It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, May 22, 2020
Venezuelan President Maduro: "Mike Pompeo Stop Your Arrogance"
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro | Photo: teleSUR
Published 7 May 2020
Maduro said during an interview with teleSUR: "I have advised Mike Pompeo: stop your arrogance and recognize that you don't have what it takes to take our government down. We are millions and we have a project, and you just can't stop that"
The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, said this Thursday that the armed incursion against the South American nation, which occurred on May 3, was a covert operation ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump.
RELATED:
Mercenary Confesses Failed Plot Was to Bring President Maduro to US
In an exclusive interview for teleSUR, the head of state reiterated that Trump was aware of this operation since he is informed about international issues and Venezuela is a focal issue of first interest, "it is one of Donald Trump's obsessions".
The armed incursion "is a covert operation ordered by Donald Trump, outsourced to Silvercorp (...) supported by Iván Duque (President of Colombia), and with a contract signed by Juan Guaidó (...) that aimed to assassinate the President, " said the Venezuelan leader.
The president also criticized that U.S. authorities waited 48 hours after the armed incursion to give a statement on the events, saying that Trump's reaction "is incredible and nervous, which initiates a set of strangely late responses."
#LIVE | President @maduro_en: I have advised Mike Pompeo: "stop your arrogance and recognize that you don't have what it takes to take our government down. We are millions and we have a project, and you just can't stop that" https://t.co/AHw8gMqXux pic.twitter.com/WDFjrLOElE— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) May 7, 2020
The Role of Guaido
President Maduro spoke about the contract that began the armed incursion and that has the signature of the former U.S. military and Silvercorp director, Jordan Goudreau, as well as the opposition political consultant Juan José (JJ) Rendón, and opposition lawmakers Sergio Vergara and Juan Guaidó.
In an interview with CNN, JJ Rendón acknowledged having signed the contract and that it aimed to undermine the integrity of the president and several members of the Venezuelan government.
"Juan José Rendón is a political adviser to drug traffickers, extreme right-wing politicians, he has made a fortune stealing, he would not bear an independent investigation. In Venezuela, he has a red code arrest warrant and he is the main adviser to Guaidó," he said.
Maduro reaffirmed that the U.S. attempt at imposing a president on Venezuela unconstitutionally was a complete failure, and emphasized that Guaidó "is a thief, a criminal" for hiring individuals to assassinate a political adversary.
"There is the contract, it is evident, so we are in the presence of moral degradation of the Venezuelan opposition (...) That experiment with a person of such vileness as Juan Guaidó failed them (...) he is a thief, a criminal who is capable of signing a contract to kill his political adversary. It is a failure,
someone will have to admit it, "said the president.
On the other hand, he emphasized that the South American nation has a civic, police, and military defense system to guarantee peace in the country, called the Bolivarian Shield, which remains active. "Our country is ready to fight, that is what they do not want to understand in Washington," he stressed.
.@maduro_en: "Guiado's signature in this contract with the U.S. mercenaries to try to overthrow us is undeniable. Also his adviser JJ Rendon has admitted he did sign. Rendon is an arrogant bandit, he is so full of himself and thinks he smarter than everyone. But he failed." pic.twitter.com/uhmD5OE852— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) May 7, 2020
Talks with the U.S. are in "Mute"
The head of state reported that they currently do not maintain communication with U.S. authorities, despite having tried to establish a dialogue through different channels.
"Not at this time. There have always been communication links, but after May 3 they were cut ... we have used three different routes that we have with three different officials from the Donald Trump government and they are completely silent."
Trudeau Rolls out His Trumpian COVID-19 Latin America Policy
By: Arnold August
Published 7 May 2020
Meanwhile, Venezuela's government puts its human and material resources at the service of its population.
Firstly, let us look at the COVID-19 issue. Under the auspices of Canada, the countries of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil are evaluating the impact of the pandemic on the Americas. As a corollary, the Trudeau Government claims, the impact on Venezuela must be examined. Perhaps we can help.
This chart, adding Ecuador to the countries referenced by Champagne, is based on the reputable Swiss-based scientific agency CDC. It sheds light on the situation. Ecuador is included along with the Champagne list, as they are all Lima Group member states.
This group of countries, of which Trudeau was a key founding member back in 2017 and its current top leader, has set the explicit goal of overthrowing the Maduro government. The facts show that it is Venezuela that serves as an example in Latin America.
Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador are right-wing dictatorships and thus, by their very nature, incapable or not interested in adopting a humane policy to fight the pandemic.
On the other hand, Venezuela has a Bolivarian Revolutionary government. It is animated by the need to fight COVID-19 and put all its meager resources, both human and physical, at the service of its population.
The resources would be far less meager if it were not for the crippling sanctions imposed by the US and Canada against Venezuela. Facts, such as the chart shows, are stubborn things.
Secondly, it is important to point out that Canada and the other Lima group countries cited in the Canadian governmental tweet (plus Ecuador) have no interest in the well-being of the peoples of Latin America.
For these countries and U.S. President Donald Trump, COVID-19 is just a tool. It serves as a weapon, not only to maintain the pre-COVID-19 tempo of the American attempt to recolonize the region with the full collaboration of its allies but to increase this aggressive momentum right in the middle of the pandemic, cynical as that is.
So, what is behind the concern of the Canadian Foreign Minister’s tweet? He mentions the “humanitarian” needs of Venezuelans as the “Venezuela crisis.”
Just finished a call with counterparts from Peru @GMeza_Cuadra, Colombia @claudiablumc & Brazil @ernestofaraujo. We discussed the #COVID19 pandemic, the impact on the Americas, notably the Venezuela crisis and the humanitarian needs of Venezuelans. @Jguaido pic.twitter.com/k4X0KQAY9a— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) ���� (@FP_Champagne) May 4, 2020
The tweet, as we noted above, also tags @Jguaido, the so-called Trump/Trudeau interim president. The Canadian government tweet was dated May 4.
During the early morning of May 3, a group of heavily armed mainly Colombian mercenaries, accompanied by armed US marines, attempted a maritime incursion into Venezuela.
The avowed goal, as these two 2-minute videos show, was to overthrow the legitimate Maduro government, confirming the Maduro government’s view.
However, the attempted coup failed miserably. The invaders were stopped and arrested or killed by the Venezuelan Civic Military-Union and local fishermen.
The Trudeau government surely knew about it as the news appeared on May 4 on Canadian state television. Besides, in my May 4 newsletter, I invited my more than 3,500 subscribers to write to Trudeau and Champagne.
In the tweet below, Orlando Viera-Blanco, the Trump/Trudeau “fake ambassador” to Canada, triumphantly announced what he thought would be the imminent entry into Caracas of Guaidó as the president and not as interim president. Note the telling exclamation mark after “soon”!”
Thanks Minister! We are moving forward with the appropriate arranges to have a call between President @jguaido and yourself soon! /Merci Ministre! Nous allons de l'avant avec les dispositions appropriées pour avoir bientôt un appel entre le président @jguaido et vous-même! La https://t.co/z84w494EKg— Orlando Viera-Blanco (@ovierablanco) May 5, 2020
There is a precedent for this. On April 29, a week before the attempted invasion, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: The Trudeau government, which is in lockstep with the U.S. on Latin American policy, surely noted that U.S. foreign policy statement.
However, the coup was foiled even before it got o the ground. The Trudeau government is strangely comfortable with these activities, as can be demonstrated by the intimate ties with the Guaidó representative in Canada.
In any case, the Canadian government is re-tuning its plans against Venezuela to match the same Trump COVID-19 policy.
Just like Trump, Trudeau now has to deal with yet another failed coup attempt. Besides, how does Trudeau explain that the Lima Group, of which he is a key member, is supposedly in favor of “a peaceful solution” in Venezuela, rather than military intervention?
And yet, the May 3rd action was a forceful and illegal military incursion on the soil of a sovereign nation. This is an ongoing story.
COVID-19: Seeds of Revolution Grown on Capitalism’s Corpse?
By: Gilbert Mercier
People protest working conditions outside an Amazon fulfillment center warehouse on May 1, 2020, in the Staten Island borough of New York City. | Photo: AFP
Published 10 May 2020
It is hard to forecast what a post-COVID-19 world will be like, but the deck of cards has been reshuffled.
As the global COVID-19 crisis builds up its incredible momentum, for which an apex is still months to come, the mainstream media and so-called policymakers are dazed and confused, lost in graphs of exponential case counts and body counts; shipments of masks and respirators; and the assembly of makeshift hospitals. Everywhere the morgues are filling up and the crematoriums are burning the cadavers at full tilt.
While the palpable fear of death looms everywhere, the 2,020 members of the billionaire class, and their worldwide political surrogates, have an eye on other graphs: not going up like the graphs of the deaths, but plunging in an even more dramatic configuration.
It is, of course, the COVID-19 induced crash of all financial markets and the precipitous dive of oil price. It is the Great COVID-19 Depression.
While the so-called Masters of the Universe billionaire class are scared like deer in a headlight, they haven’t come to the realization that their complex edifice built on the brutal exploitation of people and resources was as flimsy as a castle made of sand. It is not even a tide that is undoing global capitalism, it is a giant tsunami coming ashore everywhere at the same time. Its name is COVID-19.
Those who call themselves political leaders should pay close attention. If they think they can bring back the world order the way it was before the pandemic, they are cruelly mistaken. Like it or not, COVID-19 marks the beginning of a new era in the human adventure on the Earth. Things will never again be the same. Therefore, we must seriously think, not only about crisis scenarios but also their aftermaths.
Several worst-case scenarios are worth exploring. The first one, and some early signs indicate it is a possibility, would be the implosion of globalization and the rise of populist fascist states. In the second one, which would be even worse, the billionaire class and their political surrogates would gang up to impose a draconian authoritarian world order on the entire human population.
End of globalization and rise of small ethnic fascist states
This trend has already started within the European Union, and it is threatening to be more damaging to the EU than Brexit. As soon as the pandemic exploded in Italy, the borders within the union started to shut down. This now concerns all European countries, and it is likely to stay this way for months. To the Italian government’s dismay, China, Russia, and Cuba were more proactive in helping Italy than France, Germany, and the other EU countries. It is as if the Trumpian my-country-first doctrine gained ground across Europe overnight. Lockdown quickly meant a shutdown of national borders.
An example of this, which was perfectly despicable, was when the Czech Republic hijacked an airplane shipment from China, full of masks, on their way to Italy. It is even worse in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to do a power grab and indefinitely rule by decree. In this time of extreme global crisis, the temptation for the want-to-be neofascist strongmen has become too strong to resist. Besides, neoliberal governments like the Macron administration in France are applying coercive and authoritarian methods on their population. Therefore, who will notice it if Orban pushes things a step further?
Authoritarian billionaire class global world order
This would be the more nightmarish case scenario. One cannot discount that this option of a global corporate COVID-19 coup may come to the malevolent minds of some of the Masters of the Universe who meet in Davos every year or, even worse, the very secretive Bilderberg group. Despite the fact that the global economy is in ruins, the policymakers who work for the billionaire class will want to maintain control. They may think that the fear of the pandemic, which has made people accept oppressive measures, can be maintained indefinitely through the media they control. One can easily imagine that only a fraction of the population might regain complete freedom of movement and assembly. Meanwhile, the old, the average worker bee, and the dissenters could be confined at a whim. Besides, who needs pesky humans in capitalist production lines when they can be replaced by the docile robotic of AI?
Some people are evil enough to think along those lines. The problem with this assumption, however, providing anybody is thinking about it, is that their cherished supposed free-market economy has already collapsed. Presently the hottest commodities worldwide are masks and pulmonary respirators. The masks, of course, are still largely made in China. They are so valuable that they are put under heavily armed military escort. Operatives from the CIA travel to China with briefcases full of cash to outbid, on airport tarmacs, precious cargos already purchased by France. Israel’s Mossad has been involved in trafficking large quantities of test kits. The nationalistic fight for survival has become raw and nasty, but again capitalism was always bloodthirsty, ugly, and mean. Hopefully, for the sake of humanity, the systemic damage is too grave to fix. COVID-19 might have triggered capitalism’s end game.
Oppression and starvation — not ideologies — bring revolutions
As the COVID-19 crisis devastates the financial markets and global economy, the smarter neoliberal governments are trying to mitigate potentially unpredictable social unrest phenomena by the tricks aristocrats have used during feudalism. Like the lord of the castle, who threw a few gold and silver coins to the starving peasants during famines after bad crops, the lords of today’s capitalism put in effect “quantitative easing,” which is a euphemism for printing a massive amount of money. In the United States, the US$2.2 trillion bailout is mainly for Wall Street and large corporations like Boeing. The citizens of the US will get the crumbs, in the form of a US$1,200 check from Uncle Sam. In European countries, the give away to citizens is much bigger: the unemployment benefits to people who were laid off will reach 80 percent of their pre-COVID-19 wages.
Nonetheless, millions of people are already unemployed. In the US, nearly 10 million people filed for unemployment since March 16. Millions who were already in precarious situations must rely on food banks to eat. This is a recipe for disaster from the perspective of governments trying to keep a lid on some serious social turmoil. In effect, a careful study of the revolutionary process in world history shows that what embarks a population into the violence of a revolution is misery and despair, not lofty ideologies. Practically, it is the combination of oppression and starvation that pushes people beyond their limits. It is a collective breaking that comes once you have nothing, and therefore nothing to lose. Food shortages created by disruption of the food chain or hoarding could do this.
Authoritarian governments are, unfortunately for them, using the stick rather than the carrot to deal with the pandemic. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered police and military to kill citizens who defy the COVID-19 lockdown. The strongman bluntly told police to “shoot them dead.” In India, Modi‘s police and military have been beating people, mostly Muslims, with sticks and dousing them with chlorine. In Kenya, similarly brutal population controls are enforced. In the case of India, a country of 1.3 billion people, which has a health-care system in shambles, millions could die. At that point, the most brutal police and military tactics won’t succeed at keeping the lid on. It is likely to blow. Revolutions are about a vastly superior number of people and the sheer power of their anger. A police and military force of 250,000, for example, even if loyal to its government, cannot prevail against millions. Starvation and oppression will eventually bring fearless collective rage. That is the essence of revolution.
Countries become sovereign, self-sufficient with direct democracy
Very few countries have tackled the unfolding pandemic crisis with speed, thorough planning, rationality, and a minimum of infringement on civil liberties. Only four can be named: Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and South Korea. Leaving aside Germany and South Korea, which are much larger economies, the crisis management in Iceland and New Zealand has been rather remarkable. Iceland, in particular, has tested its small population more than any other country in the world.
That island of 350,000 people could become, in the near future, a model for real democracy. They have learned from the 2008 financial crash and changed their ways. A real democracy has to be from the bottom up and must also keep the national interest sector out of the hands of corporate imperialism. A real bottom-up democracy puts a cap on wealth concentration, spends money raised by fair taxation, and provides its citizens with free education and free universal health care. In 2018, the Gilets Jaunes movement in France was demanding a constitutional reform that would allow referendums by citizen initiative. If our world post-COVID-19 becomes more fragmented, and countries become more sovereign and independent of mega-corporate entities or global institutions like the IMF and World Bank, then democracy could be reinvented. This being said, the mitigation of global problems like the climate crisis and the mass migration it will provoke, affecting nearly a billion people in coastal areas, will have to be addressed by decisive international cooperation.
By: Gilbert Mercier
People protest working conditions outside an Amazon fulfillment center warehouse on May 1, 2020, in the Staten Island borough of New York City. | Photo: AFP
Published 10 May 2020
It is hard to forecast what a post-COVID-19 world will be like, but the deck of cards has been reshuffled.
As the global COVID-19 crisis builds up its incredible momentum, for which an apex is still months to come, the mainstream media and so-called policymakers are dazed and confused, lost in graphs of exponential case counts and body counts; shipments of masks and respirators; and the assembly of makeshift hospitals. Everywhere the morgues are filling up and the crematoriums are burning the cadavers at full tilt.
While the palpable fear of death looms everywhere, the 2,020 members of the billionaire class, and their worldwide political surrogates, have an eye on other graphs: not going up like the graphs of the deaths, but plunging in an even more dramatic configuration.
It is, of course, the COVID-19 induced crash of all financial markets and the precipitous dive of oil price. It is the Great COVID-19 Depression.
While the so-called Masters of the Universe billionaire class are scared like deer in a headlight, they haven’t come to the realization that their complex edifice built on the brutal exploitation of people and resources was as flimsy as a castle made of sand. It is not even a tide that is undoing global capitalism, it is a giant tsunami coming ashore everywhere at the same time. Its name is COVID-19.
Those who call themselves political leaders should pay close attention. If they think they can bring back the world order the way it was before the pandemic, they are cruelly mistaken. Like it or not, COVID-19 marks the beginning of a new era in the human adventure on the Earth. Things will never again be the same. Therefore, we must seriously think, not only about crisis scenarios but also their aftermaths.
Several worst-case scenarios are worth exploring. The first one, and some early signs indicate it is a possibility, would be the implosion of globalization and the rise of populist fascist states. In the second one, which would be even worse, the billionaire class and their political surrogates would gang up to impose a draconian authoritarian world order on the entire human population.
End of globalization and rise of small ethnic fascist states
This trend has already started within the European Union, and it is threatening to be more damaging to the EU than Brexit. As soon as the pandemic exploded in Italy, the borders within the union started to shut down. This now concerns all European countries, and it is likely to stay this way for months. To the Italian government’s dismay, China, Russia, and Cuba were more proactive in helping Italy than France, Germany, and the other EU countries. It is as if the Trumpian my-country-first doctrine gained ground across Europe overnight. Lockdown quickly meant a shutdown of national borders.
An example of this, which was perfectly despicable, was when the Czech Republic hijacked an airplane shipment from China, full of masks, on their way to Italy. It is even worse in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to do a power grab and indefinitely rule by decree. In this time of extreme global crisis, the temptation for the want-to-be neofascist strongmen has become too strong to resist. Besides, neoliberal governments like the Macron administration in France are applying coercive and authoritarian methods on their population. Therefore, who will notice it if Orban pushes things a step further?
Authoritarian billionaire class global world order
This would be the more nightmarish case scenario. One cannot discount that this option of a global corporate COVID-19 coup may come to the malevolent minds of some of the Masters of the Universe who meet in Davos every year or, even worse, the very secretive Bilderberg group. Despite the fact that the global economy is in ruins, the policymakers who work for the billionaire class will want to maintain control. They may think that the fear of the pandemic, which has made people accept oppressive measures, can be maintained indefinitely through the media they control. One can easily imagine that only a fraction of the population might regain complete freedom of movement and assembly. Meanwhile, the old, the average worker bee, and the dissenters could be confined at a whim. Besides, who needs pesky humans in capitalist production lines when they can be replaced by the docile robotic of AI?
Some people are evil enough to think along those lines. The problem with this assumption, however, providing anybody is thinking about it, is that their cherished supposed free-market economy has already collapsed. Presently the hottest commodities worldwide are masks and pulmonary respirators. The masks, of course, are still largely made in China. They are so valuable that they are put under heavily armed military escort. Operatives from the CIA travel to China with briefcases full of cash to outbid, on airport tarmacs, precious cargos already purchased by France. Israel’s Mossad has been involved in trafficking large quantities of test kits. The nationalistic fight for survival has become raw and nasty, but again capitalism was always bloodthirsty, ugly, and mean. Hopefully, for the sake of humanity, the systemic damage is too grave to fix. COVID-19 might have triggered capitalism’s end game.
Oppression and starvation — not ideologies — bring revolutions
As the COVID-19 crisis devastates the financial markets and global economy, the smarter neoliberal governments are trying to mitigate potentially unpredictable social unrest phenomena by the tricks aristocrats have used during feudalism. Like the lord of the castle, who threw a few gold and silver coins to the starving peasants during famines after bad crops, the lords of today’s capitalism put in effect “quantitative easing,” which is a euphemism for printing a massive amount of money. In the United States, the US$2.2 trillion bailout is mainly for Wall Street and large corporations like Boeing. The citizens of the US will get the crumbs, in the form of a US$1,200 check from Uncle Sam. In European countries, the give away to citizens is much bigger: the unemployment benefits to people who were laid off will reach 80 percent of their pre-COVID-19 wages.
Nonetheless, millions of people are already unemployed. In the US, nearly 10 million people filed for unemployment since March 16. Millions who were already in precarious situations must rely on food banks to eat. This is a recipe for disaster from the perspective of governments trying to keep a lid on some serious social turmoil. In effect, a careful study of the revolutionary process in world history shows that what embarks a population into the violence of a revolution is misery and despair, not lofty ideologies. Practically, it is the combination of oppression and starvation that pushes people beyond their limits. It is a collective breaking that comes once you have nothing, and therefore nothing to lose. Food shortages created by disruption of the food chain or hoarding could do this.
Authoritarian governments are, unfortunately for them, using the stick rather than the carrot to deal with the pandemic. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered police and military to kill citizens who defy the COVID-19 lockdown. The strongman bluntly told police to “shoot them dead.” In India, Modi‘s police and military have been beating people, mostly Muslims, with sticks and dousing them with chlorine. In Kenya, similarly brutal population controls are enforced. In the case of India, a country of 1.3 billion people, which has a health-care system in shambles, millions could die. At that point, the most brutal police and military tactics won’t succeed at keeping the lid on. It is likely to blow. Revolutions are about a vastly superior number of people and the sheer power of their anger. A police and military force of 250,000, for example, even if loyal to its government, cannot prevail against millions. Starvation and oppression will eventually bring fearless collective rage. That is the essence of revolution.
Countries become sovereign, self-sufficient with direct democracy
Very few countries have tackled the unfolding pandemic crisis with speed, thorough planning, rationality, and a minimum of infringement on civil liberties. Only four can be named: Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and South Korea. Leaving aside Germany and South Korea, which are much larger economies, the crisis management in Iceland and New Zealand has been rather remarkable. Iceland, in particular, has tested its small population more than any other country in the world.
That island of 350,000 people could become, in the near future, a model for real democracy. They have learned from the 2008 financial crash and changed their ways. A real democracy has to be from the bottom up and must also keep the national interest sector out of the hands of corporate imperialism. A real bottom-up democracy puts a cap on wealth concentration, spends money raised by fair taxation, and provides its citizens with free education and free universal health care. In 2018, the Gilets Jaunes movement in France was demanding a constitutional reform that would allow referendums by citizen initiative. If our world post-COVID-19 becomes more fragmented, and countries become more sovereign and independent of mega-corporate entities or global institutions like the IMF and World Bank, then democracy could be reinvented. This being said, the mitigation of global problems like the climate crisis and the mass migration it will provoke, affecting nearly a billion people in coastal areas, will have to be addressed by decisive international cooperation.
Birth of globalization for the people by the people
There is only one international body that is not fully at the service of global corporate imperialism, even though it has, in recent years, been ineffective at best and nefarious at worst. This organization, which has become a perversion of good intentions, is the United Nations. For it to become a positive force in the necessary mitigation of conflicts between countries and tackling the massive challenges facing humanity, it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up. A dismantlement of the Security Council would be a sine qua non. Furthermore, the delegate(s) from each country should be elected democratically. But let’s face it: at this juncture, the five countries that permanently sit on the Security Council because of their nuclear and military might are unlikely to relinquish their privileges.
It is hard to forecast what a post-COVID-19 world will be like, but the deck of cards has been reshuffled. Global corporate capitalism was sick, in all possible ways: a voracious sociopath bent on growth and without empathy, morals, and foresight. Right now it has a fever, it is coughing, and it has lost its sense of taste and smell. Truly, it is on life support.
Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire.
There is only one international body that is not fully at the service of global corporate imperialism, even though it has, in recent years, been ineffective at best and nefarious at worst. This organization, which has become a perversion of good intentions, is the United Nations. For it to become a positive force in the necessary mitigation of conflicts between countries and tackling the massive challenges facing humanity, it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up. A dismantlement of the Security Council would be a sine qua non. Furthermore, the delegate(s) from each country should be elected democratically. But let’s face it: at this juncture, the five countries that permanently sit on the Security Council because of their nuclear and military might are unlikely to relinquish their privileges.
It is hard to forecast what a post-COVID-19 world will be like, but the deck of cards has been reshuffled. Global corporate capitalism was sick, in all possible ways: a voracious sociopath bent on growth and without empathy, morals, and foresight. Right now it has a fever, it is coughing, and it has lost its sense of taste and smell. Truly, it is on life support.
Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire.
May Day 2020: Canada & Chile
Guests Magdalena Diaz, a member of the May 1 Coalition and Paz Jurado of Apoyamos Chile solidarity group joined us on May Day 2020 to discuss the most pressing issues for workers in both Chile and Canada as police repression takes place on the streets of Santiago.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been outspoken in its opposition to Israel's policies towards Palestinians | Photo: BDS
Published 21 May 2020
by Gilbert Mercier
Biden said the movement "singles out Israel - home to millions of Jews - and too often veers into anti-Semitism while letting Palestinians off the hook for their choices."
Left-wing activists in the U.S. rejected assertions by the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, who said criticism of Israel too often drifts towards anti-Semitism before he declared his opposition to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement (BDS).
RELATED:
Jewish Settler Convicted in Brutal Murder of Palestinian Family
"Criticism of Israel's policy is not anti-Semitism," Biden said during a phone call with donors earlier this week. "But too often that criticism from the left morphs into anti-Semitism."
The call was part of a virtual fundraiser hosted by Dan Shapiro, a former ambassador to Israel, and Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University.
Biden was asked how to respond to anti-Semitism among progressive activists in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
"We have to condemn it, and I've gotten in trouble for doing that," the former vice president said. "Whatever the source, right, left, or center."
The Biden campaign later released a policy paper saying it "firmly rejects" the BDS movement, a nonviolent initiative launched by Palestinians in 2005 to pressure Israel to comply with international law and defend Palestinian human rights.
Joe Biden “firmly” rejects the BDS movement, shamefully opposing the global nonviolent struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice & equality. Cutting US military aid to Israel is vital to the progressive agenda of #HealthcareNotWarfare and social, racial, climate & gender justice. pic.twitter.com/JtMHYocXnU— BDS movement (@BDSmovement) May 20, 2020
Biden said the movement "singles out Israel - home to millions of Jews - and too often veers into anti-Semitism while letting Palestinians off the hook for their choices".
Leaders of the BDS movement replied that Democratic voters should be endorsing the movement instead of rejecting it.
"By rejecting BDS, Joe Biden endorses U.S. complicity in Israel's decades-old regime of occupation, colonialism, and apartheid, and supports depriving Palestinians of our fundamental human rights," the group said.
Biden has struggled to unite a Democratic Party deeply divided between moderates and younger progressives who gravitated towards Biden's rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, who has withdrawn from the election.
The progressive wing has been outspoken in its opposition to Israel's policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, particularly under right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
#Trudeau blasts #BDS movement pic.twitter.com/LvKoOwAPvQ— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) April 2, 2019
GIANT HOSPITAL CORPORATION TAKES ADVANTAGE OF CORONAVIRUS TO FIGHT NURSES’ UNION DRIVE
Nurses cheer after community leaders spoke in support of the nurses union during a rally in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, in March 2020. Photo: Christine Rucker
THE INTERCEPT May 6 2020,
THE LARGEST HOSPITAL corporation in America, HCA Healthcare, is using the coronavirus pandemic to delay and undermine a union election for 1,600 nurses in North Carolina.
After nurses filed in March to hold an election, HCA Healthcare petitioned the National Labor Relations Board, or the NLRB, to delay the vote because of the pandemic. In the meantime, it hired professional union busters costing $400 an hour to conduct meetings inside Mission Hospital in Asheville, urging nurses to oppose joining a union.
And while the corporation stands to rake in $4.7 billion in CARES Act benefits, the number of coronavirus cases in North Carolina is steadily growing, and nurses say they had to fight for basic personal protective equipment, or PPE.
“Instead of HCA using those resources and money and effort to prepare for Covid-19 and have proper PPE, they chose to put it into union busting instead,” said Sarah Kuhl, a registered nurse with Mission’s oncology research department.
“I feel like that put us significantly behind to being adequately prepared for Covid-19,” Kuhl said.
HCA Healthcare has 184 facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom. HCA CEO Sam Hazen makes $27 million annually — 478 times the median HCA employee, and the company paid out over $600 million in dividends to shareholders last year. Of HCA’s $51.3 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2019, over $21 billion of that came from the government in payments from Medicare and Medicaid. In 2000, the corporation pleaded guilty in the case of the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history and paid $1.7 billion in fines. U.S. Senator Rick Scott, R-Fla., was CEO at the time.
In February 2019, HCA turned its sights to North Carolina. The for-profit, multinational conglomerate purchased the nonprofit Mission Hospital for $1.5 billion. Since being absorbed into HCA, Mission has been plagued by widespread complaints over cuts in staff, poor communication, and lack of access to basic supplies and PPE. The nurses filed for an election in March, with 70 percent of them signing union authorization cards, to join National Nurses United — which has 150,000 members and currently represents nurses at 19 HCA facilities across the country.
Since being absorbed into HCA, Mission has been plagued by complaints over cuts in staff and lack of access to basic supplies and PPE.
Only 37 out of HCA’s 184 hospitals have a union presence. The majority of HCA facilities are located in states with low union density like Florida and Tennessee, where the corporation is headquartered. In North Carolina, just 2.3 percent of the workers are union members.
“Our campaign is an enormous thing for North Carolina and the South,” said emergency room nurse Trish Stevenson. “This would set an enormous precedent for change, and it could happen nationwide for nurses. Health care is in dire need of a shift away from profit-driven corporations.”
HCA’s attorneys are now arguing before the NLRB that the vote should be further delayed, claiming in filings submitted to the NLRB that “[HCA] submits the election should not be scheduled prior to or during the time it and its healthcare professionals, including Registered Nurses, are dealing with the surge of Covid-19 patients and caring for those patients.”
But the megafirm has still found the time and money to wage an aggressive anti-union campaign inside the hospital, demanding nurses leave their shifts to meet one-on-one with consultants from the Crossroads Group. HCA declined a request for comment from The Intercept.
ON MARCH 15, nurse Jill Rabideau was pulled away from her patients on the pulmonary step-down unit to join a group of other health care workers for a “Labor Relations” session led by a union-busting consultant.
“It was an hour and 15 minutes of listening to an angry little man in a room that probably had 15 other nurses that were pulled off their units,” Rabideau said. “That was very frustrating to me, but particularly when everybody had all these Covid questions.”
Kuhl attended a meeting with anti-union consultants on March 13. “If you are coming in there without a whole lot of knowledge about unions and you don’t do any more research, then it can be misleading,” said Kuhl. “A lot of things we heard is that you won’t be able to talk to your manager anymore,” Kuhl said. “We heard you won’t get wage increases until the contract is signed, which is not true.”
“We couldn’t afford to let staff go to attend the meeting, but they were demanding it.”
Department of Labor disclosures show consultants from the Crossroads Group were hired at $400 an hour. The Crossroads Group is active in the union-busting space, routinely appearing in Department of Labor filings. In 2003, the NLRB found that firm’s founder Michael Penn had violated federal labor law when he threatened employees would lose their benefits at Jensen Enterprises if they voted in a union, and again in 2010 when he threatened to sue a pro-union employee at DHL for “defamation.” The Crossroads Group did not respond to a request for comment.
On March 24, Stevenson was working in the emergency room when she was asked to cover for another nurse so her colleague could attend a one-on-one meeting with a consultant.
Facing an upsurge in Covid-19 patients, Stevenson recalled, “We couldn’t afford to let staff go to attend the meeting, but they were demanding it.”
“They were just demanding that we cover nurses on their assignment, even though it’s inappropriate because we just couldn’t afford to let staff go at that time.”
Nurses throughout the hospital were already reeling from staff cuts, an exodus of experienced RNs, and rising nurse-to-patient ratios in the wake of HCA’s takeover of Mission — problems that are all exacerbated by the pandemic.
“We’re already in a state of red and then we’re being faced with a pandemic that is just further going to compromise us,” Stevenson said. “My worry is we just won’t be able to respond at all to the pandemic.”
HCA ALSO GIVES its affiliated physician groups ample legal and accounting support in applying for the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program loans, HCA documents show. The CARES Act explicitly requires that recipients of PPP loans stay neutral in union organizing campaigns.
Former NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman told The Intercept that the arrangement raises concerns.
The situation “demonstrates the tensions and hypocrisy of a hospital chain taking advantage of the provisions of the law but at the same time — exploiting the law to take advantage of the nurses,” said Liebman.
“The neutrality language is very important so that companies or lawyers that are benefiting from these loans aren’t using them to fight unionization,” said Liebman.
HCA has disclosed that it will accrue over $4.7 billion in benefits from the CARES Act, from direct payments to hospitals, accelerated Medicare payments, payroll tax deferrals, and other benefits. On an April 21 earnings call, HCA CEO Sam Hazen told Wall Street analysts “Fortunately, I see HCA Healthcare as uniquely positioned to help define the new normal and capitalize on new opportunities.”
John Logan, a labor historian at San Francisco State University, noted the irony of HCA’s actions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“[Nurses] really are organizing to have a voice over life and death issues,” said Logan. Speaking generally of anti-union campaigns in the health care space, Logan said, “Hospital administrators still think that it’s appropriate to bring in outside consulting firms that cost millions of dollars.” Hospital anti-union campaigns can cost well over $1 million, a report from the Economic Policy Institute found last year.
“I think in some ways there’s been an intensification of anti-union campaigns because employers believe they can get away with things right now that they wouldn’t in normal circumstances” Logan said.
WITH A FOR-PROFIT megacorporation newly in charge of their hospital, nurses had witnessed working conditions and patient care standards deteriorate rapidly. When the pandemic hit, union nurses acted quickly, demanding safe policies for PPE and transparency about the hospital’s plan for Covid-19 response.
“Some members of the community are thinking, ‘Why are [nurses] trying to organize a union during this pandemic?’” said Kuhl. “Organizing a union during this pandemic is more important than it was before Covid-19 existed. If we don’t get the things that we need to care for the patients who will be affected by Covid-19, either directly or indirectly, the outcome is going to be bad.”
“That’s why even though we don’t have a union yet, we did the PPE petition,” said Kuhl. “It was vital. Time was of the essence that we do that to ensure safety for our patients during this pandemic.”
Before the nurses submitted a petition for PPE on April 2 during the pandemic, said 35-year nurse Kelly Tyler, management “came through one day and gathered up all the masks, even if you were wearing a mask, they asked you to take it off. You had to go through the house supervisor to get a mask for patient care.”
After the petition was delivered, noted Tyler, HCA “made masks mandatory in patient care areas,” a victory for union nurses. “Maybe it’s not out of the goodness of HCA’s heart that they are doing this, maybe it is from the union and our demands,” Tyler said.
Kuhl put it more bluntly.
“There was zero transparency about how much PPE we had,” said Kuhl. “We weren’t getting information about how many Covid patients we had. None of that was information that we were privy to until we used collective action to get that information. That was a direct result of the union.”
Despite the delayed vote, Rabideau is confident of victory when the election is finally held. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and its uncertain aftermath, Mission nurses say that the cost of losing would be too high.
“[Nurses should] not always be the ones giving up to make corporations thrive because the price is not acceptable,” Rabideau said. “The actual cost is at the expense of our patients. … Nurses are not OK with that. I can say that unequivocally. We didn’t become nurses to make a shareholder wealthy.”
DEFENSE WORKERS, DEEMED “ESSENTIAL,” PROTEST CONDITIONS AS OVERSEAS WEAPONS SALES CONTINUE
General Electric workers hold a protest on Necco Street in Boston out of concerns for their safety on March 30, 2020. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Akela Lacy
May 18 2020,
WITH MOST OF the United States on lockdown in late April, the State Department approved billions of dollars in possible weapons sales. Workers at the manufacturing plants that would supply those sales, deemed “essential workers” toward the end of March thanks to the defense industry’s sprawling lobbying apparatus, have been forced to show up to work — even as a number of workers at those factories have tested positive for coronavirus.
The transactions approved by the State Department include $2.2 billion in possible weapons sales to India, Morocco, and the Philippines, and $150 million in blanket funds to the United Arab Emirates for order requisitions to repair and support aircraft fleets and do other related work.
The facilities in question belong to some of the world’s largest defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. At Lockheed Martin’s plant in Forth Worth, Texas, workers have protested the reopening of their facility, saying they were concerned about exposing family members to the virus, and that the company wasn’t properly cleaning facilities. Other workers have said that steps being taken to mitigate risk don’t go far enough. Asked about the spread or potential spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at their plants, the contractors generally demurred and declined to answer questions, instead referring The Intercept to company websites, many of which have stopped publicly reporting Covid-19 cases.
It’s important to keep in mind, said Mandy Smithberger at the Project on Government Oversight, that workers are being put at risk because trade groups lobbied for an overly broad designation for essential workers.
“I think it is worth asking them why that guidance shouldn’t be targeted,” said Smithberger. “I think the answer for why it’s so broad is because the companies want it to be broad. They want it to be up to them. But how do you appropriately target that so that you’re not unnecessarily jeopardizing workers?”
Many weapons factories ceased in-person operations at certain facilities at the onset of the pandemic, but have since resumed in some large cities. Several big contractors, like Boeing, in early April closed plants in major cities like Seattle and Philadelphia, while others, like Lockheed’s in Fort Worth, stayed open.
The prime contractor for the proposed missile sales to Morocco and India is a Boeing plant in St. Louis that had confirmed 15 coronavirus cases in late April. Another Boeing plant in Mesa, Arizona, is a prime contractor on one of two recent sales of Apache helicopters to the Philippines. Boeing last month resumed some operations in Philadelphia; Puget Sound, Washington; and Charleston, South Carolina. Communications Director Todd Blecher referred questions on specific Covid-19 cases at Boeing plants to their website, which does not list that information, and then to another Boeing official tracking the status of company facilities. The company did not provide information on positive cases or remaining facility closures by the time of publication.
Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, is the biggest tech company in Florida, with 8,000 workers across two major facilities in Orlando. The Orlando plant is a principal contractor on one of the Philippines Apache sales, along with Boeing’s Mesa plant. Just last year, the company had to back pay more than $320,000 to its employees for labor violations, including misclassifying workers and robbing them of pay for hours of overtime worked. Now, Lockheed executives are part of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s task force to reopen the state economy.
While the company is not publicly reporting updated numbers on confirmed or potential cases among workers, some details have emerged. Several Lockheed workers have been diagnosed with coronavirus, and at least one worker in Fort Worth, Texas, died on April 11 after being exposed to Covid-19 outside of work. A fundraising page for the family of the employee who died, run by military veteran Jennifer Escobar, whose husband works at Lockheed, blames the company for the worker’s death. “Due to the companies [sic] negligence Mr. Daniels is no longer with us. Both this gentleman and his wife have worked for Lockheed Martin for many years,” the page reads. Escobar has also begun a petition to shut down the company’s F-35 factory in Fort Worth. Lockheed last month said people who had been exposed to Daniels were directed to quarantine, and that his workspace was sanitized.
Lockheed spokesperson Dana Casey referred questions on how the facility was addressing concerns about the coronavirus to their website and a list of FAQs, which list their priorities as protecting workers, and performing and delivering for customers. The company started a $6.5 million disaster relief fund for impacted employees and retirees, implemented new cleaning procedures, and restricted travel and facility access.
Paul Black, president of the machinists union that represents workers at Lockheed’s Fort Worth plant, blamed the federal government for putting workers at risk in a March interview with the Washington Post.
Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis
Workers at the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is a prime contractor on the second Apache sale to the Philippines, have been fighting for additional protections and support since the pandemic started. They’ve held numerous demonstrations, including a strike on April 8, and have a standing petition demanding that GE “fix appalling safety conditions at the facility and allow workers to manufacture the life-saving ventilators the whole country so desperately needs.” GE did not respond to requests for comment.
After a demonstration on March 30, the Nation reported, GE made some major changes to improve safety at the Lynn plant. The IUE-CWA Local 201, which represents workers at the plant, wrote in a March 28 statement that they had informed GE of their position that the company had “failed so far to ensure that work buildings are thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, and that such failure has created an identifiable, presently existing threat to the safety of the employees who are assigned to work there.”
The Bell Textron plant in Forth Worth is also a prime contractor on the sale of attack helicopters to the Philippines. Two workers at the Bell plant tested positive for Covid-19 in mid-April, as did two workers at other locations, one nearby in Grand Prairie, and the other in Canada. A spokesperson for the company said they have had four confirmed cases at facilities in North Texas and that those people have fully recovered and returned to work. Lindsey Hughes, Bell’s manager of global communications, said the company was “taking significant steps” to keep workers safe, including arrangements for remote work, staggered schedules where possible, temperature screenings, no-touch trash cans, and regular disinfections.
“We will continue to adhere to the guidance of the CDC, WHO and local governing health authorities to implement any required changes to our business,” Hughes said.
The War Industry
The weapons industry has so far spent millions of dollars on lobbying Congress and the Department of Defense in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, on issues like getting exemptions from stay-at-home orders and relief under the CARES Act. The push to get 2.5 million defense workers classified as essential came as the United States’s undeclared wars continue, with airstrikes reaching an all-time high in Somalia as the coronavirus spread, and the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition continuing to drop bombs on Yemen.
“As states across the country issued orders requiring businesses to close in a drastic attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, the federal government issued instructions to defense contractors that directly contradicted those local efforts,” the Washington Post wrote in late March, just two weeks after the coronavirus outbreak was deemed a pandemic.
Workers stand outside the Boeing manufacturing facility in North Charleston, S.C., on May 4, 2020. Photo: Sam Wolfe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
After the first major coronavirus stimulus, a $2 trillion relief package, was passed, major defense contractors were largely disappointed with what they were allocated. Congress gave Boeing, which lobbied on the measure, $17 million in the form of support for its commercial flight business. Boeing had originally requested $60 million, and is refusing to accept the funds. The company’s push to get more federal aid comes while facing significant financial trouble even before the pandemic. Other defense industry contractors have had similar financial woes. Before it became Remington Arms, Remington, one of the country’s oldest gunmakers, filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
In arguments to keep facilities operating, industry groups have cited preserving their own competition, as well as national security. In a letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper on March 20, after several states had already started limiting large gatherings and initiating shelter-in-place orders, the Aerospace Industries Association urged the federal government to let them stay open, and to provide additional funds. They asked the Pentagon to legally establish national security programs and their workforces as essential. The same day, the Defense Department’s top acquisitions official, Undersecretary Ellen Lord — the former CEO of Textron — issued a memo saying industry companies would be expected to maintain normal work schedules.
“Our industry is inextricably linked to our nation’s continued success and global competitiveness,” AIA wrote. “Our people, products, and common supply chain help to power our economy and provide our warfighters capabilities and tools they need to defend our nation’s security.”
Boeing said it would support any U.S. decision that would keep essential businesses and supply chains open. Trade groups representing the defense industry were given daily phone calls with undersecretary Lord, beginning in March. The calls included the Chamber of Commerce, the Aerospace Industries Association, the National Defense Industrial Association, the Professional Services Council, and the National Association of Manufacturers. According to DOD, the calls were intended to ensure continuity and reliability of the defense-industrial base, and to provide agency officials with information on the pandemic’s impact on the industry, Defense News reported.
Domestic Arms Production
Plants focused on domestic arms production also remained active amid the pandemic, even as workers became sick from coronavirus. After gun manufacturers were declared an essential business at the end of March, some employees returned to work at the Remington Arms plant in Ilion, New York, which had been closed in accordance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March order that workers at nonessential businesses stay home. Less than two weeks later, one employee was diagnosed with coronavirus.
Phil Smith, who directs governmental affairs for the labor union United Mine Workers, which represents workers at the Ilion plant, acknowledged that the Ilion plant had not “been difficult with respect to implementing” additional protections, including social distancing. But he said his union was still concerned about many of their 10,000 members across the country who have also been deemed essential, including many coal miners. Asked if he would prefer that they hadn’t reopened the facility, Smith said, “What we prefer is that they be as safe as they can possibly be at work,” he said.
An employee at a SIG Sauer gun manufacturing plant in New Hampshire tested positive for the virus last month. SIG Sauer operates two manufacturing plants and a training facility in New Hampshire, the site of its U.S. headquarters. A memo from SIG Sauer’s CEO reporting the employee case did not specify which facility they worked at.
Workers in the Machinists Local S6 union at the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works facility in Maine called on their president to shut down the facility in March, slamming the company for putting them at risk. BIW was willing to use them as “sacrificial lambs to meet the needs of our customer,” they wrote to President Dirk Lesko. Workers asked that the facility temporarily shut down until it was safe to return in large groups. BIW kept the factory open, and two workers eventually tested positive for coronavirus.
One worker posted to Facebook in April, writing that he was possibly positive for Covid-19. “I’m an essential worker, who works at a company that is a part of America’s Defense Critical Infrastructure,” he wrote. “Said company has had two (2) employees with CONFIRMED cases of Covid-19. ??? there’s roughly 6800 employees between the 4 locations and training facility.” (He declined an interview, citing the rules of his employment.)
General Dynamics said in a statement to The Intercept that no other BIW employees had reported positive tested results since April 2, the date the second case was reported. The company referred questions on health and safety precautions to their website, and said attendance at BIW, “which had been down 25-30 percent from normal levels because of COVID-19, is at pre-COVID levels today, Monday, May 11.”
Maine Democratic State Rep. Seth Berry, who led a large state delegation in writing two letters to BIW raising concerns for worker safety, suggested that the company’s primary motivation for continuing in-person work at the Maine plant was to maintain profits at the expense of workers. “BIW has spoken often about its need to be competitive with the Navy’s other principal shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls,” Berry said, adding that BIW “used this argument recently to convince legislators to provide them with a $45 million tax break specifically for their operation and for no other Maine business.”
Smithberger at the Project on Government Oversight said companies were leveraging “threat inflation around China to try and stabilize and increase” defense budgets. “You’re seeing some pretty ludicrous op-eds saying that the department can’t afford to lose a single dollar.”
Workers at the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is a prime contractor on the second Apache sale to the Philippines, have been fighting for additional protections and support since the pandemic started. They’ve held numerous demonstrations, including a strike on April 8, and have a standing petition demanding that GE “fix appalling safety conditions at the facility and allow workers to manufacture the life-saving ventilators the whole country so desperately needs.” GE did not respond to requests for comment.
After a demonstration on March 30, the Nation reported, GE made some major changes to improve safety at the Lynn plant. The IUE-CWA Local 201, which represents workers at the plant, wrote in a March 28 statement that they had informed GE of their position that the company had “failed so far to ensure that work buildings are thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, and that such failure has created an identifiable, presently existing threat to the safety of the employees who are assigned to work there.”
The Bell Textron plant in Forth Worth is also a prime contractor on the sale of attack helicopters to the Philippines. Two workers at the Bell plant tested positive for Covid-19 in mid-April, as did two workers at other locations, one nearby in Grand Prairie, and the other in Canada. A spokesperson for the company said they have had four confirmed cases at facilities in North Texas and that those people have fully recovered and returned to work. Lindsey Hughes, Bell’s manager of global communications, said the company was “taking significant steps” to keep workers safe, including arrangements for remote work, staggered schedules where possible, temperature screenings, no-touch trash cans, and regular disinfections.
“We will continue to adhere to the guidance of the CDC, WHO and local governing health authorities to implement any required changes to our business,” Hughes said.
The War Industry
The weapons industry has so far spent millions of dollars on lobbying Congress and the Department of Defense in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, on issues like getting exemptions from stay-at-home orders and relief under the CARES Act. The push to get 2.5 million defense workers classified as essential came as the United States’s undeclared wars continue, with airstrikes reaching an all-time high in Somalia as the coronavirus spread, and the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition continuing to drop bombs on Yemen.
“As states across the country issued orders requiring businesses to close in a drastic attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, the federal government issued instructions to defense contractors that directly contradicted those local efforts,” the Washington Post wrote in late March, just two weeks after the coronavirus outbreak was deemed a pandemic.
Workers stand outside the Boeing manufacturing facility in North Charleston, S.C., on May 4, 2020. Photo: Sam Wolfe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
After the first major coronavirus stimulus, a $2 trillion relief package, was passed, major defense contractors were largely disappointed with what they were allocated. Congress gave Boeing, which lobbied on the measure, $17 million in the form of support for its commercial flight business. Boeing had originally requested $60 million, and is refusing to accept the funds. The company’s push to get more federal aid comes while facing significant financial trouble even before the pandemic. Other defense industry contractors have had similar financial woes. Before it became Remington Arms, Remington, one of the country’s oldest gunmakers, filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
In arguments to keep facilities operating, industry groups have cited preserving their own competition, as well as national security. In a letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper on March 20, after several states had already started limiting large gatherings and initiating shelter-in-place orders, the Aerospace Industries Association urged the federal government to let them stay open, and to provide additional funds. They asked the Pentagon to legally establish national security programs and their workforces as essential. The same day, the Defense Department’s top acquisitions official, Undersecretary Ellen Lord — the former CEO of Textron — issued a memo saying industry companies would be expected to maintain normal work schedules.
“Our industry is inextricably linked to our nation’s continued success and global competitiveness,” AIA wrote. “Our people, products, and common supply chain help to power our economy and provide our warfighters capabilities and tools they need to defend our nation’s security.”
Boeing said it would support any U.S. decision that would keep essential businesses and supply chains open. Trade groups representing the defense industry were given daily phone calls with undersecretary Lord, beginning in March. The calls included the Chamber of Commerce, the Aerospace Industries Association, the National Defense Industrial Association, the Professional Services Council, and the National Association of Manufacturers. According to DOD, the calls were intended to ensure continuity and reliability of the defense-industrial base, and to provide agency officials with information on the pandemic’s impact on the industry, Defense News reported.
Domestic Arms Production
Plants focused on domestic arms production also remained active amid the pandemic, even as workers became sick from coronavirus. After gun manufacturers were declared an essential business at the end of March, some employees returned to work at the Remington Arms plant in Ilion, New York, which had been closed in accordance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March order that workers at nonessential businesses stay home. Less than two weeks later, one employee was diagnosed with coronavirus.
Phil Smith, who directs governmental affairs for the labor union United Mine Workers, which represents workers at the Ilion plant, acknowledged that the Ilion plant had not “been difficult with respect to implementing” additional protections, including social distancing. But he said his union was still concerned about many of their 10,000 members across the country who have also been deemed essential, including many coal miners. Asked if he would prefer that they hadn’t reopened the facility, Smith said, “What we prefer is that they be as safe as they can possibly be at work,” he said.
An employee at a SIG Sauer gun manufacturing plant in New Hampshire tested positive for the virus last month. SIG Sauer operates two manufacturing plants and a training facility in New Hampshire, the site of its U.S. headquarters. A memo from SIG Sauer’s CEO reporting the employee case did not specify which facility they worked at.
Workers in the Machinists Local S6 union at the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works facility in Maine called on their president to shut down the facility in March, slamming the company for putting them at risk. BIW was willing to use them as “sacrificial lambs to meet the needs of our customer,” they wrote to President Dirk Lesko. Workers asked that the facility temporarily shut down until it was safe to return in large groups. BIW kept the factory open, and two workers eventually tested positive for coronavirus.
One worker posted to Facebook in April, writing that he was possibly positive for Covid-19. “I’m an essential worker, who works at a company that is a part of America’s Defense Critical Infrastructure,” he wrote. “Said company has had two (2) employees with CONFIRMED cases of Covid-19. ??? there’s roughly 6800 employees between the 4 locations and training facility.” (He declined an interview, citing the rules of his employment.)
General Dynamics said in a statement to The Intercept that no other BIW employees had reported positive tested results since April 2, the date the second case was reported. The company referred questions on health and safety precautions to their website, and said attendance at BIW, “which had been down 25-30 percent from normal levels because of COVID-19, is at pre-COVID levels today, Monday, May 11.”
Maine Democratic State Rep. Seth Berry, who led a large state delegation in writing two letters to BIW raising concerns for worker safety, suggested that the company’s primary motivation for continuing in-person work at the Maine plant was to maintain profits at the expense of workers. “BIW has spoken often about its need to be competitive with the Navy’s other principal shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls,” Berry said, adding that BIW “used this argument recently to convince legislators to provide them with a $45 million tax break specifically for their operation and for no other Maine business.”
Smithberger at the Project on Government Oversight said companies were leveraging “threat inflation around China to try and stabilize and increase” defense budgets. “You’re seeing some pretty ludicrous op-eds saying that the department can’t afford to lose a single dollar.”
The CIA’s Murderous Practices, Disinformation Campaigns, and Interference in Other Countries Still Shape the World Order and U.S. Politics
Glenn Greenwald May 21 2020
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, the most powerful former leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency did everything they could to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell published a full-throated endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed “Putin ha[s] recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” while George W. Bush’s post-9/11 CIA and NSA Chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, writing in the Washington Post, refrained from endorsing Clinton outright but echoed Morrell by accusing Trump of being a “useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow” and sounding “a little bit the conspiratorial Marxist.” Meanwhile, the intelligence community under James Clapper and John Brennan fed morsels to both the Obama DOJ and the U.S. media to suggest a Trump/Russia conspiracy and fuel what became the Russiagate investigation.
In his extraordinary election-advocating Op-Ed, Gen. Hayden, Bush/Cheney’s CIA Chief, candidly explained the reasons for the CIA’s antipathy for Trump: namely, the GOP candidate’s stated opposition to allowing CIA regime change efforts in Syria to expand as well as his opposition to arming Ukrainians with lethal weapons to fight Russia (supposedly “pro-Putin” positions which, we are now all supposed to forget, Obama largely shared).
As has been true since President Harry Truman’s creation of the CIA after World War II, interfering in other countries and dictating or changing their governments — through campaigns of mass murder, military coups, arming guerrilla groups, the abolition of democracy, systemic disinformation, and the imposition of savage despots — is regarded as a divine right, inherent to American exceptionalism. Anyone who questions that or, worse, opposes it and seeks to impede it (as the CIA perceived Trump was) is of suspect loyalties at best.
The CIA’s antipathy toward Trump continued after his election victory. The agency became the primary vector for anonymous, illegal leaks designed to depict Trump as a Kremlin agent and/or blackmail victim. It worked to ensure the leak of the Steele dossier that clouded at least the first two years of Trump’s presidency. It drove the scam Russiagate conspiracy theories. And before Trump was even inaugurated, open warfare erupted between the president-elect and the agency to the point where Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explicitly warned Trump on the Rachel Maddow Show that he was risking full-on subversion of his presidency by the agency:
This turned out to be one of the most prescient and important (and creepy) statements of the Trump presidency: from Chuck Schumer to Rachel Maddow - in early January, 2017, before Trump was even inaugurated: pic.twitter.com/TUaYkksILG— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 8, 2019
Democrats, early in Trump’s presidency, saw clearly that the CIA had become one of Trump’s most devoted enemies, and thus began viewing them as a valuable ally. Leading out-of-power Democratic foreign policy elites from the Obama administration and Clinton campaign joined forces not only with Bush/Cheney neocons but also former CIA officials to create new foreign policy advocacy groups designed to malign and undermine Trump and promote hawkish confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. Meanwhile, other ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials, such as John Brennan and James Clapper, became beloved liberal celebrities by being hired by MSNBC and CNN to deliver liberal-pleasing anti-Trump messaging that, on a virtually daily basis, masqueraded as news.
The all-consuming Russiagate narrative that dominated the first three years of Trump’s presidency further served to elevate the CIA as a noble and admirable institution while whitewashing its grotesque history. Liberal conventional wisdom held that Russian Facebook ads, Twitter bots and the hacking and release of authentic, incriminating DNC emails was some sort of unprecedented, off-the-charts, out-of-the-ordinary crime-of-the-century attack, with several leading Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) actually comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
The level of historical ignorance and/or jingostic American exceptionalism necessary to believe this is impossible to describe. Compared to what the CIA has done to dozens of other countries since the end of World War II, and what it continues to do, watching Americans cast Russian interference in the 2016 election through online bots and email hacking (even if one believes every claim made about it) as some sort of unique and unprecedented crime against democracy is staggering. Set against what the CIA has done and continues to do to “interfere” in the domestic affairs of other countries — including Russia — the 2016 election was, at most, par for the course for international affairs and, more accurately, a trivial and ordinary act in the context of CIA interference.
Glenn Greenwald May 21 2020
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, the most powerful former leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency did everything they could to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell published a full-throated endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed “Putin ha[s] recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” while George W. Bush’s post-9/11 CIA and NSA Chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, writing in the Washington Post, refrained from endorsing Clinton outright but echoed Morrell by accusing Trump of being a “useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow” and sounding “a little bit the conspiratorial Marxist.” Meanwhile, the intelligence community under James Clapper and John Brennan fed morsels to both the Obama DOJ and the U.S. media to suggest a Trump/Russia conspiracy and fuel what became the Russiagate investigation.
In his extraordinary election-advocating Op-Ed, Gen. Hayden, Bush/Cheney’s CIA Chief, candidly explained the reasons for the CIA’s antipathy for Trump: namely, the GOP candidate’s stated opposition to allowing CIA regime change efforts in Syria to expand as well as his opposition to arming Ukrainians with lethal weapons to fight Russia (supposedly “pro-Putin” positions which, we are now all supposed to forget, Obama largely shared).
As has been true since President Harry Truman’s creation of the CIA after World War II, interfering in other countries and dictating or changing their governments — through campaigns of mass murder, military coups, arming guerrilla groups, the abolition of democracy, systemic disinformation, and the imposition of savage despots — is regarded as a divine right, inherent to American exceptionalism. Anyone who questions that or, worse, opposes it and seeks to impede it (as the CIA perceived Trump was) is of suspect loyalties at best.
The CIA’s antipathy toward Trump continued after his election victory. The agency became the primary vector for anonymous, illegal leaks designed to depict Trump as a Kremlin agent and/or blackmail victim. It worked to ensure the leak of the Steele dossier that clouded at least the first two years of Trump’s presidency. It drove the scam Russiagate conspiracy theories. And before Trump was even inaugurated, open warfare erupted between the president-elect and the agency to the point where Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explicitly warned Trump on the Rachel Maddow Show that he was risking full-on subversion of his presidency by the agency:
This turned out to be one of the most prescient and important (and creepy) statements of the Trump presidency: from Chuck Schumer to Rachel Maddow - in early January, 2017, before Trump was even inaugurated: pic.twitter.com/TUaYkksILG— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 8, 2019
Democrats, early in Trump’s presidency, saw clearly that the CIA had become one of Trump’s most devoted enemies, and thus began viewing them as a valuable ally. Leading out-of-power Democratic foreign policy elites from the Obama administration and Clinton campaign joined forces not only with Bush/Cheney neocons but also former CIA officials to create new foreign policy advocacy groups designed to malign and undermine Trump and promote hawkish confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. Meanwhile, other ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials, such as John Brennan and James Clapper, became beloved liberal celebrities by being hired by MSNBC and CNN to deliver liberal-pleasing anti-Trump messaging that, on a virtually daily basis, masqueraded as news.
The all-consuming Russiagate narrative that dominated the first three years of Trump’s presidency further served to elevate the CIA as a noble and admirable institution while whitewashing its grotesque history. Liberal conventional wisdom held that Russian Facebook ads, Twitter bots and the hacking and release of authentic, incriminating DNC emails was some sort of unprecedented, off-the-charts, out-of-the-ordinary crime-of-the-century attack, with several leading Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) actually comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
The level of historical ignorance and/or jingostic American exceptionalism necessary to believe this is impossible to describe. Compared to what the CIA has done to dozens of other countries since the end of World War II, and what it continues to do, watching Americans cast Russian interference in the 2016 election through online bots and email hacking (even if one believes every claim made about it) as some sort of unique and unprecedented crime against democracy is staggering. Set against what the CIA has done and continues to do to “interfere” in the domestic affairs of other countries — including Russia — the 2016 election was, at most, par for the course for international affairs and, more accurately, a trivial and ordinary act in the context of CIA interference.
This propaganda was sustainable because the recent history and the current function of the CIA has largely been suppressed. Thankfully, a just-released book by journalist Vincent Bevins — who spent years as a foreign correspondent covering two countries still marred by brutal CIA interference: Brazil for the Los Angeles Times and Indonesia for the Washington Post — provides one of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet of this agency and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world
Entitled “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World,” the book primarily documents the indescribably horrific campaigns of mass murder and genocide the CIA sponsored in Indonesia as an instrument for destroying a non-aligned movement of nations who would be loyal to neither Washington nor Moscow. Critically, Bevins documents how the chilling success of that morally grotesque campaign led to its being barely discussed in U.S. discourse, but then also serving as the foundation and model for clandestine CIA interference campaigns in multiple other countries from Guatemala, Chile and Brazil to the Philippines, Vietnam and Central America: the Jakarta Method.
Our newest episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, which debuts today at 2:00 p.m. on The Intercept’s YouTube channel, is devoted to a discussion of why this history is so vital: not just for understanding the current international political order but also for distinguishing between fact and fiction in our contemporary political discourse. In addition to my own observations on this topic, I speak to Bevins about his book, about what the CIA really is and how it has shaped the world we still inhabit, and why a genuine understanding of both international and domestic politics is impossible without a clear grasp on this story.
Entitled “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World,” the book primarily documents the indescribably horrific campaigns of mass murder and genocide the CIA sponsored in Indonesia as an instrument for destroying a non-aligned movement of nations who would be loyal to neither Washington nor Moscow. Critically, Bevins documents how the chilling success of that morally grotesque campaign led to its being barely discussed in U.S. discourse, but then also serving as the foundation and model for clandestine CIA interference campaigns in multiple other countries from Guatemala, Chile and Brazil to the Philippines, Vietnam and Central America: the Jakarta Method.
Our newest episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, which debuts today at 2:00 p.m. on The Intercept’s YouTube channel, is devoted to a discussion of why this history is so vital: not just for understanding the current international political order but also for distinguishing between fact and fiction in our contemporary political discourse. In addition to my own observations on this topic, I speak to Bevins about his book, about what the CIA really is and how it has shaped the world we still inhabit, and why a genuine understanding of both international and domestic politics is impossible without a clear grasp on this story.
CANADA
Biden’s vow to kill pipeline puts Canada on defense
The Alberta government has big bucks riding on Keystone XL project — and its leader wants construction to get moving fast.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
Kenney said the province "would use every legal means at our disposal to protect our fiscal and economic interests," which could include lodging trade complaints against the U.S.
“I would have to assume that any U.S. administration values the Canada-U.S. trade relationship so much that they would be sensitive to costs of that nature," said Kenney. "At this point, our focus is on continuing to demonstrate the widespread support that exists in the U.S. for this project that represents jobs, growth and energy independence.”
Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.
Biden’s vow to kill pipeline puts Canada on defense
The Alberta government has big bucks riding on Keystone XL project — and its leader wants construction to get moving fast.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
By LAUREN GARDNER
05/20/2020
A threat by Joe Biden to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline has a Canadian province gambling that construction of the multi-billion-dollar project will begin before the Democrat has a chance to take control of the White House.
The Biden campaign vowed in a statement on Monday to kill the long-delayed pipeline should the former vice president secure the nomination and go on to win the presidency. Former President Barack Obama vetoed the pipeline in 2015, a decision that was reversed by President Donald Trump in January 2017. Biden’s announcement elicited concern among boosters of the project in both Canada and the U.S.
Advertisement
But Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, whose government has a billion dollars riding on the success of the pipeline, thinks he can call Biden’s bluff. He just needs construction to ramp up by the end of 2020.
"I cannot imagine that a U.S. president eight months from now, nine months from now, would require that thousands of miles of pipe be pulled out of the ground by the union workers who are now employed creating that project," Kenney said Tuesday during a news conference.
Even if Trump were to win reelection, the pipeline is far from a done deal now, more than three years since his election. A slew of legal challenges that are still playing out in court could continue to stymie the project, which could buy time for another Democratic president — or for the Supreme Court — to weigh in on Keystone. And Biden, if elected, could still decide to stop the project even if work does get moving this year.
Construction of the U.S. stretch is on hold while the Trump administration defends its permits in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. A district judge in Montana last month ruled in favor of the Sierra Club and other environmental and land use groups that challenged the permits, arguing that the Army Corps of Engineers had not done sufficient environmental review of the pipeline’s planned route.
Regardless of how the appeals court decides, analysts say the case is all but certain to go to the Supreme Court.
Kenney twice noted Tuesday that Biden did not oppose Keystone XL during the Democratic primaries. Still, Biden was said to have told a supporter in 2013 that he opposed the project, an opinion that put him "in the minority" on the issue in the Obama administration. Barack Obama rejected the project in 2015 — shortly after Justin Trudeau became prime minister — after years of back-and-forth over permits.
Although Biden was silent on Keystone, most other Democratic contenders vowed to cancel the project, signaling the party's leftward shift on pipeline politics.
Kenney likened the investment to Trudeau's decision to buy a multibillion-dollar pipeline from the oil sands to the British Columbia coast to ensure the Trans Mountain expansion project would continue after the private owner, Kinder Morgan, bowed out in 2018.
“We made the strategic investment exactly because there was obviously political risk," he said.
The Kenney government's C$6 billion loan guarantee to backstop TC Energy's construction-related costs wouldn't kick in until next year, the premier said, meaning money wouldn't be at stake should Biden return to the White House and cancel the project.
Kenney didn't respond to questions about whether Alberta could recoup its equity stake should the project be nixed, or whether he had an obligation to explain in greater detail the financial risks his government took on through its billion-dollar move.
05/20/2020
A threat by Joe Biden to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline has a Canadian province gambling that construction of the multi-billion-dollar project will begin before the Democrat has a chance to take control of the White House.
The Biden campaign vowed in a statement on Monday to kill the long-delayed pipeline should the former vice president secure the nomination and go on to win the presidency. Former President Barack Obama vetoed the pipeline in 2015, a decision that was reversed by President Donald Trump in January 2017. Biden’s announcement elicited concern among boosters of the project in both Canada and the U.S.
Advertisement
But Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, whose government has a billion dollars riding on the success of the pipeline, thinks he can call Biden’s bluff. He just needs construction to ramp up by the end of 2020.
"I cannot imagine that a U.S. president eight months from now, nine months from now, would require that thousands of miles of pipe be pulled out of the ground by the union workers who are now employed creating that project," Kenney said Tuesday during a news conference.
Even if Trump were to win reelection, the pipeline is far from a done deal now, more than three years since his election. A slew of legal challenges that are still playing out in court could continue to stymie the project, which could buy time for another Democratic president — or for the Supreme Court — to weigh in on Keystone. And Biden, if elected, could still decide to stop the project even if work does get moving this year.
Construction of the U.S. stretch is on hold while the Trump administration defends its permits in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. A district judge in Montana last month ruled in favor of the Sierra Club and other environmental and land use groups that challenged the permits, arguing that the Army Corps of Engineers had not done sufficient environmental review of the pipeline’s planned route.
Regardless of how the appeals court decides, analysts say the case is all but certain to go to the Supreme Court.
Kenney twice noted Tuesday that Biden did not oppose Keystone XL during the Democratic primaries. Still, Biden was said to have told a supporter in 2013 that he opposed the project, an opinion that put him "in the minority" on the issue in the Obama administration. Barack Obama rejected the project in 2015 — shortly after Justin Trudeau became prime minister — after years of back-and-forth over permits.
Although Biden was silent on Keystone, most other Democratic contenders vowed to cancel the project, signaling the party's leftward shift on pipeline politics.
Kenney likened the investment to Trudeau's decision to buy a multibillion-dollar pipeline from the oil sands to the British Columbia coast to ensure the Trans Mountain expansion project would continue after the private owner, Kinder Morgan, bowed out in 2018.
“We made the strategic investment exactly because there was obviously political risk," he said.
The Kenney government's C$6 billion loan guarantee to backstop TC Energy's construction-related costs wouldn't kick in until next year, the premier said, meaning money wouldn't be at stake should Biden return to the White House and cancel the project.
Kenney didn't respond to questions about whether Alberta could recoup its equity stake should the project be nixed, or whether he had an obligation to explain in greater detail the financial risks his government took on through its billion-dollar move.
James Coleman, an energy law professor at Southern Methodist University, said Alberta stands to lose its investment if the pipeline isn't built. TC Energy could bring a claim against the U.S. under NAFTA, he said, though the company would be up against a three-year deadline from when the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement enters into force under new limits on investor-state claims between the two countries.
“I would have to assume that any U.S. administration values the Canada-U.S. trade relationship so much that they would be sensitive to costs of that nature," said Kenney. "At this point, our focus is on continuing to demonstrate the widespread support that exists in the U.S. for this project that represents jobs, growth and energy independence.”
Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.
“THE JUNGLE” AND THE PANDEMIC: THE MEAT INDUSTRY, CORONAVIRUS, AND AN ECONOMY IN CRISIS
Photo illustration: Elise Swain/The Intercept, Getty Images
Intercepted
May 20 2020,
THE PRESIDENCY OF Donald Trump has placed a mirror in front of the harsh realities of the United States. And what it reveals about who we are as a society during a major crisis is pretty ugly. This week on Intercepted: As the Covid-19 U.S. death toll climbs toward 100,000 and unemployment is nearing 20 percent, House Democrats have offered up a bill that is intended to sharply contrast the corporatist Republican agenda. HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter analyzes how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed progressive calls for action within her own party and delivered a bill filled with corporate gifts and means-tested crumbs for many, along with some good proposals. Carter also discusses his new book “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” and the influence the famed economist maintains to this day. As Trump claims the meat industry is back on track, meat plant workers are getting sick in droves. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the industry consistently maintains the highest workplace injury rate among manufacturing and private industry. Journalist Ted Genoways, author of “The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food,” discusses the lives and deaths of meat workers and looks back at Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” and its parallels to the modern meat industry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)