https://jacobin.com/feedJacobin2024-03-18T16:10:48Zhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/trump-immigration-bloodbath-2024-campaign/Yes, Trump Really Is Dangerously Dehumanizing Migrants2024-03-18T16:10:48Z2024-03-18T16:10:48Z<p>In a speech last Saturday in Ohio, Donald Trump used the word “bloodbath.” This was played up in the initial media coverage of the speech. The New York Times, for example, ran the story under the headline, “Trump Says Some Migrants are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Bloodbath’ If He Loses.” The Joe Biden/Kamala Harris […]</p>
<h3>Contrary to some headlines, Donald Trump didn’t threaten immigrants with a “bloodbath.” But he did say some immigrants are “not people” — and the last five months in Gaza have shown us where this kind of rhetoric about “human animals” can lead.</h3>
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Donald Trump speaking during a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on March 16, 2024. (Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>In a speech last Saturday in Ohio, Donald Trump used the word “bloodbath.” This was played up in the initial media coverage of the speech. The <em>New York Times</em>, for example, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/16/us/politics/trump-speech-ohio.html">ran the story</a> under the headline, “Trump Says Some Migrants are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Bloodbath’ If He Loses.” The Joe Biden/Kamala Harris campaign upped the ante, <a href="https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1769163262283706801">suggesting</a> that Trump had not only “predicted” but “threatened” such violence.</p>
<p>Trump’s defenders pointed out that he’d been talking about the auto industry when he used the word and that in context it’s plausible that what he meant was that competition from Chinese companies building factories in Mexico would lead to a “bloodbath” for the industry. There was a feeding frenzy about this alleged misrepresentation, ranging from <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1769455728941547695">YouTube supercuts</a> of Trump-hating liberals using the word in similarly innocuous contexts to a <a href="https://www.compactmag.com/article/trump-is-right-about-the-auto-bloodbath/">high-brow article</a> by Matthew Schmitz in <em>Compact </em>magazine defending the substance of Trump’s views on trade. By the end of Sunday night, “the bloodbath hoax” was <em>the</em> story on right-wing Twitter.</p>
<p>The Right’s view of the matter isn’t entirely wrong — although Trump’s wording left more ambiguity than his defenders suggest. He also muttered something about how the bloodbath for the industry would be “the least of it” because there would also be a “bloodbath for the country.” But Trump really was talking about the auto industry both immediately before and immediately after he used the word.</p>
<p>The problem is that this isn’t all he said. Take away the “bloodbath” bit and you still have chillingly dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants.</p>
<blockquote><p>If I had prisons that were teeming with MS13 and all sorts of people that they’ve got to take care of for the next 50 years, right? Young people, they’re in jail for years and — if you call them people. I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people in my opinion but I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. They say, ‘You have to vote against him because did you hear what he said about the humanity . . .’ I’ve seen the humanity and the humanity . . . these are bad . . . these are animals, ok?</p></blockquote>
<p>Trump went on to say these unnamed countries, presumably in Latin America, were “emptying” their prisons and “driving” all the convicts to Mexico’s border with the United States. There’s a reason that conservative media wasn’t full of defenses of <em>those</em> claims: Trump pulled them out of thin air.</p>
<p>Similarly, Trump’s insinuation that asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants are more likely to be violent criminals than native-born Americans isn’t based on any kind of statistical evidence. In fact, what <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-crime-0">evidence</a> there is shows the opposite.<br />
Of course, Trump lies all the time, about both important subjects and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/the-absurdity-of-donald-trumps-lies/579622/">trivial</a> ones. “Trump makes things up” is hardly breaking news. What’s genuinely alarming here is Trump saying that some of the migrants coming to America’s borders are “not people” but actually “animals.”</p>
<p>To get a sense of what states can justify with rhetoric like that, take a long look at what’s been going on for the last five months in Gaza. On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-defense-minister-human-animals-gaza-palestine_n_6524220ae4b09f4b8d412e0a">said</a> that Israel was fighting “human animals” and would “act accordingly.” In the same statement, he announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip. He was as good as his word. In Gaza, 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes since he made that statement. Tens of thousands have been killed — mostly women and children. Right now, well over a million Gazans are <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/famine-looms-gaza-how-will-world-know-it-has-arrived-2024-03-05/#:~:text=On%20Monday%20the%20IPC%20said,of%20the%20besieged%20coastal%20enclave.">facing</a> “catastrophic hunger.”</p>
<p>At the time, Gallant’s defenders insisted that he was only calling Hamas “human animals,” not Gaza’s millions of Palestinian civilians. Similarly, the few Trump apologists who’ve bothered to defend the “animals” part of the Ohio speech have <a href="https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1769361716784365801">half-heartedly suggested</a> that he was only calling the mythical truck-loads of MS13 members being freed from prison and driven to the Mexican border “not people.” But the connection between writing part of a group out of the human race and justifying atrocities against the group as a whole is painfully clear — especially when the dehumanizing rhetoric comes with a strong suggestion that we have no way of knowing <em>which</em> members of the group are regular humans and which are “animals” not deserving of the protections we extend to our members of our species.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/new-data-show-migrants-were-more-likely-be-released-trump-biden">available statistics</a> tell us that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s total number of “encounters” (the DHS’s term for arrests of) with migrants was far greater during Biden’s first two years in office than Trump’s first two years and that a greater percentage of those “encountered” were deported under Biden. Immigration hawks point out that many people are allowed to stay in the United States for years while their asylum cases are being processed, but even there the idea the Right’s portrayal of Biden as a border dove is out of step with the reality of his record. He championed a bipartisan border bill that would have <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/02/us-border-immigration-right-wing-populism-workers">shredded</a> asylum seekers’ due process rights in order to more rapidly evict them from the country.</p>
<p>Despite all this, Trump and his followers still portray Biden as throwing the borders wide open during an “invasion” of migrants. So, what <em>do</em> they want to do to migrants?</p>
<p>In January, Texas’s extreme right-wing governor, Greg Abbott, dropped a hint. He <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/11/texas-border-migrants-greg-abbott-interview-shoot/">told</a> an interviewer, “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”</p>
<p>From his words alone, we can’t be certain what Trump would do to immigrants if he gets a second term. In his first term, after all, he failed to deliver on many things — both good and bad — that he’d promised to do in 2016. But his apocalyptic rhetoric about hordes of not-quite-human foreigners “invading” the country and bringing death and destruction to native-born Americans raises an obvious and disturbing question: What is Trump giving himself permission to do?</p>
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Ben Burgishttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/ben-barka-morocco-colonialism-nationalism/Ben Barka Was a Lost Leader of the International Left2024-03-18T15:18:43Z2024-03-18T15:05:18Z<p>Mehdi Ben Barka was a leading figure in the Moroccan nationalist movement against French colonialism. After independence, he became the focal point for opposition to the autocratic rule of King Hassan II and a driving force behind the alliance of national liberation movements that came together at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana. However, Ben […]</p>
<h3>The Moroccan left-wing revolutionary Ben Barka was one of the towering figures of the anti-colonial movement. His murder by agents of the Moroccan king with help from France and Israel was a major blow to socialist forces throughout the Arab world.</h3>
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Two photos of the Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka. (Wikimedia Commons)
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<p>Mehdi Ben Barka was a leading figure in the Moroccan nationalist movement against French colonialism. After independence, he became the focal point for opposition to the autocratic rule of King Hassan II and a driving force behind the alliance of national liberation movements that came together at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana.</p>
<p>However, Ben Barka never made it to the conference. On October 29, 1965, he was approached by two police officers on his way to a well-known brasserie in central Paris. They led him to a car and then he was driven to a villa on the outskirts of Paris. He was never seen again.</p>
<p>It is likely that Ben Barka’s assassination was ordered by King Hassan II and carried out by his interior minister Mohamed Oufkir, who was convicted of the murder in absentia by a French court in 1967. Supporting roles were played by President Charles de Gaulle’s secret services, a network spanning parallel police forces and the criminal underworld, masterminded by his dirty-tricks fixer, Jacques Foccart, and by Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad.</p>
<p>The full truth behind the murder has never come to light. Successive French presidents from De Gaulle to Emmanuel Macron have persistently obstructed justice in the name of <em>secret défense</em>, a perfectly legal and very effective means of covering up state crimes.</p>
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<h2>Who Was Ben Barka?</h2>
<p>Ben Barka became active in politics at the age of fourteen, joining the Comité d’action marocaine and then the National Party for the Realization of Reforms, later the Istiqlal (sovereignty or independence) Party. He moved to Algiers in 1940 to study mathematics at university.</p>
<p>Influenced by the Algerian People’s Party, he began to identify Morocco’s fate with that of other North African countries. On his return to Morocco, he taught at the Royal Academy. Among his pupils was the young Prince Hassan.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Mehdi Ben Barka was a leading figure in the Moroccan nationalist movement against French colonialism.</q></aside>
<p>Imprisoned for a year after signing the Proclamation of Independence of Morocco in 1944, Ben Barka played a leading role in the Istiqlal party and was involved in the 1955 negotiations with the French government in Aix-les-Bains. These talks resulted in the return of the exiled sultan to the throne as King Mohammed V, and the end of the French protectorate first established in 1912.</p>
<p>France was prepared to grant independence to Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, hoping that this would make it easier to keep hold of Algeria. Istiqlal proclaimed the return of the Sultan as a triumph over colonialism. But Ben Barka later saw it as a trap which prevented Moroccan nationalism from developing a revolutionary perspective, leaving Algeria isolated and paving the way for the neocolonial dependency of Morocco.</p>
<p>There were powerful arguments for unity between Istiqlal, the country’s biggest political party, and the king, its most powerful figurehead, not least the idea that this would help Morocco escape economic dependency after independence. For his part, Ben Barka initially believed that this alliance, along with the unity of Morocco’s social classes, could endure.</p>
<p>He chaired the country’s new consultative assembly, overseeing popular mobilizations inspired by the mass initiatives developed in Mao Zedong’s China and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, and the literacy drives undertaken in Castro’s Cuba. One scheme saw sixty kilometers of highway built by twelve thousand young volunteers in three months, a “unity road” linking Morocco’s former French and Spanish territories.</p>
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<h2>Myths of National Unity</h2>
<p>However, unity proved easier to achieve against colonial rule than after independence, as vested interests began to assert themselves. The mobilization of Morocco’s poor began to alarm the bourgeoisie, while big landowners became nervous at the prospect of agrarian reform.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>The mobilization of Morocco’s poor began to alarm the bourgeoisie, while big landowners became nervous at the prospect of agrarian reform.</q></aside>
<p>Ministers close to Ben Barka drew up plans for economic planning, widespread industrialization, and withdrawal from the franc zone, reestablishing the Moroccan dirham as the principal currency. These proposals <a href="https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/figures_de_la_revolution_africaine-9782355220371">brought the government into conflict</a> with the palace as well as the conservative wing of Istiqlal.</p>
<p>The nationalist coalition broke up. Ben Barka put forward <a href="https://books.google.ie/books/about/Probl%C3%A8mes_d_%C3%A9dification_de_Maroc_et_du.html?id=8GscAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">his own vision</a>, arguing that formal independence was not enough for countries like Morocco:</p>
<blockquote><p>We must build a new society that allows men to thrive and make all forms of exploitation disappear. For us, it’s not just a question of ending exploitation originating under the protectorate, but also the exploitation of Moroccans by Moroccans.</p></blockquote>
<p>The abandonment of the “myth of national unity” was a long process, leading to a split in Istiqlal and the formation of the Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (UNFP) in September 1959.</p>
<p>As Saïd Bouamama notes, Ben Barka’s commitment to national unity led him at times to compromise his principles. In 1956, as the war in Algeria escalated, sections of the Moroccan Liberation Army (ALN), angry at the continuing presence of French troops in Morocco under the terms of the Aix-les-Bains agreement, staged a revolt. Ben Barka sanctioned its repression, and was <a href="https://pur-editions.fr/product/7498/partis-politiques-et-protestations-au-maroc-1934-2020">held responsible by some</a> for the murder of ALN founder Abbas Messaâdi.</p>
<p>Later Ben Barka would <a href="https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/39268/">argue</a> that “independence by itself is nothing more than a form in need of content.” Intervening at the second congress of the UNFP in 1962, he outlined <a href="https://www.recherches-internationales.fr/RI77/RI77-zakia-daoud.pdf">three key errors</a> that he and his comrades had committed in negotiations over independence: their optimistic reading of the compromises made with France; the waging of struggles behind closed doors, without mass participation; and a lack of ideological clarity that made it difficult to say precisely who they were.</p>
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<h2>Neocolonial Independence</h2>
<p>In May 1960, Mohammed seized full powers for himself, appointing his son Hassan as deputy prime minister. Hassan targeted the UNPF. Hassan succeeded Mohammed after his death at the age of fifty-one from heart failure, following minor nasal surgery in 1961.</p>
<p>Ben Barka spent this period in exile, returning to a hero’s welcome for the second UNPF congress in 1962. He survived an assassination attempt in November 1962 before leaving the country again, never to return.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Ben Barka survived an assassination attempt in November 1962 before leaving the country again, never to return.</q></aside>
<p>The coalition of forces loyal to the monarchy, the Front for the Defense of Constitutional Institutions, managed to win a majority in the elections of May 1963, but its share of the vote was matched by the combined score of Istiqlal and the UNFP. Ben Barka, although not present for the campaign, won a seat in Rabat.</p>
<p>Hassan, with the help of Oufkir, ramped up his campaign against the Left. In July 1963, troops surrounded a meeting of the UNFP leadership in Casablanca and arrested those present on charges of plotting a coup d’état and the murder of the king. Hundreds more arrests followed across the country.</p>
<p>Ben Barka, who was in Cairo at the time, was among the accused. Some, like Moumen Diouri, were tortured for weeks on end. An international outcry ensued but, as Jeremy Harding <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/jeremy-harding/you-re-with-your-king">points out</a>, Hassan’s methods — “banishment, detention, disappearance and harsh crowd control” — were long-established practices of colonial rule:</p>
<blockquote><p>It would be wrong to see the Hassan era as a headlong flight from the norms of civilised nations. . . . Most colonial possessions, Morocco included, won independence in the thick of the Cold War. Whether they opted for a socialist model or a Western-style arrangement, they were able to spin disappearances, torture and maiming as regrettable features of state formation, much as the colonial powers had described them as instruments of progress.</p></blockquote>
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<h2>Opposing the Sand War</h2>
<p>Later, in September 1963, tensions between Morocco and newly independent Algeria came to a head. Anxious about the presence of a revolutionary regime on its border, Morocco invaded, sparking several weeks of what was dubbed the “Sand War.”</p>
<p>Speaking over the radio from Cairo, Ben Barka issued a rousing declaration, denouncing the Moroccan government’s “grave treason, not only to the dynamic Algerian Revolution, but, in general, to all Arab revolutions in favor of liberty, socialism, and unity, and to the world national liberation movement in its entirety.” He <a href="https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/39268/">called instead</a> for Moroccans to paralyze “the criminal hands that have appropriated power and that are armed, financed, and led by the imperialists.”</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>In September 1963, tensions between Morocco and newly independent Algeria came to a head.</q></aside>
<p>The declaration got little traction in Morocco, as Istiqlal and the Communists united behind the king. Internationally, Morocco was left relatively isolated. Cuban troops arrived in Algeria, which also received military backing from the Soviet Union and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt as well as support from the Arab League.</p>
<p>Hassan, disappointed at lukewarm backing from the United States, sought support from Israel, a state that shared an antipathy toward both Algeria and Egypt. Israel provided weapons, surveillance, and military training. In return, its intelligence agency, Mossad, received a permanent base in Rabat.</p>
<p>When the Arab League summit was held in Casablanca in September 1965, the Moroccan authorities provided Mossad with documents outlining the deliberations of the various delegations. According to the investigative journalist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Kill_First">Ronen Bergman</a>, Israeli espionage considered this intelligence coup to be the greatest achievement in its history, since it provided evidence of the state of unreadiness of various Arab nations for war against Israel — information that was pivotal to Israel’s stunning offensive two years later in the Six-Day War.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of this summit, Morocco requested Mossad’s assistance in locating and killing Ben Barka. The agency duly tracked him in Geneva prior to his arrival in Paris and provided help with the logistics of his kidnapping and the escape of those involved in his torture and murder.</p>
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<h2>Ben Barka in Exile</h2>
<p>In his absence, Ben Barka was sentenced to death twice, in March 1964 for his part in the July “plot,” and in November of the same year for supporting Algeria over Morocco. “The nationalist,” as Nate George <a href="https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/39268/">puts it</a>, “had transcended his nation.”</p>
<p>During his period in exile, Ben Barka spent time in Cairo, advising Nasser, and in Algiers, the “mecca of revolution,” as the unofficial “minister of foreign affairs” of the first Algerian president, Ahmed Ben Bella. Here he also encountered key figures in emerging liberation struggles, including Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Henri Curiel, Malcolm X, and Amílcar Cabral.</p>
<p>He played a major role in developing an understanding of neocolonialism, the means by which colonial influence was maintained in a postindependence environment. This could involve the establishment of “dummy states” with little chance of achieving real independence, or forms of “cooperation” that sucked prosperity out of Africa, or simply sowing divisions within and between nations. As Western European economies adapted to the United States’ hegemony, they were likely to follow its lead in their relations with the world, turning Africa into <a href="https://www.eyrolles.com/Loisirs/Livre/option-revolutionnaire-au-maroc-9782348038457/">Europe’s Latin America</a>.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Ben Barka sought to capitalize on the momentum of successive national liberation struggles and embed an anti-imperialist alliance across three continents.</q></aside>
<p>Independence could therefore no longer be considered as progressive in its own right. For Ben Barka, only “the political and economic content of that independence has progressive meaning.” Independent nations must come together across Africa, “to liquidate the colonial system from the entire continent.”</p>
<p>The tricontinental movement had its roots in the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference hosted by Indonesian president Sukarno in Bandung in 1955. Ben Barka sought to capitalize on the momentum of successive national liberation struggles and embed an anti-imperialist alliance across three continents.</p>
<p>Seeking an autonomous path between Soviet and Chinese influence without jeopardizing their support, he espoused, in the words of Nate George, “a socialism acceptable to nationalists and a nationalism acceptable to Marxists.” At a press conference held on October 3, 1965, weeks before his death, he <a href="https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/10/GALLISSOT/12827">claimed</a> that the conference would bring together “two currents of the world revolution: the current born with the October Revolution and the national liberation revolutions.”</p>
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<h2>Imperial Backlash</h2>
<p>Where neocolonial influence could not be maintained through unequal trade agreements or proxy governments, Ben Barka argued, it would be established through invasion and assassination. Throughout the year of his death, the point was to be underlined again and again, from the escalation of the US intervention in Vietnam to the massacre of the Indonesian left and the murders of Ben Barka himself and Malcolm X. By the end of the following decade, Che Guevara, Henri Curiel, and Amílcar Cabral, key figures in the development of the tricontinental movement, had all been assassinated.</p>
<p>The dangers of neocolonialism outlined by Ben Barka have radically intensified since then through the deployment of structural adjustment programs and punitive debt mechanisms. In this context, the <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2007/11/09/le-discours-de-dakar_976786_3212.html">racist outbursts</a> of Western politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy and his caricature of the “African” who has “not fully entered into history” serve as a reminder of the role played by colonial nations in shutting down pathways to liberation glimpsed by the struggles to assert an independent politics of anti-imperialism in the postwar period.</p>
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Jim Wolfreyshttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/just-transition-oil-workers-unions-california/Winning Fossil Fuel Workers Over to a Just Transition2024-03-18T14:04:54Z2024-03-18T13:24:14Z<p>I have a dream. I have a nightmare. The dream is that working people find careers with good pay, good benefits, and a platform for addressing grievances with their employers. In other words, I dream that everyone gets what I got over twenty-plus years as a unionized worker in the oil industry. The nightmare is […]</p>
<h3>Among the hard problems in tackling climate change is addressing the needs of workers employed by the oil and gas industries. In California, labor and climate organizers are working together to ensure a just transition as fossil fuel production scales down.</h3>
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A driver unloads raw crude oil from his tanker at Marathon Refinery on May 24, 2022, in Salt Lake City, Utah. (George Frey / Getty Images)
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<p>This article is adapted from <em>Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement</em>, edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir (The New Press, 2024).</p>
<p>I have a dream. I have a nightmare.</p>
<p>The dream is that working people find careers with good pay, good benefits, and a platform for addressing grievances with their employers. In other words, I dream that everyone gets what I got over twenty-plus years as a unionized worker in the oil industry.</p>
<p>The nightmare is that people who had jobs with good pay and power in the workplace watch those gains erode as the oil industry follows the lead of steel, auto, and coal mining to close plants and lay off workers. It is a nightmare rooted in witnessing the cruelties suffered by our siblings in these industries — all of whom had good-paying jobs with benefits and the apparatus to process grievances when their jobs went away.</p>
<p>Workers, their families, and their communities were destroyed when the manufacturing plants and coal mines shut down, with effects that linger to this day. Without worker input, I fear that communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry face a similar fate.</p>
<p>This nightmare is becoming a reality as refineries in Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, California, and New Mexico have closed or have announced pending closures. Some facilities are doing the environmentally conscious thing and moving to renewable fuels. Laudable as that transition is, a much smaller workforce is needed for these processes. For many oil workers, the choice is to keep working, emissions be damned, or to save the planet and starve.</p>
<p>United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 — a four-thousand-member local in Southern California, of which I am the second vice president — is helping to chart a different course, one in which our rank-and-file membership embraces a just transition and in which we take the urgent steps needed to protect both workers and the planet. Along with other California USW locals, we are fighting to ensure that the dream — not the nightmare — is the future for fossil fuel workers as we transition to renewable energy.</p>
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<h2>Charting a Just Transition for Fossil Fuel Workers</h2>
<p>The story of Local 675 is very much tied to its history as a local under the former Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW). The term “just transition” was coined by OCAW member and leader Tony Mazzocchi, who saw the harmful conditions that his members labored under in atomic plants. (One of those members was the chemical technician and whistleblower Karen Silkwood, who died in a car crash in 1974 on her way to deliver documents to the <em>New York Times</em>.)</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>For many oil workers, the choice is to keep working, emissions be damned, or to save the planet and starve.</q></aside>
<p>Mazzocchi envisioned a path forward — a just transition — where workers could find safer employment at the same high wages and good benefits. Mazzocchi’s vision for a just transition emerged out of his broader political work. He helped found Labor Party Advocates (with the goal of forming a Labor Party in this country), and he was a strong supporter of the New Majority Party, the precursor to today’s Working Families Party.</p>
<p>We are doing our best to follow in Mazzocchi’s footsteps by preparing our local for the needed transition to a regenerative economy. If you believe the fossil fuel companies, oil production will remain stable for years to come. That may or may not be the case, so our job — our responsibility — is to prepare our members for what might be next and to fight to ensure that their interests are represented in the transition.</p>
<p>The first step is to get our members and leaders to understand the future of the oil sector. The oil companies hold town halls and informational meetings with workers in which they trot out charts and graphs forecasting that oil demand will remain strong. But when the workers press for specifics, those in charge don’t have a good answer.</p>
<p>For instance, in one town hall, a representative for a multinational oil company working in Southern California put up a chart showing the projected global demand for fossil fuels moving forward. When one of our members asked about what demand looked like for California, they had no answer.</p>
<p>We developed our own clear-eyed presentation, one that emphasizes the need for a transition and gives our leaders and members an opportunity to discuss the trends. But just the fact that the bosses are holding these meetings has been an education for workers. If the company cares enough about the future of oil to educate the workers, then they are obviously worried.</p>
<p>Second, we need to fight for government funding to support fossil fuel workers who lose their jobs during the transition. Los Angeles city and county governments have developed a just-transition task force for extraction workers set to lose their jobs as oil wells close. Both the city and the county passed legislation mandating that oil and gas wells be a certain distance from homes and schools, leading to the closure of a number of wells and subsequent job loss for workers. In December of 2022, that task force released a blueprint for how workers and communities can transition toward a regenerative economy.</p>
<p>Across the state, a dozen unions have joined together in California Labor for Climate Jobs to push for a just transition for fossil fuels. Together, we successfully lobbied the state of California for a $40 million fund for displaced oil and gas workers and a $20 million fund for displaced extraction workers.</p>
<p>Marathon Oil, for example, has already begun converting to renewable diesel, resulting in significant job losses for members of USW Local 5 in Northern California. Job loss is especially challenging for older members who are too close to retirement for retraining. The funds are designed to support workers through retraining programs, early retirement, wage replacement, mental health services, and certification of work experience and training. Implementation is always key, so we are working hard to ensure that local and state governments are getting this money out the door and into the hands of workers as soon as possible.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Among the obstacles we are facing is a history of bad US industrial policy, which makes workers skeptical that any transition will actually be a just one.</q></aside>
<p>The funds resulted from a joint effort between labor and environmental organizations, which realized good jobs must be part of any transition to renewable energy. These kinds of coalitions are not always easy to build or sustain. Working together required labor to educate environmental groups on the range of essential goods that come out of fossil fuel production — from vaccines to clothing to household appliances — as well as to organize our own members on the inevitability of change and the need to plan for it. The transition is happening, and we have to be nimble in our response.</p>
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<h2>Obstacles to a Just Transition</h2>
<p>Among the obstacles we are facing is a history of bad US industrial policy, which makes workers skeptical that any transition will actually be a just one. One only need visit Youngstown, Ohio, or Detroit, Michigan, to see the lasting effects of the demise of steel and auto, respectively. Workers in the oil industry do not want to see their towns abandoned and their livelihoods gone with a transition to renewable energy.</p>
<p>Fossil fuel companies pose another hurdle. The fossil fuel industry has money and access. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27) negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, the fossil fuel presence was overwhelming, with over six hundred lobbyists in attendance. The talks resulted in funding for loss and damages among countries that have not contributed to climate change but suffer disproportionately from its effects. This is a worthy goal but one that maintains the status quo with regard to future emissions.</p>
<p>Obstacle three: union leadership — as well as our rank-and-file members — are unsure about how to maintain the gains we have won over so many years. Many members feel affinity to the companies that have provided us with work. The fossil fuel industry has provided steady employment and, through collective bargaining, paid good wages and offered decent benefits. Fossil fuel jobs have launched generations of workers into the middle class and sometimes beyond.</p>
<p>If our employers say all is well, it is difficult to fight them because our members want to keep their jobs. That is exactly what the companies will do right up until the time we are no longer needed.</p>
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<h2>Beyond Fossil Fuels</h2>
<p>The fossil fuel industry has long seemed impervious to change. For over one hundred years, fossil fuels have produced countless products that form the basis for our economy and society, from syringes to cell phone cases, from aspirin to asphalt, from jet fuel to tennis shoes. Fossil fuels have also provided stable employment for generations of workers and a steady tax base for communities across the country. Sons, daughters, siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins all work in the industry with the expectation that these jobs will continue for the next generation. Some will, but many will not.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Talking about demand has allowed us to move the conversation within our membership beyond climate change and toward what we need to do to make sure our folks have good jobs moving forward.</q></aside>
<p>The demand for fossil fuels is contracting, and so the industry is changing. Ford is spending almost $4 billion building electric vehicle facilities in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri. Delta, Southwest, and many other airline carriers have placed large orders for sustainable aviation fuel. Volvo is set to offer only electric vehicles by 2030; the company is also exploring using steel that has no fossil fuel footprint. Finally, General Motors will no longer be making internal combustion engines after 2035 — another hit to demand for fossil fuels. At the same time, oil lobbies are making the case that the industry is indispensable, all the while cutting staff, closing facilities, and moving to renewable fuels — all of which negatively impact our workers.</p>
<p>Our membership is more divided than the rest of the nation on the link between fossil fuels and climate. Some workers realize the need for change to protect the environment; others do not. What we tell these members is that whatever they believe about the climate, the fossil fuel industry is changing, and we need to adapt with it. Talking about demand has allowed us to move the conversation within our membership beyond climate change and toward what we need to do to make sure our folks have good jobs moving forward.</p>
<p>Environmentalists, on the other hand, don’t always take into account the wide-ranging effects of rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. For example, California recently announced plans to reduce crude oil production to 166,000 barrels a day by 2045. Currently, my refinery alone produces 363,000 barrels a day. Refineries across the state produce around one million barrels a day. The plan that’s currently in place doesn’t fully address how we would reduce production so dramatically or what the consequences of doing so would be — including the loss of jobs. The call to action from environmentalists has too often ignored the consequences for families and communities of reducing fossil fuel.</p>
<p>Over the last year and a half, labor and environmental groups in California have begun meeting to better understand each other’s positions and to develop new platforms that take into account the needs of workers, communities, and the planet. As a result, we’ve begun to build alliances that can ensure that our communities continue to thrive as we transition away from fossil fuels. These kinds of alliances are crucial to ensuring that no one is left behind as we plan for a renewable future.</p>
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Norman Rogershttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/marxist-class-analysis-class-consciousness/We Need a Revival of Marxist Class Analysis2024-03-18T14:02:33Z2024-03-18T12:54:59Z<p>Karl Marx’s most vital contribution to modern class analysis was to document the ways in which capitalist owners continually extract unpaid labor from hired workers in the production process as a primary source of their profits. After his death, many analysts overlooked his focus on this “hidden abode” of production in the capitalist labor process, […]</p>
<h3>Without solid data, discussions about class and class consciousness are often just guesswork. Empirical Marxist studies of class structure and class consciousness are invaluable for a robust socialist politics, and we need more of it.</h3>
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Philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx in a public park in Berlin, Germany. (Sean Gallup / Getty Images)
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<p>Karl Marx’s most vital contribution to modern class analysis was to document the ways in which capitalist owners continually extract unpaid labor from hired workers in the production process as a primary source of their profits.</p>
<p>After his death, many analysts overlooked his focus on this “hidden abode” of production in the capitalist labor process, focusing instead on the inequitable distribution of commodities. Later Marxist intellectuals and others insightfully analyzed other devastating general effects of capitalist development. But the labor process focus was resurrected in the wake of the student-worker protests of the 1960s, most notably by Harry Braverman’s <em>Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century </em>(1974). An array of studies followed to identify the class structure of advanced capitalist societies based on paid workplace relations between owners and hired employees.</p>
<p>Marx’s original interest in identifying conditions in which hired workers would develop a class consciousness opposing capitalism faced a similar path: many assertions of the necessity for class consciousness but little empirical investigation of its existence — until the protests of the ’60s sparked an array of studies, such as Michael Mann’s <em>Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class</em> (1973)<em>.</em> These distinctive studies of class structure and class consciousness occurred as organized labor reached historic membership highs and labor’s share threatened normal profit margins in many capitalist economies. These developments led to the onslaught of capital’s neoliberal counterattack.</p>
<p>This capitalist offensive unfolded at different times and with varying degrees of coordination across advanced capitalist countries. However, by the 1990s its effects had become evident, manifesting in deep corporate tax cuts, business deregulation, deductions in education, health and welfare funding, privatization of public services, and sustained efforts to weaken and bust unions. A consequence of this assault was a decrease in interest and funding for research into Marxist-oriented studies of class relations, coinciding with growing attention to the increasing racial and gender diversity of the workforce. Since the early 1980s, when Erik Olin Wright coordinated <a href="https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/115">national surveys</a> in several advanced capitalist countries, there have been hardly any other major empirical Marxist studies of class structure and class consciousness in the Global North.</p>
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<h2>Tipping Point</h2>
<p>We are probably living in the most dangerous time for the human species since our early origins. The massive numbers of wildfires destroying large swaths of land in many countries last summer are one sign among many that we are mere years away from irreversible environmental degradation. The scientific evidence is now irrefutable that these conditions require immediate human action. The Ukraine War and Israel’s war on Gaza remind us that we could again be facing the prospect of nuclear winter.</p>
<p>We are witnessing historic peaks in wealth inequality and historic lows in public trust regarding elected governments’ capacity to address inequities. The COP28 — 2023’s United Nations Climate Change Conference — ended without any real mechanisms to ensure environmental action, while fossil fuel companies are declaring <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/bio/zanagee-artis/oil-industry-netted-billions-profits-despite-global-price-dip">record profits</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/opinion/oil-fossil-fuels-clean-energy.html">production plans</a> with minimal public opposition from elected officials. Recent years have seen the largest <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/does-protest-work-bevins.html">social protests</a> in recorded history over environmental and social justice issues. Now more than ever, identifying class forces and mobilizing working people are crucial in the fight for a sustainable future.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Now more than ever, identifying class forces and mobilizing working people are crucial in the fight for a sustainable future.</q></aside>
<p>Important studies of the ways that class relations pervade unpaid housework and community work, as well as interacting with gender and race relations flourished from the 1980s. But recent research focusing on employment class structure and class consciousness have been very rare. However, a significant exception exists. Wallace Clement and John Myles at Carleton University conducted the Canadian Class Structure Survey in 1982, contributing to the <a href="https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/115">international set of surveys of class</a> and class consciousness led by Wright.</p>
<p>Starting in 1998, I was able to conduct a series of similar surveys through funded general research networks I directed. These surveys took place in 1998, 2004, 2010, and 2016. They provide insight into employment relations by distinguishing between employers, managers, and nonmanagerial workers, as well as examining levels and forms of class consciousness. The results are documented in my recent <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/tipping-point-for-advanced-capitalism/9781773636405">book</a>, <em>Tipping</em><em> Point for Advanced Capitalism: Class, Class Consciousness and Activism in the “Knowledge Economy</em>.” Some of the most important findings are highlighted here.</p>
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<h2>Class Structure and Consciousness</h2>
<p>The following figure summarizes the distribution of employment classes in Canada in 2016. Corporate capitalists and large employers remained very small in number. A notable trend since the early 1980s is the decline in industrial workers. But there have also been substantial gains in the numbers of nonmanagerial professional employees, as well as growth in middle managers, who monitor the increasing knowledge work of nonmanagerial employees. Professional employees have experienced deteriorating working conditions and underemployment while also becoming the most highly organized part of the labor force. These labor-process-based trends are supported internationally by employment class data in the <a href="https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse/CPEDB/">Comparative Political Economy Data Base</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/18102116/Picture1.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-205473 size-full" src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/18102116/Picture1.png" alt="" width="780" height="440" /></a></p>
<p>Class consciousness emerges across three critical levels: class identity, oppositional consciousness, and class-based visions of the future. These levels correspond to key questions: Do you identify yourself with a specific class? Do you hold class interests opposed to another class? Do you have a vision of future society that aligns with the interests of your class? Currently, a common belief amongst leftists is that many working people mistakenly see themselves as middle class, possess confused oppositional consciousness that has been enfeebled by dominant bourgeois ideology, and are unable to conceive of any real alternative to capitalism. This is far from the truth. Comparative analysis of the 1980s Wright surveys with the more recent Canadian surveys have found the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>While many people accurately identify themselves as “middle class” — in contrast with those who are evidently rich or destitute — this self-identification does not prevent a significant number (steelworkers, for example) from developing progressive, oppositional class consciousness.</li>
<li>People with a progressive pro-labor oppositional consciousness (supporting the right to strike and opposing profit maximization) significantly outnumber those with pro-capital class consciousness (opposing the right to strike and supporting profit maximization), and the number of pro-labor supporters appears to be increasing.</li>
<li>A substantial and increasing number of people express support for visions of a future economic democracy characterized by nonprofit motives and worker self-management.</li>
<li>Those people with a revolutionary labor consciousness, which combines pro-labor oppositional consciousness with support for economic democracy, comprise a small but growing group. This group is much larger than those working people whose viewpoints clearly defend existing capitalist conditions.</li>
<li>Organized nonmanagerial professional employees, such as nurses or teachers, rank among the most progressive activists in current labor and social movement networks, actively resisting and challenging encroachments on economic, social and environmental rights.</li>
</ul>
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<h2>Class-Based Activism</h2>
<p>Many nonmanagerial workers in advanced capitalist countries express a pragmatic stay-the-course mixture of hopes and fears. But few workers defend a profit-obsessed capitalism that prioritizes managerial authority while many more clearly prefer a transformation to a sustainable nonprofit, worker-managed economy. Among those with progressive class consciousness, there is nearly unanimous support for taking action against global warming and reducing poverty.</p>
<p>The strongest support is among nonmanagerial workers who are visible minorities. The growing numbers of workers with a well-developed revolutionary labor consciousness were still small in 2016 (less than 10 percent). But history has demonstrated that small, organized groups can effect transformative change when they address genuine democratic concerns.</p>
<p>These recent Canadian class surveys suggest that nonmanagerial workers possess a much greater latent progressive class consciousness than many leftist intellectuals often presume. Consciousness of exploitation in paid workplaces along with wider senses of racial and gender discrimination are animating widespread, if still occasional, social protests. Class conscious workers are core activists in most progressive social movements.</p>
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<h2>Looking Forward</h2>
<p>Following a rise in votes and demonstrations for right-wing parties in recent years, numerous pundits have speculated about unrepresentative small groups taking political power undemocratically. The Canadian surveys confirm that majorities of these small numbers of corporate capitalists, large employers, and high-level managers are clearly inclined toward right-wing policies and parties. However, the weight of this survey evidence, along with a few other recent <a href="https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/45528/mwp_2017_02.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y">surveys</a> — sensitive to objective classes defined by paid work relations in advanced capitalist countries — indicate that professional employees are, in the main, strongly supportive of progressive social policies and left-oriented political parties.</p>
<p>Unionized industrial workers and service workers have generally maintained a progressive political stance. However, in countries with weaker union movements, even some established nonmanagerial workers — distinct from visible minority workers facing discrimination and exploitation — have found themselves increasingly drawn toward anti-immigration and anti-diversity movements due to growing material precarity.</p>
<p>Reactionary ideologues and radical right-wing parties have often used chronic material and psychic insecurities to appeal to greater nationalist glory and stoke racist fears and coercive actions especially among relatively well-to-do class and ethnic groups concerned about losing their privileges. This is as true of the January 6 insurrection as it was in the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany. Limited empirical evidence from a rare <a href="https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-Fromm/frontdoor/index/index/year/2014/docId/24240">opinion survey</a> in Weimar Germany suggests that a majority of employees and skilled workers continued to support leftist political views and reject authoritarian sentiments. But only a small minority of left party supporters showed sufficient commitment to democratic rights to resist Nazism.</p>
<p>The most significant difference today is that in most advanced capitalist countries the majority of nonmanagerial workers, especially those with strong class consciousness, are more protective of their hard-earned fundamental democratic rights. They are more prepared to defend them when seriously challenged — as US workers will be if Donald Trump wins in November and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811">Project 2025</a> plans become operational.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Class-grounded surveys can track basic changes in employment class structure and links with class-based sentiments on political issues quite accurately.</q></aside>
<p>The limits of population sample surveys for predicting actual behavior are well-known. But class-grounded surveys like these conducted in Canada can track basic changes in employment class structure and links with class-based sentiments on political issues quite accurately. Since the last survey in 2016, significant events have occurred, including the pandemic, heightened economic inequities and racial grievances, more global warming events, and wars affecting advanced capitalist countries more directly.</p>
<p>A partial pre-pandemic survey in 2020 in Canada indicated a growing support for transformation to a sustainable economic democracy. There is an urgent need for full surveys of class and class consciousness in all advanced capitalist countries. These surveys are crucial for assisting progressive forces to mobilize anti-capitalist sentiments that appear to be more widespread and intense than in 2016. The survey questions from the Wright 1980s network and subsequent Canadian surveys are now <a href="https://borealisdata.ca/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5683/SP3/MFITNE">publicly accessible</a>.</p>
<p>Near-universal access to social media, the availability of many sympathetic qualified researchers, and the growing issue-based social movements in need of such grassroots intelligence make representative surveys of current classes and their political consciousness more practical than ever before. Researchers could easily undertake a new Swedish survey to compare with the Wright surveys conducted in early 1980s, which showed strong worker support for the Meidner Plan, posing a significant threat to the capitalist ownership of the economy. Similarly, a US survey could offer valuable insights by comparing current findings with those from the 1980 survey, especially since the union movement appears more active today than back then. Such surveys could significantly inform strategic mobilization efforts.</p>
<p>Surveys grounded in the labor process are now much easier and quicker to conduct than when Marx attempted one with French workers in 1880.</p>
<p>Recent experimental US <a href="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/11134429/CWCP-Report-2024.pdf">surveys</a> by <em>Jacobin</em> are promising, finding significant connections between progressive economic policies, electoral candidates, and some of Wright’s class divisions and class identities. Researchers should continue these studies and more thoroughly link them with Marxist class structures and class consciousness. Failing to seize these current opportunities for Marxist class analyses to support progressive political action — as we approach the tipping point between capitalist oblivion and a sustainable alternative — would be a profound mistake.</p>
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D. W. Livingstonehttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/tennessee-volkswagen-uaw-union-election/Tennessee Volkswagen Workers Have Filed for a Union Election2024-03-18T13:30:06Z2024-03-18T11:22:24Z<p>Autoworkers will vote on whether to form a union at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the company’s only factory on the planet without a union. On Monday, the United Auto Workers (UAW) filed for an election to represent all 4,300 of the plant’s hourly employees, after the union said a “supermajority” of workers signed […]</p>
<h3>After the UAW’s stand-up strike against the Big 3, the union pledged to embark on an aggressive campaign to organize nonunion automakers. Today, the UAW announced it is filing an election at the Chattanooga, Tennessee, Volkswagen plant.</h3>
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Autoworkers in Tennessee are voting on whether to unionize their plant. (Michael P. Farrell / Albany Times Union via Getty Images)
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<p>Autoworkers will vote on whether to form a union at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the company’s only factory on the planet without a union.</p>
<p>On Monday, the United Auto Workers (UAW) filed for an election to represent all 4,300 of the plant’s hourly employees, after the union said a “supermajority” of workers signed union cards in one hundred days. Unlike in the last <a href="https://labornotes.org/2019/04/third-times-charm-uaw-announces-new-election-volkswagen">three failed</a> drives at this plant, this time, the UAW has <a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/11/auto-workers-direct-momentum-toward-organizing-plants-across-us">publicly laid</a> out its strategy to support worker-led organizing across the nonunion auto and battery plant sector at companies like Toyota, Rivian, Hyundai, Mercedes, and Volkswagen.</p>
<p>The strategy is for workers to announce their organizing drives once they have reached 30 percent on signed union authorization cards, hold rallies with community and labor supporters at the 50 percent mark, and demand voluntary recognition when they reach 70 percent, having grown their organizing committee to include workers from every shift and job classification. If the company refuses, the workers file for an election with the National Labor Relations Board.</p>
<p>Volkswagen is the first nonunion plant to clear that milestone. More than ten thousand workers at thirteen nonunion carmakers and two dozen facilities nationwide have signed union cards since last November, when the UAW <a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/11/auto-workers-direct-momentum-toward-organizing-plants-across-us">announced</a> an ambitious goal to organize one hundred fifty thousand autoworkers.</p>
<p>That’s roughly the same number of workers covered under the Big 3 contracts at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. The union captivated the labor movement last fall with a Big 3 strike that won members landmark contracts.</p>
<p>The UAW was circumspect about confirming whether 70 percent of workers in the Chattanooga plant had indeed signed union cards. But the union’s strategy indicates that workers have built enough energy and momentum to file for an election.</p>
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<h2>Why I’m Voting Yes</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atm-Jqr9Klg">new video</a> released by the union, Volkswagen workers explain why they’re voting yes: to improve working conditions, to gain representation in management meetings, to fix broken equipment, and to win adequate health care and a better personal leave policy.</p>
<p>“We don’t have much in the way of paid time off,” Isaac Meadows, a production team member in assembly, told me. “Money comes secondary in all our conversations.”</p>
<p>Workers at Volkswagen have no sick time, and annual plant closures eat into their time-off bank. Meadows has ninety-six hours of paid time off. “When we have our scheduled shutdowns in the winter and in the summer, the company takes most of it,” he said. “And then when we do come back to work, we’re required to work a lot of Saturdays.”</p>
<p>Workers want to take back their weekends, or at least receive more notice if they are scheduled to work on the weekend on top of earning time and half. They currently are notified of weekend work on Thursday and earn time and half only if they’ve worked over forty hours during the week.</p>
<p>Zach Costello, a trainer at the plant, said the last union drive in 2019, which the union <a href="https://labornotes.org/2019/06/why-uaw-lost-again-chattanooga">lost narrowly</a> by fifty-seven votes, outmaneuvered by political and company opposition, was marred because the UAW needed to clean house.</p>
<p>At the time, a Justice Department investigation revealed long-standing corruption in the union, including embezzlement, kickbacks, and collusion with employers. Thirteen union officials went to jail, including two former presidents, after pleading guilty to embezzlement and racketeering charges.</p>
<p>“When you don’t see something good coming from unions, you assume that they have no purpose, because it seems like an extra step that you don’t need,” he said.</p>
<p>With reformers at the helm, the UAW no longer carries the patina of a union mired in corruption and complacency, as do-nothing leaders in the pocket of management settled one subpar contract after another.</p>
<p>Back in 2019, my coworkers “couldn’t point to a time in their lives where they were watching the news and saw, ‘Oh, my God, look what they did,” said Costello in reference to gains of the Big 3 stand-up strike. “That’s amazing. We can do that.”</p>
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<h2>Breaching Anti-Union Strongholds</h2>
<p>The UAW has faced repeated defeats at Volkswagen and other automakers. But while the companies succeeded in routing their workers in forming a union, the defeats were never complete. A nucleus of workplace organizers, a group that refused to accept the bosses’ tyrannical power over them, remained. When the Big 3 autoworkers bested the auto companies in their strike last year and notched landmark contracts, they were ready to stand up and renew their organizing push.</p>
<p>Yolanda Peoples, a third-generation autoworker on the engine assembly line, is one of those worker-leaders who was hired in 2011, when the plant opened, attracting eighty-five thousand applications for two thousand jobs. People said the organizing committee got to 50 percent a lot sooner than in previous drives thanks to the use of electronic cards. While all three shifts are covered by the organizing committee, they are also vocal in their support of the union drive.</p>
<p>In previous drives, “the people that were pushing for the UAW, it was like we were part of a secret society,” she <a href="https://prospect.org/labor/2024-02-15-southern-autoworkers-organize-vw-business-class-tries-to-wallop/">remembered.</a> “We had to be real hush-hush about it because we didn’t want to get in any trouble with HR because we said the word ‘union.’ So it was real hard for us to get the word around to our coworkers.” As they again have entered the organizing arena, worker-leaders have learned from these past defeats.</p>
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<h2>Diverse Workforce</h2>
<p>But the terrain of struggle inside the plant has also changed over the years. That change includes the <a href="https://uaw.org/vw/#voc2">backgrounds</a> of the plant’s workforce and a broadly representative organizing committee.</p>
<p>In 2014, nine out of ten workers at the plant were white and the majority of them men. Chattanooga’s population is 184,000, with 59 percent of residents white and 29 percent black, according to the <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chattanoogacitytennessee/PST045223#qf-headnote-a">latest </a><a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chattanoogacitytennessee/PST045223#qf-headnote-a">census estimates</a>. Racist dog whistles were effective at dividing the workforce. The conservative front group Americans for Tax Reform rented billboards around Chattanooga emblazoned with the message: “UNITED <span style="text-decoration: line-through">AUTO</span> OBAMA WORKERS.”</p>
<p>That divide-and-conquer tactic is less effective now, especially among former union members. Meadows was a union worker in Reno, Nevada. Coming from a union stronghold, he said the biggest obstacle for the campaign was overcoming the South’s deep-seated skepticism and hostility to unions, especially among younger workers who learn anti-unionism from family members. The UAW has been in the <a href="https://prospect.org/labor/2024-02-15-southern-autoworkers-organize-vw-business-class-tries-to-wallop/">crosshairs </a>of the state’s Republican politicians and outside lobbyists from Washington, DC.</p>
<p>But Meadows said that among his Nigerian, Vietnamese, Colombian, and Ukrainian coworkers, there are different sentiments toward unions. “I think because of our great diversity, it’s diluted some of that Southern political mentality. And so it’s making the conversation easier.”</p>
<p>Meadows said Volkswagen prides itself on being a globally progressive company. That has had some impact on its workforce, recently celebrating the contributions of African Americans during Black History Month. The question is whether, should workers win their election, the company will translate those lofty progressive values into bargaining a contract to recognize the contributions of Meadows, Peoples, Costello, and thousands of their coworkers in making it a successful company.</p>
<p>“We take pride in the work we do,” said Victor Vaughn, an assembly worker on the logistics line last month. “We want to be recognized for what we do, not be taken advantage of.”</p>
<p>Today, in a union press release, he said: “We are voting yes for our union because we want Volkswagen to be successful.” But he says that success shouldn’t come at the cost of bodily injury.</p>
<p>“Just the other day, I was almost hit by four five-hundred-plus-pound crates while I was driving to deliver parts,” said Vaughn. “That incident should’ve been followed up within the hour, but even after I clocked out no one asked me about it. Volkswagen has partnered with unionized workforces around the world to make their plants safe and successful. That’s why we’re voting for a voice at Volkswagen here in Chattanooga.”</p>
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Luis Feliz Leonhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/ukraine-us-weapons-defense-department/The US Isn’t Properly Tracking Its Weapons Supply in Ukraine2024-03-18T09:32:17Z2024-03-18T09:22:50Z<p>The Defense Department is not conducting adequate oversight of the unprecedented deluge of weapons it’s been sending to Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, according to a new government report reviewed by the Lever. That means the end-use of billions of dollars’ worth of arms is at risk of being unaccounted for in a country that […]</p>
<h3>Use of the US’s unprecedented weapons supply to Ukraine has not been properly tracked by the Department of Defense — and the country has a history of alleged misuse, loss, or selling of munitions.</h3>
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Commander of the Joint Forces the Armed Forces of Ukraine fires a US-made MK19 automatic grenade launcher during military training exercise in Kiev on September 27, 2023 amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Genya Savilov / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>The Defense Department is not conducting adequate oversight of the unprecedented deluge of weapons it’s been sending to Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, according to a new government report reviewed by the<em> Lever. </em>That means the end-use of billions of dollars’ worth of arms is at risk of being unaccounted for in a country that was previously a hub for the illicit arms trade.</p>
<p>The report was published a day before the Biden administration <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/us-aid-ukraine-war.html">announced</a> it would be sending another $300 million in weapons to Ukraine and urged passage of an aid bill held up in Congress that would deliver an additional $60.1 billion to the country.</p>
<p>The government report found that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States has sent more than $42 billion worth of military equipment, weapons, training, and other military support to the country, and that the United States lacks proper systems to track what is being delivered, when the munitions were delivered, and how they are being used — all of which is required by law.</p>
<p>Federal law requires the Defense Department and Ukrainian officials to track how the military equipment and weapons are being used and to prevent them from being stolen, sold, lost, or misused. Military officials call this “diversion.”</p>
<p>The report, conducted by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), found that the Defense Department is potentially failing to track allegations of end-use violations and arms diversions.</p>
<p>“While [Defense Department] officials said there had been no credible evidence of diversion of US-provided advanced conventional weapons from Ukraine, it is unclear whether all allegations are being tracked,” investigators found.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/11/2003374323/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-043-EEMU_REDACTED%20SECURE.PDF">report</a> released in January by the Pentagon Inspector General’s office found that the Defense Department failed to conduct proper end-use oversight on more than $1 billion worth of military equipment — nearly forty thousand weapons — sent to Ukraine. The Pentagon report did not investigate instances of diversion, but Defense Department Criminal Investigative Service personnel continue to “investigate allegations of criminal conduct with regard to US security assistance to Ukraine.”</p>
<p>The new GAO <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106289.pdf">report</a>, released March 13, follows a major expansion of how much military aid the United States was willing to export to conflict zones involving strategic partners. Previously, lawmakers had placed a <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/2318">$100 million cap</a> on the value of total military equipment that could be exported under the Presidential Drawdown Authority — a program established in the 1960s that allows the president to ship weapons from US stockpiles to countries in need of military assistance. However, lawmakers vastly expanded that cap to $11 billion in 2022 and $14.5 billion for 2023 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the report noted.</p>
<p>Congress has approved more than $113 billion in humanitarian and military aid for Ukraine through four different spending bills passed as of November 2023. Investigators found that the amount of military equipment and weapons being delivered and the rapid timeline have stressed the Defense Department’s delivery and reporting methods.</p>
<p>“The volume of [military equipment and weapons] delivered to Ukraine since the start of the war has been unprecedented,” government investigators said in their report, adding that military equipment deliveries that often took weeks in previous scenarios are now arriving in Ukraine within days or even hours.</p>
<p>The war in Ukraine has been viewed by some experts as a <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/">proxy war</a> between the United States and Russia. NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ukraine-nato-expansion/">claimed</a> in September 2023 that Russian president Vladimir Putin launched the invasion as a reaction to NATO potentially expanding into Ukraine.</p>
<p>“[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” Stoltenberg <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ukraine-nato-expansion/">said</a>. “He has got the exact opposite.”</p>
<p>Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has routinely <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/12/1218588127/zelenskyy-ukraine-funding-biden">pleaded</a> for additional aid from the United States and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/28/zelenskyy-seeks-support-arms-at-albania-summit-of-balkan-nations">other allied countries</a> and has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgXUai_XFZw">vowed</a> to keep fighting the Russian invasion.</p>
<p>Inadequate oversight of the weapons being sent to Ukraine is especially concerning given the scale of the arms transfers involved and Ukraine’s spotty track record. While Russia appears to be responsible for a number of <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/03/ukraine-apparent-war-crimes-russia-controlled-areas">war crimes</a> committed since the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/un-commission-concludes-war-crimes-have-been-committed-ukraine-expresses">conflict began</a>, Ukraine has at times been criticized for <a href="https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/11/2003374323/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-043-EEMU_REDACTED%20SECURE.PDF">misusing weaponry</a> — and has a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/09/armstrade.iantraynor">history</a> of alleged arms diversions to illicit markets.</p>
<p>“Ukraine, for its part, has done a pretty good job of avoiding instances of large-scale diversion, at least cross-border diversion,” said Elias Yousif, a research analyst focused on conventional defense with the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank focused on global peace. “But we know that these weapons have long shelf lives, and the world is replete with examples of weapons that were transferred to one context, that years later had been found somewhere else.”</p>
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<h2>Oversight Holes and Missing Military Equipment</h2>
<p>The GAO report, conducted from October 2022 to March 2024, looked into three main issues: the process used to deliver US-based military equipment to Ukraine, how the Defense Department has tracked the deliveries, and how defense officials have monitored how the weapons are being used.</p>
<p>GAO investigators reviewed Defense Department documents, interviewed Defense and State Department officials, observed deliveries in Germany and Poland near the Ukrainian border, and analyzed the types of military equipment and weapons sent to the conflict.</p>
<p>The kinds of weapons sent to Ukraine fall into two categories: enhanced — which includes “highly sensitive” weapons such as Javelin missiles and unmanned drones — and routine — which includes 155 mm Howitzers, ammunition, tanks, helmets, and medical kits.</p>
<p>The weapons sales and transfers are guided by laws that require Defense Department and Ukrainian officials to report any potentially unauthorized use, including illegal sales, security violations, losses, and other incidents. Federal law requires that assistance must be ended if there is a “substantial violation” of how the weapons are used and overseen.</p>
<p>The GAO report highlights how the amount of weapons being sent into Ukraine has made oversight a problem, as well as the lack of monitors on the ground. A large portion of the end-use monitoring process does not account for “wartime dynamics,” investigators noted.</p>
<p>US embassy staff who usually monitor the use of military equipment and weapons were evacuated in 2022 when Russian forces began shelling Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.</p>
<p>Defense Department officials have been able to monitor military equipment and weapons use in some low-risk areas. “However, [Defense Department] officials said they were unable to directly perform routine or enhanced [end-use] checks on [military equipment and weapons] in high-risk areas of the country because of restrictions barring US officials from most areas outside of Kyiv,” the report found.</p>
<p>As of August 2023, the Defense Department’s military equipment tracking system included only one allegation of military equipment being “inappropriately transferred” to Russian forces since the beginning of the invasion. Two months later, Defense Department officials told GAO investigators that there is no credible evidence of US-provided military equipment being diverted.</p>
<p>Defense Department officials in Poland told the investigators they had heard of diversion allegations, but said the allegations were “consistent with Russian disinformation.”</p>
<p>The tracking system also found twenty-five incidents of military equipment or other items — including night-vision devices — being lost or destroyed. Investigators noted that without a proper tracking system, there may not be an accurate count of end-use allegations and that the groups involved may lack proper information to report patterns of misuse.</p>
<p>Ukraine’s current extensive battlefield demands have likely helped prevent diversions, said Yousif at the Stimson Center, but a proper tracking system helps ensure weapons and other military equipment remain in the right hands, even after hostilities have subsided.</p>
<p>“The demand is so great on the battlefield that it has dulled the incentives for people to take weapons from where they’re most needed to maybe make some sort of lucrative deal,” he added. “But those dynamics may change, and they actually become more acute after the guns fall silent. This is a long-term challenge.”</p>
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<h2>Delivery Unknown</h2>
<p>GAO investigators also found that the process of delivering weapons to Ukraine was riddled with problems.</p>
<p>The Defense Department divisions in charge of transferring weapons to Ukraine lacked a clear set of rules and responsibilities, the GAO report found. Additionally, the sheer volume of arms and the rapid pace in which they are being shipped created problems for personnel tasked with tracking the shipments.</p>
<p>In the report, investigators highlighted how the military’s main tracking system, called DSCA 1000, lacked a clear definition of what it meant for these weapons to be “delivered.” Officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps all had different standards for when they counted shipments as complete, investigators found.</p>
<p>“Inconsistent record-keeping across three separate entities has resulted in officials marking orders complete when only they’re only partially fulfilled,” investigators noted.</p>
<p>The Army considers shipments delivered “as soon as they begin movement from Army points of origin,” which usually means locations in the United States or Europe. But in some cases, it could still take weeks before these shipments reach Ukraine.</p>
<p>The Navy, meanwhile, marks shipments delivered once they arrive at the first port outside of the United States, while the Air Force told investigators that they “had not determined a standardized delivery confirmation process for defense articles provided to Ukraine.”</p>
<p>Only the Marine Corps recorded items as delivered once they received an email confirmation from officials that they had handed over supplies to Ukrainian officials.</p>
<p>“Officials responsible for overall management of the DSCA 1000 system confirmed that [military equipment and weapons] should be considered delivered only when they have been transferred to Ukrainian authority,” investigators wrote. “However, officials from the Office of the Secretary of Defense said that there may be instances in which it would be appropriate to record defense articles as ‘delivered’ prior to their physical delivery to Ukraine.”</p>
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<h2>“Industrial-Scale Warfare”</h2>
<p>The United States has been sending military equipment and weapons to Ukraine since at least 2014, when Russia seized control of the <a href="https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2014/05/27/the-energy-dimensions-of-russias-annexation-of-crimea/index.html">oil-rich</a> Crimean peninsula, which was previously under Ukrainian control.</p>
<p>The US authorizes shipments of artillery, ammunition, missiles, anti-aircraft systems, tanks, and medical supplies to Ukraine using two avenues: the Presidential Drawdown Authority, and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which was <a href="https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ92/PLAW-114publ92.pdf">implemented</a> in 2015 and allows the Defense Department to purchase military equipment and weapons from the private sector or foreign partners on behalf of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Since the invasion, the United States has <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12040#:~:text=Provision%20of%20Defense%20Equipment&text=Since%202018%2C%20Ukraine%20also%20has,to%20procure%20U.S.%20defense%20equipment.&text=rocket%20systems;&text=35%2C000+%20grenade%20launchers%20and%20small%20arms;&text=communications%2C%20radar%2C%20and%20intelligence%20equipment,to%20Ukraine%20through%20November%202023.">sent</a> 76 tanks; 186 armored vehicles; and more than 10,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 2,000 anti-aircraft missiles, and 35,000 grenade launchers. It has also sent well over one million rounds of <a href="https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-ukraine/#:~:text=To%20date%2C%20we%20have%20provided,and%20improve%20interoperability%20with%20NATO.&text=21%20air%20surveillance%20radars.">heavy-duty artillery</a> and a bevy of other weapons.</p>
<p>Ukraine has a <a href="https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/default/files/resources/SAS-BP3-Ukraine.pdf">well-documented</a> history of illicit weapons sales in the country, and the massive amount of weapons the United States has sent to the country is raising concerns for some peace watchers.</p>
<p>Ukraine, which was a Soviet state, held large weapons stockpiles after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Throughout the subsequent decade, those weapons found their way via the black market into a number of conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East.</p>
<p>A 2022 <a href="https://www.stimson.org/2022/the-risks-of-u-s-military-assistance-to-ukraine/">report</a> conducted by Yousif and Rachel Stohl for the Stimson Center noted that the illicit weapons industry in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union was estimated at around $32 billion throughout the 1990s. Ukraine became “a centerpiece of the global illicit arms market, with its weaponry providing the means of violence for battlefields in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, and many others, all the while enriching criminal networks in Ukraine,” the two wrote in their report.</p>
<p>Yousif said that the United States’ end-use monitoring was designed for peacetime settings and is therefore “ill-suited” to track weapons during wartime. The “industrial-scale warfare” unfolding in Ukraine makes tracking US weapons even harder, he added.</p>
<p>“This isn’t just about Ukraine,” Yousif said. “There are risks associated with arms transfers in any context and under the best scenarios. And of course, Ukraine isn’t in the best scenario or the best of circumstances.”</p>
<p>Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russians in the Donbas region since 2014 and over the years, there have been <a href="https://civiliansinconflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CIVIC_Report_Ukraine_November_2016.pdf">reports</a> of indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the region. Human Rights Watch <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions">detailed</a> how Ukrainian forces used cluster munitions — missiles that spread small bombs that explode on impact — in a populated area in the city of Donetsk, which killed six people and injured dozens more.</p>
<p>Cluster munitions have <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2023/07/07/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-5/">high failure rates</a> and essentially act as land mines if they do not explode upon impact. More than 120 countries have agreed to ban the use of cluster munitions, but the United States, Ukraine, and Russia <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/cluster-munitions-ukraine-russia-usage-report/32579235.html">did not sign</a> onto the agreement.</p>
<p>In July 2023, the Biden administration <a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3451570/biden-administration-announces-additional-security-assistance-for-ukraine/">announced</a> that it was sending cluster munitions and other high-duty artillery to Ukraine.</p>
<p>“Even if Ukraine uses those within the bounds of what you might call reasonable battlefield use, that still presents a decade’s long challenge for civilians,” Yousif said. “Those will essentially contaminate acres and acres of important civilian areas for the foreseeable future, so you are essentially leaving behind fields of unexploded ordinance that could spell disaster for non-combatants and children going forward.”</p>
<p>The United States’ five largest weapons manufacturers — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon — have raked in <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202308/1295637.shtml">billions of dollars</a> since the Ukraine war started. Defense contractors spent nearly <a href="https://archive.is/j5RPX">$140 million lobbying</a> Congress, regulators, and other federal authorities in 2023.</p>
<p>The Defense Department has also relied on smaller arms dealers with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/world/europe/ukraine-military-arms-dealer-pentagon.html">questionable pasts</a> to fulfill Ukrainian weapons requests. According to the <em>New York Times, </em>one arms dealer, who received a <a href="https://www.govconwire.com/2023/04/global-ordnance-unit-wins-431m-army-ammo-supply-contract/#:~:text=Global%20Ordnance'%20military%20products%20division%20will%20provide,Army%20under%20a%20$431%20million%20firm%2Dfixed%2Dprice%20contract.">Pentagon contract</a> worth $431 million in April 2023, was indicted in 2009 on conspiracy and money laundering charges after he was allegedly caught on tape trying to bribe foreign officials. Prosecutors later dropped the charges.</p>
<p>The weapons used in the Russia-Ukraine war have taken a massive toll on human lives. A US <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-troops-killed-zelenskyy-675f53437aaf56a4d990736e85af57c4">intelligence report</a> from December 2023 estimated that more than thirty thousand Russian troops had been killed or injured. Ukrainian president Zelenskyy <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-troops-killed-zelenskyy-675f53437aaf56a4d990736e85af57c4">estimated</a> last month that thirty-one thousand Ukrainian troops had been killed so far.</p>
<p>The GAO investigators issued eight recommendations for the Defense Department to improve its tracking system. The recommendations included the Secretary of Defense developing new guidelines for the military equipment delivery process, developing a clear definition for determining when weapons have been “delivered,” improving delivery accuracy, evaluating the end-use monitoring process to ensure it is being followed, and updating monitoring protocols for allegations of end-use violations.</p>
<p>According to the GAO report, Defense Department officials agreed or partially agreed with seven of the recommendations. However, Defense Department officials did not concur with the recommendation to update monitoring and documentation of alleged end-use violations.</p>
<p>Yousif agrees that as the US military scales up the amount of weapons it is sending to conflict zones across the globe, it needs to similarly expand its tracking and oversight of these tools of war.</p>
<p>“The United States needs to make similarly scaled investments in the structures that it has in place to oversee, monitor, evaluate and hold accountable its security assistance,” said Yousif<em>.</em> “It can’t just be about getting the things to the place at the right time.”</p>
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<p>You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the<i> Lever</i>, <a href="https://www.levernews.com/">here</a>.</p>
Freddy Brewsterhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/european-investment-bank-neoliberalism-climate/Europe’s Investment Bank Shouldn’t Prop Up Private Capital2024-03-18T09:02:34Z2024-03-18T09:02:34Z<p>At the start of 2024, the European Investment Bank (EIB) — the world’s largest multilateral bank — appointed Nadia Calviño as its new president. Until last year, she was Spain’s deputy prime minister and economy minister, in which role she saw through a €3 billion windfall tax on excessive profits of energy companies and the […]</p>
<h3>The European Investment Bank has an over half-trillion-euro balance sheet — and real power to invest in the green transition. But far from pursuing its public mandate, it’s devoting public resources to propping up the continent’s largest companies.</h3>
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Flags of European Union member state fly outside the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg on Monday, July 15, 2019. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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<p>At the start of 2024, the European Investment Bank (EIB) — the world’s largest multilateral bank — appointed Nadia Calviño as its new president. Until last year, she was Spain’s deputy prime minister and economy minister, in which role she saw through a €3 billion windfall tax on excessive profits of energy companies and the banking sector. But such progressive measures belie the reality that she was a committed centrist in Pedro Sánchez’s broad-left government — clashing with <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/04/spain-left-pce-yolanda-diaz-labor-sumar">Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz</a> over European Union (EU) “recovery funds.”</p>
<p>This €800 billion package, financed through the combined EU member states’ debt, was designed to kick-start the European economy after the COVID-19 shock through loans and grants. But the funding will end in 2026 — cutting the EU budget almost in half, on top of a return to austerity. Calviño managed Spain’s share of the investments, which were implemented by means of <a href="https://odg.cat/en/publication/perte-how-public-investment-undermines-ecofeminist-change/">techno-capitalist public-private partnerships</a><u>.</u></p>
<p>In her new EIB role, Calviño is now under pressure to move toward <a href="https://www.luxtimes.lu/europeanunion/eu-finance-chiefs-seek-more-defence-funds-but-question-how/8653583.html">bankrolling the defense industry</a> in the wake of the war in Ukraine. It’s a far cry from the European and <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a-global-green-deal-through-european-climate-leadership-by-ursula-von-der-leyen-and-werner-hoyer-2021-03">Global Green Deal</a> which the EIB — meant to be the EU’s “Climate Bank” — set out to deliver in 2021, after Ursula von der Leyen became European Commission president. Calviño’s personal influence on the EIB’s direction surely has its limits. Nonetheless, with her appointment — and the start of a new European Commission and Parliament after June’s election — left-wing and progressive forces should use this window of opportunity to repoliticize the EIB’s long-overlooked public mandate.</p>
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<h2>Green Capitalism</h2>
<p>The bank was, indeed, established as a public institution to operate on a nonprofit basis, offering equity, guarantees, or concessional loans (ones on better terms than those of commercial banks) in order to support EU objectives on integration and the economy.</p>
<p>Tucked away in Luxembourg, it was established in Brussels in 1958 to develop the European economy with funds from its shareholders, i.e., the member states of the European Communities (today, the EU). Most of its initial lending focused on regional development in the poorest regions in the European Economic Community (EEC). It financed public utilities in need of large capital with long maturities. With the Washington Consensus setting in, the EIB adopted the political project of the single market and shifted to a “market-maker” <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0957178713000623">role</a> in Europe, targeting roads, railways, and other sectors impacted by the push for liberalization and privatization, such as telecommunications, electricity, or gas. Its largest corporate beneficiaries over the past decade have been Iberdrola, Deutsche Telekom, and Terna.</p>
<p>Now, the bank increasingly embraces a new stage of financing decarbonized capitalism within its market-oriented portfolio. The greening of European industry and manufacturing through support for electric vehicle production, tech companies, or renewables well serves the big European corporations like Volvo, Iberdrola, Schaeffer, Ericsson, or Repsol. But it also backs some non-EU entities such as the US semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries or Northern Fiber Holding, a German portfolio company of Swiss-based global asset manager UBS. In the first months of Calviño’s leadership, the EIB committed €942.6 million to the Northvolt battery gigafactory in Sweden, in what it says is the largest green loan package in Europe to date, with a total $5 billion of debt financing.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>The bank increasingly embraces a new stage of financing decarbonized capitalism within its market-oriented portfolio.</q></aside>
<p>The clean tech race, built on an increasing need for stable access to raw materials, is <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiIsr2TiryEAxXTQ6QEHbcxAVwQFnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fjacobin.com%2F2023%2F03%2Feu-green-deal-industrial-plan-corporate-handouts-renewables&usg=AOvVaw0XX3lPJvRbHT4QVLSGvUrc&opi=89978449">guiding the EU’s public finance to</a><a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/eu-green-deal-industrial-plan-corporate-handouts-renewables">ward</a><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiIsr2TiryEAxXTQ6QEHbcxAVwQFnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fjacobin.com%2F2023%2F03%2Feu-green-deal-industrial-plan-corporate-handouts-renewables&usg=AOvVaw0XX3lPJvRbHT4QVLSGvUrc&opi=89978449"> Europe’s biggest private firms</a> — without considering long-term environmental and socioeconomic effects. But it’s not that the EIB is mandated to pursue greenwashed or extractivist investment. In fact, large public banks like the EIB — with a <a href="https://www.eib.org/en/about/key-figures/data">balance sheet of €545 billion</a> — are well positioned to absorb finance from capital markets and redirect it in the interests of social and environmental benefit.</p>
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<h2>Where There’s a Will . . .</h2>
<p>Looking at the finance ministers of the biggest EU economies that make up the EIB’s board — from Germany’s fiscally hawkish Christian Lindner, to France’s Bruno Le Maire slashing public spending, or to the Czech Zbyněk Stanjura eroding his country’s labor code — the bank is unlikely to see a reform to systematically increase much-needed social investments amid the cost-of-living crisis. But even so, there is a lot more the bank can do already — and it ought to be supporting public projects that are financially viable over the long term, not motivated by juicy returns. The bank’s profits amounted to a whopping €2.36 billion in 2022, meaning it can indeed increase support for projects that offer social benefits rather than attractive profits. Other big public banks like Germany’s Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) set aside more risk reserves than the EIB does and keep their AAA ratings. Indeed, where there’s a will, there’s a way: at the moment, the EIB is vowing to increase its risk-taking — but for innovation and high-return projects.</p>
<p>There are limits on the scope of public investments under the EU’s neoliberal framework — one that sets rigid fiscal rules and stipulates internal-market legislation that drives the privatization of public services. But even small shifts in the distribution of EIB finance from private to public could help resist the financialization of essential public services. Trade unions and local governments should talk to the bank about its public investment interests, such as building quality jobs, or maintaining <a href="https://counter-balance.org/news/new-eib-president-must-channel-banks-power-into-rebuilding-crumbling-public-services">the foundational livability of households</a> in the face of public spending cuts (that is, increasing the amount of money left for households to spend after all bills are paid by improving access to essential public goods and services). Equally, they can ask for an advisory role; unions and cities are represented in the KfW’s Board of Supervisory Directors, after all.</p>
<p>This is paramount: as things are, to keep growing both in revenues and relevance, the EIB has been pulled toward becoming the financing arm of the EU’s key investment programs designed by Brussels bureaucrats — and by extension, Europe’s top lobby groups. For examples, we can look to the recovery funds, or RePowerEU, or <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/eu-green-deal-industrial-plan-corporate-handouts-renewables">the Green Deal Industrial Plan</a> — the EU’s response to the US Inflation Reduction Act.</p>
<p>But stronger political opposition is also needed, against relying on a tech fix to Europe’s economic woes. Take public investments in the green transition. Private actors are slow to invest in renewables, in which they see relatively little commercial appeal — and when they do, their costs and prices are much higher than a public alternative would be. In this context, European public investment ends up <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/02/green-transition-renewable-energy-government-investment-markets/">favoring well-established and capitalized companies</a> such as the fossil fuel giants TotalEnergies, Enel, or RWE. Pending full reclamation of energy into public ownership, cities and municipalities can make use of EIB finance for publicly owned renewable energy projects — taking some of the development of renewable energy away from private developers’ hands.</p>
<p>EIB’s current strategy is, instead, deeply rooted in the neocolonial plundering of cheap resources from the Global South, and in the <a href="https://zoe-institut.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/zoe-dp6-graebner-hafele-core-periphery.pdf">EU’s own core-semiperiphery relations</a> between Western Europe on the one hand, and Southern and Eastern European countries on the other. The green tech market is favoring patent holders, <a href="https://www.marks-clerk.com/insights/articles/patents-in-clean-energy-technology-who-s-filing/">two-thirds of whom are concentrated in Germany</a>. And while Poland receives major finance from the EIB — Poland’s National Development Bank has been the EIB’s biggest counterpart since 2010 — it is not developing its own industrial capacity, but rather <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-economic-dependence-curbs-rise-foreign-investmente-eu/">feeding Western capital and multinationals</a> with cheaper labor and lower taxes. This is starkly apparent in EIB-funded projects such as LG’s planned <a href="https://www.eib.org/en/projects/all/20190378">EV battery gigafactory</a> in Poland.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Neoliberal Brussels institutions should not be left to lead the bank’s operations.</q></aside>
<p>In the Global South, the bank claims to be financing development through expanding market opportunities for European businesses in sectors like <a href="https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2022-195-enel-agrees-on-eur600-million-facility-with-the-eib-and-sace-for-sustainability-linked-financing-in-latin-america">Enel’s renewables in Brazil</a>, German investments in <a href="https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/11/15/green-hydrogen-namibia-europe-japan-tax-biodiversity-impacts/">dodgy hydrogen plans</a> in Namibia, or <a href="https://newsroom.orange.com/alcatel-submarine-networks-elettra-tlc-medusa-and-orange-announce-the-beginning-of-the-construction-of-medusa-submarine-cable-system-in-the-mediterranean-sea/">Orange’s submarine cable system</a> across the Mediterranean. Here, too, internationalists and progressives should demand that the bank fund more public services, social infrastructure, and local productive sectors. Neoliberal Brussels institutions should not be left to lead the bank’s operations, proposing more of the same programs that misuse public investment to derisk big business’s profit maximization.</p>
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<h2>The Public Good</h2>
<p>To be fair, some promising policies are already in place at the EIB — albeit with flaws, or not fully implemented. A clear economic rationale has to exist for its concessional loans, combined with EU grants and guarantees, addressing market failures. For instance, to fund regions that need it most and ensure convergence of living standards across Europe (which is a part of the EIB’s mandate), the bank has a so-called Public Sector Loan Facility (PSLF): a fund of up to €10 billion EIB loans matched by €1.5 billion in EU grants to support regions impacted by the phasing out of fossil fuel–related activities and the decarbonization of polluting industries. The <a href="https://www.eib.org/en/projects/all/20220027">first PSLF project</a> signed was in Western Macedonia, a Greek region dependent on coal and lignite mining, heavy industry, and fossil fuels. Here, an EU grant of €14.5 million and €58 million of EIB loans are financing economic diversification, public health care, rehabilitation of public buildings, and public energy-efficiency works. The unfortunate thing is that the PSLF sum is dwarfed by the other “green” derisking programs.</p>
<p>The EIB also finances affordable and social housing projects like those of <a href="https://www.housingeurope.eu/resource-1737/first-investeu-funded-project-in-germany-goes-to-a-municipal-housing-company-from-hanover">Hanover’s municipal housing company</a>, or <a href="https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2017-212-investment-plan-for-europe-eib-to-finance-construction-of-2-198-rented-social-housing-units">those of Barcelona en Comú</a>, a party headed by the city’s former left-wing mayor Ada Colau. As it stands, the program itself is far from perfect: it also promotes private sector housing and public-private partnerships, so it has a limited ability to counter the assetization of a public good like housing. But there is space for European cities and municipalities with progressive political representation and organized communities to develop and demand much more long-term public financing from the EIB for affordable housing projects than is currently given.</p>
<p>In the face of the global push to compete with China’s state-led subsidies, as well as to secure a good position in supply chains and the clean tech market, pressure on public budgets is immense. But even the United States’ Chips Act includes conditions such as limitations on share buybacks and dividends. And if there’s a lesson for the EIB from Chinese or the US public finance, it’s the need to redeploy the EIB’s financial power to support publicly owned and controlled companies — and a strong program of public investment.</p>
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Alexandra Gerasimcikovahttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/government-gentrification-urban-renewal-racism/Governments Fund Gentrification. But We Can Stop It.2024-03-17T16:11:43Z2024-03-17T16:11:43Z<p>When he came to the Indianapolis eviction court where my students and I represent tenants, Robert’s case made no sense. His landlord had filed for eviction against Robert, alleging he had paid his rent late. But Robert had receipts to show differently. Lots of receipts. Robert, now in his eighties, had been living in his […]</p>
<h3>Today’s gentrification is not an accident, nor is it simply the effects of shifting preferences for urban living or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. It’s the intentional, predictable result of policy choices. And we can halt it in its tracks.</h3>
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"Gentrification in Progress" tape in front of Brooklyn Museum. (Andy Katz / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)
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<p>When he came to the Indianapolis eviction court where my students and I represent tenants, Robert’s case made no sense. His landlord had filed for eviction against Robert, alleging he had paid his rent late. But Robert had receipts to show differently. Lots of receipts. Robert, now in his eighties, had been living in his apartment for more than two decades.</p>
<p>When we confronted the landlord’s attorney with this, he shrugged. “OK, we’ll dismiss this case,” he said. “But his lease is up in three months anyway, and the new property owner is not going to renew.”</p>
<p>Turns out the attempt to evict Robert was one of a stack of cases filed by the investor-owned real estate company that recently purchased his building. The plan was to clear out the current tenants, most of whom were, like Robert, black and longtime residents of the neighborhood. The next steps were to make a few cosmetic changes in the building, rename it, and start selling condos to the wealthier, predominately white people who had begun moving into Robert’s neighborhood.</p>
<p>Robert’s story is not a new one. Black households in our community have been displaced for generations. When Robert was younger, entire blocks of black communities near downtown were bulldozed to make way for interstate highways, an urban university campus, and a medical complex. The campus where I teach and the urban highway loop I travel to get to court are both built on the land of displaced black families.</p>
<p>The same pattern was repeated across urban America. Starting with the 1949 Housing Act, the federal government <a href="https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/renewal/#view=0/0/1&viz=cartogram">spent over $13 billion</a> on a series of programs informally known as urban renewal. But in black neighborhoods, the programs were more commonly known as “<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/brent-cebul-tearing-down-black-america/">Negro removal</a>.” For good reason: black Americans made up the majority of the quarter-million families displaced by urban renewal, even though they were less than 15 percent of the nation’s population at the time.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/27/upshot/diversity-housing-maps-raleigh-gentrification.html">new wave</a> of black and working-class displacement is now occurring in the surviving neighborhoods close to urban cores. Too often, the current displacement is portrayed as less connected to government policies than the urban renewal era of the mid-twentieth century. But today’s gentrification is not an accident, nor is it simply the effects of shifting preferences for urban living or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. From zoning decisions to infrastructure investment to handing over government land and <a href="https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/housing-and-community-development-expenditures">federal development funds</a> controlled by local governments to private capital, the displacement of Robert and hundreds of thousands of others is the intentional, predictable result of choices made by government policymakers.</p>
<p>“Gentrification is not about a Starbucks suddenly appearing in a community,” John Washington, codirector of organizing at PUSH Buffalo and an organizer with the nationwide <a href="https://homesguarantee.com/our-team/">Homes Guarantee campaign</a>, says. “Displacement and homelessness are actually the goals of the architects of our housing market, and they are backed by government dollars and policy.” The driving force of government handing over land, cash, and <a href="https://housingisahumanright.substack.com/p/huge-profits-no-taxes-how-we-reward?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Ftax&utm_medium=reader2">enormous tax subsidies</a> to private developers is so undeniable that even the centrist <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/localized-anti-displacement-policies/">Center for American Progress admits</a> that “displacement today is the result of policy choices.”</p>
<p>But not everywhere.</p>
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<h2>“Using Our Tax Dollars To Displace People Is No Longer Acceptable”</h2>
<p>For the past several decades, residents of historically black neighborhoods in Louisville’s urban center watched while their communities lost black residents to foreclosures and evictions. As the longtime residents were forced out, developers purchased their homes to sell to mostly white buyers. “They were picking the bones of my community,” says Jessica Bellamy, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union whose family had lived in the Smoketown area for generations.</p>
<p>The bone pickers were backed by the Louisville Metro Government. For years, the local government had been repurposing US Department of Housing and Urban Development funds to distribute <a href="https://www.rootcauseresearch.org/post/russell-what-is-the-right-to-remain-part-3">millions of dollars to developers</a> for projects that <a href="https://brokensidewalk.com/2016/937-jackson/">spiked the cost of housing</a> for everyone in the community, even as the <a href="https://louisvilleky.gov/government/housing/housing-needs-assessment">local government’s own assessment</a> showed the city was short over thirty thousand units that are affordable to the lowest-income residents. (Nationally, there is a shortage of <a href="https://nlihc.org/gap">7.3 million housing units</a> for very low-income households.)</p>
<p>So Bellamy and other residents drafted a law to block the local government from giving money, land, or staff support for projects that would result in housing costs that were unaffordable for a neighborhood’s current residents. They called it an <a href="https://nlihc.org/resource/anti-displacement-ordinance-introduced-louisville-tenant-advocates">antidisplacement ordinance</a> and recruited Metro Council member Jecorey Arthur to introduce it. Arthur also grew up in Louisville’s historically black neighborhoods and had long fought against displacement — a musician and teacher, he recorded the song “<a href="https://1200.bandcamp.com/track/gentrification">Gentrification</a>” in 2019. But he makes it clear that the ordinance was resident driven from day one.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--center"><q>The displacement of Robert and hundreds of thousands of others is the intentional, predictable result of choices made by government policymakers.</q></aside>
<p>“It is important for other cities that are trying to address displacement to realize that a remedy is not going to come just from electoral politics,” Arthur says. “You need to have grassroots organizing at the center of the effort. That is what gets reform passed.”</p>
<p>When Arthur first introduced the legislation, he had little official support. The majority of the council refused to endorse it. Louisville mayor Craig Greenberg, <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/elections/kentucky/2022/10/17/craig-greenberg-what-to-know-democratic-louisville-mayor-candidate/68002571007/">a former developer himself</a>, aggressively opposed it. But the Louisville Tenant Union and others canvassed door to door in support of the ordinance and held phone and text banks and public events in councilors’ districts. They collected 1500 signatures on a petition and recruited fifty organizations to endorse the ordinance.</p>
<p>“No one can articulate the struggle better than the people going through the struggle,” Arthur says. So the residents spoke at community events and held one-on-one meetings with councilors. On the day of the November vote, the mayor reached out to every councilor to lobby against the ordinance. But it was too late. The antidisplacement ordinance <a href="https://www.lpm.org/news/2023-11-10/louisville-metro-council-passes-anti-displacement-ordinance-that-aims-to-combat-gentrification">passed 25–0</a> and went into law, even though the mayor refused to sign it.</p>
<p>“The end result is that using our tax dollars to displace people is no longer acceptable to the people of Louisville,” Arthur told <em>Jacobin</em>.</p>
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<h2>Pointing the Finger at Government</h2>
<p>Louisville joins Boston, which in 2020 adopted <a href="https://www.bostonplans.org/housing/affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing-article-80">a similar requirement</a> that developers seeking zoning approvals first meet antidisplacement guidelines. Other reforms are also necessary to stop displacement. Black tenants are disproportionately the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165585/indianapolis-eviction-moratorium-black-renters-suffer">targets of unjust evictions</a>, so protections like <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/5/1/23697209/landlords-tenants-good-cause-just-cause-eviction-housing">good-cause requirements</a> for evictions or lease renewals (which would have kept our client Robert in his home) are necessary.</p>
<p>So is <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/07/rent-control-arguments-myths-housing-real-estate">rent control</a> to stop price gouging, and ensuring tenants have <a href="https://shelterforce.org/2020/07/24/giving-tenants-the-first-opportunity-to-purchase-their-homes/">the right of first refusal</a> to purchase their homes or buildings if the owner intends to sell. Positive reparations like transferring government-owned property not to profiteering developers but to <a href="https://groundedsolutions.org/strengthening-neighborhoods/community-land-trusts">community land trusts</a>, and funding <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/public-housing-new-york-affordable-rent-real-estate">more public housing</a>, can start reversing the damage caused by decades of displacement.</p>
<p>But shutting off the spigot of government dollars that is funding gentrification is an important step. Housing researchers at the RVA Eviction Lab say the Louisville ordinance is changing the narrative and <a href="https://louisvilleky.primegov.com/Portal/Meeting?meetingTemplateId=2211">stopping government complicity</a> in black displacement, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights says the Louisville example will <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/louisville-anti-gentrification-development-historically-black-neighborhood-ordinance">inspire other communities</a> to follow suit.</p>
<p>John Washington says that the Homes Guarantee campaign is looking to build on the Louisville victory. “This ordinance is so valuable because governments have for too long been deflecting their responsibility for gentrification” he says. “People living in these neighborhoods have pointed the finger right back at government, demanding it stop displacing entire communities.”</p>
<p>Jessica Bellamy agrees. And she has advice for other communities struggling with displacement. “You got to be all the way done with waiting for someone else to do something,” she says. “Anyone can do this — and <em>should</em> do this, all over the damn country.”</p>
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Fran Quigleyhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/mike-quill-irish-american-twu-civil-rights/Mike Quill: The Greatest Irish American2024-03-17T15:09:01Z2024-03-17T14:47:22Z<p>The Irish in America have a proud tradition of labor radicalism. In the 1870s, the Molly Maguires organized miners in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones fought the workers’ corner in the United Mine Workers and Industrial Workers of the World, where she was joined by another Irishwoman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. […]</p>
<h3>Born in rural Ireland and a veteran of the IRA, “Red” Mike Quill went on to form one of America’s most militant unions — and to stand side by side with Martin Luther King Jr in the fight against racism.</h3>
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Transport Workers Union president Mike Quill addresses the press outside a Manhattan jail in 1966, just after being arrested for organizing a strike. (Truman Moore / Getty Images)
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<p>The Irish in America have a proud tradition of labor radicalism. In the 1870s, the Molly Maguires organized miners in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones fought the workers’ corner in the United Mine Workers and Industrial Workers of the World, where she was joined by another Irishwoman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Even James Connolly and James Larkin, founding fathers of Irish syndicalism, organized workers in the United States for many years of their lives.</p>
<p>But few Irish American radicals have made a more lasting impression than Mike Quill. One of the founders and later iconic leaders of the Transport Workers Union, Quill blazed a trail from industrial unionism to anti-fascism and civil rights advocacy, the latter of which led to a close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr.</p>
<p>“Mike Quill was a fighter for decent things all his life,” King would later say: “Irish independence, labor organization, and racial equality. He spent his life ripping the chains of bondage from his fellow man.”</p>
<p>Born in Kilgarvan, county Kerry, in 1905, into a staunchly republican family, the young Mike Quill soon found himself embroiled in Ireland’s freedom struggle. One of nine children, two of Quill’s older brothers were active service members of the local Irish Republican Army (IRA), and he recalled in later life seeing them arrested by the Black and Tans. In fact, Quill’s family home was the headquarters of the Third Battalion of the No. 2 Brigade, and Mike Quill himself served as a dispatch rider in the War of Independence.</p>
<p>“Michael was only fifteen at the time,” Mary Healy Shea, daughter of the intelligence officer for Quill’s brigade, <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/mike-quill-twu-ira-irish-hero">would later remember</a>. “He was on a scouting mission and stumbled on a patrol of Black and Tans asleep in a ditch at the foot of the mountain. He was alone. Instead of running away, he stole all their ammunition without rousing them and gleefully returned to Gortloughera with his loot.”</p>
<p>But the family’s republicanism was by no means narrow, in keeping with the developing radicalism of Kerry at the time. “My father,” Quill would say, “knew where every fight against an eviction had taken place in all the parishes around.” In fact, one of Quill’s earliest radicalizing experiences was a transport strike.</p>
<p>In May 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, railway workers took part in a national munitions strike, refusing to carry “materials designed for the destruction of life and property” on behalf of the British Army. Quill’s native Kerry, which by this time had a significant Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union organization and a large number of Labour Party councilors, was <a href="https://www.theirishstory.com/2021/10/04/kerry-and-the-1920-railway-munitions-strike-how-workers-defied-an-empire/">a stronghold of the strike</a> and remained solid for six months.</p>
<p>In 1921, the War of Independence culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which Quill and his family opposed during the Irish Civil War. Mike Quill participated in the anti-treaty side’s capture of Kenmare, but it proved to be a short-lived success, and failure in Killorglin soon afterwards turned the tide of the war in favor of the Dublin government.</p>
<p>The late historian Manus O’Riordan <a href="https://www.aoh61.com/history/labor/mike_quill.htm">writes that</a> shortly afterward, Mike Quill “had his first experience of industrial struggle when he and his brother John were fired for staging a sit-in strike in a Kenmare saw-mill.” This combination of labor and republican militancy saw Mike Quill blacklisted locally and, on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day 1926, he emigrated to New York.</p>
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<h2>The Man Who Ran the Subways</h2>
<p>By 1929, Mike Quill had settled into a job as a ticket agent with the Interboro Rapid Transit (IRT) Company. The work was bleak: twelve hours per night, seven days a week, for as little as $0.12 an hour.</p>
<p>“I was a soldier who had lost my fight for freedom,” Quill would say. “When I escaped to this city, I discovered that New York had a different battle to be fought . . . and I would have to take a side.”</p>
<p>Around this time, Quill was also reading extensively. He was particularly taken by the works of James Connolly, with the pamphlets “Axe to the Root” and “Old Wine in New Bottles,” which rested substantially on Connolly’s union experience in the United States, helping to convert Quill to the cause of industrial unionism.</p>
<p>Mike Quill was part of a wave of emigration that saw almost a quarter of a million leave Ireland for the United States in the decade from 1920 to 1930. Most of these immigrants were from rural backgrounds and, upon arrival in New York, settled into jobs as unskilled workers. Consequently, there was little interest in their plight among the larger craft unions, organized around the American Federation of Labor (AFL), or in the Irish American establishment, which was hugely influential at the time through its political operation in Tammany Hall.</p>
<p>Instead, as Mike Quill set out to organize his fellow transit workers and drive up conditions, he found allies in a familiar quarter: veterans of the IRA.</p>
<p>Through Clan na Gael, an influential Irish nationalist organization, Mike Quill met former IRA volunteers Gerald O’Reilly, Tom O’Shea and Michael Lynch, each of whom worked alongside him in the IRT. Eventually, through outreach efforts, this group of IRA veterans in the IRT grew to around two dozen.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>As Mike Quill set out to organize his fellow transit workers and drive up conditions, he found allies in a familiar quarter: veterans of the IRA.</q></aside>
<p>The group organized around the Irish Workers’ Clubs, which themselves had been established by another IRA volunteer, Jim Gralton, a communist whose story was recently the subject of the Ken Loach movie <em>Jimmy’s Hall</em>. Gralton and another Irish communist organizer, Austin Hogan, helped to build connections between the former IRA milieu and the Communist Party (CP), which provided full-timers and institutional support to help the early union organizing efforts on New York transit.</p>
<p>As labor historian Brian Hanley <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmM43NCagQ">argues</a>, this group of IRA veterans was crucial to building the fledgling Transport Workers Union (TWU). “Firstly, they were not easily intimidated by company strongmen or police; they were used to clandestine organizing; and they also had the kudos of coming from Ireland having taken part in the struggle against the British and the Free State.”</p>
<p>It is also significant that, when the TWU was formed in 1934, it used the term “transport” instead of “transit” in its name. This was the Irish terminology rather than the American one, and referred back to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union of Larkin and Connolly, which itself had initially been simply called the ITWU. Historian Joshua B. Freeman in his book about the TWU, <em>In Transit</em>, estimates that a staggering 50 percent of workers in the IRT were Irish-born men.</p>
<p>Immediately upon its foundation, the TWU found itself in an intense industrial battle. The private companies that owned New York’s public transit system were determined to strangle the infant union in its cradle. Tim Griffin, a trolleyman in the IRT, <a href="https://nyirishhistory.us/wp-content/uploads/NYIHR_V01_04-The-Controversial-History-of-the-TWU.pdf">recalled</a> the system of industrial sabotage that the bosses carried out using spies known as “dollar-a-day men”:</p>
<blockquote><p>They got an extra dollar a day to hang around and inform on anything they heard. To tell you what it was like: One time the guys were talking — the toilets were downstairs — and there was a bunch of them down there talking about how a couple of them had gotten a dirty deal. One guy said: “What we need in this place is a good union.” So he went upstairs and he was up there a short while and the dispatcher stuck his head in the window and said: “Regan, come on in. The boss wants to talk to you inside.” He went in. The boss said, “So you want to see a good union on this property, Johnny Regan.” He said, “Who told you that?” He said, “Never mind who told me that. Whoever told, you said it.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Many of the early TWU leaders, including Quill, were sacked from their jobs for this organizing effort and forced to rely on charity to stay afloat. But they remained undeterred. Against a backdrop of poverty pay and demeaning conditions, transit workers were determined to fight for better. Griffin remembers the proselytizing, “Somebody would say to you ‘See the light?’ That meant, ‘Did you join the union yet?’”</p>
<p>Most did see the light. Within a couple of years, its ranks had swelled, and the union was capable of carrying out a successful transit strike in 1935 (previous attempts by other unions in 1905, 1910, 1916, and 1919 had all been crushed). Despite Quill and his fellow leaders being first attacked by company thugs and then arrested by police, the TWU won — and was able to represent fourteen thousand IRT workers.</p>
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<h2>Red Mike</h2>
<p>However, the TWU had its sights set much higher than organizing just one private company. Before it came along, there were already <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/yellow_dog_contract">yello</a><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/yellow_dog_contract">w</a><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/yellow_dog_contract"> unions</a> in each of the transit companies in New York, and they had comprehensively failed to improve conditions. Quill and the rest of the TWU leadership were convinced industrial unionists who believed that workers had to be organized across companies and without regard to their particular jobs or trades in order to maximize their leverage. They set about a campaign to unionize the entire New York transit system, starting with the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) Corporation.</p>
<p>The effort began in early 1937, when the BMT fired union members at a powerhouse in Brooklyn. The TWU responded by occupying the building with a sit-down strike and threatening to shut off power to the BMT’s entire operation. The company folded and, even though it was initially refused recognition, the union was soon able to win its campaign with the National Labor Relations Board.</p>
<p>By the late 1930s, membership in the TWU had grown to over forty-five thousand. It had recognition in three New York subway companies and had even expanded to buses, streetcars, and taxicabs. The union had also joined the nationwide Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and was an increasingly powerful representative of its left wing.</p>
<p>Mike Quill himself had become a public figure by this time, even winning a council seat in the Bronx for the Labor Party in 1937. But he was not without his detractors, most notable among which were Irish American right-wingers.</p>
<p>The fascist Christian Front, led by celebrity radio priest Fr Charles Coughlin, and the Americans Against Communism, organized by another reactionary priest, Fr Edward Curran, were particularly virulent opponents, and battles between their supporters and Quill’s frequently became physical. Their opposition to Quill particularly centered on his progressive attitudes to race and his support for what they called “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In the latter case, these Irish organizations took their cue from European fascists with a particularly disgraceful campaign of antisemitism, which alleged that Mike Quill, who they called “Moe Quillinsky,” was not a supporter of Irish workers but merely an agent of international Jewry.</p>
<p>Quill’s remarkable victory in the densely Irish South Bronx, where he had topped the poll, knocked back these efforts somewhat. But the question of his links to communism continued throughout World War II. This wasn’t helped by a split in the TWU, which had led Quill’s erstwhile ally Tom O’Shea to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee that the union was controlled by the Communist Party.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Quill and the rest of the TWU leadership believed that workers had to be organized across companies and without regard to their particular jobs or trades.</q></aside>
<p>Quill was probably a member of the Communist Party early in the union’s life — after all, the CP had provided crucial assistance in establishing the TWU — but was never a loyalist. He did, however, maintain a clear line of opposition to anti-communists, saying he would “rather be called a Red by the rats than a rat by the Reds.”</p>
<p>Quill had supported the New Deal coalition and, in the 1940s, riding the wave of popular support for labor, the TWU expanded to become a national union. However, Quill also faced considerable industrial challenges throughout the war. The most significant of these came from the newly elected New York mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, a man who had once run alongside Quill on a Labor Party ticket.</p>
<p>With the city bringing its subway system into municipal ownership, La Guardia threatened to strip the TWU of its right to bargain on behalf of workers and strike for better terms and conditions. Quill pushed him back with a bus strike, but it was only to be the first salvo of a much larger battle over public-sector strikes. It combined with pressure from the Red Scare to force the TWU onto the back foot.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of the war, Quill finally broke publicly with the Communist Party. Ostensibly, the dispute centered on two issues: fare hikes and political endorsements. Quill, thinking primarily as a labor leader, was in favor of proposed fare hikes, which were linked to pay increases for his members. The Communists, who by this stage were emphasizing community organizing, were opposed to the hikes on the basis that they would hit lower-income New Yorkers.</p>
<p>Then, in the 1948 election, the Communist Party insisted that the TWU back Henry Wallace. Quill, believing the Wallace campaign to be hopeless and seeing support as likely to split the CIO, which he hoped to make the dominant force in American unionism, rejected Wallace in favor of Truman. This led to a bitter falling out which even pushed some of Quill’s closest friends out of leadership of the TWU — although many, such as O’Reilly, would later leave the CP and return to Quill’s side.</p>
<p>But unlike many labor leaders who split with the Communists, Quill never turned to the right. In fact, he continued to represent a left-wing approach in both the industrial and political sphere. In 1950, he was elected as a vice president of the CIO and used this role to publicly argue against a “labor statesman” approach, which would turn the movement away from the class struggle, as well as to oppose the proposed merger between the AFL and CIO.</p>
<p>But it was Quill’s commitment to the burgeoning civil rights struggle that really defined his distinctive leadership in the movement.</p>
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<h2>A Man the Ages Will Remember</h2>
<p>Since its foundation in the 1930s, the TWU had aligned itself with the radical traditions of the American labor movement. This was especially true when it came to race.</p>
<p>While the largest confederation, the AFL, had a lamentable record of propping up segregation, the TWU was committed to full integration of the working class at work and in broader society. It opposed the transit company’s policy of forbidding black workers from all but the lowest-grade jobs and insisted on equal status for its members. The TWU’s first executive featured a black porter, Clarence King, and the union hired black staff, who would engage on members’ behalf with the transit company.</p>
<p>But its most controversial position — especially among its early, largely Irish membership — was the integration of social events. Many opposed the presence of black workers at largely white dances and dinners. Quill’s position, however, was unequivocal: “If we, black and white, Catholic and non-Catholic, Jew and gentile, are good enough to slave and sweat together, then we are good enough to unite and fight together.”</p>
<p>He deepened this stance by forging a close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was a controversial position at the time in the labor movement. Today, King is feted by figures across the political spectrum in the United States. That was far from the case in the 1950s and ’60s, as King himself recognized:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mike Quill was also a pioneer in race relations. When it was hard and often bruising to stand up for equality, he was tough enough and bold enough to make himself clearly heard. Today, it is much easier to oppose discrimination, to be with the many who speak easily of equality. But thirty years ago, a leader who worried about his image and measured his popularity carefully, kept his silence in order to keep his image popular. Negroes desperately needed men like Mike Quill, who fearlessly said what was true, even though it offended.</p></blockquote>
<p>One memorable episode in Mike Quill’s relationship with King came in 1961. A small but determined rebel faction in the TWU threatened to quit the union unless Quill broke his support for civil rights. Quill responded forcefully, by inviting Martin Luther King Jr to address the TWU’s annual conference.</p>
<p>At the conference, King <a href="https://www.twu.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MLK_ConventionSpeech.pdf">praised</a> the union, its politics, and its leader. “Your crusading spirit . . . broke through the double walled citadels of race prejudice. It is pathetic that our nation did not begin decades ago, as did you, to deal with the evil of discrimination. Had it done so, in 1961 its American ambassadors in every nation on the globe would not be embarrassed and apologetic because our democratic garments exhibit some gaping moth holes.”</p>
<p>Quill’s radicalism in this era wasn’t just confined to race. He was also one of the earliest labor opponents of the Vietnam war, going so far as to compare the Viet Cong with the IRA of his youth. This position inevitably drew the ire of the national press and saw his “Red Mike” moniker reemerge, but he never wavered from his views.</p>
<p>“Most of my life I’ve been called a lunatic because I believe that I am my brother’s keeper,” Quill said. “I organize poor and exploited workers, I fight for the civil rights of minorities, and I believe in peace. It appears to have become old-fashioned to make social commitments — to want a world free of war, poverty, and disease. This is my religion.”</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>‘Most of my life I’ve been called a lunatic because I believe that I am my brother’s keeper,’ Quill said.</q></aside>
<p>While some radicals have been known to mellow in their twilight, Quill’s final years saw the defining battle of his life. In 1965, New York elected John Lindsay, a Republican, as mayor, and he set about making an impression by taking on the labor movement. As the TWU’s contract wound down, Lindsay rested on the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act, which effectively prohibited public sector strikes in New York, to try to force the union into accepting weak terms. Quill and the TWU, he believed, would not risk a strike if it meant a court injunction and the threat of imprisonment. But, as 5:00 a.m. rolled around on January 1, 1966, Quill took just such a risk, bringing his thirty-six thousand members out on strike and shutting down the city’s buses and subway system.</p>
<p>As the media filled with images of thousands queuing to cross bridges into Manhattan and traffic jams across New York, Lindsay loudly condemned the strikers, calling their action “defiance against eight million people.” The <em>New York Times </em>called for the police and army to run the buses; William F. Buckley Jr wanted the National Guard. The courts injuncted the strike and threatened its leaders with imprisonment.</p>
<p>But Quill had faith in the union he had built over three decades. “If we go to jail, the second line of leadership will take over,” he said, “if they think they’re going to scare us by flooding the place with blue documents, they have another thing coming. . . . The judge can drop dead in his black robes, we will not call off the strike!”</p>
<p>Soon after that speech, Quill and his fellow leaders were arrested at the Americana Hotel amid great media furor and imprisoned. Douglas MacMahon, one of his fellow founders of the union, took over. What wasn’t widely known at the time, but is recorded by Quill’s wife, Shirley Quill, was that he had been given medical advice not to lead the strike. Soon after his imprisonment, he was taken to hospital seriously ill.</p>
<p>Shirley Quill was sent around pickets with a simple message from his hospital bed: “keep the lines firm.” The TWU members did just that and, within twelve days, had won the strike.</p>
<p>The transit workers had won a $62 million offer, with a 15 percent wage increase over a two-year contract, no reprisals for strikers, and even two new holidays. It was an immense industrial victory.</p>
<p>Sadly, however, it wasn’t one that Mike Quill could celebrate. Before January 1966 was out, Quill was dead. His heart, weakened by an initial attack while in prison for contempt, failed. His funeral drew massive crowds and saw his coffin draped in the Irish tricolor.</p>
<p>Mike Quill died as he lived, as a fighter for the working class. Few can have given as much to as many struggles for human dignity. Whether it was the Black and Tans in the fields of Kerry or a Rockefeller as governor of New York, he never shied away from an enemy of freedom. In the end, that cost him his life.</p>
<p>But it also bought him a page in the annals of history as a son of Ireland, America, and the labor movement. As Martin Luther King Jr said upon his passing, “When the totality of a man’s life is consumed with enriching the lives of others, this is a man the ages will remember, this is a man who has passed on but has not died.”</p>
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Ronan Burtenshawhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/del-monte-kenya-colonialism-pineapples-murder/Del Monte Is Turning Kenya Into a Pineapple Republic2024-03-17T13:06:07Z2024-03-17T12:38:01Z<p>In Kenya’s lush Thika region, just north of Nairobi, stealing pineapples is a de facto capital crime. At least nine men have allegedly been killed by security guards employed by Del Monte, the world’s largest producer of pineapples. This series of killings first broke international news in June 2023, when The Guardian exposed a litany […]</p>
<h3>Del Monte’s impunity in Kenya goes beyond its security’s alleged murder of pineapple thieves. The US corporation’s leverage over the state has allowed it to swallow Kenyan land and labor whole in its quest for profit.</h3>
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<img alt src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/17123734/GettyImages-1986673291-900x600.jpg"/>
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A vendor displays pineapples while waiting for costumers at an informal market on the road opposite Del Monte’s pineapple plantations in Kabati, Kenya, on January 18, 2024. (Simon Maina / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>In Kenya’s lush Thika region, just north of Nairobi, stealing pineapples is a de facto capital crime. At least nine men have allegedly been killed by security guards employed by Del Monte, the world’s largest producer of pineapples.</p>
<p>This series of killings first broke international news in June 2023, when <em>The</em> <em>Guardian</em> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/guards-at-del-monte-pineapple-farm-accused-of-killings-in-kenya">exposed</a> a litany of deaths and violent assaults by the private security apparatus Del Monte employs to safeguard its crop from thieves. The corporation’s security guards stand <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/guards-at-del-monte-pineapple-farm-accused-of-killings-in-kenya">accused</a> by locals of killing nine men aged twenty-two to fifty-two since 2013 — “as well as five rapes, plus allegations of serious injuries, including head wounds, broken bones and cuts from blades requiring stitches.”</p>
<p>The killings in question were brutal, with most victims dying of blunt force trauma inflicted by cudgels, rocks, and fists. Attempts to dispose of bodies killed on Del Monte property were equally crude. The body of Stephen Thuo Nyoike, killed at twenty-two, was found strangled with wire by a public road. Saidi Ngotho Ndungu was found floating in a dam, while the corpses of four men were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/kenyan-police-investigate-four-suspected-killings-on-del-monte-farm">recovered</a> from a river on Christmas Day.</p>
<p>That a major corporation’s private security is implicated in the extrajudicial killings of nearly a dozen men accused of stealing fruit is appalling enough. Compound that with the savage nature of the killings — many so protracted that witnesses <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/guards-at-del-monte-pineapple-farm-accused-of-killings-in-kenya">heard</a> victims pleading for their lives — and the callous disposal of bodies on roadsides and dams. Little wonder, then, that condemnation of Del Monte’s lethal assaults has been swift and widespread. Following the <em>Guardian</em>’s reports, major UK supermarkets Tesco and Waitrose quickly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/16/major-human-rights-violations-at-del-monte-farm-in-kenya-report-finds">removed</a> Del Monte’s Kenyan pineapples from their shelves.</p>
<p>But Del Monte’s crimes are not limited to the transgressions of a few violent security guards. Its exploitation of Kenya’s land, labor, and law is systematic and severe, involving collusion at multiple levels of the Kenyan state, from local police to members of parliament.</p>
<p>This is life and death in the Pineapple Republic.</p>
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<h2>“No Visible Injuries”</h2>
<p>How do you murder nine men for stealing fruit and get away with it? Del Monte’s alleged victims were mostly poor, jobless young men, and thus easily dismissed as gang members and thieves.</p>
<p>The testimony of victims’ families, however, gestures to a broader system of cover-ups and collusion between Del Monte and Kenyan law enforcement. In Murang’a and Kiambu Counties, across whose borders sprawls the huge Thika plantation, Del Monte is seemingly above the law. Even where its guards are directly charged with murder, as in the 2019 killing of Bernard Murigi, five years can <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/guards-at-del-monte-pineapple-farm-accused-of-killings-in-kenya">pass</a> with no sign of a trial.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>How do you murder nine men for stealing fruit and get away with it?</q></aside>
<p>More frequently, deaths are dismissed as accidents despite evidence to the contrary. On at least two occasions, Del Monte has paid for the forensic examinations of its own alleged victims, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/08/del-monte-kenya-representatives-accused-of-seeking-to-cover-up-circumstances-of-mens-deaths">employing</a> a pathologist willing to conclude that battered corpses were devoid of visible injuries. Witnesses reported Saidi Ndungu begging for his life as Del Monte guards beat him with clubs — but his death certificate “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/10/peter-mutuku-mutisya-del-monte-farm-death-postmortem">gave</a> drowning as the cause.” When four bodies were found in a river on Christmas Day 2023, Del Monte insisted that these erstwhile thieves had simply drowned during a botched raid. Witnesses <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/08/del-monte-kenya-representatives-accused-of-seeking-to-cover-up-circumstances-of-mens-death">reported</a> guards beating trespassers with metal rods, dumping bodies in the river, and hurling rocks at those swimming away.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, police have seemingly colluded with Del Monte to falsify witness testimony and destroy evidence. In January, following the river incident, Del Monte allegedly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/08/del-monte-kenya-representatives-accused-of-seeking-to-cover-up-circumstances-of-mens-deaths">lured</a> potential witnesses to its property with the promise of cash and jobs, where police officers attempted to pressure them to sign affidavits dismissing December’s deaths as accidental drownings. Police apathy toward victims is similarly ubiquitous. “They don’t like following up on justice,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/guards-at-del-monte-pineapple-farm-accused-of-killings-in-kenya">said</a> a man crippled by Del Monte guards. “They only give you [a form to fill out] and that’s all.”</p>
<p>Security guards that kill with impunity, police officers on the take, and forensic pathologists willing to falsify medical evidence — while grotesque, it’s little more than the base of the edifice of exploitation that Del Monte has erected in Kenya. Understanding Del Monte’s privileged status requires understanding the economics of exporting tropical fruit at scale.</p>
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<h2>“Critical Economic Driver”</h2>
<p>Del Monte brought the pineapple industry to Kenya in 1965, but Western corporations grabbing land in the Global South to grow cash crops for export is a very old phenomenon indeed.</p>
<p>This model is the mainspring of Del Monte’s abusive practices — just as it motivated the <a href="https://hir.harvard.edu/the-dark-side-of-bananas-imperialism-non-state-actors-and-power/">atrocities</a> that United Fruit inflicted on Central America in the heyday of the so-called Banana Republic. Tropical fruit production is a multibillion-dollar industry not because margins are particularly high but because corporations like Del Monte can <a href="https://www.tni.org/files/download/landgrabbingprimer-feb2013.pdf">avail themselves</a> of huge tracts of land and cheap labor in peripheral countries eager for exports of any kind. Cheap land, cheap labor, and cheap politicians are the necessary conditions for Del Monte’s global empire.</p>
<p>Yet agrocorporations that produce cash crops for export hardly provide the state with a sure route to economic prosperity. While Del Monte directly employs some seven thousand Kenyans, it relegates them mostly to manual, low-paid labor. And where land in Kenya’s semitropical southwest is at a premium, Del Monte does not even cultivate <em>half</em> the land on its huge estates.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Cheap land, cheap labor, and cheap politicians are the necessary conditions for Del Monte’s global empire.</q></aside>
<p>Even with relatively low profit margins, exploitation of African land and labor is still big business. Del Monte is the <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-21/the-del-monte-deaths-shocking-claims-of-violence-at-pineapple-plantation/">largest</a> private sector employer in Kenya, with annual revenue expenditure <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stergios-gkaliamoutsas-655479160/?originalSubdomain=ke">exceeding</a> $100 million. More important for a country in the <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/costly-propositions">grip</a> of dollar-denominated debt, Del Monte generates some $62 million in foreign exchange. All this is enough to earn Del Monte the fawning protection of the Kenyan state, with the corporation “<a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930">considered</a> a critical economic driver both in Murang’a County and nationally.”</p>
<p>Since 2021, the Kenyan government has <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930">pledged</a> Del Monte support in the form of tax rebates, nebulous “policy incentives,” and free land surveys. In return, Del Monte promised to keep paying taxes and, in the government’s <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930">words</a>, to “roll out more transformational Corporate Social Responsibilities [sic] programmes.” Thus, even as Kenya’s citizens weather a cost-of-living <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/20/africa/kenya-cost-of-living-protests-explainer-intl/index.html">crisis</a> under punishing tax hikes, with the majority of the country <a href="https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2023/09/29/state-of-hunger-unravelling-kenyas-food-crisis/">gripped</a> by food crisis, Del Monte grows exotic fruit for foreign markets. These major multinationals enjoy lower tax burdens with the promise of fulfilling social responsibilities abdicated by the state itself.</p>
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<h2>“No More Land Left To Be Hawked”</h2>
<p>Tax rebates and cushy policies are useful, but nothing illustrates Del Monte’s leverage over the Kenyan state with starker clarity than the corporation’s control of land. Indeed, <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/news/ruto-intervenes-in-muranga-kiambu-row-over-del-monte-land-4339966#google_vignette">nobody</a> — not even the Kenyan government — knows exactly how much land Del Monte owns in the country.</p>
<p>Del Monte says that it possesses 22,500 acres; the government puts its holdings at 32,240. The Parliamentary Committee on Land <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/kiambu/how-mt-kenya-residents-are-losing-millions-to-fraudulent-del-monte-land-sale-4151812">says</a> that Del Monte has a lease for just 20,000 acres. And in any case, Del Monte only <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930">uses</a> around 14,000 acres for growing and processing pineapples. The rest it simply hoards, content to let thousands of Kenya’s most fertile acres lie fallow while its north is <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/kenya/kenya-food-security-outlook-june-2023-january-2024">beleaguered</a> by hunger.</p>
<p>Needless to say, a multinational’s ownership of more than 20,000 acres of productive farmland has not gone unchallenged. By 2020, with Del Monte’s lease of thousands of acres of fertile Thika land set to expire, local residents and federal politicians alike were <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/business/del-monte-fight-for-prime-thika-land-to-proceed-in-court-248576">clamoring</a> for land to be released in the public interest.</p>
<p>Locals’ memory of the evictions that preceded the creation of the plantation remains strong. A protest group of Kandara residents has been fighting a protracted legal battle to force Del Monte to release some 7,500 acres under the claim that it “is ancestral land that the processor ‘forcibly’ occupies.” The National Land Commission bolstered these demands in 2020, <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/business/del-monte-fight-for-prime-thika-land-to-proceed-in-court-2485736#google_vignette">ordering</a> Del Monte to divest a small parcel of land to local municipalities “for purposes of resettlement and public utilities.” In 2021 Parliament reaffirmed that Del Monte’s lease should not be renewed until the acres in question were allocated to local residents.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Del Monte is content to let thousands of Kenya’s most fertile acres lie fallow while its north is beleaguered by hunger.</q></aside>
<p>Two years later, residents still hadn’t seen an inch of that land. And, in an act of sheer farce, Del Monte’s lease had somehow been renewed. Faced with this flagrant dismissal of the court’s decision, for <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/news/ruto-intervenes-in-muranga-kiambu-row-over-del-monte-land-4339966#google_vignette">many</a> Kenyans the only sound explanation is direct collusion between Del Monte and local politicians.</p>
<p>Amid legal spats over what little land it has divested, Del Monte has been quietly shedding property to shell companies and wealthy allies rather than see it expropriated to local residents. At times the corporation deals in territory it cannot even legally own: a <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/business/del-monte-fight-for-prime-thika-land-to-proceed-in-court-2485736#google_vignette">lawsuit</a> brought by Kandara residents holds that, since 2010, Del Monte has been transferring public land to holding companies to subdivide and sell. Nearby, a prominent Kiambu County family was the <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/news/ruto-intervenes-in-muranga-kiambu-row-over-del-monte-land-4339966#google_vignette">beneficiary</a> of a whopping three thousand Del Monte acres — which it “immediately leased it back to the processor.”</p>
<p>The sheer uncertainty surrounding Del Monte’s backdoor land deals has been a boon for fraudsters. Scammers claiming to be selling parcels of company land pocketed some $164,000 before the <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/kiambu/how-mt-kenya-residents-are-losing-millions-to-fraudulent-del-monte-land-sale-4151812">fraud</a> made national news. One Murang’a official castigated those foolish enough to fall for the scam, urging “people to realize that there is no more land left to be hawked anywhere in this country.”</p>
<p>Except, apparently, if you’re rich.</p>
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<h2>“Maybe Slaves”</h2>
<p>Next to land, cheap labor is the most valuable resource that Del Monte strips from Kenya. Tropical fruit corporations have always relied on maintaining large labor forces in perpetual precarity. With the demand for labor fluctuating widely between harvest season and the rest of the year, fruit processors like Del Monte have every incentive to maintain their workers on flexible contracts with little guarantees of steady work.</p>
<p>Thus, in October 2023, in an apparent bid to “cut operational costs,” Del Monte Kenya informed its casual workers to <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930#google_vignette">expect</a> just thirteen days of employment per month. Yet even this figure seems grossly inflated. <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930#google_vignette">According</a> to workers’ spokesman Stephen Makau, the actual number of days most laborers were working each month was just <em>three</em>.</p>
<p>“We are suffering and we are going through hell,” Makau <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930#google_vignette">stated</a>. “Our pay slips are reflecting zero shillings as net pay. We cannot save and we can no longer be described as workers . . . maybe slaves.”</p>
<p>Del Monte’s employees have not passively accepted their exploitation. Indeed, strikes and resistance to labor violations stretch back nearly four decades. A 2002 report by Kenya’s Human Rights Commission <a href="https://theowp.org/reports/del-monte-kenya-workers-strike-for-better-treatment/">detailed</a> a litany of abuses and dangerous conditions sustained since the 1980s. Workers burned by sulfuric acid, dismissed for union activity, and dead of malaria after company clinics refused treatment — these comprise just a few of the cases.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Del Monte’s employees have not passively accepted their exploitation.</q></aside>
<p>In the face of appalling exploitation, Del Monte’s employees nonetheless continue to engage in strikes and collective bargaining, with Murang’a workers demanding that the corporation implement a monthly minimum of eighteen working days and use its fallow land to grow crops like maize and cassava. For plantation laborers, even subsistence must be fought for — here against a company that <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-21/the-del-monte-deaths-shocking-claims-of-violence-at-pineapple-plantation/">insisted</a> a 2021 strike of six thousand employees was outright illegal.</p>
<p>Against these demands stands not just Del Monte but an array of state institutions desperate to prevent any disruption to the corporation’s bottom line. The Central Organization of Trade Unions freely admits that Del Monte is simply too big to fail. As one board member <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930#google_vignette">makes clear</a>, “in an economy that desperately needs employment opportunities, tax and foreign exchange, we got no choice but [to] support Del Monte as a national asset and an important link to our friendly ally that is America.”</p>
<p>Thus, for the leadership of Kenya’s agricultural workers’ union, the priority is not ensuring fair labor practices but <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/muranga/workers-cry-foul-as-del-monte-cuts-working-days-to-cut-costs-4396930#google_vignette">warning</a> the government that “the country stands to lose heavily should Del Monte go under.” A telling admission that the business model in question depends on maintaining workers in conditions not far removed from slavery.</p>
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<h2>“Brutalizing Our People”</h2>
<p>A mounting set of civil lawsuits, government investigations, and retail boycotts bodes ill for Del Monte Kenya. Yet the company has more or less refused to claim any responsibility for the nine deaths and scores of violent assaults laid at its door, with corporate spokespersons cheerily <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/guards-at-del-monte-pineapple-farm-accused-of-killings-in-kenya">reminding</a> the public of Del Monte’s “longstanding commitment to human rights.”</p>
<p>Indeed, Del Monte has not only rejected its alleged mistreatment of Kenyans but Kenya’s right to hold it legally accountable in any way whatsoever. Facing a civil lawsuit from human rights groups, Fresh Del Monte — the parent company of its eponymous Kenyan subsidiary — <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/08/fresh-del-monte-says-it-cannot-be-held-liable-after-violence-at-kenyan-farm">argued</a> that, since it was domiciled in the Cayman Islands, no Kenyan court had jurisdiction to try it. The civil suit’s lawyers were unimpressed. “It is very irresponsible for Del Monte to tell us they are based in the Cayman Islands and they cannot be sued,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/08/fresh-del-monte-says-it-cannot-be-held-liable-after-violence-at-kenyan-farm">states</a> Mwangi Macharia, “but they can grow pineapples in Africa.”</p>
<p>This deflection of responsibility aligns perfectly with the broader relationship between Del Monte and its host country. For the former, Kenya is simply another locale to build the same export-oriented commercial farming machine that it operates in <a href="https://qcostarica.com/banana-workers-strike-highlights-abuses-by-corporations-in-costa-rica/">Costa Rica</a> and <a href="https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/agribusiness-including-del-monte-philippines-growers-implicated-in-violent-attacks-against-indigenous-groups/">the Philippines</a>. Its pineapple production may involve African land and labor, but Del Monte is resolute that it is not beholden whatsoever to African people.</p>
<p>In a striking echo of former banana republics, Del Monte has carved out a space of impunity in southwest Kenya. Across its huge estates, Del Monte swallows land and labor whole in its quest for export profits, defending its tropical bounty — as far as the locals are concerned — with the threat of summary execution. This regime demands the connivance of Kenya’s local and state authorities to shield Del Monte from popular backlash and legal scrutiny — the better to earn crucial foreign exchange and protect Kenya’s standing with US corporations. Relatives of the men allegedly killed for a sack of fruit worth $10 have little illusion of the hierarchy of value in Del Monte country. “They don’t value life,” <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-21/the-del-monte-deaths-shocking-claims-of-violence-at-pineapple-plantation/">said</a> the father of Stephen Nyoike. “What they value most is pineapples.”</p>
<p>There can be little doubt that Del Monte’s operations, despite their obvious economic impact, have imposed a terrible cost on Kenya. “It’s important for the world to know,” <a href="https://en.sputniknews.africa/20231227/us-company-del-monte-trades-labor-brands-of-kenyans-chair-of-ngo-representing-families-of-victims-1064335622.html">states</a> Macharia, “that this American company is brutalizing our people, killing our people, raping our women and destroying the environment.” No fruit is sweet enough to overpower that bitter taste.</p>
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Tyler Antonio Lynchhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/pandemic-movies-covid-neoliberalism-despair/Pandemic Movies Reflect Our Age of Late Capitalist Despair2024-03-17T11:11:14Z2024-03-17T11:09:40Z<p>At the end of the 2011 movie Contagion, which depicts the spread of the MEV-1 pandemic, Dr Ellis Cheever, a director of the Centers for Disease Control, receives the eagerly awaited vaccine along with other government VIPs and their immediate families. Cheever had recently married his fiancée in an ethically dubious move to make her […]</p>
<h3>Movies depicting the spread of disease have become a well-established genre and helped frame our understanding of the real-life COVID-19 pandemic. The spirit of these films increasingly reflects the despair and atomization of neoliberal capitalism.</h3>
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A still from the 2011 outbreak movie <cite>Contagion</cite>. (Rotten Tomatoes Trailers / YouTube)
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<p>At the end of the 2011 movie <em>Contagion</em>, which depicts the spread of the MEV-1 pandemic, Dr Ellis Cheever, a director of the Centers for Disease Control, receives the eagerly awaited vaccine along with other government VIPs and their immediate families.</p>
<p>Cheever had recently married his fiancée in an ethically dubious move to make her eligible for the first round of vaccine distribution. Although she expresses misgivings about receiving the vaccine before nearly all other Americans, Cheever dismisses her doubts by stating that he is “just taking care of everybody that’s in my lifeboat.”</p>
<p>The scene sharply contrasts with a comparable moment from the 1950 movie <em>Panic in the Streets</em> about the spread of plague (<em>Yersinia pestis</em>) in New Orleans. In this earlier film, another public health employee, Dr Clinton Reed, can save his wife and son by having them flee the city before potential mass panic when the public learns about the outbreak.</p>
<p>Yet Dr Reed refuses to do so. As he idealistically exclaims, “We’re all in a community, the same one.” His community, as he goes on to relate, includes his family, the people of New Orleans, and the entire world. Reed selflessly serves the public, even if his own family might die.</p>
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<h2>No Such Thing as Society</h2>
<p>Movies reflect the cultural mood as well as driving it, and movies about disease, like other genres, thus offer a useful lens to understand American society. Films of this kind date back to the early twentieth century. Some, such as <em>Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet</em> (1940), mythologized the scientific development of modern medicine. Others, like <em>White Zombie </em>(1932), depicted disease as a means to distinguish “real” Americans from “the other.”</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Movies reflect the cultural mood as well as driving it, and movies about disease, like other genres, thus offer a useful lens to understand American society.</q></aside>
<p>In spite of these differences, almost all the movies from this period shared a belief in the “common good” and a faith in reason and science to cure disease. Dr Reed was just one of many characters who exemplified this ideology.</p>
<p>In contrast, the belief in a common good is absent from most recent disease movies. <em>Rise of the Planet of the Apes </em>(2011) condemns corporate biomedicine and foresees an inevitable global pandemic, while in <em>World War Z </em>(2013), the main cause for humanity’s survival amid a fast-moving zombie pandemic is toxic, anti-intellectual masculinity. The thrust of both realistic and imaginary disease movies has shifted from support of a common purpose, however flawed, to the embrace of individual interests amid a tableau of social collapse and global destruction.</p>
<p>Over the course of the last century, disease movies have, in a broader sense, gone from offering a critique of mid-century, state-managed capitalism to an acceptance of the neoliberal order. Increasingly, recent movies even go beyond the neoliberal framework of contemporary capitalism. Reflecting debates over what comes next, they now embrace global destruction and human extinction as the inevitable outcome.</p>
<p>A famous remark of Frederic Jameson’s — “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” — literally plays out on the big screen in today’s disease movies. <em>Contagion</em> and other disease movies were among the most watched movies in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ideas underlying disease movies shaped expectations and responses to COVID. These movie stories continue to frame our thinking about diseases today as well as the perception of our place in global capitalism under US hegemony.</p>
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<h2>Depicting Disease</h2>
<p>Disease movies that aspired to realism, from the early days of film until the mid-1990s, typically featured heroes searching for a way to contain disease. If disease was a key plot element, such as the “Asiatic” cholera outbreak on a ship in <em>Pacific Liner</em> (1939), it offered a way to comment on American society and capitalism.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Disease movies that aspired to realism, from the early days of film until the mid-1990s, typically featured heroes searching for a way to contain disease.</q></aside>
<p>In the case of <em>Pacific Liner</em>, the film presented a critique of social groups that did not fulfill their class obligations. The movie criticized the upper class for partying instead of paternalistically stopping the spread of cholera below decks. Yet the working-class characters on board were no better, since they were uncivilized, justifying their huge number of deaths.</p>
<p>Only the hardworking, professional middle class correctly fulfilled their class roles, ensuring the safe arrival of the ship in San Francisco. The rules of American capitalism were clearly laid out and disease served to reinforce those social norms.</p>
<p>Mid-century movies about imaginary diseases similarly underscored these rules while also revealing problems with American capitalism. <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers </em>(1956) implicitly presented consumerist culture as a force turning the country’s citizens into conformist, emotionless “pod people.” Yet American ingenuity and heroic actions — in this case a studio-imposed happy ending to the movie — offered a way to defeat this disease-based threat to the American way of life. The 1978 remake made the social critique more explicit and then dispensed with the upbeat conclusion.</p>
<p><em>Night of the Living Dead</em> (1968) also depicts an infection that originated in space. This time, it transforms humans into the undead (“zombies” as they are now known). George Romero’s film used the undead to identify the problems of America at the time: the patriarchal family, sexism, and racism. While the film’s ending offers no solution, the undead have been contained, since America, despite its problems, is resilient. The film calls upon its audience to uncover solutions to these problems in order to improve the social contract.</p>
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<h2>Facing the Apocalypse</h2>
<p>By the mid-1990s, disease movies had begun to emerge as a separate genre, reflecting the increased awareness of reemerging infectious diseases as a reaction to the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1980s that Hollywood movies had largely ignored. The blockbuster <em>Outbreak</em> (1995) retold the story of <em>Panic in the Streets</em> from forty-five years earlier. It, too, ended by containing a disease that originated abroad but threatened the American mainland, and it, too, had a charismatic military doctor (played by Dustin Hoffman) as the hero needed to defeat it.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>By the mid-1990s, disease movies had begun to emerge as a separate genre, reflecting the increased awareness of reemerging infectious diseases.</q></aside>
<p>The film acknowledged the problems of America’s global, capitalist power at its high point, depicting the military as the bad guys. But it nostalgically retreated to a past era of heroic individualism to solve the growing concerns about infectious diseases that could spread almost instantly around the world.</p>
<p>The 2010s have witnessed the latest transformation of the genre: either doubling down on the neoliberal order or welcoming the prospect of a future, apocalyptic world. Containment is gone, and science only causes more problems. Movies like 2019’s <em>Little Joe</em>, inspired by <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</em>, openly embrace a neoliberal ideal of social conformity and a bland emotional reality. As the head of the biotech company responsible for creating a flower that turns people into zombie-like humans observes: “Who can prove the genuineness of feelings? Moreover, who cares?”</p>
<p>In contrast, <em>Rise of the Planet of the Apes </em>(2011) offers the end-times as a solution. Its easily missed end credits depict the global spread of a disease that a greedy pharmaceutical company has developed. The impending pandemic is so much to be expected that the question of how and where it strikes no longer matters.</p>
<p>The <em>Planet of the Apes</em> sequels released in 2014 and 2017 focus instead on how the supposedly better ape species goes on to remake the world and replace humans. Given a choice between conformity and extinction, it is perhaps not surprising that movies and their audiences welcome the apocalypse.</p>
<p>These narratives are central to nearly all disease movies today, from art-house cinema to mainstream, commercial junk. The six blockbuster movies of the original <em>Resident Evil</em> franchise (2002–16) are hardly consistent and indeed barely comprehensible, but they follow the same historical progression to capitalize on audience expectations.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Given a choice between conformity and extinction, it is perhaps not surprising that movies and their audiences welcome the apocalypse.</q></aside>
<p>While the first two movies tell stories about possible containment of the undead, the later ones shift to postapocalyptic landscapes with the origins and spread of disease now irrelevant. The irony is that these corporate-backed, end-of-the-world movies ultimately demand more of the neoliberal and capitalist solutions that caused the extinction in the first place. Heroes and individual brilliance will save the day, while empathy and community play no role.</p>
<p>For better and worse, disease movies have supported the shifting role of capitalism in shaping American society. Early movies offered a belief in doctors and ordinary citizens along with the application of science and reason to address social problems — or at least they pointed out where things should change.</p>
<p>Stories about ordinary Americans sacrificing material gains, let alone their family’s health, to defeat a disease have today virtually disappeared. America is no longer worth defending, and everyone is on their own. At best, recent movies, such as 2009’s <em>Zombieland</em>, convey the message that each person should “enjoy the little things in life” — in this case, one hero’s quixotic quest for a Twinkie.</p>
<p>Personal benefit trumps all else against a backdrop of hopelessness. As the only surviving human, Hermit Bob, puts it at the climax of Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy <em>The Dead Don’t Die </em>(2019): “What a fucked up world!”</p>
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<h2>Pandemics in Fact and Fiction</h2>
<p>Faced with the real-life COVID-19 pandemic, society did not collapse, and no one needed to get a gun to defend their home and family in the style of Matt Damon’s character in <em>Contagion</em>. Millions watched films like <em>Contagion</em>, <em>Outbreak</em>, or even the zombie apocalypse <em>28 Days Later</em> (2002) in an effort to understand what might happen during the early months of 2020.</p>
<p>Yet the messages that these movies conveyed were wildly off. There was no social collapse of the kind that might ultimately improve humanity, just failed expectations.</p>
<p>In some respects, the response of the US ruling class to the pandemic was even worse than the behavior previously depicted in movies. In <em>Contagion</em>, members of Congress sought to save their own lives first; in reality, members of Congress <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/richard-burr-stocks-sold-coronavirus.html">publicly denied growing fears</a> about COVID-19 while selling stock to make a private killing during the initial market collapse. If <em>Contagion</em>’s MEV-1 struck each person equally without regard to age, class, race, or any other social factor, the spread of COVID-19 revealed how the white and the wealthy were <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804391">protected by their power</a>.</p>
<p>From the perspective of early 2024, another global pandemic seems inevitable sooner or later. A more equitable response would require structural changes in the US system of power. While the Biden administration placed COVID at the forefront of its agenda in 2021, that priority quickly disappeared, along with any planning for future outbreaks, as the administration focused instead on restoring the economic status quo. America might be resilient economically, but the fruits of this resilience are still only enjoyed by the relative few — even as many share its costs.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Disease movies serve as a form of truth telling, influencing popular ideas about disease and creating new myths about how to address disease.</q></aside>
<p>In 2011 when <em>Contagion </em>was released, a former Centers for Disease Control director described how the movie’s scenario could “play out in real life.” That assumption now seems wildly optimistic: in the film, a single vaccine permanently wipes out the pandemic by curing the disease. Contrast that with the tangled story of how COVID-19 was contained without being eliminated altogether — not to mention the fact that huge swaths of the American public refuse vaccines or no longer see the point in getting boosters.</p>
<p>Disease movies serve as a form of truth telling, influencing popular ideas about disease and creating new myths about how to address disease. They need not be dark as they are today. Ingmar Bergman’s <em>The Seventh Seal </em>(1957), set during the Black Death in medieval Scandinavia, offered the vision of a knight enjoying his time with a traveling family, enabling them to escape death. He takes pleasure in what he has accomplished in life even when he dies. <em>Children of Men</em> (2006), while depicting the barbarization of capitalism during a global pandemic of infertility, offers the faith of ordinary individuals who sacrifice themselves for people of all backgrounds.</p>
<p>These stories appear unrealistic and even altruistic against the background of contemporary capitalism. But what is needed is a way to turn these ideas into a lived reality. Disease history offers examples of how stories can create new realities.</p>
<p>The myth — and it is a myth — of Jonas Salk refusing to patent the polio vaccine and rhetorically asking “Could you patent the sun?” offers one such example. Salk’s supposedly altruistic perspective about using science to help America and the world still resonates to this day. In this way, our myths, including those on screen, possess power. They can illuminate our contemporary cultural darkness and offer the hope of a brighter future.</p>
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Merle EisenbergRobert AlpertLee Mordechaihttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/prageru-capitalism-feudalism-marxism-education/PragerU’s Moral Case for Capitalism Is Terrible2024-03-17T09:28:40Z2024-03-17T09:28:40Z<p>Prager University has no classrooms. It has no dormitories or cafeterias or students running around playing frisbee on sunny days. It is not a university at all, though it does have a lot of lectures. To date, PragerU has uploaded 3,200 videos. The channel, which has been built up with lavish support from billionaire donors, […]</p>
<h3>Megapopular right-wing YouTube channel PragerU’s “moral case for capitalism” fails to address capitalism’s massive defects — its injustice, exploitation, and instability. Instead, it offers a glib pep talk about why modern society is better than feudalism.</h3>
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Daniel Hannan, the British politician who starred in PragerU's "moral case for capitalism" video, gives a speech on May 16, 2023, in London, England. (Leon Neal / Getty Images)
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<p>Prager University has no classrooms. It has no dormitories or cafeterias or students running around playing frisbee on sunny days. It is not a university at all, though it does have a lot of lectures.</p>
<p>To date, PragerU has uploaded 3,200 videos. The channel, which has been built up with lavish support from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191201141534/https:/www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-08-22/dennis-prager-university-conservative-internet-sensation">billionaire donors</a>, has 3.22 <em>million</em> subscribers. That’s over half a million more than CNBC. Several states have <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/prageru-conservative-videos-classrooms-republican-officials-help-rcna131613">recently moved</a> to approve PragerU videos for use in their public schools.</p>
<p>All of this is concerning not just because the <a href="https://www.local10.com/news/local/2023/08/01/prageru-founder-admits-conservative-material-is-indoctrination-its-now-allowed-in-fl-schools/">avowed purpose</a> of the “U” is right-wing indoctrination, but also because anyone who sits through much of the curriculum may actually get worse at critical thinking as a result. Take one of their most recent videos, titled “A Moral Case for Capitalism,” narrated by British conservative Daniel Hannan.</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" title="A Moral Case for Capitalism" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bIxwBAs_5Q8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Hannan is a high-ranking member of the Conservative Party in the House of Lords — none of which is mentioned in the video. He’s identified only as the author of a book called <em>Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.</em></p>
<p>As the video starts, Hannan makes a bold promise. While many people will grant that capitalism is a highly efficient economic system, he says, he’ll do something more unusual: he’ll make a “moral” case for it.</p>
<p>You would think, then, that the meat of his video would be taken up in addressing and refuting the standard reasons given by capitalism’s critics for thinking the system is unjust. Instead, Hannan pretends those criticisms don’t exist.</p>
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<h2>Hint: Capitalism’s Critics Don’t Typically Support Feudalism</h2>
<p>Hannan never defines “capitalism” but he seems to vaguely identify that word with the existence of markets, liberal political institutions and the rule of law, or perhaps some vague combination of the two. But neither of these is enough to differentiate capitalism from alternative systems. Markets have existed in a variety of noncapitalist societies. They might well persist under some version of <a href="https://jacobin.com/2020/05/capitalism-socialism-cooperatives-market-nhs-democracy">market</a> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/market-socialism-workplace-democracy-self-management-efficiency-economics">socialism</a>. And democratic socialists make political institutions that respect individual rights central to our conception of a desirable postcapitalist society.</p>
<p>Much of Hannan’s airtime is devoted to painting a grim picture of life <em>before</em> capitalism. This part is mostly accurate, with one glaring and hugely consequential omission: Hannan starts the clock at the agricultural revolution</p>
<p>Hannan presents capitalism simply as an outgrowth of “human nature.” This narrative would have been severely undermined if Hannan had acknowledged the existence of the long phase of human history that Karl Marx calls “primitive communism.” Humans were organized into hunter-gatherer tribes with communal property relations for the vast majority of our history as a species, and these societies were necessarily classless. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around to support a ruling class that wasn’t hunting or gathering.</p>
<p>How is it that the earliest human societies and the ones that lasted the longest were at odds with our alleged nature as a species? Instead of grappling with this contradiction, as Marxists do, Hannan sets an arbitrary start date. About “twelve thousand years ago,” he says, “one of our ancestors made a world-changing discovery.” If you “left seeds in fertile soil, plants would grow from them.” Sadly, it “didn’t take long for someone to make the next discovery,” which was that you could use coercion to force others to grow food for you.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>How is it that the earliest human societies and the ones that lasted the longest were at odds with our alleged nature as a species?</q></aside>
<p>Compressing everything between then and “roughly the end of the seventeenth century and the birth of modern liberal capitalism,” Hannan says that “almost everyone on the planet . . . lived in servitude” and that every society previous to “modern liberal capitalism” was “based on systematized oppression.”</p>
<p>That much is more or less true — at least if we start our story, as he does, at the beginning of class society. Slavery and feudalism are very bad systems. This is a point on which hardcore Marxists can agree with hardcore defenders of “modern liberal capitalism.”</p>
<p>But it’s hard to tell how this video is meant to function as a defense of capitalism against it’s most prominent nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century critics. Capitalism’s critics don’t long for a return to feudalism. We think the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a long step in the right direction. We just don’t think it goes far enough. In short, Hannah’s video doesn’t engage with our actual views enough to refute them.</p>
<p>Hannan is right to say that capitalism has very efficiently developed the productive capacities of our society, thus creating a level of material abundance unimaginable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, as well as our feudal ones. But right now those capacities are controlled undemocratically by a small minority of the population and the resulting abundance is distributed in a grotesquely equal way. <em>That’s</em> what socialists seek to change.</p>
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<h2>“Status to Contract”</h2>
<p>Quoting “the great Victorian jurist Henry Maine,” Hannan summarizes the move from feudalism to capitalism (or, in Hannan’s formulation, “the move to modern liberty”) with the phrase “status to contract.” In other words, rather than being born as either serfs or lords, people under capitalism are free to buy whatever they can afford and enter into employment contracts as they see fit.</p>
<p>The problem with this isn’t that he isn’t talking about something real and important. It’s that he’s not talking about a subject on which he disagrees with socialists, and nothing he says is relevant to where defenders of capitalism actually clash with capitalism’s critics.</p>
<p>The socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen talked about three different conceptions of “equality of opportunity” in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/04/ga-cohen-why-not-socialism-book">his book </a><a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/04/ga-cohen-why-not-socialism-book"><em>Why Not Socialism?</em></a>. “Bourgeois equality of opportunity” means eliminating all <em>legal</em> impediments to anyone who can getting ahead in society. Achieving this kind of equality is certainly important. But is it the only kind of equality worth wanting? A libertarian dystopia where all schools were privatized and poor children went to work in coal mines as soon as they could walk, after all, would still have <em>this</em> kind of equal opportunity, as long as there were no laws against upward mobility.</p>
<p>Cohen’s second-level conception of equality, “left-liberal equality of opportunity,” involves trying to remove social impediments to people getting ahead, like substandard schools in impoverished areas. Efforts made by various welfare states to move in the direction of left-liberal equal opportunity certainly represent an improvement over bare-bones bourgeois equal opportunity.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Nothing Hannan says is relevant to where defenders of capitalism actually clash with capitalism’s critics.</q></aside>
<p>But Cohen holds out as the real ideal that we should use to evaluate social progress how closely they approximate “socialist equality of opportunity” — the idea that all inequalities are unjust if they’re outside of the control of whoever ends up with the short end of the stick. It’s one thing for one person to have more than another because they worked longer hours or agreed to do a particularly demanding job others didn’t want, and quite another for a wealthy capitalist to simply inherit a business from his father the way kings inherit their thrones. Or even for some people to end up with significantly better lives than others depending on whether they had to work menial jobs or they happened to be born with the set of skills that helps them climb the ladder of middle-class upward mobility.</p>
<p>Cohen’s “socialist equality of opportunity” principle forces us to think about whether, and why, people who do socially necessary but “unskilled” labor deserve worse lives than lawyers or accountants. Such questions don’t seem to arise in Hannan’s worldview. He seems to think people who work long hours for low wages should just shut up and be grateful that they weren’t born as serfs or slaves.</p>
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<h2>Contracts, Status, and Class</h2>
<p>The most important critic of capitalism in the system’s history, whose name doesn’t appear in Hannan’s video, is Karl Marx, whose masterpiece <em>Capital</em> is precisely devoted to analyzing what a society where production is organized around “contract” rather than formally codified “status” actually works. One of the central arguments of that book is that capitalism is a class society too, even if the way that ruling classes extract the “surplus” created by the laboring population is different than the way it works in feudal and slave systems.</p>
<p>Marx proposed that in all of these systems the “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or modern workers) divide their time between the hours when they’re working to meet their own needs and the hours when they’re working to enrich slave owners or feudal aristocrats, or capitalists. Under feudalism, it all happens right out in the open. The serf is allowed to farm his own little plot of land for a certain number of weeks a year and legally required to farm his lord’s land during other weeks. Under both slavery and capitalism, Marx says, the division is disguised, though in opposite ways.</p>
<p>Slaves appear to spend <em>all</em> of their working hours working to enrich their owners, but this is misleading, since the resources owners spend feeding and clothing them are themselves produced by slave labor — whether directly or through the slaves making products that the owner sold and used to buy the food and clothing. Under capitalism, by contrast, workers are officially paid for every hour of their labor, but in practice they make goods or services equivalent to what they get back in their paychecks during <em>part</em> of the day, and during the rest they’re producing profits for the boss. If a worker produces $400 in goods over the course of an eight-hour day, and only gets back $200 in wages, then in effect they’ve spent four hours working for themselves and four hours doing unpaid labor on behalf of the boss.</p>
<p>Marx <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/06/karl-marx-labor-theory-of-value-ga-cohen-economics">says</a> that the extraction of these hours of unpaid labor is involuntary, even if under capitalism they’re being extracted not by direct coercion, as in earlier forms of class society, but by the “mute compulsion” of economic necessity. The vast majority of people born into the working class — which is to say, the vast majority of society — have no realistic way of making a living except to sell their working hours to a capitalist. That means that to put food on the table and pay rent they have no acceptable choice except to sign an employment contract in which they agree to give up much of their autonomy for eight hours of each day, and to give up a massive share of what they produce to the capitalist.</p>
<p>In Marx’s phrase, workers under capitalism are “doubly free” — both legally “free” to make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them, and “free” from any alternative way of making ends meet. In other words, they’re forced to sign contracts that confer a subordinate status.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Those of us who advocate democratic forms of socialism think that workers and communities should control productive resources and decide together how to use them.</q></aside>
<p>Socialists seek to change that through some form of collective ownership. Those of us who advocate democratic forms of socialism think that workers and communities should control productive resources and decide together how to use them. So, for example, Amazon, the business Hannan uses as an example, could either be converted into a worker cooperative or nationalized by a democratic state, or worker and state representatives could run it together in some combination of the two models. The point from a democratic socialist perspective is that, in a phrase popularized by political theorist Michael Walzer, “what touches all” should be “decided by all.”</p>
<p>Other than few desultory references to authoritarian regimes like North Korea — hardly the model that any socialist in his own society advocates — the only sentence of the video that even acknowledges the possibility that the move from feudalism to capitalism could be a step toward something <em>better</em> than capitalism (rather than humanity’s final economic destination) is one where he says that “socialism replaces our natural human relations with state control.” But he doesn’t tell us <em>why</em> working-class people making decisions collectively and democratically about, for example, how the package-shipping industry should work is less “natural” than warehouse workers taking orders from Jeff Bezos.</p>
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<h2>Why is PragerU Afraid of the Free Exchange of Ideas?</h2>
<p>If Hannan acknowledged that any of these critiques existed, he might argue that mute compulsion isn’t real compulsion and that it’s not the job of social and political institutions to guarantee that everyone’s needs are met, only to protect everyone’s rights. He repeatedly celebrates capitalism as the only system that he doesn’t see as resting on “coercion.”</p>
<p>This defense would be step up from Hannan’s weak offering. But it would still fall flat. The material conditions that produce the mute compulsion are upheld by direct coercion. <em>Any</em> system for distributing scarce resources relies on coercion. A letter from the IRS saying you still owe back taxes, or a letter from a socialist government telling you that your business has been nationalized, certainly carries with it at least an implied threat of force — but so does a “No Trespassing” sign on private property. The enforcement of property rights is by definition the use of coercion to ensure that some people and not others have access to limited resources.</p>
<p>If he was willing to engage with the ideas of anti-capitalist writers and thinkers, Hannan would be forced to explain why coercion to protect Bezos’s wealth hoarding isn’t “real” coercion like nationalizing Amazon. It would be interesting to see how he’d try to do that.</p>
<p>But he doesn’t engage with those ideas. Instead, he just gives a pep talk about markets and why modern society is better than feudalism that completely elides the points in contention in real debates about capitalism and socialism. So, for example, he brings up Amazon as an example of how market exchanges benefit both parties. Bezos becomes “fractionally richer,” but consumers get the things they need. Meanwhile, Amazon workers disappear entirely in this picture.</p>
<p>Indeed, the closest Hannan comes to acknowledging the existence of class distinctions within capitalist societies — never mind mounting a defense of those distinctions — is when he quotes the economist Joseph Schumpeter saying that the “capitalist achievement” consists not in providing more “silk stockings for queens” but in making those silk stockings cheap enough to put them in the reach of “factory girls.”</p>
<p>An attentive viewer might ask, “Wait, what’s that about factory girls? That sounds like a class division! Why don’t you say more about that?” But that’s exactly the kind of conversation the PragerU propagandists run screaming away from having.</p>
<p>Real universities, at their best, expose students to a wide variety of perspectives and sharpen their critical thinking skills so they’ll be better equipped to decide for themselves what they think. PragerU is only interested in telling people what to think.</p>
<p>If you let the “factory girls” and their equivalents in contemporary shipping warehouses think for themselves, after all, they might start questioning their status. And who knows where <em>that</em> could lead?</p>
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Ben Burgishttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/france-prisons-macron-policing-covid/France’s Jails Are at a Breaking Point2024-03-18T08:07:09Z2024-03-17T08:57:03Z<p>France may have enshrined liberté in its national motto, but its prisons are bursting at the seams. According to new figures, a record 76,258 people were being held in French jails in February — a 5.5 percent increase on one year ago. With less than 62,000 available places, the system is under strain. For every […]</p>
<h3>As the number of inmates continues to soar, France has among Europe’s most overcrowded jails. But with the range of imprisonable crimes also growing, Emmanuel Macron’s government shows little interest in rehabilitating convicts outside the cell walls.</h3>
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A prisoner stands in his cell in the Poissy prison on August 14, 2019, west of Paris. (Dominique Faget / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>France may have enshrined <em>liberté</em> in its national motto, but its prisons are bursting at the seams. According to new <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2024/03/01/le-nouveau-record-de-detenus-en-france-repose-la-question-de-la-regulation-carcerale_6219542_3224.html">figures</a>, a record 76,258 people were being held in French jails in February — a 5.5 percent increase on one year ago. With less than 62,000 available places, the system is under strain. For every one hundred places there are currently 124 prisoners — 148 when considering only the <em>maisons d’arrêt</em>, the facilities that house those serving shorter sentences or awaiting trial, the vast majority of inmates.</p>
<p>“The situation has never been as dramatic as it is today,” said Prune Missoffe, from the French branch of the International Prison Observatory. “The problem is not new, but it’s been continuously getting worse,” she said.</p>
<p>French prisons are among Europe’s most overcrowded, with a density rate tailing only Cyprus and Romania, according to Council of Europe <a href="https://wp.unil.ch/space/files/2023/06/230626_Key-Findings-SPACE-I_Prisons-and-Prisoners-in-Europe-2022.pdf">data</a> referring to 2022. In the <em>maisons d’arrêt</em>, “typically you have two or three people, sometimes even four, in a [ninety-seven-square-foot] cell for twenty-two hours a day, with one of them often sleeping on a mattress on the floor,” said Missoffe.</p>
<p>This situation generates tensions both among inmates and with personnel, and it makes it harder for prisoners to have access to services such as health care and training programs, Sébastien Nicolas, the secretary-general of prison directors’ union FO Direction, told me. “We are entrusted with inmates that we can’t take care of properly, because there are too many of them,” said Nicolas. “And the quality of services is directly correlated with recidivism rates,” he said.</p>
<p>For the government of centrist president Emmanuel Macron, as well as much of the Right, the obvious fix to the problem of overcrowded prisons is building more of them. A mammoth project aiming to create eighteen thousand new places by 2027 is currently underway, despite some delays. “We have a number of places that still reflects a population of forty-five million [rather than the current sixty-eight million],” said Patrick Hetzel, a member of parliament for conservative opposition party Les Républicains.</p>
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<h2>Too Many Prisoners</h2>
<p>France may have too few cells, but it also has too many prisoners. While France’s current <a href="https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/france">rate</a> of 109 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants remains lower than in Britain or Spain, and a far cry from the eye-watering 531 recorded in the United States, it is higher than in most other Western European countries.</p>
<p>It has also risen faster than almost anywhere else in Western Europe in recent years, with a 15 percent <a href="https://wp.unil.ch/space/files/2023/06/230626_Key-Findings-SPACE-I_Prisons-and-Prisoners-in-Europe-2022.pdf">hike</a> between 2005 and 2022 — as against a drop of 7 percent across the English Channel, of 17 percent in Spain, 30 percent in Germany, and over 40 percent in the Netherlands.</p>
<p>In France, over the past few decades, “we have seen a dynamic in which the number of prison places grows, but the number of inmates does so too, and the problem of overcrowding persists,” Gilles Chantraine, a research director at France’s National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), told me.</p>
<p>The soaring number of prisoners is hardly the result of rampant lawlessness. While France has recently seen a <a href="https://dataunodc.un.org/content/country-list">spike</a> in the reported cases of certain offenses, such as sexual violence and serious assaults, over the last four decades its overall crime rate has remained largely <a href="https://www.observationsociete.fr/modes-de-vie/divers-tendances_conditions/evolutioninsecurite/">stable</a>.</p>
<p>Instead, much of it has to do with the French criminal code growing steadily harsher over the past decades, with no exception since Macron took power seven years ago: <a href="https://oip.org/communique/plus-de-73-000-personnes-detenues-arretons-les-frais-prison-record/">120 new offenses</a> punishable by imprisonment were created or toughened between 2018 and 2023 alone.</p>
<p>Another factor is the growing use of fast-track procedures, which don’t leave the time to evaluate the best alternatives to prison for each convict and result in jail sentences eight times more often than normal trials, according to Missoffe.</p>
<p>And then there is the increasingly frequent resort to pretrial detentions, with the number of such inmates currently representing almost <a href="https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/292724-eric-dupond-moretti-19012024-politique-penitentiaire">40 percent</a> of the total prison population — up from 31 percent three years ago and twenty points higher than in <a href="https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/germany">Germany</a> or <a href="https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-kingdom-england-wales">Britain</a>.</p>
<p>While much of western Europe has seen its prison populations <a href="http://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/Dunkel_2017.pdf">balloon</a> as a result of a “punitive turn” in the 1990s and early 2000s, many countries have since managed to reverse the trend by relying on alternatives to jail time such as house arrest and community work.</p>
<p>In France, too, in recent years governments have encouraged judges to opt for such alternatives when possible. French justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti <a href="https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/292724-eric-dupond-moretti-19012024-politique-penitentiaire">boasts</a> that the number of places for “general interest work” has gone up on his watch.</p>
<p>But critics say that devoting the vast majority of resources to building new prisons means leaving peanuts for everything else. The 2024 budget <a href="https://oip.org/analyse/politique-penitentiaire-la-fuite-en-avant-continue/">includes</a> €634 million ($694 million) for the new facilities, and only €52 million ($57 million) for alternative punishments — mostly to pay for the electronic surveillance of people under house detention.</p>
<p>The French criminal system remains “very prison focused,” said researcher Chantraine. Community work, in particular, is struggling to make headway. The available spots may be on the rise, but French judges take recourse to this only <a href="https://www.vie-publique.fr/parole-dexpert/285833-prisons-systeme-penitentiaire-sinspirer-dexperiences-etrangeres#:~:text=De%20la%20m%C3%AAme%20mani%C3%A8re%2C%20s,la%20Belgique%20(38%2C4%25)">once</a> per ten prison sentences — eight times less than their Dutch counterparts.</p>
<p>The alternatives to prison, both upon first sentencing and when it comes to early release schemes, often lack the necessary supervision, which in turn makes judges wary, according to Sébastien Nicolas of FO Direction. The union is proposing to create a new “probation police” to better monitor those benefiting from these measures. “Magistrates could rely a bit less on jails, that’s for sure, but they will only do so if they can be reassured that the alternatives are subject to a proper system of controls,” said Nicolas.</p>
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<h2>Paradigm Shift</h2>
<p>To be sure, transforming a country’s approach towards criminal justice is no easy feat. In 2014, Christiane Taubira, the justice minister under the Socialist Party president François Hollande, sought a sweeping change of paradigm, introducing a new probation scheme with the goal of effectively replacing prison terms as the default punishment for a wide array of offenses. The measure was largely ignored by judges and then scrapped a few years later, under Macron.</p>
<p>Yet in early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the early release by decree of thousands of inmates close to the end of their terms, in order to prevent cases from surging in overcrowded facilities, contributed to bringing the prison population to its lowest levels in over a decade. For a few months, “the government fixed the problem of overcrowded prisons,” said Chantraine. “Many actors in the justice system discovered that it was doable, that it didn’t put French society in danger or trigger a massive rise in criminality rates. A new approach seemed possible,” he said.</p>
<p>However, <a href="https://www.liberation.fr/france/2020/05/14/prison-12-793-detenus-en-moins-et-une-occasion-sans-precedent_1788348/">calls</a> on the government to use the momentum and curtail the role of jails for good went unheeded, and as soon as the health emergency was over the prison population quickly went back to, and then topped, its pre-pandemic levels. On average, between June 2020 and February this year, it has <a href="https://www.observatoire-disparites-justice-penale.fr/les-conditions-de-d%C3%A9tention/les-%C3%A9volutions-de-la-population-carc%C3%A9rale">grown</a> by five hundred people per month. The pandemic “was a missed opportunity,” said Chantraine.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, sociologist Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/13651/discipline-and-punish-by-michel-foucault-trans-alan-sheridan/9780241386019"><em>Discipline and Punish</em></a> pointed out how prisons played a key role in the development of modern Western civilization, becoming a model for the organization of other institutions as well — including schools, hospitals and the military.</p>
<p>Today, with the current government investing big bucks in new facilities, France’s justice system seems as prison-centric as ever. The question is whether more cells can offer a real solution to a problem that has been dragging on, and getting worse, for decades. A “zero delinquency” <a href="https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-reportage-de-la-redaction/securite-en-seine-saint-denis-la-police-multiplie-les-actions-avant-les-jop-3877488">plan</a> currently being implemented to clean up the Paris region ahead of this summer’s Olympics hardly bodes well for reducing the rate of detention any time soon.</p>
<p>“Yes, we need more prison cells, that much is clear. But we shouldn’t build them with the idea of filling them up. We must also develop the alternatives to jail time as much as possible,” said Nicolas. “In France, the attitude we have towards imprisonment is somewhat pathological,” he said.</p>
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Michele Barberohttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/bougainville-mining-independence-revolution-papua-new-guinea/Bougainville’s Independence Struggle Won Against the Odds2024-03-16T16:33:14Z2024-03-16T16:33:14Z<p>The Pacific island of Bougainville lies northeast of Australia and due east of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Roughly the same size as Puerto Rico, Cyprus, or Corsica, it has a population of about 300,000. Anthropologically, the island is an incredibly complex place with a variety of precolonial cultural practices, a variegated tribal make up, and […]</p>
<h3>Bougainville is a Pacific island with a population of just 300,000, but its independence movement successfully challenged one of the world’s most powerful and predatory mining companies. Its people have now voted overwhelmingly to form their own state.</h3>
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Guerillas of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, some still wearing camouflage, watch the signing of the cease-fire agreement that ended their campaign. (Torsten Blackwood / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>The Pacific island of Bougainville lies northeast of Australia and due east of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Roughly the same size as Puerto Rico, Cyprus, or Corsica, it has a population of about 300,000. Anthropologically, the island is an incredibly complex place with a variety of precolonial cultural practices, a variegated tribal make up, and a deep commitment to Christianity.</p>
<p>The faith was brought over by German missionaries whose government formally held dominion over the island until Australia annexed it after World War II. After World War II, Bougainville entered a state of legal limbo as a United Nations Trust Territory. Australia still held administrative responsibility for the island and the neighboring archipelagos.</p>
<p>In 1975, Canberra granted independence to Papua New Guinea (PNG), which had also been under Australian state control, and included some neighboring islands in the new country, such as the large and supposedly “unexplored” Bougainville. Bougainville’s people launched a political campaign for independence, but the international community ignored it.</p>
<p>After the takeover, they continued with their struggle, which meant taking on not only the PNG government but also its Australian backers and one of the world’s most powerful mining companies. Against seemingly overwhelming odds, Bougainville’s revolutionary movement fought its way to the negotiating table and secured a referendum in 2019 that resulted in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/11/bougainville-referendum-region-votes-overwhelmingly-for-independence-from-papua-new-guinea">overwhelming support for independence</a>.</p>
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<h2>An Exploding Bomb</h2>
<p>The wartime battles on Bougainville between the Allies and Japan had brought the island and its potential riches into the consciousness of Australia and its close friends in the mining industry. In 1972, Rio Tinto, which is now the world’s second-biggest mining conglomerate, set up a subsidiary company called Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) to begin mining in the lucrative Bougainville jungle after reaching an agreement with PNG and Australia.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Bougainville’s revolutionary movement fought its way to the negotiating table and secured a referendum in 2019 that resulted in overwhelming support for independence.</q></aside>
<p>The mine was located in the central Panguna region of the island. It would soon become the focal point of revolutionary activity on the island. Throughout the 1980s, social and political contradictions grew in Bougainville as the mine expanded. The mine completely reoriented traditional life around a company town with foreign officers and businessmen enjoying supreme authority, backed up by the PNG’s armed forces, which had Australian weapons and training.</p>
<p>Capitalist modernity had come crashing onto the shores of the island. The intense, backbreaking labor carried out by the people of Bougainville at the mine was reminiscent of ancient Rome or Spanish-ruled colonial Bolivia. Aerial images of the mine in its heyday show how it destroyed the lush jungle, starting from the center of the island and moving out, like an exploding bomb.</p>
<p>Workers and other locals began to make speeches and hold study groups in secret about the conditions of the mine, partially inspired by dreams of national sovereignty. These groups began to grow in popularity as conditions in the mine drove residents to understand their subjugated position and the need for liberation from the nightmare they found themselves trapped in.</p>
<p>The people of Bougainville and their environment were expendable in the eyes of BCL and their allies. In its seventeen years of operation, the mine had become one of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/rio-tinto-accused-of-violating-human-rights-in-bougainville-for-not-cleaning-up-panguna-mine">the richest copper sites in the world</a>. It was a flagship of Rio-Tinto’s business and an extremely important source of revenue for the PNG government. Profits from the mine at some points accounted for as much <a href="https://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/357/">as 45 percent of PNG’s total export revenue</a>.</p>
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<h2>From Sabotage to Revolution</h2>
<p>The dramatic decline in living standards on the island after the introduction of the mine drove people off their subsistence plots and out of their traditional food systems. Mass environmental degradation of water and food supplies threatened their civilization and compelled them to take action.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>The dramatic decline in living standards after the introduction of the mine drove people off their subsistence plots and out of their traditional food systems.</q></aside>
<p>In 1989, multiple acts of sabotage shook the Panguna mine. Support beams were strategically blown up, entrances to the mine were caved in several times, and tools and weapons were stolen. This came as a shock to the PNG government, its Australian backers, and Rio Tinto, who saw one of the most profitable mines in the world ingeniously shut down. The firm and its national partners suffered massive embarrassment. BCL and the PNG authorities soon implemented a shoot-to-kill policy against any possible bandits.</p>
<p>The leader of this group of saboteurs was a former miner named Francis Ona who went on to be the leader of the guerrilla war against PNG and Australia. Ona quit working at the mine in 1988 to work full-time organizing resistance against it. He travelled around the island gathering support among women who saw their status plummet as traditional social structures like subsistence farming were destroyed, as well as young men who had watched their friends die in the mine.</p>
<p>Ona’s attempts at negotiation for better terms between the workers and Rio Tinto were unsuccessful, and he became radicalized by the process. A BCL manager gave the following <a href="https://www.google.com.tr/books/edition/State_Crime_on_the_Margins_of_Empire/PTCHtQEACAAJ?hl=en">justification</a> for their obstinacy:</p>
<blockquote><p>We didn’t like to be pushed into doing things the Melanesian way because the Melanesian way is a little bit . . . you put pressure on someone, and the pressure results in a reward, and then there is an attitude, I wish I had asked for more, how do I get more. You then reapply the pressure, perhaps a little harder next time, and then you get a bigger reward, and eventually you’re asking “how can I stop this, they are bleeding the company dry.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The acts of sabotage expanded into a guerrilla war and the mine completely shut down. Ona made the following statement in a radio <a href="https://www.c-r.org/accord/papua-new-guinea%E2%80%93bougainville/origins-conflict">broadcast</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>We are generally peace-loving, law-abiding people. At present we have been blamed for the lawlessness in the province. We have taken the move after painful struggle for the last twenty years of PNG rule. We are fighting to save our land from foreign exploitation.</p></blockquote>
<p>PNG security forces were sent onto the island to bring down Ona and his Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). They launched raids from coastal beachheads into the interior, trying to find and kill the BRA fighters.</p>
<p>Ona lacked access to modern firearms in the early stages of the war and used knowledge of the jungle to employ poisonous booby traps, rockslides, and ambushes. For several months, this was how the BRA defended the interior of Bougainville.</p>
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<h2>The Coconut Revolution</h2>
<p>In time, Ona procured more weapons and ammunition from the successive waves of defeated PNG forces and used this victorious streak to establish legitimacy among the residents of the island. He established military training infrastructure and set up revolutionary villages where traditional culture and subsistence farming made a return.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>The Papua New Guinea government imposed an embargo on Bougainville in 1990 and went on to launch the bloodiest phase of the war.</q></aside>
<p>The BRA leader took advantage of the island’s staunch Christianity to bring a theory of liberation theology into his propaganda. Ona was not only a guerrilla general but also a preacher, musician, and farmer. One academic <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42705027">article</a> presented him as a Moses leading his people to the promised land, a sovereign independent Bougainville.</p>
<p>This record of success made the PNG government and its allies rethink their strategy. They imposed an embargo on Bougainville in 1990 and went on to launch the bloodiest phase of the war. This proved to be the biggest conflict in Oceania since World War II.</p>
<p>The BRA was a revolutionary force that had to withstand assaults from Australian-trained PNG special forces as well as the direct involvement of Australian forces, dropping grenades onto villages from helicopters. These tactics spurred condemnation of Canberra’s role from international and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DAQmP8S0vQ">domestic antiwar activists</a>.</p>
<p>In the face of this onslaught, the BRA and the people of Bougainville took heavy losses, which were compounded by the lack of medical supplies due to the embargo. As many <a href="https://www.c-r.org/programme/pacific/bougainville-conflict-focus">as twenty thousand people</a> died in Bougainville’s ten-year conflict: between one thousand and two thousand of those were deaths in combat, with civilians accounting for the rest. The island had a population of around only 200,000 at this time.</p>
<p>A documentary called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sl8KJDOqK4&t=454s"><em>The Coconut Revolution</em></a> explores the day-to-day experience of embargo, war, and revolution on the island. The camera follows Ona as he trains young men, leads religious services, and grows crops. Footage of young children slapping PVC piping to make music for worship is juxtaposed with footage of Australian pilots dropping bombs on villages. The film also explores the homemade technology built to outwit the embargo, as well as the new food systems pioneered by the women of the island.</p>
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<h2>Digging Deeper</h2>
<p>Morale among PNG forces worsened as the reality of fighting against a deeply entrenched guerrilla force began to set in. This prompted government officials to use even more violent tactics in the hope of securing a rapid victory. The PNG authorities implemented a strategy of village razing, torture, and indiscriminate killings of young men suspected of belonging to the BRA. However, the rebel force continued to hold fast.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Morale among PNG forces worsened as the reality of fighting against a deeply entrenched guerrilla force began to set in.</q></aside>
<p>It is important not to completely romanticize the BRA, whose use of child soldiers garnered international condemnation. However, they were the only effective opposition to a world of exploitation rooted in the hell of suffocating mineshafts. Many of the soldiers had only known the violence of the mine and saw counterviolence as the only legitimate way of bringing it to an end.</p>
<p>With pressure mounting, the government of PNG leader Julius Chan had dug itself into a deep hole. This was the largest military operation in the young country’s history. Not only was their country’s GDP on the line — they also had Australia and Rio Tinto breathing down their necks.</p>
<p>After several failed peace negotiations between the BRA and PNG, Chan grew impatient. His government decided to hire the mercenary networking firm <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/04/spicer200704">Sandline International</a> in 1997, with backing from Australia. Sandline in turn contracted the South African mercenary group Executive Outcomes to fight the BRA.</p>
<p>Executive Outcomes was one of the world’s <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/132682/1/PPP_30.pdf">largest mercenary forces</a>. It was staffed with highly experienced special-forces veterans from the white-settler regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia. The company’s business model was based around the defense of resource interests across the Global South.</p>
<p>Just a year earlier, the Indonesian government had hired it to fight guerilla forces in West Papua, which had occupied some of Rio Tinto’s gold and copper mines. Executive Outcomes succeeded in its mission, using <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339464736_Sandline's_mercenaries_helped_Kopassus_East_Timor_and_West_Papua_2">horrific methods of repression</a>. Human rights groups are still coming to terms with the violence in West Papua.</p>
<p>When the Executive Outcomes story broke, it might have seemed that hope was fading for the people of Bougainville. However, they received help from an unlikely ally. In 1997, a PNG journalist published an exposé with details of the secret agreement Chan had struck with Executive Outcomes for the use of forty-four mercenaries for $36 million. The company was even considering buying a stake in BCL.</p>
<p>The PNG army was deeply insulted by the news, especially the lead commander of the Bougainville operation, Jerry Singirok, who had to believe that the war was unwinnable. Singirok and his allies in the high ranks of the army went on an <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-17/no-regrets-over-papua-new-guinea-sandline-affair-sir-julius/7256118">unauthorized nighttime operation</a> to arrest every Executive Outcomes mercenary.</p>
<p>Chan had no idea what was happening until he woke up the next morning to massive protests outside his home after Singirok informed the public over the radio. The mercenaries were released and sent home to cheers of approval from a massive crowd of PNG citizens.</p>
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<h2>Toward Independence</h2>
<p>These were some of the biggest public protests in PNG history, and they had support from a determined portion of the military command. Chan was forced to resign, and new elections were held in 1997. The new government ended the war in Bougainville through a peace settlement. There was a cease-fire, after which negotiations for the legal status of Bougainville commenced.</p>
<p>People in Bougainville celebrated the peace but also reflected upon the pain and suffering they had witnessed. The Me’ekamui Revolution still had a lot of lessons to learn on the pathway to independence. Fiscal problems and financial illiteracy made it possible for several resource companies to scam the young autonomous nation. The current government is trying to bring back mining in a safer form, but mining-related operations still give rise to <a href="https://landportal.org/fr/node/92399#:~:text=Channon%20Lumpoo%2C%2027%2C%20was%20shot%20by%20a%20high%2Dpowered,the%20time%20of%20his%20death.">violent incidents</a>. Rio Tinto has stated their desire to restore ties with Bougainville on multiple occasions.</p>
<p>In 2019, the people of Bougainville <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/bougainville-independence-papua-new-guinea.html">officially voted for independence</a> in a referendum, with almost 98 percent voting in favor. The legal process for independence is still ongoing. A former BRA commander, Ishmael Toroama, was recently elected president of Bougainville.</p>
<p>Whatever the future holds for Bougainville, the Me’ekamui Revolution was a spectacular achievement. At a time when revolutionary dreams were fading elsewhere, the people of Bougainville held firm against the combined power of Rio Tinto, Australia, and PNG, and are on a path toward securing their own country.</p>
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Matt Schierzhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/pharma-drug-price-negotiations-democrats/Pharma-Backed Democrats Are Fighting To Keep Drugs Expensive2024-03-16T14:38:14Z2024-03-16T14:38:14Z<p>While President Joe Biden is using Medicare to lower the cost of a handful of overpriced drugs and wants to expand the practice to hundreds more, some of Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats are working to do the opposite. After the pharmaceutical industry unleashed a $1.5 million bipartisan donation blitz, members of Biden’s own party have […]</p>
<h3>For the first time ever, Medicare is negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to reduce the cost of livesaving medicines. Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats are working to curtail the negotiations and protect the industry’s tax loopholes. </h3>
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Protesters call on Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) to stand up to Big Pharma and support Medicare's drug price negotiations on September 17, 2021 in San Diego, California. (Jerod Harris / Getty Images for Protect Our Care)
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<p>While <a href="https://www.levernews.com/tag/joe-biden/">President Joe Biden</a> is using Medicare to lower the cost of a handful of overpriced drugs and wants to expand the practice to hundreds more, some of Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats are working to do the opposite.</p>
<p>After the pharmaceutical industry unleashed a $1.5 million bipartisan donation blitz, members of Biden’s own party have joined with Republican lawmakers to try to limit the number of drugs regulators can cut prices for in the future — an initiative <a href="https://www.levernews.com/tag/donald-trump/">Donald Trump</a> is actively campaigning on in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.</p>
<p>Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (CA), Wiley Nickel (NC), Josh Gottheimer (NJ) and Donald Davis (NC) are each cosponsoring at least one of several proposed bills that would limit regulators’ ability to <a href="https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/press-release/3-charts-about-medicare-drug-price-negotiations/#:~:text=2)%20Although%20the%20Medicare%20negotiated,next%20several%20months%20of%202024.">negotiate down prices</a> of drugs covered by the Medicare government insurance program. The legislation would erode the drug-pricing reforms included in the Democrats’ 2022 <a href="https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare">Inflation Reduction Act</a> — efforts that <a href="https://scottpeters.house.gov/2022/8/rep-peters-passes-historic-measure-to-reduce-healthcare-costs-and-fight">Peters</a>, <a href="https://www.ncdp.org/media/icymi-ncdp-sen-nickel-highlight-democrats-inflation-reduction-act-bo-hines-maga-extremism/">Nickel</a>, and <a href="https://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer-helps-pass-inflation-reduction-act-win-for-nj-families">Gottheimer</a> supported. (Davis had not <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2024/02/05/democrat-weaken-medicare-drug-price-negotiation/">yet been elected</a> to Congress.)</p>
<p>The four, who all hail from states with a major biotech or drug-industry presence, have together raked in more than $300,000 from pharmaceutical and health-products interests during the 2023–2024 congressional session. Gottheimer is reportedly eyeing a <a href="https://newjerseyglobe.com/fr/ramping-up-for-possible-gubernatorial-bid-gottheimer-picks-national-political-operative-as-new-chief-of-staff/">2025 gubernatorial run</a> in New Jersey, home to the pharmaceutical giant <a href="https://www.merck.com/">Merck & Co</a>.</p>
<p>The eleven Republicans signed onto the bills have received $1.2 million in total from the same industries.</p>
<p>One of the bills, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5539/text?s=1&r=88">Optimizing Research Progress Hope and News (ORPHAN) Cures Act</a>, would exclude critical drugs for rare diseases from these price negotiations. Two other bills, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5547#:~:text=Introduced%20in%20House%20(09%2F18%2F2023)&text=This%20bill%20requires%20drug%20products,Medicare%20Drug%20Price%20Negotiation%20Program.">Maintaining Investments in New Innovation (MINI) Act</a> and the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7174/cosponsors?s=7&r=1">Ensuring Pathways to Innovative Cures (EPIC) Act</a>, would delay the process for many other medications.</p>
<p>If these bills pass, experts worry it would degrade the power of Biden’s drug price negotiation efforts and lead to continued price gouging for lifesaving medicines.</p>
<p>“The price negotiations, in the grand scheme of things, will improve affordability and improve access for Medicare beneficiaries,” Jeromie Ballreich, a health economist at Johns Hopkins University, said. “[But] ultimately pharmaceutical companies recognize that price negotiation is going to reduce their prices, reduce their revenue, reduce their profit, and they are in the business of making money.”</p>
<p>Biden is pushing to expand provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that targeted pharmaceutical companies’ long history of unregulated price hikes. While the current measure allows Medicare to negotiate the price of <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/explaining-the-prescription-drug-provisions-in-the-inflation-reduction-act/#:~:text=Under%20the%20new%20Drug%20Price,for%202029%20and%20later%20years.">160 drugs by 2034</a>, Biden said in his State of the Union address that he wants regulators to increase that number to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoRS437q518">500 drugs over the next decade</a>. Trump, meanwhile, may try to <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/02/07/trump-medicare-price-negotiations-executive-power">weaken these reforms</a> as part of his <a href="https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf">Project 2025</a> reelection plan to remake the executive office.</p>
<p>Lawmakers and their industry backers argue that the number of drugs up for price negotiation should be limited, since such interventions will lead to lower profits for industry, which in turn will stifle innovation for essential drugs. This argument is particularly prevalent in the rare-disease space, because developing these complicated drugs requires risky investments. Yet experts counter that pharmaceutical manufacturers will continue to make billions from rare-disease drugs and other medications, even after price negotiations.</p>
<p>Powerful pharmaceutical companies are also taking to the courts to try to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/11/pharma-drug-priding-biden-negotiations/">block current drug price negotiations</a>. Drugmakers including Bristol Myers Squibb and Novartis have <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/major-drugmakers-to-join-forces-in-court-for-drug-pricing-battle">submitted lawsuits in New Jersey</a> arguing that existing Medicare price negotiations, which currently involve <a href="https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/4bf549a55308c3aadc74b34abcb7a1d1/ira-drug-negotiation-report.pdf">ten popular and costly drugs</a>, violate the First, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Lobbying groups for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry spent a combined $36 million on lobbying on the <a href="https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/0c22f110-a184-4e38-9b1c-e312e4dedd48/print/">Inflation Reduction Act</a> and other matters last year, according to lobbying records. The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a lobbying group representing the biotech industry, lobbied specifically on the <a href="https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/b9354562-66b4-4705-8400-7e52ce1e9f21/print/">ORPHAN Cures Act</a> and <a href="https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/f07f8f3f-6c1a-40b7-979e-c5ac832e98e8/print/">MINI Act</a>, both of which were introduced in September 2023.</p>
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<h2>Profits From Rare Diseases</h2>
<p>To help encourage the sort of risky research and investments required for medicines that treat specific rare and intractable diseases, the Inflation Reduction Act exempted such “orphan drugs” from Medicare price negotiations — but only if the approved drug is designated to treat a single rare disease.</p>
<p>Makers of rare-disease drugs receive major tax incentives, fee exemptions, and exclusivity deals thanks to the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 — but a <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/congress-incentivizes-rare-disease-research-big-pharma-exploits-it/">loophole</a> in the law allows them to keep such incentives even if the drugs are then approved for additional conditions shortly thereafter.</p>
<p>The new ORPHAN Cures Act would amend the Inflation Reduction Act to exclude all orphan drugs from price negotiations, including those that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved to treat “one or more rare diseases or conditions” — meaning those that take advantage of the Orphan Drug Act loophole.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Makers of rare-disease drugs receive major tax incentives, fee exemptions, and exclusivity deals thanks to the Orphan Drug Act of 1983.</q></aside>
<p>Rep. John Joyce (R-PA), who introduced the bill, received <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=H&t0-search=Joyce">a total of</a> $94,600 from the pharmaceutical and health products industries during the 2023–2024 session, according to OpenSecrets.</p>
<p>Democrats Peters, Nickel, Davis, and Gottheimer are cosponsoring the bill, alongside four Republicans.</p>
<p>Peters, who has long been considered one of <a href="https://www.levernews.com/follow-the-pharma-money/">Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats</a>, received more than $133,000 from the pharmaceutical and health products industries during the 2023-2024 session, positioning him among the <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=M">top 20 congressional recipients</a> from these industries. In the 2022 election cycle, he was among the top three recipients.</p>
<p>In that time period, Peters spearheaded a successful effort to stop a 2021 House bill that would have allowed the federal government to <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/20/pharma-peters-cash-after-torpedo-pelosi-bill/">negotiate some drug prices</a>, and immediately received nearly $20,000 from pharmaceutical executives and lobbyists. His wife is president and CEO of Cameron Holdings, an investment firm that <a href="https://www.cameron-holdings.com/portfolio-companies.html">owns equity</a> in a company that provides manufacturing and packing for pharmaceutical companies.</p>
<p>Peters, <a href="https://www.levernews.com/follow-the-pharma-money/amp/">one of the wealthiest lawmakers in Congress</a>, has refused to <a href="https://www.levernews.com/the-pharma-bait-and-switch/">reject pharmaceutical industry donations</a>, <a href="https://www.levernews.com/dems-spin-control-over-pharma-cash-and-drug-pricing-vote/">telling constituents</a>, “I’m not going to unilaterally disarm and defund my campaign so that Republicans can win. I just think that’s a dumb thing to do.”</p>
<p>In response to a request for comment, Paul Iskajyan, Peters’s communications director, noted in an email, “Representative Peters strongly supports Medicare price negotiations; he in fact helped write the legislation included in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped prescription drug and insulin costs for seniors and allowed Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. Likewise, people dying from rare diseases need drugs to survive and many of those cures are being created in San Diego, which employs more than 70,000 people in life sciences.”</p>
<p>Peters’s Democratic cosponsors, Nickel, Davis, and Gottheimer, received roughly $168,000 in total during the 2023–2024 session from the pharmaceutical and health products industries, according to OpenSecrets.</p>
<p>Davis and Gottheimer did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
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<h2>Small Molecules, Big Profits</h2>
<p>Legislators are also trying to increase the amount of time certain drugs must be on the market before they are even considered for price negotiations. The MINI Act, introduced by Nickel and cosponsored by Davis and Peters, would increase the timeline of these negotiations for a class of “small-molecule drugs” that use <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajmg.c.32033#:~:text=Gene%2Dtargeted%20therapies%20(GTTs),rare%20monogenic%20disease%20therapy%20development.">genetically targeted technology</a> from seven to eleven years, to coincide with the timeline for biologically derived medicines like vaccines and insulin, otherwise called biologics.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.astrazeneca.com/r-d/next-generation-therapeutics/small-molecule.html">Small-molecule drugs</a>, chemically derived medications that can easily enter cells, are used to treat a wide range of conditions from high cholesterol to allergies, and make up <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590098620300622">most drugs available</a> on the market. In general, small-molecule drugs are considered less expensive to <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/08/29/drugmakers-investors-ira">make and administer than biologics</a>, hence the smaller window before regulators are allowed to start negotiating down their prices.</p>
<p>According to Nickel, small-molecule drugs that use genetically targeted technology to directly alter genes, often as part of rare-disease treatments, can be risky and costly, and therefore deserve the same extended timeframe as biologics before the government tries to cut their prices.</p>
<p>“When we incentivize innovation into one type of drug and not the other, we are hurting the potential for cures and treatments in certain areas medically,” Rep. Nickel wrote in an email. “The drugs targeted by MINI use gene-targeting technology to treat rare diseases, and over half of those drugs are targeting pediatric or young-adult populations.”</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>Legislators are also trying to increase the amount of time certain drugs must be on the market before they are even considered for price negotiations.</q></aside>
<p>Nickel’s arguments are echoed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the powerful Washington drug lobby, who <a href="https://phrma.org/en/Inflation-Reduction-Act">contend</a> that the Inflation Reduction Act’s current drug price negotiation provisions will “discourage the development of small-molecule medicines.” The lobbying group insists that “companies should be able to make decisions based on patient needs and science, not on misguided government reimbursement policies.”</p>
<p>Nickel, who represents North Carolina’s <a href="https://edpnc.com/industries/biotech-pharmaceuticals/">biotech hotbed</a>, <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=H&t0-search=nickel">received $41,000</a> from the pharmaceutical and health products industries during the 2023–2024 session, according to OpenSecrets.</p>
<p>When asked about these contributions, Matt Landini, Nickel’s press secretary and digital manager, responded: “As an official government office, we are prohibited from discussing political or campaign activities.”</p>
<p>Seven other Republicans — including Joyce, who introduced the ORPHAN Cures Act — are sponsoring the bill. Rep. Bucshon (R-IN), one of the cosponsors, has long been a <a href="https://www.courierpress.com/story/opinion/columnists/jon-webb/2017/10/19/webb-opiate-fighters-take-thousands-pharma-companies/781305001/">pharmaceutical industry favorite</a>, receiving $174,500 from the industries over the last session, putting him <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=M">at number five of all congressional recipients</a> of pharma money.</p>
<p>The Biotechnology Innovation Organization spent $9 million lobbying on the MINI Act and other matters in 2023, according to lobbying records.</p>
<p>Another bill, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7174/actions?s=7&r=1">EPIC Act</a>, introduced this January by Rep. Gregory Murphy (R-NC) and cosponsored by Davis, would exempt all small-molecule drugs from price negotiations until they have been on the market for eleven years.</p>
<p>Murphy received <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=H&t0-search=murphy">almost $63,000</a> from the pharmaceutical and health product industries during the 2023–2024 session. Over that same time period, Davis received <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=H&t0-search=Davis%2C+Don">roughly $52,000</a> from these industries, including <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2024/02/05/democrat-weaken-medicare-drug-price-negotiation/">contributions from the political action committees for drug companies</a> including Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Eli Lilly and Company.</p>
<p>Two of the EPIC Act’s other three Republican co-sponsors, Reps. Brett Guthrie (KY) and John Curtis (UT), received $233,900 and $108,500, respectively, putting them both in the <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?code=H04&cycle=2024&ind=H04&mem=Y&recipdetail=M">top twenty congressional recipients of pharma money</a> during the 2023–2024 session.</p>
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<h2>“It Seems a Little Bit Crazy”</h2>
<p>Drugmakers funding these legislators insist that drug price negotiations as they exist now will hinder the development of new medical cures, particularly in the rare-disease space. Some rare-disease patients and advocates agree: Khrystal Davis, whose son has Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1, spoke at a <a href="https://energycommerce.house.gov/events/health-subcommittee-hearing-legislative-proposals-to-support-patients-with-rare-diseases">recent House Health Subcommittee hearing</a> about how the Inflation Reduction Act “jeopardizes continued research, development, and funding of orphan drugs.”</p>
<p>This argument leans on a <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126">2021 report</a> from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that concluded lower drug revenues would lead to “approximately 8 fewer drugs . . . introduced to the U.S. market over the 2020–2029 period and about 30 fewer drugs over the subsequent 10 years.” From 2013 to 2022, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, a branch of the FDA that regulates over-the-counter and prescription drugs, averaged <a href="https://www.fda.gov/drugs/new-drugs-fda-cders-new-molecular-entities-and-new-therapeutic-biological-products/new-drug-therapy-approvals-2022#:~:text=From%202013%20through%202022%2C%20CDER,novel%20drug%20approvals%20per%20year.">forty-three new drug approvals per year</a>, or 430 per decade.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-08/57010-New-Drug-Development.pdf">A subsequent report</a> from the Congressional Budget Office found that reducing profits of top drugs by 15 to 25 percent would be associated with a negligible drop in the number of new drugs introduced over the next decade.</p>
<p>Aaron Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says corporate interests and their congressional advocates use the threat of stifling drug innovation to hide their true incentives: defending companies’ incredibly high profit margins.</p>
<p>“It seems a little bit crazy to me to say that all innovation is going to cease because of the Inflation Reduction Act Medicare negotiations, when there are already really substantial incentives that exist for profit in the pharmaceutical market,” Kesselheim said.</p>
<p>Kesselheim and his colleagues found that from the time of their FDA approval to the second quarter of 2023, sixteen rare-disease drugs brought in anywhere from $6.6 billion to $19.2 billion in <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/Cost%20of%20Exempting%20Sole%20Orphan%20Drugs%20from%20Medicare%20Negotiation%20(JAMA%20IM).pdf">global revenue for Big Pharma</a>. Rare-disease medications are also becoming a huge portion of the drug market, accounting for 43 percent of new drugs <a href="https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2023/06/12/wvu-research-shows-how-much-pharmaceutical-companies-are-capitalizing-on-rare-drug-incentives">approved in 2023</a>.</p>
<p>Kesselheim likewise argues that small-molecule drugs, including those that use genetically targeted technology, will still deliver massive profits to their developers, even with their current shorter timeframe before regulators start negotiating down their prices.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VdjNvhIzC8gD7Hi2Y95sQZLbEb-4UM8J/view?usp=sharing">testimony</a> he provided to the House Health Subcommittee on the matter last month, Kesselheim noted that these small-molecule drugs “already generate substantial revenues and delaying Medicare price negotiation will have no effect on generating incentives for the discovery and development of these drugs.” He added that the government’s definition of “genetically targeted technology” is vague, making it hard to predict which of the small molecule drugs would qualify for this exemption.</p>
<p>According to Kesselheim’s testimony, of the ten current drugs currently selected for Medicare price negotiations, seven are small-molecule drugs. Global revenues for these seven medications ranged from $15 billion to $57 billion per drug in the first nine years following their FDA approval.</p>
<p>Kesselheim’s arguments are backed up by a 2019 <a href="https://s8637.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WHPC_White-Paper_How-Much-Can-Pharma-Lose_FINAL-November-2019.pdf">analysis</a> conducted by Ballreich at Johns Hopkins and the West Health Policy Center, a state and federal policy research organization. Ballreich and his colleagues found that “large pharmaceutical manufacturers could endure significant revenue reductions, including the reductions considered in legislative proposals, while maintaining current research investments and still achieve the highest returns of any market sector.”</p>
<p>Kesselheim added that it’s important to remember that drugs are only eligible for Medicare price negotiations after they have been on the market for many years, thereby giving companies plenty of time to reap the rewards and invest in new medicines. From 2022 to 2023, Medicare paid $50.5 billion for beneficiaries’ use of the ten prescription drugs <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/08/29/hhs-selects-the-first-drugs-for-medicare-drug-price-negotiation.html">currently selected for price negotiations</a>. This expenditure came despite the fact the government and taxpayers heavily subsidized the development of each of these drugs, <a href="https://www.levernews.com/americans-paid-11-billion-to-make-drugs-you-cant-afford/">shelling out $11.7 billion on crucial research</a>.</p>
<p>At the same time, researchers have found that pharmaceutical companies are using far more of these profits to <a href="https://www.levernews.com/how-big-pharma-actually-spends-its-massive-profits/">enrich shareholders</a> through stock buybacks and dividends than they are on drug research and development.</p>
<p>Whether or not they actually need to, some drugmakers are already changing course on their development of vital medicines in order to fight drug reforms.</p>
<p>Last year, a Swiss pharmaceutical company said they would <a href="https://www.levernews.com/pharma-giant-threatens-to-delay-drugs-over-new-price-controls/">delay research and development</a> for an ovarian cancer drug to reduce the amount of time the medicine is subject to price negotiations. And this past October, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals <a href="https://www.certara.com/blog/will-the-inflation-reduction-act-impact-drug-development-decisions/#:~:text=Will%20the%20Inflation%20Reduction%20Act%20Impact%20Drug%20Development%20Decisions%3F,-January%2027%2C%202023&text=The%20short%20answer%20is%20yes,recent%20press%20release%20by%20Alnylam.">paused clinical trials of a drug for Stargardt disease</a>, a rare eye disorder, as they “evaluate the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act.”</p>
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<p>You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the<i> Lever</i>, <a href="https://www.levernews.com/">here</a>.</p>
Helen Santorohttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/banks-finance-junk-fees-regulations/Banks Want to Protect Their Most Predatory Junk Fee2024-03-16T12:26:15Z2024-03-16T12:26:15Z<p>Of all the various “junk fees” financial institutions use to pocket ever more of your money, the most blatant profit grab might be the fees they can charge you for purchases that are instantly declined due to inadequate account funds — since banks face no costs at all when such a transaction is immediately rejected. […]</p>
<h3>Federal regulators have introduced a ban on one of banks’ most blatant profit grabs: nonsufficient funds fees. Even though most don’t charge those fees now, financial institutions are fighting the rule to preserve their future right to.</h3>
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Joe Biden speaks about protecting consumers from junk fees at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 15, 2023. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>Of all the various “junk fees” financial institutions use to pocket ever more of your money, the most blatant profit grab might be the fees they can charge you for purchases that are instantly declined due to inadequate account funds — since banks face no costs at all when such a transaction is immediately rejected.</p>
<p>According to a little-covered <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/rules-under-development/nonsufficient-funds-nsf-fees/">new proposal</a>, federal regulators want to ban these non-sufficient funds fees as part of <a href="https://www.levernews.com/tag/joe-biden/">President Joe Biden</a>’s ongoing fight against predatory junk fees, which he touted in last week’s <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/03/07/2024-state-of-the-union-biden-rails-against-shrinkflation-price-gouging-and-junk-fees.html">State of the Union</a> address. But the banking lobby is already attacking the move, even though banks and credit unions insist they mostly don’t charge — and don’t even want to charge — such fees.</p>
<p>The opposition suggests that in the face of a regulatory crackdown, banks want to preemptively preserve their future rights to extract profits from the most desperate borrowers. Indeed, as federal regulators aim to limit more commonly charged fees — like overdraft penalties and credit card late fees — banks may look to recoup their profit margins by expanding their use of non-sufficient funds fees.</p>
<p>Such fees, experts say, are particularly egregious, even compared to the myriad other junk fees that bring big financial institutions billions in profits every year. Non-sufficient funds fees are penalties charged when a transaction is rejected, like when a debit card purchase is declined because there’s not enough money in the account to cover it. The penalty is <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_fees-for-instantaneously-declined-transactions-nprm_2024-01.pdf">$32 on average</a>, similar to the average <a href="https://www.levernews.com/the-gop-fights-to-preserve-predatory-fees/">overdraft fee</a>.</p>
<p>But unlike overdrafts, in which banks pay for a transaction that exceeds the account balance, banks incur no cost at all when transactions are quickly declined — because the money never leaves the customer’s account. Such fees aren’t covering any loss for the bank. They’re just bringing in profits.</p>
<p>Thanks to previous efforts by federal regulators to limit these fees and mounting public pressure, nearly two-thirds of large banks have stopped collecting all kinds of non-sufficient funds fees, according to an <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/vast-majority-of-nsf-fees-have-been-eliminated-saving-consumers-nearly-2-billion-annually/">October analysis</a>. It’s even less common for banks to charge the penalties for transactions that are instantly declined, <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_fees-for-instantaneously-declined-transactions-nprm_2024-01.pdf">regulators say</a>, even among the big banks and credit unions that continue to collect the fees for other transactions.</p>
<p>But even when these fees are limited, experts say they are harmful.</p>
<p>“These [fees] tend to hit people who can least afford it the most,” explained Ruth Susswein, the director of consumer protection at advocacy group Consumer Action.</p>
<p>“There’s a lot of money to be made, and clearly, unless they are publicly embarrassed or a rule is put in place to stop them, financial institutions are going to choose to make as much profit as possible — and often off the people who can least afford it,” she continued.</p>
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<h2>“The CFPB Has Found Banks Guilty Without Accusation”</h2>
<p>The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (<a href="https://www.levernews.com/tag/cfpb/">CFPB</a>), the federal consumer protection agency, <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/rules-under-development/nonsufficient-funds-nsf-fees/">announced</a> the proposed new rule on non-sufficient funds charges for instantly declined transactions in January. Under the new policy, which is now open for public comment, such fees “would constitute an abusive practice under the Consumer Financial Protection Act.” It would apply to debit card transactions, ATM withdrawals, and some transactions on apps like Venmo — but non-sufficient funds fees that take a few days to process would not be included.</p>
<p>Most large banks do not currently charge a fee when a card is instantaneously declined, regulators said. The proposal, they emphasized, was meant to prevent banks from charging them in the future.</p>
<p>“The CFPB is proposing this rule primarily as a preventive measure,” <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_fees-for-instantaneously-declined-transactions-nprm_2024-01.pdf">regulators wrote</a> in their proposal. “Financial institutions have ongoing incentives to generate revenue, and [non-sufficient funds] fees may become increasingly appealing as a revenue source in the absence of this proposal.”</p>
<p>That might be especially true, regulators noted, as the <a href="https://www.levernews.com/the-lie-thats-inflating-your-credit-card-bills/">federal crackdown</a> on overdraft fees, credit card late fees, and other such charges begins to eat into banks’ revenue. Right now, banks earn billions from <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/data-spotlight-overdraft-nsf-revenue-in-q4-2022-down-nearly-50-versus-pre-pandemic-levels/full-report/">overdraft fees</a>, money that comes straight from the pockets of disproportionately<a href="https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/overdraft-fees-biden-administration-poor-americans-20240202.html"> low-income</a> and financially vulnerable households.</p>
<p>And banks, credit unions, and the rest of the finance industry have indeed lined up to oppose the CFPB’s new proposed ban, public comments on the new proposal show.</p>
<p>“It appears that the CFPB has found banks guilty without accusation or due process,” <a href="https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CFPB-2024-0003-0004">complained</a> the president of a state bank in Nebraska, claiming that his bank had no plans to charge such fees.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CFPB-2024-0003-0007">letter</a> from the trade group National Federation of Independent Businesses, meanwhile, urged the CFPB to rescind the rule and instead “focus its energies on solving existing problems that have a material adverse effect on consumers, a category that does not include non-sufficient fund fees.”</p>
<p>Mike Litt, the consumer campaign director at the advocacy organization US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), said it was revealing that banks and other business interests were opposing the new proposal, while at the same time claiming they had no intention to charge such fees.</p>
<p>“If they’re saying that they’re not doing it or that they’re not making money off it, then they shouldn’t really have a problem with it being officially prohibited, I would think,” Litt said.</p>
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<h2>“The Banks and Credit Card Companies Don’t Like It”</h2>
<p>The CFPB has been waging its fight against junk fees for years, and they have become a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s agenda, as the president highlighted during the State of the Union address last week.</p>
<p>“The banks and credit card companies don’t like it,” Biden said. “Why? I’m saving American families $20 billion a year with all of the junk fees I’m eliminating.”</p>
<p>Earlier regulation by the CFPB in the 2010s on non-sufficient funds fees, regulators say, contributed to many banks dropping the fees entirely — most notably <a href="https://www.capitalone.com/about/newsroom/eliminating-overdraft-fees/">Capital One in December 2021</a>.</p>
<p>Capital One’s announcement that it would no longer charge any fees for declined transactions or overdrafts came the <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_overdraft-call_report_2021-12.pdf">same day</a> the CFPB released a landmark report finding that banks were raking in more than $11 billion annually from both kinds of fees. Other major banks quickly <a href="https://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/content/newsroom/press-releases/2022/01/bank-of-america-announces-sweeping-changes-to-overdraft-services.html">fell in line</a> as public pressure mounted.</p>
<p>Regulators have also been <a href="https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/2023/fil23032a.pdf">taking aim</a> at what they call “double-dipping” of the fees, in which banks collected multiple fees for a single declined transaction. In July 2023, regulators issued Bank of America a <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/bank-of-america-for-illegally-charging-junk-fees-withholding-credit-card-rewards-opening-fake-accounts/">$150 million penalty</a> for the practice, among other predatory behavior. The bank is no longer <a href="https://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/content/newsroom/press-releases/2022/01/bank-of-america-announces-sweeping-changes-to-overdraft-services.html">collecting</a> penalties from declined transactions.</p>
<p>“What we’ve seen after all of this work from the CFPB is that a vast majority of [non-sufficient fund] fees have been eliminated, which the CFPB estimates is saving consumers nearly $2 billion a year,” Litt explained, referencing the CFPB’s <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-proposes-rule-to-stop-new-junk-fees-on-bank-accounts/#:~:text=In%20early%202022%2C%20the%20CFPB,billion%20annually%20from%20these%20changes.">January announcement</a>.</p>
<p>Now, with its new proposal, the CFPB wants to prevent the fees from returning by banning them outright. The agency is declaring them illegal under the Consumer Financial Protection Act, the landmark consumer protection legislation passed in 2010.</p>
<p>“It’s a really good move that many [banks] have eliminated the [non-sufficient funds] fee voluntarily, but there’s nothing to say tomorrow that a new CEO doesn’t come in and try to reinstate it,” Susswein said.</p>
<p>Ed Mierzwinski, the senior director of the federal consumer program at US PIRG, echoed that sentiment.</p>
<p>“[Big banks] pretend they’re not doing these abusive things,” he said. “But if they weren’t doing these abusive things, there would be no problem. And the CFPB wouldn’t act.”</p>
<p>The banking industry — and its “phalanx of lobbyists,” Mierzwinski said — is readying for a fight against CFPB regulation on several fronts. Commercial banks spent <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?id=F03">$67 million</a> lobbying federal lawmakers in 2023.</p>
<p>For the proposal barring fees on instantly declined transactions, <a href="https://www.regulations.gov/document/CFPB-2024-0003-0001">public comment</a> will remain open until March 25, and after that, regulators will begin to finalize the rule. Regulators have also proposed <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-proposes-rule-to-close-bank-overdraft-loophole-that-costs-americans-billions-each-year-in-junk-fees/">a rule limiting</a> overdraft fees, which will force banks to charge either a low-benchmark fee set by regulators or prove that higher overdraft penalties are necessary to <a href="https://www.levernews.com/the-gop-fights-to-preserve-predatory-fees/">recoup</a> their own losses.</p>
<p>And last week, the CFPB <a href="https://www.levernews.com/the-lie-thats-inflating-your-credit-card-bills/">announced</a> a new final rule capping most credit card late fees at $8. It took only two days for the US Chamber of Commerce and big banks to file a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-consumer-agency-sued-by-banks-us-chamber-over-credit-card-late-fee-cap-2024-03-07/#:~:text=March%207%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20The,pay%20their%20bills%20on%20time.">lawsuit</a> to block the rule, which they did in federal court on Thursday.</p>
<p>“The CFPB is trying to stop abusive practices that harm particularly low-income people with the least money in their accounts,” Mierzwinski said. The new proposal on fees for declined transactions, he emphasized, “is really just a part of a much larger package that addresses all these unfair practices.”</p>
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<p>You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the<i> Lever</i>, <a href="https://www.levernews.com/">here</a>.</p>
Katya Schwenkhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/gaza-profits-bds-weapons-corporations/The Obscene US Profiteering From Israeli War and Occupation2024-03-17T21:33:16Z2024-03-16T11:05:16Z<p>Since it began in mid-October of last year, Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of 29,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians — including 19,000 women and children. Israeli government ministers have made statements that strongly suggest they are aiming at the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the […]</p>
<h3>It’s not just the defense industry — plenty of US-based corporations do business with Israel and are complicit in its violation of Palestinian human rights in Gaza and beyond. Here are some of the worst offenders.</h3>
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An Israeli army battle tank moves along the border between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip on January 31, 2024. (Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)
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<p>This article was originally published by <a href="https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324french.html"><i data-stringify-type="italic">Dollars & Sense</i></a>.</p>
<p>Since it began in mid-October of last year, Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of 29,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians — including 19,000 women and children. Israeli government ministers have made statements that strongly suggest they are aiming at the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, and South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which ruled on January 26 that Israel may be in violation of the United Nations’ Genocide Convention and ordered it to immediately cease violations, including its killing of Palestinians.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, despite increasing evidence of Israeli war crimes, the US government has offered unconditional support to the offensive, apart from perfunctory pleas that Israel exercise “restraint” and respect human rights. The Biden administration has requested $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel from Congress, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion in aid the United States already sends annually.</p>
<p>That aid has been held up in Congress; but in December 2023, President Joe Biden twice circumvented the legislature to sell weapons to Israel, with a total value exceeding $200 million. All this is taking place in the context of decades of occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a proliferating and increasingly violent settler movement that continues to displace Palestinians, and what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations have described as a system of apartheid.</p>
<p>The long-standing Israeli occupation and the current war on Gaza are big business for many US-based defense contractors. But beyond military suppliers, many US corporations have substantial investments in Israel. These companies are also complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses — and as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long recognized, putting pressure on these companies may be crucial to changing Israeli policy.</p>
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<h2>The Defense Racket</h2>
<p>The US corporations with the most direct complicity in Israeli crimes, of course, are military contractors. According to Molly Gott and Derek Seidman, writing for the investigative news website Eyes on the Ties, five of the six biggest weapons manufacturers in the world are based in the United States. Those are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon).</p>
<p>Disturbingly, but unsurprisingly, many of these companies saw their stock prices shoot up when Israel’s war on Gaza began, Gott and Seidman reported. And weapons company executives have been publicly enthusiastic about the opportunities for profit opened up by the war. Discussing the conflict on an earnings call on October 24, RTX CEO Greg Hayes declared, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking.” On General Dynamics’s earnings call the following day, the company’s CFO and executive vice president Jason Aiken said, “If you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”</p>
<aside class="pq pq--right"><q>Weapons company executives have been publicly enthusiastic about the opportunities for profit opened up by the war.</q></aside>
<p>There can be little doubt that Israeli forces are using these weapons to commit war crimes against Palestinians. As Stephen Semler <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/biden-weapons-israel-gaza-palestine">reported</a> in <em>Jacobin</em>, many of the specific weapons that the Biden administration has sent to Israel have been repeatedly used to commit war crimes in the past. This includes Hellfire missiles, artillery shells, and assault rifles that have been used to kill clearly identified civilians. It also includes white phosphorus, which Semler describes as “a brutal incendiary weapon capable of burning straight through flesh, bone, and even metal” that is outlawed for use near civilians by Protocol III of the Geneva Conventions. Israel has used white phosphorus repeatedly, including in the current war.</p>
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<h2>Profiting From War, Occupation, and Apartheid</h2>
<p>Looking beyond weapons companies and their investors, plenty of other US corporations are profiting from the brutal assault on Gaza and the Israeli occupation and apartheid more generally.</p>
<p>The BDS movement is targeting a number of international corporations for consumer boycott campaigns, which are “carefully selected due to the company’s proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid,” according to a statement on the BDS website. Among the companies based in the United States are Hewlett-Packard (and its enterprise and government services spin-off Hewlett-Packard Enterprises), Chevron, and real estate company RE/MAX.</p>
<p>Hewlett-Packard provides computer hardware and other technology to the Israeli military, police, and government offices. Hewlett-Packard Enterprises provides servers for the country’s Immigration and Population Authority, which BDS says Israel uses “to control and enforce its system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Energy giant Chevron, meanwhile, extracts gas claimed by Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean; according to BDS, it provides the Israeli state with billions of dollars in revenue in gas-licensing payments. In addition, according to BDS, Chevron is:</p>
<blockquote><p>implicated in Israel’s illegal transfer of extracted fossil gas to Egypt through a pipeline illegally crossing the Palestinian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in Gaza, owing Palestinians millions in transit fees. It is also potentially complicit in Israeli pillage of Palestinian gas reserves offshore the occupied Gaza Strip, a war crime under international law.</p></blockquote>
<p>In 2017, SOMO, an Amsterdam think tank that investigates multinational corporations, produced an extensive report on Noble Energy’s involvement in the violation of Palestinian rights connected to its extraction of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean — the company was acquired by Chevron in 2020. In addition to participating in illegally blocking the Palestinian Authority’s access to its small gas reserves off the coast of Gaza via collaboration with Israel’s navy, SOMO reports that its extraction activities in Israeli gas fields could be draining Palestinian gas reserves as well.</p>
<p>“By failing to make efforts to assure Palestinian consent to gas extraction from [Israeli gas fields contiguous with Palestinian gas reserves],” SOMO concluded, “Noble Energy has failed to comply with the OECD Guidelines [for Multinational Enterprises] and [the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights] and conduct appropriate human rights due diligence to identify and prevent potential adverse human rights impacts.” Their report continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>The company has also potentially contributed to a violation of the collective right of self-determination. Furthermore, if Palestinian natural gas was indeed drained . . . it could be argued that Noble Energy participated in an act of pillage, in violation of international humanitarian and criminal law.</p></blockquote>
<p>RE/MAX markets and sells property on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely viewed as illegal under international law. The Israeli settler movement has long committed violent attacks against Palestinians, often with the implicit or explicit blessing of the Israeli armed forces. It has only grown bolder and more violent since the start of the war. Other US corporations that do business in Israel and have been singled out by BDS for divestment or other forms of pressure campaigns (though not complete boycotts) include Intel, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Airbnb, Expedia, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Papa John’s.</p>
<p>Following the example of other successful boycott and divestment campaigns, BDS selects only a handful of companies as targets in order to maximize the impact of its campaigns. But these companies are only the tip of the iceberg. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) maintains a more comprehensive list of companies complicit in various aspects of Israeli occupation and apartheid. Plenty of US-based corporations are, no surprise, to be found on their list as well.</p>
<p>Leaving aside weapons suppliers, among the other prominent and particularly egregious offenders is Caterpillar Inc., the construction machinery and equipment manufacturer, whose D9 armored bulldozer is frequently used by the Israeli military. Israel has deployed Caterpillar D9s to destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and other buildings in the occupied territories, as well as in attacks on Gaza that kill civilians. In 2003, US activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by one of these bulldozers “as she attempted to defend a Palestinian home from being demolished while the family was still inside,” according to the AFSC.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--left"><q>US trade with and investments in Israel play a significant role in Israel’s economy, constituting a potentially powerful source of leverage on the Israeli state</q></aside>
<p>.</p>
<p>ExxonMobil Corporation and Valero, not to be outdone by Chevron’s violations of human rights, provide fuel for the Israeli aircraft that have been relentlessly bombarding Gaza for the past few months. Motorola Solution Inc., the communications and surveillance company, has long provided the surveillance technology that Israel uses to monitor Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements and at separation walls and checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Travel and tourism company TripAdvisor, meanwhile, is involved in the occupation in a more mundane way: like Airbnb, its websites frequently list and act as booking agents for properties in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights.</p>
<p>Overall, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, in 2022 the United States exported $20 billion worth of goods and services to Israel, accounting for 13.3 percent of the latter’s total imports. Israel in turn exported $30.6 billion to the United States, with that figure amounting to 18.6 percent of all Israeli exports. US trade with and investments in Israel play a significant role in Israel’s economy, constituting a potentially powerful source of leverage on the Israeli state.</p>
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<h2>The Importance of Economic Boycotts</h2>
<p>The BDS movement is partly inspired by the decades-long anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa’s system of apartheid. The boycotts began when African National Congress leader Albert Luthuli called for them in 1958, and the UK-based Boycott Movement (later the Anti-Apartheid Movement) was founded the next year. It initially called for a boycott of South African goods, but expanded to demand total disinvestment from and economic sanctions on South Africa.</p>
<p>Eventually, the international pressure created by the Anti-Apartheid Movement helped bring an end to South African apartheid. The hope of BDS supporters is that a similar movement might one day help bring about an end to Israel’s oppression of Palestine.</p>
<p>Right now, the prospects for ending Israeli occupation and apartheid anytime soon look quite dim. The immediate demand that advocates for Palestine are pushing in the United States is a permanent cease-fire in Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza; some activists have also been protesting and attempting to disrupt US weapons sales to Israel. In the long run, though, achieving justice in Palestine will likely require pressuring our own government, and the many US companies who are currently complicit in Israeli crimes, to change course.</p>
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Nick Frenchhttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/judith-butler-whos-afraid-gender-review/The Right Pushes Culture War to Mask Its Unpopular Agenda2024-03-16T09:45:50Z2024-03-16T09:45:50Z<p>An encounter with people unfamiliar but nevertheless hostile to their work motivated Judith Butler to write Who’s Afraid of Gender? The writer, who began their career working on the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, has, since the publication of Gender Trouble (1990), become synonymous with everything wrong and right about how we think about […]</p>
Joanna Wuesthttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/rachel-corrie-death-anniversary-rafah-gaza-idf/Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine2024-03-16T14:32:40Z2024-03-16T08:57:02Z<p>Today there may be no town on Earth denser with misery and foreboding than Rafah, pushing up against Gaza’s border with Egypt. Since mid-October, Israeli forces have already bludgeoned their way through Gaza City and Khan Younis, massacring, destroying homes, and leaving starvation and terror in their wake. More than one million Palestinians fled south […]</p>
<h3>This day in 2003, the IDF killed American activist Rachel Corrie as she defended homes in Rafah from destruction. As Israel threatens to invade the city, a volunteer who stood alongside Rachel writes on her legacy — a call for steadfast solidarity with Gazans.</h3>
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Rachel Corrie, then twenty-three, speaks during a mock trial of US president George W. Bush on March 5, 2003 in Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. (Abid Katib / Getty Images)
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<p>Today there may be no town on Earth denser with misery and foreboding than Rafah, pushing up against Gaza’s border with Egypt.</p>
<p>Since mid-October, Israeli forces have already bludgeoned their way through Gaza City and Khan Younis, massacring, destroying homes, and leaving starvation and terror in their wake. More than one million Palestinians fled south to Rafah, swelling its population to seven times its earlier size.</p>
<p>But now, Israel’s sights are set on Rafah itself — threatening a devastating invasion.</p>
<p>Rafah is today a sprawling city of canvas and plastic sheeting as much as concrete; cold and often sodden, hungry and distraught. Disease is spreading, as people barter what little food they have for medicine, and women tear <a href="https://actionaid.org/news/2024/women-gaza-resort-using-scraps-tent-place-period-products-and-go-weeks-without-showering">scraps</a> from tents to use as sanitary towels. Orphans — there may be as many as ten thousand in Rafah — fend as best they can.</p>
<p>Last year, Israel dropped <a href="https://twitter.com/MuathHumaid/status/1730492298192961932">leaflets</a> over Khan Younis telling Palestinians to go to “shelters” in Rafah, to escape the fighting. But there are no shelters, and there has been no escape. Early in the war, a friend lost thirty-five members of his extended family in a single air strike on the town. Most were women and children.</p>
<p>More frequent than attacks on Rafah itself, the sound of air strikes echo from the north, an ominous reminder that the worst may yet be to come.</p>
<p>Last month, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that a failure to invade Rafah would be tantamount to his country’s defeat, and that he would order an invasion <a href="https://www.barrons.com/news/israel-s-netanyahu-says-not-entering-rafah-means-losing-war-530a6605">even if</a> all the Israeli hostages were released.</p>
<p>US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said that Washington will not support an invasion of Rafah without a “clear” plan to protect civilians, and that no plan has been provided yet. Israeli officials are reported to be working on a scheme to transfer Palestinians in Rafah to “humanitarian islands” to the north — where, already, food and medicine are scarcer still, and people have <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68471572">starved</a> to death.</p>
<p>President Joe Biden has said that an invasion of Rafah would be a “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-makes-contradictory-comments-gaza-red-line-msnbc-interview-2024-03-09/">red line</a>,” but promised no consequences if Israel crosses that red line, as it has crossed so many others. Netanyahu, as he has before, responded with contempt: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them,” he <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/israels-netanyahu-says-he-will-defy-bidens-red-line-and-invade-rafah/">said</a>.</p>
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<h2>“Razed and Bullet-Riddled and Bare”</h2>
<p>At the height of the second intifada, in 2002–03, I lived in Rafah as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization that supports nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Among my colleagues was Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer from Olympia, Washington State, in the United States, with a zany sense of humor that belied a seriousness about life — and the purpose of it — that I would not fully understand until reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Rachel_Corrie">her writing</a> years later. Later to join the group was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall">Tom Hurndall</a>, a talented photographer who was shot through the head by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper in April 2003, and died the next year after a nine-month coma.</p>
<figure id="attachment_205400" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-205400" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-205400 size-medium" src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/15170904/Burning-Man-by-Denny-Sternstein-MD-540x675.jpg" alt="" width="540" height="675" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-205400" class="wp-caption-text">Rachel Corrie. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Rafah, even then, was “razed and bullet-riddled and bare,” as Rachel put it in a message to her parents. We spent most nights in the houses of families near the border with Egypt. Israel had been creating an empty strip of land there, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/10/17/razing-rafah/mass-home-demolitions-gaza-strip">demolishing homes</a> to create a free-fire zone, and so a tactical advantage for their troops who occupied positions along the border. Sometimes they warned families to leave with bullhorns. Sometimes they shot into the homes until the families fled. And at any moment of day or night, demolition or not, they might rake the homes on the border’s edge with gunfire.</p>
<p>Not every bullet fired at a wall penetrates the building — but some do, especially those fired from more powerful weapons. Everyone who stayed at our friend Abu Jamil’s house, including Rachel, could not but notice, as they played with his children, the pockmarks left by bullets that struck the interior wall, at head height, over the kitchen sink.</p>
<p>When Palestinians called us, we used to go out to protest Israel’s armored bulldozers as they worked along the border strip, watching them and trying to intercede if they moved to demolish a home. We slowed them down a few times, made it more awkward, gave a family here or there a respite of a few days, or weeks. Perhaps we dragged the global spotlight onto that strip of land more frequently than if we hadn’t been there. But the demolition rumbled on. And the world had other preoccupations: the invasion of Iraq was looming.</p>
<figure id="attachment_205401" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-205401" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-205401 size-medium" src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/15171130/CCC-with-Nasrallah-Family-900x597.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="597" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-205401" class="wp-caption-text">Cynthia and Craig Corrie, parents of Rachel, with the Nasrallah family. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)</figcaption></figure>
<p>On March 16, 2003, a little after 5:00 p.m., I watched as one of Israel’s <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/11/21/israel-caterpillar-should-suspend-bulldozer-sales">US-made</a> bulldozers, huge and hulking, turned toward the house of Dr Samir Nasrallah and his young family. Rachel, a friend of Dr Samir’s, placed herself between the bulldozer and the house. As the bulldozer started toward her, it began to build up a roiling mound of earth in front of its blade. As the mound reached Rachel, she began to climb it, struggling to keep her footing on the soft earth, steadying herself with her hands, until her head was mostly over the level of the blade. The driver might have looked her in the eye. But he ploughed on, and she began to lose her footing.</p>
<p>A few weeks before that day, Rachel had a dream about falling, which she recorded in her journal:</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react . . . And I heard, “I can’t die, I can’t die,” again and again in my head.</p></blockquote>
<p>The soil on the Rafah border, an uneven mixture of clay and sand, has a warm hue, not so different from that of the Utah cliffs. From across the years, like much of Rachel’s writing, the nightmare seems to have the quality of a premonition.</p>
<p>Try though she did, Rachel could not keep her footing; the bulldozer pushed on, it dragged her under, pushed her into the earth, crushed her insides. She died as I held her hands in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital. In my <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/four-eyewitnesses-describe-murder-rachel-corrie/4460">initial account</a> of the event, written two days later, I noted that ten Palestinians had been killed across Gaza since Rachel, largely without notice beyond the enclave itself.</p>
<figure id="attachment_205403" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-205403" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-205403 size-medium" src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/15171954/Rachel-Corrie-Protest-Gaza-900x617.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="617" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-205403" class="wp-caption-text">Rachel Corrie stands in front of an IDF bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, on the day she was killed. (Courtesy of ISM Palestine)</figcaption></figure>
<p>My own friendship with Rachel aside, there is a discomfort in relating this that it is necessary to acknowledge, especially today, in the light of the devastation that Rafah faces. Part of our aim, all those years ago, was to exploit a racist structure of violence, and the racist structure of attention that sits alongside it, in order to undermine those same structures. Some people might believe that such an attempt was always quixotic, or that any bid to exploit such a racist structure, such as our effort to pull international eyes to Gaza, is inevitably to affirm that structure.</p>
<p>Regardless, having made my choice, more than two decades ago, I am committed. Whenever I am asked to speak about Rachel, I do so, not only to honor a friend, but on the theory that perhaps her story is a way to render comprehensible to some people, far from Palestine, broader truths about the violence of occupation, and the politics that make that violence possible. And that those truths lead us ultimately back to Palestinians, and back to Rafah. I believe they lead other places too.</p>
<p>Israel’s military operates under the assumption of impunity. So, when some exceptional event, such as the killing of a <a href="https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/iopt0605/8.htm">non-Palestinian</a>, raises the prospect of accountability, the system is ill prepared to respond. The result is often a series of bizarre lies. In Rachel’s case, the authorities could have stuck to disputing details of our eyewitness <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/affidavits-eyewitnesses-rachel-corrie-killing-schnabel-dale-purssell/1248">testimonies</a>. Instead, they also fabricated the <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/2011-04-03/ty-article/idf-officer-u-s-activist-ignored-warnings-before-crushed-by-bulldozer/0000017f-dbc1-db5a-a57f-dbeb066c0000">claim</a> that Rachel had “hid behind an earth embankment” and was hit by a falling concrete slab. Our photographs of the scene, both before and after Rachel was killed, showed that she was standing in open ground.</p>
<p>In a familiar pattern, the official response was, in approximate order: we didn’t do it, we did it but it wasn’t our fault, even if it was our fault we aren’t liable, and anyway they were terrorists. The IDF’s commander for the southern Gaza strip at the time of the killing told a Haifa court, presumably with a straight face, <a href="https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/rachel-corrie-was-cynically-sent-to-front-d8fppmgx">that</a> “a terror organisation sent Rachel Corrie to obstruct IDF soldiers. I am saying this in definite knowledge.” Observers of the current war will recall a series of similarly “definite” pronouncements.</p>
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<h2>Israel’s Impunity Is an American Export</h2>
<p>Volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines have always been at the heart of the internationalist tradition. And that remains true today, whether <a href="https://palsolidarity.org/">accompanying shepherds and olive-pickers</a> in the hills of the West Bank, <a href="https://www.solidaritycollectives.org/">running supplies</a> to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the war with Russia, giving medical support to the revolutionaries of Myanmar, or fighting the so-called Islamic State group alongside the People’s Protection Units in northeastern Syria. These endeavors, and the people who undertake them, shouldn’t be idealized. But the deep solidarity and connection they embody are unique.</p>
<aside class="pq pq--center"><q>The solidarity of volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends.</q></aside>
<p>Still, this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. And it doesn’t need to be. The solidarity of volunteers needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends. That’s something most people can get involved in somehow. In the case of Palestine, it starts by building public support and political pressure toward a cease-fire and a halt to military aid to Israel. That includes unrelenting pressure on Biden and the defense of <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/jamaal-bowman-cease-fire-gaza-reelection">congressional advocates</a> of a cease-fire from those who want to punish their stance.</p>
<p>The United States underwrites Israel’s occupation through massive <a href="https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts">military and financial aid</a>, and it is underwriting the present war on Gaza. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official, told the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/06/us-weapons-israel-gaza/"><em>Washington Post</em></a> that the administration had facilitated “an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support.”</p>
<p>The result, always painfully evident in Rafah, is that Israel’s impunity is an American export. But a withdrawal of support will, in all likelihood, not be enough. Sanctions designed to coerce the recognition of Palestinians’ fundamental rights will be necessary. They will need to go far beyond targeting <a href="https://www.state.gov/imposing-further-sanctions-to-promote-peace-security-and-stability-in-the-west-bank/">individual settlers</a> or their supporters.</p>
<p>The call for sanctions is a direct challenge to the main, unspoken tenet of US policy toward Israel. Biden and his subordinates will speak about the need for a Palestinian state, and the need for Israel to show restraint. But their main principle, which has held absolute for three decades and was predominant for decades before that, is that Israel must never be <em>forced</em> to make such concessions. Israel may be cajoled, flattered, persuaded, and nudged, but never compelled. The result is that Palestine is held in a permanent state of exception.</p>
<p>A relative of Dr Nasrallah, the pharmacist whose family home Rachel was defending when she was killed, told me that he felt as though Rafah had been sucked into a “black hole, where international rules do not apply, and the world cannot see or feel us.”</p>
<p>He describes returning home one afternoon to a scene of carnage, the aftermath of an air strike on a neighboring building, in which at least two families were entirely wiped out and another lost two children. (Friends of the Nasrallahs are <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-nasrallahs-leave-gaza">raising funds</a> to help them out of harm’s way.) The relative, who asked that his name not be used, said that it was now common to see men breaking down in tears at the slightest defeat, unable to provide for their wives or children. “We speak,” he said, “about a fine line between life and death.”</p>
<p>An invasion of Rafah, which may be several weeks away, would be a disaster “beyond imagining,” United Nations <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/02/1146522">doctors</a> say. As Rachel <a href="https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel/emails">put it</a> a few weeks before she was killed: “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”</p>
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Tom Dalehttps://jacobin.com/2024/03/uber-australia-worker-committee-union/Uber Australia Is Creating a Yellow Union to Head Off Reform2024-03-15T16:22:01Z2024-03-15T16:22:01Z<p>Since 2017, fifteen food-delivery riders have lost their lives on Australian roads. And this is only the most tragic outcome of an industry that systematically mistreats workers. As numerous media reports have revealed, gig workers face substandard rights and a myriad of workplace dangers as they struggle to make ends meet on paltry wages. Over […]</p>
<h3>After expanding into Australia over a decade ago, Uber is now setting up employer-controlled committees that mimic real union structures. It’s part of a multipronged strategy aimed at heading off demands for better wages and safer conditions.</h3>
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People walk past an Uber carshare car parking at Bondi Beach on February 11, 2023 in Sydney, Australia. (Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
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<p>Since 2017, fifteen food-delivery riders have lost their lives on Australian roads. And this is only the most tragic outcome of an industry that systematically mistreats workers. As numerous media reports have revealed, gig workers face substandard rights and a myriad of workplace dangers as they struggle to make ends meet on paltry wages.</p>
<p>Over the last year, however, the Anthony Albanese Labor government has pressed ahead with its plans to regulate gig work, putting companies like Uber under pressure. In response, Uber has ramped up initiatives to ensure it can continue to profitably operate in Australia, which has <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/transport/australia-is-uber-s-crown-jewel-after-revenues-surge-to-9-2b-20231029-p5efui">been described as</a> Uber’s “crown jewel” due to the phenomenal profits the company makes there.</p>
<p>The company has engaged closely with Parliament on the gig-worker reforms. And, aware that the Transport Workers’ Union is attempting to organize, or at least regulate, the industry, Uber has also set up a national committee to consult with its workers on health and safety issues. However, according to one of the workers’ representatives who spoke to <em>Jacobin</em>, Uber’s committee might not be as empowering or representative as the company claims.</p>
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<h2>The Gig Economy’s “Double Movement”</h2>
<p>To understand Uber’s initiative, it helps to have an overview of the recent expansion of gig-work companies like Uber, which has involved two major phases.</p>
<p>Roughly speaking, this two-part process can be seen as a microlevel version of a “double movement,” a concept advanced by Hungarian economic sociologist <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/04/karl-polanyi-the-great-transformation-neoliberalism-countermovement-capitalism">Karl Polanyi</a> in his 1944 work <em><a href="https://inctpped.ie.ufrj.br/spiderweb/pdf_4/Great_Transformation.pdf">The Great Transformation</a></em>. According to Polanyi, the first movement describes a period of capitalist-driven upheaval that is followed by a countermovement in which the state intervenes to mitigate the upheaval’s destructive effects.</p>
<p>In the first part of the gig-economy double movement, companies and investors pushed aggressively to flood the market — and in Uber’s case, this meant undercutting the taxi industry in order to grab massive swathes of customers.</p>
<p>Part of this meant sidestepping existing workplace regulations. Documents <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/15/the-uber-files-australia-launched-operated-illegally-document-leak">leaked to the <em>Guardian</em></a> showed that, when Uber launched in Australia in 2012, the company knew it was operating illegally, as it lacked the required commercial vehicle and driver licenses.</p>
<p>It was, after all, a similar tactic to that which it had used in other countries. As the Silicon Valley maxim has it, the goal was to “move fast and break things.”</p>
<p>After establishing a large and loyal customer base, Uber then moved to the second phase by lobbying to legalize its operation, increase its social license, and ensure that any state intervention would occur on terms favorable to the company.</p>
<p>As the company’s head of public policy said in an email to his team in 2015, “Ops has poured gasoline on the fire, so now it’s up to us to protect what they’ve built.”</p>
<p>In an Australian context, Uber’s second phase now means ensuring that Labor governments don’t impose an industrial-relations framework that might threaten its business model.</p>
<p>So far, the signs are that this has been successful. According to a <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Education_and_Employment/ClosingLoopholes/Report">Senate inquiry report</a>, over the last year, the Labor government has agreed to some of Uber’s suggested amendments to its Closing Loopholes legislation, praising the company for its “constructive approach.” For its part, <a href="https://www.uber.com/en-AU/newsroom/closing-loopholes-bill/">Uber welcomed the bill</a> as “a significant step forward in ensuring a sustainable future for Australia’s gig economy.”</p>
<p>The legislation, which passed in February, gives the Fair Work Commission (FWC) the power to impose minimum standards in the gig-work industry. However, the precise nature of those standards will be determined when a case is brought before the FWC, which won’t happen before August this year at the earliest.</p>
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<h2>A Potemkin Health and Safety Committee?</h2>
<p>Part of Uber’s strategy for the second phase has included setting up structures mimicking those that can be established by organized workers in other sectors, such as health and safety committees.</p>
<p>Health and safety committees are elected by workers and have a range of statutory powers, depending on the state or territory. Perhaps most significantly, if a health and safety representative identifies unsafe conditions, they can shut down a worksite or direct a worker to stop working.</p>
<p>In many workplaces, employees organize among themselves to form these committees. In this case, however, Comrade Uber has taken the initiative to form its own committee.</p>
<p>Last year, Uber Eats called on workers to nominate for its National Work Health & Safety Committee via app notifications and emails, with representatives from every state and territory divided into the type of vehicle they used.</p>
<p>Registered Uber workers then elected representatives from among the nominees. However, as Uber didn’t answer questions from <em>Jacobin</em> about what percentage of its workforce had taken part in voting, it’s unknown how representative the successful nominees were.</p>
<p>Furthermore, <a href="https://www.uber.com/au/en/u/uber-eats-whs-committee/">according to the committee’s website</a>, over half of the committee was hand-picked by the company itself. Uber says it decided to incorporate non-elected members to adequately “represent the diverse voices of delivery people, including diversity of gender and cultural background.”</p>
<p>According to the committee’s website, the committee’s role is to “provide input from the delivery people they represent,” which involves engaging “regularly with those delivery people to understand and distill important WHS issues.”</p>
<p>So far, “engagement” consists of a link to a Google form that workers can use to contact their representatives about health and safety concerns. These messages are then sent to a generic email address. Beyond this, it’s unclear what other forms of engagement Uber has in mind.</p>
<p>However, the Google form is not a direct link between workers and their representatives.</p>
<p>As an Uber WHS committee member recently told <em>Jacobin</em>, as of late February, that the company had not yet given committee members access to that generic email address. According to the rep — whom <em>Jacobin</em> has chosen not to name — Uber had promised to give them access to the email following the committee’s first quarterly meeting of 2024. Uber also did not answer questions about whether the representatives have been given access to this email.</p>
<p>The form itself states that “all information is provided <em>directly</em>” to worker representatives. However, <em>Jacobin </em>and another Uber worker put this to the test in early March. Both requests were answered not by worker representatives, but by Uber’s “industrial relations” officer. It’s not clear whether this person fields all incoming messages submitted via the Google form.</p>
<p>Ordinarily, workplace law guarantees workers access to health and safety representatives (HSR). <a href="https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-health-and-safety/consultation/health-and-safety-representatives-and-work-groups?uclick_id=3bab58a4-3682-47e1-b456-adc74b21ebbf">As outlined by</a> Safe Work Australia, employers must “ensure workers’ health and safety interests are well represented and each worker can easily access their HSR.”</p>
<p>According to the rep who spoke to <em>Jacobin</em>, Uber has also provided no information on the hours expected of committee members. Indeed, the company repeatedly used the word “obscure” to describe the process thus far and explained that as of late February, the committee hadn’t met since November, when its members were flown up to Sydney and put up in a luxury hotel for their induction. The company also treated them to dinner at Sydney’s Babylon Rooftop bar and grill.</p>
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<h2>Uber Union?</h2>
<p>Unions typically view health and safety as an essential part of the overall goal of organizing workers to win better wages and conditions. Indeed, as unions regularly point out, workplace safety can’t be separated from wages. Because gig workers are paid per job rather than per hour, it’s a system that encourages them to take risks to avoid delays and the lower earnings that result.</p>
<p>This is a major problem in the gig economy. The Uber Eats delivery rep who spoke to <em>Jacobin </em>said they personally earn on average $18 to $20 per hour, well below Australia’s minimum wage of $23.23. This report is unlikely to be an isolated or exceptional case — according to a <a href="https://www.twu.com.au/doordash/gig-workers-survey-unmasks-the-flexibility-myth/">2023 survey of over one thousand gig workers</a>, at least 57 percent of food-delivery workers are paid less than minimum wage.</p>
<p>Additionally, it’s an essential principle of trade unionism that workers have the right to organize autonomously from their employers. And yet, one of the first things a visitor sees on the Uber WHS committee website is a banner proclaiming that “the Transport Workers Union (TWU) acknowledges and supports the establishment of a National WHS Committee.”</p>
<p><em>Jacobin</em> reached out to the TWU to ask whether it has any involvement with the committee, and whether it had confidence that Uber was genuinely seeking to empower its representatives.</p>
<p>According to TWU secretary Michael Kaine, Uber developed its plans to form a WHS committee after TWU members in Canberra used statutory rights to set up work groups with elected workers as health and safety representatives.</p>
<p>Additionally, a TWU spokesperson confirmed that several TWU members had been elected as safety representatives in the Australian Capital Territory, and as a result would be eligible to sit on Uber’s national committee. Beyond this, the union gave no indication that it has any ongoing role with the committee.</p>
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<h2>The TWU and Uber</h2>
<p>The TWU has spearheaded the push to regulate the gig economy. In 2021, the TWU and Uber <a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-driving-ubers-historic-agreement-with-the-twu-on-gig-work-186044">signed a statement of principles</a> about baseline conditions in the industry. And the TWU was no doubt instrumental in pushing Labor to include gig-work reforms in the Closing Loopholes legislation.</p>
<p>However, efforts to organize the industry — as distinct from regulating it — are slow going. As the TWU’s spokesperson told <em>Jacobin</em>, the union has hundreds of transport gig worker members, including food-delivery riders, rideshare drivers, and Amazon Flex couriers, across the country.</p>
<p>If Uber’s <a href="https://www.uber.com/en-AU/newsroom/flexibility-works/">claim of 150,000 workers</a> using the Uber and Uber Eats app is correct, that represents union density of less than 1 percent, a low figure, even in comparison with Australia’s relatively low rate of unionization.</p>
<p>But it’s not hard to understand the reasons for this. Simply put, gig workers aren’t an easy sector to unionize.</p>
<p>Gig workers are fragmented and culturally and linguistically diverse, and few plan a long-term career in the “industry.” And with such low and precarious income, the idea of giving some of it away in union dues is no doubt an unappealing proposition.</p>
<p>However, there are important precedents. There are similar challenges to organizing Australia’s itinerant, migrant-dominated fruit and vegetable workforce — but other unions <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/04/australian-farmworkers-agriculture-fruit-pickers-shortage">have nevertheless made inroads there</a>.</p>
<p>If gig workers aren’t going to be unionized anytime soon, it makes sense for the TWU to lobby for better regulations or to launch challenges at Fair Work rather than threatening gig-work companies with industrial muscle that it doesn’t have.</p>
<p>If the union can use its political heft within Labor to advocate for legislative changes like the recent gig-work reforms, this can be part of a broader organizing strategy.</p>
<p>However, Uber’s health and safety committee demonstrates not only that gig-work titans have a long-term public relations strategy. It also highlights weaknesses in a union strategy that focuses on lobbying for improved regulations to the exclusion of rank-and-file organizing.</p>
<p>Without engaged and organized workers, the danger is that representative structures will be controlled by employers, who will render them ineffective at best. At worst, they might constitute a form of “union-washing,” allowing exploitative companies to market themselves as pro-worker while subverting genuine attempts to win better conditions. And even if they do facilitate some improvements to safety, it seems highly unlikely that such bodies will raise one of the main drivers of workplace accidents, namely, piece rates that are often well below the legal minimum.</p>
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Zacharias Szumer