Yemen: End American Complicity

by Brendan O’Soro / December 16th, 2022

Recall your attention to the response from the US establishment after Russia was found to be using Iranian drones in the war in Ukraine. The extent of the outrage was so intense that the issue was brought to the UN Security Council, and the spokesman for the State Department briefed the press on the American position conveyed during the proceeding. He said, “we expressed our grave concerns about Russia’s acquisition of these UAVs from Iran,” and “we now have abundant evidence that these UAVs are being used to strike Ukrainian civilians and critical civilian infrastructure.” He added, “we will not hesitate to use our sanctions and other appropriate tools on all involved in these transfers.”

American intelligence officials later told the New York Times that Iran had sent members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Crimean Peninsula; they had been sent, the allegation goes, to train the Russian military how to use the drones they had acquired. Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer, commented on this, saying, “sending drones and trainers to Ukraine has enmeshed Iran deeply into the war on the Russian side and involved Tehran directly in operations that have killed and injured civilians,” and “even if they’re just trainers and tactical advisers in Ukraine, I think that’s substantial.”

The Biden Administration and members of the intelligence community have endorsed an important principle: a state is responsible for the crimes it enables others to commit. Applying this standard to those designated as enemies is quite common, but powerful states always reserve a different set of standards for themselves. Any morally serious person will endorse the precept of universality, and insist upon applying the same criteria to ourselves that we do to others.

If one were to establish the goal of reducing the amount of violence in the world, the simplest way to begin would be to eliminate one’s own contribution to it; the withdrawal of American involvement in criminal acts would mitigate much of the savagery. The Biden administration is responsible for directly facilitating crimes in Yemen that greatly exceed anything Iran is accused of. The Administration has the opportunity to enact the principles they’ve enunciated, and it doesn’t require sanctions or other coercive measures, they merely need to stop participating in the Yemeni war.

The consequences of the war are not controversial. The United Nations estimated that 377,000 people had died at the end of 2021, and that doesn’t account for the destruction that occurred the following year. Yemen is the scene of perhaps the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with almost three-quarters of the population, 23.4 million people, requiring humanitarian assistance. The Yemeni population is subjected to a blockade that can reasonably be classified as torture, the World Organization Against Torture has reported. The legal director for the organization said, “the tens of thousands of civilians who die due to malnutrition, waterborne diseases, and the lack of access to healthcare are no collateral damage of the conflict.”

The American contribution to the war is not opaque. While the Obama administration was in office, some officials warned that the support they were providing could make them criminally liable for the war crimes being committed. During his campaign for the presidency, Joe Biden said he intended to treat Saudi Arabia like “the pariah that they are,” and he made clear his intention to stop selling weapons to them; his determination in this matter didn’t survive his election. Arms sales continued, diplomatic cover for the continuation of the blockade is still provided, and Saudi Arabia still relies on American contractors to service its Air Force. The dependency on American contractors to maintain and service Saudi warplanes cannot be overstated: if the US canceled these contacts the Saudi planes would be restricted to their hangers.

On December 6, The Intercept reported that Bernie Sanders was advancing a war powers resolution aimed at halting American support for the war Saudi Arabia was leading in Yemen. The Biden administration was asked to avoid incriminating themselves as transparent hypocrites, and allow for their policy to approach the standard they condemn Iran for failing to reach. This task was too strenuous for the administration. They lobbied intensely against the resolution and Sanders was forced to withdraw it.

It should never be shocking when a president behaves in a manner contrary to how he presented himself during his campaign; or when an administration condemns enemies for their crimes while they are committing worse acts. Hypocrisy of this sort is a prominent feature of the American political establishment. But this is a particularly egregious example of this. The Biden administration is reserving the right to aid Saudi Arabia as they annihilate Yemeni society and slaughter its inhabitants, and they expect to be greeted with something other than contempt when they accuse their enemies of criminal conduct. This isn’t a privilege that should be afforded to them.FacebookTwittReddit

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Brendan O’Soro is an independent writer from western Massachusetts. Read other articles by Brendan.

A Catholic University With a Radical History Faces a Union Drive of Its Own

Catholic radical Louis J. Twomey’s labor institute at Loyola University New Orleans trained a generation of workers for class struggle. A new union drive among the university’s food service workers draws on that legacy of the best of Catholic trade unionism.

Loyola University in New Orleans. (Arnoldius / Wikimedia Commons)


BYCODY R. MELCHER
12.11.2022
 Jacobin 

“[It is an] immoral principle that human labor is a commodity.” 

-Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ, Address before the Industrial Relations Committee of the Louisiana State Senate, 1954

The American Catholic Church was once an incubator of working-class activism. As Catholic institutions face unionization drives of their own, will they forsake this legacy or embrace it?

Food service workers at Loyola University New Orleans, a Jesuit university, have recently gone public with their intent to unionize. While the workers are technically employed by a third-party contractor, the university can greatly influence the result of the drive. It has yet to be determined how the university will respond.

UNITE HERE’s Challenge to Third-Party Exploitation

An important component of the recent upsurge in labor militancy in the United States has been UNITE HERE’s concerted effort to unionize food service workers employed through private contracting companies like ISS Guckenheimer, Compass Group, Aramark, and Sodexo. As a cost-saving measure, public institutions (prisons, schools, universities, hospitals, airports, etc.) and private corporations (particularly tech companies that provide employees’ meals so they don’t feel compelled to live anywhere but the workplace) often contract out back-of-house food preparation and front-of-house food service labor. To avoid having a direct employer-employee relationship with its workforce — and most importantly, to avoid the regulations and demands inherent to that relationship, such as the provision of benefits and adequate wages — these “employers” instead farm out their labor needs to companies that specialize in providing neither benefits nor adequate wages.

Just one of those companies, Sodexo, generated a net profit of roughly $363 million in 2021 alone, while a full-time employee, at some locations, can expect to make less than $25,000 a year, with little to no health or retirement benefits. Full-time Sodexo employees at Loyola, some of which have held their jobs for more than twenty years, make just $13.75 an hour and need to work additional jobs to pay for medical insurance. Fittingly, Sodexo, which is headquartered in France, is an abbreviation that stands for Société d’Exploitation Hotelière.

Given these conditions, unions like UNITE HERE have made great strides organizing these workers. To take just one instance, since 2018, UNITE HERE has organized food service workers at twenty-three Google offices, representing roughly 90 percent of all food service workers at Google. Overall, UNITE HERE organized sixty-two thousand workers from 2014 to 2019. Importantly, the union has focused specifically on the South, a longtime bastion of “business friendly” nonunion labor.

In its nationwide campaign to organize Sodexo workers, UNITE HERE has recently initiated organization campaigns at several Southern universities that contract their food services through the company. Loyola University New Orleans, a private Jesuit university with a long history of fostering social justice causes (and where I happen to teach in the Department of Sociology), is one of those universities.

On a strictly moral level, it might sound strange, even hypocritical, that a social justice–oriented university affiliated with the left-wing of the Catholic Church would employ nonunion labor in the first place, let alone contract a demonstrably exploitative company with a litany of unfair labor practice accusations. Ignoring, momentarily, that the thrust of the Gospels is, in essence, “rich people are going to hell,” and the fact that the Pope, a Jesuit himself, has consistently advocated for the right to organize unions, Loyola has an institutional history of promoting organized labor.

That institutional history began with Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ.
The Radicalized “Labor Priest”

Father Twomey was one of many “labor priests” that the American Catholic Church produced during the early to mid-twentieth century. Twomey is unique, however, in that he began his activist career at precisely the same time that the labor priests’ activism, in general, began to wane. As Steve Rosswurm has shown, the heyday of American Catholic labor radicalism peaked in the 1930s as the Church attempted to “carry the message of trade unionism into every working-class Catholic home.” The Church, with the Jesuits as the vanguard, established dozens of labor schools across the country, like the Xavier Labor School in Manhattan and the Kansas City School of Christian Workmen. These labor schools sought to undermine “materialistic capitalism” by training workers how to organize their own unions. Perhaps more consequentially, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), founded in 1937, served as an organizational base for both the initiation of union drives and partisan control of existing unions.

The Association’s activism, however, changed dramatically in the mid-1940s. Anti-communist from the beginning, ACTU’s strategy shifted over time from a positive program of attracting workers to the Church through its support of working-class causes — that is to say, away from the clutches of the secular Communist Party, which, contrary to Red Scare myths, experienced widespread popularity during the period — to a negative policy of actively attacking and red-baiting left-wing unionists. Rather than organizing workers, the Church’s labor policy began to focus almost exclusively on purging existing unions of left-wingers and establishing competing anti-communist unions to siphon members from Communist-controlled ones. The purge of the left-wing of the labor movement, aided in no small measure by the American Catholic Church, ultimately led to the long-term decline of the American labor movement.

Enter Father Twomey.

Louis Twomey was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1905. Besides turning down a contract to play professional baseball with the Washington Senators to enter the priesthood, he lived a relatively unremarkable life until his ordination in 1939. After his ordination, Twomey earned multiple master’s degrees, served as a high school principal, and, in 1947, was assigned by the Jesuit leadership of the South to Loyola University New Orleans. Formally, Twomey was the regent of the university’s law school and a lecturer of jurisprudence. However, immediately upon arriving at the university, Twomey established the Institute of Industrial Relations.

The institute’s initial philosophy — that is, Twomey’s initial philosophy — was one of labor-management accommodation. Twomey assumed that the relationship between labor and capital need not be inherently antagonistic, and, through good-faith negotiation, the wants of both could be achieved. They could, in Twomey’s words, “quit their class struggle . . . in the spirit of Christian and democratic loyalty to American ideals.” The issue, however, was that American business, especially in the South, was not particularly interested in quitting the class struggle.

Almost from the beginning, businesses refused to send representatives to institute courses or meetings, considering even the concept of negotiating with workers as a group as too prolabor. So Twomey and his institute, eventually renamed the Institute of Human Relations, shifted sharply to the left and became what capital feared it already was: a center that prepared workers for the class struggle. It is worth emphasizing that the behavior of capital is responsible for Twomey’s ideological shift. Since the bosses refused to acknowledge workers as anything but exploitable labor, Twomey eventually recognized the inherent antagonism between capital and labor, and, more broadly, between capital and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Twomey began to regularly offer courses on how to organize and proficiently participate in labor unions (courses like “Principles and Practices of Collective Bargaining” and “Public Speaking and Parliamentary Procedure”), as well as more general courses on the labor movement as a whole (“Current Industrial Problems”). Importantly, Twomey, unlike much of the Church at the time, was a dedicated integrationist and anti-racist. Courses at the institute were open to workers regardless of race, even as the university itself remained white-only (an issue Twomey was actively attempting to remedy). While the courses it sponsored did not provide college credit, Twomey’s institute was one of the first, if not the first, instances of integrated education on a college campus in the Deep South since Reconstruction.

Twomey did not stop at integrating the institute. He, along with the chair of Loyola’s sociology department, Fr Joseph H. Fichter, SJ, worked tirelessly to integrate the entire university, eventually succeeding in 1952, when the law school accepted its first black applicants. Twomey had first attempted to integrate the university in 1949, but failed after the administration yielded to student demands to keep the school segregated. That first cohort of black students included Norman Francis, who went on to become the first black president of Xavier University, the only Catholic Church–affiliated historically black college or university, and who also led the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

For Twomey, the elimination of racial oppression and working-class exploitation went hand in hand. He would commonly describe the cause of labor organizing and the fight against white supremacy as “two sides of the same coin.”

Twomey was deeply involved in a series of strikes conducted by disproportionately black sugarcane workers throughout the 1950s. The sugarcane workers, often sharecroppers whose homes were on planter-owned property, lived in a state of “semi-feudalism,” as Twomey put it. The workers, with Twomey’s assistance, established the Agricultural Workers Union, which represented more than two thousand sharecroppers and laborers. Twomey solicited larger labor movement support, especially through the Teamsters, who provided financial assistance during the strike.

The strike ultimately failed — not due to the lack of resolve or militancy of the workers but because of a backroom deal brokered between the state’s labor apparatus (the Louisiana Labor Council) and the sugar planters. Louisiana became a right-to-work state in 1954, but the law was repealed in 1956 because the Labor Council agreed to abandon the cause of the cane workers if the sugar planters agreed to support the elimination of right-to-work in the state. This event led Twomey to deeply distrust the bureaucratization of the labor movement, compelling him to double down on the promotion of union democracy and rank-and-file militancy through the institute.

Twomey spent the rest of his life as a committed advocate for labor and civil rights. He served, in an advisory capacity, in the Johnson administration’s Department of Labor, demanding that the national government take seriously the plight of the rural working class, black and white. As a result, he was often accused, by those in and out of the Church, of being a communist.

Twomey died in 1969, and his institute, after various name changes and a definite shift away from labor issues (the final name of the institute was the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice), followed him in death in 2017.

Today’s Sugarcane Workers

Sodexo food service employees in the South are disproportionately black, unconscionably exploited, and subject to the ever-present oppressive structures of white supremacy. Comparisons to the sugarcane workers that Twomey championed are, I think, fairly accurate. Twomey, I’m sure, would be horrified if he knew this was occurring at the university he used as an institutional base to support the cause of civil and workers’ rights.

I’m also sure that he’d support UNITE HERE in its mission to organize these workers.

CONTRIBUTOR
Cody R. Melcher is an assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University New Orleans.

Canadian Businesses Took Pandemic Benefits to the Bank and Left Workers Holding the Bag


Employers took billions from the Canadian government in wage support funds, and many of them continued to pay CEOs millions and issue dividends. Yet the government is now looking for payback from workers, not bosses.

Canadian corporations took government money and ran — all the way to share buybacks, executive compensation and bonuses, and dividend payouts, even while workers struggled.

 (Gabriel Vergani / EyeEm / Getty Images)

BYDAVID MOSCROP
Jacobin 

We know the neoliberal state valorizes the business sector. Political speeches about business often sound like benedictions, though we do get the odd, fleeting song of praise for the worker who makes all industry possible in the first place. Occasionally, in an effort to make our elected officials seem relatable, we hear a shot taken at the corporate class. But the fix is in. We all know who has the power — it’s clear as day in the plaudits paid to business by our political classes. And in the parlance of neoliberal speech, “business” is a synecdoche for “businessperson” — and a “businessperson” is an owner, not a worker.

Because the working public is fraught with class dis- or misalignment, pundits and politicians constantly attack a “lazy” and “entitled” workforce without adequate pushback. In the absence of a prominent voice from labor to correct this narrative, the media depicts working people as loafers waiting for their chance to take advantage of state largesse or corporate noblesse oblige. So, when in March 2020 the government of Canada introduced two pandemic support measures — one for employers and one for workers — it was a safe bet for anyone paying attention that when it came time for settling accounts, there would be a marked difference in whose benefits would be scrutinized and whose would be greenlit.

Last week, Canada’s auditor general, Karen Hogan, released a report on pandemic benefits. In her study of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) — disbursed to individuals — and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) — disbursed to businesses — Hogan concludes “the federal government quickly delivered COVID-19 benefits to Canadians” but found “post-payment verification work is falling short.” It’s not hard to guess who will be in the most need of this post-payment “verification.”

Ask Not What CEWS Can Do for You, Ask What CEWS Can Do for Your Boss

Canada paid pandemic benefits between 2020 and 2022 amounting to CAD $210 billion. Of that, $100 billion went to CEWS, which ended in October 2021. Roughly 36 percent of Canadian businesses received subsidy support, with the top three industries posting much higher rates. A full two-thirds of the accommodation and food services industry received CEWS, with arts, entertainment, and recreation next at 56 percent, and manufacturing at 55 percent.

In her report, Hogan identifies $4.6 billion in payments to ineligible recipients through individual pandemic supports. This number includes CERB payments but excludes CEWS. For the wage subsidy, the numbers were much higher.

“Our analysis identified 51,049 employers that received $9.87 billion in Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy payments whose monthly GST/HST filings did not demonstrate a sufficient revenue drop to be eligible for the subsidy,” states the report. And that total could be much higher — the report suggest it could be up to $15.5 billion.


So far, the government’s repayment focus has been on individuals and not employers — as low-income people struggle to repay the cash. Shocker. Labor journalist Jeremy Appel has a sharp take on that predictable outcome.

On the business side, while ineligibility (due, for instance, to applicants not meeting the revenue decline threshold) is grounds for repayment, one can imagine small businesses making good faith errors as they tried to support their workers. That doesn’t absolve the state for leaning into heavily supporting employers over workers, but it does ask us to distinguish cases that are warranted from those that are unjustified.

A primary consideration in determining justification is scale. It would be absurd to lump your local café or record shop in with telecommunications oligopolists, energy conglomerates, or retail chains. Still, we need to ask why it is that the $2,000 a month CERB benefit paid as well or better than pre-pandemic wages for so many workers. This problem — the fundamental problem of wages — reminds us that small businesses, in spite of the aesthetic preference of locavores, are often no better than their corporate counterparts.
One Rule for Bosses and Another for Workers

Of the 447,149 businesses who received CEWS, over 250,000 of them had between zero and five employees. In the interest of full transparency, this writer, who is incorporated and pays himself a monthly wage, is one of them. I like to borrow a phrase and remind people I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man — to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year! Perhaps I should have been a grocery store or oil company CEO. But that’s fodder for another column.

A mere 0.34 percent of businesses with five employees or fewer (868) are under audit compared to 32.69 percent (85) of those with 1,000 to 4,999 employees and 41.67 percent (ten) of those with more than five thousand workers. All told, a mere 0.8 percent of recipients — representing 12 percent of the total subsidy payouts — are or were under audit. In contrast, as many as 1.7 million Canadians may have to pay back CERB funds out of 8.5 million total recipients — or 20 percent. And that’s before any further investigations that may emerge after the auditor general’s report, which is recommending further investigation of over four million recipients alongside another 259,000 more for the Canada Recovery Benefit, which replaced CERB.

In May 2021, the New Democratic Party called on the government to claw back CEWS payments from companies who used the program for purposes other than paying wages. In his letter to the Trudeau government, NDP MP Peter Julian wrote, “The wage subsidy was clearly supposed to go to workers and toward protecting Canadians’ jobs — not bonuses for top corporate brass.”

As critics pointed out at the time, the Liberal government failed to place restrictions on businesses who took CEWS funds. That meant big corporations could take the money and run — all the way to share buybacks, grotesque executive compensation and bonuses, and dividend payouts. And run they did. What was the government going to do? Audit them years later, at great expense, after that money had done its job? Corporate giants are nothing if not good at employing accountants and lawyers whose expertise is jamming up the feds.
Pandemic Benefits for Shareholders

In December, 2020, the Financial Post found nearly six dozen companies that had received at least $1.03 billion in wage subsidies while collectively paying out more than $5 billion in dividends. The Post also reported that seventeen of these companies bought back shares or introduced buyback programs.

Businesses who bothered to mount a defense tended to take the line that dividends and buybacks were financed with other money. Not this pile, you see. That pile. Corporate PR’s attempts at misdirection sometimes beggar belief. Companies tried to sell the idea that they were too poor to pay employees without taxpayer cash while being rich enough to make it rain dividends, buybacks, and bonuses.

Imperial Oil was the most egregious of the lot, taking $120 million in wage subsidy cash while paying out a whopping $324 million in dividends. Others on the list include Corus Entertainment, Leon’s Furniture, and Extendicare. In the case of Leon’s, the Financial Post investigation noted “the injection of CEWS it received inflated the company’s net income to historic levels that may look out of the norm after seeing how hard most retailers were hit during the lockdowns in the early months of the pandemic.” Keep in mind, all this wage subsidy money was presumably eligible funding that businesses could, by way of a shell game, accept while carrying on as usual. Because the government didn’t bother to make the rules of disbursement stringent enough to forestall abuse, businesses took advantage in exactly the way one would expect.

While big companies were receiving wage subsidy money in the upward of tens of millions of dollars, their top executives were making a killing. In January,2022, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report that found average annual compensation for the top one hundred chief executives in Canada was $10.9 million. Air Canada stood out as a particularly egregious offender. While senior executives eventually gave back their bonuses after public outcry, the company initially paid out $10 million in bonuses after taking billions in public support, including a liquidity program and the wage subsidy.

As the dust settles on the pandemic support programs in Canada, we ought to pay particular attention to who bears the brunt of the hunt for so-called overpayments. We ought to also resist attempts to construct individual CERB recipients as lazy, entitled fraudsters while big companies made off like bandits while taking public wage subsidy funds. As always, our primary question of analysis should be, who has the power?, and we should adjust our critiques and priorities accordingly. In this case, it’s not hard to do. Sure, workers received $2,000 here and there — just enough not to be able to afford both rent and food. But it was businesses that made record profits, offered generous dividends, bought back stock as a market flex, and paid their executives millions upon millions in compensation.

David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He hosts the podcast Open to Debate and is the author of Too Dumb For Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones.

U$A
Young, Scrappy and Hungry: Gen Z in the Midterm Elections

ByOlivia Ma
December 11, 2022



“Gen Z and millennials make up a third of our country, but we are nowhere near a third of government, and I think we need a government that looks like the people,” Maxwell Alejandro Frost commented following his election to Congress on Nov. 8. After defeating 72-year-old Republican Calvin Wimbish by 19 percentage points, Frost, a 25-year-old activist and Democrat, became the newly elected representative for Florida’s 10th Congressional District. More notably, he became the first member of Gen Z to join the Congress. “History was made tonight,” Frost tweeted following his victory.

The U.S. Constitution states that only citizens above the age of 25 are eligible to serve in the House of Representatives, meaning that the midterm elections of 2022 were the first year where members of Generation Z — those born between 1997 and 2012 — were eligible to run for any of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives.



According to the Pew Research Center, Gen Z is the “most diverse” and “best-educated” generation in American history. Compared to generations before them, more belong to racial and ethnic minorities, have grown up using electronics, and have decided to pursue higher education. But how would the environment they grew up in impact their political ideologies? How are they planning to lead?

During the 2022 midterm elections, a few passionate Gen Z candidates campaigned against those who were much older and more experienced. With younger age, higher aspirations, agendas more extreme than their contenders’, and the aim to represent younger voices, they became the focus of the media, drawing support and attention while also eliciting skepticism regarding how far they could go.

How does this younger and more diverse generation view American politics? These Gen Z candidates searched for an answer by pushing from the opposing party. “Are we remaining stagnant by trying the same things or are we going to move forward and try to build a better coalition and actually put up a fight against Republicans in the district?” Ray Reed commented on the work of Trish Gunby, his Democratic primary opponent. Only 25 years old, Reed, a St. Louis native, ran to represent the 2nd Congressional District of Missouri.

“How do we break through that mold? It’s by electing young people to office that can resonate with these voters, have a platform at the national stage, that can show them ideas, policies, values that they’re not hearing elsewhere at all,” said 25-year-old Karoline Leavitt, Republican candidate for the 1st Congressional District of New Hampshire, a toss-up district that the Republicans were hoping to gain.

Reed and Leavitt are among the few Gen Zers who ran for seats in the House of Representatives, yet they represented the opposite of the political spectrum. Reed advocated for restricting firearms, codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law, and curbing student debt. On the other hand, Leavitt — who once worked as assistant press secretary during the Trump administration — called for “less government and more freedom” and believed that the 2020 election was stolen.

“No one is really a moderate,” commented Elena Moore in the National Public Radio podcast. Her colleague Kristen Soltis Anderson later added, “The frame has shifted from, I’m going to bring about that change by being someone who looks for opportunities to work across the aisle, and more, I’m going to disrupt the institutions and systems that are allowing the other side to continue to prevail.”

Yet it seems that at least 59% of the voters in Florida’s 10th Congressional District agreed with Frost, his activism, and support for gun control, affordable housing, and universal health care. “I come from a generation that has gone through more mass-shooting drills than fire drills,” Frost said in an interview with the New York Times in August. “This is something that my generation has had to face head-on: being scared to go to school, being scared to go to church, being scared to be in your community. That gives me a sense of urgency.” It is arguably his passion for activism and social issues as such that helped him defeat nine other Democrats in his primary election in August and his Republican opponent in November.

History has indeed been made as this 25-year-old prepares to enter Congress. As of 2021, the median age of members of the Congress was roughly 65, while that of the House was just under 59. The 117th Congress is dominated by those born between 1946 and 1980. Even the millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — took up only 7% of Congress. Frost, on the other hand, was born in 1997 and is not even half of the average age of the chamber he joins. He not only represents Florida’s 10th Congressional District but also serves as a voice for over 68 million Gen Z Americans, approximately 21% of the U.S. population. Frost pushes forward the tide of the younger generation entering politics, as he mentioned in his victory speech, “I’m the first. But I definitely won’t be the last.”

Among Reed, Frost, and Leavitt, only Frost made it to Congress. On Aug. 2, Ray Reed lost his campaign in the Democratic match-up of his district. His opponent Trish Gunby, roughly 40 years his senior, secured the district’s Democratic primary with 85.2% of the votes. Karoline Leavitt, on the other hand, won the Republican primary of New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District on Sept. 13 with 33.4% of the votes. Yet facing incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas, Leavitt lost by eight percentage points.

After his loss in August, Reed stated on Twitter that he would take a break but did not want to “stay away for long.” A temporary defeat does not seem to dim his ambition, yet the future remains uncertain: Will time wear off their ambition and smoothen their relatively extreme agendas?

Perhaps history may be a guide. Immediately following President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, a series of young and ambitious Democrats were sworn into office in 1975 hoping to reform a Congress centered on seniority and conservatism. Joe Biden, then 30 years old, was sworn into office just two years before as a senator from Delaware — the youngest age possible for the Senate. He shared similar visions as those “Watergate babies,” advocating for the environment, civil rights, and a withdrawal from the Vietnam war. Yet 50 years later, he is now considered moderate by his party and often accused of not addressing pressing issues nationwide.

Will the same happen to the Gen Z candidates in the future? Perhaps they will remain adamant about changing the world or even grow more radical. Or perhaps, as older generations have suggested, their ambitions will wear off in the decades to come, while a future generation will push for more changes. As the 2022 midterm elections have mostly settled down, the focus is currently on how Frost and other young activists can represent the voices of young America. Yet in the future to come, it may shift to how well they can hold onto their youthful ambitions.

Image by Sushil Nash is licensed under the Unsplash License.

Northern Syria needs 'clearing' of Kurdish forces: Erdogan tells Putin

Syrian Kurds wave flags in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil, during a demonstration

 on February 2, 2018. - Copyright SAFIN HAMED/AFP or licensors

By Euronews with AFP • Updated: 11/12/2022

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his Russian counterpart on Sunday that there was a need to "clear" northern Syria of Kurdish forces, during a telephone call.

Turkey's leader said to Vladimir Putin “it is ... a priority to clear the border of terrorists, at least 30 km deep", referring to Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria, according to a statement from his office.

The two leaders also discussed grain supplies and a potential regional gas hub in Turkey, both countries said.

Both men discussed "the problem" of resolving the Syrian conflict and how the conditions of a 2019 agreement between Russia and Turkey could be "fulfilled".

Three years ago Moscow and Ankara signed a deal, promising to create a buffer zone between the Turkish border and YPG forces that would be controlled by the Syrian army and Russian military police.

While Russian and Syrian forces are in the border region, the agreement was not fully implemented and Kurdish groups remain.

The two countries will continue "close contact" in the realms of defence and foreign policy, the Russian presidency said in its statement.

 
Erdogan has threatened to launch a military operation in northern Syria against the YPG since November.

 
Kurds protest against Turkish threats in Syria's Qamishli

Turkey launched air and artillery strikes in Syria and Iraq following an explosion in Istanbul on 13 November that six people and wounded dozens of others.

Ankara accused the YPG and its affiliates the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) of being behind the attack that killed six people in Istanbul on November 13.

Kurdish forces have denied any involvement. They typically attack only targets linked to the Turkish state.

A separate agreement on the creation of a buffer zone in northern Syria was struck between Ankara and Washington in 2019.

Turkey criticises the US, as well as Russia, for not respecting these deals and allowing the YPG to remain in the north, which is home to the bulk of Syria's Kurdish population.

During the Syrian Civil War, the Kurds were able to carve out an autonomous state in north and eastern Syria, having long wanted more political autonomy.

Kurdish troops spearheaded the fight against the Islamic State, working alongside international forces to drive the jihadist group from its Syrian strongholds.

Both Moscow and Washington oppose a possible Turkish ground incursion into northern Syria.

Coffee consumption to rise 1-2 pct per year: International Coffee Organization

Roasted coffee beans are seen on display at a Juan Valdez store

 in Bogota, Colombia June 5, 2019. (File Photo: Reuters)

Bloomberg
Published: 11 December ,2022

Global consumption of coffee is likely to climb by 1 percent to 2 percent a year through the end of the decade, according to International Coffee Organization Executive Director Vanusia Nogueira, who estimated about 25 million more 60 kilograms bags would be needed over the next eight years

“We are more conservative now for a short-term projection,” Nogueira said during a conference in Hanoi held by the Vietnam Coffee-Cocoa Association, referring to all the events the world is facing, including high inflation in Europe.

The ICO’s previous forecast that global consumption will rise 3.3 percent per year on average in the next four to five decades was too “optimistic,” she added.

The global industry will reach a balance in coffee supply and demand in the next two or three years, from the current deficit, Nogueira said in an interview with Bloomberg.

The world needs more of both arabica and robusta beans, but increases in robusta production and demand will be higher, she said.

Traditional arabica producers are trying to grow robusta amid global warming while roasters have also tried to add more cheaper robusta in their blends. “If you have robusta with higher quality, consumers won’t feel a big difference in the blends.”

Many markets are looking for fine robusta, Nogueira said at the conference on Sunday. Vietnam is doing its homework on expanding to high-quality robusta production “quite well,” she said, recalling her surprise on tasting three sets of “very good coffee cups” during a visit a day earlier with a group of international guests to a coffee shop owned by the nation’s second largest coffee exporter Vinh Hiep Co.

The ICO doesn’t see Vietnam’s global dominance of robusta exports being hurt by Brazil’s increased production of conilon, because the extra output is to supply the South American country’s soluble industry, the world’s largest, according to Nogueira.

She said coffee-growing nations need to boost consumption domestically for better prices and benefits to their economies.

Vietnam sees domestic coffee consumption rising 5 percent to 10 percent in coming years, from the current 300,000 tons, which comprises 170,000 tons used for instant coffee production, Do Ha Nam, vice head of the country’s coffee association, said during the same conference.

Nam, who is also chairman of the nation’s top shipper Intimex Group, projected shipments from Vietnam dropping in 2022-23 because of lower production and insignificant carry-over stocks from the previous season.

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Amid growing discontent, a jump in the number of Chinese seeking to move to Canada

The exodus by mostly middle-income and wealthy people has been dubbed the 'run' phenomenon.

By Liu Fei and Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin
2022.12.11

People have lunch at a food court in Beijing's middle-class neighborhood of Shangdi, Aug. 17, 2022. The current exodus from China is mostly middle-class families and high-earning corporate professionals who have the means to relocate.

 Credit: AFP

The number of Chinese applying to emigrate to Canada rose 15 percent during the July-September quarter, the latest indication of widespread public dissatisfaction with life in China, particularly under the harsh anti-virus restrictions of the past three years that have hamstrung economic growth and curbed individual freedoms.

Canada’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship received 9,925 applications from Chinese people for permanent residency during the third quarter, up 15 percent from the same quarter of 2021.

The exodus, mostly of middle-class families and high-earning corporate professionals who have the wherewithal to relocate, has been dubbed the "run" phenomenon, using a Chinese character that sounds a little like the English word "run."

Lin Litong, who came to Canada as a student six years ago, said he's not surprised by the trend.

"There was a saying that became popular 10 or 20 years ago -- voting with one's feet," Lin told Radio Free Asia. "There is a deep sense of discontent running through the entire business and political elite and all through the middle class."

"It's about regaining a sense of safety and security," he said. "It doesn't matter if people say life is more complex in foreign countries ... at least people feel safe."

China's "10-point" announcement on Dec. 7 that it would loosen some aspects of the zero-COVID restrictions in the wake of mass protests across the country didn't appear to have had much effect on keyword searches for "emigration," which have been spiked several times since the Shanghai lockdown that began in late March.

While keyword searches on WeChat and Baidu saw spikes in searches for "10-point plan" and "no more PCR tests," searches for "emigration" also doubled to nearly 120 million on the day of the announcement.

Vote of no confidence

China announced strict curbs on "non-essential" overseas travel by its nationals in May, amid a surge in immigration inquiries after weeks of grueling mass testing, lockdowns and forcible mass transportation to quarantine camps. 

Reports have also surfaced on social media of people leaving China for foreign study having their passports clipped and invalidated as they boarded planes, and also from people who had been denied passports when they applied for them. In April, Chinese residents were ordered to hand over any valid passports to the authorities for "safe-keeping."

People protest in solidarity over COVID-19 restrictions in mainland China, during a commemoration of the victims of a fire in Urumqi outside the Chinese consulate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Nov. 29, 2022. Credit: Reuters

Shanghai resident Xiao Zhang said the upsurge in searches for "emigration" was a kind of vote of no confidence in the government.

"This sudden uptick in discussions about emigration recorded by the WeChat Index was linked to the official announcement relaxing zero-COVID controls," Zhang said. "Many people seem to think that the current ban on overseas travel is directly linked to the zero-COVID policy, so they think that once those rules are relaxed, they have a better chance of getting out [of China]."

But in reality, Zhang said he thinks the exit ban has more to do with controlling people and capital outflows. So while the government may relax immigration rules, he suspects it will be for only a short window.

Immigration consultation

Meanwhile, business has been booming in recent years for immigration consultants, although there are signs of a potential crackdown on that sector too, with reports emerging of immigration consultants being hauled in for questioning by state security police. 

Immigration consultant Huang Tianle said Canada's immigration policies tend to favor younger people, meaning that Chinese parents often send their children to study there to obtain the legal right to remain.

He said the current wave of Chinese emigration to Canada was preceded by a similar wave of people leaving Hong Kong after China launched a citywide crackdown on dissent and political opposition in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

Many remain politically engaged even after leaving China, with considerable support seen on Canadian university campuses for the recent wave of anti-lockdown protests in Chinese cities.

The Hon Hsing Athletic Club performs a dragon dance outside of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Chinatown in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Feb. 5, 2022. Credit: Reuters

Bai Yun, a musician and poet living in Canada, said she had composed a song in honor of the "white paper" movement, so named because of the blank sheets of A4 printer paper held up by protesters, that was sung at a recent rally in Toronto.

"Can you hear the sound of the dawn, a window opening to face the sun?" the crowd sang.

Sunny Sonam, chairman of the Toronto branch of the Tibetan Youth Association, said he was optimistic that people have a clearer idea of the way forward, despite the tailing off of public protests on the streets of Chinese cities in recent days.

"People realize that enough is enough," Sonam said. "It's terrible when power is concentrated in the hands of one person."

"Of course this wave of protests will slowly dissipate as zero-COVID restrictions are lifted, but people now know that standing together is an effective way to make their voices heard."

Propaganda machine

There are signs the Chinese Communist Party's censorship and propaganda machine is fighting back against the exodus of well-heeled professionals.

While the #emigration hashtag on social media typically garners tens of thousands of daily views, much of the content focuses on the disadvantages of living overseas, suggesting some kind of intervention by the ruling Communist Party's "public opinion management" system. 

At their peak, search queries for the keyword "emigration" hit 70 million several times during the Shanghai lockdown between March and May, and 130 million immediately afterwards. The same keyword also showed peaks on Toutiao Index, Google Trends and 360 Trends between April and the end of June 2022. 

People attend a candlelight vigil commemorating the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre in Beijing, standing outside of the Chinese consulate in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 4, 2022. Credit: AFP

More recently, the hashtags #escapefromGuangzhou and #escapefromZhengzhou were trending amid COVID-19 lockdowns in those cities.

Shanghai-based Xu Xiangcheng, who works in education, said he has been preparing to leave China since the national security crackdown on Hong Kong in 2019.

Xu, who is in his 40s, said that he was educated in the communist system, but that his generation has a deep affinity for Hong Kong and Taiwan. “Hong Kong means a lot to us."

Giving up the dream

He said he once had a fantasy that he could do something to “make Chinese society better,” but the “forcible occupation of Hong Kong by the Communist Party and the suppression of such ideas there made me think I didn't want my kids getting an education in this kind of environment," he said. "So I made up my mind to emigrate three years ago."

Xu said many of his friends have the same idea.

"They didn't decide this until this year, because the situation deteriorated," he said. "I feel that there is no hope for this place, so I have to leave."

While Xu has been in contact with an immigration consultancy, his plans were hugely hampered by the zero-COVID policy.

"I have run into problems preparing the materials to support my visa application, because there is always so much [bureaucratic] back and forth in China," he said. "A lot of documents are unavailable due to lockdowns."

"Schools are suspended and my bank is closed, along with government departments, which makes things very difficult," he said.

“Things are really miserable”

Henan-based current affairs commentator Li Fatian said there are plenty of rural residents who are hoping to leave, too.

"Small and medium-sized enterprises have been hit hard by the pandemic restrictions," Li said. "There are no jobs, and businesses are still paying rent despite being forced to close their doors."

"This stupid, one-size-fits-all policy makes it impossible for a lot of people to survive [in China]," he said. "Things are really miserable right now."

Li said many migrant workers have been forced back to rural areas by lockdowns, which has likely defused wider anti-government unrest due to lower population density and less access to timely information.

Current affairs commentator Fang Yuan said most people now want to escape the strict anti-virus rules, one way or another, even if leaving the country isn't an option.

"The exodus from large, medium and smaller cities to rural areas is the main form of escape, or fleeing cities under lockdown," Fang said. "It's disruptive to daily life, because these are essential workers."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Iran hands new 10-year sentence to Baha’i figures: Group


Judge gavel in front of Iran flag

AFP
Published: 11 December ,2022:

Iran has jailed for 10 years each two prominent Baha’i figures as part of a crackdown on its largest non-Muslim religious minority, the group representing the community at the UN said Sunday.

Mahvash Sabet, 69, and Fariba Kamalabadi, 60, who had both previously served 10-year prison terms over their activism, were handed new sentences after a one-hour trial on November 21, the Baha’i International Community (BIC) said in a statement.

The two women had been arrested in late July at the start of a fresh crackdown against the Baha’is, who are estimated to number some 300,000 in Iran.

The Islamic republic recognizes minority non-Muslim faiths including Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism but does not extend the same recognition to Baha’ism.

“It is profoundly distressing to learn that these two Baha’i women... are once again being incarcerated for another 10 years on the same ludicrous charges,” said Simin Fahandej, representative of the BIC to the UN in Geneva.

“Words fail to describe this absurd and cruel injustice,” she added.

The precise nature of the national security-related charges were not immediately clear, but Iran's intelligence ministry said in August it had arrested Baha’is suspected of spying for a center in Israel and working illegally to spread their religion.

At least 90 Baha’is are currently in prison or subject to ankle-band monitoring, the BIC said, adding that it had counted 320 individual acts of persecution against members of the community since the end of July.

The crackdown has seen Baha’i homes destroyed and business shut down, it added.

Iran is also in the throes of a nationwide crackdown against protests over the September death of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian women of Kurdish origin, after her arrest by the morality police.

Baha’is are used to Iranian accusations of links to Israel, whose northern city of Haifa hosts a center of the Baha’i faith that was established following the exile of a Baha’i leader well before the state of Israel was created.

Baha’is regard such allegations has a pretext for persecution.

Both Sabet and Kamalabadi had been part of a now disbanded Baha’i administrative group known as the Yaran.

The pair were first arrested in 2008 and released in 2018, according to the BIC.

Sabet, who wrote poetry during her decade in Tehran's Evin prison, was recognized in 2017 as an English PEN International Writer of Courage.

'A disgrace that weakens Europe’: Anger over MEPs-Qatar corruption scandal 

By Euronews • Updated: 12/12/2022


The arrest and charging of four people in connection with an anti-corruption investigation involving members of the European Parliament and a Gulf state, said to be Qatar, could shake Brussels to its core.

Some MEPs, including one of the parliament's vice-presidents Eva Kaili who was held in custody on Sunday, have been accused of accepting large sums of money from a Gulf country reported to be World Cup hosts Qatar. Doha has denied the accusations.

The EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described the latest developments as "very worrisome" as he arrived for a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

"An investigation is underway and we are following it up," he said. "These are very serious accusations."

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the "full force of law" had to be brought to bear in the case. "This is about the credibility of Europe, so this has to trigger consequences in various areas," she said.

"This is a scandal that we need to get to the bottom of so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again," Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said, calling for a "full and transparent investigation".

The Greek government moved on Monday to freeze Kaili's assets, AFP reported. The Greek politician has also been suspended by the European Parliament's Socialists & Democrats and expelled from Greece's centre-left PASOK party.

The co-president of the Greens group in the European Parliament, Philippe Lamberts, called for a parliamentary inquiry and for the issue of corruption to be brought up this week at the year's last EU assembly’s plenary session.

The EU legislator was due to open on Monday in what promised to be a fiery session. It is scheduled to vote this week on a proposal to extend visa-free travel to the EU for Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Ecuador. Some lawmakers have suggested the debate and vote should be postponed.

EU Parliament vice-president Eva Kaili in custody for alleged 'bags of cash from Qatar'

'A big reparation job to do'

Niels Fuglsang, a MEP with the Danish Social Democratic Party, pointed to the damaging effect this scandal could have on the bloc.

"If we can be bought, if members of the European Parliament and other politicians can be bought to say certain things, to vote in certain ways... it's a disgrace and it makes Europe weaker," he told Euronews.

“So, it's in everybody's interest that we get to the bottom of this and adopt rules to make sure such things must never happen [again]... That [what happened] is very wrong, and we have a big reparation job to do."

This affair is "shameful and intolerable" and "very seriously" damages the Parliament's reputation, EU Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said on Sunday.

French left-wing politicians have lambasted the "very serious scandal", with MEP Manon Aubry (The Left) demanding a debate on the issue and criticising "aggressive lobbying" by Qatar.

On Friday, Belgian police staged 16 raids across Brussels. Around €600,000 in cash was seized, in addition to computer equipment and mobile telephones.

They came amid investigations into months-long suspicions of "substantial" money payments made by a Gulf state to influence MEPs.

The Belgian federal prosecutor's office did not name the country, but a source close to the issue confirmed to AFP that it was Qatar, which other media outlets have also reported.

Kaili has since been arrested and charged. And she has been stripped of her duties as vice-president of the European Parliament.

The other three individuals who have been charged remain unnamed. But AP reported at their number includes one EU lawmaker and a former member.

EU 'should strengthen anti-corruption laws'

Some experts have argued in light of the scandal that the EU should now strengthen its anti-corruption legislation.

"I would believe -- and I do believe -- that it would be very important that the EU seriously thinks about these questions and prepares itself for situations like this in the future," Tamás Lattmann, an expert on international and European law, told Euronews.

"[It should] propose some kind of legislation of its own to handle situations like this, and to make the possible cooperation with member-states' authorities much more seamless and to some extent, more guaranteed."

Before the scandal broke, the assembly was considering visa free entry into the Schengen zone for Qatari citizens.

But the European People's Party, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens have since called for the suspension of the assembly’s vote on the issue.

The allegations come at a sensitive time for Qatar as it hosts the World Cup. The Gulf State has already had to battle against claims around alleged human rights abuses of migrant workers and the LGBT+ community.

"Any allegation of misconduct on the part of the State of Qatar testifies to serious misinformation," a Qatari government official told AFP on Saturday.

Additional sources • AFP, AP, Reuters

Big names bail from NGO caught up in EU Parliament graft scandal

Mogherini, Avramopoulos among former officials bolting from the board of Fight Impunity.

European Parliament in Strasbourg | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images

BY SARAH WHEATON AND VINCENT MANANCOURT
DECEMBER 11, 2022 

Bold-faced names are jumping ship from the board of an NGO at the center of an alleged corruption scandal in the European Parliament.

Former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, former French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, former European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos and former MEP Cecilia Wikström are all listed as members of an “Honorary Board” of Fight Impunity. So is MEP Isabel Santos.

They’ve all quit the board in the wake of allegations against the founder of Fight Impunity, Pier Antonio Panzeri.

Panzeri, an ex-MEP from the Socialists and Democrats group, was arrested on Friday in connection with accusations of bribes and undue influence from Qatar — charges Doha denies. European Parliament assistants who have worked for the organization have also been arrested and had their offices sealed by police.

Starting an NGO in Brussels is relatively easy. Gaining credibility is much harder. When connections are currency, it helps to show who you know.

Panzeri, a former chairman of the Parliament’s human rights subcommittee, knew some powerful people — and he apparently leveraged them to create the impression of an exclusive club.

He knew Mogherini, for example, through his membership in the Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs. Then Panzeri, who left Parliament in 2019, tapped her to join the board of Fight Impunity, according to an aide at the College of Europe, where Mogherini is now rector. The aide noted that she was invited to join the board along with Avramopoulos and Emma Bonino, a respected elder of the Italian left and former foreign minister.

Mogherini agreed to give opening remarks in March at a presentation that students organized with the NGO, but otherwise Mogherini has had no involvement with the organization, the aide said. Mogherini left the board as of Saturday, the aide added.

Avramopoulos said that he, Cazeneuve and Wikström also bolted from the board as soon as they heard about the allegations.

The honorary board had “no executive or managerial role,” Avramopoulos said in an email Sunday. He also noted that he had been invited to join “along with other personalities.”

Avramopoulos said he received permission from the European Commission to take up the position, and received a declared honorarium between February 2021 and February 2022. After that, the honorarium stopped “as I had zero involvement with Fight Impunity,” Avramopoulos said.

Both Avramopoulos and the Mogherini aide said the subject of Qatar never came up in the context of Fight Impunity.

Isabel Santos, a sitting S&D MEP from Portugal, said Sunday that she had already written to Fight Impunity asking to be removed from the board.

“I am shocked and surprised by the latest news involving the President of the Association,” she said in an email, referring to Panzeri.

Bonino’s membership on the Fight Impunity board isn’t likely to be her biggest headache. A former MEP and decorated human rights activist, she is the founder of No Peace Without Justice.

According to Italian newswire Ansa, the director general of that NGO, Niccolò Figà-Talamanca has also been detained in the corruption probe. Focused on international criminal justice, human rights and promoting democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, the organization is officially based in Rome and Brussels, and has the same Brussels address as Fight Impunity, at 41 Rue Ducale.

Neither Bonino nor Figà-Talamanca responded to messages sent through No Peace Without Justice on Saturday.

Eddy Wax contributed reporting.