15 December 21
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14 December 21
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Lawmakers and corporate lobbyists stymied recent proposed legislation to protect employees’ jobs when they flee an unsafe workplace — exactly the kind of protection that could have saved the Amazon workers who died at work during tornadoes over the weekend.
NBC News reported Monday that workers at a Kentucky candle factory were told by superiors that they could be fired if they fled their workplace as a powerful storm approached. In Edwardsville, Illinois, one Amazon worker who died reportedly texted his girlfriend beforehand: “Amazon won’t let us leave.”
At least eight workers were subsequently killed at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory in Kentucky, while six workers were killed in the Illinois disaster at Amazon, whose warehouses have been plagued by deadly cataclysms and allegations of hazardous conditions.
Horrifying details are emerging about the tornado disaster at Amazon's warehouse in Illinois, where at least 6 workers were killed on the job.
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) December 13, 2021
Before he died, Larry Virden reportedly texted his girlfriend: "Amazon won’t let us leave." He leaves behind four children. pic.twitter.com/3ZRLik9VIs
“The Urgent Need for Protection Against Unfair Firings”
As in most other states, corporate interests have preserved “at will” employment laws in both Kentucky and Illinois that allow employers to fire workers for no cause. But earlier this year, Illinois lawmakers introduced legislation to protect workers from such firings unless an employer had “just cause” for a termination.
The Illinois bill, called the Illinois Employee Security Act, explicitly states that a “just cause” for firing does not include “an employee’s refusal to work under conditions that the employee reasonably believes would expose him or her, other employees, or the public to an unreasonable health or safety risk.”
The legislation, which has fifteen sponsors, would join Illinois with Montana as the only two states with a “just cause” law. However, the bill was criticized by the powerful Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and it was formally opposed by the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. Both organizations list Amazon as a member.
Amazon also disclosed donating last year to the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, another organization opposing the measure, according to state records.
Since being introduced in February, the bill has been bottled up in Illinois’s Democratic-controlled legislature, despite a survey from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) showing that a third of Illinois workers “say that fear of being fired or disciplined would prevent them from raising workplace health and safety concerns to their employer.”
The disaster “shows the urgent need for protection against unfair firings — like the [Illinois Employee Security Act], which is now under consideration in the state legislature,” said Paul Sonn, state policy program director for NELP. “Retaliation against workers who refuse to work under dangerous conditions is not just inhumane — it endangers all of us by silencing workers from sounding the alarm about dangers on the job.”
Integrity Staffing Solutions, a temporary staffing firm that has listed jobs at the Edwardsville Amazon warehouse, is a member of the American Staffing Association, a group that’s employed dozens of lobbyists to fight the Illinois Employee Security Act, likely because the bill would also extend protections to temp workers.
“Temporary labor is a vastly expanding sector in the workforce, and that has workers living day-to-day — even more precarious than paycheck-to-paycheck — and limits access to basic workplace protections and rights,” said Kara Rodriguez of the Raise the Floor Alliance, which has been pushing the legislation. “In October, Amazon announced they will hire 150,000 temp workers to prepare for the seasonal boost in sales. The American Staffing Association was quick to oppose the [“just cause” legislation] because it includes temp workers under just cause protections.”
According to reporting by the Intercept, some longtime Amazon workers say they’ve never been part of any kind of tornado safety or fire drill during their time working for the company.
For Amazon’s part, Dave Clark, the CEO of the company’s retail business, tweeted on Saturday: “We’re deeply saddened by the news that members of our Amazon family passed away as a result of the storm in Edwardsville, Illinois. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their loved ones, and everyone who has been impacted by the storm’s path across the U.S.”
Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos celebrated sending a former professional football player into space.
A National Campaign for Just Cause
The Illinois bill was part of a larger campaign by progressive groups to pass “just cause” legislation in states and cities throughout the country. Those standards are included in some employment and union contracts. However, they are not codified in most federal, state, or local laws, leaving most workers without such protections when Amazon and other companies fight off union drives.
NELP has for years pressed federal, state, and local lawmakers to change employment standards to require those protections — and the effort has notched recent victories.
For instance, Miami-Dade County also passed an ordinance protecting workers from employer retaliation if they comply with evacuation orders during a hurricane. In 2019, the Philadelphia City Council passed a bill prohibiting employers from firing workers in the parking industry without cause. The following year, New York’s City Council enacted a law extending just cause protections to the city’s 67,000 fast-food workers.
Proponents of “just cause” legislation argue that “the lack of protection against unfair termination of workers stymies enforcement of workplace laws by chilling workers from blowing the whistle on employer violations of their rights — such as the right to a minimum wage, to a healthy and safe workplace, and to be free from discrimination and harassment,” as one NELP report put it.
That argument has proven broadly popular: NELP’s February poll found “71 percent of voters in battleground congressional districts — including 67 percent of Republican voters — supported the adoption of just-cause laws.”
Business groups have opposed the legislation because they say it “imposes mandates on an employer’s discipline system and interferes with personnel management,” as the Illinois Chamber wrote.
“Employers who feel strongly opposed to this bill may wish to consult with a lobbyist or their state legislative representative regarding their concerns,” the employment law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP advised its Illinois clients in March. “Should this bill become law, Illinois employers need to be prepared to review and revise their termination practices.”
President Joe Biden has been under pressure to sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to extend such protections to their workers. In November, he signed an order with some limited language.
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine sued the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Tuesday. (photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., cites the modern version of an 1871 law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was enacted after the Civil War to safeguard government officials carrying out their duties and protect civil rights. Two similar suits have been filed already this year related to Jan. 6 — one by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and another by a number of police officers who fought the rioters that day.
Racine’s suit, however, is the first effort by a government agency to hold individuals and organizations civilly responsible for the violence at the U.S. Capitol on the day Congress ceremonially confirmed President Biden’s 2020 election victory.
An attorney representing two of the defendants criticized the lawsuit after it was filed Tuesday, saying it targeted the wrong people.
“You can’t file a fantasy in court,” said Jonathon Moseley, who represents Zachary Rehl, the president of the Philadelphia Proud Boys chapter, and Kelly Meggs, an Oath Keeper from Florida. “There were clearly violent people who assaulted police that day, but that wasn’t the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers.”
A similar lawsuit led to a $26 million verdict last month against more than a dozen of the nation’s most influential white supremacists and hate groups for their role in the deadly 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville. That trial evidence drew heavily on the defendants’ text messages, social media posts and videos to reconstruct how they conspired in advance of the violence.
In the 1980s, a lawsuit drove an Alabama-based faction of the Klan into bankruptcy, forcing members to turn over their local headquarters to the family of a murdered Black man.
Racine’s suit names as defendants Proud Boys International LLC, Oath Keepers and dozens of their most high-profile members — mostly individuals who are charged in federal court with committing crimes related to Jan. 6. The goal is to unravel the financing behind the groups and secure “full restitution and recompense” for the city of Washington, which has incurred huge costs for treating hundreds of injured officers.
“I think the damages are substantial,” Racine said in an interview. “If it so happens that it bankrupts or puts these individuals and entities in financial peril, so be it.”
He declined to say whether he’d discussed the lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department officials overseeing the criminal cases. Federal prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against individuals affiliated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and the FBI continues to investigate those groups’ activities in the days and months leading up to Jan. 6.
Racine’s civil suit was put together with the assistance of two nonprofit groups that focused on the Jan. 6 assault, the States United Democracy Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In addition, two private law firms are serving as pro bono outside counsel.
At a news conference, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt called Jan. 6 “the most predictable terror attack in the history of our country,” and Racine thanked journalists for identifying the many “red flags” that preceded that day.
“There is no substitute for bringing a civil suit that seeks damages against each of the individuals and groups responsible,” said Norman Eisen, a veteran of the Obama White House Counsel’s Office who co-chairs the Democracy Center with former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican. “It is a way to assure those bad actors never do it again.”
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the District’s nonvoting delegate in Congress, said the lawsuit could eventually provide much-needed resources to the city. She said $9 million in federal funding meant for the District would pay for costs related to Jan. 6, but that money does not cover medical treatment and leave for police officers.
One of the most badly injured was D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who was shocked with a stun gun as rioters dragged him down the steps of the Capitol. Fanone lost consciousness and was stripped of his badge and gun; he suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury.
“The domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol and violently assaulted hundreds of brave law enforcement officers were stoked by groups promoting The Big Lie,” Fanone said in a statement. “Those of us who suffered physical and emotional harm trying to defend democracy will never forget, nor will we cease working to hold accountable everyone responsible for inciting the mob, wherever the evidence may lead.”
The lawsuit draws heavily on evidence gathered by federal prosecutors seeking to prove that dozens of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members conspired to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. It says the defendants conspired “to prevent, interrupt, hinder, and impede, through force, intimidation, and threat . . . United States officials from discharging official duties of their offices and positions of trust as part of the formal process for counting and certifying the count of electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election and declaring a winner of the 2020 presidential election.”
Except for Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, all the named defendants in the lawsuit are also charged with federal crimes. Two have already pleaded guilty.
In the criminal cases, prosecutors have drawn on encrypted chats and emails to claim that the Oath Keepers planned for weeks in advance of Jan. 6 — recruiting new members, engaging in paramilitary training, setting up radios to stay in communication and stashing guns just across the river in Virginia.
Prosecutors say one Florida Oath Keepers member said in a Dec. 19 Facebook message that he had “formed an alliance” with the Proud Boys to “shut this [expletive] down,” and later referred to the Proud Boys as a “force multiplier.”
Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers’ founder, has not been charged with a crime, nor is he named as a defendant in Racine’s lawsuit. Charging papers in the criminal cases refer to him simply as “Person One.” Prosecutors say he designated leaders for the Jan. 6 operation, huddling with them before they went in the building and staying in touch with them as they stormed the Capitol.
The portrait drawn in court filings of the Proud Boys’ pre-Jan. 6 planning is more diffuse. While the Oath Keepers embrace military gear and terminology, the Proud Boys are styled as a social club for like-minded men; their adherents are charged in small groups rather than in a single overarching indictment.
Prosecutors say Proud Boys were among the first to knock down barricades and breach the Capitol windows on Jan. 6 — paving the way for thousands of others to follow. Four prominent members of the group are set to go on trial in May.
Proud Boys leader Tarrio was jailed at the time of the riot for burning a “Black Lives Matter” flag stolen from a church during an earlier protest in D.C. But like Rhodes, he is described by prosecutors as coordinating with others who are accused of invading the building.
Only a few of the dozens of Proud Boy and Oath Keeper defendants have agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the government; many are challenging the legal basis for the charges. They say they were not conspiring to use violence against police or politicians but in battle with leftist counterprotesters, who had tangled with right-wing agitators at previous Trump rallies.
The Oath Keepers “intended to affect the actions of Congress: otherwise known as political demonstration and protest,” wrote Carmen Hernandez, who represents one defendant in that group.
The remains of the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory. (photo: Reuters)
Night shift employees report managers took roll call as tornado bore down to be sure no one had left without permission
The barrage of tornadoes that tore through Kentucky and surrounding states killed a dozen children, including a two-month-old infant, Governor Andy Beshear said on Tuesday. A total of 74 people died in Kentucky, with the oldest victim at 98 years old. Eight people have yet to be identified. More than 18,000 homes remained without power on Tuesday.
Beshear said the storms produced “the strongest set of tornadoes that we have ever seen Kentucky and what we believe will probably be one of the most devastating tornado events in US history”.
The fatalities included eight at a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, that was reduced to rubble. Deaths at the candle factory were initially feared to be much higher, but a company spokesman said on Monday that the remaining 102 workers on duty at the time are alive and have been accounted for.
Multiple employees of the Mayfield Consumer Products factory told NBC News that they took shelter in bathrooms and hallways when they first heard tornado warning sirens, then supervisors ordered them back to work when they mistakenly assumed the danger had passed.
“I asked to leave and they told me I’d be fired,” Elijah Johnson, 20, told NBC, claiming that he was among a group of about 15 concerned colleagues who were refused permission to evacuate.
“‘Even with the weather like this, you’re still going to fire me?’” he said he asked his manager.
The manager replied, “Yes,” Johnson said, adding that bosses took a roll call to find out if anybody had already left.
Images of the wreckage of the scented candle factory, one of the largest employers in western Kentucky, has become symbolic of the devastation caused by the unseasonal tornado that killed dozens across several states. Some have already questioned why the factory was even operational that night.
The factory workers’ claims cast an even darker shadow over the events of the evening. According to NBC, citing another night shift worker, there was a three to four hour lull between the first alarm sounding and the arrival of the tornado that leveled the building, time in which she said the 110 workers should have been sent home but weren’t.
Haley Conder, 29, said she was one of a number of employees who approached three managers again at about 9pm when the alarm sounded a second time.
“‘You can’t leave, you can’t leave. You have to stay here,’” Conder said the managers told the group. “The situation was bad. Everyone was uncomfortable.”
McKayla Emery, 21, interviewed by NBC from her hospital bed, said she overheard a group receiving a similar answer earlier in the evening.
“People had questioned if they could leave or go home,” said Emery, who said she had wanted to stay to earn overtime pay. “‘If you leave, you’re more than likely to be fired,’” she said they were told. “I heard that with my own ears.”
The Guardian was unable to reach Mayfield Consumer Products representatives for comment on Tuesday, but according to NBC the company is denying the allegations.
“It’s absolutely untrue. We’ve had a policy in place since Covid began. Employees can leave any time they want to leave and they can come back the next day,” said Bob Ferguson, a company spokesperson.
Ferguson said managers had not told employees that leaving their shifts meant risking their jobs, and that company management had followed emergency protocols from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Beshear told reporters that the Kentucky Division of Occupational Safety and Health Compliance would undertake a months-long review of the deaths at the factory.
The governor said that such reviews are done whenever workers are killed on the job.
“So it shouldn’t suggest that there was any wrongdoing. But what it should give people confidence in, is that we’ll get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.
Activists in Los Angeles protest the rising cost of student loans. (photo: David McNew/Getty)
The Biden Administration announced that student loan repayments would officially continue on Feb. 1, 2022. For almost two years, millions of Americans were given some reprieve for their student loan payments due to the crippling economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Back in March 2020, all payments and interest rates were paused, giving most Americans more money to tuck away as millions were forced into unemployment at the height of the pandemic. Now, financial uncertainty looms again for millions of student loan borrowers as new fears begin to emerge about the Omicron variant that’s slowly sweeping across the U.S.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed the news on Dec. 13 during a press conference noting that getting Americans back on track with paying off their student loans has been a “high priority for the administration.”
“We’re still assessing the impact of the [COVID-19] Omicron variant,” Psaki said during the briefing. “But a smooth transition back into repayment is a high priority for the administration. The Department of Education is already communicating with borrowers to help them to prepare for return to repayment on February 1st and has secured contract extensions with loan servicers.”
STUDENT LOAN PAYMENTS: Jen Psaki was asked if President Biden will extend the student loan payment pause. pic.twitter.com/F86ZSGtjiK
— Forbes (@Forbes) December 11, 2021
Elsewhere in Psaki’s update, the White House official claimed that “41 million borrowers have benefited” from the extended pause and that The Biden Administration would be working directly with Americans to hopefully make the process easier through repayment plans.
According to Forbes, Biden has helped to cancel “$12.5 billion in student loan debt for about 640,000 borrowers since he entered office.” However, much of that student loan forgiveness has gone to specific groups of people including the disabled, or for students whose campuses’ closed due to unforeseeable circumstances, like the pandemic.
Many student loan borrowers felt duped following the news, given that at one point during Biden’s campaign, the steadfast politician was proposing a plan to automatically clear up to $50,000 of student loan debt for all Americans who provided public service. Now, it appears as though he’s doubled back on those prospects claiming that Congress should be the one to grant widespread forgiveness through legislation.
The news comes as a sad reality for Black women in particular, who are drastically affected by the student loan crisis. Black women owe on average 22 percent more student loan debt than their white counterparts. Additionally, Black women graduate from undergrad owing nearly $41,466 compared to white women who owe $33, 851, the American Associated of University Women (AAUW() reported.
Joint exercise in Pacific between U.S., Australian and Japanese military forces. (photo: U.S. Navy)
Note for TomDispatch Readers: It’s that end-of-the-year moment again when I ask all of you for money to keep this website afloat. Believe me, this isn’t how I like to spend my time either, but your contributions are what keep us going. So, I’ve written my sole funding appeal letter of this year to all TomDispatch subscribers, including in it, of course, the very plea for donations without which — no exaggeration — TD will sooner or later simply cease to exist. If you want to see that letter, click here, but if the mood just strikes you anyway, you can simply go right to the TD donation page and contribute. Truly, I can’t begin to tell you what your contributions, which come in from all over this divided country and beleaguered planet of ours, mean to me. A million thanks in advance! Tom]
Yes, four-star General Lloyd Austin commanded American forces in Iraq back in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, he took over from General James Mattis (remember him?) as the head of United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, overseeing America’s wars in the Greater Middle East and Afghanistan (where he had earlier commanded troops himself). Retiring from the Army in 2016, he promptly joined the board of directors of weapons giant Raytheon Technologies. When he became secretary of defense for President Biden and divested himself of his Raytheon shares, it was estimated that he had made $1.7 million from that company alone and he was then believed to be worth $7 million. As for James Mattis, who had left the U.S. military to become a board member for another major weapons maker, General Dynamics, he was believed to be worth $10 million when he came out of retirement as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense.
And all of that turns out to be pretty standard for the losing military commanders of our war-on-terror years. As Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post discovered, having been a commander in one or more of America’s failed wars of this century generally proved an all-too-lucrative calling card in the military-industrial complex. “The eight generals who commanded American forces in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2018,” he wrote, “have gone on to serve on more than 20 corporate boards.” Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw the famed (and disastrous) “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, was on a record 10 of those (and was known to have been paid a million dollars by just one of them). He would even form the McChrystal Group, which, as Peter Maass pointed out recently at the Intercept, “has more than 50 employees and provides consulting services to corporate and government clients.”
Do you remember how, in all those years commanding troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s generals regularly saluted our remarkable progress there and no less regularly insisted that the U.S. military had “turned a corner” in each country? As early as 2004 in Iraq, for instance, Major General Charles Swannack, Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, claimed “that we’ve turned that corner. I can also tell you that we are on a glide path towards success.” In 2010, General McChrystal would similarly claim that the U.S. had “turned the corner” in Helmand Province in the embattled poppy-producing southern heartland of Afghanistan. In 2017, General John Nicholson, then the U.S. commander there, would stare cheerily into the future, saying: “Now, looking ahead to 2018, as [Afghan] President [Ashraf] Ghani said, he believes we have turned the corner and I agree.” And so it went, year after year after year.
As it happened, it was all fantasy. Only when America’s generals retired and stepped through that infamous “revolving door” of the military-industrial complex did things change. I think you could say accurately, in fact, that that was the moment when each of them finally “turned a corner” triumphantly. Today, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore considers a military in which the losses are all on the battlefield and the gains in Congress as well as in that very military-industrial complex which only continues to soar like a missile in a moment when so many other parts of this society are sinking fast. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The U.S. Military Budget as a Mushroom Cloud
Why It’s Time to Make Deep Cuts at the Pentagon
Final approval of the latest military budget, formally known as the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, may slip into January as Congress wrangles over various side issues. Unlike so much crucial funding for the direct care of Americans, however, don’t for a second imagine it won’t pass with supermajorities. (Yes, the government could indeed be shut down one of these days, but not — never! — the U.S. military.)
Some favorites of mine among “defense” budget side issues now being wrangled over include whether military members should be able to refuse Covid-19 vaccines without being punished, whether young women should be required to register for the selective service system when they turn 18 (even though this country hasn’t had a draft in almost half a century and isn’t likely to have one in the foreseeable future), or whether the Iraq War AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), passed by Congress to disastrous effect in 2002, should be repealed after nearly two decades of calamity and futility.
As debates over these and similar issues, predictably partisan, grab headlines, the biggest issue of all eludes serious coverage: Why, despite decades of disastrous wars, do Pentagon budgets continue to grow, year after year, like ever-expanding nuclear mushroom clouds? In other words, as voices are raised and arms waved in Congress about vaccine tyranny or a hypothetical future draft of your 18-year-old daughter, truly critical issues involving your money (hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of taxpayer dollars) go largely uncovered.
What are some of those issues that we should be, but aren’t, looking at? I’m so glad you asked!
Seven Questions with “Throw-Weight”
Back in my Air Force days, while working in Cheyenne Mountain (the ultimate bomb shelter of the Cold War era), we talked about nuclear missiles in terms of their “throw-weight.” The bigger their throw-weight, the bigger the warhead. In that spirit, I’d like to lob seven throw-weighty questions — some with multiple “warheads” — in the general direction of the Pentagon budget. It’s an exercise worth doing largely because, despite its sheer size, that budget generally seems impervious to serious oversight, no less real questions of any sort.
So, here goes and hold on tight (or, in the nuclear spirit, duck and cover!):
1. Why, with the end of the Afghan War, is the Pentagon budget still mushrooming upward? Even as the U.S. war effort there festered and then collapsed in defeat, the Pentagon, by its own calculation, was burning through almost $4 billion a month or $45 billon a year in that conflict and, according to the Costs of War Project, $2.313 trillion since it began. Now that the madness and the lying are finally over (at least theoretically speaking), after two decades of fraud, waste, and abuses of every sort, shouldn’t the Pentagon budget for 2022 decrease by at least $45 billion? Again, America lost, but shouldn’t we taxpayers now be saving a minimum of $4 billion a month?
2. After a disastrous war on terror costing upward of $8 trillion, isn’t it finally time to begin to downsize America’s global imperial presence? Honestly, for its “defense,” does the U.S. military need 750 overseas bases in 80 countries on every continent but Antarctica, maintained at a cost somewhere north of $100 billion annually? Why, for example, is that military expanding its bases on the Pacific island of Guam at the expense of the environment and despite the protests of many of the indigenous people there? One word: China! Isn’t it amazing how the ever-inflating threat of China empowers a Pentagon whose insatiable budgetary demands might be in some trouble without a self-defined “near-peer” adversary? It’s almost as if, in some twisted sense, the Pentagon budget itself were now being “Made in China.”
3. Speaking of China and its alleged pursuit of more nuclear weaponry, why is the U.S. military still angling for $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years for its own set of “modernized” nuclear weapons? After all, the Navy’s current strategic force, as represented above all by Ohio-class submarines with Trident missiles, is (and will for the foreseeable future be) capable of destroying the world as we know it. A “general” nuclear exchange would end the lives of most of humanity, given the dire impact the ensuing nuclear winter would have on food production. What’s the point of Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, if America’s leaders are preparing to destroy it all with a new generation of holocaust-producing nuclear bombs and missiles?
4. Why is America’s military, allegedly funded for “defense,” configured instead for force projection and global strikes of every sort? Think of the Navy, built around aircraft carrier strike groups, now taking the fight to the “enemy” in the South China Sea. Think of Air Force B-52 strategic bombers, still flying provocatively near the borders of Russia, as if the movie Dr. Strangelove had been released not in 1964 but yesterday. Why, in sum, does the U.S. military refuse to stay home and protect Fortress America? An old sports cliché, “the best defense is a good offense,” seems to capture the bankruptcy of what passes, even after decades of lost wars in distant lands, for American strategic thinking. It may make sense on a football field, but, judging by those wars, it’s been a staggering loss leader for our military, not to mention the foreign peoples on the receiving end of lethal weapons very much “Made in the USA.”
Instead of reveling in shock and awe, this country should find the wars of choice it’s fought since 1945 genuinely shocking and awful — and act to end them for good and defund any future versions of them.
5. Speaking of global strikes with awful repercussions, why is the Pentagon working so hard to encircle China, while ratcheting up tensions that can only contribute to nuclear brinksmanship and even possibly a new world war as early as 2027? Related question: Why does the Pentagon continue to claim that, in its “wargames” with China over a prospective future battle for the island of Taiwan, it always loses? Is it because “losing” is really winning, since that very possibility can then be cited to justify yet more requests for funds from Congress so that this country can “catch up” to the latest Red Menace?
(Bonus question: As America’s generals keep losing real wars as well as imaginary ones, why aren’t any of them ever fired?)
6. Speaking of global aggression, why does this country maintain a vast, costly military within the military that’s run by Special Operations Command and operationally geared to facilitating interventions anywhere and everywhere? (Note that this country’s special ops forces are bigger than the full-scale militaries of many countries on this planet!) When you look back over the last several decades, Special Operations forces haven’t proven to be all that special, have they? And it doesn’t matter whether you’re citing the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Put differently, for every SEAL Team 6 mission that kills a big bad guy, there are a surprising number of small-scale catastrophes that only alienate other peoples, thereby generating blowback (and so, of course, further funding of the military).
7. Finally, why, oh why, after decades of military losses, does Congress still defer so spinelessly to the “experience” of our generals and admirals? Why issue so many essentially blank checks to the gang that simply can’t shoot straight, whether in battle or when they testify before Congressional committees, as well as to the giant companies (and congressional lobbying monsters) that make the very weaponry that can’t shoot straight?
It’s a compliment in the military to be called a straight shooter. I suggest President Biden start firing a host of generals until he finds a few who are willing to do exactly that and tell him and the rest of us some hard truths, especially about malfunctioning weapons and lost wars.
Forty years ago, after Ronald Reagan became president, I started writing in earnest against the bloating of the Pentagon budget. At that time, though, I never would have imagined that the budgets of those years would look modest today, especially after the big enemy of that era, the Soviet Union, imploded in 1991.
Why, then, does each year’s NDAA rise ever higher into the troposphere, drifting on the wind and poisoning our culture with militarism? Because, to state the obvious, Congress would rather engage in pork-barrel spending than exercise the slightest real oversight when it comes to the national security state. It has, of course, been essentially captured by the military-industrial complex, a dire fate President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about 60 years ago in his farewell address. Instead of being a guard dog for America’s money (not to mention for our rapidly disappearing democracy), Congress has become a genuine lapdog of the military brass and their well-heeled weapons makers.
So, even as Congress puts on a show of debating the NDAA, it’s really nothing but, at best, a political Kabuki dance (a metaphor, by the way, that’s quite common in the military, which tells you something about the well-traveled sense of humor of its members). Sure, our congressional representatives act as if they’re exercising oversight, even as they do as they’re told, while the deep-pocketed contractors make major contributions to the campaign “war chests” of the very same politicians. It’s a win for them, of course, but a major loss for this country — and indeed for the world.
Doing More With Less
What would real oversight look like when it comes to the defense budget? Again, glad you asked!
It would focus on actual defense, on preventing wars, and above all, on scaling down our gigantic military. It would involve cutting that budget roughly in half over the next few years and so forcing our generals and admirals to engage in that rarest of acts for them: making some tough choices. Maybe then they’d see the folly of spending $1.7 trillion on the next generation of world-ending weaponry, or maintaining all those military bases globally, or maybe even the blazing stupidity of backing China into a corner in the name of “deterrence.”
Here’s a radical thought for Congress: Americans, especially the working class, are constantly being advised to do more with less. Come on, you workers out there, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and put your noses to those grindstones!
To so many of our elected representatives (often sheltered in grotesquely gerrymandered districts), less money and fewer benefits for workers are seldom seen as problems, just challenges. Quit your whining, apply some elbow grease, and “git-r-done!”
The U.S. military, still proud of its “can-do” spirit in a warfighting age of can’t-do-ism, should have plenty of smarts to draw on. Just consider all those Washington “think tanks” it can call on! Isn’t it high time, then, for Congress to challenge the military-industrial complex to focus on how to do so much less (as in less warfighting) with so much less (as in lower budgets for prodigal weaponry and calamitous wars)?
For this and future Pentagon budgets, Congress should send the strongest of messages by cutting at least $50 billion a year for the next seven years. Force the guys (and few gals) wearing the stars to set priorities and emphasize the actual defense of this country and its Constitution, which, believe me, would be a unique experience for us all.
Every year or so, I listen again to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech. In those final moments of his presidency, Ike warned Americans of the “grave implications” of the rise of an “immense military establishment” and “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” the combination of which would constitute a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.” This country is today suffering from just such a rise to levels that have warped the very structure of our society. Ike also spoke then of pursuing disarmament as a continuous imperative and of the vital importance of seeking peace through diplomacy.
In his spirit, we should all call on Congress to stop the madness of ever-mushrooming war budgets and substitute for them the pursuit of peace through wisdom and restraint. This time, we truly can’t allow America’s numerous smoking guns to turn into so many mushroom clouds above our beleaguered planet.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Xiomara Castro speaks at a press conference on November 28, 2021, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (photo: Inti Ocon/Getty)
None of Honduras’s long-standing problems have disappeared with Xiomara Castro’s election as president. But the Honduran people have struck a blow against rapacious capitalists at home and Washington’s meddling from abroad.
Castro’s win is a blow to the oligarchic power of the National Party, which masterminded the 2009 coup with the help of the US State Department. The country never recovered from the coup; in fact, under National Party rule things got worse, with violence and narcotrafficking increasing while Juan Orlando Hernández, the outgoing president who was supported by the US State Department and Barack Obama’s administration, stole directly from public institutions.
Beyond his own implication in venal criminal activity, Hernández has allowed crime and corruption to flourish in an impoverished Honduran society. The working poor faces utter and unrelenting destitution, high levels of crime and violence are a part of everyday life, and conditions have forced a migrant exodus of mostly women and children.
Castro’s Libre party’s win was in significant part a protest vote against the National Party and a vote for the dead: those protesters who perished during the coup and later during the fraudulent 2017 elections; those who were killed in defense of Honduras’s rivers and ancestral lands; those who protested the Hernández administration’s many crimes, including promises of mobile hospitals to treat COVID-19 that never materialized; those who lost their lives to Hurricanes Iota and Eta during the pandemic, which rendered entire families homeless, living on the side of roads or in makeshift shelters on the Caribbean coast without aid from the government.
This was also a vote of the youth who came of age during the coup. Castro received the most votes ever for a president in Honduran history, and she was voted in by young people. Her win was also a win for Honduran feminists. After 200 years of independence from Spain and sixty-four years since women’s suffrage was won in 1957, Honduras will have a woman president.
This is significant in a time of extreme violence against women in the country and the culture of impunity regarding femicides. This year alone, according to the Red Lésbica Cattrachas, 304 cis women have been killed, out of which only fifty cases have been prosecuted. Of the 399 LGBT murders committed since the 2009, 123 of the victims were transgender. Castro’s championing women’s and LGBT issues will be a change in a country where previous presidents have looked away.
The Hernández administration was found culpable in June 2021 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for its failures to investigate and prosecute the case of the murder of trans activist Vicky Hernandez. The ruling demanded changes to the education system and the establishment of a law protecting various gender identities. In another case, GarÃfuna Community of Punta Piedra and Triunfo de la Cruz v. the State of Honduras, the Honduran state was found to have defied International Labor Law Convention 169 for its subjection of Hondurans to the privatization and theft of communal lands.
Other cases stuck in court without sentencing include the Berta Cáceres murder trial, where no sentence has been issued despite finding David Castillo of the Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA) corporation guilty this past July, and the trial of Guapinol River defenders, who organized to protect the river from pollution and deforestation and are still incarcerated. Castro’s presidency is expected to bring Honduras into compliance with international human rights norms and to restore its own judicial order.
Most importantly, this Libre party victory is a win for bottom-up organizing of Hondurans who have organized and protested since the 2009 coup. This organizing took many forms, in every region of the country, from protecting rivers and ancestral lands, to standing up to extractive industries, to fighting for abortion and LGBT rights and a gender identity law, and protesting fraud year after year.
Castro has proposed a participatory democracy plan that would begin with a national constitutional assembly to refound Honduras, a fundamental demand of the resistance movement that emerged after the 2009 coup. This is an opportunity to draft a new constitution that would be reflective of all Hondurans, including those who have historically lacked sufficient legal protections like indigenous and Garifuna communities, women, and LGBT Hondurans.
President Castro faces many challenges, of course, not least of which is the building of unity and reconciliation in a society broken by the US-backed coup and the National Party. First, the coffers of the public sector have been emptied by the Hernandez administration, leaving the country economically devastated. She will have to rebuild constitutionality and the rule of law, and she will need to generate and maintain support for a national dialogue for reconciliation.
Then there is the challenge of the US State Department and its reach in the region, its covert forces and its drug war, as well as persistent anti-communist agendas, the local and regional oligarchs, narcotrafficking in the region itself, extreme poverty, external debt, and the migration crisis.
None of these issues are new, and they plague not just Honduras but all of Central America. What is new, however, is a feeling of hope that Castro has embodied. For the first time in a very long time, Honduras has a people’s president, elected by a majority of Hondurans in a legitimate election, and an accompanying coalitional movement of Hondurans ready to help lead on their own terms.
Solar farms can double as thriving pollinator habitats. (photo: Fresh Habitat)
The study, from researchers at Lancaster University in the UK that will be presented today at an Ecology Across Borders conference, shows that installing solar farms could be greatly beneficial to nature.
“Our findings provide the first quantitative evidence that solar parks could be used as a conservation tool to support and boost pollinator populations. If they are managed in a way that provides resources, solar parks could become [a] valuable bumble bee habitat,” said Hollie Blaydes, associate lecturer and doctorate student at the university. “In the UK, pollinator habitat has been established on some solar parks, but there is currently little understanding of the effectiveness of these interventions. Our findings provide solar park owners and managers with evidence to suggest that providing floral and nesting resources for bumble bees could be effective.”
While there’s no doubt that solar farms are helpful in generating clean energy, some critics say that these projects require extensive amounts of land that should instead be left untouched. Blaydes notes that solar parks disturb only about 5% of the ground, and these areas can also create new habitats for vulnerable pollinators, whose numbers are dwindling.
The researchers note that there are benefits for land owners who want to install solar parks, too. These lands could become meadows, rather than turf, cutting down land management costs for maintaining grass and other interventions. Meadows could also support four times more bumblebees compared to land covered in turf grass.
Another interesting point of the study is that these solar farms could further support bee density up to 1 kilometer outside of the solar farms, and the pollinators could then tend to nearby agricultural crops as well.
The UK already has about 14,000 hectares of solar farms, which have gained both praise and grievances. But Lancaster University researchers continue to dispel concerns.
Another 2021 university study, in collaboration with Ludong University in China and University of California Davis in the U.S., found that solar farms produce “cool islands,” reducing temperatures by about 2.3°C (36.14°F) 100 meters around the solar farm. Cooling effects on a lesser scale extend up to 700 meters around the solar farm.
Alona Armstrong, senior lecturer of energy and environmental sciences at Lancaster University and co-author of the cool islands study, said, “This heightens the importance of understanding the implications of renewable energy technologies on the hosting landscape — we need to ensure that the energy transition does not cause undue damage to ecological systems and ideally has net positive consequences on the places where we build them.”
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