Republicans are backing Ukraine in the war. So why is there support for Russia on America's far right?

LONG READ

Will Carless and Jessica Guynn
Sat, March 26, 2022

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there has been near unanimous denunciation of President Vladimir Putin, from President Joe Biden calling Putin a "war criminal," to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing him as a "ruthless thug."

But the Ukraine invasion has found a significant pocket of support from prominent figures on the far right including white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who regularly gushes about Putin on his Telegram channel. The war is also a hot topic in QAnon chatrooms where Putin is often portrayed as a hero.

Conservative pundits have also voiced support for Russia. Candace Owens has pushed the Putin talking point that Russia created Ukraine. She also tweeted "Russian lives matter." She was retweeted by the Russian embassy in the U.S.

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Why is there support for Russia on the far right?

Putin has a long history of cultivating and providing material support to far-right leaders in Europe and the United States, according to Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In exchange, those leaders parrot Kremlin talking points, Weiss said.

America's far right shares a common enemy with Putin and Russia: the West's liberal values and the cabal of elites they say controls the economy and the media.

“It helped for Russian purposes to act like all of these other people agree with them,” Weiss said. “It was a way of creating an echo chamber where there isn’t one.”

Like Putin, former president Donald Trump has frequently professed his personal admiration for the Russian president and capitalized on the disdain for western liberal values among some conservatives, said Jared Holt, a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab who researches extremism.

With Trump out of office, many of his supporters are now looking to Putin to take on their enemies, Holt said.

"Some of these far-right cliques within the broader pro-Trump movement came to view Trump as an avatar, fighting against the ills of society they perceive," he said. "I think they view Putin, also, as an avatar standing up against similar forces."

Why are Kremlin talking points in Americans' news feeds?

Unfounded claims to gin up support for the war – including claims that the US is funding bioweapon labs in Ukraine or crisis actors are faking events in the war – have gained traction on social media throughout the conflict, according to Zignal Labs, a software company that tracks and analyzes trends in online narratives.

The far right has echoed many of these claims. On his Telegram channel, Joseph Jordan, a white nationalist podcaster who goes by the name Eric Striker, claimed a pregnant woman injured in the bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital was an Instagram celebrity. QAnon-affiliated Twitter and Telegram accounts also spread the pro-Kremlin conspiracy theory which was quickly debunked.

New conspiracies pop up daily. They are manufactured for a domestic audience in Russia and pro-Moscow Ukrainians but also push buttons in the US. The latest spreading on social media is an unfounded report from Russian state media outlet Sputnik that Hunter Biden and George Soros are funding biolabs in Ukraine.

The danger? That Russian propaganda will find a receptive audience beyond extremist channels, said Stephanie Foggett, director of global communications at intelligence and security firm The Soufan Group.

"The far right used the pandemic to creep into the mainstream and broaden their appeal to followers of QAnon and anti-vaxxers," Foggett said. “Now there is a really, really ripe ecosystem for conspiracy theories.”

Ukraine as extension of culture wars

Fueling support for Putin and his Russian offensive is the perception that he alone can save the world from identity politics and western globalization, extremism experts say.

Putin has long fomented aggression towards the LGBTQ+ community. He has passed stringent laws against "gay propaganda," and recently blasted gender nonconformity as a "pandemic" equal to Covid-19.

"Putin ain't woke," former Trump advisor-turned-far-right podcaster Steve Bannon declared on his show shortly before the Russian invasion. "He's anti-woke."

In Putin, the far right sees a strongman capable of remaking the world order and rejecting liberal values such as gay rights, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University.

"This is similar to the way that we saw some far-right support for the Taliban last August," Miller-Idriss said. "There's the appeal of a 'strong man' or the idea of a strong resistor against the West and all that's gone with that in both of those cases – anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, authoritarian hyper-masculine, all of that kind of tough-guy stuff."

Putin doubled down on this rhetoric in a speech Friday, in which he accused the West of trying to "cancel" Russia. The Russian president invoked author J.K. Rowling, who has been criticized for her anti-trans comments.

“Not so long ago, they canceled children’s author Joan Rowling whose books were spread all over the world in the hundreds of millions of copies, because she did not please fans of so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said in a televised speech.

For some, the conflict in Ukraine is about the same stuff of the culture wars in the US and that's dangerous, Foggett says.

“What really concerns me is that the right especially, they are projecting their own social anxieties into the Ukraine-Russia conflict,” she said.
Not everyone on the far right supports Putin

Not everyone on the far right is siding with Russia in the war. Some Neo-Nazis and white supremacists oppose Putin because of his vow to "de-Nazify" Ukraine.

One U.S.-based neo-Nazi website declared support for Ukraine based solely on the claim that Russian military success would undermine a region that has previously been welcoming to white supremacist organizing.

Kesa White, a researcher at PERIL who tracks white supremacists and other groups, said she's also seen another narrative gain traction online.

"They're saying that Putin is enabling the 'white genocide,'" White said, referring to the longstanding racist trope that white people are being disproportionately killed across the world by people of color in order to undermine global white supremacy. "They feel that their white brothers and sisters are being killed, and having to fight for something that doesn't necessarily pertain to them."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ukraine, Trump and QAnon: Why the far right is backing Russia, Putin

FOX NEWS

Ingraham Guest Says ‘No Reason Whatsoever’ For Ukrainian Refugees To Come To U.S.

Lee Moran
Sat, March 26, 2022, 2:06 AM·2 min read

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and a guest pushed back on Friday against President Joe Biden’s pledge to accept 100,000 refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Obviously, our hearts break for the people in Ukraine. It is absolutely horrific what has happened to them,” said Ingraham, before asking guest Todd Bensman: “But is bringing them all the way to the United States in their best interest? And what about the U.S. taxpayers?”

Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies ― a far-right anti-immigrant group that’s known for its ties to white nationalists ― suggested the refugees would be better off staying in Europe where they have been offered three-year residencies with associated health care, rights to work and housing.

“So there’s really no reason whatsoever for Ukrainians to be coming to our border or for us to be bringing in huge swells, numbers of Ukrainians here,” he argued. “They’re doing great for a group of war refugees.”

“The issue is that they are not asylum-seekers,” Bensman added. “They have asylum, right in their own neighborhood, so it’s a little bit disingenuous.”

“Then that makes more sense. OK,” Ingraham agreed.

More than 3.5 million refugees have now fled Russia’s invasion. More than half of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children have been displaced by the conflict.

The Biden White House, announcing its pledge on Thursday, acknowledged in a fact sheet that it expected “many Ukrainians will choose to remain in Europe close to family and their homes in Ukraine.”

But its raft of measures aimed to “help relieve some of the pressure on the European host countries that are currently shouldering so much of the responsibility,” reported CNN, citing a senior official.

VIDEO Ingraham Guest Says ‘No Reason Whatsoever’ For Ukrainian Refugees To Come To U.S. (yahoo.com)

Marie Yovanovitch says it will take a 'concentrated effort over a number of years' to undo the 'damage' that Mike Pompeo did to the State Department

Sonam Sheth,Nicole Gaudiano

Fri, March 25, 2022

Mike Pompeo in 2017.REUTERS/Carlos Barria

• Yovanovitch told Insider it'd take "years" to undo the "damage" Pompeo did to the State Department.

• The former ambassador said Pompeo "presided over the hollowing out of a great institution."

• She wondered in her memoir whether the department would "survive the betrayals of the Pompeo years."

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, told Insider in a wide-ranging interview that it would take "years" to reverse the damage that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did to the State Department.

Pompeo "presided over the hollowing out of a great institution," Yovanovitch told Insider. She added that Donald Trump's first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, "started it and Pompeo continued it, so there's is lasting damage."

When he took the helm at the department, President Joe Biden's secretary of state, Antony Blinken, made a commitment to following the rule of law, protecting diplomats and foreign service officers, and promoting US policy abroad.

But "it takes a concentrated effort over a number of years not only to knit the fabric of the State Department back together again, but to give it the kinds of resources that are necessary for our diplomacy," Yovanovitch told Insider.

The former ambassador didn't mince words about her view of Pompeo in her new memoir, "Lessons from the Edge." She was blunt when she said Pompeo's "hypocrisy was galling" and wondered whether the State Department would "survive the betrayals of the Pompeo years."

Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post in Ukraine in April 2019 following a smear campaign by Trump's allies, led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. In her book, Yovanovitch discussed her pleas for the State Department, and Pompeo himself, to publicly support her against Giuliani's efforts to discredit her work in Ukraine and against bogus allegations that she was a partisan Obama holdover.

But Yovanovitch later testified to Congress that Pompeo failed to protect her from the White House. She was one of more than a dozen witnesses to testify at Trump's first impeachment inquiry in late 2019; it centered on his efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching bogus political investigations into the Biden family while Trump withheld vital security assistance and a White House meeting.

Yovanovitch said that when congressional staffers began contacting her in mid-August 2019 — shortly before the impeachment inquiry was launched — to discuss "Ukraine-related" matters, she started thinking about hiring a lawyer.

"Although the department lawyers usually tried to watch out for State personnel, their job was to protect State's interests, not mine," she wrote. "I was a team player, but the past six months had shown me that I could no longer trust the coach."

She also wrote that it was ironic that Pompeo pledged to work with "uncompromising personal and professional integrity" after being unable to guard her against Giuliani and Trump's attacks. She recalled the day that she flew back to Washington, DC, from Kyiv after being abruptly fired without cause.

That day, Pompeo unveiled an "ethos statement" at the State Department "with great fanfare," the memoir says. In addition to the promise to work with "uncompromising personal and professional integrity," the statement promised to "show 'unstinting respect in word and deed for my colleagues,'" Yovanovitch writes.

"Every Foreign Service officer I knew agreed with these points, but coming from Pompeo, the irony was too much to handle," the book says. "We were all tired of Pompeo's talk. We just wanted him to walk the walk. He didn't need to swagger."

Looking forward, the former ambassador told Insider that the way the US conducts diplomacy needs to be overhauled, in the same way the US military reformed after the Vietnam War and intelligence services did after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Diplomacy in 2022 needs to "meet the challenges of the 21st century in a way that reflects many of the tools that we've got now that we didn't have back in the day," she said. One example she highlighted is the advent of social media and how journalists, activists, and governments use it to spread awareness about issues.

"When we respond on social media, we don't have to have it approved by, you know, 20 different people in Washington, but we can be more nimble and more effective," Yovanovitch said.

Ginni Thomas Texts Expose Rift in House Jan. 6 Panel


Luke Broadwater, Jo Becker, Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer
Sat, March 26, 2022


Peter Navarro, former trade advisor to the White House, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Oct. 30, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times).

WASHINGTON — Buried in the thousands of documents that Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s final White House chief of staff, turned over late last year to the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack were text messages that presented the panel with a political land mine: what to do about Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The messages showed that Thomas, who goes by Ginni, relentlessly urged Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Trump’s legal efforts to keep power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort.

The public disclosure of the messages Thursday focused new attention on one avenue of the investigation and risked creating a rare rift within the committee about how aggressively to pursue it, including whether to seek testimony from Ginni Thomas.

In the Thomases, the committee is up against a couple that has deep networks of support across the conservative movement and Washington, including inside the committee. The panel’s Republican vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, has led the charge in holding Trump to account for his efforts to overturn the election but has wanted to avoid any aggressive effort that, in her view, could unfairly tarnish Justice Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court and an icon among the Republican base.

So although a debate has broken out inside the committee about summoning Ginni Thomas to testify, the panel at this point has no plans to do so, leaving some Democrats frustrated. That could change, however: On Friday, despite the potential for political backlash, Cheney indicated she has no objection to the panel asking Ginni Thomas for a voluntary interview.

A New York Times Magazine investigation last month examined the political and personal history of Ginni Thomas and her husband. That included her role in efforts to overturn the election from her perch on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement, and in mediating between feuding factions of organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around Jan. 6,” as one organizer put it.

During that period, the Supreme Court was considering a number of cases related to the election, with Justice Thomas taking positions at times sympathetic to Trump’s efforts to challenge the outcome.

This month, Ginni Thomas acknowledged attending the rally that preceded the violence in an interview with a conservative news outlet, but otherwise downplayed her role. Then came disclosure of the texts to Meadows, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.

If the committee does not summon Ginni Thomas, some legal analysts said, it runs the risk of appearing to have a double standard. The panel has taken an aggressive posture toward many other potential witnesses, issuing subpoenas for bank and phone records of both high-ranking allies of the former president and low-level aides with only a tangential connection to the events of Jan. 6.

“I think it would be a dereliction not to bring her in and talk to her,” said Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor who has closely tracked the committee’s work. “It certainly is inconsistent with their neutral, ‘find the facts where they go’ type of approach to this.”

The committee’s light touch with Ginni Thomas to date reflects a number of considerations by both members and investigators, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Some saw the pursuit of Ginni Thomas as a distraction from more important targets. Others worried that pursuing Ginni Thomas could by implication sully Justice Thomas’ reputation. Still others argued that the panel could not know the full extent of her role without further questioning. And some members of the committee saw the text messages for the first time Thursday.

The lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’ shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’ former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Trump — have major roles in the matter.

A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, lawyer John Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Trump’s inner circle. And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’.

This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Trump try to overturn the election. Wood began the questioning by noting that Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.

“Like you, John,” Eastman shot back.

For at least several weeks, the committee’s senior level has discussed whether to call Ginni Thomas to testify, as well as whether to issue subpoenas for any other communications she may have had with the White House or the president’s legal team about the election, including a message she told Meadows she sent to Kushner, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.

There are plenty of leads to pursue. The committee could recall Dustin Stockton, a rally organizer who told the Times about a conversation he had with Caroline Wren, a Republican who helped raise money for the Jan. 6 “March for America,” in which she described Ginni Thomas’ peacemaking role. They could also recall Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, two rally organizers close to Ginni Thomas, to ask about her post-election communications with them.

It could subpoena records from not only Ginni Thomas, but also CNP Action, which was deeply involved in the effort to spread falsehoods about the election. Investigators could ask her the name of the friend she was referring to when she wrote back to thank Meadows, saying: “Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now…I will try to keep holding on.” (Ginni Thomas and her husband have publicly referred to each other as their best friends.) Ultimately, they could ask her whether she had discussed Trump’s fight to overturn the election with her husband.

Justice Thomas has declined to comment on the matter, through a representative. A lawyer for Ginni Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Privately, some Republicans conceded that Ginni Thomas’ texts to Meadows were a mistake — particularly ones in which she urged Meadows to make Sidney Powell, a lawyer who had advocated conspiracy theories about voting machines being hacked, the face of the legal team. Yet the Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried about being seen as critical of Ginni Thomas, predicted that if Democrats increased pressure on the Thomases, the right would counter with more calls for investigations of Democrats if Republicans win back the House in the November elections.

Conservatives have long viewed criticism of his Ginni Thomas as an attack on Justice Thomas. Her supporters include lawyer Mark Paoletta, who was Justice Thomas’ “sherpa,” introducing him to senators for his confirmation hearings.

The news media “seeks to portray Ginni Thomas’s public policy work as a threat to the Supreme Court in order to pressure Thomas to recuse himself from any case that Ginni, or any of the groups she has worked with, has even commented on,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Examiner.

Justice Thomas could in the coming months consider a long list of important legal issues surrounding Jan. 6. He may be called upon to rule on questions involving the prosecution for contempt of Congress of Steve Bannon, a onetime aide to Trump, or concerning the House committee’s efforts to obtain emails from Eastman.

Nichols is overseeing the criminal prosecution of Bannon, who was charged with contempt of Congress in November after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the committee.

Nichols is also handling the high-profile defamation lawsuits that Dominion Voting Systems filed last year against two lawyers closely associated with Trump: Rudy Giuliani and Powell.

Perhaps most important, Nichols is the only federal jurist in Washington so far to have thrown out the key obstruction of Congress charge that the Justice Department has used against hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants to describe the political results of a pro-Trump mob storming into the Capitol. Differing from 12 other federal judges, Nichols wrote in a ruling this month that prosecutors had stretched the statute beyond its original intent.

The ruling could prove important to the House committee as it weighs whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of Trump.

Cheney has indicated that she believes Trump may have violated the obstruction of Congress law, going so far as to read from the text of the statute on the House floor. If prosecutors ultimately use the law to charge Trump, it could face scrutiny from Nichols — or from another district judge who could consider his opinion.

Such a case, too, could eventually be considered by the Supreme Court and Justice Thomas.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Text messages reveal leading role of Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife in facilitating Trump coup plot


Jacob Crosse
wsws.org

On Thursday, the Washington Post and CBS News reported that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows repeatedly after the November 2020 election in support of Trump’s dictatorial efforts. In her messages to Meadows, Thomas endorsed fascistic QAnon conspiracy theories, calling for Trump’s political enemies to be “arrested & detained” and face “military tribunals, for sedition.”

Virginia "Ginni" Lamp Thomas (Wikimedia Commons)The messages confirm that Virginia Thomas, a lifelong Republican Party operative who married her “best friend” Clarence Thomas four years prior to his accession to the Supreme Court in 1991, coordinated with the White House chief of staff and Republican lawmakers to overturn the election of Biden and with it, American democracy.

The texts, which regurgitate verbatim arguments advanced on the fascist InfoWars program hosted by Alex Jones, follow an admission by Thomas earlier this month that she participated in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally held outside the White House. The rally coincided with the attack on Congress by far-right militia elements, white supremacists and pro-Trump sycophants who were summoned by the aspiring-dictator and his Republican allies to occupy the Capitol, take politicians hostage and block the Electoral College certification.

The text messages were part of a tranche of material turned over by Meadows last year to the January 6 House Select Committee charged with investigating Trump’s failed coup. Before Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, he volunteered some 9,000 pages of documents, which included 2,320 texts, at least 29 of which were shared between Thomas and Meadows. While Meadows was held in contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate with the committee in December 2021, he has yet to be arraigned over four months later.

In their report, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write that the texts “show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results—and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice.” Woodward and Costa noted that the text messages have been independently verified by five sources who have seen the original documents, as well as Meadows’ attorney, George Terwilliger III, who told the Post that “nothing about the text messages present any legal issues.”

The first of the 29 messages between Thomas and Meadows was sent by Thomas on November 5, 2020, two days after the election. In the text, Thomas included a link to a YouTube video named “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik was a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and worked under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker in the US State Department.

A former member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Pieczenik has made multiple appearances on InfoWars in the last decade. While on the program, Pieczenik has echoed the disgusting lies of its host, Jones, that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a “false flag” operation engineered by the “deep state” as a pretext to abolish the Second Amendment. He also appears to have been the originator of the QAnon claim that alleged “legitimate ballots” had a special encryption code printed on them to distinguish them from fraudulent, i.e., Biden, ballots.

Commenting on Pieczenik’s video, Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she added.

Throughout his presidency Trump embraced the QAnon movement, which posits that Trump will lead a military coup, dubbed “The Storm,” that will end in a purge of his political opponents. Trump, and other Republican politicians, frequently share QAnon talking points on social media accounts and most recently in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Trump co-conspirators and sitting Republican representatives Lauren Boebert (Colorado) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) are known adherents to the far-right movement.

In the same November 5 message to Meadows, Thomas shared a right-wing meme proliferating on “Stop the Steal” social media pages at the time which read: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO [Guantanamo Bay Prison] to face military tribunals for sedition.”

The day before Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, on November 6, Thomas sent another message to Meadows imploring him not to “… concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” The Post notes that it is “unclear” if Meadows responded, however, Trump continued to take Thomas’ advice, refusing to concede the election while vowing to take his dictatorial ambitions to the Supreme Court.

“We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court—we want all voting to stop,” Trump declared on November 4.

On November 10 Thomas texted Meadows again, telling him he was “in my prayers!!” and urged him to continue supporting Trump’s coup plotting. “Help This Great President stand firm” against “the greatest Heist of our History.” Since his 2016 campaign, Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election is due to “fraud.” Since his defeat to Biden, Trump has repeatedly referred to the 2020 election, in which he lost the Electoral College vote 306–232 and the popular vote by over 7 million, as the “Crime of the Century.”

Meadows replied: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do,” to which Thomas replied some nine minutes later, “Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!”

Later that same night, Thomas wrote to Meadows expressing her frustration that more Republicans in Congress were not rallying enough far-right lumpen elements in furtherance of the coup, “House and Senate guys are pathetic too… only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots… [Texas Rep. Louie] Gohmert, [Ohio Rep. Jim] Jordan, [Arizona Rep. Paul] Gosar and [Texas Rep. Chip] Roy.”

In addition to coordinating with Meadows and Republican lawmakers, the texts revealed that Thomas was also in communication with senior White House adviser and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. On November 13, the Post report claims she texted Meadows, “Just forwarded to [your] gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.”

A November 19 text from Thomas to Meadows reveals her avid support for the far-right lawyer Powell. Urging Meadows to make Powell the “lead and the face” of their efforts to overturn the election, Thomas wrote, “Mark (don’t want to wake you)… Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

In the same thread, Thomas, revealing her knowledge of inner-workings within the White House, something she no doubt shared with her Supreme Court justice husband, advised Meadows on managing White House personnel.

“Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark. The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”

Thomas wrote, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB [Justice Amy Coney Barrett] and others.” Meadows replied to the text later that same day, “Thanks so much.”

The same day that Thomas texted Meadows to “Release the Kraken,” Trump coup lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell held a press conference where they alleged “communists” in China, Cuba and Venezuela, along with “antifa” elements and billionaire Holocaust survivor George Soros were part of a wide ranging plot to block the election of Trump through electoral fraud.

“Globalists, dictators, corporations, you name it—everybody’s against us except President Trump,” Powell declared in a fascist tirade.

The phrase “Release the Kraken” was popularized by Powell during an appearance she made on the Fox Business Network with Lou Dobbs on November 13. In her appearance Powell spewed election conspiracies and ended the interview claiming she was going “to release the Kraken.” However within three days of the deranged November 19 press conference, Trump, Giuliani and Ellis had soured on Powell, with Giuliani releasing a statement on November 22 saying she was not a member of the Trump legal team.

The same day as the statement, Thomas reached out to Meadows, expressing disappointment that Powell was no longer part of the inner coup circle. “Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” wrote Thomas.

Two days later, on November 24, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences… the whole coup and now this… we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.” Meadows, agreeing with Thomas’ delusions, wrote, “You’re preaching to the choir. Very demoralizing.”

Meadows, adopting overt Christian themes, added that their joint efforts to overturn the election was “a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

The Post writes that Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!” While Virginia never directly refers to her husband in the texts, the couple have frequently referred to each other as their respective “best friends.”

While Ginni Thomas was urging Trump’s chief of staff to overturn the election in early December, her husband argued that a Texas lawsuit advanced by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other pro-Trump lawyers seeking to invalidate millions of voters in the “battleground” states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin should be heard by the Supreme Court. At the time, Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote a joint statement saying they did not believe the court has “discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls without our original jurisdiction.”

After November 24, 2020, the Post report notes that there is “an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.”

In that January 10 message, Thomas, echoing the sentiments of the fascist mob that broke into the Capitol, expressed her revulsion at Vice President Mike Pence’s unwillingness to unconstitutionally reject the electoral college vote of states Trump lost.

“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas bemoaned to Trump’s chief of staff. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.” In what could be a reference to the poor performance of the fascist militias who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, Thomas claimed that those “who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”

In addition to disproving Thomas’ lying claims that she “played no role with those who were planning and leading the January 6 events,” as she claimed in an interview earlier this month, the texts illuminate the obvious conflict of interest between Justice Thomas and any future court hearings pertaining to Trump’s failed coup.

In addition to supporting a hearing on the previously mentioned Texas lawsuit, earlier this year Clarence Thomas was the only justice to vote against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House pertaining to the attack. In a functioning democratic society, the justice would already have been impeached and removed from the bench, however, as of this writing, it is not even clear if he, recently discharged after being hospitalized this week, would even recuse himself from any future hearing related to January 6. Currently there is no legal mechanism that would force him to do so.

If Clarence Thomas does choose to recuse himself it will not be due to any pressure imposed on him by the Democratic Party. In a pathetic statement issued Friday morning, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden meekly suggested that Thomas, “at the bare minimum … recuse himself from any case released to the January 6th investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”

That Wyden accepts that Trump will be free to “run again” in 2024 shows that there will be no accountability for Trump or any of his high-level co-conspirators if it is left to the Democratic Party and the courts, riddled with reactionaries like Thomas, to decide. That Trump and his far-right conspirators in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court remain free to plot their next coup underscores that the only social force capable of defeating dictatorship and the rise of fascism is the international working class armed with a socialist program.

YEMEN IS THE HOUTHI'S HOME
'We are lost': Yemenis face eighth year of struggle as war grinds on

Smoke rises during an air strike on an army weapons depot 

on a mountain overlooking Yemen's capital Sanaa

Fri, March 25, 2022

SANAA (Reuters) - Khaled Rmeishi, 16, has spent half his life watching Yemen, and his hopes for the future, collapse under a war that has pushed millions in the long-impoverished Arabian peninsula country deeper into poverty and hunger.

Rmeishi, who is in the ninth grade, helps his family by working at his father's car repair garage in the capital Sanaa and hopes later to have a trade job as a mechanic, plumber or electrician.

"When I first started my education, when I first went to school, all I saw was war ... It affected my schooling, my work, it affected everyone," he said at the garage, where he washed and polished a blue sedan and fixed a bumper.

"We've wasted enough years of our lives. I hope the war will stop and that we will live in peace and security."


 Security guards and journalists inspect the site of a Saudi-led air strike on a telecommunication station, in Sanaa

The war between the Iran-aligned Houthi group and a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which enters its eight year on Saturday, has killed tens of thousands of people and left 19 million people reliant on food assistance.

Some 22 million need support to access health services, 8.5 million children require education support and 16 million need help accessing potable water, according to the United Nations.

Fighting has displaced some 4 million people inside Yemen.

 Relatives carry bodies of the victims of air strikes on a detention center to be buried at a cemetery, in Saada

"We are lost, people are lost, it's as if we are buried underground," said Abdullah Hamzeh at Darwan camp near Sanaa. "My children and I are destitute, we have no income, nothing. We pray to God that this war will stop across all of Yemen."

Yemen's economy has collapsed and the flow of goods into the import-dependent country has been severely hindered by coalition restrictions on areas held by the Houthis, who ousted the Saudi-backed government from Sanaa in late 2014.

The United Nations has warned that the world's largest humanitarian operation in Yemen will be further scaled back, including food and health assistance, after a pledging drive raised less than a third of the $4.27 billion sought for 2022.

"Please don't forget the people of Yemen. We need your support as the international community, we need you to be active in the peace process," said Sami Fakhouri, head of the Yemen delegation to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, referring to U.N.-led peace efforts.

A car falls while being lifted by a crane at the site of a Saudi-led air strike in Yemen's capital Sanaa

(Reporting by Yemen team; Writing by Ghaida Ghantous; Editing by Alison Williams)

ECOCIDE / OHS

Crews remove snow from damaged Alaska pipeline oil tanks


This March 16, 2022, drone photo provided by Alyeska Pipeline Co. shows snow covering 62-foot tall and acre-wide oil tanks at the Valdez Marine Terminal in Valdez, Alaska. Workers at the endpoint of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline are using saws to cut up large blocks of hard-packed snow on top of the oil storage tanks so they can shove the chunks off the tanks, some of which have damaged infrastructure after more than 4 feet of snow fell in Valdez in a month. 

(Alyeska Pipeline Service Company via AP) 


Fri, March 25, 2022

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Workers at the end point of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline are using saws to cut up large blocks of hard-packed snow on top of oil storage tanks so they can shove the chunks off the tanks.

More than four feet (1.2 meters) of snow fell in the community of Valdez between mid-February and mid-March, causing the snow buildup that has damaged infrastructure and vented petroleum vapors into the environment, the Anchorage Daily News reported Friday.

Wet weather then caused the snow to freeze during colder weather, said Donna Schantz, who leads the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council. The group monitors the activities of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the pipeline.

The tanks are located at the Valdez Marine Terminal and Alyeska said it has periodically taken some of the 14 tanks out of service. There have been no disruptions to oil shipments, the company said.

As many as 80 contractors wearing respirators to protect them from fumes are working in shifts around the clock to clear the snow off the tanks, Alyeska spokesperson Michelle Egan said. Additional resources are expected.

The contractors are roped to the tops of the tanks and must use handsaws to remove the snow since they can’t use power tools because of the risk of sparks that could set the petroluem products in the tanks on fire.

Each of the 14 tanks is 62 feet (19 meters) tall and spans 1 acre (0.40 hectares). It generally takes a crew of 10 or 11 people up to two weeks to clear snow from each tank.

“That is taking tremendous focus,” Egan said. “We do things very methodically, very safely. It takes as long as it takes.”

The tanks hold the oil until it is loaded onto tankers for shipment. Alyeska is owned by affiliates of North Slope producers ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Hilcorp. The pipeline moves about 500,000 barrels of crude a day through the 800-mile (1,287-kilometer) pipeline.

Up to four tanks have been taken out of service at various points after the snow pileup sheared off valves installed along the upper edges of the tank roofs. The valves are part of a system used to regulate vapors coming off the oil, and the accumulated snow created enough downward force to knock off 10 valves, Alyeska said.

Workers are installing temporary caps in place of the damaged valves.

A state regulator said at least seven tanks have released vapors into the atmosphere, violating Alyeska’s Clean Air Act permit.

Potential penalties or enforcement actions haven’t been decided yet, Moses Coss, an official with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, said.

“We have been in contact with our regulators since the beginning,” Egan said in an email to the Daily News. “We followed our permit and reported emissions appropriately.”

The contractors are wearing respirators because the broken valves are allowing the release of hydrocarbons like benzene, a carcinogenic chemical that is dangerous at high levels of exposure.

The federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration "sets the limit for benzene exposure; our limits are more conservative,” Egan said. “We do not permit workers to work in areas with detectable levels of hydrocarbon without respirators.”

The workers wear traction devices and are roped to the tanks to prevent them from falling.

Four workers have slipped while removing snow, which the company described as “first aid injuries” in a letter to employees. A copy was obtained by the Anchorage newspaper.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Whistleblower says Microsoft spent millions on bribes abroad


Amrita Khalid
·Contributing Writer
Fri, March 25, 2022

Stringer . / reuters


In an essay published Friday on the whistleblower platform Lioness, former Microsoft manager Yasser Elabd alleged that Microsoft fired him after he alerted leadership to a workplace where employees, subcontractors and government operators regularly engaged in bribery. He further alleges that attempts to escalate his concerns resulted in retaliation within Microsoft by managers, and eventual termination from his role.

Elabd claims in his essay that he worked for Microsoft between 1998 and 2018, and had oversight into a "business investment fund " — essentially a slush fund to "cement longer-term deals" in the Mid-East and Africa. But he grew suspicious of unusual payments to seemingly unqualified partners. After examining several independent audits, he discovered what he believes is a common practice: After setting up a large sale to entities in the region, a "discount" would be baked in, only for the difference between the full-freight cost and discounted fee to be skimmed off and divided between the deal-makers.

“This decision maker on the customer side would send an email to Microsoft requesting a discount, which would be granted, but the end customer would pay the full fee anyway. The amount of the discount would then be distributed among the parties in cahoots: the Microsoft employee(s) involved in the scheme, the partner, and the decision maker at the purchasing entity—often a government official,” Elabd alleged.

The former Microsoft manager gave several examples of suspicious transactions and red flags he witnessed over his two decades working for the company abroad. In one audit, Microsoft gave the Saudi Ministry of the Interior a $13.6 million discount which never reached the agency’s doors. In 2015, a Nigerian official complained that the government paid $5.5 million for licenses "for hardware they did not possess."

In another example, Qatar’s Ministry of Education paid $9.5 million, over a period of seven years, for Microsoft Office and Windows licenses that went unused. Auditors later discovered that employees at that agency didn’t even have access to computers.

“We are committed to doing business in a responsible way and always encourage anyone to report anything they see that may violate the law, our policies, or our ethical standards,” Becky Lenaburg, a VP at Microsoft and deputy general counsel for compliance and ethics, wrote in a statement to The Verge. “We believe we’ve previously investigated these allegations, which are many years old, and addressed them. We cooperated with government agencies to resolve any concerns.”

Elabd claims his attempts to alert managers resulted in his being shouted at by one manager, iced out of certain deals and told by an executive that he had effectively set himself up to be let go after attempting to involve CEO Satya Nadella. After being terminated, Elabd wrote that he brought his documentation before the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice. He claims the DoJ refused to take up his case. According to Protocol, the SEC dropped the case earlier this month due to a lack of resources.

“As I alleged in my complaint to the SEC, Microsoft is violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and continues to do so brazenly. And why wouldn’t they?" wrote Elabd. "By declining to investigate these allegations and the evidence I’ve given them, the SEC and DOJ have given Microsoft the green light.”

Apple Pays Another Round of Rare $200,000 Bonuses to Some Staff

Mark Gurman
Fri, March 25, 2022


(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. is paying a small number of engineers another round of special stock bonuses as part of an unusual push to retain key talent, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The iPhone maker doled out the bonuses in recent days to a select group of employees in its software and hardware engineering departments, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the move isn’t public. The rewards ranged from around $100,000 to upwards of $200,000 in restricted stock units, with some in the company referring to them as special retention grants.

The bonuses are designed to keep the employees from leaving by vesting over several years, and they could become more valuable over time if Apple’s stock price continues to rise. The shares are up more than 40% over the past 12 months, though they’re down slightly in 2022 -- part of a broader pullback for tech stocks.

Apple previously gave out special stock-based bonuses in December, with the rewards topping $180,000. In that case, the payouts went to employees in the company’s hardware technologies group, which designs its custom chips, and its team working on future virtual and augmented reality headsets. But it’s been rare in the past for Apple to rely on such rewards.

The company has suffered some attrition in its chip design group, and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. has stepped up recruiting of engineers -- aiming to put them to work on the so-called metaverse.

The number of employees receiving the special grants this cycle is smaller than in December, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said. A spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

Some engineers were informed of their bonuses by senior executives in their respective divisions. Over the past few weeks, the company has also been giving typical annual bonuses and compensation adjustments ahead of its April 15 vesting date. Employee stock vests twice annually, in April and October.

Inflation also has put pressure on employers to boost compensation. And Apple is preparing for a return to the office -- a source of tension for some employees. By May, the company will require engineers and other corporate staff to work out of the office at least three days a week.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Activision Faces New Sexual Harassment Suit as Microsoft Buyout Looms

The suit says the plaintiff complained to HR on multiple occasions and was dismissed.

COLETTE BENNETT
MAR 25, 2022 

Sexual harassment allegations have plagued the video game industry at an alarming rate over the last several years, revealing a deeply rooted problem with the way the once male-dominated business coexists with female and female-identifying employees.

But while the allegations have surfaced in major companies like Sony (SNE) - Get Sony Corp. Report and Ubisoft (UBSFY) , none have been as plentiful as those leveled at "Call of Duty" publisher Activision Blizzard (ATVI) - Get Activision Blizzard, Inc. Report.

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It started when California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed the first discrimination-related suit against Activision Blizzard in July 2020, accusing the company of a "frat boy culture" that included unwelcome sexual advances and derogatory comments about rape towards women.

While Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick tried to address the complaints by way of a statement promising "a new zero tolerance policy for inappropriate behavior," a Wall Street Journal feature dug deeper and found more.

That included evidence that alleges Kotick was well aware of accusations of rape within the company and ignored them. The Journal also found proof of roughly 700 employee complaints about inappropriate conduct in the workplace.

It led to major consequences, from sharp stock drops to Activision Blizzard employees staging walkouts.

So when Microsoft announced in January that it intended to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, it seemed like the embattled gaming publisher might be undergoing some major changes under new management, despite investors being less than thrilled about the deal.

On March 23, yet another sexual harassment lawsuit was filed.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

What Does The New Lawsuit Say?

The new lawsuit was filed by attorney Lisa Bloom with Los Angeles County Superior Court and involves an anonymous current employee of Activision Blizzard.

The suit details Doe's experiences as a senior administrative assistant to former Blizzard staffers Mark Skorupa and alleges a wide variety of complaints.
Scroll to Continue

"Activision Blizzard's failure to curb sexist and harassing conduct emboldened its leadership and others to touch Ms. Doe's breasts, thighs, and other body parts, to comment on her breasts, to invite her to a swinger party, to attempt to kiss her and to make numerous sexualized comments to her," the document reads.

The suit goes on to say that Doe complained to HR on multiple occasions and was dismissed, saying "HR asked Ms. Doe to keep all of her issues, concerns, recordings, or emails to herself because they could be very damaging to Activision Blizzard."

The suit also alleges that Ms. Doe was demoted and her applications for positions in other departments were declined.

Doe seeks financial compensation as well as a promotion to the position of Executive Assistant and a raise.

The suit also seeks several changes to the way it conducts business in relation to sexual harassment complaints, including a rotating HR department and an outside investigation firm to investigate past and future complaints.

It also calls for the firing of Kotick.

Will This Affect Activision Blizzard's Stock?

The lawsuit appears to have had little effect on Activision Blizzard's stock this time around, which has stayed fairly stable since the big dip it took last November.

That said, these accusations Activision Blizzard's continue to have a major effect on its reputation in the video game industry.

In its annual report from late February, the company addressed the impact.

"We have observed labor shortages, increasing competition for talent, and increasing attrition,” including “a significantly higher turnover rate of our human resources function in 2021.”

It still remains to be seen if Activision Blizzard will make the changes it promised to overhaul its workplace culture. But it is still ignoring a California law requiring it to add another woman to its board of directors by the end of 2021.

 COLETTE BENNETT

Google Fiber workers successfully unionize in Kansas City


Bryan Menegus
·Senior News Editor
Fri, March 25, 2022, 

The roof of a Google fiber instillation truck is pictured Salt Lake City, Utah, 

U.S., September 28, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake (Mike Blake / Reuters)


In a tally with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this afternoon, Google Fiber customer service workers — employed by staffing agency BDS Connected Solutions, which is subcontracted by Alphabet — voted nine to one to form a union. They'll be represented by the Alphabet Workers Union, an arm of the Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA.)

Workers at the store, which operates out of Kansas City, Missouri, told Engadget back in January that they were feeling left out of important workplace conversations, especially around safety and staffing. Kansas City was the market where Google Fiber first launched, approximately a decade ago. Workers at this store skipped straight to petitioning the NLRB for union recognition because, for reasons unknown, the supermajority of union card-signers were seemingly ignored by Google and BDS alike. At the time Emrys Adair, a worker at this location said, "There's been no acknowledgement, no pushback. No response at all yet." Since then neither company responded to Engadget's requests for comment.

Among the ballots cast, nine were in favor while one was opposed; an additional ballot was challenged, but the number of challenged ballots was not sufficient to change the result of the election.

“Our campaign faced many efforts to discourage us from exercising our right to a collective voice on the job. Yet it was always clear to all of us that together we can positively shape our working conditions to ensure we all have access to the quality pay, benefits and protections we have earned," Eris Derickson, one of the retail associate at this location, told press in a statement today. "We all enjoy our work with Google Fiber and look forward to sitting at the negotiating table with BDS Connected Solution to set a new standard for our workplace to improve both worker, customer and company experience.”

The Alphabet Workers Union sees this not only as a victory for this specific store, but part of a broader campaign to level the playing field between Alphabet's full-time staff, and its larger and reportedly worse-compensated TVCs (temps, vendors and contractors, in Google parlance.) “Since our founding we have been committed to tackling Alphabet’s segregative, two-tiered employment system. Alphabet wants to maintain its reputation for treating its workers well but doesn't want to pay for it. Instead, the trillion dollar corporation relies on temporary, contract and vendor workers to provide essential work for the company without the same pay, benefits or rights as full time employees," Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a Google software engineer with AWU-CWA wrote in a statement today.

What remains next is for these Google Fiber workers to bargain their first contract, itself a herculean effort that companies have tremendous power to draw out or undermine. Thus far, the specific changes these workers hope to win in bargaining have not been disclosed by the AWU-CWA, though keeping those goals close to the chest is by no means unusual.

Earlier this year, document discovery by the NLRB revealed the existence of an internal Google initiative called "Project Vivian." As reported by Wired, the program was meant "to dissuade employees from unionizing after worker activism began heating up in late 2018"; and as it was put in the in documents themselves by Michael Pfyl, the company's director of employment law, Project Vivian was intended “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.”

Initially, workers had applied to have Alphabet and BDS considered joint employers in their unionization application. Hoping to avoid legal headaches and in the interest of an expedient vote, however, Alphabet were eventually dropped.

“We have many contracts with both unionized and non-union suppliers, and respect their employees' right to choose whether or not to join a union," a Google spokesperson told Engadget. "The decision of these contractors to join the Communications Workers of America is a matter between the workers and their employer, BDS Solutions Group."

Correction: an earlier version of this story listed Alphabet as a joint employer. While initially filed as such with the NLRB, those terms changed over the past two months and we've updated to reflect that.

Push to unionize tech workers gets more momentum as Google Fiber subcontractors in Kansas City join their ranks


David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Colin Lodewick
Fri, March 25, 2022

Google Fiber subcontract workers in Kansas City voted today to join the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), part of the Communication Workers of America’s (CWA) broader push to organize tech workers.

The election results add a small number of Google Fiber retail workers, subcontractors of BDS Connected Solutions, to the budding union movement at Google’s parent company. That union formed a year ago after a series of disputes between Google workers and management, including the firing of Black AI ethics researcher Dr. Timnit Gebru.

“Today we are elated to see the NLRB reaffirm what we have already known — that we enjoy overwhelming support for our union,” said Eris Derickson, a retail associate at BDS Connected Solutions and Google Fiber in a statement.

The Google Fiber workers filed their petition for their election with the National Labor Relations Board on January 4, 2022 — the one year anniversary that Google workers launched the AWU. The NLRB petition names BDS Connected Solutions, not Google, as the employer.

The Kansas City Google Fiber workers, who voted 9 to 1 in favor of unionizing, hope to advocate for equal protections and benefits across Google for subcontract workers and full-time employees. With formal recognition from the NLRB, they're now the first AWU-CWA members with bargaining rights. Prior Alphabet union members had not gone to that length and therefore could not bring their employer to the bargaining table to negotiate labor contracts.

“Since our founding we have been committed to tackling Alphabet’s segregative, two-tiered employment system,” said Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a software engineer and member of AWU-CWA based in Cambridge, Mass., in a statement. “We are proud to stand with our fellow Alphabet workers as they head to the negotiating table to secure the pay, benefits and rights they have earned.”

The rights of temporary workers were central to AWU’s mission from the start, which opted not to pursue NLRB recognition in order to include all Alphabet employees, regardless of classification as contractors or full-time employees. Other issues include wages and compensation and the effort to hold the company accountable to being a positive force in society.

“We have many contracts with both unionized and non-union suppliers, and respect their employees' right to choose whether or not to join a union,” said a Google representative in a statement. “The decision of these contractors to join the Communications Workers of America is a matter between the workers and their employer, BDS Solutions Group.”

Today’s election result is part of a greater wave of labor organizing activity playing out in workplaces across the country that are not traditionally unionized, including in retail and food service sectors at companies like REI and Starbucks and at tech behemoths like Amazon. Earlier this month, tech workers at the New York Times voted to join NewsGuild alongside their editorial colleagues.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com