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Jen Nessel, Center for Constitutional Rights, (212) 614-6449, jnessel@ccrjustice.org
UN Report Presses U.S. on Slavery Reparations for First Time, Spotlights Environmental Racism in "Cancer Alley"
Black community leaders from Louisiana who addressed committee earlier this month hail recommendations
**Live stream at 2 p.m. CT / 3 p.m. ET**
For the first time, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) is calling on the U.S. government to begin the process of providing reparations to descendants of enslaved people. The recommendation comes in the committee's report on its review of U.S. compliance with the CERD treaty. The committee also took the unusual step in its countrywide review of citing human rights violations in a specific state: environmental racism in Lousiana's "Cancer Alley."
The committee's report incorporates several of the proposals of the Louisiana delegation that the Center for Constitutional Rights accompanied to Geneva earlier this month. Appearing before the committee, leaders from three grassroots organizations - the Descendants Project, Inclusive Louisiana, and Concerned Citizens of St. John Parish - detailed the longstanding failure of government at all levels to protect their historic Black communities from the many harms of toxic industry, including the profound disregard for the burial grounds of their ancestors.
Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, also appeared before the committee and made the case for a broad reparations framework to address the harm done by both the monumental injustice of slavery and its legacy, which includes environmental racism, the desecration of Black history, economic inequality, mass incarceration, police violence, racial health disparities, and anti-Black racism in the U.S. immigration regime.
"We traveled over 10,000 miles to get the support of the UN because, unfortunately, our grave concerns about pollution in Cancer Alley are ignored by our local, state, and even federal officials," said Joy Banner, co-founder of The Descendants Project with her sister Jo Banner. "We're appreciative to have the amplification of the UN and expect the U.S. to take our demands seriously."
"We are on the frontline advocating that our elected officials are held accountable to ensure clean air, water, and soil is available for everyone in our community," Inclusive Louisiana said in a statement. "Today, we are so grateful that CERD has called out Cancer Alley and are demanding actions to be taken on environmental racism, pollution, protection of burial sites and the human rights of minority and Indigenous communities. We also are thankful that the UN has called for more to be done to deliver reparations."
"Today is a great day for the citizens of Cancer Alley," said Tish Taylor of Concerned Citizens of St. John. "Thanks to CERD for hearing and responding to our pleas for JUSTICE FOR ALL. Concerned Citizens of St. John looks forward to a day when the children at 5th Ward Elementary School and our entire parish can enjoy clean air, water, and soil."
"The unprecedented attention given by the UN to the lingering legacies of colonialism and slavery and the CERD committee's call for reparations marks a turning point in the U.S. human rights movement," said Nadia Ben-Youssef, advocacy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "The lived experiences of our partners clearly traced the afterlife of slavery, and the committee's expressed concerns about environmental racism in Cancer Alley is testament to the powerful advocacy of our partners -their testimonies and analysis offered the international community an irresistible vision of a radically different future."
In addition to addressing the committee, the Louisiana delegation submitted a shadow report, "The Afterlife of Black Enslavement: Environmental Racism and the Desecration of Black History in Louisiana," which puts toxic industry's threat to Black communities in historical context and makes a number of recommendations that were echoed by the committee, including reparations for slavery, a moratorium on new pollution-causing plants, and a concerted effort to protect the burial grounds of enslaved people.
**Members of the delegation will respond in a livestreamed event at 2:00 p.m. CT / 3:00 p.m. ET today: https://facebook.com/descendantsproject**
Read the Center for Constitutional Rights' full list of themes submitted to the committee here.
Read the UN CERD report here.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CCR is committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
(212) 614-646468 'Summer of Heat' Activists Arrested in NYC Protesting Citgroup's Fossil Fuel Financing
"Citi's business model is frying our planet," said one campaigner.
Scores of activists were arrested Friday during a protest outside Citigroup's New York City headquarters, where demonstrators condemned what organizers called the megabank's "racist investments devastating Black and brown communities" and fueling the worsening climate emergency.
Around 1,000 people including environmental leaders from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana gathered at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan's Financial District, where they rallied before marching to "demand that Wall Street stop funding the fossil fuel projects causing environmental devastation in mostly Black and brown communities in the Gulf South and across the globe."
The march ended at Citigroup's headquarters on the west side of Lower Manhattan, where organizers from New York Communities for Change said 68 people were arrested. The group said a total of 259 activists have been arrested during ongoing Summer of Heat on Wall Street protests, which it organized along with Stop the Money Pipeline, Climate Defenders, and Planet Over Profit.
"On Monday, climate activists from the Gulf South and allies held a roving speak out in front of financial institutions backing the fossil fuel industry, including KKR, BlackRock, and Bank of America," New York Communities for Change said. "On Wednesday, protesters held a civil disobedience action in front of the insurance conglomerate Chubb, which insures petrochemical projects destroying the climate in the Gulf South and around the globe."
One of the protest's organizers, Roishetta Ozane—who founded the Vessel Project of Louisiana—said that "projects that kill our communities like Freeport LNG (liquefied natural gas), Cameron LNG, Corpus Christi LNG, and others would not exist without the backing of financial institutions like Citigroup."
"Money made from them is blood money," Ozane added. "Since they destroy our homes, we're coming to pay them a visit. We will break this cycle of violence and exploitation now because later is too late. We want Citigroup to stop funding fossil fuels and to stop hurting our communities and our families."
As Stop the Money Pipeline coordinator Alec Connon explained in an opinion piece published earlier this month by Common Dreams:
Since the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, Citi has provided $204.46 billion in financing to the company's most rapidly developing new coal, oil, and gas fields. Remarkably, Citi has provided more money to those oil and gas companies than even JPMorgan Chase―the bank that climate activists like to call the 'Doomsday Bank.'
To be clear, I'm talking here only about the financing Citi has provided for companies developing new oil and gas reserves, not merely investing in infrastructure to keep the oil pumping from existing reserves. When we take into account financing to all fossil fuel companies, Citi has provided a little shy of $400 billion to coal, oil, and gas companies since 2015.
Citigroup contends that it is "supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy through our net zero commitments and our $1 trillion sustainable finance goal," and that its "approach reflects the need to transition while also continuing to meet global energy needs."
However, Climate Defenders organizing director Marlena Fontes countered that "Citi's business model is frying our planet."
"Every credible climate scientist says that we can't afford to put one more penny into fossil fuels, but Citi is the number one funder of fossil fuel expansion in the world," Fontes added. "Until Citi stops funding fossil fuels, they can expect resistance from everyday people like us who want our children to be able to play outside without coughing on wildfire smoke or getting sick from deadly heatwaves."
GOP Attack on Biodiversity, Climate 'Sticks Finger in the Eye of American People'
Critics of a House appropriations bill that guts environmental agencies warn it's a sign of what the Republicans will do if they retake the Senate and the presidency next year.
Democrats and watchdog groups reacted with outrage on Friday as a U.S. House environmental subcommittee led by Republicans approved an appropriations bill that would reduce funding for two federal agencies and limit their ability to protect the environment.
The House Appropriations Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee voted to advance a bill to weaken the regulatory capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), cutting funding for conservation, climate action, national parks, and environmental justice initiatives.
"This bill sticks a finger in the eye of the American people who care deeply about clean air, climate change, endangered species, and responsible use of public lands," said Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Project. "It's a nasty wishlist to defund the priorities of protecting a livable future."
The fiscal year 2025 bill proposes a 20% cut to the EPA's annual budget, from $9.2 billion to $7.4 billion, including a $749 million cut to state and tribal assistance grants. It also proposes reductions to many Interior agency budgets, including a $210 million cut to the National Park Service and a $144 million cut to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Taking aim at the government's ability to regulate industry, most of the Republicans' spending allocations are below fiscal year 2024 and almost all of them are below the amount requested by the Biden administration.
Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), the subcommittee's ranking Democrat, said in a statement that the proposed EPA cut was "irresponsible" and that she was "greatly disappointed and frustrated" by the bill, which "completely disregards the reality of a warming planet and ignores the need for us to do more, not less."
Pingree's Democratic colleague, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the full appropriations committee, agreed.
The bill "promotes dirty energy, taking the side of fossil fuel companies and those who deny the scientific reality rather than address the escalating risk to our economy and national security presented by the changing climate and growing number of extreme weather events," DeLauro said in the statement.
Critics of the bill also objected to the large number of "poison-pill" riders that seek to undo Biden administration rules and undermine the Endangered Species Act by naming specific animals for which listing can't be funded. Per a Trump-era Interior rule, the legislation also delists most gray wolf populations from the ESA.
"This proposal is a hatchet job of disastrous proportion that in an unprecedented scale, targets our nation's most imperiled species and the law saving them from extinction," Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement.
The Republicans' bill includes proposed reductions to funding for clean water infrastructure projects, which Food and Water Watch (FWW) said was a step in the wrong direction—water and sewer systems need huge infusions of money just to meet current water quality standards.
"The proposed cuts would leave many with unsafe water and exacerbate the nation’s water affordability crisis, adding more pressure on household water bills at a time when families are already grappling with soaring costs for essential services," Mary Grant, a FWW campaign director, said in a statement, calling safe water "non-negotiable."
Grant said that to safeguard Americans' clean water from "foolishly political annual appropriations battles," Congress should pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, And Reliability (WATER) Act—a call she also made last year, when the same subcommittee advanced a similar bill.
The full appropriations committee will consider the bill on July 9. If the bill passes through the committee and then the full chamber, as last year's version did, it's unlikely to make headway in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate. However, critics of the bill warned that it's a sign of what the Republicans will do if they retake the Senate and the presidency.
Earlier this month, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump said that he plans to gut federal agencies dealing with climate, such as the Interior Department. A union of EPA workers rebuked Trump for the remarks.
Supreme Court Refuses to Rescue Prison-Bound Steve Bannon
When he's done serving his four-month sentence for flouting congressional subpoenas, the former top Trump adviser faces a federal trial over the We Build the Wall scam.
Steve Bannon, a onetime senior adviser to former U.S. President Donald Trump who was convicted of defying congressional subpoenas related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, must report to prison Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his 11th-hour bid to avert his four-month sentence.
In a single-sentence order with no public dissents, the Supreme Court stated that Bannon's "application for release pending appeal presented to the chief justice and by him referred to the court is denied."
In July 2022, a federal jury found Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. That October, he was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $6,500. Bannon has remained free pending appeals and has benefited from a pause imposed by Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee.
David Schoen, an attorney for Bannon, toldThe Washington Post on Friday: "I fully believe the conviction will be reversed and it is a shame to see it mishandled like this. He never should be going to jail for even a day."
However, Bannon not only faces four months behind bars for flouting Congress, another federal trial awaits him over his alleged conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the
We Build the Wall fundraising scam.