“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”
―
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Wildland Firefighters Struggle To Keep Up With Raging Wildfires
Sep 23, 2022
NBC News
Progress is being made on California’s largest wildfire of the year as crews battle the flames on the frontlines, leaving some to deal with a different kind of burnout. NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin has the story of one 15-year wildland smokejumper veteran who explains why many in the profession are facing labor strains as catastrophic fires become more prevalent.
JUST THIS YEAR BIDEN INCREASED THEIR WAGES TO $15HR. THEY GET NO OT PAY
Sep 23, 2022
NBC News
Progress is being made on California’s largest wildfire of the year as crews battle the flames on the frontlines, leaving some to deal with a different kind of burnout. NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin has the story of one 15-year wildland smokejumper veteran who explains why many in the profession are facing labor strains as catastrophic fires become more prevalent.
AND $15HR IS TOO MUCH FOR SOME FOLKS
California Is Dependent on Prison Labor for Fighting Fires. This Must End.
A prison firefighter from Oak Glen Conservation Camp looks out of a gated window as he is transported to a work assignment under the authority of CAL FIRE on September 28, 2017, near Yucaipa, California.
DAVID MCNEW / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Abby Cunniff,
California’s Incarcerated Public Workers
The low or unpaid workforce needed for wildfire management in California has long been disciplined by the police and prisons. “Paddywagon raids” carried out by fire wardens and sheriffs targeted “vagrants” who couldn’t prove their employment and thus would be either available to work in the forests or sent to jail if they didn’t. These took place in the early 20th century, as large groups of laborers were necessary for state-mandated projects in wildfire management and timber. The California prisons had auxiliary “road camps” starting in 1913, where incarcerated people built roads and highways throughout the state. The first iteration of “fire camp” was a stop-gap program started by a Los Angeles probation officer during the Great Depression to reduce the costs of incarceration in a crowded city jail.
The Los Angeles model caught on and during World War II, sentenced prisoners were given vacant positions in both manufacturing and forestry. Prison forest camps were established during the war, due to the Board of Forestry’s concerns that the state lacked sufficient labor power to counteract wartime arson attempts from Axis forces, which had occurred on occasion in Oregon. In the same period, the California Department of Corrections was formed as a separate entity from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1944 and these prison fire camps became a centerpiece of this new department. “Forest labor camps were the flagship of the department’s new approach,” wrote historian Volker Janssen.
When Gov. Pat Brown took office in 1959, he sought to expand the number of prisoners in camp and the rehabilitation programming in the Conservation Camp System. The focus on creating good workers and well-adjusted citizens out of the prisoners was particularly apparent in the Conservation Camp Program, which took its name after FDR’s insistence on conserving the resources and men of the nation. Brown’s unique contribution to the conservation program was construction of the Conservation Centers, first in Susanville, then in Jamestown and Chino, in order to recruit and train more individuals to join hand crews for forestry, trail maintenance and wildfire management. Brown championed these centers with the combined support of a state senator from Susanville, as well as the director of corrections and director of natural resources.
The Susanville prison, originally named the California Conservation Center, was built on 1,100 acres with open dormitories with 16 people in each, which was meant to replicate the number of people assigned to each hand crew. Programming at the center was meant to replicate military training for physical aptitude, with additional classroom training on firefighting in order to prepare incarcerated people before they were stationed at one of the Northern California fire camps. However, the number of people who were eligible and interested in working in conservation camps began to wane as drug convictions increased in the late 1960s and more placements were demanded in remote Northern areas of the state. Most prisoners had preferred to participate in the program because of the freedom it afforded them to meet with their family, but camp placements were more than 6 to 8 hours north of Los Angeles urban centers at this point.
The California prison system began to balloon in the 1970s, as it transformed into the “golden gulag,” and the Conservation Center held less and less relevance to the mission of the Department of Corrections. However, when the Susanville Center was slated to be closed in April 1973, the town pulled together a “Save Our Center Committee” which argued that the closure of the Susanville prison would spell economic ruination for the town, which had come to depend on the tax revenue of guards to support local education and government programs.
Even more damning, however, was the argument that the town would not be able to make do without the labor of incarcerated people used for wildfire management, fuel reductions and natural hazards mitigation. They reasoned that if the labor of these prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but their town would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free as a part of the Conservation Center programming.
After a year of rallies and town hall meetings, the “Save Our Center Committee” successfully lobbied the Department of Corrections to convert the Conservation Center into a medium-security facility. It was renamed the California Correctional Center, and was used as a reception center for other prisons instead of primarily as a training ground for the fire camp program. In the following decades, the prison became overcrowded and held 4,400 people, which was nearly four times the original capacity of 1,200. As the number of guards increased to keep up with the incarcerated population, the prison’s payroll skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 1963 to $34 million in 1995.
The Susanville residents lobbying for the protection of their prison won their demand to safeguard prison jobs — for both free and incarcerated people working in them. They recruited the construction of another facility in their town, High Desert State Prison, and they have kept open the Antelope Conservation Camp in their town as well. However, the pressure to reduce the overcrowded state prison system and sentencing reforms have forced the state to reduce the number of Level 1 prisoners, which has limited recruitment of incarcerated people for wildfire management labor.
Replacing Prisoner Labor?
The budgets from 2020-2022 have successively implemented Newsom’s “right-sizing” and closure of camps and prisons throughout the state, and a mandate to limit public spending on prisons. Newsom successfully closed one prison in Tracy, and has plans to close three more in the next three years. After writing it into the 2020-21 budget, CAL FIRE and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released a joint statement announcing the closure of eight fire camp locations, bringing the total in operation to 35 throughout the state. Throughout these projected closures, tenuous agreements have been drawn up between the California prison guards’ union (CCPOA) and Newsom about staffing cuts, salary increases and campaign support in the wake of the decreasing total population of California prisons. Only after Newsom promised a bonus and yearly raise to all prison guards did their union write out a check of $1.75 million for Newsom’s recall defense campaign, which was the single largest contribution from a state employee union.Environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.
Throughout the 1970s, lawsuits from prisoners alleged that their living conditions were grotesque. Their discontent culminated in a protest against the guards in 1977. Today, incarcerated people say the facility is worse than ever. More than 100 incarcerated people at the California Correctional Center in Susanville filed an amicus brief in May 2022 testifying about the poor conditions of the facility in order to underscore the urgency of the state’s plan to permanently close the facility. They explained that the roofs of the building often leak and leave their cells flooded for days, which contributes to the growth of algae and black mold throughout the facility. As Truthout has previously covered in the case of other California prisons, environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.
Reducing prison population and program sizes will reduce state expenditures in one way but will require more spending to replace the millions of work hours that Conservation Camp Program hand crews have carried out on controlled fires, trail maintenance, fuel reduction and firefighting.
The decrease in incarcerated people has meant that there are 100 fewer hand crews available to CAL FIRE. The 2021 and 2022 budgets have replaced the Conservation Camp Program hand crews with people from the California Conservation Corps and California Military Department, but so far, they have only been able to scrape together funding for 24 additional crews, meaning that CAL FIRE is still short about 1,000 frontline wildfire and forestry workers.
Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, one of the state’s largest prison abolitionist organizations, argues that this is exactly the opportunity for a just transition away from carceral facilities supporting town economies, and a need for state investment in careers in wildfire management and conservation to replace prisons. Experts in forestry policy agree with Kaneda, and argue that California’s forest restoration requires coordination with Tribal governments, recruitment of formerly incarcerated firefighters, and improvements in wages and conditions for all forestry and hand crew workers.
The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program takes this proposal a step further; it trains formerly incarcerated people to become professional firefighters. Many of their program participants were in fire camp themselves and want to join the ranks of CAL FIRE and county fire departments but encounter many difficulties doing so. However, as journalist Adam Mahoney reported in the news site Capital B, Royal Ramey, co-founder of the organization and a former incarcerated firefighter, speaks enthusiastically about the possibilities for careers in firefighting. “We need firefighters, and to be doing a job that is needed by the world makes it more fulfilling,” Ramey told Capital B. “Purpose is something they take from you in prison; this gives it back.”
Abby Cunniff is a Ph.D. student in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Abby Cunniff,
September 23, 2022
PART OF THE SERIES
The Road to Abolition
The Road to Abolition
On September 7, 2022, after many attempted delays from the City of Susanville, California, a Lassen County judge ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to close one of Susanville’s two prisons. The court case and public debate over the prison closure has been almost entirely based on the anticipated loss of 1,000 jobs in the prison, but the closure of this facility marks an enormous shift in the use of prison labor for public work. The California Correctional Center in Susanville is set to be closed by June 2023. It is one of two remaining training hubs for the California Conservation Camp Program, which, before 2019, made up 192 of 208 hand crews working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (also known as CAL FIRE).
Although popular references to prison labor today often focus on the production of manufactured goods for private companies, public work programs make up significantly more of the total work assignments in prison. In fact, public work assignments are a larger percentage of prison jobs than government and private manufacturing combined.
Public work is a catchall category that refers to many types of manual labor for state governments including doing road work, cleaning up landfills and hazardous spills, moving debris and clearing roads after a hurricane, filling sandbags to mitigate flooding, carrying out forestry work in state-owned forests and firefighting.
Many Western states — like Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Oregon — have “conservation camp” programs where a few hundred incarcerated people are put to work on behalf of natural resource departments on vegetation management, hazardous fuel reduction projects and wildland fire suppression. California’s conservation camp program is the largest of these by far, employing somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 incarcerated people across the state in an average year to carry out millions of hours of work for CAL FIRE.
A groundbreaking new report on incarcerated workers by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law Center aggregated all types of prison jobs in state and federal facilities. They broke down the types of prison jobs into four main sectors: maintenance of prison facilities (80 percent), production of goods and services for government agencies (6.5 percent), public work (8 percent) and work for private industries (>1 percent). The report estimates that 63,000 of all incarcerated workers are doing public work (8 percent of prison jobs).
Incarcerated firefighters face much higher rates of injury than professional firefighters, and are largely unable to negotiate the conditions of their work. A TIME investigative report found that incarcerated firefighters were four times more likely to be injured from “object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures” than professional firefighters working on the same fire.
These types of programs use incarcerated workers to carry out year-round wildfire management labor, largely because they comprise an incredibly cheap labor pool for the state governments dealing with increasingly devastating fire seasons. However, California’s Conservation Camp Program, also known as “fire camp,” has been using this labor force for close to a century, and Susanville’s embattled prison has been at the heart of this program.If the labor of prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free.
Susanville’s California Correctional Center is closing for two reasons. Firstly, the prison would require half a billion dollars in repairs to be up to code, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, making it a prime target for closure. Secondly, there are fewer “low-level offenders” eligible for fire camp, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has reduced the size of the conservation camp program and is routing all remaining training for the program through the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.
The smaller number of Level 1 (or “low level”) incarcerated people is a direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California must release people from state prisons in order to reduce overcrowding. In tandem with other sentencing reforms and California’s Public Safety Realignment Initiative, federal enforcement of the 2011 ruling has reduced the number of people convicted of so-called nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious crimes, and these are the people who have historically made up 92 percent of California’s state hand crews.
This year, CAL FIRE reported that there are only 37 hand crews made up of incarcerated people, and only about 75 total hand crews, which is less than 25 percent of the standard 208 hand crews that CAL FIRE had relied upon. To restore the forestry and firefighting capacity of CAL FIRE, it must train and recruit people with livable wages and workplace protections.
Although popular references to prison labor today often focus on the production of manufactured goods for private companies, public work programs make up significantly more of the total work assignments in prison. In fact, public work assignments are a larger percentage of prison jobs than government and private manufacturing combined.
Public work is a catchall category that refers to many types of manual labor for state governments including doing road work, cleaning up landfills and hazardous spills, moving debris and clearing roads after a hurricane, filling sandbags to mitigate flooding, carrying out forestry work in state-owned forests and firefighting.
Many Western states — like Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Oregon — have “conservation camp” programs where a few hundred incarcerated people are put to work on behalf of natural resource departments on vegetation management, hazardous fuel reduction projects and wildland fire suppression. California’s conservation camp program is the largest of these by far, employing somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 incarcerated people across the state in an average year to carry out millions of hours of work for CAL FIRE.
A groundbreaking new report on incarcerated workers by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law Center aggregated all types of prison jobs in state and federal facilities. They broke down the types of prison jobs into four main sectors: maintenance of prison facilities (80 percent), production of goods and services for government agencies (6.5 percent), public work (8 percent) and work for private industries (>1 percent). The report estimates that 63,000 of all incarcerated workers are doing public work (8 percent of prison jobs).
Incarcerated firefighters face much higher rates of injury than professional firefighters, and are largely unable to negotiate the conditions of their work. A TIME investigative report found that incarcerated firefighters were four times more likely to be injured from “object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures” than professional firefighters working on the same fire.
These types of programs use incarcerated workers to carry out year-round wildfire management labor, largely because they comprise an incredibly cheap labor pool for the state governments dealing with increasingly devastating fire seasons. However, California’s Conservation Camp Program, also known as “fire camp,” has been using this labor force for close to a century, and Susanville’s embattled prison has been at the heart of this program.If the labor of prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free.
Susanville’s California Correctional Center is closing for two reasons. Firstly, the prison would require half a billion dollars in repairs to be up to code, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, making it a prime target for closure. Secondly, there are fewer “low-level offenders” eligible for fire camp, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has reduced the size of the conservation camp program and is routing all remaining training for the program through the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.
The smaller number of Level 1 (or “low level”) incarcerated people is a direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California must release people from state prisons in order to reduce overcrowding. In tandem with other sentencing reforms and California’s Public Safety Realignment Initiative, federal enforcement of the 2011 ruling has reduced the number of people convicted of so-called nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious crimes, and these are the people who have historically made up 92 percent of California’s state hand crews.
This year, CAL FIRE reported that there are only 37 hand crews made up of incarcerated people, and only about 75 total hand crews, which is less than 25 percent of the standard 208 hand crews that CAL FIRE had relied upon. To restore the forestry and firefighting capacity of CAL FIRE, it must train and recruit people with livable wages and workplace protections.
California’s Incarcerated Public Workers
The low or unpaid workforce needed for wildfire management in California has long been disciplined by the police and prisons. “Paddywagon raids” carried out by fire wardens and sheriffs targeted “vagrants” who couldn’t prove their employment and thus would be either available to work in the forests or sent to jail if they didn’t. These took place in the early 20th century, as large groups of laborers were necessary for state-mandated projects in wildfire management and timber. The California prisons had auxiliary “road camps” starting in 1913, where incarcerated people built roads and highways throughout the state. The first iteration of “fire camp” was a stop-gap program started by a Los Angeles probation officer during the Great Depression to reduce the costs of incarceration in a crowded city jail.
The Los Angeles model caught on and during World War II, sentenced prisoners were given vacant positions in both manufacturing and forestry. Prison forest camps were established during the war, due to the Board of Forestry’s concerns that the state lacked sufficient labor power to counteract wartime arson attempts from Axis forces, which had occurred on occasion in Oregon. In the same period, the California Department of Corrections was formed as a separate entity from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1944 and these prison fire camps became a centerpiece of this new department. “Forest labor camps were the flagship of the department’s new approach,” wrote historian Volker Janssen.
When Gov. Pat Brown took office in 1959, he sought to expand the number of prisoners in camp and the rehabilitation programming in the Conservation Camp System. The focus on creating good workers and well-adjusted citizens out of the prisoners was particularly apparent in the Conservation Camp Program, which took its name after FDR’s insistence on conserving the resources and men of the nation. Brown’s unique contribution to the conservation program was construction of the Conservation Centers, first in Susanville, then in Jamestown and Chino, in order to recruit and train more individuals to join hand crews for forestry, trail maintenance and wildfire management. Brown championed these centers with the combined support of a state senator from Susanville, as well as the director of corrections and director of natural resources.
The Susanville prison, originally named the California Conservation Center, was built on 1,100 acres with open dormitories with 16 people in each, which was meant to replicate the number of people assigned to each hand crew. Programming at the center was meant to replicate military training for physical aptitude, with additional classroom training on firefighting in order to prepare incarcerated people before they were stationed at one of the Northern California fire camps. However, the number of people who were eligible and interested in working in conservation camps began to wane as drug convictions increased in the late 1960s and more placements were demanded in remote Northern areas of the state. Most prisoners had preferred to participate in the program because of the freedom it afforded them to meet with their family, but camp placements were more than 6 to 8 hours north of Los Angeles urban centers at this point.
The California prison system began to balloon in the 1970s, as it transformed into the “golden gulag,” and the Conservation Center held less and less relevance to the mission of the Department of Corrections. However, when the Susanville Center was slated to be closed in April 1973, the town pulled together a “Save Our Center Committee” which argued that the closure of the Susanville prison would spell economic ruination for the town, which had come to depend on the tax revenue of guards to support local education and government programs.
Even more damning, however, was the argument that the town would not be able to make do without the labor of incarcerated people used for wildfire management, fuel reductions and natural hazards mitigation. They reasoned that if the labor of these prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but their town would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free as a part of the Conservation Center programming.
After a year of rallies and town hall meetings, the “Save Our Center Committee” successfully lobbied the Department of Corrections to convert the Conservation Center into a medium-security facility. It was renamed the California Correctional Center, and was used as a reception center for other prisons instead of primarily as a training ground for the fire camp program. In the following decades, the prison became overcrowded and held 4,400 people, which was nearly four times the original capacity of 1,200. As the number of guards increased to keep up with the incarcerated population, the prison’s payroll skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 1963 to $34 million in 1995.
The Susanville residents lobbying for the protection of their prison won their demand to safeguard prison jobs — for both free and incarcerated people working in them. They recruited the construction of another facility in their town, High Desert State Prison, and they have kept open the Antelope Conservation Camp in their town as well. However, the pressure to reduce the overcrowded state prison system and sentencing reforms have forced the state to reduce the number of Level 1 prisoners, which has limited recruitment of incarcerated people for wildfire management labor.
Replacing Prisoner Labor?
The budgets from 2020-2022 have successively implemented Newsom’s “right-sizing” and closure of camps and prisons throughout the state, and a mandate to limit public spending on prisons. Newsom successfully closed one prison in Tracy, and has plans to close three more in the next three years. After writing it into the 2020-21 budget, CAL FIRE and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released a joint statement announcing the closure of eight fire camp locations, bringing the total in operation to 35 throughout the state. Throughout these projected closures, tenuous agreements have been drawn up between the California prison guards’ union (CCPOA) and Newsom about staffing cuts, salary increases and campaign support in the wake of the decreasing total population of California prisons. Only after Newsom promised a bonus and yearly raise to all prison guards did their union write out a check of $1.75 million for Newsom’s recall defense campaign, which was the single largest contribution from a state employee union.Environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.
Throughout the 1970s, lawsuits from prisoners alleged that their living conditions were grotesque. Their discontent culminated in a protest against the guards in 1977. Today, incarcerated people say the facility is worse than ever. More than 100 incarcerated people at the California Correctional Center in Susanville filed an amicus brief in May 2022 testifying about the poor conditions of the facility in order to underscore the urgency of the state’s plan to permanently close the facility. They explained that the roofs of the building often leak and leave their cells flooded for days, which contributes to the growth of algae and black mold throughout the facility. As Truthout has previously covered in the case of other California prisons, environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.
Reducing prison population and program sizes will reduce state expenditures in one way but will require more spending to replace the millions of work hours that Conservation Camp Program hand crews have carried out on controlled fires, trail maintenance, fuel reduction and firefighting.
The decrease in incarcerated people has meant that there are 100 fewer hand crews available to CAL FIRE. The 2021 and 2022 budgets have replaced the Conservation Camp Program hand crews with people from the California Conservation Corps and California Military Department, but so far, they have only been able to scrape together funding for 24 additional crews, meaning that CAL FIRE is still short about 1,000 frontline wildfire and forestry workers.
Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, one of the state’s largest prison abolitionist organizations, argues that this is exactly the opportunity for a just transition away from carceral facilities supporting town economies, and a need for state investment in careers in wildfire management and conservation to replace prisons. Experts in forestry policy agree with Kaneda, and argue that California’s forest restoration requires coordination with Tribal governments, recruitment of formerly incarcerated firefighters, and improvements in wages and conditions for all forestry and hand crew workers.
The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program takes this proposal a step further; it trains formerly incarcerated people to become professional firefighters. Many of their program participants were in fire camp themselves and want to join the ranks of CAL FIRE and county fire departments but encounter many difficulties doing so. However, as journalist Adam Mahoney reported in the news site Capital B, Royal Ramey, co-founder of the organization and a former incarcerated firefighter, speaks enthusiastically about the possibilities for careers in firefighting. “We need firefighters, and to be doing a job that is needed by the world makes it more fulfilling,” Ramey told Capital B. “Purpose is something they take from you in prison; this gives it back.”
Abby Cunniff is a Ph.D. student in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
U$A
Two Powerful Unions Have Come Together to Fight the Right’s Attack on Higher Ed
Izabel Depina, student organizer and vice president of Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts, chants during a rally held by the American Federation of Teachers outside the statehouse in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 19, 2020.
JESSICA RINALDI / THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
According to “America’s Censored Classrooms,” a report released in August by the nonprofit human rights group PEN America, 39 percent of the 137 educational gag orders introduced in state legislatures so far this year have targeted colleges and universities. Most of them focus on race and LGBTQIA+ issues and seek to suppress discussion of topics the right wing deems “divisive.”
This, PEN concludes, is an about-face for the right: “Just four or five years ago, Republican lawmakers were touting so-called Campus Free Speech Acts purportedly designed to protect intellectual diversity and free expression. Now many are targeting higher education with some of the most censorious language to date.”
Indeed, bills to restrict the freedom to teach and learn have sparked outrage — and organizing — on campuses throughout the country. In addition to increased COVID-inspired health and safety concerns and an ever-increasing spike in the number of low-paid contingent laborers, it is not surprising that campus workers are mobilizing in every region of the U.S. and pushing for a New Deal for Higher Education. The effort is being led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), two groups that entered into a permanent affiliation agreement that took effect on August 1.
The agreement builds on more than a decade of joint work in support of intellectual freedom but allows the 50,000-member AAUP to retain its independence and autonomy.
In promoting the New Deal for Higher Education campaign, both the 1.7 million-member AFT and the AAUP say they are elevating the “common good,” advancing a platform that defends academic freedom, and promoting shared governance between administrators and faculty. In addition, they are mobilizing members to push Congress and the states to reinvest in higher education, oppose censorship, cancel all student debt and protect part-time employees from arbitrary firings.
The stakes have rarely been higher.
“People see that democracy is under assault,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told Truthout. “We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity. We have to fight authoritarianism as we work to make a difference in people’s lives and communities.”
Paul Davis, national vice president of the AAUP and an emeritus professor at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, agrees and sees the affiliation as providing enhanced organizing opportunities. “This country and its people are changing,” Davis says. “OK, so let’s adjust and not throw our hands up in the air in despair. When the economy changes, we have to be able to react; we have to change, too.”“People see that democracy is under assault. We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity.”
The pace of change, he adds, has escalated. In fact, he reports that shortly after campuses shut down because of COVID-19, both the AAUP and the AFT began receiving requests for help in forming bargaining units. “We began to hear primarily from adjuncts, in every part of the country, who were being treated horribly. They were mobilizing for respect, job security and better pay,” he says.
But it was not just adjuncts who were fed up — and riled up. Cathy Wagner, a professor of creative writing at Miami University of Ohio, began working with the Faculty Alliance of Miami in the spring of 2020, following the announced layoff, in March 2020, of 150 full-and-part-time faculty for the Fall 2020 semester.
“The cuts meant that everyone’s workload was going to go up,” Wagner explains. “Worse, it meant that we would not be able to work with students in the way that we wanted to. It was a scary time, but we talked to a lot of people who’d formed academic unions at their schools. In some of these places, faculty and administrators had come together to discuss budget projections. This did not happen at Miami University. Our administrators refused to come to the table and discuss anything with us.”
During the subsequent 18 months, Wagner says Miami’s full-time faculty and librarians worked to organize the campus and got enough union cards signed to demand an election. Adjuncts, Wagner explains, were excluded because Ohio law bars part-time public employees from collective bargaining. Still, the full-timers prevailed.
But, Wagner says, the union still has not been recognized by Miami University’s administration.
“They are dragging their feet to slow down the process, quibbling over the composition of the bargaining unit,” she explains. “They want to keep librarians, visiting professors and non-tenure-track faculty out. We say ‘no,’ and are hoping the State Employee Relations Board will force them to stop stonewalling.” Wagner says the Faculty Alliance of Miami, in tandem with the AAUP and the AFT, is pushing the State Employee Relations Board to issue a decision on the make-up of the bargaining unit; since 9 of 10 public university faculty unions in Ohio include non-tenured faculty, “we believe that precedent is on our side,” she says.
Another issue has also promoted increased activism — and made the Faculty Alliance increasingly visible on campus. “Turns out, Miami had higher enrollment numbers for the 2021-2022 academic year than the administration expected,” Wagner says. “The college also got CARES Act money so we ended up with a $262 million surplus. It makes my stomach hurt to even think about this.”
Financial boondoggles notwithstanding, AFT/AAUP organizers say faculty throughout the country are united in demanding administrative transparency, faculty and staff input in decision-making, better pay and the academic freedom to determine what course materials to use and what content to include in the courses they teach.
Ernesto Longa, president of United Academics at the University of New Mexico (UNM), says those concerns motivated faculty to begin organizing there in 2014. He credits both the AFT and the AAUP with helping them win union recognition in 2019. “We began negotiating our first contract at the beginning of 2020,” Longa told Truthout. “Then the pandemic hit and since we were dealing with a very anti-union administration it took us 18 months to hammer out the first three-year contract. Thankfully, the AFT provided some of the heavy lifters who helped us with table negotiations and research.” The successful result included a 7.12 percent raise in year one, with annual wage reopeners during each of the following two years covered by the contract.“Every AAUP member is now an AFT member. Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom.”
Longa says that while he and the negotiating team were pleased with the initial contract, everyone understands that more needs to be done to ensure that adjuncts and others are paid decently and have job security. “There are still adjuncts who make $2,500 for teaching a three-credit class,” he says. He also notes that United Academics still has a lot to learn about organizing and negotiating. “We’re slowly finding out just how pro-employer the law is when it comes to contract interpretation,” he says. “We now know that our language has to be precise. A clause that says UNM may do something, rather than shall do something, allows UNM to sidestep the protections we thought we’d won.”
Another challenge, Longa continues, involves outreach to form a coalition between United Academics and members of unions that represent other staff at UNM — the college’s hospital employees, food service workers, graduate students, security staff and medical interns and residents belong to what he calls a “smorgasbord of unions” — to build solidarity.
“We want to do wall-to-wall organizing and coordinate our bargaining efforts,” he says.
Unlike the faculty at UMN, faculty at New Jersey’s Rutgers University have been organized for decades. Nonetheless, they have been working without a contract for more than three months. Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations, says that although students and faculty recently returned to campus, staff are already planning a series of escalating actions to ensure that they get an equitable contract.
“We’ve been in an ongoing and beneficial affiliation with the AFT and the AAUP since the early 2000s,” Givan told Truthout. “Right now, we’re seeing heightened awareness of the need for greater investment in public higher ed due to the outsourcing of staff roles and increased dependence on adjunct labor.” Additionally, she sees the need to defend academic freedom as a priority since 12 members of the Rutgers faculty are on the Professor Watchlist compiled by the right-wing Turning Point USA. All 12 have been targets of hate mail, doxing and smear campaigns because of their anti-racist and pro-LGBTQIA+ work.
While the University Faculty Senate has denounced the list, Givan nonetheless worries that some faculty may self-censor in an effort to avoid negative publicity.
That said, Givan says she is proud that Rutgers’s bargaining unit continues to be a leader in academic unionism, promoting equal pay for equal work for adjuncts, supporting environmental justice initiatives on- and off-campus, and opposing overspending on athletics. A recent scandal in which the 50-plus member football team racked up $450,000 in DoorDash bills — 19,745 orders between May 2021 and June 2022 — is a case in point.
Challenging this, and fighting attacks on higher education more broadly will, of course, be an uphill slog. At the same time, several recent campus labor victories bear mention. A five-day strike, led by AFT/AAUP members at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, ended in mid-September after 500 faculty walked off the job. Similarly, AFT/AAUP-organized faculty at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, reached a tentative agreement on a five-year contract, averting a strike earlier this month.
The AFT’s Randi Weingarten sees these victories as harbingers of future successes. “Every AAUP member is now an AFT member,” she says. “Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom. Both are under assault. Precarity has become a through line on campuses throughout the country, but people understand the importance of organizing. They know that we’re working to make our communities better and make a positive difference in people’s lives.”
Eleanor J. Bader is an award-winning journalist who writes about domestic social issues, movements for social change, books and art. In addition to Truthout, she writes for The Progressive, Lilith Magazine and blog, the LA Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review and other online and print publications.
September 23, 2022
According to “America’s Censored Classrooms,” a report released in August by the nonprofit human rights group PEN America, 39 percent of the 137 educational gag orders introduced in state legislatures so far this year have targeted colleges and universities. Most of them focus on race and LGBTQIA+ issues and seek to suppress discussion of topics the right wing deems “divisive.”
This, PEN concludes, is an about-face for the right: “Just four or five years ago, Republican lawmakers were touting so-called Campus Free Speech Acts purportedly designed to protect intellectual diversity and free expression. Now many are targeting higher education with some of the most censorious language to date.”
Indeed, bills to restrict the freedom to teach and learn have sparked outrage — and organizing — on campuses throughout the country. In addition to increased COVID-inspired health and safety concerns and an ever-increasing spike in the number of low-paid contingent laborers, it is not surprising that campus workers are mobilizing in every region of the U.S. and pushing for a New Deal for Higher Education. The effort is being led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), two groups that entered into a permanent affiliation agreement that took effect on August 1.
The agreement builds on more than a decade of joint work in support of intellectual freedom but allows the 50,000-member AAUP to retain its independence and autonomy.
In promoting the New Deal for Higher Education campaign, both the 1.7 million-member AFT and the AAUP say they are elevating the “common good,” advancing a platform that defends academic freedom, and promoting shared governance between administrators and faculty. In addition, they are mobilizing members to push Congress and the states to reinvest in higher education, oppose censorship, cancel all student debt and protect part-time employees from arbitrary firings.
The stakes have rarely been higher.
“People see that democracy is under assault,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told Truthout. “We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity. We have to fight authoritarianism as we work to make a difference in people’s lives and communities.”
Paul Davis, national vice president of the AAUP and an emeritus professor at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, agrees and sees the affiliation as providing enhanced organizing opportunities. “This country and its people are changing,” Davis says. “OK, so let’s adjust and not throw our hands up in the air in despair. When the economy changes, we have to be able to react; we have to change, too.”“People see that democracy is under assault. We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity.”
The pace of change, he adds, has escalated. In fact, he reports that shortly after campuses shut down because of COVID-19, both the AAUP and the AFT began receiving requests for help in forming bargaining units. “We began to hear primarily from adjuncts, in every part of the country, who were being treated horribly. They were mobilizing for respect, job security and better pay,” he says.
But it was not just adjuncts who were fed up — and riled up. Cathy Wagner, a professor of creative writing at Miami University of Ohio, began working with the Faculty Alliance of Miami in the spring of 2020, following the announced layoff, in March 2020, of 150 full-and-part-time faculty for the Fall 2020 semester.
“The cuts meant that everyone’s workload was going to go up,” Wagner explains. “Worse, it meant that we would not be able to work with students in the way that we wanted to. It was a scary time, but we talked to a lot of people who’d formed academic unions at their schools. In some of these places, faculty and administrators had come together to discuss budget projections. This did not happen at Miami University. Our administrators refused to come to the table and discuss anything with us.”
During the subsequent 18 months, Wagner says Miami’s full-time faculty and librarians worked to organize the campus and got enough union cards signed to demand an election. Adjuncts, Wagner explains, were excluded because Ohio law bars part-time public employees from collective bargaining. Still, the full-timers prevailed.
But, Wagner says, the union still has not been recognized by Miami University’s administration.
“They are dragging their feet to slow down the process, quibbling over the composition of the bargaining unit,” she explains. “They want to keep librarians, visiting professors and non-tenure-track faculty out. We say ‘no,’ and are hoping the State Employee Relations Board will force them to stop stonewalling.” Wagner says the Faculty Alliance of Miami, in tandem with the AAUP and the AFT, is pushing the State Employee Relations Board to issue a decision on the make-up of the bargaining unit; since 9 of 10 public university faculty unions in Ohio include non-tenured faculty, “we believe that precedent is on our side,” she says.
Another issue has also promoted increased activism — and made the Faculty Alliance increasingly visible on campus. “Turns out, Miami had higher enrollment numbers for the 2021-2022 academic year than the administration expected,” Wagner says. “The college also got CARES Act money so we ended up with a $262 million surplus. It makes my stomach hurt to even think about this.”
Financial boondoggles notwithstanding, AFT/AAUP organizers say faculty throughout the country are united in demanding administrative transparency, faculty and staff input in decision-making, better pay and the academic freedom to determine what course materials to use and what content to include in the courses they teach.
Ernesto Longa, president of United Academics at the University of New Mexico (UNM), says those concerns motivated faculty to begin organizing there in 2014. He credits both the AFT and the AAUP with helping them win union recognition in 2019. “We began negotiating our first contract at the beginning of 2020,” Longa told Truthout. “Then the pandemic hit and since we were dealing with a very anti-union administration it took us 18 months to hammer out the first three-year contract. Thankfully, the AFT provided some of the heavy lifters who helped us with table negotiations and research.” The successful result included a 7.12 percent raise in year one, with annual wage reopeners during each of the following two years covered by the contract.“Every AAUP member is now an AFT member. Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom.”
Longa says that while he and the negotiating team were pleased with the initial contract, everyone understands that more needs to be done to ensure that adjuncts and others are paid decently and have job security. “There are still adjuncts who make $2,500 for teaching a three-credit class,” he says. He also notes that United Academics still has a lot to learn about organizing and negotiating. “We’re slowly finding out just how pro-employer the law is when it comes to contract interpretation,” he says. “We now know that our language has to be precise. A clause that says UNM may do something, rather than shall do something, allows UNM to sidestep the protections we thought we’d won.”
Another challenge, Longa continues, involves outreach to form a coalition between United Academics and members of unions that represent other staff at UNM — the college’s hospital employees, food service workers, graduate students, security staff and medical interns and residents belong to what he calls a “smorgasbord of unions” — to build solidarity.
“We want to do wall-to-wall organizing and coordinate our bargaining efforts,” he says.
Unlike the faculty at UMN, faculty at New Jersey’s Rutgers University have been organized for decades. Nonetheless, they have been working without a contract for more than three months. Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations, says that although students and faculty recently returned to campus, staff are already planning a series of escalating actions to ensure that they get an equitable contract.
“We’ve been in an ongoing and beneficial affiliation with the AFT and the AAUP since the early 2000s,” Givan told Truthout. “Right now, we’re seeing heightened awareness of the need for greater investment in public higher ed due to the outsourcing of staff roles and increased dependence on adjunct labor.” Additionally, she sees the need to defend academic freedom as a priority since 12 members of the Rutgers faculty are on the Professor Watchlist compiled by the right-wing Turning Point USA. All 12 have been targets of hate mail, doxing and smear campaigns because of their anti-racist and pro-LGBTQIA+ work.
While the University Faculty Senate has denounced the list, Givan nonetheless worries that some faculty may self-censor in an effort to avoid negative publicity.
That said, Givan says she is proud that Rutgers’s bargaining unit continues to be a leader in academic unionism, promoting equal pay for equal work for adjuncts, supporting environmental justice initiatives on- and off-campus, and opposing overspending on athletics. A recent scandal in which the 50-plus member football team racked up $450,000 in DoorDash bills — 19,745 orders between May 2021 and June 2022 — is a case in point.
Challenging this, and fighting attacks on higher education more broadly will, of course, be an uphill slog. At the same time, several recent campus labor victories bear mention. A five-day strike, led by AFT/AAUP members at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, ended in mid-September after 500 faculty walked off the job. Similarly, AFT/AAUP-organized faculty at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, reached a tentative agreement on a five-year contract, averting a strike earlier this month.
The AFT’s Randi Weingarten sees these victories as harbingers of future successes. “Every AAUP member is now an AFT member,” she says. “Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom. Both are under assault. Precarity has become a through line on campuses throughout the country, but people understand the importance of organizing. They know that we’re working to make our communities better and make a positive difference in people’s lives.”
Eleanor J. Bader is an award-winning journalist who writes about domestic social issues, movements for social change, books and art. In addition to Truthout, she writes for The Progressive, Lilith Magazine and blog, the LA Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review and other online and print publications.
International Interference in Haiti Is Crushing Its Garment Industry
Factory workers demanding a pay rise demonstrate
in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on February 23, 2022.
RICHARD PIERRIN / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Frances Madeson,
Even before Haiti’s unelected de facto and extremely unpopular Prime Minister Ariel Henry shocked an already economically burdened Haitian populace by announcing on September 11 that he was ending fuel subsidies (a single gallon of gas now costs $4.79 in U.S. currency), the Haitian economy has been taking hit after hit from its foreign “investors.” Conflicts concerning who has the right to govern Haiti, and for what term, have torn up the country since prior to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenal Moïse in his Port-au-Prince home in July 2021. Moïse had selected Henry as Haiti’s prime minister just two days before he was trapped in his bedroom, roughed up (the autopsy showed several broken bones) and then slain in a hail of 15 bullets, one of which exploded his heart.
After a two-week power struggle between Henry and the then-incumbent Prime Minister Claude Joseph, Henry prevailed and assumed power on July 21, becoming Haiti’s seventh prime minister in four years. Henry’s alignment with the foreign oligarchic forces suppressing Haiti politically and economically was a factor in Daniel Foote’s resignation as U.S. Special Envoy a year ago. As Truthout reported, Foote did not mince words when criticizing the Biden administration for its decision to support Henry: “[W]hat our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates,” Foote wrote. “The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner — again — is impressive.”
While Foote’s historic act was noted, it was not heeded, and continued U.S. support of Henry has come grievously home to roost. In mid-July, a major foreign apparel company operating in Haiti announced massive layoffs in the garment sector, passing along the pain of what they say has been a 45 percent reduction in orders from major U.S. customers such as Target, Walmart and The Gap to Haitian workers and their families. Other companies have also indicated that mass layoffs are likely, and industry insiders have predicted that an estimated 20,000 jobs could soon disappear, according to local reports. This represents over 34 percent of all workers in the garment industry, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of Haiti’s exports. Some factories, such as Go Haiti which laid off 800 workers, have already closed up shop entirely, and Val D’Or CEO Robert Rothbaum stands accused of illegally shuttering the apparel company’s Port-au-Prince factory without notice in January, and absconding with 1,000 Haitian workers’ wages and severance pay.
That indignity, along with an inflation rate that was in excess of 22 percent making it impossible for Haitian workers to close the gap between their meager sweatshop earnings and the cost of basic human necessities, led to an industry-wide strike that won workers some modest gains: On February 21, the Superior Council on Wages acted to raise the minimum wage for garment worker to 770 gourdes (or $6.63 in U.S. currency) a day, which amounts to roughly half of what they were demanding. But with the rate of inflation now at 30.5 percent, those gains have been eroded and then some. In such desperate times, a job, even one that’s woefully compensated, is arguably better than no job at all.
Grassroots Unite in Opposition to Ariel Henry Continuing as De Facto Prime Minister
Even in the midst of the current widespread turmoil, labor unions and workers’ rights advocates in Haiti are sounding a screeching alarm about the layoffs that are expected to happen by year end. They are explicitly connecting the issue to international interference with Haiti’s political sovereignty, especially the continued imposition of the U.S.-backed Henry, who critics say has stood squarely in the way of democratic self-governance.
In an open letter last month to S&H Global SA, the subsidiary corporation of a South Korean company which said it will reduce its workforce in Haiti from 10,000 workers to 6,000, the Autonomous Central of Haitian Workers (CATH) called the deep cuts “illegal, unjustified, and unjustifiable.” The labor union’s letter cries out against the proposed layoffs and the union-busting tactics used against workers attempting to advance garment workers’ rights, and demands restitution for harms against them.An estimated 20,000 jobs could soon disappear, according to local reports. This represents over 34 percent of all workers in the garment industry, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of Haiti’s exports.
The Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a law firm based in Port-au-Prince that represents unions in their fight against labor rights abuses in Haiti, is pressing the money damages case for the Val D’Or workers. In a blistering press release, the labor law firm blames the proposed massive layoffs on the stranglehold that foreign business interests have on the garment sector. The firm points to a number of key formal legal mechanisms in loan and trade programs that have been disastrously imposed on Haiti over the years by The Core Group, the very same multinational supervisory body to which Ariel Henry answers. Imposed upon Haiti by the United Nations in 2004 after the U.S.-backed coup of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Core Group is charged with “steering the electoral process.” Comprised of ambassadors to Haiti from Brazil, the European Union, France, Germany, Spain and the United States, in addition to representatives to Haiti from the Organization of American States and the United Nations, its creation was originally proposed as a six-month interim transition support measure, yet it endures to this day. Many Haitians understandably see Henry as being in cahoots with the enemy, defined in this instance as foreign states exploiting (and now blithely discarding) the Haitian workforce, enabled by Haiti’s entrenched oligarchic forces.
BAI also calls out a turn in U.S. foreign policy so intent in controlling Haiti’s politics that it perversely acts against the business interests of U.S. companies that have, until recently, been able to richly profit from low-cost apparel goods manufactured in Haiti. BAI’s September 8 press release states:
This is most recently manifest in U.S. support for de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry and his repressive and undemocratic government, whose policies drive many of Haiti’s current challenges — including the deteriorating security situation that is pushing foreign investors out of the country. “Haitians do not need more conditioned loans and sweatshops,” explains BIA Managing Attorney Mario Joseph. “If the international community really wants to help, they should stop interfering in our democracy and investing in jobs that inhibit our self-sufficiency and fail to give back to the community.”
In its announcement, S&H Global attributed the reduction of demand by its customers which precipitated the layoffs to “the recent economic decline in the US market.” But Ose Pierre, a representative of the Solidarity Center who is living among, organizing with and talking to garment workers every day, says the nebulous statement makes sense. “They don’t want to say that there’s a problem because there’s no order,” Pierre told Truthout by telephone from Port-au-Prince, “because of the political situation in Haiti.”
In Pierre’s analysis, Henry’s continuation of Moïse’s extra-parliamentary authoritarian rule has created such political instability, bloody turf wars and lethal street fights, that businesses are being defeated in their struggles to fulfill orders.
“The political issue has a very big impact on production in Haiti,” Pierre explained. “We have gangs in control of the street. They decide when people can go to work, or not.” This is especially a problem for workers who live in one district of the city, but who have to pass through another to reach their workplace, he added. “We have two factories in Carrefour but the workers cannot cross Martissant. It’s a problem. There are two other factories in Croix-des-Bouquets where drivers crossing the border were kidnapped while trying to deliver the containers.”
Factory owners are closing the factories because “business as usual” cannot be conducted, he emphasized, and not because workers are intentionally withholding their labor. Surrounded by ruthless gang and police violence, people are sticking close to their neighborhoods where neighbors know each other, he says. Venturing out of one’s own turf can lead to dangerous confrontations with warring gang members affiliated with various political parties, or just getting caught in the crossfire.The labor law firm blames the proposed massive layoffs on the stranglehold that foreign business interests have on the garment sector.
“We have a prime minister here, but we don’t have a parliament, and we don’t know exactly who manages this country,” Pierre said. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons why one year after the assassination of Moïse, we’ve never heard a resolution about what actually happened. We’ve heard that the prime minister may be implicated, but the story keeps changing, and we don’t know exactly where these things are left.”
Those With the Means to Leave Are Exiting in Droves
Those who can, Pierre says, are selling their possessions to scratch together enough money to secure a visa and $800 or $900 for a ticket to Brazil or Chile “where it’s actually not that much better,” he said. Or they attempt to cross into the Dominican Republic, which has become openly and murderously hostile to Haitian workers. Even Dominican Black people have been slain there recently, because they were mistaken for Haitian nationals.
Also perilous, Haitians are risking their lives on unsafe voyages on the open sea to the U.S. “In the last couple of months, we saw many boats, and those sailing in them were being arrested on the ocean,” Pierre said. “People cannot afford to live in Haiti. For those who cannot go to another country, they try to find another job.”
But having been trained on the sewing machines and having devoted their entire working lives to manufacturing apparel, many workers do not possess transferable skills, Pierre said, and have taken to peddling home-produced wares on the street. “You can go everywhere and you can find people trying to do some trade on the street, some little commerce,” he explained. Before the spike in gas prices, some intrepid Haitians, for example, would go to the north to buy fruits unavailable in the west and south, and bring them to the other regions for sale. But options like these are few, and are becoming increasingly foreclosed.
Even tourism marketed to Haitians living in the diaspora or internal to Haiti is stymied under the circumstances. “Haitians would be very happy to come to eat naturally, to enjoy the nice temperature we have in the country, and the sea, the mountains, and the ecological diversity. But we can’t activate it because of the instability.”
In Pierre’s assessment, the most important thing, even more important than saving a single sector like the garment sector, which is relatively new in Haiti, is gaining democratic political stability, which means an end to international interference and moving beyond Henry’s continuation of Moïse’s gang-plagued and autocratic governance.
“The solidarity you find in Haiti is a force of strength,” he said. “If we have political stability, people can live in this country, and even live well.”
Frances Madeson has written about liberation struggles in the U.S. and abroad for Ms. Magazine, VICE, YES! Magazine, The Progressive Magazine, Tablet Magazine, American Theatre Magazine and Indian Country Today. She is also the author of the comic novel Cooperative Village.
Frances Madeson,
September 24, 2022
Even before Haiti’s unelected de facto and extremely unpopular Prime Minister Ariel Henry shocked an already economically burdened Haitian populace by announcing on September 11 that he was ending fuel subsidies (a single gallon of gas now costs $4.79 in U.S. currency), the Haitian economy has been taking hit after hit from its foreign “investors.” Conflicts concerning who has the right to govern Haiti, and for what term, have torn up the country since prior to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenal Moïse in his Port-au-Prince home in July 2021. Moïse had selected Henry as Haiti’s prime minister just two days before he was trapped in his bedroom, roughed up (the autopsy showed several broken bones) and then slain in a hail of 15 bullets, one of which exploded his heart.
After a two-week power struggle between Henry and the then-incumbent Prime Minister Claude Joseph, Henry prevailed and assumed power on July 21, becoming Haiti’s seventh prime minister in four years. Henry’s alignment with the foreign oligarchic forces suppressing Haiti politically and economically was a factor in Daniel Foote’s resignation as U.S. Special Envoy a year ago. As Truthout reported, Foote did not mince words when criticizing the Biden administration for its decision to support Henry: “[W]hat our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates,” Foote wrote. “The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner — again — is impressive.”
While Foote’s historic act was noted, it was not heeded, and continued U.S. support of Henry has come grievously home to roost. In mid-July, a major foreign apparel company operating in Haiti announced massive layoffs in the garment sector, passing along the pain of what they say has been a 45 percent reduction in orders from major U.S. customers such as Target, Walmart and The Gap to Haitian workers and their families. Other companies have also indicated that mass layoffs are likely, and industry insiders have predicted that an estimated 20,000 jobs could soon disappear, according to local reports. This represents over 34 percent of all workers in the garment industry, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of Haiti’s exports. Some factories, such as Go Haiti which laid off 800 workers, have already closed up shop entirely, and Val D’Or CEO Robert Rothbaum stands accused of illegally shuttering the apparel company’s Port-au-Prince factory without notice in January, and absconding with 1,000 Haitian workers’ wages and severance pay.
That indignity, along with an inflation rate that was in excess of 22 percent making it impossible for Haitian workers to close the gap between their meager sweatshop earnings and the cost of basic human necessities, led to an industry-wide strike that won workers some modest gains: On February 21, the Superior Council on Wages acted to raise the minimum wage for garment worker to 770 gourdes (or $6.63 in U.S. currency) a day, which amounts to roughly half of what they were demanding. But with the rate of inflation now at 30.5 percent, those gains have been eroded and then some. In such desperate times, a job, even one that’s woefully compensated, is arguably better than no job at all.
Grassroots Unite in Opposition to Ariel Henry Continuing as De Facto Prime Minister
Even in the midst of the current widespread turmoil, labor unions and workers’ rights advocates in Haiti are sounding a screeching alarm about the layoffs that are expected to happen by year end. They are explicitly connecting the issue to international interference with Haiti’s political sovereignty, especially the continued imposition of the U.S.-backed Henry, who critics say has stood squarely in the way of democratic self-governance.
In an open letter last month to S&H Global SA, the subsidiary corporation of a South Korean company which said it will reduce its workforce in Haiti from 10,000 workers to 6,000, the Autonomous Central of Haitian Workers (CATH) called the deep cuts “illegal, unjustified, and unjustifiable.” The labor union’s letter cries out against the proposed layoffs and the union-busting tactics used against workers attempting to advance garment workers’ rights, and demands restitution for harms against them.An estimated 20,000 jobs could soon disappear, according to local reports. This represents over 34 percent of all workers in the garment industry, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of Haiti’s exports.
The Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a law firm based in Port-au-Prince that represents unions in their fight against labor rights abuses in Haiti, is pressing the money damages case for the Val D’Or workers. In a blistering press release, the labor law firm blames the proposed massive layoffs on the stranglehold that foreign business interests have on the garment sector. The firm points to a number of key formal legal mechanisms in loan and trade programs that have been disastrously imposed on Haiti over the years by The Core Group, the very same multinational supervisory body to which Ariel Henry answers. Imposed upon Haiti by the United Nations in 2004 after the U.S.-backed coup of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Core Group is charged with “steering the electoral process.” Comprised of ambassadors to Haiti from Brazil, the European Union, France, Germany, Spain and the United States, in addition to representatives to Haiti from the Organization of American States and the United Nations, its creation was originally proposed as a six-month interim transition support measure, yet it endures to this day. Many Haitians understandably see Henry as being in cahoots with the enemy, defined in this instance as foreign states exploiting (and now blithely discarding) the Haitian workforce, enabled by Haiti’s entrenched oligarchic forces.
BAI also calls out a turn in U.S. foreign policy so intent in controlling Haiti’s politics that it perversely acts against the business interests of U.S. companies that have, until recently, been able to richly profit from low-cost apparel goods manufactured in Haiti. BAI’s September 8 press release states:
This is most recently manifest in U.S. support for de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry and his repressive and undemocratic government, whose policies drive many of Haiti’s current challenges — including the deteriorating security situation that is pushing foreign investors out of the country. “Haitians do not need more conditioned loans and sweatshops,” explains BIA Managing Attorney Mario Joseph. “If the international community really wants to help, they should stop interfering in our democracy and investing in jobs that inhibit our self-sufficiency and fail to give back to the community.”
In its announcement, S&H Global attributed the reduction of demand by its customers which precipitated the layoffs to “the recent economic decline in the US market.” But Ose Pierre, a representative of the Solidarity Center who is living among, organizing with and talking to garment workers every day, says the nebulous statement makes sense. “They don’t want to say that there’s a problem because there’s no order,” Pierre told Truthout by telephone from Port-au-Prince, “because of the political situation in Haiti.”
In Pierre’s analysis, Henry’s continuation of Moïse’s extra-parliamentary authoritarian rule has created such political instability, bloody turf wars and lethal street fights, that businesses are being defeated in their struggles to fulfill orders.
“The political issue has a very big impact on production in Haiti,” Pierre explained. “We have gangs in control of the street. They decide when people can go to work, or not.” This is especially a problem for workers who live in one district of the city, but who have to pass through another to reach their workplace, he added. “We have two factories in Carrefour but the workers cannot cross Martissant. It’s a problem. There are two other factories in Croix-des-Bouquets where drivers crossing the border were kidnapped while trying to deliver the containers.”
Factory owners are closing the factories because “business as usual” cannot be conducted, he emphasized, and not because workers are intentionally withholding their labor. Surrounded by ruthless gang and police violence, people are sticking close to their neighborhoods where neighbors know each other, he says. Venturing out of one’s own turf can lead to dangerous confrontations with warring gang members affiliated with various political parties, or just getting caught in the crossfire.The labor law firm blames the proposed massive layoffs on the stranglehold that foreign business interests have on the garment sector.
“We have a prime minister here, but we don’t have a parliament, and we don’t know exactly who manages this country,” Pierre said. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons why one year after the assassination of Moïse, we’ve never heard a resolution about what actually happened. We’ve heard that the prime minister may be implicated, but the story keeps changing, and we don’t know exactly where these things are left.”
Those With the Means to Leave Are Exiting in Droves
Those who can, Pierre says, are selling their possessions to scratch together enough money to secure a visa and $800 or $900 for a ticket to Brazil or Chile “where it’s actually not that much better,” he said. Or they attempt to cross into the Dominican Republic, which has become openly and murderously hostile to Haitian workers. Even Dominican Black people have been slain there recently, because they were mistaken for Haitian nationals.
Also perilous, Haitians are risking their lives on unsafe voyages on the open sea to the U.S. “In the last couple of months, we saw many boats, and those sailing in them were being arrested on the ocean,” Pierre said. “People cannot afford to live in Haiti. For those who cannot go to another country, they try to find another job.”
But having been trained on the sewing machines and having devoted their entire working lives to manufacturing apparel, many workers do not possess transferable skills, Pierre said, and have taken to peddling home-produced wares on the street. “You can go everywhere and you can find people trying to do some trade on the street, some little commerce,” he explained. Before the spike in gas prices, some intrepid Haitians, for example, would go to the north to buy fruits unavailable in the west and south, and bring them to the other regions for sale. But options like these are few, and are becoming increasingly foreclosed.
Even tourism marketed to Haitians living in the diaspora or internal to Haiti is stymied under the circumstances. “Haitians would be very happy to come to eat naturally, to enjoy the nice temperature we have in the country, and the sea, the mountains, and the ecological diversity. But we can’t activate it because of the instability.”
In Pierre’s assessment, the most important thing, even more important than saving a single sector like the garment sector, which is relatively new in Haiti, is gaining democratic political stability, which means an end to international interference and moving beyond Henry’s continuation of Moïse’s gang-plagued and autocratic governance.
“The solidarity you find in Haiti is a force of strength,” he said. “If we have political stability, people can live in this country, and even live well.”
Frances Madeson has written about liberation struggles in the U.S. and abroad for Ms. Magazine, VICE, YES! Magazine, The Progressive Magazine, Tablet Magazine, American Theatre Magazine and Indian Country Today. She is also the author of the comic novel Cooperative Village.
Chomsky: The US and Israel Are Standing in the Way of Iran Nuclear Agreement
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid speaks at a security briefing about Iran for the foreign press at the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem on August 24, 2022.
DEBBIE HILL / POOL / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
September 24, 2022
During the first few decades of the post-war era, the U.S. considered Iran one of its closest geostrategic allies, especially after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s leader. However, since the 1979 revolution, which abolished the monarchy and established an Islamic republic, the U.S. and Iran have been mortal enemies, largely due to the role that Israel occupies in the region. In this context, during the last couple of decades, the thorniest issue in the U.S.-Iran relationship has been Tehran’s nuclear program, which, Iran says, is focused on energy, not weapons. Israel has been adamantly opposed to the program, even though it is accepted beyond dispute that Israel itself is a nuclear power. In 2015, Iran and several other countries, including the United States, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, according to which Iran was willing to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to nuclear inspections in exchange for billions of dollars of relief support. However, the Trump administration withdrew U.S. support from the agreement — and Israel continued its policy of sabotage and assassination of scientists.
Current talks between Washington and Tehran’s rulers to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement have been stalled, and there is little hope that progress will be made any time soon. Naturally, the U.S. places the blame on Tehran. However, U.S. propaganda grossly distorts the reality of the situation, Noam Chomsky points out in this exclusive interview for Truthout. The barriers to diplomacy are none other than Israel and the United States, says Chomsky.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S. and Iran are at odds with each other, having difficulty even talking to each other. Why do they hate each other so much, and how much of a role does Israel’s shadow play in this continuous drama?
Noam Chomsky: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d like to say a few words, once again, on why I feel that the entire framework in which this issue is discussed is seriously distorted — yet another tribute to the enormous power of the U.S. propaganda system.
The U.S. government has been telling us for years that Iranian nuclear programs are one of the gravest threats to world peace. Israeli authorities have made it clear that they will not tolerate this danger. The U.S. and Israel have acted violently to overcome this grave threat: cyberwar and sabotage (which the Pentagon regards as aggression that merits violence in self-defense), numerous assassinations of Iranian scientists, constant threats of use of force (“all options are open”) in violation of international law (and if anyone were to care, the U.S. Constitution).
Evidently, it is regarded as a most serious issue. If so, we surely want to see whether there is some way to lay it to rest. There is: Establish a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, with inspections — which, we know, can work very well. Even U.S. intelligence agrees that before the U.S. dismantled the joint agreement on nuclear weapons (JCPOA), international inspections of Iran’s nuclear program were successful.
That would solve the alleged problem of Iranian nuclear programs, ending the serious threat of war. What then is the barrier?
Not the Arab states, which have been actively demanding this for decades. Not Iran, which supports the measure. Not the Global South — G-77, 134 “developing nations,” most of the world — which strongly supports it. Not Europe, which has posed no objections.
The barrier is the usual two outliers: the U.S. and Israel.
There are various pretexts, which we may ignore. The reasons are known to all: The U.S. will not allow the enormous Israeli nuclear arsenal, the only one in the region, to be subject to international inspection.
In fact, the U.S. does not officially recognize that Israel has nuclear weapons, though of course it is not in doubt. The reason, presumably, is that to do so would invoke U.S. law, which, arguably, would render the massive U.S. aid flow to Israel illegal — a door that few want to open.
All of this is virtually undiscussable in the U.S., outside of arms control circles. On rare occasions, the major media have come close to bringing up the forbidden topic. A year ago, New York Times editors proposed “One Way Forward on Iran: A Nuclear-Weapons-Free Persian Gulf.”
Note: Persian Gulf, not Middle East. The reason, the editors explain, is that Israel’s nuclear weapons are “unacknowledged and nonnegotiable.” Filling in the gaps, they are unacknowledged by the U.S. and are nonnegotiable by U.S. fiat.
In brief, there is a straightforward approach to addressing this grave threat to world peace, but it is blocked by the global hegemon, whose power is so enormous that the topic can barely even be discussed. Rather, we must adopt the framework imposed by U.S. power and keep to the deliberations over renewing some kind of agreement over Iranian nuclear weapons.
Another matter that must be sidelined, though it is so obvious that even the grandest propaganda system cannot entirely efface it, is that the current crisis arose when the U.S. unilaterally destroyed the JCPOA, over the strenuous objections of all other signers and the UN Security Council, which had endorsed it unanimously. The U.S. then imposed harsh sanctions on Iran to punish it for the U.S. dismantling of the agreement. Again, other signers strenuously objected, but they obeyed: The threat of U.S. retribution is too awesome, as in many other cases; notoriously the crushing Cuba sanctions, opposed by the whole world apart from the two usual outliers, but obediently observed.
Again, I apologize for continually reiterating all of this. It must, however, be understood. Having made that gesture, let’s accept reality, subordinating ourselves to the mighty U.S. propaganda system, and keep to the permitted framework of discussion.
Turning finally to the question, first, Israel’s role is more than shadow play. Israel is right at the center of the story, both in its constant violent attacks on Iran and in the “unacknowledged” nuclear arsenal that blocks to path to diplomatic settlement, thanks to its superpower protector.
On mutual hate, we should remember that we are talking about governments. The U.S. and Iranian governments were close allies from 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the parliamentary government of Iran and reinstalled the Shah’s dictatorship, until 1979, when a popular uprising overthrew the Shah and Iran switched from favored friend to reviled enemy.
Iraq then invaded Iran and the incoming Reagan administration turned to lavish support for its friend Saddam. Iran suffered huge casualties, many from chemical weapons while the Reaganites looked away and even tried to shift responsibility to Iran for Saddam’s murderous chemical war against Iraqi Kurds. Finally, direct U.S. intervention swung the war in Iraq’s favor. After the war, President Bush Sr. invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production, a serious threat to Iran of course. And the U.S. imposed harsh sanctions on Iran. So, the story continues.
U.S. charges against Iran are too familiar to need reviewing.
Unsurprisingly, nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran have stalled again and it is unlikely that there will be a deal any time soon — if at all — to restore their 2015 nuclear deal. First, what do you see as the stumbling blocks in these talks? And didn’t Iran already make a huge concession when it agreed to the 2015 nuclear agreement without requiring that Israel does away with its own arsenal of nuclear weapons?
Negotiations, through European intermediaries, seem to have been put on hold until after the U.S. November elections, at least. There are outstanding disagreements on a number of issues. The most important, for now, are reported to be Iranian foot-dragging on inspection of traces of uranium that bear on whether Iran had an undeclared weapons program before 2003. In contrast, Israeli nuclear weapons programs are nonnegotiable by U.S. fiat, not even subject to inspection.
Iran’s relationship with Russia has been further strengthened since the start of the Ukraine war. Do such moves on the part of Tehran’s rulers indicate the possibility of a complete break from the West?
It’s hard to see how the break should go much farther. Iran’s closer relations with Russia are part of a general global realignment, its contours unclear, involving the major Asian states and Russia-China links.
How likely is it that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?
Israel has repeatedly attacked these facilities with sabotage and assassination. It is likely to proceed with further efforts to prevent Iran from gaining the capability to produce nuclear weapons — which many countries have.
Iranian leaders have consistently claimed that they have no intention of producing nuclear weapons. I have no idea what their strategic thinking might be. Perhaps they are thinking along the lines of U.S. nuclear doctrine: that “nuclear weapons must always be available, at the ready, because they ‘cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict’” (Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, STRATCOM 1995). As Daniel Ellsberg has emphasized, in that respect nuclear weapons are constantly used to enable other aggressive actions with impunity.
Whatever the motives, for Iran or any other state, these weapons must be eliminated from the Earth. NWFZs are a step in this direction. A more far-reaching step is the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), now in force though without the participation of the nuclear states. Iran was active in negotiation of the TPNW and was one of 122 states that voted in favor its adoption, though it has not yet signed it. These are concerns that should be uppermost in our minds, for all states, for the security of all of life on Earth.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
During the first few decades of the post-war era, the U.S. considered Iran one of its closest geostrategic allies, especially after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s leader. However, since the 1979 revolution, which abolished the monarchy and established an Islamic republic, the U.S. and Iran have been mortal enemies, largely due to the role that Israel occupies in the region. In this context, during the last couple of decades, the thorniest issue in the U.S.-Iran relationship has been Tehran’s nuclear program, which, Iran says, is focused on energy, not weapons. Israel has been adamantly opposed to the program, even though it is accepted beyond dispute that Israel itself is a nuclear power. In 2015, Iran and several other countries, including the United States, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, according to which Iran was willing to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to nuclear inspections in exchange for billions of dollars of relief support. However, the Trump administration withdrew U.S. support from the agreement — and Israel continued its policy of sabotage and assassination of scientists.
Current talks between Washington and Tehran’s rulers to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement have been stalled, and there is little hope that progress will be made any time soon. Naturally, the U.S. places the blame on Tehran. However, U.S. propaganda grossly distorts the reality of the situation, Noam Chomsky points out in this exclusive interview for Truthout. The barriers to diplomacy are none other than Israel and the United States, says Chomsky.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S. and Iran are at odds with each other, having difficulty even talking to each other. Why do they hate each other so much, and how much of a role does Israel’s shadow play in this continuous drama?
Noam Chomsky: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d like to say a few words, once again, on why I feel that the entire framework in which this issue is discussed is seriously distorted — yet another tribute to the enormous power of the U.S. propaganda system.
The U.S. government has been telling us for years that Iranian nuclear programs are one of the gravest threats to world peace. Israeli authorities have made it clear that they will not tolerate this danger. The U.S. and Israel have acted violently to overcome this grave threat: cyberwar and sabotage (which the Pentagon regards as aggression that merits violence in self-defense), numerous assassinations of Iranian scientists, constant threats of use of force (“all options are open”) in violation of international law (and if anyone were to care, the U.S. Constitution).
Evidently, it is regarded as a most serious issue. If so, we surely want to see whether there is some way to lay it to rest. There is: Establish a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, with inspections — which, we know, can work very well. Even U.S. intelligence agrees that before the U.S. dismantled the joint agreement on nuclear weapons (JCPOA), international inspections of Iran’s nuclear program were successful.
That would solve the alleged problem of Iranian nuclear programs, ending the serious threat of war. What then is the barrier?
Not the Arab states, which have been actively demanding this for decades. Not Iran, which supports the measure. Not the Global South — G-77, 134 “developing nations,” most of the world — which strongly supports it. Not Europe, which has posed no objections.
The barrier is the usual two outliers: the U.S. and Israel.
There are various pretexts, which we may ignore. The reasons are known to all: The U.S. will not allow the enormous Israeli nuclear arsenal, the only one in the region, to be subject to international inspection.
In fact, the U.S. does not officially recognize that Israel has nuclear weapons, though of course it is not in doubt. The reason, presumably, is that to do so would invoke U.S. law, which, arguably, would render the massive U.S. aid flow to Israel illegal — a door that few want to open.
All of this is virtually undiscussable in the U.S., outside of arms control circles. On rare occasions, the major media have come close to bringing up the forbidden topic. A year ago, New York Times editors proposed “One Way Forward on Iran: A Nuclear-Weapons-Free Persian Gulf.”
Note: Persian Gulf, not Middle East. The reason, the editors explain, is that Israel’s nuclear weapons are “unacknowledged and nonnegotiable.” Filling in the gaps, they are unacknowledged by the U.S. and are nonnegotiable by U.S. fiat.
In brief, there is a straightforward approach to addressing this grave threat to world peace, but it is blocked by the global hegemon, whose power is so enormous that the topic can barely even be discussed. Rather, we must adopt the framework imposed by U.S. power and keep to the deliberations over renewing some kind of agreement over Iranian nuclear weapons.
Another matter that must be sidelined, though it is so obvious that even the grandest propaganda system cannot entirely efface it, is that the current crisis arose when the U.S. unilaterally destroyed the JCPOA, over the strenuous objections of all other signers and the UN Security Council, which had endorsed it unanimously. The U.S. then imposed harsh sanctions on Iran to punish it for the U.S. dismantling of the agreement. Again, other signers strenuously objected, but they obeyed: The threat of U.S. retribution is too awesome, as in many other cases; notoriously the crushing Cuba sanctions, opposed by the whole world apart from the two usual outliers, but obediently observed.
Again, I apologize for continually reiterating all of this. It must, however, be understood. Having made that gesture, let’s accept reality, subordinating ourselves to the mighty U.S. propaganda system, and keep to the permitted framework of discussion.
Turning finally to the question, first, Israel’s role is more than shadow play. Israel is right at the center of the story, both in its constant violent attacks on Iran and in the “unacknowledged” nuclear arsenal that blocks to path to diplomatic settlement, thanks to its superpower protector.
On mutual hate, we should remember that we are talking about governments. The U.S. and Iranian governments were close allies from 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the parliamentary government of Iran and reinstalled the Shah’s dictatorship, until 1979, when a popular uprising overthrew the Shah and Iran switched from favored friend to reviled enemy.
Iraq then invaded Iran and the incoming Reagan administration turned to lavish support for its friend Saddam. Iran suffered huge casualties, many from chemical weapons while the Reaganites looked away and even tried to shift responsibility to Iran for Saddam’s murderous chemical war against Iraqi Kurds. Finally, direct U.S. intervention swung the war in Iraq’s favor. After the war, President Bush Sr. invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production, a serious threat to Iran of course. And the U.S. imposed harsh sanctions on Iran. So, the story continues.
U.S. charges against Iran are too familiar to need reviewing.
Unsurprisingly, nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran have stalled again and it is unlikely that there will be a deal any time soon — if at all — to restore their 2015 nuclear deal. First, what do you see as the stumbling blocks in these talks? And didn’t Iran already make a huge concession when it agreed to the 2015 nuclear agreement without requiring that Israel does away with its own arsenal of nuclear weapons?
Negotiations, through European intermediaries, seem to have been put on hold until after the U.S. November elections, at least. There are outstanding disagreements on a number of issues. The most important, for now, are reported to be Iranian foot-dragging on inspection of traces of uranium that bear on whether Iran had an undeclared weapons program before 2003. In contrast, Israeli nuclear weapons programs are nonnegotiable by U.S. fiat, not even subject to inspection.
Iran’s relationship with Russia has been further strengthened since the start of the Ukraine war. Do such moves on the part of Tehran’s rulers indicate the possibility of a complete break from the West?
It’s hard to see how the break should go much farther. Iran’s closer relations with Russia are part of a general global realignment, its contours unclear, involving the major Asian states and Russia-China links.
How likely is it that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?
Israel has repeatedly attacked these facilities with sabotage and assassination. It is likely to proceed with further efforts to prevent Iran from gaining the capability to produce nuclear weapons — which many countries have.
Iranian leaders have consistently claimed that they have no intention of producing nuclear weapons. I have no idea what their strategic thinking might be. Perhaps they are thinking along the lines of U.S. nuclear doctrine: that “nuclear weapons must always be available, at the ready, because they ‘cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict’” (Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, STRATCOM 1995). As Daniel Ellsberg has emphasized, in that respect nuclear weapons are constantly used to enable other aggressive actions with impunity.
Whatever the motives, for Iran or any other state, these weapons must be eliminated from the Earth. NWFZs are a step in this direction. A more far-reaching step is the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), now in force though without the participation of the nuclear states. Iran was active in negotiation of the TPNW and was one of 122 states that voted in favor its adoption, though it has not yet signed it. These are concerns that should be uppermost in our minds, for all states, for the security of all of life on Earth.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
BACK WHEN WOMEN WERE CHATTEL
Arizona Judge Lifts Injunction Against State’s 1864 Anti-Abortion Law
Abortion rights protesters chant during a reproductive rights rally near the Tucson Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Arizona, on Monday, July 4, 2022
.SANDY HUFFAKER / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
PUBLISHED September 24, 2022
Planned Parenthood Arizona on Friday night vowed that its fight to protect reproductive healthcare in the state was “far from over” after a judge lifted a decades-old injunction which had blocked an anti-abortion rights law dating back to 1864 — before Arizona was even established as a state — and allowed the ban to be enforced.
Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson said in her ruling that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed the constitutional right to abortion care, had been the basis for barring the 1864 law from being enforced. Since Roe was overturned in June, she said, the injunction should be annulled.
Johnson’s decision will “unleash [a] near-total abortion ban in Arizona,” said Planned Parenthood Arizona, with the law including no exceptions for people whose pregnancies result from rape or incest. Under the law, which was first passed by Arizona’s territorial legislature and then updated and codifed in 1901, anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain abortion care can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The law does include an exception for “a medical emergency,” according to The New York Times, but as Common Dreams has reported, such an exception in practice has already resulted in a Texas woman being forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy until her health was deemed sufficiently in danger before a doctor provided care.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told the Times that “medical professionals will now be forced to think twice and call their lawyer before providing patients with oftentimes necessary, lifesaving care.”
In a statement on Twitter, Hobbs vowed to “do everything in my power to protect” abortion rights in Arizona, “starting by using my veto pen to block any legislation that compromises the right to choose” if she becomes governor.
“No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement. “I cannot overstate how cruel this decision is.”
The ruling was handed down a day before the state’s 15-week abortion ban, which was signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in March, was set to go into effect. Although abortion care had remained legal in Arizona after Roe was overturned on June 24, it has been largely unavailable as medical providers waited to see whether Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s motion to lift the injunction on the 1864 law would succeed.
Johnson’s ruling made Arizona the 14th state to ban nearly all abortions following the overturning of Roe. Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced his proposal to pass a nationwide forced-pregnancy bill that would ban abortion care at 15 weeks of pregnancy.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Saturday called the ruling “catastrophic, dangerous, and unacceptable.”
“Make no mistake: this backwards decision exemplifies the disturbing trend across the country of Republican officials at the local and national level dead-set on stripping women of their rights,” she said.
Planned Parenthood Arizona, which had argued in court that medical professionals in the state should be permitted to continue providing abortions under the 15-week ban, said its “lawyers are evaluating next steps in the case.”
Planned Parenthood Arizona on Friday night vowed that its fight to protect reproductive healthcare in the state was “far from over” after a judge lifted a decades-old injunction which had blocked an anti-abortion rights law dating back to 1864 — before Arizona was even established as a state — and allowed the ban to be enforced.
Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson said in her ruling that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed the constitutional right to abortion care, had been the basis for barring the 1864 law from being enforced. Since Roe was overturned in June, she said, the injunction should be annulled.
Johnson’s decision will “unleash [a] near-total abortion ban in Arizona,” said Planned Parenthood Arizona, with the law including no exceptions for people whose pregnancies result from rape or incest. Under the law, which was first passed by Arizona’s territorial legislature and then updated and codifed in 1901, anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain abortion care can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The law does include an exception for “a medical emergency,” according to The New York Times, but as Common Dreams has reported, such an exception in practice has already resulted in a Texas woman being forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy until her health was deemed sufficiently in danger before a doctor provided care.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told the Times that “medical professionals will now be forced to think twice and call their lawyer before providing patients with oftentimes necessary, lifesaving care.”
In a statement on Twitter, Hobbs vowed to “do everything in my power to protect” abortion rights in Arizona, “starting by using my veto pen to block any legislation that compromises the right to choose” if she becomes governor.
“No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement. “I cannot overstate how cruel this decision is.”
The ruling was handed down a day before the state’s 15-week abortion ban, which was signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in March, was set to go into effect. Although abortion care had remained legal in Arizona after Roe was overturned on June 24, it has been largely unavailable as medical providers waited to see whether Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s motion to lift the injunction on the 1864 law would succeed.
Johnson’s ruling made Arizona the 14th state to ban nearly all abortions following the overturning of Roe. Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced his proposal to pass a nationwide forced-pregnancy bill that would ban abortion care at 15 weeks of pregnancy.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Saturday called the ruling “catastrophic, dangerous, and unacceptable.”
“Make no mistake: this backwards decision exemplifies the disturbing trend across the country of Republican officials at the local and national level dead-set on stripping women of their rights,” she said.
Planned Parenthood Arizona, which had argued in court that medical professionals in the state should be permitted to continue providing abortions under the 15-week ban, said its “lawyers are evaluating next steps in the case.”
W.House blasts 'catastrophic' Arizona abortion ban ruling
Sat, September 24, 2022
The White House on Saturday blasted a court ruling in Arizona that imposes a near-complete ban on abortions in the southwestern US state as "catastrophic, dangerous and unacceptable."
On Friday, a judge in Arizona's Pima County had ruled that the stricter ban -- imposed in 1864 and expanded by a 1901 law, years before Arizona became a state -- must be enforced.
"If this decision stands, health care providers would face imprisonment of up to five years for fulfilling their duty of care; survivors of rape and incest would be forced to bear the children of their assaulters; and women with medical conditions would face dire health risks," spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The Arizona decision sparked outrage from abortion providers and seemed sure to plunge the thorny issue deeper into the national debate ahead of midterm elections in November.
The ruling "has the practical and deplorable result of sending Arizonans back nearly 150 years," said Brittany Fonteno, president of the Arizona branch of Planned Parenthood, the country's largest provider of reproductive services.
"No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom," she said in a statement.
The ruling from Judge Kellie Johnson came in a case filed in Arizona seeking clarification after the US Supreme Court in June overturned the constitutional right to abortion but left it to the states to set new parameters.
The 1864 ban in Arizona, which permits abortions only when a woman's life is in danger, had been blocked by injunction since 1973, when the US high court first found there was a constitutional right to abortion.
The Pima County ruling came a day before a ban on abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, passed earlier by the Arizona legislature, was to take effect. That law was supported by Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican.
But with Republican-led states across the country imposing even more rigid rules since the Supreme Court decision, some in Arizona wanted to go further.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, asked the court to "harmonize" conflicting state laws, and he welcomed the Pima County ruling.
"We applaud the court for upholding the will of the legislature and providing clarity and uniformity on this important issue," he said in a statement, the AZCentral.com news website reported.
Planned Parenthood had argued before Johnson that a number of abortion-related laws passed in Arizona since 1973 effectively created a right to abortion, but the judge was unswayed.
AZCentral reported that in the many years the 1864 law was in effect, numerous doctors and amateur abortion providers received jail terms for violating it.
This year's decision by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has been seized on by Democrats, who expect it to anger and mobilize women to vote against Republicans in the fall.
Several special elections held since that ruling have shown significantly higher female participation, and some Republican politicians, once absolutists, have begun to tiptoe around the subject.
In Arizona, a Donald Trump-backed candidate for the US Senate, Blake Masters, once described abortion as "genocide" and called for a federal "personhood" law for fetuses.
But as he slips in the polls, Masters has softened his tone and removed some of the toughest anti-abortion language on his website.
He now voices opposition only to "very late-term and partial birth abortion," two rare procedures.
bbk/sw/md
Sat, September 24, 2022
The White House on Saturday blasted a court ruling in Arizona that imposes a near-complete ban on abortions in the southwestern US state as "catastrophic, dangerous and unacceptable."
On Friday, a judge in Arizona's Pima County had ruled that the stricter ban -- imposed in 1864 and expanded by a 1901 law, years before Arizona became a state -- must be enforced.
"If this decision stands, health care providers would face imprisonment of up to five years for fulfilling their duty of care; survivors of rape and incest would be forced to bear the children of their assaulters; and women with medical conditions would face dire health risks," spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The Arizona decision sparked outrage from abortion providers and seemed sure to plunge the thorny issue deeper into the national debate ahead of midterm elections in November.
The ruling "has the practical and deplorable result of sending Arizonans back nearly 150 years," said Brittany Fonteno, president of the Arizona branch of Planned Parenthood, the country's largest provider of reproductive services.
"No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom," she said in a statement.
The ruling from Judge Kellie Johnson came in a case filed in Arizona seeking clarification after the US Supreme Court in June overturned the constitutional right to abortion but left it to the states to set new parameters.
The 1864 ban in Arizona, which permits abortions only when a woman's life is in danger, had been blocked by injunction since 1973, when the US high court first found there was a constitutional right to abortion.
The Pima County ruling came a day before a ban on abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, passed earlier by the Arizona legislature, was to take effect. That law was supported by Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican.
But with Republican-led states across the country imposing even more rigid rules since the Supreme Court decision, some in Arizona wanted to go further.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, asked the court to "harmonize" conflicting state laws, and he welcomed the Pima County ruling.
"We applaud the court for upholding the will of the legislature and providing clarity and uniformity on this important issue," he said in a statement, the AZCentral.com news website reported.
Planned Parenthood had argued before Johnson that a number of abortion-related laws passed in Arizona since 1973 effectively created a right to abortion, but the judge was unswayed.
AZCentral reported that in the many years the 1864 law was in effect, numerous doctors and amateur abortion providers received jail terms for violating it.
This year's decision by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has been seized on by Democrats, who expect it to anger and mobilize women to vote against Republicans in the fall.
Several special elections held since that ruling have shown significantly higher female participation, and some Republican politicians, once absolutists, have begun to tiptoe around the subject.
In Arizona, a Donald Trump-backed candidate for the US Senate, Blake Masters, once described abortion as "genocide" and called for a federal "personhood" law for fetuses.
But as he slips in the polls, Masters has softened his tone and removed some of the toughest anti-abortion language on his website.
He now voices opposition only to "very late-term and partial birth abortion," two rare procedures.
bbk/sw/md
Brazil’s China-Heavy Election
China is now a topic of electoral debate in Brazil from all sides of the ideological spectrum.
By Igor Patrick
September 24, 2022
Electoral merchandise with the likeness of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who is running for re-election, right, and of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is also running for president, second right, are displayed for sale on a street in Brasilia, Brazil, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022.
China is now a topic of electoral debate in Brazil from all sides of the ideological spectrum.
By Igor Patrick
September 24, 2022
Electoral merchandise with the likeness of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who is running for re-election, right, and of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is also running for president, second right, are displayed for sale on a street in Brasilia, Brazil, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022.
Credit: AP Photo/Eraldo Peres
“The elections this year will determine whom you serve. Bolsonaro is the only one capable of saving us from the Chinese communist domination agreed with Lula and the corrupt Workers’ Party.”
The paragraph above accompanied an amateur montage spread in Brazilian WhatsApp groups. In it, in addition to the apocalyptic prediction, are images of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula – the leading opposition candidate and favorite to win in Brazil’s elections against far-right Jair Bolsonaro on October 2 – shaking hands with Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao, the current and former Chinese presidents.
Despite the bizarreness, such a message would not have attracted attention in the last presidential election in 2018. After all, Jair Bolsonaro was known for his hawkish remarks against the communist country and even visited Taiwan when he was still running for office.
However, four years later, a message like this reveals something more profound: Just a week before Brazil’s historic elections, it is now clear that China has entered the domestic political debate, with uncertain consequences and repercussions for China’s relations not only with the largest South American country but with all of Latin America.
China Throughout The Ideological Spectrum
Strategies for dealing with China’s rise and its impact on local economies have been the subject of contention in the United States and Europe for years, if not decades. In Brazil, however, this is not the case.
Apart from rare mentions of Mercosur, Brazilian election campaigns are dominated mainly by domestic issues. This trend has been exacerbated by the increasing budget cuts in the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the controversial impeachment trial in 2015, and the economic chaos caused by the corruption cases in state-owned companies uncovered by Operation Car Wash. To illustrate how marginal Brazilian foreign relations are, not even a paragraph is devoted to them in Bolsonaro’s campaign promises for his next (and increasingly unlikely) term.
For the 2022 elections, some mention of China was expected by Bolsonaro’s supporters. The president, his allies, and even one of his sons frequently mentioned Beijing and eventually even got into a fight with the then-Chinese ambassador, Yang Wanming (after they accused China of covering up COVID-19 origins). Despite the strengthening of trade relations and Jair Bolsonaro’s visit to China in 2019, his tenure has been marked by unbridled contempt for the Chinese and their growing importance in Brazil
China experts and observers, however, were initially surprised by the sharp statements made by even moderate candidates. Ciro Gomes, currently third in the polls and one of the prominent figures on the Brazilian left, was the first to attack. At a campaign event, Gomes declared that “they [the Chinese] have military artifacts in Venezuela, right next door, more effective than any deterrent structure of Brazilian defense aimed at Manaus because they have begun to distrust the follies of our Brazilian governance.”
Lula has followed suit. The international community largely remembers the former Brazilian president and current candidate for a third term as one of the most strident voices in defense of the so-called Global South. He was one of the main proponents of BRICS and the G-20, and he was the one in charge when China became Brazil’s leading trading partner in 2009, surpassing the United States.
Nevertheless, Lula did not spare criticism in his speech to Brazilian businesspeople at the São Paulo State Federation of Industry (Fiesp). “We have the illusion that China is occupying Africa, that China is occupying Latin America,” he said. “No, it is occupying Brazil. It is dominating Brazil.” Lula also praised his former vice president, the late José Alencar, who “was the only businessman who said ‘I am not afraid of China.’”
In his opinion, Beijing is to blame for the rapid deindustrialization seen in Brazil in recent years – rhetoric that has become popular in other countries around the world and previously reproduced by Bolsonaro himself, who in 2018 complained about China “buying Brazil, instead of buying from Brazil.”
When Lula joined in, it became clear that the debate on China had left the raucous bubbles of the far-right fueled by Bolsonaro and had become a topical part of the Brazilian political debate.
Prospects for China’s Relations With Brazil and Latin America
Both Lula and Ciro have tried to repair the damage – the former has told farmers he hoped to “restore relations with China in six months” if elected, while the latter even attended a meeting with Chinese embassy officials – but they also promise protectionist economic policies that are likely to make life difficult for Chinese investors in Brazil, no matter who wins the elections.
Brazil is facing a severe cycle of deindustrialization and has complained for years about China’s unwillingness to open up to Brazilian exports of higher value-added products (data from Brazil’s Ministry of Economy show that soybeans, iron ore, oil, beef, and cellulose accounted for 89.5 percent of all Brazilian exports to China in 2021). Local businesspeople complain about the few tariffs and regulatory barriers for Chinese products, especially with the emergence of e-commerce platforms like AliExpress in the country.
It makes little sense for Beijing to diversify its purchases from Brazil. Although Brazil was the main destination for Chinese investment in the world in 2021, especially in agriculture and power generation, the Chinese still see the country as an essential part of their food security strategy, not as a source of highly-developed products. Given the hostility of the Brazilian business community and the government’s consensus, Chinese officials are likely to feel even more compelled to accelerate their plans to reduce dependence on Brazilian commodities (particularly soybeans).
Preparations for this are underway. In its 2021 Five-Year Plan, China set minimum targets for national soybean production, requiring provinces to produce at least 650 million tonnes annually. The plan also includes belts for large-scale agriculture and the payment of massive subsidies to grain producers. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce, betting on the emergence of new acreage in the wake of climate change, has signed an agreement to pool soy production areas and build an industrial alliance with Russia, expecting to import at least 3.4 million tonnes from there by 2024; similar commitments have also been made with Ethiopia and Tanzania.
As sinologist MaurÃcio Santoro, author of “Brazil-China Relations in the 21st Century: The Making of a Strategic Partnership,” points out, rising U.S. pressure against Beijing’s influence in Brazil and an increasingly hostile attitude toward the Chinese within Brazil could make China the scapegoat for structural problems in the local economy. The potential for weakening relations in the medium and long term should not be overlooked.
Since every crisis is followed by an opportunity, Argentina can benefit from a possible split. As the most prominent South American economy to integrate the Belt and Road Initiative, Buenos Aires already has Beijing’s explicit support to join BRICS if the group expands as the Russians and Chinese want. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Argentina slowly fills the gap left by the cooling of Sino-Brazilian relations, even if its agriculture sector is much smaller, less diversified, and technologically inferior to that of Brazil.
In addition to trade and diplomatic problems, anti-China rhetoric could have unintended consequences in domestic politics. There is a notorious lack of expertise in Chinese studies in Brazil. There is not a single bachelor’s degree program in the field in the country, and the subject is often left out of traditional schools of international relations. Moreover, the number of Mandarin speakers is so low that it is not even counted by statistical offices.
Making one of Brazil’s most complex economic relationships the target of populist electoral discourse could lead to diplomatic incidents and ruptures that are difficult to repair with the Chinese. Examples abound; regardless of the motives, there is no denying the extent to which appealing to the electorate has eroded relations with China in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, leaving little room for their normalization.
When the polls open on October 2, the world will be looking at Brazil and the possible results. China will be watching as closely as any country.
GUEST AUTHOR
Igor Patrick is a Brazilian journalist specializing in China affairs. He holds a master’s degree in China Studies (Politics and International Relations) from the Yenching Academy at Peking University and a second one in Global Affairs from the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University. He is currently conducting research at The Wilson Center on Chinese influence in Latin America.
“The elections this year will determine whom you serve. Bolsonaro is the only one capable of saving us from the Chinese communist domination agreed with Lula and the corrupt Workers’ Party.”
The paragraph above accompanied an amateur montage spread in Brazilian WhatsApp groups. In it, in addition to the apocalyptic prediction, are images of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula – the leading opposition candidate and favorite to win in Brazil’s elections against far-right Jair Bolsonaro on October 2 – shaking hands with Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao, the current and former Chinese presidents.
Despite the bizarreness, such a message would not have attracted attention in the last presidential election in 2018. After all, Jair Bolsonaro was known for his hawkish remarks against the communist country and even visited Taiwan when he was still running for office.
However, four years later, a message like this reveals something more profound: Just a week before Brazil’s historic elections, it is now clear that China has entered the domestic political debate, with uncertain consequences and repercussions for China’s relations not only with the largest South American country but with all of Latin America.
China Throughout The Ideological Spectrum
Strategies for dealing with China’s rise and its impact on local economies have been the subject of contention in the United States and Europe for years, if not decades. In Brazil, however, this is not the case.
Apart from rare mentions of Mercosur, Brazilian election campaigns are dominated mainly by domestic issues. This trend has been exacerbated by the increasing budget cuts in the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the controversial impeachment trial in 2015, and the economic chaos caused by the corruption cases in state-owned companies uncovered by Operation Car Wash. To illustrate how marginal Brazilian foreign relations are, not even a paragraph is devoted to them in Bolsonaro’s campaign promises for his next (and increasingly unlikely) term.
For the 2022 elections, some mention of China was expected by Bolsonaro’s supporters. The president, his allies, and even one of his sons frequently mentioned Beijing and eventually even got into a fight with the then-Chinese ambassador, Yang Wanming (after they accused China of covering up COVID-19 origins). Despite the strengthening of trade relations and Jair Bolsonaro’s visit to China in 2019, his tenure has been marked by unbridled contempt for the Chinese and their growing importance in Brazil
China experts and observers, however, were initially surprised by the sharp statements made by even moderate candidates. Ciro Gomes, currently third in the polls and one of the prominent figures on the Brazilian left, was the first to attack. At a campaign event, Gomes declared that “they [the Chinese] have military artifacts in Venezuela, right next door, more effective than any deterrent structure of Brazilian defense aimed at Manaus because they have begun to distrust the follies of our Brazilian governance.”
Lula has followed suit. The international community largely remembers the former Brazilian president and current candidate for a third term as one of the most strident voices in defense of the so-called Global South. He was one of the main proponents of BRICS and the G-20, and he was the one in charge when China became Brazil’s leading trading partner in 2009, surpassing the United States.
Nevertheless, Lula did not spare criticism in his speech to Brazilian businesspeople at the São Paulo State Federation of Industry (Fiesp). “We have the illusion that China is occupying Africa, that China is occupying Latin America,” he said. “No, it is occupying Brazil. It is dominating Brazil.” Lula also praised his former vice president, the late José Alencar, who “was the only businessman who said ‘I am not afraid of China.’”
In his opinion, Beijing is to blame for the rapid deindustrialization seen in Brazil in recent years – rhetoric that has become popular in other countries around the world and previously reproduced by Bolsonaro himself, who in 2018 complained about China “buying Brazil, instead of buying from Brazil.”
When Lula joined in, it became clear that the debate on China had left the raucous bubbles of the far-right fueled by Bolsonaro and had become a topical part of the Brazilian political debate.
Prospects for China’s Relations With Brazil and Latin America
Both Lula and Ciro have tried to repair the damage – the former has told farmers he hoped to “restore relations with China in six months” if elected, while the latter even attended a meeting with Chinese embassy officials – but they also promise protectionist economic policies that are likely to make life difficult for Chinese investors in Brazil, no matter who wins the elections.
Brazil is facing a severe cycle of deindustrialization and has complained for years about China’s unwillingness to open up to Brazilian exports of higher value-added products (data from Brazil’s Ministry of Economy show that soybeans, iron ore, oil, beef, and cellulose accounted for 89.5 percent of all Brazilian exports to China in 2021). Local businesspeople complain about the few tariffs and regulatory barriers for Chinese products, especially with the emergence of e-commerce platforms like AliExpress in the country.
It makes little sense for Beijing to diversify its purchases from Brazil. Although Brazil was the main destination for Chinese investment in the world in 2021, especially in agriculture and power generation, the Chinese still see the country as an essential part of their food security strategy, not as a source of highly-developed products. Given the hostility of the Brazilian business community and the government’s consensus, Chinese officials are likely to feel even more compelled to accelerate their plans to reduce dependence on Brazilian commodities (particularly soybeans).
Preparations for this are underway. In its 2021 Five-Year Plan, China set minimum targets for national soybean production, requiring provinces to produce at least 650 million tonnes annually. The plan also includes belts for large-scale agriculture and the payment of massive subsidies to grain producers. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce, betting on the emergence of new acreage in the wake of climate change, has signed an agreement to pool soy production areas and build an industrial alliance with Russia, expecting to import at least 3.4 million tonnes from there by 2024; similar commitments have also been made with Ethiopia and Tanzania.
As sinologist MaurÃcio Santoro, author of “Brazil-China Relations in the 21st Century: The Making of a Strategic Partnership,” points out, rising U.S. pressure against Beijing’s influence in Brazil and an increasingly hostile attitude toward the Chinese within Brazil could make China the scapegoat for structural problems in the local economy. The potential for weakening relations in the medium and long term should not be overlooked.
Since every crisis is followed by an opportunity, Argentina can benefit from a possible split. As the most prominent South American economy to integrate the Belt and Road Initiative, Buenos Aires already has Beijing’s explicit support to join BRICS if the group expands as the Russians and Chinese want. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Argentina slowly fills the gap left by the cooling of Sino-Brazilian relations, even if its agriculture sector is much smaller, less diversified, and technologically inferior to that of Brazil.
In addition to trade and diplomatic problems, anti-China rhetoric could have unintended consequences in domestic politics. There is a notorious lack of expertise in Chinese studies in Brazil. There is not a single bachelor’s degree program in the field in the country, and the subject is often left out of traditional schools of international relations. Moreover, the number of Mandarin speakers is so low that it is not even counted by statistical offices.
Making one of Brazil’s most complex economic relationships the target of populist electoral discourse could lead to diplomatic incidents and ruptures that are difficult to repair with the Chinese. Examples abound; regardless of the motives, there is no denying the extent to which appealing to the electorate has eroded relations with China in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, leaving little room for their normalization.
When the polls open on October 2, the world will be looking at Brazil and the possible results. China will be watching as closely as any country.
GUEST AUTHOR
Igor Patrick is a Brazilian journalist specializing in China affairs. He holds a master’s degree in China Studies (Politics and International Relations) from the Yenching Academy at Peking University and a second one in Global Affairs from the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University. He is currently conducting research at The Wilson Center on Chinese influence in Latin America.
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