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Black Lives Matter protest. (photo: Getty)
he US Justice Department and federal law enforcement “deliberately targeted” Black Lives Matter demonstrators under the “express direction” of Donald Trump and former US Attorney General William Barr, according to a sweeping analysis from advocacy group Movement for Black Lives.
In nearly every prosecution, cases related to protests from 31 May through 25 October “resulted in hundreds of organisers and activists facing years in federal prison with no chance of parole” after federal law enforcement “exploited the expansive federal criminal code” to assert jurisdiction over protest-related cases that “bore no federal interest,” according to the report.
The report – which examines 326 criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors in the wake of 2020 protests amid an uprising against police violence and racial injustice after the police murder of George Floyd – appears to “largely corroborate what Black organisers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report says.
Movement for Black Lives has pointed to the findings as part of a legacy of government and law enforcement attempts to undermine Black organising and opposition to white supremacy, from the FBI’s harmful legacy of Cointelpro operations to Trump-era prosecutions of racial justice protesters while ignoring police brutality and rising threats of white supremacist violence at the heart of the protests.
Federal prosecutors “aggressively sought jurisdiction” in protest cases despite equivalent state-level charges that were sufficient in nearly every case, according to the report, issued in conjunction with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) clinic at the City University of New York School of Law.
Federal prosecutions typically result in higher conviction rates, and roughly 88 per cent against protesters carried harsher penalties than equivalent state charges, the report found.
“The government greatly exaggerated the threat of violence” from protests, with the “vast majority” of charges involving “non-violent offenses or offenses that were potentially hazardous but were restricted to property destruction, not violence against people,” according to the report.
More than 25 per cent of all cases included “stacked charges” against defendants “with multiple redundant charges being brought arising from the same facts – leading to far more severe potential sentences against defendants,” according to the report.
More than 22 per cent of all cases involved potential mandatory minimum sentences, and 20 per cent involved offences where the defendant was alleged to have conspired or abetted a crime without actually committing any.
Rhetoric from the White House and Justice Department depicted protests as made up of “violence radicals,” while federal law enforcement justified its authority by pointing to state and local leaders’ “abdication of their law enforcement responsibilities in deference to this violent assault,” according to the report.
In May, then-Attorney General Barr claimed that “anarchistic and far-left extremists” hijacked protests and pledged to invoke federal laws against crossing state lines using interstate highways to “incite or participate in violent rioting.” He also directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate such acts of “domestic terrorism” and, in one memo, urged prosecutors to charge protesters with sedition.
Mr Trump also announced he would be “mobilizing all available federal resources ... to stop the rioting and looting.” He also signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to dispatch law enforcement to cities and states with Democratic-led governments.
“These directives, meant to disrupt the movement, were the primary reason for the unprecedented federalisation of protest-related prosecutions seen in 2020,” the report says.
The most common charge (32 per cent) was arson, which prosecutors broadly encompassed beyond setting a fire, according to the report.
“Civil disorder” accounted for 15 per cent of charges, followed by assaulting an officer (13.8 per cent), which included pointing laser pointers in the general direction of law enforcement.
The report also found that “protest-related prosecutions by federal authorities generally did not correlate to population size, as one might expect, but rather to the deployment of federal law enforcement to police protests,” suggesting that “the deployment of federal law enforcement functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to more prosecutions, and serving to legitimize in circular fashion the alarmist rhetoric that led to the deployment in the first place.”
The only two violent charges related to murder were brought against members of the far-right paramilitary group Boogaloo Boys.
And though Mr Trump, members of his administration and his allies in Congress continue to blame “antifa” for protest violence, the report found just one criminal complaint that listed any affiliation to “antifa”, and one pointed to their self-identification as an anarchist.
The report demands amnesty for protesters and calls on Congress to pass the Breathe Act, which would move federal funding for police departments to community-based public safety programmes.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (photo: Getty)
s Republicans raise concerns that Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops will turn Afghanistan “back to a pre-9/11 state — a breeding ground for terrorism,” Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman lays out how the U.S. war on terror after the September 2001 attacks actually fueled white, right-wing extremism. Ackerman says U.S. elites consciously chose to ignore “the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history.” His new book is “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the hour with Spencer Ackerman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.
Spencer, you begin your book, with the prologue, with Timothy McVeigh visiting the far-right paramilitary compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma, before what you call, the prologue’s chapter heading, “the worst terrorist attack in American history.” Talk about the connection you see between the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and the so-called war on terror.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: I thought it was extremely important to see the war on terror in its fullness, in its totality, and only then can we understand its implications. And I think the only way to really do that is to look at who were the exceptions to the war on terror, who the war on terror didn’t target, despite fundamentally similar actions. And there we can understand not just what the war on terror is, but its relationship to American history, which shapes it so deeply.
And so, I also wanted to kind of start with a journalistic cliché, where the reporter kind of zoologically takes a reader through this unfamiliar and scary world of violence committed by fanatical people who are training with heavy weapons and talk about committing mass atrocity for a sick and supposedly divinely inspired religion. But I wanted those people to be white. I wanted the reader to see how similar these actions were, how similar some of the motivations were, how similar some of the justifications were. But we never treated them like that.
The whole purpose of the phrase “war on terror” was a kind of social compromise amongst respectable elites in order to not say the thing that they were in fact building, which was an expansive war only against some people’s kinds of terror, only against nonwhite people’s kinds of terror, only against foreigners’ kinds of terror, and not against the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history, one that seeks to draw its own heritage out of the general American national heritage, people who call themselves not dissenters, not rebels, but patriots, people who are restoring something about America that they believe a corrupt elite, that is now responsive to nonwhite power at the expense of the extant racial caste, that has been deeply woven inside not just the American political structure, but the American economy, that drives American politics — how that ultimately never gets treated.
This is exactly what Timothy McVeigh was about. This is what Timothy McVeigh had as his motivations for murdering 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, including 19 children. And we looked away from it. We looked away from how deep the rootedness of white supremacist violence was in this country. We listened to what I believe are principled civil libertarian objections against an expensive category of criminalized association. Treating people who might have believed as McVeigh did, odious as I believe that is, but ultimately not committing acts of violence — treating them as, essentially, indistinct from McVeigh was absolutely intolerable, as it always should have been, to the American political elites, but that intolerability did not extend to Muslims.
And there it was easy, after 9/11, to construct an apparatus fueled by things like the PATRIOT Act, that expanded enormous categories of criminal association, known as material support for terrorism, authorized widespread surveillance, that certainly would not be focused simply even on American Muslims, as disgusting as it was that it was focused on them primarily. But, ultimately, all of these things that both parties, that the leaders of the security services and intellectuals created, maintained and justified, so readily, against the threat of a foreign menace, seen as civilizational, seen as an acceptable substitute for a geopolitical enemy that had served as a rallying purpose throughout the 20th century — the war on terror is kind of a zombie anti-communism in a lot of its political cast and association. And never would any of this be visited upon white people. From the start, the war on terror showed you exactly who it was going to leave out from its carceral, from its surveillance and from its violent gaze.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to Donald Trump this week, considering a 2024 challenge to President Biden, said in a statement Biden “surrendered” to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee demanded a plan from Biden to stop Afghanistan from becoming a, quote, “safe haven” for terror groups after the Taliban takeover. This is Republican Congressman Michael McCaul on CNN.
REP. MICHAEL McCAUL: We are going to go back, Jake, to a pre-9/11 state, a breeding ground for terrorism. And, you know, I hate to say this — I hope we don’t have to go back there — but it will be a threat to the homeland in a matter of time.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have the Republicans now talking about a foreign terrorist threat. The Republicans, who have been denying the insurrection of January 6, calling it, you know, no worse than a group of tourists coming to Washington, D.C., and not wanting to investigate that, even though, under Bush, under Trump, the intelligence agencies have said the number one domestic terror threat is right-wing white supremacists.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: We see who the war on terror, then as now, is a mechanism for having terrorism excused, not terrorism dealt with: when that terrorism is white, when it is politically powerful. When, for reasons that they themselves probably ought better to explain, politicians sympathize with it, seek to draw strength from it, that’s a real serious red flag for American democracy. We don’t have to treat it as if it is a new red flag for American democracy. This is always how American democracy has been eroded. This is always alongside the ways in which capital has been extremely willing to ally with white supremacy. This is what the creation of Jim Crow was. This is how the maintenance of segregation in the North of the country, which we don’t often talk about as much in its different permutations — I’m a New Yorker. This city is segregated even still. You see that definitely with the way the school system is constructed.
Ultimately, we are seeing, throughout this past week, the ease with which the Republican Party, supposedly now in the Trump era feeling antipathy to the war on terror, readily snapped to war on terror politics when it comes to the demonization of refugees, the idea that America has a responsibility to take in the refugees that it itself creates, out of this psychotic, racist fear of white replacement, that demographics are ultimately driving the erosion of, you know, in its respectable settings, white political power, not just on the fringes, but at the centers of American governance.
And that is a politics of the war on terror that has been here from the start. Trump makes it vastly less subtle, to the extent that it was subtle, than it was before. And his hold on the party is not an accident. His hold here has everything to do with the way that he was able to recognize the ways in which the war on terror is an excellent sorting mechanism for figuring out who is a real American and who is a conditional American. And then, as we saw him using the tools of the war on terror on the streets of cities like Portland and Washington, D.C., and New York and in the skies over as many as 15 cities last summer, he’s willing to use it on Americans that he calls terrorists.
AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, you write repeatedly about Adham Hassoun. Tell us his story.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Amy, I just want to thank you so much for asking about Adham. I knew you would. You have truly been one of the journalistic heroes of this era.
And Adham Hassoun is a symbol of the ways that the war on terror criminalized people. Adham Hassoun is a Palestinian-born man who survived — he grew up in the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s and immigrated to Florida in the 1990s. And as a refugee himself and an active participant in his community in Miami, in South Florida, in the Islamic community there, he wrote a lot of checks to refugee charities, people that he had thought were helping refugees and helping war victims in places like Bosnia, where the wars became genocidal in the Balkans against Balkan Muslims.
And, ultimately, among the people that he met and tried to help was a convert named José Padilla. José Padilla would, after 9/11, become famous as someone John Ashcroft accused of trying to set off a radiological weapon inside the United States. And very shortly after that happened — Padilla was at first placed in military custody, an American citizen; that was allowed at the time — the feds came for Adham. And even though Adham had committed no violence, Adham had done nothing criminal, the feds and immigration authorities locked him up, and they leaned on him to try and inform on his community, to try and be an informant. And he refused to do that. He considered it an affront to his dignity. He considered it unjust.
And as a result, he spent a tremendous amount of time — he spent years in jails in Florida, while, ultimately, the FBI and the local prosecutor — who eventually would be the Trump Cabinet member Alex Acosta — came up with pretexts to prosecute him. He was originally charged as a co-defendant with José Padilla, who is now placed in federal custody. And even though there was no way that the government could connect him to any act of violence, thanks to the PATRIOT Act and thanks to, frankly, the atmosphere politically in the years after 9/11, that he could be charged with things that simply were not acts of violence or acts of active contribution to specific people committing specific acts of violence that the government could name, and he was convicted. And as he was sentenced, the judge reduced his sentence — the feds were seeking life for Adham — because the judge recognized that the government couldn’t point to any act that he — you know, act of violence that he was responsible for. That was in 2007. He served until 2017 in federal prison, a variety of federal prisons.
And then, in 2017, when he had finished his sentence, he had figured that he would be deported, that ultimately he would go back to probably Lebanon. He was kind of done, as you can imagine, with the United States at that point. But he didn’t. What happened instead was that he was sent into ICE detention in western New York, outside of Buffalo, at a place called Batavia. And after the PATRIOT Act became law in 2001, there was great civil libertarian fear over one of its provisions, Section 412. Section 412 said that any nondeportable noncitizen, which is to say a stateless person who doesn’t have a country that will take that person in, who is deemed a threat to national security by the authorities — ultimately, in this case, the determination is made by the secretary of homeland security — could be imprisoned indefinitely. That never happened throughout the whole war on terror, until it was time to keep Adham Hassoun locked up.
Ultimately, in early 2020, around like late February, early March, Adham gets sick, to the point where he — we don’t know for sure, but he thought that he got COVID. By April of that year, Batavia was the ICE detention facility with the highest COVID outbreak inside. So, here was a figure who the United States criminalized, robbed of his freedom, and then ultimately endangered his life by the incompetence and indifference that it showed in allowing COVID to run wild in facilities filled with people that the United States functionally treated as nonpeople.
And it took a very valiant effort by local attorneys and by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge his detention. Ultimately, instead of outright losing the case, as a judge indicated after she ruled Adham had to go free, because the FBI admitted —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Spencer.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: — that it relied on a — sorry. Adham was ultimately successful, once the government dropped its case in order to preserve its power to do this. And he lives in freedom, I’m happy to say, right now in Rwanda.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds. What has surprised you most about what is happening today?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Very little at this point, I’m sorry to say, surprises me. But the general indifference by the American political and intellectual elites to the relationship between the war on terror and the erosion of democracy is also a very deep thread and very historically rooted, not just in the war on terror, but before, and certainly seeing that those connections have to be made in order to have any form of real democracy in this country and safety and dignity for so many people.
AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter. His new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) speaks during a press conference on June 16, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Samuel Corom/Getty)
ew lawmakers are as outspoken about the end of the war in Afghanistan as Michael Waltz, a Republican from Florida’s 6th Congressional District.
In recent weeks, Waltz has called on President Joe Biden to “reverse course,” relaunch military operations in the region, and “crush the Taliban offensive by committing American air power” supported by “special forces.” The Florida congressman has warned darkly of an “Al-Qaeda 3.0” and stated that no negotiations should take place with the Taliban “until the situation is stabilized militarily.”
Leading this push, in the pages of newspapers, over talk radio, and on cable television, Waltz couches his advocacy in his identity and experience. Not only is he a sitting memer of Congress, but he is a former Green Beret, a former aide to Dick Cheney, and “a father … sickened by what’s to come for the Afghan women and girls that are being mercilessly abused by the Taliban and sold into sex slavery,” as he wrote in opinion column published last week in Fox News.
There’s one crucial part of Waltz’s experience he tends to leave out: Before his successful run for Congress in 2018, he managed a lucrative defense contracting firm with offices in Afghanistan. The company was recently sold to Pacific Architects and Engineers, or PAE, one of the largest war contractors the U.S. has hired to train and mentor Afghan security forces. The deal personally enriched Waltz by up to $26 million, a figure made public by a filing disclosed this month.
In 2010, after stints in the military and as an adviser to the Bush administration, Waltz helped found Metis Solutions, a defense contractor that “provides strategic analysis, intelligence support, and training,” with offices in Arlington, Virgina; Tampa, Florida; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and Kabul, Afghanistan. The company grew rapidly to 400 employees.
Led in part by Waltz, the company won coveted contracts to train special forces in Afghanistan, including a controversial program to develop artisanal mining operations in strategic villages.
“Congressman Waltz is a highly decorated army officer who served his country in uniform for the last 25 years that included combat tours in Afghanistan where he took the fight directly to the Taliban alongside Afghan forces,” said a Waltz spokesperson in a statement to The Intercept. “Additionally, he served in civilian positions where he frequently traveled to Afghanistan at his own risk to assist in building the capacity of the Afghan government and business sectors.”
Metis Solutions continued to grow even after Waltz stepped down to serve in Congress. In July 2020, shortly before its acquisition by PAE, Metis Solutions was awarded a $26 million contract from the military on “counter threat finance.” The announcement of the award noted that the work would be conducted in Afghanistan and the U.S.
Congressional ethics disclosures show that in 2019, Waltz held up to $1 million in equity from Metis Solutions and up to $250,000 in options of Metis Solutions stock. In November 2020, PAE announced that the company was acquiring Metis Solutions in an all-cash deal worth $92 million with the self-proclaimed goal to increase its foothold in the intelligence, analysis, and training space serving government clients. The lawmaker’s subsequent ethics disclosure, filed last week, shows that he earned between $5 and $25 million in capital gains from his stock sales, in addition to up to $1 million from exercising his options.
For Waltz, the timing was impeccable. The sale occurred just before the formal announcement by both Donald Trump and Biden to finally end the war in Afghanistan. PAE’s stock is now down nearly 20 percent since last year, with the greatest drop in value occurring over the last month. The company has been reported as among the most harmed by the decision to draw down forces in Afghanistan.
Waltz is “proud to have helped build a company that employs hundreds and provided advisory support to the U.S. military and Afghan government,” his spokesperson wrote to The Intercept. “This in no way disputes the recklessness of the Biden Administration’s withdrawal. Congressman Waltz is in full compliance with his obligations as approved by the House Ethics Committee with Democrats in the majority.”
PAE is the fourth largest defense contractor active in Afghanistan since fiscal year 2016. Over that period, the company accumulated contracts in Afghanistan worth more than $930 million, largely for the training and mentoring of Afghan security forces. It currently holds the primary contract for securing the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
For PAE, these great financial gains from war come despite allegations of waste and failure.
In 2015, PAE paid $1.45 million to settle a whistleblower fraud case claiming that the company set up a big-rigging scheme to defraud the U.S. government over uniforms intended for the Afghan military. Two years later, the company paid another settlement, this time for $5 million, over claims that the firm submitted false invoices and defrauded the government over its work mentoring counter-narcotics police in Afghanistan.
Metis Solutions’ work in Afghanistan included a foray into the controversial area of mineral extraction. In 2012, the firm released a statement touting its work with the Afghan government developing agribusiness, construction, and mining. “We are very excited to begin this important work,” said Waltz in a press release. “Together with our Afghan partners and the Department of Commerce, METIS will make this program an instrumental next step in developing Afghan businesses for sustainable growth.”
Part of the work developing mining solutions came from the Afghan Business Development program, funded through USAID, which provided $1.8 million to Metis Solutions.
Another part of the mining development work was funded through the Pentagon’s “Task Force for Business and Stability Operations initiative,” an effort that was reportedly rife with fraud. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan, known as SIGAR, reported that Metis Solutions was tapped by the TFBSO to “provide an artisanal mining expert to train both special forces personnel and local partners in proper artisanal mining methods and supporting Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Afghanistan Village Stability Operations by identifying potential small scale mineral development in strategic villages.”
But the projects never got off the ground. Another SIGAR audit report found that Metis Solutions was one of several contractors awarded TFBSO work that “met few to none of their contract deliverables.” The report noted that “these contract deliverables were not met because of a combination of inadequate planning by TFBSO, weak definition of contract requirements, lack of oversight by TFBSO of its contractors, changing circumstances in Afghanistan, and changing priorities of the Afghan government.”
In particular, the auditors flagged that Metis Solutions was forced to terminate its contract in less than five weeks over timeframe concerns and a bidding dispute. The report did not blame Metis Solutions for the failure and noted that “because of unforeseen obstacles, it may have avoided the waste of $83,861 had it not rushed Metis contractors to deploy to Afghanistan before the protest could be resolved.”
Wasted dollars and failed projects are perhaps among the most defining aspects of the American-led occupation of Afghanistan, which is estimated to have cost more than $2 trillion over its 20 years. SIGAR audits have identified countless examples of mind-boggling forms of fraud and waste worth hundreds of billions of dollars, including $70 million embezzled from a trucking company, $1.6 million on a water-filtration system that failed after only two months, and $50 billion on mine-resistant vehicles that were scrapped as unnecessary.
The police forces trained by PAE and other defense contractors have declined in quality in recent years, and they quickly abandoned their posts as the Taliban approached over the last month. The failure should come as no surprise.
Auditors found that Kabul residents experienced skyrocketing crime in 2020, with violence unfolding in previously safe neighborhoods. Gallup polling has indicated that the failure to protect the Afghan public from petty criminals and organized crime was a central concern for residents in 2019, before the Taliban’s recent return to power. At the same time, there were rampant reports of police corruption, with Afghan police involved in extortion schemes and checkpoint robberies of residents.
The extractive industry has been similarly scarred with grift and false hope. Afghanistan’s recently deposed President Ashraf Ghani has faced criticism over his personal family ties to artisanal mining contracts, allegedly concealed from the public during his time in office. The industry has faced pervasive corruption, as well as health and safety issues, and few stable job prospects for Afghan residents.
Waltz’s fervor for protecting the Afghan people ignores years of government reports showing an abysmal record of U.S. nation-building efforts. The U.S.-launched war has resulted in the deaths of 47,245 civilians, over 66,000 Afghan police and military, widespread torture, and the empowerment of warlords and criminal gangs that have unraveled life for most Afghans.
Even the mixed gains for women’s rights in Afghanistan have faded under U.S. occupation. SIGAR has shown that female participation in Afghan elections declined dramatically since 2014, and many of the U.S.-backed gender equality efforts have been poorly designed and implemented, with little local support. As several independent investigative reports have found, the U.S. has falsified women’s enrollment in education programs and misled on other development benchmarks.
Waltz, though, is undeterred, and has said America’s 20-yearlong engagement in Afghanistan is only the beginning.
“We are in a multi-decade war and we are only 15-years in,” said Waltz, speaking to the Scout Warrior and the National Interest for a story published in January 2017. The future congressman and defense contractor said he expected a 100 year war.
Nabisco workers on strike in Richmond, Virginia. (photo: International Union Local 358)
hen workers at a Frito-Lay production plant in Topeka, Kansas, went on strike last month, they threw into relief the fact that the increased pandemic-era snacking that has boosted profits for PepsiCo, Frito-Lay’s parent company, has come courtesy of working conditions so bad as to lead to suicides and divorces. Now, workers are on strike at another snack-food company, one responsible for Oreos, Triscuits, Planters nuts, and Ritz crackers — Nabisco.
Workers at a Nabisco bakery in Portland, Oregon, went on strike on August 10. They have been working twelve-to-sixteen-hour shifts, with some working seven days a week. The workers say the company is pushing for an alternative workweek, a concession that would take away overtime pay for Saturdays and Sundays, with time paid at regular rates until a worker hits forty hours, regardless of the shift’s length or the day of the week. One worker told the Huffington Post that the changes could amount to a loss of $10,000 a year for some workers. Nabisco is also pushing for a two-tier health care plan, which would slot newer workers into a higher-cost deal while also serving to divide workers within the union.
While Nabisco, which is owned by parent company Mondelēz International (the company was spun off from snack giant Kraft Foods in 2012), saw profits nearly double in the latest quarter of 2021, its workers have seen none of that money, all while working through the pandemic. As the Northwest Labor Press noted, Nabisco CEO Dirk Van de Put received $18 million in compensation in 2020, 561 times that of the company’s median worker.
The Portland workers are members of Local 364 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), the same union that represents the Frito-Lay workers in Topeka. In the days since the roughly two hundred workers in Portland began their strike, other Nabisco bakery and production workers have followed them out the door. The strike has spread to Aurora, Colorado, and Richmond, Virginia. Nathan Williams, an oiler at the Richmond plant who has worked there for thirty years, told Vice that, during the pandemic, “Some people worked every day — 16 hours a day — for three months.”
The workers are covered by a pattern agreement, meaning they have identical contracts, all of which expired earlier this summer. In a statement on the spreading strike, Mondelēz International said that it is “disappointed” by the workers’ decision to strike, adding, “Our goal has been — and continues to be — to bargain in good faith.”
The Nabisco strike is another example of a dynamic spreading across industries in the United States: as employers scramble to staff up, many currently employed workers are subjected to mandatory overtime, with bosses seeking to work them to the bone rather than recruit more people — a potentially costly move when workers are hard to find. In response, some workers are using their increased leverage during a period of employer panic over the tight labor market to push back, demanding better wages and working conditions — and much of the time, those demands are about hours and scheduling.
In a statement on the Richmond strike, which began on August 15, BCTGM president Anthony Shelton said workers in all three states “are telling Nabisco to put an end to the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and get off the ridiculous demand for contract concessions at a time when the company is making record profits.”
The reference to outsourcing is a long-standing concern, as Nabisco continues to close operations in the United States while building up plants in Mexico. In 2015, the company told workers at its Chicago factory to accept a 60 percent cut in pay and benefits or it would lay them off and focus on a newly established operation in Salinas, Mexico. The workers refused the obscene concession. Despite receiving rhetorical support from both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign — on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Trump said, “I’m not eating Oreos anymore” — they failed to force Nabisco to reverse its decision. Some six hundred workers lost their jobs.
As Stephen Franklin wrote of the Chicago plant closure at In These Times, the move was a means of taking advantage of the exploitation faced by workers in Mexico. Shortly after opening its Salinas plant in 2014, Nabisco signed a union contract that “capped the top day rate at 200 pesos, about $14.90 per day. BCTGM eventually obtained a copy of the contract, which it called proof that the Mexican workers were victims of a protection contract.” Such contracts are dictated by the company, which picks a union and enforces its terms through it, hobbling workers’ ability to independently organize. This move by Nabisco underlines the necessity of raising labor standards across borders, with workers at Nabisco’s operations in the United States and Mexico needing one another if they’re to stymie the company’s ruthless pursuit of lower labor costs.
This year, Nabisco closed two locations — one in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and the other in Atlanta, Georgia, affecting some one thousand BCTGM members. The union says the company continues to threaten to shutter operations in the United States if workers don’t accept concessions.
Such is the context for the Nabisco strike: pushed to the brink, workers walked out. Spirits are high on the picket lines — community members and organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are showing up in support, with the Frito-Lay workers in Topeka sending pizza. A growing number of people are sick of the tyranny of work, fed up with spending so many hours either on the job or on the way to and from it. Nabisco workers are some of those people. Now is no time for concessions.
A woman walks past a collapsed building in Jeremie, Haiti, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, four days after the city was struck by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake. (photo: Matias Delacroix/AP)
ver the weekend, Haiti was hit by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake on the western part of the island.
Thus far, nearly 2,000 people have been reported dead and nearly 7,000 injured, and about 1.2 million people have been impacted, according to UNICEF. The homes of up to 1.5 million residents have been damaged, per the New York Times. And to make matters worse, Tropical Storm Grace made landfall on the island Monday, bringing flooding and mudslides and further limiting access to food, shelter, and water for those in need.
The earthquake and storm are expected to be particularly devastating given the political instability Haiti is experiencing. Harley Etienne, who studies urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan and researched land tenure policies in post-earthquake Haiti, says while the early figures are not as bad as the 2010 earthquake — when well over 100,000 people died, and aid agencies both were plagued by dysfunction and contributed to a large-scale cholera outbreak — the political situation in Haiti is far worse today than it was 11 years ago.
President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated less than two months ago, creating a power vacuum in which Haiti has a prime minister but no functioning legislature or head of state. A constitutional referendum to choose a new leader has been postponed to November.
In Etienne’s study of post-2010 Haiti, he found that successful rebuilding requires a strong rule of law. Without it, there is nothing to hold both Haitian officials and nongovernmental organizations accountable in providing temporary housing, managing land disputes, and revitalizing building codes to ensure future safety.
Given current political instability, respect for the rule of law really does not exist at the moment, according to Etienne, and that invites foreign actors — not all of whom are necessarily acting in the best interest of the Haitian people.
I spoke with Jean Eddy Saint Paul, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the founding director of the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute, about this theory.
Saint Paul — who was born in Haiti and lived there for 32 years (including in Torbeck, which was damaged by the earthquake, until he was 12) — said he believes that rebuilding Haiti will require reasserting political sovereignty, no small task for a country reconstructing its government along with its buildings and still affected by the legacy of colonialism.
Our conversation — which explored how neocolonialism affects Haiti’s political institutions, what the role of the international community is in the rebuilding of Haiti, and why Haiti is unfairly mischaracterized — is below, edited for length and clarity.
Gabby Birenbaum
What are you hearing from people on the ground right now regarding access to relief?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
Just today, I was in communication with someone who is a CEO of a hospital there. Some of those hospitals, they are damaged, they received a lot of damage. Fortunately, the hospital of my friend, it is [undamaged]. This hospital is among the few providing health care to people in Haiti. Those people, they are in need of everything. Some are injured. They have lost their home. They don’t have a floor where to stay. For instance, there are more than 100 people who are sheltered in the hospital of my friend.
They don’t have shelter. They don’t have food. This is the situation.
Gabby Birenbaum
How does the political instability in Haiti affect its ability to respond to crises like this earthquake?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
It affects a lot because politics shapes everything. And when you say political instability, yes, of course, there is the political instability in Haiti. But also, we should ask why. What are the causes? The political instability is not something that just came from the sky. That political instability has some deep roots — some causes that are internal and other causes that are external.
In Haiti, you have a disconnection between the intellectual elites and the masses of the Haitian population. Because those elites, they use their knowledge not for the progress of Haiti. The general tendency has been, historically, those elites, people with knowledge that should be leaders to guide the Haitian population, they have established a pact just to have some position of power in order to maintain their privilege. You don’t see, historically, elites fighting for the improvement of the lives of the general population.
Political elites, they don’t see politics as a means to serve the general population. They see politics as a means to have wealth and privilege for themselves and for their families and for their tribe.
You have those religious elites, who have a lack of spirituality. It’s a Christianity that is totally deprived of charity. They don’t use, for instance, the Bible, the word of God, in order to make a difference in the lives of the oppressed.
And then you have those economic elites. In Haiti, we don’t have a national bourgeoisie. In Haiti, we have a class that calls themselves the private sector of business. The economic class, they see Haiti as a place of economic transaction. They don’t have any kind of self-identity to the [nation] of Haiti.
So when you put together all those internal factors, you see that Haiti has internal factors that we need to change.
Gabby Birenbaum
How has the recent earthquake affected Haiti’s political situation and the ability of Prime Minister Ariel Henry to be effective?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
The prime minister has a lack of legitimacy in Haiti. Ariel Henry was, in a certain way, just the decision of the international alliance, who decided, “Oh, this guy now should be the guy to handle the situation.” [Most Western nations backed Henry over his rival, former interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph.] Ariel is not the result of a legitimate consensus of the Haitian population.
I don’t think Ariel has the capacity and the credibility to deal with the situation, because he came into power in a context after the assassination of the president, in a context in which most of the institutions are not working. The government doesn’t have a strong capacity.
Most of the members of Ariel’s government came from the regime of Jovenel Moïse. And we are dealing with the same corrupted politicians. I won’t be surprised if many of them will see that tragedy as an opportunity to make money.
Gabby Birenbaum
And how do history and colonialism fit into the puzzle of instability?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
Those are very important, because Haiti was the first country to liberate itself against slavery — the first successful anti-slavery revolution in the world. Since the Haitian Revolution, the masters of the capital system, they never accepted the fact that Haiti showed the way for the progress of the Global South because the Haitian Revolution was beyond class, gender, and race.
But because capital cannot survive without slavery, without white supremacy, the international community has also managed to put their feet on the neck of people since the very inception of Haiti. Here’s some quick data: In 1825, France caused the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs, which now, in the common currency, is more than $21 billion, just to recognize Haitian independence. This is stupidity, because Haitian people fought for their independence.
The Global North, they [hated] Haiti automatically. The US didn’t recognize Haitian independence until 1861. Also, the US intervened in Haiti for 19 years. Woodrow Wilson sent the US military in Haiti, to occupy Haiti for 19 years. They [ignored] the Haitian Constitution. They took the national funds of Haiti, the money of Haiti, and it was transferred to the National City Bank. They used this money of Haiti to [bankroll] Wall Street.
When we are talking about political instability, in so many ways, we have to go to the root causes. Now, that political instability can explain why, in Haiti, the political institutions are so fragile. Because there has been a process of [exploitation] of the political institutions. The [institution] is very, very weak. The Haitian government has to wait for the assistance of the international community. But it’s also because the international community has been constantly and negatively involved in Haitian politics.
The government we had in Haiti was never the will of the Haitian people. There have been governments imposed by the US Department of State. For instance, in 2010, Hillary Clinton was the US secretary of state. She went into Haiti and intervened in the election, and picked the candidate that was convenient for the US. We have to understand that the international community has always worked to [undermine] Haitian institutions.
When you have an election, [foreign powers] are picking people that are convenient for their interests but are not good for the interests of the Haitians. Of course it will give you what we are seeing now: very weak institutions that cannot respond to the needs of the Haitian population.
Gabby Birenbaum
What can be done, in the short term, to strengthen Haiti’s political institutions and the recovery effort?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
The international community, and more specifically the US and Canada and France, should have a drastic change in their foreign policy toward Haiti. For instance, in the short term, we should have a kind of investigation to know why the Clinton Foundation, from 2010 to 2015, managed [nearly] $14 billion to rebuild Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, to come back better. [While nearly $14 billion in aid was promised to Haiti, the Clinton Foundation, which had many active projects in Haiti at the time, raised only $30 million of that.] Why were the Clintons [not] able to really help Haiti? Where’s the $14 billion collected on behalf of the Haitian people? This is something that we should have an international investigation.
[While the Clinton Foundation didn’t oversee the Haiti aid effort, former President Bill Clinton did sit on the UN’s Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, and as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was in charge of over $4 billion for Haiti managed by USAID. Both efforts included little input from the Haitian government and people, and are widely regarded as failures.]
Secondly, the international aid that they are sending to Haiti should go to the local organizations and not to international NGOs. When there is some kind of earthquake in Haiti, many international NGOs, they put Haiti under the umbrella of charity. They took the money. Ninety percent of the money went back to the US, to those national NGOs. [Between January 2010 and June 2012, about 10 percent of the overall money raised for Haiti went to the Haitian government or Haitian organizations. The remaining 90 percent went to non-Haitian NGOs.] We shouldn’t give any money on behalf of the Haitian community to NGOs, for instance, that stole the money they collected in 2010.
Many international nations have some important interests in Haiti. They don’t want to give Haitian people the chance to figure out their own solutions. The Biden administration, for instance, should understand that Haiti is a sovereign country — the first Black empire. They should stop the anti-Blackness foreign policy against Haitian people. Those things should be very helpful in order to give Haitian people a chance.
Gabby Birenbaum
And what about in the long term? How can Haiti set up a political system that ensures a longer-term stability?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
When you say political system, that political system that we have now, in 2021, wasn’t put in place in 2021. According to my explanation, it’s because of a long, long, long process. So in order to have a certain type of political system, [we have to] create a new one.
We will need, first, a new kind of education. There is a new generation of Haitian people that we should educate differently. There is an ongoing neocolonial education. We should abandon that perspective. We should now have economic elites, political elites, religious elites, intellectual elites that love Haiti and that should use their knowledge in order to make a difference in the life of others.
International leaders can help in the short term, for instance, by changing the kind of narrative they have on Haiti. The mainstream narrative has been that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti is not really the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti is a country that has big problems, but Haiti is not a poor country. According to my explanation, all these external factors have helped to [create] poverty in Haiti.
Haiti is not poor. Haiti is a very wealthy country. But Haitian people never had a chance to have decent politicians to lead the country, to manage the resources of Haiti, and to use the resources of Haiti to develop the country.
Long before the earthquake, Haiti was a country in which we have a lot of petroleum. We have wood. We have natural gas. We have a lot of natural resources — if the international community gives Haitians the opportunity, when we have elections, to not go and meddle in the Haitian elections. Give the opportunity to the Haitian electorate to pick!
We need a kind of new nation — a Haitian with a sense of patriotism, a Haitian with a sense of nationality, that loves the place. For instance, you will use your skills to help the education of citizenship of Haiti. We need education centered on the promotion of citizenship, because Haiti is a country where we have a lack of civics now.
And also, we need a kind of international solidarity from brown and Black folks around the world for the Haitian people. Because the Haitian Revolution was led in the name of racial justice, no matter your skin color. The Haitian Revolution was about human dignity. The Haitian Revolution symbolized life and signified decency. If we want to give decency to our society, we should [promote] the values of the Haitian people.
The Haitian Revolution was a revolution anticipating Black Lives Matter, when Black Lives Matter was not actually hashtagged.
Gabby Birenbaum
How can the international community help Haiti in a way that embraces that solidarity you were talking about?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
I think international solidarity can take many forms. For instance, the Haitian diaspora, and allies and friends of Haiti who want to help, they should not send their money to international NGOs. They should identify the local organizations that are on the ground doing the work.
We can call in small donations. And those donations should go directly to the people, to organizations on the ground that would help the victims. But if we repeat the mistakes of 2010, sending money to big NGOs, big international institutions, we will see the repetition of the corruption of 2010. International NGOs will get more money, and the victims won’t receive anything. Their lives will be less and less dignified.
The Haitian diaspora should come together. We need to have less division, less conflict among us in the diaspora. The many people from the North, they should come together in a diasporic organization in order to go and create and found schools and hospitals. We need to form what we call a strategy of local development aid in Haiti.
Gabby Birenbaum
What steps should Haiti take to prepare for future storms and earthquakes, like updating building codes and alarm systems? How can it rebuild in a way that is resilient?
Jean Eddy Saint Paul
You cannot do that if you don’t have strong institutions.
Because we had 11 years, from 2010 to 2021. So what did we do in 11 years? Nothing! To do what you’re asking, you need decent politicians. They are the [ones who] will make the decisions and be placed in the institutions.
But if we still have that lack of leadership, if we don’t have strong institutions, then those institutions cannot do this by themselves. They need individuals with a high sense of ethics and responsibility and commitment in order to help the situation. An earthquake is not a fatality. It’s just a natural disaster. But in Haiti, because of bad political leadership, the earthquake has added more pain to the daily lives of the population.
Haiti has many seismic faults. We cannot predict when the next earthquake will be in Haiti — two weeks, two years, 20 years, we don’t know. But we know for sure another earthquake will hit Haiti. We cannot have investment without institutions that are working.
Meltwater flowing across the Greenland ice sheet in 2007. (photo: Uriel Sina/Getty)
or the first time on record, precipitation on Saturday at the summit of Greenland — roughly two miles above sea level — fell as rain and not snow.
Temperatures at the Greenland summit over the weekend rose above freezing for the third time in less than a decade. The warm air fueled an extreme rain event that dumped 7 billion tons of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall in Washington, DC, nearly 250,000 times.
It was the heaviest rainfall on the ice sheet since record keeping began in 1950, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and the amount of ice mass lost on Sunday was seven times higher than the daily average for this time of year.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, said this is evidence Greenland is warming rapidly.
"What is going on is not simply a warm decade or two in a wandering climate pattern," Scambos told CNN. "This is unprecedented."
The National Science Foundation's Summit Station is located at the highest point on the Greenland ice sheet, where scientists can observe Arctic weather and changes in the ice. The station has been staffed year-round to observe extreme changes since 1989. The majority of the weekend's rain fell from the southeast coast of Greenland up to the Summit Station.
Jennifer Mercer, program officer for the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation, said because of the significant rain event, operations at the Summit Station would need to change: "It means that we need to consider weather events that we have not had to deal with before in the history of our operations there," she told CNN.
"Increasing weather events including melting, high winds, and now rain, over the last 10 years have occurred outside the range of what is considered normal," Mercer said. "And these seem to be occurring more and more."
As human-caused climate change warms the planet, ice loss has rapidly increased. A major UN climate report released this month concluded that the burning of fossil fuels led to Greenland melting over the past two decades. A recent study published in the journal Cryosphere found Earth has lost a staggering 28 trillion tonnes of ice since the mid-1990s, a large portion of which was from the Arctic, including the Greenland ice sheet.
In July, the Greenland ice sheet experienced one of the most significant melting events in the past decade, losing more than 8.5 billion tons of surface mass in a single day, which was enough to submerge Florida in two inches of water. It was the third instance of extreme melting in the past decade, during which time the melting has stretched farther inland than the entire satellite era, which began in the 1970s.
In 2019, Greenland shed roughly 532 billion tons of ice into the sea. During that year, an unexpectedly hot spring and a July heat wave caused almost the entire ice sheet's surface to begin melting. Global sea level rose permanently by 1.5 millimeters as a result.
"We are crossing thresholds not seen in millennia, and frankly this is not going to change until we adjust what we're doing to the air," said Scambos.
Other unusual events have become more frequent, too, Mercer said.
Two years ago, a polar bear made it to the Summit Station, which was unusual since polar bears live in coastal regions where they can easily find food. The bear had trekked several hundred miles inland across the ice sheet. In the last five years, Mercer said three polar bears have been sighted high on Greenland's ice sheet.
According to Mercer, the rain will have a lasting effect on the properties of the snow, leaving a crust of ice behind that will absorb more energy from the sun, until it gets buried by snow. Scambos said this crusty layer will also be a barrier that prevents the downward draining of melt water, which will then flood the surface of the ice sheet and initiate run off at higher elevations.
Because of the layer of ice it created, the weekend's rainfall event "will be visible in ice core records in the future," Mercer said.
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