What’s Going On?
The Guardian is reporting this morning that oil prices are spiking to over $107 a barrel as Iran aligned rebel Houthis in Yemen targeted Saudi Arabia's east west crude pipeline. As President Trump's war of choice in Iran has continued, the entire Mideast has been destabilized with oil at one point hitting $126 dollars a barrel.
Back in July, Oxfam reported that big oil was set to double their profits as their emissions helped fuel deadly heat waves. The global economic justice non-profit noted the planet's six biggest oil companies saw their profits jump from $23 billion to $45 billion.
At the exact same time, we see record breaking life threatening heat waves in South Asia, Europe, and North America that killed tens of thousands of people. While Canada and the US were faced with epic forest fires, West Africa saw catastrophic monsoons that Oxfam reports has "upended thousands of lives and destroyed vital infrastructure across that region. Of course, just last month a catastrophic collapse of a glacier in the border regions of Tibet and Nepal killed 1,300 people with the BBC reporting the Himalayan glaciers are now losing land mass 65 percent faster than they were just a decade ago.
The climate crisis is very much intensifying.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that the Trump EPA is going to actually end limits on climate pollution coming from the nation's vast complex of power plants that provide electricity by burning fossil fuels like oil and gas. It's this power sector that's the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that generates carbon dioxide.
Even as the effects of the climate crisis intensify and are producing a growing body count, President Trump has insisted the climate crisis is a "hoax."
Trump's dismantling of Obama-Biden era efforts to address the climate crisis has been accompanied by an across the board attack on scientific research that's historically been the foundation for advances in public health both here in the United States and around the world.
At the same time, Nicholas Kristoff with the New York Times that Elon Musk's demolition of the US AID program that funded basic medicines and items like mosquito netting had already caused 750,000 deaths worldwide with the British medical journal the Lancet predicting that in just four years time, the Trump-Musk cuts could cause over nine million deaths.
We will got into all of this with our ALL-Star current events panel that includes New Jersey social justice activist Larry Hamm, the founder of the People's Organization for Progress and labor historian Dr. Joe Wilson.
We also got a Delaney Hall update about the ongoing human rights and health crisis unfolding at Newark's private immigration prison run by the GEO Group, who were also major donors to the Trump campaign warchest. Kathy O'Leary, NJ Pax Christi, Dr. Kate Sugarman, and Jonathan Wilson Hargrove, assistant director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale University, explain how ICE and its private jailers are not providing basic healthcare to the thousands of people they are sweeping up.
In our second hour we were very fortunate to have Dr. Giridhar Mallya, one of the world's leading public health experts who is also the senior policy officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which promotes through its research the core principle that healthcare is not a privilege but a basic human right.
The segment opened with this:
"For 52 years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has operated under the fundamental belief that everyone in America should have a fair and just opportunity to thrive," wrote Dr. Richard E. Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Foundation. "We hold on to that belief now more than ever. And, as we look to RWJF’s future, we are making significant changes to our work to center dismantling one of the biggest barriers to health in America: structural racism."
Besse continued. We all have dreams for ourselves and our families. But we don’t all have the same opportunities to make those dreams come true. The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020 made that clear. People of color died at higher rates than White people, especially at the beginning of the pandemic; the drop in life expectancy for Black Americans was twice as great as that of White Americans. Structural racism embedded in every aspect of society is the root cause of the health disparities that persist today.
We finished up with a wide ranging interview with Steven Banks, New York City Corporate Counsel, who spent decades from his position at the Legal Aid Society suing New York City over its treatment of the homeless.
Banks discussed Mayor Mamdani's landmark decision to release the municipal files from 9/11 WTC files from the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations that chronicles what the city knew and when it knew it about the air quality in lower Manhattan after the 2001 World Trade Center attack.
At the time, the US EPA said the air was "safe to breathe" but a 2003 EPA Inspector General report despite data that showed it was not. Since, close to 9,000 participants in the Victim Compensation Fund and the 9/11 World Trade Center Health Program have died, three times the number of people that perished on 9/11.
Currently just 145,000 of the estimated 400,000 people exposed to the World Trade Center toxics are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program. Banks said the Mamdani administration is committed to helping both active and retired city workers to enroll in the program who may have been exposed to the deadly dust between Sept. 11th and the end of July 2002.
Also of concern to Mayor Mamdani are the tens of thousands of residents in the area, including 19,000 former K-12 school kids sent back into New York City public schools that were in the hazard zone. Since, DOE staff and students have succumbed to 9/11 related cancers.
Banks highlighted Mayor Mamdani's efforts to let more city workers, residents, commuters and students. More than 57,000 people in the 9/11 WTC Health Program have one or more cancers with that cohort being almost evenly divided between first responders and survivors.
