Venezuelan Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, during her speech at the 74th UN General Assembly in New York. teleSUR English

September 28, 2019 Scott Scheffer

https://bit.ly/2olukeh

For years, Pentagon officials have been discussing, assessing and reporting on climate change.

They consider its implications for imperialist military tactics and strategy. They cite the possibilities of mass migration due to water and food shortages. They stress the need to prepare to deal with possible mass uprisings. They’ve written reports that assess the vulnerability of their military installations to extreme weather events – drought, flooding, wildfires, etc.

But like the proverbial elephant in the room that everyone pretends not to notice, one pertinent fact gets omitted from every discussion, report or study by the top military brass: that the U.S. military itself is by far the single worst polluter in the world.

Many studies over the last decade rate countries based on how much their economy contributes to the rising amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. In 2016, the U.S. was the third largest polluter behind Saudi Arabia and Australia, emitting 15 metric tons per capita.

But greenhouse gases take decades or even centuries to dissipate. Historical records kept by the World Resources Institute show that since 1850, the U.S. and Europe are responsible for nearly two-thirds of the heat-trapping contaminants currently in our atmosphere.

But many contemporary studies exclude some or all of the emissions caused by armed forces.

How bad is the pollution from the U.S. military? The information is not easy to get. The authors of a study called “U.S. Military Pollution”, published on TheEcologist.org, point to the efforts of the U.S. Department of Defense to conceal information and resist any restrictions:

”It’s no coincidence that U.S. military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across U.S. government departments.

“In fact, the United States insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This loophole was closed by the Paris Accord, but with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap will return.

“Our study is based on data retrieved from multiple Freedom of Information Act requests.”

It isn’t only CO2 emissions. Mint Press News reported that the Defense Department is responsible for more toxic waste than the five largest U.S.-based chemical companies combined.

Pentagon’s environmental racism

The military is guilty of leaving toxic waste behind in various forms: contaminating drinking water with perchlorates and other components of jet fuel; the horrors of depleted uranium, used in Iraq and other countries attacked by the imperialist military, that has radiated the ground and air, causing cancer rates to spike; nuclear tests that displaced entire populations and destroyed islands in the Bikini Atoll and destroyed First Nations lands in Nevada; mining for uranium that poisoned Navajo lands in the Black Hills; the mass destruction of the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico – the list goes on and on….

From: Coalition to March on the DNC

We’re happy to announce that our coalition is growing every day! Thank you to Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Young People’s Resistance Committee, Students for a Democratic Society – Parkside, Wisconsin Bail Out The People Movement, Party for Socialism and Liberation – Milwaukee, Welfare Warriors, and Legal Me Up for agreeing be a part of this movement! If you or someone you know is in an organization that would like to participate, please send us a message or email us at march.on.dnc.2020@gmail.com!

#MarchOnDNC2020 #DNC2020 #MKEDNC

October 10, 2019: 1st Coalition Meeting & March

Solidarity picket for striking UAW members

LiberateMKE Joint Public Hearing on 2020 Budget

https://truthout.org/articles/federal-workers-will-flood-washington-to-resist-trumps-war-on-unions/

J. David Cox Sr., Truthout

Nearly every week there’s a new press report on how the Trump administration is trying to undermine the public servants who are entrusted to carry out our most critical government programs and policies.

There are far too many examples to list, but here are some of the more egregious examples:

• The White House is seeking to dismantle the federal personnel office and assert direct control over non-political employment issues affecting federal workers, including compensation, health and retirement benefits, and rules that ensure employees are hired and fired based solely on merit.
• The administration is attacking the rights of federal employees to organize and bargain collectively at the worksite by seeking the authority to kick union members out of the union and make it difficult for union members to renew their memberships, while also attempting to financially hinder federal unions by eliminating the option for employees to deduct their union dues from their paychecks along with insurance premiums, charitable contributions and similar recurring payments.
• Political appointees are replacing previously negotiated union contracts with illegal management edicts that prevent a union from carrying out its representational obligations at multiple agencies, including the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Social Security Administration.
• Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie has proposed stripping language from the union contract that protects medical professionals and other staff who blow the whistle on mismanagement or other violations that could threaten patient safety and prevent veterans from accessing vital services.
• Department heads are relocating two U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies and the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from Washington, D.C., to new locations more than 1,000 miles away, in a transparent attempt to force out career employees and minimize their work.

As these examples make painfully clear, this administration has a simple mission: destroy labor unions and take away workers’ union rights, even if that means weakening vital government programs.

The labor contracts unions negotiate with federal agencies are the only thing preventing this administration from dismantling programs it doesn’t believe in, firing employees for any reason or no reason at all, and selling off chunks of the government to private corporations and special interests.

These attacks reverberate beyond the federal employees and labor unions that are the direct target. They threaten the separation of powers that help ensure our government works for the people in a fair and efficient manner.

There is precious little time left to stop the administration from declaring an all–out war on federal workers. Court challenges filed by our union, the American Federation of Government Employees, and others have so far prevented the White House from legally enforcing three executive orders, issued in May 2018, that are designed to annihilate federal unions. But time is running out, and this administration has demonstrated it has no issue defying court injunctions or violating the law to get its way.

That’s why hundreds of federal employees and allies from across the country are gathering in Washington on September 24 to protest these attacks, stand up for government workers’ voice on the job and in our democracy, and defend the work public servants perform on our nation’s behalf every day. The “Fed Up? Rise Up!” rally is being organized by the four unions that represent the majority of federal workers: the American Federation of Government Employees, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the National Federation of Federal Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union. Our protest will put pressure on the White House to stop the attacks on federal workers, their contracts and their voice at work.

This isn’t just do-or-die time for federal employee unions, for our collective bargaining rights and for the work we do on the public’s behalf every day; nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake.

Jeffrey David Cox Sr. is national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFGE which is the largest union representing federal and D.C. government employees.

More than 2,000 federal employees, union members and members of Congress protested on July 25, 2018, in Washington, D.C., as the U.S. District Court heard arguments in legal challenges brought by federal unions against three union-busting executive orders issued by President Trump in May 2018.

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES

AFGE

https://bit.ly/2mAJhbO

By Silvana Melo and Claudia Rafael

We needed Greta, a Swedish blonde girl, 16, to walk into the United Nations and tell us that the planet is dying. Even though she does not live in the areas of extreme attacks suffered by Mother Earth and its inhabitants due to fierce runaway capitalism in the faraway southern area of the world. With her solitary leadership, Greta is not aspiring to change the world. She just walked in and said to the ruling class that the planet is at a cliff’s edge. The ruling class looks at her, blonde and Swedish, and the Argentinean media talks about her as they will never talk about hundreds of thousands of children, mostly of color, ravaged by the system that is poisoning them, contaminating what they eat and drink, exhausting the land, disappearing the forests and hills, and ending the fresh water reserves. The thing is that climate change for them is like a magical thing dropping out of the sky. Not an atrocious phenomenon caused by concrete countries, concrete companies, names and surnames and a system: capitalism.

This is why Bruno Rodriguez, an Argentinean, 19, was unnoticed after having talked right after Greta in that display window of colonists that is the U.N. Because this guy from an unknown neighborhood said he came from a Latin American country, the son of five centuries of looting. From a country filled with agrotoxics it does not control at all, chopped down and prayed-upon, impoverished and victimized. (And after talking at the U.N., Bruno said that Vaca Muerta, a deposit of unconventional oil and gas in the Patagonia, is not feasible —a mortal sin in Argentina where no one talks about extractivism).

The two of them, Greta and Bruno, talked to the United Nations, right where the Trump and Bolsonaro of the world show off, where the King of Spain dared to tell Hugo Chavez “Why don’t you shut up?” The agency that played a humanitarian aid game with Haiti when it was destroyed by an earthquake in 2010 when they kept food staples sleeping comfortably in their warehouses without distributing them for a long time among the hungry and the outcasts. They infected Haitians with cholera through the excrements of their blue helmets in the only river from which citizens had any possibility of drinking fresh water.

RELATED CONTENT: The Global Shock

They are 16 and 19. Many listen to them. Many believe in them. Because from the cold and decontaminated Sweden she knows how to talk. Some say there is a whole world of power behind her feeble figure. Perhaps there is; perhaps there is not. But the two of them say and know that the world is dying.

Just as millions of boys and girls die in the outskirts of life, due to hunger; drugs; agrotoxics; trigger-happy police; armies pointing at their back or front; femicides; clandestine abortion; teenage pregnancy; stray bullets; extreme cold; or the most complex tangles of violence.

What if one of these kids—just as Greta did a year ago— said in the classroom of any town in a South American city that he is not going to school and that he stands for his protest? What would he shout to those who own things and people to tell them that they are responsible for his own hunger and that of his brothers and friends? Will anybody give him a place in the U.N. before Angela Merkel to denounce the Bayer Corporation for poisoning his days? Would they allow him to show his sore skin to question Chevron for the pollution caused by fracking in the Argentine province of Neuquen? Would they accept him to sit in front of the President of France Emmanuel Macron and give details about how big French companies benefit from monoculture and the import of meat from Brazil while they publicly condemn fires in the Amazon rainforest? Would he be allowed to talk before Swiss representatives about money laundering, corruption, and the systematic contamination of each of the companies owned by Glencore, a Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company, owner of mining companies in three Argentinean provinces? ….

RELATED CONTENT: Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites

Featured image: Climate activist Bruno Rodriquez

ATTENTION:

Union family day at the picket

UAW Local 722 is inviting all union members to join their picket line on Saturday, September 28th at 2200 Willis Miller Drive Hudson, WI.

Pass Just Cause @RockCo Board Meeting

61 South Main Street, Janesville, WI, 6-9 P.M.

On Sept 26th a Just Cause standard ordinance had its first reading at the Rock County Board of Supervisors meeting. In the past six weeks it was introduced, assigned to the Staff Committee and recommended to the full board from that committee. It is expected to be voted on at the next County Board meeting on October 10th
*Please wear green and join us.
*Let your County Supervisor know to VOTE YES before the meeting
*ROCK CO RESIDENTS Sign the online petition
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/restore-just-cause-for-public-employees-in-rock-county?source=direct_link&
*Things can change quickly, keep undated on this event page

What is Just Cause?
Just Cause is a standard to ensure fairness in the workplace used around the world. It is a standard element in union contracts. All fire fighters, law enforcement and most transit workers employed by local government in Rock County currently have this protection in their contracts. We need it for all Rock Co employees.
The Seven Steps of a Just Cause Disciplinary Standard
• Was the employee forewarned of the consequences of his or her actions?
• Are the employer’s rules reasonably related to business efficiency and performance the employer might reasonably expect from the employee?
• Was an effort made before discipline or discharge to determine whether the employee was guilty as charged?
• Was the investigation conducted fairly and objectively?
• Did the employer obtain substantial evidence of the employee’s guilt?
• Were the rules applied fairly and without discrimination?
• Was the degree of discipline reasonably related to the seriousness of the employee’s offense and the employee’s past record?

Why do we need an ordinance at the county level?
The vast majority of public service workers lost the ability to negotiate a contract when ACT 10 passed the legislature in 2011. No contract; no Just Cause.

AFSCME Wisconsin Council 32

Labor Day 2019 in Milwaukee

Vermont State Labor Council AFL-CIO

VT AFL-CIO Stands With Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Local 73

Whereas all students deserve the right to a quality public education in sustainable community schools with full wrap around services, and

Whereas all students deserve smaller class sizes with a hard cap in order to receive adequate attention from teachers and end overcrowding of classes, and