Wall Street Strikes Again With Mass Media Layoffs

There is one real solution to creating a modicum of job stability: Taming Wall Street’s greed.

An abandoned Los Angeles Times vending machine is seen in Covina, California
(Photo: Johndhackensacker3d/CC BY-SA 3.0)


LES LEOPOLD
Jan 31, 2024

Common Dreams

Mass layoffs are ripping through the news industry. More than 20,000 media jobs were cut in 2023 with many more on the chopping block. Just this past week, the Los Angeles Times announced the layoffs of 20% of its newsroom employees.

Time Magazine said it will terminate 15% of its unionized editorial staff.

Sports Illustratedlaid off most of its staff.

Business Insider cut 8% of its staff and Forbes another 3%.

The unionized staff at Conde Nast (publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, Bon Appetit, Glamour, Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, and Teen Vogue) walked out to protest looming layoffs, while chanting, “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!”

And private equity and hedge funds like Alden Global Capital are buying up newspapers and gutting staffs, again and again.

The reason is obvious, right? Social media is eating into newspaper revenues. Advertisers have discovered that you can reach more people and sell more products by paying influencers and running ads on social media, Amazon, and Google. And many people prefer to get their news for free from their algorithm-informed social media feeds, rather than from the traditional press. At first glance it appears these mass layoffs of journalists might be nothing more than the pain and suffering that goes with technological progress, just like the obsolescence of elevator operators or turnpike toll collectors.

Well, tell that to the workers in the tech sector who create and staff the online mega-stores and build those marketing algorithms, the pride and joy of the new knowledge economy. In 2023, a year in which the U.S. had historically low unemployment, rising wages, and declining inflation, approximately 262,000 workers in the tech industry lost their jobs, and another 24,500 have joined them so far in January 2024. These mass layoffs are taking place even though these companies have been earning record profits and achieving record valuations.

It’s high time for politicians of all stripes to realize that their policy choices created this dangerous and enlarging inequality, and it should now be their duty to protect the livelihoods of the American people, not the enormous profits on Wall Street.

The research for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, reveals a full-scale epidemic hitting all sectors of the economy. We estimate that approximately 30 million U.S. residents have experienced mass layoffs since 1996. Add in the indirect effects on their families and communities and more than half of the U.S. workforce has felt the enormous adverse financial, health, and emotional stresses and strains caused by mass layoffs (defined as 50 or more workers laid off at one time for at least a month).

Wall Street’s Two-Pronged War

The “new high-tech economy,” it turns out, operates on a long-established Wall Street value: unabashed greed. And mass layoffs, high-tech and low, media and industrial, are caused by that greed. To enrich themselves, the leaders of Wall Street hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment banks demand that corporations go into the stock market and repurchase their own shares—stock buybacks. This causes their stock prices to immediately rise, since future earnings expectations are now spread over a smaller number of shares. Rising stock prices transfer enormous amounts of corporate wealth to the largest investors and top company officers, who are compensated with stock incentives.

To pay for these stock buybacks that exclusively benefit shareholders, publicly traded corporations cut costs, most often and effectively through mass layoffs of their employees. You’ll find this at all the big-name high-tech companies, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. You’ll also find it in manufacturing (Siemens), retail (Toys R Us), banking (Wells Fargo), pharmaceuticals (Roche), and services (Marriott International). Citigroup just announced the layoff of 20,000 employees. In 2023, it conducted $1.5 billion in stock buybacks.

Leveraged buyouts, which have negatively affected so many journalists, are another form of financial pillage. When private equity firms and hedge funds buy up companies the deals are financed largely with borrowed money, debt that is then put on the books of the company that was purchased. Servicing that debt becomes a major corporate expense, most often paid for by cutting costs through mass layoffs. Again, in almost all cases, there’s a connection between leveraged buyouts and mass layoffs. Just ask the former employees at Twitter, who got X-ed out because of the enormous debt load Elon Musk added after he purchased the company. The same is true for all those working for newspapers acquired in recent years by Alden Global Capital.

The Public Wants Mass Layoffs to Stop

Most policymakers in both major political parties continue to view mass layoffs as a product of the unstoppable forces of technology and globalization. That’s the story their Wall Street donors tell them. But the victims of wave after wave of mass layoffs are not buying this. Americans believe, and rightfully so, that working people should not have to be put in a position of abandoning their communities and move because of mass layoffs. They understand that policy choices inspired by greed, not unstoppable economic laws, are at play.

As recent polling reports: “Seventy percent of respondents preferred a focus on ’helping struggling areas to recover’ while only 30% chose ‘helping people move to opportunity.’ Views were broadly similar across nearly all demographic breakdowns, including class, region, gender, party, and generation.”

Overall, 62% of respondents said they were willing to pay higher prices as a result of policies that “strengthen American manufacturing by ensuring that more of the things I buy are made in America.” Perhaps they would even pay more to see their local newspapers freed from Wall Street vultures.

The real divide that is tearing us apart is between the wealthy with secure livelihoods and those who have seen their entire world turned upside down by mass layoffs.

Nevertheless, politicians and pundits alike continue to ignore mass layoffs. Instead, they attribute working class anger to what they argue is increasing polarization between the educated and uneducated (those without college degrees). Supposedly, the educated, especially in urban areas, are moving more to the Democratic Party, while the uneducated are joining the angry MAGA hordes.

As one think tank leader put it, “The fetish for manufacturing is part of the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they’re in in the U.S.” And when workers objected to the 2024 proposed purchase of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross dismissed it by saying, “There is no real concern other than xenophobia.”

But, as we show clearly in Wall Street’s War on Workers, the data is extremely flimsy for trashing the working class in this fashion. In fact, working class people are growing more liberal on social issues (including immigration), and do not form a disproportional percentage of the dreaded MAGA base. The same is no doubt true for many of the journalists who are out in the street.

The real divide that is tearing us apart is between the wealthy with secure livelihoods and those who have seen their entire world turned upside down by mass layoffs.

Taming Wall Street’s Greed

There is one real solution to creating a modicum of job stability: Taming Wall Street’s greed. We should:Outlaw stock buybacks because they are stock price manipulation, as they were before their deregulation in 1982.

Curtail leveraged buyouts by limiting the amount of debt that can be used.

Provide aid to areas devastated by mass layoffs, with direct public investments that offer not just job training, though that helps, but also needed and secure jobs. Every American willing and able to work should have a right to a decent, stable job.

As for the media, the newspaper industry needs a new system like those proposed in Canada and Australia, where companies like Google and Facebook must pay for all the journalistic content they are grabbing for free in the U.S. And artificial intelligence should pay for using news content to train its generative programs.

Such solutions may seem obvious, once we look closely at these issues, but we’re not close to adopting reforms. Neither major political party is willing to support policies that might upset their Wall Street donors. And few politicians are eager to close the revolving door to future jobs in high finance.

The disconnect with the American public is enormous. Another recent poll revealed that 85% of Americans believe that mass layoffs have a negative impact on workers, and 71% believe mass layoffs harm the overall economy.

Clearly, the American people want elected politicians of both major parties to face up to the obvious: Layoffs hurt working people and increase Wall Street’s domination of our economy. It’s high time for politicians of all stripes to realize that their policy choices created this dangerous and enlarging inequality, and it should now be their duty to protect the livelihoods of the American people, not the enormous profits on Wall Street.

It will take guts for the political establishment to wean itself from Wall Street cash. But if our democracy keeps failing to provide a modicum of job stability, our democracy itself will be endangered.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


LES LEOPOLD is the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the forthcoming book “Wall Street’s War on Worker s: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It.” Read more of his work on his substack here.

Danakali goes after new project as “vultures” on the prowl

Cecilia Jamasmie | January 19, 2024 | 

Danakali explored the use of filtered seawater at Colluli. 

(Image courtesy of Danakali.)

Danakali (ASX: DNK) warned shareholders on Friday of “predatory activity” by unidentified groups currently approaching investors with “vulture” share purchase offers for their stakes in the company as little as A$0.01 each.


The company, which last year sold its 50% stake in the Colluli potash project in Eritrea to Chinese buyers for $121 million (A$154.7 million), returned nearly 90% of the proceeds to shareholders mid-January.

Danakali now has cash reserves of about A$38 million, or about A$0.11 a share. This means shareholders are being offered less than 10% of the underlying value of their shares, it said.

The Australian miner noted in a separate statement it was already exploring a range of new liquidity options for shareholders. These include an off-market share buyback and further distribution of the firm’s cash reserves in the form of a capital return.

The alternatives are part of Danakali’s efforts to get its shares re-listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Its latest proposal to resume trading was rejected.

“We believe the extended suspension of our shares puts our shareholders in a difficult position and we will now explore other options to achieve additional liquidity while continuing to engage with the ASX,” executive chairman Seamus Cornelius said in a statement.

“From what we can ascertain, most of the activity has originated offshore and potentially beyond the reach of Australian regulators. Any shareholder who has received such an offer should contact Danakali directly,” he noted.

The Perth-based miner said it had taken the first steps to pursuing a new project in Eritrea by applying to an exploration licence covering 1,537 km². Preliminary work at the property shows the area may be prospective for copper and gold, the company said.

Danakali noted it would report back to shareholders on the outcome of the board’s work and talks in coming weeks.

 

Samantha Power, Ebola, and Obama’s Scramble for Africa

by Jean-Philippe Stone / January 8th, 2024

It is crucial to re-examine Samantha Power’s actions and decision-making during the Ebola epidemic in relation to the broader historical context of President Barack Obama and AFRICOM (Africa Command)’s covert Scramble for Africa.

AFRICOM is the brainchild of Dick Cheney who, after his energy task force identified African oil as ripe for the picking, conspired with Donald Rumsfeld to create Africa Command. (1) However, African governments wanted nothing to do with AFRICOM. South African officials in particular criticized the US for attempting to impose AFRICOM to undermine China’s growing influence on the continent. (2) Mao Zedong deserves credit for masterminding China’s original “pivot to Africa” in the sixties, sending engineers and guerrilla warfare instructors to coach aspiring revolutionaries in Zambia, Rhodesia, and Zanzibar. (3) Following the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989 and the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, China’s engagement with Africa focused strictly on trade. By 2006, Sino-African trade skyrocketed to $55.5 billion—a very worrying development for Washington policymakers anxious about China’s rapid  ascendency to superpower status. The US was getting “lapped” (to borrow athlete Samantha Power’s phrase) by the Asian Dragon in Africa and AFRICOM seemed like a solution. But American foreign policy was a public relations catastrophe due to the Iraqi and Afghan quagmires. Everyone knew why the US courted Africa and it had little to do with disaster relief. Material benefits tempted poorer African nations to welcome AFRICOM bases, but Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi quickly cajoled them back into line. (4)

Whether you admire or despise him, Ghaddafi was nothing if not consistent in his anti-imperialist foreign policy. Within a year of ousting the British-backed King Idris during the 1969 Libyan Revolution, Ghaddafi dismantled the US Wheelus Air Base and expelled all foreign military personnel. The US never forgave this defiance and endeavoured to destroy Libya via protracted proxy wars. In 1978, a nearly decade long conflict erupted between Libya and Chad’s rulers. One of whom, Hissène Habré, “the creation of the Americans in no small measure”, was convicted of war crimes in 2015 for murdering 40,000 people. (5) While Cuban troops inflicted humiliating defeats on US-backed South African apartheid armies in Namibia and Angola, the Libyans, after a string of victories in the early eighties, were eventually booted out of northern Chad by 1987, outmatched by combined US and French firepower. Yet Ghaddafi ‘s regime lived to fight another day, and he sprang into action once again as the spectre of American imperialism returned to haunt Africa in the form of AFRICOM.

By 2008, the US offered massive sums of money to African governments in return for hosting US military bases. In response, Ghaddafi doubled the money so that African nations withdrew from the bargain —a tactic which paid-off handsomely when the African Union rejected AFRICOM. Moreover, Ghaddafi was a staunch pan-Africanist who aimed to terminate Africa’s reliance on Western finance. The African Investment Bank based in Libya, whose goal was to fund African development at no interest, could have posed a serious challenge to the IMF’s domination if the regime had survived. In short, as Dan Glazebrook argues, Ghaddafi’s Libya, for all its faults, represented the last line of defence for Africa’s political and economic independence. Libya’s descent into anarchy, piracy, terrorism, and modern-day slavery in the wake of Ghaddafi’s execution cleared the way for AFRICOM’s stealth invasion of Africa. (6)

Shortly after NATO’s destruction of Libya left the continent exposed to unprecedented levels of US meddling, the Obama administration ignored African hostility to AFRICOM and imposed a US military hardware “superhighway” in the Horn of Africa. As Nick Turse observed, “operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the limited interventions of the Bush years”. (7) From Chabelley base in Djibouti to Camp Gilbert in Ethiopia, the latter replete with modern gyms and video game parlours, AFRICOM’s tentacles slithered deeper into the continent by 2012. The US hired mercenaries or contractors to man surveillance-aircraft jetting out of Entebbe in Uganda as hundreds of US commandos shared bases with Kenyan soldiers in Manda Bay. US marines trained recruits in the Burundi National Defence Force, while AFRICOM oversaw fourteen major joint-training exercises with armed forces in Morocco, Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal, and South Africa in a single year. Before drones took headlines by storm, cumbersome reconnaissance planes flying out of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso dotted the skies above Mali and Mauritania like parched vultures scouring for prey. A new era of colonial misadventure and exploitation was well and truly underway in Africa. (8)

Less than a year before she purportedly saved the world from Ebola, Samantha Power set her sights lower and saved the civil-war ridden Central African Republic in December 2013. Dreading that another Rwandan genocide was in the offing as Muslim Seleka insurgents and Christian militias threatened to hack each other to pieces, Power begged the international community and the US in particular to intervene before it was too late. (9) By April 2014, Power got her wish. The UN Security Council authorized the deployment of thousands of US-backed African Union peacekeeping troops into the CAR. (10) Within three years, the US “provided more than $800 million to fund humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping operations, peacebuilding and reconciliation programs”. (11)

AFRICOM already established a foothold in the CAR before Power’s intervention, nominally hot on the heels of the deranged Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony lurking in the thick jungles straddling the border between Uganda and the CAR. (12) Curiously, according to the Washington Post, US advisors tasked with bringing Kony to the ICC (International Criminal Court) weren’t keen on completing their mission. Locals in the southern CAR region of Obo grew fearful of their new American visitors, while Ugandan and Congolese officers wondered why US Special forces soldiers, equipped with the latest high-tech gadgets and satellite imagery, never bothered to pursue Kony into the forests. (13) In fact, Kony, the Osama Bin Laden of sub-Saharan Africa, is still on the run today.

This is pure speculation, but it is doubtful capturing Kony was the real reason why AFRICOM ventured into the CAR. It’s even harder to believe US officials claiming they were driven by the goodness of their hearts to prevent ethnic cleansing:  “I mean [CAR] is not a strategic target. Outside of “never again”, why else would we have gotten involved?” (14) Aside from the fact the CAR is renowned for harbouring vast diamond, gold, copper, uranium, and timber reserves, virtually all neighbouring states like Chad, Sudan, the DRC, and even South Africa took turns vying for control of the CAR’s resources for forty years by sponsoring violent coups and rebellions. (15) Was the US any nobler in its intentions? Evidence is scant at this time, but history and common sense suggest otherwise.

Samantha’s soft power posturing in the CAR, wittingly or not, was part and parcel of the Obama administration’s scramble for Africa. The old-fashioned, fire-and-fury, full-spectrum dominance-styled interventionism of the Bush/Cheney era was inconceivable and unpopular both at home and abroad. Therefore, Obama and Power looked elsewhere to legitimize US imperialism in Africa. They settled on a new doctrine centred around “human security”, a term borrowed from Global Health Governance lingo.

Maryam Deloffre defines this relatively novel doctrine thusly: “human security broadens the notion of security to focus on the individual and then considers things such as poverty, pandemics, and climate-change disasters…as security threats”. (16) This doctrine sounds reasonable in theory. Who can deny that deadly viruses like Ebola or Covid are a danger to our collective human security? But the practical application of this doctrine is problematic. As Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh argues, the developing world sees no noticeable difference between “human security” and traditional interventionist agendas like R2P (Responsibility to Protect- the thesis of Samantha Power’s book A Problem From Hell). For the Global South, “human security” policies are code for brutal interventions. (17) Nefarious actors like the US military are much too likely to instrumentalize “human security” to further the interests of corporations on the lookout for resources to plunder.

The weaponization of global health has been the bedrock of AFRICOM’s “human security” doctrine since the organisation’s inception. Stephen Harrow, former director of the Africa program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, stated in 2008 that AFRICOM would strive to gain a foothold on the continent via “rising commitments with respect to global health in Africa”. Dr Dan Henk at the US Air War College stressed that military planners in AFRICOM focused on health, infrastructural rehabilitation, environmental renewal, and human security to interfere in Africa nations. (18) In 2009, reports at the Department of Defence’s Global Health Engagement programme recommended the creation of “an overall global health security plan that combines civilian and military disease surveillance capabilities”. In February 2014, Assistant Secretary of Defence Jonathan Woodson emphasised once again that the US military had to expand its global health engagement strategy. (19) Clearly, AFRICOM planned to use “human security” crises as justifications to intervene in whatever natural disaster African nations will suffer next. The Ebola epidemic happened to be that opportunity.

By September 2014, both President Obama and Samantha Power spoke fluent “human security” parlance in speeches warning of the existential threat that Ebola posed to the world. Obama likened Ebola to ISIS terrorists and declared “ This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security…it’s a potential threat to global security if these countries break down…” (20) At the UN Security Council Power echoed her boss and announced “…we have declared the current outbreak a threat to international peace and security”. (21) The rhetoric worked like a charm. Swept up by fear, confusion, and panic, 130 nations co-sponsored UN Resolution 2177 on Ebola Relief, guaranteeing the militarization of medical and humanitarian responses to the pandemic—much to the delight of AFRICOM. Power’s behind-the-scenes schmoozing at the UN, to get member states to back the bill, certainly was a “significant achievement”— it gave the West and the US military carte blanche to “intervene anywhere in the developing world”. (22) Power didn’t save the world from Ebola, but she definitely made it easier for the US to conquer it.

As Jacob Levich noted, “the Ebola crisis offered a useful cover for a substantial escalation in US military presence” in West Africa. The White House authorized the transfer of 3,000 troops to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Senegal under AFRICOM command by September 2014. Another US military base was constructed in Monrovia during this deployment as well. (23) If the Bush administration spent years courting, flattering, and hosting dictators like Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea in return for oil, Obama jettisoned the pleasantries and let the military swoop right into West Africa. (24) Lest there be any lingering doubt about Washington’s true objectives in the region, consider this: war game simulations at the Pentagon imagined a terrorist attack in New York would be the perfect excuse to invade Mauritania. (25)

For West Africans on the ground, US military aid was no different to an occupation. Cartoon sketches in Monrovian newspapers joked that Liberians should prepare themselves for the day US soldiers come barging into homes with guns akimbo shouting “ KNOCK KNOCK !! HUMANITARIAN AID!! Alongside the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, and African Union states all sent troops to pacify the virus. China was the only nation to deploy mostly medical personnel. (26) Marouf Hasain Jr contends that the overwhelming militarization and securitization of social life in West Africa during the epidemic remains one of the most defining memories for survivors and witnesses today. (27) Medical anthropologist Adia Benton concedes that local armies and police were guilty of repressing certain segments of their own people, while foreign troops were generally well-behaved but indifferent to local populations. (28) As Mark Honigsbaum observed in his analysis of the WHO’s initial mismanagement of the Ebola pandemic, many Liberians, Guineans, and Sierra Leonians did not think highly of foreign medical or military staff, who often only treated Westerners airlifted to Europe or the US, while Africans were left to die in abysmal hospitals. (29)

This blatantly colonial conduct and rhetoric (Airforce Colonel Clint Hinote compared Ebola to ideological contamination and encouraged public health workers to employ counter-insurgency measures) is jarring, given that the CIA is largely responsible for ruining Liberia as a functioning democracy. (30) Three decades worth of CIA destabilization campaigns doomed Liberia’s healthcare system long before Ebola struck—an inconvenient truth everyone in mainstream media avoided like the plague.

Historian Jeremy Kuzmarov argues that, had the CIA never conspired to topple President William Tolbert in 1980, Liberia may have avoided the disastrous fate so many African nations now endure. Despite immense pressure from Jimmy Carter to relinquish Liberia’s sovereignty, Tolbert refused to allow another US base to deface his country. He liberalized Liberia’s political system, advocated for African economic independence, and introduced universal healthcare and free education. Much like Ghaddafi, Tolbert paid the ultimate price for his heresy. He was killed by US-backed rebels led by Samuel Doe, who allowed US embassy staff to dictate policy in every Liberian ministry. Doe embraced neoliberalism, worked closely with the IMF to privatize industries, and granted US military personnel unlimited access to local airports to funnel weapons to anti-communist “contras”.

The CIA tired of Doe as well and schemed to replace him with Charles Taylor, who plunged Liberia into a devastating civil war throughout the nineties. The US, hedging its bets, backed Taylor’s rebels who were “advised…on how to carry out the conflict in Liberia”, while President Bill Clinton helped fund the West-African peacekeeping force allied with Doe’s loyalists. Following years of atrocities, Taylor emerged victorious after winning elections in 1997. Clinton and, bizarrely, Jesse Jackson warmed up to Taylor until George Bush ruined the party. Taylor resigned as president of Liberia in 2003 after the ICC convicted him of war crimes, only to be succeeded by another US embassy favourite, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (31) The Harvard-educated and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Sirleaf presided over a capital where none of its citizens could access running water for six years during her tenure as president. She surrendered the countryside to bands of rampaging warlords and paramilitaries, proved powerless to prevent Liberian death squads from collaborating with a French army that killed thousands in the Ivory Coast, and is the only leader on the continent to offer AFRICOM Liberian territory to build a base. (32)

With such a long record of unspeakable poverty, criminal leadership, and CIA wrongdoing, is it any wonder Liberia was ill-equipped to face Ebola? Western media hardly mentioned this history when lamenting woefully understaffed and ramshackle West African hospitals. Not a hint of sympathy for these public health systems can be found in the US press. Journalists from Medical Daily heaped praise on authoritarian corporate entities instead, like the Firestone Rubber company , whose innovative managers took it upon themselves to do the job governments and socialised healthcare proved incapable of doing. (33) We are told Firestone spared no expense to protect its approximately 80,000 strong workforce. Accomplishments included training medical personnel, using bribes and bullying to acquire resources, and the construction of makeshift quarantine shelters. Yet not a word about Firestone’s appalling human rights record and working conditions tantamount to “the modern equivalent of slavery”. (34)

None of this bothered the head honchos at AFRICOM. It didn’t matter that most Ebola Treatment Units (mainly large tents filled with cheap plastic mattresses) the US military erected in West Africa remained empty for the duration of the epidemic. It didn’t matter that even the Washington Post admitted Obama’s militarized aid intervention made little discernible impact on halting the spread of Ebola. The disease had already subsided before the ETUs were set-up. (35) What did matter was that the “human security” doctrine Obama trumpeted and Samantha Power legitimized at the UN had become reality. The White House kicked one nasty intervention habit, only to pick up a “healthier” one. AFRICOM solidified its stranglehold further via partnerships like APORA (African Partner Outbreak Response Alliance), which sees the US Armed Forces Health Surveillance Centre “help improve African militaries’ ability to effectively support civilian authorities to identify and respond to a disease outbreak”. (36) African nations like Rwanda are now cooperating with APORA in some capacity. (37) Mission accomplished.

Here is a summary of the numerous AFRICOM military installations and operations which proliferated throughout Africa since the Ebola epidemic:

• In 2014 the US built a gargantuan drone base in Agadez, Niger, to spy on or eliminate various Islamic groups, born out of the chaos of NATO’s disastrous regime change war in Libya, scattered across the Sahel region in Mauritania, Chad, and Sudan. (38)
• One of AFRICOM’s permanent bases at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti has exponentially grown in size as more drones and military hardware flood the Horn of Africa.
• Airports in Entebbe, Uganda, have been especially active since 2014, as the US military helps ship “equipment and soldiers to the Central African Republic in support of the African Union’s effort to confront destabilizing forces and violence”. (39) (referring to the ongoing civil war between Christians and Muslims in the CAR—a quagmire which Russia is now embroiled in)
• The US now frequently leads joint military exercises with the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea—to keep a sharp eye on the safe passage of Nigerian oil tankers to the US. The “official” justification for this military presence is, according to Ghanaian socialist groups, to suppress the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. (40)
• For over a decade, the US has trained the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)’s army—a relationship which deepens with each passing year. A separatist Ugandan rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is keeping US military advisors, along with their Congolese and Ugandan counterparts, extremely busy in the oil-rich Lake Albert region. (41)
• AFRICOM even acts as the European Union’s informal customs officer. Since EU nations have quietly moved their borders from the Mediterranean sea all the way down to the southern reaches of the Sahara Desert, US and French bases in Mauritania and Chad keep watch on masses of refugees desperately trying to escape uninhabitable weather conditions and incessant warfare. (42)
• In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was caught granting waivers for military aid to the South Sudanese military, despite its employ of child soldiers. (43)
• In 2018, geographer Adam Moore noted Air Forces Africa intended to construct 30 permanent or temporary bases in four African nations. Vice News alleged the US military set-up six new facilities in Somalia alone, while smaller “contingency” bases were present in Cameroon and Mali. A contingency outpost in Gabon was soon converted into a forward command centre. (44)
• In 2018, the US roped Ghana into its sphere of influence by persuading Plagiariser-in-chief Nana Akufo-Addo to sign a 20 million dollar “Status of Forces” agreement, which allows US military personnel to carry arms, grants them immunity if accused of crimes, and heavily implies a base will eventually be built on Ghanaian soil. The President lied to protesters opposing this capitulation, promising US bases would stay away from Ghana.
• In 2021, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari pleaded with the US to relocate AFRICOM from Stuttgart, Germany, to somewhere in Africa so as to coordinate attacks against Islamic militants. Once upon a time, Nigeria was one of AFRICOM’s most vociferous critics.
• Finally, AFRICOM is sending attachés and consultants to the African Union’s meetings, arousing fears that the AU’s security and response framework is being slowly co-opted to benefit American corporate and military interests at the expense of member states. (45)

Samantha Power served her purpose, intentionally or not, as an agent of US empire. One might file her actions under the heading ‘benevolent imperialism’. The US’ militarized response to the Ebola epidemic precipitated AFRICOM’s far from benign incursions into West Africa—and Power was there to see it through.

END NOTES

(1) Horace G. Campbell, “Obama in Africa”, (26/6/2013),

(2) Abel Esterhuyse, “The Iraqization of Africa? Looking at AFRICOM from a South African Perspective”, Strategic Studies Quarterly, (2008), pp. 111-115.

(3) Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London,2019), pp. 185-223.

(4) A. Carl LeVan, “The Political Economy of African responses to the US Africa Command”, Africa Today (2010), p. 2.

(5) Jeremy Kuzmarov, “How the CIA Helped Ruin Liberia”, (30/7/2021).

(6) Dan Glazebrook, “NATO’s War on Libya is an Attack on African Development”, (6/9/2011).

(7) Nick Turse, “Obama’s Scramble for Africa”, (12/7/2012),

(8) Ibid.

(9) Bate Felix and Pascal Fletcher, “Ghost of Rwanda” haunts as US envoy visits Central African Republic”, (19/12/2013).

(10) Andrew Katz, “UN Authorizes Peacekeeping Mission to Central African Republic”, (9/4/2014).

(11) Charles J. Brown, “The Obama Administration and the struggle to prevent atrocities in the Central Republic December 2012-September 2014”, (November 2016), p. 7.

(12) Nick Turse, “Obama’s Scramble for Africa”, (12/7/2012).

(13) Sudarsan Raghavan, “In Africa, US troops moving slowly against Joseph Kony and his militia”, (16/4/2012).

(14) Brown, “The Obama Administration…”, p. 8.

(15) Henry Kam Kah, “History, External Influence, and Political Volatility in Central African Republic (CAR)”, (2014), pp. 18-20.

(16) Jacob Levich, “The Gates Foundation, Ebola, and Global Health Imperialism”, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (September 2015), p. 726.

(17) Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, “Human Security twenty years on”, (June 2014).

(18) Esterhuyse, “The Iraqization of Africa?…”, pp. 115-116.

(19) Thomas Cullison, Charles Beadling, Elizabeth Erickson, “Global Health Engagement: A Military Medicine Core Competency”, (1/1/2016).

(20) Cheryl Pellerin, “Obama: UN will Mobilize Countries to fight Ebola Outbreak”, (25/9/2014).

(21) Samantha Power, “Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power at an Emergency Security Council Meeting on Ebola”, (18/9/2014).

(22)  Levich, Ibid, pp. 726-727.

(23) Ibid, pp. 724-725.  

(24) Vijay Prashad, “A New Cold War Over Oil”, (11/8/2007).

(25) Nick Turse, “The US will Invade West Africa in 2023 After an attack in New York—According to Pentagon War Game”, (22/10/2017).

(26) Adia Benton, “Whose Security?: Militarisation and Securitisation During West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak”, in The Politics of Fear: Médecins sans Frontières and the West African Ebola Epidemic, edited by Michiel Hofman and Sokhieng, (2017), pp. 28-30.

(27) Marouf Hasain Jr, Decolonizing Ebola Rhetorics Following the 2013-2016 West African Ebola Outbreak (2019).

(28) Benton, Ibid, pp. 26-27.

(29) Mark Honigsbaum, “Between Securitisation and Neglect: Managing Ebola at the Borders of Global Health”, Medical History Journal, (2017), p. 286.

(30) Levich, “The Gates Foundation…”, pp. 722-723.

(31) Kuzmarov, “How the CIA Helped Ruin Liberia”.

(32) Thomas Mountain, “Nobel for President, No Water for Citizens”, (12/10/2011).

(33) Levich, “The Gates Foundation..”, p. 723. See Susan Scutti, “Firestone keeping Ebola Away From Employers In Liberia through Low-tech Intervention program”, (13/10/2014).

(34) Levich, “The Gates Foundation…”, pp. 722-723.

(35) Ibid, p. 725.

(36) Thomas Cullison et al.

(37) MOD Updates, “RDF Hosts Seventh African Partner Outbreak Response Alliance (APORA 2019)”, (20/5/2019).

(38) Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group, “Defending Our Sovereignty: US military Bases in Africa and the Future of the African Union”, (8/7/2021).

(39) Captain Christine Guthrie, “Uganda troops support US airlift missions”, (22/1/2014).

(40) Socialist Movement of Ghana, Ibid.

(41) Ibid.

(42) Ibid.

(43) Nick Turse, “Hillary Clinton’s State Department Gave South Sudan’s Military a Pass for its Child Soldiers”, (9/6/2016).

(44) Nick Turse, “US military says it has a “light footprint in Africa. These documents show a vast network of bases”, (1/12/2018).

(45) Socialist Movement of Ghana, Ibid.

Jean-Philippe Stone is an Irish post-graduate who recently completed a PhD in Modern History at the University of Oxford. He works as a Senior Correspondent at the Organization for World Peace. Read other articles by Jean-Philippe.

 

Widespread population collapse of African Raptors

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS

An international team of researchers has found that Africa’s birds of prey are facing an extinction crisis.

The report, co-led by researchers from the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews and The Peregrine Fund, and published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution (4 January 2024), warns of declines among nearly 90% of 42 species examined, and suggests that more than two-thirds may qualify as globally threatened.

Led by Dr Phil Shaw from St Andrews and Dr Darcy Ogada of The Peregrine Fund,  the study combines counts from road surveys conducted within four African regions at intervals of c. 20–40 years and yields unprecedented insights into patterns of change in the abundance of savanna raptor species.

It shows that large raptor species had experienced significantly steeper declines than smaller species, particularly on unprotected land, where they are more vulnerable to persecution and other human pressures. Overall, raptors had declined more than twice as rapidly outside of National Parks, Reserves and other protected areas than they had within. Worryingly, many species experiencing the steepest declines had suffered a double jeopardy, having also become much more dependent on protected areas over the course of the study.

The study’s authors conclude that unless many of the threats currently facing African raptors are addressed effectively, large, charismatic eagle and vulture species are unlikely to persist over much of the continent’s unprotected land by the latter half of this century.

The study also highlights steep declines among raptors that are currently classified as being of ‘least concern’ in the global Red List of threatened species. They include African endemics such as Wahlberg's Eagle, African Hawk-eagle, Long-crested Eagle, African Harrier-hawk and Brown Snake-eagle, as well as Dark Chanting-goshawk. All of these species have declined at rates suggesting that they may now be globally threatened.

Several other familiar, widespread raptor species are now scarce or absent from unprotected land. They include one of Africa’s most powerful raptors - the Martial Eagle - as well as the highly distinctive Bateleur.

Dr Phil Shaw commented: “Since the 1970s, extensive areas of forest and savanna have been converted into farmland, while other pressures affecting African raptors have likewise intensified. With the human population projected to double in the next 35 years, the need to extend Africa’s protected area network – and mitigate pressures in unprotected areas – is now greater than ever”.

Dr Darcy Ogada added: “Africa is at a crossroads in terms of saving its magnificent birds of prey. In many areas we have watched these species nearly disappear. One of Africa’s most iconic raptors, the Secretarybird, is on the brink of extinction. There’s no single threat imperiling these birds, it’s a combination of many human-caused ones, in other words we are seeing deaths from a thousand cuts”.

Professor Ian Newton OBE FRS, FRSE, a world-leading ornithologist who was not involved in the study, commented: “This is an important paper which draws attention to the massive declines in predatory birds which have occurred across much of Africa during recent decades. This was the continent over which, only 50 years ago, pristine populations of spectacular raptors were evident almost everywhere, bringing excitement and wonder to visitors from many parts of the world. The causes of the declines are many – from rampant habitat destruction to growing use of poisons by farmers and poachers and expanding powerline networks – all ultimately due to expansions in human numbers, livestock grazing and other activities. Let us hope that more research can be done and, more importantly, that these birds can be protected over ever more areas, measures largely dependent on the education and goodwill of local people.”

Raptors of all sizes lead an increasingly perilous existence on Africa’s unprotected land, where suitable habitat, food supplies and breeding sites have been drastically reduced, and persecution from pastoralists, ivory poachers and farmers is now widespread. Other significant threats include unintentional poisoning, electrocution on power poles and collision with powerlines and wind turbines, as well as killing for food and belief-based uses.

The late Dr Jean Marc Thiollay laid the foundation for this study in the 1970s, by initiating a remarkable long-term monitoring effort in West Africa, where the average decline rate was more than twice that of other regions. The Peregrine Fund’s Dr Ralph Buij, who has re-surveyed some of the original areas, noted that: “the human footprint is particularly high throughout West Africa’s savannas, and the near complete disappearance of many raptors outside that region’s relatively small and fragmented protected area network reflects an ecological collapse that is increasingly affecting other parts of the continent. Some raptors that occur mostly in West Africa, such as the little-known Beaudouin’s Snake-eagle, are vanishing into oblivion.”

The study’s findings highlight the importance of strengthening the protection of Africa’s natural habitats and aligns with the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP15 goal of expanding conservation areas to cover 30% of land by 2030. They also demonstrate the need to restore natural habitats within unprotected areas, reduce the impact of energy infrastructure, improve legislation for species protection, and establish long-term monitoring and evaluation of the conservation status of African raptors. Crucially, there is a pressing need to try to increase public involvement in raptor conservation efforts.

To this end, the study’s authors have developed the African Raptor Leadership Grant to address the immediate need for more research and conservation programs. It supports educational and mentoring opportunities for emerging African scientists, boosting local conservation initiatives and knowledge of raptors across the continent. This initiative, which was launched in 2023, awarded its first grant to Joan Banda, a raptor research student at AP Leventis Ornithological Research Institute in Nigeria, who will be studying threats to African owls.

ENDS

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41559-023-02236-0 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

African savanna raptors show evidence of widespread population collapse and a growing dependence on protected areas

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

4-Jan-2024

Captive-bred birds able to improve their flight and migration performance

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

SDE BOKER, Israel, January 8, 2024 – Two types of experiences affect the behavioral skills of animals: the animal's environment during its early development and acquired experience. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's researchers followed Egyptian vultures during migration, a critical and challenging period for them, and investigated how their flying skills developed by examining their performance using high resolution tracking.

Their findings were published in the journal Current Biology last month.

The flight skills of two groups of birds of the species Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), a long-distance soaring raptor, were assessed using GPS transmitters for 127 autumn migrations of 65 individuals. The two groups were quite different in terms of their early life experiences: one group was raised in captivity and the other in the wild. The birds in both groups improved their flight and migration performance as they gained experience. However, the improvements observed were most evident for vultures raised in captivity.

During their first migration, the captive-bred birds were less efficient but were able to catch up with the migration performance of those raised in the wild as early as the second migration. Thus, the experience gained helped offset the shortcomings of their early life experience at an early stage. Just as it is harder for humans to learn a language in old age, the vultures that hatched in captivity and were set free at a later age found it difficult to learn the necessary flying and roaming skills, but eventually caught up with those that learned earlier.

"We were able to generate data on the vultures' migration and flying skills. The data made it possible to learn about the value of early experience and acquired experience and their impact on the ability of birds to cope with challenging periods such as migration," explained Dr. Ron Efrat, one of the lead investigators, who recently completed his doctoral studies in the laboratory of Prof. Oded Berger-Tal of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. "It seems that birds, like humans, are also affected by their life experience," he concluded.

The research group included: Prof. Nir Sapir from the University of Haifa, Prof. Thomas Mueller from Frankfurt University, and the Senckenberg Research Center in Germany, and Ohad Hatzofe, Bird Ecologist of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

This study was supported by the German Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), grant number I-1465-413.13.2018. In addition, Ron Efrat was supported by the Adams Fellowship of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2023.11.012 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Early and accumulated experience shape migration and flight in Egyptian vultures

How banks' racist loan policies shape bird populations in Los Angeles

DPA
2023/11/06

A hummingbird hovers while collecting nectar from flowers. They are a rare sight in some areas, less so in others, say observers. 

Juan Carlos Hernandez/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa

On a recent afternoon in LA’s Boyle Heights neighbourhood Christian Benitez and Eric M. Wood stood outside a corner liquor store searching for birds.

The researchers spotted a house sparrow and pulled binoculars to their eyes. “They’re all over the shrubbery in Boyle Heights,” said Wood, an associate professor of ecology at Cal State Los Angeles.

Among the most ubiquitous and abundant songbirds in the world, house sparrows are urban creatures that thrive where people do. They’re resilient, adaptable and aggressive, and are found around buildings and streets, scavenging food crumbs or nesting in roof tiles.

But less than 10 miles to the northeast, in the wealthy city of San Marino, house sparrows were nowhere to be heard.

Instead of the sparrows, ravens, common pigeons and a Cooper’s hawk the bird watchers spotted in Boyle Heights, the manicured lawns and mature trees of San Marino bristled with a very different assortment of birds.

“There goes a band-tailed pigeon right over there,” Wood exclaimed, turning his attention from a red-tailed hawk. They also recognized acorn woodpeckers, a California towhee, dozens of turkey vultures circling overhead, a dark-eyed junco, a mockingbird, an Anna’s hummingbird and a black phoebe.

It was, the researchers said, a vivid illustration of the so-called luxury effect — the phenomenon by which wealthier, and typically whiter, areas attract a larger and more diverse population of birds.

“That huge difference in wealth, separated by only a few miles, really surprised me when I first moved here,” said Wood, who is from Santa Rosa, in the Bay Area.

In fact, when it comes to the Los Angeles Basin, the researchers say that bird species are remarkably segregated.

In a new study, the researchers argue that the difference in bird populations is a lasting consequence of racist home lending practices from decades ago, as well as modern wealth disparities.

Historically redlined nonwhite communities, such as Boyle Heights, have less tree canopy and greater housing density than greenlined neighbourhoods. As a result, these areas have less bird biodiversity and larger populations of synanthropic birds — species adapted to dense urban environments such as house finches and sparrows, European starlings, common pigeons and northern mockingbirds.

Greenlined areas, on the other hand, have more trees and vegetation cover, which attract more birds and a greater diversity of them. Forest birds such as yellow-rumped warblers, band-tailed pigeons, acorn woodpeckers and black-throated gray warblers are more abundant in these areas, researchers found.

“The legacy of our discriminatory practices is still written into the city itself,” said study co-author Travis Longcore, an adjunct professor with the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “Even though those practices explicitly are outlawed, this city is an accretion of its history, and it doesn’t just go away because time has passed.”

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation was established to stabilize the nation’s housing market. It helped struggling families prevent foreclosures by swapping mortgages that were in, or close to, default with new ones that homeowners could pay for.

As part of the program, the corporation created security risk maps to evaluate mortgage lending risks. Greenlined areas were considered “best” for investment and tended to be white neighbourhoods Redlined zones were deemed “hazardous” and were disproportionately Black and other nonwhite communities.

Those maps were among the starting points for the authors. Between 2016 and 2018, twice during the non-breeding season from October to March, researchers conducted bird surveys across 132 locations in 33 residential communities in L.A. that had been greenlined, redlined or excluded from the risk assessment maps. In each location, they’d set a five-minute timer and jot down every bird they could see or hear.

The authors amassed data on race and ethnicity, residential housing patterns, the percentage of buildings, paved areas and tree canopy cover, and more. Their results, they wrote, verified that “patterns of income inequality, both past and present ... carry over to influence urban biodiversity.”

For Laura Redford, a history professor at Brigham Young University, the findings were no surprise.

“[The security risk maps] are indicative of trends that were already happening, and they codified things that were already in place,” said Redford, who has researched real estate development in L.A. from the early 20th century. “So the discrepancy in green space or in shrubbery, or the number of trees, those kinds of things, I think goes all the way back to how these spaces were developed and marketed in the first place.”

Although the lending program ended in the 1950s, its segregationist legacy still shapes the environment — and health — of area neighbourhoods.

Other researchers have found strong links between historically redlined communities and increased risks of diabetes, hypertension and early mortality from heart disease. Redlined communities are also hotter and have more pollution and less canopy cover and green spaces than non-redlined regions, studies show.

San Marino and Pasadena, for example, have average tree canopy coverage of nearly 26% and 24% , respectively, according to an L.A. County tree canopy map. The median household income in San Marino between 2017 and 2021 was $174,722 , according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Pasadena’s was $89,661 .

In comparison, Boyle Heights’ canopy cover is 12.6% , and the median income within the same time period was $69,778.

The availability of nature and its correlation with socioeconomic differences are patterns researchers have seen “over and over again globally” and are not unique to L.A. or California, said Danielle F. Shanahan, chief executive of Zealandia Ecosanctuary in New Zealand.

“People who live in more affluent areas have more tree cover, not just in the green spaces, but actually in their backyards as well,” said Shanahan, an adjunct professor with Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. “And of course, that correlates with the biodiversity metrics, so things like birds.”

Though few studies have examined the relationship between self-reported well-being and the diversity of plant and bird species in an area, they have shown conflicting results. In one, researchers found a positive effect; in another, no effect; and in a third, people reported feeling better when they thought an area was rich with species diversity.

“Nonetheless, such studies suggest that variation in nature itself, not just the general levels of provision of green space, has an important role in enhancing population health,” wrote Shanahan and authors of a paper on how urban nature benefits human health.

As plant pollinators and seed spreaders, birds are “really crucial to ensure that our natural systems are healthy and can continue and thrive in the future,” she added. “And that has a feedback loop for our own well-being.”

It’s a perspective Marcos Trinidad tries to impart to students and the L.A. communities he works with.

A senior forestry director for TreePeople and former director of the Audubon Center at Debs Park, Trinidad said that a neighbourhood’s bird abundance and biodiversity speaks volumes about the health of its human residents.

“If we see an abundance of birds, and we have that connection with what those birds need, which food they eat, what shelter they require, what habitat they need to thrive, we can now start looking at our own environment and making those relationships to what we need to thrive and what we need in our own neighbourhoods,” he said.

As a kid, Benitez also noticed the stark differences between his South Gate neighbourhood and wealthier ones. But in his child’s mind, it was just the way things were.

Now he realizes there were larger systemic forces at play.

“I never looked at birds and trees the way that I do now,” he said. “Coming into the lab and being able to understand more deeply how different socioeconomic factors can impact things like birds, people, trees and the environment, that really turned the light on for me.”

In the paper, the authors write that if promoting urban biodiversity is a goal, “cities across the U.S. and the world must work to understand their racist and segregationist histories, which is a necessary step toward creating conditions that support urban wildlife along with a more equitable experience of wildlife for a city’s inhabitants. Otherwise, urban wildlife — in our case, birds — will likely continue to be as segregated as a city’s population.

“Without strong, yet careful intervention,” they continued, “residential urban biodiversity will continue to be primarily for the affluent in the City of Angels.”

Among the most abundant songbirds in the world, house sparrows are urban creatures that thrive where people do. Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa

An acorn woodpecker flies away from a fencepost on a hillside in Oregon. Researchers say where you see certain birds reflects racist city planning practises from decades ago. 

Robin Loznak/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa

© Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

Island in the sun

Grenada briefly stood out as a shining example.

Mahir Ali 

Published November 1, 2023

BY 1983, it had been eight years since US troops had finally departed from Indochina. Much to the consternation of some in the military-industrial-political hierarchy, the so-called Vietnam syndrome — the psychological repercussions of a superpower being defeated by a small Asian country — militated against the idea of dispatching combat troops to distant lands.

The Beirut deployment of 1982 in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was technically a peacekeeping mission, alongside France and Italy. (None intervened to pre-empt or halt the Sabra-Shatila massacre later that year.) But when a suicide bomber drove a truck into US military barracks near Beirut airport on Oct 23, 1983, the 241 fatalities added up to the worst single-day toll for US forces since the first day of the 1968 Tet Offensive.

The Beirut attack was blamed on Hezbollah. Two days later, the US was prepared to demonstrate it remained the big boss. So, 40 years ago last week, the Reagan administration achieved a long-desired objective by invading a Caribbean island that measures no more than 350 square miles, with a population of 98,000.

Grenada had been on America’s radar since the March 1979 New Jewel Movement (NJM) revolution, which had overthrown the repressive government of Sir Eric Gairy, who straddled the island’s 1974 hop from a British colony to an independent neocolonial outpost on the southern fringes of the Caribbean, close to Venezuela but fairly distant from the US.

Grenada briefly stood out as a shining example.

The NJM was inspired by the civil rights movement in the US and liberation struggles in Africa as much as by the Cuban revolution, but its revolution was more or less peaceful. Its dozens of poorly armed cadres took the army by surprise while Gairy was out of the country — possibly having left behind instructions that the NJM, by then the main opposition party, be eliminated.

It wasn’t the fact of power changing hands that bothered the US as much as what came next. The People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), as the new regime styled itself, lost little time in making amends for the centuries of colonial exploitation and years of postcolonial continuity. In the four-and-a-half years it was in power, unemployment fell from 49pc to 14pc. A mass literacy programme took just a year to reduce national illiteracy to 2pc. Secondary education became free, and university education almost free. Healthcare improved, as did GNP.

Equal rights and pay for women were introduced, alongside paid maternity leave. Women’s, youth and workers’ organisations were set up; these were consultative rather than decision-making bodies, but the boast of participatory democracy wasn’t an empty one. The ruling NJM, however, remained restricted to 100 or so members, and there were growing tensions between its central committee and the PRG. The prime minister, Maurice Bishop, was not only popular among Grenadians but also established an international presence disproportionate to the size of his nation.

The direction of his administration meant that his overtures to Washington went unrewarded, and the usual sources of international credit dried up. Grenada’s closeness to Havana and friendly ties with Moscow led the US to claim, with no evidence, that an airport being built with Cuban help would serve as a Soviet base. But it was game-planning an invasion for a different reason: Grenada’s successes, however modest, offered an inspiring alternative to the typical neo-imperialist model. That’s why Nicaragua was simultaneously being destabilised and the Allende experiment in Chile had been aborted a decade earlier. Fidel Castro remained the biggest thorn in Uncle Sam’s side, but invading Cuba would not have been a Grenada-style slam dunk.

It wasn’t the US invasion, though, that killed off the NJM experiment, but ructions within the party on seemingly ridiculous grounds that pitted the pragmatic Bishop against the majority of his central committee comrades. After he was placed under house arrest, a popular uprising on Oct 19, 1983, managed to liberate him, but just hours later, he and some of his colleagues were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned to death. His NJM rivals accused him of being insufficiently Leninist. They, in turn, were referred to by Castro as “hyenas” and “the Pol Pot group”.

Suffice it to say that by the time the US marines and their token Jamaican and Barbadian cohorts landed at the incomplete airport the Americans had objected to, they were effectively vultures feeding off the corpse of what the locals idealised as a ‘revo’.

The same airport today bears Bishop’s name, and this year Grenada for the first time marked his anniversary as National Heroes Day. It’s all very well to memorialise that remarkable revo, but the main lesson must be about what even the tiniest nation can achieve under appropriate guidance.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2023

Corporate Thievery in America’s Mobile Home Parks

BY JIM HIGHTOWER

 OCTOBER 16, 2023

Over time, words with beautiful meanings occasionally get degraded into ugliness. “Gentle,” for example.

Originally meaning good natured and kindly, it was twisted into “gentry” in the Middle Ages by very un-gentle land barons seeking a patina of refinement. Then it became a pretentious verb — to “gentrify” — meaning to make something common appear upscale.

And now the word has devolved to “gentrification,” describing the greed of developers and speculators who oust middle-and-low-income families from their communities to create trendy enclaves for the rich.

The latest move by these profiteers is their meanest yet, targeting families with the most tenuous hold on affordable shelter: People living in mobile home parks. Some 20 million Americans — especially vulnerable senior citizens, veterans, the disabled, and immigrant workers — make their homes in these inexpensive parks.

Well, “inexpensive” until the vultures sweep in, including multi-billion-dollar Wall Street powerhouses like Blackstone Group, Apollo Global Management, and Carlyle Group that are buying up hundreds of trailer parks across the country.

These are easy for unprincipled speculators to grab — while tenants might own their mobile home, they rent the lots, and the first sign that a huckster has taken over a neighborhood park is an unwarranted spike in everyone’s rent.

Residents are captive tenants, for these homes are not really mobile — and even if one can be moved, the cost can top $10,000. New Yorker magazine notes that today’s typical mobile-home park has been called “a Waffle House where customers are chained to their booths.”

Corporate predators can collect ever-rising rents and fees while cutting amenities, steadily driving out lower-income families. Then the business model can switch to gentrification, remaking the parks to attract more upscale owners.

And where do former tenants go? Away. Out of sight, out of mind.

James Hightower is an American syndicated columnist, progressive political activist, and author.