Peace: Well-Being for the Poorest

by Becca Mohally Renk / September 19th, 2024

Peace has always been fundamental to me.

My first forays into activism were for peace: as an elementary school student blowing up balloons for a protest when the white train carrying nuclear warheads passed through my hometown in Idaho, organizing a protest of the first Gulf War in junior high school, writing letters to protest Army recruiters being allowed on school grounds in high school. I love peace so much that I studied it in college – my bachelor’s degree is in Peace and Global Studies.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself sobbing tears of gratitude recently during a military speech. September 2nd was the 45^th anniversary of the founding of the Nicaraguan Army, and President Daniel Ortega began his speech to the troops by talking about peace.

“Today we are able to hold this celebration in times of peace, and how much has it cost to reach this stage of peace. Peace meaning well-being for the poorest.…In peace we can fight poverty. In peace we can ensure education for all families, for the children of working-class families, rural families, poor families with low incomes.”

As I listened to the President’s address, I didn’t just tear up, I sobbed tears of gratitude. Gratitude to the Nicaraguan Revolution for identifying poverty as its number one enemy and fighting against that enemy with everything it’s got. Gratitude for being able to see with my own eyes the alleviation of so much suffering in my time. Gratitude that I’ve been able to contribute my grain of sand to this struggle.

Gratitude that we are not alone in this, that we are working in concert, struggling shoulder to shoulder with the government of the people of Nicaragua to vanquish poverty together in this beautiful country.

My tears, however, were also tears of sorrow for my country of birth. I have always held a vain hope for a similar struggle against poverty in the United States. I went to school with kids who didn’t have enough to eat, with kids who were constantly sick because their parents couldn’t afford to take them to the doctor, with kids whose families didn’t have running water or a good way to heat their house. In the thirty years since I left home, the situation for families like theirs has only gotten worse, for the simple reason that the well-being for the poorest is not in the interests of those that govern the United States.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and early 90s, my sister and I attended public school in Idaho. Every year, like schoolkids all around the U.S., we were required to raise money for the school: selling candy bars door-to-door; making desserts for bake sales; asking businesses to sponsor us for each mile we’d ride in the annual Bike-A-Thon when we would pedal five and a half miles with our classmates, then go back and collect the money…all just to get enough cash to keep the school going.

Yet, 43% of the U.S. annual budget goes toward military spending. As the old protest poster says, “It’ll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” So, during President Ortega’s speech to the Nicaraguan Army, I was also crying for all those who are suffering in the U.S., with no hope of poverty alleviation from their government.

Unlike the U.S., Nicaragua has actually been invaded by a foreign country in recent history – mostly by the U.S. Nicaragua suffered 10 years of U.S. proxy war which targeted civilians, health centers and schools. Nicaragua suffered a U.S.-led and funded coup attempt in 2018, is currently suffering under illegal unilateral coercive measures – sanctions – and suffers continued destabilization attempts by the U.S.

Yet, even with such real threats to national security, Nicaragua’s total military spending is only 3% of the national budget.

Where does Nicaragua invest the majority of its funds? In peace. In, as President Ortega says, the “well-being of the poorest.”

Social spending is 53% of Nicaragua’s annual budget – free education from preschool through university, universal free health care, low-income housing, low-interest loans and much more.

Nicaragua knows what it is like to live in times of war, and therefore peace is truly precious here. It is such a privilege to be able to experience living in a country that is truly at peace, and to see what can be accomplished when peace, the well-being of the poorest, is prioritized. May peace always reign in Nicaragua!

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Originally from Idaho, Becca Renk has lived in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, for more than 20 years, working in sustainable community development with the Jubilee House Community and its project, the Center for Development in Central America. Becca coordinates the Casa Benjamin Linder solidarity project in Managua. Read other articles by Becca.

 

There Is Only One Night Left to Build Fortifications

The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter (2024)

by Vijay Prashad / September 19th, 2024

Niniko Morbedadze (Georgia), The Orange Clouds on the Boundary, 2018.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 13 September, at a conclave in Washington, DC, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer indicated that it would be acceptable for Ukraine to fire missiles, provided by the West, into Russian territory. No official decision has been announced as of yet, but it is clear where the conversation among North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member states is headed. After Starmer – whose approval rating with voters sits at 22% – returned to London, his foreign secretary David Lammy told the press that the UK government is in conversation with other allies about lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of UK-provided Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Sir John McColl, a retired senior UK army officer, went further, stating that these missiles would eventually be used against Russia, yet – by themselves – they would not enable Ukraine to prevail. In other words, knowing full well that these missiles will not change the tenor of the war, these men (Biden, Starmer, and McColl) are willing to risk deepening the conflict.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made the use of Western-provided missiles a central theme of his conversations with world leaders, claiming that if his military is allowed to fire the Storm Shadow missiles (from the UK), SCALPs (from France), and ATACMS (from the US), then Ukraine will be able to hit Russian military bases on Russian soil. A greenlight by NATO to use these three missile systems, which have already been supplied to Ukraine by NATO member countries, would be a significant escalation: if Ukraine were to use these missiles to attack Russia, and Russia were to retaliate with an attack on the countries that provided the missiles, it would trigger Article 5 of the NATO charter (1949), drawing all NATO member countries directly into the war. In such a scenario, several nuclear powers (US, UK, France, and Russia) will have their fingers on the nuclear button and could very well take the planet down the path of fiery destruction.

Ion Grigorescu and Arutiun Avakian (Romania/Armenia), The Genius and the Era, 1990/1950s.

In December 2021, Russia and the United States held a series of consultations that, even at that late hour, could have prevented hostilities from breaking out in Ukraine. A summary of those discussions is vital to highlight the key issues underlying the conflict:

1.  7 December 2021. US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a two-hour video conference. The White House readout, which is only a paragraph long, focused on Russian troop movements on the Ukrainian border. The Kremlin summary is a bit longer and introduced a point that the United States has ignored: ‘Vladimir Putin warned against the shifting of responsibility on Russia, since it was NATO that was undertaking dangerous attempts to gain a foothold on Ukrainian territory and building up its military capabilities along the Russian border. It is for this reason that Russia is eager to obtain reliable, legally binding guarantees ruling out the eventuality of NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of offensive weapons systems in the countries neighbouring Russia’.

2. 15 December 2021. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met with US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried in Moscow. The Russian press release published after the meeting said that ‘they had a detailed discussion of security guarantees in the context of the persistent attempts by the US and NATO to change the European military and political situation in their favour’.

Maria Khan (Pakistan), Craving for Love, 2012

3.  17 December 2021. Russia released a draft treaty between itself and the United States as well as a draft agreement with NATO. Both texts made it clear that Russia was seeking firm security guarantees against any destabilisation of the status quo to its west. In these texts, there are explicit and important statements about missiles and nuclear weapons. The draft treaty says that neither the US nor Russia should ‘deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party’ (article 6) and that both sides should ‘refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories’ (article 7). The draft agreement with NATO says that none of the NATO countries should ‘deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties’ (article 5).

4.  23 December 2021. In his annual press conference, Putin once more broadcast Russia’s anxiety about NATO’s eastward movement and about the threats of weapons systems being deployed on Russian borders: ‘We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania, and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see? We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached US borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well. Or, even if it does not join NATO, that military bases and strike systems will be placed on its territory under bilateral agreements’.

5.  30 December 2021. Biden and Putin had a phone call about the deteriorating situation. The Kremlin’s summary is more detailed than the one from the White House, which is why it is more useful. Putin, we are told, ‘stressed that the negotiations needed to produce solid legally binding guarantees ruling out NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of weapons that threaten Russia in the immediate vicinity of its borders’.

On 24 February 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine.

Louay Kayyali (Syria), Then What?, 1965.

Russia has been anxious about its security guarantees ever since the United States began to unilaterally withdraw from the delicate arms control system. The bookends of this dismissal are the US’s 2001 departure from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and 2019 revocation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The disposal of these treaties and the failure to acknowledge Russian pleas for security guarantees – alongside NATO aggressions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya – caused anxieties to grow in Moscow about the possibility that the West could place short-range nuclear missiles in Ukraine or in the Baltic states and be able to strike large Russian cities in the west without any hope of defence. That has been Russia’s main argument with the West. If the West had taken the treaties that Russia proposed in December 2021 seriously, then we might not be in a situation where the Western countries are discussing the use of NATO missiles against Russia.

A new study by the consulting firm Accuracy shows that arms companies in the United States and Europe have benefited enormously from this war, with stock market capitalisation for the main weapons companies having increased by 59.7% since February 2022. The largest gains were made by Honeywell (US), Rheinmetall (Germany), Leonardo (Italy), BAE Systems (UK), Dassault Aviation (France), Thales (France), Konsberg Gruppen (Norway), and Safran (France). The US companies Huntington Ingalls, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman also saw gains, though their percentage increases were lower because their absolute profits were already at obscene levels. While these NATO merchants of death profit enormously, their populations continue to struggle with higher prices due to fuel and food price inflation.

Askhat Akhmedyarov (Kazakhstan), Geopolitical Soldier, 2014.

Perhaps the most cruelly ironic part of this entire debate is that allowing Ukraine to strike Russia would not necessarily result in any military benefit. Firstly, Russian air bases have now moved out of range of the missiles under discussion, and, secondly, Ukrainian supplies of these missiles are low. Adding to the looming threat of nuclear war are two recent statements from the US. In August, the US press reported that the Biden administration had produced a secret memorandum about preparing the US nuclear arsenal to combat China, North Korea, and Russia. This came on the heels of another report, in June, that the US is considering expanding its nuclear forces.

All of this is part of the backdrop of the 79th United Nations General Assembly meeting taking place this month, where member states will discuss a new Global Compact. The draft compact uses the word ‘peace’ over a hundred times, but the real noise we hear is war, war, war.

Tuvshoo (Mongolia), Tears of Joy, 2013.

When I was a teenager in Calcutta, India, I would often zip off to the Gorky Sadan theatre and watch the films of the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, which ruminated about life and the human desire to be better. One of these films, Mirror (1975), about the outrageousness of war, is anchored in the poems of the filmmaker’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky. As tensions rise in Ukraine, the elder Tarkovsky’s poem ‘Saturday, June 21’ (referring to the day before the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany 1941) warns us against mounting threat of war:

There’s one night left to build fortifications.
It’s in my hands, the hope for our salvation.

I’m yearning for the past; then I could warn
Those who were doomed to perish in this war.

A man across the street would hear me cry,
‘Come here, now, and death will pass you by’.

I’d know the hour when the war would strike
Who will survive the camps and who will die.

Who will be heroes honoured by awards,
And who will die shot by the firing squads.

I see the snow in Stalingrad, all strewn
With corpses of the enemy platoons.

Under the air raids, I see Berlin
The Russian infantry is marching in.

I can foretell the enemy’s every plot
More than intelligence of any sort.

And I keep pleading, but no one will hear.
The passersby are breathing in fresh air,

Enjoying summer flowers in June,
All unaware of the coming doom.

Another moment – and my vision disappears.
I don’t know when or how I ended here.

My mind is blank. I’m looking at bright skies,
My window not yet taped by criss-crossed stripes.

Warmly,

VijayFacebook

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, andThe Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

 

Contemplation: Which Values, What Actions?

by William Manson / September 10th, 2024

By mediating between our minds and social reality, the all-encompassing communications media processes such raw social facts into more digestible morsels of factoids, benighted biases, ignorant assumptions, distorted opinions, and alluring pseudo-pleasures.

But imagine the following scenario: all interactive media break down.  Silence–and a blank, darkened screen.  No more conditioning and intermittent reinforcement and puppeteering–which string us along the information-glutted blind alley with its deafening roar of talktalktalk.

Cognitive dissonance: one sits alone, or perhaps fetishistically fondles one’s dead smartphone, Aladdin-like.  Panic: what is one to think?  But then, almost imperceptibly… one’s mind enters a state of relaxation, even repose.  Freed from the constant stream of intrusions and distractions, one has time to reflect:

“What exactly have I been doing–and why?  And where am I going with all this?

What are the possible negative (unintended) outcomes of all this unremitting effort?

Will this undeviating path turn into a blind alley–and lead to new problems?  And who decided on the impositions which structure my life?”

Suddenly liberated from the pseudo-activity of constant re-activity (“messages,” “tweets,” “alerts”), one feels adrift.  Adrift and floating freely, into the rediscovered realm of self-awareness and conscientious reflection.  Coming up for air, so to speak, one may feel the rush of new insights and creative alternatives.  One suddenly recalls: didn’t Socrates himself remind us that “the unexamined life is not worth living”?

Each individual, even in an emerging totalitarian technocracy, retains a secret treasure: the capacity for inner enlightenment (and the resolve to retain an optimal degree of autonomous self-direction).  Deep in thought, one may resemble Rodin’s brooding sculpture of The Thinker (who is not smiling).

Drastic measures may be necessary.  Despite the weight of insidious habituation–which over time has normalized a world of nuclear arsenals and melting ice caps–one may fiercely resist the all-encompassing impositions which are falsely presented as desirable choices.  Modern medicine: drugs, drugs, and more drugs.  The “smartphone”: a brazen invasion of one’s privacy, volition–and dignity.  “Democratic” elections: lies, lies, and more lies.  The trivialization of one’s social encounters: excessive chatter and pointless garrulity.  The binary fallacy of two “genders”: rather, simply two sexes with an overwhelmingly shared set of (human) emotional and behavioral predispositions.  A lifelong occupation or “career”: for what, exactly?  The “necessity” of a relationship: personal fulfillment or constant adjustment to the expectations of another?

It may appear that I am advocating a solipsistic withdrawal from socio-political engagement and  activism.  But, paradoxically, a revolution in values begins in the free thought of each individual.  And it is only in those precious periods of solitude that the individual feels free to transcend what Karl Marx, solitary thinker par excellence, termed the socially prevailing false consciousness.

Moreover, given the constants of human needs and aspirations, individuals who regain such contemplative awareness are likely to realize the same new values and alternate solutions which can revitalize communal cooperation.  The first step, anticipated by Thoreau and Gandhi, is negative revolt: non-cooperation, non-participation, and, to a large degree, “not-doing” (Lao-Tze).  Or, in contrast to the frenzied, pointless activity all around us: “Don’t just do something, sit there.”FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Intellectual historian and psychoanalytic anthropologist, William Manson (Ph.D., Columbia) has published numerous scholarly books and papers, and is a longtime contributor to Dissident Voice. Read other articles by William.

Connecting the Dots Between Climate Destruction and Its Financial Backers

By Eve Gutman

September 19, 2024

Source: Waging Non-Violence

Image by EQAT/Rachael Warriner

Standing on a mobile stage in a suburban Philadelphia park on July 3, Ugandan human rights activist Hillary Taylor poured a cup of dirt into a clay vase. “This soil represents all my communities in Uganda and Tanzania,” he said to a crowd of 300 people gathered near the global headquarters of Vanguard, the world’s largest fossil fuel investor.

This was the start of a major day of action for Vanguard S.O.S. — the international campaign that’s calling for the powerful asset manager to deal with its climate change problem and invest in a livable future. Participants came from near and far to dramatize the connection between asset managers like Vanguard and the harm their investments cause frontline communities.

As an outspoken advocate with StopEACOP, the campaign fighting the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, Taylor was one of several people representing communities on the frontlines of dangerous pipelines and toxic incinerators built and run by companies financed by Vanguard. Another was Denali Nalamalapu, co-director of Protect of Our Water, Heritage, Rights in western Virginia, who told the crowd, “I came here today bringing the energy of folks in Appalachia who have been fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline for the past 10 years. When we march up to Vanguard, we will be carrying with us the righteous rage of all the people endangered by this pipeline.”

Nalamapalu, like Taylor, had brought soil from their land and added it to the clay vase. A week later, a smaller group attempted to deliver the vase to Vanguard incoming CEO Salim Ramji, along with a large welcome card signed by hundreds of people, but the gifts weren’t accepted by Vanguard security at the entrance to its campus.

After rallying and hearing from speakers like Nalamapalu and Taylor, the crowd marched to the entrance of Vanguard’s campus, sat in its driveway and held a Quaker meeting for worship. The silent crowd of hundreds of people blocking the road made for an unusual sight in an office park, but one filled with the growing power of a determined movement. As we marched back to the park, singing, plans for more actions were already forming.
Connecting the dots

More and more people are getting involved in climate finance campaigns and talking about following the money from fossil fuels back to their investors, funders and insurers. The climate movement is increasingly taking on financial institutions like asset managers, which have few publicly-accessible branches and are far removed from the immediate impacts of their investments. Making the connection between fossil fuel sites and the distant corporate headquarters from which they’re being financed and insured may be a challenge — but it’s also an opportunity. It begs for activists to get creative with our strategy, try out new tactics, and forge and nurture relationships across distance and differences.

As part of the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign, my organization — Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT (where I serve as the media and research coordinator) — holds regular direct actions at Vanguard’s headquarters in Pennsylvania. We’ve also been joining actions organized by groups resisting Vanguard investments in other places and have trained people around the country to hold their own actions targeting Vanguard. EQAT and the organizations we work with in the campaign are testing out models for how to connect the dots between the largest investors/funders of fossil fuels and their real life impacts — and learning lessons in the process.

Vanguard invests $413 billion of its customers’ money in coal, oil and gas, making it the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels. As a bondholder, Vanguard uses its customers’ money to finance the construction of new oil and gas pipelines at a time when science tells us with resounding clarity that — in order to have a safe and healthy future — we cannot extract and burn more fossil fuels. As a stockholder, Vanguard gets to vote at the annual corporate meetings of major polluters like Exxon and Chevron. However, Vanguard actively votes against sustainable action at companies in its portfolio. It does all this despite publicly acknowledging that climate change is a risk to investors.

Because Vanguard has so far failed to take meaningful action on climate change, a network of groups in North America, Europe and Australia have built the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign. We are straightforward with our demands that Vanguard:

1. use its power and influence as a shareholder to push the companies it invests in to do better on climate change,

2. exit its investments in fossil fuel companies that refuse to transition their businesses to be in alignment with no more than a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise and

3. offer climate-responsible funds as mainstream products.

For over three years, we have held dozens of protests, made hundreds of phone calls, sent thousands of letters and moved tens of millions of dollars out of Vanguard, with more to come.

As EQAT prepared to join the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign in 2021, we turned to points of intervention and story-based strategy to focus how we were going to build power and leverage that power to pressure Vanguard. In their influential book “Re:Imagining Change,” Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning wrote about points of intervention, or “specific places in a system where a targeted action can effectively interrupt the functioning of the system and open up opportunities for change.”

There are points of destruction, where resources are extracted or injustice enacted; points of production, where goods are produced; points of consumption, where goods are bought or used; points of decision, where decision-makers make decisions about destruction, production and consumption; and points of assumption, where narrative and belief about the issue is developed and shaped. When campaigners get clear about what these points are in our specific campaigns, we can make strategic choices about where to take action in order to apply the most pressure.

EQAT decided to begin by coupling actions at corporate headquarters — the point of decision — with actions at polluting facilities that are Vanguard investments: points of destruction. That meant that some of our first protests in the campaign were at local oil-fired power generating stations owned by Exelon and trash incinerators owned by Covanta — both Vanguard investments. When we did take action at Vanguard’s headquarters, we did so with a concrete understanding of the impacts caused by corporate decisions, and we were able to tell a clearer and more compelling story about the connection between them.

Since then, EQAT has returned to one of those Covanta trash incinerators during key moments of the campaign to hold actions in collaboration with Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, or CRCQL. It’s thanks to that group’s 30-plus years of experience pushing back against the incinerator — and holding events that educate about the impacts on the climate and community — that EQAT keeps coming back for actions.
Forging relationships across distances and differences

The impacts of Vanguard’s investments reach far beyond trash incineration and power generation in the Philadelphia region. As the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign has grown, there have been more opportunities to connect the dots between Vanguard’s investment choices and real harm in people’s lives — between the point of decision and points of destruction.

In late 2022, a delegation of leaders from Achuar and Wampís Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and fishing communities on the Peruvian coast traveled to Pennsylvania, requesting to meet with Vanguard about its financial support of an oil company threatening their communities. When Vanguard ignored their request to meet, EQAT worked with Amazon Watch to turn out over 100 people to accompany the delegation and protest Vanguard’s disregard of human rights and Indigenous sovereignty.

This past winter, EQAT joined with StopEACOP campaigners on the digital action app chilli and helped hundreds of people contact Vanguard about its investments in TotalEnergies, the company behind the destructive African pipeline. chilli is a platform that connects its thousands of users with quick daily digital actions, like emailing the executives of the corporations financing fossil fuel projects.

I worked with its team to create a video explaining the connection between Vanguard and EACOP, and they set up a “mission” in the app where hundreds of people participated in nine digital actions targeting Vanguard between January and March. Collaborating on the digital actions was outside EQAT’s usual focus on in-person direct action, but we knew it was an important act of relationship building to show up for partners (who would later show up at the large action at Vanguard in July).

This spring, we worked with groups in Appalachia to take action at Vanguard’s office in Charlotte, North Carolina. It coincided with a big march through downtown Charlotte that visited Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo — calling out all of these investors and funders of the dangerous Mountain Valley Pipeline. While in North Carolina, EQAT organizers spent time in living rooms, backyards and Quaker meeting houses, singing, sharing food and telling stories of wins and losses. With that visit, we planted seeds of connection whose effects were apparent by the big action at Vanguard that summer.

We also signed on as a supporter of Summer of Heat on Wall Street in New York City, a season of sustained nonviolent civil disobedience against the financiers of fossil fuels. EQAT members took part in their actions at Citibank headquarters — which launched the season of action — as well as interfaith actions where leaders of many faiths came together to demand Citi do better. A busload of Summer of Heat participants joined us at the Vanguard action, tying together our work there and their work on Wall Street.

Actions like those in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York and online were only possible thanks to relationships — and those relationships developed thanks to the international network of groups that is the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign. Participating in this campaign network has allowed member groups to make connections across differences, forge relationships built on common cause and work together to take action that tells the story of why Vanguard needs to change. The actions were a product of the relationship building that had already been going on behind the scenes and, in turn, were an opportunity to strengthen those relationships and keep working together.

The entire campaign network stands to gain so much when groups taking action at the points of decision collaborate with groups taking action at the points of destruction. Being able to uplift stories of the frontline impacts of Vanguard’s investments at its corporate headquarters — as well as getting to be present at events organized by frontline communities — has undoubtedly strengthened the campaigning that EQAT does.

Back at Vanguard, Virginia-based singer, educator and organizer, BJ Lark, spoke to the crowd. Lark and her organization, CommUNITY ARTSreach, have been involved in opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project of two Vanguard portfolio companies. As she explained, “I grew up Gullah Geechee. Some of my wisest ancestors said: We did not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we are borrowing it from our children. It is not yours to destroy.”

Cutting off the flow of money to fossil fuel expansion and redirecting financial support away from fossil fuel corporations dead set on sticking with the status quo are vitally important. The stakes of inaction are enormous, but so are the possibilities of the better world we can win with collective action and solidarity. Forging relationships across distances and differences doesn’t just happen; it takes work, consistency and thoughtfulness. But when we can show up for each other and show how working together benefits each others’ campaigns, connecting the dots between points of decision and points of destruction can bring so much to the work of groups in both places.

As Vanguard S.O.S. takes action in new places this fall, campaigners will be applying lessons learned and learning new ones in the process. It’s all in service of winning the changes that bring us ever closer to having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and a safe climate in which to thrive.

 AMERIKA

Ten Ways Project 2025 Could Undermine Workers’ Rights

By Bryce Covert

September 19, 2024

Source: Capital and Main

Image by SecretName101, Creative Commons 4.0

In late August, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance told a crowd of union firefighters that he and his running mate, Donald Trump, are “the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” Trump has long claimed to champion working Americans, and Vance even walked a picket line. The Republican Party appeared to try to cozy up further to unions when it had Teamsters President Sean O’Brien speak at its national convention in July.

But those public stances and declarations stand in stark contrast with the blueprint for what Republicans want to do if and when they retake the White House. Project 2025 is an almost 900-page document laying out an agenda for the next Republican president in detail, and it lists a multitude of priorities that would, if enacted, harm workers’ pay, safety and ability to organize. Taken as a whole, the priorities the authors describe are “so unbelievably anti-union, anti-worker, anti-anybody but corporate interests,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. 

When asked for an interview about the labor-related provisions, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, declined, saying, “Our chapter on that topic clearly lays out our suggested policies.” Project 2025 claims that “American workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace” and advocates for restoring “family-supporting jobs as the centerpiece of the American economy.” But to solve these issues, it attacks a “massive administrative state” and “woke nonsense” while promoting “flexibility” and “experimentation” in the laws that enshrine bedrock protections.

The spokesperson also added, “Project 2025 does not speak for President Trump or his campaign.” Trump has also recently distanced himself from the document, although at least 140 people who worked for him were involved in crafting it and Vance wrote a foreword for an upcoming book by its main architect. In 2022 Trump said Heritage was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

The document is also full of numerous labor-related ideas long espoused by the Republican Party, including many that bubbled up during the Trump administration. Even so, the laundry list of priorities would harm large numbers of workers if enacted, experts said. It’s still “shocking when you look at it compiled in its entirety,” said Lynn Rhinehart, senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s not new, but it is radical.”

Below is a list of 10 proposals from Project 2025 that labor experts say will harm working people.

---

1. Restricting Access to Overtime Pay

Project 2025’s proposed changes to overtime would slash workers’ paychecks, blocking many from qualifying while introducing loopholes that would erase the time-and-a-half they’re due after working 40 hours, experts said. Project 2025 calls for rolling back the Biden administration rule that raised  the salary threshold to $58,656 and expanded the protection to 4.3 million more workers. Project 2025 calls for returning to the Trump-era threshold, which would mean millions fewer workers would be eligible for overtime.

Another proposal to let employers calculate overtime over two or four weeks instead of one would significantly reduce workers’ earnings. “There’s no math where workers get paid more under this policy,” said Aaron Sojourner, senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. It also calls for letting workers trade their overtime pay for paid time off, an idea Republicans have pushed since at least 2013. While the policy is marketed as offering greater flexibility, it does not create a new leave benefit. “It’s deceitful,” Rhinehart said.

2. Eroding Workplace Safety

Project 2025 seeks to weaken workplace safety standards for all Americans, including teenagers. The document states, “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.” It calls on the Department of Labor to allow teenagers to work in these jobs with “proper training and parental consent.” It is “saying they want children to be less safe,” said Janelle Jones, vice president of policy and advocacy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “That is just a shocking thing to say.” And yet it’s one that hearkens back to former President Ronald Reagan’s administration, which proposed rolling back child labor protections.

It also calls for exempting small businesses, as well as first-time and “non-willful” violators, from Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fines, and to only focus safety inspections on “egregious offenders.” OSHA is already under-resourced and understaffed. Its maximum fines often amount to a slap on the wrist — $161,323 at the very most — even if a worker is severely injured or killed. In 2022, nearly 5,500 people were killed on the job and another 120,000 are estimated to have died from an illness contracted at work.

3. Allowing States to Sidestep Worker Protections

A push to excuse states from federal labor laws could lower wages, weaken union rights and even roll back child labor standards — all in the name of what Project 2025 authors call “experimentation.” States that secured waivers from federal labor law, under their proposal, would have to ensure they do not “take away current rights held by workers or employees,” according to the document. But Rhinehart said that, without definitions, “the sky’s the limit” in terms of what worker protections states could seek to upend.

There’s already some indication of what they might try to do. Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee have all passed laws banning employers who voluntarily recognize unions from receiving state economic development funds. (Those laws could be struck down by a court because they are preempted by federal labor law, said Jennifer Sherer, acting director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network.) Since 2021, 31 states have introduced bills to weaken federal child labor laws. Five states  don’t even have a minimum wage, while two have lower wages than $7.25 an hour, so the federal standard is the only way workers in those states are guaranteed at least $7.25 an hour.

4. Eliminating Public Sector Unions

The authors question “whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place,” calling on Congress to consider whether they are allowable.  These unions cover about a third of the public sector workforce, or 7 million people. Getting rid of them is “a super-radical idea,” Rhinehart said. And yet it, too, is an old idea; conservatives have long attacked them, from then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker stripping most of them of collective bargaining rights to conservatives backing the attack on public sector union dues in the Supreme Court case Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

5. Stripping Protections From Misclassified Workers

Project 2025 calls for rolling back a Biden administration rule that makes it easier for Uber drivers and contracted-out janitors to secure employee status, and with it, essential workplace benefits. “The entire body of labor standards and labor rights is built on the foundation of employment,” said Sojourner. Employee status ensures unemployment pay, workers’ compensation, union rights, discrimination protection, minimum wage and overtime pay, as well as oversight by OSHA. Eliminating the rule will allow corporations to treat far more workers who should be classified as employees as independent contractors, stripping them of these benefits.

6. Shielding Major Brands From Accountability for Labor Violations

Project 2025 also calls for rolling back a Biden administration rule that holds some large corporations responsible for the working conditions inside franchised or contracted-out operations. Weakening the so-called “joint employer” rule would kneecap union drives among workers employed by franchises of major brands like McDonald’s and KFC. It would also block their ability to hold those brands accountable for wage theft,  harassment and other violations of labor law.

7. Curtailing Workers’ Speech Rights 

One proposal would strip protections for any workers who discuss wages or complain about mistreatment — unless they complete the arduous process of forming a union. Under this provision, workers “can be fired just for the act of coming together and talking about something,” Block said. Eliminating what’s known as “protected concerted activity” is an idea that was pushed unsuccessfully by conservative groups in amicus briefs in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, the Supreme Court case that upheld arbitration agreements that bar class-action lawsuits. 

8. Making It Harder to Win Union Recognition

Project 2025 wants to do away with employers’ ability to voluntarily recognize a union after a majority of workers sign cards in favor, a process commonly known as “card check.” This method offers a faster, easier way for workers to form an official union. “It’s called voluntary recognition for a reason,” said Rhinehart, emphasizing that no employer has to use it. Getting rid of it is “a very radical proposal to undermine organizing,” she said.

9. Denying Labor Rights to Employees at Small Business

The document calls for exempting small businesses from oversight by labor agencies and denying small business employees the protections of the National Labor Relations Board. Given that the median union bargaining unit is just 21 workers, this would “strip millions of workers of their organizing rights,” Rhinehart said. Proposals like this have been around “for decades,” she added.

10. Weakening Bedrock Legal Protections

The document proposes allowing unions to negotiate over existing workplace laws — such as the minimum wage and health and safety protections — instead of treating them as fixed standards. It “would put unions and workers in the position of having to bargain to hold onto their statutory rights,” Rhinehart said, sapping their ability to fight for things above and beyond those floors.

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Even if there are labor rights that the agenda doesn’t specifically undo, its other proposals undermine them. The early chapters of Project 2025 call for firing many career civil servants who enforce regulations, including those that protect workers, politicizing their jobs. The authors call on the next president to fire National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo “on Day One,” someone who has overseen some of the most ambitious expansions of workers’ organizing rights in decades. It argues that the budgets for labor agencies should be significantly reduced, and Project 2025 proposes a hiring freeze for federal career officials. 

Without enough manpower and financial resources, these agencies can’t enforce workers’ rights. “Even the regulations and statutes that are on the books that they don’t want to roll back almost become a dead letter,” Block noted. “The robustness of your rights are only as good as the ability of federal agencies to stick up for you.”

Under Project 2025’s agenda, “working people are really just on their own,” she added, while corporations “can pretty much do anything they want.”