Giovanna Frank-Vitale 646.200.5334, Giovanna.vitale@berlinrosen.com
Derrick Plummer 202.466.1576, dplummer@ufcw.org
Americans Call On Obama to Challenge Walmart to End Income Inequality, Take Real Steps Towards Sustainability
Today, responding to President Obama's call to address the income inequality that he said was the "defining challenge of our time," Walmart workers, elected officials, faith leaders and prominent environmental and advocacy groups are calling on the president to challenge Walmart to take real steps to improve jobs and protect the environment. The wave of calls for change comes as the president visits a northern California Walmart store in Mountain View, CA, where hundreds of people are rallying and asking him to challenge the low-wage employer to improve jobs.
Today, responding to President Obama's call to address the income inequality that he said was the "defining challenge of our time," Walmart workers, elected officials, faith leaders and prominent environmental and advocacy groups are calling on the president to challenge Walmart to take real steps to improve jobs and protect the environment. The wave of calls for change comes as the president visits a northern California Walmart store in Mountain View, CA, where hundreds of people are rallying and asking him to challenge the low-wage employer to improve jobs.
"When I heard President Obama was visiting my store, I wanted to tell him what income inequality really looks like--right here working at the country's largest employer," said Pam Ramos a Mountain View Walmart worker. "I bring home $400 every two weeks. That isn't enough to cover the bills, and all I can afford to eat for lunch is a cup of coffee and a bag of potato chips. The president needs to know there is no solution to end income inequality in this country that doesn't include improving jobs at Walmart. We are here today to ask him to stand with us in calling on Walmart to raise wages and pay my co-workers and me a minimum of $25,000 a year for full-time work."
In addition to the hundreds that rallied outside of the store, 32 groups including, Global Exchange, Jobs with Justice, Moveon.org, and Rainforest Action Network, signed onto the joint statement below:
"It's hard to understand why President Obama, who has stated that inequality is the 'defining issue of our time' and stressed the need to tackle climate change, has decided to visit Walmart--a company known for paying low wages and doing little to address its poor environmental record.
"Walmart is making no progress on clean energy. In fact, it is going backwards. According to the EPA its use of renewable energy has dropped in the last two years and just 3 percent of Walmart's powercomes from its wind and solar projects. Nine years ago it said it wanted to become a sustainability leader. Instead, it lags behind many of its competitors and small businesses already using 100% renewable energy.
"Even though the company makes $16 billion in profits, hundreds of thousands of Walmart workers are paid less than $25,000 a year. Pam Ramos, who works at the Mountain View Walmart the President is visiting, is living in her car because low wages and medical bills keep her from covering the rent.
"We are asking the President to challenge Walmart to help strengthen the American economy and protect our environment by becoming a leader in sustainability and creating better jobs. The country's largest employer should not only be supporting the bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, it should be providing workers a minimum of $25,000 a year and full-time work."
The groups who signed the joint statement:
* Change to Win
* Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center
* Coalition of Labor Union Women
* ColorOfChange
* Environmental Action
* Fair World Project
* Food and Water Watch
* Food Chain Workers Alliance
* FWAF
* Global Exchange
* Institute for Local Self-Reliance
* Interfaith Worker Justice
* Jobs with Justice
* Jobs with Justice SF
* LAANE
* Labor Council for Latin American Advancement
* Making Change at Walmart, Puget Sound
* Massachusetts Jobs With Justice
* Moveon.org
* Rainforest Action Network
* RH Reality Check
* Right to the City Alliance
* The Other 98%
* The Ruckus Society
* UFCW 152 NJ.
* UFCW 1776
* UFCW local 1473
* UFCW Local 555
* United Students Against Sweatshops
* USAction
* Warehouse Worker Resource Center
* Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice
Walmart workers--part of OUR Walmart--have been taking the country's income inequality head on by calling on the giant retailer to publicly commit to ending retaliation against workers and provide better wages for workers. While the majority of associates are paid less than $25,000 a year, Walmart makes $16 billion in annual profits and the Waltons--the richest family in the country--have a combined wealth of more than $148 billion. Many workers must rely on taxpayer-supported programs like food stamps and public health care just to get by.
Marketplace recently revealed that Walmart is the biggest beneficiary of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Walmart takes 18 percent of all food stamp dollars-- or $13 billion in revenue. A Congressional report calculated that Walmart workers are forced to rely on $900,000 in taxpayer funded supports, including food stamps and healthcare, at just one of the company's 4,000 stores.
Environmentalists have also been calling on the company to take real steps towards sustainability, recently awarding the company the "greenwasher of the year" award for its efforts to talk the talk about sustainability, without taking real, meaningful steps towards even meeting its own goals - or standards in the industry. Just 3 percent of Walmart's power comes from its wind and solar projects and its use of renewable energy has fallen 25% in the last two years.Walmart continues to lag behind many of its competitors including Kohl's, Staples, and Whole Foods who are already using 100% renewable energy.
OUR Walmart works to ensure that every Associate, regardless of his or her title, age, race, or sex, is respected at Walmart. We join together to offer strength and support in addressing the challenges that arise in our stores and our company everyday.
'Insure Our Survival': XR Launches Campaign at British Insurance Industry Awards Night
"We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy," one activist said.
Key industry players arriving at London's Royal Albert Hall Wednesday night for the British Insurance Awards were met with a warning: Stop underwriting new oil, gas, and coal projects or face direct action from Extinction Rebellion.
Climate activists greeted the insurers with signs, photographs of extreme U.K. flooding, protest music, performance art, and business cards announcing XR's new "Insure Our Survival" campaign to pressure the industry away from backing fossil fuels.
"This is just the beginning," Insure Our Survival spokesperson Alex Penson said in a statement. "Thousands of XR activists stand ready to focus their nonviolent direct action energy on the insurance firms who are greenlighting the climate crisis by providing fossil fuel crooks with the insurance they need to dig and drill for oil, gas, and coal."
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest,"
The insurance industry has emerged as a target of the climate movement in recent years, as advocates point out that new fossil fuel projects would not be able to move forward without it.
"The insurance industry has a superpower," Penson said. "At a stroke, it could stop the fossil fuel crooks in their tracks and save the lives of billions of people threatened from the worst-case climate scenarios that scientists are saying are increasingly possible."
However, to date the industry has not chosen to use that power. According to the most recent report from the global Insure Our Future campaign, not one of the 30 major insurance firms it analyzed in 2023 had policies in line with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The insurers included in the U.K.-based Lloyd's market were the leading fossil fuel insurers, Insure Our Future found, earning $1.6-2.2 billion in premiums from oil, gas, and coal in 2022.
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest," Penson continued, "struggling to survive in barely habitable countries haunted by crop failures, malnutrition, deadly storms, floods, and heatwaves."
At Wednesday's event, XR activists held up photos taken by photographer Gideon Mendell, showing massive flooding in the U.K. that has been made worse by the climate emergency. They also held up signs reading, "Stop Insuring New Fossil Fuels" and "Insure Our Survival."
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
At the sound of a violin, XR's Oil Slickers—activists draped in black cloth to resemble an oil spill—glided around the insurance luminaries as they approached the hall for the industry's annual awards ceremony.
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
A choir also sang a song to the tune of "Imagine," including the line, "Imagine all insurers, fighting for us all."
"Last night we challenged insurers having a good time and congratulating each other on their good work at the Royal Albert Hall to face up to some uncomfortable truths—that some of their work leads to flooded homes and wrecked lives for their customers facing more and more climate crisis-driven extreme weather events," Penson said.
The activists also distributed business cards to the attendees warning them that, if they continued to back new fossil fuel projects, XR would target them with direct action designed to hurt both their reputations and their bottom line.
Pension said: "We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy to speed a just transition to a low or no-carbon economy."
XR's U.K.-based Insure Our Survival campaign emerged from the global Insure Our Future campaign, and in particular an international week of action it organized in late February and early March, including events in London and around the U.K.
About a month after the protests, Zurich Insurance announced that it would no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects.
Sierra Signorelli, Zurich's chief executive of commercial insurance, said at the time that Zurich took the action in keeping with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
"Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn't required for the transition," Signorelli said. "We think it's the right time to evolve our position."
Insure Our Survival campaigner Lucy Porter said that since the spring, many insurance employees, in both senior and junior positions, had spoken to XR saying they supported a move away from backing climate-polluting projects.
"We intend to work with them to make insurance part of the climate solution, not part of the problem, and we invite other people in the industry to contact us and work with us," Porter said.
Porter continued, "To those who continue to put their profits before a livable planet we say: We will hold you accountable through an escalating campaign of nonviolent direct action across the country."
'More Unhinged by the Minute': Senior Israeli Lawmaker Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," the hardline Knesset member and former Israeli defense minister said.
A longtime Israeli lawmaker and former defense minister took to the airwaves and social media on Wednesday to suggest his country should do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party said during a Channel 12 interview. "And we will have to use all the means that are available to us."
"We will have to stop with the deliberate policy of ambiguity, and it needs to be clear what is at stake here," Liberman continued, apparently referring to Israel's refusal to say whether it has nuclear weapons. "What is at stake here is the future of this nation, the future of the state of Israel, and we will not take any risks."
Member of Knesset and former Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman, live on Channel 12, openly calls to use nuclear weapon against Iran, in order to prevent it from reaching weaponization of its nuclear program. What a fuckin' psycho. pic.twitter.com/NYGfQ1zqVp
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 4, 2024
When pressed on what he meant by stopping Iran with non-conventional means, Liberman said, "I said it very clearly."
"Right now there is no time to stop the Iranian nuclear program, their weaponization, by using conventional means," he added.
Liberman made similar comments on social media, where his remarks sparked alarm and condemnation. The lawmaker's hardline call comes amid powder keg tensions between Tel Aviv and Tehran, which warned last week that any Israeli invasion of Lebanon—from which Iranian ally Hezbollah is resisting Israel's annihilation of Gaza—would trigger an "obliterating war."
According to the Arms Control Association (ACA), a U.S.-based advocacy group, Iran is a "threshold state," meaning "it has developed the necessary capacities to build nuclear weapons."
However, a February 2024 threat assessment report authored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence stated that "Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device."
"Since 2020, however, Tehran has stated that it is no longer constrained by any JCPOA limits," the report says, a reference to so-called Iran Nuclear Deal from which the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018 under former President Donald Trump. "Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced [International Atomic Energy Agency] monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so."
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Kamal Kharazi, a foreign policy advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
told the Financial Times earlier this week that his country would "have to change our doctrine" if faced with an existential threat.
The ACA and others estimate that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material for approximately 200 more.
Liberman isn't the first Israeli lawmaker to suggest nuclear war against Iran. Far-right Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi—who sparked outrage by saying Israeli forces are "too humane" in Gaza and should "burn" the Palestinian territory—said in April that "in the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition, we will have to use everything we have."
'They're Everywhere': Common Foods Linked to Elevated Levels of PFAS in Body
Results from a new study "definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," a co-author said.
Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of "forever chemicals" in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows.
The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people. The findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, add to the mounting evidence of the accumulation of PFAS, which were developed by chemical companies in the mid-20th century, in the natural environment and the body.
"The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," Megan Romano, a Dartmouth epidemiologist and co-author of the paper, toldThe Guardian. “Now we're in a situation where they're everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation."
PFAS are a class of 16,000 compounds linked to a wide range of adverse health conditions including cancer, with research ongoing. The chemicals' development and production went effectively unregulated for decades, but has received significant attention in recent years, with alarming studies coming out regularly.
3M, a consumer goods multinational that developed and manufactured many PFAS compounds, knew that they were accumulating dangerously in the blood of the general public, but concealed it, according to a recent investigation co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker; the article was written by journalist Sharon Lerner, who previously reported on PFAS-related deception by 3M and Dupont for The Intercept.
Such corporations may yet face unprecedented legal action. As Steven Shapin wrote in the London Review of Books on Thursday, "It is thought that the monetary scale of American lawsuits against companies responsible for PFAS water pollution may eventually dwarf those involving asbestos and tobacco, considering that people are in a position to decide whether or not to smoke cigarettes but everybody has to drink water."
While much of the concern about PFAS has rightly centered on drinking water—in which they're found worldwide—that is just one of the ways the chemicals can get into the human body. A new study this week showed they can be absorbed through the skin.
Food intake is also a primary means of accumulation in the body, and the new Dartmouth study indicates which foods are the worst. The study doesn't explore why, though Romano discussed some possible reasons with The Guardian. Rice is likely contaminated because of PFAS in soil or agricultural water, while coffee could have PFAS because of various factors including filters. Animal products can be contaminated if, among other reasons, the ground that the animals lived off was treated with PFAS-fouled toxic sludge, which is used by farmers as a cheap alternative to fertilizer.
Even consumption of backyard chicken eggs lead to elevated levels of PFAS, and that could be because of the table scraps the chickens are often fed, Romano said.