One-third of Iowa deer test positive for SARS-CoV-2, scientists see a new stream of mutations

Free-living animals can act as a reservoir for the virus, allowing it to multiply and mutate into variants with increased transmissibility and virulence, before spilling back into the human population

Author of the article: Devika Desai
Publishing date: Nov 12, 2021 

Nearly one-third of Iowa deer are infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus, 

which causes COVID-19 in humans, a study has found. 

PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES


With COVID-19 caseloads on the decline and vaccines rolling out around the world, nations have begun preparations for the next phase of the pandemic — learning to live with the virus.t

However, we may not be fully in the clear, scientists say after a study found the first evidence of animals transmitting the virus in the wild, with troubling implications for the spread of the disease and emergence of new variants.

Released on November 6, the preprint study found that one-third of the white tail deer population in Iowa over the past nine months has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans — indicating that not only can deer catch the virus from humans but can also transmit it within their population in overwhelming numbers.

The study has not yet been peer-reviewed or published.

The transmission, it added, most likely resulted from “multiple zooanthroponotic spillover events” and “deer-to-deer transmission”, arising from herds in close proximity to humans.

The analysis was prompted by a recent report that found 40 per cent of free-living white-tailed deer in the U.S. contained antibodies against the virus.

Researchers were still “astonished” by the high viral loads detected in the animals, said Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, clinical professor of virology at Penn State and the coauthor of the study.

“What was certainly surprising is the level of positivity we saw,” he said. “The amount of virus we detected in each of the animals was quite astonishing. We weren’t expecting that.”

Kuchipudi couldn’t say whether the deer displayed symptoms of the virus, instead pointing to the results of an earlier analysis conducted by Kansas State University researchers on adults and fawns, in which they injected the virus into healthy deer. While those animals didn’t appear to be affected by the virus, Kuchipudi acknowledged that environmental factors affecting health, access to resources could alter those results in the wild.

“We don’t know (if) the deer will actually express or exhibit any symptoms in the natural settings,” he said. “But based on the experimental set, infections, we know that they do not show any clinical symptoms.”

Can humans catch the virus from the infected deer?

The study, Kuchipudi acknowledged, comes with its ‘limitations’ and it could not say whether people living near herds or hunting the deer could catch the virus from the animals.

But it’s entirely possible, he said, pointing to studies done on infected mink populations that showed the virus “spilling back” into human populations in contact with the infected animals.

“Based on what we know about viruses when they spill into animals … the possibility of spilling back into humans cannot be ruled out,” he said.

Which could make learning to live with the virus more complicated than originally hoped. For one, it’s entirely possible that Iowa deer aren’t the only animals getting infected with the virus.

An analysis conducted in Ohio also found a similar level of infectivity among white-tailed deer. Previous studies in general have found that several animal species could be potentially susceptible to the virus, including cats, dogs, pumas, gorillas and snow leopards in zoos, and farmed mink.

A week ago, hyenas at the Denver zoo recently tested positive , marking the first confirmed cases in those animals.

The biggest concerns lay in what we don’t know about the virus transmission among wild animals, Kuchipudi said. Left uncontrolled, the virus could jump from one host to another and in the process, undergo mutations long enough to create new variants, some of which “could undermine the existing vaccines.”

“Now the chances of virus mutation has become twice as complicated because now it is also happening, at least in one animal species …. and perhaps in other animals that we do not know yet,” he said.

Many wild animal species, the study explained, already harbour a number of endemic coronaviruses, presenting all the more opportunities for a residing SARS-CoV-2 virus to ‘recombine and acquire or evolve increased fitness traits such as increased virulence, transmissibility, pathogenicity, and immune evasion.”

In other words — a virus that can freely circulate among animals is much harder to eradicate among humans.

Which means governments and infectious disease experts are now tasked with a new challenge two years into the pandemic — assessing just how widespread the virus is and the risk that arises from that. “What other animals (in the vicinity) could be getting infected,” Kuchipudi asked.

The evidence for virus spread within the free-living animal population also highlights the importance of the ‘One Health’ approach, a concept that advocates the need to consider animal, human and environmental health when fighting emerging infectious diseases. “In order to protect human health, we must also protect animal and environmental health,” Kuchipudi said. “But this should be done in a concerted effort rather than silos that do not talk to each other.”

Rare Antarctic penguin travels an incredible 3,000 km to New Zealand

An Adélie penguin named Pingu was found on the shores of New Zealand — far away from its natural habitat in Antarctica.

© Provided by National Post An Adelie penguin is seen at the coast of 

Banks Peninsula after travelling from his natural habitat of Antarctica

 in New Zealand Nov. 12, 2021.

National Post 4 hrs ago

After accidentally travelling 3,000 kilometres away from his home, Pingu has become only the third Adélie penguin to have been found on New Zealand’s coasts, the first two making their visits in 1962 and 1993.

“First I thought it (was) a soft toy, suddenly the penguin moved his head, so I realized it was real,” Harry Singh, the resident who found him, told BBC News .

Singh and his wife were walking on the beach at Birdlings Flat, a settlement south of the city of Christchurch, when they came across Pingu.

Singh remembers the penguin looking exhausted, and said it did not move for an hour. The bird also looks lost and alone in footage shared on Singh’s Facebook page .

“We did not want it to end up in a dog’s or cat’s stomach,” Singh said.

VIDEO Antarctic penguin releases into wild after travelling 3,000 km to New Zealand

So, they called penguin rescuers .

Singh got a hold of Thomas Stracke from the Christchurch Penguin Rehabilitation, who has been rehabilitating penguins on New Zealand’s South Island for about 10 years.

“Apart from being a bit starving and severely dehydrated, he was actually not too bad, so we gave him some fluids and some fish smoothie,” Stracke told The Guardian .

© Allanah Purdie, Department of Conservation New Zealand/Handout via REUTERS An Adelie penguin is seen at the coast of Banks Peninsula after travelling from his natural habitat of Antarctica, in New Zealand Nov. 12, 2021.

Otago University zoology professor, Philip Seddon, said Pingu was potentially a younger bird that became entangled in a current that swept him into New Zealand waters.

“I think if we started getting annual arrivals of Adélie penguins, we’d go; ‘Actually, something’s changed in the ocean that we need to understand’,” Seddon told The Guardian. “All species of penguin are like marine sentinels … when they’re doing badly, they’re giving us an early signal – canaries in coal mines – an early signal that things are not good.”

While Adélie penguin populations appear to be stable at the moment — increasing in some areas while decreasing in others — Seddon told The Guardian that changes in penguin behaviour could be an early warning sign that the marine ecosystem was in trouble.

“More studies will give us more understanding where penguins go, what they do, what the population trends are like — they’re going to tell us something about the health of that marine ecosystem in general,” he said.

Pingu was eventually released onto a safe beach on the Banks Peninsula south of Christchurch in hopes of helping him to complete his journey home.

Tony Cliff

Rosa Luxemburg

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Rosa Luxemburg’s place in history

Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx, did not exaggerate when he called Rosa Luxemburg the best brain after Marx. But she did not contribute her brain alone to the working-class movement; she gave everything she had – her heart, her passion, her strong will, her very life.

Above all else, Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist. And among the great revolutionary socialist leaders and teachers she has a special historical place of her own.

When reformism degraded the socialist movements by aspiring purely for the “welfare state”, by tinkering with capitalism, it became of first importance to make a revolutionary criticism of this handmaiden of capitalism. It is true that other Marxist teachers besides Rosa Luxemburg – Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and others – conducted a revolutionary fight against reformism. But they had a limited front to fight against. In their country, Russia, the roots of this weed were so weak and thin that a mere tug was sufficient to uproot it. Where Siberia or the gallows stared every socialist or democrat in the face, who in principle could oppose the use of violence by the labour movement? Who in Tsarist Russia would have dreamed of a parliamentary road to socialism? Who could advocate a policy of coalition government, for with whom could coalitions be made? Where trade unions scarcely existed, who could think of considering them the panacea of the labour movement? Lenin, Trotsky and the other Russian Bolshevik leaders did not need to counter the arguments of reformism with a painstaking and exact analysis. All they needed was a broom to sweep it away to the dungheap of history.

In Central and Western Europe conservative reformism had much deeper roots, a much more embracing influence on the thoughts and moods of the workers. The arguments of the reformists had to be answered by superior ones, and here Rosa Luxemburg excelled. In these countries her scalpel is a much more useful weapon than Lenin’s sledgehammer.

In Tsarist Russia the mass of the workers were not organised in parties or trade unions. There there was not such a threat of powerful empires being built by a bureaucracy rising from the working class as in the well-organised workers’ movement of Germany; and it was natural that Rosa Luxemburg had a much earlier and clearer view of the role of the labour bureaucracy than Lenin or Trotsky. She understood long before they did that the only power that could break through bureaucratic chains is the initiative of the workers. Her writings on this subject can serve as an inspiration to workers in the advanced industrial countries, and are a more valuable contribution to the struggle to liberate the workers from the pernicious ideology of bourgeois reformism than those of any other Marxist.

In Russia, where the Bolsheviks were always a large and important part of the organised socialists, even if they were not always the majority, as their name signifies, the question of the attitude of a small Marxist minority to a mass, conservatively-led organisation never really rose as a problem. It remained for Rosa Luxemburg largely to develop the right approach to this vital question. Her guiding principle was: stay with the masses throughout their travail and try to help them. She therefore opposed abstention from the main stream of the labour movement, no matter what the level of its development. Her fight against sectarianism is extremely important for the labour movement of the West, especially at present, when welfare-stateism is such an all-pervading sentiment. The British labour movement, in particular, having suffered from the sectarianism of Hyndman and the SDF, later the BSP and SLP, then the Communist Party (especially in its “third period”) and now further sects, can gain inspiration from Rosa Luxemburg for a principled fight against reformism which does not degenerate into flight from it. She taught that a revolutionary should not swim with the stream of reformism, nor sit outside it and look in the opposite direction, but swim against it.

Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the structure of the revolutionary organisations – that they should be built, from below up, on a consistently democratic basis – fits the needs of the workers’ movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin’s conception of 1902-04 which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by the Stalinists the world over.

She understood more clearly than anyone that the structure of the revolutionary party, and the mutual relation between the party and the class, would have a big influence, not only on the struggle against capitalism and for workers’ power, but also on the fate of this power itself. She stated prophetically that without the widest workers’ democracy “officials behind their desks” would replace the workers’ hold on political power. “Socialism”, she said, “cannot be decreed or introduced by edict.”

Rosa Luxemburg’s blend of revolutionary spirit and clear understanding of the nature of the labour movement in Western and Central Europe is in some way connected with her particular background of birth in the Tsarist Empire, long residence in Germany, and full activity in both the Polish and German labour movements. Anyone of smaller stature would have been assimilated into one of the two environments, but not Rosa Luxemburg. To Germany she brought the “Russian” spirit, the spirit of revolutionary action. To Poland and Russia she brought the “Western” spirit of workers’ self-reliance, democracy and self-emancipation.

Her The Accumulation of Capital is an invaluable contribution to Marxism. In dealing with the mutual relations between the industrially advanced countries and the backward agrarian ones she brought out the most important idea that imperialism, while stabilising capitalism over a long period, at the same time threatens to bury humanity under its ruins.

Being vital, energetic and non-fatalistic in her approach to history, which she conceived of as the fruit of human activity, and at the same time laying bare the deep contradictions of capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg did not consider that the victory of socialism was inevitable. Capitalism, she thought, could be either the ante-chamber to socialism or the brink of barbarism. We who live in the shadow of the H-bomb must comprehend this warning and use it as a spur to action.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the German labour movement, with decades of peace behind it, sank under the illusion that this situation was everlasting. We who are in the throes of discussion about controlled disarmament, United Nations, Summit Meetings, could do no better than learn from Rosa Luxemburg’s clear analysis of the unbreakable tie between war and capitalism, and her insistence that the fight for peace is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

A passion for truth made Rosa Luxemburg recoil from any dogmatic thought. In a period when Stalinism has largely turned Marxism into a dogma, spreading desolation in the field of ideas, Rosa Luxemburg’s writings are invigorating and life-giving. Nothing was more intolerable to her than bowing down to “infallible authorities”. As a real disciple of Marx she was able to think and act independently of her master. Though grasping the spirit of his teaching, she did not lose her critical faculties in a simple repetition of his words, whether these fitted the changed situation or not, whether they were right or wrong. Rosa Luxemburg’s independence of thought is the greatest inspiration to socialists everywhere and always. In consequence, no one would have denounced more forcefully than she herself any effort to canonise her, to turn her into an “infallible authority”, a leader of a school of thought or action. She loved the conflict of ideas as a means of coming nearer to the truth.

During a period when so many who consider themselves Marxists sap Marxism of its deep humanistic content, no one can do more to release us from the chains of lifeless mechanistic materialism than Rosa Luxemburg. For Marx communism (or socialism) was “real humanism”, “a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle”. [96] Rosa Luxemburg was the embodiment of these humanistic passions. Sympathy with the lowly and oppressed was a central motive of her life. Her deep emotion and feeling for the suffering of people and all living things expressed themselves in everything she did or wrote, whether in her letters from prison or in the deepest writings of her theoretical research.

Rosa Luxemburg, however, well knew that where human tragedy is on an epic scale tears won’t help. Her motto, like that of Spinoza, might have been, “Do not cry, do not laugh, but understand”, even though she herself had her full share of tears and laughter. Her method was to reveal the trends of development in social life in order to help the working class to use its potentialities in the best possible way in conjunction with objective development. She appealed to man’s reason rather than to emotion.

Deep human sympathy and an earnest desire for truth, unbounded courage and a magnificent brain united in Rosa Luxemburg to make her a great revolutionary socialist. As her closest friend, Clara Zetkin, wrote in her obituary:

In Rosa Luxemburg the socialist idea was a dominating and powerful passion of both heart and brain, a truly creative passion which burned ceaselessly. The great task and the overpowering ambition of this astonishing woman was to prepare the way for social revolution, to clear the path of history for Socialism. To experience the revolution, to fight its battles – that was the highest happiness for her. With a will, determination, selflessness and devotion for which words are too weak, she consecrated her whole life and her whole being to Socialism. She gave herself completely to the cause of Socialism, not only in her tragic death, but throughout her whole life, daily and hourly, through the struggles of many years ... She was the sharp sword, the living flame of revolution.

 

Note

96. K. Marx, Capital, vol.I, p.649

First published as a pamphlet in 1959 (International Socialism, No.2/3).
Reprinted 1968, 1969 and 1980) (note on editions).
Reprinted in Tony Cliff, International Struggle and the Marxist Tradition, Selected Works Vol.1, Bookmarks, London 2001, pp.59-116.
Transcribed by Artroom, East End Offset (TU), London.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Proofread by Anoma Cartwright (march 2008).

Tony Cliff: Rosa Luxemburg (1959) (connexions.org)

Kyle Rittenhouse’s tears

The 18-year-old who shot three men at a protest took the stand and resorted to a tried-and-true strategy for white men in trouble.

Kyle Rittenhouse becomes emotional as he testifies during his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Wisconsin on November 10. Mark Hertzberg/Getty Images

SCOTUS JUSTICE KAVANAUGH AT SENATE CONFIRMATION HEARING 

CRYING OVER BEER AND RAPE

By Jamil Smith@JamilSmith 

 Nov 11, 2021

What Kyle Rittenhouse displayed in a Kenosha, Wisconsin, courtroom this week as he testified in his homicide trial was what folks like to call an “ugly cry.”

Charged in the killings of two men and injury of another amid days of racial justice protests last summer, the defendant started to falter on the stand as he described that fateful night last August, when the then-17-year-old was armed with a rifle, patrolling the streets of a town that was not his own. Rittenhouse’s eyes shut almost completely, save for an occasional glance to his left in the direction of the jury. Then came the sobbing, which kept the rest of his response to his attorney’s questioning about that evening from escaping his quivering lips.

Rittenhouse’s blubbering was the headline of the day after the defendant offered his much-awaited testimony in the case Wednesday, recalling the night he shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber to death and “vaporized” much of the bicep of medic Gaige Grosskreutz, according to Grosskreutz’s testimony. Rittenhouse wasn’t weeping with regret; he was claiming self-defense, and recounting how he felt his life was in danger.

The trial and pretrial proceedings had already sparked a national outcry after Judge Bruce Schroeder decided last month that prosecutors may not refer to Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz as “victims,” and that defense attorneys could call them “looters” or “arsonists.” Now with his tears, Rittenhouse has cast himself as the lone victim in his own homicide trial.

When he wasn’t crying, Rittenhouse explained why he had traveled the roughly 20 miles from Illinois. Earlier that day, he allegedly offered “condolences” to a business owner for cars that were set afire the previous night, and he said that he and a friend agreed to help provide armed protection for the business that night. The defendant also testified that he gave a bulletproof vest in his possession — issued by the Grayslake, Illinois, police department’s Explorer program for young people interested in law enforcement careers — to a friend, saying he felt he wouldn’t need it because, he recalled in the courtroom, “I’m going to be helping people.”

The Illinois teenager faces two counts of first-degree homicide and one of attempted homicide, along with three other charges in the shooting on August 25, 2020, just a couple of nights after a Kenosha police officer shot Black motorist Jacob Blake seven times in the back in front of three of his children. The killings of the demonstrators caused a national shock wave last summer, highlighting the powder keg of emotion surrounding arrests, clashes, and tense exchanges as tens of millions of Americans took to the streets to protest racial injustice.

The debate this week has centered on whether the defendant’s spectacle was authentic. Whether or not the crying was real, it was a performance, and it had an audience. Like many white men accused of violent crimes and misconduct before him, Rittenhouse appealed with his tears not merely to the 12 fellow citizens who will decide his fate, but also to certain white members of the American public who too often see emotion like that and imagine only the faces of their sons — not any born to mothers who look like mine.


 A former Oklahoma City police officer was convicted Thursday of raping and sexually victimizing eight women on his police beat in a minority, low-income neighborhood.

There is evidence that Rittenhouse conspicuously aligned himself with the “blue lives matter” crowd, so it’s worth considering his sobbing within the context of the toxic and limited view of manhood that remains so popular in America, particularly among the modern political right. Some compared Rittenhouse to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reaction when questioned during his confirmation hearings about Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegations of sexual assault. Wednesday’s display from Rittenhouse bore some similarities to Kavanaugh’s sanctimonious anger, which he often dotted with cracks in his voice. As I wrote at the time, the future Supreme Court justice took advantage of the leeway that his gender and privilege affords to him, and Rittenhouse did the same.

It is a particular privilege to be considered a “boy” after you’ve become an adult — and when you’ve made decisions like Rittenhouse’s. In Rittenhouse’s case, he was generously characterized by the New York Times as someone “who has idolized law enforcement since he was young” and went to Kenosha “with at least one mission: to play the role of police officer and medic.” The prosecution noted a number of his lies Wednesday, including false claims to the press about being an EMT. Part of the discomfort as we watched him emote, to say nothing of the suspicion, may be that we’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.

However, Rittenhouse’s emotion on the stand should be an indictment of his behavior, not an excuse for it. By law, he was too young to have the weapon he used to kill. He told the court that the reason he picked the AR-15-style rifle, as opposed to a handgun, is he thought “it looked cool.”

Legal experts I spoke with judged Rittenhouse’s testimony to be a positive for him, because the defense must have it both ways: While admitting to the facts of the shootings, they must show that Rittenhouse was the good guy that night, and that he feared for his life. If Rittenhouse provoked the conflict and shooting with his actions, he has no credible claim to self-defense. But if he can convince the jury that, as he told the court, it was either him or them, perhaps he created sufficient reasonable doubt. Time will tell.

American jurisprudence has bigger problems than Kyle Rittenhouse. This trial, however, is shining light on a few. Our legal system tends to treat young white men like him as sob stories rather than cautionary tales, especially if they exhibit anything approximating fear or remorse. The resentment and accusation of melodramatics is due in part to the reasonable presumption that another 17-year-old who isn’t white, committing the same act, wouldn’t receive the same sympathy. They wouldn’t be able to be caught in false statements — such as Rittenhouse’s claim on the night of the killing that Rosenbaum was armed when he allegedly threatened Rittenhouse prior to the shooting (Rosenbaum wasn’t) — and have any expectation that tears could secure their acquittal.

Rittenhouse’s victims were all white men, making them somewhat of an exception in American jurisprudence. Typically, such prejudgment is saved for people of color, and is handed out by law enforcement. If people of color even survive encounters with law enforcement and live to see the inside of a courtroom for the chance to be wrongfully convicted or disproportionately sentenced, it feels like a small miracle.

The self-styled militia patrolling the city that night were, by several accounts, mostly white men, yet another example of the unequally enforced protections of the Second Amendment. It isn’t that they didn’t have the right to do so, though Rittenhouse technically was too young (among the charges he faces is possessing a dangerous weapon under the age of 18).

Is it reasonable to think that a Black person similarly outfitted with a weapon of war during a civil rights protest in Kenosha would not have been arrested or potentially harmed by the police swarming the streets? If that person shot someone, would they be able to use the defense so many police officers use when killing Black and brown people — that they feared for their  Life? Tears on the stand didn’t work for the Exonerated Five in New York City back in 1989. Would they work for anyone who looked like us?

This speaks to much of the negative reaction to Rittenhouse’s display on the stand Wednesday. It isn’t simply that a killer cried about his own fear, rather than the lives he took. It represented the exercise of entitlement, the enduring perception of the youth of white men and boys who commit illegal acts.

Racial favoritism remains one of the many cancers afflicting our jurisprudence. By the late summer of 2020, there were fewer children incarcerated in the United States than at any point since the 1980s — but then a survey, released in March by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, revealed that even during a pandemic, the racial disparity in youth detention grew even wider, with white children in 30 states being released at a rate 17 percent higher than Black youths.

“America’s mistreatment of Black children is chronic and casual,” NYU law professor emerita Kim Taylor-Thompson wrote in May. “The ‘Black person as criminal’ stereotype, which equates dangerousness with skin color, has demonstrated remarkable resilience over time. It persists even in light of conflicting data.”

Kyle Rittenhouse can’t reverse that stereotype by himself, even if he’s convicted. It isn’t bad if Rittenhouse receives a fair trial. Everyone should. That’s the point. However, it’s the exploitation of the leeway too often given to young white defendants that makes people resentful, and rightfully so.

The manner in which Rittenhouse has been granted grace is astounding, but not necessarily bad. But Jacob Blake is paralyzed today, in part, because he didn’t receive the benefit of the doubt from a police officer that Rittenhouse has received from a legion of supporters (with even a judge seeming to tip the scales in his favor). If all lives truly mattered, that wouldn’t be the case.

Correction, 6 pm: A previous version of this story stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought the AR-15-style rifle he used from Illinois. A friend of Rittenhouse’s is alleged to have purchased the gun for him in Wisconsin.

The political issues in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial

Tom Carter
WSWS.ORG

The murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, currently underway in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has become a focal point for a nationwide campaign to legitimize vigilante terror against left-wing protests and lionize the far-right youth as a hero.

The trial itself has been transformed into a kind of courtroom version of a Trump rally, with the American-flag-tie-wearing judge breaking with all semblance of propriety Thursday to lead the jury in a round of applause for Rittenhouse’s defense expert on the ground that he was a “veteran” and “served our country.”

Throughout the trial, the judge has gone out of his way to exclude all of the evidence that would undermine Rittenhouse’s claim that he was acting in self-defense when he killed two people and wounded a third during a protest against police brutality on August 25, 2020.

Before the killings in Kenosha, Rittenhouse openly boasted that he planned to gun down purported shoplifters with his assault rifle. After he posted bail, he was caught flashing “white power” signs, posing for selfies with Proud Boys members, drinking beer, and belting out a song associated with the Proud Boys at a pub together with top Proud Boys leaders.

Rittenhouse displays a white supremacist hand gesture while meeting with members of the Proud Boys

The claim that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense, which turns reality completely on its head, has been taken up by Trump and the Republican Party, together with sections of the American media, carrying along in their wake disoriented pseudo-left and libertarian figures like Glenn Greenwald, who seek to blind the population to the political forces behind this fascistic campaign.

The only legal right to self-defense involved in the Rittenhouse case is the right of the protesters to defend themselves from an unstable right-wing extremist youth who showed up to their protest, brandished an illegal gun at them, and even pointed it at them while it was loaded. At the point Rittenhouse pointed his loaded assault rifle directly at a protester, the protesters would have been fully within their legal rights to forcefully disarm him, or if necessary, to shoot him.

If Rittenhouse is acquitted, it would embolden the violent paramilitary militias that have been cultivated in the orbit of Trump and the Republican Party. It would effectively provide legal sanction for neo-Nazi and fascistic militias to march into future left-wing protests armed to the teeth, to terrorize workers, students, and youth with assault rifles, and to shoot protesters whenever they “feel threatened.”

The politics of Kyle Rittenhouse

Kyle Rittenhouse, who was 17 years old at the time he carried out the killings in Kenosha, is the product of an utterly toxic political and cultural environment. Decades of unending war, attacks on public education, and a generally deranged cultural and political atmosphere have produced many such brutalized, broken, and disoriented young people in America—a phenomenon doubtless accelerated by the pandemic and by the official indifference to mass death.

Without any progressive outlet for their energies, cut off from all culture and historical knowledge, many young people see no future to look forward to except a hopeless grind of oppressive and exploitative jobs that pay less than survival wages. Under these conditions, some of these damaged, atomized young people can become vulnerable to the influence of the far-right, as was the case with Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse was not a native of Wisconsin. Instead, he traveled there from his hometown of Antioch, Illinois, about 60 miles north of Chicago, where he was born into a troubled family. His father struggled with alcoholism, experimented with drugs, and was periodically unemployed. At one point his father was charged with domestic battery, and on two occasions, according to TheNew Yorker, his mother stayed in a women’s shelter.

A cellphone video taken weeks before the shooting that subsequently came to light provides a glimpse of a bleak existence. Rittenhouse was filmed on the Kenosha waterfront repeatedly punching a girl who had gotten into a fight with his sister. The family frequently faced eviction and teetered on the edge of financial ruin.

During his teenage years, Rittenhouse gravitated to right-wing politics, supporting Trump’s reelection campaign, the pro-police “Blue Lives Matter” movement, and participating in police ride-alongs. While a teenage police cadet, he was trained by the police with “replica” guns. He played paintball and was attracted to all of the trappings of militarism and military violence.

Rittenhouse bought his black AR-15 assault rifle, a close relative of the M16 assault rifle that has seen widespread use by the American military, “because it looked cool.” During the trial, he admitted he never intended to hunt with it. The gun was purchased illegally, since Rittenhouse was too young to own it, but America’s gun control laws are unevenly enforced and often easy to evade. In similar fashion, he drove a car without a driver’s license.

On August 23, protests exploded in Kenosha, Wisconsin against the killing of Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man who was shot seven times at point blank range in front of his children as he was attempting to get into his car. Coming three months after the murder of George Floyd, the killing of Jacob Blake uncorked a “geyser of social anger in Kenosha,” as the World Socialist Web Sitewrote at the time. Protesters were subject to violent police attacks and viciously labeled as “rioters” and “looters” in the media.

Rittenhouse, 17 at the time, was already immersed in far-right politics on social media. Before the shootings, Rittenhouse was recorded openly boasting that he wished to shoot people he saw coming out of a CVS store, who he believed were shoplifting. “Bro, I wish I had my f—ing AR. I’d start shooting rounds at them.”

On August 25, as the Jacob Blake demonstrations continued to unfold, a right-wing “patriot” militia that had formed on Facebook, calling itself “Kenosha Guard,” posted a call for volunteers: “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” The formation of the militia was endorsed by a city council member, who called for the “Kenosha Guard” to oppose “evil thugs.” The supposed “commander” of the militia sent a message to the police chief stating, “We are mobilizing tonight and have about 3,000 RSVP’s.” The police chief made no effort to dissuade him.

On the same day the “Kenosha Guard” posted its call for volunteers, Rittenhouse and a friend traveled the 20 miles from Antioch to Kenosha. According to a brief filed by prosecutors summarizing Rittenhouse’s political background as well as his conduct after the shooting, the prosecutors concluded: “The fact that he has since celebrated his notoriety strongly suggests that he set out to achieve the goal of becoming famous.”

After the killings, Rittenhouse was immediately elevated as a far-right icon. Fascist and QAnon conspiracy adherent Lin Wood, who later supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, helped to raise money for Rittenhouse’s defense, together with lawyer and right-wing zealot John Pierce. Pierce tweeted that Rittenhouse had fired the “shot heard around the world” and that: “A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun.”

Rittenhouse posted bail following a fundraising campaign led by these far-right figures, after which he was spotted in a bar in Racine County where he celebrated with leading members of the Proud Boys organization in Wisconsin, joined by his mother. Surveillance video and photos of this meeting at Pudgy’s Pub obtained by prosecutors show Rittenhouse flashing “white power” hand signs, grinning and posing for selfies with other Proud Boys members, and belting out the Proud Boys anthem.

According to prosecutors, after the shootings, Rittenhouse’s “family has sold merchandise with his image on it that celebrates his acts of violence.”

The events of August 25, 2020

The Kenosha shootings took place against a backdrop of massive protests against police brutality touched off by the killing of George Floyd and a runaway pandemic that was claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, with workers raising demands in their workplaces for measures to combat the spread of the disease.

The far-right militias were brought forward to oppose the coronavirus lockdowns, storming the Michigan Capitol on April 30, 2020. In October, a plot was exposed by far-right militia members to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor. These militias would go on to play a significant role in the violent attempt to overturn the elections and install Trump as president on January 6, 2021. The mobilization of far-right militias to assist the police in crushing protests in Kenosha in August 2020 was one point on this trajectory.

On June 1, Trump infamously demanded that governors “dominate” the protests, and the police took him at his word. Images circulated around the world of what amounted to a national police riot, with police ramming protesters with their cars and indiscriminately shooting protesters and journalists with “less-lethal” munitions.

As protests exploded in Kenosha in August, members of the pro-Trump far-right militias mobilized on social media, openly boasting about their intent to shoot protesters. One post read, “Armed and ready. Shoot to kill tonight.”

While confronting what amounted to a police riot, residents, organizers, and protesters were justifiably fearful of the added danger of violence from the right-wing vigilantes making their way into the city with the tacit support of the police.

Trump would go on to openly solidarize himself with the Proud Boys during the September 29 presidential debate, declaring, “stand back and stand by.”

On the night of August 25, Rittenhouse joined a group of far-right militia members that had given itself the mission of “protecting” a car dealership. Rittenhouse’s own behavior that night was immature and unstable. He was captured on video earlier that evening boasting that he was an “E.M.T.” (which was not true) and also claiming that protesters were creating a bomb (also not true). At one point, Rittenhouse told police he was hit in the head with a baseball bat (also not true).

The presence of these armed far-right militias at a protest against police brutality was an extreme provocation and itself a violation of the protesters’ rights to demonstrate without being subjected to violent threats and intimidation.

When far-right militia members positioned themselves on the roof overlooking the protests like snipers, some demonstrators called out that the militias were pointing laser sights at them. The act of pointing a loaded gun at a person is an extremely dangerous act by itself, and a further provocation, compounded by the use of a laser sight. In another confrontation, one armed vigilante screamed, “F— around and find out!”

The police made no effort to restrain the right-wing vigilantes, with whom they were in open sympathy. Instead of arresting Rittenhouse for carrying an illegal rifle, for being out past curfew, or for brandishing the illegal rifle at protesters, at one point the police brought water to the militia members, infamously saying, “We appreciate you.”

Rittenhouse’s first victim was Joseph Rosenbaum, a homeless man who had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital hours before the protest and, according to a report in the New Yorker, had wandered into the scene of the confrontation carrying a plastic bag with a few of his belongings in it. It is undisputed that Rittenhouse was brandishing his AR-15 and pointed it towards at least one protester.

Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, followed Rittenhouse into a parking lot where, according to prosecutors, Rittenhouse pointed the rifle at him, and Rosenbaum tried to take it from him. Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum in the groin, the hand (gunpowder residue was found on Rosenbaum’s palm), and the back, killing him. Rittenhouse ran away, saying “I just killed somebody” on his cellphone.

After Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum, protesters collectively reacted, in the words of Gaige Grosskreutz, on the belief that Rittenhouse was an “active shooter.” Protesters charged Rittenhouse and knocked him to the ground. Anthony Huber courageously pushed his girlfriend out of the way and charged Rittenhouse, striking him with a skateboard and struggling for control of the rifle. Rittenhouse shot Huber through his heart and right lung, killing him.

Gaige Grosskreutz, a volunteer medic who was armed, pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse, and Rittenhouse shot him in the arm, resulting in a gruesome wound that nearly severed his entire right bicep. Then Rittenhouse approached police with his hands up, but the police drove past him. Rittenhouse fled back to Illinois, where amid a popular outcry he was labeled a “fugitive from justice” and ultimately extradited back to Wisconsin to face murder charges.

The killing of Trevon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery

The legal issues in the Rittenhouse trial bear a strong resemblance to those in the killing of Trevon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman, a wannabe cop, decided that Martin looked “suspicious,” aggressively pursuing Martin even after a dispatcher told him not to. After provoking a confrontation with the unarmed black teenager, Zimmerman shot Martin in the heart, killing him instantly.

Zimmerman, like Rittenhouse, was celebrated as a right-wing icon, and was only arrested several months later after a campaign by Martin’s parents attracted nationwide support. He was charged with murder and manslaughter but was acquitted after a travesty of a trial, during which the police barely concealed their sympathy for him, and in which Zimmerman asserted that he was acting in “self-defense” and claimed the benefit of Florida’s “stand your ground” statute.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, if anyone had a right to self-defense in that case, it was Trevon Martin. “Zimmerman had no cause to get out of his car in the first place and pursue Martin while wearing a firearm—especially after being told not to do so,” we wrote. “The young man had every right to use force to defend himself against such a provocation, and the fact that Zimmerman may have been getting the worse in a fight he picked does not excuse lethal force.”

The prosecution of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was killed in February of last year by three armed white vigilantes near Brunswick, Georgia, is proceeding at the same time as the Rittenhouse trial. After the vigilantes provoked a confrontation, Arbery allegedly struggled over a shotgun carried by one of the vigilantes before they shot and killed him. The vigilantes claimed that Arbery was a “burglary suspect” and that they had shot him in “self-defense” while attempting to carry out a “citizen’s arrest.” Notwithstanding these claims of self-defense, Arbery’s killers currently face multiple charges, including murder and aggravated assault.

In the same way, if anyone had a right to self-defense in the Rittenhouse case, it was protesters who collectively confronted a far-right youth illegally carrying and brandishing an assault rifle and pointing it at them. Simply by carrying the rifle to the protest as an associate of a far-right militia, Rittenhouse’s conduct constituted an implicit death threat and a reckless and extreme provocation. Having recklessly provoked a violent confrontation, Rittenhouse cannot legally claim to have acted in self-defense in the confrontation that he provoked.

The Rittenhouse trial

The judge in Rittenhouse’s case, Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder, has gone out of his way to exclude all of the evidence that would undermine the narrative presented by Rittenhouse’s attorneys and their far-right allies.

In February, Rittenhouse violated a court order by concealing his whereabouts from the prosecutors, but the judge denied a request by Kenosha prosecutors for a warrant to rearrest him and increase his bail.

In September, the judge entered orders excluding all of the evidence of Rittenhouse’s political activities and motivations from the trial, including his affiliation with the Proud Boys and his declaration that he wanted to kill shoplifters with his rifle two weeks before the protests.

In October, the judge ruled that prosecutors could not call Rittenhouse’s victims “victims” or even “alleged victims.” At the same time, he permitted Rittenhouse’s defense attorneys to refer to the victims as “arsonists,” “looters” or “rioters.”

During the trial itself, the judge wore an American flag tie. If any more evidence was needed of his political bias, his cellphone rang during the trial and the ringtone was the country-music song “God Bless the USA” that has been the theme song of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rallies, also known by its lyrics “Proud to be an American.”

When he took the stand, Rittenhouse conformed his testimony to the jargon of police officers who testify after having shot someone: “I used deadly force to stop the threat that was attacking me,” he said. When Rittenhouse appeared to break down on the stand, the judge came to his aid by solemnly excusing the jury.

When the prosecutors attempted to cross-examine him, suggesting that he had conformed his testimony to what earlier witnesses had said, the defense attorneys jumped up and demanded that the judge declare a mistrial “with prejudice,” meaning that the judge would toss out the charges and bar the prosecutors from ever bringing them against Rittenhouse again. The judge then proceeded to yell—not at the defense attorneys for making such a frivolous request—but at the prosecutors when they attempted to cross-examine Rittenhouse regarding his political motivations: “Don’t get brazen with me!”

As trial opened yesterday, Schroeder carried out what amounts to a provocation of his own. As Rittenhouse’s “use of force” expert was about to take the stand, the judge declared that he wanted to know if there were any veterans in the room.

When nobody answered, it was clear that the judge knew the answer to his own question: “Well, that’s unusual not to have at least somebody in here, but Dr. Black [Rittenhouse’s next defense witness] is – what branch?”

Black replied, “Army, sir.” Then the judge proceeded to lead the jury in a round of applause for Black: “Okay, and I think we can give a round of applause to the people who have served our country.”

Black, an expert hired by Rittenhouse who routinely testifies on behalf of police officers, went on to testify about his military service and background as a veteran police official. Just as he would in a case involving a police officer, Black then provided a second-by-second breakdown of the shootings that emphasized how quickly they happened, which aimed to underscore how Rittenhouse allegedly made a split-second decision to shoot.

Black previously testified the shootings were “reasonably necessary.” Another of Rittenhouse’s witnesses was Drew Hernandez, who attended the January 6 riot, and who bolstered Rittenhouse’s claim that he fired in self-defense.

The campaign to legitimize vigilante terror

The campaign to lionize Rittenhouse follows in the wake of the largest protests in American history last year, which brought between 15 and 26 million people into the streets, together with a pandemic spiraling out of control, a mounting strike wave and emerging signs of combativeness among workers in the automotive, logistics, education, and health care industries.

Under these circumstances, right-wing vigilante groups are being brought forward to act as a battering ram against working class opposition.

In this context, Rittenhouse has been embraced as “our boy Kyle” by the Daily Stormer, the website of the neo-Nazi and anti-Semite Andrew Anglin. A Republican state representative from Florida tweeted, “Kyle Rittenhouse For Congress,” and far-right-wing provocateur Anne Coulter tweeted: “ALL THE BEST PEOPLE #StandWithKyle.”

In the wake of Kenosha shooting, then-president Trump instructed Homeland Security officials in a subsequently leaked memorandum to frame the case in a manner sympathetic to Rittenhouse, ordering them to emphasize that Rittenhouse “took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.”

Days after the shooting, Trump himself came to Rittenhouse’s defense: “I guess it looks like he fell and then they very violently attacked him,” Trump said.

The response of the Democrats and their media satellites to the far-right campaign around Rittenhouse has been ambivalent to sympathetic, generally accepting the entire right-wing “self-defense” framework. Many of the news headlines have featured sympathetic coverage of Rittenhouse’s supposed sobbing fit on the stand.

When Ayanna Pressley, a Democratic congresswoman from Massachusetts, called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist domestic terrorist” and denounced media outlets for whitewashing his politics, Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and candidate for the 2020 presidential nomination, responded by defending Rittenhouse on the grounds that he only wanted to “protect people.”

Where there is criticism of Rittenhouse from the Democratic camp, it is couched in racial categories that simply do not fit the facts of the case—Rittenhouse’s three victims were all white.

Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, has appointed himself to the task of championing the case for the right-wing extremist gunman, celebrating on Twitter how “genuine liberals” are “expressing shock and horror upon realizing, after watching the trial, that so much of what the media told them about the Rittenhouse case is false.”

Greenwald is taking advantage of the fact that all of the evidence of Rittenhouse’s political motivations was excluded from the trial by the judge. Greenwald also implied that Rittenhouse had been unfairly labeled a “racist,” dishonestly concealing the fact that Rittenhouse was caught flashing “white power” signs after being released on bail.

Reading Greenwald’s tweets, one would have no way of knowing that Rittenhouse is an “honorary member” of the Proud Boys, whose founder Gavin McInnes was an open “Western chauvinist,” misogynist, and anti-Semite who shouted on his show in 2016: “We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you … We will assassinate you.”

Attacking the World Socialist Web Site for its coverage of the trial yesterday, Greenwald wrote: “You’re literally on the side of the state, its prosecutors, and the carceral system: the engines of fascist power. That’s who you cheer and applaud. I maintain my pro-defendant principles regardless of the ideology of the defendant,” adding “Communists 4 Prosecutors.”

It is Greenwald who is “on the side of the state” and of “fascist power.” Building up the legitimacy of the far-right militias with which Rittenhouse is associated is, in reality, a political objective of a substantial section of the American ruling class, who plan to use these militias to terrorize left-wing social opposition.

In Rittenhouse’s case, his militia was mobilized specifically to aid the police in violently crushing a left-wing protest, in the context of violent assaults on protesters by police nationwide. Prior to the shooting, another militia member with whom Rittenhouse was in contact named Ryan Balch openly boasted: “You know what the cops told us today? They were like, ‘We’re gonna push ’em down by you, ‘cause you can deal with them, and then we’re gonna leave.’”

Greenwald, now a frequent guest on Fox News, has employed similar sophistry to justify his defense of the participants in the January 6 coup attempt as well as the participants in the plot to kidnap and assassinate the Democratic governor of Michigan.

Under conditions of rampant police and vigilante violence, there is absolutely nothing unprincipled about demanding the prosecution of those who perpetrate right-wing violence—and with exposing and denouncing, in this case, a right-wing judge’s extraordinary efforts to derail that prosecution.

It is necessary to warn that in the same way that the German ruling elite embraced the Freikorps and subsequently the brownshirts to suppress the danger from below, sections of the American ruling class are bringing forward the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups to serve a similar purpose: to suppress left-wing opposition through terror and violence.

The open support for Rittenhouse by Trump and the Republican Party, the extraordinary and provocative behavior of the judge, the willingness of a former police official to support and collaborate with Rittenhouse’s defense—together with the hopeless disorientation of middle class pseudo-left and libertarian figures represented by Greenwald—all underscore the real danger of right-wing terror becoming normalized in America.

As was the case in the last century, the international working class, organized and acting collectively, is the only social force which can stop and reverse this danger.

The Truck Driver Shortage Doesn’t Exist. Saying There Is One Makes Conditions Worse for Drivers

Alana Semuels
Fri, November 12, 2021,

Truck Drivers Support the Supply Chain
A trucker washes his windshield as he fuels up his truck at the Loves Truck stop on November 5, 2021 in Springville, Utah. 

Credit - George Frey / Getty Images

As the U.S. contends with supply-chain problems that could make holiday shopping harder, one explanation comes up again and again: The country doesn’t have enough truckers. “The Biggest Kink in America’s Supply Chain: Not Enough Truckers,” a New York Times story read this week. Where Are All the Truck Drivers? Shortage Adds to Delivery Delays, cried a Wall Street Journal headline the week before.

In reality, there is no shortage of people who want to get into truck driving, nor is there a shortage of people who have obtained commercial driving licenses (CDLs).

The stories inevitably cite a report from the American Trucking Association that says the industry is short 80,000 drivers and quote experts who blame the alleged shortage on a lack of people interested in these difficult jobs. Yet, in California alone, there are 640,445 people who hold active Class A and Class B commercial driver’s licenses, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Meanwhile there are only 140,000 “truck transportation” jobs in the state, according to the state Employment Development Department.

Those numbers speak to the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people who become truck drivers every year—some with their training subsidized by the government—only to find that the job pays much less than they’d been led to believe, and that working conditions in the industry are terrible.

A Problem of Too Many Truckers

There’s no trucker shortage; there’s a trucker retention problem created by the poor conditions that sprung up in the industry in the wake of 1980s deregulation. Turnover for truck drivers in fleets with more than $30 million of annual revenue was 92% at the end of 2020, meaning roughly 9 out of every 10 drivers will no longer be working for that company in a year.

“​​There’s no shortage of workers, that’s the narrative that gets propagated by industry leaders,” says Mike Chavez, the executive director of the Inland Empire Labor Institute, which is working on a partnership to create better recruiting and retention programs for drivers. “We still have a lot of positions that can’t be filled because of the working conditions.”

There were 1.5 million people employed in trucking last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 1% fewer than in October 2019, and 15% more than a decade ago. That’s a faster growth rate than overall nonfarm employment, which is still down 2% from October 2019 and up only 12% from a decade ago.

In fact, there are so many truck drivers right now that brokers are able to pit them against each other and worsen conditions, says Sunny Grewal, a Fresno, Calif.-based driver. Grewal, 32, has been driving since 2010, and has a refrigerated truck, which he uses to haul fruits and vegetables. It costs him $1.75 to $2 to drive a mile empty, so any job that pays less than $3 a mile isn’t worth it, he says. Yet as brokers see more drivers looking for jobs, they post more loads that pay less and end up requiring a lot of unpaid waiting around. “If they know there are a lot of carriers, they treat you like crap,” Grewal says.

He’s recently gotten jobs hauling loads of produce, only to arrive and be told the produce hasn’t even been picked from the field. He has to wait until it’s picked and packaged, and doesn’t get paid for the first four hours he waits. There have been times when he’s waited 27 hours to pick up a load. Truckers get paid per mile driven, so all that waiting means lost money, especially since federal regulations stipulate that he can only drive 11 hours out of every 24. He only gets paid $150 for a “layover day,” which is a day spent waiting. He can’t tell brokers he doesn’t want to wait around, because they’ll find someone who will take the load, especially because rates are high right now.

“If I refuse it, someone else will take it,” he told me.

There are other frustrations—even when he has to wait for hours outside warehouses, he’s not allowed to use their bathrooms, and he can’t leave or he’ll lose his place in line. Government regulations mandate that he takes a break every 14 hours (and can drive 11 of those 14 hours), there aren’t enough places where he’s allowed to park his truck and sleep. Truckers across the country have long complained that the lack of truck parking creates unsafe conditions; Grewal shudders when he hears stories of truck drivers killed while at remote locations.

Deregulation Changed Everything

It’s hard to imagine another profession where people don’t get paid for hours they spend at work—unless it’s gig economy jobs where Uber drivers don’t get paid for the time they spend waiting for a passenger to order a car. Some of the problems in trucking arose because the job essentially went from a steady, well-paid job to gig work after the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s, says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream.

Deregulation essentially changed trucking from a system where a few companies had licenses to take freight on certain routes for certain rates into a system where just about anyone with a motor-carrier authority could move anything anywhere, for whatever the market would pay. As more carriers got into trucking post-deregulation, union rates fell, as did wages. Total employee compensation fell 44% in over-the-road trucking between 1977 and 1987, he says. Today, drivers get paid about 40% less than they did in the late 1970s, Viscelli says, but are twice as productive as they were then.

Now that truck drivers are gig workers, the inefficiencies of the supply chain are making the jobs worse and worse, as Grewal has discovered. “So much of this is about the inefficient use of time. Is there a shortage of truck drivers? Probably not. But they are certainly being used less and less efficiently,” Viscelli says. “That’s the long term consequence of not pricing their time.”

Ironically, the louder the narrative becomes about the “shortage” of truck drivers, the more resources pop up to funnel people into driving. In 1990, the trucking industry figured it needed about 450,000 new drivers and warned of a shortage; in 2018, before the pandemic, the industry said it was short 60,800 drivers.

During the pandemic, government money paid for even more people to attend truck driving school. California paid $11.7 million to truck driving schools in the state in 2020, up from just $2.4 million in 2019, primarily from federal money through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The recently-passed infrastructure bill includes initiatives to grow the trucking workforce, including creating an apprenticeship program for drivers under 21 to work in interstate commerce. But the vast majority of the people who pay for truck driving school don’t end up becoming truck drivers.

“Every Monday, they’ve got 100 new people they’re going to put through orientation, and in three months, less than half of them will be in the industry,” says Desiree Wood, the president of REAL Women in Trucking, a network that provides resources and support to female drivers.

Driving Up Debt

Many people take out debt to get a CDL, or enter into what Viscelli calls “debt peonage”—essentially going to school tuition-free but promising to work for a certain trucking company to pay off their debt. But getting your CDL is just the first step, says Wood. After you get your CDL, most drivers have to get further training, where they team up with another driver and learn how to drive and maneuver a truck, by actually doing it on the road. These other drivers are often not specialized trainers—sometimes they only have a little more experience than the newbie driver. This model is especially detrimental to women, many of whom have filed complaints about being sexually assaulted by their partners, who are responsible for determining whether they get the final okay to drive. Long-haul trucking company CRST settled a lawsuit in May brought by a woman who says she was raped by the lead driver, terminated, and then billed $9,000 for her training.

It’s during this stage that many people drop out, either because their trainers aren’t helpful, or they get intimidated by ice on the road, or because they’re not making much money as a team driver. But long-haul trucking companies move a lot of their freight through student-driver partnerships like these. When student drivers quit, the companies just has more trainees to sub in, fed into the industry by the myth of a trucker shortage. “Over-recruiting is the biggest part of the problem,” says Wood.

Blaming supply chain problems on trucker shortages enables trucking companies to recruit more people and charge them for school, only for the students to realize that trucking, as it exists today, is not a desirable profession.

“We need to find ways to attract, recruit and retain drivers,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, on a call about supply chain backlogs last month. “ We’re gonna have to think about new compensation models, benefits packages, etcetera. We want to make this a profession that folks want to come to.”

A Summit Trucking LLC advertisment hangs inside a school for students who are earning their commercial driver's license (CDL) at Truck America Training of Kentucky.

Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Truck driving companies that pay workers well have much fewer problems with retention. Turnover at “less-than-truckload” fleets, where drivers can make $100,000 a year moving loads to local terminals where they are picked up by long-haul truckers, was just 14% in the same period that the overall industry experienced 92% turnover. Many of these drivers are unionized, Viscelli says, and work jobs similar to the ones they would have had before deregulation.

Of course, it’s not easy for trucking companies to just pay drivers more. If they tell a major retailer like Walmart that they’re raising the cost to haul a load, Walmart will only find a trucking company that can do it for cheaper. And trucking companies are dealing with many of the hardships of the supply chain backlog—they told me that they can’t get appointments to pick up or drop off containers at the ports of Los Angeles or Long Beach. Any increase in costs will be charged to the cargo owners whose stuff they are hauling—and likely passed onto consumers.

California’s landmark AB5, which would reclassify truck drivers from independent contractors to employees could force the system to become more efficient. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to hear a challenge to the law, which was vehemently opposed by truck driving companies.

In the meantime, says Grewal, there’s another way in which the supply chain shortages are making it harder to be a truck driver. The price of trucks has skyrocketed. He’s seen refrigerated trailers like his go for $100,000, 30% more than a year ago; dry vans—semi trailers enclosed from outside elements—have doubled in price, from $35,000 to $70,000. That means many would-be professionals who buy trucks after hearing that there’s a driver shortage will be hurting even more.

A 20-year truck-driving veteran explains why the solution to the supply-chain crisis is in sight but greed is getting in the way

Ben Winck
Thu, November 11, 2021

The Port of Long Beach on October 27, 2014, in Long Beach, California. 

Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images

The US doesn't have enough drivers to solve the shipping crisis because of greed, one driver said.


On top of higher pay, companies must accept smaller profits in the port business, he said.


Firms' prioritization of profits created a workforce "that will leave in a heartbeat," he added.

Companies know how to solve the supply-chain crisis, a truck-driving veteran said, but they just don't want to pony up the cash.

Nearly every element of the US supply chain is stretched too thin. Key ports are badly congested, with a historic number of cargo ships waiting to unload containers. The mess boils down to "pure supply and demand economics," Ryan Johnson, who has been a truck driver for 20 years, said in an October 27 Medium post. As the economy reopened, Americans flush with pandemic savings unleashed a wave of pent-up demand that has swamped the supply chain.

At this stage, Johnson said he didn't see any immediate solutions because trucking companies would rather wait out the supply-chain crisis than rethink their wage structure and profit margins. He said they could fix it but wouldn't.

Among the biggest choke points is the country's supply of port truckers. Only a handful of trucks have the tags, registration, and driver certifications needed to work in shipping ports, and companies can charge higher rates elsewhere, which leaves little incentive to invest in the port business, Johnson said.

The industry has also long relied on "low wages and bare-minimum staffing" to boost their profits, Johnson told Insider. When the pandemic hit and a large number of drivers were laid off, many saw little reason to return, and Johnson said he saw no signs that trucking companies would raise wages to bring workers back.

"You can go make $20 an hour at McDonald's with no benefits, or you can make $4 an hour driving a truck with no benefits," Johnson said, referring to how many drivers are paid per load, not by the hour. "I don't blame them for leaving."

And the massive backlog of containers guarantees truck drivers will run at full capacity for the foreseeable future. The bottlenecks hurt suppliers and consumers, but shipping companies' profit margins are intact, Johnson said.

Trucking companies, then, are in no rush to rehire, he added. More drivers would mean higher operating costs. Automation at ports would theoretically make firms more productive, but that would also require pricey investments that business owners just don't want to make, Johnson said.

"Since they're not paying the workers any more than they did last year or five years ago, the whole industry sits back and cashes in on the mess it created," he said.
The government can't solve the shipping crisis

The Biden administration announced in October that the Port of Los Angeles, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, and other companies would move to 24/7 operations to ease shipping pressures. But even around-the-clock work won't do the trick, Johnson said.

For starters, labor laws and biological needs keep truckers from operating around-the-clock. The few companies that work with ports also lack the equipment needed to haul more containers. While ports and warehouses are working 24/7, the drivers crucial to moving items between them are still scarce.

Deploying the National Guard to work as drivers would probably do more harm than good, Johnson said. Members would "have no idea what they're doing" the moment they arrive in the port, since the situation is already a logistical mess, he added.

Using the National Guard would also prompt regular drivers to leave, Johnson said. Shipping capacity would plunge, and once the National Guard left, companies would have to make do with even fewer drivers, he said.

The problem, like with the greater labor shortage, is low pay, Johnson said. Trucking "is the same as it's always been," with long hours and unattractive wages. he added. The pandemic led many truckers to realize they would be better off elsewhere, and the industry hasn't adapted yet.

By not paying drivers more, companies "created the labor force that will leave in a heartbeat," Johnson said.

"When you run everything on a shoestring budget and the shoestring breaks, you can't put it back together again," he said. "This is the new normal. There's no doubt in my mind about that."

There is no truck driver shortage in the US

Nicolás Rivero 2 days ago

© Provided by Quartz A man with a beard and a baseball cap sits in the cab of his truck.

The country is facing a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers, warned the American Trucking Associations (ATA), an industry group representing big US trucking companies, on Oct. 25. It’s a warning they’ve more or less repeated every year since 2005. But it’s particularly worrying in the middle of a global supply chain crisis when there aren’t enough truckers to haul goods out of jam-packed ports.

This driver shortage argument has appeared repeatedly in news stories examining why the gears of the global economy are grinding to a halt. Executives at publicly traded companies have referenced the “driver shortage” in at least 45 calls with investors in the past month alone, according to data from Factset.

But the assertion that the US is suffering from the latest round of a 16-year truck driver shortage is misleading at best. About 2 million Americans work as licensed truck drivers, and states issue more than 450,000 new commercial driver’s licenses every year, according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. In fact, it's the most common job in 29 states.

The problem is retention. Many of those licensed drivers are no longer behind the wheel because they can find better working conditions and pay elsewhere. Jobs in factories, construction sites, and warehouses pay similar wages, and don’t require people to work 70-hour weeks, sleep in parking lots, or wait in line for hours without pay or bathroom breaks to pick up a container at an overwhelmed port.

The real shortage is of good trucking jobs that can attract and retain workers in a tight labor market. The annual turnover of drivers at big trucking companies averaged 94% between 1995 and 2017, according to ATA statistics. That means those companies have to re-fill almost every driver position every year to replace the people who are leaving. A third of drivers quit within their first three months on the job. The problem is particularly acute for long-haul truck drivers who carry goods great distances across state lines.

The trucking labor market isn’t broken

Economic theory suggests that when there’s a shortage of something—in this case, workers willing to driver trucks—prices (or wages) will rise and more people will be motivated to supply it. Eventually, the shortage should abate. Yet the “driver shortage” rhetoric has been repeated by the trucking industry since the late 1980s. How could such a clear shortage persist for three decades in a market economy?

In 2019, two economists for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) set out to investigate the mystery of the perpetual driver shortage: Was there something fundamentally broken about the trucking labor market?

The short answer, they found, is no. The labor market for trucking works about the same as the labor market for all sorts of blue-collar work. Differences in pay entice workers to enter the truck driving industry—and leave it for better opportunities. “There is thus no reason to think that, given sufficient time, driver supply should fail to respond to price signals in the standard way,” the authors wrote.

In other words: Raise wages, and the workers will come.

Trucking companies are raising wages, and drivers are biting

The real world is testing those economists’ theory. Trucking wages have risen 6.7% since April, when the American covid-19 epidemic began in earnest, according to BLS figures. The number of working truckers is, accordingly, up 7%. When trucking companies raised wages in the runup to the 2020 holiday shopping season, trucking employment went up. When trucking companies cut wages immediately after, employment went down.

Trucking companies are once again hiking wages in an effort to attract drivers ahead of the holiday season. This year, drivers are in higher demand than ever thanks to the extreme backlog of containers clogging up shipyards: Ports simply can’t offload containers onto trucks fast enough. So trucking firms are giving drivers splashy pay raises of up to 25%, offering bonuses of up to $1,000 per day for drivers who get stuck waiting in lines at ports, and guaranteeing minimum salaries no matter how much cargo drivers are able to haul.

The market, in other words, is working as expected. Companies need more drivers, so they’re raising pay and benefits and attracting more employees. But it hasn’t been enough to solve the problem entirely: There are still more open trucker jobs than there are workers willing to drive. (The ATA estimates the difference to be 80,000 jobs, which is the basis for their warnings about the driver shortage.) And overall trucking employment still lags behind where it was during the holiday peak in 2019.

The problem, according to Adan Alvarez, a spokesman for the Teamsters Union, is that trucker wages have been depressed for decades, and they haven’t risen enough yet for the industry to reach full employment. “Companies are now playing catch-up for a problem that has been developing for many years,” he said. The latest spate of pay raises hasn’t made a huge difference for US truckers’ average earnings. Trucker wages are still rising at about the same rate as overall US wages, so the premium relative to comparable jobs is negligible.

That makes it harder for trucking to compete against other blue-collar employers also raising wages in manufacturing, construction, and logistics. “Increasing pay a little bit can make a job slightly more attractive, but not noticeably more attractive than other occupations that come with less of a hassle factor,” said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents independent drivers and small trucking companies. “There are many hardships and sacrifices involved in driving trucks. We’re talking about 70-80 hour a week jobs where oftentimes you’re away from home for weeks at a time.”

Jerry Sigmon Jr., COO of the trucking company Cargo Transporters, says recent pay raises have mainly just helped his firm keep up with rising wages at competing employers. Cargo Transporters, which operates a fleet of about 500 trucks, has raised wages three times this year. The third raise, announced Oct. 27, even came with an extra week of paid time off. “I'm not going to say we've had a flood of applicants coming in,” he said. “But we're able to take care of our existing employee base better to keep more from leaving.”

Paying truckers more isn't enough

Driver pay is important, but ultimately it’s just one part of the equation. To solve this problem, the trucking industry will have to offer more competitive wages and working conditions—and the US will have to invest in infrastructure improvements to alleviate some of the hardships that drive truckers out of the industry.

Stakeholders across the industry—the ATA, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the Teamsters, and trucking executives like Sigmon—say the US needs to upgrade its infrastructure to make trucking less miserable for drivers.

Drivers are forced to wait in lines at ports that weren’t built to handle the volumes of cargo they’re currently seeing. They waste time searching for overnight parking and wind up ending their driving days early when they happen to find a spot. These challenges make the job more aggravating and less efficient; the more time drivers spend waiting and looking for parking, the less time they’re able to cover distance on the highway, deliver goods to customers, and get paid.

Even if wages are changing, America's infrastructure priorities aren't geared toward truckers.

The newly passed $1.2 trillion US infrastructure bill does include $17 billion for upgrading US ports and $110 billion for upgrading roads, bridges, and highways—but to the chagrin of the trucking industry, it does not include funding for truck parking (nor does the larger social spending bill working its way through Congress).