At least that’s the way that artist, Occupy Wall Street veteran and environmental activist Lopi LaRoe sees it. But last week she received a letter threatening her with jail time and thousands of dollars in fines for enlisting Smokey to the anti-fracking cause.

In the fall, LaRoe created an image of Smokey that altered his famous invective “Only you can prevent forest fires” to “Only you can prevent faucet fires” — a reference to the phenomenon of flaming taps that occasionally occur near where fracking takes place. The adjustment seemed to her in line with the message of conservation Smokey has come to embody.

“This is the radicalization of Smokey the Bear,” said LaRoe. “This is Smokey waking up and saying, ‘Oh you didn’t do that to my environment.’ Smokey wants to fight the corporations and protect the air and the water and the plants and the animals and the people.”

Her parody went viral. She began printing T-shirts at the insistence of friends on Facebook, but demand quickly surpassed those in her immediate circle of contacts. Soon she was packing Smokey in FedEx envelopes and sending him off to Australia and other far-flung terrains. There are also tote bags and patches with the Smokey meme available at LaRoe’s website. (The tote bags, she advertises, are “great for dumpster diving.”) LaRoe says she’s not out to become rich and the money she charges customers goes toward covering her costs so that she can keep spreading the message of faucet-fire prevention far and wide.

“It spread like wildfire,” she said, grinning ear to ear.

Not everyone is amused. LaRoe received a cease-and-desist letter from the Metis Group, which serves as legal counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service division. The letter informs LaRoe that Smokey, his character and his slogan are property of the U.S. government and warns that she has until May 2 to halt the use of Smokey on her “products” and to stop distributing electronic copies of the meme. Otherwise, she faces up to six months in prison and a penalty as high as $150,000.

“Any time anybody uses Smokey’s image for anything other than wildfire prevention,” said Helene Cleveland, fire prevention program manager for the Forest Service, “it confuses the public. What we’re trying to do is keep Smokey on message.” Cleveland added that the 1952 Smokey the Bear Act takes the character out of the public domain and “any change in that would have to go through Congress.” 

Two other entities besides the Forest Service claim joint rights to Smokey. The National Association of State Foresters — a non-profit organization consisting of directors of U.S. forestry agencies — and the Ad Council.

Remember “This is your brain on drugs”? Or the Indian weeping over pollution? They were the Ad Council’s handiwork. A non-profit, it describes itself as a promoter of “public service campaigns on behalf of non-profit organizations and government agencies” with a focus on “improving the quality of life for children, preventive health, education, community well being and strengthening families.” Smokey the Bear was born at the Ad Council, on the desk of abstract expressionist and Marx-influenced art critic Harold Rosenberg, who had a part time job there in the mid-1940s.

The Ad Council’s board of directors is a conflagration of representatives of the world’s wealthiest corporations, including representatives of such companies as General Electric, which announced plans last month to spend $110 million on a research lab devoted to the study of fracking, and finance giants such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. On its website, Citibank advertises an “extensive array of deposit, cash management and credit products” for oil and gas drillers, while a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary boasts its “Oil & Gas Investment Banking group covers the complete oil and gas value chain, which includes exploration and production, natural gas processing and transmission, refining and marketing, and oilfield services.”

LaRoe believes that those who claim to own Smokey “don’t care that I’m selling a few T-shirts. They’re out to crush the meme.”

Both the Ad Council and the Metis Group declined to comment for this story.

Despite the warnings in the cease-and-desist letter she received, the May 2 deadline to shut down her site and retire her anti-fracking Smokey came and went; LaRoe has not ceased or desisted. Instead, she enlisted the help of her own legal counsel, who fired back with a letter to the Metis Group on Friday. In it, attorney Evan Sarzin argues that LaRoe ‘s culture-jamappropriation of Smokey is permissible under the fair-use exemption to exclusive copyright ownership and chides the Forest Service for attempting to infringe on LaRoe’s First Amendment rights.

Sarzin also points out that this is not the first time the Forest Service has sought to silence environmentalists for appropriating Smokey’s image. In the early 1990s, the Forest Service demanded reparations from the Sante Fe-based conservation group LightHawk after it used Smokey’s likeness in ads critical of the agency’s practice of auctioning off land to timber companies. (The Forest Service, as part of the Department of Agriculture, makes its land available for commercial use.) Unlike LaRoe’s Smokey, LightHawk’s black bear appeared angry and wielded a chainsaw. “Say it ain’t so, Smokey,” read the ads.

With legal funds provided by the Sierra Club, LightHawk sued the Forest Service in 1992 for infringing on its freedom of speech. The court eventually sided with the plaintiffs, noting that “the satirical use of Smokey the Bear to criticize Forest Service management techniques is unlikely to cause confusion or to dilute the value of Smokey the Bear to help prevent forest fires. Thus the Forest Service cannot have a compelling interest in prohibiting such use.”

Sarzin also calls attention to the fact that the Forest Service’s own research points to environmental degradation caused by fracking. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Environmental Quality by Forest Service researchers linked frack fluid to the death of 150 trees in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. Despite their findings, the Forest Service is considering approving fracking leases in the nearby George Washington National Forest. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which opposes the plan, says it represents a threat to local wildlife — including the black bear.

A report released last month by the National Parks Conservation Association warns that fracking for oil is decimating the ecosystem surrounding Theodore Roosevelt National Park, named after the Republican president who founded the Forest Service. “Unless we take quick action,” the report warns “air, water and wildlife will experience permanent harm in other national parks as well.” Thus, Sarzin writes, LaRoe’s Smokey meme “is a message that the Forest Service should endorse.”

LaRoe hopes that by gaining publicity she can force the Forest Service to take a stand against fracking. In order to continue the fight, however, she says she needs the support of groups whose mission it is to defend civil liberties or protect the environment to provide legal defense funds — just as the Sierra Club did for LightHawk.

“This is about more than me as an artist,” LaRoe said. “This is about everybody’s right to freedom of speech and a healthy environment.”

Her childhood memories of Smokey, she explains, are compelling her to keep raising faucet-fire prevention awareness despite the threat of jail time. “When we were little kids we were taught that there is this bear out there that wants to protect our forests. Smokey is our bear. He belongs to the people.”

This article first appeared at Wagingnonviolence.org.

[Hospital Corporation of America] instructed its admissions staff to determine whether the ailments of those seeking treatment were life threatening. If not, they were told to pay up in advance or were shown the door. In 2009, a patient with an artificial heart valve complaining of a fever was 86′d from HCA’s Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, only to die of related respiratory problems three days later. HCA eventuallypaid $38,000 in fines to the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, no action has been taken against HCA over its billing practices and a former executive with the corporation, Marilyn Tavenner, is currently acting administrator of the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. The expansion of Medicaid coverage scheduled for 2014 under the Affordable Care Act, could offer HCA—along with those in the industry following their lead—a fresh pool of patients to over bill.

Read the full article here.

The piece also focuses on Brooklyn’s Long Island College Hospital, which the State University of New York wants to close and potentially auction off, according to critics. On Sunday, patients, caregivers and unions representing staff at the hospital will rally to keep the 155-year-old institution open. More on that here.

-Peter Rugh

Parent after parent, teacher after teacher, student after student takes the microphone and pleads for their school to remain open.

Similar scenarios are consistently playing out in many parts of the country. Officials in Chicago last week announced plans to eliminate fifty-four schools next year in one swoop. The city’s mayor, former Obama White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, was on vacation at the time of the announcement and could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month twenty-three schools got the axe in Philadelphia, about ten percent of the city’s total. Nineteen protestors, including American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, were arrested for attempting to block the entrance to the building where Philly’s education reform committee dished out the guillotine treatment.

In New York, these PEP meetings have become a tired ritual. Everybody knows what to expect, and this evening’s turnout is not what it has been in the past. Last year, a group calling itself Occupy the DOE – Department of Education – held an alternative, and louder, meeting while the panel was in session; the voices of parents, students and educators frequently drowned out those who sat on stage with microphones at their lips.

Tonight, there’s a significant crowd on hand but it falls far short of years before. The United Teachers Federation, which represents educators in New York, hasn’t even bothered to mobilize its members, apparently preferring to bide its time until the mayoral election in November when, presumably, someone more amenable than billionaire Michael Bloomberg will be in office.

Following in the footsteps of many who came before him, Bloomberg systematically underfunded the city’s institutions of learning. Simultaneously, his Department of Ed has ramped up standardized testing — a cash cow for giant publishing houses like Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt and Pearson, who design the tests used to measure whether schools are making the grade or whether the DOE will toss them overboard.

“We have a responsibility not to react to emotions,” said School’s Chancellor Dennis Walcott, whose responses to reporters’ questions before the hearing rolled off his tongue with robotic speed and efficiency. “We have a responsibility to act to facts. The facts are that schools are not doing well.”

The mayor, whom Walcott answers to, has the ability to appoint a supermajority of members to the PEP. He’s used his power to bolt-up 140 schools that weren’t “doing well” during his decade-plus reign. In Brooklyn Tech’s auditorium this evening, that number reached 162.

Meanwhile, for approximately every public school the DOE has crossed off its books, a charter school has opened up. Charter’s are frequently non-union. They receive public funding but are privately run, sometimes by for-profit educational management firms.

In New York, hedge funds have lobbed large sums of money into charters and often sit on their boards. “Hedge fund executives,” The New York Times has noted, are developing into a “significant political counterweight” to teachers unions and other advocates of public education.

When it comes to an increased emphasis on testing, charters have a key advantage over traditional public schools: they can cross students off their grading sheets if they’re not meeting their academic standards. Often that means students with learning disabilities get shown the door.

By contrast, public schools have to take everybody. Public school teachers attest that students with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, or who speak English as a second language commonly enter their classrooms well after semesters have started.

The roots of the charter model, which is gradually phasing out and replacing traditional public institutions in New York and nationwide, go back to ideological experiments implemented abroad — specifically, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet who seized power in Chile in 1971.

“The first iteration of this project to privatize education, to control what people thought was under Pinochet,” says Dr. Lois Weiner who has written extensively on the decline of America’s public education system. The model was crafted by the World Bank, she says, which used Chile as a neoliberal petri dish in the 1970s.

From there the privatization project spread throughout Latin America where a number of dictators backed by the U.S. and international financiers ruled the roost. Out of Latin America, neoliberal education crossed oceans to Asia and Africa, chasing troubled economies like fire through dry brush.

Weiner says the scenario typically went something like this: “’Oh, you want money to build a bridge?’ That means modernizing your education system. And what do they mean by modernize? They mean standardized tests, they mean charter schools, they mean dismantling teachers unions.”

Pinochet and Thatcher

Britain’s Margaret Thatcher brought the privatized model to Europe, where it later spread to countries in the former Eastern Block still dizzy from the fall of the Soviet empire.

Charter-friendly legislation passed by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s helped the neoliberal education model grow roots in the U.S. In the following decade, President’s George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” bill, followed by Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, tied school funding to test results, further facilitating the dismantling of public education.

Arne Duncan, the current Education Secretary, has bragged of his ambition to continue on a federal scale what he accomplished as head of Chicago schools: mass school shutterings and the propagation of charters.

The emphasis on standardized tests to measure student achievement goes back much farther, however, and is laced with racism. Harvard President James Bryant Conant, a firm believer that an intellectual elite must govern the unwashed masses, laid the ground for the modern standardized testing system in the 1930s when he enlisted Princeton psychology professor Carl Brigham to design an aptitude test for students seeking college admission.

Brigham was an ardent member of the eugenics movement, whose adherents claimed physical traits such as skin color could serve as moral and intellectual indicators. Brigham developed what would later serve as a pathfinder example of standardized testing: the SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is still widely used as a benchmark for college admissions.

At the PEP hearing in Brooklyn, the racist elitism pioneered by Brigham and Conant was alive and well, with test results serving as a justification to shut the city’s working class, black and brown youth out of their schools. An ongoing lawsuit from the UFT accuses the Department of Ed of violating chapter six of the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring discrimination from programs accepting federal dollars, since the majority of those impacted by the closings hail from communities of color.

Yet while the city’s Department of Ed has used test results to qualify the closings, they have likewise resisted testing classrooms for Polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCBs. The once widely used, highly toxic electrical coolant pioneered by Monsanto was banned by Congress in 1979. Advocates with New York Lawyers for Public Interest have identified 1,200 city schools either contaminated or potentially contaminated with PCBs. But the DOE refuses to test the air in classrooms for traces of the toxin, despite warnings from the Environmental Protection Agency. “Our kids are essentially being poisoned,” said Noah Gotbaum, a parent of three children in the school system. “The DOE says, ‘No, don’t worry.’”

Gotbaum was elected to serve on his local Community Education Council in Harlem, a body meant to give parents a voice in the schooling of their children. But he says the “tin-pan dictatorship” of the PEP are the ones pulling the strings, regardless of input from parents.

In one example, last December, Gotbaum says he and other parents learned from a three-line advertisement in Crain’s New York that a triad of public schools in Manhattan were slated for demolition, to be replaced by high-income housing. In testimony before the PEP on Mar 11, Gotbaum complained that “the borough president was not told. Parents were not told. I’ll tell you who was told: the developers. You are rushing to destroy our schools.”

Like the UFT, Gotbaum is hoping New York’s next mayoral administration will place a higher value on democracy than the Bloomberg administration. Other’s think a fresh approach is needed.

The Movement of Rank-and-File Educators, or MORE, is attempting to take over the teachers union in elections slated for April. They want to push the UFT more toward a social justice approach. “What MORE would do differently,” says Julie Cavanagh, a Brooklyn school teacher and MORE candidate for the UFT’s presidency, “is change the philosophy and ideology of how the union functions.” That means building “real organic partnerships with the communities that we serve.”

MORE has modeled itself on the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which took over the Chicago teachers union in 2010 and led a strike that fought back attempts to cut teacher pay last June. They attribute their success cooperation from the community. Parents and students joined the Chicago teachers on the picket-line. The strike was seen as being about more than a contract, but about the systemic racism within the city’s underfunded public schools.

Decked in red t-shirts, members of MORE were out in force at the PEP hearing, standing by parents and students where the UFT leadership was absent. Their hope is that those with a mutual stake in preserving public education can band together to beat back the privatization of learning and build a quality school environment for all.

Those wondering what the scenario would look like, should schooling go the opposite way, might examine Louisiana where Hurricane Katrina has provided an impetus for the overhaul the state’s education system. Legislation approved by lawmakers in 2011 gives corporations the ability to govern charter schools and decide who gets in and who doesn’t — provided, of course, that they are the ones subsidizing the school.

Asked what would happen should a porno shop, strip club or gambling establishment enter into this quid-pro-quo arrangement, Louisiana State Senator Julie Quinn replied: “I think we would welcome a business, casino or otherwise.”

Up north, bodies young and old shuffled out of Brooklyn Tech late on the evening of the 11th. On the stage behind the panel members appointed by the mayor had executed 22 schools simply by raising their arms when it came time to vote. A number of specialty schools were among those given the boot, including the Law, Government and Community Service High School in Queens.

Watching the proceedings, Noah Gotbaum wondered aloud, “What are we teaching our youth about democracy?”

This post first appeared at Occupy.com.

“[B]eyond his job in academia,” writes ProPublica’ Justin Elliott, “Moniz has also spent the last decade serving on a range of boards and advisory councils for energy industry heavyweights, including some that do business with the Department of Energy. That includes a six-year paid stint on BP’s Technology Advisory Council as well as similar positions at a uranium enrichment company and a pair of energy investment firms.”

Here are some of the wallets that have Moniz in them:

• He was on BP’s Technology Advisory Council between 2005 and 2011, a position for which he received a stipend, according to BP. Spokesman Matt Hartwig said the company does not disclose details of such payments. (A 2012 BP financial report disclosed that one council member received about $6,200.) The council “provides feedback and advice to BP’s executive management as to the company’s approach to research and technology,” according to the company. BP has also provided $50 million in funding to Moniz’s MIT Energy Initiative. Moniz talked about that relationship while delivering a warm introduction before a 2009 speech at MIT by BP’s then-CEO Tony Hayward.

• From 2002 to 2004, Moniz sat on the strategic advisory council of USEC, a public company that provides enriched uranium to nuclear power plants. A company spokesman said Moniz was paid for his role on the nine-member council, but declined to say how much. USEC, which has been seeking a $2 billion loan guarantee from the Energy Department for a centrifuge plant in Ohio, has applauded Moniz’s nomination.

• He’s on the board of ICF International, a Fairfax, Virginia-based company which does energy and environmental consulting. It has received Energy Department contracts as part of what one executive called a “longstanding relationship with the Department of Energy.” As a board member, Moniz got $158,000 in cash and stock in 2011, according to the company’s most recent annual report.

• He is on the strategic advisory council of NGP Energy Technology Partners, a private equity firm that invests in both alternative energy and fossil fuel companies. The Washington, D.C.-based firm declined to comment.

• He is on the board of advisers of another private equity firm, the Angeleno Group,which says it provides “growth capital for next generation clean energy and natural resources companies.” The Los Angeles-based firm didn’t respond to requests for comment.

• He is a trustee of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC), a Saudi Aramco-backed nonprofit organization. The organization did not respond to requests for comment.

• He was on the board of directors of the Electric Power Research Institute from 2007 to 2011, following a stint on the group’s advisory council that began in 2002. A nonprofit utility consortium, the organization does research for the industry with an annual budget of over $300 million. The group paid Moniz $8,000 between 2009 and 2011, according to its most recent tax returns.

• Since 2006, Moniz has been on the board of General Electric’s “ecomagination” advisory board which advises the company on “critical environmental and business issues.” The company did not respond to inquiries about compensation.

Click here to read ProPublic’s full article.

The 16-year-old Guyanese youth could have had a premonition of his own death.  Dwayne Charles, who grew up with Gray, told the Village Voice this week, “They been harassing Kiki. They were out for him.” Charles says on one occasion cops approached Gray at a fried chicken joint and began patronizing and interrogating him. “He was about to get up and leave. They was like ‘sit the fuck down before I shoot you. Sit the fuck down.’”

Or, the post could have been Gray’s way of joking around, something Keayana Coke says he loved to do. Coke, also 16, helps her older sister run a local sweet shop, one of the few places where kids in East Flatbush can go after school. Gray used to come in, sit at the counter, chew gummy bears and pass the time, she says, painting a very different picture of him from that of the gang-banger that many stories in the media have run with.

A handwritten sign on the front window of her sister’s shop reads, “Kiki Forever,” and Coke is still talking about him in present tense. “He’s like mad cool to joke around with,” she said. “Not everybody is a saint, everybody has their faults. But we’re kids. We all just want to live. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

Details of Gray’s death have been trickling out slowly since Saturday. Seven bullets entered his body, three of which hit him in the back, according to an autopsy report. One witness told The New York Times that officers stood over Gray while he died pleading for his life. The New York Police Department claims that Gray was brandishing a gun when plain-clothes detectives opened fire and that a gun was found in Gray’s possession. But another witness has come forward and told the New York Daily News that Gray was unarmed when he was killed.

While the story of Gray’s final hours remains far from complete, the teen’s death has already begun to haunt the NYPD. Clashes broke out between mourners and police Monday night during a vigil and celebration of the Gray’s life that turned into a protest.

Video posted on YouTube shows teenage girls with balloons in their hands being manhandled by police attempting to clear the streets. From there the scene grew more ugly.

Protesters “threw garbage cans, broke car windows and messed up fruit stands,” recalls Coke, who was closing up her sweet shop when the violence broke out nearby. “They felt like if they talked quietly, if they weren’t brutal with it, they wouldn’t be heard. But they got what they wanted, and now they was on the news.”

Many news reports described the protest as a riot. But anti-police brutality activist Jose LaSalle doesn’t consider that to be the case. “Every time people act the same way police act with them, they say it’s a riot, that we’re out there acting like criminals,” says Lassalle. He listed examples of criminal activity that New York City police officers have been caught engaging in recently: fixing tickets to meet quotas, selling guns to kids in the Bronx, rape, and plotting to kidnap, murder and cannibalize young women. That’s not to mention the slew of high-profile shooting deaths attributed to police that have occurred within the past year or two. Bronx teenager Ramarley Graham, for instance, was shot after officers broke down the door of his family’s home and killed him in front of his grandmother and six-year-old brother. Then there’s Shantel Davis, who police shot and killed last August just blocks from where Gray died.

The incident that ended Davis’ life came after she crashed a Toyota Camry that police claim was stolen — a charge the family disputes — at a busy intersection in East Flatbush. While she was trapped inside the vehicle by the car’s airbags, narcotics officer Phillip Atkins shot Davis in the stomach and pulled her onto the pavement where she bled to death. Police confiscated video of the slaying, supposedly as evidence. But nine months have passed since the killing and Atkins, an officer with a long paper trail documenting incidents of brutality and false arrests, remains on desk duty at the 67th Precinct in the same neighborhood – the same station from which the officers who shot Gray operated.

To many local residents, shootings such as these are only the most shocking expressions of the day-to-day racism that young people of color there and in neighborhoods across the city experience every day.

“As soon as they see a Latino on a corner,” Keayana Coke said, police “automatically think we’re doing something.”

LaSalle echoed her feeling. “If they find themselves in the park, police is in there harassing them,” he said. “If they find themselves on the corner, just talking among their friends, police is harassing them.” It’s all part of a policy the NYPD calls Stop, Question and Frisk. Statistics compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union show that that nearly 90 percent of those targeted for stop-and-frisks are young males of color.

“That’s a lot of pressure,” LaSalle added. “Psychologically, that’s going to create an environment of anger, an environment of hate towards the police department.”

Only a mass movement, LaSalle believes, will force authorities to recognize that the streets have reached a boiling point. People’s rage, he said, is “about to spill over and they’re the ones that are going to feel the water fall when it hits the floor. They’re going to feel the tsunami.”

Confrontational protests have continued in East Flatbush following Monday’s outpouring of rage, forcing the 67th Precinct into nightly lockdown, while officers have remained stationed on every corner along Church Avenue, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare.

Many of those who are taking part in the campaign for justice in the Davis case have joined forces with those now protesting since Gray’s death. The crowds in East Flatbush have included local young people side-by-side with Occupy Wall Street veterans and anti-stop-and-frisk activists. City Council Member Jumanne Williams, however, has expressed grave concerns about the protests. While stating that he shares the community’s frustration, he has accused people from outside the community of inciting young people to violence.

“We cannot turn our anger against our neighbors,” reads a statement from his office.

There has been some damage to local property, but the protesters’ ire has been directed mainly at the NYPD. Gray’s sister was pulled into a cop car while crossing the street during a march on Wednesday and was given a desk-appearance ticket. After that, demonstrators hurled projectiles at police and pushed against barricades. Bottles flew out the windows of nearby buildings. One protester said the “look of panic on the driver of a police van’s face after the rear window of his van was smashed, seemingly from nowhere” was stuck in his mind. Cops wielded batons and discharged pepper spray. More than 40 people were arrested, including three who were documenting the use of force by police.

Council Member Williams has called for anger to be channeled peacefully toward City Hall and the NYPD’s headquarters at One Police Plaza in Manhattan. Otherwise, he said, “I fear this will be a long and bloody summer ahead.” But for now the 67th Precinct remains the focus of a rage felt across the city.

“I really hope we get justice,” said Keayana Coke. “This is our home. They’re driving us out of our home and killing us off one by one.”

An earlier version of this article first appeared at Wagingnonviolence.org. 

Photos via JennaPope.com. Jenna was injured in the line of duty Wednesday.

Get well, Jenna!

Ernest Moniz

“We have concerns given the importance of this position at this time in history where it’s becoming clear that we need to enact policies that will aggressively combat climate change,” said Emily Wurth of the consumer advocacy group Food and Water Watch. “Dr. Moniz does not fit the bill.”

In return for millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry, Moniz’s Energy Initiative has churned out research to the industry’s liking, most notably a 2011 report that finds “environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable,” and that fracking is a “low-cost, short-term opportunity to reduce U.S. power sector CO2 emissions by up to 20%.”

That report, entitled “The Future of Natural Gas,” was produced in partnership with the educational non-profit (read: propaganda) Clean Skies Foundation, which was set up by fracking tycoon Aubrey McClendon in 2007. McClendon was forced to step down last year as CEO of Chesapeake Energy, America’s second largest fracking firm, after Reuters revealed he was misappropriating millions in company funds for personal gain. Clean Skies has its own, mostly internet-based TV “news” network run by Branded News, the same outfit that operates an internet channel for the National Rifle Association. The foundation’s stated mission is to “educate the American public about clean energy – particularly natural gas [sic].”

The 2011 Energy Initiative/Clean Skies report formed the basis of testimony Moniz submitted to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources later that year.

Enter biologist Robert Howarth. Howarth has never been invited to give testimony on Capitol Hill, although his work has appeared in the weekly newspaper The Hill, which covers policy goings-on in Washington. Howarth was awaiting the release of a report that he and his colleagues at Cornell University had been preparing for the past year and a half when he read something in the paper that startled him. Someone had illicitly obtained a copy of Howarth’s report, the first comprehensive analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from hydraulic fracturing, and passed it to The Hill just days before Howarth and his team were set to go public with their findings.

“The industry was promoting shale gas as something that might actually be good for global warming,” said Howarth, “because it puts out less carbon dioxide to get the same amount of energy compared to oil or coal.” But his report, primarily funded by his university with a grant from the Park Foundation, estimates that on average between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of any given fracking well leaks methane into the atmosphere — a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Based on his findings, Howarth says the greenhouse footprint of shale gas exceeds oil and coal.

The article in The Hill attempted to cast doubt on Howarth’s research ahead of its publication. Christopher Van Atten, a Vice President with the oil and gas consultancy firm MJ Bradley and Associates, is quoted claiming that Howarth’s information, which was gathered from the Congressional Governmental Accountability Office, academic sources and the drilling industry’s own data, is based on “several key assumptions that are highly uncertain or based on limited data points.”

Among Howarth’s fiercest critics were staffers at Energy Initiative. Melanie Kenderdine, the Initiative’s associate director, attacked Howarth’s research on CNBC, accusing him of deviating from accepted scientific standards. The timing of Howarth’s findings couldn’t have been worse for the Energy Initiative, which was about to release its “Future of Natural Gas” report.

“I think there’s a problem at MIT and I’m sad about that,” says Howarth, who earned his PHD at the institute. “I’m very proud of them as an institution but they have taken a lot of money from the oil and gas industry and I think any objective observer can see it’s influenced what they’ve put out in terms of research.” While toting the low carbon footprint of gas produced from fracking, the paper by Moniz and researchers at the Energy Initiative barely mentions the impact of methane, except to briefly suggest that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency conduct further research into emissions — an admission Howarth believes is due to his own work.

Obama continues to promote oil and gas drilling, despite overtures to environmentalists, prompting Stephen Stromberg in the Washington Post to describe the president’s climate strategy as a “flying unicorn.”

But the line between propaganda and science isn’t just blurry at MIT. “The industry is increasingly funding studies across the country,” said Wurth, of Food and Water Watch. “And it’s not surprising the studies they fund are in line with what the industry would like for them to be.”

For example, last year, the State University of New York in Buffalo shut down its Resources and Society Institute after the Public Accountability Initiative revealed the institute had distorted data in a study examining the impact of regulations on fracking in Pennsylvania. Researchers claimed regulations had reduced the environmental impact of fracking in the state, suggesting that drilling could be conducted safely in New York.

Yet, as the Public Accountability Initiative points out, “According to the report’s own data, the rate of major environmental accidents actually increased 36% from 2008 to 2011” and “major environmental events increased 900%.” It was later revealed that the report’s lead authors had ties to the drilling industry, and that sections of the report were lifted from an earlier document written for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

In a separate incident, two researchers were forced to leave the University of Texas at Austen in December after publishing a report that frequently lacked footnotes while claiming there was no link between hydraulic fracturing and water contamination. One researcher, Dr. Charles Chip Groat, failed to disclose the fact that he sat on the board of a fracking company; Groat had received $1.5 million in compensation from the Plains Exploration and Production Company at the time he released the report under the letterhead of the university.

Some unlikely players have also gotten mixed up in frackademia. Though they’ve since come under new leadership, the Sierra Club, a 120-year-old conservation organization, has up until recently promoted natural gas as a transition fuel. The group took funds from frackers, including approximately $25 million from the Chesapeake Energy, to go after the corporation’s competitors in the coal industry. Some of that cash went towards funding research at Carnegie Mellon, which purports that fracking has a lower greenhouse gas imprint than coal.

Without frackademics at their disposal to substantiate claims that hydraulic fracturing is safe, drillers would have little evidence to justify their assertion that pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and toxic chemicals into the ground and sucking out oil or gas is environmentally responsible. Exclude well-funded “scientists” like Moniz, and the pro-frack field is narrowed to misinformed citizens from dying agricultural towns lured by the prospect of leasing their land, and smiling salespeople in 30-second ad slots.

Take the new film “Frack Nation,” an attempt to counter “Gasland,” the movie that helped initiate widespread protests against the drilling practice across the U.S. Director Phelim McAleer claims his movie was financed by the “99%” through the crowd funding site Kickstarter, but donors include the head of publicity for Cabot Oil and Gas. And Cabot got a bang for their buck. The film portrays two residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania, as lone crazies after their water was turned to fire by the company.

Energy in Depth also got their money’s worth. The drill industry PR group helped raise funds for the film and has sponsored screenings. Throughout the movie, McAleer works hard to convince anyone watching that only wacko environmentalists and Vladimir Putin would want to halt fracking. That’s right, Putin. Frack Nation suggests that Russia’s prime minister and his friends in the Russian oligarchy are funding the anti-fracking movement in the United States so that Russia alone can corner the global gas market.

But if the fossil fuel industry’s lavishly paid research is so spot on, if their ads touting fracking’s green credentials are so accurate, how then can drillers account for the hordes of people holding jars of contaminated water who banged on the doors of the American Natural Gas Alliance last summer in Washington? Or the bans on fracking that have been instituted by municipalities from Niagara Falls to Las Vegas? Or the residents of fracked communities who have chained themselves to equipment and blockaded roads leading to well sites?

They cannot. And by now, despite the gas industry’s best PR efforts, the word frack has become profane — even, fittingly, used as a substitute for the word fuck on the hit Sci-Fi show Battle Star Galactica. Few politicians dare to utter it, including President Obama who refers to fracking as “innovative drilling techniques.” When he signed an executive order last year that established a task force aimed at shaking more gas out of America’s shale, he alluded to fracking as the “development of unconventional domestic natural gas resources.”

Even now that droughts in the Midwest and October’s Superstorm Sandy have rendered climate change impossible to ignore, Obama continues to promote oil and gas drilling, prompting Stephen Stromberg in the Washington Post to describe the president’s climate strategy as a “flying unicorn.” Given the dire warnings from the scientific community about climate change, Obama’s approach might more accurately be portrayed as the Flying Unicorn of Climapocalypse — because, in essence, fracking fits right into his imaginary efforts to tackle climate change.

In speeches, the president continues to tout natural gas as being somehow related to clean energy. But despite millions of dollars spent by the drilling industry on radio, television and internet advertising to make us believe it’s true, many of the 99% remain unconvinced. A lot of Americans still aren’t sold on the idea of injecting their country with thousands of hydraulic needles packed with millions of gallons of frack fluid in order to bloat the pockets of oil and gas firms. Though Energy Secretary nominee Ernest Moniz is also doing his best to convince us, the true science on fracking is getting out. Just ask all those people whose water is on fire.

A press liaison at the Energy Initiative said Moniz was unable to comment on this story, since the scientist was on a fundraising tour and would be meeting with energy companies all week.

This article originally appeared at Occupy.com.

The media whirlwind surrounding the Oscar nomination of the documentary 5 Broken Cameras has put the spotlight on film as a tool for social justice in Palestine. In the film, Palestinian farmer and filmmaker Emad Burnat chronicles the struggle against the construction of the “Apartheid Wall” in the West Bank village of Bil’in. He records demonstrations in the village as well as its cultural and social gatherings. Throughout the course of filming the movie, Israeli security forces break five of Burnat’s cameras.

5 Broken Cameras is one more step in the ongoing global effort to raise awareness about the Israeli occupation. But another video released last year to much less fanfare had a very tangible impact on one family. Thanks to footage posted online under the title “isreali (sic) army tortured a woman,” Abdelrahaman Salayma is not in jail.

The video was shot in Hebron (also known by its Arabic name, Khalil), a city divided into two sections under a system Israel calls the “separation policy.” This ancient and vibrant city, a center of industry in the West Bank, has become one of the most troubled examples of life under Israeli occupation. The area known as H2 is under full Israeli military control, and access is highly restricted for Palestinians. All Palestinian shops in H2 were closed by the Israeli military following the 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein. Palestinians are barred from living in most H2 areas. H1, on the other hand, is under Palestinian Authority control.

In Hebron’s historic old city, H1 runs right alongside H2. About 500 ultra-Zionist settlers live in H2, and the Israeli government provides as many as 2,000 soldiers to protect them. Many of these settlers live next door to Palestinians, and some Palestinian homes have had their front doors welded shut by the military, forcing the residents to enter through windows accessible only from the roof.

The old city is also the center of settler violence in Hebron. Especially vulnerable are those, like Abdulrahaman Salayma, who live near the Tel Rumeida settlement. The Palestinians in the area are subjected to frequent attacks by both settlers and soldiers. Settlers habitually throw rocks and fists at Palestinians — and, in one particularly extreme case, a washing machine. Soldiers enter homes for random night raids, terrorizing the residents and searching through their belongings.

When the soldiers broke in to Salayma’s house, he thought it was just a regular night raid. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s something normal, because the soldiers come often,’” he told me. “[Then] a soldier grabbed me by the shirt, so I thought, ‘Maybe this is something new.’”

The soldiers told Salayma to get dressed because he was under arrest. His mother began screaming at the soldiers to let her son go. At this point, someone in his family started filming.

In the video, Salayma’s mother can be seen screaming at the soldiers as they drag her violently from the house. She falls to the ground and is picked up by the soldiers before being taken to jail along with her son.

“They kept her in jail four days. Thirteen soldiers went to court and said she hit them,” Salayma said. But Salayma’s family had the video.

Issa Amro is the director of Youth Against Settlements, the group that posted the video on YouTube. He believes the video alone saved Salayma and his mother from an extended stay in Israeli prison. “If it wasn’t on film, they both could have gone to jail for a long time,” he said.

In a tragic twist of fate, video also became an integral element in the story of Salayma’s cousin Mohammad, murdered on his 17th birthday by Israeli border police in Hebron. The border police initially claimed Mohammad had attacked them with what turned out to be a toy gun, but a security-camera video released later puts the lie to their story. Mohammad was empty-handed when he was killed.

The footage can’t help Mohammad, but for thousands of people living in Hebron’s old city, video often makes all the difference.

Another volunteer with Youth Against Settlements, Sundus Allazeh, told me, “If we want to take a picture or film settlers or soldiers making problems, it helps us a lot.” It produces an immediate change in the aggressors’ behavior. I’ve heard this story over and over again while covering Hebron for the Palestine Monitor.

Edan Alsharabaty of Youth Against Settlements told me, “When the soldiers see the cameras, they will stop attacking, or they will talk with the people in a nice way.” Sami Nastheh, co-founder of the Hebron Defense Committee, said, “The cameras are the only thing that makes the soldiers afraid.”

Many of the cameras in Hebron were donated by B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization that maintains an office in the city. Over the last eight years B’Tselem has distributed more than 200 cameras in Gaza and the West Bank, including 40 in Hebron alone. Musa Abu Hashhash, a field worker with B’Tselem, reiterated the effect that cameras have on the behavior of soldiers and settlers.

“It’s a big difference,” he said. “First, for the people, it reduced violence, especially by the settlers or soldiers. When you open your camera in the face of a settler or soldier, they stop. This is for sure.”

B’Tselem also takes footage to court on behalf of Palestinians arrested unjustly by Israeli security forces. B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari said she provided footage of arrests to the Israeli courts 10 times, and in all but one case the person being detained was released. Despite the notoriously unjust court system Israel uses for Palestinians, the videos provide such hard evidence that the judge is forced to release the prisoners.

Although filming in public is unambiguously legal under Israeli law, B’Tselem takes precautionary measures. Its volunteers are given copies of permits authorized by the IDF’s high commander in Hebron, as well as a letter from B’Tselem’s director. They put B’Tselem stickers on the cameras to provide another layer of protection to their volunteers.

Buying cameras, however, is expensive. Al-Ja’bari told me there still aren’t enough cameras for everyone who needs them in Hebron, and B’Tselem is forced to distribute them according to levels of need.

“We gave cameras to those who had been attacked several times,” she said. And not everyone is willing to take one. “Many people have been attacked, but they are afraid.”

Abu Hashhash of B’Tselem told me that when the group began operating in Hebron, it often provoked violent reactions from Israeli soldiers. But this has happened less and less often thanks to the refusal of B’Tselem and others to stop filming.

“At the beginning they were very angry at being filmed. They would break the camera, detain volunteers. But they got used to it,” he said. “This was not easy. It was hard work. It took patience, sacrifices.”

The idea of casting a watchful eye on police and security forces isn’t unique to Palestine. In the United States, such “copwatch” programs date back to at least the Black Panthers. Organizations such as Witness continue this tradition today, offering online trainings and producing documentaries based on video testimony collected by members. Witness’ Cameras Everywhere Initiative seeks to build a framework for making effective use of cameras as they become increasingly more ubiquitous in conflict zones around the world.

And, of course, Palestinian protests like those shown in 5 Broken Cameras will continue to be documented and broadcast to the world, spreading their messages and raising awareness. But for residents of Hebron, cameras play a crucial self-defense role in daily life. For Sami Nastheh, cameras are “one of the most effective weapons we have.”

This article first appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.

What kind of morals Obama has, well that’s another matter, but he likes to exercise them everyday, whether it’s giving his kill list a good once over or playing golf with an oil and gas tycoon while climate protesters are ringing his doorbell. You know, the kind of not-so-hopie-changie stuff that would have made liberals livid if George W. Bush had pulled it.

The logo for Sunday’s innocuously titled Forward on Climate rally looked a lot like the emblem of the president’s 2008 campaign, back when he promised that we’d remember his election as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Showing just how far we’ve come since then, the swooping road leading to a rising sun — tacked to so many American lawns in ’08 — was replaced on Sunday by a swirl representing a hurricane.

Billionaire Tom Steyer spoke for the 1 percent at the rally. “The Keystone XL pipeline is a bad investment,” he told the mostly broke and debt straddled young people on hand, even as the hedge fund he manages has oil, coal, nuclear and fracking holdings.

Previously, Steyer pontificated to the Washington Post: “I feel like the guy in the movie who goes into the diner and says, ‘There are zombies in the woods and they’re eating our children.” As often happens in horror movies, those who you think are your friends turn out to be brain eaters.

Organizers of Sunday’s rally might do better to encourage their bases to use their brains, but it appears they’ve chosen to dumb down their politics in the interest of casting as wide a net as possible.

And then there was Van Jones. “I have had the honor of serving this president,” said the former White House green jobs adviser whom Obama fired at the first wiff of a right wing smear campaign months into his first term. Jones continued, “What I want to tell the next generation is this: Don’t be a chumps!” The phrase caught on. Chants of “Don’t be chumps” rippled through the crowd.

While a petition in the run up to the February 17 demonstration from the Public Interest Research Group urged signatories to let the president know they “have his back when it comes to tackling global warming,” former Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein asks, “Why should we have Obama’s back when he keeps stabbing us in ours?”

The crowd on Sunday was truly an awesome sight. This is in large part because tote bag environmental groups (you send them money, they send you a tote) like the Sierra Club and the PIRGs encouraged their membership to attended the Forward on Climate rally — more evidence that simply lobbying the White House has gotten them no where. An estimated 35,000 to 50,000 people turned up. Meanwhile a recent poll found an estimated 64 percent of Americans believe it’s time we take action on climate change. Rather than guarding the president’s back, why not use these numbers to push back instead?

This post first appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.

For more photos of the rally taken by the incredible Jenna Pope click here.

Despite a strategy of ignoring climate change during his first term, President Barack Obama claims he’s ready to make it a top priority. In his State of the Union address on February 12, he said: “For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.”

But the president has so far failed to back up his words with any meaningful action, and there’s good reason to doubt his sincerity. Moments after noting that “the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15,” Obama boasted that his “administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.”

The president’s dueling words were speaking to opposing constituencies. On the one hand, there’s the American people, the majority of whom believe it’s time for action on climate change. On the other, there’s the fossil fuel lobby, which certainly isn’t as big as half the U.S. population, but makes up for it in spending power.

Indeed, the president wasn’t at home when demonstrators came calling. He was in Florida, golfing with Houston Astros owner Jim Crane, who has interests in fracking and natural gas pipelines, and who even invested in the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and summer of 2010.

Between the two sides rests the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry nearly a million barrels of raw bitumen crude oil from the deforested tar sands region in Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The multinational oil industry and Wall Street banks that fund them have a lot riding on this pipeline, and they want to see it bring tar sands oil to the global market. The problem with that, however, is there might not be much of a globe left, once the tar sands crude makes it to the market.

“The science is crystal clear,” said James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “We have to stabilize atmospheric composition if we want to have a stable climate.” This requires that we reduce and eventually halt the flaring of fossil fuels. The Keystone XL would do just the opposite.

If the total crude from Alberta’s tar sands were burned, the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would increase from its current 390 parts per million to 600 ppm, sending our planet over a climate cliff. Sea levels would continue to rise, and extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy would grow more severe.

“We have thousands of cities on coastlines around the world,” said Hansen, outlining what’s at stake. “We have governments that are coal-fired and well-oiled. If we allow fossil fuel use to continue business as usual, we guarantee that over the coming decades we will begin to see large changes in sea level, and we will lose all of those cities.” The Keystone XL pipeline, Hansen added, “wills young people a future of economic devastation.”

With that threat hinging on whether Obama allows the Keystone XL to be completed, activists have been working for nearly two years toward a different future. After a similar mass demonstration in Washington in the fall of 2011, Obama denied TransCanada’s initial permit application, kicking the pipeline down the road into his second term.

“He doesn’t have to go through Congress,” said Belinda Rodriguez, an organizer with the environmental group 350.org, which put out the initial call for Sunday’s mass mobilization. “He doesn’t have to slog through forming some complicated cap and trade legislation. All he has to do is reject the permit.”

Rodriguez, a recent New York University graduate, helped organize a divestment campaign on campus that is pressuring the academic institution to remove its investments from the fossil fuel industry. While some, including the Nation Institute’s Christian Parenti, have argued that divestment will do little to hurt the bottom line of fossil fuel companies, it has helped mobilize a whole new swath of young climate activists. Hundreds of divestment campaigns have sprung up on campuses across the country, comprising a major base that 350.org drew from on Sunday.

In a prelude to the big demonstration, James Hansen and nearly 50 others engaged in a sit-in at the White House on February 13. Among those arrested was Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, marking the first time a leader of the organization had taken part in civil disobedience since it was founded by John Muir 120 years ago. Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actress Daryl Hannah were also led away in handcuffs, lending their celebrity to the cause.

But far from the click of cameras, dust has yet to settle on another arena in the battle against the Keystone XL. Down in Texas, activists with the Tar Sands Blockade have been locking down to equipment, occupying trees in the pipeline’s path and otherwise stalling construction since August. For their efforts, they’ve been sued by TransCanada, brutalized by the company’s security personnel in collusion with local law enforcement and endured long stays in jail thanks to overzealous prosecution of their nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.

They’ve also uncovered damning evidence that the Keystone XL will be seeping oil all along its planned route. Back in December, three activists barricaded themselves inside a mile-long segment of the pipe, where they spotted light pouring through a welded segment. Once the trio was forcibly removed, the pipeline went into the ground.

While it was just one section of the XL, which will be making its way across America’s wildlife habitats, playgrounds and backyards if completed, who knows how many segments contain leaks?

“Tar Sands Blockade has proof positive that the welds are false,” hollered Ramsey Sprague, an organizer with the group, while disrupting a talk by a TransCanada quality control manager last month at Marriot Hotel in Woodlands, Texas. But his message was drowned out by a sound system blaring soft jazz.

While lone activists yelling within the confines of suburban hotel convention centers can be easily ignored, the tens of thousands of people raising their voices surely shook the walls of the highest office in the land.

Demonstrators, however, remained divided over whether they were there to support Obama by showing that they’ll have his back if he rejects the XL Pipeline–or to demand that he do so.

At a rally near the Washington Monument before the march to the White House, Obama’s fired green jobs adviser Van Jones reminded the crowd that he had had “the honor” of serving the president. He went on to say that Obama that he shouldn’t inject America with a “dirty needle from Canada,” since that would undermine the credibility of the executive office. The Sierra Club’s Michael Brune, who has previously said he believes Obama has a “strong moral core,” made similar appeals as Jones.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer also spoke at the rally. Steyer told the Washington Post, recently that when it comes to climate change, “I feel like the guy in the movie who goes into the diner and says, ‘There are zombies in the woods, and they’re eating our children.’”

But as often happens in horror movies, those who you think are your friends turn out to be brain-eaters. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Steyer’s Farallon Capital Management holds stock in NRG Energy, operators of several coal plants and one nuclear facility, as well as Ram Energy Resources and Sandridge Energy, both oil and natural gas firms.

“Having a representative of the 1 percent just because he happens to be against this particular investment is extremely short-sighted and naïve,” said author and environmental activist Chris Williams. “This is a struggle for justice against the ruling class, and they’re completely the wrong choice for an ally–just like Obama.”

Williams helped organize an EcoSocialist contingent at the February 17 demonstration. Chants of “One, two, three, four / climate change is class war” rose from the contingent, offering a sharp contrast to the innocuous politics of many of the moderate green groups they marched beside. As Williams said:

Obama has repeatedly boasted about how much pipeline has been laid on his watch and how his administration has gone the extra mile to cut red tape and facilitate offshore, deep-shore and any-shore drilling–all while opening up more federal lands and the Arctic in order to wring every last drop of oil and gas from the North American continent.

Williams added that Obama’s drone strikes and kill lists further cast dispersions on the “moral core” of the president.

Speaking with Williams the night before the rally in the packed hall of a church in Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein agreed. “Why should we have Obama’s back when he keeps stabbing us in ours?”

Just as the climate is reaching a tipping point, so too is the climate movement. “If the president rejects the pipeline,” said Williams, “It will encourage all of us to ask the question, ‘what next?’” If Obama approves the XL, it could serve to highlight the fact that this struggle is larger than any one individual. “This is about a system that depends on the production of fossil fuels for energy, and profit and endless growth as the engine of progress within capitalism.”

Earlier versions of this article first appeared at WagingNonviolence and  SocialistWorker.org

A number of socialist organizations have formed the Ecosocialist Contingent to march together at the demonstration, making the case for a united and independent grassroots movement that does not look toward the Democratic Party for solutions or help. For more information visit: www.ecologicalsocialists.com.

The organizations planning to take part in the Contingent have drafted the statement below for public release.

System Change, Not Climate Change!

A statement from the Ecosocialist Contingent for the Forward on Climate, February 17th, 2013

Tens of thousands of activists, including students, indigenous leaders, religious groups, and community organizations will assemble in DC on February 17 for one of the largest climate and environmental justice demonstrations ever. The climate extremes of 2012 have shifted public opinion in favor of change, despite Obama’s electoral silence. The rise of Idle No More has further energized the movement and internationalized perspectives. February 17th should mark the beginning of a more united, grassroots  climate movement with no illusions in the free market or the Democratic Party. We ecosocialists are honored to stand with so many and say no to the Keystone XL!  No to extreme energy!

Ecosocialists believe capitalism is killing the planet. The drive to increase profits assumes endless growth on a finite planet. Capitalism depends on cheap oil and gas, and shuns energy conservation and a swift switch to renewables as unprofitable.

The US war machine has devastated the Middle East in the service of ExxonMobil. Fossil Fuel corporations continue to scour the planet for ever-more oil, gas, coal and profit. This must change. We must bring human society back into balance with nature. Politicians such as President Obama are beholden to corporate interests and refuse to do what’s necessary to avert ecological catastrophe. Only the self-organization of the 99% can turn society around.

Mobilizations like those of the First Nations people, farmers, and towns who are blocking pipeline construction through their lands offer a way out of the crisis. Progressives, radicals, the labor movement, and First Nations must unite. We demand President Obama reject the Keystone XL permit. We demand a massive public works campaign, green jobs and cuts to defense spending. We support broad action campaigns for free and publicly-owned mass transit, public ownership of renewable energy, as well as an end to racism, sexism, homophobia, and oppression.

The capitalist system is in fundamental conflict with the climate system.  Capitalist exploitation of nature is the flip side to the exploitation of human labor.  Ultimately therefore, to solve the ecological and social crisis, we need a revolutionary movement that creates a new society free of exploitation, oppression, and the profit motive.  A society which measures the quality of life not through the competitive acquisition of things, but by our relationship to each other and nature, that acts to protect and restore our planet for future generations.

• No to the Keystone XL Pipeline, fracking, mountaintop removal, nuclear power and extreme energy
• Respect indigenous rights
• Tax the polluters!  Build a renewable infrastructure with union labor
• Another World is Possible! For a society based on human need, not profit.

Endorsing organizations and individuals:

Editorial board, New Politics
Chicago Socialist Party
West Queens Green Party, NYC
Green Party Manhattan Local
Bronx Green Party
Bronx County Green Party
Ecosocialist Horizons
International Socialists (Canada)
Mike Davis, Professor, Creative Writing, UC Riverside; author of Planet of Slums, In Praise of Barbarians, Late Victorian Holocausts
Ian Angus, Editor, ClimateandCapitalism.com
Sherry Wolf, Author, Sexuality & Socialism
Phil Gasper, Associate Editor, International Socialist Review
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor & publisher of Jacobin magazine, senior editor In These Times.
Sam Gindin
Victor Wallace, Managing Editor, Socialism & Democracy
Chris Williams, Professor, Pace University; author, educator, activist
Gregg Shotwell, author of Autoworkers Under the Gun
Joanne Landy, Co-Director, Campaign for Peace and Democracy; editorial board member, New Politics
Alan Wald, editorial board, Against the Current
Subhankar Banarjee, photographer, writer, and activist
John Stachel, *Director, Center for Einstein Studies, Boston University
Kevin Hengehold
David Schwartzman, Professor Emeritus, Biogeochemistry, Howard University;http://www.solarUtopia.org and http://www.redandgreen.org
Lois Wilcken, La Troupe Makandal, Inc
Ernest Boyd, Asheville, North Carolina
Rory Short, Quaker/Yogi/Buddhist/Environmentalist
John Sharkey
Lance Newman, Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences
Professor of English and Environmental Studies. Westminster College
Sue Udry, *Executive Director, Defending Dissent Foundation
David Barsamian, Director, Alternative Radio
Mark A. Lause, Professor of History, University of Cincinnati
Ann Montague, Co-Chair, Lavender Caucus,SEIU 503 (Oregon)
Greg Albo, Professor of Political Economy, York University
Ellis Boal
Dana Bisignani, Women’s Studies Instructor, Poet, Graduate Student, Purdue University
Michael Friedman, Biologist, member Professional Staff Congress (CUNY), AFT local 2334
Michael Rubin, State Coordinating Committee, Green Party of California
Howie Hawkins, Teamsters local 317, 2010 Green party candidate for NY Governor
Sandy Boyer, Radio Free Eireann