20 April 21
We Need a Few Donations in the $100 Range
Right now it’s all very small donations. It’s inspiring but we need to augment that with a few slightly larger donations. Even as much as one hundred dollars really picks up the effort of the smaller donors.
Who can manage a one hundred dollar donation?
Sincerely.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
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CA 95611
19 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
There Shouldn't Be Vaccine Patents in a Health Crisis. Most Americans Agree: Waive Them.
Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
Lennard writes: "A new poll found most Americans want Biden to break drug companies' monopolies and end Covid-19 vaccine apartheid."
he extremity of Covid-19 vaccine apartheid cannot be overstated. As of mid-February, the United States had acquired enough vaccines for three times its total population, while in 130 countries, not a single vaccine shot had been administered. This is no accident, but the direct and long-predicted result of a vaccine production and access model tied to privatized intellectual property and entrenched medicine monopolies.
The majority of Americans want President Joe Biden to act to end this intolerable vaccine inequality. Sixty percent of U.S. voters said they wanted Biden to endorse a motion at the World Trade Organization that would waive patent barriers and other crucial intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, according to a new poll from Data for Progress and the Progressive International. This would enable a significant expansion of global production and rollout, while disrupting the extraordinary profiteering of pharmaceutical leviathans in a death-dealing pandemic.
The refusal on the part of major pharmaceutical companies and Western powers to ensure the sharing of vaccine patent and production information has been an immeasurable moral failure, not to mention a most foolish approach to a pandemic in need of a global response. The new poll also makes clear that, for Biden, blocking vaccine sharing is not even a popular position. Seventy-two percent of registered Democrats want the president to remove patent barriers to speed vaccine rollout and reduce costs for less affluent nations.
At present, WTO rules over intellectual property mean that most countries are barred from producing the leading vaccines that have been approved, including those by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, which are U.S.-produced. Last October, South Africa and India brought a proposal to the WTO for a temporary waiver that would apply to certain intellectual property on Covid-19 medical tools and technologies until global herd immunity is reached.
It garnered majority support from member states: A hundred countries support the proposal overall, and 58 governments now co-sponsor it; 375 civil society organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Amnesty International have signed a letter in support.
The waiver was blocked, however, by a small number of wealthy nations and blocs, including the U.S., the U.K., and the EU, that chose instead to leave vaccine production in the hands of only a few pharmaceutical companies, which, through public-private partnerships, have ensured priority access to the rich countries in turn.
There are no legitimate grounds for maintaining patent barriers in this health crisis unless you’re a pharmaceutical giant making billions or, of course, a Western power invested in maintaining global power through neoliberalization, market monopolies, and racialized capitalism. The strongest advocates of intellectual property protections in medicine, Bill Gates chief among them, have offered no ethical basis for the current status quo beyond vague gestures to protecting “innovation.”
Even a self-interested approach, that sees the devastating economic possibilities of a mutating virus turning the pandemic into something endemic, should make the necessity of a patent waiver clear. The commitment to monopoly medicine is, in this sense, ideological.
The WTO waiver proposal needs backing by a consensus of the the organization’s 164 members to pass. It was under President Donald Trump that the U.S. blocked the patent waiver: a move that came as no surprise for an administration of white nationalists, which proudly left the World Health Organization. A change of tack by the Biden administration, which rejoined the WHO on Day One, could go a long way in pushing other wealthy countries to follow suit.
The Data for Progress and the Progressive International poll makes clear that Biden has a popular mandate in acting against vaccine apartheid. Burcu Kilic, research director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen and member of Progressive International’s Council, called on Biden to “listen to Americans who put him in power” and “do the right thing.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Senate Budget Committee, responded to the poll saying the U.S. should be “leading the global effort to end the coronavirus pandemic.” According to Sanders, “a temporary WTO waiver, which would enable the transfer of vaccine technologies to poorer countries, is a good way to do that.” More than 60 lawmakers have added their signature to a letter pushing Biden to save lives through a global vaccination drive.
For an entire year, public health organizations and civil society groups have en masse urged an internationalized pandemic response of open-sourced research and medical tools. Such calls for cooperation and equity were swiftly quashed, in no small part thanks to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As Alexander Zaitchik noted in a crucial piece for The New Republic, Gates’s long history of intellectual property crusading enacted a Covid-19 vaccine response in line with a status quo “defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”
I’m not the first to highlight the colonialist regime that has shaped this unequal vaccine scenario. Sharon Lerner reported for The Intercept that countries including Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey, which hosted Pfizer vaccine trials, have been shut out of sufficient vaccine access. The same extractive practices that have historically enriched Western powers through the direct expense and suffering of colonized peoples continue to this day with most deadly consequences — vaccine apartheid among them.
Whether Biden, no enemy to neoliberalism, will take a stand against the approach of canonized philanthropist Gates is not yet clear. It’s now undeniable that U.S. voters, alongside the broad public health community, want him to.
Demonstrators attend a peace walk on Sunday honoring the life of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. (photo: Shafkat Anowar/AP)
Attorney for Adam Toledo's Family: 'Adam Died Because He Complied'
Noel King, NPR
King writes: "Thousands of people marched on Sunday in Chicago's Little Village. That's the neighborhood where 13-year-old Adam Toledo was shot and killed three weeks ago."
Police body camera footage released last week shows police chasing Adam down an alley. An officer orders him to show his hands, but less than a second later, after Adam has stopped running, his hands are up and the officer shoots him.
The shooting has led to demonstrations and demands that the Chicago Police Department make major changes.
Demonstrators have also come out en masse to pay tribute to Adam. In Little Village on Sunday, demonstrators were joined by the Toledo family as they helped lead a peaceful processional through the neighborhood. One day earlier, the family hosted some 20-30 people in their home for a novena — nine days of prayer in memory of a loved one.
Among those who gathered with the family this weekend was their attorney, Adeena Weiss-Ortiz. In an interview with Morning Edition, Weiss-Ortiz spoke about a family that has been devastated by the killing, saying: "Every day for this family is another day of pain and suffering without Adam."
"The last time his mother saw him, she was putting him to bed in the room that he shared with his 11-year-old brother. And the next time she saw him, he was in the morgue," said Weiss-Ortiz.
She said it will be up to the Cook County State's Attorney in Chicago, and possibly the Department of Justice, to decide whether Eric Stillman, the officer who shot Adam, should face charges. For now, Weiss-Ortiz said, her focus is on "justice for Adam, and that means reform, training and ensuring that another child does not get killed at the hands of law enforcement."
Interview Highlights
What is your understanding of what happened in that alley and what has emerged as a really big question — was he holding a gun?
Everybody has seen this video that came out from COPA, from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. When you look at that video and that foot pursuit, you don't see a gun in Adam's hand. Adam takes a pause at the break in the fence. It looks like he's trying to get something out of his pocket, throws it down, turns around to the officer. Adam died because he complied with the officer's directive. Adam may still be alive today had the officer given him the opportunity to comply.
At a press conference, Chicago's mayor, Lori Lightfoot, said: "We must do more to help children like Adam before they end up in encounters like this one." She talked about getting kids off the streets. She said sometimes the streets are as "seductive and powerful as a narcotic." Has Adam's family or anyone told you about what was happening in his life that he was out in the street that night?
Yeah, I was there at that press conference. Look, Adam is a typical 13-year-old boy. He loved going to the park. He was a young uncle. He had a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old nephew that he would dote upon and take them down the slides. He was an emerging artist based on his teacher's comments. He liked playing cards, biking around the neighborhood with his little brother and [making] Lego creations. When Lori Lightfoot spoke about seduction of the streets, I understood her comment. But Adam was your typical 13-year-old boy.
Acknowledging that there are dangers for 13-year-olds, even typical 13-year-olds, the mayor has pledged to reform the police since she took office almost two years ago. Do you have faith in her ability to do that? And as somebody who works in the legal system and with the judicial system, what do you think needs to happen in Chicago?
Well, you know, born out of the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald, the African American young man that was shot down at the hands of police, born out of that case was a 2019 federal consent decree which touched upon use of force, community policing, accountability and transparency, recruitment, training, etc. Lori Lightfoot has a huge task on her hands. I believe, with time and with a more aggressive approach, this is something that can be addressed, but we have to be able to ensure that this does not happen again to any other child in the future.
How will you go about that process, though?
Well, as part of our dealings with the city in this case, we are looking at what reform looks like, how to achieve it, how to have officers deal with shoot/no shoot situations. The consent decree talks about how to deal with those with mental health disabilities. The consent decree also needs to talk about what to do in a situation when you're confronted with a child.
So there are specific steps in the consent decree that address certain areas of policing, but there are also parts where the consent decree just doesn't make clear what should happen.
That is correct. So the consent decree had hit certain points and certain benchmarks. And actually there was an article that came out in the Chicago Tribune a couple of years ago noting that CPD failed on certain timelines and certain benchmarks as set forth in that consent decree. So, yes, [a] more aggressive approach needs to be taken with the city and the Chicago Police Department in ensuring all terms of that order is complied with.
Lastly, what are you telling the Toledo family to expect at this point?
I'm telling them to expect a long journey. I'm telling them to hold up and that with time we will be able to ensure that this does not happen to another child. I am telling them that this is an unfortunate death, but that we don't want this to happen again to any other child and that Adam will not have died in vain.
'Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign received three times more campaign contributions from the border industry than did Donald Trump's.' (photo: Wolfgang Schwan/REX/Shutterstock)
A Lucrative Border-Industrial Complex Keeps the US Border in Constant 'Crisis'
Todd Miller, Guardian UK
Miller writes: "It's time to build bridges, not walls."
In 1994, the US’s annual border and immigration budget was $1.5bn. In 2020, the budget exceeded $25bn - a 16-fold increase
’ll never forget Giovanni’s blistered feet as an EMT attended to him on the Mexico side of the US-Mexican border in Sasabe, a remote desert town. On the back of one foot, his skin had been rubbed away and the tender, reddish, underlying tissue exposed. One toenail had completely ripped off. Giovanni, who was from a small Guatemalan town near the Salvadorean border, had just spent days walking through the Arizona desert in the heat of July.
When I think of the “border crisis”, I think of Giovanni’s gashed feet. Stories of death and near death, of pain and immense suffering like this, happen every single day. This displacement crisis is not temporary; it is perpetual.
This is something that I’ve witnessed in my own reporting for more than two decades. The border by its very design creates crisis. This design has been developed and fortified over the span of many administrations from both political parties in the United States, and now involves the significant participation of private industry.
The border-industrial complex and its consequences is one of the reasons that I argue in my new book Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders that if people honestly want a humane response to border and immigration issues we have to confront something much bigger than the Trump legacy, and begin to imagine and work towards something new.
Across the line from where I sat looking at Giovanni’s feet was one of the most fortified and surveilled borders on planet Earth. An array of armed border patrol agents, walls, surveillance towers, implanted motion sensors and Predator B drones were deployed specifically to force people like Giovanni (and the group of five people he was with) into desolate, deadly regions. Like many, he walked a full day through a rugged mountain range until his feet became too wounded and his shins started to give out. He also ran out of water.
What happened to Giovanni is part of the design of what the US border patrol calls “prevention through deterrence”. By blockading traditional crossing areas in border cities, a 1994 border patrol strategic memo notes, the desert would put people in “mortal danger”.
At the beginning of this strategy, in 1994 under the Bill Clinton administration, the annual border and immigration budget was $1.5bn, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In 2020, the combined budget of its superseding agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), exceeded $25bn. That is a 16-fold increase.
Another way to look at the scope of this money juggernaut are the 105,000 contracts, totaling $55bn, that CBP and Ice have given private industry – including Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, G4S, Deloitte and Core Civic, among others – to develop the border and immigration enforcement apparatus. That is worth more than the total cumulative number of border and immigration budgets from 1975 to 2003. That’s 28 years combined amounting to $52bn. The companies can also give campaign contributions to key politicians and lobby during budget debates. And so we have the formula of a perpetual “border crisis”: the bigger the crisis, the more need for border infrastructure, generating more revenue.
One result? Since the 1990s, nearly 8,000 human remains have been found in the US borderlands. The number of actual deaths is almost certainly much higher. Families of migrants continued to search for lost loved ones.
In this sense, Giovanni was lucky. He decided he could go no further and left his group. He was disoriented when he turned around. The high desert landscape of mesquite and grasslands all blended together. Luckily, he found a puddle from a rain storm, which likely saved his life from death of dehydration.
By the time I saw him, Giovanni’s feet were a disaster, but that wasn’t the disaster that brought him to the border. As the EMT applied antibiotic cream so that his discolored feet glistened, he spoke to me at length about the fact that it hadn’t rained in his community for 40 days; the crops wilted, and the harvest never came. He lived in the “dry corridor”, he told me. The term describes a huge swath of territory running from Guatemala to Nicaragua that is getting dryer and dryer as a direct result of global warming. According to an estimate from the World Food Programme, this has left 1.4 million farmers in severe crisis.
In that sense, Giovanni was, like many others coming from Central America, driven by the climate crisis. The back-to-back hurricanes in late 2020, in particular, displaced countless people. Since the United States has produced nearly 700 times more carbon emissions than El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras combined since 1900, you might think it would be ethically obligated to help undo the damage. Instead, as with other large historic greenhouse gas emitters, it is at the global forefront of militarizing its borders.
As the Zapatistas say, Basta Ya. There has to be another way to imagine the world. Yet instead of truly confronting the problems that we face as a globe – such as climate change, endemic inequalities in which 2,000 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, and runaway pandemics where the health of people and peoples across borders become intimately interconnected - the solution somehow always becomes more border walls, more surveillance technologies and more suffering. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls worldwide. Now there are 70, two-thirds created since 9/11.
Clearly the time has arrived for new questions to be asked. When geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses the abolition of prisons, she talks about presence. “Abolition is about presence,” Gilmore has said, “not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” Gilmore stresses that abolition today is not just about ending incarceration, but also about “abolishing the conditions under which prisons became solutions to problems”. This approach also applies to borders: how do we shift the conditions under which borders and walls became acceptable solutions to problems? Perhaps the answer lies not in the impossible task of building a humane border, but rather a more humane world in which concepts such as borders and prisons are seen as outmoded, unjust ways of relating to one another.
Maybe the biggest impediment to this is the global border-industrial complex. Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign received three times more campaign contributions from the border industry than did Donald Trump’s. While the president has called for a reversal of Trumpian policies, he is far from challenging a border-industrial complex that leaves people like Giovanni with ravaged feet and near death in the Sonoran Desert. The border is designed to be in a perpetual crisis, but we can stop this by shifting to something new. Abolition is not about destruction, but about restoring who we can be. It’s time to build bridges, not walls.
John Oliver. (photo: HBO)
John Oliver to White Americans: 'March in the Streets and Demand a Better Country'
Adrian Horton, Guardian UK
Horton writes: "John Oliver began Sunday's Last Week Tonight by acknowledging the horrific timelessness of another monologue about police shootings in the US, after a week in which police killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago, both unarmed."
The Last Week Tonight host calls for action in response to the police killings of Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo, and investigates personal bankruptcy reform
ohn Oliver began Sunday’s Last Week Tonight by acknowledging the horrific timelessness of another monologue about police shootings in the US, after a week in which police killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago, both unarmed.
“I can safely say this week has been a fucking nightmare,” said Oliver on Sunday evening, “from the news that [Wright] was pulled over for minor traffic violations, including having an air freshener hanging on his rearview mirror, to the 26-year veteran of the police force who killed him claiming it was somehow an accident, to the local police department flying a ‘thin blue line’ flag after the shooting, which is just corn-fed, deep-fried bullshit.”
The killing of Wright, just 10 miles from the courthouse where officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd, launched what Oliver called a “depressingly familiar cycle” in which the president “insisted on ‘peaceful protest’, which is so often just another way to prioritize compliance over righteous dissent and to protect property over human lives”.
Oliver outlined his routine response to such tragedies – list statistics on racist policing, dunk on “appalling” responses from conservative figures, reiterate the moral wrongness of the entire situation. But he rejected the repetition this time, because “the fact is, we couldn’t even finish writing about what happened to Daunte Wright before the city of Chicago released video of one of their officers killing a 13-year-old unarmed child, Adam Toledo – footage which clearly contradicted the picture of an armed confrontation painted by the police and the mayor.”
Over the course of seven years on air, Last Week Tonight has done stories on police militarization, their overuse of municipal violations and raids, their lack of accountability, and how the history of American policing is intertwined with white supremacy. “I could make the same arguments to you again now,” Oliver said. “I could describe the problem to you, but I think you know what and who it is. I could offer solutions, but I think you know what they are. I could offer you anger, but if you’re a sentient human being alive right now and you are not already full of that, I honestly don’t know what to say to you.
“Because the fact is, Black people continue to be mowed down by the police that they pay for,” he concluded.
“It’s once again been made painfully clear that we – and when I say we, I mean white America – have to stop talking about fundamental change in policing and actually make it happen,” he later added, “because this cycle of state violence against Black lives has to be stopped. So put on your shoes, leave the house, march in the streets, and demand a better country – one in which Black people are treated with fundamental respect.”
The host then pivoted to his main subject for the evening: personal bankruptcy. The promise of a fresh financial start is an alluring one; over the last decade, between 800,000 and 1.5 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy each year, “and many worry that once the current pandemic assistance stops, more and more people will need the type of help that bankruptcy offers”, Oliver explained.
Though bankruptcy – the legal procedure of forgoing one’s debt and limited assets for a clean ledger – is marked by “completely misguided social stigma”, the process “is not solely caused by bad decisions”, Oliver explained. “It’s often caused by bad luck – unavoidable challenges like job loss, divorce, surprise medical bills, or perhaps even, you know, a once-in-a-century global pandemic.”
It’s also not an easy out – absurdly, the process of filing for bankruptcy can cost over $1,000, which means “a lot of people can’t afford to go bankrupt – a true sentence that fundamentally doesn’t make sense,” Oliver said.
Congress enacted the modern bankruptcy code in 1978, during a period of significant deregulation for credit card companies, which “worked out very well for them, because they marketed themselves aggressively, and during this time, consumer debt began to sharply rise”, Oliver explained. “What the industry clearly wanted was people stuck in a lucrative cycle of minimum payments, late fees and interest hikes. What they didn’t want spoiling that was people cutting the cycle short through bankruptcy.”
A 2005 bankruptcy reform bill supported by credit card companies made it “far more complicated to file for bankruptcy than it had previously been”, he continued, “which in turn made it far more costly, which meant many people ended up in a situation where they couldn’t afford to go bankrupt”.
Oliver blamed “so much of what is wrong with our current bankruptcy system” on that 2005 law, which made it harder to discharge student loan debt, mandated paternalistic credit counseling courses, and added a dozen ways for debtors to run technically afoul and fail to complete the process, thus having to start again and spend more.
Though Congress ostensibly passed the 2005 measure to curb exaggerated abuse of the bankruptcy system by wealthy people, filings in poorer neighborhoods decreased 32% more than in rich ones in its wake, “showing that, as always, when things are designed to become harder for everyone, for the rich they just become a bit more expensive, and for the poor, they become basically impossible”, said Oliver.
As a solution, “ideally, the people responsible for that 2005 law would acknowledge that our system badly needs fixing”, Oliver added. That would include Joe Biden, whose support was crucial for its passage in the Senate, where he clashed in hearings with Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard law professor studying debt.
It’s Warren who, in December 2020, introduced the Consumer Bankruptcy Reform Act, which remains unlikely to pass in the Senate as long as the filibuster remains in place. Regardless, “something big needs to happen here,” Oliver concluded, “because we badly need to get our broken bankruptcy system working again, for people who desperately need a lifeline.”
Mick Mulvaney in the Oval Office. (photo: Oliver Contreras/WP)
The Rapid Rise and Fall of the Misguided 'America First Caucus'
Steve Benen, MSNBC
Benen writes: "Over the weekend, the whole initiative - which drew some oblique criticism from House Republican leaders - started to unravel."
A group of right-wing House Republicans eyed an America First Caucus to protect "Anglo-Saxon political traditions." It didn't work out well.
or several decades, far-right members of Congress enjoyed a special group, intended to be separate from the GOP mainstream. It was called the Republican Study Committee, and it was home to the House's most rigid ideologues and reactionary voices.
Eventually, however, it wasn't quite enough. As longtime readers know, the more radicalized House Republicans became, the more the Republican Study Committee included nearly everyone from the GOP conference. The Study Committee became fine for run-of-the-mill far-right members, but some really conservative members wanted an even more exclusive caucus that would exclude those who weren't quite far enough to the right.
The House Freedom Caucus was born — and it racked up some victories. Two members — Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows — went on to serve as White House chief of staff, while Florida's Ron DeSantis became governor of Florida.
But what if some extremists decided the far-right Republican Study Committee was too moderate, and the even-further-to-the-right House Freedom Caucus wasn't quite unhinged enough? NBC News reported late last week:
A group of ultraconservative House Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are discussing launching an "America First Caucus" that would protect "Anglo-Saxon political traditions." Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, told reporters Friday that he's "looking at" joining. "There is an America First Caucus," he said, confirming that Greene is involved.
Punchbowl News obtained a copy of the America First Caucus' seven-page "policy platform," which was every bit as nativist as one might expect. The document called for a "common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions" and a return to, of all things, an architectural style that "befits the progeny of European architecture."
The "platform," not surprisingly, went on to call for a "pause" to all immigration to the United States.
By all accounts, the initial membership list for the caucus was tiny. Marjorie Taylor Greene was initially described as a founding member, as was Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who's been dogged by questions in recent months about his white-nationalist ties. Gohmert publicly conceded that he was considering joining the faction, and while some reports said Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., had agreed to be involved in the effort, the Alabaman soon after said otherwise.
And then, of course, there was Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., currently at the center of a burgeoning scandal and ongoing criminal investigation, who published a tweet on Friday announcing that he was "proud to join" Greene in the America First Caucus.
Over the weekend, however, the whole initiative — which drew some oblique criticism from House Republican leaders — started to unravel. As NBC News reported, Greene released a statement Saturday saying the right-wing platform was "a staff-level draft proposal from an outside group that I hadn't read." Around the same time, Gosar issued a statement of his own, insisting that he hadn't authored the nativist document and adding that he intended to "continue to work on America First issues in the House Freedom Caucus."
All of which leaves us with a few questions.
First, Greene distanced herself from the ugly "policy platform," but she didn't explicitly say whether she intended to move forward with the creation of an America First Caucus or not. Will this entity exist or not?
Second, as Greene and Gosar distance themselves from the America First Caucus draft blueprint, where does this leave Gaetz? Remember, he publicly declared his "pride" in joining this right-wing offshoot after the platform reached the public through news accounts.
And third, if these right-wing members decide not to move forward with this nativist endeavor, won't that open the door to other House Republican radicals to seize the opportunity for themselves?
President Miguel Diaz-Canel (L) and Raul Castro (R), Havana, Cuba. (photo: Twitter/jpplusni)
Cuba: Diaz-Canel Elected First Secretary of Communist Party, Succeeding Castro
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Cuba's president Miguel Diaz-Canel on Monday was elected as First Secretary of the Communist Party succeeding former President Raul Castro."
READ MORE
An African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana). (image: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay)
Total's East African Oil Pipeline to Go Ahead Despite Stiff Opposition
Mongabay
Excerpt: "The $3.5 billion heated oil pipeline will connect oil fields in the Lake Albert basin in western Uganda to the port of Tanga on the Tanzanian coast."
he Ugandan and Tanzanian governments have signed agreements with French oil major Total and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) to build a 1,400-kilometer (900-mile) pipeline from Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park to the Tanzanian port of Tanga on the Indian Ocean. The pipeline’s critics say 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) of protected areas will be impacted and 12,000 families displaced from their land.
If completed, the $3.5 billion pipeline will transport heavy crude from more than 130 wells inside Uganda’s largest national park, which is home to threatened African elephants and lions, a formidable population of Nile crocodiles, and more than 400 bird species. Conservationists say it won’t just threaten wildlife but that it flies in the face of efforts to curb global warming by locking in investment in a dirty fuel.
“We have been working in the oil-rich subregion of Uganda. It’s not a desert, like many oil mining spaces, but rather a high biodiversity area,” Atuheire Brian at the African Initiative on Food Security & Environment (AIFE) told Mongabay in an email. “We can’t afford to have agreements signed in secrecy, and that’s the case for Uganda.”
Total has a majority stake in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project, with the Uganda National Oil Company, CNOOC, and Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation being minority stakeholders.
“Our commitment is to implement these projects in an exemplary and fully transparent manner,” Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné said at the signing ceremony on April 11. Though the event, attended by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, was televised, the text of the agreements has not been made public.
“Total is also taking into the highest consideration the sensitive environmental context and social stakes of these onshore projects,” Pouyanné added.
But a coalition of NGOs opposing the pipeline says the pipeline planning process has been opaque throughout, disregarding judicial and parliamentary procedures.
The pipeline’s route runs through the Lake Victoria basin, crossing waterways big and small, including the Kagera River. In Uganda, its path will impact almost 2,000 km2 (770 mi2) of protected areas sheltering endangered species including eastern chimpanzees and African savanna elephants.
In Tanzania, the pipeline runs through seven forest reserves and the Wembere Steppe, a recognized key biodiversity area. The Tanga port itself abuts two ecologically sensitive marine areas.
The prospect of oil spills tarnishing this wilderness and the absence of assurances about mitigation measures have fueled resistance. The greenlighting of the project in the absence of final environmental and social management plans, drawn up through proper public consultation, has alarmed many.
In March, in response to growing pressure from green groups, the French oil giant announced that its drilling activities in Murchison Falls National Park will be restricted to 1% of the park’s area and that it would bankroll a 50% increase in the number of rangers to bolster conservation efforts.
This concession failed to placate critics.
“Major environmental and human rights risks remain. The top priority should be to deal with the concerns of communities suffering from the project, not start drilling at all cost,” Antoine Madelin, advocacy director of the International Federation for Human Rights, told the Associated Press.
More than 12,000 families will be displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for the pipeline. Questions remain about whether they will be adequately compensated. A 2020 report coproduced by Oxfam and other rights-based organizations found that people likely affected by the pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania did not have adequate information about timelines, compensative procedures, and the social and environmental risks involved. The mega project meant to secure the future of populations in the two countries has introduced created greater uncertainty for those whose lives will be most disrupted by it.
To halt the project, green groups are trying to block funding by lobbying investors, banks and insurance companies. In March, an open letter signed by more than 250 civil society organizations called on 25 commercial banks not to finance the project. The campaign led two of Total’s key financiers, Barclays and Credit Suisse, to deny any intention of funding the EACOP.
Annual per capita income in Uganda is less than $800, and the government has pinned its hope on oil riches to pull the country out of poverty. “We believe that this should be a catalyst for economic growth,” Robert Kasande, a top official at Uganda’s ministry of energy, said during the signing ceremony.
Environmentalists point out that the economics of investing in fossil fuels don’t add up. “The whole world is waking up to the fact that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and as a result, the price of oil will continue to plummet,” the open letter said. “Rather than betting its development on a dying industry, we need to recognize that East Africa’s economic strength comes from the region’s biodiversity, heritage, and natural landscapes.”
The agreements signed this month now need to be ratified by the parliaments in Uganda and Tanzania. Construction is expected to begin in July, and the first oil exports are anticipated in 2025.
This article was originally published by Mongabay.
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