#POLITICALPRISONER

Brittney Griner’s teammates break silence amid Russia detention

USA Basketball teammates express support for Griner after weeks in detention, say, ‘It could have been any of us’.

Two-time Olympic gold medallist Brittney Griner has been detained in Russia since mid-February on drug charges

 [File: Brian Snyder/Reuters]

Published On 1 Apr 2022

Brittney Griner’s teammates have broken their silence amid the US basketball player’s continued detention in Russia, saying they are hopeful that everything is being done to get her home safely.

Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medallist and All-Star centre in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), has been detained in Russia since mid-February on charges of carrying vape cartridges that contained cannabis oil in her luggage.

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Her detention comes at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and Russia over the continuing war in Ukraine, and US officials have kept a low profile publicly amid concerns Griner could be used as a pawn in the dispute.

The WNBA also has said little publicly about Griner’s detention, though the league said in a statement on March 23 that it was continuing to work with government officials and others to get Griner home.

“We’re not talking about BG the basketball player, we’re talking about BG the wife, the daughter, the sister, the human being,” A’ja Wilson, the 2020 WNBA most valuable player and Griner’s teammate on the US national team, said on Friday at USA Basketball training camp.

Griner is a two-time Olympic gold medallist and WNBA All-Star 

[Mark Ralston/Pool via Reuters]

“That’s what I’m caring about. I get the silence and you don’t want to talk about it. I can’t even imagine to put myself in that situation. It’s tough,” Wilson said. “Hopefully, everyone’s doing what they need to do to make sure she gets home safe.”

Last month, US Department of State spokesman Ned Price said an American diplomat in Moscow was granted consular access to Griner and found her to be in “good condition“. Price added, “We will continue to do everything we can to see to it that she is treated fairly throughout this ordeal.”

But a Moscow court in mid-March extended Griner’s detention until May 19, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported – and concerns have persisted about the WNBA star’s fate.

An official with a Russian agency that monitors prison conditions said last month that the only problem the six-foot, nine-inches (206cm) Griner faces in detention is her height. “The beds in the cell are clearly intended for a person of lesser height,” Ekaterina Kalugina of the Public Monitoring Commission told TASS.

Griner, who plays for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, was in Russia to play club basketball before the US season resumed, a common practice for players, who can earn much higher salaries in foreign leagues than on domestic teams.
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The 31-year-old played in Russia for the last seven years in the winter, earning more than $1m per season — more than quadruple her WNBA salary.

Breanna Stewart of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm says women basketball players need to be valued more in the US [Eric Gay/AP Photo]

USA Basketball and Seattle Storm WNBA player Breanna Stewart, who also earns more than $1m to play in Russia, seized on this deeper problem in comments about Griner’s detention earlier this week.

“The big thing is the fact that we have to go over there. It was BG, but it could have been anybody,” Stewart said from the US training camp in Minneapolis. “WNBA players need to be valued in their country and they won’t have to play overseas.”

That was echoed by Angel McCoughtry, another two-time Olympic gold medallist who plays for the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx. “People are saying she’s 6-foot-9, she’s different. It’s really not about that,” McCoughtry said on Wednesday. “It could have been any of us.”

Meanwhile, USA Basketball coach Cheryl Reeve said on Friday that the US national team and the WNBA are “not going to forget about Brittney Griner”.

“Brittney’s not here, we’re going to do the things she would have done. She’s very philanthropic. Try to honour her in that way until the highest level of government can work this out,” Reeve said.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Imprisoned Griner gets support from USA Basketball teammates

By DOUG FEINBERG

1 of 9

USA National Basketball Team's A'ja Wilson, center, teammate to Brittney Griner who is imprisoned in Russia, and teammates take part in a spring training practice session, Friday, April 1, 2022, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A’ja Wilson wishes that she and her USA Basketball teammates could do more to help Brittney Griner right now.

They’ve all been straddling the line of trying not to say anything that could potentially hurt the WNBA star’s case as she’s still imprisoned in Russia on drug allegations, but also wanting Griner and her family to know that they care about her.

“We’re not not talking BG the basketball player, we’re talking about BG the wife, the daughter, the sister the human being,” Wilson, the 2020 WNBA MVP, said Friday at USA Basketball training camp.

“That’s what I’m caring about. I get the silence and you don’t want to talk about it. I can’t even imagine to put myself in that situation. It’s tough,” she said.

Griner, one of many stars who play in Russia during the WNBA offseason, was detained after arriving at a Moscow airport in mid-February. Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges that allegedly contained oil derived from cannabis, which could carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

The 6-foot-9 Phoenix Mercury center was returning to the country after the Russian League took a break for the FIBA World Cup qualifying tournament. The two-time Olympic gold medalist recently had her detention extended to the middle of May.

“Hopefully everyone’s doing what they need to do to make sure she get’s home safe,” Wilson said. “That’s going to be the top priority of all of us. I know it’s tough and hard.”

Players have been keeping discussions about how to best help Griner within their community. WNBA players have been very cohesive in the past when rallying behind issues such as voter registration or the Black Lives Matters movement.

For the first few weeks following Griner’s detention, it was decided that it was clearly better for them to say less. That’s changed over the last few days as players have been more available and willing to talk.

“I can guarantee you this, this group here and women of the WNBA , we’re not going to forget about Brittney Griner,” USA Basketball coach Cheryl Reeve said. “Brittney’s not here, we’re going to do the things she would have done. She’s very philanthropic. Try to honor her in that way until the highest level of government can work this out.”

Breanna Stewart has stepped up to help The Phoenix Rescue Mission, a charity that Griner has been involved with for a long time.

“While BG is away I wanted to support her and her charitable efforts and do what I can from an off-the-court standpoint to help her and her family,” Stewart said.

Griner’s legal team has been quietly seeking her release and has declined to speak out about the case since her arrest was made public.

Of the thousands of U.S. citizens arrested and jailed in prisons abroad, a small subset are designated by the U.S. government as wrongfully detained — a category that affords their cases an extra level of government attention and places them under the auspices of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs at the State Department. The U.S. government has not yet put Griner’s case in that category.

Griner is not the only American detained in Russia. Marine veteran Trevor Reed was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2020 on charges alleging that he assaulted police officers in Moscow. And Michigan corporate security executive Paul Whelan is serving a 16-year sentence on espionage charges that his family and the U.S. government have said are false. U.S. officials have publicly called for Moscow to release them.

Johnson to ‘bet big’ on nuclear energy despite Sunak’s reservations

Delayed strategy expected to focus less on onshore wind turbines in England amid Conservative backlash

The prime minister is said to be determined to press on with plans to build nuclear power stations, despite the chancellor’s concerns over cost. Photograph: Reuters

Rowena Mason

THE GUARDIAN

Deputy political editor
Sat 2 Apr 2022

Boris Johnson wants his promised energy security strategy to “bet big” on nuclear despite Rishi Sunak’s reservations – but he has cooled on more onshore wind turbines in England amid a Conservative backlash.

The prime minister is determined to press ahead with plans to build up to eight new nuclear power stations even though the chancellor has concerns about the cost, projected to reach more than £13bn.

It is understood the energy strategy, expected to be announced next week, is likely to contain targets for nuclear but will not put a figure on the cost.

Johnson will also commit to a “stretching” target on offshore wind, according to a Whitehall source. But he is now said to be less enthusiastic about the possibilities of onshore wind in England, believing Scotland offers a better landscape for new turbines.

One ally of the prime minister said he would “not really [be] pushing for onshore wind in England” although it would “be in the strategy as an option where people want it, which realistically means in Scotland”.

Johnson and Sunak are understood to have discussed the new strategy this week, which was commissioned to ensure security of supply amid soaring gas prices fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The document was delayed owing to a row over the scale of its ambitions on nuclear, but is now likely to be published at the end of next week.

Sunak will be in London for the launch of the strategy. However, he is reported to be going on holiday in California, where he has a second home, at some point over parliamentary recess, despite rising pressure over the lack of measures to help with the cost of living and energy bills in the spring statement.


Johnson’s energy strategy held up over nuclear funding row with Sunak

The Treasury is understood to have concerns about expanding nuclear power in the UK, with the cost of new plants due to be loaded on to people’s energy bills under the fresh funding system. The government would also be likely to take minority stakes in new projects, and has set aside an estimated £1.7bn on getting one plant, Sizewell C, in a position to go ahead.

But with a renewed focus on weaning the UK off gas, Johnson is insistent on the need to press ahead with new plants, with a draft target of around 16GW of nuclear power in the medium term and closer to 30GW in the longer term. According to the government’s own impact assessment, it takes on average 13 to 17 years from initial investment to electricity being generated by a new nuclear plant.

On onshore wind, allies of No 10 had described Johnson as “open-minded”, but “passionate about offshore”. He appears to have cooled on the prospect of more onshore wind, as well as the potential for fracking in England, because Tory MPs are resisting developments in their constituencies.

The idea of giving communities discounts on their energy bills if they accept onshore developments in their areas has been mooted, meaning the prospect of new developments is “not impossible”, but still difficult, sources said.

However, Johnson has been giving out mixed messages on onshore wind after telling a group of industry leaders this week that he was “horrified” how long the planning process takes. He was told that a wind turbine can be put up in a day, but planning permission can take a decade.

Officials expect No 10 will approve an energy bill to set targets and strategy for energy security, to be announced in the Queen’s speech in May.

The UK has struggled to build new nuclear power stations in recent decades, with the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi in 2020 pulling out of plans to build a new reactor at Wylfa, north Wales, and a move against allowing Chinese investment in Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast.

Can nuclear power solve the energy crisis? 

It depends who you ask

The path to net zero is unclear



The Conversation

What’s holding up the UK government’s strategy for securing the country’s energy supply in light of the Russia-Ukraine war and soaring market prices of oil and gas? According to The Guardian, a split between the prime minister, Boris Johnson, and chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, over proposals for new nuclear reactors.

Johnson has told industry figures that he wants nuclear power to meet 25% of the UK’s energy demand by 2050, up from 16% today. That would mean roughly 30 gigawatts (GW) from a source that is currently set to shrink to 3.6GW by 2030, as all but one of the UK’s eight plants are due to be decommissioned by the end of the decade.

Sunak is reported to be unhappy with the £13 billion price tag attached to eight new nuclear reactors. But Open University’s professor of energy William Nuttall argues new reactors are worth the upfront cost for the part they can play on an all-renewable grid:

Large nuclear power stations have huge turbine generators spinning at high speed. These hold their speed in the face of small national fluctuations [in energy supply], providing stability to the grid. A constant base supply of nuclear power could continue to meet demand when renewable generation falters because the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

Nuclear power generation can be dialed up to cover gaps in supply from renewable sources, a job that coal and gas generators are often called upon to do now. Another low-carbon way to do this is to build batteries big enough to store the electricity generated by green sources.

More bang for your buck with batteries?

While the falling costs of solar and wind energy continue to exceed expectations, nuclear construction projects remain expensive behemoths with “a history of cost overruns … around the world” argue MV Ramana and Xiao Wei, experts in security and energy supply at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

We’re researchers who have examined the economics of electricity generation in Ontario, and we’ve demonstrated that as the costs of batteries decline, the cost of supplying electricity using a combination of renewables and battery storage would be cheaper than using nuclear power.

Bill Lee and Michael Rushton, lecturers in nuclear energy at Bangor University, are unconvinced. They argue that battery technology simply isn’t advanced enough to do what reactors are already capable of doing within the vanishing window of opportunity to avert catastrophic global warming.

Even today’s largest battery stores can only provide back-up electricity for a few hours, which is not always enough to cover extended periods of low wind or shorter daylight hours during winter. Battery technology is improving all the time, but it may not do so fast enough to meet rising electricity demand.

Rolling out lots of electric vehicles could squeeze the supply of batteries even further, potentially even increasing their cost.

Scientists are still working out the kinks in grid-scale batteries. 

EPA/Jens Buettnert

They argue that balancing supply represents just a fraction of nuclear power’s potential contribution to decarbonization. The government has also nudged the industry regulator to begin the approval process for Rolls-Royce SMR’s small modular reactor design.

The company announced in 2020 that it hoped to bring 16 of these reactors — which are much smaller, cheaper to build, and typically generate one-third of the energy of a traditional nuclear power plant — online by 2025.

“Because they burn the fuel more efficiently, this new generation of reactors also produces much less nuclear waste,” say Lee and Rushton. They believe that:

Future nuclear reactors will not just be big kettles making steam to drive turbines that generate electricity. The heat produced during the nuclear reaction can be diverted to power processes that are currently difficult to decarbonise.

Take heating in buildings, for example. Heat cooler than 400°C can be extracted after the turbine, and pumped into district heating systems, replacing fossil fuels like natural gas. This is a process that is already carried out daily from municipal waste incinerators across Europe.

And that’s not all, they say.

High-temperature heat (between 400 and 900°C) could be diverted from nearer the reactor, before it reaches the turbine in a nuclear plant. It could be used to power processes that produce low-carbon hydrogen fuel, ammonia and synthetic fuels for ships and jets. This heat could also supply industries such as steel, cement, glass, and chemical manufacturing, which often otherwise use burners powered by fossil fuels.
Future threats and opportunities

Not everyone is convinced that nuclear power is a reliable tool in the effort to slow global warming and shore up energy supplies though. Paul Dorfman is an honorary senior research associate at UCL’s Energy Institute. He argues that “nuclear energy is, quite literally, “on the frontline of climate change – and not in a good way”.

“Nuclear power is often credited with offering energy security in an increasingly turbulent world, but climate change will rewrite these old certainties,” Dorfman says.

“Nuclear power plants must draw from large sources of water to cool their reactors, hence why they’re often built near the sea,” Dorfman highlights. “Two in five nuclear plants operate on the coast and at least 100 have been built just a few meters above sea level.

In a world made increasingly turbulent by climate change, that’s a problem, Dorfman argues.

“A recent US Army War College report also states that nuclear power facilities are at high risk of temporary or permanent closure due to climate threats – with 60% of US nuclear capacity at risk from future sea-level rise, severe storms, and cooling water shortages.”

Could nuclear fusion save us? It wasn’t so long ago that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives were bullish about the prospect of a reactor being able to harness the power within stars by 2040. Thomas Nicholas, a Ph.D. candidate in plasma science and fusion energy at the University of York, set the record straight in 2019:

“Unlike current nuclear power plants — which split atoms in a process called fission — nuclear fusion binds atomic nuclei together. This releases much more energy than fission and produces no high-level nuclear waste.”

Because of the embryonic status of fusion research (what many hailed as a recent breakthrough still puts the world on track for possible demonstration fusion power plants by the 2050s), Nicholas argues that:

The likely role for fusion would be as an energy source in a post-carbon society … Climate policy should prioritise deploying proven technologies immediately, without relying on speculative solutions. Stopping climate change is too important to leave to the last minute.

This article by Jack Marley Environment + Energy Editor, UK edition, is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Time to decamp from cold-war ideas

Sections of the left which still think of the world in blocs, Sheri Berman writes, are guilty of blocked thinking.

SHERI BERMAN

28th March 2022

Playing for peace: a concert by the Ukraine National Opera near Lviv 

on Saturday (Ruslan Lytvyn / shutterstock.com)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine presents the greatest threat to peace in Europe since the end of the cold war and the wars in former Yugoslavia. Maintaining peace throughout the globe is one of the left’s primary goals, so its responses to this crisis are critical. Unfortunately, parts of the left remain mired in a pathology which weakened it morally and politically during the cold war—‘campism’.

Campism views the world as divided into two hostile camps: an aggressive, imperialist one led by the United States and an anti-imperialist one composed of America’s ‘opponents’. During the cold war, this Manichean worldview led parts of the left to rationalise or ignore crimes committed by the Soviet Union, China and other adversaries of the US.

Although the cold war ended, parts of the left remain mired in this worldview, allowing its responses to world events to be driven by what it opposes (the US), rather than what it stands for—progressive principles. This has led parts of the left to blame the US for the invasion of Ukraine, it having purportedly threatened Russia via the ‘expansionist drive’ of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Empirical problems

There are obvious empirical problems with this position. Leave aside that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has trampled on numerous international agreements impinging on Ukraine’s sovereignty over recent years. The timeline of the intervention, as indeed those in the other former Soviet republics of Chechnya and Georgia, does not correlate with actual prospects for NATO membership.

For the first decade or so of the 21st century, Ukraine wavered in its leanings between Russia and the west. Even after Russia intervened in Ukraine’s 2004 election and invaded Georgia in 2008, public support for accession to NATO remained low. What changed this was direct Russian aggression.

In 2013 the ‘Euromaidan’ protests erupted in Kyiv’s huge central Independence Square (maidán means square in Ukrainian). The Russian-oriented president, Viktor Yanukovych, had refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union, already agreed by the parliament, and was attempting instead to tie Ukraine to the Russian-led Eurasian economic union.

After months of protests and deadly clashes between unarmed protesters and the police, Yanukovych fled and was replaced by a new government. Putin refused to accept this outcome—as a dictator he was of course threatened by having a country to which his own people felt a sense of kinship turn towards Europe and overthrow a leader who had ignored the will of, and used violence against, his people.

Putin proceeded to invade Ukraine, annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in the eastern Donbas region. (He has also supported pro-Russian dictatorships in Belarus, Kazakhstan and other parts of the former Soviet empire, without even the fig-leaf of potential NATO membership as a pretence.) Before Putin’s invasion NATO membership wasn’t on the political agenda in Ukraine—perhaps unsurprisingly, after 2014 it was.

Bizarre and counterproductive

Putting to one side the question of how much NATO membership actually mattered to Putin, blaming the invasion on Ukraine’s desire to join the alliance is bizarre and counterproductive, since it rests on a principle the left normally vehemently opposes. That is that big, powerful countries, such as Russia, are entitled to ‘spheres of influence’, while smaller, less powerful countries, such as Ukraine, are not entitled to determine their own political alliances and fates—they should accept that they are essentially ‘second-class citizens in the community of states’. (This is, as some note, an ‘anti-imperialism of fools’.)

Campism has also led parts of the left not merely to align themselves with, but cite approvingly, figures fundamentally opposed to progressive principles. For example, campists have consistently referred to the arguments of international-relations ‘realists’ such as John Mearsheimer and Henry Kissinger, who, unlike their current left-wing fans, at least have the virtue of being clear and consistent in justifying great-power predation, regardless of its source. They believe, as Thucydides famously put it, that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Other campists have praised right-wing dictator-sympathisers such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News for his ‘entirely sensible position on Ukraine’.

This stance has also led parts of the left to engage in the type of ‘westplaining’ it normally abhors. As two scholars from the region have complained, ‘it’s galling to watch the unending stream of Western [intellectuals] and pundits condescend to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives’. Parts of the left simply assume, without any further investigation, that NATO ‘expansion’ was driven by the aggressive, imperialist desires of the US and western Europe, rather than by the wishes of east Europeans themselves.

Another commentator from the region more colourfully bemoaned those who ‘know fuck-all about Eastern Europe’ but whose ‘Orientalism’ leads them to claim to understand the interests of its peoples better than they do:

We see NATO in a completely different, and I dare say much more nuanced way. When you say ‘Fuck NATO’ or ‘End NATO expansion’, what I hear is that you do not care about the safety and wellbeing of my Eastern European friends, family and comrades …

What is this NATO alternative you are advocating for? Have you considered asking us what we think of it? Or did you just decide, as you did many times in your history, and to many other countries you felt superior towards, that it will be you, and your leaders, who will be setting the cards on the table, and we just need to submit? Did you already take out your ruler to make straight lines on the map, except that this time it will be the map of the place where I grew up?

Weak and hypocritical

During the cold war, disgust with American foreign policy led parts of the left to adopt a campist world view, which went beyond justified criticism of the US to unjustified rationalisations of the often-even-worse crimes of its opponents. Despite the end of the cold war and the advent of the very different multipolar world we now inhabit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes clear that this tendency continues to infect parts of the left, leading it to make intellectually weak and hypocritical arguments and justify the actions of an aggressive dictator.

In so doing, campists allow the left’s opponents to point out the weaknesses, hypocrisies and obvious anti-American sentiments lying beneath their arguments. This enables them therefore to avoid dealing with the absolutely critical claims which the left should with all its energy be promoting: peace, democracy, human rights and justice.

This is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal



SHERI BERMAN is a professor of political science at Barnard College and author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (Oxford University Press).

MSF Suspending Some Operations in Haiti Due to Gang Violence

April 02, 2022 
Agence France-Presse

A woman guides a child past a demonstration against increasing violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 29, 2022.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI —

The French charity Doctors without Borders (MSF) announced Friday that it is temporarily suspending operations in an impoverished suburb of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, due to rising gang violence.

The security situation in Haiti has been deteriorating for months, with gangs exerting influence far beyond the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince.

The Caribbean nation is also facing an increase in kidnappings: between five and 10 people are abducted every day in Haiti, according to Haitian human rights organizations.

"We condemn all forms of obstruction and violence against medical services, our patients and staff members," said Thierry Goffeau, MSF's director for Haiti, in a statement announcing the temporary closure of a hospital in the Cite-Soleil neighborhood.

The hospital will remain closed "as long as security conditions are not guaranteed," the statement said.

The Cite-Soleil hospital opened more than a decade ago, and provides emergency care, although its service for serious burns had already been transferred to another hospital in the capital due to a previous wave of violence.

Last August, MSF was forced to permanently close a hospital it had been operating for 15 years in the Martissant neighborhood, one of the most disadvantaged in Port-au-Prince, after police fled their local station and a wave of gang violence and looting forced thousands to flee their homes.

Twelve years of Orban: How the EU has failed to rein in Hungary's democratic backsliding
By Alice Tidey • Updated: 02/04/2022 - 08:31

Viktor Orban, Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister delivers his annual state of the nation speech at the Varkert Bazaar conference hall, in Budapest, Hungary, Feb 12, 2022. - Copyright AP Photo/Anna Szilagyi

Viktor Orban, the ultra-conservative Hungarian Prime Minister on the cusp of securing a fifth consecutive term, has built his career on bashing the European Union and has mostly gotten away with it.

Yet, his influence on the bloc and its institutions is chequered at best.

Orban, 58, now the EU's longest-serving leader could on Sunday renew his time at the helm of the eastern country for another four years. His nationalist-populist party, Fidesz, currently has a slight lead over the opposition, which banded together to present a single candidate for the top job and in most constituencies.

His campaign was, as is now usual, filled with attacks against Brussels — its "imperialist tantrums" and "pro-immigrant bureaucrats" — and thin allusions to a possible Huxit.

For years now, Orban has implemented reforms of the judiciary, media and civil society he knew would put him on a collision course with Brussels all while pocketing EU money. Through it all, he cast himself as the protector of traditional — read Christian — European values and promoted an "illiberal democracy" agenda, which once garnered him the moniker "the dictator" by former Commission Chief Jean-Claude Juncker.

Hungary election: A short history of Viktor Orbán's strained relationship with the EU

What this has revealed is that EU institutions are largely unable — or unwilling — to sanction such authoritarian backsliding.

"This anti-Brussels rhetoric is around almost since he took over power and it became more violent after each election," Zsolt Enyedi, a professor and senior researcher at the Central European University's Democracy Institute, told Euronews.

"European Union institutions responded to this barrage of attacks after a while, but they let Orban get away with them for many, many years. Orban was shielded by (former German Chancellor Angela) Merkel and by the European People's Party," he added.

All EU institutions, however, shouldn't be painted with the same brush.
Fidesz isolated in European Parliament

"The European parliament has emerged as a sort of conscience of the EU," Daniel Hegedus, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank, said.

MEPs triggered Article 7 proceedings -- calling for the suspension of certain rights -- against Hungary and Poland in September 2018 over rule of law concerns. They have also pushed for the creation of a rule of law mechanism to financially sanction member states seen as backsliding.

Fidesz is now also out of the European People's Party (EPP) group in the parliament, having chosen to leave in March 2021 right before it could get expelled — the party had been suspended from the EPP in 2019. The centre-right EPP was sharply criticised for how long it took them to condemn Orban and Fidesz's domestic policies and to proceed with a possible expulsion course.

"There were different opinions on whether we get them straight inside with internal discussions or should we just kick them out. More or less everybody agreed that the policy line of Fidesz was not right but how to correct this was very much a thing," an EPP insider told Euronews.

"The question before Orban was expelled from the EPP was would Fidesz strengthen the populist side? Would he form a separatist group in the parliament?" the source added.

If that was indeed the plan for Orban, then it backfired.

"The populists are split. They are even more split than they were at the beginning of this term. So there is no such voice as a big united anti-European front," the insider added. "Also as Fidesz is not included in any other group, they are independent, they don't have much to say inside of Parliament, their voice is now practically not heard."

OSCE recommends deployment of election observation mission to Hungary

Parliament now more united

Additionally, the constant attacks on the EU and the reforms it undertook seemed to have boosted MEPs' resolve to protect the bloc as a liberal beacon.

"In my view, the Hungarian Fidesz delegation in the European Parliament, and Fidesz when it was in the EPP, strengthened the topics of rule of law, democracy, human rights and women's rights in the EP as a whole and also in the EPP group. This was precisely because Fidesz challenged all of these values so strongly," Sirpa Pietikainen, a Finnish EPP MEP, told Euronews.

"Without the challenging from Fidesz of these values, it could even be that we would now have a less defined and less united position on rule of law, human rights violations or gender equality issues. Sometimes the paradox is that by challenging something you end up strengthening the principle you challenge. A bit like Putin's actions in Ukraine right now," she argued.

But while MEPs have triggered Article 7 and have now pushed for the use of the new rule of law mechanism against Hungary, nothing much has happened. Action is out of their hands.

Commission 'failed tests'

The Commission, which acts as the guardian of the treaties and defender of EU legislation, has launched and won multiple court cases against Budapest over changes in the Hungarian Constitution, the lowering of the retirement age for judges, the crackdown on NGOs and the treatment of migrants and refugees.

Yet, not much has changed.

"This was far too little, so it didn't make much difference on the ground. These court decisions almost always go against Hungary and some of the other violators of fundamental norms of liberal democracy but they are not respected, and the Commission doesn't do much about that," Enyedi said.

For Hegedus, "the Commission failed these tests" launched by the parliament and court decisions, and with "the rule of law issue practically off the table" due to the Russian aggression on Ukraine, Orban knows he "doesn't need to fear the Commission or sanctions".

Council's need for compromise

The European Council, i.e. leaders of member states, have been equally weak in their ability to rein in Orban and Fidesz, the two experts said.

"The EU has many other challenges and you do need the support of Hungary's prime minister for tackling these challenges, so they have to make various compromises. The rule of law mechanism keeps being postponed and it has been watered down anyway and only applies to some very, very specific violations of rule of law and not a general drift towards authoritarian rule," Enyedi explained.

Yet even though the Council — especially Poland which has similarly drawn the ire of Brussels — largely protects Orban from MEPs' wrath, leaders are still not fooled.

Orban's veiled references to a Huxit are not seen as credible by his fellow heads of state who are still reeling from the consequences of the UK's departure from the union.

"The whole operation of the Orban regime -- which is built on the strategic corruption and abuse of EU funds --, this political system is not operational outside of the European Union," Hegedus explained.

"The Hungarian government did a lot on its multilateral foreign policy and close ties with Russia and China to demonstrate for the EU institutions that it has other strategic options but these strategic options are not genuine. Neither Russia, nor China, would be ready to provide that sort of financial transfer for Hungary which amounts to 3-4% of its annual GDP. So no, I think leaving the European Union is not an option," he added.
'Enlargement fatigue'

Orban's shift toward a semi-authoritarian regime may have also impacted the bloc's enlargement — unchanged since the accession of Croatia in 2013. The Hungarian leader has been developing closer ties with leaders in the Western Balkans, where many countries hope one day to become member states, but where democratic and rule of law standards are spotty.

"I think the democratic demise in Central Europe, and especially in Hungary and Poland, significantly contributed to enlargement fatigue in some member states," Hegedus said.

For Enyedi, "Hungary is an example of how accession of a new country can go wrong."

"The very strong ties between (Serbian President Aleksandar) Vučić and Orban mean that if Serbia was accepted, you know, the Orban bloc will get stronger and nobody wants that. So in that sense, I think Serbia's accession prospects are directly hurt by this strong cooperation between the leaders of the two countries," he added.

As for Orban's hope of exporting its "illiberal democracy" model to other member states, this too has largely stalled, mostly because, as is the case in the European Parliament, right-wing populist parties across the bloc do not actually align on many issues.

Even the Visegroup group, comprising the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, has many cracks and these are widening because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with Warsaw resolutely anti-Russia while Orban has been much more conciliatory.

"He put a lot of energy into supporting forces that could undermine liberal democracy in Europe," Enyedi stressed, including "directly interfering with domestic politics" in non-EU neighbouring countries or in fellow member states — a Hungarian bank with close ties to him provided a €10.7 million loan to French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen to fund her campaign.

"He has been trying to build an authoritarian right-wing alliance for a long time, which was not successful, and actually now, the prospects are not very good," he concluded.

Hungary election: Who is Viktor Orban and how has he stayed in power for so long? 

By David Hutt • Updated: 30/03/2022

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gestures after delivering his annual state of the nation speech, 12 February, 2022. Slogan reads "Let's go forwards, not backwards!" - Copyright Credit: Reuters

To his supporters, Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban represents true European values: Christianity; the predominance of the nation-state; government for the masses, not the elites.

To his critics, he’s an opportunistic populist who cares only about his own power and has made Hungary a pariah within Europe.

In this Sunday's (3 April) election, Orban, who's been in office since 2010, faces his biggest challenge yet to stay in power.

Who is Viktor Orban and how did he come to power?

In March 1988, Orban was anything but a right-wing autocrat. He and his fellow students at Bibo College near Budapest — many of whom would be rewarded with top jobs in his governments — formed the Alliance of Young Democrats, or Fidesz, an ostensibly liberal-orientated movement.

His first taste of fame came the following year when he gave a rousing speech in Heroes’ Square in Budapest, just as the country’s communist regime was collapsing.

At Hungary’s first free election, in April 1990, Orbán’s youthful party won 22 out of 386 seats in parliament.

Analysts tend to divide Orbán’s political metamorphosis across three stages.

Since the early 1990s, “he transformed from a liberal politician first to a national-conservative, and later to a populist radical-right leader,” said Daniel Hegedüs, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

A younger Viktor Orban at a Fidesz party congress in 1990. 'Listen To Your Heart' was their campaign song and slogan.Credit: Földi Imre/MTVA

On the one hand, this could be put down to sensible politics. Centre-right parties led the Hungarian government between 1990 and 1994, so it made sense for Fidesz, in opposition, to take up left-wing causes.

But the leftist government of Prime Minister Gyula Horn, from 1994 until 1998, was marked by calamity. With the economy failing, Horn was forced to impose crippling privatisation and austerity policies in return for financial support from abroad.

Now, it made sense for Orbán to attack the ruling party from the right. In a party speech in April 1995, he declared that Fidesz “must seek cooperation with the forces politically right of centre.”

That year, the party was renamed Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Party.

But analysts say more dangerous motives lurk behind Orbán’s protean nature. First, shifting between political positions allowed him to build up his own personal power. Around 1993, Orbán, who was vice-president of Fidesz at the time, pressured the party to move rightwards. As a result, liberal-minded members, including the more popular Gábor Fodor, left to join another party. Orbán was elected Fidesz chairman thereafter, cementing himself as its indisputable figure.

The Hungarian-born journalist Paul Lendvai, in his 2017 biography Orbán: Hungary's Strongman, identifies another personality trait that explains his career: a deep-seated sense of inferiority.

Born in 1963 near the city of Székesfehérvár, Orbán’s family was rural middle-class. A bright student — he studied at the University of Oxford for a year on a scholarship — he nonetheless perceived himself as being treated by others as a provincial. He felt patronised by leftist intellectuals in the early 1990s. His sense of inferiority, Lendvai wrote, made him particularly susceptible to feelings of “betrayal” by allies, and to the “cosmopolitan Europhiles” who dominated many of the other political parties.

In May 1998, to the surprise of many, Fidesz won the most seats in parliament at the country's general election, with Orbán becoming the youngest head of government in Europe at the time.

He entered government through a coalition with the centre-right Independent Smallholders Party and Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF).

“His first government period between 1998 and 2002 happened in his national-conservative period, and his politics were largely in compliance with liberal democratic principles,” said Hegedüs.

Much of that changed after the next election in 2002. Although the Fidesz-MDF alliance won the most seats, a left-liberal alliance was able to form a coalition government, evicting Orbán from office. He cried foul of electoral fraud and poor treatment by left-leaning newspapers. In opposition, Fidesz drifted further towards the political right. His nationalism was ratcheted up. He began to rail against the Treaty of Trianon, a post-First World War agreement that stripped Hungary of around two-thirds of its territory and two-fifths of ethnic Hungarians, who found themselves living in newly independent, neighbouring countries.

In a now-infamous speech in 2009, delivered at a closed-door party meeting, he called for a “central political forcefield” that would govern the country for the next decades. After almost a decade in opposition, by 2010 Orbán had been able to craft “a coherent national ideology attractive for a large part of the Hungarian society”, said Hegedüs.

Viktor Orbán with his daughter Ráchel at the Fidesz national campaign launch event in 1994

Credit: Illyés Tibor/Magyar Távirati Iroda Zrt

How has Viktor Orban managed to stay in power for so long?

Fidesz's overwhelming victory in the 2010 general election freed Orbán’s hand, analysts say, allowing him to rework the constitution in 2012.

In alliance with the Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP), its small satellite party, Fidesz went on to win a two-thirds majority in parliament in 2014 and 2018.

During this period independent media were shut down, while friendly newspapers were lavished. Courts were packed with cronies. The electoral system was re-written. Nationalism was ramped up, especially amid the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe, when Orbán’s government erected fences to keep out the mainly Muslim refugees. Internationally, Orbán made friends with the authoritarian governments of Russia and China, whose interests he has protected during EU voting. Meanwhile, Brussels challenged Hungary to mend its ways, now threatening to restrict economic relief until political reforms are made.

Andras Bozoki, professor of political science at the Central European University in Vienna, reckons Orbán’s autocratic tendencies were present from the outset of his career, and he had transformed Fidesz into a “highly centralised party” by 2003. However, this was masked during his first spell as prime minister, between 1998 and 2002, since Orbán had to govern as part of a coalition with two relatively strong parties.

What has kept Orbán in power? For Bozoki, it’s largest due to the political and constitutional changes enforced since 2010, which have clothed Orbán in immense power. Some changes are subtle. In 2014, for instance, the share of MPs elected from single-member constituencies — which favours Fidesz — was raised to 106 out of the 199 seats in parliament. The rest are appointed by proportional representation. At the 2018 ballot, Fidesz won just 49% of the popular vote but picked up 67% of seats in parliament.

Many of Fidesz’s populist policies are, indeed, popular, analysts say. The state invests heavily in welfare spending.

“He is a charismatic populist politician who used heavy state propaganda and always found an enemy to fight with,” Bozoki said.

Any problem in the country is usually blamed on Orbán’s go-to villains: migrants, the EU, or George Soros, a Hungarian-born philanthropist who Orbán claims is trying to impose cosmopolitan liberalism onto Hungary from afar.

Orbán has also been fortunate. He took power in 2010 as European economies were beginning to recover from the global financial crisis. Hungary’s economy contracted by 6.7% in 2009 but began to grow at a steady rate afterwards. In 2018, it grew by 5.4%, the largest annual increase of the post-communist era. At the same time, Orbán was fortunate in having to face off against a divided opposition. At the 2018 general election, almost 80 parties competed, with six gaining more than 1% of the vote.

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks as he arrives for an EU summit at the European Council building in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020

Credit: John Thys/AP
Orbán’s facing his toughest fight yet

Come 3 April, Orbán faces a far different threat.

In December 2020, six of the country’s largest opposition parties, as well as some smaller groups and movements, agreed to contest the 2022 election as part of the United for Hungary alliance. After extensive primaries, the non-partisan Péter Márki-Zay, the mayor of the southeastern city of Hódmezővásárhely, was selected as the alliance’s prime ministerial candidate.

The latest opinion polls, taken in late March, vary greatly. Republikon, a think-tank, gives Fidesz a three percentage point lead on the opposition alliance. According to Társadalomkutató, another pollster, it has an eleven point advantage. Most pundits expect another victory for Fidesz and its junior KDNP partner, but they are not overly sure.

Much lies in its favour. It has much more money: perhaps around 20 times more than the opposition alliance, reckons Bozoki, of the Central European University. And Fidesz can use the electoral law to their own advantage.

“Since Hungary is not a democracy, but a competitive authoritarian regime, and there will be no free and fair elections, Fidesz always has a high chance to win,” Bozoki added.

Despite this, the opposition alliance cannot be ruled out. Analysts point to a large share of undecided voters in the opinion polls, suggesting that the outcome could be close.

Márki-Zay, the opposition candidate, is something of a conservative, which might attract some Fidesz supporters and undecided voters.

Liberals will opt for the opposition alliance regardless.

Dániel Mikecz, an analyst with the Republikon think-tank, reckons that even if Fidesz wins, it is likely to lose its supermajority in parliament. That could stymie its ability to alter political institutions and could make it more vulnerable to opposition attacks in parliament, but probably won't have any effect on Orbán’s style of leadership, said Mikecz. Fidesz would likely continue with their “polarising way of making politics.”

For some analysts, an opposition victory would fundamentally change Hungary. A new administration would drop many of Orbán’s most controversial policies and loosen up the political system. It would make peace with the EU. Without state funds, Fidesz would struggle to keep its loyal media and affiliates on side.

But the United For Hungary alliance is precarious. Its composite parties rarely see eye to eye on the most important issues. Agreements over which candidates to field have been unsteady. It is also lop-sided: most of its support comes from two parties, the liberal Democratic Coalition (DK) and the right-wing Jobbik, according to the latest opinion polls. How it would actually go about forming a coalition government is another matter, perhaps one best left for late-night arguments if the opposition alliance secures a surprise victory next Sunday.

Exclusive: As Sacramento Educators Strike, Post-COVID Numbers Show Accelerated Membership Losses in California Teachers Association

Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) teachers and school staff rally at Rosemont High School. (Getty Images)
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Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

With the Minneapolis teacher walkout settled, the eyes of the education world turn to Sacramento, where teachers and support employees unions have been on strike since March 23.

The Sacramento City Teachers Association is the ninth-largest of the California Teachers Association’s 981 local affiliates. Its demand for increased hiring is meant to address more than school district staffing shortages. CTA locals all across California have been losing members for four years, and COVID only made things worse.

According to the union’s latest internal figures, the number of active members — those working in the state’s public schools — fell to 293,548, more than 35,000 fewer than the union’s high-water mark in 2018. Losses were felt in every region of the state and included all categories: K-12 teachers, education support employees and higher education faculty.

Some of the more recent losses can be explained by the effects of the COVID pandemic and school closures over the past two years. But the union’s membership losses went beyond school staffing declines.

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Raises, Bonuses, Layoffs — After 3 Weeks, Minneapolis Teachers Union, District Settle the First Strike in 50 Years

As of Feb. 29, 2020, two weeks before the first school closures in California, membership stood at 304,509. The union also tracks non-members, eligible school employees who have decided not to join. In February 2020, more than 28,000 workers, or 8.5 percent of the total, fell into this category.

Almost two years later, the number of non-members grew to more than 34,000, or 10.4 percent. Put another way, there were 5,000 fewer employees available to recruit, but the union ended up with 11,000 fewer members. At least in California, the union member exodus exceeded that of the much talked-about teacher exodus.

Related to its overall membership concerns, the union reviewed the work of its charter school task force. This internal committee was formed to develop and propose regulations for charter schools, unionize charter school employees and help them negotiate their first contracts. The committee reported that it has aided in unionizing 3,200 employees at 94 charter schools since 2014.

One can question how much of an achievement this is. California has, at last count, 1,351 charter schools, meaning the unionized ones constitute just under 7 percent of the total.

Despite its membership losses, the union doesn’t seem to be suffering much financial pain. It expects more than $212 million in income this year, most of it from annual dues of $753 per member. Much of it goes into various political activism pots.

The union has $2.8 million in its statewide candidate political action committee, $3.8 million in its media fund, $4.8 million in its independent expenditures fund, $12.8 million in its advocacy fund and $26.1 million in its ballot initiative fund. It appears this last fund will sit quietly for another year, as signature-gathering has ceased for all the ballot initiatives the union was preparing to fight.

In total, that’s more than $50 million designated to influence both legislators and the public to adopt the union’s agenda or embrace its viewpoint. That money is at work in Sacramento even when teachers are not.

ICYMI SELF ORGANIZING WORKERS

First Amazon labour union in the US: Watch warehouse workers celebrating their victory

The Amazon Labor Union list of demands include immediate changes to health and safety policies, higher pay, more promotions, and better working conditions.

Scroll Staff

Amazon Labor Union wins election at

Amazon warehouse in New York City

Nick Barrickman

WSWS.ORG

The Amazon Labor Union was declared the winner Friday in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) contest held in Staten Island, New York. The vote covers more than 8,000 Amazon workers at the JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center, the largest warehouse in the city.

Amazon JFK8 distribution center union organizer Jason Anthony speaks to media on Friday, April 1, 2022, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

JFK8’s workers voted in the ALU with 2,654 “yes” votes to 2,131 “no” votes, or a margin of close to 10 percentage points, in an election which drew out more than half of the warehouse’s eligible voters. Another ALU election is planned for April 25 at the LDJ5 warehouse on Staten Island, which employs roughly 1,600 workers.

The ALU’s victory came a day after results were announced for a similar union election at Amazon held in Bessemer, Alabama. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is losing the vote at the BHM1 fulfillment center, where it received only 875 “yes” votes to 993 “no” votes. Several hundred contested ballots are currently being litigated, and the result will be announced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) within the next few weeks.

The highly depressed turnout (only 39 percent) for the Alabama vote came despite glowing media coverage and high-profile political support from Biden and other Democrats. Biden’s NLRB allowed the RWDSU to re-run the election after an initial attempt failed.

The larger turnout at the JFK8 facility may be attributed to the fact that the ALU has promoted itself as an independent union, run by current and former Amazon workers. Christian Smalls, the ALU’s leader, is a former JFK8 worker who was fired in 2020 after he and several co-workers organized a walkout in protest of Amazon’s lackluster COVID-19 protections.

In another difference from the RWDSU campaign, the ALU raised a specific set of demands of the company, including raises to $30 an hour, more vacation days and paid time off as well as an increase in break times during shifts. Numerous investigations have revealed the widespread occurrence of workers injuring themselves in Amazon’s vast warehouses as well as foregoing rest times and bathroom breaks in order to make obscenely high “rates.”

A New York Times investigation of the JFK8 warehouse last year determined that the corporation tracked “every minute of most warehouse workers’ shifts, from how fast they packed merchandise to how long they paused… If productivity flagged, Amazon’s computers assumed the worker was to blame.”

No doubt, many workers voting for the ALU did so out of a desire to improve their conditions and carry out a fight against the corporation and its multi-billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos.

Such a fight, however, requires the mobilization of the working class independently of the corporatist trade unions, which are heavily promoted by sections of the ruling class, particularly the Democratic Party, as critical instruments for the suppression of the class struggle. This requires the development of a network of rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by the workers themselves.

While the ALU claims to be independent, its orientation is in fact to the trade union apparatus, a section of which sees in such initiatives (at Amazon, Starbucks and other companies) a method to somehow revive support for thoroughly discredited organizations.

Tellingly, Democratic Party-connected media outlets have heaped praise on Smalls and the ALU. As it has throughout the entire Amazon unionization campaign, the Times led the way, declaring the JFK8 vote “a stunning win” and “one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation.” The Democratic Socialists of America-aligned Jacobin magazine, which sees as its principal role the strengthening of the trade union apparatus, called it a “David-and-Goliath… fight between the independent union and one of the world’s most powerful companies.”

There are already numerous signs that Smalls and the ALU are open to an approach from the RWDSU or other pro-corporate organizations. Speaking to NPR about the RWDSU, Smalls declared “I hope they’re successful… We know we show our support and solidarity with them.” The RWDSU’s president Stuart Appelbaum, a longtime Democratic Party and state operative, has offered to “support them [the ALU] and not look for anything in return” if “Chris runs out of money.”

During the campaign for unionization at JFK, the ALU borrowed office space from the Unite Here, an organization (with $150 million in assets) that has played a critical role in isolating and defeating the struggles of service workers—and keeping them on the job during the pandemic.

There is no doubt that in the aftermath of its victory at Amazon, the fledgling ALU will have more than just office space offered to it. Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) quickly offered “whatever support we can” to the ALU.

Why 2 union drives for Amazon workers had such different 

outcomes

Alexandra Garfinkle

·Senior Reporter

Fri, April 1, 2022, 

It’s a historic victory. On Friday, workers at an Amazon (AMZN) Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize, marking the first U.S. union in the e-commerce giant's history.

Where does that leave a pending union vote for Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama? Though 6,153 workers were eligible for that vote, 1,868 valid votes were counted Thursday — 875 voted "yes" to being represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) while 993 voted "no.” It looks like Amazon has come out ahead there so far, though the hundreds of challenged votes, a little north of 400, could swing the election towards the union.

However, in Staten Island, where workers voted to be represented by the emerging Amazon Labor Union, it was a resounding victory. The difference, experts said, is in part a matter of location, location, location.

“Alabama is an anti-union, right-to-work state,” said Patricia Campos-Medina, a Cornell University labor expert. “The level of outside pressure against the union in Alabama is so high, whereas New York is a pro-union state.”

In a right-to-work state, employees are not required to join or pay dues to a union in order to work for a given company.

In 2021, Hawaii and New York were the most unionized states in the country, with membership rates at 22.4% and 22.2% respectively, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The figures in Alabama are much lower, at about 6%. To be sure, Alabama’s neighbors in the Deep South are even less union-friendly — South Carolina is the least-unionized state, with membership rates at 1.7%.

Still, the victory in Staten Island could have ramifications for Amazon workers across the country. “It could force Amazon to come up with a new strategy nationwide,” Tamara Lee, a professor at Rutgers University, told Yahoo Finance.

The company released a statement on Friday saying that, while it was disappointed with the outcome in Staten Island, it was exploring next steps. The company also suggested that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had unfairly influenced the vote.

"We’re evaluating our options, including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the NLRB that we and others (including the National Retail Federation and U.S. Chamber of Commerce) witnessed in this election," the company said.

Politcians and RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum pose for a picture at the entrance to the Amazon facility in Bessemer.

The role of race in Bessemer

The Bessemer warehouse’s workers are predominantly Black, making up about 80% of the workforce, according to a study conducted by Lee and Maite Tapia, a labor expert at Michigan State University. Bessemer itself is a predominantly Black suburb of Birmingham, with 72.7% of the population identifying as Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The study released by Lee and Tapia reveals that workers’ lives at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer are particularly tinted by the South’s deep history of racial injustice and contemporary Black experiences of policing.

“Public records indicate that Amazon engages police on an off-duty basis around the country, but this engagement is significantly more prevalent among fulfillment centers located in the Southern ‘Black belt’ than in other parts of the country,” the report states.

To be sure, we don't have the final results of the Alabama vote yet and likely won't know more for several weeks. Whether the workers in Bessemer ultimately prevail like those in Staten Island, it’s going to be a much closer call. It’s a marked difference from the 2021 Bessemer vote, which was a landslide victory for Amazon. Some experts believe the closeness of the Alabama election is already an achievement, one that will resound even further with the success of Amazon’s Staten Island workers.

“This should be talked about as a victory for Black workers and Black workers in the South,” Tapia said. “That’s not to say that white workers didn’t vote yes, but it is important to highlight the resilience of Black workers who are fighting against strong racist legacies inside and outside the workplace.”

Allie Garfinkle is a senior tech reporter at Yahoo Finance. Find her on twitter @agarfinks.