https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX4bL9Trvpc
Thursday, September 3, 2020
American Involvement Poisons Brazilian Democracy
Will Bacha August 31, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/american-involvement-poisons-brazilian-democracy/
The United States has a long history of meddling in the political affairs of other nations and using shadowy military and espionage techniques as a means of overthrowing governments seen as being a threat to American political and monetary interests. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of the early nineteenth century and continuing through the Cold War, Latin America has been at the epicenter of American efforts to subvert democracy, deny national sovereignty, and serve capital abroad. From the American-backed coup that replaced Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende and replaced him with the brutal fascist dictator General Augusto Pinochet to the recent failed efforts to depose of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the United States has a long history of attempting to influence politics and government affairs in this part of the world.
Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, has long weighed heavily on the minds of American political and economic elites wary of any perceived threats to U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and eager to profit from Brazil’s enormous mineral, petroleum, and agricultural wealth. In the early 1960s, as his administration prepared to back the 1964 military coup that would depose the democratically-elected President João Goulart and result in the establishment of over two decades of military rule in Brazil, President John F. Kennedy made his promise to “prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba” a signature component of his Cold War-era Latin American policy.
While CIA-backed military coups may today be viewed as relics of a distant Cold War past, the recent political history of Brazil demonstrates conclusively that American involvement into Brazilian economic and political affairs has persisted well into the twenty-first century. Recent evidence consisting of leaked memos, messages from the encrypted messaging service Telegram and other documents have implicated the United States government and the Department of Justice in deeply entrenched plots to destabilize Brazil’s democracy for political and economic gain for years. The United States government worked closely with Brazilian “anti-corruption” probes into the activities of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as “Lula” and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, drastically transforming Brazil’s economic and political trajectory to the apparent benefit of American and multinational business interests.
The most famous of these maneuvers was known as Operation Lava Jato, Portuguese for “car wash.” This less-than-scrupulous investigation, spearheaded by a Curitiba-based judge, Sérgio Moro, and prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, was initiated in 2014 as a money-laundering investigation; however, the scope of the Operation quickly expanded to include allegations of bribery and corruption at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned petroleum giant, eventually implicating a laundry list of prominent political and business figures. For several years, Lava Jato was widely praised, both in Brazil and internationally, as a long-overdue reckoning into political and economic networks historically rife with clientelism and corruption. Moro himself was celebrated as a hero, an impartial and independent crusader against the impunity of Brazil’s political and economic elite.
However, since 2019, investigations by The Intercept and Agência Pública have shown that Lava Jato, far from representing a non-partisan campaign against corruption across the Brazilian political spectrum, had a special prosecutorial interest in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), and especially in two of the Party’s most prominent figures: Lula and Rousseff. These investigations have further confirmedthat Moro and Dallagnol, almost from the inception of their investigation, enjoyed extensive assistance and cooperation from the United States Department of Justice and other American government agencies.
Leaked Telegram messages and other documents indicate that Moro engaged in many unethical and illegal acts during the investigation, including wiretapping Rouseff’s phone and leaking an edited phone conversation to Rede Globo, Latin America’s largest commercial television network.
When questioned in 2019 about the Department of Justice’s involvement in the operation by a group of United States congressmen and women, Attorney General William Barr’s response provided little in the way of answers, but did clarify that the Department of Justice was involved in the Lava Jato operation by including links to articles on the DOJ website proving collaboration between American and Brazilian officials.
While serving as Attorney General under the administration of George H.W. Bush, Barr was instrumental in issuing pardons to six officials from the Reagan administration who had been charged with serious crimes related to the Iran-Contra Scandal, indicating that he is unwilling to hold American officials who have participated in illegal acts in foreign nations accountable for their actions.
In July 2017, Moro sentenced Lula to nine and a half years in prison, ostensibly on charges of money laundering and corruption; according to the charges, Lula had received $1.2 million in improvements to a beachfront apartment from a construction firm that, in turn, had allegedly received large contracts from Petrobras. Announcing his verdict, Moro promised that the charges would ensure that Lula would be banned from political office for 19 years, or twice the length of his prison sentence. As Lula was 71 years old in 2017, such a sentence would in effect end Lula’s political career.
In April 2018, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, in a 6-5 vote, ordered Lula to begin serving his sentence, despite the fact that he had not yet exhausted all of his appeals. On the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision, with the outcome of the vote still in doubt, Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, General Eduardo Villas Boas, made an ominous statement that was widely viewed as suggesting that the Brazilian military would be willing to intervene in order to ensure Lula’s imprisonment and removal from the presidential race.
On November 8, 2019 – once Bolsonaro had won the 2018 presidential election and been sworn in as President of Brazil – Lula was released from prison after 580 days. Nevertheless, the damage had been done: as a result of his conviction, Lula was not allowed to run for president in the 2018 elections, even though he was the obvious frontrunner. By allowing Bolsonaro to ascend to the presidency with relative ease, this ban had dramatically changed the dynamic of Brazil’s modern political history.
Lula, while immensely popular at home – especially among Brazil’s poor and working classes – was regarded with some apprehension by American interests eager to uphold the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” in Latin America and distrustful of Lula’s close ties to left-wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. While his government stopped short of the policies of nationalization pushed by other foreign leaders famously overthrown by the United States, such as Salvador Allende or Mohamed Mossadegh, Lula strenuously opposed the privatization of Petrobras, and promoted Odebrecht, Brazil’s privately-owned engineering and construction powerhouse, at the possible expense of American business interests in South America, southern Africa, and the Middle East. Thus, Lula not only posed a large threat to his political rivals on the right, but also to American corporate interests.
Bolsonaro and Lula’s other political rivals had reason to fear his success in the looming 2018 presidential election. Lula, who President Barack Obama in 2009 referred to as “the most popular politician on earth,” had easily won two previous presidential elections in 2002 and 2006, and left office in 2010 with an 87% approval rating. There was no question that he was the obvious frontrunner in 2018.
With Lula barred from the ballot, Bolsonaro coasted to victory in the 2018 presidential election. Bolsonaro, for one, did not allow Moro’s crucial role in securing his victory go unrewarded. Only days after the election, Bolsonaro announced that Moro would serve in his administration, even creating a new post for him; this new position, commonly known as that of the Supreme Justice Minister, gave Moro immense power until his resignation in April of this year, as it put him in charge of a consolidated force of specialized surveillance teams and other law enforcement agencies.
Leaked phone conversations show that Moro colluded with Prosecutor Delton Dallagnol, violating the Brazilian Judiciary’s Code of ethics by not acting as an impartial judge. In fact, Moro exerted a huge amount of control over the entire legal process; he would let prosecutors know of his decisions in advance, decide the order in which individuals would be prosecuted, and urged other officials to move as quickly as possible, among other ethical transgressions. In essence, he acted as a consultant to the prosecution instead of a disinterested third party.
The main justification for initiating impeachment proceedings against Rousseff was her alleged engagement in a practice known in Brazil as pedeladas. This can be translated to English as “peddling,” and generally refers to the practice of delaying repayment to state banks as a means of masking public debt. The final report from Brazil’s Senate concluded that Rousseff had not engaged in any such practices, which should have effectively dismantled the case against her. However, Brazilian and American actors were already conspiring to ensure that this would not be the case.
A unique characteristic of Brazilian politics is that the Vice President is almost always from a different party than the President and each office has constitutionally separate terms. Thus, although Rousseff was a prominent PT member, her Vice President, Michel Temer, belonged to the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), a center-right party that ultimately supported the impeachment proceedings against her.
Temer’s brief tenure as President was marred by scandal after scandal and deep unpopularity. Within less than two months after taking office, three of his ministers were removed from their posts due to allegations of corruption. Furthermore, taped recordings of conversations between these ministers indicate a massive conspiracy involving the military, mass media and Brazilian judiciary that had as its aim the removal of Rousseff from power.
Additionally, evidence from undercover informants indicate that that Temer was the recipient of illegally sourced campaign funds and massive bribes while also violating several election laws.
Given Temer’s own implication in massive bribery and corruption schemes – crucially, unlike Rousseff and Lula, Temer has been credibly accused of lining his own pockets with bribes, including payments sourced from Odebrecht and JBS, one of the world’s largest meat-packing companies – the political motivations underlying the push for Rousseff’s impeachment come into focus. For Temer, Bolsonaro, and the rest of the Brazilian right, removing Rousseff from office was never a question of accountability for alleged government improprieties or preserving the integrity of the office of the presidency. Rather, as Azadeh Shahshahani, a past president of the National Lawyers Guild who also served as a juror for the International Tribunal for Democracy in Brazil, writes in The Nation, Rousseff’s impeachment represented “an attempt by Brazil’s elite to regain power through non-electoral means and re-implement the neoliberal agenda” that had been rejected, at least partially, by successive PT governments.
In a 2016 speech in New York, Temer explicitly stated that the reason for Rouseff’s impeachment was that her economic policies were not in line with those espoused by the MDB. Lula, Rousseff, and the PT had won four consecutive presidential elections on platforms of increased public spending and modest expansions of social programs that lifted an estimated 36 million Brazilians out of poverty in the decade from 2003 until 2013. Temer and the MDB, meanwhile, sought the implementation of a more traditionally business-friendly, albeit electorally unpopular, agenda of privatization and austerity.
Further demonstrating the fundamental, political nature of impeachment proceedings against Rousseff is the fact that many members of the Chamber of Deputies who voted for impeachment cited bizarre, irrelevant reasons – such as their desire for “peace in Jerusalem,” to protect the freemasons of Brazil, or to prevent Communism from taking hold in the country – as the reasons behind their votes.
More hideously, Bolsonaro – then a congressman from the state of Rio de Janeiro – dedicated his vote in favor of Rousseff’s impeachment to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a notoriously brutal agent of the military dictatorship. Rousseff, who as a young woman was active in the left-wing armed resistance to the military regime, was imprisoned and tortured from 1970-1972 by the DOI-CODI torture unit headed by Ustra.
Ultimately, a report from the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s office even concluded that Rouseff was not guilty of any of the crimes with which she had been charged. Even more damning, the aforementioned, independent International Tribunal for Democracy in Brazil tasked with investigating Rouseff’s impeachment concluded that, “what is happening in Brazil is a conspiracy against democracy. Impeachment is being used for partisan purposes to depose a democratically elected leftist president. This is, in effect, a coup, and those who engineered it are guilty of massive corruption and grave crimes, and must be held to account.”
The constitutional legitimacy of Rousseff’s ouster aside, upon illegitimately assuming the presidency in 2016, Temer wasted little time playing straight into the hands of American economic interests, giving American companies rights to oil reserves and other natural resources, and even going so far as to provide huge tax breaks to international petroleum giants such as Chevron and Exxon.
Brazilians were not the only individuals violating the laws of their country during the Lava Joto investigation. The United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was instituted to prevent American citizens from bribing foreign officials or using other methods in order to help American business interests outside of the country. According to The Intercept, the FCPA is “the legislation through which the U.S. claims jurisdiction to prosecute the bribery of foreign officials, even if the acts occurred outside of the U.S., as long as the transactions — or the corporations or individuals who made them — use the U.S. financial system.” (Petrobras, for instance, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, despite being a Brazilian state-owned enterprise).
The FCPA, therefore, is also frequently invoked by the American government in order to justify its involvement in the political and economic affairs of foreign countries, although the FCPA explicitly prohibits Americans from engaging in international operations of this sort without acknowledgement and approval from the government of the nation where such an investigation is taking place. Functionally speaking, the FCPA may be wielded abroad by the U.S. government as a powerful tool in the interests of American capital. For example, referencing the creation of a new Miami-based FBI squad dedicated to prosecuting corruption in Latin America, Leslie Backschies, the chief of the FBI’s international corruption unit, described her unit’s mission as ensuring that American businesses “can compete fairly” in Latin America.
Nonetheless, despite the consent of certain members of the Brazilian judiciary, the involvement of the FBI and DOJ in Lava Jato never received the necessary acknowledgment and approval by the leaders of Brazil’s executive branch. Rather, in violation of the FCPA, FBI agents colluded with Lava Jato prosecutors and judges without the required consent from the very PT-controlled executive branch that they sought to prosecute.
Citizen Truth spoke with Priscila D. Carvalho, a post-doctoral researcher at INCT -Institute of Democracy (Instituto da Democracia e da Democratização da Comunicação) in the Brasilian city of Belo Horizonte. She indicated that one must be careful of assigning too much agency to American or other foreign actors with respect to Rousseff’s impeachment, Lava Jato, and the ascendance of Bolsonaro. According to her, the Brazilian situation is perhaps more analogous to recent events in Chile – it has been documented that in 2014, as the center-left president Michelle Bachelet prepared to enter office, the World Bank unexpectedly downgraded Chile’s investment rating, precipitating massive foreign capital flight and contributing to the defeat of Bachelet’s Nueva Mayoria coalition in the 2017 presidential election – than to the 1964 coup in Brazil, the 1973 ouster of Allende, or even the U.S.-backed military coup this past November that removed Evo Morales from office in Bolivia. “The problems that our democracy has today are very much internal problems,” and originate fundamentally from Brazil’s “own institutions,” she emphasized.
Regardless of the real extent to which American actors and interests played a consequential role in Rousseff’s impeachment, Lava Jato, and Bolsonaro’s rise to power, recent events in Brazil undeniably demonstrate the contemporary significance of “lawfare” in Latin America, and America’s role in exporting and encouraging such tactics abroad. “Lawfare” can be generally understood as the manipulation of legal systems and institutions for political or partisan gain; in recent years, “lawfare” operations in Latin America – from Peru to Venezuela to Bolivia to Argentina – have almost unanimously targeted center-left or left-wing leaders and parties, and have been conducted with the support of the United States, often in collaboration with other multinational bodies, such as the World Bank (in the case of Chile) or the Organization of American States (in the case of Bolivia and Venezuela).
What might have been the motivations underlying American cooperation with a “lawfare” campaign aiming to cripple the PT and destabilize Brazil’s democratic system? Without a doubt, Rouseff’s 2013 decision to cancel a meeting with Barack Obama did not go unnoticed in Washington; the reasoning behind this decision shed even more light on America’s shadowy intrusions into Brazilian democracy. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden proved that the National Security Agency was using advanced espionage techniques to keep tabs on both Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Lula, for his part, has also cast Lava Jato as an American-backed campaign to deny Brazil its economic sovereignty, and to punish him and the PT for refusing to privatize Petrobras, and for protecting the enormous “Pré-Sal” oil deposits off the country’s northeastern coast from foreign exploitation.
There is another troubling dimension of the FBI’s involvement in Brazil and other foreign nations – although the FBI is ostensibly a domestic intelligence agency and security service, the organization has hundreds of agents based in at least 90 countries, including Brazil .
As a result of the outcome of the Lava Jato operation, companies such as Petrobras were forced to pay upwards of $8 billion in fines to United States courts which had issued the sentences as a consequence of the corruption charges. Most of this money was eventually sent back to Brazil, but instead of being entrusted to the Brazilian government the majority went straight to Dallagnol, who planned to use the money to establish an independent anti-corruption fund, most like to appease friends in the United States. Nonetheless, Dallagnol’s plan was not successful, and Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled the proposal unconstitutional last year.
Today, Brazil has suffered nearly four million cases of the coronavirus and is rapidly approaching 120,000 deaths. The pandemic has struck Brazil’s indigenous communities with a particular ferocity – indigenous Brazilians are dying of COVID-19 at a rate nearly twice that suffered by non-indigenous Brazilians; in the Amazon region, the coronavirus mortality rate among indigenous peoples is nearly 250% higher than that of the general population. Few governments in the world have rivaled Bolsonaro in terms of callousness and incompetence with respect to his response to the pandemic. Meanwhile, fires are raging uncontrollably in some of the most ecologically rich regions of the planet – the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet which straddles the borders between Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. According to Brazil’s national space agency, fires in the Amazon increased by 84% from 2018 to 2019 (Bolsonaro’s first year in office), and 2020 promises to be worse still; according to the same agency, fires in the Pantanal have tripled since 2019.
It is the slate of crises currently afflicting Brazil – simultaneously economic, political, ecological, and epidemiological – that is the true legacy of Moro, Dallagnol, and Lava Jato. Perhaps more than the egregious violations of the FCPA committed by the FBI and DOJ over the course of their involvement in the Lava Jato investigation; more than the active collaboration of American government agencies with an anti-PT, pro-capital plot thinly disguised as an apolitical war on corruption; more than Lava Jato’s slow erosion of Brazilians’ popular trust in electoral democracy; more than the ugly resonance that such collaboration has with previous instances of American intervention in Latin America during the twentieth century; it is Bolsonaro, and his crimes against Brazil and its people, that must be remembered as the outcomes of Moro’s zealous crusade.
How Big Corporations are Draining the Life out of a Sick America
Paul Buchheit September 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/how-big-corporations-are-draining-the-life-out-of-a-sick-america/
Our richest corporations are much to blame for the free-market “winner take all” philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings.
(Common Dreams) When Dr. Jonas Salk was asked about a patent on his polio vaccine in 1955, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When Gilead Sciences recently developed an anti-Covid drug for about $12 per treatment, they set the price at $3,200.
As Republicans and business leaders decry the word ‘social’ as anti-American, they continue to promote the free-market “winner take all” philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings and job opportunities. Our richest corporations are much to blame. A review of the facts should make this clear.
They Continue to Cheat on Taxes
After building their businesses on 70 years of taxpayer-funded research and development, six dominant tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Netflix), which together are worth over $7 trillion, have avoided over a hundred billion dollars in taxes over the past decade.
The profits of some of the largest U.S. corporations are surging in this pandemic year of sickness and death. And the levels of fraud and deceit keep growing along with the profits. A shocking analysis by the Tax Justice Network concludes that “Multinational firms operating around the world are shifting over $1 trillion in profits every year to corporate tax havens.” A trillion dollars a year lost to the people in need of jobs and food and housing.
They’ve Rigged the System
Fifty years of lobbying against their own tax responsibilities have borne fruit for the big corporations. First of all, the corporate tax rate has dropped from about 35 percent to a low of 11 percent in 2019.
Secondly, the payroll tax has been used to make up the corporate shortfall. In the past fifty years, the corporate percent of tax revenue from major sources has decreased from 23 percent to 7 percent. The payroll tax percent has increased from 24 percent to 39 percent. Corporations have drastically cut their taxes while putting more of the tax burden on workers.
It gets more insidious. In the past ten years, Republicans have waged an anti-IRS campaign, slashing the budget of one of the most productive and cost-effective government agencies, and eliminating the positions of highly specialized employees who might have been expected to go after the largest corporations and the biggest cheaters.
And it gets personal. According to the IRS’s own Taxpayer Advocate, the average U.S. household pays $3,000 per year to make up for the delinquents and deadbeats.
Their Greed Reached New Heights
With the 2017 corporate tax cuts came the lofty assurances that money would be freed up for new investment in jobs and R&D. So what happened? Hypocrisy happened. In the following year, S&P 500 companies set a new record for buying back their stock to artificially boost stock prices for management and investors—a practice that was illegal until the Reagan years. While about a third of S&P companies are now curtailing stock buybacks in response to the pandemic, others have depleted so much of their funds that they have turned to the pandemic-inspired CARES Act for relief to “distressed industries.”
Start with the airlines. The Big Four spent $42.5 billion on buybacks between 2014 and 2019, and now they’re asking for $50 billion in bailout money. Delta CEO Ed Bastian had the audacity to say “the owners of a business deserve a return, too.” Boeing, which was actually borrowing money to buy back stock, is now asking for a $17 billion bailout from taxpayers.
Merck, whose 1950s slogan was “Medicine is for people, not for profits,” spent $10 billion on R&D in 2018 and $14 billion on share repurchases and dividends.
At Home Depot, according to the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project, the money spent on buybacks could have boosted the average employee’s salary by $18,000 a year.
And fast food giants including KFC, Wendy’s, and Papa John’s, who, according to the New York Times, had spent great sums of money on buybacks, now need $145 billion of taxpayer funding to avoid mass layoffs.
They Show Disdain for the American Worker
Stock buybacks are only part of the corporate trend to diminish the state of the worker. Automation is eliminating millions of jobs. The old argument that the loss of jobs to technology has always been followed by a new and better class of work becomes meaningless when the machines start doing our thinking for us. And when the changes are occurring at such a rapid pace. A McKinsey report states: “Those earlier workforce transformations took place over many decades, allowing older workers to retire and new entrants to the workforce to transition to the growing industries. But the speed of change today is potentially faster.” The speed of change is faster still because of the loss of jobs during the COVID pandemic.
Common arguments in favor of the tech companies are that (1) they’re making a lot of people rich, and (2) they’re providing all of us with remarkable products. Well, they’re making about 20% of Americans rich. And their products are a result of 70 years of taxpayer-funded research and development, much of it by government agencies. If today’s companies were truly offering a fair return to the taxpayers who built their businesses, they’d be doing a lot more to ensure that all Americans have the means to support their families.
"Isn't Just Good Policy—It's Good Politics": 145 Groups Demand Biden Ban Fossil Fuel Execs and Lobbyists From Campaign and Cabinet
"Joe Biden can't address the climate crisis while listening to people taking checks from the fossil fuel industry."
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/01/isnt-just-good-policy-its-good-politics-145-groups-demand-biden-ban-fossil-fuel
A diverse coalition of nearly 150 progressive advocacy groups is demanding that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden ban fossil fuel executives and lobbyists from his 2020 campaign and commit to barring them from his administration if elected in November, warning that a cabinet stocked with Big Oil representatives would render empty the former vice president's vows to confront the climate crisis with ambition and urgency.
In a letter (pdf) Tuesday morning, 145 organizations representing a wide array of progressive interests called on Biden to "ban all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from any advisory or official position on your campaign, transition team, cabinet, and administration," arguing there are countless qualified experts and advocates who have not attempted to benefit financially from polluting and extractive industries.
The letter's signatories—which include Oil Change U.S., Greenpeace, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, People's Action, and Public Citizen—raised alarm at a Bloomberg report earlier this month indicating that industry-tied individuals like Jason Bordoff, a member of the National Petroleum Council, are advising the Biden campaign in an informal capacity."People who left government to serve on a fossil fuel industry board, enrich themselves as oil and gas advisors, receive funding from fossil fuel companies to espouse 'reasonable' climate positions, or work with industry front groups should have no role in a Biden administration or campaign," the groups wrote. "Neither should fossil fuel backers on Wall Street, who have attempted to profit off pollution."
"Joe Biden can't address the climate crisis while listening to people taking checks from the fossil fuel industry like Ernest Moniz, Jason Bordoff, Ken Salazar, and Heather Zichal," Collin Rees, senior campaigner at Oil Change U.S., said in a statement. "Biden must act boldly in collaboration with grassroots leaders fighting for environmental and climate justice—which means ruling out positions for dangerous 'all-of-the-above' boosters whose time has passed."
The letter points to polling (pdf) from progressive policy shops Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media showing that 61% of Democratic voters oppose "fossil fuel industry lobbyists or representatives working in the White House and other government agencies." Voters overall oppose fossil fuel industry representatives serving in the federal government by a 22-point margin, the survey found.
"Banning fossil fuel representatives isn't just good policy—it's good politics," the groups wrote. "Ruling out positions for fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives is a critical way to show your commitment to a future that prioritizes people, not polluters."
The groups' call comes hours after Biden, speaking in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Monday, told supporters that contrary to President Donald Trump's claims, he has no plan to ban fracking even as he pushes for large investments in clean energy and promises to treat the climate crisis like the "existential threat" that it is.
Tamara Toles O'Laughlin of 350 Action said Biden's approach to the climate emergency will be judged not by soaring rhetoric and promises but by his actions during the presidential campaign and, if elected, while in office.
"Thanks to the environment and climate movement's decades of tireless work to make decision-makers act boldly, the Biden-Harris campaign has adopted the strongest climate platform of any presidential ticket in history," said O'Laughlin. "However, real progress will be measured by relationship to communities most impacted and investments in the same."
"Fossil fuel representatives have no place at the table except to hand over their dirty profits to rebuild what they have broken," O'Laughlin continued. "Any accommodation to fossil fuel executives will undermine the promise of our shared work and throw away our chances of a livable future in the climate decade."
Read the full letter:
Dear Vice President Biden,
Congratulations on your nomination as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. As you have said, this is a historic time for our nation. Over 180,000 Americans have lost their lives to theCOVID-19 pandemic that continues to ravage the nation. Millions are rising up to demand racial justice and an end to white supremacy. Donald Trump has put our democracy on the line with his attacks on our right to vote and threats to contest the election. Meanwhile, the climate emergency is ravaging our country, as supercharged wildfires burn across western states, climate-intensified floods and derechos slam the Midwest, and sea level rise threatens our coasts.
We want to thank you for your bold plans to combat the climate crisis and create millions of good-paying, union jobs in a clean energy economy. We applaud the ways in which you have put environmental justice at the heart of your plans, making sure that the communities of color who are on the frontlines of this crisis are at the forefront of its solutions. Implementing your plans would be a major step toward putting this country back on track to meet our global commitments under the Paris Agreement while centering the communities most harmed by environmental injustice.
Your leadership on climate and environmental justice is why we urge you to ban all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from any advisory or official position on your campaign, transition team, cabinet, and administration.
For decades, oil, gas, and coal executives have lied to the American people about the threat of climate change and lobbied against government action, all while attempting to present themselves as part of the solution. During this election, the American Petroleum Institute is spending upwards of $24,000 per day to mislead voters into thinking that fossil gas is "clean" energy, even though methane emissions associated with gas can make it worse than coal. Meanwhile, fossil fuel corporations have continued to expand their operations, destroy our environment, and pollute communities—especially communities of color—across this nation and around the world.
The Trump Administration has fully embraced these fossil fuel interests. Former oil and gas lobbyists now run the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. At their behest, the Trump administration has instigated 100 environmental rollbacks, putting our health and safety at risk. During the coronavirus pandemic, the administration has continued to slash environmental protections and give billions of dollars in bailouts to fossil fuels.
These abuses have real costs in the communities that you have pledged to serve. Nearly half of Americans now breathe polluted air, the vast majority of which comes from burning fossil fuels, according to research by the American Lung Association. According to a 2016 NAACP report, 71% of African Americans live in counties in violation of air pollution standards. Indigenous people have seen their rights trampled to build dangerous new pipelines like Dakota Access and Keystone XL. Latina women in Texas who live near gas flaring are seeing a 50% increase in premature births.
To advance environmental justice, you must stand up to fossil fuel CEOs, stop the expansion of oil, gas, and coal production, and rapidly transition us away from fossil fuels. A Biden administration free of fossil fuel interests would signal your commitment to restoring a government by and for the American people.
Banning fossil fuel representatives isn't just good policy—it's good politics. According to a new Data for Progress poll, American voters oppose fossil fuel industry lobbyists or representatives working in the executive branch by a 22-point margin. Sixty-one (61) percent of Democrats oppose fossil fuel industry representatives working in the administration, while only 22 percent are open to the idea. Ruling out positions for fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives is a critical way to show your commitment to a future that prioritizes people, not polluters.
This critical need to advance climate and environmental justice is why we are concerned by initial reports that people with ties to fossil fuel interests have been advising your campaign and may be angling for roles in your administration. People who left government to serve on a fossil fuel industry board, enrich themselves as oil and gas advisors, receive funding from fossil fuel companies to espouse "reasonable" climate positions, or work with industry front groups should have no role in a Biden administration or campaign. Neither should fossil fuel backers on Wall Street, who have attempted to profit off pollution.
We appreciate your team's recent reiteration of your commitment to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as part of your comprehensive approach to climate action and environmental justice. A commitment from you to ban all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from your administration would go far to assuage any lingering concerns about your climate commitments that may have been raised when the DNC dropped support for ending fossil fuel subsidies from the 2020 Platform.
Many thousands of talented experts, advocates, and community leaders who do not represent coal, oil, and gas companies would gladly serve in your administration and help move our country forward into the clean energy future. They've shown the expertise, principles, and dedication that should be a requirement for any administration role. We urge you to choose them over the fossil fuel CEOs, lobbyists, and representatives who are profiting from climate destruction.
We thank you for making combating the climate crisis a top priority for your campaign. We look forward to working alongside you to build back better, create a new, clean energy economy that creates millions of good-paying, union jobs, and address the crises of climate change, Covid-19, mass unemployment, and the environmental injustice and racism that have plagued our nation for too long. Millions of us are ready to get to work: There's no need to slow us down with people tied to fossil fuel interests.
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