OUR Walmart Fasters To Bring Protest To Clinton HQ Today
On Wednesday, Walmart workers will bring their Fast for 15 protest to Hillary Clinton's campaign HQ in Brooklyn.
On Wednesday, Walmart workers will bring their Fast for 15 protest to Hillary Clinton's campaign HQ in Brooklyn.
The OUR Walmart demonstrations that have been happening all week in New York are drawing attention to the income inequality that has become the trademark of the nation's largest and most profitable corporate employer, and the injustice and instability for Walmart workers struggling to provide basic necessities like food for their families.
OUR Walmart is calling on Hillary Clinton to support the call for $15 and full time at the company.
The faster's message is clear: while Walmart employees can barely put food on the table this Thanksgiving, Walmart continues to thrive as the largest supplier of groceries in the nation. And anyone who wants to serve as President must understand that Walmart's low wage business model is having an impact on the entire economy and getting an economy that works for main street requires Walmart to lead on wages and hours.
Clinton was a Walmart Board Member for six years, and was reportedly paid $18,000 annually in addition to $1,500 for each meeting she attended as a board member.
Last week, OUR Walmart sent a letter to all the Democratic candidates asking them to address the issue in their debate last week. Clinton refused to do so.
"I was recently fired for my activism after working at Walmart for five years but I am fasting to try and improve the working conditions and wages for all of my friends still working at the store," said Tyfani Faulkner, a former Walmart customer service manager in Sacramento, CA. "I am going to Hillary Clinton's office to demand that she speak up for me, for my daughter and for the tens of thousands of Walmart workers across this country working and living in poverty. One of the things I remember most from working at Walmart, was my friends and I emptying our pockets to scrape together one meal we all could share for lunch. This should not be happening in America. We need a champion in the White House and we're going to Hillary's office to demand that she take up our cause."
OUR Walmart, the worker-led organization which has already won significant victories - including a wage increase for 500,000 Walmart workers - announced last week that over 1,400 people, including hundreds of Walmart workers, have each committed to a "liquids-only diet" as they fast for 1 to 15 days. Workers decided that they would fast to bring immediate attention to all of the Walmart employees who go hungry every day because of low wages and hours. More than twenty-two partner organizations are supporting their efforts nationwide including CREDO Action, local Jobs with Justice chapters, ROC United and Demos.
If you would like to attend or interview a Walmart worker, please contact OURWalmart@FitzGibbonmedia.com.
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.
UN Experts Say 'Targeted Starvation Campaign' by Israel Has Led to Famine Across Gaza
The starvation of Palestinians in Gaza "is a form of genocidal violence," said 10 rights experts.
While the United Nations still has not formally declared a famine in Gaza after nine months of Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid, 10 top U.N. experts on Tuesday said they have seen enough.
"We declare that Israel's intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza," said the experts.
Michael Fakhri, special rapporteur on the right to food, was joined in the statement by other experts including Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, and Paula Gaviria Betancur, special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons.
They said the recent deaths of three children in various parts of the enclave led the experts, who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations as a whole, to declare a famine has taken hold.
"Fayez Ataya, who was barely six months old, died on May 30, 2024 and 13-year-old Abdulqader Al-Serhi died on June 1, 2024 at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah," said the experts. "Nine-year-old Ahmad Abu Reida died on June 3, 2024 in the tent sheltering his displaced family in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis. All three children died from malnutrition and lack of access to adequate healthcare."
"With the death of these children from starvation despite medical treatment in central Gaza, there is no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza," they continued.
At least 34 Palestinians in Gaza—the majority being children—have now died from malnutrition since October, when Israel began its bombardment of the enclave in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced there would "be no electricity, no food, no fuel" allowed in to Gaza.
Israeli officials said in response to Tuesday's statement that it has increased the aid allowed into Gaza recently, but hundreds of delivery trucks remain stranded in Egypt and a floating pier built by the U.S. has not significantly improved the humanitarian crisis.
The U.N. experts said that with the first death of a child from malnutrition and dehydration, it should have been considered "irrefutable that famine has taken hold."
"When a two-month-old baby and 10-year-old Yazan Al Kafarneh died of hunger on February 24 and March 4, respectively, this confirmed that famine had struck northern Gaza," they said. "The whole world should have intervened earlier to stop Israel's genocidal starvation campaign and prevented these deaths... Inaction is complicity."
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is backed by the U.N., said last month that Gaza is at high risk for famine and that nearly half a million people were facing "catastrophic" food insecurity, with an extreme lack of food.
In May, Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, who had previously hesitated to say Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, said Israel's "sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory" ultimately convinced him that Israeli officials are "engaged in genocide."
In March, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to ensure its military refrain from violating the Genocide Convention by preventing humanitarian aid from reaching people in Gaza, saying that "the catastrophic living conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have deteriorated further" and that "famine is setting in."
A woman named Ghaneyma Joma told Reuters on Monday at a hospital in Khan Younis that she feared her son would soon die of starvation.
"It's distressing to see my child... lying there dying from malnutrition because I cannot provide him with anything due to the war, the closing of crossings, and the contaminated water," she told the outlet.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the U.S. government, the biggest international funder of Israel's military and a persistent defender of its actions in Gaza, to ensure that a cease-fire agreement is reached and that Palestinians receive necessary humanitarian aid.
"The intentional starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza can only occur with the active complicity of the Biden administration in Israel's campaign of genocide," said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the group. "This complicity must end, and the Palestinian people must be offered a future in which they are free of occupation and can live in dignity."
Report Names Institutions Behind $4.3 Trillion in Climate-Wrecking Investments
"Investors need to draw a red line on fossil fuel expansion and they need to do it now," said an author of the report, which cites Vanguard and BlackRock as the largest institutional investors in fossil fuel companies.
Institutional investors including the Vanguard Group and BlackRock collectively own $4.3 trillion in the stocks and bonds of fossil fuel companies, according to a report released Tuesday by Urgewald, a nonprofit based in Germany.
Urgewald and partner nonprofits tracked investments into nearly 3,000 companies in the coal, oil, and gas sectors for Investing in Climate Chaos 2024, a report that follows on similar research they published last year.
The $4.3 trillion in financing jeopardizes the quick phaseout of fossil fuels that's necessary to avoid unmanageable climate breakdown, the report says.
"If institutional investors continue backing companies that are still expanding their coal, oil, and gas operations, it will be impossible to phase out fossil fuels in time," Katrin Ganswindt, Urgewald's head of financial research, said in the report. "Investors need to draw a red line on fossil fuel expansion and they need to do it now."
🆕 Investing In Climate Chaos reveals top investors in coal, oil and gas.
👉 Discover who they are & the full report:https://t.co/ix94o84YtT
📢 Calling on all investors to stop all forms of financial support (bonds, loans...) to companies developing new fossil fuel projects. pic.twitter.com/VsRmXD41tl
— Reclaim Finance (@ReclaimFinance) July 9, 2024
Urgewald looked at the holdings of more than 7,500 institutional investors worldwide including "pension funds, insurance companies, asset managers, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds, and asset management arms of commercial banks" as of May 2024.
The true investment total may be higher than $4.3 trillion, given the lack of transparency in bond markets; the report authors estimated that they only included 20-30% of actual bond holding in fossil fuel companies.
Of the $4.3 trillion, more than half was invested by U.S.-based companies. In fact, $1.1 trillion was held by just four companies: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, and Capital Group—dubbed "the filthy four" by Urgewald—each of which had more than $160 billion in fossil fuel investment holdings.
Alec Connon, co-director of Stop the Money Pipeline, said the outsized role of the U.S. was the result of poor governance.
"This mirrors the complete lack of action by U.S. regulators to effectively monitor and address the climate and transition risks of large institutional investors," Connon said in the report. "This inaction lays the ground for the next economic crisis and puts the world on a fast track towards climate chaos."
Nearly $4 trillion of the $4.3 trillion in holdings went to companies that are actively developing new fossil fuel projects, not just tapping existing projects, though the report doesn't specify how much actually went toward new development; many companies do both.
In any case, it's clear that new development abounds: Companies have increased capital expenditure on oil and gas exploration by more than 30% since 2021. ExxonMobil, among the biggest beneficiaries of the institutional investing documented in the report, alone spends $1.4 billion annually searching for new reserves in 37 countries, the publication says.
All of this is in spite of pledges to "transition away" from fossil fuels, as countries agreed to do at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai in December. Environmental campaigners are trying to use those pledges, loophole-ridden as they may be, to pressure institutional investors and regulators to take action.
"The question is, will institutional investors continue snapping up bonds of companies like Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, or TotalEnergies whose business model relies on heating up the planet?" the report's authors asked. "Or will pension funds, insurers, and asset managers realize that these investments will produce more heatwaves, more catastrophic floods, more climate disasters?"
Urgewald is one of the NGOs that produces the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, the latest publication of which found that big banks shoveled nearly $7 trillion into fossil fuel companies in the eight years after the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. That report, released in May, showed that major banks including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup together financed fossil fuel companies to the tune of $705 billion in 2023, the hottest year on record.
'All of Our Tricks Worked': Spoof ExxonMobil Ad Nails Just How Easy It's Been for Big Oil
"Do you have any idea how easy it is to get you off our backs with a little bullsh*t about your responsibilities to the planet?"
A new parody ExxonMobil advertisement released Tuesday by a group founded by Adam McKay—the Academy Award-winning writer and director of the blockbuster doomsday climate comedy Don't Look Up—mocks humanity for letting Big Oil get away with causing one of the biggest existential threats of all time.
"There's a world we all want to live in again. A world where the air is pure and crisp and clean and fills your lungs with joy. A world where you can drink water from any river or creek and your house will still be there tomorrow if it rains," the narrator of Yellow Dot Studio's latest parody video says in the two-minute clip. "Here at Exxon, we believe in that world, and we're working hard to make sure that our customers believe that we believe in that world."
"We understand the road has been bumpy, and we haven't always done the best we could," he says over footage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, in which more than 10 million gallons of crude oil were spilled in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
Wow, this new Exxon ad is surprisingly candid. pic.twitter.com/FYEf2GNdGE
— Yellow Dot Studios (@weareyellowdot) July 9, 2024
The voice-over continues:
Sure, our own scientists accurately predicted climate change 60 years ago. But we didn't want you to know about it. That's why we spent billions on ads and media manipulation covering it up, then we rigged the government so leaders in both parties would do our bidding, and yes, we did everything in our power to block clean energy tech so we could keep force-feeding you oil via expanding global infrastructure, monstrous vehicles, and disposable plastics and chemicals that don't go away. Ever.
The video follows the recent conclusion of a bicameral Senate investigation into Big Oil's decades of spreading climate disinformation and obstructing a green transition—after which lawmakers called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate fossil fuel giants. There is also a nascent movement urging state and local prosecutors to go after the oil and gas industry for climate-related deaths.
"And yes, every now and then you squawk about how evil we are, but then we drop gas prices a nickel and you shut right back up," the narrator says. "Do you have any idea how easy it is to get you off our backs with a little bullshit about your responsibilities to the planet? About your carbon footprint? Pretending plastic recycling actually makes a difference?"
"You're letting us get away with it, you dumb bitches" he adds mockingly. "All of our tricks worked. The world is a burning, out-of-control charnel house. The last generation to die of old age has already been born, and you still let oil executives freely show their face in public."
"We're just one company but you're 7 billion people," the video concludes. "Get off your asses and do something, you fucking peasants!"