The Good Friday Agreement: 25 years of deflecting from British imperialism

Farrah Koutteineh & Paul McGoldrick

The New Arab
11 Apr, 2023

World leaders including Biden, Sunak, Blair & Clinton will mark 25 years of the so-called peace agreement in Belfast, but it's no cause for celebration as segregation & inequality continue, argue Farrah Koutteineh & Paul McGoldrick.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (R), former US Senator George Mitchell (C) and former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern (L) smiling on April 10, 1998, after they signed The Good Friday Agreement. [GETTY]

This week will see global leaders both past and present, from Biden to Sunak, to Blair and the Clintons, descending upon Belfast to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

Indeed the 10 April 1998 was a landmark moment in Irish history when two agreements were signed – one between the British and Irish governments, and the other between the ‘Northern Irish’ political parties. It affirmed that the North of Ireland would constitutionally remain a part of the UK, outlined a power sharing assembly to make up a devolved government of both Irish-Republican and British-Unionist parties, promised police reform, granted the early release of political prisoners, and called for the disarmament of paramilitary groups, which included the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and others.

Also referred to as the Belfast Agreement, it was signed by a select few political leaders from the UK to the Republic of Ireland, aided by the Clinton administration, and was voted on by the public in both the North & South in an all-Ireland referendum.

''An obvious and expected absence in the reportage of the Good Friday Agreement’s 25th anniversary, is its unwritten aim: ensuring the longevity of British imperialism in Ireland. Indeed, continuing to distort the history of 800 years of British oppression of Ireland with a fabricated narrative of sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants, would pacify what was becoming an uncontainable issue: Irish resistance.''

It came after over 30 years of intensified armed Irish-republican struggle against British military occupation and its partition of the North of Ireland, often referred to as ‘The Troubles’, which claimed the lives of over 3,600 people.

As global political leaders arrive in Belfast this week to mark the agreement's quarter centenary, the vast majority of the population across the North of Ireland who live in deprived, impoverished and segregated communities, who are victim to corrupt sectarian policing, and a mental health crisis, are not joining in the celebrations.

This is largely because decades on, the vast majority of points that were outlined in the agreement have either failed in practice, or have remained empty words on paper.

One of the main aims – outlining power-sharing of its devolved government between Unionist and Republican parties – has proven to be a colossal failure. The North’s executive, which is the sitting government at the time, presides over the local Assembly (Stormont) in Belfast. However, Stormont has been in a state of collapse for almost half of its existence. In fact, if you add up the number of party boycotts, political stalemates and executive dissolutions, the North has effectively been without a functioning government for 10 entire years since 1998.

One of the most contentious parts of the agreement was the promise of police reform. For decades, the police force in the North, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), was deeply sectarian, consisted mostly of Protestant officers who colluded with British intelligence and Protestant/loyalist paramilitary groups in carrying out political assassinations and subjugated the Irish-Catholic population. However, the agreement seems to have merely rebranded the RUC into today’s Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI); with many RUC officers continuing to serve.

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According to recent statistics published by the PSNI, their broader religious make-up comprises 67% perceived as Protestant and 32% perceived as Catholic, and its elite Special Branch, remains almost 80% Protestant, despite the agreement’s promise to achieve 50/50 representation.

Discrimination against the Irish/Catholic community is confirmed by the PSNI’s own statistics which state they are twice as likely to arrest and charge a Catholic in the North than a Protestant. Between 2016 to 2020 they arrested 57,000 Catholics compared to 31,000 Protestants. Of those that they then charged, 27,000 were Catholic’ and 15,000 were Protestant.

In reality, since the often referred to ‘peace agreement’ which has historically been praised for supposedly ‘bringing two sides together’, the North of Ireland has only become more segregated. For example, there are more segregation walls or “peace walls” – 116 of them to be precise – dividing Catholic and Protestant communities today than there were at any point before the agreement. Furthermore, 93% of all schools remain segregated by religion, and 90% of all social housing is also still segregated.

One of the vital points of the agreement was for the North of Ireland to constitutionally remain part of the UK, and since 1998 it has remained the poorest part of it. Over 330,000 people are living in abject poverty, 1 in 4 children are living on the poverty line and there is an ever increasing homeless population. To make matters worse, privatisation is expanding faster across the North of Ireland than anywhere else in the UK, with Westminster’s neoliberal policies forcing the shutdown of hospitals, healthcare centres and vital public services.

Another undoubtable failure of the agreement was the absence of any solution to address the decades of trauma people in the North experienced. Statistics reveal that thousands more people have died by suicide after the Troubles, than died during, and there’s been an estimated 5748 deaths recorded as suicide since 1988. A veritable and persisting mental health emergency.

Finally, an obvious and expected absence in the reportage of the Good Friday Agreement’s 25th anniversary, is its unwritten aim: ensuring the longevity of British imperialism in Ireland. Indeed, continuing to distort the history of 800 years of British oppression of Ireland with a fabricated narrative of sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants, would pacify what was becoming an uncontainable issue: Irish resistance.

Historically, radical class unity had long existed between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, most notably the 1932 strikes, where over 60,000 workers from both communities fought for fair pay and better living conditions. The divides only developed and deepened through the concerted efforts of British forces.

Ultimately the agreement was fundamental in Britain’s suppression of Irish resistance. This was achieved through its policy of disarming paramilitary groups (which were predominantly Irish resistance groups) and the renaming of the North’s police force, who didn’t adopt any of the changes stated but continue to work alongside British intelligence in undermining Irish republican activity aimed towards ending British presence.

It couldn’t be clearer that this agreement was only crafted and signed to prolong British imperialist interests in Ireland.

As world leaders flock to Belfast regurgitating the same disingenuous sentiment that the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to violence, all the facts prove otherwise. Violent segregation, a corrupt sectarian police force, suicide, homelessness and abject poverty all persist for the people of the North, from both sides of the ‘peace walls’. They do not reap any benefit from the Good Friday Agreement, instead they are pawns in Britain’s long game of imperialism on the Island.

Farrah Koutteineh is head of Public & Legal Relations at the London-based Palestinian Return Centre, and is also the founder of KEY48 - a voluntary collective calling for the immediate right of return of over 7.2 million Palestinian refugees.

Paul McGoldrick is a member of the Robert Emmet 1916 Society who are based in Co. Fermanagh, Ireland. They are a socialist republican pressure group who are involved in grassroots leftwing activism. Paul is also a mental health campaigner involved in various community lead initiatives aimed at tackling social deprivation and inequality.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Elbit Systems vs Tony Greenstein: A shining example of the UK's crackdown on Palestine activism

Emad Moussa

The New Arab
12 Apr, 2023

The UK government’s targeting of Palestine solidarity attempts to criminalise and depoliticise action taken by activists like Tony Greenstein, and silence campaigns on Israel’s crimes under the guise of ‘fighting anti-Semitism’, argues Emad Moussa.


Elbit’s headquarters was for years the target of an ongoing campaign by rights activists, particularly Palestine Action, for their complicity in Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, writes Emad Moussa. [GETTY]

Until very recently, Elbit Systems Ltd, the Israeli arms firm, was one of the main beneficiaries of some of the UK Ministry of Defence’s lucrative contracts. But in December last year, the firm was reportedly ousted from two contracts to deliver training for the Royal Navy.

Elbit’s headquarters was for years the target of an ongoing campaign by rights activists, particularly Palestine Action, for their complicity in Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. This speculatively made the UK Armed Forces feel that their association with the firm was too problematic for their image.

For the activists who set out to expose the firm’s complicity in war crimes, the Elbit aftereffect continues to define much of their lives. Not only that, their cases have become yet another iteration of the UK government’s renewed attempts to suppress Palestine activism.

''In addition to the heavy judiciary’s gavel, Tony Greenstein has been demonised by pro-Israel groups as an anti-Semite. The UK-based newspaper The Jewish Chronicle, among others, had already developed a negative fixation on him, publishing several articles with 'anti-Semitism' as the recurring theme, either to ‘explain’ Greenstein’s activism or the reason he was suspended from the Labour Party in 2018.''

One of those activists is Tony Greenstein, a long-time British Jewish anti-Zionist and writer, and a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. Along with five others, and personally labelled the ‘lead defendant,’ Greenstein is currently standing trial at the Wolverhampton Crown Court charged with the possession of ‘articles with intent to destroy property’ belonging to Elbit.

Two years ago, a group of Palestine Action activists, including Greenstein, were intercepted by the police on their way to Elbit’s UAV engines factory near Shenstone, Staffordshire. The goal was to climb over the factory roof and spray it with red paint symbolising the blood of Palestinian children killed by Israel, and to attract public attention to Elbit’s role.

After arrest, Greenstein was kept in a holding centre for a week before being bailed out in anticipation of the trial. Due to Covid and the resulting Crown Court backlog, the trial was postponed for two years. If convicted, the 69-year-old activist is facing up to one year in prison.

Stripped down to its bare legal components, the court procedures appear like a typical case of ‘criminal conduct’ associated with property damage. Greenstein, however, argues that the judiciary approach was to take Palestine out of the equation, depoliticise the case, and simply reduce it to a criminal act.

The police action and, subsequently, the judiciary reaction have been highly disproportionate to the ‘threat’ posed by the activists. What is even more critical is that the disproportionate response did not apply to Elbit’s serious breach of not only international law but also the UK’s human rights norms.

One can only speculate, in this light, that the MoD’s cancellation of contracts with Elbit was more about dodging public embarrassment and less about committing to the UK or international laws tackling the usage of lethal weapons against civilians.

In addition to the heavy judiciary’s gavel, Greenstein has been demonised by pro-Israel groups as an anti-Semite. The UK-based newspaper The Jewish Chronicle, among others, had already developed a negative fixation on him, publishing several articles with “anti-Semitism” as the recurring theme, either to ‘explain’ Greenstein’s activism or the reason he was suspended from the Labour Party in 2018.

Asked whether that sounded ludicrous considering he is Jewish, he explained that anti-Semitism merely means opposing the Israeli state, which is falsely projected unto the world as the ‘collective Jew.’ Hence the conflation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

The new definition of anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has indeed broadened the ‘anti-Semitic label,’ becoming a point of reference to Israel’s advocates and state officials. Even with the lack of certain examples in the definition, the IHRA has urged civil society bodies, locally and internationally, to adopt it on the basis that it reflects a hard-won consensus among IHRA’s member countries.

A 2021 Oxford University report found irrefutable evidence that the IHRA definition was principally drafted and negotiated by pro-Israel advocacy groups, not Jewish history scholars. Instead of protecting Jews against anti-Semitism, it was skewed to shield the Israeli state against valid criticism.

The British government adopted the IHRA definition in 2016. It has since deployed it repeatedly as a quasi-legal apparatus to disrupt the UK’s free speech whenever Israel was in question.

UK universities, for instance, were pressured to embrace the definition or otherwise lose funding streams. The result was - and continues to be - stifling and sabotaging the career of academics and scholars who dared to stand up for Palestinian rights. From the smearing campaign against Bristol University’s Professor David Miller to Sheffield University suspending Palestinian academic Shahd Abu Salameh, all are examples of how the UK government has selectively weaponised anti-Semitism to silence pro-Palestine dissent.

Perturbing for rights campaigners in particular is the introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC). The Bill grants the police not only additional powers to suppress protests but also broad discretion on what constitutes illegal campaigning or activism. Against the PCSC backdrop, the government is also planning to introduce a bill banning BDS, which would severely cripple social movements campaigning for justice in Palestine.

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Not all is bad news, however. Successful push-backs are also a growing phenomenon. Greenstein remains optimistic that public opinion is steadily shifting in Palestine’s favour. “At some point,” he said, “anti-Zionism was a very small fringe amongst Jews. But nowadays, more [disillusioned] Jews are turning their back to the Zionist state.”

His optimism is not without grounds. After a decade in which US Democrats have shown increasing affinity toward the Palestinians, their sympathies now lie with Palestinians not Israelis, 49% to 38% respectively. This is paralleled by growing indicators that the Israeli hasbara has been losing its influence in the US, with more Americans saying it is “acceptable”, even a “duty” for the U.S. Congress to question the Israeli-American relationship.

As it stands, a tangible change in government policies toward Palestine in Britain may not be likely in the foreseeable future. An increase in activism may even lead to further criminalisation of solidarity efforts. But that could also trigger more dissent, especially when free speech becomes conditional.

With that in mind, Greenstein likes to look back at history as an indication that times can change. Political activism deemed criminal today, could be heroised tomorrow. Nelson Mandela was once a ‘terrorist’ and the suffragette movement was treated as ‘criminal’, but today they are seen as inspiring examples of historical justice. Victory was obtained by people waging struggles in the past, and it will one day be the case for Palestinians also.

Dr Emad Moussa is a researcher and writer who specialises in the politics and political psychology of Palestine/Israel.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

The long and brutal history of enforced disappearances in Iraq

Iraq has one of the largest numbers of missing persons worldwide, with up to one million people having been forcibly disappeared in the past 50 years.

In-depth
Paul Iddon
11 April, 2023

The spate of people who were "disappeared" throughout Iraq over the past century has once again been raised by the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED).

In a recent statement, the committee "urged Iraq to immediately establish the basis to prevent, eradicate and repair this heinous crime," noting that enforced disappearances aren't clearly defined as a crime under Iraqi law.

The committee estimates that 250,000 to one million people have disappeared in Iraq since 1968 when Saddam Hussein's Baath Party seized power. The broad estimate is unsurprising considering the scale of the atrocities that has seen large numbers of people forcibly disappeared in Iraq since 1968.

As a result, Iraq has one of the largest numbers of missing persons worldwide.

"A UN committee estimates that 250,000 to one million people have disappeared in Iraq since 1968, when Saddam Hussein's Baath Party seized power"

As early as 1969, Saddam Hussein set the tone for what would come under his rule. He met a family who had a relative unjustly executed by the Baath Party and insisted they take the blood money the regime offered them.

"Take the money," he reportedly told them. "Do not think you will get revenge, because if you ever have the chance, by the time you get to us, there will not be a sliver of flesh left on our bodies."

Saddam's tyrannical reign had consequences that would affect Iraqis of various backgrounds for generations.

In the 1970s, the regime uprooted and deported hundreds of thousands of Persian Iraqis who had lived in the country for millennia. After defeating the Kurdish movement in 1975, the regime moved to ‘Arabise’ parts of the country, destroying hundreds of Kurdish villages in the process, especially in Kirkuk province.

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That was a mere preview of the crimes the Baathists would perpetrate in the 1980s. In 1979, Saddam consolidated his power with an infamous purge of his parliament, becoming the undisputed ruler of Iraq. In 1980, he invaded Iran, initiating a war that lasted eight years and left at least a million dead in its wake.

In 1983, he moved against the Barzani tribe in Iraqi Kurdistan. He condemned them as collaborators of Iran and subsequently had 8,000 of the tribe's men and boys disappeared, leaving their women, traditional homemakers who did not previously work or independently earn money, destitute and fending for themselves.

In a visit to Iraqi Kurdistan's Erbil that year, Saddam said the Barzanis were "severely punished and have gone to hell".

Only after Saddam was deposed in 2003 did Kurds begin to retrieve the remains, buried hundreds of miles from Iraqi Kurdistan in Iraq's desert border regions. Bodies of Barzani males who disappeared that year continue to be found 40 years later.

In July 2022, 100 bodies found in mass graves in southern Iraq were returned to Barzan in Iraqi Kurdistan for burial. Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani expressed his condolences and hope that "their souls are in better places".

Next to the village of Barzan graves have been dug for the Kurds that were killed during the Anfal, a series of genocide campaigns Saddam Hussein led from February to September 1988 to eradicate the Kurdish people. [Getty]

The mass killing of the Barzanis was followed by the Anfal ("spoils of war") campaign that began in 1987. That brutal campaign saw Iraqi forces murder an estimated 182,000 people, including 5,000 men, women, and children, in a single day in the infamous bombing of Halabja with chemical weapons on 16 March 1988.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded that Saddam's regime "committed the crime of genocide" for its actions against Kurds in this period.

Following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, after Iraq was expelled from Kuwait by a multinational US-led coalition, the Kurds in the north and the Shia Arabs in the south revolted against Saddam, hoping the US would support them. It did not.

While US intervention in the north helped the Kurds establish their autonomous region outside of Saddam's control, he still retained control over the Shia south and cracked down hard.

"Twenty years after Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime was deposed, enforced disappearances remain widespread in Iraq"

"Thousands of Shi'a, including hundreds of clerics, have been imprisoned without charge or have disappeared in state custody since the uprising; many Shi'a shrines and institutions in al-Najaf and Karbala were devastated during the rebellion or demolished by government forces in its aftermath," read a 1992 HRW report.

In 2003, Saddam was toppled by a swift Anglo-American ground invasion of Iraq, briefly kindling hopes that better days were ahead for the brutalised Iraqi people. The uncovering of mass graves revealed the extent of the toppled dictator's crimes against Iraqis. Still, many of the disappeared remained missing or unidentified.

Iraq entered a new phase marked by sectarian violence and terror. Even though Saddam was gone, Iraqis continued to suffer from enforced disappearances. During the violence that brought the country into a state of civil war in the late 2000s, sectarian murders were rife, as were disappearances at the various checkpoints ordinary Iraqis had to pass through every day by soldiers, police, and militiamen.

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The rise of the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014 led to a new round of disappearances and atrocities in Iraq. The group infamously conquered one-third of the country that year and subjected the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq to a systematic campaign of abductions and genocide.

Yazidi males were summarily executed, while women and girls were enslaved and raped. Even after the last of the territory that made up IS's self-styled caliphate was recaptured in 2019, thousands of Yazidis remained missing.

The Free Yezifi Foundation estimates that IS enslaved 6,417 Yezidi women and children and that over 2,693 Yezidi men and women remain missing. The majority of them are presumed dead.

The Shia-majority Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) were formed in response to IS's onslaught. Some of the more extreme elements fighting under the PMF umbrella carried out retributions against Sunni populations.

An aerial picture shows mourners gathering around coffins wrapped with the Iraqi flag during a mass funeral for Yazidi victims of the Islamic State (IS) group in the northern Iraqi village of Kojo in Sinjar district, on 6 February 2021. [Getty]

In 2017, Amnesty International reported that 643 men and older boys in Anbar province's Saqlawiya disappeared after being abducted by PMF forces as they fled the June 2016 battle of Fallujah and separated from their families.

In 2018, HRW noted that thousands of Iraqi men faced arbitrary arrests by government forces and the PMF, which was officially a state paramilitary. The overwhelming majority of cases that HRW report documented were Sunni Arab males as young as nine and as old as 70.

Such cases demonstrate the sad fact that 20 years after Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime was deposed, enforced disappearances remain widespread in Iraq.

This state of affairs has led some to lament that Iraq merely transitioned from a republic of fear under Saddam – where Iraqis feared running afoul of the authorities and being forcibly disappeared and brutally tortured – to a republic of terror under militias, many of them officially state-sanctioned.

"The Iraqi people used to know exactly who it was who killed them, whereas today they are ignorant of the exact identity of their killers"

"Perhaps the sole major difference left between then and now is that in the Republic of Fear, the source of that fear was known, whereas its source is now obfuscated in today's Republic of Terror," wrote Dr Munqith Dagher in 2020.

"The Iraqi people used to know exactly who it was who killed them, whereas today they are ignorant of the exact identity of their killers."

The UN committee's report is a reminder that conclusively determining what happened to those Iraqis who have disappeared since 1968 remains important, as is taking firmer steps to end this cruel practice once and for all.

Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist based in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, who writes about Middle East affairs.

U$A

The Coming Commercial Real Estate Crash That May Never Happen

By Tim Mullaney,CNBC • Published April 10, 2023 

Richard Baker | In Pictures | Getty Images

Concerns about a commercial real estate crash have followed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and regional banking crisis.

Some bank real-estate loans may be threatened by persistence of work-from-home.

Almost a quarter of office-building loans need to be refinanced in the next year at higher rates and lower quality properties where vacancy rates are high are at the greatest risk.

But industrial, retail and hotels are solid.

Only two months ago, SL Green & Co. chief executive Marc Holliday was sounding happy. The head of New York's biggest commercial landlord firm told Wall Street analysts that traffic to the company's buildings was picking up, and more than 1 million square feet of space was either recently leased or in negotiations. The company's debt was down, it had finished the structure for its 1 Madison Avenue tower in Manhattan, and local officials had just completed an extension of commuter rail service from Long Island to Green's flagship tower near Grand Central Station.

"We are full guns blazing," Holliday said on the quarterly earnings call, with workers headed back to offices after a pandemic that rocked developers as more people worked from home, raising the question of how much office space companies really need any more. "We can hopefully …continue on a path to what we think will be a pivot year for us in 2023."

Then Silicon Valley Bank failed, and Wall Street panicked.

Shares of developers, and the banks that lend to them, dropped sharply, and bank shares have stayed low. Analysts raised concerns that developers might default on a big chunk of $3.1 trillion of U.S. commercial real estate loans Goldman Sachs says are outstanding. Almost a quarter of mortgages on office buildings must be refinanced in 2023, according to Mortgage Bankers' Association data, with higher interest rates than the 3 percent paper that stuffs banks' portfolios now. Other analysts wondered how landlords could find new tenants as old leases expire this year, with office vacancy rates at record highs.

How much an office crash could hurt the economy

There are reasons to think the road ahead will be rocky for the real estate industry and banks that depend on it. And the stakes, according to Goldman, are high, especially if there is a recession: a credit squeeze equal to as much as half a percentage point of growth in the overall economy. But credit in commercial real estate has performed well until now, and it's far from clear that U.S. credit issues spreading outward from real estate is likely.

"There's a lot of headaches about calamity in commercial real estate," said Kevin Fagan, director of commercial real estate analysis at Moody's Analytics. "There likely will be issues but it's more of a typical down cycle."

The vacancy rate for office buildings rose to a record high 18.2% by late 2022, according to brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield, topping 20 percent in key markets like Manhattan, Silicon Valley and even Atlanta.

But this year's refinancing cliff is the real rub, says Scott Rechler, CEO of RXR, a closely-held Manhattan development firm. Loans that come due will have to be financed at higher interest rates, which will mean higher payments even as vacancy rates rise or remain high. Higher vacancies mean some buildings are worth less, so banks are less willing to touch them without tougher terms. That's especially true for older, so-called Class B buildings that are losing out to newer buildings as tenants renew leases, he said. And the shortage of recent sales makes it hard for banks to decide how much more cash collateral to demand.

"No one knows what is a fair price," Rechler said. "Buyers and sellers have different views."
What the Fed has said about commercial real estate

Federal Reserve officials up to and including Chair Jerome Powell have stressed that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were outliers whose failures had nothing to do with real estate – Silicon Valley Bank had barely 1 percent of assets in commercial real estate. Other banks' exposure to the sector is well under control.

"We're well aware of the concentrations people have in commercial real estate," Powell said at a March22 press conference. "I really don't think it's comparable to this. The banking system is strong, it is sound, it is resilient, it's well capitalized."

The commercial real estate market is a bigger issue than a few banks which mismanaged risk in bond portfolios, and the deterioration in conditions for Class B office space will have wide-reaching economic impacts, including the tax base of municipalities across the country where empty offices remain a significant source of concern.

But there are reasons to believe lending issues in commercial real estate will be contained, Fagan said.

The first is that the office sector is only one part of commercial real estate, albeit a large one, and the others are in unusually good shape.

Vacancy rates in warehouse and industrial space nationally are low, according to Cushman and Wakefield. The national retail vacancy rates, despite the migration of shoppers to online shopping, is only 5.7%. And hotels are garnering record revenue per available room as both occupancy and prices surged post-Covid, according to research firm STR. Banks' commercial real estate lending also includes apartment complexes, with rental vacancies rates at 5.8 percent in Federal Reserve data.

"Market conditions are fine today, but what develops over the next two to three years could be pretty challenging for some properties," said Ken Leon, who follows REITs for CFRA Research.

Still, most debt coming due in the next two years looks like it can be refinanced, Fagan said.

That's one of the reasons Rechler has been drawing attention to the issues. It shouldn't sneak up on the market or economy, and it should be manageable with the loans spread out across their own maturity ladder.

About three-fourths of commercial real estate debt generates enough income to pass banks' recent refinancing standards without major changes, Fagan said. Banks have been extending credit using a rule of thumb that a property's operating income will be at least 8% of the loan every year, though other experts claim a 10% test is being applied to some newer loans.

To date, banks have had virtually no losses on commercial real estate, and companies are showing little need to default either on loans to banks or rent payments to office building owners. Even as companies lay off workers, the concentration of job losses among big tech employers, in Manhattan, at least, means that tenants have no trouble paying their rent, S.L. Green said.
Bank commercial mortgage books

Take Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial, or Cincinnati-based Fifth Third, two of the biggest regional banks.

At PNC, the $36 billion in commercial mortgages on the books of the bank is a small fraction of its $557 billion in total assets, including $321.9 billion in loans. Only about $9 billion of loans are secured by office buildings. At Fifth Third, commercial real estate represents $10.3 billion of $207.5 billion in assets, including $119.3 billion in loans.

And those loans are being paid as agreed. Only 0.6% of PNC's loans are past due, with delinquencies lower among commercial loans. The proportion of delinquent loans fell by almost a third during 2022, the bank said in federal filings. At Fifth Third, only $10 million of commercial real estate loans were delinquent at year-end.

Or take Wells Fargo, the nation's largest commercial real estate lender, where credit metrics are excellent. Last year, Wells Fargo's chargeoffs for commercial loans were .01 of 1 percent of the bank's portfolio, according to the bank's annual report. Writeoffs on consumer loans were 39 times higher. The bank's internal assessment of each commercial mortgage's loan's quality improved in 2022, with the amount of debt classified as "criticized,'' or with a higher-than-average risk of default even if borrowers haven't missed payments, dropping by $1.8 billion to $11.3 billion

"Delinquencies are still lower than pre-pandemic," said Alexander Yokum, banking analyst at CFRA Research. "Any credit metric is still stronger than pre-pandemic."
Wall Street is worried

The riposte from Wall Street is that the good news on loan performance can't last – especially if there is a broader recession.

In a March 24 report, JPMorganChase bank analyst Kabir Caprihan warned that 21% of office loans are destined to go bad, with lenders losing an average of 41% of the loan principal on the failures. That produces potential writedowns of 8.6%, Caprihan said, with banks losing $38 billion on office mortgages. But it is far from certain that so many projects would fail, or why value declines would be so steep.

RXR's Rechler says that market softness is showing in refinancings already, in ways banks' public reports don't yet reveal. The real damage is showing up less in late loans than in the declining value of bonds backed by commercial mortgages, he said.

One sign of the tightening: RXR itself, which is financially strong, has advanced $1 billion to other developers whose banks are making them post more collateral as part of refinancing applications. Rechler dismissed rating agencies' relatively sanguine view of commercial mortgage backed securities, arguing that markets for new CMBS issues have locked up in recent weeks and ratings agencies missed early signs of housing-market problems before 2008's financial crisis.

The commercial mortgage-backed bond market is relatively small, so its short-term issues are not major drivers of the economy. Issuance of new bonds is down sharply – but that began last year, when fourth-quarter deal volume fell 88 percent, without causing a recession.

"The statistics don't reflect where it's going to come out as regulators take a harder look," Rechler said. "You're going to have to rebalance loans on even good properties."

Wells Fargo has tightened standards, saying it is demanding that payments on refinanced loans take up a smaller percentage of a building's projected rent and that only "limited" exceptions will be made to the bank's credit standards on new loans.

Without a deep recession, though, it's not clear how banks' and insurance companies' relatively diversified loan portfolios get into serious trouble.

The primary way real estate could cause problems for the economy is if an extended decline in the value of commercial mortgages made deposits flow out of banks, forcing them to crimp lending not just to developers but to all customers. In extreme cases, that could threaten the banks themselves. But if developers continue to pay their loans on time and manage refinancing risk, MBS owners and banks will simply get paid as loans mature.

Markets are split on whether any version of this will happen. The S&P United State REIT Index, which dropped almost 11% in the two weeks after Silicon Valley Bank failed, has recovered most of its losses, down 2% over the past month and remains barely positive for the year. But the KBW Regional Banking Index is down 14% in the last month, even though deposit loss has slowed to a trickle.

The solution will lie in a combination of factors. The amount of loans that come up for refinancing drops sharply after this year, and new construction is already slowing as it does in most real estate downturns, and loan to value ratios in the industry are lower than in 2006 or 2007, before the last recession.

"We feel like there's going to be pain in the next year," Fagan said. "2025 is where we see our pivot toward a [recovery] for office."

In Colombia, a Story of Coffee, Family, and Climate Change


Photograph by Giacomo Bruno
#The Frontline#Identity & Community#Environmental Justice

04.10.2023
WORDS BY LUKE OTTENHOF

On The Frontline, a Colombian coffee farmer shares his fears of losing his family’s business to climate change and a market that doesn’t reward sustainability.

Coffee farmer Julián Arroyave does the same thing every morning when he wakes up at 5 a.m.: he takes a shot of aguardiente. It’s a sweet sugar cane liquor, Colombia’s favorite spirit. It’s fortifying and warming in the cool morning darkness. Outside, parakeets and roosters chirp and coo.

After the sip, Arroyave grinds coffee beans and sets a pot of water to boil. He mixes the grinds in, and within a few minutes, coffee is ready. Arroyave said this is how most Colombians prepare their coffee. It’ll simmer on the stove for most of the day. He and his farmhands will come back to dunk small ceramic cups when they need a pick-me-up. Arroyave will have 19 more cups throughout the long day.

Arroyave’s coffee farm, Finca La Palma, is spread along the steep slopes of a long, narrow spur of land just north of the town of Filandia in Colombia’s green, mountainous Cordillera Central. This is the heart of Colombia’s famed Eje Cafetero: the Coffee Axis. It sits between a split in the Andes Mountains over 6,000 feet above sea level, the ideal conditions for growing arabica coffee. For now, at least.

Finca La Palma has been in Arroyave’s family for four generations, starting with his great-grandfather. But Arroyave is at risk of losing his way of life as predatory global market dynamics and climate change complicate farming arabica coffee at a small scale. The future of coffee may shift away from family farmers like Arroyave and toward the industrialized mono-cropping of the giant coffee farms in neighboring Brazil.

Across 7 acres of Andean hillside, Arroyave raises around 30,000 coffee trees from seed to fruit. On the sunny January morning I visit him, he walks me through the dense, claustrophobic tangle of stiff, strong branches and green leaves. The trees sit on an incline of about 70 degrees, and the dark, rich soil doesn’t do any favors with keeping your footing. But Arroyave, in jeans and a blue polo, steps confidently and swiftly through the foliage, swatting limbs aside—one fingernail is painted with the Colombian flag—and looking back to ensure I make it through. Spread among the thicket of coffee trees are banana, mandarin, lime, and avocado trees. These provide fresh produce for Arroyave’s family and workers, but they do much more than that. The scents from the fruits waft through the farm, making their way into the coffee tree flowers. The process gives the beans slightly different flavor notes.

When we reach a clearing on the edge of the hill, Arroyave gestures to a stump to stand on. The view is spellbinding: rolling, magic-green ripples of earth trailing down beneath a bright blue, cloud-spotted sky.

“Coffee growers, not just me, we do this with a lot of care, with a lot of love.”

JULIÁN ARROYAVE

COFFEE FARMER

He cherishes the land and his relationship with it; you can see it in how he steps around the trees like old friends and how his hands grasp a piece of fruit from a branch. Cultivating and enjoying coffee is part of his life, and the tradition is now an integral part of the region’s culture and identity. The Eje Cafetero is one of the country’s top tourist destinations, and the region has won national awards for its coffee.

Looking out over the land, Arroyave’s sharp blue eyes and perpetual grin wane for a moment. He thinks these might be the last years of Finca La Palma. His children aren’t interested in continuing the family’s coffee farming tradition, so when Arroyave is too old to work, he might have to sell the farm. Arroyave doesn’t blame them; he smiles when he talks about his eldest son’s desire to go to university and find a job in the city.

When he was just 16, he left Finca La Palma to work as a police officer in Bogotá for 25 years. “When I was young, I also left town and the farm to go dominate the world,” he said. “All young people want to do that. We just hope they come back.” But it’s increasingly likely that if Arroyave’s children chose to continue Finca La Palma, they would be returning to a different farm than the one they grew up on as the planet grows hotter.

Coffee has grown to become a cornerstone of Colombia in the nearly 300 years since the French stole the crop from Africa and spread it across the Caribbean for cultivation and export. In 2021, the country exported $3.2 billion worth of coffee beans, making it the third-largest exporter in the world. Coffee was Colombia’s third-largest export after crude oil and coal, and the coffee production industry accounts for some 700,000 jobs in the country, on which half a million families depend. Some 95% of the country’s coffee farmers are smallholders like Arroyave.

But coffee producers are trapped between two worsening crises: climate change and poor pay. While the price of a cup of coffee rose overall between 1980 and 2018 alongside record profits for the roasting industry in 2021, the average price of unroasted beans from producers like Arroyave has stagnated and even dropped. And the climate crisis promises to devastate the industry in the coming decades. A United Nations study estimated that, by 2050, regions like the Eje Cafetero that are suited for coffee growing could decline by 50% with increased rainfall and higher temperatures making coffee farming more difficult. Some experts predict a global coffee crisis.

Andrés Montenegro, sustainability director of the Specialty Coffee Association, puts these numbers in different terms. “That’s not only a lot of coffee,” he said. “That’s a lot of people whose livelihoods rely on coffee. That’s a 50% impact on their income. If they’re already poor, they will be poorer.”

Montenegro, who is from Colombia’s southern Nariño Department, calls this “the coffee paradox.” “The coffee paradox is thriving coffee industries, reporting billions in profits every year, and poor farmers struggling to make a decent living every year,” he said.

Coffee farmers in the Filandia region have two harvests in the year. The first comes in April and May, and the second, larger harvest arrives between September and December. In these periods, Arroyave and his workers—local laborers from nearby Filandia—navigate through the dense web of tree branches, hand-picking tens of thousands of bright, deep-red coffee cherries. They drop them into sturdy woven baskets that are strapped around their waist, which hold up to 50 pounds of beans.

But not all the beans will be usable. Arroyave plucks a coffee cherry from a nearby tree, pulls a pocket knife from his pocket, and digs it into the tip of the cherry, prying it open and wiping away the gelatinous pulp surrounding the bean. He pulls the bean apart into two halves and points to the tiny black dots on them. These are the tiny coffee borer beetle, la broca in Spanish. Along with coffee rust, an aggressive fungus that infects and destroys the tree’s leaves and can decimate up to 80% of a coffee crop, la broca is Arroyave’s arch enemy.

Arroyave fights both threats, but he refuses to use pesticides, which compromise the coffee beans’ flavor and health. This type of coffee is “basura,” he grimaced. Garbage. Whenever Arroyave sees plants and spiders on his trees, he smiles. These are his natural pesticides: they eat and help temper broca populations. Unfortunately, studies of Ethiopian and Colombian coffee territories indicate that rising temperatures and rainfalls increase the likelihood of broca infestations and other diseases like coffee rust.

Farmers in the Eje Cafetero are bracing for climate chaos. Coffee needs a fine balance of rain and sun, which the area offers. But weather patterns have been changing quickly. “Last year, we didn’t have the summer we normally expect,” Arroyave said. “It was really short with only a few days of sun and a lot more rain. When the coffee flower captures too much water, it falls off and doesn’t produce cherries. That leads to a significant loss of production.” Luckily, Arroyave hasn’t yet had a landslide, or derrumbe in Spanish, on his farm. But last year’s heavy rainfalls brought flooding and derrumbes across central Colombia that killed 204 people and displaced more than 400,000.

Farmers like Arroyave in the Cordillera Central will be dealing with more and more weather extremes in the coming decades, particularly droughts and floods, which are intensified by La Niña and El Niño, climate patterns that originate in the Pacific Ocean and affect temperature extremes around the world.

“Some years, we have tons of water, which turn into floods, and then we have droughts sometimes even in the same year,” said Ana María Loboguerrero, the director for climate action at the Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture at the agricultural organization CGIAR. “There have been instances where farmers lose [all the crops] that they have. That’s like losing all their income for that year.” This unpredictability makes it difficult for farmers to decide when to harvest, which varieties to grow, or when to water—decisions that will maximize their yields.

Arabica beans like the ones Arroyave grows (he favors the Castilla varietal at the moment) are particularly susceptible to a changing climate. Robusta beans, which are popular and industrialized in Vietnam and Brazil, are expected to fare better in the climate crisis’ higher heat, but the majority of Colombian coffee farmers grow arabica.

Arroyave’s worries extend beyond his industry.

“Climate change hasn’t just affected coffee farmers,” he said, “but all people who depend on the land.”

In a brick room built on the back of the bungalow at Finca La Palma where the workers take their breaks, an old, hulking machine separates the harvested beans from their pods and pours them into a deep concrete tub filled with water. The good beans sink; the bad ones that the broca has burrowed into float and are skimmed off the top. After the wash, the water is emptied through a pipe that drains into the coffee trees. The empty bean pods are added to an enormous compost pile in various stages of decomposition. That compost is used to help cultivate the new trees. Arroyave grins and makes a circle motion with his hand. “It’s all cyclical,” he said.

He dries his beans on the rooftop of the bungalow, which he keeps covered like a greenhouse by a section of translucent plastic roofing. It’s only about 70 degrees Fahrenheit out, but the drying area feels like a sauna up here. Arroyave uses a wooden rake to move the beans around every two hours for 20 days. After drying, Arroyave roasts them at his roastery in Filandia, where they’re bagged and branded for sale. Arroyave sells Finca La Palma beans domestically. The permits for export are too expensive. A new initiative to institute a living income for coffee farmers shows promise, but Arroyave said his farm is too small to benefit from it.

This exclusion leaves smallholder farmers like Arroyave—who make up a lion’s share of Colombia’s coffee production industry—in the lurch. Both Montenegro and Loboguerrero’s research confirms that the situation at Finca La Palma is becoming eerily familiar.

“Kids don’t want to be on the coffee farm not because they don’t want to work in coffee, but because they don’t want to be poor,” Montenegro said. “They don’t want to endure the same struggles they see their parents face today.”

“Kids don’t want to be on the coffee farm not because they don’t want to work in coffee, but because they don’t want to be poor.”

ANDRÉS MONTENEGRO

SPECIALTY COFFEE ASSOCIATION

Between the harvests, Arroyave, his father-in-law, and a few hired hands face an endless list of maintenance tasks. They germinate and cultivate new coffee plants in a wooden planter box for eight months before transferring them to the ground. The Castilla varietals take between nine months to a year to begin producing berries, and if Arroyave is lucky, they’ll reliably bear fruit for 15 years before they begin to slow down, weaken, and rot. Then, Arroyave must hack them out and load them atop the compost pile. Nothing is wasted at Finca La Palma.

When the work in the coffee trees is finished for the day, Arroyave turns his attention to the other tasks on the farm. He feeds and tends to the pigs, chickens, and other fowl before he drives back into Filandia where he lives. He meets with his wife and two children in the town’s central square, sipping coffee and chatting with friends. As he drives into town, his left hand is constantly flying out the window to wave and holler a greeting at vendors and community members on streetside patios. Then, the Arroyaves head home for dinner.

Arroyave has a new job, too. Nowadays, Finca La Palma isn’t just a working coffee farm. Like a lot of fincas in the region struggling with insufficient profits, it’s also a tourist destination. Arroyave books tours through WhatsApp and picks up travelers in town to drive them the bumpy 20 minutes north of Filandia to La Palma. Arroyave is a natural guide: he’s warm and energetic, palpably passionate about the land and his work. The day my partner and I visit Finca La Palma, we’re the only guests.

Near the tour’s end, he sits me down at a table on the bungalow’s patio and prepares coffee three different ways. He sets a hot plate with a tin bowl on it, then pours in some unroasted beans. He cranks the heat up and stirs the beans every few seconds. A thick, sharp fragrance fills the patio. When the beans are ready, he transfers them into a grinder, then uses the grounds to prepare fresh coffee with a pour-over, a French press, and an Italian moka pot. He even prepares a tart, fiery shot: a hit of coffee with aguardiente and juice from a lime-orange hybrid that grows in his yard

As I sip my coffee, Arroyave reminds me how much time and work went into each sip. By his count, it’s around two years of labor. He would know. He’s raised this coffee from seed to cup. It’s a pride that only farmers can understand.

“Coffee growers, not just me, we do this with a lot of care, with a lot of love,” Arroyave said. “This is our culture, our tradition. It’s what we know how to do.”

FACT CHECKING JASMINE HARDY
Correction, April 10, 2023 1:51 pm ET
The previous title of Ana María Loboguerrero as head of global policy research for agricultural organization CGIAR in the text was outdated and has been corrected to reflect her current title.

Sharply Fewer in U.S. See Energy Situation as "Very Serious"

BY JEFFREY M. JONES

GALLUP

POLITICS
APRIL 10, 2023


STORY HIGHLIGHTS

34%, down from 44% a year ago, say U.S. energy situation is very serious

Declines seen among all key subgroups

Americans prioritize environmental protection over energy production

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans show significantly less concern about the U.S. energy situation now than they did a year ago, with 34%, down from 44%, describing the situation as “very serious.” The 2022 spike came amid sharply rising gas prices and was the highest percentage seeing the situation as very serious since 2011. The record-high 58% viewing the energy situation as very serious was recorded in 2001, amid rolling blackouts in California.

In addition to the 34% of U.S. adults who say the energy situation is very serious, 51% describe it as “fairly serious,” and 14% say it is “not at all serious.” The latter readings have increased by five and four percentage points, respectively, since last year.

The March 1-23 poll also found a six-point drop in the percentage of Americans who worry “a great deal” about the availability and affordability of energy, from 47% to 41%. However, energy concern remains higher than it has been in any other year since 2012 (48%), which tied 2006 for the highest in the trend that dates to 2001.

Lessened concern about the energy situation is likely related to lower average gas prices now versus a year ago. In March 2022, gas prices were about 80 cents higher per gallon than in March 2023, and they were on their way to a record of more than $5 per gallon in June 2022.

Gallup first asked Americans for their assessments of the U.S. energy situation in the late 1970s during the energy crisis. At that time, about four in 10 said the situation was very serious, before the proportion climbed to 47% in August 1979 amid gasoline shortages that summer.

When Gallup next asked the question, in 1990 -- also during a period of rising gas prices -- far fewer, 28%, described the situation as very serious, but that figure eventually rose to 40% during the Persian Gulf War.

A decade later, Americans’ concern was subdued, until the California energy crisis prompted a surge in concern. By 2002, after the crisis passed, a record-low 22% said the situation was very serious.
All Groups Inclined to See Situation as Less Serious, but Gaps Remain

The decline in perceptions of the energy situation as very serious is seen across all key subgroups. Republicans showed one of the larger drops -- 15 percentage points, from 64% to 49%. However, they remain more likely than other demographic or political subgroups to describe the situation as very serious. For example, 34% of independents and 21% of Democrats believe the energy situation is very serious.

The 20-point decline among Eastern residents rating the energy situation as very serious is also one of the bigger declines among subgroups. Now, there are substantial regional differences, particularly between Eastern residents, who show less concern, and Southern residents, who show more.

There are also notable divides by age, with 19% of those under age 30 viewing the situation as very serious, compared with 42% of those aged 50 and older. A year ago, Americans between 30 and 49 were about as likely as older Americans to believe the energy situation was very serious, but that has changed, given the larger 17-point drop among the middle-aged group.

The age and regional differences may largely reflect the political leanings of these subgroups.
Americans Prioritize Environment Over Energy Production

Since 2001, Gallup has asked Americans to assess the tradeoff between protecting the environment and producing greater energy supplies. In most years, they have put a higher priority on environmental protection than energy production, including 53% to 43% currently.

Historically, the margin in favor of the environment has tended to be larger when energy prices are relatively low, and smaller when they are higher. During the period of high gas prices between 2009 and 2013, for example, Americans were mostly divided or they slightly prioritized energy development over the environment. This pattern was temporarily disrupted in May 2010 after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill created an environmental disaster in that region. Later, after gas prices fell starting in 2014, Americans again began prioritizing the environment, with the gap in its favor reaching a record 25 points in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Last year, amid surging gas prices, the gap narrowed to four points, before expanding this year.

Americans also favor “green” solutions over those involving increased production of traditional energy supplies when asked how to better address the nation’s energy problems.By 56% to 40%, Americans say the nation should emphasize more energy conservation by consumers rather than increased production of oil, gas and coal.

By an even larger margin, 59% to 35%, the public believes the nation should emphasize the development of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power over producing energy from oil, gas and coal.

On both of these questions, Americans have consistently favored conservation or alternative energy production over traditional energy-source production, though the sizes of the gaps have varied, depending on the current energy situation.
Republicans, Democrats on Different Sides of Energy-Environment Debate

Republican and Democratic opinions on environmental protection versus energy tradeoffs are mirror images of each other. By 79% to 18%, Democrats say the nation should prioritize environmental protection over energy production, while Republicans would prioritize energy production by 80% to 17%.

The movement on this item among all Americans this year is attributable to independents, who prioritize the environment by 57% to 37% but were divided last year. Both Republicans' and Democrats' preferences were unchanged in 2022 compared with 2023.

Large majorities of Republicans also believe the U.S. should emphasize production of oil, gas and coal over both conservation and alternative energy, while Democrats and independents favor the more environmentally conscious approaches.

Bottom Line

Americans’ concern about the energy issue and how it relates to environmental protection is responsive to changes in the U.S. energy situation. Typically, Americans are less concerned about energy when gas prices are low and supply is abundant, but their concerns rise when energy prices spike, as was the case last year, or when supplies are limited. Thus, the rise in energy concern last year, and the decline this year, is consistent with historical opinions about energy.

The data are clear that Republicans and Democrats have very different views about the approaches the U.S. should take on energy. Independents’ opinions, however, are closer to those of Democrats, making the nation as a whole more sympathetic to proposals that emphasize environmental protection over energy production.

View complete question responses and trends (PDF download).

Director At Florida Liberal Arts College Likens Ron DeSantis’ Takeover To ‘Fascism’

In a resignation letter, Aaron Hillegass wrote a scathing rebuke of the governor’s efforts to transform New College into a conservative beacon.

By Nina Golgowski

HUFFPOST
Apr 11, 2023


Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to transform the New College of Florida into a conservative beacon are being compared to fascism by the school’s director of the applied data science program, who issued a scathing rebuke recently while announcing his resignation.

Aaron Hillegass, in a letter shared on social media Saturday, tore into the Republican governor’s recent appointment of six conservatives to the public school’s Board of Trustees and the ousting of the school’s president in favor of a conservative career politician.

He further ripped a DeSantis official’s expressed desire to turn the small liberal arts school into a conservative “Hillsdale College of the South.” One newly appointed trustee said this could inspire other conservative state legislators to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States.”

Hillsdale College is a small private Christian school in Michigan that has prided itself in not adhering to Title IX ― a civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools ― since it doesn’t accept public funding.


“Hillsdale College is bad for America,” Hillegass said in his letter addressed to the school’s newly appointed interim president Richard Corcoran, a former Republican speaker of the Florida State House who was reportedly awarded a lucrative $699,000 a year salary for the new role ― more than double of what the school’s previous president was making.

Hillegass, who said he was hired just before DeSantis’ takeover, said in his letter submitted Friday that Republican efforts to overhaul the Sarasota college, his alma mater, “cultivates prejudice against immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, minorities, and non-Christians.”

“When a governor guts the leadership of a state school in an effort to make a facsimile of Hillsdale, this is fascism,” he wrote.

“Not the shocking Kristallnacht-style fascism,” he said, referencing acts of Nazi violence against Jews, “but the banal fascism that always precedes it.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in January announced plans to reform public universities by banning "critical race theory" and investing millions of dollars in Sarasota's New College.

Hillegass went on to say that while he loves New College, he hopes the school “fails miserably and conspicuously” and that “If I were more patriotic, I would burn the college’s buildings to the ground” — a comment that he told HuffPost by phone on Tuesday was merely hyperbole.

“I would never burn a building down. Nor should anyone else,” he later tweeted.

“My peers at the university have been very supportive. They’re happy that someone stood up and said it,” Hillegass told HuffPost of the general reaction on campus.

“Academic freedom, whether you’re on the left side or the right side, all academics agree that academic freedom is important.”

Hillegass, who said that he would be leaving the college when his contract ends in August ― a decision that he said followed him being asked if he would renew ― emphasized the importance of academic freedom.

“Academic freedom, whether you’re on the left side or the right side, all academics agree that academic freedom is important,” he said, though standing up for this has not been easy.

“People have left threatening voice messages for me, people have sent me really awful emails,” he said of some of the public response. “It’s a whole range of a lot of really angry posts, a lot of really supportive posts.”

Internally, he said he has “not been given any trouble” at the school over his letter and even had “a very good talk about it” with one of the new trustees, Eddie Speir.

DeSantis in January announced the appointment of six conservatives to the New College of Florida's board of trustees.

He said he believes many others employed by the college have been quietly sending out their resumes amid ongoing legal efforts by DeSantis to ideologically transform public education.

“I think that this is true all over Florida with House Bill 999,” he said, referencing a controversial bill that, among other things, would prohibit certain course material in public schools that support diversity, equity, inclusion, or the teaching of Critical Race Theory. It also would make changes to tenure.

“I think that a lot of academics in Florida who have options are sending out their resumes,” he said. “As top-notch professors leave the state, Florida will find itself having a hard time producing a modern workforce.”

Representatives with New College did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Tuesday.

Mehdi Hasan Exposes Trump’s Biggest Prison Hypocrisy In 60 Furious Seconds

The MSNBC host used the ex-president's own words against him.

Ed Mazza
Apr 10, 2023


Donald Trump has claimed that he is the victim of a “witch hunt” and “political persecution” as he faces charges of falsifying business records in New York.

But as MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan pointed out on Sunday night, no one has tried to prosecute ― and threatened to prosecute ― political rivals quite like Trump himself.

Hasan set out to name everyone Trump has threatened to jail in just 60 seconds, from Hillary Clinton to Snoop Dogg.

He made it, too ... but only barely:

'We Shall Overcome': Joan Baez Embraces Tennessee Dem After Powerful Performance

The folk singer-songwriter sang the iconic protest song with Justin Jones in the wake of the GOP-led Tennessee House expelling him last week.


Ben Blanchet
Apr 10, 2023, 


Joan Baez joined hands with Tennessee Democrat Justin Jones during a touching rendition of “We Shall Overcome” in the wake of the GOP-led Tennessee House’s expulsion of him for his role in a gun violence protest.

Jones, one of two Black Democrats expelled from the state House on Thursday, has referred to the expulsion as an “attack on democracy” and it’s likely he could rejoin the body following a meeting by the Nashville metro council on Monday.

Baez was friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and often sang the iconic protest song during the civil rights movement of the ’60s, notably at the March on Washington.

Baez, who was in Nashville for a discussion with Emmylou Harris this past weekend, weighed in on the expulsion and added that movements are fueled by “little victories and big defeats,” The Tennessean reported.

Jones, in a tweet, referred to meeting Baez as part of a “movement of the spirit.”

“She stands with us in our struggle in Tennessee and said she’s hopeful to see young voices leading,” Jones wrote. “‘WE SHALL OVERCOME...’ Serendipitous, indeed.”

wo later joined in a performance of the song at an airport before embracing each other with a hug.

You can watch a clip of their performance below.

After a controversial merger, Nevada Gold Mines union is back

In 2019, management abruptly stopped recognizing a union. This week, the company and the union negotiated a new contract.

Daniel Rothberg 

March 31, 2023
This story was produced in collaboration between High Country News and The Nevada Independent.

Nearly three years after the National Labor Relations Board sued Nevada’s largest gold mining business for not recognizing a union that had been in place for decades, a collective bargaining committee reached an agreement with the company this week for a new three-year contract.

The contract provides more than a thousand workers at Nevada Gold Mines with an 8.5% increase in wages over the contract’s term, along with other protections, as the mega-company continues to hold a large amount of influence over a local economy dominated by its operations.


Local 3 Bargaining Committee members include President Steve Ingersoll, District Rep. Scott Fullerton, senior business agents Phil Herring and Dylan Gallagher, business agents Lyman Hatfield and Kevin Rains, and members Carl Peters (Underground Operations), Eli Myrick (Underground Operations), Jackulyn Kinkead (Underground Operations), Charles Gonzalez (Surface Process Maintenance), Ernie Lopez (Surface Mine Maintenance), Norm Wilson (Surface Mine Maintenance) and Olivia Sharlow (Surface Custodian).
Photo courtesy of Operating Engineers Local 3

“The greatest highlight to note is that in December of 2019, we could not receive recognition… and our members faced a large amount of uncertainty and insecurity,” Scott Fullerton, a district representative for Operating Engineers Local 3, said in a press release Tuesday. Negotiating a new three-year contract, Fullerton said, “says a lot about the dedication of the membership, the determination of Local 3 and the importance of both parties communicating effectively.”

The new collective bargaining agreement covers Nevada Gold Mines’ operations that used to be managed by Newmont, including Gold Quarry, Leeville, Pete Bajo, Emigrant, Chukar, Deep Post, Deep Star, Exodus, Mill 5, Mill 6, South Area Leach, Genesis/TriStar, Rita K and parts of North Area Leach. The agreement does not cover areas previously operated by Barrick.

In an email, Fullerton said any employee covered by the agreement could join the union. As of Jan. 30, the bargaining unit consisted of 1,394 employees with 542 union members.

Nevada Gold Mines did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2019, Nevada Gold Mines was formed as a joint venture between multinational mining giants Barrick and Newmont, companies with deep histories operating massive gold mines across the Interstate 80 corridor in northeastern Nevada, from Winnemucca to West Wendover. Merging the two operations into one company led by Barrick — Nevada Gold Mines — had an immediate impact on workers. Where there were two major competing employers in the area, now there is one.

In the months following the merger, Nevada Gold Mines management stopped recognizing the union, which had represented Newmont employees since 1965, taking actions that the nation’s top labor regulator told a federal court “left many employees feeling terrified and betrayed.”
“There’s no competition for labor anymore.”

In June 2020, the National Labor Relations Board asked a U.S. District Court judge to grant an injunction reinstating the union, alleging that the company had engaged in “unlawful conduct.”

Nevada Gold Mines had initially responded by calling the federal agency’s request “an extreme and draconian injunction” to force it into a labor agreement that had preceded the new company. But the case did not proceed as the company entered into settlement talks that culminated in a win for the union: Nevada Gold Mines agreed to recognize the union and restore benefits.

Gold country: A precious metal, a mining mega-corp and a captive workforce
Read more

During the past two years, The Nevada Independent and High Country News have investigated workplace changes at Nevada Gold Mines. Through a tip form, dozens of former and current workers have shared information about policy changes at the mines, discrimination complaints and the company’s outsized influence over the labor pool. In addition, workers have reported concerns that the company placed an emphasis on productivity at the expense of safety.

After the settlement agreement, Operating Engineers continued to file additional complaints with federal regulators, alleging unfair labor practices concerning pay and worker classifications. But union officials said communication with the company improved. By March 2022, the company had agreed to issue $1.1 million in back pay and damages and a one-year contract extension with a 2.5% pay increase. The negotiations over the new contract began in February.

After the contract was negotiated Tuesday, Fullerton said that the agreement marked “positive progress” in a relationship with Nevada Gold Mines that had started on adversarial footing.

The contract, Fullerton said, also includes pension increases and addresses “safety aspects,” though he noted that the safety record of union areas is better than the record in other areas.


Mining operations at the Nevada Gold Mines mine near Elko, Nevada.
Photo courtesy of Operating Engineers Local 3

Although there are several small mines in the region — and a few more are expected to come online — Nevada Gold Mines remains a regional giant, employing roughly 7,000 workers and thousands of contractors. The company’s size, workers said, gives it significant control over the local labor pool, supplies and contractors. Carl Peters, an underground miner with Nevada Gold Mines, said in a press release that he participated in the union’s volunteer negotiating committee because he felt that the union “is the only thing that holds this company in check.”

“There’s no competition for labor anymore,” he added.

Jackulyn Kinkead, an underground truck operator and a member of the negotiating committee, said in a statement that the union “came out ahead on everything.” Kinkead said that she valued having the union protection: “If something happens, I am able to make a phone call.”

Daniel Rothberg is an environment, water and energy reporter for The Nevada Independent. He is based in Reno.