Redefining the Working Class
Beyond white men in hard hats

© Keith Dodds

Shamira Ibrahim

BAFFLER
no. 63
May 2022

THE POSTMORTEMS WERE SWIFT and decisive. Despite winning the popular vote, Hillary Clinton had lost key Rust Belt States. Which meant she had been rejected by working-class voters—those white guys in hard hats. This analysis could be indirect or straight-on. Mark Lilla wrote on the New York Times op-ed page that Clinton’s loss was a rejection of “identity liberalism.” By acknowledging the interests of traditionally disfavored groups, she turned off “the white working class and those with strong religious convictions,” Lilla argued. Two days after the election, Joan C. Williams, author of White Working Class (2017), wrote for the Harvard Business Review that Clinton lost because blue-collar whites saw in her “the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite.” Even Bernie Sanders, the so-called paragon of coalition building on the left, found himself deferring to the public narrative. “It is not good enough to have a liberal elite,” Sanders said on a CBS This Morning interview less than a week after election day. “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

There was nothing new in this critique of a losing Democratic campaign. When Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale, a labor-friendly former vice president from Minnesota, in 1984, a series of focus groups led by the pollster Stanley Greenberg zeroed in on working-class voters in Macomb County, Michigan, who Greenberg famously labeled as “Reagan Democrats.” As one reporter noted at the time, Greenberg “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African Americans.” The New York Times reported a few days after the 1984 election that exit polls showed Mondale winning 90 percent of the African American vote. Yet Mondale apparently had been unable, in the Sanders formulation, to “talk to where I came from.”

There’s no dispute that general working-class support for Democrats has fluctuated from election cycle to election cycle. The one constant, though, is that “working-class” is almost always used in the media to suggest white, male workers. The representative Reagan Democrat was, literally, a white autoworker in Michigan. Even when the white prefix is used to indicate a specific research interest—as in Joan Williams’s White Working Class—there is still an unspoken assumption that this is the part of the working class that matters most. White workers were supposedly neglected in the 2016 campaigns, and so we ended up with Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton.

Last year, I spent time talking to workers involved in the Fight for $15 campaign. One of them, Deatric Edie, a then-forty-two-year-old mother of four in Florida, was working three jobs at fast food franchises, at hourly wages of $11, nearly $10, and $8.65, respectively. “My whole life is dedicated to working,” she said. The American labor force is teeming with workers like Edie, but when they get media attention, they are more often classified as “the working poor” than as simply the American working class. Few reporters assigned to dig into working-class sentiment would turn to someone like Edie—a Black woman who has suffered from extended housing instability—as a typical voice of working-class discontent, despite the inherent understanding that people like Edie have about the ways that class, gender, and race interact to subjugate the most marginalized communities in the working-class service industry, and despite their overrepresentation in that field. “They said that ‘Black Lives Matter,’” Edie remarked to me. “But they’re still not protecting us. The health and economic security of Black workers, our voices, are still not being heard.”

The United States, however, is much closer now than it was in the era of the Reagan Democrats to a transformation, a point at which the working class will no longer be predominantly white. According to Census Bureau projections, we are still about twenty years away from the tipping point when the population as a whole is more than 50 percent non-white. But we are about ten years away from the point where people of color will represent a majority of the working class, according to a 2016 report by Valerie Rawlston Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. Defined in this context as workers with less than a bachelor’s degree, in 2013, about two-thirds of the entire workforce was “working class.” But the white share of that bloc is falling and is likely to dip below 50 percent by 2032.

Business Bites Back

The diminished status of the non-white working class is not a matter of accident, but of design. Take, for example, the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, which came into law in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s package of New Deal reforms. A foundational piece of American labor legislation, it granted the right of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining—and yet certain labor sectors were specifically excluded, including agricultural workers and domestic workers. Field workers were predominantly Black, of course, and domestic workers were heavily Black and female. As a result, the pipeline for a growing labor movement remained siloed by race, gender, and class.


The diminished status of the non-white working class is not a matter of accident, but of design.

Nevertheless, by 1945, union membership peaked at over 35.4 percent of non-agricultural employment across labor sectors. There were big wins in the industrial working class with the formation of labor federations such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the United Auto Workers (UAW), giving labor enough political capital to become a linchpin in the national political process. Operations such as the Committee on Political Education would later be engaged in voter registration for union members; in-house analysts would help form policy recommendation and research.

A few key moments not only stemmed the tide of these gains in power from within the ranks of the labor class but stymied efforts of Black and brown communities to build solidarity with the white working class. The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied successfully for the Taft-Hartley Act, which passed in 1947 and made it much tougher for labor organizing and unionizing. The Act allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, permitting non-union employees to join a unionized workplace, as well as granting employers the right to spread anti-union sentiment during elections. The prospect of employees benefiting from unionization without having to pay dues made voting for unionization a much riskier gamble. Employers were not beholden to accuracy in their efforts to spread dissent, allowing them to imply that jobs or entire industries might collapse as a result of unionization. Sympathy strikes were also banned. Most aggressively, the bill required that union officers affirm they were not members of the Communist Party, removing some of the more radical elements of the labor movement that were strong supporters of women’s rights and racial solidarity.

The business establishment saw the political threat that a multiracial, multiethnic labor movement could pose. “The power of unions transcends the collective bargaining done on behalf of their workers,” explains Tamara Draut in Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (2016). “The real power is that through union dues, the labor movement can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting, and issue advocacy, all on behalf of ordinary Americans.” She continues:

It’s that amassing of political power that is so threatening to conservatives and corporate America. After all, big labor has been responsible for advances in our day-to-day lives that still make conservatives livid: Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare too; unemployment insurance; Social Security; the forty-hour workweek; pensions (what’s left of them, anyway), and the minimum wage.

“In every presidential election between 1948 and 1964,” Draut notes, “the Democratic candidate launched his campaign with a Labor Day rally in Detroit’s Cadillac Square.”

By the 1970s, the momentum of the labor movement had stalled, while the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement had made some in the white working class restive. The Republican Party was poised to drive a wedge between groups of workers. One artifact, known as the Powell Memo, articulated in 1971 the tactics by which corporate leaders would marshal their resources against what the memo called the “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It sketched a playbook for businesses to imitate the AFL-CIO by asserting their political power, especially through the national Chamber of Commerce. “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation,” wrote Lewis Powell, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice. Powell called for financing through the joint effort of national organizations to fund pro-business viewpoints in public school curricula, on college campuses, and in the media. He also asserted that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” This guidance was well-received: the presence of corporate lobbyists and political action committees boomed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, dramatically transforming the political process. Since then, Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission have only buttressed that power, paving the way for the first SuperPACs in 2010. According to Draut, big business outspent unions in the 2012 elections by a margin of fifty-seven-to-one.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The big business counterattack might have been halted by an ever-strengthening coalition of different racial and ethnic members of the working class. But this is where the long-prevailing refusal of the American power elite—in law, government, and the media—to see and respect nonwhite workers was crucial.


The business establishment saw the political threat that a multi-racial, multi-ethnic labor movement could pose.

“We’ve never been seen as working class—that our work is valued—it’s always been that our work is required,” Celeste Faison, director of campaigns for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me in a recent phone interview. “To exclude Black and brown voices from the working-class conversation is to deny that they are a part of the electorate.” When imagined as mostly white, the working class gets the benefit of being buoyed by economic policy, entitled to a decent quality of life; the working poor, imagined as nonwhite, are the subject of endless case studies in sociology classes, with an emphasis on their failures in capability. As Draut puts it in Sleeping Giant, “It’s much easier to go to battle for ‘Americans who did all the right things’ and got the rug pulled out from under them than it is to stick up for the hardworking, hard-luck, drew-the-short-end-of-the-stick population who too easily remind us that the American dream is more ephemera than enduring reality.”

“I do think we have to have a conversation around what is traditionally seen as white-collar work versus blue-collar work,” Faison added when we spoke, “who does those different kinds of jobs, how they’re valued, and who we think about when we’re talking about blue-collar workers.” We’ve seen a transition in working-class jobs since the deindustrialization era of the late 1970s through the 1990s, when free trade agreements such as NAFTA made it advantageous for corporations to move their major factories out of urban centers and into other countries, often in the Global South. By 1987, only 27 percent of Black workers were employed in industrial jobs, according to Draut. “When the working class shifted from ‘making stuff’ to ‘serving people,’ it brought with it lots of historical baggage,” she writes. “The long-standing ‘others’ in our society—women and people of color—became a much larger share of the non-college-educated workforce. And their marginalized status in our society carried over into the working class, making it easier to overlook and devalue their work.”

The gains made by Black men and women after the civil rights movement began to integrate workspaces but maintained the racial hierarchy; white professionals moved up the managerial ladder. “Securing wage growth and greater equality by both class and race calls for sustainable working-class solidarity that supersedes the racial and ethnic tensions present among all groups of people,” writes Valerie Wilson in her 2016 EPI report. “Getting to that point requires honesty and a collective reckoning about race, white privilege, and institutional racism, with respect to the costs and benefits to each of us.” Similar appeals were made in the most hopeful moments of the civil rights era. Black labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in 1966 urged a multiracial coalition in support of labor investments, such as those outlined in the Freedom Budget for All Americans. “The tragedy is that the workings of our economy so often pit the white poor and the black poor against each other at the bottom of society,” Randolph wrote in the introduction. “We shall solve our problems together or together we shall enter a new era of social disorder and disintegration.”

The Republican game plan of the 1970s and 1980s—when Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” melded into the GOP’s appeal to “Reagan Democrats”—curtailed any opportunity for reconciliation, leveraging the tensions of school integration and affirmative action to cleave the working class along racial lines. “The Republican Party used the detachment of white elites from the implementation of integration to charge the Democratic Party with liberal elitism: championing the rights of minorities from a lofty perch on which they remain unaffected,” Draut explains. They promoted the idea of reverse discrimination, “arguing that better-qualified whites were losing jobs to less-qualified minorities. It was a cynical and ugly ploy, but it worked.” Thus, the term working class became racially loaded.

Soon came the racist dog whistles that are now fully integrated into the American narrative—associating nonwhites with criminality and terms like welfare queen. “The term welfare queen became a not-so-subtle code for ‘lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.’ The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let ‘some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,’ while ‘you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger,’” writes Michelle Alexander in the highly lauded The New Jim Crow (2010). “These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it.”

White America was open to these appeals, ready to accept that the Black working poor were not only asking for but stealing something that did not belong to them. They were interlopers in the working class, a separate group of workers than the white industrial laborers who toiled away to help build this great nation. The boundaries between them needed to be monitored and enforced by all means at their disposal, including mass incarceration, Clinton-era claims about “superpredators,” and the subsequent passage of the 1994 Crime Bill.

By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, winning almost the entirety of the African American vote, according to exit polls at the time, while also appearing to win back some of the “Reagan Democrats,” the Republican business establishment saw an existential threat. When big business grabs for the levers of power, screeds on personal responsibility always come to the forefront, the implication being that food, health care, and housing are luxuries outside of the guarantees of life, liberty, and the ever-elusive pursuit of happiness. “Demography is not destiny but demography will have an impact on the future of the American economy, politics, and social infrastructure,” Valerie Wilson writes.

As the United States continues to undergo this demographic shift, we have to think in terms of big structural and policy changes that help to advance greater equality, expand opportunity for all, and yield universal benefits to the economy. This includes empowering workers to secure gainful employment, bargain for higher wages, and achieve racial and gender pay equity; closing gaps in student achievement and access to college; protecting voting rights; and enacting immigration and criminal justice reform.

Essential Now, Exploitable Always

Since the financial meltdown of 2008, a new uprising has been struggling to emerge. While the financial crisis did not spawn the transformations to our capitalist system that the Great Depression did—when labor unions fought for a revised social contract between the government, businesses, and workers that ultimately became the New Deal—recent years have seen a significant uptick in anti-capitalist activism and labor organizing, from movements like Occupy Wall Street, to the ongoing fights to unionize major corporations like Starbucks and Amazon, to the Fight for $15 and a Union, which started in 2012 with two hundred fast food workers going on strike outside of a McDonald’s in Manhattan.

When big business grabs for the levers of power, screeds on personal responsibility always come to the forefront.

“I joined the movement and we started talking amongst each other in the workplace, learning each others’ stories, and we had more in common with each other than we did apart,” Terrence Wise recently told me. He is a second-generation fast-food employee who has been organizing with the Fight for $15 for the last nine years. “All of us were making low wages, no benefits, struggling to feed our family . . . our strength was in our numbers and coming together, telling our stories.”

The Covid-19 pandemic provided even more visibility to working-class issues, with urgency placed on labor protections for essential workers. “We did make some gains through this framing of ‘essential work,’” Faison agreed, adding the key caveat that “we have to make sure that essential work is not a vanity phrase but is a call to make sure that those workers have the most amount of protections possible because they are the most vital parts of the working class.” In conversations with Wise, he noted that all gains obtained for essential workers, from increased protective equipment to hazard pay, were the result of collective direct action at the labor level—and are subject to the whims of the corporation should attentions shift. “We need to have access to a union. That’s bargaining power, you know, where we can set the standards, whether it’s wages, working conditions, safety,” Wise explained. “Until we have a true institution, a union, something that can assure that we can fight and win those things and gain those protections, we’re just at their will.”

As costs of living continue to accelerate beyond many workers’ wage increases and as businesses continue their inevitable backlash against union drives, it will become even more critical for our conception of the working class to shed the white supremacist artifice of its past in favor of a multiracial coalition. The last several decades have seen codified frameworks built to do exactly the opposite; the challenge will lie not only in nullifying them but also in shattering an entrenched oppositional structure that uses racial division to minimize solidarity and keep nonwhite workers on the margins. “This new working class faces a triple-headed challenge: overcoming entrenched corporate power, defeating the economic hegemony of neoliberalism, and tackling pervasive and stubborn racial, ethnic, and gender oppression,” as Tamara Draut puts it. “The first challenge to toppling such powerful and historical injustices is making visible the cause and the claim.”

That happened in a stunning way this spring. In an election overseen by the NLRB, workers voted to unionize at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Christian Smalls—a deeply empathetic Black man sporting a do-rag, gold chains, and gold grills to match—would become the leader of the behemoth’s first recognized union in America. Smalls had been fired by Amazon in 2020 after he led a walkout in protest of pandemic working conditions. But he kept organizing with warehouse workers on the inside, forming the Amazon Labor Union alongside his former coworker Derrick Palmer, despite getting no official backing from any national unions. Following tried-and-true American practices of union busting, Amazon targeted Smalls, expecting his role to create dissension within organizing ranks; the company had assessed him as “not smart or articulate.” Instead, with his colleagues, he successfully built a coalition over the next two years. “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because while he was up there, we were organizing a union,” Smalls said on the day the ALU won its election.

The prospects for a united working class are always uncertain, but transformative change is both viable and visible. It may look something like previous generations’ labor struggles, retooled for the modern titans of contemporary global capitalism. But it will also look different, as it did in Staten Island, where neither Amazon’s leaders, nor its anti-union consultants, nor people in the mainstream media and established unions, seemed capable of recognizing the face of a new working-class hero. A comment made by A. Philip Randolph in the 1966 Freedom Budget speaks directly to today’s working class, mostly unorganized, some of whom have to work multiple jobs to pay the bills: “In these United States, where there can be no economic or technical excuse for it, poverty is not only a private tragedy but, in a sense, a public crime. It is above all a challenge to our morality.”

A Better Foreign Policy Abroad Requires a Strong Labor Movement at Home

Polling shows that most Americans oppose their country’s forever wars, but this dispersed opposition has done little to alter the United States’ foreign policy. For the antiwar movement to be successful, it must build its base in organized labor.

Amazon workers attend a union rally outside the company's Staten Island facility, April 24, 2022. 

(Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)


BY CHRISTOPHER MCCALLION

JACOBIN
05.30.2022

Despite a number of dramatic changes in the international distribution of power over the past three decades, the United States has not fundamentally abandoned its grand strategy of primacy (also called “liberal hegemony” or “deep engagement”). During the so-called unipolar moment, the United States faced no peer competitors, and yet remained in a state of near-constant war, attempting to impose its preferences on large parts of the world. As new powers rise, the United States seeks to maintain primacy despite finding itself in a state of severe strategic overstretch, facing growing challenges with diminishing relative resources, and possessing many protectorates but few independently capable allies.

Some foreign policy experts have questioned why “the Blob” has not pursued a corresponding strategic readjustment. The rough answer, as Stephen Walt has pithily summarized, is that “liberal hegemony is a full employment program for the foreign policy establishment.” The foreign policy establishment enjoys particular autonomy within the government and, while shielded from public oversight or accountability, remains mainly answerable to the corporate beneficiaries of US primacy abroad.

The intransigence of the foreign policy elite is due to a general deficit of democratic control over American government. A revitalized labor movement is necessary in order to both replenish democracy at home and to act as a powerful institution to channel otherwise diffuse public interests and influence policymakers.

The Democratic Deficit

Walter Lippmann, one of the last century’s most prominent journalists and political commentators, spent much of his career critiquing what he saw as the excesses of modern democracy. Lippmann argued that amid the complexity and dislocation of mass industrial society, the public was incapable of rendering responsible judgements on political affairs. An enlightened technocracy was necessary to manage public opinion and govern on their behalf.

Lippmann’s political philosophy was a response to what he perceived as the failure of twentieth-century democratic governments to adequately respond to the international crises which precipitated the two world wars. Claiming that the public oscillated impulsively between naive isolationism and intemperate jingoism, Lippmann argued for a stronger executive and constraints on popular sovereignty in order, in his view, to preserve liberal government at home and prudent statecraft abroad.

At least since the Cold War, foreign policy has indeed been run by an increasingly autonomous elite, deeply insulated within an executive branch that commands ever-expanding powers. Ironically, Lippmann would likely characterize America’s currently overcommitted elite-run foreign policy as “insolvent.” As a pioneer of the neoliberal movement, were Lippmann alive today, he might also be discomfited by the domestic consequences of unconstrained elite rule. The neoliberal turn in American politics weakened organized labor, empowered corporations, and hollowed out New Deal social investment, resulting in mind-boggling economic inequality alongside the highest incarceration rates in the world, mass epidemics of despair and anomie, and mass surveillance by both the national security state and tech corporations.

Belying elites’ stated enthusiasm for meritocracy and innovation is a track record whose hallmarks have been unaccountability and inertia. Those responsible for catastrophic failures like the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, or the loss of the presidency to an historically unpopular buffoon were confronted with neither punishment nor lost esteem. Instead, something resembling a mutual protection racket allows leaders who violate the public trust to continue circulating through the revolving door between government, the private sector, and media commentary and academia. Meanwhile, amid widespread corruption and culture-war pandering, the government seems increasingly incapable of either day-to-day functioning or much-needed reform.

While Lippmann believed that the failures of American foreign policy were caused by an excess of democracy, it seems self-evident today that the calamities of American foreign policy are due to a deficit of democracy.

The Working Class Fought for Democracy

In an influential article, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset argued that the correlation between democratic government and capitalist market economies was due to the growth of the professional middle class; however, comparative historical evidence shows that the urban working class has been the most consistent champion for democracy, while the professional middle class has often preferred restrictions on democracy or even shifts into authoritarianism when they feel their interests are endangered by challenges from below.

One recent study concludes that, in many cases, “middle-class moderates have encouraged authoritarian transitions to bring stability and deliver growth,” and that self-described centrists “seem to prefer strong and efficient government over messy democratic politics.” As Karl Polanyi long ago argued, the correlation between capitalism and democracy is not due to their inherent compatibility but rather to their inherent tension; the inequality produced by capitalism generates its own resistance in the form of popular movements that seek to expand democratic control over a market economy which fails to self-regulate.

Alexander Keyssar’s important history of the right to vote makes clear that struggles for universal suffrage in the United States have from the beginning been a class struggle alternating between expansion and contraction of the franchise, with the most decisive factor being the need to mobilize the “lower orders” in wartime. From the beginning of the nineteenth century through the AFL-CIO’s critical support for the Civil and Voting Rights acts, organized workers’ movements have played a central role in fighting for democratic expansion. As the AFL-CIO executive council declared in 2020: “Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers. The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it.”

It is generally overlooked that, even in their diminished current state, labor unions still represent more women, African Americans, and Latino citizens than any other membership organization. As Jake Rosenfeld demonstrates, labor unions are even more effective than churches in their ability to increase voter turnout among working-class people. These effects are particularly strong among private-sector union members, and even more so among those with less than a college degree — a demographic with a particularly low propensity to turn out to the polls.

In the electoral realm, unions’ biggest impact comes not from campaign donations, where they are vastly outspent by business PACs that face much looser campaign finance rules, but by providing masses of campaign volunteers and engaging in broad voter registration drives. Alexis de Tocqueville adamantly believed that civil associations were the fundamental ballast for democracy; for tens of millions of Americans over generations, labor unions have been the primary locus of civic life and democratic assembly, acting as “schools of democracy” and bridging the main site of workers’ everyday activity with local and national self-government.

Organized Labor Against the Blob

According to Pew Research Center, most Americans believe that the United States should be actively engaged in world affairs and international trade, but prioritize “good diplomacy” over “military strength,” and rank domestic issues at the top of their concerns. Unfortunately, according to an important 2005 study by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, public opinion has virtually no effect on foreign policy, which instead strongly tracks the preferences of internationally oriented corporations, which favor open access to trade and investment abroad. Page and Jacobs noted that experts seemed to have some effect on foreign policy, but that experts are also likely influenced by business groups.

Interestingly, Page and Jacobs found that unions’ preferences tended to be similar to those of the public in general, but unions seemed to have a greater effect on policymakers than public opinion. While anti-union critics portray organized labor as a “special interest group,” gaining benefits through concentrated influence at the expense of a diffuse general public, economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff, in an influential study, found that unions tend to have exactly the opposite function, most successfully lobbying for legislation advancing broad social and economic benefits rather than legislation benefiting unions alone. This suggests that a strong union movement could be a powerful tool to impress the public’s policy preferences — including foreign policy — on lawmakers and policymakers.

The history of organized labor’s foreign policy has not always been rosy. During the Cold War, the AFL-CIO was consistently split: the AFL under the leadership of George Meany pursued a hard line on the Soviet Union and nonalignment in the developing world (even denouncing George Kennan for being “soft” on communism), while the CIO under UAW president Walter Reuther demonstrated a greater willingness to pursue limited engagement with the Soviet Union, along with arms control and foreign aid. Under the consolidated leadership of Meany and his successor, Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO opposed communist-affiliated trade unions worldwide, sometimes even collaborating with the CIA and aiding subversion efforts in advance of US.-backed coups.

In recent years, however, organized labor has tended to be increasingly skeptical of the use of American force. The AFL-CIO passed convention resolutions in 2005 and 2009 demanding an end to the Iraq War. In 2011, the AFL-CIO executive board issued a statement that “the militarization of our foreign policy has been a costly mistake,” and called for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan. Despite historically having been favorable toward military spending to support defense-related jobs, in 2013 the AFL-CIO passed a convention resolution entitled “Our Nation Needs New Priorities: Cut Pentagon Spending to Invest in Our People and Communities,” and again in 2017 passed a resolution titled “War Is Not the Answer,” which called for greater spending on education, infrastructure, and jobs at home instead of costly military interventions abroad.

Organized labor’s firmest foreign policy position has been its opposition to free trade deals like NAFTA, permanent normal trade relations with China, the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This is unsurprising, as a number of studies have found that free trade and offshoring have significantly contributed to job losses and wage stagnation for millions of American workers.

The erosion of America’s manufacturing base in the face of foreign competition is starkly correlated with the decline in union membership over time, as shown below. Union preferences may actually align with policymakers’ recent efforts to “onshore” or “reshore” strategic industries and avoid critical supply shocks.

(Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis; US Census Bureau; unionstats.com)

A strong labor movement is neither a panacea for America’s problems nor a guarantee for good policymaking, but it is a necessary condition for a government that is responsive to the majority of its constituents. Unions increase civic participation, amplify the policy preferences of the general public, and act as a counterbalance to narrow corporate interests in government. Organized labor supports a foreign policy that puts working Americans over multinational corporations and that exercises military power more cautiously. And by consistently advocating for greater attention to domestic imperatives like education, health care, housing, and wages, unions help to strengthen the foundations of America’s power.

After decades of strategic overextension, disastrous interventions, and bloated defense budgets that have arguably contributed to America’s relative decline rather than forestalling it, more attention to problems at home is the prudent policy that the public demands and that existing policymaking experts refuse to supply. Ironically, a foreign policy program backed by labor might finally, to paraphrase Walter Lippmann, bring America’s commitments into balance with its capabilities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher McCallion is an adjunct lecturer in political science at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Indigenous Organizers in Alaska Lead the Way Toward Livable Climate Future

Panelists speak during a session of the 2022 Alaska Just Transition Summit: Vol II, which took place May 20-22, 2022, in Anchorage, Alaska.

TANNER JOHNSON

BY C.J. Polychroniou,

Truthout

PUBLISHED May 30, 2022

In the United States, the public and politicians are moving in opposite directions on climate change. Grassroots environmental activism is spreading on the local state, regional and national levels, while Congress generally continues with a “business-as-usual” approach, rejecting the foremost way to avoid the worst consequences of global warming: the Green New Deal.

While the Green New Deal remains aspirational in the U.S., it has been adopted by the European Union, and scores of countries around the world have committed to pursuing its goals.

Among the many organizations in the U.S. fighting for environmental sustainability and a just transition toward clean, renewable energy is Native Movement, an organization dedicated to building people power for transformative change and imagining a world without fossil fuels.

“There is no future at all with continued oil and gas extraction,” says Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller, Native Movement’s climate justice director, in this exclusive interview for Truthout. “We must eliminate fossil fuel extraction now through a just transition that guarantees justice for workers and for the lands.”

Miller is a Dena’ina Athabascan and Ashkenazi Jewish woman. She works toward Indigenous rights advocacy and is a member of the Alaska Just Transition Collective and the Alaska Climate Alliance.

C.J. Polychroniou: Ruth, what does a just transition, from a Native and Indigenous perspective, look like in Alaska?

Ruth Miller: A just transition is a journey of returning to economies, governance structures and social contracts that are not new, but built on Indigenous wisdoms and place-based knowledge to create a truly regenerative economy. A just transition will be built on a values framework of anti-racism and decolonization, deep reciprocity, and respect for all lands, waters and air.

Any just transition for Alaska must be rooted in Indigenous perspectives, because it is Alaska’s Native nations who have lived in harmony with these lands for over 30,000 years, and whose deep connections, encyclopedic knowledge and spiritual interconnectivity will heal the wounds of the past 100 years of colonization and extractive capitalism. For this reason, we refer to this shift in resource extraction, governance, labor practices and culture as “remembering forward,” first translated in 2020 in the Behnti Kengaga language as “Kohtr’elneyh,” and in 2022 in the Dena’ina language as “Nughelnik.”

In Alaska this takes many forms. It includes deep democracy, which actively seeks to incorporate minority voices as well as those in the majority and requires the diversification of elected leaders. It includes an end to all oil and gas extraction, as well as irresponsible mining and other development projects. It means a return to responsible land management practices, including timber and fisheries management, and it means returning stewardship of lands and waters back to their original and eternal caretakers. It includes supporting Alaska Native language and cultural revitalizations while supporting unimpeachable subsistence hunting and fishing rights. It means all workers will have their fair pay and rights protected through strong unions, while communities will be empowered to support themselves through mutual aid networks and non-predatory community loan funds for moving toward clean and efficient energy.

A just transition for Alaska means investing in regenerative industries like sustainable mariculture and ocean-healing crops such as kelp, while also supporting culturally informed eco-tourism that elevates local business with local returns. As we have previously written for Non-Profit Quarterly, “To achieve [a Just Transition], resources must be acquired through regenerative practices, labor must be organized through voluntary cooperation and decolonial mindsets, culture must be based on caring and sacred relationships, and governance must reflect deep democracy and relocalization.”

Why is the complete elimination of fossil fuel extraction needed to secure a just transition?

The simple truth is that the oil and gas industry is one of the largest contributors to climate change, spewing greenhouse gas emissions to the point at which we are now in the sixth great extinction — one which has been entirely caused by recent human activity. The Arctic, being bled dry for its non-renewable resources, is now experiencing a climate crisis at two to four times the rate as the rest of the globe.Ending oil extraction requires questioning the systems that rely on it and healing the wounds of our communities so we may envision a collective future together.

In Alaska, thawing permafrost is not only destabilizing Arctic infrastructure, but the thawing of eons-old organic material leads to the accelerated release of methane, a gas more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. The same thawing is leading to coastal and riverbed erosion, causing more and more communities to be forced to relocate. Already less Arctic sea ice returns in the winter than past generations remember, putting coastal communities at increased risk of damage by winter storms.

With a global temperature rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius or higher (which we are projected to reach within the decade without drastic international action now), it is expected we will have an entirely ice-free Arctic Ocean at least once every eight years. Beyond their climate effects, extractive projects are already causing extreme and irreversible devastation to lands, waters and food systems.

The ecological harm caused by such projects leaves toxic waste, pollution and contamination, harming the health of Alaska Native peoples who live closest with the land. Near the sites of extractive projects, high rates of cancers, birth defects, respiratory illnesses, and more health impacts have been observed for decades. Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit relatives suffer increased rates of homicide, disappearance and domestic violence in and around the man camps that supply labor to extractive development projects.

There is no future at all with continued oil and gas extraction…. We must eliminate fossil fuel extraction now through a just transition that guarantees justice for workers and for the lands.

What are the main obstacles for Alaska to overcome its oil extraction and how would this impact Alaskans?

The dominant story of Alaska began as the “last frontier,” ready to be settled and exploited by colonizers. The same narrative now tells the public that the Alaskan economy is dependent on oil and gas, and that we would be left bereft if we challenged those industries. Dark money streams, particularly from the Koch brothers, flow into Alaska to purchase elections for extractive industries.

This is a hurdle we are poised to overcome. These stories are nothing more than myths meant to erase Indigenous history and excellence and undermine any visioning toward a truly regenerative economy for our state. Colonial distortions of history poison our education system and prevent real conversation about the past and future of our state and its people. We are seeking deep decolonization and truth-telling to confront the disempowerment and marginalization of Native people in the name of resource extraction. Ending oil extraction requires questioning the systems that rely on it and healing the wounds of our communities so we may envision a collective future together. As the boom-and-bust cycle of resource extraction continues to enrich the elite few at the cost of the public, Alaskans are awakening to the power and potential of a better economy — one that is just, regenerative and sustainable.

Already communities are showing ingenuity and resilience as they develop place-based economies that support livelihoods and healthy living — small-scale hydroelectric turbines in Igiugig village to move the community off diesel, high-tunnel greenhouses for year-round produce in the interior of Alaska, mariculture and kelp farming in the Southcentral and Southeast regions. Grassroots efforts across the state (many Black, Indigenous and people of color-led and in rural communities) are leading the way, through renewable energy, local food systems, eco-tourism, sustainable recreation, and much more. Strong unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers are already providing apprenticeship programs to invest in worker transition, while other groups like the Fairbanks Women Carpenters Union, UNITE HERE are pursuing worker health and safety.

The burden of transformation is on the state of Alaska and the federal government to catch up to the progress already happening across Alaska. Alaskans are designing our collective future and taking our story into our own hands.

What is the Alaska Just Transition Collective and who are the communities it is accountable to? How does it bring folks together in action to advance a shared vision for Alaska’s future?

The Alaska Just Transition Collective is a group of Alaska-based organizations with a spectrum of focuses working to support Alaska along a path toward a post-oil economy, an Indigenized Regenerative Economy. Alaska Just Transition facilitates intersectional collaboration to build critical thinking around economic and social transition. The Alaska Just Transition Collective is currently comprised of a number of organizations, including Native Movement, Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Alaska Public Interest Research Group, Native Peoples Action, The Alaska Center, Alaska Poor People’s Campaign and Native Conservancy. However, the just transition community is significantly broader and ever-expanding.

In January of 2020, the first Alaska Just Transition Summit was held on the lands of the Lower Tanana Dené peoples. Kohtr’elneyh (“Remembering Forward” in Benhti kanaga) was a groundbreaking gathering in Alaska that brought together community organizers, tribal leaders, artists, union members, faith leaders, investors, elected officials, educators, small business owners, renewable energy industry leaders, and many more from critical sectors. Alaskans shared, brainstormed and strategized a collective path toward a post-oil economy built on just values frameworks with a home for all. We dived deep into the healing necessary to move toward decolonization, and centered Indigenous voices to move with place-based wisdom and ancestral imperative.

Once the pandemic was upon us, we shifted to online offerings that dove into the intricacies of just transition in a four-part webinar series, and later convened “Fireside Chats” to explore national policy options for Alaska, following the pillars of the THRIVE Agenda (thriveagenda.com) and making the national approaches relatable and visible to Alaskans. Through these online gatherings we reengaged with the hundreds of community members that joined us in person in 2020, as well as expanded our community and tended to new and exciting relationships with more sectors and local leaders.

This year we gather once more in person, on Dena’ina lands, proudly bearing the name Nughelnik (“It is remembered within us” in Dena’ina qenaga). This summit will work to address the pains of the past two years, while also diving deeper into real strategy and active examples of just transition already taking place in Alaska. A just transition does not exist without the leadership and sovereignty of the communities that are deeply impacted by economic transition. Without including the voices of Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, queer, immigrant communities, for example, we are missing key leadership in our path forward. We are working to elevate voices that were regretfully not as visible in our first summit, and to make invitations for all identities to feel stewardship and ownership over our collective space.

As organizers, we hope that the next iteration will be regional and local just transition plans that will ripple across the state and be stewarded by local community members. Through this approach, our partnered organizations will continue to offer support and convening space for community members to lead us forward.

The Just Transition Collective is uplifting Indigenous place-based knowledge systems and ways of life while shaping regenerative economies, stewarding lands and waters, and building more just and equitable communities for all. Can you share the specific principles and aims guiding this vision?

We as a collective honor the Jemez Principles of Democratic Organizing, which in summation includes deep inclusion of all voices and identities; an emphasis of community-driven organizing, which means we engage when tribal sovereigns and communities most impacted by issues invite us; allowing people to speak for themselves; working together in solidarity and mutuality by understanding that we are deeply interconnected and must transform together; building just relationships among ourselves, modeling just workplace practices that reflect compassion and humanity; and commitment to self-transformation.

We also honor the Defend the Sacred Alaska Principles, which describe a similar approach to community organizing:
Unlearn, Dismantle, Heal, and Create: Decolonize.
Organize from the “bottom-up.”
Uplift a matriarchal, decentralized, and marginalized leadership.
Grow an inclusive movement for all.
Create space for people to speak for themselves.
Work together in unity, solidarity, and accountability to each other.
Strive to build just relationships in our organizing.
Uplifting marginalized & oppressed voices that align with these values.
Commit to a just and equitable transition away from an extractive, oppressive economy toward a regenerative, holistic, living worldview.
Acknowledge that we exist in a tangible system of racial injustice and that it is our responsibility to dismantle it.
Be soulful.

While we carry these principles through all our work as organizations, our tangible vision for just transition is articulated through these goals of our recently held summit, which will shine the light toward future work:“Remember Forward through Grief and Celebration”: This means recognizing that for many communities, the pandemic surfaced previously unspoken imbalances wrought by capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy, while many other communities have been acutely aware of their struggle to survive and regain balance since the onset of colonization. As outlined in the 2022 Alaska Just Transition Guide, this goal is about our effort to “reconnect healing as an essential strategy, as we share tools and practices as we move through tumultuous times.”
“Shape Community and Post-Pandemic Economy”: This means developing “a meaningful and reciprocal plan of action to support communities, extend care, and articulate long-term healing needed for Alaska’s economy and culture.”
“Reimagine Community in a Post-Extractive Economy”: This involves creating a space for our community “to align around a shared vision for a fundamental transformation in Alaska and beyond” and to turn this vision into action by identifying goals and sharing strategies.
“Weave Storytelling to Illuminate the Path”: This involves an effort to “highlight Alaskan stories of day-to-day challenges and celebrations on the path of visionary planning.”

Participants of the 2022 Alaska Just Transition Summit: Vol II gather for a group photo.TANNER JOHNSON

What strategies have you discovered work best for bringing grassroots and frontline perspectives to bear on national policies like the Green New Deal?

Our theory of engagement with national policy requires translating policy into accessible formats but also empowering our Native frontline communities to speak back to national policy.

Policy work must be reflective of those it is meant to help but also must grow from the ground and answer the needs of communities while honoring their expertise. Therefore, our work is twofold: Firstly, as is the case with the Green New Deal, we were involved in early stages to edit initial drafts of National Economic Recovery Plan proposals to ensure that Alaskan interests were protected, but also that there was unique language that accommodated both our tribal sovereign governments and our complex social services distribution, often through Alaska Native corporations.

We worked with our national partners to ensure that Alaskans could see themselves in the proposals and had many opportunities for consultation. Concurrently, we also elevated examples of Alaskan leadership, where our local initiatives were not just supporting national policy but truly driving it with visionary action: We drafted the “Alaska’s Time to THRIVE” zine to illustrate how regenerative economy is already taking hold across our state, in all aspects of a just transition. This document and the accompanying “Fireside Chats” allowed for deep consultation on these policies from an abundance mindset, where Alaskans were already positioned to lead.

Additionally, we work diligently with community members to elevate local stories from the land, and to empower narrative sovereignty — the ability to tell one’s own story with integrity and authenticity. Through storytelling skills-building and video projects, stories from community members and from the land are able to speak for themselves. We can offer our organizations as conduits to uplift and share these stories widely, particularly within national and international decision-making spaces.

One example of this initiative was our Fall 2021 Indigenous Filmmakers Intensive. Native Movement partnered with the University of Alaska Fairbanks to offer an intense curriculum guided by faculty members and Indigenous film industry professionals, as well as filmmaking gear as students wrote, directed and produced stories of climate justice from their rural communities. These stories were later showcased at the United Nations global climate negotiations at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, and will soon be shown at the Anchorage Museum. Through these techniques, we are able to deepen the sovereignty and self-determination of our communities while sharing their wisdom and leadership with national and international policy makers.

Ukraine War Hits Africa's Most Vulnerable As Aid Costs Spike


By Edward McAllister
05/30/22 

A child walks outside makeshift shelters at the Kaxareey camp for the internally displaced people after they fled from the severe droughts, in Dollow, Gedo Region, Somalia May 24, 2022. Picture taken May 24, 2022. Photo: Reuters / FEISAL OMAR

A small charity broke ground this year on a clinic in northern Burkina Faso to care for thousands of women and children who have fled Islamist insurgents wreaking havoc along the fringes of the Sahara.

But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, global supply chains buckled and the cost of building materials, fuel and food spiked in West Africa. The charity's founder, Boukary Ouedraogo, was forced to make a tough decision: he halted construction of the clinic with only the foundations laid.

Similar calls are being made across sub-Saharan Africa, where aid projects are threatened by the fallout from the war in Ukraine, potentially putting millions of lives at risk.

Humanitarian agencies already struggling with widespread price increases under the pandemic say the crisis in Europe has made things worse. Even the cost of life-saving therapeutic foods for malnourished children has spiked.

Compounding the problem, some donors have diverted state aid from Africa's worst-hit countries to help support more than six million refugees who have fled the fighting in Ukraine.

Denmark said in March it was halving its aid to Burkina Faso this year to accommodate Ukrainian refugees. Its budget for Burkina's neighbour Mali, also in the grips of an Islamist insurgency, has dropped 40%.

Sweden has also said it plans to divert $1 billion from its aid budget to help cover the cost of hosting Ukrainian refugees.

Ouedraogo's clinic was desperately needed in Kaya, a town of dirt streets and squat brick buildings surrounded by arid scrubland. Its population has swelled in recent years as thousands of people from surrounding villages flee militant attacks, straining the already basic health care system.

"What happened in Ukraine happened at the same time as the crisis in this country got worse," said Ouedraogo, who runs the BO Foundation in Burkina Faso.

"We hope all the donors can keep their attention," he said. "We felt what we were doing was going to reduce the number of deaths and infant mortality."

EMERGENCY LEVELS

It's a similar story in Sudan. In a southern area faced with conflict and food shortages, a paediatric clinic run by Senegal-based medical charity Alima faces a $300,000 funding gap due to an increase in costs, including fuel for the clinic's generator.

At this rate, Alima will have to shut the programme down, said its director of operations, Kader Issaley.

Action Against Hunger, a charity with operations across Africa, has seen the cost of foodstuffs such as rice, oil and sugar rise 20% to 30% over the past year.

This will reduce its coverage by the same amount, said Mamadou Diop, a representative from its West Africa office.

"We have to totally rethink our approach," said Diop. "We must decide, do we reduce supply or reduce the number of beneficiaries?"

The problem is not limited to Africa. The U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) feeds 13 million people a month in Yemen, where the economy has been wrecked by years of war, but it has reduced rations for 8 million of them since January.

It may have to make further cuts, after raising only a quarter of the $2 billion it needs for Yemen this year from international donors.

"We're taking food from the poor and feeding the hungry," said WFP representative to Yemen, Richard Ragan.

"In June we will have to make some tough decisions about possibly even going down to just feeding five million, those who are really most at risk," he said

UNIQUE IN SCOPE

Still, Africa's problems are unique in scope.

Conflict in Ethiopia, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel region have forced millions to flee their homes. Nearly half a billion people live in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.

West Africa alone faces an unprecedented food shortage that threatens nearly 40 million people, driven in part by drought and the impact of the war in Ukraine on food prices and supply.

The impact of higher costs on aid organisations varies, health specialists say.

Smaller non-profits reliant on institutional donors such as governments for yearly budgets may struggle more than a larger charity such as Medecins Sans Frontieres, which raises money through public campaigns.

MSF said it did not foresee cutting back its operations due to the war in Ukraine.

But few are immune. A drop in funding that preceded the Ukraine war has forced WFP to cut rations in seven countries in West and Central Africa.

In Nigeria, the continent's most populous country, the number of people receiving emergency assistance from WFP has dropped from 1.9 million in September to 650,000.

Like Burkina Faso and Mali, northern Nigeria is also wracked by a prolonged Islamist insurgency.

Health specialists and aid workers said it was too early to assess exactly what the impact on communities will be and it could take months to see how much damage the cutbacks cause.

"Further funding shortfalls will contribute to worsening food security and nutrition in locations where food insecurity is already at emergency levels," said WFP spokesman for Western Africa, Djaounsede Madjiangar.

PLUMPY'NUT SPIKE

In Somalia, one-year-old Hassan howled in a blue plastic bucket suspended from a scale as a medical technician noted his weight: 5.6 kg.

It was an improvement. Hassan weighed only 5.2 kg when he first began receiving treatment for severe acute malnutrition at a clinic run by aid workers in the south of the country three months ago - about half what a boy his age should weigh.

His partial recovery is thanks to a sweet peanut paste called Plumpy'Nut developed by French scientists in the 1990s that has become a crucial weapon in the fight against child malnutrition.

Three small sachets a day for six weeks can be enough to bring a starving child back to full health, according to U.N. children's charity UNICEF.

"He used to be much worse," said the boy's mother, Hasan Habiba Mohammed Nur, patting his bony legs under an oversized T-shirt. "The Plumpy'Nut has really helped him."

UNICEF says it spends $137 million a year on therapeutic food and the overall market is estimated to be worth up to $400 million.

But aid agencies say it is becoming too expensive.

Over the past year, the cost of Plumpy'Nut has risen 23%, including a 9% increase imposed since the Ukraine crisis began, Plumpy'Nut's main producer Nutriset, told Reuters.

In a letter to customers in March warning of impending price increases, it said the cost of ingredients such as palm oil, milk powder and whey, and packaging including laminate for the sachets, had risen sharply. Shipping expenses have also rocketed. In all, costs are up 39%, Nutriset said.

"The war in Ukraine is indirectly impacting the price of raw materials, and prices will continue to increase even more in the weeks and months to come," Nutriset said.

The increases worry UNICEF. It predicts that prices of therapeutic foods will rise 16% in the next six months because of Ukraine and pandemic disruptions. Without further funding, 600,000 more children may miss out on treatment, it said in May.

The effects are already being felt, aid workers say.

Alima's budget to buy and ship a batch of Plumpy'Nut to a project in an impoverished area in the southeast of Democratic Republic of Congo is about 175,000 euros ($188,000).

But with a rise in fuel costs and the price of Plumpy'Nut, the shipment now costs 230,000 euros, said Hassan Bouziane, who runs logistics at Alima.

He now has to go to donors to get more cash, taking up valuable time.

"The impact on the beneficiaries will be huge," said Bouziane. "The treatment for a child of five years old is six weeks. When you lose two weeks, that is a third of their treatment."

($1 = 0.9333 euros)

What US re-entry into Somalia means for the Horn of Africa and for bigger powers

Published: May 30, 2022 

THE CONVERSATION

US Navy sailors for the Combined Joint Task Force in the Horn of Africa off the coast of Djibouti. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The US has announced it will resume a limited military presence in Somalia. The former administration withdrew troops from the country in 2020. The mission of the American soldiers is still what it has been for the last 15 years: to advise and assist Somali forces. US troops will not be directly involved in conflict. Their number, 450 to 500, is smaller than the last deployment.

The decision to redeploy in Somalia might appear to be surprising, for two important reasons. First, US president Joe Biden promised during his campaign to avoid the “forever wars” against terror lasting since 2002. None of these wars were ever fully won and remain unpopular with the US electorate. It is also surprising in the light of moves to restructure the US military to meet a threat from China.

What better explains this decision, however, is the renewed emphasis on the old rivalry with Russia since Russia’s Ukrainian intervention.

Announcing the redeployment, the Pentagon claimed it was partly for operational security. After their withdrawal in 2020, American special forces continued to train Somali soldiers outside Somalia, and at times travelled in and out of the country. The Pentagon said the redeployment would end the ad hoc support by creating bases inside Somalia.

Unofficially, American officials have claimed that the redeployment is due to worsening security conditions in Somalia. This argument is open to question: the security situation is in reality relatively stable.

What is without doubt is that the deployment will have a direct influence on US-Russian rivalries in the region.

Military situation in Somalia

Somalia’s security landscape has not changed much since the US pullout over the previous year. The frontlines between the al-Qaida affiliated Harakat al-Shabaab, the Somali government, and the Forces of the African Union in Somalia have remained largely the same during the American absence. So has the rate of terror attacks. Al-Shabaab has not expanded its territories though it does exercise control in areas supposedly under government control.

Several researchers have reported that al-Shabaab is booming economically and is able to infiltrate the Somali security services. But this was also the case before the American withdrawal from Somalia.

What has changed is the international setting. Over the past few years the China-US rivalry has intensified. And over the past year, the US-Russia rivalry has exploded, partly influenced by the outbreak of the Ukraine war. These rivalries have large scale impacts at the Horn of Africa.

It is notable that the American redeployment announcement came days after the electoral defeat of Somali president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (“Farmaajo”). The former Somali president was a close ally of Russia’s new friends in the Horn of Africa – Ethiopia and Eritrea. The newly elected Somali president is much cooler towards Ethiopia and Eritrea. He has also pointedly welcomed the US redeployment.

Post-Ukrainian reality in the Horn of Africa

Farmaajo enjoyed a close alliance with Ethiopian president Abiy Ahmed and Eritrea’s president Issayas Afeworki. Ethiopian forces helped Farmaajo insert his candidates in states hostile to him by, for example, suppressing his opponents. This was the case in Somalia’s south west regional state during the election there in 2018. They also backed Farmaajo against his political rival president Ahmed “Madobe” of the Somali Jubaland regional-state in 2019.

In return, Farmaajo sent his Somali forces to fight on the side of Abiy Ahmed in the Ethiopian civil war. And Issayas Afeworki intervened in Ethiopia’s civil war and trained Somali forces.

The Ethiopian civil war and the Ukrainian war increasingly saw the United States at odds with this tripartite alliance. First the US criticised the Ethiopian government for its actions in Tigray, which the United States saw as heavy handed and filled with human rights transgressions. The US special envoy to the Horn of Africa stated:

As the war approaches its one-year anniversary, the United States and others cannot continue ‘business as usual’ relations with the government of Ethiopia.

The worsening US-Ethiopian relations were also fuelled by a Russian military cooperation agreement with Ethiopia. This came in a period when Ethiopia had lost a lot of Russian produced materials in the battlefields of Tigray. Anti-American demonstrations took place in Addis Ababa, with Russian flags and pro-Russian slogans. And the US imposed sanctions on Eritrean and Ethiopian leaders.

The relationship between the US and Eritrea and Ethiopia was worsening before the Ukrainian war. When the Ukrainian war broke out, Eritrea fully supported Russia at the United Nations while Ethiopia abstained from a vote condemning the action. That’s not all. The US was also worried about Chinese investments to secure a naval base in Eritrea.

US deployment timing

The timing of the American redeployment in Somalia has two possible explanations in my view. It might have been delayed until after the recent elections in order to insulate it from local politics. Or one could see it as the US way to shore up a president with the will and potential to withstand the Russian-backed alliance of Eritrea and Ethiopia in the Horn. That would in turn shore up the US and its allies against Russia.

The latter point will be an outcome of the deployment anyway. It may well turn out to be the most important outcome, given that US engagement over 13 years has failed to bring about the end of al-Shabaab. The insurgents remain strong, and rich, but short of the ability to overrun the Somali government.

Author

Stig Jarle Hansen
Associate Professor of International Relations, Norwegian University of Life Sciences

The Almighty Gun
Ritualistic child sacrifice is the price we pay for veneration of gun rights

America's Death Cult. | Fibonacci Blue

Alienated
Rafia Zakaria, 

BAFFLER

May 27, 2022

THE CARTHAGINIANS WERE some of the richest and most powerful people in the ancient world. A Phoenician colony, Carthage was located in present-day Tunisia. The city was operative from around 800 BCE until 146 BCE, when it was sacked and destroyed by the Romans.

There is something else that was notable about the Carthaginians. This particular ancient culture sacrificed its own children to their gods. The wealth and good fortune of their city-state, Carthaginians believed, could only be assured by pleasing the gods, and their gods were hungry for children. These children, many seemingly only a few weeks old, were taken to ritual locations known as “tophets.” The accumulation of archaeological evidence from Carthage studied in recent decades reveals that the sacrifices appeared to have been carried out year after year. Archaeologists excavating the “tophet” sites have found the cremated remains in over a thousand urns, all containing the remains of sacrificed children.

Literary sources confirm the Carthaginian belief in child sacrifice. The Roman historian Diodorus wrote, “There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.” Diodorus also alleged that some elite members of society actually purchased children from poor people and then reared them specifically for sacrifice. The burned remains of the children, often intermingled with those of animals who were also sacrificed with them, were then buried beneath tombstones expressing gratitude and thanks to the gods whose favor was now assured.

Americans have this in common with the Carthaginians. Year after year, the United States sacrifices children at the altar of gun rights. Since the Columbine shootings in 1999, at least 185 people have been killed in school violence, according to the Washington Post—the great majority of them children and teenagers. The Post’s database shows that more than three hundred eleven thousand children have now witnessed gun violence in schools. And school shootings are just a fraction of the death toll: already this year, 142 children (eleven and younger) and 515 teens have been killed by gunshots, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Tallying GVA reports from these last four years, more than four thousand children and teens have been shot and killed.

The Carthaginians believed that the good fortunes of their society or of wealthy individuals could only be maintained if these babies were sacrificed, pure and whole to their exacting gods. The good of many was thus assured by the annihilation of the weakest, the most vulnerable, the most worthy of protection. The same calculation is at play in post-millennial America. The unfettered freedom to carry assault weapons, American society has deemed, is so necessary and so important that sacrificing ten, twenty, or thirty children a year is a good bargain. The Carthaginian children that were rolled into a burning pit of fire were chosen and marked for sacrifice. In the United States, the killings are random—no one knows which children in which unassuming school will confront a killer. No one knows how many children exactly will die. The only certainty is that they will die and that no one will do anything about it.


The unfettered freedom to carry assault weapons, American society has deemed, is so necessary and so important that sacrificing ten, twenty, or thirty children a year is a good bargain.

Looking back into ancient history, child sacrifice seems the epitome of barbarism. And it is this barbarism into which the United States appears to have descended. The right to bear arms—including assault rifles whose entire purpose is to kill large numbers of victims as fast as possible—is more important than the lives of American children. The children of the poor are at particular risk, as those families don’t have the wherewithal to escape to safer schools in exclusive enclaves. But as we saw ten years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, this American gun depravity can strike just about anywhere.

The killings in Uvalde, Texas, are the latest episode of child sacrifice in the United States. On May 24, an eighteen-year-old gunman stormed into Robb Elementary School in the south Texas town. He holed himself up in a fourth-grade classroom. There were only two more days left in the school year. Some children had just received awards for being on the honor roll. There he shot nineteen children and two teachers. Other students and at least one adult were reported to be hospitalized; the death toll may rise further. For those who survive, their lives will be scarred by the trauma of watching one and then another and then another of their classmates being shot along with their teacher.

As with most rituals, America has become practiced in handling the aftermath of school shootings. The security “experts” are lined up and paraded on cable news channels with incredible alacrity, all sporting appropriately solemn faces as they discuss the unfolding horror. In the twenty-four hours immediately after the event, the death toll rises, the parents are told, the country finds out. As is the case with rituals, everything that happens from this point on feels scripted, or rather, is scripted. There is the dead-end outrage, the futile presidential address, and the dogged stance of gun rights advocates insisting that the incident is not about guns at all. Talking points quickly replicate on right-wing channels: teachers should carry weapons; schools should have only one door. Anything to divert the attention from the availability of lethal weapons to any and all.

Those Americans whose children have not been victimized by heavily armed gunmen hug their children close and wonder if the next shooting will be at their children’s school. It very well could be. In the cruelest parallel, just like the tiny bones of child victims from three thousand years ago have to be tested carefully with the most advanced methods, so, too, did the dead of the latest American school shooting. The identity of some of the dead children had to be confirmed by DNA testing.

The barbarity of an America that can bear to witness this over and over again seems as much of an anathema as an ancient culture’s cruel penchant for sacrificing babies to a fire god. It truly takes a craven people to witness not one but two mass shootings in ten days and yet be too paralyzed to ensure that they do not happen again. In the days to come, nineteen small coffins will be buried, and America will see the raw grief of the parents whose worlds have ended. One side will discuss the savagery of making mass killing weapons available so easily, the other will use mental health lingo to insist that such incidents can never be stopped, or that gun control is an ineffectual solution.

Carthaginian child sacrifice ended when the city-state was sacked by the Romans. The culture itself and the belief in the powerful potential of human sacrifice did not end until the culture was annihilated. The day after the tragedy, Texas politicians from Governor Greg Abbott to Senator Ted Cruz arranged themselves on a stage for a press conference, a cabal of white male elders (and a few token women and persons of color in the back) murmuring words about the deaths of brown children. They told the world that Uvalde as a community had “mental health” issues that needed to be addressed. At this point, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke could not bear this dastardly show of feigned solemnity and victim blaming; he came up to the stage and directly addressed Abbott, saying, “This is on you.” He was told to sit down. “You are doing nothing. You are all doing nothing!” O’Rourke said. He was quickly accosted and silenced, and someone among the group of white men gathered on stage yelled, “You’re out of line!” Another was heard to call him a “sick son of a bitch.” Even that intervention appeared to be part of the regular programming.

America's gun obsession is a cultural disease

Despite a long-running national debate, the problem is only growing worse

JAMES ZOGBY

Assault weapons have grown in popularity in the US since the expiration of a ban on them in 2004. AFP

It’s difficult to find the words that adequately describe most Americans’ feelings on first learning of the massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Texas last week. There was shock, fear, even nausea and then disgust at the realisation that this nightmare the country experienced too many times before was playing out again.

As expected, the next day’s papers were filled with graphs and charts showing how many mass shootings America has had (an average of one a day); how many school massacres it’s had in the past few decades (dozens); how many gun homicides (50 a day); and how many guns are owned by US civilians (more than 400,000,000). Bottom line: Americans own more guns and have a higher per capita murder rate and mass causality events annually – by far – than any other developed country on Earth.

No matter how many times they are told this and how many outrages they endure, Americans know in their hearts that nothing will be done. And so, they are resigned to live with fear, knowing the nightmare will return.

Let’s face it: the US, in this sense, is a troubled country. Its debate on gun violence can best be described as pathetic. Republicans and some Democrats fearful of getting in the crosshairs of the “gun lobby” refuse to take any action. They refuse to allow even limited controls on guns, arguing that the unfettered right to own weapons is sacred. The solution to gun violence, they argue, is more guns.

Having seen legislation to ban assault weapons or place limits on gun purchases routinely defeated, Democrats have either given up trying or been reduced to offering weak proposals. The result: Each new tragedy gives birth to short-lived horror, a bit of finger-pointing, a half-hearted attempt to pass some limited reforms and then failure.

The reality is deeper than policies or legislation. It is not just that America’s stockpile of guns is too sophisticated or that it have too many of them. The root problem is its sick "gun culture".

My generation grew up playing "cowboys and Indians" or "cops and robbers". If we didn't have cap pistols or toy rifles, we simply improvised with a pointed finger, a thumb trigger and "pow, pow, you're dead". My grandchildren do not play these games. Instead, they act out more fanciful tales of fantasy futuristic heroes, all possessing more potent weapons. But they will also make do, when needed, with sticks or fingers morphing them into weapons possessed of all sorts of destructive powers. And the video games they play and movies they watch are largely based on killing – so much so that it has become normalised

.

A shooting at a Texas elementary school in May left 19 children and two teachers dead. Reuters

If we didn't have cap pistols or toy rifles, we simply improvised with a pointed finger

From cradle to grave, Americans are fed a steady diet of guns and violence. From cartoons, westerns or cop shows to video games and Quentin Tarantino's "bullet and blood fests", guns and shooting and killing are ingrained into America’s "deep culture". Like home-made apple pie, guns have become part of what America is as a nation.

There is a scene in the film-noir cult classic Gun Crazy, in which Bart, the film's main character, is staring longingly into a store window as a young boy. The object of his desire is a six-shooter. Unable to resist its call, he shatters the glass and attempts to steal the weapon, only to be arrested in the act.

The next scene has Bart standing before a judge trying to explain his obsession with guns. He tells the court: "I feel good when I'm shooting them. I feel awful good inside, like I'm somebody."

Bart's fixation with the weapon is pathological, and it leads ultimately to his demise. When I see the look on the faces of gun enthusiasts lining up to make what they fear may be their last purchase before "Democrats take our guns away", I think of Bart. When I watch them sensually cradling their assault weapons or "zoned out" at the shooting range, I think of Bart, knowing that nothing good can come of it.

We know all this. And yet there continues to be a pathological obsession not only with owning weapons, but also with blocking any reasonable controls on their ownership. The modus operandi of this lobby is simple and direct. They allow no discussion, no compromise, no concessions and no wavering or weakness. And they mask their deadly advocacy with the US Constitution, arguing that what is at stake is the very survival of America's freedoms. In the process, they further inflame the passions of their adherents.

In the end, Americans have a "gun crazy" culture, armed to the teeth, with some believing that they are the true patriots defending liberty against tyranny. When we add to this mix all of the resentments and pressures that gave birth to the Tea Party and Trumpism (including a not-so-subtle appeal to race), we are left with a dangerous and volatile brew.

Americans will see more angry debate. They may pass some weak and ineffective legislation. And then they’ll move on to another issue that will distract them until the next massacre occurs. And another one will occur, because until there is a prolonged and serious national discussion about the country’s troubled obsession with guns and purge ourselves of this pathology, it will only be skirting around the edges of an issue that is killing its people.

Published: May 30, 2022

James Zogby
Dr James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute and a columnist for The National

Meet Oregon's Tina Kotek, who hopes to be America's first lesbian governor

The former Oregon House speaker won the state’s Democratic primary, though she’ll face headwinds in November as Republicans eye the governor’s mansion.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tina Kotek, left, is embraced by her wife, Aimee Kotek Wilson, during a primary election party at Revolution Hall in Portland, Ore., on May 17.

Beth Nakamura / The Oregonian via AP

May 30, 2022
By Matt Lavietes

Tina Kotek is hoping to make political history again. She became the country’s first out lesbian speaker of a state House of Representatives in 2013. She broke barriers once again by becoming Oregon’s longest-serving speaker, before stepping down in January to run for governor.

Now, after winning the state’s Democratic nomination for governor last week, Kotek hopes to add another notch to her political belt by becoming the first lesbian governor in the United States.

“It’s not why I’m running,” Kotek, 55, said. “But I also know that it can create inspiration for other young people to be like, ‘Look, life can get better. I can do whatever I want, because look at this person or that person.’ So, it’d be an honor.”

Oregon Rep. Tina Kotek speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 2016.

David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images

To achieve that, she’ll have to get past Republican Christine Drazan, the former minority leader of the Oregon House, in November’s open general election. And amid the tough current national environment for Democrats, Republicans are eyeing the Oregon governor’s mansion as an opportunity to score a win in a solidly blue state.If elected, Kotek would follow three other LGBTQ Democrats who have headed a state government: former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who came out as gay during his resignation speech in 2004; Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who is gay; and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, who is bisexual.

Kotek was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, and made her way west in 1987 to attend the University of Oregon, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in religious studies. She then went to the University of Washington to pursue her master’s degree in comparative religion and international studies.

Kotek, who is Roman Catholic, said that while many religious institutions have rejected LGBTQ people, religious teachings — at least the way she interprets them — have always played an important role in her life.

“I think God has said, ‘People are who they are. I’ve made them that way. Let’s support and celebrate people in their authentic selves,’” she said. “That’s what I believe in, and I think that’s what a lot of people believe. I know a lot of Oregon voters believe that.”

As she learned about different religions as a student, Kotek also had another spiritual awakening of a different sort: She came out as a lesbian. Like her learnings about religion, Kotek said that her coming out experience has equally shaped her success and political style.

“When you’re coming out, you have to build a resilience of dealing with people who treat you differently for who you are, and that has made me a stronger person,” Kotek said. “It’s also made me open to saying, ‘Look, I want to understand where you’re coming from and let’s have a conversation.’”

“I’ll talk to anybody,” she added. “Because at the end of the day, we’re all human beings.”

After graduate school, Kotek returned to Oregon to work in public policy for various nonprofits. In 2007, she was elected to the state’s House of Representatives.

If elected governor, Kotek said she intends to use her bully pulpit to fight back against the historic number of anti-LGBTQ bills circulating in state legislatures throughout the country.

More than 320 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group. Many of the bills aim to limit the instruction of LGBTQ issues in schools, trans youths’ ability to participate in school sports and trans youths’ access to gender-affirming medical care. The Oregon Legislature, however, is not currently considering any such bills, according to HRC.

“It’s hard when you’re young,” Kotek said. “You’re trying to figure out who you are, and to have people coming after you, feeling like you can’t be your authentic self right now, that’s hurtful. It’s damaging for LGBTQ youths, who have a higher degree of suicidality, and it’s dangerous.”

Kotek added that she believes the problems that the slate of legislation aims to solve are “manufactured” to distract Americans from more pressing issues such as health care costs and inflation.

“Picking on a couple of trans kids who want to be their authentic self and play sports? Is that really the issue that we need to be focusing on in this country?” Kotek asked. “I don’t think so.”

In recent weeks, the LGBTQ community has also been rattled that some of their federal rights may be stripped away by the Supreme Court after a leaked draft majority opinion this month showed the court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion rights decision. Politico originally reported the leaked draft of the court’s opinion, which sent political shockwaves across the nation.

Kotek said that if elected, she would “look into” modifying Oregon’s Constitution to protect same-sex marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized nationwide in a landmark ruling in 2015.

“We’re in that kind of moment where people want to push back, whether it’s because of raw politics or fear,” Kotek said. “What I would say is, let’s have dialogue, let’s work through it, let’s keep moving forward.”

“That’s why I consider myself a progressive,” she added. “We can always make the world better, we can always move forward.”