fighters that we are celebrating. And finally, I want to say, especially today, one of the key components of Black August is to fight for the freedom of our political prisoners and within that, decarcerating and abolishing prisons as a whole. So Black August is more than just another black history month. It really oftentimes celebrates those that we have forgotten or that our history books don’t want us to learn about because of the militant stance they took.
Eddie Conway: Okay, I’m going to stick with you for another minute, because I want to do a follow-up. One of the things that a criticism that I had of a Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, was that it did the history of the black community up to the civil rights era and then it leaped into crack cocaine. And somewhere in the middle of that, the whole black liberation struggle was missing. And one of the things that I find that writers, especially black writers, the white writers, Betty Petty bourgeoisie writers, et cetera, tend to leave out the struggle of black people historically and I’m concerned. And I wonder why that is, why there’s no talk about the struggle, the rebellion, the sacrifices our warriors made on the continent, on the ships, during slavery and up until today. Why do you think it’s ignored, the warriors, men and women, of the African people?
Monifa Bandele: Yeah. Well, I have two answers to that. One is that those of us that come out of that tradition need to tell that story. We need to create more books, more films, more cultural representations of the struggles that we come out of. I love the book by Dr. Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back. There’s not just one book on this stuff. We need to create a plethora of study and texts that highlight what happened in Haiti, what happened on the various plantations that forced the civil war to happen. It was the abolitionists doing work. We always say there’s an outside game and there’s an inside game. And we learned about the inside game, the lobbying and the letter writing and the stories and the shift in the political narrative. But there was also a very fierce rebellion growing on plantations all over the country to where the system could not be contained.
There was a push happening, not just the Nat Turner Rebellion, but many pushing us into the civil war. So that’s one thing that we have to tell that, we have to tell that, we have to document that. We hope that we’re doing that better through Black August. And then the second piece I think is really clear. We saw it highlighted at the funeral of John Lewis, where a former President of the United States took the opportunity in celebrating a leader in the civil rights movement to take a jab at a leader in the black liberation movement.
Bill Clinton: He showed us a young man. There are some things that you cannot do to hang on to a position, because if you do them, you won’t be who you are anymore. And I say there were two or three years there where the movement went a little bit too far towards Stokely, but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.
Monifa Bandele: So in describing what he thought was so great about John Lewis’ life, he said, and he was the victor over Kwame Ture. So again, there’s the mainstream narrative and there’s the white, really white supremacy infrastructure that wants to say, this is how we want you to dismantle white supremacy. This is the way we feel comfortable with your approach to dismantling white supremacy. And we have to push back and say, no, we’ve always had many tracks to our liberation. They’re all important. The work that John Lewis did was important and the work that Kwame Ture did was powerful and important, and you cannot discredit one over the other. And so I think that’s why we see more one than the other is because the state prefers our stance to be a certain way, to be non militant. I don’t say nonviolent because there was a lot of violence in the work that John Lewis and his comrades did. They were just on the receiving end of it. It was really was no nonviolent struggles, but as far as our tactics to advance our liberation, there is a curating of it, an erasure of some of the work that we did and Black August, as this tradition grows, as a way for us to say no by any means necessary.
Eddie Conway: Okay, good, good, good. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Jonathan Jackson, August 7th, 1970, and the attempt to free to Soledad brothers. But Lumumba, you, both of you all are really founding members of the Black August hip hop stuff. What is that? Talk a little bit about that movement with black artists, hip hop artists and so on.
Lumumba Bandele: Thank you. So it’s a good transition from your previous question because Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, along with Stress Magazine and at the time, a brother named Kofi Taha from Students with Jericho were charged by two of the sisters in exile, all attending the World Youth Festival in Havana, Cuba in 1997. And she talked to us both individually. They talked us both individually and also collectively saying that we need to figure out how to use our resources, our networks, our platforms, to contribute more to the freedom of political prisoners. And I want to make a distinction because the charge really was to create a program. When we came back and decided that we were going to do a hip hop program, we then decided to call it Black August. So it is a distinction and that we weren’t charged to do a Black August event. We were charged to do an event around political prisoners, and we thought that the vehicle of Black August is a perfect container for it.
And so Black August hip hop project was designed to do just that, to create a space where we could use hip hop as a tool to talk about our liberation struggle, our freedom struggle, to honor and give voice and narrative to those men, women, and other nameless folks who participated and sacrificed in our liberation struggle. We decided to do a concert in New York City and have all of the artists donate their time. And we would sort of put a twist on the traditional hip hop show. The traditional hip hop show, when you go in, you’re inundated with all of this commodification and around soft drinks, beer, cigarettes, always ever things. And so we took a twist on that and when you went into the Black August show, you were inundated around images of freedom fighters. Instead of merchandise around the room, you actually had tables being staffed by organizations who were trying to share their campaigns and people were directed to join organizations.
So it really was rooted in not only a message, but an aesthetic of black liberation and the objective was to share that information, but also direct people to become involved, and so raise awareness and raise money. And then it was an additional component, which was an international component to create a national network between hip hop communities in the diaspora and on the continent and in the United States. And we did that when we traveled internationally. The first three years, we went to Cuba, we then went to Brazil, we went to South Africa, we went to Venezuela. We went to Haiti, Tanzania, all of these places where hip hop lives. And we have some success stories. The second trip to Cuba, Common, the rap artist out of Chicago was able to go and had an opportunity to sit down with Assata Shaku and came back and recorded Song for Assata.
Now, this is important because prior to that, MXGM was a part of the Hands Off Assata coalition. And our work in that space really was limited to doing poetry readings, doing speak outs. And we had these tri-fold kind of brochures that talked about who she was. And we could probably tell that we were not getting as many people involved or informed as we should, but by taking Common and by having him have access to her, by him being able to come back and create that song, there’s no way now for us to quantify how many people know her story, how many people now are directed to her autobiography. How many people now know the real truth about her? How many people have begun to dismantle this label that the state puts on her as a terrorist. And so those are some of the main things that the concert was able to do.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And it should be noted too, that the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has been working endlessly, tirelessly for the freedom of black people, as well as political prisoners. And that’s my question. This new movement is actually creating political prisoners, will create political prisoners and people all across the country, not only going to jail, even though it doesn’t seem like a lot is going on, it also is that a lot of people in these movements are now being killed at peaceful protests, rallies, demonstration. They’re being ran down by cars or shot, or just made to disappear. Considering that, talk a little bit about your work around political prisoners and also about what the movement activists need to be doing today to ensure that 50 years later, they’re not struggling to liberate their political prisoners.
Lumumba Bandele: Yeah. So that’s part of why we talk about political prisoners in the way that we did. And why we use Black August as that vehicle, because it’s not those individuals who were identified because of who they were, you were not identified because you’re just Eddie Conway. Shaku who was not identified because he’s Shaku, because these are people who took very radical, uncompromising stances for our freedom and the concepts still exist. This generation now has born a number of, and countless, in fact, people who may not necessarily have the organizational vehicle at the moment, but have the desire to make sure that we obtain freedom by any means necessary. That’s a dangerous position to be in because the state has shown us that they will push back on that, they will criminalize our movement. They will attempt to incarcerate our movement and they will continue to murder freedom fighters as they see fit.
And so when we talk about the history of a freedom struggle, it helps highlight the stories. It helps highlight the realities of it, but more importantly, it helps highlight the trajectory of it because it didn’t start with us. It didn’t start with you all. It didn’t start with the generation before you were part of a long trajectory of Africans, who’ve been fighting for freedom since the Europeans touched the shores of West Africa. This movement has not stopped. Our freedom struggle has not stopped. It takes different iterations, different forms and we are part of this long trajectory that will continue to grow. And so we want to make sure people know the history. We want to make sure people understand the ramifications of engaging in a certain level of struggle. And we want to make sure that people have the support necessary when they engage, how they choose to engage.
Eddie Conway: Okay. With that as the final note, thanks both of you for joining me and continue to do the work that you’re doing. It’s great. I follow what you’re doing and we need to do more of it across the board. Thank you.
Lumumba Bandele: Well, but before you go, we want to say thank you because you have been a source of inspiration for so many. And so, your freedom, your liberation, your being able to be freed from prison inspired so many of us. And for those of us who were told that the work around political prisoners was an impossible task. You are living example of making it possible. And so we thank you.
Monifa Bandele: Yeah. And I want to echo that. I want to say that currently the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, as a part of a 100 member coalition called the Movement for Black Lives. And it’s a level of organizing we’ve never seen in our lifetime. And so it is clear in every aspect of that work, the important foundation that was laid by you and your comrades, both during the sixties and seventies, but also throughout those campaigns to keep the work going while you were behind the bars, and to free political prisoners. It is evident in everything that we do, so much thanks and much honor.
Eddie Conway: All right. And thank you. Okay. On that note, we will end this and thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
Studio: Cameron Granadino Production: Ericka Blount Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-24--As Democrats Hedge on Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Biden Misleads on Plan

We are in the dog days of summer , with record heat waves and extreme weather events happening throughout the United States and the world .
Meanwhile , one of the global oil majors has a professed climate solution : powering its oil drilling with wind and solar energy across the world and the Democrats deleted policy platform language to end fossil fuel subsidies .
If you have a story you think deserves a spot in the roundup or story pitches in general , get in touch with me at [ email protected ] or on Twitter at @ SteveAHorn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here .
On August 17 , the first day of its convention , the Democratic National Committee struck a clause in its policy platform calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies .
The decision , unsurprisingly , has drawn a strong rebuke from climate justice advocates .
First reported by HuffPost , the language initially added into the document on July 27 read “ Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels , and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.
” In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a DNC official said the language had been “ incorrectly included ” and “ after the error was discovered ” it was removed .
“ This is a commonsense position held by both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris , ” Collin Rees , senior campaigner for the group Oil Change International told HuffPost .
“ The DNC should immediately include it in the platform.
” A lesser covered aspect of that story is how language about enhanced oil recovery and carbon capture , utilization and sequestration ( CCUS ) never made it into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debate .
CCUS means capturing carbon at power plants and utilizing that carbon for , predominantly these days , oil drilling via a method called “ flooding.
” It is a way to extract oil out of the ground in reservoirs which have already run dry after conventional drilling transpires , extending the lifeline of oil wells .
The captured carbon is shipped via CO2 pipelines to those oil fields .
That reneged proposal , brought forward by John Laesch , an Aurora , Illinois-based member of the DNC Platform Committee , reads @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reflect our commitment to a clean energy future by eliminating special tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies , including any tax subsidies for enhanced oil recovery ( EOR ) , carbon capture and storage ( CCS ) or direct air capture ( DAC ) .
” But Laesch , a Sanders backer , says the language was dropped without it ever getting a vote or consideration from the committee .
“ Even though I did not drop my amendments , someone made the decision to break DNC rules and just dropped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who works full time as a carpenter and is a member of the Carpenters Local 174 , explained it in an August 5 blog post .
“ Apparently other platform members had accepted speaking opportunities in exchange for dropping their amendments.
” In an interview , Laesch said he intended to see the amendment through to a “ moral defeat , ” but was not granted that chance .
For its part in response , the Biden campaign claims it supports an end to fossil fuel subsidies.Policy director Stef Feldman tweeted that Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. fossil fuel subsidies & then rallying the rest of the world to do the same—as was outlined in his climate plan last year.
” Yet , his plan says he will “ double down on federal investments and enhance tax incentives for CCUS.
” .
Further , a system of tax subsidies already exists for CCUS , giving companies $ 35/ton for CO2 who use it for enhanced oil recovery and $ 50/tons for those who permanently sequester it .
Laesch closed his account of platform negotiations by saying he wants Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scientists , not oil profiteers.
” For more on this story , see TRNN climate correspondent Aman Ahzar ’ s piece published on August 21 .
California is on fire , a worst case nightmare scenario in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic still tearing through the United States , which has surpassed the 175,000 deaths tally .
There are currently 367 fires happening at once in California with 27 of them considered major .
The fires are the result of a combination of weeks-long heat wave , bone dry chaparral after a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ California ’ s Death Valley National Park recorded the hottest recorded temperature in the history of the Earth at 130°F .
Some of the fires were caused by 11,000 lightning strikes .
Lightning bolts also ignited one of Arizona ’ s record-size wildfires this past June .
Two people have died so far in California and over 30,000 structures are threatened .
The heat of the fires is so intense that it has burned and destroyed fire monitoring cameras .
One of the fires was turned into a fire tornado .
The largest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in size as of August 21 , erupting in the late-night hours of August 19 .
The most severe fires have erupted in Northern and Central California , over 350,000 acres in size .
For perspective , that ’ s the combined size of New York City and Chicago both on fire in their entirety at the same time .
But Southern California has not been spared either .
The Dome Fire burned over 43,000 acres , bigger than the size of Miami , burning down iconic Joshua Trees—an endangered species due to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on August 18 , allowing firefighters from outside the state and the National Guard to assist in fire suppression efforts .
“ We ’ re putting everything we have on these fires , ” Newsom said at a press conference announcing the emergency order .
“ We ’ re now getting support from across the western U.S. and for that we ’ re grateful.
” The state is “ stretched thin ” on its ability to fight all of the fires with its current firefighting force @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Associated Press .
Much of that workforce consists of incarcerated individuals serving in the state ’ s Conservation Camps Program .
But with the pandemic having a disproportionate impact on state prisoners for cases and deaths , and thousands of prisoners getting early-release due to prison reform laws coming into effect or getting it due to COVID-19 overcrowding concerns , the state has had to look elsewhere for people to stave off the hell fires .
The intense smoke could also contribute to higher COVID-19 case loads , according to recent studies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Service and University of Birmingham ( UK ) .
On August 20 , the air quality from the smoke in the San Francisco Bay Area was the worst in the entire world .
The severe smoke has engulfed much of the northern and central portions of the state .
CAL FIRE issued a stern warning for all Golden State residents : “ My recommendation is that all the citizens in California be ready to go if there is a wildfire .
Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quickly .
Everybody should be ready to go , especially if you ’ re in a wildfire area.
” Weeks after landing a permit from California to fuel one of its biggest oil fields with solar panels , Chevron announced it has gone global with its plan to fuel its oil operations with renewable energy .
The California-based global oil major announced a partnership on July 30 with the renewable energy company Algonquin Power to set up solar- and wind-powered oil extraction in countries ranging from Argentina , Kazakhstan , Australia , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States : the Texas- and New Mexico-based Permian Basin .
The company has cited the partnership as a key component of its global sustainability plans .
“ Chevron intends to lead in the future of energy by developing affordable , reliable and ever-cleaner energy , ” Allen Satterwhite , President of Chevron Pipeline & Power said in a company press release .
“ This agreement advances Chevron ’ s commitment to lower our carbon footprint by investing in renewable power solutions that are reliable , scalable , cost efficient , and directly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ company ’ s quarterly August 1 investor call , CFO Pierre Breber called the deal between the companies “ way to scale up what we ’ ve been doing previously.
” He added that “ We intend to be in business a long time ” as a means to “ reduce the carbon intensity of our products , ” translated as generating less greenhouse gases from the drilling process itself , usually powered by other fossil fuels such as diesel or natural gas But Danielle Fugere , president of the shareholder advocacy group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drilling with solar isnot enough , calling it a form of “ Reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the margins , while continuing business as usual , ” she told the New Mexico-based Carlsbad Current Argus .
In the Algonquin ’ s quarterly investor call held on August 14 , CEO Arun Banskota said the company will likely do its first project in the Permian Basin .
Chevron is one of the top drillers in the Permian , with its operations growing in the recent year and a half with the acquisition of other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Noble Energy .
Chevron ’ s fellow fracking company in the Permian , fellow global oil giant ExxonMobil , is also active in renewable energy-powered drilling in the Permian .
In November 2018 , the company signed a renewable energy contract with the Danish company Ørsted to build both a 3,560 acres in size and with 1.3 million solar panels , as well as a wind farm to power drilling in the region .
The wind farm got $ 22.56 million in tax incentives .
“ The Sage Draw wind farm , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ power 120,000 typical American homes , but most of the electricity won ’ t go to the surrounding farms and towns .
Instead , the biggest customer will be ExxonMobil , ” wrote EnergyWire reporter Mike Lee in a story published in July .
The research firm IHS Markit calculated in a July analysis that 45 oil and gas projects nationwide are powered by renewable energy.. “ This is a greenwash , while oil and gas expansion keeps hurting frontline communities and wrecking the climate , ” he said .
“ Powering fossil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t a ‘ climate solution ’ of any sort — it ’ s a death sentence for the planet .
”

Welcome back to TRNN’s Climate Crisis News Roundup.
We are in the dog days of summer, with record heat waves and extreme weather events happening throughout the United States and the world. Meanwhile, one of the global oil majors has a professed climate solution: powering its oil drilling with wind and solar energy across the world and the Democrats deleted policy platform language to end fossil fuel subsidies.
If you have a story you think deserves a spot in the roundup or story pitches in general, get in touch with me at steve@therealnews.com or on Twitter at @SteveAHorn. You can read the previous edition here.
DNC, Biden Fossil Fuel Subsidies
On August 17, the first day of its convention, the Democratic National Committee struck a clause in its policy platform calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies. The decision, unsurprisingly, has drawn a strong rebuke from climate justice advocates.
First reported by HuffPost, the language initially added into the document on July 27 read “Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels, and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.”
In a statement provided to the publication, a DNC official said the language had been “incorrectly included” and “after the error was discovered” it was removed.
“This is a commonsense position held by both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” Collin Rees, senior campaigner for the group Oil Change International told HuffPost. “The DNC should immediately include it in the platform.”
A lesser covered aspect of that story is how language about enhanced oil recovery and carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) never made it into the platform and did not get a debate. CCUS means capturing carbon at power plants and utilizing that carbon for, predominantly these days, oil drilling via a method called “flooding.” It is a way to extract oil out of the ground in reservoirs which have already run dry after conventional drilling transpires, extending the lifeline of oil wells. The captured carbon is shipped via CO2 pipelines to those oil fields.
That reneged proposal, brought forward by John Laesch, an Aurora, Illinois-based member of the DNC Platform Committee, reads “Democrats believe the tax code must reflect our commitment to a clean energy future by eliminating special tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies, including any tax subsidies for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), carbon capture and storage (CCS) or direct air capture (DAC).” But Laesch, a Sanders backer, says the language was dropped without it ever getting a vote or consideration from the committee.
“Even though I did not drop my amendments, someone made the decision to break DNC rules and just dropped the amendments anyway,” Laesch, who works full time as a carpenter and is a member of the Carpenters Local 174, explained it in an August 5 blog post. “Apparently other platform members had accepted speaking opportunities in exchange for dropping their amendments.”
In an interview, Laesch said he intended to see the amendment through to a “moral defeat,” but was not granted that chance.
For its part in response, the Biden campaign claims it supports an end to fossil fuel subsidies.Policy director Stef Feldman tweeted that Biden “continues to be committed to ending U.S. fossil fuel subsidies & then rallying the rest of the world to do the same—as was outlined in his climate plan last year.”
Yet, his plan says he will “double down on federal investments and enhance tax incentives for CCUS.”. Further, a system of tax subsidies already exists for CCUS, giving companies $35/ton for CO2 who use it for enhanced oil recovery and $50/tons for those who permanently sequester it.
Laesch closed his account of platform negotiations by saying he wants Democrats to “be the party of climate scientists, not oil profiteers.”
For more on this story, see TRNN climate correspondent Aman Ahzar’s piece published on August 21.
California on Fire
California is on fire, a worst case nightmare scenario in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic still tearing through the United States, which has surpassed the 175,000 deaths tally.
There are currently 367 fires happening at once in California with 27 of them considered major. The fires are the result of a combination of weeks-long heat wave, bone dry chaparral after a months-long drought and high wind speeds. California’s Death Valley National Park recorded the hottest recorded temperature in the history of the Earth at 130°F. Some of the fires were caused by 11,000 lightning strikes. Lightning bolts also ignited one of Arizona’s record-size wildfires this past June.
Two people have died so far in California and over 30,000 structures are threatened. The heat of the fires is so intense that it has burned and destroyed fire monitoring cameras.
One of the fires was turned into a fire tornado. The largest of the fires is over 137,000 acres in size as of August 21, erupting in the late-night hours of August 19. The most severe fires have erupted in Northern and Central California, over 350,000 acres in size. For perspective, that’s the combined size of New York City and Chicago both on fire in their entirety at the same time.
But Southern California has not been spared either. The Dome Fire burned over 43,000 acres, bigger than the size of Miami, burning down iconic Joshua Trees—an endangered species due to climate change to begin with.
Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on August 18, allowing firefighters from outside the state and the National Guard to assist in fire suppression efforts.
“We’re putting everything we have on these fires,” Newsom said at a press conference announcing the emergency order. “We’re now getting support from across the western U.S. and for that we’re grateful.”
The state is “stretched thin” on its ability to fight all of the fires with its current firefighting force, a spokesman for CAL FIRE told the Associated Press. Much of that workforce consists of incarcerated individuals serving in the state’s Conservation Camps Program.
But with the pandemic having a disproportionate impact on state prisoners for cases and deaths, and thousands of prisoners getting early-release due to prison reform laws coming into effect or getting it due to COVID-19 overcrowding concerns, the state has had to look elsewhere for people to stave off the hell fires.
The intense smoke could also contribute to higher COVID-19 case loads, according to recent studies by researchers at the U.S. National Forest Service and University of Birmingham (UK). On August 20, the air quality from the smoke in the San Francisco Bay Area was the worst in the entire world. The severe smoke has engulfed much of the northern and central portions of the state.
CAL FIRE issued a stern warning for all Golden State residents: “My recommendation is that all the citizens in California be ready to go if there is a wildfire. Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing out your driveway so you can leave quickly. Everybody should be ready to go, especially if you’re in a wildfire area.”
Solar, Wind Power Oil Drilling
Weeks after landing a permit from California to fuel one of its biggest oil fields with solar panels, Chevron announced it has gone global with its plan to fuel its oil operations with renewable energy.
The California-based global oil major announced a partnership on July 30 with the renewable energy company Algonquin Power to set up solar- and wind-powered oil extraction in countries ranging from Argentina, Kazakhstan, Australia, and in the biggest fracking field in the United States: the Texas- and New Mexico-based Permian Basin. The company has cited the partnership as a key component of its global sustainability plans.
“Chevron intends to lead in the future of energy by developing affordable, reliable and ever-cleaner energy,” Allen Satterwhite, President of Chevron Pipeline & Power said in a company press release. “This agreement advances Chevron’s commitment to lower our carbon footprint by investing in renewable power solutions that are reliable, scalable, cost efficient, and directly support our core business.”
In the company’s quarterly August 1 investor call, CFO Pierre Breber called the deal between the companies “way to scale up what we’ve been doing previously.” He added that “We intend to be in business a long time” as a means to “reduce the carbon intensity of our products,” translated as generating less greenhouse gases from the drilling process itself, usually powered by other fossil fuels such as diesel or natural gas
But Danielle Fugere, president of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, said powering oil drilling with solar isnot enough, calling it a form of“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the margins, while continuing business as usual,” she told the New Mexico-based Carlsbad Current Argus.
In the Algonquin’s quarterly investor call held on August 14, CEO Arun Banskota said the company will likely do its first project in the Permian Basin. Chevron is one of the top drillers in the Permian, with its operations growing in the recent year and a half with the acquisition of other major fracking companies, Anadarko Petroleum and Noble Energy.
Chevron’s fellow fracking company in the Permian, fellow global oil giant ExxonMobil, is also active in renewable energy-powered drilling in the Permian. In November 2018, the company signed a renewable energy contract with the Danish company Ørsted to build both a 3,560 acres in size and with 1.3 million solar panels, as well as a wind farm to power drilling in the region. The wind farm got $22.56 million in tax incentives.
“The Sage Draw wind farm, which straddles Lynn and Garza counties, can power 120,000 typical American homes, but most of the electricity won’t go to the surrounding farms and towns. Instead, the biggest customer will be ExxonMobil,” wrote EnergyWire reporter Mike Lee in a story published in July.
The research firm IHS Markit calculated in a July analysis that 45 oil and gas projects nationwide are powered by renewable energy..
Oil Change International’s Rees denounced these projects as a “deadly distraction.”
“This is a greenwash, while oil and gas expansion keeps hurting frontline communities and wrecking the climate,” he said. “Powering fossil fuel extraction with renewable sources isn’t a ‘climate solution’ of any sort — it’s a death sentence for the planet.”
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-24--A wildcat strike in 1970 solved the last crisis at USPS

Labor activist Paul Prescod gives context to the fight over the future of the post office.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, great to have you all with this once again. Now I really want to explore today part of the postal crisis we’re facing the United States today. And to understand this crisis, the nation’s facing at this moment, we have to go back to the roots of labor militancy back in 1970 when there was a walk-out postal strike that led to increased wages and benefits, but also opened the Pandora’s box of privatization, which led to Federal Express and other mail delivery companies being born.
While the strike was successful, Richard Nixon got a law passed that said the agency would have to raise its own funds [inaudible 00:00:36] products, postage and more. So this crisis we face now has its roots in a 50-year old labor struggle. And that 50 years slow death and diminution of the post office.
To walk us through that history and bring us to the moment we’re in now, we’re joined by Paul Prescott. He was a union activist, member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, a teacher himself, and the contributing editor to [Jacqueline 00:00:58] Magazine, where he wrote the article, When the Mailman Rebelled. And Paul, welcome. Good to have you with us.
Paul Prescott: Thanks so much for having me. Good to be here.
Marc Steiner: So take us back to 1970 and what happened then. Maybe in terms of our ages and generations, I probably could take you back there first. But in terms of your history and your study, tell us what went on in 1970. This walk out strike that changed the nature of the post office, and in many ways were the roots of where we are now.
Paul Prescott: Yeah, sure. And definitely fill me in on gaps that I miss. So postal workers, this had been building for a while. So this was what seemed like a very spontaneous strike, but the conditions have been building for a long time.
So generally, they were treated worse than other public workers, government workers, civil servants. They made a lot less than sanitation workers, police officers, firefighters. And based on the law, they weren’t allowed to strike. So a lot of postal workers called it, they had collective begging, not collective bargaining.
And they described a lot of the mail rooms they worked in as dungeons. Overheated, no ventilation, no air, no windows, and things like that. So it had been building for a long time. And in 1969, Postal Workers Union branch in the Bronx, a few workers went on a sick out. So they called in sick as a protest action.
And this really caught fire in a way people didn’t really expect, and workers started on their own mobilizing to get those same workers reinstated and not be fired for what they did. And it really took off and it showed there was a lot of anger boiling beneath the surface.
And this boiled over into this big union meeting in New York City. It was the largest meeting that they ever had in that Postal Workers Union local. There were some [inaudible 00:02:51] activists who were gaining prestige in the local, and they basically led a strike vote that passed by somewhat of a thin margin.
And from there, the leadership of the unions were not really in control of this. So it spread like wildfire, and all of a sudden you had this national postal workers strike that no one saw coming. Union leaders in necessarily sanction it, and so things seemed out of control from that point. But they were really striking to catch up to what they saw the gains that other government employees were making during that time.
Marc Steiner: There’s always the thing about the moment we were in then, and why this might’ve been happening as well. Some of the lowest paid federal workers were among the postal workers back in the day. We can talk a bit about that, and how many of the workers were people of color, Latinos in the Southwest and black workers who, especially in urban areas in the West and the East, and the Panthers and black power was rolling, and the Vietnam war was happening. A lot of the people working there were Vietnam war vets. So there was a lot there that made this boil over. Think about that moment and talk a bit about that from your perspective historically in your studies, but also think about what that means for right this moment.
Paul Prescott: And it’s interesting because even a lot of average [inaudible 00:04:14] workers, they didn’t consider themselves radicals. They talked about this climate of the sense. So this is a point where the Vietnam war is very unpopular. And it’s not just unpopular, but even it’s now becoming mainstream to oppose the Vietnam war. It’s not just students on campus.
You’ve had the civil rights movement going for many years, the black power movement. In general, a lot of workers described that people just questioned authority in general throughout society. And so you had Vietnam war veterans, whether they’re black or white going to the war. They expect to be treated well, and they come back to this crappy job with crappy pay, so they’re angry about that.
Many black people who had been involved in the civil rights struggle. And it’s sort of like taking this militancy that was existing outside the labor movement, and bringing it inside the labor movement, and really starting to question authority in many ways.
I don’t think you can draw direct parallels, but it’s sort of an interesting moment now where you’ve had so many people, especially younger people excited by the Bernie Sanders campaign in this moment we’re living in. A lot of these people do not at least yet have a connection with the labor movement. So it will be interesting to see if they bring these more, I wouldn’t even call them radical, but America’s context, radical politics into the workplace as like a side of struggle.
Marc Steiner: Right, and I think about that. The postal workers or union members, clearly, they’re trying to complete the dismantling of the post office that began in 1970 at the end of the strike. So let me start there and then come back to what I said first. How do you make this connection between what happened at that moment? You have this situation in 1970, the workers strike across the country, workers slowing down, walking out of their jobs about eight days, right? Am I right about that?
Paul Prescott: Right.
Marc Steiner: Eight days in March and 1970. And they sent federal troops to New York, and you can talk a bit about that. You wrote about that. But what do you think happened politically where the workers struck, got what they wanted, in a walkout strike, which doesn’t always happen because those strikes are “illegal” and then Nixon and company, and the republicans in charge and democrats as well in 1970, turned on the workers and started dismantling and creating this privatized agency? Talk about that dynamic.
Paul Prescott: And just to pick up for us about the federal troops being sent and just to give you the [inaudible 00:06:47] dramatic the situation got. So Nixon calls in the National Guard to move the mail. And there’s a lot of freaking out about what this means for just discipline in general.
Federal workers are supposed to be more docile. You’re not supposed to really question authority because you work for authority. And Time Magazine said, “This could really set a bad precedent if you have federal workers defying the law like this, what is this going to mean for our society?”
So Nixon calls in the National Guard. It turns out moving the mail is actually hard. There are skills associated with it. They did terribly at moving the mail. There were actually some reports of some postal workers who were in the National Guard actually deliberately sabotaging the process to help out postal workers.
So it is pretty dramatic. You think about revolutions when they get serious, that’s when the military starts turning on authority. So maybe it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but you have the National Guard also defying orders in that sense.
So the strike ended up, it wasn’t overwhelming victory. So the postal workers got big pay raises. They were also able to maximize the salary where they would max out. They got really good health benefits. They also got more structured collective bargaining that allowed them to actually bargain and not beg in the future.
But the other side of that which you mentioned is the Postal Reorganization Act. And that set it up in a different way. There were some gains and some downsides to it. So they set it up to be less political where the postmaster general was just directly appointed by whichever party is coming in power.
They also set it up, like you said, the post office have to now be self-sufficient funding. A lot of people still don’t know this, but the post office does not take taxpayer dollars. Now I will say the post office actually did not have much of a problem being self–sufficient financially.
So my take on this, and when you interview in the union, they might have a different take. I think the push for privatization was going to come either way. I think especially once the ’80s really got going, that’s where you see the attack on labor, the attack on the left, and privatization in all kinds of industries. You can even actually date it back to President Carter. He actually started a lot of this deregulation.
So I don’t think it was totally because of that reorganization that caused the privatization, I think that was coming anyway because they just wanted to privatize everything in the public sector. The real problems came with funding is in 2006, some people might know about, there was a bipartisan bill Congress passed called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
And that’s where they forced the post office to pre-fund pensions and health benefits 75 years in advance. And literally no other government agency, no other private corporation has to do this. So before that, they were basically breaking even, or running a surplus. Ever since that moment, they’ve been in a deficit. And it’s just been getting worse and worse because each year billions of dollars, they have to set aside.
And when COVID hit, it’s hit everyone hard economically, and the postal service is no different. So they were already in this weak position because of that law. And that was just now being accelerated by what’s been happening with the economic crisis.
Marc Steiner: So one of the things here that’s interesting that you made me think of as you were describing what happened over the decades, culminated in 2006. Is that what we’re facing now with COVID or facing out with this vote by mail and the Trump’s attacks on that and his allies attacks on the post office on voting by mail, this is also attack on the working class. Working class who work in the post office.
And you see most polls say that 90% of Americans are happy with the post office. There’s a confluence of events here that don’t parallel 1970, but clearly for me have the roots there, but talking about what you see now. You’ve been involved as a labor activist. You know a lot of folks were involved in the postal struggle as well. Make those connections for us.
Paul Prescott: And it’s an interesting moment. I’m really glad that all of a sudden the postal service is in the news, it’s like all the rage now. But generally from MSNBC, CNN, they’re coming at this from the angle of the election. And of course that’s important to protect our voting rights. But I think even more importantly is postal service as a working class institution.
And this goes to show why they want to privatize it. And DeJoy’s move to delay mail, it’s not just about the election. I think they also were doing this as one more step to undermine it and privatize it. So the postal service is home to over 600,000 living wage jobs. The average salary is 55,000 a year, so obviously postal workers aren’t living large. It’s not like a worker’s utopia.
But in the United States in 2020, it is harder and harder to come by good solid union jobs with good benefits and stability. So that’s a big reason why they want to attack it. And you can think of it as a form of union busting.
And also, I’ll just say a little bit about particularly for black workers, historically and today. Postal service has been a very crucial institution for upward mobility. This goes all the way back to the 1940s, and it’s continued all the way until today. 21% of postal workers are black, so they’re disproportionately represented in the postal workforce.
And again, there’s been a crisis in jobs for everyone, but especially black workers. A lot of them public sector jobs are like the very thin line between some kind of stability and being impoverished. So it doesn’t seem like it’s a racial justice struggle, but I think people should recognize when we talk about black lives matter, we can hold police accountable. We could defund the police, but if at the same time the postal service is privatized and these jobs are destroyed, that’s going to be a disaster especially for black workers who have gotten so much out of this institution over the long term.
Marc Steiner: So as somebody who thinks deeply about the history of labor and is also a labor activist in your own union and had the sense of solidarity with the postal workers, where do you think the struggle is going to go? And how do you think labor solidarity fits into all of this, and what we may not be aware of this unfolding?
Paul Prescott: The old slogan from labor, injury to one is an injury to all. Many people in the labor movement don’t take that as seriously as they should. But I think we’re at an interesting moment where again, the public is overwhelmingly on the side of the postal service. It’s a good flash point to unite around.
In Philly, we’ve been working with the Postal Workers Union. These unions should see this as a fight they need to double down on because it’s also about saving the public sector more generally. If they can prioritize this, you know they’re going to go to the next thing. And I also think this is an opportunity for activist crisis, hopefully where we do save the post service.
And you’re even seeing centrist democrats are now coming out, at least for the time period of now to save the postal service. Let’s think about the future. So the Postal Workers Union has talked about postal banking, and this is a demand that Bernie Sanders lifted up. That’s the only reason I first heard about it. And that’s all for basic banking services in the post office. We used to have it in this country, many other countries do it, and it would be a big attack on the payday loan industry.
And again, I think you can look at this through a lens of racial justice. I think you see basically these loan sharks are most active in working class communities of color, and this would be a win for everyone. So not only do you provide good banking options for working people, you would create more employment in a post office. So more good living wage jobs. It’s also a way of increasing revenue for the postal service.
So I think people should be thinking about activist crisis, labor and community allies uniting around the postal service, not just to save it, not just to repeal that 2006 law, which absolutely needs to happen, but how can we expand the postal service, postal banking, people have talked about having electric car charging stations at post offices. People have talked about internet as an internet hub for communities that don’t have as much internet access. We should be thinking bigger.
Of course, this is going to take funding, and it’s going to be a political struggle, but I think we’ve seen in this moment that the public is actually on our side on this, and I think there’s a lot of material to work with in terms of mobilizing people around this public service.
Marc Steiner: So we can include. I think that what you’re raising here is a really important issue for us to wrestle with in the coming months around this struggle. It seems there’s this confluence of events happening. The fight for the future of democracy, the right to vote by mail, and the danger of the right trying to seize that. A working class organization with a huge plurality of workers of color in the postal workers in issues of race, and then thinking about what 21st century postal servers should be, that is also a threat to some private companies like Federal Express, like the big internet companies, Comcast, and the rest, because it could change the nature of what we think the public sector should do in terms of being the highway for America. It Allows things to build around it. I think there are a lot of tentacles to this that we’re not considering.
Paul Prescott: It’s a perfect example of… It touches on so many different struggles at the same time. And also we need to look at what can unite the broadest possible people, and it’s kind of cliche, but I’ve been very disturbed at the culture wars, which to be fair, right wing and left wing drum up. But the right wing is very skilled at creating a culture war to divide us. And the post service is good example of institution that 91% support that’s urban, that’s rural, republican, democrat, independent. It’s something that we really can unite around.
Marc Steiner: And the whole idea of public banking, which unites the rural as well as urban suburban. That whole idea was put forth before. If it gets raised in the proper way, this could actually heighten the consciousness and pull some of the elements of the white working class back into the struggle with everybody else.
Paul Prescott: And just wanting to keep in mind, we need to be vigilant. So what DeJoy has said is that he’s going to stop mail delays until the election’s over. And again, these delays are basically a ploy to privatize. So I work in public education, this happens all the time. You take away my funding and support, the school start not doing so well. And then you turn around and say, “Oh, wow. It looks like we need a charter school and we need to privatize.”
So right after the election, this fight will be live. And also we should be aware of that democrats, many of them are probably fine with privatizing the postal service as well. I do think Trump is definitely worse than what Biden would be, but I can easily see the Pete [inaudible 00:18:54] judges of the world in I don’t know, 2028 being totally fine with privatizing it.
So we should be clear that the only thing that will get us out of this is building a broad movement. There’s not many allies we can really rely on in Congress besides someone like Bernie, but he’s unfortunately pretty unique in our political system.
Marc Steiner: Well, Paul Prescott, this one really interesting. And I appreciate you taking the time today and it’s good to have you with us. Paul Prescott, as we said earlier, is a union activist, writes for Jacqueline Magazine, and you’ll be seeing more of him in Real News as we dive into labor and the future of the struggle here in America. And Paul, thanks for your work. And thanks for joining us today.
Paul Prescott: Thanks so much for having me.
Marc Steiner: And we’ll be covering this post office issue in depth over the next coming weeks. And Paul Prescott will be back. Please let us know what you think and give us your ideas. And I’m Marc Steiner, the Real News Network. Thank you for joining us. Take care.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-24--Prisoners say they were intimidated over Black lives matter movement

Black prisoners were grabbed from their bunks and corralled without masks .

Black prisoners were grabbed from their bunks and corralled without masks.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Speaker 1: In July of this year, 200 black prisoners were taken from their cells in the middle of the night and corralled in the mess hall in Soledad prison, by all-white and Latino guards. There were no black guards involved.
Speaker 2: Everybody was either smashed off the top bunk, thrown against the wall, one brother actually got pushed down the stairs. Another guy got his finger broke, another guy got thrown off the top bunk and slammed on his head, literally, and all three of them got taken directly from their cells to medical. They didn’t even make it to the kitchen. One of them I seen getting rolled by in a wheelchair.
Speaker 1: In the midst of this pandemic, they were handcuffed with zip ties, they were seated shoulder to shoulder, back to back, without any masks, no social distancing was respected. The guards were in full riot gear and in addition to putting all their lives in jeopardy, a sniper was positioned to be able to shoot them if necessary.
Speaker 3: So the sniper they actually called in and he walked above the building, just to where they could see him. So he wasn’t in the chow hall with them, but he was one of the guard snipers.
Speaker 1: One prisoner contacted his wife and explained what happened. She wrote a article about it in the San Francisco Bay View.
Speaker 3: Well, according to the warden it was an investigation into security threat groups, which are prison gangs, but the people that I’ve spoken to on the inside are not affiliated in any way with any gangs and when they were actually pulled back, they were questioned about things like Black Lives Matter.
Speaker 1: This is the horrifying story that Tasha Williams’ husband recounted to her inside Soledad.
Speaker 4: So they called me into the office and first they tried to act cool like, “We’re here just to question you about a few things.” Then they immediately started asking me about Black Lives Matter, how I felt about it, George Floyd, if what’s happening on the streets is going to spill over into the prison system? And I’m like, “Dude, you all pulled me out of my cell at three o’clock in the morning, rammed my head up against the wall, cuffed me to the point to where my hands turned blue, because of Black Lives Matter.” They’re like, “Oh well, it’s not that, we always want to question you but just it’s a lot going on in the world. I see you’re Muslim. How do you feel about police brutality?” And it’s like, all these questions don’t make any sense. So I’m like, “Man, well what’s going on you all? Is this really what you guys are here to question everybody about, because the only individuals you have inside the room were black.”
Speaker 1: We reached out to the prison officials in California. They responded with a statement saying what they usually respond, that they were looking out for the best interests of the prisoners and they wanted to make prisoner’s lives safer in the future, when in fact they put all 200 of those prisoners at risk of catching COVID-19 with the way in which they handled this whole situation.
Nearly 50 years ago, there was a murder of three black prisoners in the courtyard of the prison by guards shooting from gun towers. It was totally unnecessary. It was a targeted assassination. Three of the revolutionary leaders of an organization that was operating in Soledad were killed. Prisoners staged a hunger strike. They demanded that something happen. Inquiries were made. The guards were exonerated.
No prisoners were allowed to testify to tell what had happened and so pretty much they got away with murdering three prisoners. The result of this was that at some point later on one guard was tossed off of the fourth tier and three other prisoners were charged with that. And there begins the saga of George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers. That was 50 years ago and 50 years later, the same thing is still happening.
Speaker 5: The term Soledad Brother doesn’t apply to us three only, you understand? It applies to all of us brothers down in Soledad who’ve been making moves and who are working on the idea that concentration camps won’t work on black folks and oppressed people here in the United States. We’re just not going for it and we’re trying to break down that thing there and pursue our present goal, the proof that it won’t work on us.
Studio: Cameron Granadino Production: Ericka Blount Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.