24 December 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The senator’s betrayal is devastating for the future of trust and cooperation within the Democratic party
The White House was reported to be “blindsided” by the news. But progressives have long seen this moment coming. All year long progressives in Congress have been negotiating with moderates like Manchin over the Biden administration’s legislative priorities. They agreed to support an infrastructure bill which the moderates badly wanted (and which was, to be fair, a good piece of legislation) in exchange for assurances that Build Back Better would also pass Congress. They stuck by this deal through thick and thin, even when Manchin insisted on defanging many of its climate provisions. They didn’t even balk when asked to drop their demand that both pieces of legislation pass Congress at the same time, which would have prevented Manchin from shirking on the agreement later.
In return, progressives got screwed – badly. For all the talk over the last few years of the emergence of a “tea party of the left” or moderate hair-rending over the social media antics of “the Squad”, progressives in Congress approached these negotiations constructively, reasonably, and in good faith. They put aside their concerns about Joe Biden and gave him the wins he wanted on centrist priorities, even when that meant delaying action on their own. And they did this even though the evidence is that the main components of the Build Back Better agenda are overwhelmingly popular with the public at large and might even help to save an administration which the public sees as badly adrift.
This outcome is devastating for the future of trust and cooperation within the Democratic party. Progressives can hardly be expected to continue to subordinate their own goals to those of the moderate wing in the future or trust moderate leaders to work towards progressive goals. There’s not likely to ever be a “tea party of the left”, but progressives can be expected to start exerting themselves much more vigorously through public debate, legislative negotiation and launching primary challengers against the centrists who thwart their agenda.
Progressives are also likely to be emboldened because Manchin’s betrayal provides additional validation for two important components of their critique of the Democratic party. The first is that the party has been too willing to put corporate interests above tackling social welfare and climate change. Manchin not only represents the coal state of West Virginia but also profits handsomely from the industry personally. This consideration can hardly have been far from his mind when he forced the removal from the Build Back Bill of a provision which would have done more than anything to force energy companies to phase out fossil fuels. With the future of the planet at stake and figures like Manchin blocking the party from doing anything about it, progressives can only conclude that the party itself needs transforming.
The second progressive critique which has been vindicated by this turn of events is the charge that the Democratic party’s leadership is too complacent and chummy – some might also add old – to face up to the challenges facing America today. Throughout this year, Biden has barely lifted a finger in public to shepherd Build Back Better through Congress. If activists used to worry about the deals that got done behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms, then 2021 was the year of the smoke-filled Zoom: a hazy interminable conversation between the president and Manchin which never seemed to yield any concrete results, but which did just enough to keep Biden quiet in public. If the president had seen himself as more of a crusader for progressive goals than a former senator still working the room, there’s no guarantee the outcome would have been different. But one thing is for sure: the approach he did take failed.
Trust takes years to build and only a single act to destroy. And unfortunately, there’s no time now to rebuild it, because Manchin’s blow comes as Democrats have only a short time to pass major legislation before campaigning begins for the midterms. This could meanlosing out not only on salvaging some parts of Build Back Better, but also on crucial action on safeguarding voting rights. And without any significant new accomplishments, the party faces dim prospects in 2022 and 2024.
As imperfect a vehicle for progressive hopes as it is, the Biden presidency may be the last in a long time with both the desire and the capabilities to tackle social inequality, hold back the rise of the oceans, and safeguard American democracy. Manchin and his enablers may have just killed it. Progressives will never forgive, and they will never forget.
People react after Kimberly Potter, the former Minnesota police officer who killed Black motorist Daunte Wright, was found guilty of manslaughter. (photo: Adam Bettcher/Reuters)
Ex-officer maintained during trial that she made a mistake when she grabbed her gun instead of her Taser
The former police officer, who is white, had maintained that she made a tragic mistake when she grabbed her gun, instead of her Taser, and shot Wright, who was Black, when he was pulled over while driving in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center.
But on Thursday the jury found Potter guilty of both of the charges she faced, of first-degree and second-degree manslaughter.
Potter’s bail was revoked and she was led from court in handcuffs. Sentencing is due on 8 March.
Shouts of “justice” rang out outside the courthouse in Minneapolis on Thursday afternoon as protesters who had braved freezing temperatures for days awaiting the outcome praised the verdict.
Almost two hours after the conviction, Daunte’s parents, Katie and Aubrey Wright, who had sat holding hands and gulping in deep breaths as they waited for the jury’s pronouncement, emerged, accompanied by Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, who led the prosecution of the case.
Aubrey Wright began to speak, as if to thank prosecutors, but choked up after two or three words and fell silent.
Katie Wright described how she “sort of let out a yelp” when the verdict came down.
Asked by reporters how she felt, she added: “That moment that I heard guilty on manslaughter one [in the first degree] – every single emotion that you could imagine running through your body.”
Ellison pointed out how there would be “an empty chair” at the dinner table of Daunte’s family over the holidays, after the loss of the 20-year-old, who also had a baby son called Daunte Jr.
Ellison said the young man had had his whole life ahead of him and was proud to be a new father and loved his mother and siblings and “his whole beautiful family”.
The attorney general chose to describe the verdict as “a degree of accountability”, rather than justice, because a life lost could not be brought back.
But demonstrators outside the courthouse, braced for the possibility of yet another acquittal after a fatal police shooting, became celebratory, with a brass band showing up and a man playing When the saints come marching in on a trombone as people danced.
Wright was killed while the former police officer Derek Chauvin was on trial, in the same Minneapolis court house where Potter was just convicted, for the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, sparking the biggest anti-racism uprising in the US since the civil rights movement.
Floyd’s death, for which Chauvin was convicted, had become a symbol for the estimated hundreds of people killed by police in Minnesota and the wider US, and eventually for racially biased policing around the world. The sudden and violent killing of Wright in the middle of that trial ramped up tension and grieving in local communities.
Unlike Chauvin’s drawn-out torture of Floyd as he died, Potter was seen on body-camera footage shocked and traumatized after killing Wright with a single shot.
After shouting “Taser, Taser, Taser”, while she trained a new officer and was accompanied at the traffic stop by another officer, Potter fired at Wright, but it was her gun she was holding.
She apologized while appearing on the stand as the final trial witness, testifying in her own defense, but prosecutors accused her of a “blunder of epic proportions” in Wright’s death and said a mistake was no defense, and that she was a highly-trained officer schooled in the use of both stun gun and firearm, and avoiding mix-ups.
Prosecutor Erin Eldridge called Wright’s death “entirely preventable. Totally avoidable.”
Potter’s attorney, Earl Gray, argued that Wright was to blame for trying to flee from police, after he tried to get back into the car to drive away as the rookie officer Potter was training was about to handcuff him.
Wright’s killing prompted angry but non-violent protesters to gather in Brooklyn Center demanding justice.
Demonstrator and mother Bethany Hemrich told the Guardian at the time: “They didn’t have to kill him. I feel like if it was a white person, they wouldn’t have shot him.”
On Thursday afternoon, one demonstrator outside court told CNN, without disclosing her name, that “the world has changed” since Floyd’s murder.
“The world can change for the better, for us Black people, I have a Black son growing up in this world,” she said, adding that it was tough to live wondering “who is the next man who is going to be killed?”
People queue at a popup COVID-19 testing site in New York, U.S., December 3, 2021. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
We’ve been making the same errors for nearly two years now.
This is not March 2020. We have masks. We have better treatments. Our immune systems are much more prepared to fight off the virus, thanks to vaccines. But as a society, we are still not prepared. Here are the six traps that we keep falling into, each consequence made all the more acute because of Omicron’s speed.
We rush to dismiss it as “mild.”
In February 2020, when the then-novel coronavirus still seemed far away, a reassuring statistic emerged: 82 percent of cases were mild—milder than SARS, certainly milder than Ebola. This notion would haunt our response: What’s the big deal? Worry about the flu! Since then, we’ve learned what mild in “most” people can mean when the virus spreads to infect hundreds of millions: 5.4 million dead around the world, with 800,000 in just the U.S.
This coronavirus has caused far more damage than viruses that are deadlier to individuals, because it’s more transmissible. A milder but more transmissible virus can spread so aggressively that it ultimately causes more hospitalizations and deaths. Mild initial infections can also lead to persistent, debilitating symptoms, as people with long COVID have learned. The notion of a mostly mild disease became entrenched so rapidly that the experience of many long-haulers was dismissed. We’ve seen how such early concepts can lead us astray, and still the idea of Omicron as an intrinsically mild variant has already taken hold.
We don’t know yet if Omicron is less virulent than Delta. We do know it’s far more transmissible in highly immune places. That’s enough for worry. We can expect Omicron cases to be milder in vaccinated people than unvaccinated. And because the variant is able to infect many vaccinated people that Delta cannot, the proportion of infected people who need to be hospitalized will look lower than Delta’s. What’s less clear is if Omicron is intrinsically any less virulent in unvaccinated people. Some early data from South Africa and the U.K. suggest that it might be, but confounding factors like previous immunity are hard to disentangle. In any case, Omicron does not appear so mild that we can dismiss the hospitalization burden of a huge wave.
That burden will depend largely on how many unvaccinated and undervaccinated people Omicron reaches. The U.S. simply has too many people who are entirely unvaccinated (27 percent) and people over 65—the age group most vulnerable to COVID—who are unboosted (44 percent). In a country of 330 million, that’s tens of millions of people. Omicron will find them. Because this variant is so fast, the window for vaccinating or boosting people in time is smaller. And although vaccines remain very good at protecting against hospitalization, we make a mistake when …
We treat vaccines as all-or-nothing shields against infection.
When the COVID-19 vaccines first started rolling out this time last year, they were billed as near-perfect shots that could block not only severe disease, but almost all infections—absolute wonders that would bring the pandemic to a screeching halt. The stakes some prominent experts laid out seemed to be: Get vaccinated, or get infected.
The summer of Delta made it clear that the options were not binary. Vaccinated people were getting infected. Their antibody levels were dropping (as they always do after vaccination), and the new variant was super transmissible and slightly immune-dodging. Infections among the vaccinated very, very rarely turned severe, and the vaccines had never been designed to stave off all infections. But every positive test among the immunized was still labeled a breakthrough, and carried a whiff of failure.
Our COVID shots were never going to stop infections forever—that’s not really what any vaccines do, especially when they’re fighting swiftly shape-shifting respiratory viruses. Think of disease as a tug-of-war on a field with death and asymptomatic infection at opposite ends, and symptomatic disease and transmission in between. The vaccines are pulling in one direction, the virus in the other. A jacked vaccine can force the virus to yield ground: People who would have been seriously ill might get only an irksome cold; people who would have been laid up for a week might now feel nothing at all. When the virus shifts and gains strength, it will first make gains in the zone of infection. But it would have to pull really hard to completely usurp the stretch of field that denotes severe sickness, the vaccines’ most durable stronghold.
With the highly mutated Omicron, the coronavirus has once again yanked on the line. This should prompt a heave from us in response: an additional dose of vaccine. But no number of boosts can be expected to make bodies totally impermeable to infection. That means the vaccinated, who can still carry and pass on the virus, cannot exempt themselves from the pandemic, despite what the White House has implied. None of our tools, in fact, is sufficient on its own for this situation, which makes it extra dicey when …
We still try to use testing as a one-stop solution.
For tests to fulfill their very essential role in the pandemic toolkit, they need to be accessible, reliable, and fast. Nearly two years into the pandemic, that’s still not an option for most people in the United States.
PCR-based tests, while great at detecting the virus early on in infection, take a long time to run and deliver results. Laboratory personnel remain overstretched and underfunded, and the supply shortages they battled early on never truly disappeared. Rapid at-home tests, although more abundant now, still frequently go out of stock; when people can find them, they’re still paying exorbitant prices. The Biden administration has pledged to make more free tests available, and reimburse some of the ones people nab off shelves. But those benefits won’t kick in until after the new year, leapfrogging the holidays. And only people with private insurance will qualify for reimbursements, which are not always easy to finagle. If anything, the gross inequities in American testing are only poised to grow.
Even at their best, test results offer only a snapshot in time—they just tell you if they detected the virus at the moment you swabbed your nose. And yet, days-old negatives are still being used as passports to travel and party. That left plenty of time for Delta to sneak through; with the speedy, antibody-dodging Omicron, the gaps feel even wider. It’s a particular worry now because Omicron seems to rocket up to transmissible levels on a faster timeline than its predecessors—possibly within the first couple of days after people are infected. That leaves a dangerously tight window in which to detect the virus before it has a chance to spread. Test results were never a great proxy for infectiousness; now people will need to be even more careful when acting on results. Already there have been reports of people spreading Omicron at parties, despite receiving negative test results shortly before the events.
Omicron cases are growing so quickly that they’re already stressing the United States’ frayed testing infrastructure. In many parts of the country, PCR testing sites are choked with hours-long lines and won’t deliver answers in time for holiday gatherings; a negative result from a rapid antigen test, although speedier, might not hold from morning to afternoon. (Some experts are also starting to worry that certain rapid tests might not detect Omicron as well as they did its predecessors, though some others, like the very-popular BinaxNOW, will probably be just fine; the FDA, which has already identified some PCR tests that are flummoxed by the variant, is investigating.) Our testing problem is only going to get worse, even as …
We pretend the virus won’t be everywhere soon.
By now, this story should sound familiar: A new virus causes an outbreak in a country far away. Then cases skyrocket in Europe, then in major U.S. cities—and then in the rest of the country. Travel bans are enacted too late and, in any case, are incredibly porous, banning travel by foreigners but not Americans (as if the virus cared about passports). This is what happened with the original virus and China, and this is what has happened again now with Omicron and southern Africa.
Then and now, the experience of other places should have been a warning about how fast this virus can spread. How Omicron cases will translate into hospitalizations will be harder to discern from trends abroad. Whereas everyone started from the same baseline of zero COVID immunity in early 2020, now every country—and even every state in the U.S.—has a unique mix of immunity from different vaccines, different levels of uptake, different booster schemes, or different numbers of previous infections. Americans’ current mix of immunity is not very good at heading off Omicron infections—hence the rapid rise in cases everywhere—but it should be more durable against hospitalizations.
We’ll have to keep all of this in mind as we try to divine Omicron’s future in the U.S. from hospitalizations in South Africa and Europe. Could we see differences simply because a country used AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which is slightly less effective than the mRNA ones? Or boosted more of its elderly population? Or had a large previous wave of the Beta variant, which never took hold elsewhere? And some communities remain especially vulnerable to the virus for the same reasons they were in March 2020. Just like at the beginning of the pandemic …
We fail to prioritize the most vulnerable groups.
As Omicron tears through the U.S., it will likely repeat the inequities of the past two years. Elderly people, whose immune systems are naturally weaker, are especially reliant on the extra protection of a booster. But on top of the 44 percent who haven’t had their boosters yet, 12 percent of Americans 65 and over aren’t even “fully vaccinated” under the soon-to-be-updated definition. Boosters might not even be enough, which is why the most vulnerable elderly people—those packed into nursing homes—must be surrounded by a shield of immunity. But Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for nursing-home staff has faced legal opposition, and almost a quarter of such workers still aren’t vaccinated, let alone boosted. Even if they all got their first shots today, Omicron is spreading faster than their immune defenses could conceivably accrue. Without other defenses, including better ventilation, masking for both staff and visitors, and rapid testing (but … see above), nursing homes will become grim hot spots, as they were in the early pandemic and the first Delta surge.
Working-class Americans are vulnerable too. In the pandemic’s first year, they were five times as likely to die of COVID-19 as college-educated people. Working-age people of color were hit even harder: 89 percent fewer would have lost their lives if they’d had the same COVID death rates as white college graduates. These galling disparities will likely recur, because the U.S. has done little to address their root causes.
The White House has stressed that “we know how to protect people and we have the tools to do it,” but although America might have said tools, many Americans do not. Airborne viruses are simply more likely to infect people who live in crowded homes, or have jobs that don’t allow them to work remotely. Making vaccines “available at convenient locations and for no cost,” as the White House said it has done, doesn’t account for the time it takes to book and attend an appointment or recover from side effects, and the 53 million Americans—44 percent of the workforce—who are paid low wages, at an hourly median of $10, can ill-afford to take that time off. Nor can they afford to wait in long testing lines or to blow through rapid tests at $25 a pair. Making said tests reimbursable is little help to those who can’t pay out of pocket, or to the millions who lack health insurance altogether.
Once infected, low-income people are also less likely to have places in which to isolate, or paid sick leave that would let them miss work. To make it feasible for vulnerable people to protect those around them, New York City is providing several free services for people with COVID, including hotel rooms, meal deliveries, and medical check-ins. But neither the Trump nor Biden administration pushed such social solutions, focusing instead on biomedical countermeasures such as therapeutics and vaccines that, to reiterate, cannot exempt people from the pandemic’s collective problem.
Unsurprisingly, people with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and jobs in grocery stores and agricultural settings are overrepresented among the unvaccinated. The vaccine inequities of the summer will become the booster inequities of the winter, as the most privileged Americans once again have the easiest access to life-saving shots, while the more vulnerable ones are left to keep the economy running. Ultimately, the weight of all these failures will come to rest on the hospital system and the people who work in it, because, even now …
We let health-care workers bear the pandemic’s brunt.
Health-care workers have been described as the pandemic’s front line, but the metaphor is inexact. Hospitals are really the rear guard, tasked with healing people who were failed by means of prevention. And America’s continuing laxity around prevention has repeatedly forced its health-care workers to take the brunt of each pandemic surge. Delta was already on its second go at sending hospitalizations climbing. Omicron, with its extreme transmissibility, could accelerate that rise.
If so, many of the trends from the early pandemic will likely recur at rapid speed. Omicron’s global spread could cause shortages of vital equipment. Hospitals will struggle to recruit enough staff, and rural hospitals especially so. (Biden’s plan to send 1,000 military personnel to hospitals might help, but most of them won’t be deployed until January.) Nonessential surgeries will be deferred, and many patients will come in sicker after the surge is over, creating crushing catch-up workloads for already tired health-care workers.
Many Americans have mistakenly assumed that the health-care system recovers in the lulls between surges. In truth, that system has continually eroded. Droves of nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, lab technicians, and other health-care workers have quit, leaving even more work for those left behind. COVID patients are struggling to get care, but so are patients of all kinds. In this specific way, the U.S. is in a worse state than in March 2020. As the doctors Megan Ranney and Joseph Sakran wrote, “We are on the verge of a collapse that will leave us unable to provide even a basic standard of care.” Being overwhelmed is no longer an acute condition that American hospitals might conceivably experience, but a chronic state into which it is now locked.
Omicron is dangerous not just in itself, but also because it adds to the damage done by all the previous variants—and at speed. And the U.S. has consistently underestimated the cumulative toll of the pandemic, lowering its guard at the first hint of calm instead of using those moments to prepare for the future. That is why it keeps making the same mistakes. American immune systems are holding on to their memories for dear life, but American minds seem bent on forgetting the past years’ lessons.
An emotional Oslaida Mederos, center, speaks to members of the media during an impromptu press conference. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
Supporters of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos say the sentence is deeply unjust and truck drivers around the country have taken up his cause, using hashtags like #NoTrucksToColorado and #NoTrucksColorado.
Speaking at the rally at the state Capitol, Leonard Martinez, one of the lawyers representing Aguilera-Mederos, said the injustice of such long sentences needs to be addressed, both by reforming sentencing laws but also looking at the actions of prosecutors and judges.
“This fight is not just for him but for all,” he said.
The Colorado judge has said mandatory-minimum sentencing laws forced him to impose the long prison term after Aguilera-Mederos was convicted of vehicular homicide and other charges.
His family said in a statement they do not want to minimize the loss of those killed in the crash, but are calling on Gov. Jared Polis to “take immediate action” to reduce the sentence for the 26-year-old man with no criminal record. He was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol and fully cooperated with investigators, supporters said in a statement. More than 4.7 million people have signed an online petition asking for a commutation.
Polis, a Democrat, said Tuesday he is reviewing a clemency application.
Prosecutors asked for a reconsideration of the sentence after the outcry. But they also noted the driver declined plea deal negotiations and said the convictions recognize harm caused to crash victims.
A hearing has been scheduled to discuss the reconsideration request on Monday.
In a statement Wednesday, District Attorney Alexis King said the victims and their families want to be heard as the resentencing request is considered.
“Our primary concern is ensuring that they are able to share with the court how this incident has impacted their lives as the court considers the appropriate sentence and follows the process set forth in the law,” said King, who asked for patience from those seeking an immediate resolution.
Aguilera-Mederos’ trial attorney, James Colgan, said Wednesday that King, who inherited the case from her predecessor, could have dropped some of the charges against him if she wanted a different sentence to be reached, given the state’s laws.
Colgan said he is open to having either the governor or the judge decide a new, fair sentence. He declined to say what that might be.
“When there’s tragedy on both sides, there’s got to be a happy medium, because ruining someone’s life isn’t going to make life better for the victims,” said Colgan.
Aguilera-Mederos testified that he was hauling lumber when the brakes on his semitrailer failed as he was descending a steep grade of Interstate 70 in the Rocky Mountain foothills in spring 2019. His truck plowed into vehicles that had slowed because of another wreck outside Denver, setting off a chain-reaction wreck and a fireball that consumed vehicles and melted parts of the highway.
He wept as he apologized to the victims’ families at his Dec. 13 sentencing.
“I am not a murderer. I am not a killer. When I look at my charges, we are talking about a murderer, which is not me,” he said. “I have never thought about hurting anybody in my entire life.”
Prosecutors argued he should have used a runaway ramp designed for such situations. Aguilera-Mederos, for his part, said he was struggling to avoid traffic and trying to shift to slow down.
District Court Judge Bruce Jones said at sentencing that mandatory minimum sentencing laws required consecutive sentences on 27 counts of vehicular assault, assault, reckless driving and other charges. “I will state that if I had the discretion, it would not be my sentence,” the judge said.
The crash killed 24-year-old Miguel Angel Lamas Arellano, 67-year-old William Bailey, 61-year-old Doyle Harrison and 69-year-old Stanley Politano. Relatives of victims supported at least some prison time at his sentencing hearing.
Bailey’s wife, Gage Evans, told The New York Times the driver’s sentence shouldn’t be commuted but said lawmakers should instead examine the sentencing laws.
“This person should spend some time in prison and think about his actions,” Evans said, adding she and other victims’ relatives object to a “public narrative” that Aguilera-Mederos is a victim. “We are truly the victims,” she said.
The Amazon warehouse in Bessemer. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty)
For the first time, Amazon is experiencing a multi-site U.S. work stoppage. It comes at the end of a year marked by union organizing and labor militancy at the retail giant.
Coming just three days before Christmas to ensure maximum impact, the action caps a year of intense organizing and protest by Amazon warehouse workers who have been on the frontlines of both the Covid-19 pandemic and extreme weather events.
Organized by the labor network Amazonians United, the walkouts occurred during the morning shifts at the company’s DIL3 facility in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood and at the DLN2 warehouse in the nearby town of Cicero.
“We’ve been underpaid, overworked, and also unsafely staffed going on months now,” said Ted Miin, a sortation associate and Amazonians United member at the DIL3 delivery station. “We’ve tried to raise these issues with management, but they’ve effectively dismissed our concerns.”
Miin told In These Times that at his warehouse in Gage Park, 65 out of an estimated 100 workers signed onto a petition demanding a $3‑per-hour raise and safe staffing. The petition was delivered to management a month ago, but the workers never received a response. “They’re not taking us seriously, so we’re walking out,” he said.
At the DLN2 delivery station in Cicero, Miin explained that management explicitly promised double-pay for those working on Thanksgiving, but only gave one-and-a-half time pay. He also said that new hires at the facility did not receive a promised $1,000-dollar sign-on bonus.
“We have not received the bonuses we were promised. There are people here who were hired as permanent workers, and then they took their badges away and made them temporary workers,” one Cicero worker told reporters on Wednesday. “They are staffing this place unsafely, making people work too fast.”
The Cicero workers say they are demanding a $5‑per-hour raise and a return to 20-minute breaks, alleging managers recently reduced their break time by five minutes.
“We’re willing to go back to work. We will work hard to make sure everyone gets their Christmas gifts, everyone gets their packages. But we just want to be treated fairly,” another Cicero worker explained. “This is the busiest month of the year. If Amazon can meet our demands, treat us right like human beings, we will make everybody’s Christmas a beautiful one.”
Asked for comment about the workers’ allegations, Amazon senior PR manager Barbara Agrait told In These Times: “We respect the rights of employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so. We are proud to offer employees leading pay, competitive benefits, and the opportunity to grow with our company.”
The walkouts come as Amazon’s safety policies are under scrutiny after six workers were killed when a tornado ripped through a delivery station in Edwardsville, Illinois on December 10. Following that tragedy, at least 500 Amazon employees on the East Coast signed petitions calling for an end to the company’s ban on workers bringing their cellphones into warehouses, which limits their ability to get updates about severe weather events or other emergencies.
Amazonians United is a solidarity union of Amazon workers scattered across the country, functioning as a union but without seeking legal recognition through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Since 2019, its members have organized petition campaigns and work stoppages to successfully win paid sick leave, pay increases and safety measures.
By not seeking legal recognition, Amazonians United’s strategy is decidedly different from that of established unions like the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which lost a high-profile union certification vote at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama this spring but will get a revote after the NLRB found that the company illegally intimidated workers during the election.
“We are a union. We’re a solidarity union. We take care of each other,” Miin said of Amazonians United, contending that in the legal realm of NLRB certification votes, the company has more power because it can hire high-priced lawyers and union busters. “We’re focused on building power where we have power, which is on the shop floor. Our union is our relationship with each other as coworkers. We build our union by engaging in struggle.”
The Chicago-area walkouts are supported by Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) — a worker center based in Joliet, Illinois that also organizes and advocates for Amazon employees.
“Just one week ago we saw the high cost of Amazon’s relentless pursuit of profit in the tragedy in Edwardsville, Illinois,” said Marcos Ceniceros, WWJ’s interim executive director. “Since then, Amazon hasn’t slowed its pace at all and is putting workers’ health on the line every day with no regard for their lives or livelihoods. We stand in solidarity with Amazonians United as they fight for the fair and safe working conditions we all deserve.”
Rep. Jesús “Chuy” GarcÃa (D‑Il.), whose district includes Gage Park, also expressed support for the walkouts, tweeting, “Let’s stand with courageous workers from Amazonians United Chicagoland fighting for better wages and working conditions! It’s time for Jeff Bezos and Amazon to pay their fair share!”
Wednesday’s work stoppage was expected to last at least until the end of the morning shift, and Miin said he and his coworkers would wait to see management’s response before deciding on next steps. Employees at the Cicero facility allege that supervisors made illegal threats not to allow them back to work, but that they plan to return anyway.
“We know we’re being treated unfairly, and we’re doing something about it,” Miin explained, hoping other workers would follow Amazonian United’s example. “If we can in any way be encouragement or inspiration for others, we want our coworkers and all workers to see that we can get organized, we can fight back — and that when we fight, we win.”
Presidential candidate Gabriel Boric talks during his closing campaign rally ahead of the presidential run-off election in Santiago, Chile, Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021. (photo: Matias Delacroix/AP)
Gabriel Boric’s victory in Chile is a vindication of the mass movement that took to the streets in 2019 — and points toward a country ready to bury Pinochet’s legacy and neoliberalism for good.
That result would have been greater had it not been for the policy of transport minister Gloria Hutt Hesse, who deliberately offered almost no public transport services, especially buses to the poor barrios, in the hope of forcing Boric voters to give up and go back home. On Election Day, there were constant reports in the mainstream media featuring people throughout the country, and particularly in Santiago, complaining about having to wait for two or even three hours for buses to polling centers. There were therefore justified fears that the election would be rigged — but the determination of poor voters was such that the move failed.
Kast’s campaign, with the complicity of the Right and the mainstream media, was one of the dirtiest in the country’s history, reminiscent of the US-funded and US-led “terror propaganda” mounted against socialist candidate (and eventual president) Salvador Allende in 1958, 1964, and 1970. Through innuendo and the use of social media, the Kast camp spewed out crass anti-communist propaganda, charged Boric with assisting terrorism, and suggested that he would install a totalitarian regime in Chile. The campaign sought to instill fear primarily in the petty bourgeoisie by repeatedly predicting that drug addiction, crime, and narco-trafficking would spin out of control if Boric became president, and even implying that Boric himself takes drugs. The mainstream media also assailed Boric with insidious questions about Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, to which he did not produce the most impressive answers.
But the mass of the population saw it through, sure in the knowledge that their vote was the only way to stop Pinochetismo taking hold of the presidency. They had had enough of President Sebastián Piñera. They also knew that, in the circumstances, the best way to secure the aims of the social rebellion of October 2019 was to defeat Kast and his brand of unalloyed Pinochetismo.
As the electoral campaign unfolded, Kast backtracked on some of his most virulent Pinochetista statements — but people knew that if he won, he wouldn’t hesitate to fully implement them. Among other gems, Kast declared his intention as president to abolish the ministry for women, same-sex marriage, and abortion (the laws on which are already very restrictive); eliminate funding for the mseum in memory of the victims of the dictatorship and the Gabriela Mistral Center for the promotion of arts, literature, and theater; withdraw Chile from the International Commission of Human Rights and close down the National Institute of Human Rights; cease the activities of FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales), the prestigious Latin American center of sociological investigation); build a ditch in the North of Chile, at the border with Bolivia and Peru, to stop illegal immigration; and empower the president with the legal authority to detain people in places other than police stations or jails — that is, restore the illegal procedures of Augusto Pinochet’s sinister police.
Kast’s intentions left no doubt as to what the right choice was in the election. I was, however, flabbergasted by various leftist analyses advocating against voting, in one case because “there [was] no essential difference between Kast and Boric.” Worse, another suggested that “the dilemma between fascism and democracy was false” because Chile’s democracy is defective. My despair with such “principled posturing,” probably dictated by the best of political intentions, turned into shock when on election day itself a Telesur correspondent in Santiago interviewed a Chilean activist who only attacked Boric, the main message of the feature being that “whoever wins, Chile loses.”
The center-left Concertación coalition, which in the 1990–2021 period governed the nation for twenty-four years and bears a heavy responsibility for maintaining and even perfecting the neoliberal system, openly expressed its preference for Boric, assiduously courting support for him in the second round. Those who believe there is no difference between Kast and Boric do so not only from an ultraleft stance, but also through finding Boric guilty by association, even though he has not yet had the chance to commit a crime.
This brings us to a central political issue: What does the legacy of the October 2019 rebellion and all its positive consequences mean for the Chilean working class? What is now posed in Chile is the struggle not for power, but for the masses who for decades were conned into accepting — however grudgingly — neoliberalism as a fact of life. The 2019 rebellion that was the first mass mobilization that sought not only to oppose, but also to get rid of neoliberalism. That rebellion extracted extraordinary concessions from the ruling class, including a referendum for a constitutional convention entrusted legally with the task of drafting an anti-neoliberal constitution to replace the 1980 one promulgated under Pinochet’s rule.
The referendum approved the proposal of a new constitution and the election of a convention by 78 and 79 percent respectively in October 2020. The election of the Convention gave Chile’s right only thirty-seven seats out of 155 — barely 23 percent — whereas those in favor of radical change got an aggregated total of 118 seats, or 77 percent. More noticeably, Socialists and Christian Democrats, the old Concertación parties, got a joint total of seventeen seats.
The biggest problem remains the fragmentation of the emerging forces aiming for change. Together, they hold almost all the remaining seats, but they are structured in at least fifty different groups. Nevertheless, in tune with the political context, the convention elected Elisa Loncón Antileo, a Mapuche indigenous leader, as its president, and there were seventeen seats reserved exclusively for the indigenous nations and elected only by them — a development of huge significance.
The 2019 rebellion also obtained other concessions from the government and parliament, including the return of 70 percent of pension contributions from the private “pension administrators” (AFPs), which Chileans rightly see as a massive swindle that has lasted for more than three decades. This has dealt a heavy blow to Chile’s financial capital. A proposal in Parliament for the return of the remaining 30 percent at the end of September 2021 failed to be approved by a very small margin of votes, but I am certain the AFPs have not heard the last on the matter.
The scenario depicted above suddenly became confused with the results of the presidential election’s first round, which not only saw Kast come out first (with 27 percent against 25 for Boric), but which also elected deputies and senators for Chile’s two parliamentary chambers. Though Apruebo Dignidad did very well with thirty-seven deputies (out of 155) and five senators (out of fifty), the right-wing Chile Podemos Más (Piñera’s supporters) got fifty-three deputies and twenty-two senators, and the old Concertación got thirty-seven deputies and seventeen senators.
There are several dynamics at work here. With regard to the parliamentary election, traditional mechanisms and existing client relationships apply, with experienced politicians exerting local influence and getting elected. In contrast, most of the elected members of the convention are an emerging bunch of motley pressure groups organized around single-issue campaigns (AFPs, the privatization of water, the price of gas, the abuse of utility companies, the defense of Mapuche ancestral lands, state corruption, and so forth) and did not stand candidates for a parliamentary seat.
On December 19, Boric publicly committed to supporting and working together with the Constitutional Convention for a new constitution in his victory speech. This has given and will give enormous impetus to the efforts to constitutionally replace the existing neoliberal economic model.
What the Chilean working class must now address is their lack of political leadership. They lack a National Front of Popular Resistance (Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, FNRP) like the one organized by the people of Honduras to fight against the coup that ousted Mel Zelaya in 2009. The FNPR, made up of many and varied social and political movements, evolved into the Libre party that has just succeeded in electing Xiomara Castro, the country’s first female president. The obvious possible avenue to address this potentially dangerous shortcoming would be to bring together in a national conference all the many single-issue groups alongside all social movements and willing political currents to set up a Popular Front for an Anti-Neoliberal Constitution.
After all, they have taken to the streets for two years to bury the oppressive, abusive, and exploitative neoliberal model, and it’s becoming clearer what they should replace it with: a system based on a new constitution that allows the nationalization of all utilities and natural resources, punishes the corrupt, respects the ancestral lands of the Mapuche, and guarantees decent health, education, and pensions. The road there will be bumpy, but we have won the masses; now, with a sympathetic government in place, we can launch the transformation of the state, and build a better Chile.
An airplane flies over caribou from the Porcupine Caribou Herd on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. Democrats are pushing for fossil fuel drilling to end in the area, as well as off the U.S. (photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
Democratic plans to restrict new oil and gas development offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge raise red flags for Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a crucial swing vote
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a critical swing vote, has rejected a provision that would prohibit all future drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico, according to three people familiar with the matter, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. He also expressed surprise at top Democrats’ decision to include language ending an oil and gas leasing program in the pristine refuge, a longtime priority for party leaders and their environmentalist allies, but he has not indicated whether he will oppose it.
Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, exercises a de facto veto over the $2 trillion climate and social spending plan because it needs all 50 Democrats’ votes to win Senate passage.
A spokeswoman for Manchin declined to comment on the matter. Asked about the senator’s opposition during the White House press briefing Thursday, deputy national climate adviser Ali Zaidi declined to address it or say how it would affect the president’s climate targets.
Manchin’s objection to the proposal comes amid a broader rift between the influential senator and top Democrats over President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which party leaders had hoped to pass by the end of the year. Despite months of negotiations and Democrats’ attempts to shrink the bill’s size to win Manchin’s vote, he has withheld his support and a long list of disagreements remain.
The senator, who earns millions from his family’s waste coal business, succeeded in killing a key piece of Biden’s climate agenda — a $150 billion plan to push power companies toward cleaner energy. He also has targeted measures that would affect the oil and gas industry, objecting to a tax credit for electric cars and a provision that would reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Manchin also criticized the design of the funding measure, arguing that Democrats are relying on funding gimmicks to say their legislation is paid for.
House Democrats’ version of the spending bill included a permanent ban on new offshore drilling — which would not apply to existing leases — as well as language that would end the oil and gas leasing program authorized on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain in the 2017 tax bill.
Senate leaders jettisoned the offshore drilling provision from their version of the bill in light of Manchin’s opposition but have preserved language ending the oil and gas leasing program on the refuge.
Two weeks before President Donald Trump left office, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management auctioned off the right to drill on more than 550,000 acres of the refuge’s coastal plain for $14.4 million. When the leases were later modified, the revenue generated dropped to $12 million. Federal law requires the department hold another lease sale by 2024.
The oil and gas industry has lobbied Manchin to oppose both House proposals.
Manchin has a close rapport with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who used to chair the panel and has made opening the refuge to drilling a top priority. It is not clear whether he will support the ban, but Democratic staffers have been optimistic they can secure his support for the measure.
However, the provision still could be challenged under what is known as the “Byrd Rule,” which seeks to exclude extraneous policy matters from reconciliation and changes that decrease federal revenue. If the Senate parliamentarian agrees that it does not pass muster, the provision would be struck from the bill.
Environmental groups criticized senators’ decision to drop protections against future offshore drilling from the bill.
The current global oil and gas demand does not justify drilling in U.S. coastal waters, they argued, and would accelerate global warming at a time when scientists warn that countries need to burn fewer fossil fuels. The Natural Resources Defense Council noted that oil companies already hold leases to more than 10 million acres of ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico alone, most of which hasn’t been developed.
“We won’t strengthen our economy by locking future generations into decades more reliance on dirty fuels that do more harm than good,” said Alexandra Adams, the group’s senior director of federal affairs. “The Senate should restore these essential protections immediately — and then pass this bill.”
Democrats and Republicans have fought for decades over whether to open the refuge to oil and gas exploration and what sort of limits to put on offshore drilling.
The Biden administration is reassessing the refuge leases and the environmental analysis that underpins the drilling program on the coastal plain. But that move could spark a protracted legal battle, and advocates have pressed congressional Democrats to provide more lasting safeguards for a habitat that shelters caribou, birds and the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears threatened by an overheating planet.
Many Republican governors in the Southeast oppose drilling near their coasts out of fear that a major oil spill would harm tourism, as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico did. But many Republicans in national office support the idea.
In 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to permit drilling in most U.S. continental-shelf waters, including protected areas of the Atlantic. But early steps to allow oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic Ocean faced significant hurdles and legal challenges from opponents. In 2020, the administration acknowledged that permits to allow seismic blasting in the ocean — the first step toward locating oil deposits for drilling — would not be renewed after they expired.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment