Tidbits - September 3, 2015 - Unions and BDS; Farm worker Rebellion; Cornel West; Solidarity Confinement Victory; Drones in Dakota; lots of announcements...
Portside
The rap song, sung by Sofia Ashraf, exhorts Unilever to clean up the toxic site of its abandoned mercury thermometer factory and compensate hundreds of its workers who have been exposed to mercury poisoning. The factory moved to India after it was shut down in Watertown, N.Y., in the early 1980s when concern over mercury in the Great Lakes was at its peak.
Hopes were high among environmentalists when a bill designed to protect California’s drinking water was introduced in the state Assembly earlier this year. After all, California has passed some of the most far-reaching environmental laws and regulations in the nation, and the state legislature is dominated by the Democratic Party, whose members are generally inclined to vote for tougher environmental standards. It never had a chance.
What good is it to protect ourselves with nuclear weapons if we poison our people in the process? Unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be missing from the Obama administration and Congress, and one of professor Parkinson’s most important lessons—that “delay is the deadliest form of denial”—remains lost on US decision makers.
Greece's new government is committed to `ecological transformation'. Syriza's existing programmatic commitments to work towards "the development of a new paradigm of social, environmental and economic development," and the need to build a public sector of a "new type" could transform energy and climate politics in the EU and beyond.
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