Pandemic Capitalism

Pervasive inequality is a chosen catastrophe. It’s time for a rethink.

by

Chris Oestereich

The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. (Photo: Flickr/Andy Roberts. CC BY 2.0.)

I was a canary in the economic coal mine.

It was a normal workday. I woke up and started my daily routine. Brush, shave, shower, dress… Except that morning’s routine stopped when I found myself face down in the shower. Scared and confused, I called out to my wife. She helped me up and got me to a doctor, who found me to be in good health. I spent the rest of the day resting, while feeling relieved by the diagnosis.

The next morning I was a bit apprehensive about the shower. The fear was warranted. I woke up on the floor again, more confused than the day before and terrified. My doctor suggested that I ‘put my affairs in order.’

That was ten years ago. The driving force was stress that stemmed from financial challenges. When outflows exceed inflows, the well eventually runs dry. Our remaining resources were circling the drain. Pride and an unjust economic system had us in a trap. I eventually broke.

We live our lives shackled to the ideas of dead economists.

My story isn’t unique. Millions of people live like this. Our porous safety net leaves us to fend for ourselves. Our myths tell us that we’ve failed in a system that’s built for success.

We live our lives shackled to the ideas of dead economists. It’s a natural occurrence. It takes time, effort, and resources to galvanize human systems. New ideas take hold, become dominant, and ossify. Those who benefit try to maintain their place. But complex systems aren’t static. The longer and harder the status quo is maintained, the greater the system contorts. Eventually, it breaks and reforms. The question is how.

The current flavor of ‘no holds barred’ capitalism sits at this precipice. For years, it has extracted everything within its reach. It has exploited our natural resources and damaged our ecosystems. It has claimed our time and effort, and even our hopes and dreams. All these things have been treated as resources to be mined for a system that’s systematically designed to benefit the few.

The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. That might be tough to swallow, but there’s a good trick involved: buying in uncritically allows you to believe that your self-interest is benevolent. That so many people are willing to do so is captured by Upton Sinclair’s famous quip, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The result is an absurdist cargo cult in which the haves take ever more while telling themselves that manna is surely falling from heaven upon the masses. Growth remains the answer even in an era of environmental breakdown. But it’s a brittle system that’s collapsing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Our food system is a prime example.

Problems arose early on in the pandemic as conditions in meatpacking plants played to the strengths of the virus. By late April 2020, 5,000 workers had tested positive and dozens of plants had closed. Millions of animals were led to slaughter with no intent of feeding people. Instead, they were killed in service of mitigating financial losses. At a time when hunger was rife, we learned that a system built for efficiency was indifferent to challenges beyond its balance sheets.

Prior to the pandemic, 37 million Americans - 11 million of them children - lived in food-insecure households, meaning that they weren’t able to afford healthy food for their families. In June 2020, Feeding America, a national network of food banks, estimated that another 17 million individuals were at risk of joining that group. An April survey of mothers with children age 12 and under found that the percentage who were running out of food - and lacked enough money to purchase more - had jumped from an already dire range of 15-20% to around 40%.

The result? Millions of animals were slaughtered for naught, while millions of people lacked proper sustenance. That outcome was the result of ‘good business decisions.’

The state of family finances is dire. A report published in 2019 found that nearly 40% of Americans couldn’t come up with $500 without selling something or taking out a loan. Another survey found that 49% were planning to live paycheck to paycheck, and that was before a coronavirus-led string of over 46 million unemployment claims. Meanwhile, the total wealth of US billionaires surged by over $600 billion. Jeff Bezos ‘earned’ $24 billion in that time.

Viewed through the lens of race, this ugly picture becomes even more grotesque, since Black and Hispanic families have a fraction of the savings held by white families. They’re also far more likely to be renters, who lack the legal protections that benefit homeowners. Evictions, like incarcerations, hit such communities disproportionately, but the landlord still comes on the first of the month.

Back in April 2020, nearly a third of renters didn’t pay their rent on time, a significant increase over 2019. States put eviction moratoriums in place as the wave of unemployment unfolded, but those protections are expiring. Amid a global pandemic, millions of people are at risk of being turned out into the streets. Why?

The pervasive inequality we live with—in a system that tells us it will provide everyone with abundance—is a chosen catastrophe, a designed failure that’s thrust upon the many.

The answer is simple: doing otherwise would refute the central premise of capitalism - profit. Its ideology is a one-trick pony that only knows one answer - more.

For years, millions of people have struggled ever harder to survive in the maw of a relentless economic system that tells us that coming up short is a matter of personal failure. But we know that’s a lie. The pervasive inequality we live with—in a system that tells us it will provide everyone with abundance—is a chosen catastrophe, a designed failure that’s thrust upon the many.

It’s time for a rethink.

The current system is dying, but it won’t go quietly. We can allow it to continue thrashing about and possibly give rise to something even darker, or we can fight to build something better. The stirrings are out there in communities that are shifting towards justice and equality. Learn from them and push for such changes wherever you are. The situation is dire, but there’s opportunity in it.

Kenneth Boulding once claimed that “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Fortunately, Amsterdam is moving away from such madness by embracing Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economy,” which shows us how to provide for everyone’s essential needs while living within our ecological means.

If we can’t live within planetary limits, humanity is a failed project. If we can’t provide everyone’s necessities, humanity is a misnomer. Those are table stakes. Raworth’s ideas are fundamental pillars that underpin my new book on “Pandemic Capitalism” and promising alternatives. We ought to consider such possibilities in the context of the lockdowns. When most people were told to stay home from work, the people who fed you and took out your trash were deemed to be of the utmost importance; it’s just that capitalism has long treated them otherwise.

If we use this moment to rethink our economic systems, we should start by thinking about what we value and what we ought to reward. At minimum, shouldn’t people who are working in “essential” roles earn a living wage?

Let’s put this in context with recent reports on Gilead’s COVID-19 treatment, Remdesivir, which is becoming a sought after treatment for people hospitalized with the virus. A study of the medication found it shortened hospital stays by about four days, while reducing mortality and serious adverse events for hospitalized patients by around 5-6%.

When the firm’s pricing of a typical course was set at $2,340 it was met with outrage. Gilead’s Chairman and CEO, Daniel O’Day, penned an open letter in which he portrayed the choice as an act of benevolence. As he put it, Gilead would normally “price a medicine according to the value it provides,” before claiming that the medicine would save US patients approximately $12,000 in hospital charges. I don’t believe Upton Sinclair would’ve taken the bait.

Compare this with the choices of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who both developed vaccines for polio, and both put their discoveries into the commons. Their work led to polio’s eradication.

Salk and Sabin declined personal fortunes. By contrast, Gilead took $70 million in taxpayer assistance to develop their drug and then charged taxpayers thousands of dollars to access it. They did so while explaining that it was a ‘bargain’ that they’d only offer in the moment’s extreme circumstances.

These are the ‘normal’ but absurd outcomes of capitalism as we know it. Taking essential services and research out of corporate control is a necessary step. Universal Basic Incomes are another. With those, everyone would be guaranteed a reliable income stream. If we’re able to implement an economic system rooted in these alternatives, the reduction in striving will help us foster more Salks and Sabins.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought the tyranny of our economic system into sharp focus. We have a choice to make: will we reclaim our independence?

Chris Oestereich lectures on social innovation at Thammasat University. He founded the Wicked Problems Collaborative, a press focused on humanity’s biggest challenges, and co-founded the Circular Design Lab, a systemic design laboratory. His latest book is Pandemic Capitalism.

Key U.S. Ally Indicted for

Organ Trade Murder Scheme

by NICOLAS J S DAVIES JULY 7,2020

Photograph Source: Andrew Milligan sumo – CC BY 2.0

When President Clinton dropped 23,000 bombs on what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999 and NATO invaded and occupied the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, U.S. officials presented the war to the American public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population from genocide at the hands of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. That narrative has been unraveling piece by piece ever since.

In 2008 an international prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused U.S.-backed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo of using the U.S. bombing campaign as cover to murder hundreds of people to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Del Ponte’s charges seemed almost too ghoulish to be true. But on June 24th, Thaci, now President of Kosovo, and nine other former leaders of the CIA-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA,) were finally indicted for these 20-year-old crimes by a special war crimes court at The Hague.

From 1996 on, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies covertly worked with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to instigate and fuel violence and chaos in Kosovo. The CIA spurned mainstream Kosovar nationalist leaders in favor of gangsters and heroin smugglers like Thaci and his cronies, recruiting them as terrorists and death squads to assassinate Yugoslav police and anyone who opposed them, ethnic Serbs and Albanians alike.

As it has done in country after country since the 1950s, the CIA unleashed a dirty civil war that Western politicians and media dutifully blamed on Yugoslav authorities. But by early 1998, even U.S. envoy Robert Gelbard called the KLA a “terrorist group” and the UN Security Council condemned “acts of terrorism” by the KLA and “all external support for terrorist activity in Kosovo, including finance, arms and training.” Once the war was over and Kosovo was successfully occupied by U.S. and NATO forces, CIA sources openly touted the agency’s role in manufacturing the civil war to set the stage for NATO intervention.

By September 1998, the UN reported that 230,000 civilians had fled the civil war, mostly across the border to Albania, and the UN Security Council passed resolution 1199, calling for a ceasefire, an international monitoring mission, the return of refugees and a political resolution. A new U.S. envoy, Richard Holbrooke, convinced Yugoslav President Milosevic to agree to a unilateral ceasefire and the introduction of a 2,000 member “verification” mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). But the U.S. and NATO immediately started drawing up plans for a bombing campaign to “enforce” the UN resolution and Yugoslavia’s unilateral ceasefire.

Holbrooke persuaded the chair of the OSCE, Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek, to appoint William Walker, the former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador during its civil war, to lead the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM). The U.S. quickly hired 150 Dyncorp mercenaries to form the nucleus of Walker’s team, whose 1,380 members used GPS equipment to map Yugoslav military and civilian infrastructure for the planned NATO bombing campaign. Walker’s deputy, Gabriel Keller, France’s former Ambassador to Yugoslavia, accused Walker of sabotaging the KVM, and CIA sources later admitted that the KVM was a “CIA front” to coordinate with the KLA and spy on Yugoslavia.

The climactic incident of CIA-provoked violence that set the political stage for the NATO bombing and invasion was a firefight at a village called Racak, which the KLA had fortified as a base from which to ambush police patrols and dispatch death squads to kill local “collaborators.” In January 1999, Yugoslav police attacked the KLA base in Racak, leaving 43 men, a woman and a teenage boy dead.

After the firefight, Yugoslav police withdrew from the village, and the KLA reoccupied it and staged the scene to make the firefight look like a massacre of civilians. When William Walker and a KVM team visited Racak the next day, they accepted the KLA’s massacre story and broadcast it to the world, and it became a standard part of the narrative to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia and military occupation of Kosovo.

Autopsies by an international team of medical examiners found traces of gunpowder on the hands of nearly all the bodies, showing that they had fired weapons. They were nearly all killed by multiple gunshots as in a firefight, not by precise shots as in a summary execution, and only one victim was shot at close range. But the full autopsy results were only published much later, and the Finnish chief medical examiner accused Walker of pressuring her to alter them.

Two experienced French journalists and an AP camera crew at the scene challenged the KLA and Walker’s version of what happened in Racak. Christophe Chatelet’s article in Le Monde was headlined, “Were the dead in Racak really massacred in cold blood?” and veteran Yugoslavia correspondent Renaud Girard concluded his story in Le Figaro with another critical question, “Did the KLA seek to transform a military defeat into a political victory?”

NATO immediately threatened to bomb Yugoslavia, and France agreed to host high-level talks. But instead of inviting Kosovo’s mainstream nationalist leaders to the talks in Rambouillet, Secretary Albright flew in a delegation led by KLA commander Hashim Thaci, until then known to Yugoslav authorities only as a gangster and a terrorist.

Albright presented both sides with a draft agreement in two parts, civilian and military. The civilian part granted Kosovo unprecedented autonomy from Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav delegation accepted that. But the military agreement would have forced Yugoslavia to accept a NATO military occupation, not just of Kosovo but with no geographical limits, in effect placing all of Yugoslavia under NATO occupation.

When Milosevich refused Albright’s terms for unconditional surrender, the U.S. and NATO claimed he had rejected peace, and war was the only answer, the “last resort.” They did not return to the UN Security Council to try to legitimize their plan, knowing full well that Russia, China and other countries would reject it. When UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright the British government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s plan for an illegal war of aggression against Yugoslavia, she told him to “get new lawyers.”

In March 1999, the KVM teams were withdrawn and the bombing began. Pascal Neuffer, a Swiss KVM observer reported, “The situation on the ground on the eve of the bombing did not justify a military intervention. We could certainly have continued our work. And the explanations given in the press, saying the mission was compromised by Serb threats, did not correspond to what I saw. Let’s say rather that we were evacuated because NATO had decided to bomb.”

NATO killed thousands of civilians in Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia, as it bombed 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 69 schools, 25,000 homes, power stations, a national TV station, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and other diplomatic missions. After it invaded Kosovo, the U.S. military set up the 955-acre Camp Bondsteel, one of its largest bases in Europe, on its newest occupied territory. Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, visited Camp Bondsteel in 2002 and called it “a smaller version of Guantanamo,” exposing it as a secret CIA black site for illegal, unaccountable detention and torture.

But for the people of Kosovo, the ordeal was not over when the bombing stopped. Far more people had fled the bombing than the so-called “ethnic cleansing” the CIA had provoked to set the stage for it. A reported 900,000 refugees, nearly half the population, returned to a shattered, occupied province, now ruled by gangsters and foreign overlords.

Serbs and other minorities became second-class citizens, clinging precariously to homes and communities where many of their families had lived for centuries. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma and other minorities fled, as the NATO occupation and KLA rule replaced the CIA’s manufactured illusion of ethnic cleansing with the real thing. Camp Bondsteel was the province’s largest employer, and U.S. military contractors also sent Kosovars to work in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2019, Kosovo’s per capita GDP was only $4,458, less than any country in Europe except Moldova and war-torn, post-coup Ukraine.

In 2007, a German military intelligence report described Kosovo as a “Mafia society,” based on the “capture of the state” by criminals. The report named Hashim Thaci, then the leader of the Democratic Party, as an example of “the closest ties between leading political decision makers and the dominant criminal class.” In 2000, 80% of the heroin trade in Europe was controlled by Kosovar gangs, and the presence of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops fueled an explosion of prostitution and sex trafficking, also controlled by Kosovo’s new criminal ruling class.

In 2008, Thaci was elected Prime Minister, and Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. (The final dissolution of Yugoslavia in 2006 had left Serbia and Montenegro as separate countries.) The U.S. and 14 allies immediately recognized Kosovo’s independence, and ninety-seven countries, about half the countries in the world, have now done so. But neither Serbia nor the UN have recognized it, leaving Kosovo in long-term diplomatic limbo.

When the court in the Hague unveiled the charges against Thaci on June 24th, he was on his way to Washington for a White House meeting with Trump and President Vucic of Serbia to try to resolve Kosovo’s diplomatic impasse. But when the charges were announced, Thaci’s plane made a U-turn over the Atlantic, he returned to Kosovo and the meeting was canceled.

The accusation of murder and organ trafficking against Thaci was first made in 2008 by Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY), in a book she wrote after stepping down from that position. Del Ponte later explained that the ICTFY was prevented from charging Thaci and his co-defendants by the non-cooperation of NATO and the UN Mission in Kosovo. In an interview for the 2014 documentary, The Weight of Chains 2, she explained, “NATO and the KLA, as allies in the war, couldn’t act against each other.”

Human Rights Watch and the BBC followed up on Del Ponte’s allegations, and found evidence that Thaci and his cronies murdered up to 400 mostly Sebian prisoners during the NATO bombing in 1999. Survivors described prison camps in Albania where prisoners were tortured and killed, a yellow house where people’s organs were removed and an unmarked mass grave nearby.

Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty interviewed witnesses, gathered evidence and published a report, which the Council of Europe endorsed in January 2011, but the Kosovo parliament did not approve the plan for a special court in the Hague until 2015. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers and independent prosecutor’s office finally began work in 2017. Now the judges have six months to review the prosecutor’s charges and decide whether the trial should proceed.

A central part of the Western narrative on Yugoslavia was the demonization of President Milosevich of Yugoslavia, who resisted his country’s Western-backed dismemberment throughout the 1990s. Western leaders smeared Milosevich as a “New Hitler” and the “Butcher of the Balkans,” but he was still arguing his innocence when he died in a cell at The Hague in 2006.

Ten years later, at the trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the judges accepted the prosecution’s evidence that Milosevich strongly opposed Karadzic’s plan to carve out a Serb Republic in Bosnia. They convicted Karadzic of being fully responsible for the resulting civil war, in effect posthumously exonerating Milosevich of responsibility for the actions of the Bosnian Serbs, the most serious of the charges against him.

But the U.S.’s endless campaign to paint all its enemies as “violent dictators” and “New Hitlers” rolls on like a demonization machine on autopilot, against Putin, Xi, Maduro, Khamenei, the late Fidel Castro and any foreign leader who stands up to the imperial dictates of the U.S. government. These smear campaigns serve as pretexts for brutal sanctions and catastrophic wars against our international neighbors, but also as political weapons to attack and diminish any U.S. politician who stands up for peace, diplomacy and disarmament.

As the web of lies spun by Clinton and Albright has unraveled, and the truth behind their lies has spilled out piece by bloody piece, the war on Yugoslavia has emerged as a case study in how U.S. leaders mislead us into war. In many ways, Kosovo established the template that U.S. leaders have used to plunge our country and the world into endless war ever since. What U.S. leaders took away from their “success” in Kosovo was that legality, humanity and truth are no match for CIA-manufactured chaos and lies, and they doubled down on that strategy to plunge the U.S. and the world into endless war.

As it did in Kosovo, the CIA is still running wild, fabricating pretexts for new wars and unlimited military spending, based on sourceless accusations, covert operations and flawed, politicized intelligence. We have allowed American politicians to pat themselves on the back for being tough on “dictators” and “thugs,” letting them settle for the cheap shot instead of tackling the much harder job of reining in the real instigators of war and chaos: the U.S. military and the CIA.

But if the people of Kosovo can hold the CIA-backed gangsters who murdered their people, sold their body parts and hijacked their country accountable for their crimes, is it too much to hope that Americans can do the same and hold our leaders accountable for their far more widespread and systematic war crimes?

Iran recently indicted Donald Trump for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, and asked Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant for him. Trump is probably not losing sleep over that, but the indictment of such a key U.S. ally as Thaci is a sign that the U.S. “accountabilty-free zone” of impunity for war crimes is finally starting to shrink, at least in the protection it provides to U.S. allies. Should Netanyahu, Bin Salman and Tony Blair be starting to look over their shoulders?

More articles by:NICOLAS J S DAVIES

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on “Obama At War” in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

Lopez Obrador’s Visit to Trump is a Betrayal of the U.S. and Mexican People

by LAURA CARLSEN JULY 8, 2020

Photograph Source: Israel.rosas83 – CC BY-SA 4.0

To praise a tyrant is to insult a people. López Obrador’s proposed visit to Washington is an insult to the American people, and especially to the 37 million Mexican migrants who live in the United States.

The purpose of the state visit with Donald Trump on July 8 is to celebrate the entry into force of the Mexico-United States-Canada Treaty (T-MEC) on July 1. It comes at the worst possible time.

First, AMLO is traveling to the United States at the height of the pandemic in both countries. In the U.S., a new outbreak concentrated in the southern states has secured its position as the world leader in deaths from COVID-19, largely attributed to the lack of measures and strategies by the federal government and the disregard for scientific knowledge that President Trump and his supporters publicly express.

As well as the obvious hypocrisy in making a non-essential trip to the US when most of the population is prohibited from traveling in order to control the pandemic, AMLO said he’s going to thank Trump “for his gesture of support and solidarity” by selling — not donating. – ventilators to Mexico to treat COVID-19 patients. Congratulating Trump on anything related to his attitude toward the pandemic is inconceivable now: in addition to recommending potentially lethal treatments, the US president delayed the response to the virus, dismissed and disregarded the recommendations of his own experts, pulled the country out of the World Health Organization, has sought to profit from the tragedy and promoted the reopening that led to the current crisis. In this disaster, recent studies show that the Latino population is dying from COVID-19 at a rate twice that of the white population, while many migrants are unable to access health services and are excluded from rescue support.

If the health context is serious, the political context is even more serious. The main purpose of López Obrador’s first trip abroad, his first since taking office a year and a half ago, is to display the good relationship he has with Donald Trump. Appeasement has always been AMLO’s strategy, ignoring Trump’s racist, authoritarian and often illegal actions, and accommodating aggressions against Mexico and the cruel treatment of the migrant community. Now he plans to pat Trump on the back at a critical moment for Trump’s reelection campaign. With only four months to go until the presidential elections, everything Trump does is thought out in electoral terms. He’s losing in the polls. Trump needs at least part of the Latino vote, and the praise of the Mexican president will serve to dress him up as a statesman and friend of Mexico, despite the constant attacks.

The Mexican president’s show of political support for Donald Trump will also come at a time of massive protests in the United States against racism, and the growth of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This movement is profoundly radical – anti-capitalist, feminist and pro-human rights–the antithesis of Trump-ism. With broad support from many sectors of U.S. society that are fed up with a repressive government of the 1%, the movement has made remarkable progress in defending human life and proposing new visions for society.

Amid multiple crises and Trump’s attempts to turn back the fight for social justice, BLM offers an unprecedented path for change in the United States. In the context of the pandemic and the revolt, people are building networks of mutual support, learning new ways of living together, dreaming hew societies, and strengthening ties across barriers and borders. Migrant organizations not only support their fight, they share it. Community and national grassroots organizations are giving the world lessons in building popular movements and making social change in favor of the poor.

Mexico should be learning from them, rather than kowtowing to Trump–the protesters are Mexico’s real allies. A visit by the Mexican president to polish Trump’s image and ingratiate himself with the corrupt investor world he represents, is a betrayal of the migrant community in the United States, of the growing movement for justice and of the principles for which millions of the kind of nation Lopez Obrador said he would build, exactly two years ago.

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More articles by:LAURA CARLSEN

Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas Program in Mexico City and advisor to Just Associates (JASS) .

Will the New NAFTA Make the Pandemic Worse for Mexicans?

For Mexican workers, farmers, and the poor, the pandemic and the new treaty replacing NAFTA are a devastating one-two punch.

by

David Bacon

Published on

Tuesday, July 07, 2020

by

Foreign Policy In Focus

Elva Nora Cruz is the sister of a fired Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME) member, and sits with Triqui women protesting violence in Oaxaca under a tent in Mexico City’s central square, the zocalo (Photo: David Bacon)

In the debate over the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, the new trade treaty replacing NAFTA that went into effect on July 1, many promises were made about the effectiveness of its labor protections.  Supposedly, they will protect the labor rights of Mexican workers, which will free them to push for better wages and conditions.

These promises are reminiscent of those made when the original NAFTA was debated over a quarter of a century ago. At the time, its corporate backers insisted it would lead to prosperity for workers and farmers, who would no longer be obligated to leave home to find work in the United States.

Whether the old treaty created better conditions—for workers in the maquiladora factories on the border, for Mexican migrants toiling in U.S. fields, or for farmers in the communities from which the migrants come—is more than an economic issue. In the era of the pandemic, the record of the old treaty must be examined to determine as well its responsibility for life and death. Did the changes it provoked make Mexicans more vulnerable to the virus? And because it continues the same economic regime, the new agreement cannot avoid raising the same questions.

The Impact on Mexico

NAFTA had a devastating impact on Mexican workers, farmers, and the poor, and its labor and environmental side agreements did nothing to protect them. The problem lies in the agreement’s purpose—to facilitate the penetration of U.S. capital in Mexico. By taking down barriers to investment and the activity of U.S. corporations, it instituted cataclysmic political and economic changes. The current trade agreement shares NAFTA’s purpose and will have the same impact.

The 1990 report by the U.S. Congress’ Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development recommended that the United States negotiate a free trade agreement with Mexico in order to deter migration. But even this report warned, “It takes many years—even generations—for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect,” and in the meantime would create years of “transitional costs in human suffering.”

Mexico’s “years of sustained growth” turned out to be a tiny 1.2-2 percent, whose benefits were reaped by a billionaire class that multiplied while real income for workers and farmers fell. The consequences were clearest in the displacement that suffering caused. It set millions of Mexicans into motion as migrants, which now exposes them to the virus.

Three million farmers were displaced by corn dumping, to allow U.S. corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to take over Mexico’s corn market. Mexico lost its CONASUPO stores serving farmers and the poor, and Wal-Mart became the country’s largest employer. Waves of privatization, mandated to provide opportunities for banks and investors, cost the jobs of hundreds of thousands as Mexico threw open its economy. As investment increased, the income of Mexicans declined.

Investment had health consequences beyond unemployment. The prelude to COVID came in 2009, with the spread of the H1N1 virus, or swine flu. In Mexico some call it the NAFTA flu, because the agreement provided the vehicle for Smithfield Foods to fill the Perote Valley in Puebla with hog farms. The virus started in a valley town, La Gloria.  Its source was the intense concentration of pigs and their waste. The waste from Smithfield’s U.S. operations was so considerable it led to prohibitions even by the conservative government of North Carolina.

By moving south Smithfield did not just escape environmental protections. It became so dominant that one of every four meals of pork eaten in Mexico now comes from this company’s farms and its imports from the United States. But 125,000 Mexicans lost jobs in pig farming in the process, and people got sick and died from the virus all over Mexico. NAFTA’s environmental side agreement did nothing to help the people of the Perote Valley stop the company’s depredations. The new USMCA makes no change in the Perote Valley and would do nothing to prevent a similar situation in the future.

The failure of NAFTA’s labor side agreement was even more complete. Not a single independent union won bargaining rights, nor a single fired worker reinstated, because of a NAFTA complaint. That abysmal record continues today. The Mexican miners union has been on strike at the huge Cananea copper mine since 2007. The treaty had no impact on regaining their rights. Instead, NAFTA’s freeing of investment to move across borders helped the mine’s owner. The wealthy Larrea family bought the ASARCO mines in Arizona, and forced the miners’ cross-border allies, the United Steel Workers, out on strike there as well. NAFTA’s goal of freeing investment didn’t guarantee labor rights; it jeopardized them. The new agreement has precisely the same goal.

Migrants Also Suffer

Complaints of labor violations weren’t made just about Mexico. Some were filed over the violation of workers’ rights in the United States. A number were filed on behalf of Mexican immigrants, including the massive firing of immigrant workers during organizing drives by Washington apple workers and Maine egg farm workers. Cases were even filed against the U.S. government itself for denying immigrants protections under U.S. labor standards. None resulted in any concrete action. The side agreement’s last case was just settled this week, when seafood workers were told that their H-2B visa status did not protect them against discrimination because they are women. According to the Centro de los Derechos de Migrantes, in 2016 “we submitted a complaint under the NAFTA labor side accord, arguing systemic sex-based discrimination in guest worker programs.” Four years later, Mexico’s National Administrative Office assured the workers they could report any discrimination to ICE or read about their rights in brochures.

The forced migration of these workers, who today are endangered by COVID-19, was a product of NAFTA and its displacing impact in Mexican communities. The number of Mexicans forced to cross the border to find work went from about 4.5 million to 12.5 million in the NAFTA era. The Trump administration now seeks to channel that flow of people. It has cut off visas for family reunification, the achievement of the civil rights movement when it won the end of the bracero program and the passage of the Immigration and Nationalities Act of 1965. As a result of Trump’s recent orders, however, displaced people can now only come legally as H-2A guest workers in agriculture. Growers brought a quarter of a million of these workers into U.S. fields last year, and even more are being brought this year, in the middle of the COVID crisis.

The Southern Poverty Law Center called the H-2A program “Close to Slavery” in a report, and its abuses have been widely documented.  NAFTA, while it produced this forced migration, had no impact on protecting the rights of migrants. The current trade agreement has no protection either.  In the era of the pandemic, that can be deadly.

In March, over 70 H-2A guest workers were infected in the barracks of Stemilt Fruit Company in central Washington State because they are housed in crowded barracks, sleeping in bunk beds that make social distancing impossible. Yakima County, one of the main destinations for these H-2A workers, has the highest rate of infection of any county on the west coast. Yet Washington State told growers that putting those migrants into barracks with bunk beds was acceptable. Growers therefore don’t have to spend money on building new housing, although workers are paying the price. The old treaty offered no protection for them, and the new treaty will not protect them either.

The lack of effectiveness of either treaty in advancing the interest of workers is tied to the power imbalance between the United States and Mexico. Both NAFTA and the USMCA cement in place the relationship in which U.S. corporations dominate decisions in Mexico affecting Mexican workers. Recent struggles by workers on the border against the virus and poverty wages have made that clear.

AMLO’s Response

One of the first acts by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) after he was inaugurated president in December 2018 was to mandate the doubling of wages in the border factories. In Matamoros, tens of thousands of workers went on strike after their U.S. employers and Mexican partners simply refused to obey the law. The government, however, seemed afraid to use its considerable power to force maquiladora employers to comply.

When the COVID-19 crisis started, the Mexican government ordered U.S.-owned factories to stop production, many of them auto assemblers and plants in the Pentagon’s supply chain. Again, companies simply refused to comply until their own workers went on strike and forced them to close the doors. At least twelve people died in the Lear auto parts plant alone. Then the U.S. ambassador, the State Department, and the executives of big U.S. defense and auto corporations leaned on the government in Mexico City. AMLO folded under the pressure and allowed them to restart production, even though workers will get sick and die as a result.

The leverage that the agreements have given the United States is very disturbing. The growth of U.S. production in Mexico has made the Mexican government dependent on keeping that sector operating. This doesn’t just affect the past governments that were notoriously pro-corporate. Mexicans elected AMLO because he promised to end this neoliberal dependence and make life in Mexico more attractive for Mexicans. But the U.S. government and companies have been able to use their leverage to pressure him to reverse those promises. Trump threatened to shut the border and forced Mexico to agree to illegally keep applicants for asylum, including women and children, in camps. NAFTA provided no means to stop Trump from doing this, and the new treaty won’t do that either.

Now this popularly elected president is going to Washington to greet Trump before the election, hat in hand, desperate to see this new trade agreement implemented. But signing the new treaty and a White House visit are not creating friendship with Mexico. Instead, the celebratory visit is a bitter blow to Mexicans in the United States who have felt the sting of Trump’s rhetoric.

“Trump conditioned his support for the USMCA on Mexico keeping quiet and taking in thousands of deported Mexicans, putting their sons and daughters in cages,” declared a bitter statement by the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. “How is it possible,” it asked Lopez Obrador, “that you, who won the election in Mexico on a progressive platform of change for our country, have become a collaborator with Donald Trump, who from the time he was a candidate never hid his racism and hatred towards us?”

Juvencio Rocha Peralta, executive director of the Association of Mexicans in North Carolina, accused Lopez Obrador of “paying homage” to Trump while ignoring the havoc in communities of migrants caused by the virus. “What we need from you are jobs in our home towns, so that our national economy no longer depends on remittances from our labor here.”

Abandoning a path of development in its own national interest, Mexico has signed a trade treaty that subordinates its health policies during a pandemic to the needs of U.S. corporations. Mexico’s migration policies cater to the labor demands of U.S. growers and the political demands of the U.S. right wing. This dependence is exacting a terrible price, measured in the deaths of maquiladora workers in border factories and migrants in U.S. fields.

David Bacon is a writer, photojournalist, and former union organizer. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008), Communities Without Borders (2006), and The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border (2004). In his latest project, Living Under the Trees, Bacon is photographing and interviewing indigenous Mexican migrants working in California's fields.