February, 22 2021, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Email:,info(at)fwwatch(dot)org,Seth Gladstone -,sgladstone@fwwatch.org
Vilsack's Confirmation to USDA Is a Warning Sign for Family Farmers and Food, Worker Safety
Statement of Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch
WASHINGTON
Tom Vilsack will be confirmed as Agriculture secretary by the U.S. Senate this afternoon. In anticipation, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter has issued the following statement:
"We can confidently predict what Tom Vilsack's leadership of the Agriculture Department will look like, because he's led it before. And the prediction is grim. In his previous stint at USDA, Vilsack backed mass corporate consolidation of our food system at the expense of struggling family farmers. Similarly, he readily advanced industry-driven initiatives allowing companies to inspect their own poultry processing plants, dismantling federal oversight of food and worker safety.
"This administration needs to drastically shift course from the Trump era by supporting sustainable, independent farming, halting the toxic expansion of polluting factory farms, and ultimately prioritizing consumer health and worker safety. We have little hope that Tom Vilsack cares to undertake this effort, so we will be pressuring him doggedly to see the light."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
Peace Group Faces Death Threats After 'False Accusations' by Lawmaker at RNC
"This is a deliberate attempt to scapegoat and incite hate and retaliatory violence against our organization and views."
Jul 17, 2024
CodePink on Wednesday published a recording of a vicious death threat it received after a GOP congressman's dubious assault allegation against one of the peace group's members resulted in her arrest outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
According to CodePink, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.)—a former Navy SEAL—"falsely accused" Nour Jaghama, the group's Palestine campaign coordinator, of assault after he ran into her from behind. Jaghama was arrested and held for 15 hours in a Milwaukee jail before being released. She was charged with battery against a sitting member of Congress.
"CodePink unequivocally states that no one from our organization assaulted anyone," the group said in a statement. "We attended the RNC to deliver a message of peace and disarmament, adhering strictly to nonviolent protest methods."
Van Orden took to social media Tuesday evening to claim he was "assaulted by what appeared to be a member of the pro-Hamas group CodePink" in "an incident of political violence."
"Republicans have been intimidated and targeted for years including the attempted assassination of [former President Donald] Trump and we will no longer stand by and allow lawlessness," the congressman added.
Van Orden has a history of aggressive behavior toward others, including profanity-laced tirades against a fellow congressman and a group of teenage Senate pages, and threatening a librarian over a book about gay rabbits.
Hours after Van Orden's post, CodePink received the following message:
The next Palestinian protest in the street, I'm going to get my semi-truck and run over you fucking faggots and make road pancake out of you, you fucking cunt. I hope you all die, bitch.
"Mere days after a high-profile assassination attempt, [Van Orden] used the same words to describe our peace organization that the nation is using to describe the person who attempted to kill Donald Trump," CodePink said in a statement. "This is a deliberate attempt to scapegoat and incite hate and retaliatory violence against our organization and views. In a heated political moment where people all over the United States are called to unite, Van Orden used the moment to incite hate against nonviolent activists."
CodePink called Van Orden's "pro-Hamas" slur "an obvious example of the racial profiling and anti-Palestinian hatred that has been stoked in this country since October 7."
"Hateful messaging and false accusations against Palestinians led to the killing of Wadea Al Fayoume, a 6-year-old boy in Illinois, the shooting of three Palestinian young men in Vermont, and the attempted drowning of a Palestinian child in Texas," the group added. "This incident is another incitement of violence against Palestinians. The very same rhetoric that leads our elected officials to disregard Palestinian life in Gaza is the rhetoric they use to disregard Palestinian life at home."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Disconnection Crisis': Power Shutoffs Put Poor at Risk as Heatwaves Ravage US
"For households who will be shut off from electricity this summer because they cannot afford their bills, even being inside their homes is dangerous," a new report says.
Jul 17, 2024
Low-income Americans face climbing energy costs and the possibility of summertime power shutoffs—even amid a devastating heatwave—if they can't pay their utility bills, thanks to a lack of legal protections in most states, a report issued Tuesday by a pair of advocacy groups warns.
The Center for Energy Poverty and Climate (EPC) and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA) released the report, which calls for an increase in federal funding to address the issue, as more than 100 million Americans this week face heat advisories and extreme temperatures driven by climate change become increasingly common.
Many low-income people face the prospect of extreme heat inside their own homes, as 31 states offer no summer shutoff protections, the groups said.
"For households who will be shut off from electricity this summer because they cannot afford their bills, even being inside their homes is dangerous," the report says. "In less extreme situations, a family can ride out a hot day by opening their windows, taking a cool shower, and hoping it cools down at night. But when the heat persists for weeks, or the outside air is dangerous, opening a window will only make things worse."
Millions of US low-income households face power shut-offs amid deadly heat.
Half of Americans live in states without rules restricting disconnections for unpaid or overdue bills, report finds. https://t.co/0WYJHmwJ4e
— Watchdog Progressive (@Watchdogsniffer) July 16, 2024
EPC and NEADA estimated that the average American household will spend $719 on cooling costs between June and September of 2024, an 8.7% increase over last year. The rising costs of basic goods has left low-income households forced to decide between paying for food, energy, rent, and other essentials such as medicine, the report says.
Despite the increased need, federal funding to help low-income Americans cover their energy costs declined in fiscal year 2024. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program budget was cut significantly—from $6.1 billion to $4.1 billion—and only 12% is estimated to be allotted to summer cooling initiatives.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives initiated the cut, which they attempted to make even more dramatic. EPC and NEADA have called for the funding to be restored, and progressive lawmakers have regularly pushed for more funding for the energy needs of low-income Americans in recent years.
Power shutoffs in summer months are common across much of the U.S., and were faced by roughly 1 million customers or more in 2022, according to Sanya Carley and David Konisky, two energy insecurity researchers who wrote about what they call the "disconnection crisis" in The Conversation on Wednesday.
One in four Americans faces energy insecurity—a figure that hasn't improved in the last decade, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The problem is prevalent among people with less than two times the federal poverty line income, and especially common in Black and Hispanic households, a 2021 study in Nature Energy found.
Though data are incomplete, disconnections are known to be high in certain parts of the U.S., including the South. "Large investor-owned utilities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Indiana have averaged disconnection rates near 1% of customers, and some city utilities have been even higher," Carley and Konisky wrote.
The monopolistic power that utilities hold, including their influence in state capitals, contributes to the high prices and the lack of protections. "Energy companies are skimming profits from rate hikes," Food and Water Watch wrote in a briefing released Wednesday, citing examples in California, Louisiana, and Florida.
Residents feel the squeeze and are forced into terribly difficult choices—made worse by the extreme weather caused by climate change.
"Aside from unreasonable rate hikes, my May usage was up 10% from last year because of rising heat," David Coleman, a retiree in Florida, told Food and Water Watch. "I pay that bill out of my UnitedHealthcare healthy food benefit. Less for food; more for energy."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Palestinian Envoy Demands End to 'Most Documented Genocide in History'
"Peace will not be achieved at the expense of our rights but by upholding them," said Riyad Mansour. "That is the only path to peace. Let us finally collectively embark on it."
Jul 17, 2024
Ahead of the International Court of Justice's expected advisory opinion on legal consequences for Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, Palestine's permanent observer at the United Nations reminded other diplomats at a U.N. Security Council meeting on Wednesday that the slaughter of more than 38,000 people in Gaza has been broadcast for nine months—while Israel has claimed it is acting in self-defense and is targeting Hamas.
"What is happening in Gaza is going down as the most documented genocide in history," Riyad Mansour said. "When will the world denounce the crimes and stop tolerating their reoccurrence?"
In addition to the daily news of aerial and ground attacks on schools, homes, and places of worship in Gaza, Mansour pointed to Israeli soldiers' filming of their own attacks in the enclave, leaving no doubt that innocent civilians are being targeted.
Members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have "openly, brazenly, and repeatedly" shared its "crimes" on social media, said Mansour.
Since the IDF began its bombardment of Gaza in October with political and material support from the United States and other Western countries, videos taken by Israeli soldiers themselves have shown the controlled detonation of Israa University, a soldier blowing up a mosque, and another IDF fighter giving a thumbs up while driving a bulldozer into a destroyed car, accompanied by the caption, "I stopped counting how many neighborhoods I've erased."
In a segment produced by Al Jazeera in March, Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now said that "there have been a remarkable number of videos posted by Israeli soldiers on social media, depicting themselves pillaging property, mocking the death and destruction that they are causing, and most egregiously, torturing, humiliating, and mocking detained Palestinian prisoners."
Meanwhile, human rights experts and aid groups have amplified images of the results of Israel's use of what Mansour called "the ultimate weapon": a near-total blockade on humanitarian relief. Last month, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documented the deaths from starvation of five-month-old Fayez Attaya and 13-year-old Abdulqader Al-Serhi—two of more than two dozen children who have perished as U.N. experts have warned famine has taken hold in Gaza.
"Two million people who were subjected to a 17-year-old blockade are now confronted with a hermetic siege, dying of hunger and disease while food and medicine are available only meters away," said Mansour on Wednesday.
Palestinians including Bisan Owda, a journalist who won a Peabody Award for her coverage, have also documented their own forced displacement, the destruction of their homes, and the loss of loved ones.
Mansour on Wednesday asked the Security Council—which only voted in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza in June, after U.S. officials had vetoed several resolutions—why it has allowed Israel to violate international laws and norms.
"What is a rule that's not enforced? What do these rules mean anymore when for nine months Israel has bombed the homes, hospitals, schools—including those designated as U.N. shelters—and now people in tents as is the case in al-Mawasi?" he asked.
Mansour emphasized that Israeli soldiers have good reason to think they can film themselves committing potential war crimes.
"Everything in [Israel's] history tells it it will get away with it," said the envoy. "It is betting this time will be no exception. But, this time must be the exception, and change must start right now."
Mansour added that the ICJ's pending ruling on the occupation of Palestine "should serve as basis for our collective action in the days to come."
"As all your nations have refused to forego their rights, the Palestinian people will never accept to relinquish theirs," he said. "Peace will not be achieved at the expense of our rights but by upholding them. The right to life, to liberty, and to dignity. That is the only path to peace. Let us finally collectively embark on it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular