#including safety from insular violence.

[halo-eater]

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[comicaurora]

Sorry to drop a hella irl-political question on your mostly webcomic blog, but have you/any of the OSP gang heard of/been participating in the week-long strike for palestine that's been (presumably) all over tumblr/the internet?

For some background info: Following the attack on Oct. 7th by the hamas militant group (a terrorist org. Or resistance group, depending who you ask), the state of israel (which is practically a mass colonial settlement on Palestinian land since '48) has taken the attack as an excuse to indiscriminately bomb the homes of thousands if not millions of homes while forcebly displacing almost all of the ~2.3 million people crammed in the gaza strip with no escape.

'Israel' has also tightened it's blockade on the strip of land such that a growing majority of people there are experiencing catastrophic starvation, disease from sewage-infested drinking water (as water aid is too scarce). Soon even deaths by preventable causes such as diabetes will occur since insulin pens for children have been blocked from entering by israel, who controls gaza's borders, water, power, food supplies, and shoreline. Civilians in Gaza are very frequently and indiscriminately killed often in places they were told were safe zones to evacuate to. It's agreed upon by both experts and laymen worldwide that what is happening (and has BEEN happening before Oct.7th) is nothing short of genocide.

In the occupied Palestinian west bank, where there is no hamas whatsoever to use as an excuse, Palestinians are still arrested without a fair trial for years, abused, prevented from using certain roads, shot, and often straight-up have their houses stolen by armed or military-backed israeli settlers (many of whom have no ancestral connection to the land at all) in a system often compared to or outright stated to be apartheid.

Very recently, a journalist in Gaza by the name of Bisan Owda called for a strike from January 21st to January 28th. The conditions of the strike can be paraphrased as:

Cease all unnecessary purchases or payments, avoid generating ad revenue when possible

Do not go to work or school if you can possibly avoid it

Pay for things only in cash if you must

Use social media exclusively to flood the internet with palestinian voices and resources about the ongoing genocide against the palestinian people

Attend protests if you can

Be visible.

It's the 26th now, but joining late would be far better than to not join at all and stay silent.

I figured I'd ask since since OSP has covered various topics about history and/or politics and we're kinda watching some awful history unfolding, the kind of history where neutrality doesn't really work and a side needs to be taken.

Opinions? (Sorry if I'm coming across as condescending! I just really want my favorite blogs to be aware and take a stance rather than being silent hhhghf)

Okay, here's my answer.

OSP has been supporting calls for a ceasefire for months, and we were fundraising in direct support of it via Doctors Without Borders all through November and December. Total, we raised over $30,000. If we include the UNICEF fundraiser we ran on the Spider-Man streams, the total is over $40,000.

During our charity livestreams, we have made our positions clear – we support a ceasefire, Israel is perpetuating settler-colonialist violence and has been for decades, Hamas is a terrorist organization that endangers Israelis and Palestinians alike, the innocent people of both Palestine and Israel deserve safety and peace. We concluded that the best thing we could do under the circumstances was empower those who are in a real position to actually help by providing funding for their work. We believe this is significantly more beneficial than adding Another Angry Internet Post to the pile of insular outrage on Internet Land. Fundraising for the organizations with boots on the ground feels like it does a lot more good than being loud online for the benefit of other online people.

This is not the first time I've heard reference to the strike, but it is the first time I've seen the parameters of the strike laid out, which to me indicates that it wasn't spread as widely or effectively as it could've been.

I understand and appreciate why you sent this ask, but your premise worries me. I know this may surprise and startle us denizens of the internet, but being extremely loud on the internet is not the only or the most effective form of activism, and people not being extremely loud on the internet with every account they have is not the same thing as silent complicity in war crimes, and people acting like those two things are the same thing has been unbelievably frustrating to watch.

If we act like everything is a binary moral choice between "scream your loudest, most angry opinions online every time you feel angry about them" and "not doing that is literally the same thing as participating in genocide", we are creating a very strong pressure to flood the internet with our angriest, most unformed thoughts, lest we be branded as complicit in war crimes. Social media sites live and die on engagement, hence why twitter has rapidly trended towards doomscrolling and encouraging inflammatory clickbait - angry shouty people are traffic and traffic is money. The cynical part of me is utterly unsurprised that social media encourages the idea that the only true form of activism is being loud on social media.

It sounds like you had the feeling that sending me this ask was weird and a boundary overstep, and you were correct. My platform is not world-changing or in any way politically powerful beyond our ability to create charity fundraisers for causes we believe in, and we are doing what we can to help in the tiny ways that we can from halfway across the world, from a position of absolutely zero political weight beyond emailing our representatives. You are just asking me to also shout about it online loudly enough that I measure up to an artificial loudness metric, because my existing shouting was not already loud or omnipresent enough.

You are not entitled to know every thought in my head or every action I take in my life. I am not online to perform outrage and live up to an arbitrary moral standard of Shouting Enough. I am especially not online on my fantasy webcomic blog to do those things. Please understand that what you see of me is what I choose to share, and I am under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to share more.

[thunderboltfire]

I have a lot of complicated feelings when it comes to what Neflix has done with the Witcher, but my probably least favourite is the line of argumentation that originated during shitstorms related to the first and second season that I was unlucky to witness.

It boils down to "Netflix's reinterpretation and vision is valid, because the Witcher books are not written to be slavic. The overwhelming Slavic aestetic is CDPR's interpretation, and the setting in the original books is universally European, as there are references to Arthurian mythos and celtic languages" And I'm not sure where this argument originated and whether it's parroting Sapkowski's own words or a common stance of people who haven't considered the underlying themes of the books series. Because while it's true that there are a lot of western european influences in the Witcher, it's still Central/Eastern European to the bone, and at its core, the lack of understanding of this topic is what makes the Netflix series inauthentic in my eyes.

The slavicness of the Witcher goes deeper than the aestetics, mannerisms, vodka and sour cucumbers. Deeper than Zoltan wrapping his sword with leopard pelt, like he was a hussar. Deeper than the Redanian queen Hedvig and her white eagle on the red field.

What Witcher is actually about? It's a story about destiny, sure. It's a sword-and-sorcery style, antiheroic deconstruction of a fairy tale, too, and it's a weird mix of many culture's influences.

But it's also a story about mundane evil and mundane good. If You think about most dark, gritty problems the world of Witcher faces, it's xenophobia and discrimination, insularism and superstition. Deep-seated fear of the unknown, the powerlessness of common people in the face of danger, war, poverty and hunger. It's what makes people spit over their left shoulder when they see a witcher, it's what makes them distrust their neighbor, clinging to anything they deem safe and known. It's their misfortune and pent-up anger that make them seek scapegoats and be mindlessly, mundanely cruel to the ones weaker than themselves.

There are of course evil wizards, complicated conspiracies and crowned heads, yes. But much of the destruction and depravity is rooted in everyday mundane cycle of violence and misery. The worst monsters in the series are not those killed with a silver sword, but with steel. it's hard to explain but it's the same sort of motiveless, mundane evil that still persist in our poorer regions, born out of generations-long poverty and misery. The behaviour of peasants in Witcher, and the distrust towards authority including kings and monarchs didn't come from nowhere.

On the other hand, among those same, desperately poor people, there is always someone who will share their meal with a traveller, who will risk their safety pulling a wounded stranger off the road into safety. Inconditional kindness among inconditional hate. Most of Geralt's friends try to be decent people in the horrible world. This sort of contrasting mentalities in the recently war-ridden world is intimately familiar to Eastern and Cetral Europe.

But it doesn't end here. Nilfgaard is also a uniquely Central/Eastern European threat. It's a combination of the Third Reich in its aestetics and its sense of superiority and the Stalinist USSR with its personality cult, vast territory and huge army, and as such it's instantly recognisable by anybody whose country was unlucky enough to be caught in-between those two forces. Nilfgaard implements total war and looks upon the northerners with contempt, conscripts the conquered people forcibly, denying them the right of their own identity. It may seem familiar and relevant to many opressed people, but it's in its essence the processing of the trauma of the WW2 and subsequent occupation.

My favourite case are the nonhumans, because their treatment is in a sense a reminder of our worst traits and the worst sins in our history - the regional antisemitism and/or xenophobia, violence, local pogroms. But at the very same time, the dilemma of Scoia'Tael, their impossible choice between maintaining their identity, a small semblance of freedom and their survival, them hiding in the forests, even the fact that they are generally deemed bandits, it all touches the very traumatic parts of specifically Polish history, such as January Uprising, Warsaw Uprising, Ghetto Uprising, the underground resistance in WW2 and the subsequent complicated problem of the Cursed Soldiers all at once. They are the 'other' to the general population, but their underlying struggle is also intimately known to us.

The slavic monsters are an aestetic choice, yes, but I think they are also a reflection of our local, private sins. These are our own, insular boogeymen, fears made flesh. They reproduce due to horrors of the war or they are an unprovoked misfortune that descends from nowhere and whose appearance amplifies the local injustices.

I'm not talking about many, many tiny references that exist in the books, these are just the most blatant examples that come to mind. Anyway, the thing is, whether Sapkowski has intended it or not, Witcher is slavic and it's Polish because it contains social commentary. Many aspects of its worldbuilding reflect our traumas and our national sins. It's not exclusively Polish in its influences and philosophical motifs of course, but it's obvious it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

And it seems to me that the inherently Eastern European aspects of Witcher are what was immediately rewritten in the series. It seems to me that the subtler underlying conflicts were reshaped to be centered around servitude, class and gender disparity, and Nilfgaard is more of a fanatic terrorist state than an imposing, totalitarian empire. A lot of complexity seems to be abandoned in lieu of usual high-fantasy wordbuilding. It's especially weird to me because it was completely unnecessary. The Witcher books didn't need to be adjusted to speak about relevant problems - they already did it! The problem of acceptance and discrimination is a very prevalent theme throughout the story! They are many strong female characters too, and they are well written. Honestly I don't know if I should find it insulting towards their viewers that they thought it won't be understood as it was and has to be somehow reshaped to fit the american perpective, because the current problems are very much discussed in there and Sapkowski is not subtle in showing that genocide and discrimination is evil. Heck, anyone who has read the ending knows how tragic it makes the whole story.

It also seems quite disrespectful, because they've basically taken a well-established piece of our domestic literature and popular culture and decided that the social commentary in it is not relevant. It is as if all it referenced was just not important enough and they decided to use it as an opportunity to talk about the problems they consider important. And don't get me wrong, I'm not forcing anyone to write about Central European problems and traumas, I'm just confused that they've taken the piece of art already containing such a perspective on the popular and relevant problem and they just... disregarded it, because it wasn't their exact perspective on said problem.

And I think this homogenisation, maybe even from a certain point of view you could say it's worldview sanitisation is a problem, because it's really ironic, isn't it? To talk about inclusivity in a story which among other problems is about being different, and in the same time to get rid of motifs, themes and references because they are foreign? Because if something presents a different perspective it suddenly is less desirable?

There was a lot of talking about the showrunners travelling to Poland to understand the Witcher's slavic spirit and how to convey it. I don't think they really meant it beyond the most superficial, paper-thin facade.

[prophet-of-chaos]

THE TESTAMENTS

> HISTORY

( There is graphic content beyond, detailing death and violence. Such is the nature of life in this universe. A censored TL;DR has been included at the beginning. ) A MOMENT IN TIME Nyx was born as one of twins to the Kishi clan after a barren period without children. Given the name Sayomi and her twin brother Yoruko, they were both promised in service to their patron deity Cosmos as thanks for blessing the clan with twins. 

Nyx disliked the life of a young acolyte because she frequently received horrible visions while meditating in contact with Cosmos. Instead, she indulged in the travellers that frequently visited Asmodia to trade, seeking stories and knowledge from them. 

A historian she befriended from one of the crews helped her to trace back some of her clan’s history to a time where they were proud warriors and served a different deity. One of the temple sites he showed her pictures of was the same as one she had seen in her visions. Intrigued by this, Nyx sought out said god, known only as Chaos. They received her inquiries with vigour, indulging all her questions and accepting her as a servant on the following conditions: she would endeavour to restore their power and notoriety in the galaxy; she would become a vessel for balancing the universe in their favour and meting out their justice; and she would be devout to Chaos’ teachings, all in return for great powers. 

Spurred by promises from this being and a growing distrust of her clan’s true motives for her life, Nyx escaped with the historian’s crew and smuggled herself out into the universe. She forsook the name Sayomi, and adopted the mantle Nyx, given to her by Chaos. She travelled with this crew for a time, devoting herself to the teachings of Chaos and creating simple wares for the crew to sell as a way of giving back to the ship.  The historian and several other members of the crew died in a tragic oversight while they were exploring a historic site. Seeking a powerful relic of Chaos, they ran into scalpers looking to strip the ruins for valuables. The ensuing tussle claimed the lives of her closest companions, and their bloodshed awakened the weapon dormant within the ruins — Celeste, a cursed war-hammer and battle axe with a fragment of Chaos’ power living inside. Though the scalpers escaped, Nyx felt responsible for the outcome, and promised to take up the historian’s work and mantle to honour all he had done for her. 

She also took up bounty hunting, to both empower herself and hunt down the crooks that murdered her crew. After making good on her promise to avenge them, she continued to pursue the bounty hunting pathway, eventually rising to the top of the ranks and dominating Inner Eye as the Top Hunter for 13 years. 

Nyx retired 4 years ago to allow time for her historic curation and preservation interests, but remained supportive of Delilah Leach who followed to take the title. 

More recently, she made contact with her twin brother after hearing the Kishi clan had been purged from their planet due to an crash and an environmental disaster. She didn’t realise he was infected with a Carnasite, and when her guard was down, became infected with a particularly vicious strain of the parasite through a bite from Yoruko. Regrettably, she ended up killing him and retreating to cope with the incoming effects of the infection.

Chaos instructed her to seek refuge in one of His temple chambers, immersed in His power to give her the best chance of surviving the invader’s changes. She disappeared during this period for years, before being recovered along with Celeste from a mysterious temple buried under the shifting sands of Ha’tut in a portal guarded by a Voledan Sandworm. 

She now serves as an assistant leader and point of guidance for the Inner Eye faction, under Motus’ leadership.

THE BIRTH OF A SPECIES The Kishi clan arrived on Asmodia a millennia ago, after their ancestral species the Keph’rah escaped a war-torn homeland and journeyed out into the galaxy. 

The Keph’rah were birthed from the pressures of warring aliens and a hostile landscape, the break-down of these species developed a novel hybrid. From those too weak to be warriors and too timid to be leaders came a new nocturnal species seeking a new home. 

They were guided into the stars by a galactic force known only as Chaos. They became devout to Chaos, who gifted them preternatural magical abilities in exchange for all-consuming worship. The Keph'rah travelled extensively, scattering about the stars. Some splintered off along the way, settling new planets they never left. Others reached out to new deities, seeking new pathways. Fewer still remained true to the path of a follower, building monuments and beautiful temples across the galaxy until they simply... vanished, along with most of the evidence they ever existed, over a thousand years ago. The entirety of this erasure baffled galactic historians, and became a point for much research for those interested in such affairs.

One of the surviving splinters became the Kishi, settling on Asmodia under the instruction of a gentle guiding force they came to know as Cosmos. They presented themselves to the young Keph’rah as a maternal, warm deity, kinder and more forgiving than Chaos had ever been. Cosmos promised that the Keph’rah would find peace and safety on Asmodia, that she would not demand such intense sacrifice from her followers, and that those under her care would only prosper. As proof of this offer, Cosmos instructed them where was safest to settle, what to consume, sent the most perceptive of them forewarning visions of terrible weather or animal threats, so they could best prosper in their new home. 

What they didn’t realise was the more control they allowed this deity, the more Cosmos quietly shaped them as a species. The closest and most devout began to take on mystic qualities and prophetic dreams, driving them further from Chaos. They lost much of their magical ability, but in exchange, an awakened few developing blinded eyes in their palms. These always looked skyward to their Goddess and saviour, Cosmos, receiving visions and dreams to further aid the clan. Fewer and fewer males were born into the clan, their history of strength and warrior leadership dwindling, despite being what had carried them thus far into the galaxy. Most of the clan found they didn’t mind these changes once they became aware, giving themselves a new name to distance themselves further from the ones they had left behind. And thus, the Kishi became devoted servants to the Supreme Mother, Cosmos.

THE ADVENT OF A PROPHET

Nyx was born thousands of years after the Keph’rah’s first settlement, when their origins had become folklore and little but a buried part of the Kishi’s history. It was an unspoken taboo to dwell on the past, many eager to please their Goddess’ to continue receiving blessings of future-sight.  Nyx’s birth signalled the dawn of great peace for the Kishi clan. She was born as one of twins, after several barren years for the clan. Despite a healthy small population, plenty of resources, and a slowly growing territory, the Kishi clan had no children for many years. She represented the answer to the Kishi’s prayers and the future of their clan. She was called Sayomi, a night-gifted beauty from the stars, and her brother Yoruko, a child of darkness and starlight. 

True to the system of their matriarchal clan, Sayomi had been promised to Cosmos when she was born as thanks for heeding the clan’s prayers. Her life had been mapped for her, projecting devoted service in the name of Cosmos. Many would be privileged to take on the duties of a priestess in the clan, as few were gifted with foresight and a close connection to the Goddess’ visions. 

This life never seemed to suit Sayomi, though she had been born for its purpose. Whenever she received her training, she would complain of terrible visions and dreadful nightmares, unbefitting for such a kind goddess’ powers. She would see foreign places crumbling, bloodshed, children screaming. Blood splattered on the stones of a temple floor. A mother with babe ripped from her arms. A warrior falling on his sword. A priest being incinerated in a great wall of flames. Rapture. 

The visions were always extremely vivid and detailed. She displayed a strong aptitude for the future-sight aspect of her training and receiving visions, but hated using it because it brought her such distress. The clan thought she was lying to shirk her divine duties, and ignored her complaints.

Cosmos was kind. Cosmos was benevolent. Cosmos would not show a child such terrible things. Sayomi simply had an overactive imagination.

This disbelief made her despise her service, and she avoided it at all costs.

She was a restless, rambunctious, daring, and most of all, curious child. Though she remained a polite student, she was an unwilling acolyte, much preferring to tag along with the foraging parties and her brother, who gathered food for the clan. She loved the thrill of finding old settlements scattered about the planet, hints of their ancestors embedded in the trunks of towering mushrooms and gentle rivers weaved by ancient hands to find water for their clan. She felt as though some of the ancient carvings might hold the key to unlocking her visions and explaining some of the things she saw. Yoruko was also the opposite of what he was born to be. He was timid, and much preferred to hide behind his sister’s skirts. He’d offer to hold her gathered food rather than pick it himself, scared of even a bug’s pin-prick bite or an animal rustling in the undergrowth. A far cry from the bold and efficient gatherer spot he was supposed to fulfil, the two of them became insular. Yoruko preferred his twin’s company, and Sayomi preferred to have none at all. The clan viewed them as an odd pair, murmurings that they might even be cursed with chaotic energy... but they persisted. Everybody found their place in the clan eventually. There was no space for those who didn’t.

DAWN OF A NEW FUTURE

Situated on the edge of a trade route, Asmodia saw regular traffic from traders looking stock up on exotic and rare native wares from their resource-rich planet. Though they were a private and secretive species for the most part, they did enjoy their trading. The technology and news from the surrounding galaxy these travellers brought was welcome, both as part curiousity and part opportunity to spread the teachings of their Goddess Cosmos. The Kishi had amicable relations with their visitors, and even gained a host of regular traders who would come with larger shipments in exchange for a prepared selection of teas and jewellery.  Contrary to the rest of her peers, Sayomi thrived on these mysterious travellers. As a youngling, she would make regular efforts to sneak away from her elders to have extra time with visitors, even if that went as far as clambering into their ships as a temporary (and terribly obvious) stowaway. The traders humoured her, for they were as curious about the secretive Kishi people as she was about the wider universe. She tried her best to learn Galactic Common, trading pictures drawn with berry dye and charcoal at first, until she could understand more of their stories. They told her of the galaxy, of the people they traded with, the history of the wares they bartered. In return, she showed them the buried parts of the jungle on Asmodia, pieces of their history and their first settlements. She also shared what trees to dig under to find the rare luminescent stones, and what beautiful fruits were safe to pick for vibrant dyes. Some of the traders were just eager to make the best deal and be on their way, and told her useless fibs in exchange for her information and items. One regular crew took quite the liking to her though. There was a young historian aboard who was just as fascinated by the history of her planet and people as she was. She spent long hours with him, tracing the history of her clan to their original ancestors in the Keph’rah, and the powers that had guided them to their salvation.

In particular, he showed her a photo of an ancient temple he had visited, and she realised — though she had never been there, she knew that place. She had seen it in her visions, time and time again. Intrigued, she asked him to bring her more information about the temple and the being they had worshipped there. SECRETS OF AN ANCIENT PEOPLE

Thrilled by the chance to finally explain herself, she brought up her revelation to the Elders of the clan. She wasn't mad, nor cursed — she was seeing visions! True visions, of places that existed, and people in the past!

But they swore her to secrecy.

The people she had spoke of worshipped the wrong God, and were long gone. Irrelevant. Dangerous. She was never to speak of the past again; she was to abandon these foolish pursuits, and focus on the fitting. Cosmos only ever showed visions of the future. To be viewing the past was wrong, and clearly these travellers had put thoughts in her head. Sacrilegious thoughts. The Elders began to restrict the number of travellers allowed near the settlement, and further restrict her access to them.

Wounded and outraged, it began to occur to Sayomi just how much of their past had been kept from her during her studies. The Elders had known about their heritage, and yet had always denied her questions! If their people had such a proud spacefaring history with so many great warriors that had brought them here, why were they actively trying to bury it? Why did they destroy the relics of their first settlements, and shun even play-fighting amongst the children? 

She began to distrust the Cosmic deity. Tasked with many long hours of meditation daily to become closer to Cosmos, Sayomi started to hate the practice, the manicured lifestyle, every effort she made in service to Cosmos. 

Instead, she spent her time of mandatory meditation casting her mind out, further into the galaxy, seeking connections from other powers. On some days she would disappear altogether, running away from the clan and wandering for days in a trance-like state. If there was one controlling and all-powerful being, surely there were others who would be more compassionate to her lust for knowledge. It was half curiousity, half angry defiance, with little care for what repercussion may come her way from those she made contact with. Her life was so orchestrated, every disruption and threat removed from her as though she were a perpetual child.  She never truly expected an answer.

THE UNIVERSE LISTENS TO THOSE WHO CRY

A voice responded to Sayomi’s dreaming, one both familiar and unfamiliar to her. She knew she had never heard them in her lifetime, but had the distinct feeling that many before her had been close to this being. They introduced themselves as Chaos, and welcomed her back to the fold as a true child of theirs. 

They were a being of great power who dwelled in the past, but whose influence had dwindled over time as their followers had been struck by misfortune. She connected to His qualities of balance, justice and clairvoyance. A secret part of her supposed Chaos had been the one sending her visions of the past, all this time. 

When Chaos spoke to her, it felt like she had come home again. They welcomed her inquiries, embracing the mind that had travelled far from her body and allowing it to stay in their company. Time stretched out endlessly, though mere minutes had passed in her body. Every time she sought them out, she learned a little more, yearned for their power and their influence to free her from the mindless existence as a priestess in training. She ached for the literal chaos they promised, to reclaim their warrior history and connect to the past that had been so desperately kept from her. 

And so, Chaos promised her everything she wished for. The power to change her destiny. The power to reclaim her past. The power to harness the universe and stoke the wildfire of her heart, that need to explore. 

In exchange, she would become His Prophet.

They would accept her as a servant on the following conditions: she would endeavour to restore their power and notoriety in the galaxy; she would become a vessel for balancing the universe in their favour; she would mete out their justice accordingly; and she would be devout to Chaos’ teachings. She agreed, gladly. She would abandon the new way and return to the old. She would no longer be Sayomi — instead, she would become Nyx, the name offered to her by Chaos to claim her. By the time she had returned to her body, the pact had been made. 

ESCAPE FROM ASMODIA

The change was almost immediate when she returned. The eyes on her palms awakened and blazed with divine purple fire, the first of her gifts. Her eyes took on an unnatural, violet hue, and though she did not realise it at the time, it was at that moment that Cosmos had forsaken her and denied her the ability of future-sight. 

The clan was horrified, believing her cursed, and she fled without time to even bid Yoruko farewell. 

Thankfully, the Historian’s crew had not yet departed, and she managed to convince them to allow her on board. In exchange for her skills as a seamstress that she had learned in training, she would be allowed to board if they could sell her creations. She agreed, thankful that they would not need to return to Asmodia for such wares soon, and left with them into the universe beyond. 

THE GALAXY BELONGS TO CHAOS

Life aboard the Trader’s ship was not what she had expected, but she loved every moment of it. She threw herself whole-heartedly into the physical work of maintaining the old cargo clunker, spending every dreaming moment with Chaos. They slowly made other powers available to her, her most beloved one being Clairvoyance. She tested it on every item they collected for trade in the ship, training her connection to Chaos and her use of His divine abilities. 

Her bargain with the Captain (with the aid of the historian) had been for every successful batch of fabrics they made, they would seek out an ancient site she had been shown in a vision by Chaos. There would surely be relics there she would get permission to trade, and they could restore a part of the site to reinvigorate Chaos’ reach in the galaxy. 

This worked peacefully, for a time. She became hardy and capable, studying common languages so she could speak freely, without a translator and reading with the Historian. They restored several sites across the galaxy in Chaos’ name and prospered. She remembers this part of her life fondly and full of wonder. 

Like most reveries however, this one did not last. 

BECOME ONE WITH THE STARS, MY DEAR FRIENDS

Chaos gave her a vision of a powerful relic which had once consumed a part of His physical vessel and stored a great deal of power. It had many names over the millennia it had existed, but once Nyx had it, it would be hers to name and bear. It was a weapon fitting of a proud warriors’ history, and had been wielded by some of her ancestors many years ago. 

When they arrived at the site, it seemed just as she had seen in her ancient visions, only aged by the weather and scratched at by scavengers. Some lesser carvings had been stolen from the walls, gems picks out of statues’ eyes, but the innermost chambers remained intact. Following the instruction of her deity, Nyx guided her small crew of the Historian, the Engineer, the Captain and the Surveyor into the ruins, leaving a skeleton crew and the Medic back on their waiting ship. 

Absorbed in their explorations, they had not noticed a small band of scalpers had followed them into the ruins, catching wind of their conquests on nearby planets and looking to snag a few spoils for themselves. 

Inside the temple, Nyx found the dormant hammer she would come to call Celeste, the Reaver of Stars. It slumbered, unwitting in its new owners hands, much too heavy for her and unwieldy. She did not fret — there would be time to learn how to best use it later. She had not expected to wish for those lessons so soon.

As they turned to leave, they were ambushed by a nasty group of grave-diggers. Several bandits and a mutant hound, they had not come to bargain. This inner chamber had remained a mystery for so long to many bands who wished to claim its contents. They would do anything, anything, to take those items for themselves. Fatally inexperienced and unequipped for such an encounter, the Traders crew left with one survivor that day: Nyx. 

The Surveyor had been shot first, the Engineer set upon by knives. The Surveyor was caught trying to find cover to set explosives, and the Captain had bravely defended them until the hound had stripped every last one of the tentacles from his face. 

Nyx froze in the face of violence, the scene she had seen so many times in her nightmares. Those screams, that blood — it was the vision of her friend’s deaths, a final resounding gift from Cosmos. She had always thought it was a view of the past, but she had seen these deaths many times before. 

The Historian, ever the bookish man, had bravely pulled his gun on the bandits and stood in Nyx’s way, though he bled from his side and limped to her defense. They were terribly outnumbered now... and it was his blood that awakened Celeste. 

The hammer split at the scenes, pulsing with sinew and loosing a terrible, anguished scream as it awakened to the taste of innocent blood. 

It was a terrible, bloody dance that followed, Nyx barely conscious in her rage. Chaos took the reigns at some point, allowing her to abound in the reckless, divine chaos of the moment. She did not wield Celeste with experience, only blind grief and terror. It was enough to smite a few and send the others scrambling with a small handful of gems from the chamber. Nyx was too exhausted to pursue, still detached from her body as Chaos aided her, stumbling back to the ship. There had been no survivors, confirmed by the Medic. 

The shock of the loss left her reeling. Truthfully, Nyx never quite recovered from that fateful day and the loss of the crew, especially not the Historian and the Captain who represented so much of her freedom and journey thus far. She felt terribly responsible for leading them there and putting them in the temple that day. Chaos urged her to seek balance... These feelings were as a result of an unfair loss that had left the ‘scales’ unbalanced. She should press onwards and seek revenge, to level the scales of justice in His favour again.  

She gladly took this explanation as motivation, seeking some kind of direction after she was left drifting, listless following the loss. In an effort to memorialise her fallen crew, she took up the Historian’s mantle, continuing his research across the galaxy. As for the lives of the others... She turned to bounty hunting. She was sure to get her revenge that way.

THE TURN OF AN AGE — BALANCE RESTORED

Full of sorrow and remorse, Nyx left the fractured Trader’s crew. She had expressed her desire for revenge, and hoping to redirect her, the Medic had suggested she should try ‘Fortune’. Armed with her new weapon and a burning desire to never be helpless again, Nyx grew her strength day by day and conquered each power Chaos allowed her. She hunted, small things at first, testing her strength... and then tracked down every single remnant of that scalping crew with fervent determination that surprised even herself. 

She exacted bloody revenge on every single one that had caused her grief and caused pain to her true family. The carnage delighted Chaos, who spurred her onwards. Her hunts became bigger, fostering a connection with Celeste and developing her unique fighting style to help her climb the ranks. She used her talents, those inherited from her clan and those gifted to her by Chaos, to become a fearsome hunter in the upper echelons of Fortune. Her strength belied her stature, a moonlit priestess who left curses and ashes in her wake.

For 13 years, she reigned as the Top Hunter for Inner Eye, renowned for completely reshaping battlefields to her whim, smiting the worst of her targets with inextinguishable purple flames and leaving those ‘live’ targets with a death sentence, branded into their skin. Death would come for them all, and Chaos would claim those who denied Him. 

To her faction, she remained the polite mentor the Captain had taught her how to be, and the willing student the Historian had instilled in her. She guided those lost to the pathway of Chaos, and restored the fading history of those whose voices had been lost to time. 

EVENING COMES FOR ALL OF US

An upcoming hunter in the ranks caught her eye — a Delilah Leach, as tenacious as she was capable. The history of each of her members was important to her, of course, but it never overshadowed the individual. She felt herself becoming restless again, seeking the fulfilment of her historical work over the endless hunting. She would continue to hunt, but would simply rescind the mantle to somebody new, to shift the balance to new, promising power so she could continue to spread the word of Chaos. 

She maintained a good relationship with Delilah, supporting the new hunter as she distanced herself from hunting for a time. She dropped off the radar for a time, and rumour had it she made contact with her twin brother Yoruko after he made contact with her...

The truth of the rumour was that the Kishi clan had been hit with terrible disaster — first an environmental disaster after a trading ship had crashed carrying hazardous goods, starving most of the population into oblivion. Next, the planet they had fled to for salvation had been infested with a terrible, insatiable parasite. 

When he reached out, he still had clarity of mind and control of his body. By the time she met with him, he had become nigh rabid, barely managing to keep his mind intact long enough to speak to her. In a moment of weakness, she embraced him, and their proximity overwhelmed his waning control. Yoruko bit her with a festering bite, a pain unlike any she had experienced before in her time hunting. Her hands blazed reflexively, Chaos igniting them in an effort to protect his prophet. She was too anguished to douse the flames, howling as she struggled with her own pain and watched her brother burn. 

Nyx would come to learn later what kind of mercy she had given him, instead of allowing him to starve as a Carnasite vessel. At the immediate moment, she could barely manage with the changes that began to swiftly take hold of her, the strain she had been infected with particularly savage. Chaos strained their power to transport her to the nearest temple location, a buried portal on Ha’tut in the badlands outside Zavora. Protected by a great Voledan Sandworm, in a plain that continuously shifted, they believed she would be safe as she He worked on the worst of the parasite’s effects. 

Inside the chamber, Chaos laid Nyx to rest in the embrace of His power. Weaved into a cocoon by the raging Carnasite, Nyx slumbered for the next few years. Considered dead to most, missing to others, Fortune would occasionally get sporadic signals from the tracking tag on Celeste, signal bleeding through the magic barrier that protected the temple chamber. 

She would have continued to lie dormant there, if an expedition from Inner Eye had not happened upon the temple, solved the puzzles within, and awoken the Prophet of Chaos.

THE PROPHET RETURNS

The time resting served her well — once awakened, though weak, Nyx had completely synergised with the Carnasite. The original strength of the host and the arcane powers of Chaos fed into the maturation of the parasite, giving it strangely aware qualities. Curiously, it seems to have developed speech... using her brother’s voice. It carries a part of him too, and though she deeply regrets the circumstances that led to his death, she still bears the connection through his untimely gift.  

Nyx now resides back at Fortune, having taken up the Assistant Leadership position she was offered by Motus before she disappeared. 

[rebeccabrunk]

As a leader, your authenticity matters - especially to your queer employees

Leadership is a powerful influence in organizational culture. As leaders, our role is crucial to creating workplaces that are inclusive, safe and set our people up for success.

Every business has a ‘culture’.

What is a business's culture? Culture is an ambiguous word, and we're starting to hear it more frequently in and about our workplaces. Many organizations include blurbs about their company culture right on their websites, but what is it really?

Culture is co-created by the people in the organization. It's the shared values, attitudes and beliefs that we share, and these ideas influence the way things are "around here" or how they get done. Casual Friday is a great example - do you love it or hate it? That says something about your values, and if your company loves casual Friday, it tells you something about theirs.

Businesses can have cultures that focus on particular goals, such as innovation, inclusion or safety. They can have aggressive cultures, that worship competition and cutthroat negotiations, and they can embrace diversity. Similarly, if harassment, discrimination or bullying goes unnoticed or unaddressed, these issues can become part of company culture too.  

Company culture is especially important for queer employees.

The micro-cultures of our businesses, organizations and universities can often unintentionally recreate the  larger cultures they belong to - so we can often see issues of discrimination and disadvantage that happen in larger society happening in our businesses too. Queer employees are particularly vulnerable to harassment, discrimination and abuse at work because often our larger culture is slow to react to these types of abuse in life, and this vulnerability can compound with issues regarding race or gender. This makes queer women of color particularly vulnerable to violence, especially if they are trans.

Did you know, research shows that 90% of queer people experience anxiety and stress when it comes to work? This ranges from coming out stress, to being misgendered, to harassment and lack of accessibility to safe bathrooms (1). It's not surprising when you consider the range of social stigma and discrimination that make navigating life difficult for queer people - but it does make it our responsibility as leaders to respond.

And whether we're front line managers, executive board members or company CEO's, our employees learn what rules matter and which rules can be disregarded through observing us. We transfer information on our values and attitudes towards others, ourselves and the company to our staff in three major ways:

Where do we allocate time and resources? We either have enough time or money, and what we do with both says plenty about our organizational values. Leaders that talk frequently about diversity without any follow through will struggle to get employees on board with inclusion initiatives. Funding mentorship programs, being transparent with pay discrepancies and creating spaces and avenues for people to return back to work or get re-skilled are all good ways to put our money where our mouth is (2).

What do we tolerate? Leaders who tolerate harassment, discrimination or bullying only create breeding grounds for these unacceptable behaviors in their workplace (3). Stamp it out when it's brought to you, don't wait for it to make your workplace sick.  

We influence our staff through role modeling (4). Employees interpret what's actually important by paying attention to what matters to us. When we behave inclusively, when we make an effort to promote initiatives around equality, and when we encourage diversity, employees see where we put our effort and understand that those actions and behaviors are valued by the company.

While it may be convenient, the old phrase "do as I say, not as I do" is often ineffective - therefore, being an authentic leader might be the best thing you can do for your company's culture.

Belonging to a tribe is an innate human need, and it is a survival skill that has kept us alive through most of human history. It's the feeling that we are part of a group. There is a theory in scholarly literature called optimal distinctiveness theory (5), which explains this need with a caveat - that we also need to be appreciated for uniqueness within that group. Every employee has an optimal level where they feel as though they belong to a group that still appreciates them for their uniqueness outside of the group identity.

If people are too insular in the group, they can lose their sense of identity and this can sometimes cause friction. If a person is too unique, they can be excluded from the group and their sense of belonging can suffer. This can be the case with queer employees who belong to organizations that still struggle with discrimination, incivility and micro-aggressions.  

So be an example to your employees, and show them that celebrating difference is part of your company culture. Attending diversity trainings, questioning hiring or promotion decisions when bias, and don't be afraid to let your employees get to know the real you. If you want a company culture that values diversity and inclusion, encourage belonging and authenticity in your team by (6):

Share decision-making, and ask for your employees opinions. Show them their individual voices matter.

Demonstrate fair treatment to everyone, be accessible to all your employees when they need you.

Don't tolerate discriminatory behavior, even if its from your partners or friends.

Practice having the courage to be transparent and authentic about who you are. Practice valuing your own uniqueness, and show how we're all different and that it is an advantage.

Be authentic to yourself when you show up for work so you can better show up for your queer members of staff.

----------------------------------------

Further reading: 1) Irwin, J. (2002). Discrimination Against Gay Men, Lesbians, and Transgender People Working in Education. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 14(2), 65–77. 2) Michàl E. Mor Barak, The Inclusive Workplace: An Ecosystems Approach to Diversity Management, Social Work, Volume 45, Issue 4, July 2000, Pages 339–353 3) Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191. 4) DeSouza, E. R. (2011). Frequency rates and correlates of contrapower harassment in higher education. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26(1), 158–188. 5) Brewer, M. B. (1993). Social identity, distinctiveness, and in-group homogeneity. Social Cognition, 11(1), 150–164. 6) Brunk, R. (2018). A statistical analysis of inclusive leadership and its benefits to organizational climate and perceptions of inclusion. University of Leeds.

[marymosley]

Minneapolis Leader: Fear About Dismantling The Police Department Is Just Another Example Of Privilege

Today we discussed the vow of the majority of the Minneapolis City Council to “dismantle” the police department as well as some historical comparisons to such radical actions.  That effort was led in part by Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender who appeared today on CNN.  When CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked about those who are concerned about their personal safety, Bender said that such concerns “comes from a place of privilege” and that people are now experiencing the reality of life for African Americans.  While not explored further by CNN, there is at least a possibility that the fear of a home intruder is not “coming from a place of privilege” but a place of self-preservation.

Camerota asked “Do you understand that the word, dismantle, or police-free also makes some people nervous, for instance? What if in the middle of [the] night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?”  Bender’s response was:

“I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege. Because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.”

Bender went on to detail how the police department could be removed from a variety of incidents from mental health calls, for some domestic violence calls, for health-related issues.”  She did not address the primary question and Camerota did not press her to answer.  There are some very good ideas for reform, including the possible use of non-police resources.  However, none of that involves “dismantling” the department as opposed to addressing such insular reforms for reform as the Mayor has suggested.

Bender attended the same rally where Mayor Jacob Frey was booed for not agreeing to dismantle the police.  The organizers and supporters chanted “no more cops.”

Bender however has been fueling such calls at the rally and on social media.

Lisa Bender@lisabendermpls

Yes. We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety. https://twitter.com/jeremiah4north/status/1268598536234508288 …

Jeremiah Ellison@jeremiah4north

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together.

We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.

It’s really past due. https://twitter.com/BenjaminPDixon/status/1268538772532219909 …

30.4K

4:44 PM – Jun 4, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Bender notably did not respond when asked point bank whether she wanted to get rid of the the police: “So what are you trying to do?” Are you hoping by dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department that you will be getting rid of the police department?”

Bender responded: “I think in Minneapolis, watching George Floyd’s death, and the four — the actions of the four police officers that were involved has been a huge wake-up call for so many in Minneapolis to see what many already knew, which is that our police department is not keeping every member of our community safe.”

The city council now appears to have a veto proof majority to dismantle the police department. Other jurisdictions are considering similar moves and Los Angeles just announced a major cut in funding.  Again, the silence of other politicians is perfectly deafening as they try to avoid any public criticism or conflict with the most radical elements of this movement.  

What I find odd is that the fear of being without police is a form of privilege but it is still viewed by Bender as somehow beneficial because it makes non-African Americans experience fear.  Wouldn’t it be better (indeed a form of leadership) to seek to remove the fear from the African-American community rather than making the fear universal?  It is likely solving the greater threat of fire in one community by telling another community to go without fire protection.  You achieve equity but hardly the equity that you would want. That however was not part of this interview.

There is also no idea what is meant by a “transformative new model of public safety.” That might be a useful detail to work out before vowing to dismantle the police department. People just may need police rather than platitudes before Bender “imagines” her  new “vision.”

What is left is uncontested jargon where any questions or doubts are dismissed as admissions of privilege.

  Minneapolis Leader: Fear About Dismantling The Police Department Is Just Another Example Of Privilege published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

[illionoisprelawland-blog]

Will America Live to See Its Future? A Mental Health and Gun Violence Approach in 2020

By Olivia Reeves, University of Chicago Class of 2021

May 14, 2019

In 2017, 39,773 people in the United States lost their lives to gun violence. This approximates to 12 deaths per 100,000 people, around 8 of which were suicides. [1] As of April 30, 2019, 148 people have been killed and 414 have been injured by guns in mass shootings alone, not counting suicides or accidental gun violence nor isolated homicides. [2] The numbers speak for themselves: Americans are dying at alarming rates by their own hands and by the hands of others with firearms as a key weapon of choice. Regardless of individual opinion on the Second Amendment or the right to defend one’s home or property, reformed gun violence prevention methods and mental health advocacy are a nonpartisan affair now, given that everyone is at risk when one person is at risk.

On November 23, 2020, the United States will elect a president for the next four years, an undoubtedly vitriolic campaign trail ahead of us, but as a nation of voters we must sift through the political bile to find the facts and the policies that have the potential to save or sentence a generation of Americans vulnerable to harm. At present, dozens of Democrat politicians have declared their candidacy to oppose incumbent Donald Trump, with Joe Biden taking a sharp lead in the public support in opinion polls this week. [3] As the newly appointed frontrunner, Biden will most certainly be tasked with convincing us that hehas America’s future at heart, specifically when it comes to the already deeply controversial topics of mental health and gun policy, especially in the delicate and dangerous overlap of these subjects. Americans of all backgrounds and all party affiliations carry passionate opinions on what lawmakers should do next to cut down on gun violence, but it will take a true feat to meet as many of these demands as possible to secure the presidency in 2020.

The inclusion of restrictive policies that screen individuals with a history of mental illness or a criminal record have long been the subject of partisan debate, but in a more modern and researched list, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) denotes several traits that indicate a potential susceptibility to violence rather than suggesting all those with a history of mental illness are at risk of becoming violent.[4] These traits include substance abuse, a history of violent behavior, untreated psychosis, or being a young male. Many of these traits reflect growing trends in school shootings in particular, the most notable being young males as perpetuators. This is not to suggest that we must regard all young men or recovering substance addicts with suspicion, but rather that these are the groups that should be receiving special concern and care before purchasing a firearm in order to protect both these individuals and those around them from any potential danger factors. NAMI suggests policies for mental health such as intervention, treatment options, family support, and methods for suffering individuals to be proactively helped. Such intervention and access can also support those considering suicide, given that it is the tenth highest cause of death currently.[5] If we as Americans have access to guns, we also have a duty to protect the hurting and vulnerable among us as a responsibility that goes with the freedom of firearm ownership.

In light of the last decade of ever frequent shootings, policymakers have also gone head to head over gun control legislation, down to the definition of the phrase “gun control” itself. The National Rifle Association (NRA) refutes gun control across the board, citing primarily the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and also that those unsafe to own firearms will obtain them through illicit channels such as the black market or theft.[6] In 2017, legislation banning semiautomatic weapons, the echo of a policy that expired in 2004, was rejected in the senate, marking a win for the NRA and its supporters, one of whom is a vocal President Trump, who will therefore likely give Biden an uphill battle for the support of the gun lobbies and NRA supporters. There are currently restrictions on who can own a gun without a license to do so (license carriers being law enforcement officials, for example), including those under eighteen, those with criminal records, those with mental illness impeding safety, and dishonorably discharged members of the armed forces.

Joe Biden has a long record with gun legislation that appeared to sway left over time. In 1986 he supported the Firearm Owners Protection Act, legislation that differentiated legal and illegal firearm possession. Since then, however, his record reverses starkly, including his authorship support of the Brady Bill and his primary role in the Obama-era Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. [7] In 2018, following student protests in the wake of the Parkland, Florida shooting, Biden commented, “What's happened here is the nation as a whole has decided it can no longer, in my view, continue to turn a blind eye to the prostitution of the Second Amendment here and can no longer turn a blind eye to the enormous damage being done not just in our schools but on our streets.” [8]A gun-owner himself, Biden has advocated against AR-15s and other “military-style weapons,” but defends the right to own firearms regardless. [9]

As such, his policies likely won’t be to revoke the Second Amendment, but rather reform how it is approached in the modern world. This will appease the 57% of Americans pulling for stricter gun laws, but may alienate the 46% of Americans who don’t believe stricter gun laws will curb mass shootings.[10] By restricting anything at all, Biden has the left of center anti-gun advocates on board, including those involved in organizations such as Never Again MSD and Everytown for Gun Safety, but will need to make a harder appeal to the centrists and contemplative gun owners who are open to his ideas but unconvinced of their efficacy. Without a surefire plan, it will be harder to convince the electorate that change is possible after so many years of all talk and no action.

In regards to mental health provisions, Biden is a staunch supporter, by means of the Biden Foundation, the advocacy organization he and wife Dr. Jill Biden founded. At the World Mental Health Day opening speech in 2018, he emphasized, “We need to ensure they have access to healthcare providers in rural areas or [in places with] few medical facilities, and we need to ensure that insurance policies include mental health. We have to make it clear to all people that there is no stigma in seeking help for a mental health issue.” [11] As such, it seems that Biden’s positions on both gun violence and mental health are solidly ingrained from a lifetime of legislation. As a possible president, he has the drive and motivation to make mental health access more available, and as he notes in the above quote, this access is not limited to those with expensive health insurance policies in major cities. This could go a long way with the 59% of voters who have limited to no trust in Trump’s healthcare plans, which include the abolishing of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. [12] The ACA, colloquially titled Obamacare, expanded mental healthcare insurance options, including addiction treatment, which Biden’s recent stances align with. [13]

This pro-mental healthcare stance resonates both with the left and the right to some degrees in the context of gun violence prevention. The NRA has been advocating for a mental-health approach to violence reduction rather than a gun control philosophy, and therefore would likely heavily support mental health reform in the context of gun violence prevention, on the grounds that mental health reform keeps guns out of the hands of those unsafe to possess them. [6]This would need to occur in a somewhat insular plane, however, given that the right and the NRA are opposed to gun control or reduction policies that would theoretically go hand in hand with mental healthcare. In contrast, the left has been advocating for mental health resources for years, with middling success. More airtime and resources to the mental healthcare sector would undoubtedly be warmly received, but the reception may cool a tad when coupled with the clause of keeping guns in the hands of Americans as well. The advocacy of mental health policy alongside gun check narratives also promotes the narrative rejected by NAMI, which cultivates the idea that all mental illness is at fault for violence rather than just several very distinctive risk groups. In essence, mental health policy is convoluted enough at present, but the additional caveats of gun policy tied in would serve to advance voter support in some factions, and place a damper upon it in others. In order to succeed on this very fine line, Biden needs to go carefully, appealing with the idea of a carefully worded an non-ableist mental health policy that emphasizes safety in gun sales. This captures many of the desires of juxtaposed American groups and would give Biden the best chance at the most votes.

The essential takeaway? Biden is only one contender, and though his voting record and policy commentary have been largely supportive of reforming gun violence issues in America, he’s still a wild card with the possibility to adapt and change within his role as a presidential candidate. The American people must focus not on who they want to win, but on who will do the most good in office, regardless of party lines. Americans are dying every day from the prevalence of unrestricted guns and the lack of mental healthcare combining into a toxic climate where children feel afraid in schools and where the mall, the movie theatre, and the local house of worship are all no longer safe. The issue is not who wins on a partisan fight, or who slings the best comebacks during debates. It is the deeply ingrained system of violence that has taken root within America, and a look at Joe Biden’s likely policy stances show that not every group can come out entirely satisfied. That concept of uncompromising politicism should take a backseat on the left to the right in favor of the real concern: how do we keep our own alive when we have constructed a country where it is so easy for them to die? We cannot afford for our choices to be only “run, hide, fight” any longer.

 _______________________________________________________________

Olivia Reeves is a second year at the University of Chicago studying English with minors in Human Rights and Gender Studies. She plans to attend law school and focus her work in civil rights litigation.

________________________________________________________________

[1]Mervosh, Sarah. “Nearly 40,000 People Died From Guns in U.S. Last Year, Highest in 50 Years.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/us/gun-deaths.html.

[2] Mass Shooting Tracker, 2019, www.massshootingtracker.org/data.

[3] “Election 2020 - 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination.” RealClearPolitics, 2019, www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html.

[4] “NAMI.” NAMI, www.nami.org/Learn-More/Public-Policy/Violence-and-Gun-Reporting-Laws.

[5] “Suicide Statistics.” AFSP, 16 Apr. 2019, afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/.

[6]Nra-Ila. “ILA | Frequently Asked Questions.” NRA, 2018, www.nraila.org/for-the-press/frequently-asked-questions/.

[7] Seitz-Wald, Alex. “Biden Voted with the NRA When the Senate, and the Nation, Were Very Different.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 2019, www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/biden-voted-nra-when-senate-nation-were-very-different-n997311.

[8] Tillett, Emily. “Joe Biden Denounces ‘Prostitution of the Second Amendment.’” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 29 Mar. 2018, www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-denounces-prostitution-of-the-second-amendment/.

[9] Page, Clarence. “In Gun Debate, Some Democrats Are Letting Politics Turn Too Personal.” Chicagotribune.com, 30 Apr. 2019, www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-perspec-page-guns-nra-democrats-kamala-harris-joe-biden-beto-orourke-20190430-story.html.

[10] “Gun Policy Remains Divisive, But Several Proposals Still Draw Bipartisan Support.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 23 Jan. 2019, www.people-press.org/2018/10/18/gun-policy-remains-divisive-but-several-proposals-still-draw-bipartisan-support/.

[11] “Notes from the Road: Commemorating World Mental Health Day in London (Biden Foundation).” The Campaign to Change Direction, 31 Oct. 2018, www.changedirection.org/notes-from-the-road-commemorating-world-mental-health-day-in-london-biden-foundation/.

[12] Shepard, Steven, et al. “Poll: Majority of Voters Don't Trust Trump on Health Care.” POLITICO, 3 Apr. 2019, www.politico.com/story/2019/04/03/poll-majority-trust-trump-health-care-1250889.

[13] Norris, Louise. “How Obamacare Improved Mental Health Coverage.” Healthinsurance.org, 16 Apr. 2019, www.healthinsurance.org/obamacare/how-obamacare-improved-mental-health-coverage/.

Photo Credit: Tim Dobbelaere from Ieper, Belgium

[brood-mother]

hey, i'm super into your 'the sun sets on us' blurb/board on pinterest. can you say more about the story? it looks super interesting

of course, yeah! it’s still in its infancy so i don’t even have definite names for the main characters yet (umm let’s call the them middle sis jara, little bro elan, and big bro amal for purpose of this i guess?). i’ll put it behind a read more because i am going to go IN on this bc i don’t get to talk about it often and i am excited abt it. edit: i definitely got carried away but it felt good to air it out, thank you.

anyway, the basic premise is that in this universe, magic is an inherently destructive force. it is capable of doing fantastic, unbelievable things, but it requires a lot of energy, and typically consumes that energy in the form of life-force. magic users, if they regularly use magic, have a dramatically reduced life-span (even magic users who totally abstain from using magic can expect to live to 60 at the absolute most, a good 20 or so years less than a normal person). magic use blackens and scorches the flesh. magic users are constantly hungry, and run at unnaturally high temperatures because of the perpetual unnatural energy generation in their bodies. however, it is possible to draw that life-force from other people and even the environment around you, and as such in most places seek to eradicate magic with extreme prejudice.

the siblings live in one such country with their father; their mother, a magic user like jara, has already passed away naturally. they live in almost total isolation to protect jara from persecution (although relatives of magic users are also treated abysmally whether they show talents or not), but when war breaks out in the land, conscription is enforced, and every family must provide at least one able bodied adult to join the army. the father immediately volunteers, so as to stop anyone from sniffing around, but shortly thereafter the siblings are forced to flee their home without him or be swallowed up in the violence. 

at first they are comfortably anonymous in a tide of refugees, but eventually it becomes hard to hide. other magic users flushed out by the war are caught, persecuted. people are scared, angry; scapegoatism is rife, and an actual witch-hunt begins. with nowhere to hide and so little experience of the ‘real’ world, the siblings are forced to flee. they run aimlessly for a while until they realise the only place they could ever be safe is a secluded, insular, frozen land far to the north. most southerners only know of it through fearful hearsay and myths, but it is rumoured magic is seen as a boon, and magic users are like gods among mortal men. 

the journey there is treacherous; they must first make it to the northern coast of their own country, cross the sea, and then trek across a great barren wasteland to reach it. on the way, they encounter many obstacles, not least of all a dragon (dragons, while exceedingly rare and quite dangerous, are not devastating beasts in this world; they’re sort of on the same level as a polar bear, maybe, if polar bears could breath fire). while it should be easy enough for them to defeat with jara’s magic - she is naturally inclined to a particularly destructive type of magic known as entropy, which causes poison, decay, unconsciousness, etc -  if they work together, amal panics and freezes, allowing elan to be mauled badly enough that he nearly dies, and has to have his arm amputated, which widens the schism in their already strained relationship.

eventually they reach their destination. they spend several weeks on the outskirts, among common folk with no magic. the land is barren and inhospitable, and the eke a modest existence as farmers, labourers, hunters, etc. while not technically oppressed, non-magic users are almost seen as second-class citizens; they’re used for their superior physical strength and health/longevity and rarely raise above that station, and are often excluded from ‘magic-only’ spaces and the upper echelons of society. magic is essentially a ticket to the aristocracy, regardless of birth. jara uses this to her advantage, and tries to find a space for herself with elan and amal posing as her servants so that they are permitted where other non-magic users aren’t.

it doesn’t work, at least not initially. while she is a magic user, she is still a foreigner in a very deliberately insular country. she is generally looked down upon, mistrusted and scoffed at for being untrained and reluctant to use her magic. she eventually garners enough ire to be challenged but another young woman; they skirmish, and jara manages to defeat her, but only just. this catches the attention of a particularly wealthy and powerful man, for whom the other woman was an apprentice (rather than standard blood inheritance laws, magic-users have apprentices who compete for the right to inherit their wealth, rank, legacy, etc, and apprentices in return contractually bind themselves to their master’s service). he releases her, and instead offers his apprenticeship to jara.

jara accepts immediately. while it is obvious that the competition between apprentices is ruthless, even a failed apprentice is held in good esteem and can live comfortable lives. she sees it as an opportunity to secure a better life for her and her brothers. all is well at first: she finds the magic-users strange and intimidating, with their gold-dipped hands to hide their burnt flesh, elaborate head-dresses meant to represent their magical aura, and clothes of sheer wispy material to prove that they don’t feel the cold, but she enjoys learning and shows great natural talent. she is even surprised to find she actually gets along with her master’s other apprentice, yulia, and they become close friends very quickly.

for a while, things go very well for jara. her talents grow tenfold. she experiences a wealth of new things she’s never tried before. for the first time in her life, she is able to be unapologetically herself. for the first time in her life she is not made to feel like a burden, a liability, or a mistake. for the first time in her life, she is not hungry. she even sees many older magic-users, those living well beyond the expected age in her home country, which gives her hope and confidence.

meanwhile, without jara’s knowledge, things develop differently for the brothers. jara’s master takes a particular interest in amal. he considers amal to be a ‘perfect psychical specimen’, and appears to think very highly of him - for a non-magic user. he wants to train him to be his personal guard and assistant. amal is easily flattered, and eagerly agrees, and is naively unconcerned by the apparent need for secrecy. 

as both a non-magic user, and physically ‘deformed’, elan is largely neglected by everyone - including his own siblings, who are suddenly busy with their own training. he becomes (more) moody and withdrawn, his resentment of amal grown to toxic levels, and only finds solace in the unexpected companion ship of the master’s current bodyguard, tymo, a strange and quiet man with a creeping terminal illness. as they become closer and tentatively explore their feelings for each other, he confides in elan about his master’s horrid mistreatment of him, and the reason his morbid interest in amal: he is obsessed with the idea of “blessing” non-magic users with the gift of magic, but it can only work on those with magic already in their blood - like amal, and like tymo. he’s tried the experiment on dozens of ‘guards’ but their bodies cannot handle the strain, and the few that survive sicken and die as tymo is.

things take a turn for the worse for jara. her studies begin to tread in areas of magic that she doesn’t care to learn, namely how to siphon the life-force of things to lessen the tax of magic-use. at first it is only plants, fruits, even the earth itself. her natural inclination towards entropy means she is exceptionally proficient at it. then they move on to livestock, and finally, her master presents her with a human - a magicless member of the household staff. at first she refuses and the master tries to sooth and flatter her, insisting that even sweet yulia had completed the lesson, and yulia wasn’t nearly as accomplished as she was. jara still refused, and the master becomes enraged at that point - he needs her magic to conduct his experiments, and as his apprentice she all but belongs to him. he threatens to use elan and amal in the next lessons if she fails to comply and, terrified, she does.

she watches the damaged flesh on her hands smooth and heal. she feels stronger than she has in months, the weariness of her magic use washing away, and she realises this is what allows the mages to live as they do. their magnificent buildings, the forever-blooming gardens, even the ability to grow food in such an unforgiving landscape - it’s all beyond the reach of natural magic. they use the non-magic citizens like batteries.

jara realises in that exact moment that both she and her brothers are in grave danger, and the only way she can ensure their safety is to play along. she acts as though she finally realises the true extent and appeal of her power, and that she understands what her master desires of her. as soon as she is away from him, she begins to plan her escape. she turns to yulia, her closest and indeed only friend, for help. she knows the master has forced her to do such horrible things too, and jara wants her to escape with them. she also tells her brothers.

at first amal refuses to believe it until tymo himself explains what his fate was to be. they agree a time and a place to meet so that they might all flee together. however, when the night comes, yulia and tymo are waiting for the siblings but something is off: once they are within sight tymo cries out that it’s an ambush, and that yulia had betrayed them to gain favour with the master. the trio manage to escape, but only just, and tymo is left behind.

they make it to a safe place, but elan cannot forgive himself for leaving tymo behind. he goes back in the hopes that he can free him somehow, and is caught. however, rather than being killed or tortured for the whereabouts of jara and amal, the master offers him a deal. he will give him tymo. he will give him an amazing functional prosthetic arm. he will even use magic to extend tymo’s pitifully short life, like he had his own. 

elan accepts. he provides a location, and his granted his boon, and while the master and yulia go to collect his siblings he is told to wait in the castle with tymo. he doesn’t wait: the information he gave the master was false, and he manages to escape the guards and flee with tymo back to their true hiding place.

the master anticipated this. he put a tracking spell on tymo, and is lead right to their position. in the cold and freezing forest, they fight. it nearly kills her, sapping her strength until her entire body is tortured and scorched from the exertion, but in the end, jara comes through victorious by draining the very life from her master until he crumbles to dust, betraying herself and her morals, but saving her family. 

she then has to make one final agonising choice: does she stay and inherit her master’s vast estate where they can live in comfort in a rotten land, or go back on the run where they can never rest but will always be free? either way, she knows she must fight to protect every single day of her life.

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Made homeless by the state: Britain's assault on women seeking asylum

By Priscilla Dudhia

I've spent the last year speaking with 106 women who've sought asylum in England and Wales about their experiences of being made destitute in the UK. These are women with no statutory financial or housing support and no right to work. Yesterday, Women for Refugee Women, together with our regional partners, published a report on those harrowing findings. It's the largest recent piece of research on the effects of destitution on asylum-seeking women in the UK.

The women who shared their stories came from 29 different countries. A quarter of them were from DR Congo, famously referred to by one senior UN official as "the rape capital of the world". They had all fled various forms of brutal violence from the state or the community.

Seventy-one percent of women said that they had been tortured and around 60% said that they had been raped in their home countries. Others had faced FGM, forced prostitution, trafficking and forced marriage. A third of the women said that they had been targeted because of their gender and almost a quarter because of their political activities. Gay women from countries like Uganda, Cameroon and Nigeria - where homophobic violence is well-documented - were persecuted because of their sexuality.

Many of these women then made dangerous journeys to seek safety. Almost half of those I spoke with told me that they had suffered rape, sexual violence, torture or captivity as they made their way to our shores.

But when these brave women arrived in the UK they were treated with suspicion and hostility. Josephine, who fled DR Congo after being targeted for her political activities, told me: "I was traumatised by this asylum system. I don't think my mental state will ever be the same again."

The Windrush scandal exposed an immigration system that is unjust and broken. But even before then, WRW and our partners - including Women Asylum Seekers Together Manchester, Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group, and Women with Hope in Birmingham - have been seeing hundreds of destitute women over the years. We have heard so many stories from them of the routine disbelief that people seeking refuge are facing under the Hostile Environment. The vast majority of women I spoke with for this research felt that they had not been believed by the Home Office, in a process that demands unrealistically high levels of consistency, coherence and credibility from traumatised individuals.

Women are additionally disadvantaged by an insufficient awareness among some Home Office decision-makers of how gender-based violence, particularly when inflicted by community or family members, falls within the UK's obligation to grant asylum. Mariam, who fled the war in Somalia, during which she was raped multiple times, waited ten years to receive refugee status after the Home Office made an incorrect decision on her initial claim. In the meantime, she became homeless, hungry and suicidal.

Over the years governments on both the left and right have hacked away at basic protections for people seeking asylum, who are banned from working and from claiming mainstream benefits. While their claims are being processed, they must turn to a separate and more restricted system for housing and support - support that equates to £5.39 a day to cover everything from meals, travel to legal and medical appointments, to warm clothes and period pads. But once their claims are rejected, often because they have been unable to attain a fair hearing, many women are left with no support at all.

The women I spoke with, whose claims were refused, feared an on-going risk of persecution if they were to return to their countries of origin. They have therefore remained in the UK in the hope that one day their stories will be believed. Meanwhile, they are forced into a state of indefinite and extreme poverty.

I say 'forced' because it is deliberate. It is a policy created by our government in the hope that pushing vulnerable people with insecure status into desperate and fearful situations will make them leave the UK.

The UK is the world's sixth largest economy and consistently reminds us of its "long and proud tradition of giving sanctuary". But my research revealed the most shocking statistics of harm experienced here by these women. One woman in our network, Saron, said: "It wasn't what happened to me in my country that broke me. It was what I went through here."

Almost all of the women I spoke with were hungry while they were living in the UK. Around half were made street homeless, while others sofa-surfed with strangers or were trapped in abusive relationships, just so they could get a meal and a roof for the night. Given their precarious living situations, many women were raped or suffered sexual violence. In fact, 32 women who were raped or sexually abused in the country of origin told us that they were subjected to rape or sexual violence again when living destitute in the UK.

Evelyn, who was trafficked from west Africa, said: "I was trafficked to the UK by a man who kept me locked up and raped me. When I managed to get away I claimed asylum, but the Home Office didn't believe what had happened to me. I had no accommodation or support for six years. It was so hard for me. I met a man who said that I could stay with him, but he forced me to have sex with him and abused me in other ways. I didn't want to be with him but I had no choice."

Like many other women I spoke with, Evelyn felt unable to turn to the police for protection because she feared that her information would be shared with the Home Office, who would then proceed to detain or deport her. Recent reports show that 60% of police forces have referred victims of crime to the Home Office, proving that these fears are very real.

In light of the cruel and humiliating struggles, it is unsurprising that almost all of the women became depressed when destitute. A third said that they actively tried to kill themselves.

There are no official figures on how many women and men are living destitute. But in 2017 the British Red Cross estimated that at least 15,000 people seeking asylum were destitute in the UK.

Echoing the views of other women who shared their stories with me, Agnes, from the Ivory Coast said: "I have a dream that, one day, everyone who seeks asylum will be treated with dignity."

On 14 February, Women for Refugee Women and our grassroots partners from across England and Wales will launch Sisters Not Strangers – a campaign to end the destitution of asylum-seeking women in the UK. In the current political climate, of increasing insularity and decaying empathy, this is a challenging time to speak up for women who are seeking asylum. But history shows us the potential for real change. I hope that some of you reading will join our movement in support of a fair and humane asylum system, a system that believes women who have fled danger, and gives them the safety that they deserve.

[survival0001-blog]

G.O.T. Preparedness? Active Threat Training to Improve Survival Outcome

New Post has been published on https://outdoorsurvivalqia.com/trending/g-o-t-preparedness-active-threat-training-to-improve-survival-outcome/

G.O.T. Preparedness? Active Threat Training to Improve Survival Outcome

By Kiernan Group Holdings (KGH)

Today “active shooter” is top of mind for Americans – it is a threat that is real, pervasive, and debilitating, leaving countless lives encumbered by uncertainty and fear.

What in the past seemed like an anomalous event that happened somewhere else has become almost commonplace, occurring with increasing frequency and lethality.

These incidents occur where we work, where we learn, where we serve, and where we worship, as we recently witnessed at the in Pittsburgh on an early Saturday morning, where congregants gathered to celebrate life.

(The suspected shooter is in custody after opening fire at the Tree of Life synagogue. Courtesy of ABC News and YouTube. Posted on Oct 27, 2018.)

They can occur even where we go to play as we learned from the 1 October event in Las Vegas, and more recently at the in Thousand Oaks California, filled with college aged young adults.

We know is that on average it takes six-eight minutes for the first responders to arrive, make entry, and contain the threat which is their first priority.

Often, by then, much of the killing has already been done.

How would your staff react in the 8 minutes prior to first responders arrival? Would they know action steps to improve outcome for survival? Woud they have the confidence to take action without hesitation?

What we have come to understand through the experience of conducting hundreds of workshops across the country is that the gap of time prior to first responders arrival – can be best used to take some advantage away from the individual seeking to do harm.

Kiernan Group Holdings (KGH) believes that the best defense to any active threat is a prepared and engaged citizenry capable of sound decisions in complex and emerging threat environments.

(A gunman opened fire at a country music bar during a student night in the city of Thousand Oaks, California, killing 12 people and injuring several before turning the gun on himself. The shooter stormed the Borderline Bar and Grill wearing a black trenchcoat armed with a pistol equipped with an extended magazine and smoke grenades and began targeting people as young as 18. Courtesy of the Daily Mail and YouTube. Posted on Nov 8, 2018.)

Replacing fear with confidence to react without hesitation can dramatically change the outcome of an incident, wherever it occurs when an ordinary day turns into an extraordinary one without warning.

has been honored with two Platinum awards from American Security Today, for developing a common sense approach to preparedness from the classroom to the boardroom.

Kiernan Group Holdings

2018 Platinum ‘ASTORS’ Award Winner

Preparedness Without Paranoia Approach

Best Homeland Security Education Program

Additionally, Kathleen Kiernan has been recognized for her life-long commitment to Government and Homeland Security was recognized with a prestigious 2017 ‘ASTORS’ Excellence in Homeland Security Award.

CEO of KGH and SameShield, chronicling the role of women in traditionally insular professions – specifically law enforcement, the military, diplomacy, and private industry.

Excellence in Homeland Security

Preparedness Without Paranoia® (PWP) is not your typical Active Threat type training.

(Courtesy of Kiernan Group Holdings)

It is non-tactical by design; and is complimentary to the tactical concepts and operations employed by first responders, including the knowledge of what to do when law enforcement arrives on the scene to contain the threat.

We believe that preparedness is a mindset and the foundation for resiliency at an individual and community level which requires a holistic approach, not a single-threaded tactical solution.

PWP was developed by experienced practitioners to provide educational, state of practice actionable knowledge to individuals and organizations supported by academic rigor, national level guidance, and resources including video.

KGH has painstakingly captured the experience of responders, of victims, and of witnesses to actual incidents to bring authenticity to the learning experience.

(At least 12 people were killed, including a sheriff’s deputy, and 10 to 12 others were wounded when a gunman entered a crowded bar during a “college country night” event and opened fire in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Courtesy of TIME and YouTube. Posted on Nov 8, 2018.)

The key is developing a preparedness mindset and understanding in large measure that security sense is really common sense that can be learned and applied in critical, emergency situations.

Much the same as we were taught as children about different forms of danger and of safety, common sense tools in retrospect that we learned to apply without conscious thought: buckling a seatbelt, looking both ways before crossing a street, or responding to a fire alarm.

(Hear directly about the ‘Preparedness Without Paranoia’ Education and Training Series from Dr. Kathleen Kiernan, CEO & Founder of Kiernan Group Holdings. Dr. Kiernan, a 29-year veteran of Federal Law Enforcement, retiring as Assistant Director for the Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information for the ATF, developed PWP, an approach to individual engagement and education to increase confidence and decrease victimization in active threat environments. Courtesy of Kiernan Group Holdings and YouTube. Posted on Oct 8, 2018)

We engage regularly with teachers, children, and their parents to understand what and how children think about threats to inform the conversations that need to occur at home, at school as well as in their parent’s boardrooms crossing over into workplace violence, employee preparedness and emergency education.

For children we have built a series of learning materials and activity books to meet them where they are developmentally, and engage them in the conversations, not talk around them.

(PWP Minor Visions:Always find a trusted adult to talk to if something isn’t right. Courtesy of Kiernan Group Holdings and YouTube. Posted on Dec 7, 2018.)

From a business perspective, KGH offers a variety of training opportunities and sessions which aremetric-based, in compliance with national level standards and guidance and a suite of audit-ready analytic tools for use by training managers and HR professionals.

Clare O’Loughlin, PWP® Program Manager instructs PWP® to local business leaders at the Huntsville Madison County Chamber of Commerce. (Courtesy of Kiernan Group Holdings)

The G.O.T Preparedness learning management portal is designed to provide educational and training resources for individuals and organizations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from active threat situations.

We understand that Active Threat is not confined to active shooters; it includes insider threat, terrorism, and workplace violence.

In September 2012 following the shooting at in Minneapolis, Minnesota, several civil lawsuits were filed against the company, which alleged that the company should have known from the shooter’s work history that he was potentially dangerous.

(A man police identified as 36-year-old Andrew Engeldinger had been fired from his job at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis Thursday morning. Police say Engeldinger returned that afternoon and opened fire before taking his own life. As of 4:45 p.m. Friday, six people had died. Courtesy of CCX Media and YouTube. Posted on Sep 28, 2012.)

Following this shooting, the (OSHA) changed its General Duty Clause to include active shooter incidents as a recognized hazard in the workplace.

Pending legislation () will, if passed, make education and training on workplace violence a requirement.

include competitive intelligence, open-source analytics, market analysis, and investment opportunity identification, access to technology and advanced training, and the identification and integration of breakthrough ideas and subject matter experts.

Dr. Kathleen Kiernan, CEO of Kiernan Group Holdings (KGH)

Founded in 2009, Kiernan Group Holdings (KGH), a Woman-owned small business (WOSB), is an intelligence, law-enforcement, and national security consulting, training, and risk services firm providing tailored solutions to complex challenges.

KGH nurtures an array of purposeful partnerships with organizations and individuals in the law enforcement, military, intelligence, academic, and private sectors both at home and abroad.

These partnerships include national level organizations as well as small innovative companies developing new capabilities.

KGH’s team of cross-sector experts in threat assessment, emergency preparedness, and risk management specialize in providing evidence-based and state of practice Active Threat preparedness consulting services.

The 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program

The Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards Program is specifically designed to honor distinguished government and vendor solutions that deliver enhanced value, benefit and intelligence to end users in a variety of government, homeland security and public safety vertical markets.

2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Luncheon at ISC East

The 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Awards Program drew an overwhelming response from industry leaders with a record high number of corporate and government nominations received, as well as record breaking ‘ASTORS’ Presentation Luncheon Attendees, with top firms trying to register for the exclusive high – end luncheon and networking opportunity – right up to the event kickoff on Wednesday afternoon, at the ISC East registration!

Over 130 distinguished guests representing National, State and Local Governments, and Industry Leading Corporate Firms, gathered from across North America, Europe and the Middle East to be honored among their peers in their respective fields which included:

The Department of Homeland Security

The Federal Protective Service (FPS)

Argonne National Laboratory

The Department of Homeland Security

The Department of Justice

The Security Exchange Commission Office of Personnel Management

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Viasat, Hanwha Techwin, Lenel, Konica Minolta Business Solutions, Verint, Canon U.S.A., BriefCam, Pivot3, Milestone Systems, Allied Universal, Ameristar Perimeter Security and More!

The Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards is the preeminent U.S. Homeland Security Awards Program highlighting the most cutting-edge and forward-thinking security solutions coming onto the market today, to ensure our readers have the information they need to stay ahead of the competition, and keep our Nation safe – one facility, street, and city at a time.

The 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program was Proudly Sponsored by ATI Systems, Attivo Networks, Automatic Systems, Desktop Alert, and .

2018 Champions Edition

See the 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Champions Edition – ‘Best Products of 2018 ‘ Year in Review’ for in-depth coverage of the outstanding products and services of firms receiving American Security Today’s 2018‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards.’

Nominations for the AST 2019 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program will officially open as of January 1st, 2019 at .

Enter Early to Maximize Media Coverage of your Products and Services at Kickoff, and Get the Recognition Your Organization Deserves!

And be sure to Register Early for the 2019 ‘ASTORS’ Awards Presentation Luncheon at ISC East 2019 to ensure your place at this limited- space event!

2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Luncheon at ISC East

Why the 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program?

American Security Today’s comprehensive Annual Homeland Security Awards Program is organized to recognize the most distinguished vendors of physical, IT, port security, law enforcement, and first responders, in acknowledgment of their outstanding efforts to ‘Keep our Nation Secure, One City at a Time.’

Why American Security Today?

American Security Today is uniquely focused on the broader Homeland Security & Public Safety marketplace with over 70,000 readers at the Federal, State and local levels of government as well as firms allied to government.

The old traditional security marketplace has been covered by a host of security publications that have changed little over many years.

American Security Today brings forward a fresh compelling look and read with our customized digital publications that provides our readers with solutions to their challenges.

Our Editorial staff provides a full plate of topics for our AST monthly digital editions, AST Website and AST Daily News Alerts.

The editorial calendar and AST’s high drawing website features 23 different Technology and Marketing Sectors such as Access Control, Perimeter Protection, Video Surveillance/Analytics, Airport Security, Border Security, CBRNE Detection, Border Security, Ports, Cybersecurity, Networking Security, Encryption, Law Enforcement, First Responders, Campus Security, Security Services, Corporate Facilities and Emergency Response among others.

These sectors are part of the new integration, where these major applications communicate with one another in a variety of solutions to protect our cities and critical infrastructure.

AST has Expanded readership into vital Critical Infrastructure audiences such as Protection of Nuclear Facilities, Water Plants & Dams, Bridges & Tunnels, and other Potential targets of terrorism.

Other areas of concern include Transportation Hubs, Public Assemblies, Government Facilities, Sporting & Concert Stadiums, our Nation’s Schools & Universities, and Commercial Business Destinations – enticing targets for extremist or lone wolf attacks due to the large number of persons and resources clustered together.

Kiernan Group Holdings (KGH) – Changing the World (Multi-Video)

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G.O.T. Preparedness? Active Threat Training to Improve Survival Outcome

[christophertheodore-org]

Rex Tillerson could be America’s most dangerous Secretary of State

“My philosophy is to make money.”—Rex Tillerson

On January 1, Rex Tillerson retired from oil giant Exxon Mobil after 41 years, the last 10 as CEO and chairman of the board. When he appears in January before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be considered for U.S. Secretary of State, Exxon Mobil will be preparing to appear before a jury at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, just blocks away. There, the company will face allegations that security forces under its employ engaged in serious human rights abuses, including murder, torture, sexual violence, kidnapping, battery, assault, burning, arbitrary arrest, detention and false imprisonment. The complaint specifically names Rex Tillerson.

Among the plaintiffs, all of whom use aliases out of fear for their lives, is “John Doe II.” According to the complaint, in August 2000, soldiers working for Exxon Mobil beat and tortured him “using electricity all over his body, includ[ing] his genitals.” After approximately three months, the “soldiers took off his blindfold, took him outside the building where he had been detained and showed him a pit where there was a large pile of human heads. The soldiers threatened to kill him and add his head to the pile.” He was ultimately released, only to have the soldiers return later to burn down his house.

John Doe I, et al., v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. is awaiting a trial date expected “any day now,” according to lead plaintiff attorney Terrence Collingsworth. The complaint alleges that from 2000 through 2004, private military security forces employed by Exxon Mobil to protect its natural gas operations in Aceh province, Indonesia, committed the cited offenses against local villagers. From 1976 to 2005, Aceh was embroiled in a violent independence struggle. In the midst of the conflict, Exxon Mobil essentially privatized Indonesian soldiers, the complaint argues, despite their well-documented history of abusing Indonesian citizens, and aided and abetted the human rights violations through financial and other direct material support.

Exxon Mobil has fought the case for 15 years, denying not the human rights abuses, but rather that the company should be liable. A federal judge ruled, however, not only that the company must stand trial, but also that “sufficient evidence demonstrates” that Exxon Mobil corporate officers “exerted significant control” over the security decisions made by its Indonesian subsidiary.

A 2006 amendment and a 2007 complaint adding new plaintiffs allege that top Exxon Mobil officials “have been continuously involved” in the Indonesian operations and that “Exxon Mobil Corp. officials who have met with Indonesian officials include … Rex W. Tillerson, president of Exxon Mobil Corp.”

It is just one of countless lawsuits, investigations and allegations confronting the company and its former CEO involving human rights abuses; unsafe working conditions; investor and public fraud; destruction of the environment, climate and public health; support of dictators; contributions to global instability and inequality; and being party to wars and conflict—in addition to decades of verdicts against the company—all of which will follow Tillerson into and haunt the next administration, should Congress permit him to join it.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaks at the annual shareholders  meeting in Dallas. (Mike Fuentes/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Workers clean up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which released 11 to 38 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in 1989. (Photo: Vick Vanessa)

T-Rex

Rex Tillerson has carefully constructed a public veneer for Exxon Mobil as a law-abiding, spit and polish, model corporate citizen. The storyline goes that because it is so big and has so much money, Exxon Mobil can afford to do everything just right. That may be true in some cases, but more often, Exxon Mobil wields its vast influence and wealth in a manner more closely in line with the philosophy of its infamous founder, John D. Rockefeller, who once said, “The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company in 1870 and quickly built one of the world’s most ruthless corporate monopolies. In describing the company’s tactics and practices over the next 30 years, the Interstate Commerce Commission’s late-19th-century reports did not mince words: “unjust,” “intentional disregard of rights,” “illegal,” “excessive,” “extraordinary,” “forbidden,” “wholly indefensible,” “obnoxious,” “absurd and inexcusable,” and “so obvious and palpable a discrimination that no discussion of it is necessary.”

The nation and the courts were equally repulsed. The Populist movement railed against the erosion of democracy and subsequent inequality resulting from Standard Oil’s power over the federal and multiple state governments, and in a key 1911 victory, a Supreme Court ruling broke up Standard Oil into 34 separate corporate parts. The largest pieces were Standard Oil of New Jersey—later Exxon—and Standard Oil of New York—later Mobil. In 1999, the two were allowed to re-merge, forming today’s Exxon Mobil. It is the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, and the sixth-largest company on the planet. Were Exxon a country, its $246 billion in revenue in 2015 would make it the 42nd-largest by GDP.

Like generations of senior management before him, Rex Tillerson has spent his entire career at Exxon Mobil. Recruited fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, Tillerson, who is known to colleagues as “T-Rex,” rose through the ranks, becoming senior vice president of Exxon Mobil in 2001, president and board member in 2004, and CEO and board chairman in 2006. His 2015 salary was $27.3 million, or about 500 times the median U.S. household income. If confirmed, he will join what is set to be the wealthiest cabinet in U.S. history.

Exxon Mobil is a uniquely insular company, often referred to as a “cult.” In Steve Coll’s Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power, executives of other oil companies describe Exxon Mobil as “ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable … priggish Presbyterian deacons” who maintain “kind of a 1950s Southern religious culture. They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South. … They shared a belief in the One Right Answer.”

“All of the top executives are imbued with the Exxon culture and regard themselves as carriers of the culture,” Neva Goodwin, great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, told me in 2013. Tillerson, she said, is civil, “but [he] never responds in such a way that suggests that he could be at all influenced to change his positions.”

As George W. Bush once famously said of Exxon Mobil: “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”

Other than a stint as president of the Boy Scouts of America from 2010 to 2012, Tillerson does not publicly step outside his role as Exxon Mobil executive. It is as its voice that he gives speeches, offers policy analyses and grants interviews. To understand Rex Tillerson as a man or intuit how he will behave as secretary of state, therefore, we must observe Exxon Mobil’s actions under his leadership and his stated objectives for its future.

Until required to change policy in 2014 to continue receiving federal government contracts, Exxon Mobil failed to meet a single Human Rights Campaign criterion for an LGBTQ-inclusive workplace. When I investigated Exxon Mobil’s LGBTQ polices for The Advocate in 2013, a gay former employee told me, “I feel that [Exxon is like that] racist old aunt, that racist grandfather figure, that person completely out of touch with the times.”

The word I hear most often to describe Exxon Mobil under Tillerson is “bully.”

It is a viewpoint shared by Exxon Mobil’s closest neighbors in its home state of Texas. “They are a major polluter that is breaking the law and threatening the health of millions of Texans and I think they are grossly irresponsible to their neighbors,” says Luke Metzger, director of Austin-based nonprofit Environment Texas. The group is suing Exxon Mobil for breaking clean air laws at its Baytown oil refinery and chemical plant more than 4,000 times between 2005 and 2010, pollution which Metzger alleges continues to this day in this largely Hispanic community near Houston.

In 2013, two workers died and 10 were injured with severe burns at Exxon Mobil’s Beaumont, Texas, refinery. The Department of Labor cited the company for numerous safety violations that resulted in the deadly flash fire. “People do get hurt, and it’s because of the way that Exxon handles its business inside,” said Ricky Brooks, president of the United Steelworkers local representing workers at Exxon Mobil’s facility in nearby Baytown, when I spoke with him a few months after the fire.

The company is vehemently anti-union, says Brooks, and workers, whether unionized or not, are made to fear for their jobs if they speak out. Size and influence, he argues, allow Exxon Mobil to get away with what others cannot. “Exxon only changes when forced to,” he says, “and few people, or governments for that matter, are in a position to force them.”

Within months of my conversation with Brooks in 2013, farmers in Basra, Iraq protested Exxon Mobil, demanding compensation for lost jobs and what they allege is stolen farmland; families in Mayflower, Ark., were forced from their homes when 210,000 gallons of heavy Canadian tar sands oil spilled from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline; and locals in Eket, Nigeria protested Exxon Mobilin response to a November 2012 oil spill that they said wreaked havoc on coastal land and livelihoods.

Why he wants the job

Exxon Mobil operates in some 200 countries and has current direct joint ventures with companies from China and Russia to Saudi Arabia. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, it also keeps a lot of its profits outside the United States, with a whopping $51 billion offshored in both 2014 and 2015, and another $47 billion in 2013. On Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful People 2016, Tillerson clocks in at #24, while President Obama is #48. Secretary of State John Kerry did not make the list.

So why does Rex Tillerson want a job that could easily be seen as a step down in power and influence? A partial answer is that Tillerson turns 65 in March and faced a forced retirement. He also has unfinished business, particularly in Russia, which he likely does not trust the Trump administration to handle. His personal interests and those of Exxon Mobil—often referred to as “Mother Exxon” by employees—have been seemingly one and the same for his entire adult life.

Rex Tillerson is leaving Exxon Mobil in far worse condition than when he took over. This is problematic by several measures, including his own personal legacy and fortune.

In 2003, Exxon Mobil had the most profitable year of any corporation ever. It then beat its own record every year for the next five years. Its $45.2 billion in 2008 remained the highest annual corporate profits ever recorded until surpassed in 2015 by Apple.

Then oil prices crashed in 2009, and have yet to recover. Exxon Mobil’s profits in 2015—though still a staggering $16 billion—were 65 percent less than 2008’s high, and less than half of what they were in 2014.

Tillerson owns some 600,000 shares of Exxon Mobil stock and was promised approximately 1.8 million more upon his retirement. In response to potentially insurmountable conflicts of interests as secretary of state, however, his golden parachute was altered one week prior to his scheduled confirmation hearing. Tillerson will sell his current stocks worth about $54 million (though valued at almost $25 less per share today than 2014) and convert the rest to $180 million in cash that cannot be invested in Exxon Mobil for 10 years.

Exxon Mobil is cash-poor and debt-ridden, such that, for the first time since the Great Depression, Standard & Poor’s stripped it of a AAA credit rating in April 2016, citing the “reserve-replacement ratio” as the company’s greatest challenge—that is, finding enough new oil reserves to replace that which it pumps from the ground.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating whether Exxon Mobil has been inflating the size of its oil reserves by counting reserves as “booked”—meaning planned and accessible for producing—when they should not be. In response, the company was forced to report in late October that it would likely need to “de-book” some 3.6 billion barrels of tar sands oil in Canada and about 1 billion oil-equivalent barrels in other North American fracking operations. This means that with the stroke of a pen, Exxon Mobil may soon lose nearly 20 percent of its booked reserves—the measure that most determines the value of oil company stock.

To increase its value, therefore, Exxon Mobil needs more oil. Fortunately for the company, it has the potential for a good deal more in Russia’s Arctic.

In 2001, George W. Bush famously looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and dubbed him “Pootie Poot.” The Bush administration was not shy about its oil agenda and how far it would go to achieve it. Russian reserves were a key target, and Putin a leading ally.

At the time, Tillerson had already been hard at work building relationships in Russia as president of Exxon Neftegas Limited (1998-1999), the subsidiary responsible for Exxon Mobil’s Russian and Caspian Sea holdings. Between 2011 and 2013, after more than a decade of work, Tillerson signed cooperation agreements for 10 joint ventures with Russia’s state-controlled oil company Rosneft, including those in the Russian Arctic. The Financial Times reported in 2014, “Russia was going to be Exxon’s next mega-area. And the list of mega-areas in the world is very short.”

As a result, Exxon Mobil’s 63.7 million-acre Russian holdings are nearly five times larger than its second-largest holdings—its 14 million acres in the United States.

The Obama administration, however, did not see Russia in the same warm light. In 2014, the president imposed sanctions against Russia after it sent troops into Crimea. The sanctions permit some of Exxon Mobil’s projects, but none of its Arctic or other offshore exploration, not only halting these operations but also making it impossible for the company to book the potentially enormous reserves.

Oil from Russian drilling operations gushes from damaged pipelines in Usinsk in the Russian Arctic in May 2012. Greenpeace Russia reports that every 18 months, over 4 million barrels of oil spew into the Arctic Ocean from Russian operations. (Photo: Staffan Julén/Greenpeace)

Exxon Mobil’s Russian Arctic holdings became even more valuable when, in late December, Obama joined Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in banning oil and gas activities in virtually the entire U.S.—and all of Canada’s—Arctic waters. Unlike the Russian sanctions, which were implemented with a presidential executive order that can be overturned by another such order, the drilling ban is more akin to the designation of a National Monument and would require an act of Congress to overrule.

According to Bloomberg, Tillerson made multiple personal visits to the White House since 2014 to discuss, among other things, Russian sanctions. Unable to budge Obama, Tillerson may now just get the job done himself, directing negotiations as secretary of state and advocating for Donald Trump to revoke the sanctions.

Trump has Russian sympathies of his own, and the Russian government made well-apparent its preference for his candidacy over that of Hillary Clinton. Trump is also building one of the most fossil-fueled administrations in U.S. history. Nonetheless, I doubt Tillerson trusts Trump, and he certainly did not support Trump.

The oil industry, including Rex Tillerson, gave its overwhelming financial support to Jeb Bush for president in 2016. Tillerson gave the maximum individual contribution of $2,700 to Bush and $5,000 to Bush’s Super PAC. He gave another $33,400 to the Republican National Committee. He never gave a dime to Trump.

Once it was clear that Bush was no longer a contender, the oil industry, including Exxon Mobil’s employees, shifted support to Clinton. Meanwhile, the Exxon Mobil PAC focused on taking the House and Senate for the Republicans, greatly increasing the money spent on these races. Exxon Mobil ultimately spent nearly nine times more on congressional races (close to $1.5 million) than on the presidency (less than $170,000), just barely edging out Koch Industries to become the oil industry’s biggest spender in the 2016 election, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would the oil industry, a GOP mainstay, put its money behind Clinton? Perhaps the companies wanted to back the odds-on favorite; perhaps an industry that works on 25- to 50-year timelines decided that it could weather another four to eight years of a known quantity (even an unfriendly one) like Clinton better than an unknown one like Trump, who could cause irreparable damage. Controlling Congress was the security measure against either presidential victor.

But once Trump became president-elect, a full-court Republican-establishment press composed of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates reportedly offered “glowing endorsements” of Tillerson either to Trump or to Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As I detail in The Bush Agenda, the ties that bind these men and women to Exxon Mobil run deep. In 2000, for example, the oil industry, including Exxon Mobil, spent more money than on any previous election to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office, while Baker’s law firm has represented Exxon Mobil for decades, and Gates and Rice have a consulting firm that has Exxon Mobil as a client.

Simply put, Exxon Mobil needs the U.S. government to play ball, or at least behave.

Tillerson serving as some sort of Trump overseer for the Bush-era Republican oil establishment, however, should raise many red flags, particularly with the possibility of fellow Bush administration alum John Bolton—who reiterated in November a call for regime change in Iran—as his undersecretary. We have already experienced, and continue to suffer the consequences of, the devastation wrought by this group in pursuit of its crude objectives.

Russian President Vladimir Putin presents Rex Tillerson with a medal at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 21, 2012. (Photo: Michael Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images)

By any means necessary

Exxon Mobil has never been shy about working with dictators, be they Hajji Muhammad Suharto of Indonesia, Idriss Déby of Chad, Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola or Saddam Hussein of Iraq (to name but a few).

But sometimes alliances go sour. Change is often necessary.

Members of the Bush administration, many of whom had worked together for decades, made fully transparent their ambitions for American “empire” (their word) long before taking office in 2000, including the plan to invade Iraq (with Iran next in their sights).

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. Within six years, it was largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms, including Exxon Mobil. “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007.

Exxon Mobil joined with other Western oil giants to have a direct hand in this long-desired outcome. The company participated in the Cheney Energy Task Force, which first met just 10 days into the new administration. Its work included reviewing “operational policies” toward Iraq and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” In its final report in May 2001, the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be urged “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” This is precisely what was achieved in Iraq.

Exxon Mobil met with Cheney’s staff in January 2003, two months before the invasion, to discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry, while then-CEO Lee Raymond had many private meetings with longtime friend Dick Cheney. For the next decade, former and current executives of Western oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, acted first as administrators of Iraq’s oil ministry and then as “advisers” to the Iraqi government.

Gary Vogler, an executive and 21-year company veteran, left Exxon Mobil in 2002 to help plan and lead the U.S. government’s oil agenda in Iraq. Vogler later told MSNBC that in an October 2002 meeting in Houston, he and other members of the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group for Iraq were told by Army Corps Lt. Col. Paul Shelton, “Look, the military can get you a lot of information, but you’ve got to keep in mind the cost of that information … may be the lives of 19-year-old Marines and soldiers.”

In April 2003, Vogler joined former Shell Oil CEO Philip Carroll on the ground in Iraq. “The ministry once again has a strong man at its helm,” reported Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine upon Vogler’s arrival at the Iraqi Oil Ministry. By that summer, Exxon Mobil had joined with several other Western oil companies to articulate their own goals for post-war Iraq through the International Tax and Investment Center’s (ITIC) Iraq project. The ITIC’s report, “Petroleum in Iraq’s Future,” released in the fall of 2004, made the case for opening Iraq’s oil industry to foreign oil companies using Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) that grant companies control over production decisions, the right to book reserves as their own and contract lengths 10 times longer than is typical.

As I detailed on CNN.com in 2013, as the war continued, so too did the administration and industry efforts to open Iraq’s oil sector under their preferred terms. Western oil companies met with the Iraqi government and ultimately signed contracts to gain not all they had hoped for, but enough. In 2009, Exxon Mobil emerged as one of the war’s biggest winners, joining with PetroChina to sign a PSA for the super-giant West Qurna oil field, one of the largest oil fields in the world, and later acquiring exploration contracts in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

While the war did have its victors, it was of course disastrous not only for Iraqis, but for the entire region, contributing to the formation of the Islamic State, the Syrian War and today’s refugee crisis.

We know very little of Trump’s actual foreign policy agenda other than an intention to put “America First” while turning toward Russia and against Iran. But perhaps we can gain some guidance from Trump’s words to Anderson Cooper in 2015 on taking on the Islamic State: “I’d bomb the hell out of the oil fields …. I’d then get Exxon, I’d then get these great oil companies to go in­—they would rebuild them so fast your head will spin.” A “ring” of U.S. troops would then surround the wells, Trump said, protecting the oil companies.

Climate “risk” or climate change?

January will be a busy month for Rex Tillerson. On January 19, he has been called to testify in a federal lawsuit brought by 21 young people alleging that the oil and gas industry has sought to both prevent the U.S. government from taking action to protect the environment from climate change and lock in a fossil-fuel-based national energy system with full knowledge of the extreme dangers it poses. Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is before the U.S. District Court of Oregon and will be set for trial this year.

The suit stems from a 2016 investigation by InsideClimate News, as do the state and federal investigations into potential fraud perpetrated by Exxon Mobil against the public and its shareholders regarding what the company knew about climate change and when, and what it did with that information. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, the investigation uncovered that Exxon’s own scientists confirmed in the 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels harms the climate. The company then chose to publicly deny the reality of climate change and finance the climate denialist movement (findings Exxon Mobil disputes).

As secretary of state, Rex Tillerson would lead U.S. negotiations tackling climate change. Tillerson’s rhetoric has led some to conclude that this may not be such a bad thing. The facts, however, reveal that it would be disastrous.

On the one hand, Tillerson acknowledges the reality of climate change and has publicly stated his support for carbon taxation and the Paris Climate Agreement. Exxon Mobil’s lobbying disclosures under Tillerson, however, expose a very different picture. In 2008 and 2009, the company nearly doubled its already top-tier federal lobbying expenditures (spending $29 million and $27.4 million, respectively), outspending every other corporation, to successfully thwart congressional and White House efforts to pass meaningful climate change legislation, dashing the 2009 U.N. Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in the process. Exxon Mobil continues to fund climate denialist organizations and those that are leading the attacks on the Paris Agreement and Obama’s Clean Power Plan, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As for the company’s actual operations, a 2014 study published in Climatic Change journal found that Exxon Mobil has contributed more global greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere over the last 150 years than all but one company (Chevron). Under Tillerson, Exxon Mobil has fought climate-related initiatives launched by shareholders and rejected any meaningful commitment to renewable or alternative energy. As I reported for Rolling Stone in 2013, “Since 2002, Exxon Mobil, which took in $45 billion in profit last year alone, put a grand total of $188 million into its alternative [energy] investments, compared to the $250 million it dedicated to U.S. advertising in the last two years alone.”

A close read of Tillerson and the company’s words on the topic, moreover, reveal a very careful focus on “risks” posed by climate change (or by those responding to it). Exxon Mobil’s annual report to the SEC in 2016 stated, for example, “Due to concern over the risk of climate change, a number of countries have adopted … frameworks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Tillerson’s line is one of scientific uncertainty about what those risks may be, blind faith in the ability of technology to address any such risks should they emerge, and a zealous commitment to the necessity and dominance of oil and natural gas.

The language of “risk” implies that all climate effects are yet to come—such as when Tillerson said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in 2013 that climate change “does present serious risk” yet “our ability to project with any degree of certainty the future is continuing to be very limited.” But, as of 2012, nearly 1,000 children a day were already dying because of climate change, and the estimated annual death toll was 400,000 people worldwide.

In 2008, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President J.S. Simon told Congress: “The pursuit of alternative fuels must not detract from the development of oil and gas.” To grasp the threat posed by Exxon Mobil and Rex Tillerson, one could replace “alternative fuels” with just about any phrase, word or concept expected of a just U.S. secretary of state—be it “diplomacy,” “equality,” “peace,” “climate justice” or “human rights.”

US Exxon Mobil refinery workers in Port-Jerome, western France, joined a strike in support of workers at the French multinational integrated oil and gas company Total S.A. on February 23, 2010. (Photo: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images)

Choosing sides

“This is the purest test you can imagine: Either you’re pro-science or anti-science; either you stand with the people, or you stand with the polluters. It’s that simple,” said Jamie Henn of 350.org. He was speaking in advance of a protest in Cheyenne, Wyo., planned for January 9, to urge Republican Sen. John Barrasso to use his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reject Tillerson’s nomination. The protest is part of a month-long series of protests which include “flooding Capitol Hill” with events targeting key senators who play a big role in cabinet picks.

Tillerson is scheduled to appear in January for hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Democrats have promised a bruising fight. They would need just one Republican to join them to block the nomination and Marco Rubio (Fla.) may be that Republican, having voiced concerns about Tillerson’s Russian ties. If the vote goes to the full Senate and Democrats stand united there, just three Republicans would be needed to block Tillerson. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) have expressed deep reservations.

With leading international human rights organizations, including Global Witness and Amnesty International, condemning Tillerson’s nomination in no uncertain terms, and with Greenpeace coordinating petitions and actions with numerous other groups to block it, the fight is far from over. Tillerson’s nomination comes at a time of heightened unity and strength within the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground, brought to national attention with the years-long battle led by Native Americans to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Terrence Collingsworth, the human-rights lawyer who has fought Exxon Mobil for more than 15 years in defense of the people of Aceh, worries about the damage done simply through the nomination of Rex Tillerson—which, he believes, makes it clear which side the United States government is now on under the presidency of Donald Trump.

“Imagine what will happen in the future,” he says. “[People around the world] will not feel that the U.S. will back them up in trying to hold these companies accountable.” Instead, he argues, we will have—even more than today—“a sweetheart arrangement between foreign governments and the U.S. government to promote the exploitation of natural resources at all costs.”

This article has been updated to include the 2007 amended complaint in John Doe I, et al., v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al.

Antonia Juhasz, a leading energy analyst, author, and investigative journalist specializing in oil.  An award-winning writer, her articles appear in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Atlantic and more. Juhasz is the author of three books: “The Bush Agenda,” “The Tyranny of Oil” and “Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill.” Follow her on Twitter at @AntoniaJuhaz.

Source:

inthesetimes.

[christheodore]

Rex Tillerson could be America’s most dangerous Secretary of State

“My philosophy is to make money.”—Rex Tillerson

On January 1, Rex Tillerson retired from oil giant Exxon Mobil after 41 years, the last 10 as CEO and chairman of the board. When he appears in January before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be considered for U.S. Secretary of State, Exxon Mobil will be preparing to appear before a jury at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, just blocks away. There, the company will face allegations that security forces under its employ engaged in serious human rights abuses, including murder, torture, sexual violence, kidnapping, battery, assault, burning, arbitrary arrest, detention and false imprisonment. The complaint specifically names Rex Tillerson.

Among the plaintiffs, all of whom use aliases out of fear for their lives, is “John Doe II.” According to the complaint, in August 2000, soldiers working for Exxon Mobil beat and tortured him “using electricity all over his body, includ[ing] his genitals.” After approximately three months, the “soldiers took off his blindfold, took him outside the building where he had been detained and showed him a pit where there was a large pile of human heads. The soldiers threatened to kill him and add his head to the pile.” He was ultimately released, only to have the soldiers return later to burn down his house.

John Doe I, et al., v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. is awaiting a trial date expected “any day now,” according to lead plaintiff attorney Terrence Collingsworth. The complaint alleges that from 2000 through 2004, private military security forces employed by Exxon Mobil to protect its natural gas operations in Aceh province, Indonesia, committed the cited offenses against local villagers. From 1976 to 2005, Aceh was embroiled in a violent independence struggle. In the midst of the conflict, Exxon Mobil essentially privatized Indonesian soldiers, the complaint argues, despite their well-documented history of abusing Indonesian citizens, and aided and abetted the human rights violations through financial and other direct material support.

Exxon Mobil has fought the case for 15 years, denying not the human rights abuses, but rather that the company should be liable. A federal judge ruled, however, not only that the company must stand trial, but also that “sufficient evidence demonstrates” that Exxon Mobil corporate officers “exerted significant control” over the security decisions made by its Indonesian subsidiary.

A 2006 amendment and a 2007 complaint adding new plaintiffs allege that top Exxon Mobil officials “have been continuously involved” in the Indonesian operations and that “Exxon Mobil Corp. officials who have met with Indonesian officials include … Rex W. Tillerson, president of Exxon Mobil Corp.”

It is just one of countless lawsuits, investigations and allegations confronting the company and its former CEO involving human rights abuses; unsafe working conditions; investor and public fraud; destruction of the environment, climate and public health; support of dictators; contributions to global instability and inequality; and being party to wars and conflict—in addition to decades of verdicts against the company—all of which will follow Tillerson into and haunt the next administration, should Congress permit him to join it.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaks at the annual shareholders  meeting in Dallas. (Mike Fuentes/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Workers clean up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which released 11 to 38 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in 1989. (Photo: Vick Vanessa)

T-Rex

Rex Tillerson has carefully constructed a public veneer for Exxon Mobil as a law-abiding, spit and polish, model corporate citizen. The storyline goes that because it is so big and has so much money, Exxon Mobil can afford to do everything just right. That may be true in some cases, but more often, Exxon Mobil wields its vast influence and wealth in a manner more closely in line with the philosophy of its infamous founder, John D. Rockefeller, who once said, “The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company in 1870 and quickly built one of the world’s most ruthless corporate monopolies. In describing the company’s tactics and practices over the next 30 years, the Interstate Commerce Commission’s late-19th-century reports did not mince words: “unjust,” “intentional disregard of rights,” “illegal,” “excessive,” “extraordinary,” “forbidden,” “wholly indefensible,” “obnoxious,” “absurd and inexcusable,” and “so obvious and palpable a discrimination that no discussion of it is necessary.”

The nation and the courts were equally repulsed. The Populist movement railed against the erosion of democracy and subsequent inequality resulting from Standard Oil’s power over the federal and multiple state governments, and in a key 1911 victory, a Supreme Court ruling broke up Standard Oil into 34 separate corporate parts. The largest pieces were Standard Oil of New Jersey—later Exxon—and Standard Oil of New York—later Mobil. In 1999, the two were allowed to re-merge, forming today’s Exxon Mobil. It is the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, and the sixth-largest company on the planet. Were Exxon a country, its $246 billion in revenue in 2015 would make it the 42nd-largest by GDP.

Like generations of senior management before him, Rex Tillerson has spent his entire career at Exxon Mobil. Recruited fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, Tillerson, who is known to colleagues as “T-Rex,” rose through the ranks, becoming senior vice president of Exxon Mobil in 2001, president and board member in 2004, and CEO and board chairman in 2006. His 2015 salary was $27.3 million, or about 500 times the median U.S. household income. If confirmed, he will join what is set to be the wealthiest cabinet in U.S. history.

Exxon Mobil is a uniquely insular company, often referred to as a “cult.” In Steve Coll’s Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power, executives of other oil companies describe Exxon Mobil as “ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable … priggish Presbyterian deacons” who maintain “kind of a 1950s Southern religious culture. They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South. … They shared a belief in the One Right Answer.”

“All of the top executives are imbued with the Exxon culture and regard themselves as carriers of the culture,” Neva Goodwin, great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, told me in 2013. Tillerson, she said, is civil, “but [he] never responds in such a way that suggests that he could be at all influenced to change his positions.”

As George W. Bush once famously said of Exxon Mobil: “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”

Other than a stint as president of the Boy Scouts of America from 2010 to 2012, Tillerson does not publicly step outside his role as Exxon Mobil executive. It is as its voice that he gives speeches, offers policy analyses and grants interviews. To understand Rex Tillerson as a man or intuit how he will behave as secretary of state, therefore, we must observe Exxon Mobil’s actions under his leadership and his stated objectives for its future.

Until required to change policy in 2014 to continue receiving federal government contracts, Exxon Mobil failed to meet a single Human Rights Campaign criterion for an LGBTQ-inclusive workplace. When I investigated Exxon Mobil’s LGBTQ polices for The Advocate in 2013, a gay former employee told me, “I feel that [Exxon is like that] racist old aunt, that racist grandfather figure, that person completely out of touch with the times.”

The word I hear most often to describe Exxon Mobil under Tillerson is “bully.”

It is a viewpoint shared by Exxon Mobil’s closest neighbors in its home state of Texas. “They are a major polluter that is breaking the law and threatening the health of millions of Texans and I think they are grossly irresponsible to their neighbors,” says Luke Metzger, director of Austin-based nonprofit Environment Texas. The group is suing Exxon Mobil for breaking clean air laws at its Baytown oil refinery and chemical plant more than 4,000 times between 2005 and 2010, pollution which Metzger alleges continues to this day in this largely Hispanic community near Houston.

In 2013, two workers died and 10 were injured with severe burns at Exxon Mobil’s Beaumont, Texas, refinery. The Department of Labor cited the company for numerous safety violations that resulted in the deadly flash fire. “People do get hurt, and it’s because of the way that Exxon handles its business inside,” said Ricky Brooks, president of the United Steelworkers local representing workers at Exxon Mobil’s facility in nearby Baytown, when I spoke with him a few months after the fire.

The company is vehemently anti-union, says Brooks, and workers, whether unionized or not, are made to fear for their jobs if they speak out. Size and influence, he argues, allow Exxon Mobil to get away with what others cannot. “Exxon only changes when forced to,” he says, “and few people, or governments for that matter, are in a position to force them.”

Within months of my conversation with Brooks in 2013, farmers in Basra, Iraq protested Exxon Mobil, demanding compensation for lost jobs and what they allege is stolen farmland; families in Mayflower, Ark., were forced from their homes when 210,000 gallons of heavy Canadian tar sands oil spilled from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline; and locals in Eket, Nigeria protested Exxon Mobil in response to a November 2012 oil spill that they said wreaked havoc on coastal land and livelihoods.

Why he wants the job

Exxon Mobil operates in some 200 countries and has current direct joint ventures with companies from China and Russia to Saudi Arabia. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, it also keeps a lot of its profits outside the United States, with a whopping $51 billion offshored in both 2014 and 2015, and another $47 billion in 2013. On Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful People 2016, Tillerson clocks in at #24, while President Obama is #48. Secretary of State John Kerry did not make the list.

So why does Rex Tillerson want a job that could easily be seen as a step down in power and influence? A partial answer is that Tillerson turns 65 in March and faced a forced retirement. He also has unfinished business, particularly in Russia, which he likely does not trust the Trump administration to handle. His personal interests and those of Exxon Mobil—often referred to as “Mother Exxon” by employees—have been seemingly one and the same for his entire adult life.

Rex Tillerson is leaving Exxon Mobil in far worse condition than when he took over. This is problematic by several measures, including his own personal legacy and fortune.

In 2003, Exxon Mobil had the most profitable year of any corporation ever. It then beat its own record every year for the next five years. Its $45.2 billion in 2008 remained the highest annual corporate profits ever recorded until surpassed in 2015 by Apple.

Then oil prices crashed in 2009, and have yet to recover. Exxon Mobil’s profits in 2015—though still a staggering $16 billion—were 65 percent less than 2008’s high, and less than half of what they were in 2014.

Tillerson owns some 600,000 shares of Exxon Mobil stock and was promised approximately 1.8 million more upon his retirement. In response to potentially insurmountable conflicts of interests as secretary of state, however, his golden parachute was altered one week prior to his scheduled confirmation hearing. Tillerson will sell his current stocks worth about $54 million (though valued at almost $25 less per share today than 2014) and convert the rest to $180 million in cash that cannot be invested in Exxon Mobil for 10 years.

Exxon Mobil is cash-poor and debt-ridden, such that, for the first time since the Great Depression, Standard & Poor’s stripped it of a AAA credit rating in April 2016, citing the “reserve-replacement ratio” as the company’s greatest challenge—that is, finding enough new oil reserves to replace that which it pumps from the ground.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating whether Exxon Mobil has been inflating the size of its oil reserves by counting reserves as “booked”—meaning planned and accessible for producing—when they should not be. In response, the company was forced to report in late October that it would likely need to “de-book” some 3.6 billion barrels of tar sands oil in Canada and about 1 billion oil-equivalent barrels in other North American fracking operations. This means that with the stroke of a pen, Exxon Mobil may soon lose nearly 20 percent of its booked reserves—the measure that most determines the value of oil company stock.

To increase its value, therefore, Exxon Mobil needs more oil. Fortunately for the company, it has the potential for a good deal more in Russia’s Arctic.

In 2001, George W. Bush famously looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and dubbed him “Pootie Poot.” The Bush administration was not shy about its oil agenda and how far it would go to achieve it. Russian reserves were a key target, and Putin a leading ally.

At the time, Tillerson had already been hard at work building relationships in Russia as president of Exxon Neftegas Limited (1998-1999), the subsidiary responsible for Exxon Mobil’s Russian and Caspian Sea holdings. Between 2011 and 2013, after more than a decade of work, Tillerson signed cooperation agreements for 10 joint ventures with Russia’s state-controlled oil company Rosneft, including those in the Russian Arctic. The Financial Times reported in 2014, “Russia was going to be Exxon’s next mega-area. And the list of mega-areas in the world is very short.”

As a result, Exxon Mobil’s 63.7 million-acre Russian holdings are nearly five times larger than its second-largest holdings—its 14 million acres in the United States.

The Obama administration, however, did not see Russia in the same warm light. In 2014, the president imposed sanctions against Russia after it sent troops into Crimea. The sanctions permit some of Exxon Mobil’s projects, but none of its Arctic or other offshore exploration, not only halting these operations but also making it impossible for the company to book the potentially enormous reserves.

Oil from Russian drilling operations gushes from damaged pipelines in Usinsk in the Russian Arctic in May 2012. Greenpeace Russia reports that every 18 months, over 4 million barrels of oil spew into the Arctic Ocean from Russian operations. (Photo: Staffan Julén/Greenpeace)

Exxon Mobil’s Russian Arctic holdings became even more valuable when, in late December, Obama joined Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in banning oil and gas activities in virtually the entire U.S.—and all of Canada’s—Arctic waters. Unlike the Russian sanctions, which were implemented with a presidential executive order that can be overturned by another such order, the drilling ban is more akin to the designation of a National Monument and would require an act of Congress to overrule.

According to Bloomberg, Tillerson made multiple personal visits to the White House since 2014 to discuss, among other things, Russian sanctions. Unable to budge Obama, Tillerson may now just get the job done himself, directing negotiations as secretary of state and advocating for Donald Trump to revoke the sanctions.

Trump has Russian sympathies of his own, and the Russian government made well-apparent its preference for his candidacy over that of Hillary Clinton. Trump is also building one of the most fossil-fueled administrations in U.S. history. Nonetheless, I doubt Tillerson trusts Trump, and he certainly did not support Trump.

The oil industry, including Rex Tillerson, gave its overwhelming financial support to Jeb Bush for president in 2016. Tillerson gave the maximum individual contribution of $2,700 to Bush and $5,000 to Bush’s Super PAC. He gave another $33,400 to the Republican National Committee. He never gave a dime to Trump.

Once it was clear that Bush was no longer a contender, the oil industry, including Exxon Mobil’s employees, shifted support to Clinton. Meanwhile, the Exxon Mobil PAC focused on taking the House and Senate for the Republicans, greatly increasing the money spent on these races. Exxon Mobil ultimately spent nearly nine times more on congressional races (close to $1.5 million) than on the presidency (less than $170,000), just barely edging out Koch Industries to become the oil industry’s biggest spender in the 2016 election, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would the oil industry, a GOP mainstay, put its money behind Clinton? Perhaps the companies wanted to back the odds-on favorite; perhaps an industry that works on 25- to 50-year timelines decided that it could weather another four to eight years of a known quantity (even an unfriendly one) like Clinton better than an unknown one like Trump, who could cause irreparable damage. Controlling Congress was the security measure against either presidential victor.

But once Trump became president-elect, a full-court Republican-establishment press composed of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates reportedly offered “glowing endorsements” of Tillerson either to Trump or to Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As I detail in The Bush Agenda, the ties that bind these men and women to Exxon Mobil run deep. In 2000, for example, the oil industry, including Exxon Mobil, spent more money than on any previous election to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office, while Baker’s law firm has represented Exxon Mobil for decades, and Gates and Rice have a consulting firm that has Exxon Mobil as a client.

Simply put, Exxon Mobil needs the U.S. government to play ball, or at least behave.

Tillerson serving as some sort of Trump overseer for the Bush-era Republican oil establishment, however, should raise many red flags, particularly with the possibility of fellow Bush administration alum John Bolton—who reiterated in November a call for regime change in Iran—as his undersecretary. We have already experienced, and continue to suffer the consequences of, the devastation wrought by this group in pursuit of its crude objectives.

Russian President Vladimir Putin presents Rex Tillerson with a medal at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 21, 2012. (Photo: Michael Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images)

By any means necessary

Exxon Mobil has never been shy about working with dictators, be they Hajji Muhammad Suharto of Indonesia, Idriss Déby of Chad, Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola or Saddam Hussein of Iraq (to name but a few).

But sometimes alliances go sour. Change is often necessary.

Members of the Bush administration, many of whom had worked together for decades, made fully transparent their ambitions for American “empire” (their word) long before taking office in 2000, including the plan to invade Iraq (with Iran next in their sights).

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. Within six years, it was largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms, including Exxon Mobil. “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007.

Exxon Mobil joined with other Western oil giants to have a direct hand in this long-desired outcome. The company participated in the Cheney Energy Task Force, which first met just 10 days into the new administration. Its work included reviewing “operational policies” toward Iraq and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” In its final report in May 2001, the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be urged “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” This is precisely what was achieved in Iraq.

Exxon Mobil met with Cheney’s staff in January 2003, two months before the invasion, to discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry, while then-CEO Lee Raymond had many private meetings with longtime friend Dick Cheney. For the next decade, former and current executives of Western oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, acted first as administrators of Iraq’s oil ministry and then as “advisers” to the Iraqi government.

Gary Vogler, an executive and 21-year company veteran, left Exxon Mobil in 2002 to help plan and lead the U.S. government’s oil agenda in Iraq. Vogler later told MSNBC that in an October 2002 meeting in Houston, he and other members of the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group for Iraq were told by Army Corps Lt. Col. Paul Shelton, “Look, the military can get you a lot of information, but you’ve got to keep in mind the cost of that information … may be the lives of 19-year-old Marines and soldiers.”

In April 2003, Vogler joined former Shell Oil CEO Philip Carroll on the ground in Iraq. “The ministry once again has a strong man at its helm,” reported Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine upon Vogler’s arrival at the Iraqi Oil Ministry. By that summer, Exxon Mobil had joined with several other Western oil companies to articulate their own goals for post-war Iraq through the International Tax and Investment Center’s (ITIC) Iraq project. The ITIC’s report, “Petroleum in Iraq’s Future,” released in the fall of 2004, made the case for opening Iraq’s oil industry to foreign oil companies using Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) that grant companies control over production decisions, the right to book reserves as their own and contract lengths 10 times longer than is typical.

As I detailed on CNN.com in 2013, as the war continued, so too did the administration and industry efforts to open Iraq’s oil sector under their preferred terms. Western oil companies met with the Iraqi government and ultimately signed contracts to gain not all they had hoped for, but enough. In 2009, Exxon Mobil emerged as one of the war’s biggest winners, joining with PetroChina to sign a PSA for the super-giant West Qurna oil field, one of the largest oil fields in the world, and later acquiring exploration contracts in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

While the war did have its victors, it was of course disastrous not only for Iraqis, but for the entire region, contributing to the formation of the Islamic State, the Syrian War and today’s refugee crisis.

We know very little of Trump’s actual foreign policy agenda other than an intention to put “America First” while turning toward Russia and against Iran. But perhaps we can gain some guidance from Trump’s words to Anderson Cooper in 2015 on taking on the Islamic State: “I’d bomb the hell out of the oil fields .... I’d then get Exxon, I’d then get these great oil companies to go in­—they would rebuild them so fast your head will spin.” A “ring” of U.S. troops would then surround the wells, Trump said, protecting the oil companies.

Climate “risk” or climate change?

January will be a busy month for Rex Tillerson. On January 19, he has been called to testify in a federal lawsuit brought by 21 young people alleging that the oil and gas industry has sought to both prevent the U.S. government from taking action to protect the environment from climate change and lock in a fossil-fuel-based national energy system with full knowledge of the extreme dangers it poses. Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is before the U.S. District Court of Oregon and will be set for trial this year.

The suit stems from a 2016 investigation by InsideClimate News, as do the state and federal investigations into potential fraud perpetrated by Exxon Mobil against the public and its shareholders regarding what the company knew about climate change and when, and what it did with that information. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, the investigation uncovered that Exxon’s own scientists confirmed in the 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels harms the climate. The company then chose to publicly deny the reality of climate change and finance the climate denialist movement (findings Exxon Mobil disputes).

As secretary of state, Rex Tillerson would lead U.S. negotiations tackling climate change. Tillerson’s rhetoric has led some to conclude that this may not be such a bad thing. The facts, however, reveal that it would be disastrous.

On the one hand, Tillerson acknowledges the reality of climate change and has publicly stated his support for carbon taxation and the Paris Climate Agreement. Exxon Mobil’s lobbying disclosures under Tillerson, however, expose a very different picture. In 2008 and 2009, the company nearly doubled its already top-tier federal lobbying expenditures (spending $29 million and $27.4 million, respectively), outspending every other corporation, to successfully thwart congressional and White House efforts to pass meaningful climate change legislation, dashing the 2009 U.N. Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in the process. Exxon Mobil continues to fund climate denialist organizations and those that are leading the attacks on the Paris Agreement and Obama’s Clean Power Plan, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As for the company’s actual operations, a 2014 study published in Climatic Change journal found that Exxon Mobil has contributed more global greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere over the last 150 years than all but one company (Chevron). Under Tillerson, Exxon Mobil has fought climate-related initiatives launched by shareholders and rejected any meaningful commitment to renewable or alternative energy. As I reported for Rolling Stone in 2013, “Since 2002, Exxon Mobil, which took in $45 billion in profit last year alone, put a grand total of $188 million into its alternative [energy] investments, compared to the $250 million it dedicated to U.S. advertising in the last two years alone.”

A close read of Tillerson and the company’s words on the topic, moreover, reveal a very careful focus on “risks” posed by climate change (or by those responding to it). Exxon Mobil’s annual report to the SEC in 2016 stated, for example, “Due to concern over the risk of climate change, a number of countries have adopted … frameworks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Tillerson’s line is one of scientific uncertainty about what those risks may be, blind faith in the ability of technology to address any such risks should they emerge, and a zealous commitment to the necessity and dominance of oil and natural gas.

The language of “risk” implies that all climate effects are yet to come—such as when Tillerson said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in 2013 that climate change “does present serious risk” yet “our ability to project with any degree of certainty the future is continuing to be very limited.” But, as of 2012, nearly 1,000 children a day were already dying because of climate change, and the estimated annual death toll was 400,000 people worldwide.

In 2008, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President J.S. Simon told Congress: “The pursuit of alternative fuels must not detract from the development of oil and gas.” To grasp the threat posed by Exxon Mobil and Rex Tillerson, one could replace “alternative fuels” with just about any phrase, word or concept expected of a just U.S. secretary of state—be it “diplomacy,” “equality,” “peace,” “climate justice” or “human rights.”

US Exxon Mobil refinery workers in Port-Jerome, western France, joined a strike in support of workers at the French multinational integrated oil and gas company Total S.A. on February 23, 2010. (Photo: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images)

Choosing sides

“This is the purest test you can imagine: Either you’re pro-science or anti-science; either you stand with the people, or you stand with the polluters. It’s that simple,” said Jamie Henn of 350.org. He was speaking in advance of a protest in Cheyenne, Wyo., planned for January 9, to urge Republican Sen. John Barrasso to use his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reject Tillerson’s nomination. The protest is part of a month-long series of protests which include “flooding Capitol Hill” with events targeting key senators who play a big role in cabinet picks.

Tillerson is scheduled to appear in January for hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Democrats have promised a bruising fight. They would need just one Republican to join them to block the nomination and Marco Rubio (Fla.) may be that Republican, having voiced concerns about Tillerson’s Russian ties. If the vote goes to the full Senate and Democrats stand united there, just three Republicans would be needed to block Tillerson. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) have expressed deep reservations.

With leading international human rights organizations, including Global Witness and Amnesty International, condemning Tillerson’s nomination in no uncertain terms, and with Greenpeace coordinating petitions and actions with numerous other groups to block it, the fight is far from over. Tillerson’s nomination comes at a time of heightened unity and strength within the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground, brought to national attention with the years-long battle led by Native Americans to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Terrence Collingsworth, the human-rights lawyer who has fought Exxon Mobil for more than 15 years in defense of the people of Aceh, worries about the damage done simply through the nomination of Rex Tillerson—which, he believes, makes it clear which side the United States government is now on under the presidency of Donald Trump.

“Imagine what will happen in the future,” he says. “[People around the world] will not feel that the U.S. will back them up in trying to hold these companies accountable.” Instead, he argues, we will have—even more than today—“a sweetheart arrangement between foreign governments and the U.S. government to promote the exploitation of natural resources at all costs.”

This article has been updated to include the 2007 amended complaint in John Doe I, et al., v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al.

Antonia Juhasz, a leading energy analyst, author, and investigative journalist specializing in oil.  An award-winning writer, her articles appear in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Atlantic and more. Juhasz is the author of three books: “The Bush Agenda,” “The Tyranny of Oil” and “Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill.” Follow her on Twitter at @AntoniaJuhaz.

[christophertheodore-org]

Rex Tillerson could be America’s most dangerous Secretary of State

“My philosophy is to make money.”—Rex Tillerson

On January 1, Rex Tillerson retired from oil giant Exxon Mobil after 41 years, the last 10 as CEO and chairman of the board. When he appears in January before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be considered for U.S. Secretary of State, Exxon Mobil will be preparing to appear before a jury at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, just blocks away. There, the company will face allegations that security forces under its employ engaged in serious human rights abuses, including murder, torture, sexual violence, kidnapping, battery, assault, burning, arbitrary arrest, detention and false imprisonment. The complaint specifically names Rex Tillerson.

Among the plaintiffs, all of whom use aliases out of fear for their lives, is “John Doe II.” According to the complaint, in August 2000, soldiers working for Exxon Mobil beat and tortured him “using electricity all over his body, includ[ing] his genitals.” After approximately three months, the “soldiers took off his blindfold, took him outside the building where he had been detained and showed him a pit where there was a large pile of human heads. The soldiers threatened to kill him and add his head to the pile.” He was ultimately released, only to have the soldiers return later to burn down his house.

John Doe I, et al., v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. is awaiting a trial date expected “any day now,” according to lead plaintiff attorney Terrence Collingsworth. The complaint alleges that from 2000 through 2004, private military security forces employed by Exxon Mobil to protect its natural gas operations in Aceh province, Indonesia, committed the cited offenses against local villagers. From 1976 to 2005, Aceh was embroiled in a violent independence struggle. In the midst of the conflict, Exxon Mobil essentially privatized Indonesian soldiers, the complaint argues, despite their well-documented history of abusing Indonesian citizens, and aided and abetted the human rights violations through financial and other direct material support.

Exxon Mobil has fought the case for 15 years, denying not the human rights abuses, but rather that the company should be liable. A federal judge ruled, however, not only that the company must stand trial, but also that “sufficient evidence demonstrates” that Exxon Mobil corporate officers “exerted significant control” over the security decisions made by its Indonesian subsidiary.

A 2006 amendment and a 2007 complaint adding new plaintiffs allege that top Exxon Mobil officials “have been continuously involved” in the Indonesian operations and that “Exxon Mobil Corp. officials who have met with Indonesian officials include … Rex W. Tillerson, president of Exxon Mobil Corp.”

It is just one of countless lawsuits, investigations and allegations confronting the company and its former CEO involving human rights abuses; unsafe working conditions; investor and public fraud; destruction of the environment, climate and public health; support of dictators; contributions to global instability and inequality; and being party to wars and conflict—in addition to decades of verdicts against the company—all of which will follow Tillerson into and haunt the next administration, should Congress permit him to join it.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaks at the annual shareholders  meeting in Dallas. (Mike Fuentes/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Workers clean up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which released 11 to 38 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in 1989. (Photo: Vick Vanessa)

T-Rex

Rex Tillerson has carefully constructed a public veneer for Exxon Mobil as a law-abiding, spit and polish, model corporate citizen. The storyline goes that because it is so big and has so much money, Exxon Mobil can afford to do everything just right. That may be true in some cases, but more often, Exxon Mobil wields its vast influence and wealth in a manner more closely in line with the philosophy of its infamous founder, John D. Rockefeller, who once said, “The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company in 1870 and quickly built one of the world’s most ruthless corporate monopolies. In describing the company’s tactics and practices over the next 30 years, the Interstate Commerce Commission’s late-19th-century reports did not mince words: “unjust,” “intentional disregard of rights,” “illegal,” “excessive,” “extraordinary,” “forbidden,” “wholly indefensible,” “obnoxious,” “absurd and inexcusable,” and “so obvious and palpable a discrimination that no discussion of it is necessary.”

The nation and the courts were equally repulsed. The Populist movement railed against the erosion of democracy and subsequent inequality resulting from Standard Oil’s power over the federal and multiple state governments, and in a key 1911 victory, a Supreme Court ruling broke up Standard Oil into 34 separate corporate parts. The largest pieces were Standard Oil of New Jersey—later Exxon—and Standard Oil of New York—later Mobil. In 1999, the two were allowed to re-merge, forming today’s Exxon Mobil. It is the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, and the sixth-largest company on the planet. Were Exxon a country, its $246 billion in revenue in 2015 would make it the 42nd-largest by GDP.

Like generations of senior management before him, Rex Tillerson has spent his entire career at Exxon Mobil. Recruited fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, Tillerson, who is known to colleagues as “T-Rex,” rose through the ranks, becoming senior vice president of Exxon Mobil in 2001, president and board member in 2004, and CEO and board chairman in 2006. His 2015 salary was $27.3 million, or about 500 times the median U.S. household income. If confirmed, he will join what is set to be the wealthiest cabinet in U.S. history.

Exxon Mobil is a uniquely insular company, often referred to as a “cult.” In Steve Coll’s Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power, executives of other oil companies describe Exxon Mobil as “ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable … priggish Presbyterian deacons” who maintain “kind of a 1950s Southern religious culture. They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South. … They shared a belief in the One Right Answer.”

“All of the top executives are imbued with the Exxon culture and regard themselves as carriers of the culture,” Neva Goodwin, great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, told me in 2013. Tillerson, she said, is civil, “but [he] never responds in such a way that suggests that he could be at all influenced to change his positions.”

As George W. Bush once famously said of Exxon Mobil: “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”

Other than a stint as president of the Boy Scouts of America from 2010 to 2012, Tillerson does not publicly step outside his role as Exxon Mobil executive. It is as its voice that he gives speeches, offers policy analyses and grants interviews. To understand Rex Tillerson as a man or intuit how he will behave as secretary of state, therefore, we must observe Exxon Mobil’s actions under his leadership and his stated objectives for its future.

Until required to change policy in 2014 to continue receiving federal government contracts, Exxon Mobil failed to meet a single Human Rights Campaign criterion for an LGBTQ-inclusive workplace. When I investigated Exxon Mobil’s LGBTQ polices for The Advocate in 2013, a gay former employee told me, “I feel that [Exxon is like that] racist old aunt, that racist grandfather figure, that person completely out of touch with the times.”

The word I hear most often to describe Exxon Mobil under Tillerson is “bully.”

It is a viewpoint shared by Exxon Mobil’s closest neighbors in its home state of Texas. “They are a major polluter that is breaking the law and threatening the health of millions of Texans and I think they are grossly irresponsible to their neighbors,” says Luke Metzger, director of Austin-based nonprofit Environment Texas. The group is suing Exxon Mobil for breaking clean air laws at its Baytown oil refinery and chemical plant more than 4,000 times between 2005 and 2010, pollution which Metzger alleges continues to this day in this largely Hispanic community near Houston.

In 2013, two workers died and 10 were injured with severe burns at Exxon Mobil’s Beaumont, Texas, refinery. The Department of Labor cited the company for numerous safety violations that resulted in the deadly flash fire. “People do get hurt, and it’s because of the way that Exxon handles its business inside,” said Ricky Brooks, president of the United Steelworkers local representing workers at Exxon Mobil’s facility in nearby Baytown, when I spoke with him a few months after the fire.

The company is vehemently anti-union, says Brooks, and workers, whether unionized or not, are made to fear for their jobs if they speak out. Size and influence, he argues, allow Exxon Mobil to get away with what others cannot. “Exxon only changes when forced to,” he says, “and few people, or governments for that matter, are in a position to force them.”

Within months of my conversation with Brooks in 2013, farmers in Basra, Iraq protested Exxon Mobil, demanding compensation for lost jobs and what they allege is stolen farmland; families in Mayflower, Ark., were forced from their homes when 210,000 gallons of heavy Canadian tar sands oil spilled from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline; and locals in Eket, Nigeria protested Exxon Mobilin response to a November 2012 oil spill that they said wreaked havoc on coastal land and livelihoods.

Why he wants the job

Exxon Mobil operates in some 200 countries and has current direct joint ventures with companies from China and Russia to Saudi Arabia. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, it also keeps a lot of its profits outside the United States, with a whopping $51 billion offshored in both 2014 and 2015, and another $47 billion in 2013. On Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful People 2016, Tillerson clocks in at #24, while President Obama is #48. Secretary of State John Kerry did not make the list.

So why does Rex Tillerson want a job that could easily be seen as a step down in power and influence? A partial answer is that Tillerson turns 65 in March and faced a forced retirement. He also has unfinished business, particularly in Russia, which he likely does not trust the Trump administration to handle. His personal interests and those of Exxon Mobil—often referred to as “Mother Exxon” by employees—have been seemingly one and the same for his entire adult life.

Rex Tillerson is leaving Exxon Mobil in far worse condition than when he took over. This is problematic by several measures, including his own personal legacy and fortune.

In 2003, Exxon Mobil had the most profitable year of any corporation ever. It then beat its own record every year for the next five years. Its $45.2 billion in 2008 remained the highest annual corporate profits ever recorded until surpassed in 2015 by Apple.

Then oil prices crashed in 2009, and have yet to recover. Exxon Mobil’s profits in 2015—though still a staggering $16 billion—were 65 percent less than 2008’s high, and less than half of what they were in 2014.

Tillerson owns some 600,000 shares of Exxon Mobil stock and was promised approximately 1.8 million more upon his retirement. In response to potentially insurmountable conflicts of interests as secretary of state, however, his golden parachute was altered one week prior to his scheduled confirmation hearing. Tillerson will sell his current stocks worth about $54 million (though valued at almost $25 less per share today than 2014) and convert the rest to $180 million in cash that cannot be invested in Exxon Mobil for 10 years.

Exxon Mobil is cash-poor and debt-ridden, such that, for the first time since the Great Depression, Standard & Poor’s stripped it of a AAA credit rating in April 2016, citing the “reserve-replacement ratio” as the company’s greatest challenge—that is, finding enough new oil reserves to replace that which it pumps from the ground.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating whether Exxon Mobil has been inflating the size of its oil reserves by counting reserves as “booked”—meaning planned and accessible for producing—when they should not be. In response, the company was forced to report in late October that it would likely need to “de-book” some 3.6 billion barrels of tar sands oil in Canada and about 1 billion oil-equivalent barrels in other North American fracking operations. This means that with the stroke of a pen, Exxon Mobil may soon lose nearly 20 percent of its booked reserves—the measure that most determines the value of oil company stock.

To increase its value, therefore, Exxon Mobil needs more oil. Fortunately for the company, it has the potential for a good deal more in Russia’s Arctic.

In 2001, George W. Bush famously looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and dubbed him “Pootie Poot.” The Bush administration was not shy about its oil agenda and how far it would go to achieve it. Russian reserves were a key target, and Putin a leading ally.

At the time, Tillerson had already been hard at work building relationships in Russia as president of Exxon Neftegas Limited (1998-1999), the subsidiary responsible for Exxon Mobil’s Russian and Caspian Sea holdings. Between 2011 and 2013, after more than a decade of work, Tillerson signed cooperation agreements for 10 joint ventures with Russia’s state-controlled oil company Rosneft, including those in the Russian Arctic. The Financial Times reported in 2014, “Russia was going to be Exxon’s next mega-area. And the list of mega-areas in the world is very short.”

As a result, Exxon Mobil’s 63.7 million-acre Russian holdings are nearly five times larger than its second-largest holdings—its 14 million acres in the United States.

The Obama administration, however, did not see Russia in the same warm light. In 2014, the president imposed sanctions against Russia after it sent troops into Crimea. The sanctions permit some of Exxon Mobil’s projects, but none of its Arctic or other offshore exploration, not only halting these operations but also making it impossible for the company to book the potentially enormous reserves.

Oil from Russian drilling operations gushes from damaged pipelines in Usinsk in the Russian Arctic in May 2012. Greenpeace Russia reports that every 18 months, over 4 million barrels of oil spew into the Arctic Ocean from Russian operations. (Photo: Staffan Julén/Greenpeace)

Exxon Mobil’s Russian Arctic holdings became even more valuable when, in late December, Obama joined Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in banning oil and gas activities in virtually the entire U.S.—and all of Canada’s—Arctic waters. Unlike the Russian sanctions, which were implemented with a presidential executive order that can be overturned by another such order, the drilling ban is more akin to the designation of a National Monument and would require an act of Congress to overrule.

According to Bloomberg, Tillerson made multiple personal visits to the White House since 2014 to discuss, among other things, Russian sanctions. Unable to budge Obama, Tillerson may now just get the job done himself, directing negotiations as secretary of state and advocating for Donald Trump to revoke the sanctions.

Trump has Russian sympathies of his own, and the Russian government made well-apparent its preference for his candidacy over that of Hillary Clinton. Trump is also building one of the most fossil-fueled administrations in U.S. history. Nonetheless, I doubt Tillerson trusts Trump, and he certainly did not support Trump.

The oil industry, including Rex Tillerson, gave its overwhelming financial support to Jeb Bush for president in 2016. Tillerson gave the maximum individual contribution of $2,700 to Bush and $5,000 to Bush’s Super PAC. He gave another $33,400 to the Republican National Committee. He never gave a dime to Trump.

Once it was clear that Bush was no longer a contender, the oil industry, including Exxon Mobil’s employees, shifted support to Clinton. Meanwhile, the Exxon Mobil PAC focused on taking the House and Senate for the Republicans, greatly increasing the money spent on these races. Exxon Mobil ultimately spent nearly nine times more on congressional races (close to $1.5 million) than on the presidency (less than $170,000), just barely edging out Koch Industries to become the oil industry’s biggest spender in the 2016 election, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would the oil industry, a GOP mainstay, put its money behind Clinton? Perhaps the companies wanted to back the odds-on favorite; perhaps an industry that works on 25- to 50-year timelines decided that it could weather another four to eight years of a known quantity (even an unfriendly one) like Clinton better than an unknown one like Trump, who could cause irreparable damage. Controlling Congress was the security measure against either presidential victor.

But once Trump became president-elect, a full-court Republican-establishment press composed of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates reportedly offered “glowing endorsements” of Tillerson either to Trump or to Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As I detail in The Bush Agenda, the ties that bind these men and women to Exxon Mobil run deep. In 2000, for example, the oil industry, including Exxon Mobil, spent more money than on any previous election to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office, while Baker’s law firm has represented Exxon Mobil for decades, and Gates and Rice have a consulting firm that has Exxon Mobil as a client.

Simply put, Exxon Mobil needs the U.S. government to play ball, or at least behave.

Tillerson serving as some sort of Trump overseer for the Bush-era Republican oil establishment, however, should raise many red flags, particularly with the possibility of fellow Bush administration alum John Bolton—who reiterated in November a call for regime change in Iran—as his undersecretary. We have already experienced, and continue to suffer the consequences of, the devastation wrought by this group in pursuit of its crude objectives.

Russian President Vladimir Putin presents Rex Tillerson with a medal at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 21, 2012. (Photo: Michael Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images)

By any means necessary

Exxon Mobil has never been shy about working with dictators, be they Hajji Muhammad Suharto of Indonesia, Idriss Déby of Chad, Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola or Saddam Hussein of Iraq (to name but a few).

But sometimes alliances go sour. Change is often necessary.

Members of the Bush administration, many of whom had worked together for decades, made fully transparent their ambitions for American “empire” (their word) long before taking office in 2000, including the plan to invade Iraq (with Iran next in their sights).

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. Within six years, it was largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms, including Exxon Mobil. “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007.

Exxon Mobil joined with other Western oil giants to have a direct hand in this long-desired outcome. The company participated in the Cheney Energy Task Force, which first met just 10 days into the new administration. Its work included reviewing “operational policies” toward Iraq and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” In its final report in May 2001, the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be urged “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” This is precisely what was achieved in Iraq.

Exxon Mobil met with Cheney’s staff in January 2003, two months before the invasion, to discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry, while then-CEO Lee Raymond had many private meetings with longtime friend Dick Cheney. For the next decade, former and current executives of Western oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, acted first as administrators of Iraq’s oil ministry and then as “advisers” to the Iraqi government.

Gary Vogler, an executive and 21-year company veteran, left Exxon Mobil in 2002 to help plan and lead the U.S. government’s oil agenda in Iraq. Vogler later told MSNBC that in an October 2002 meeting in Houston, he and other members of the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group for Iraq were told by Army Corps Lt. Col. Paul Shelton, “Look, the military can get you a lot of information, but you’ve got to keep in mind the cost of that information … may be the lives of 19-year-old Marines and soldiers.”

In April 2003, Vogler joined former Shell Oil CEO Philip Carroll on the ground in Iraq. “The ministry once again has a strong man at its helm,” reported Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine upon Vogler’s arrival at the Iraqi Oil Ministry. By that summer, Exxon Mobil had joined with several other Western oil companies to articulate their own goals for post-war Iraq through the International Tax and Investment Center’s (ITIC) Iraq project. The ITIC’s report, “Petroleum in Iraq’s Future,” released in the fall of 2004, made the case for opening Iraq’s oil industry to foreign oil companies using Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) that grant companies control over production decisions, the right to book reserves as their own and contract lengths 10 times longer than is typical.

As I detailed on CNN.com in 2013, as the war continued, so too did the administration and industry efforts to open Iraq’s oil sector under their preferred terms. Western oil companies met with the Iraqi government and ultimately signed contracts to gain not all they had hoped for, but enough. In 2009, Exxon Mobil emerged as one of the war’s biggest winners, joining with PetroChina to sign a PSA for the super-giant West Qurna oil field, one of the largest oil fields in the world, and later acquiring exploration contracts in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

While the war did have its victors, it was of course disastrous not only for Iraqis, but for the entire region, contributing to the formation of the Islamic State, the Syrian War and today’s refugee crisis.

We know very little of Trump’s actual foreign policy agenda other than an intention to put “America First” while turning toward Russia and against Iran. But perhaps we can gain some guidance from Trump’s words to Anderson Cooper in 2015 on taking on the Islamic State: “I’d bomb the hell out of the oil fields …. I’d then get Exxon, I’d then get these great oil companies to go in­—they would rebuild them so fast your head will spin.” A “ring” of U.S. troops would then surround the wells, Trump said, protecting the oil companies.

Climate “risk” or climate change?

January will be a busy month for Rex Tillerson. On January 19, he has been called to testify in a federal lawsuit brought by 21 young people alleging that the oil and gas industry has sought to both prevent the U.S. government from taking action to protect the environment from climate change and lock in a fossil-fuel-based national energy system with full knowledge of the extreme dangers it poses. Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is before the U.S. District Court of Oregon and will be set for trial this year.

The suit stems from a 2016 investigation by InsideClimate News, as do the state and federal investigations into potential fraud perpetrated by Exxon Mobil against the public and its shareholders regarding what the company knew about climate change and when, and what it did with that information. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, the investigation uncovered that Exxon’s own scientists confirmed in the 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels harms the climate. The company then chose to publicly deny the reality of climate change and finance the climate denialist movement (findings Exxon Mobil disputes).

As secretary of state, Rex Tillerson would lead U.S. negotiations tackling climate change. Tillerson’s rhetoric has led some to conclude that this may not be such a bad thing. The facts, however, reveal that it would be disastrous.

On the one hand, Tillerson acknowledges the reality of climate change and has publicly stated his support for carbon taxation and the Paris Climate Agreement. Exxon Mobil’s lobbying disclosures under Tillerson, however, expose a very different picture. In 2008 and 2009, the company nearly doubled its already top-tier federal lobbying expenditures (spending $29 million and $27.4 million, respectively), outspending every other corporation, to successfully thwart congressional and White House efforts to pass meaningful climate change legislation, dashing the 2009 U.N. Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in the process. Exxon Mobil continues to fund climate denialist organizations and those that are leading the attacks on the Paris Agreement and Obama’s Clean Power Plan, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As for the company’s actual operations, a 2014 study published in Climatic Change journal found that Exxon Mobil has contributed more global greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere over the last 150 years than all but one company (Chevron). Under Tillerson, Exxon Mobil has fought climate-related initiatives launched by shareholders and rejected any meaningful commitment to renewable or alternative energy. As I reported for Rolling Stone in 2013, “Since 2002, Exxon Mobil, which took in $45 billion in profit last year alone, put a grand total of $188 million into its alternative [energy] investments, compared to the $250 million it dedicated to U.S. advertising in the last two years alone.”

A close read of Tillerson and the company’s words on the topic, moreover, reveal a very careful focus on “risks” posed by climate change (or by those responding to it). Exxon Mobil’s annual report to the SEC in 2016 stated, for example, “Due to concern over the risk of climate change, a number of countries have adopted … frameworks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Tillerson’s line is one of scientific uncertainty about what those risks may be, blind faith in the ability of technology to address any such risks should they emerge, and a zealous commitment to the necessity and dominance of oil and natural gas.

The language of “risk” implies that all climate effects are yet to come—such as when Tillerson said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in 2013 that climate change “does present serious risk” yet “our ability to project with any degree of certainty the future is continuing to be very limited.” But, as of 2012, nearly 1,000 children a day were already dying because of climate change, and the estimated annual death toll was 400,000 people worldwide.

In 2008, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President J.S. Simon told Congress: “The pursuit of alternative fuels must not detract from the development of oil and gas.” To grasp the threat posed by Exxon Mobil and Rex Tillerson, one could replace “alternative fuels” with just about any phrase, word or concept expected of a just U.S. secretary of state—be it “diplomacy,” “equality,” “peace,” “climate justice” or “human rights.”

US Exxon Mobil refinery workers in Port-Jerome, western France, joined a strike in support of workers at the French multinational integrated oil and gas company Total S.A. on February 23, 2010. (Photo: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images)

Choosing sides

“This is the purest test you can imagine: Either you’re pro-science or anti-science; either you stand with the people, or you stand with the polluters. It’s that simple,” said Jamie Henn of 350.org. He was speaking in advance of a protest in Cheyenne, Wyo., planned for January 9, to urge Republican Sen. John Barrasso to use his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reject Tillerson’s nomination. The protest is part of a month-long series of protests which include “flooding Capitol Hill” with events targeting key senators who play a big role in cabinet picks.

Tillerson is scheduled to appear in January for hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Democrats have promised a bruising fight. They would need just one Republican to join them to block the nomination and Marco Rubio (Fla.) may be that Republican, having voiced concerns about Tillerson’s Russian ties. If the vote goes to the full Senate and Democrats stand united there, just three Republicans would be needed to block Tillerson. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) have expressed deep reservations.

With leading international human rights organizations, including Global Witness and Amnesty International, condemning Tillerson’s nomination in no uncertain terms, and with Greenpeace coordinating petitions and actions with numerous other groups to block it, the fight is far from over. Tillerson’s nomination comes at a time of heightened unity and strength within the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground, brought to national attention with the years-long battle led by Native Americans to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Terrence Collingsworth, the human-rights lawyer who has fought Exxon Mobil for more than 15 years in defense of the people of Aceh, worries about the damage done simply through the nomination of Rex Tillerson—which, he believes, makes it clear which side the United States government is now on under the presidency of Donald Trump.

“Imagine what will happen in the future,” he says. “[People around the world] will not feel that the U.S. will back them up in trying to hold these companies accountable.” Instead, he argues, we will have—even more than today—“a sweetheart arrangement between foreign governments and the U.S. government to promote the exploitation of natural resources at all costs.”

This article has been updated to include the 2007 amended complaint in John Doe I, et al., v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al.

Antonia Juhasz, a leading energy analyst, author, and investigative journalist specializing in oil.  An award-winning writer, her articles appear in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Atlantic and more. Juhasz is the author of three books: “The Bush Agenda,” “The Tyranny of Oil” and “Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill.” Follow her on Twitter at @AntoniaJuhaz.