Rev. Don Gillett, Lexington - 859-396-5925, Tayna Fogle, Lexington - 859-492-0397, Reverend Megan Huston, Bowling Green - 270-996-7021, Pam McMichael, Louisville - 865-235-7077
Kentucky Poor People's Campaign Shut Out of State Capitol Second Week in a Row
Media Availability in Frankfort with Rev. William Barber, National Co-Chair
Calling on lawmakers to address housing, worker issues, and public education, 150 poor people, clergy and advocates rallied in Frankfort Monday as the Kentucky Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival continued its fifth straight week of nonviolent direct action. The action in Kentucky was part of a wave of protests hitting nearly 40 state capitals and Washington, D.C.
Kentucky is the only state in the country that has denied Poor People's Campaign participants access to their statehouse. Rev. Barber is returning to Kentucky on Wednesday, June 13, 2018 and will be available to the media from 10:30 am - 11:30 am on the Capitol steps.
Bearing an eight-foot scroll with Kentucky and national statistics and demands, participants sought once again to enter the Capitol as a group, based on the constitutional right of peaceful assembly to redress grievances through 'petition, address or remonstrance'. Citing the 'two in, two out' rule created specifically for the KY Poor People's Campaign, protestors were denied access to the Rotunda by armed Kentucky State Police. Kentucky Poor People's Campaign participants sang, prayed and shared stories as they kept the front doors open into the early evening to emphasize having been denied access.
The KY Poor People's Campaign is demanding access to a public building that houses elected officials, including the Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General, Supreme Court, Senate President and Speaker of the House.
UN: POVERTY GETTING WORSE UNDER TRUMP
In 35 state capitals, poor people, clergy and advocates demanded the right to healthcare and a healthy environment for all. The protests Monday come days after U.N. officials sounded the alarm on the Trump administration's efforts to undermine social safety net programs for the poor. On Saturday, Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, criticized rollbacks to healthcare and welfare benefits in the U.S. over the past year, which aim to "punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship," Alston said. He said that under the Trump administration and the current Congress, America's poor are becoming more destitute.
The U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other country, at approximately $10,348 per person per year, yet there are more than 32 million people who lack health insurance in America, including 4.6 million Black people, 10.2 million Latinx and 13.6 million Whites. And environmental degradation in the U.S. exacerbates the healthcare crisis hurting America's poor the most: at least 4 million families in the U.S. are exposed to high levels of lead from drinking water and other sources, while an estimated 13.8 million U.S. households cannot afford water.
THE UNFINISHED WORK OF 1968 POOR PEOPLE'S CAMPAIGN
Over the past two years, leaders of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival have been laying the groundwork for this week's protests. They carried out a listening tour in dozens of states across this nation, meeting with tens of thousands of people from El Paso, Texas to Marks, Mississippi to South Charleston, West Virginia. Led by the Revs. Barber and Theoharis, the campaign has gathered testimonies from hundreds of poor people and listened to their demands for a better society.
A Poor People's Campaign Moral Agenda, announced in April, was drawn from this listening tour, while an audit of America conducted with allied organizations, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Urban Institute, showed that, in many ways, we are worse off than we were in 1968.
Earlier this year, poor people, clergy and advocates traveled to statehouses all over the country and the U.S. Capitol to serve notice on lawmakers of the demand that they address the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and America's distorted national morality. Lawmakers have failed to act, and this spring's six weeks of nonviolent moral fusion direct action is yet another attempt to instruct them on these issues.
The Campaign draws on the unfinished work of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, reigniting the effort led by civil rights organizations, labor union and tenant unions, farm workers, Native American elders and grassroots organizers to foster a moral revolution of values. Despite real political wins in 1968 and beyond, the original Poor People's Campaign was tragically cut short, both by Dr. King's assassination and by the subversion of the coalition that sustained it. Still, the original vision and many of its followers did not go away.
The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral is building a broad and deep national moral movement - rooted in the leadership of poor people and reflecting the great moral teachings - to unite our country from the bottom up. Coalitions have formed in 39 states and Washington, D.C. to challenge extremism locally and at the federal level and to demand a moral agenda for the common good.
The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is co-organized by Repairers of the Breach, a social justice organization founded by the Rev. Barber; the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; and hundreds of local and national grassroots groups across the country.
'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.