NON-ENDORSEMENT ENDORSES TRUMP

LA Times Non-Endorsement Another Sign of Our Billionaire-Dominated Politics

By Ari Paul

October 26, 2024

Source: FAIR

BOSTON, MA - OCTOBER 26: Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Founder and CEO NantWorks, Leader of the Cancer MoonShot 2020, announces newest initiatives for Cancer MoonShot 2020 at Hyatt Regency Boston on October 26, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images for NantHealth, Inc.)

The Los Angeles Times will not be making a presidential endorsement in this election, the first time the paper has stayed silent on a presidential race since 2004. But the decision not to endorse a candidate was not made by an editor. The paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, stepped in to forbid the paper from doing so.

The move sparked a furor over the lack of editorial freedom (Semafor, 10/22/24; KTLA, 10/22/24; Adweek, 10/23/24). The paper lost 2,000 subscribers, and editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, along with two other staffers, including a Pulitzer Prize winner (Guardian, 10/25/24).

Guardian (9/23/16): “The lack of transparency around Soon-Shiong’s reasons for not allowing his paper to make a presidential endorsement has left journalists in the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom frustrated and confused.”

The LA Times was widely expected to support the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, a Southern California resident and former senator from the state. The paper’s editorial board enthusiastically supported Joe Biden in 2020 (9/10/20) and Hillary Clinton four years before that (9/23/16).

According to news reports, the paper had been preparing an endorsement until Soon-Shiong reached across the wall that is supposed to separate the business and editorial wings of a newspaper. He tried to rationalize his decision, according to the Guardian:

“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Soon-Shiong told Spectrum News, noting he was a “registered independent.”

On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong tweeted that he had asked the editorial board to instead publish a list of positive and negative attributes about both of the presidential candidates, but that the board had refused.

Soon-Shiong said that the dangers of divisiveness in American politics was highlighted by the responses to his tweet about his decision not to endorse, saying the feed had “gone a little crazy when we just said, ‘You decide.’”

And the LA Times is not alone. The Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post will also issue no presidential endorsement, for the first time since 1980 (NPR, 10/25/24). Former editor-in-chief Martin Baron called the move “cowardice,” telling NPR:

Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

Alarms about editorial freedom

Stat (11/21/16): “Soon-Shiong called it an ‘incredible honor’ to dine with Trump, who ‘truly wants to advance health care for all.’”

Soon-Shiong, who bought the LA Times from Tronc in 2018, attempted to portray himself as a defender of the free press against attacks from then-President Donald Trump (CNBC, 9/7/18). But Soon-Shiong—a doctor who made a fortune in the for-profit medical industry (New Yorker, 10/25/21)—was not shy about his ambitions for a top health position in the Trump administration (Stat, 11/21/16, 1/25/17).

Is Soon-Shiong trying to make nice with Trump? One thing we know about him is that he’s not big on paying taxes; “He hasn’t paid federal income tax in five consecutive recent years,” ProPublica (12/8/21) reported.

He’s also not overly concerned about ethical niceties; Stat (7/20/17) has raised questions about conflicts of interest in his medical business and how they might impact patients. A Politico investigation (4/9/17) of Soon-Shiong’s research foundation found widespread self-dealing:

Of the nearly $59.6 million in foundation expenditures between its founding in 2010 and 2015, the most recent year for which records are available, over 70% have gone to Soon-Shiong–affiliated not-for-profits and for-profits, along with entities that do business with his for-profit firms.

This isn’t the first time Soon-Shiong’s intervention at the paper has raised alarms about editorial freedom. The Daily Beast (10/22/24) reported that earlier this year “executive editor Kevin Merida resigned after Soon-Shiong tried to block a story that accused one of his friends’ dogs of biting a woman in a Los Angeles park.”

Layoffs at the Times earlier this year also sparked outrage from trade unionists and journalists. “A delegation of 10 members of Congress warned Soon-Shiong in a letter that sweeping media layoffs could undermine democracy in a high-stakes election year,” reported Los Angeles Magazine (1/23/24).

There was also a racial element, the Times union said in a statement (Editor and Publisher, 1/24/24):

It also means the company has reneged on its promises to diversify its ranks since young journalists of color have been disproportionately affected. The Black, AAPI and Latino Caucuses have suffered devastating losses.

Bezos is far better known than Soon-Shiong; while it’s not reported that he directly intervened to stop a Post endorsement, like at the LA Times, NPR noted that Bezos depends on harmonious interactions with the federal government, as the company he founded, Amazon, depends on government contracts. Conflict-of-interest questions have long surrounded his control of the paper (FAIR.org, 3/1/14, 3/14/18, 9/19/19; CJR, 9/27/22; Guardian, 6/12/24; CNN, 6/18/24).

Helping a fellow billionaire

NPR (10/25/24): Elon Musk “has become one of the leading boosters of baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in immigrants to illegally vote for them — a conspiracy theory that Trump and other Republicans have made core to their narratives about the 2024 election.”

It’s hard to ignore that in blocking endorsements expected to go to Trump’s opponent, billionaire owners are using their media power to help a fellow billionaire. With the Washington Post, readers can easily assume that Bezos cares more about not offending the powerful than its now-laughable slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Bill Grueskin (X, 10/25/24), a professor at Columbia Journalism School, said that these endorsements are “unimportant politically” because “few votes would be swayed”—the Los Angeles area and the Beltway are solidly blue. But there’s an ominous factor here, he said, because “the billionaire owners are (intentionally or not) sending a signal to the newsrooms: Prepare to accommodate your coverage to a Trump regime.”

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is likewise using his wealth and his ownership of the social media network Twitter (rebranded as X) to boost Trump (PBS, 10/21/24; NPR, 10/25/24).

And Republican megadonor and billionaire Miriam Adelson “shelled out $95 million to the pro-Donald Trump Preserve America PAC during its third quarter,” Forbes (10/15/24) reported. Her late husband bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal in December of 2015 (AP, 12/17/15), and as the New York Times (1/2/16) reported:

Suspicions about his motives for paying a lavish $140 million for the newspaper last month are based on his reputation in Las Vegas as a figure comfortable with using his money in support of his numerous business and political concerns, said more than a dozen of the current and former Review-Journal staffers and local civic figures who have worked closely with him.

Big money has played an enormous part in US elections, especially since the Citizens United decision eviscerated limits on campaign spending (PBS, 2/1/23). “A handful of powerful megadonors have played an outsized role in shaping the 2024 presidential race through mammoth donations toward their favored candidates,” Axios (10/23/24) reported. These megadonors “skew Republican,” the Washington Post (10/16/24) reported.

Much of the press in the United States has, correctly, portrayed a second Trump term as a threat to democracy and a move toward corrupt autocracy, eroding institutions like the free press and independent justice system (Atlantic, 8/2/23; New York Times, 9/21/24, 10/3/24, 10/22/24; MSNBC, 10/22/24; NPR, 10/22/24). Yet the intervention of Soon-Shiong and his fellow moguls is an indication that our media are already not in democratic hands. Far from it; they are in the hands of the billionaire class. And it is sure to have an impact on this election.

She Exposed a Prestigious Medical Journal’s Silence on the Holocaust. Now She’s Asking About Gaza.

A historian who exposed the New England Journal of Medicine's silence on Nazi atrocities confronted the journal’s treatment of Gaza during a Harvard symposium.

By Jonah Valdez

October 26, 2024

Source: The Intercept

Fire consuming tents of people seeking refuge next to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital

Earlier this year, two Harvard medical historians published an article on a leading American medical journal’s willful ignorance of Nazi atrocities in the 1930s and ’40s. The article found that the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the nation’s longest-running and most prestigious medical publications, either chose not to cover the Nazi regime’s racist and antisemitic health policies, mass killings, and medical experimentation, or, in one case, praised the Nazi health care system for its approach to public health.

The New England Journal of Medicine convened a symposium on Wednesday where the authors, Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Allan M. Brandt, could present their findings — and Abi-Rached took the opportunity to call the journal out for repeating its mistakes today.

“Is the silence of the journal regarding the pulverization of the health care system in Gaza, and Israel’s relentless attack on health care workers and the creation of a public health and humanitarian disaster and the weaponization of starvation similar or different to its silence during the Holocaust?” Abi-Rached said toward the end of her talk, joining the symposium virtually from Paris. “What explains the erasure of the predicament of Palestinians in the pages of the journal? What do we mean by the political determinants of health if we precisely ignore the plight, the health, and well-being of marginalized and vulnerable populations?”

Abi-Rached, who recently fled the Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon, where she grew up and had been teaching, questioned why the journal has yet to publish any articles about Palestinians and Gaza.

During her talk, Abi-Rached cautioned that the destruction in Gaza is a part of “a significant erosion” of the international humanitarian laws and framework born out of World War II and after the atrocities of Holocaust. She then noted that no one should be surprised that her paper with Brandt, published amid the war in Gaza, had “elicited such strong reactions among medical doctors, public health experts and other healthcare personnel, and the wider public, who were rightly appalled by the silence of the journal regarding the suffering of Palestinians.”

She said that it is the role of historians, medical journals, and universities to speak out and raise such questions to reckon with both past and present, referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as “the most glaring and moral crisis of our time.” 

“What is happening today in Gaza is unprecedented. It far surpasses the violations of medical neutrality seen in El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine,” Abi-Rached continued. “We are witnessing today the same deliberate and systematic targeting of health care personnel, not only in Gaza, but also in Lebanon where the conflict has moved and shifted.” (“Medical neutrality” refers to the principle of preserving access to medical care during times of war.)

Abi-Rached’s remarks arrive at a moment when many in the medical community are speaking out about atrocities carried out by the Israeli military, largely led by medical workers who have treated patients in Gaza’s hospitals over the past year. 

Most recently, Feroze Sidhwa, a surgeon who worked at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, for two weeks in March and April, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times based on the observations of 65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saw patients during the war. Doctors provided X-ray images showing bullets embedded in the skulls and spines of patients. Many reported that they repeatedly treated children, often under 12, shot in the head or chest. Pro-Israel critics dismissed the evidence as “digitally altered or completely falsified,” and The Times took the unusual step of publishing a note saying that the paper stood by the reporting after doing “additional work to review our previous findings.”

Throughout the war in Gaza, the Israeli military has targeted hospitals in repeated airstrikes and ground operations. Earlier this week, 19-year-old Palestinian student, Shaban al-Dalou, was seen burning alive while hooked up to an IV drip after an Israeli airstrike on Al-Aqsa Hospital set fire to the tents of hundreds of displaced people sheltering there. 

More than 800 health care workers have been killed in Gaza in the past year, and the majority of its hospitals have either been destroyed by Israeli strikes or are struggling to operate due to a lack of resources amid the ongoing blockade of medical supplies. 

In Lebanon, where Israel recently intensified its attacks by unleashing widespread bombs and airstrikes, about half of its medical centers and clinics have been closed due to structural damage or their proximity to bombardments in recent weeks. 

Abi-Rached and Brandt’s article, “Nazism and the Journal,” received wide attention after its publication in March, including coverage by the New York Times. Even at the time, the article’s omission of Israel’s war in Gaza and its inability to draw through lines from the Holocaust and what experts have called an unfolding genocide of Palestinians generated pushback from other medical experts. 

After Abi-Rached’s talk on Wednesday, applause broke out from the crowd of several dozen in the conference room of the school’s Countway Library. 

Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, responded to Abi-Rached’s remarks by acknowledging that the journal has yet to publish any works about Gaza. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t publish on Gaza,” he said, adding that he is open to the idea. Yet he mentioned that it has been challenging to find a unique voice on the topic.

“To my mind, it’s not enough to say, ‘Attacks on hospitals are bad.’ That’s been said everywhere, we’re not a unique voice in saying that. It’s not enough to say that medical neutrality is an important value,” Rubin said. “So what is it that we can say that will change people’s thinking?”

“And I am not sure what that is, and we would love to be able to create a unique perspective,” he added. “I don’t think we’ve seen that yet and that’s I think what we’re looking for.”

He also acknowledged the potential for pushback. After the publication of the issue on historical injustices, which included Abi-Rached and Brandt’s article, a number of readers canceled their subscriptions in protest, Rubin said. Gaza is even more fraught, he said.

“We’ve heard in the room that there are legitimate controversies that aren’t so clear,” Rubin said, referring to an earlier question from an attendee. 

Before Rubin spoke, one attendee, who said his family has lived in Israel since its creation in 1948 and whose daughter lost a friend during the October 7 attacks, argued that medical neutrality is being “destroyed by both sides” and pointed to Hamas’s rejection of medical services from the Red Cross, as required under international law. He also mentioned the allegation of Hamas using hospitals “as cover for military activities.” Israeli and U.S. officials often allege that Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as a shield, but the claims have been shown to either be exaggerated or unsubstantiated.

The attendee identified himself as a co-chair of the Jewish Employee Resource Group at Mass General Brigham, and added that a survey of Jewish staff at the hospital showed a quarter feel fear working in the hospital and more than two-thirds “feel unable to declare their fully authentic self while at work.”

“In both settings, we would love there to be neutrality around this, so that Jewish staff would not feel that, and similarly, in war, that health care facilities and health care was observed as a neutral space, by all sides, in context of conflict,” he said. 

Brandt, Abi-Rached’s co-author, answered by decrying what he saw as the erosion of the Geneva Conventions through the various conflicts across the globe and talked of the need to restore trust in such institutional norms. 

Abi-Rached then pushed back on the “both sides” argument from the attendee, arguing that his logic is “a bit dangerous.”

The idea that “by merely having combatants or militants being treated at the hospital, that this is enough of a justification or a pretext to bomb it, and by doing that cause even more harm — one should be reminded that this is precisely what fascists have been using historically as an argument,” she said, referencing a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini justifying his bombing campaign on Ethiopian hospitals in the 1930s.

Abi-Rached previously referenced the effects of Israel’s wars on the health care system in Lebanon in a Boston Review article published earlier this month. In the piece, she detailed the moments when dozens of patients from Israel’s pager bombings poured into the Beirut hospital in which she worked.

“We have become subjects in a morbid experiment,” she wrote. “New weapons are being tested, studied, and perfected on lives deemed expendable, with the approval of the most powerful democracies in the West.”

“Is the unfolding war part of the expansion of Eretz Israel, with more and more illegal settlements, driven by the messianism of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu?” Abi-Rached continued. “Could it be explained by the enduring trauma of the Holocaust that is still lingering generations later, with a disturbing transference of hate of Nazis onto hate of ‘Arabs’ who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in the first place?” 

Boeing plans to launch effort to raise over $15 billion in capital as early as Monday, source says

 Boeing branding at Farnborough International Airshow · Reuters

Sun, October 27, 2024 
By David Shepardson

(Reuters) - Boeing is set to launch as early as Monday its plan to raise more than $15 billion in capital, a source briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Reuters first reported on Oct. 16 that the planemaker was closing in on a plan to raise around $15 billion with common shares and a mandatory convertible bond as it sought to bolster finances worsened by a crippling ongoing strike.

The new capital is set to come from a mix of the sale of stock and convertible preferred shares, the source added, saying the total amount raised could rise based on demand.

Boeing declined to comment on Sunday.

Bloomberg News reported the expected timing of Monday's capital raise earlier.

Last week, machinists voted nearly two to one to reject Boeing's latest offer seeking to end the strike that has halted 737 MAX production.

The company said earlier this month in regulatory filings that it could raise as much as $25 billion in stock and debt with its investment-grade credit rating at risk.

The aerospace giant has been dealing with increased regulatory scrutiny, production curbs and a loss of confidence from customers since a door panel blew off a 737 MAX plane in midair in early January.

Boeing has been burning through cash all year and last week announced a new $6 billion quarterly loss. Earlier this month, Boeing said it had secured a $10 billion credit agreement with major lenders: Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

Boeing said earlier this month it would cut 17,000 jobs - 10% of its global workforce - and delay first deliveries of its 777X jet by a year.

The top three credit rating agencies - S&P, Moody's and Fitch - have said they will cut Boeing's ratings to junk if it raised new debt without retiring some $11 billion of debt maturing through Feb. 1, 2026.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

‘Not Good Enough’: Striking Machinists Reject New Boeing Offer

By Jenny Brown

October 26, 2024

Source: Labor Notes


Hundreds of workers chanting “Strike! Strike!” at Boeing’s Everett, Washington, factory marched out during their lunch break on September 8, a few hours after the Machinists union recommended a tentative agreement with the company.

After 40 days on strike, 33,000 Machinists rejected an improved contract offer from Boeing by 64 percent on Wednesday. The offer included a 35 percent wage increase over 4 years.

Members of Machinists (IAM) District 751 and District W24 build passenger jets and freighters, including the 737, 767, and 777. Most work at Boeing’s huge factories at Everett and Renton, Washington.

“It’s a little bit better, but it still needs to go further,” said Ky Carlson, who was staffing a picket line at Everett on Tuesday, where she would normally be assembling the 777.

“It’s an easy no vote for me,” said Jon Voss, a mechanic and steward at Renton, where he builds wings for 737, “because I know Boeing has multiple offers ready to just throw at us until we finally get what we deserve.”

Mylo Lang, an apprentice machinist at Boeing’s Auburn, Washington fabrication plant, said his priorities were pay, retirement, time off, and no mandatory overtime. “We’ve made progress in each of those areas, but we haven’t gotten a big win, a definitive win in any of them.”

The union originally demanded a 40 percent raise, and most strikers still see that as the goal, with a bigger bump in the first year.
NO PENSIONS, NO PLANES

In the new offer, the company proposed to contribute 4 percent of pay into a 401(k), plus a match of up to 8 percent that a worker contributes, and a one-time $5,000 contribution to each worker’s 401(k).

But many people are sticking with the slogan, “No pensions, no planes,” said Carlson. They want the company to restore their defined benefit pension, which Boeing froze in 2016: Those who were vested couldn’t accrue more, and everyone, old and new, was given a 401(k).

About 40 percent of the current workforce had the pension before it was frozen. Voss, with 13 years in, calculated that the loss cost him $600,000.

Workers say the pension was stolen by company job blackmail and union collusion. In 2013 Boeing forced a contract reopener by threatening to move more work away from the Puget Sound area.

“During that extension we lost our defined benefit pension, stagnated wages, there was a massive cost-shift on healthcare, and we were stuck in that agreement for almost 11 years,” District 751 President Jon Holden told Valley Labor Report.
NEW INCREASES

After a decade of stagnating wages, pay is still the key sticking point. Machinists at Boeing can start at $20 an hour—just above the area’s minimum. The new contract would have added 12 percent to that in the first year (a raise of $2.40), with raises in the next three years of 8, 8, and 7 percent.

Workers overwhelmingly rejected the company’s previous offer, with a 25 percent wage increase, on September 12. That contract would have eliminated a union-wide annual performance bonus that is usually 3 to 4 percent of earnings. Workers charged that after a 16 years of half-percent annual wage gains, they would barely keep up with inflation. The union had recommended that contract, but the members voted 96 percent to strike.

The new offer, which union leadership presented for a vote but failed to recommend, restored the annual performance bonus and included a new guarantee that it would not go below 4 percent. It also included a $7,000 bonus on signing.

Both contract offers included a guarantee that Boeing’s next plane would be built in the Puget Sound area. Workers said that was not going to happen during the four-year life of the contract. But Holden argued that once that guarantee is in the contract, it becomes an issue the union can strike over if the company tries to take it out. A more likely timeline for production of a new single-aisle passenger jet is ten years.
WEIRD WAGE PROGRESSION

Slow wage progression remains a sore spot. “It doesn’t really seem like they’ve done a whole lot for newer people, which make up a pretty significant portion of the workers,” said Lang, who has worked for Boeing for six years. “We’ve had a really high turnover, especially since the pandemic.” Around 40 percent of workers have less than five years in.

Currently, if you hire in at $20 an hour, you get 50 cent wage increase every six months. But then at year six, you leap to the full pay for your classification—if you were able to survive that long. The “zoom” to top pay is a result of starting pay stagnating while a cost of living adjustment has incrementally increased top pay. The rejected contract proposal would not change that, although the union has proposed fixing it

“There’s got to be more incentive for people,” said Voss, “because the starting wages and the length of time it takes to actually make money is just too long, and they’re not going to retain talent.”

If wages helped retention, it would help Boeing, too, Voss said. “Getting people who care about what they’re doing is very important.”

Voss was also concerned that the proposed contract left janitorial workers maxed out at $26.56, cut off from the increases other workers would get. “They’re some of the hardest-working people here,” he said.

On the up side, the October 19 proposal would have ended the practice of bumping people down the wage progression when they change classifications, which might happen if a worker trained for a different job. The proposal would have allowed those workers to stay at their existing pay when moving laterally.
OVERTIME STILL NOT FIXED

Boeing heavily relies on mandatory overtime in some departments, pushing workers to the point of physical collapse or mental breakdown.

The new contract bans a second consecutive weekend of mandatory overtime, and limits days to ten hours. But it still allows up to 112 hours of mandatory overtime in a three-month period.

Many workers would like to see the contract ban mandatory overtime altogether.

“I don’t think that people should be required to work more than 40 hours a week to keep their jobs,” said Lang. “That seems like something that we’ve fought pretty hard for in this society, and something that we should be definitely holding every company to.”

Last year Machinists won this demand at Spirit Aerosystems, a former Boeing unit the company sold in 2005. But in return, the Wichita, Kansas, workforce agreed to allow alternative work schedules, with rotating shifts that can rob workers of regular weekends off. Boeing is in the process of buying Spirit back.
STATE OF THE COMPANY

Workers report that the company has been unable to produce planes in the struck factories at Everett and Renton, despite trying to get managers to work on them. Production was already way behind orders before the strike, with a backlog of 4,000 orders for the 737.

Showing financial stress, on October 15, the company announced plans to raise $25 billion through borrowing and selling stock, and to open a $10 billion line of credit. It hopes to avoid a ‘junk bond’ rating, which would increase its borrowing costs.

The company spent $61 billion on stock buybacks between 1998 and 2018, indulging shareholders and company executives instead of investing in its workforce or in airplane production. Those chickens came home to roost when underinvestment in new plane development led to flawed design workarounds, leading to two deadly 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 350 people.

The strike has halted payments for planes and Boeing reported a staggering $6 billion loss for the quarter on October 23.

When the strike started, Boeing announced furloughs of managers and cancelled parts orders to conserve cash. On October 11, Boeing announced a ten percent reduction in its 170,000 worldwide labor force.

Some workers were freaked out by the layoff announcement at first, Carlson said, but Machinists are unlikely to be made redundant, since the company has been struggling to keep up with demand and to keep trained workers from leaving.
STRIKERS HOLDING UP

Boeing cut off strikers’ health care at the end of September. Since the third week of the strike, the union has been providing $250 a week in strike pay, and most strikers are either living on savings or relying on additional jobs.

Months ago, when Voss asked co-workers about their plans for a strike, he learned that Boeing was a second job for some newer workers. They told him, “I’m just going work my first job more while we’re on strike.” Others were easily able to pick up work elsewhere.

“Financially, people are ready to weather the storm,” he said.

Carlson said she knows a lot of people who have gone to work for Amazon. “We’re nowhere near the breaking point,” she said.

Lang, in Auburn, said he noticed that more people have been using the community food supplies provided at the union hall.

“I think that just people are really committed to getting a good deal,” said Lang. “We recognize that this is a unique time for us, that we have a unique bargaining position. We’re in it for a good contract, not just an okay contract.”

‘There is no money’: Cuba fears total collapse amid grid failure and financial crisis

Ruaridh Nicoll in Havana
Sat, October 26, 2024 

Residents prepare a soup over an open fire during a blackout after the failure of a major power plant in Havana on 19 October.Photograph: Ramón Espinosa/AP

Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.

“You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.

Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.



Related: The Cuban Collapse – a photo essay

Parts of Cuba’s communist system still function: the municipality sent Maria food. “We are three families here,” she said. “I live alone, the lady who lives next to me [does] also, and there are two children, the children’s mother, her aunt and an elderly man.”

A week after the blackout, the island has returned to the status quo ante with regular power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. But the crisis has left a deep, melancholy dread about the future.

“Cubans have a cheerful idiosyncrasy,” said Julio César Rodríguez, 52. “Even when things are bad we laugh. But this is really bad.”



This current crisis began on 17 October, when an order went out for all non-essential state workers to go home.

The effort to save power didn’t save the system, and a day later, the island went dark. Antonio Guiteras, one of the main power stations, shut down, crashing all the other big generating stations in the system.

“It’s very hard to restart a power station,” said a retired engineer from Antonio Guiteras, who asked to remain anonymous. “You need to produce a lot of electricity just to get it going.”

Antonio Guiteras was built in 1989, and is now battered and obsolete. “The truth is that it was built rotten,” said the engineer. He told harrowing stories of working with faulty safety equipment, political management who would disappear when problems arose and a system long pushed to its limit.



“There was a scheduled maintenance programme, but it was never followed,” he said. “The requirements were too tight. We were told: ‘The factory has to produce, so patch it up.’”

The government acknowledges the parlous state of its system, blaming the 62-year old-trade embargo imposed by the United States. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said “financial and energy persecution” made it difficult to “import fuel and other resources necessary”.

For most of its existence, Cuba’s government has relied on the largesse of allies – first Russia and then Venezuela. But those countries, facing their own difficulties, have cut supplies heavily. “It’s like trying to keep a sinking ship afloat with corks,” said one European diplomat.

In a televised address, Cuba’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero, said the emerging private sector would have to pay more for its power, while the government looks to renewables to secure its future energy needs.



The island is blessed by sunshine, but the multiple attempts to start solar projects have nearly all failed when the companies involved failed to get paid. “The government isn’t stupid,” said a foreign businessman. “But there is no money.”

Instead a deal has been cut with a Chinese firm to provide the materials for a slew of solar farms in return for access to Cuba’s nickel deposits. But with well over 10% of Cuba’s population having fled the economic crisis on the island in the last two years, there is scepticism whether the expertise remains to build such systems.

Joe Biden has said that while he’s “tough” on the Cuban government, he supports the Cuban people. But Washington could do much more help Cuba, argued the US academic William LeoGrande in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Related: Scarce food and stifling homes: sputtering grid pushes Cuba nearer collapse



“The proponents of regime change should be careful what they wish for,” he wrote. “A collapse of the regime would be a humanitarian disaster, spurring an emigration tsunami far larger than what we have seen so far. A breakdown of social order could unleash a surge of criminal violence.”

Unlike during previous power cuts, there has been very little protest this time, beyond the bashing of some pots and pans. People seem exhausted and government ministers have made it clear that the government will come down hard on any “indecent” behaviour.

Recent months have seen a new round of intimidation of journalists, with several forced to flee the country. On Wednesday, Amnesty International declared four people currently in Cuban jails – the journalist Félix Navarro and his daughter, Sayli Navarro, as well as protesters Roberto Pérez Fonseca and Luis Robles – as “prisoners of conscience”.

Meanwhile, one crisis begets another. Failures have been reported in the equally obsolete water supply system. Six hundred thousand people lack regular running water, but the blackouts appear to have multiplied that number by damaging pumps and pipes.

 Much of Havana is dry.

Dariel Ramírez was sitting on his stoop in the old town. He didn’t have much to eat because he had shared his stored food with others before it spoiled.

Asked how he was preparing for any repeat of the power crisis, he pointed towards the Museum of the Revolution, where the central symbol of communist rule is displayed: the boat on which Fidel and Raúl Castro arrived from Mexico in 1956.

“If this happens again, we need to prepare the Granma yacht,” he said. “So we can all sail away.”

Additional reporting by Eileen Sosin

Cuba Struggles Amid Hurricanes, Sanctions, and Blackouts

Through days of blackouts and shortages, we report from Cuba, where ordinary people are paying the price for years of tightening US sanctions.

By Ed Augustin

October 27, 2024

Source: Jacobin



To say that Cuba has had a trying week would be an understatement. After a grid failure last Friday caused four days of nationwide blackouts and a Category One hurricane smashed into the eastern province of Guantanamo on Monday, killing seven, the lights are back on most of the time and things have steadied on the island.

Nilza Valdés Núñez, sixty-one, from Guanabacoa, East Havana, feels a bit of a relief. I spoke to her on Monday, the day after her eighty-one-year-old mother cooked all the defrosting meat in their freezer that her brother in Florida had bought for them.

“The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” said, pausing with tears in her eyes but fury in her voice, “make you feel so bad.”

Nilza Valdés Núñez’s empty freezer. (Ed Augustin / Jacobin)

At a time when over a million Cuban homes are already going without running water, the power cuts compounded the problem by disabling pumps. People carried water to their houses in buckets from nearby cisterns and wells.

Before the blackouts, the street price of a bag of ten bread rolls in her neighborhood was about 50 cents (150 pesos). In their aftermath, it shot up to nearly a dollar (280 pesos).

Once all but vanquished, hunger has returned in Cuba in recent years, as state guaranteed food rations have been cut. With scarce food spoiled and prices rising this last week, some who rely on state salaries or pensions and don’t have relatives to help them out from abroad are now feeling the pinch as much as people were in the Special Period following the Soviet Union’s collapse.

At the same time, the country’s resilience is striking. Massive outages like this would terrify people in other countries, but many I met took them calmly and even with nonchalance.

Playing on her phone in old Havana, next to a crumbling three-story building with a tree growing out of its roof, Anyeli Imbert told me, “It’s not scary for us when the lights go out because we’re used to it. It’s not a big deal.”

Anyeli Imbert in Havana. (Ed Augustin / Jacobin)

Other people’s resilience came out in humor. “These things happen,” said Yosvani Valdés, on the same block. “The lights go out in Japan when there are typhoons. The lights went out in Houston a few weeks ago when there was a cyclone there. People blow these things out of proportion, but we Cubans face adversity with laughter, and we always find a way through.”

A Crisis of Legitimacy

The ruling Communist Party of Cuba, meanwhile, faces its biggest political crisis ever. Four failed attempts to get the national grid back online have underscored a growing sense that the government is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the multiple crises, many of which are rooted in sweeping US sanctions. Economically, it’s bankrupt. Ideologically, it has not fully enacted its own reform program, formally agreed upon way back at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, in 2011.

In many senses, the expanded market economy is keeping the show on the road: more food is now imported by the private sector than by the withering state. But the increased inequality it has brought has also undermined a sense that everyone is facing the crisis together — a major difference between the Special Period thirty years ago and today. People who go without breakfast now see overweight officials on television exhorting them to further tighten their belts. Social justice has been eroded, and with it much of the government’s legitimacy.

Speaking about the outages In Washington, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that the United States is “concerned about the potential humanitarian impacts on the Cuban people.” Laughing as if the claim were far-fetched, she added, “I just want to make clear that the US is not to blame for the blackouts on the island.”

In fact, US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.

Washington specifically targets tankers that deliver the fuel the island needs to keep the lights on. By freezing assets of ships delivering oil, the Treasury Department leaves Cuba with fewer suppliers, driving up the island’s energy costs.US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.

More broadly, over the last decade sanctions on Cuba have been ramped up to unprecedented levels. The Joe Biden administration has left in place the most potent sanctions enacted by the Donald Trump administration, including the powerful Helms-Burton Title III, which chills investment in the island, and the false accusation that Cuba sponsors terrorism, which cuts it out of much of the world banking system. Economists calculate that these new sanctions cost the state billions of dollars a year — leaving less money to import petroleum, repair obsolete infrastructure, and import solar panels.

“We are doing everything we can to make it as damn hard as possible for Cuba to keep the lights on,” said Fulton Armstrong, who previously served as the top US intelligence officer for Latin America who is now a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.

He added that “people at the State Department have been alarmed by the efficiency of their threats” to the private sector. The thoroughness of sanctions enforcement by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the Department of the Treasury has created a culture of “overcompliance” in the private sector, he said, where companies steer clear of trading with Cuba because ambiguous regulations and the severity of the penalties make it not worth their while. “In the olden days, OFAC had twenty or twenty-five people devoted to Cuba,” he said. “But in the digital age, you have these large bureaucracies to hunt down people who could be violating our embargo and to harass the private sector in the US, Europe, and Latin America.”

During the Biden administration, there’s been an odd disconnect between the reality of sanctions and the way they are spoken about. Whereas the Trump administration bragged about how its “maximum pressure” sanctions would cripple the island, the Biden administration has kept the core of the sanctions regime in place but flat-out denies that it has anything to do with Cuba’s crises.

Window-dressing measures help this effort. Joy Gordon, an expert on sanctions at Loyola University Chicago, dubbed this the “theatrics of humanitarian concern” in an article last year. In what she describes as a “gushingly self-congratulatory” press release, OFAC announced “general licenses” for humanitarian goods in countries the United States sanctions. “The provision of humanitarian support to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable populations is central to our American values,” OFAC said. But the severity of the overall sanctions regime means that the general licenses do not really allow for more humanitarian goods to get in.For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.

In the wake of the power outages and the latest hurricane, there’s been a flurry of organizing by people in the United States who demand a different relationship with Cuba. Hundreds of activists attended an online emergency meeting this week organized by Massachusetts Peace Action. Cuba experts with decades of experience signed an open letter to President Biden calling on him to ease sanctions and to provide American aid to the Cuban people during his final weeks in office.

But the island’s energy crisis isn’t going away anytime soon. Many of the Soviet-era power stations are nearing half a century old. The country can barely afford spare parts and is unable to import enough petroleum to keep the lights on. Getting the grid back online and going back to “normal” means millions of people, especially those outside Havana, enduring long power outages every day.

And the events of this week have kicked off a vicious cycle that will be hard to break. In the wake of the national outages, Canada, from which more tourists visit Cuba each year than anywhere else, updated its travel warning for the island. Reduced tourism revenue would make it even harder for the government to dig itself out of the energy crisis.

Ultimately, analysts say that modernizing Cuba’s power grid will require external assistance. There’s not much on the horizon. US pressure prevents Cuba going to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or Inter-American Development Bank for support. Deliveries of Venezuelan oil, sent to Cuba in exchange for doctors, nurses, and teachers working in Venezuela ever since 2000, have dropped markedly in recent years. Mexico has offered technical assistance to keep the grid running. But Russia and China, bigger players who have surely been consulted this week, have not shown signs of decisively stepping in.

For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.

US policy toward Cuba hangs in balance as presidential election looms

Dave Sherwood and Matt Spetalnick
Mon, October 28, 2024 



HAVANA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In Cuba, all eyes are on the U.S. presidential election.

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican contender Donald Trump have said little about the Caribbean island nation, a longtime U.S. foe just 90 miles (145 km) from its border.

But this election, Cubans and on-island analysts told Reuters, could be decisive as its communist-run government struggles to beat an economic crisis that has increasingly made life unbearable for many of its residents.

For decades, the United States has enforced a trade embargo against the island that complicates Cuba's global financial transactions. Trump's designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism and reinstatement of other restrictions during his 2017-2021 presidency snuffed out an historic rapprochement under former President Barack Obama, under whom President Joe Biden served as vice president.

Both candidates said in brief statements they would continue to draw a hard line on Cuba.

"Cuba is not prepared, nor will it be prepared to resist any more pressure (from the United States)," said Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat who is now an independent political analyst.

Alzugaray said a second Trump presidency "does not bode well." He had more hope for a Harris presidency, which he said could ease sanctions to avoid another potential international conflict so close to U.S. shores.

But he said there were no guarantees.

"Harris could also reason that (Cuba's) government is at the point of collapse, so why invest political capital in saving it?" Alzugaray told Reuters.

In Cuba, U.S. policy can mean life-changing decisions.

Trump has said he would eliminate Biden's parole program, which has allowed tens of thousands of Cubans with U.S. sponsors to enter the country legally.

"I'm for Kamala," said Libia Morales, a 63-year old Cuban from Cienfuegos who waited for a visa appointment outside the U.S. embassy.

"Trump is already saying he will deport all immigrants and crush us even more with the blockade."

Cuba's spiraling social and economic crisis came to a head this month when its electrical grid collapsed, blacking out the island for days and sparking scattered protests.

Cuba blamed U.S. sanctions for complicating the purchase of fuel and spare parts for its oil-fired power plants. Critics say mismanagement and an inefficient state-run economy are also to blame.

Whatever the roots of the crisis, the result is a record-breaking migration wave that has drained Cuba of its once youthful workforce - many of whom, in turn, arrive on the U.S. border, a problem for both countries, analysts say.

Upwards of a million people have left the island since 2020, according to Cuban official statistics, nearly a tenth of its population, an exodus with few comparisons outside of wartime.

Fabio Fernandez, a professor of history with the University of Havana, said any new limits on Cuban migration could bring dire consequences.

"If there is no escape valve for migration it could be a problem for Cuba," Fernandez said.

BACKBURNER

On the U.S. side, Cuba has been largely absent from campaign policy and rhetoric.

During the 2020 campaign, then-President Trump blasted leftist leaders in Cuba and Venezuela, winning over much of Miami’s large Cuban American community. But this time, Florida is widely seen as more firmly in Trump’s camp, which some experts say is the reason both campaigns have largely left the issue on the backburner.

Trump sanctions on Cuba during his first administration "ended the disastrous Obama policy that ultimately flowed funds to the repressive Castro regime," Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly told Reuters.

"Under weak Kamala Harris, our adversaries, including Cuba, are emboldened and everyone is less safe. President Trump will fix it starting Nov. 5.”

Kelly did not respond to a question on whether a second Trump administration would restore restrictions on Cuba that Biden had modestly rolled back, including the flow of remittances.

Harris' campaign also suggested she would maintain pressure on Cuba.

“Vice President Harris stands with the people of Cuba as they fight for their rights after decades of repression and economic suffering at the hands of the communist regime,” said Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokesperson for the Harris campaign.

“She will stand up to all authoritarians — including the very leaders that Trump has praised and embraced.”

Finkelstein did not respond to questions about whether Harris, as president, would stick to Biden’s Cuba policy or take a revised approach.

(Reporting by Dave Sherwood and Matt Spetalnick; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Nelson Acosta, Carlos Carrillo, Mario Fuentes and Anett Rios in Havana; Editing by Daniel Wallis)