Critiques of Current News Stories through a Community Rights Lens

Thoughts on the latest controversy at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals

To the untrained eye, we have plenty of state and federal government agencies to protect our air, water, food, drugs, transportation...all kinds of things to make sure people are safe. But a look at our history gives the context of how these regulatory agencies, as their name implies, regulate harm rather than stop it. They [...]

Permits Legalize Pollution at Thacker Pass

Posted by Protect Thacker Pass, March 4, 2022 On February 25th, the State of Nevada issued three permits to Canadian mining company Lithium Nevada, legally authorizing them to pollute air, water, and soils with toxic and dangerous substances including arsenic, antimony, uranium, sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide, and millions of tons of greenhouse gases. These permits [...]

Buffers do not mean protection from harm

Published January 27, 2022 in The News-Review By John Hunter, Douglas County Community Rights member and sitting Board member for the Oregon Community Rights Network (ORCRN) In a Nov. 26, 2021 News Review article concerning the Feb. 2020 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), is now the negotiated Private Forest Accord between 13 conservation groups and 13 [...]

How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial

As if we need any more examples as to why we need to strip business corporations of all of their corporate constitutional "rights" as quickly as possible before it becomes so unmanageable that corporations themselves become our literal governing bodies. But here's an example anyway: America’s largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying [...]

Leaked Audio Shows Pressure to Overrule Scientists in “Hair-on-Fire” Cases

The following story illustrates the enormous pressure EPA scientists are under to approve new chemicals for sale, so much so that between 2016 and 2020 NONE of the 3,835  new chemicals were stopped from being sold despite concerns that at least some were harmful. It's despicable and abhorrent, yet even without those shady dealings, the [...]

From the Archives: Uncolonizing Our Minds

On the Supreme Court by Richard Grossman Published by Counterpunch on 16 April 2010. So the Supreme Court has been igniting passions, has it? Of its Citizens United decision, people cried: “shameless hypocrisy,” “nothing short of fraud . . . ,” “Truly frightening . . . ,” “a narrow elite is imposing itself through the [...]

Trump’s EPA Helped Erase Records of Almost 270,000 Pounds of Carcinogenic Pollution

In the following episode of "Intercepted" podcast, two investigative reporters discuss how the EPA is not set up to protect people from air pollution--and eventual death from breathing these poisons. They lament the fact that regulatory agencies are up against impossible odds as corporations can outspend and outmaneuver them. Agreed, this is lamentable, but it [...]

Just how severe will America’s minority rule become?

"A tiny minority of the US population can stop pretty much any federal legislation they want to. And that’s before we factor in the not insignificant fact that large corporations currently have more constitutionally protected “rights” than do We The People - from property rights to First Amendment free speech protections. Minority rule plus corporate [...]

It’s unavoidable: we must ban fossil fuels to save our planet. Here’s how we do it.

Community Rights US Founding Director Paul Cienfuegos comments on this important story in "The Guardian," which is linked below: In the early days of US energy corporations building commercial nuclear power plants that they claimed at the time would be “too cheap to meter,” an anti-nuclear-power movement rose up rapidly in response. It didn’t demand [...]

How The 1st US City to Fund Reparations for Black Residents is Making Amends

Paul  Cienfuegos, founding director of Community Rights US introduces this exciting recent news with some thoughts on how revolutionary ideas, such as this and that of Community Rights, always start somewhere before they gain momentum and are folded into cultural norms. See the article below his comments. Every truly revolutionary idea starts building towards actual [...]

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