Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the 80 year-old president of the world’s fifth largest country, is facing a tight race in a bid for his fourth presidential term in Brazil’s general elections on Sunday (4 October). The EU, which earlier this year concluded a landmark trade deal with the Mercosur bloc, which includes Brazil, will be watching the polls closely.
He holds a narrow poll lead over Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the country’s former president Jair, who is currently serving a 22 year prison sentence for staging a coup against Lula’s newly formed government in 2023.
The left-wing leader’s third term, won by with a slim 50.9 percent majority in 2022, distinguished itself for leading anti-deforestation policies and getting the EU-Mercosur trade partnership across its long-awaited finish line, 26 years after negotiations started.
Though Brussels suspended animal product imports from Brazil on 3 September, due to insufficient guarantees of antibiotic regulation compliance, “President von der Leyen commended President Lula’s role and political leadership in the negotiations leading up to the agreement,” the EU commission said in a statement.
The Mercosur deal marked a historic diversion of EU energies South of the Rio Grande river, at a time when Europe and Latin America were both being bombarded by tariff threats from Washington.
The Bolsonaros’ professed support of US president Donald Trump have critics worrying “this election could have major implications for the direction of Brazil’s foreign policy, its global influence,” wrote Dr. Christopher Sabatini, Latin America director at the Chatham house think tank.
Election interference by the US was discussed throughout Lula’s campaign, most notably with Meta disabling his Facebook ads just days before Brazilians went to cast their votes, state-run Agência Brasil reported on 25 September.
At a time when virtually every other democracy on the South American continent has pivoted to the right, a win for a Brazilian Trump enthusiast and supporter of environmental commodification would be a setback for the EU’s climate ambitions.
“A Flávio Bolsonaro government would represent a much stronger geopolitical alignment with Washington and the Trump administration. That could affect climate cooperation, deforestation policy, critical minerals and European access to Brazilian commodities and industrial partnerships,” said Eduardo Raguse, climate co-coordinator at NGO network Friends of the Earth Latin America.
Brazil’s climate observatory recorded its biggest annual fall in emissions in 15 years, with a 16.7 percent reduction in 2024 from the previous year, largely due to a drop in forest clearance in the Brazilian Amazon, which was halved over Lula’s third term.
But Lula has been simultaneously expanding Brazil’s national petrol company’s drilling area into the Amazon’s depths.
“Lula’s government has increasingly framed critical minerals as an issue of national sovereignty and industrial policy,” Raguse told EUobserver, since the Workers’ party leader has referred to Brazil’s petrol reserves as its “passport for the future.”
But along a global pivot to the right, a win for Bolsonaro’s heir or Lula’s renewed interest in fossil fuel politics would not stray too far from the EU’s current conservative climate script, and according to Socialist and Democrat MEP Leire Pajin, will mean little for EU trade.
“Whoever wins the election in Brazil, the EU-Mercosur relationship goes far beyond electoral cycles or trade,” the Spanish vice-president of the Euro-Latin American parliamentary assembly told EUobserver. “Governments may differ in priorities or pace, but the agreement transcends them.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 14, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
In what environmental advocates describe as “another gift to the fossil fuel industry,” the Trump administration plans to end rules limiting the release of planet-heating emissions from power plants that burn coal and gas.
Power plants are considered the largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and account for about a quarter of the nation’s climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In 2024, the EPA under the Biden administration used the Clean Air Act to require that many new gas plants and existing coal plants reduce their carbon emissions by 90%, including by installing carbon capture technology, by 2032.
The EPA estimated that the rule would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions by about 1.38 billion metric tons over the next two decades, the equivalent of about a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector.
Another gift to the fossil fuel industry!
— Safe Climate Campaign now @safe-climate.bsky.soc (@safe_climate) September 14, 2026
The US will allow power plant polluters to dump unlimited planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas.@maxinejoselow https://t.co/ZeiSaFkEpC
On Monday, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator under President Donald Trump, announced an end to this policy at a meeting of energy ministers at the Group of 20 conference in Houston.
Not only will this prevent the enactment of a policy that the EPA has estimated would prevent around 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma cases by 2035. But the administration is also rolling out a proposal seeking to prevent future administrations from regulating carbon emissions as a health risk.
It is an effort that runs parallel to the administration’s rescission of the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allowed the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act on the grounds that they are harmful to human health. That move is also being challenged in court.
Power plants are regulated under a different section of the Clean Air Act, Section 111, which allows the EPA to regulate facilities that “cause, or contribute significantly to” dangerous air pollution.
But whereas the courts have previously interpreted this statute to regulate the outputs of entire facilities, the Trump administration is asking courts to adopt a novel reading of the statute which says each individual chemical under scrutiny must “contribute significantly” to climate change.
As Meredith Hankins, legal director for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained in a policy memo last week, it likely won’t be easy for the administration to prove that the CO2 emissions from US power plants aren’t a significant driver of climate change.
“Power sector emissions account for a quarter of total US emissions, so if they cannot be counted as significant, it’s hard to conceive of any emissions that would,” Hankins wrote. “In fact, if the US power sector were a nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter after China, the United States, India, and Russia. That’s a pretty ‘significant contribution’ to the problem.”
The effort to gut power plant regulations comes after the hottest meteorological summer recorded in US history and amid a year with one of the largest numbers of climate disasters on record, including widespread drought, destructive wildfires, and repeated flooding and tornado outbreaks.
As the planet has warmed over the last half-century, the US has seen a sharp, near-sevenfold increase in weather disasters costing over $1 billion, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” said Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, following news of the EPA’s rollback of power plant rules. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”
She added that “the Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country.”
If successful, the reversal of the power plant rules would be one of the most significant steps in Zeldin’s push to eviscerate the EPA’s authority to combat climate change on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Earlier this summer, during a meeting of the National Coal Council, he bragged that “many of the items” on the industry’s “wish list are now done.”
He has put the wheels in motion to roll back virtually every Biden-era regulation on the coal industry, including rules limiting pollution from mercury and toxic metals, controls on toxic wastewater from coal plants, and limits on coal ash.
And while seeking to undermine the legal basis to regulate greenhouse gases, Zeldin’s EPA has also taken a sledgehammer to its practical ability to do so, dismantling offices that collect climate data, erasing information about human-caused climate change from the agency’s websites, and filling research panels with scientists employed by the fossil fuel industry.
Former State Department energy official Alan Eyre noted that on the world stage, the US “has always been obstructionist” when it comes to climate policy. Under Trump, he said, “we’re actively malevolent.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 31, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
President Donald Trump on Monday warned Americans that they risk becoming “backwards and poor” unless they allow Big Tech companies to build artificial intelligence data centers in their communities.
In a social media post, the president expressed indignation that any town or city wouldn’t welcome data centers, which have drawn nationwide opposition for generating pollution and jacking up utility bills.
“The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
In reality, AI data centers create very few jobs once they are completed, as most of their functions are fully automated.
Trump then said that Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they “kill the Golden Goose” that is AI data centers.
“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” Trump wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
Building AI data centers has become massively unpopular throughout the US.
A poll conducted by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro earlier this month shows that 75% of Americans now oppose building AI data centers in their area, including 61% registering strong opposition.
While Republicans polled in the survey were more supportive of data centers than Democrats and independent voters, it nonetheless found that opposition among Republicans outweighed support by 43 points.
Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris marveled at how politically tone deaf the president sounds when it comes to data centers, commenting that “Donald Trump is actively trying to help as many Democratic senators as possible get elected.”
Longtime GOP operative Frank Luntz similarly noted data centers’ unpopularity, citing a recent Gallup poll showing 63% of Republican voters oppose having one of the facilities built in their communities.
“We’re about to see whether President Trump can sway those voters to support them, as he’s done on many issues before,” Luntz remarked.
Democratic US Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed wasted no time tying the president’s position on data centers to his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers.
“Make no mistake—this is Mike Rogers’ position on data centers,” wrote El-Sayed. “He’s got up to $2.6 million invested in companies cashing in on the data center boom, all while Michiganders watch their utility bills soar. You can’t trust a word out of Mike’s mouth because he’s only out for himself, for Donald Trump, and for Big Tech—not Michigan.”
Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), observed that Trump is merely “sharing the perspective of Wall Street and Big Tech” and is showing “no interest… in grappling with the mass revolt across American communities, or to learn anything from them.”
Screenwriter David Simon, creator of the acclaimed television series The Wire, accused Trump of brazenly lying about data centers’ economic benefits.
“If data centers are a geographic benefit to communities, you can be sure they’d be siting and building them in affluent and politically connected environs,” wrote Simon. “Curiously, they’re dumped in poorer, less influential places. Go fucking figure.”
Republican Kentucky state Rep. Savannah Maddox took issue with the president disparaging communities opposed to data centers, which include many of the rural communities that voted for him in three presidential elections.
“Rural doesn’t mean ‘backwards and poor’ and development doesn’t always equate to being ‘successful and rich,’” wrote Maddox. “President Trump wouldn’t be president without the rural voters who inhabit America’s heartland. It is not wrong of us to question the sudden and wide-scale effort to convert arable land into data centers. We are not stupid for wanting to protect our rural way of life.”
After a deadly “derecho” storm and flash floods slammed the midwest in early August, downing trees and power lines, tens of thousands of residents in and around Gary, Indiana have been surviving without power for 12 days and counting. According to the Associated Press, “Northern Indiana Public Service Co. said 68,000 customers were still without power as of Thursday morning, the majority of them in Lake County beside the Illinois border. The utility said it has restored power to 306,500 others since Aug. 11. But power is not expected to be fully restored until Tuesday [Aug. 25] in some places, including Gary.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of residents and community leaders about the ongoing blackout in Gary and the conditions that led to this avoidable national tragedy. Panelists include: GlenEva Dunham, president of the Gary Teachers Union, AFT Local 4; Freida Graves, Project Director at the faith-based nonprofit Families Anchored in Total Harmony (FAITH) CDC; and Reverend John Jackson, Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Gary, Indiana with an urgent update on the ongoing nightmare tens of thousands of residents are living through after having to survive 10 days without power as of this recording. And we’re recording on Saturday, August 22nd. So yesterday, the Associated Press reported this. “In Gary, Indiana, schools remain closed after the deadly August 11th storm down trees and power lines. Residents turned to social media to find open laundromats and working wifi while others sought food, diapers, and cleaning wipes for low income neighbors. Meanwhile, heavy rains in central Ohio brought flash flooding that covered roadways Thursday morning in Columbus, the state capitol, where emergency crews rescued motorists from stranded cars and saved a 12-year-old boy who was swept off a bridge.
Northern Indiana public service companies said that 68,000 customers were still without power as of Thursday morning, the majority of them in Lake County besides the Illinois border. The utility said it has restored power to 306,500 others since August 11th, but power is not expected to be fully restored until Tuesday in some places, including Gary. Like Baltimore, Gary is a majority Black town that has been through and is going through a lot. And it is frankly a national disgrace and a moral outrage that it isn’t a bigger news story and a national emergency that an entire chunk of the country and tens of thousands of our neighbors have just been living in darkness for 10 days and counting. And the stories that I’ve been seeing and hearing from working people in Gary are so strikingly and unbearably similar to the stories that I’ve been seeing and hearing from working people in Cuba who are being strangled by the oil blockade imposed by our own government.
It is all just devastating and horrifying and it’s unacceptable. And working people are being crushed and abandoned and they need help. And people in and around Gary, Indiana need help right now. And I’m really grateful to be joined today by three guests who are going to help us understand what is happening, what is and isn’t being done, and what you can do to help. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell them what is happening, what you are seeing around you, what you and your community need, and what they can do to help.
Freida Graves:
Hi, good afternoon. My name is Freida Graves. I’m a lifelong resident of Gary, Indiana. I am director of Food as Medicine for Faith CDC and a member of Progressive Community Church. What I see going on and what I feel went on, this is unprecedented. We’ve never had this kind of damage from the derecho tornado that hit, the land-based tornado that hit. For my prospect, there are certainly things that could have been done to prepare ourselves for this kind of weather event that we felt was coming. For our part, our church is solar. So at our point, we knew that at some point, and we have a solar backup battery. We’ve been fearing that for 10 years because we knew at some point as the weather changed, the weather events were going to get worse and worse. And we’d been speaking about this for years, probably to deaf ears, but some people pay attention to the environmental people pay attention, but the people that need to pay attention and make some changes could have previously done so had they listened.
But right now, I’m not saying we’re the end all be all, but I am saying that there’s some things that we could have done to prepare ourselves a little bit better. Now, as for the second part with the trees down and the poles down, I definitely think NIPSCO could have did a better job over the years of maintaining some of that. Some of this could have been avoided with some maintenance and paying attention. Gary was named Tree City several times. So to let you know how many trees we have and how many old trees and how many trees that are native and not native. I do think that some of this could have been possibly avoided had NYPSCO over the years, maintained it and kept up with what was going on, cutting down the trees that need to be cut down and maintaining the wires and the base.
So I’m not going to say total blame is with NIPSCO because it’s a lot of things that Gary sometimes gets ignored on certain things. But I do think with my mindset, they could have absolutely done a better job and we probably would not be in a position. We might’ve had some outages, but not to the point we have now. My power’s not on after 11 or 12 days. And everybody can afford generators. And we have senior buildings where today our church for two days has been passing out water and household supplies and all these kind of things like that for people that are coming down. Yesterday we did over a thousand people. Today I sent $500 worth of stuff to senior buildings. That’s just one senior building that has no air conditioning, no power, and the people are suffering. So from my point, I think things could have been done better on NIPSCO.
And I think for the mayor and administration, yes, they’re trying to get out there and work, but he can’t do it alone. It has to be NIPSCO. It has to be downstate. It has to be all these things that are regulated and made to be better. So I’ve been trying to keep positive. That’s why we’re doing the giveaways. That’s why we’re doing everything we did. Yesterday was 12 hours today. I’ve been out here 10 hours doing giveaways and sending them to seniors apartments. So because all of us are coming together here, churches, faith-based organizations, people are coming together. That’s what’s made everything better. That’s why we kept maintaining our positive spirit because people are coming together and moving together and working together. Thank you pastor for letting me go. And thank you, Ms. GlenEva, for letting me go. I’m going to have to go back outside, but things definitely could have been done better if they had maintained these trees and poles and all these things.
And I thank you for that. Let me be on the show and everyone have a blessed
GlenEva Dunham:
Day. All right, I’m GlenEva Dunham, president of Gary Teachers Union, AFT Local Number four, also president of State Federation of AFT in Indiana. When the tornado or the storm came on the August 11th, we were in school. And so our whole focus was trying to get the children out safely, and we were successful in that, and that was great. All of our schools, we have 10 buildings. They have been down with power. Right now, six of our schools do have power. So we plan on going back into the buildings on Monday, but no students. Four of our buildings will go into our career center and they will just do some professional development and just getting ourselves together before we bring the students in. So what I’m finding about the whole situation, so School City has been feeding the children. We’ve been having drive through lunches every day since school has been out, and that’s been a great thing to make sure they’re fed.
The city opened up the YWCA where a lot of our children have been going, and that has been a 24-hour service. And a lot of our teachers have been to the YWCA and have found some of their students and able to give them work as well. And so that’s been the focal point. Mayor Melton, we’re good friends. We worked together when he was a senator, getting our schools back. Our schools were taken over by the state. And so he’s been working really, really hard. Social media has really been hard on him, but he’s really been working really, really hard. And so I’m proud of the administration. I’m proud of our city. I’ve been driving around. I’ve been here at Gary all my life. I’ve worked all over because I’ve worked in many schools. I’ve been teaching 48 years, and I’ve really seen the devastation. I’ve never seen anything like it.
As far as the comparison with the neighboring communities, are they getting their service sooner than us? It looks like they are, but I know that Gary has more square footage than any of our regional cities, East Chicago, Hammond. Matter of fact, I’m the state fair president. I have 27 locals and 10 of my locals are right here. Lake Station, Porter County, East Chicago, Hammond, Whiting, Griffin, all of those are my locals. So I’ve been in touch with all of them. And also, there was devastation on the south end of our state, which is not really included, but me being a State Fair president, they had a lot of flooding down there. So they didn’t get it like we got it, but they got it pretty bad. But I’m proud of the city. I’m proud of, like Frida said, people coming together. Now that the folks have got a word about it, people are coming from all over the country and helping us.
And so sometimes bad things happen, but in bad things, good things can come out of that. And that’s what I’m seeing, and that’s what I’m hoping. And I’m praying that we all get our power on. I mean, 10 days for us was hard. We did have a generator, but still when the lights came on, Reverend Jackson, I though I was in heaven. It was so bright. I was so happy. So I’m saying I’m a positive person. And so it’s been a lot of back and forth about on social media, should you be positive? Can you express your feelings? Can you say what you think about the administration or whatever? But at the end of the day, we’re going to get through this because I lean on big shoulders. I always go back to my ancestry. Our ancestors, they went through a lot of stuff. And so we have to go back and think about how did they get over?
And we also have to put God in the picture. We can’t just leave God out and think that he’s forgot all about Gary Indiana because I’ll never believe that. So I believe that we’re going to get through this. I’m praying that it won’t be Tuesday because if it’s Tuesday, a lot of people will lose all hope because that’s just too, too long. The mayor was kind of a positive this morning saying that he hope he got the message through on the front page of the Post Tribune, our daily paper. Bron, the governor was on the headlines pushing NIPSCO to do better. And so like I say, I’m seeing a lot of trucks, so I’m just hoping that we’ll get our power before Tuesday.
Rev. John Jackson:
I’m John Jackson and I pastor the Trinity UCC congregation in the great city of Gary, Indiana. I also write a column in the Gary Crusader spiritual column that connects spirituality. I try to show the merging of the secular and the sacred in those columns. And I’m framing this this way as kind of a Katrina 2.0. Gary and Northwest Indiana, from my vantage point, are experiencing a Katrina moment. And as we know, the hurricane that hit in 2005, it did massive destruction. But what it really did in addition to that was pull the covers off, as I think Gleneva was saying, pull the covers off of the lack of maintenance in New Orleans for the levees. As the levees broke, it showed that in the working people’s area of Black, brown and poor whites, what they had been dealing with all along. And so it pulled the covers off of the same thing I see happening here in Gary, Indiana and Northwest Indiana.
Bulgaria, Indiana in particular because it is an older city, if not the oldest city. And as Friday said, it’s a lot of space, a lot of area. And as Gleneba pointed out, there’s a lot of trees. And what it showed is that the maintenance on the trees really had not been done. And so NPSCO has not been faithful in doing the maintenance, which it would have lessened the effect of trees falling on wires and then power outages. And so that’s one issue. But then it opens up the other issue of the rate hike. NPSCO just got a rate hike. And so when you look at that, and now you’ll hear some of the executives talking about how much money it costs for this, how much money it costs for that, well, those things don’t line up together. Then you put in, and I’m staying on the area of rates right now, because there is this legislation called Construction Work in Progress.
And what that legislation allows NIPSCO to do is bill customers for work they plan to do in the future. So that’s part of our bill. And I don’t understand how you bill somebody for something that you’re not doing right now. I don’t understand how that goes. The other part is that if a tree falls on the wire and the wire connected to your house pulls your meter out, my understanding is that the resident has to hire an electrician to affix and get that meter back. Then NPSCO comes out, connects to power.
There’s some disconnect here, there’s some problem here. And with that, in this time, there are not all electricians, but there are some that see the opportunity to gouge people. So there’s a need for electrical engineers and electricians who are honest and who will take care of that. And in fact, it’s really NPSCO’s responsibility, in my humble opinion. I was in a meeting that Good Mayor Melton had called on Thursday with a couple of NIPSCO executives, the president of NIPSCO, and I think the vice president or something of night source. And so he had leaders in the community, political leaders, religious leaders, grassroots persons, civic organizations were in the room. And so one of the things that was said by the NIPSCO executives is that they’re not coming on your property to trim the tree. And my thought was, “Well, if I give you permission to do that, you should be doing that ahead of time.
But when the tree falls on the wire, you got to come in there anyway.” So these things have exacerbated this moment where you have people who have been sitting. My church is still without power. People have been sitting in hot homes and apartments for 11 days now. And when the first estimates of restoration came out, Gary wasn’t on the list. Now, this is in conjunction with a tornado that came through in June that did massive destruction and a lot of the same things were happening that we’re experiencing now. So there are people that have been recovering from that. And then you have this now and this extended delay in restoring power. I know that ComEd in Illinois has more people, but still, I don’t understand why Gary is always last on the list to get restored. So after the meeting Thursday that Mayor Melton had called with the executive, then they said that very night we’re going to put a new list of days and times for power to get back on.
Once again, Gary last on the list with the prospect of being restored on Tuesday. Why does Gary always have to take the backseat for other areas? And knowing that it’s an older city and the infrastructure needs restored, how come the infrastructure was not taken care of five years ago? Three years ago? How come they haven’t been working all day? These are questions that I’m just relating questions that persons in my own congregation are raising. And then again, people have lost food. And so we do a lot of food giveaways. So as best we can without power, we’ll get food and we have to give it away right away. But people without food and without just the ability to have decency and hygiene, everybody’s not able to have generators. And those that have generators has spent close to a fortune in getting gas for it in 11 days.
And so what compensation will NIPSCO offer? Here’s another question I’m getting from a congregation. So for 11 days, there’s been no power. Why do we got to pay a bill? Why isn’t a moratorium on paying a bill for the next month or two? Because the objective in a transaction is that if I pay my money, then I’m going to get the goods or the service in return. Now, if I pay my money and I don’t get those goods and services, then I’m expecting that there’s going to be some compensation that will help reduce the difficulty that I’ve been placed in because you don’t have the ability to provide what I’m paying for. So these are questions that I’m just fueling for my congregation with what happened in June and then now and this extended thing and all of the excuses that we have now. It was a massive storm.
It was unprecedented. But as I think GlenEva pointed out, we’ve known for years now that the tornado alley has been shifting because of climate change. That means I know the executive of NIPSCO have been apprised of that too. So therefore there is been opportunity to beef up the infrastructure that can help reduce the level of challenge that people are facing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I appreciate y’all so much for laying that out for me and our listeners, all of us. It’s really helpful information, even if it’s hard to hear. You’re right. It’s like the echoes of Katrina are just so loud and like Katrina and not just Katrina. I mean, I’ve been going around to places all over this country where working people are experiencing toxic explosions, constant pollution, or huge blackouts like this, or they’re being locked out of their jobs at poisonous facilities. I was just interviewing the BP workers over in Whiting who have been locked out of their jobs for five months. And for listeners, we’re talking about the same area that’s all right around the same area. And so I wanted to hook that into a question. Pastor Jackson, you were laying out the conditions that set Gary up for failure. The conditions that weren’t addressed by the company to mitigate the vulnerabilities that were there in case a major storm hit and certainly prepared for an emergency if this many people are without power.
How the hell are they going to get help? How are we going to reimburse them for the costs and how are we going to make this right? That’s a question that I think is on everyone’s mind right now. But I wanted to hook that into the conditions of Gary itself and life for working people in Gary as well. I wanted to ask if you guys could say, because Gleneva, you’re president of the teacher’s union, and we interview working people in education and all over the place, including BP oil workers in Whiting, Indiana, because we just talk to people about their lives, their jobs. And what we hear from folks is life’s getting harder. We’re working longer for less. Schools are more packed or they’re under-resourced. So that also makes our communities vulnerable to these kinds of catastrophes. I mean that also amplifies the burden that poor and working people have to bear in an economy that’s already asking them to bear too much.
And so I wanted to ask if you could just also help listeners understand what working people in and around Gary have been going through up until this as well. Are they making enough money? Is the air safe to breathe? How are people doing before a catastrophe like this hits?
GlenEva Dunham:
We have to remember, we go back about maybe about two months ago, NISCO was on strike. And I don’t know if you know that, Mr. Alvarez, that they were on strike. I was on the picket line with them and it was for working conditions. And I believe some years ago they did lay off 200 linemen. And so they’re working short-staffed. I sit on the board of the AFL CIO and one of my brothers, he just retired 35 years with NISCO. So he came on Facebook and did a diagram of how the process goes, how the trees and all of this. And then I want to say a couple of things about what Reverend Jackson said. So Mayor Milton did say that the governor, I did get a copy of his declaration because my whole thing was getting my teachers and my paraprofessionals paid. Although we didn’t work, we have in our contract, if it’s anything beyond our control, we get paid.
So that’s part of our working conditions. But there’s a $5,000 per household from the government if you can produce receipts, which is going to be hard because my husband’s been getting gas every night, but the gas stations haven’t had receipts. So that’s going to be hard from your food, if you have receipts from food that you threw away also. And we also have a foundation called the Legacy Foundation where they’re going to help with those monitors or meters that Reverend Jackson is talking about too. So I’m just trying to say there aren’t things working in our favor as far as things that’s not working in our favor. So working conditions, I mean schools, Gary schools were taking over for five years. We just got our schools back last year. This is the second year we’ve been out of state takeover. Then Mayor Melton was Senator Melton, and he was very instrumental in getting our school corporations back.
And it was all about money, but then that’s all about the state. I’m a State Federation president as well. The formula for funding, public education is like trash. Indiana has a, what, $4 billion surplus. And so always people talk about Indiana, I always just say, “Hey, Mike Pitce was our governor.” So it’s always about them being conservative, fiscal, so they can get on Trump’s bandwagon. Bron is, I call him baby Trump. So we’re not getting services. He just passed a law where his children won’t get fed next summer in summer programs, didn’t get fed this summer. When churches have their programs, they usually can rely on the government to bring in lunches. So all of that has been snatched away from us. So yeah, all of that. Big government, NPSCO, people talk about the monopoly. People have said we need another company. NPSCO has been around since I’ve been born, so I don’t even know how that works.
I know it’s all about big money, money talks. But working conditions, like I said, NPSCO was on the picket line. They went back in, their clericals stayed out because they didn’t get. But from my understanding, they really didn’t get what they were out there about, but they just came on back in. Well, BP Amico, theirs was much different. They’re trying to take insurance, everything. They’re trying to strip them and still, still trying to. So they had a bigger fight. So that’s a picture of economics and education. And Gary is always just, people look down on us. I thought Richard Hatcher was the greatest mayor ever, but if you listen to people talk, the detriment to our city started with him. But then it was about the black and white thing. We had the big convention here, the Black convention in West Side, and that’s when we gave the platform for Black America to go forth.
And a lot of people got elected after that. And so that’s on Gary. And then we had the great white flight. I was part of the integration movement. I lived in the projects, was bused to Glen Park, which is our white part of town back in the day where they thought that was better for us. So I mean, it’s a lot of history in Gary about why we are where we are. But I like to think about in the moment. In the moment, I sit on the Redevelopment Commission now appointed by the mayor. I finished one term. We have a lot going on. I hate this happened, but I just see it as a bigger picture. We have Glenn Robinson, one of our NBA players, he just donated $100,000. He did not cancel the Jackson weekend. So I’m sure they’re coming in town. I mean, we had the premier of that movie here.
So that second generation of Jacksons are friends with our mayor. So I can’t, being a union leader, I have to look at it on a positive because I deal with kids. I taught kindergarten for 31 years, so you have to be positive. And so that’s where I am. And I get it. I know the history of Gary. I know Hurricane Katrina. I saw all of that. But still where I sit, I have to think that better days are coming. We’re going to get through this because I’ve never seen what I’ve seen. I’ve never seen all these people coming together. A 18-wheeler truck out of Tree of Life. My husband just left from over there and people on Facebook saying what they got, Pampers and all that. I mean, lay people, a lot of my teachers who got little organizations, nonprofits, they’re meeting on corners, giving out supplies.
I just think it’s going to get better. I see in my own neighborhood, my husband is 80. I see the young man, they helped him pull his choke on his generator. They helped him get his generator fixed. So I’m seeing that in our communities and our communities have always come together in hard times. And I’ve seen it year after year after year. And so that’s what I’m relying on. Yeah, we got to get to the core of what happened. I believe Eddie, he reached across the aisles. He knows how to work with the people across the aisles. That’s how we got things that we’re getting now. That’s how we got all this money for demolition of the blight. Things are going down, things are coming up. So he’s a smart man. And so I put my money on him any day. No matter what anybody says, I know his heart, I know his spirit.
I know like attracts like people coming to our city because tomorrow Jamal Bryant will be here from Atlanta. My son is talking about the Keith B or whoever his name is. I don’t know him, but my son is 33 and that’s exciting. The young folks, the other young folks want to come and do stuff for us. And so I’m looking at it like that. I’m passionate about all of this, but I was out with power for 11 days too. And so I had no ideas. And I got senior citizens, I got retired teachers who I’m looking at. I’m like, how much more can they take? And so I’m glad Reverend Jackson was in on that meeting. I know my superintendent was there, and I know they put a word down in ISCO. And I’m just, like I said, 20 new trucks in our neighborhood. So I don’t know if I answered the question, but there you go.
Rev. John Jackson:
Yeah. GlenEva really set the stage when she went over the challenges Gary has had. Another framing point I tend to use is historically, Gary is similar to what happened in Haiti. When Haiti in 1804 was the first nation to liberate itself from oppression and servitude to France, it sent shock waves throughout the hemisphere. And after that, France, America, Britain has been punishing Haiti ever since, to the point of even forcing Haiti to pay restitution and reparations to have the unmitigated gall to declare that they’re human beings and would not be subjugated. But the people in Haiti are resilient people. They are a positive people. They are hopeful people, which is why they have been able to endure some horrific conditions that have been forced upon them. Like you mentioned And Cuba and how Cuba’s being strangled by this country as we speak. And so Gary has been under attack ever since.
It had the unmitigated gall to declare that Black folk know how to run stuff too and elected Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher. And so that is when the vicious attack came from downstate in Indiana and then from after the Carter administration, then from the national government. And so the resilient and prideful and strong people of Gary have been enduring this for all of these years. So that’s part of the backdrop of it.
The federal dollars and all of the corporate dollars have not flowed in over the years. So people have had to use gum and duck and everything to put things together and have done a pretty admirable job. But the fact of the matter is we pay taxes and those taxes are supposed to go to making sure that working class people, poor people can have life with dignity. And so one of the other challenges that has been already lifted up is there has been not enough attention to Gary in this moment. This is an incredible moment in the sense that an unprecedented storm comes through and does massive damage and you don’t have national news. Now, Gleneva mentioned that Pastor Jamal Bryant is coming and then there are a lot of social media folk that are moving and using their resources. I’m getting calls from all over Chicago and whatnot because I work with an organization that’s a social justice organization, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.
And so there’s mobilization among people, grassroots organizations, everyday people, residents, helping their neighbors get through, cutting down trees so that they can get it off of people’s cars and help folk get the trees off their houses as much as possible, getting the streets clear as much as possible. Of course, folk do this in crisis because of their resiliency and their strength and their love for living and humanity. But the fact of the matter is we shouldn’t have to bear this burden like this. We shouldn’t have to bear the neglect that has happened. It’s not just NIPSCO. It is broader than that. And the line workers for NYPSCO, the people that are going out, getting on the poles and all of that, these people are working hard. They’re working. So it’s not about them. It’s about the institution itself. Because what we’re talking about is institutional.
You were talking about predatory capitalism, these things. So that’s why from this spiritual as a pastor vantage point, I see my faith and as a follower of Jesus Christ who also was a community organizer against the empire of Rome so that he could create an alternative community against the predatory nature of the Roman Empire, which had created society of oppression for people extracting from them profit and not caring about people. And so this is where the vantage point that I come from and therein is the hope because people are going to resist. People are going to build. People are going to help each other get together. But my focus is, okay, the lights are going to come back on. We can’t go back to business as usual. And a lot of people, all of us, you get happy when the light comes on. And again, that’s another metaphor for the light of our faith.
We get joy when the light comes back on, but the light also brings heat. And that heat then has to be applied so that we don’t get to this point again so that we can have a utility company that works better for the people. Now, I really hope that the executives have been listening and hearing the people so that they can take back the changes that need to be made. We’ll see. But we have to not allow the moment to just die down.
We got to keep pushing so that Gary can get the attention and the resources and the work that needs to be done so that again, there’s going to be another storm. It could be another storm in another few days. We are in this season of storms. Now, if things go the way they have been going, we’re going to do this again. And this is something we can’t do. It shows again, it covers all that there’s some stuff that needs to be done to strengthen. One of the executives, because the question was ask, well, how come the wires, the lines are not underground? There are places in Northwest Indiana where the lines are underground. They experience less outages than other places where the wires are on top of the ground. Well, the executive said it costs 10 times more to do that than to do what they’re doing right now.
I understand that, but NIPSCO is recording record profits. I’m going to leave it at that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m not because I’m like, they’re recording record profits and they’re saying it’s costing more to put the lines underground. And what they’re also saying is that that cost is less tolerable to us than the cost of tens of thousands of people going two weeks without power. That is what they’re saying is that costs, they could pay that cost, but they would rather working people, poor people, regular people bear that cost ourselves of their negligence. We are bearing the costs not just of their negligence, but of their profits. Those profits come in our expense. I don’t know if you could get a more clear cut example than this. Record profits for the same company while people that pay for their service are left without power for 10, 11 days and counting. So sorry, I’m just so fired up and frustrated about all of this. I was even going to say, well, we got to wrap up, but no way we can wrap up on that because I wanted to give y’all just one more chance to hop in because I appreciate you so much for your time.
I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could just finish with any final messages you have for listeners about what they can do to help folks in Gary now and what advice you have to them about how they can put that lesson into practice Reverend Jackson spoke of, that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure that this kind of catastrophe doesn’t happen again or keep happening or keep getting worse every time the news cycle resets.
GlenEva Dunham:
I just want to say, if this is going to our Gary residents, first and foremost, we have to vote. We have to vote. Our voting record is dismal. So we have to get involved. We can’t just wait until crisis and things like that to want to come out. We have to get involved. We have to go to the meetings. We have activists like Carolyn McCrady herself who they have meetings all the time and they call the NPSCO execs to the meetings. And those meetings are not attended by the people who are in line right now. And I know sometimes it’s hard to get to meetings and stuff, but we have to become aware of what’s going on to us. So we just got to put our voice out there. That’s number one. Number two, I know the city has on their website, they have all kind of paid.
They have set up a fund. So there’s people because a lot of people are talking, a lot of people have platforms, and we are suffering. Some people are suffering and need help. And so if you can’t get to Gary, there are places where you can do donations and make sure that the donations get where they need to be. One of them is a legacy foundation that is a not-for-profit in our community.
Just continue to pray for us because I believe in the power of prayer. Tomorrow is Sunday. If you are gathering and worshiping, make sure Gary is spoken out loud, that you pray for us, that we get our power on, and that also we pray for folk like CEOs. We can’t forget them. We need to pray that their hearts are touched, that they would do a better job of the people who keep them living. Like Reverend Jackson said, we pay their salaries. And that’s where we fight all the time as a union leader. We have to tell the people we are taxpayers. These schools, that’s a whole nother thing, they belong to us. So we have to let people know that we are taxpayers and we do know how to protest. And Reverend Jackson again is good at that. His church is Afrocentric and they are a cornerstone in our community.
So we just want you to keep us in your prayers financially if you can, because it’s going to take a lot. I have a neighbor across the street who’s waiting, he has a tree in his yard, and he said that he’s in the queue. We have a 311 that you put your name in there, but I don’t think that they’re going to get his tree out his yard. I don’t think that he’s going to have to get somebody to do that. And I know financially he probably can’t. And so come to the community, get online, see some of the people who are talking, DM them, see what they need, the schools, all of us. So just offer us the assistance that you can.
Rev. John Jackson:
Frida and Gleniva, they are examples of ordinary people who just love God and who love our people and who love to be of service to people, just ordinary people who take on these roles because they want to help people’s lives be better. They are replicated by hundreds of thousands in Gary, Indiana. And so that just gives you an idea of the quality of people that we have. I forgot to mention when you asked about what has the residential Gary had to put up with. I work with a group called GUARD, Gary Advocates for Responsible Development. And just a couple of months ago, we had a town hall meeting dealing with the steel mill, US Steel that has been purchased by Nippon Steel, Japanese company. The town hall was about challenging Nippon Steel who pledged something like $4 billion when they purchased Gary as investments and challenging them to use funds to update the blast furnaces from the toxic furnaces they have to the clean steel.
Because that’s another issue in Gary because of the steel mill, because of a lot of factories and things like that, which there’s a high rate of health problems from breathing problems to cancer. It is a high rate because of this. So you’ve got this going on and now you got this going on. It is a heavyweight to carry. So one of the things that going forward, there is no Citizens Action Coalition for Gary, CAC, which help monitor to help put some accountability to NPSCO. So that’s one thing that needs to happen, that the Citizen Action Coalition would get established. And as Gleneba pointed out, prayer is always necessary because that’s the engine that drives us, that’s the connection that gives us strength because we are a believing people. But also going forward, the right attention and not always trying to find a negative and magnifying it.
Every community has negatives in it, but there has been campaigns to try to magnify a few negatives and not look at the great work and the great citizens of this great city. And so we need more persons like yourself, Brother Alvarez and others and the national attention to point out what actually is missing here. What is not being provided in this city of 60,000 plus people and the needs that they have from the schools to. And we can, as Laniba said, these are other areas that we could have a whole show on. Because again, it comes down to we are taxpayers and our taxes should be used to make sure that life is better. It should not be profit over people. It should not be price over principle. It should not be money over meeting. It should not be those things. And so from the federal government to corporations on down, we need more of the attention to point out that people are enduring and they’ve got joy, but they shouldn’t have to bear the burden alone.
That’s why we pay taxes. And voting, yes, voting is connected to these things. Voting is connected and we have to exercise. It’s one tool in the toolbox, but like a good carpenter, you use all the tools in the toolbox. So voting is important.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from Gary, Indiana. GlenEva Dunham, president of the Gary Teachers Union, Freida Graves, Project Director at Faith Farms, and Reverend John Jackson, Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you and we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network because we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of working people’s struggles around the US and across the world.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there. And please help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter now. It really, really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
For the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The facility, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, is BP’s last unionized oil refinery in the United States. BP says it is pursuing “modernized job structures, training, and upskilling,” but workers and their union—United Steelworkers Local 7-1—say that the company has not bargained in good faith, that its contract proposals pose blatant existential threats to workers’ jobs, pay, and collective bargaining rights, and that the company is illegally trying to crush the union out of existence with the lockout. In this episode of Working People, we speak with three locked out workers at the BP oil refinery in Whiting: Eric Schultz, president of USW Local 7-1; Leno Miller, assistant griever for USW Local 7-1; Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7-1, and a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are going to Whiting, Indiana, where for the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum or BP has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. This is the last unionized BP refinery in the United States, and this is a really important struggle and a really important story. But with everything in the world and the news being so crazy these days, it has not gotten the attention that it deserves from national media.
But that is why we are so lucky to have someone like Sarah Lazare, a brilliant journalist and the editor of the excellent Workday Magazine going where others won’t and lifting up the stories that need to be told and heard. In her recent report titled Locked Out Refinery Workers Say BP is Trying to Starve Us and Crush the Union, which was jointly published by Workday Magazine and the American Prospect. Sarah writes, “British Petroleum, one of the 10 largest oil and gas companies on earth, kicked out its workforce at the Whiting Crude Oil Refinery, which at its peak produces 440,000 barrels a day on March 19th. The previous contract expired in January and United Steelworkers Local 7.1 declined management proposals that workers say would existentially threaten the local. The union has been locked out for over 140 days, and it says it is fighting for its survival against an employer that wants to cut pay in jobs, undermine workers’ ability to strike and tear the local away from national bargaining.
The lockout is illegal,” the union says. By late May, United Steel workers had filed 15 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company is refusing to bargain in good faith and using threats, coercive statements, and surveillance. The fight has become a test of endurance. On one side are workers who are not receiving the equivalent of strike pay, though members can ask for help from an assistance fund financed by the United Steel workers. On the other side is an oil company that brought in $189.2 billion in revenue in 2025. In an email to Workday Magazine and the prospect, BP spokesperson Cesar Rodriguez said that the company is pursuing, “Modernized job structures, training, and upskilling.” But workers say that this is just code for greater disposability and degraded conditions, and they declare a new pay progression would make it easier for BP to fire people and harder for workers to get to the highest rates of pay.
They’re also concerned about the proposed loss of dozens of jobs from the bargaining unit. On March 2nd, management presented the local with their last, best and final offer and the union membership voted it down. A revised settlement was offered the next day, but it too was rejected. On March 17th, the union gave a counter offer. Just four hours later, the company rejected our counterproposal, issued notice of the cancellation of rolling extensions and a notice of intent to lock us out of our jobs effective at midnight on March 18th, according to the United Steel workers. To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests. Eric Schultz is the president of United Steel Workers Local 7.1. Leno Miller is an assistant griever for USW Local 7.1. And Tim Powell is a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1 and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee.
Eric, Leno, Tim, thank you so much for joining me today on the show, especially with everything that you guys got going on. I really, really appreciate it. And I do wish we were meeting under less horrifying and infuriating circumstances. And we’re going to talk about the lockout and everything that’s going on right now. But before we do, I’d love for listeners to get to know you first because most people have never met or spoken to folks in your line of work. So tell us more about yourselves, how you got into this work, and the kind of jobs that you do on a day-to-day basis before this lockout began.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for taking the time to have us. Again, my name’s Eric Schultz. I’m a machinist in the refinery. I hired in October of 2009. I started off in our machinist apprenticeship program. So that was a four-year apprenticeship where you learn the refinery inside and out from a mechanical standpoint. What machinists do out here? It’s kind of an amalgamated trade. It’s more like a millwright machinist. We’ll do anything from repairing pumps in the field, turbines, compressors. We have shop work where we repair relief valves, the pumps and the turbines inside the shop. So we do a lot of things from A to Z as far as a maintenance millwright mechanic would do. And then so that was 2009, about 2014, July of 2014, I came onto the union board as a divisional rep. I represented our machinists and our instrument in electrical groups.
And then about five years ago, I became president of local.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. You machinists need to rebrand as the MacGyver union because you’re out there fixing things that I didn’t even know existed or that are taped together and you got to have an intimate knowledge of this machinery and the kind of machinists I’ve talked to from the railroad industry to the gas and oil industry to Kellogg’s. There are just so many nuances that none of us understand. So I can only imagine the kind of stuff that you guys are doing out there in the field.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah. Especially in an oil refinery, it’s a very niche market. You run into equipment that you wouldn’t run into in many other fields. We’ve got equipment from the 1940s and 1950s all the way up to incredibly modern equipment. So you kind of need to know the gamut. And we’ve got some amazing machinists out here that they’re absolutely experts on their units. They’re the ones that our operators will turn to to ask for help troubleshooting. Even our engineers walk into the main shop where our pump mechanics are, turbine mechanics, and ask them to help diagnose what went wrong and what they could do to fix it. So we’ve got some amazing mechanics out here, machinists. Hey,
Leno Miller:
My name’s Leno Miller. I’m a operations specialist for the refinery. I grew up in the area. I’ve carried a card my entire adult life, first of which out of high school, I carried a Teamsters card for a couple years. I worked at the local UPS plant. After that, I ended up in an automotive plant. I carried a UAW card before I got into the refinery. I hired in just shy of 20 years ago. So if BP refuses to come back to the table and bargain in good faith, I can get 20 years on the outside locked out, which not a good feeling, but that’s where we’re at. Inside the refinery, like I said, it’s been almost 20 years. So I started out as an operator, which do rounds, take samples, monitor the equipment on a day-to-day basis. We work 12-hour shifts, swing shifts. From there, I became a board operator, a council operator, which is a specialist by trade what’s referred to in the refinery.
And then I ended up becoming a chief operator as well, a chief operator and a council operator, which is a cross-qualified position, which is one of the positions that the company is proposing to do away with. So I would essentially get bumped down from a chief operator and a board operator to a technician. I would lose my specialist qualification and my pay that comes with it.
Tim Powell:
I’m Tim Powell. I started almost 20 years ago. It was 19 years this January. Started at the Cats and it was spent just about 10 years.
Eric Schultz:
No one’s gonna know what the Cat is…
Tim Powell:
Yeah. So I started over at basically a gasoline processing unit. Spent 10 years there. Had an opportunity to transfer to another part of the refinery where we were basically make diesel using high pressure hydrogen and crude oil. And I was an outside operator for most of that time. About six years ago, I got onto the console board operator job as well. So specialists, we take training every year. We do training every quarter going through computer training. Now they’re trying to say that we need to interview for these jobs again and see if we’re still qualified to be there if they’re even going to keep the job. I’m third generation USW on both sides of my family. There’s been union people throughout my family from coal miners to steel workers, city bus drivers. I mean, my family has lived on a union paycheck for generations.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that.Because I started this show eight years ago not knowing much about unions at all. I did not grow up in a union family. In fact, back in the day, we were more of an anti-union family. We didn’t know anything. And to be honest, the few union jobs that my brother had had at a Rite Aid just weren’t good. And so I think now that we’re at a point in this country where less than 10% of the workforce is actually in a union, it’s important to talk to folks out there about what being in a union means. And so I wanted to ask you guys, why is it important for workers in this industry especially, and workers in general, to have a union? Tell us more about why being in a union is important to you and your family. And then let’s sort of unpack some of the nuances of labor relations in this industry that listeners need to know about.
Because again, we’re talking about the last unionized BP refinery in the United States.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, sure. I mean, from my perspective, the first thing that most people come to, they think about is pay. Pay, retirement, when they think of a union. For me personally, I feel like in this industry, it’s more about the ability to collectively bargain, meaning we have 800 people that get to stand shoulder to shoulder, elect representatives, the representatives, then go sit down with the company. And you’re on as close to equal footing as you’re going to get. Without a union, it’s each man or woman for themselves. So the byproduct of that collective bargaining, yeah, it gets pay and it’s retirement, but to me, most importantly, it’s having a voice on the working conditions inside the plant, safety issues. We’ve got a contractual joint health and safety committee where members of the union sit down with members of management monthly to identify safety issues and then create programs to try to address those issues.
So at the end of the day, we do make good money because we work in an incredibly profitable industry and it’s a highly complex job that all of us do out here. But what good does that do if at the end of the day, you’re going to go home and you’re not going to be the same way that you left? You’re going to go home injured or even worse. And this is an industry that when things go wrong, they can go wrong real fast. Incidences can turn into fatalities very fast in this industry. An incident that spirals out of control inside of an oil refinery is highly likely to affect the community. And if you follow along in the news in the last year or two, it seems like once a month we’re reading about a refinery fire in which the community is ordered to shelter in place because of toxic releases that are getting into the community.
So to me, the most important piece of a union is to make sure that we go home safe and that when you retire, you actually can enjoy your retirement and not be struggling with debilitating injuries or diseases, which are very prevalent in this industry. You look at the cancer rates for an oil worker versus any other line. You look at mesothelioma, different issues. We have asbestos is all over the refinery. Everywhere you look, there’s stickers on piping that say warning asbestos. So we live with these things every day. And that’s to me the biggest thing that a union could do is help protect its workforce.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to sort of underline everything that you said in red pen, listeners are going to have the hairs on the back of their neck standing up the same way I am because I’ve interviewed on this show a worker, Leo Linder, who was on the deep water horizon when it blew in the Gulf. So if folks are wondering how bad could it get, that’s how fucking bad it can get. Pardon my French. But it can get bad in so many other ways like we’ve been covering on this show. We talked to folks in Roseland, Louisiana near the Smitty Supply Plan where that massive explosion in fire happened and people said it was raining black sludge all over the place. I mean, we’ve talked to residents of East Palestine, Ohio where that Norfolk Southern train derailed over three years ago. And you’ve heard the hell that they’re going through.
You’ve heard the hell that railroad workers are going through and how they are being crushed into oblivion while all of our communities, our supply chain are being put at long-term risk for the sake of short-term, massive profits for Wall Street shareholders and company executives. This is part of the same horrible, vicious cycle that we’re hearing about from working people in different industries in different parts of the country all over the place. So please, I beg you, pay attention to what these guys have to say. Leno, sorry to hop in there. Please hop back in.
Leno Miller:
No, you’re spot on. And the refinery operates not only in Whiting, it’s basically in the center of three communities. It operates in Hammond, Indiana as well and also East Chicago. So it’s in the middle of a very populated area that has accepted the risks of operating a large crude oil refinery in the middle of it. But the promise that was made was the community was going to get some of the benefit of that. We were going to get the jobs. And it’s like you said, that’s where they’re breaking the promise. So if you’re bringing in workers from out of state to try to replace us and you’re trying to extract wealth out of the community, not even wealth, you’re just trying to extract a basic income and a basic way of life from the area in order to send it to shareholders and wealthy executives, especially it’s a foreign oil company.
So I mean, that’s the goal, right? And that’s what people need to understand. They’re trying to take from our community and from people that actually live and work here in order to send it elsewhere.
Tim Powell:
To build on something that Eric said too about the equal footing to have when we’re talking, when we’re negotiating with this company, a union honestly to me is the only way that everybody who has a particular job is going to get that same pay. Doesn’t matter how much the guy next to you is kissing ass to the company. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad woman or what color you are. You’re getting that pay. It’s not that your friend across the aisle is going to get an extra 20 bucks an hour because he’s buddies with the boss. Everybody gets the pay for that work. And that’s the only guarantee honestly to me in this country that you have that.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the company’s large proposals that they have on the table is to eliminate seniority as a means for promotion. And they view it as, well, it’s a flawed system. It’s not always the best person that gets it with seniority. They want to go what they call merit-based. Well, you look at, well, let’s look at reality. Let’s look at outside of a union facility. Do women and men in this country make the exact same amount of money for doing the exact same job? Why not? Because the merit-based system is so effective. Do minorities make as much money as white men in this country for doing the exact same job? Absolutely not. I mean time and time again, no one would even argue that case. Well, is that a merit-based system? It is. So merit, they act like merit is some great system that only the best and the brightest rise to the top.
And they’re full of shit and everybody knows that. The guy who plays softball and goes to the bar with the supervisor afterwards is more likely to get the good jobs and get better pay. The executive’s nephew that gets brought right into the plant and gets to go to the front of the line, that guy is more likely to make more money than everybody else. That’s what merit-based systems are. So absolutely, that’s one of the main issues with them. And back to the safety piece, another one of their issues, and I don’t want to get too much into the nuances of the proposals because we would need a three-hour show probably. But what one of them is the reclassification of all of our jobs. So as Leno was saying, right now he’s risen to the level of an operations specialist. We have operation specialist field, operations specialist board, and then operations specialist cross qualified, which is you do them both.
That is the top of the top. So they want to eliminate those roles, but then still have us do the same work. But they want to call us tech threes and tech fours, and then the company would get to pick the tech fours. But then they also, for our operators, they want them to have to know five different jobs throughout the refinery. Places that are, it might take you 15 minutes to get from this unit to the next unit, and that’s hoping there’s not a train stopped in the middle of the refinery. So they want to spread everybody out and make them the term jack of all trades, the ace of none. Well, if you just go back a few years ago, our sister refinery in Toledo, Ohio, which BP has since sold, it’s no longer a British Petroleum facility, but there was a double fatality.
Two brothers were killed in a fire out there. And the Chemical Safety Board, when they came back, when they finally concluded their study, one of their findings that they punished the company for was rotating the operators too much so that they didn’t just get good in one area. So the company’s taking credit for, well, I’ve got this many operators that can handle this many jobs, but they can’t do it. They necessarily can’t do it well. You do it better when you specialize. So flash forward, so the Chemical Safety Board says that the company was wrong for the way that they were handling operations. So what does this management group decide to do? They decide to put a proposal on a table to do exactly here what they were doing in Toledo and spread our operators too thin. And people just saw the proposal, the average person in the community, they wouldn’t understand the implications of the company’s proposals.
And it would make it incredibly unsafe out here. Not to mention making these guys do a lot more work for less money, but again, more importantly, you’re going to have a bunch of people who just aren’t going to be as familiar with the equipment. When stuff goes wrong, you need the people that just know instantaneously, instinctively how to get out there and what to do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I mentioned earlier that this is the sickness that we’re seeing spread to industries all across the board. And even though people may not understand the nuances of y’all’s contract, they understand that sickness of the corporate-minded Wall Street-minded obsession with cutting costs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, removing important layers of security to save a buck, and all at the expense of the workers who are being asked to do way too much for less than they were getting before. That leads to hazards all over the damn place. That’s the same stuff that we’ve heard from your fellow machinists at Boeing who described like, “Hey, how did job conditions and planes get so bad at Boeing over the years?” Well, this is part of it. That worker that I interviewed on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew in the Gulf, he said the same thing.
BP was pushing speed over safety and look at the results. I mean, the same thing was said to us by the railroad workers. They’ve been cutting jobs. They’ve been making the trains longer and heavier. They’ve been making workers be on call twenty four seven, running them into the ground. And it’s only a matter of time until those short-term profits run out and you end up with a massive, massive, dangerous problem that’s going to take years to fix. And that is, again, I really, really want to stress for folks, those are the stakes of what we’re talking about here, not just for frontline workers in these industries, but for fence line communities living near these industries or living near a railroad track, living near the Gulf of Mexico or any coast where your ability to go outside is basically in the hands of wealthy corporations that are making disastrous decisions that could impact you and your family.
But I don’t want to belabor the point because I know we have limited time here. And I wanted to, before we get really into the lockout itself, Eric, I wanted to ask if you could unpack for our listeners the baseline of understanding that we need to have for labor relations in this industry, how this is working with bargaining with BP. I mean, because we had to learn that four years ago when the railroad workers almost went on a national strike. I had to become a PhD in the Railway Labor Act and explain quickly that there are 13 craft unions. There are four major rail carriers. Everyone’s bargaining in sort of different fashion. So listeners of this show are a little familiar with hairy labor questions like that. But I guess just for your average lay listener, what are the things that folks need to understand about how bargaining works in this industry so that they understand everything that we’re going to talk about with the lockout?
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, sure. So in the oil industry, we bargain at a national level. Not every facility, but every USW facility is in one way or another part of the national oil bargaining pattern agreement. And that’s been since the 1960s. Since the 1960s, there’s only been. We haven’t had a national strikes. We had one in 2015. Prior to that, 1980, I believe. So there’s really, yes, how is the labor relations in the industry? National oil bargaining, it’s been a stabilizing influence for both our members and the companies. Usually when we’ve got our final settlement offer on the table, the top table will bargain it and then it gets passed out to everybody else across the country and we put it across the table locally. Typically, you always feel like, “Man, I wish we got more. It wasn’t great, but 90-something percent of the membership votes yes for it.” And that’s probably how good bargaining works is neither party walks away feeling like they absolutely got the whole hog.
Both parties feel like, yeah, we got something, we gave up a little bit of something and we move on. So that’s how it’s typically been. Now this is a lockout, and there’s only been two lockouts in the oil industry in the last 25 years that we’re aware of. And there’s one common denominator between the two lockouts is there’s one guy that was at ExxonMobil on the HR team, on the negotiating team that was part of the lockout in Beaumont, Texas. Again, it was an Exxon refinery in Beaumont, Texas. They were locked out for 10 and a half months. While they were locked out, British Petroleum liked what they saw. They hired one of the guys from that team, his name’s Jordan Marks. They hired him and he came to Whiting and started working in the background. He wasn’t at the table with us in the first round of bargaining, but he had been there looking at the contract and trying to devise a way to do here what he did in Beaumont, Texas.
And so that’s where we’re living right now. Part of the reason that we believe that we filed so many labor board charges is that it was apparent that the company was at best surface bargaining. They had no intent to get an agreement this round of bargaining. Their intent was to push us into a strike. And then eventually if we didn’t strike, then they were just going to lock us up. So this was preordained. The company had this in mind the entire time, and that’s absolutely apparent. Now, national bargaining, everybody else, every other corporation that’s a part of it agreed to the patent. There was only one other site. There’s a site in California that’s having issues too. But the rest of the country, the membership all voted yes, and the companies all voted yes on national oil bargaining. We are in an absolute different spot than our peers.
When we get together with our sisters and our brothers from other locals, people that work for Marathon, people that work for Exxon, Chevron, they don’t have these problems. Most of their negotiations were not contentious. Obviously they didn’t get everything they wanted, but they all got a deal on time. So that’s kind of where we’re at is we’re just in this spot where British Petroleum chose years ago to go down this road in an effort to break the union here, to eliminate the union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk a little more about that. Let’s talk about how we got to this point. And what are the key contract issues and working conditions that you’re fighting with the company over right now? And how far back does this fight go?
Eric Schultz:
So it started, I mean, they kind of tested the waters in our last round of bargaining. So our last contract negotiation period was in 2022. It was another round where the rest of the country, the companies and the unions all agreed to national pattern and moved on down the road. We had to roll our contract for weeks after the expiration of the contract because British Petroleum had a 120-day strike and lockout notice on the table, which is something that they also did. Jordan and his cronies in Beaumont, Texas, there was a little bit less, but they put a strike and lockout notice on the table for them, the previous contract. So again, it’s lazy just bringing the exact same lazy playbook. So that was last round of bargaining. And eventually we had enough people in management that had a spine and could push back against corporate interests that were pushing for that 120-day strike and lockout notice.
And they pulled it off the table and we went down the road. So really it started last round of bargaining where you could see the items on the walls. Our smaller bargaining units, we also represent a plant right across the street called White and Clean Energy, which is a British petroleum plant. We represent our plant guards, our pipeline employees. And we’ve seen the company coming just absolutely trying to gut their contracts. And that’s what we saw this round. I mean, it’s hard to answer what are the issues because it’s everything. They basically took the contract book and went from cover to cover. And they’re proposing to change pretty much anything that benefits a union worker. Again, with the job reclassifications, we have decades of memorandums of agreements, letters of understandings, side agreements that govern how our job classifications work and how they’re policed. They want to eliminate all those and start all over again and then put management’s rights on everything.
Once we ink the deal, their proposal is going forward, the company can make any changes they want that they see fit. So who would sign a contract that the very next day it’s rendered useless because the company could go and change it however they want? And that’s where our job classifications, how we’re trained, what kind of work we have to do, how they can eliminate someone, how they can terminate someone for the company’s, their interpretation of lack of ability. So that elimination of seniority for the bidding into higher positions, elimination of plant seniority for the purpose of layoffs. So right now their proposal is they could basically, once we sign the deal, if they wanted to eliminate one of our groups, our lab, we represent our laboratory employees. As soon as we sign the deal, the company could then give us a piece of paper saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to lay off 50 people in the lab.
And then it would just go by that. Whereas right now we have plant seniority. If they wanted to lay off 50 people, it’s the 50 junior people, which makes it painful on the company. But what it does is it forces them to come sit down and be reasonable and have a conversation about how can, okay, you have to reduce headcount. We don’t want to talk about it, but we will. We’re not afraid to have hard conversations. And then we’ll work out a way to try to help them meet their goals, but at the same time protect our members. They want to eliminate that. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Management’s rights for the use of AI. Their original proposal was that the contract language would survive the life cycle of the contract. They said it would go into perpetuity, meaning you’re going to agree to something that forever you’ve given up your rights, your local, state and federal rights to bargain over the use of artificial intelligence forever.
And that’s just ridiculous, absolute ridiculous language. But again, it just goes on and on and on. Any one of these issues during a regular year would’ve been a very contentuous issue that could have led to a strike or a lockup. And instead, they decided to throw the entire kitchen sink at it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And the way that they’re trying to sweeten this deal is offer one time payments to you guys. Basically blood money to say like, “Hey, take this couple thousand dollars and sign away your collective bargaining rights.” I mean, that’s nuts. And that’s me speaking. That’s just me editorializing, but this is kind of making my head spin. And I know I could talk to you guys for hours, but we don’t have that long. And so with the time that we have, I wanted to go back around the table and just ask if you guys could sort of tell listeners how this whole lockout situation has unfolded as you’ve experienced it. Give us a worker’s eye view breakdown of events on the ground since the lockout began to now. How are you guys holding up after five months of this?
Tim Powell:
Well, with me being on the assistance committee, we’re meeting at least three days a week, sometimes more, usually six to seven hours a day. And everybody brings in their necessity bills. They bring in your mortgage, your rent, your car note, your car lease, your medical bills if they’re broken down in the monthly things, insurance, our medical insurance. The things we need to live that we can no longer provide for ourselves because BP took away our paychecks. We on the assistance committee hear the sad stories every day of like, “Well, we had to cut this back. We weren’t able to do this with the kids this summer. We weren’t able to do this. I had to sell this.” And you get jaded to it because you’re hearing it all the time, but every day there’s another heartbreaking story that you’re hearing because this person put in between.
I’ve got guys who have put in two years, I’ve had families that have come in, the guys have been here 25 years and they can’t provide how they’ve been providing for their family for the last 25 years. It’s crazy.
Leno Miller:
Yeah, it hurts. And that’s by design. I mean, that’s what BP is the company that we’ve, all three of us have been here on average close to 20 years. And by design, the company that we’ve. I mean, we’ve all missed holidays, birthdays. We’ve been dedicated workers for 20 years. And in order for short-term gains to be able to take from us, this company just posted in three months they made $5.7 billion and they’re paying a bigger dividend. We’ve been here sacrificing our personal lives for 20 years and they are intentionally hurting us and our families. So it’s shameful.
Tim Powell:
Now just are the holidays we’ve missed, but you mentioned 12 hour shifts, 16, 18 hour shifts, 12 to 19 shifts in a row. I mean, yeah, it’s great money when we’re working, but you don’t see your family for 19 days. You go home and you say hey to the wife and you fall asleep. For them not to think that this is a sacrifice every day that what we’re doing for them to then make a sacrifice even farther on this, it just drives you out of your mind.
Leno Miller:
That goes back to you asked the benefits of a union. We’re the union. The union is its workforce. The union is voted by us. It represents us. It is us. It’s the workforce. A Fortune 500 company, the workers are a line item. You’re a number on a spreadsheet. You mean absolutely nothing to them. Nothing at all. So Bernie’s Petroleum has no loyalty to us whatsoever. The only thing they care about is their shareholders. That’s it. It’s short-term value. Like I said, they made $5.7 billion in three months and increased their dividend while we were locked out.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So where do things stand now? Like what can be done and what can folks listening to this do to stand in solidarity with y’all and the other 800 folks who have been locked out here?
Eric Schultz:
So unfortunately, we’re at a standstill right now. Again, as Leno just mentioned, that’s by design. They didn’t lock us out with the intent to hurry up and get a deal. They locked us out knowing that they have a number in their mind. They know how many months that they wanted this to go. They’re going to want to put as much economic stress and pain on families as possible with the intent that eventually will crack. Eventually enough of the membership will be. When they’re visiting the assistance committee asking for help, those conversations will turn from uncomfortable right now, painful, turn to hostile and panicked. That’s what the company wants. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close to there yet, but that’s their design. We don’t foresee, unfortunately, this ending anytime soon. The things that we’re trying to do, we’re hoping to make some headway is public pressure, try to make sure that the community understands what’s going on and then try to ask the community to be vocal, to stand up and support us and tell British Petroleum to end the lockout and get back to the table.
And for the first time, actually come seriously with the desire to bargain. We’re asking the same of our local leaders, whether it’s political leaders or community leaders. We’re asking the same of state officials, federal officials. We feel like if we can get enough public pressure, enough political pressure, enough economic pressure on maybe somebody in London will finally say, “All right, enough’s enough. Let’s go. Go get a deal.” So that’s kind of where we’re at right now is just in this holding pattern and doing everything we can to keep our membership and their families propped up. Just yesterday, one of our representatives, Carolina Ramsey, she’s also the one that runs our. She oversees our entire assistance committee. She helped organize a school supply giveaway and backpack giveaway. That was really well attended. We had a lot of local political leaders pitched in and put the word out to get these supplies sent in, book bags and everything that would be needed to go inside of them.
So between things like that, the food pantry, we’ve had our local food bank, Northwest Indiana Food Bank, teamed up with the United Way and we had four mobile distributions where they came out to the union hall and dropped off food. Like Tim was talking with our assistance committee. We’ had our assistance committee up and running since about maybe a month into this. And we’ve given out quite a bit of money, and we’ll continue to do so. And everything we’re doing is with the intent to try to make sure that people stay calm, that people have at least their basic needs met and just kind of supplement them while at the same time asking them to go out and find work because that’s how we’re going to win this is by being able to withhold. And we’ve had numerous people go out of state to find jobs.
It’s an interesting spot to be in. Some people had no problem right away going to find a job. It depends what field you came from. If you were in the local pipe fitters union before you came and worked here and you still paid your dues in the background and still kept your car, you probably went right back to work. Same thing if you were in the electrician’s union, carpenter’s union. But some of our operators are in a much different spot because this is such a niche field. Where do you go to the next refinery to go find a job? And that’s where people are having to go out of state to go find work. And a lot of people can’t because we’re almost, it’s like we’re toxic to them because they know, “Oh, well, why would I waste money to hire this guy or gal if they’re going to leave and go right back to British Petroleum once the lockout’s over?” So we’ve had a lot of people say, “They told me they loved me.
They loved everything about the interview and my resume. They’d hire me, but they ask that I commit to I’m not going to go back to the refinery when the lockout ends.” And when people would honestly tell them, “I can’t promise that,” then they’d say, “Well, thanks. If you change your mind, let us know.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and what you’re talking about goes the other way as well. I mean, for folks out there listening, the question of why should anyone stand in solidarity with 800 union workers who’ve been locked out by their employers? Because you stand with your fellow worker. I mean, you do it because it’s what’s right to do. That’s our policy on this show. It’s been our policies from the beginning. But on top of that, I think anyone living near this facility in Indiana or Illinois would want to know that that dangerous, complex facility is being operated by undertrained scab workers right now. And we don’t ever want to punch down and say your fellow worker is your enemy. I mean, those people who have taken those jobs have their own bargain with God that they’re going to have to kind of deal with. But the point of fact is, is that the trained specialists that you’re talking about are not operating the specialized machinery in that oil refinery right now.
Leno Miller:
Yeah. To expand on that too, one of their proposals that’s a sticking point for us, as Eric mentioned, that they brought to the table last time as well is the strike and lockout. Right now we can serve 24-hour strike notice. Currently, they want 150 days. Their BP stance publicly that they keep repeating over and over is that they need that. They need at least that 120 to 150 day strike notice to be able to continue to operate the refinery safely in the event of a work stoppage. How much notice did they give us when they locked us out? 24 hours. So both things can’t be true. Either you don’t need it or you’re lying, right? Or you are operating unsafely currently in the community. If it’s unsafe to operate without that much of a notice and preparation, then that’s how you’re currently operating unsafely.
Eric Schultz:
And to point out the 24-hour notice that we have, that’s not Wildcat 24-hour notice. That’s not mid-contract. That’s only after the contract expires. So I think a lot of people in the community don’t see that, don’t understand that. So they think just on any random Tuesday, I could just wake up in a bad mood and serve the company 24-hour strike notice. No, no. This is after you’ve spent months negotiating a contract. You knew that February 1st was the contract expiration. And our goal is to be as early as possible to hash out any issues so that by February 1st, you got a deal. You get that national agreement comes down from the top table. You take it to membership, you vote on it, and you move on. What they want to do is make that February 1st where we’re now that once February 1st comes, now we can serve notice.
And it’s something that we don’t take lightly. We could have done it this round of bargaining. And a lot of our members were upset that we weren’t serving strike notice when the contract expired because of all the ridiculous proposals that the company had on the table. So it’s something that we’re not going to just flippantly serve strike notice. We understand that people, it’s painful for us to be on strike. We’re willing to do it, just we don’t take it lightly. Well, so February 1st comes, now what they want to do with this 150-day strike and lockout notice is they won’t even start really bargaining, seriously bargaining until about 148 days into that 150-day strike and lockout notice, because that’s how they’re working it now. Our contract expires February 1st. They’re not serious about the proposals until the end of January. They just keep wanting to play mess around and they want to do this art of the deal stuff where they just put crazy things on the table knowing that, hey, we’re going to pull them off and we’ll meet in the middle type of thing.
So that’s all they’re going to do. They’re going to shift us 148 days down the road. Now maybe they’ll start to bargain. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, the national pattern folks all went back to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and Tim, I wanted to toss it to you to have the final word here. Being a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee, any final notes that you wanted to give for folks out there listening? Folks in the area or folks listening from around the country, anything that they can do to help?
Tim Powell:
You touched on a point about not punching down on your fellow workers, whether it’s in your union or out in the community. This is 800 families who don’t have the money right now to go out to eat. They’re cutting down on all of their summer projects, their summer vacations. Things aren’t getting the jobs that you normally do around the house during the summer, like doing your deck, your fence, and that kind of stuff. We’re not able to spend that. We’re not able to employ a contractor. We’re not able to tip the waitress at the restaurant because we’re not even going to the restaurants. Everybody is seeing a reduction in the wages because we are cut out. We have a couple of websites. I’m sure that we can share those, but I can’t remember all of them right off the top of my head right now, but Eric can get to that.
But we gladly appreciate any donation that we can get. Any help is helping. I was here yesterday handing out backpacks and notebooks and all the school supplies yesterday. It’s not just taking that money off the people’s hands. It was also like your wife isn’t having to freak out at the store trying to figure out how she’s going to buy the stuff.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, I will say to your point, the website, you ask how people can help. The easiest way is we propped up a website specifically for what we’re dealing with. It’s called supportoilworkers.com. On that website, it answers all those questions. If you wanted to send a check to help our assistance committee help pay bills or that money also goes to help just run the hall on a day-to-day basis, making sure that we have food for picketers, making sure that we’ve got the toiletries and things like that at the hall. So there’s an address and a way to send a check there. There was a link to an Amazon store for us, and that’s been fantastic. Every day we get shipments in here of diapers, formula, non-perishable food items, toiletries, things like that. They go, we stock them on the shelves and then members are free to come and take anything that they need.
So support oilworkers.com. And then today, hopefully today it’s going to start. We’ve been working with a company that we’ve used for years for all of our swag, our t-shirts and hats, ImagePoint. And today, hopefully we’ll have this store up and running. We’re going to have a pop-up store. There’s two shirts that people can pick from, and it’s going to be nationwide. We’ll be blasting this out every which way we can. It’s only going to be up for two weeks. And you can pick either of these shirt designs and a multitude of colors and styles, anything from a hooded sweatshirt to a tank top to a regular t-shirt. And then the proceeds for that will go help our strike and defense fund. So again, today I will send you that link once we get it up and running. We’re just getting the bugs ironed out of it.
There’ll be a couple of shirts. It’ll run for two weeks, then it’ll shut down. They’ll print, they’ll go into production, and they’ll start mailing out all the shirts to whoever purchased one. And then a couple weeks later, we’re going to pop up a second store with two different shirts. So all in, there’s going to be four different shirt designs for people to pick from. And we’re kind of hoping that some people that if you have the means and you really want to show some support, we hope that some people will choose to try to collect all four of those shirts.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Eric Schultz, President of United Steel Workers Local 7.1, Leno Miller, Assistant Griever for USW Local 7.1, and Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1, and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.
I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
UPDATE ON OCTOBER, 10, 2026
Hurricane Isaias leaves hundreds of thousands of people without power in Alabama, Georgia and Florida, with all three states declaring emergencies Flooding is a continuing risk, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says as he warns of a “very hazardous situation”, according to BBC.
Winds peaked at 120mph (193km/h) before Isaias made landfall in Florida late on Friday – images show houses battered by winds and felled trees.
Two people are dead in Alabama, according to the governor, while two more have been killed in separate incidents in Florida. Isaias peaked as a category three hurricane, bringing heavy rain and powerful wind, but has since been downgraded
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck at 12:56 P.M. local time on Friday about 12 kilometers (7 miles) from the town of Tonosí, in southwestern Panama, at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The epicenter was roughly 239 kilometers (148 miles) from the capital.
In the two hours that followed, the USGS recorded multiple aftershocks, including one of magnitude 6.6.
The U.S. Tsunami Warning System issued a tsunami threat for the Pacific coasts of Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, though several countries canceled their alerts hours later.
Panamanian authorities reported no injuries, although some material damage was noted in initial reports.
The Panama Canal, which carries between 3 and 5% of world trade, said it remained operationalafter activating emergency and inspection protocols, with no disruption to ship transit. Tocumen International Airport was temporarily closed and its administrative staff evacuated, but operations resumed shortly afterward once safety checks were completed.
Venezuela’s message comes as it continues its own recovery from the double earthquake of June 24, which prompted the government’s Venezuela Rises plan and a series of housing handovers for affected families.
Panama also lies within the now cursed Pacific Ring of Fire (maps and details in previous updates)
UPDATE ON AUGUST 21, 2026
A powerful 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Peru’s southern Ayacucho region this Thursday, August 20, without preliminary reports of fatalities or significant material damage, according to the Geophysical Institute of Peru (IGP), TeleSur has reported.
The seismic event occurred at 1:00 P.M. local time with its epicenter located 35 kilometers north of the Coracora district, in the province of Parinacochas. The earthquake lasted approximately one minute and perceptibility reports arrived from various regions, including the capital Lima.
Peru also lies within the now cursed Pacific Ring of Fire (maps and details in previous updates)
The Geophysical Institute of Peru’s technical report specifies that the tremor had a depth of 108 kilometers, classifying it as an intermediate-focus event. Due to this depth, the seismic waves propagated toward several regions of the country. Authorities ruled out the occurrence of a tsunami.
In the town of Coracora, the earthquake intensity reached levels III-IV on the Mercalli scale, being clearly perceived by the population inside their homes. The moderate intensity at the surface, despite the large magnitude, responds to the depth of the hypocenter, which dissipated part of the energy before reaching the surface.
Emergency response organizations and risk management institutions have not reported fatal victims,injured persons or considerable material damage so far. However, the teams of the National Institute of Civil Defense (Indeci) and local authorities maintain field evaluations in the rural communities near the epicenter to rule out damage to vulnerable infrastructure.
UPDATE ON AUGUST 15, 2026
At 12:24 p.m., the earth shook in the province of Catania. The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) recorded a magnitude 3.9 earthquake with its epicenter near Linguaglossa. The hypocenter, located just 1 kilometer below the surface, amplified the perception of earthquake movement among the population.
The magnitude 3.9 earthquake felt in the Catania area at the end of the morning, with its epicenter 7 kilometers from Linguaglossa, was “triggered by the opening of the Pernicana fault linked to volcanic activity.” Salvo Cocina, head of the Sicilian Civil Protection Department, explained this on his social media channels.
A strong 4.5 magnitude tremor was recorded overnight near Granada, Spain. There is reportedly extensive damage.
The earthquake struck at 1:40 AM last night in the Alhendin area, in the metropolitan area of Granada, in the southern region of Andalusia, Spain, causing property damage and approximately one hundred calls to the 112 emergency service.
The earthquake, centered at a depth of 2 km, caused cornices to fall, damage to facades and roofs of buildings, particularly in Armilla, in addition to falling objects reported by numerous residents, according to emergency services. However, no injuries or casualties were reported.
According to local press, although its epicenter was in the metropolitan area, it was felt in several towns in the surrounding area, such as Ogíjares, as well as Armilla, Churriana, and Alhendín. According to currently available information, the tremor was felt most intensely in Cenes de la Vega.
A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck eastern Indonesia, killing at least two people, according to an initial, partial death toll provided by emergency services.
Local authorities are currently working to assess the overall extent of the damage and estimate the final death toll. These figures will be officially released as soon as more detailed information on the situation in the affected areas becomes available.
According to an initial provisional report, the death toll is at least 20.
The powerful earthquake particularly affected the Flores region. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and confirmed by local seismographs, the earthquake occurred at 5:58 a.m. local time at a surface depth of approximately 10-15 kilometers, with its epicenter located in the sea off the north coast, approximately 68 kilometers from the town of Ende in East Nusa Tenggara province.
Following the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck the northern coast of Flores, Indonesia, three aftershocks measuring 5.9, 5.6, and 6.1 were recorded, according to the USGS.
Following the powerful earthquake, the Indonesian Meteorological, Climatological, and Geophysical Agency (BMKG) issued a tsunami warning for several coastal areas, including East Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara, and South-East Sulawesi, urging local authorities and residents to stay away from beaches and coastal areas.
The alert was then lifted after no significant changes in sea levels were detected.
The Indonesian archipelago, composed of thousands of islands, is notoriously one of the most geologically active and at-risk areas on the planet. The entire region extends along the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire,” a vast arc characterized by intense volcanic activity and frequent, powerful earthquakes generated by the collision of major tectonic plates.
MORE DETAILS AND VIDEOS ON THE RING OF FIRE IN THE UPDATES BELOW
UPDATE ON AUGUST, 22, 2026
The official death toll from the 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck Colombia on August 10th has risen to 329, causing damage and casualties in 481 municipalities across 16 departments.
Two weeks after the quake, the National Disaster Risk Management Unit (UNGRD) also recorded 4,600 injured, 247 missing, 364 rescued, and 314,751 people affected by the tragedy. The earthquake caused widespread damage to homes, infrastructure, and public services.
According to the latest reports, 171,273 homes were damaged, another 31,183 destroyed, and 553 buildings collapsed. The earthquake also affected 367 health facilities, 3,710 schools, and 5,584 community centers.
UPDATE ON AUGUST, 11, 2026
The death toll from the 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck Colombia has risen to at least 132 and more than 570 injured, according to Asocapitales, the Association of Colombian Capital Cities.
Cali Mayor Alejandro Éder, who was attacked yesterday while assisting the population, reported that the death toll in the Colombian city, one of the hardest hit by yesterday’s earthquake, has risen to over 85, with 885 injured.
Colombian families have been posting information about their missing loved ones on citizen-run websites following the powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake that shook the country. As of Monday evening, more than 2,700 people were reported missing.
The death toll from the powerful earthquake in western Colombia has climbed to 111, President Abelardo de la Espriella said.
“As of 12:30 a.m. (5:30 p.m. GMT ), 111 people died, 87 were injured, 1,575 residential houses were damaged, 37 were completely ruined, 61 buildings collapsed,”he said in an address to the nation.
Read more in the VIDEO Description on Gospa News Rumble Channel
UPDATE ON AUGUST, 10, 2026
At least 71 people are dead and dozens more are injured after a strong earthquake hit about 250 miles west of Bogotá, Colombian officials said. Rescue and evacuation operations are underway.
The Colombian Association of Capital Cities (Asocapitales) said the highest number of deaths was recorded in the department of Risaralda (40), followed by 27 deaths in Valle del Cauca and four in Chocó.
Pereira, Cali, Manizales, Quibdó and Armenia have the most critical situations, with people killed, injured and trapped in collapsed homes and buildings.
The cities have also reported damage to hospital infrastructure, airports, public utilities and transportation systems.
On Monday, the Colombian Geological Service (SGC) confirmed that a magnitude 7.4 earthquake shook much of Colombia, causing deaths and damage in cities such as Manizales, Cali and Pereira.
The tremor was felt at 7:34 a.m. local time and was centered in the town of San Jose del Palmar, in the department of Choco, located on the Pacific coast, at a depth of 82 kilometers.
Colombia’s Pacific coast falls within the Ring of Fire (details in the investigation below), which in a single week in early July recorded 93 earthquakes, including the devastating one in Venezuela and, at the end of the month, one of the most powerful in the last ten years in Japan (read below previous updates)
“We have just experienced a serious seismic event in the department of Choco. Although the epicenter was San Jose del Palmar, in the capital Quibdo there are injuries and serious damage to buildings,”the governor of Choco, Nubia Carolina Cordoba, said in her X account.
The earthquake was felt in Bogota, Cali, Popayan, Manizales, Armenia, Pereira, Medellin and other cities in the central and western parts of the country, and some of them reported material damage.
In Pereira, the capital of the department of Risaralda, numerous buildings suffered significant structural damage, including the airport, and some partially collapsed. At least 18 people were killed in Pereira by the earthquake that struck Colombia today.
Children are believed to be among those trapped under the rubble of the university hospital in Cali, Colombia, damaged by the strong 7.4-magnitude earthquake recorded this morning. Blu Radio reports that parts of the hospital have collapsed. Rescue teams are busy carrying out checks and assistance operations.
Mayor Jorge Eduardo Rojas of Manizales told Blu Radio that so far the 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck Colombia has caused two deaths in the city and the collapse of more than 10 buildings and 20 homes, as well as structural damage to two hospitals, two schools, and several churches, including the Cathedral Basilica.
A tower of the Manizales Cathedral in Colombia collapsed following the 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck the country this morning. The quake also caused the dome to collapse and the detachment of the figure of Christ installed on the central bell tower.
Other parts of the structure are also reportedly damaged, while deep cracks are visible on the remaining standing portions of the cathedral. Images shared on social media and reposted by local media show the severe damage to the Metropolitan Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, one of the city’s main architectural symbols.
The church is considered one of the most emblematic buildings in the historic center of Manizales and is recognized as an architectural and cultural heritage site of Colombia. It was declared a National Monument in 1984. Construction of the current cathedral began in 1928, after a fire destroyed the previous church in 1926. In 1951, the church was elevated to the rank of minor basilica by Pope Pius XII.
On Monday, the Purace volcano, located in Colombia’s Cauca department and under an orange alert for the risk of an eruption for a month, made a powerful emission of ash and gases.
This occurred on the same day that Colombian authorities were responding to an emergency caused by a magnitude 7.4 earthquake that has so far left 71 people dead.
Purace continues to show an increase in seismic energy and in the temperature of emissions of ash and gases such as sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide.
That situation led the Civil Aeronautics Authority (Aerocivil) to order the temporary closure of Guillermo Leon Valencia Airport in Popayan, the capital of Cauca, because of the risk that ash and gases pose to air navigation.
UPDATE ON JULY, 30, 2026
The death toll from the powerful earthquake in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture has risen to 28, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said.
“This figure includes those whose deaths are thought to be linked to the aftermath of the earthquake,” he said.
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UPDATE ON JULY, 28, 2026
One of the most powerful earthquake in latest 10 years has struck Japan.
Earthquake measuring 7.1 magnitudes struck the southern island of Kyushu. More than 50 people were injured, and over 45,000 homes were left without power.
It has caused fires, damage to roads and bridges, the collapse of buildings, and power outages, said Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Bullet train service was disrupted. Nearly 30 aftershocks were recorded (see the people’s panic in the video images below), and the threat of further strong tremors remains.
The violent earthquake ccurred near the city of Kumamoto, the capital of that island of Japan.
This nation was already hit by other earthquakes in early July (Iwate coast see previous updates below) which were among the 93 recorded in a single week in the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire (details and videos below).
Authorities issued a tsunami warning, which was lifted two hours after the quake. The warning concerned the nearby Ariake and Yatsushiro seas, on the western coasts of Kumamoto, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, and Saga prefectures, about 900 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. The U.S. Geological Survey revised the quake’s magnitude from 7.1 to 6.8.
Seven is the maximum magnitude on the country’s seismic intensity scale (shindo).
Click on the title above if you can’t see the video preview for technical reasons and you can watch it directly on the Gospa News Rumble channel.
According to Japanese broadcaster NHK, at least 50 people were hospitalized after the quake. The collapse of 12 homes was also reported, with four people trapped inside.
Police said they had received reports of an “explosion” inside an Aeon Mall in Kumamoto (footage in the video). “Many people” were trapped, NHK reported. Television station TBS reported that the damage to the mall caused a “considerable” number of victims.
UPDATE ON JULY, 2, 2026
The world witnessed an unusually busy week of seismic activity, with 93 earthquakes measuring magnitude 4.5 or higher recorded globally in just seven days, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).
From a devastating double earthquake in Venezuela to powerful tremors off the coast of Japan and Northern California, the spate of quakes has raised questions about whether the planet is becoming more geologically active.
Below the interesting report by WION TV (an Indian outlet based on New Delhi) and our investigation on The Ring of Fire and the HARP (inside HAARP) nightmares…
A strong earthquake registered by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) as M6.0 hit off the coast of Iwate Prefecture, Honshu at 12:08 UTC (21:08 JST) on July 1, 2026. The agency is reporting a depth of 40 km (25 miles). USGS registered this quake as M5.9 at a depth of 37 km (23 miles).
The epicenter was located about 55 km (34 miles) E of Noda (population 4 201), 58 km (36 miles) E of Kuji (population 34 418), 75 km (45 miles) NE of Miyako (population 51 150), and 88 km (55 miles) ESE of Hachinohe (population 239 046), Japan. There is no tsunami threat from this earthquake.
The coast of Iwate Prefecture has been previously hit by another earthquake on June, 25, the same day in which happened the devastating double seismic event in Venezuela (read below)
According to the USGS PAGER, 849 000 people are estimated to have felt light shaking, and 3.2 million weak. The USGS issued a Green alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. There is a low likelihood of casualties and damage.
Below we publish the list of earthquakes detected in recent days by the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), but we only report those with a magnitude stronger than 4.
As you can see, 5 of them occurred within or near the Pacific Ring of Fire.
READ MORE IN THE POST BELOW
READ FULL INVESTIGATION BELOW
In reporting the devastating news about the double earthquake in Venezuela, we were among the first to publish the video from KATU News, a Portland, Oregon-based television news station and an ABC Television affiliate owned and operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which reported three powerful seismic events that occurred almost simultaneously in the Caribbean country, Japan, and California.
Other newspapers have highlighted that, according to experts, there were five earthquakes on June 25, 2026, all located in the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire,” a vast area of underground fault lines experiencing constant seismic and volcanic activity.
The fact that these earthquakes occurred just yesterday, marking the 45th anniversary of the apparitions of the Queen of Peace in Medjugorje, who entrusted the visionaries with 10 catastrophic secrets for humanity, is a question we will address in an upcoming Gospa News investigation.
This investigation will analyze contemporary events from a supernatural perspective and in light of the Christian prophecies of the Bible and the Marian prophecies of Blessed Virgin’s apparitions in La Salette, Lourdes, Fatima, Kibeho, and, of course, in the small village in Bosnia and Herzegovina where the GospaFanies, or Epiphanies of the Gospa, aka Our Lady in Croatian, continue to occur in a surprising way, even for the Catholic Church…
We will do so thanks to my extensive theological training and reports as pilgrim journalist: to Lourdes with Pope John Paul II and 10 times to Medjugorje to interview the visionaries.
For now, let’s focus on the facts related to natural “Wild Weather,” which takes its name from the YouTube account that posted a Canadian geologist’s journey inside the Ring of Fire.
But we will certainly consider the hypothesis that the anthropogenic nightmares of geoengineering may have influenced this geological phenomenon.
Advancing a hypothesis is the most scientific thing there is, and if Galileo Galilei had not hypothesized the heliocentric system, we would still all believe that Ptolemy made the sun revolve around the earth, and not vice versa, as is now well-established.
«Earth has shown intense seismic activity in the past few hours» highlighted an article published by official website of RAI News, the Italian Statal Television network, confiming our previous pointing out.
While the Pacific Ring of Fire has recorded at least five moderate-to-strong magnitude earthquakes at various points along its vast tectonic belt, an unusual double earthquake of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 occurred in Venezuela, just 39 seconds apart, causing hundreds of deaths and extensive damage. Both events occurred almost simultaneously.
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake also occurred in Japan around the same time, without apparent damage. A few hours earlier, another earthquake occurred in California, USA.
The Pacific Ring of Fire is home to approximately 90% of the world’s seismic activity, while the Venezuelan earthquake occurred at the boundary between the Caribbean and South American plates, a different tectonic zone.
As we reported in previous post, Katu News explained in details this sismisc events.
Less than half an hour later the Venezuelan destastating tremosrs, «in another hemisphere, a 6.9-magnitude quake hit off the coast of Japan, with Earthquake Track reporting the epicenter was at east northeast of Kuji».
It struck off the coast of Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan on Thursday morning and was felt in nearby areas, including Aomori.
According to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the earthquake occurred at 7:30 a.m. JST on June 25 off the coast of Iwate Prefecture. The quake had a depth of approximately 50 kilometers (31 miles). The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) also measured the earthquake at magnitude 6.9.
Tremors were felt across several areas in northern Japan, including Aomori Prefecture, while residents in cities such as Sendai and Morioka reported noticeable shaking that lasted for a couple of minutes. The quake was also felt mildly in Tokyo, according to local reports.
Also on Wednesday, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake shook Northern California in the morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake was centered 7 miles north of Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, north of Ukiah, and east of Highway 101. It had a depth of 5.0 miles.
«The tremors in Venezuela, the CNR explains in a statement, are linked to plate tectonics, specifically to a system of strike-slip faults, including the Boconò Fault, which regulates the relative motion of the South American and Caribbean plates. This is an area that has often suffered earthquakes and severe damage, notably the destructive 7.7 magnitude earthquake of March 26, 1812, in Caracas» RAI News reported.
Studies are ongoing, but last night Venezuela appears to have been struck by a “double” of earthquakes in rapid succession and spatially separated.
A rare seismic phenomenon, in which an initial earthquake triggers a subsequent one minutes or hours later, several kilometers apart. Unfortunately, the effects can be devastating.
A similar phenomenon occurred in Turkey and Syria in 2023, where two earthquakes of about 7.7 magnitude along the East Anatolian Fault, 9 hours apart and 90 kilometers apart, caused nearly 40,000 deaths.
The Ring of Fire (also known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Rim of Fire, the Girdle of Fire or the Circum-Pacific belt) is a tectonic belt of earthquakes and volcanoes.
It is about 40,000 km (25,000 mi) long and up to about 500 km (310 mi) wide, and surrounds most of the Pacific Ocean.
«The Ring of Fire contains between 750 and 915 active or dormant volcanoes, around two-thirds of the world total. The exact number of volcanoes within the Ring of Fire depends on which regions are included. About 90% of the world’s earthquakes, including most of its largest, occur within the belt» Wikipedia explains.
The Ring of Fire is not a single geological structure. It was created by the subduction of different tectonic plates at convergent boundaries around the Pacific Ocean.
These include: the Antarctic, Nazca and Cocos plates subducting beneath the South American plate; the Pacific and Juan de Fuca plates beneath the North American plate; the Philippine plate beneath the Eurasian plate; and a complex boundary between the Pacific and Australian plate.
The interactions at these plate boundaries have formed oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, back-arc basins and volcanic belts.The inclusion of some areas in the Ring of Fire, such as the Antarctic Peninsula and western Indonesia, is disputed.
The Ring of Fire has existed for more than 35 million years but subduction has existed for much longer in some parts of the Ring; many older extinct volcanoes are located within the Ring.
More than 350 of the Ring of Fire’s volcanoes have been active in historical times, while the four largest volcanic eruptions on Earth in the Holocene epoch all occurred at volcanoes in the Ring of Fire.
«Discover the explosive power of the Pacific Ring of Fire, where volcanoes and earthquakes are reshaping New Zealand, Japan, and the entire world in real time»
This is the mission of a very interesting video published just two weeks ago on YouTube social channel by Wild Weather, the home for documentaries on the devastating power of Mother Nature and the worst natural disasters that occur across the globe.
«Join Canadian geologist Professor Nick Iles on an epic journey across the Pacific Rim, immersing you in the tectonic forces that define the most dangerous region on our planet. From the boiling mud pools of New Zealand’s volcanic islands to the seismic cities of Japan, this documentary explores the dramatic collisions between the Pacific and Australian plates, the science behind subduction zones, and the human stories shaped by these relentless natural events» we can read in the description of the footage.
«You’ll witness firsthand the birth of new lands, the devastation of historic eruptions like Tarawera and Mount Unzen, and the relentless monitoring efforts of scientists trying to predict the unpredictable»Wild Weather wrote.
«We’ll explore how ancient Maori and Japanese legends intertwine with modern geological research and how communities prepare for the next major earthquake or eruption. Discover how the dynamic landscapes of the Southern Alps are created and destroyed by tectonic uplift, glaciers, and rivers sifting gold from mountain debris. From the largest eruption in 70,000 years at Lake Taupo to the looming threat of Mount Fuji, this video is a comprehensive guide to the science, history, and enduring mystery of life in the Pacific Ring of Fire» concluded the social channel.
While the correlation between invasive human actions on the planet through geoengineering is now a consolidated and disturbing certainty in the atmospheric field for military climate control and alteration, its interconnections with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are for now only risky hypotheses by some scientists around the world who have since been denigrated as falsifiers.
But the issue continues to be a hot topic, as confirmed by the fact that even the specialized journal Nature has published a scientific article entitled “Earthquake conspiracy discussion on Twitter,” which focuses precisely on the activity of the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) but analyzes the conspiracy’s impact from a social perspective.
Gospa News’ investigations into HAARP and related issues regarding military geoengineering for weather control have been so numerous and well-documented that even the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which has operated the station since it was handed over to them by the US Air Force, has issued official denials that have proven to be a patch worse than the hole.
In fact, we have demonstrated, in seven investigations, that when anomalous floods or thunderstorms with exceptionally violent electromagnetic fields occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, HAARP experiments were underway or had just been completed.
This led the official website to attempt to conceal such dangerous research, with its unknown short-, medium-, and long-term impact on the ionosphere.
And today, it seems very strange to us that the last warning about radio frequency alterations for the experiments dates back to November 2025, as if the Alaska station had not conducted any research campaigns for seven months (one is scheduled for August).
An exceptional historical analysis of the military use of geoengineering has been published by our Sri Lankan collaborator, athe academic of University of Colombo Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, PhD, who has reconstructed all the experiments since US Army Operation Popeye in Vietnam.
Finally, American doctor Ana Maria Mihalceva has published a declassified Pentagon document outlining all the military objectives in the field of weather management for unconventional warfare.
Therefore, the correlation between HAARP experiments, largely funded by the US Air Force, and atmospheric alterations can be considered established.
To understand whether there may also be correlations with earthquakes, it is necessary to briefly analyze the activity of HARP, a second scientific station located right at the University of Alaska Fairbanks HAARP facility.
The first seismic station in Alaska was installed at the Astronomical Observatory in Sitka in 1904. In 1935, a second seismic station was installed near Fairbanks as a cooperative project between the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the University of Alaska. They remained the only installations in the state until after the 1964 Great Alaska earthquake.
«The Alaska portion of the National Science Foundation USArray Project began in 2014, dramatically changing the statewide coverage by installing 197 new sites in mainland Alaska, southeast Alaska, and western Canada (15 sites in 2014, 32 sites in 2015, 70 sites in 2016, and 80 sites in 2017). Site locations were purposefully selected to follow a uniform grid with an ∼85 km station spacing. If there was an existing seismic station within the area proposed for a new station, the existing site was upgraded with new vaults, sensors, and/or dataloggers to improve data quality» we can read in the official website.
But what are these monitoring activities? Does the HARP station simply record seismic events to compile statistics?
From the details of the Alaska Earthquake Center’s mission, it certainly doesn’t seem so. A quick read of the Geophysical Institute’s official presentation under the heading “Seismology & Geodesy”…
«The Seismology and Geodesy group pursues a wide range of disciplines with both global and local significance. We study earthquakes, tsunamis, earth structure, and active tectonics, as well as non-traditional sources of seismicity including nuclear explosions, glaciers, volcanoes, and landslides. We contribute to research topics with global relevance by leveraging the rich tectonics of Alaska, long records of instrumental recordings across the state, and the high-performance computing resources of the Geophysical Institute».
So far, it seems like a normal monitoring activity with very sophisticated tools, but the following sentences do not bode well…
«The Alaska Earthquake Center is embedded within the Seismology and Geodesy group and carries out Alaska’s earthquake monitoring mission. This includes operating a 250 station seismic network, research on specific earthquake and tsunami hazards, and an extensive public engagement campaign to help improve Alaska’s earthquake readiness. As a University Affiliated Research Center with the Department of Defense, the group pursues a wide range of R&D and operational missions to assess potential nuclear activities worldwide».
This confirms that the HARP station also works – of course secretely – for the US Pentagon, now renamed the Department of War by US President Donald Trump.
This circumstance alone represents a nightmare in light of some globally significant conspiracies carried out by US military agencies.
All this happened before this terrible and anomalous double earthquake, which also had a strange echo in the Pacific Ring of Fire…
For today, I think that’s enough to raise very strong suspicions.
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Gospa News director and founder
MAIN SOURCES
GOSPA NEWS – HAARP DOSSIER & CLIMATE GEOENGINEERING
NATURE – Earthquake conspiracy discussion on Twitter
HARP Earthquake center inside HAARP
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