It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, December 26, 2024
The Real War on Christmas Is a Class War Waged by Bosses
The War on Christmas isn’t fully a figment of Fox News’s imagination. But the villains are today’s capitalist Scrooges, relentlessly exploiting their workers with long hours and low wages through the holidays.
Striking Amazon drivers walk the picket line in Skokie, Illinois, on June 26, 2024. (Teamsters / X)
In the right-wing imaginary, the War on Christmas had a good run. Fox News host John Gibson alleged in a 2005 book that liberals were planning to “ban the sacred holiday,” and a moral panic was born, yielding outrage after outrage almost every year. This year, however, the defenders of all things merry and bright have been pretty quiet, and polling shows that even among conservatives and Donald Trump supporters, a declining minority of Americans believe that the beloved holiday is under siege. Sensitive neighbors (and corporations hoping to avoid their ire) may continue to wish us a “Happy Holidays,” the ACLU may continue to object to religious iconography in the town square, yet Americans are ignoring the likes of Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, instead adulting with a “live and let live” attitude.
This rare moment of cultural chill allows us to come together as Americans to confront the real war on Christmas, the one you won’t hear about on Fox News: a class war.
If you’ve read Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, you’ll remember that the main character is one of literature’s nastiest bosses. Ebenezer Scrooge hates the holiday and resents giving his employee, Bob Cratchit, even one paid day off with his family, calling Christmas “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket” and demanding that the terrified Cratchit be at his desk “all the earlier” the next day.
An original illustration of “Marley’s Ghost” by John Leech from the 1843 edition of A Christmas Carol. (Wikimedia Commons)
Dickens, like his contemporary, Karl Marx, made observations about capitalism and its abuses to the human spirit that remain all too relevant today; in this case, his point was that bosses don’t stop acting like bosses at the holidays. Today, layoffs at this time of year are common. Last week, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been elected to exactly no government office but suddenly seems to be running everything, was apparently seeking to outdo Scrooge by trying to force a government shutdown, which would have meant that active-duty soldiers and other government workers wouldn’t get their paychecks.
For some workers, conditions on the job get even worse at Christmastime. One of the reasons Americans give for working during the holiday is the fact that it is an especially busy time of year for their company or industry. Retail is one brutal example. If you’re shopping online for Christmas presents, and using Amazon to do so, you’ve probably noticed how fast your packages arrive: that’s convenient for the procrastinating holiday shopper, but there is a human toll to that efficiency. Amazon workers say the holiday season is particularly stressful, given the intense pressure they’re under to make so many more time-sensitive deliveries than usual.
As Teamsters went on strike at seven Amazon warehouses — in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Southern California — some workers have observed that they were barely seeing their loved ones this season, considered “peak” for the company. “When you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,” a packer in Staten Island told Labor Notes, “And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.”
Even for those who don’t have to slave away in an Amazon warehouse, exploitation gets in the way of Christmas. Many people don’t get paid enough to enjoy travel and gift-giving. In fact, financial stress during the holiday season is so common that articles advising us how to manage it are published every year.
In A Christmas Carol, the problem of the callous capitalist is resolved spiritually; Scrooge is visited by a series of ghosts who make him understand the poverty of his greedy ways. The ghosts awaken in Scrooge a compassion for Cratchit and his struggling family, showing him the sour misery of his own life as a capitalist and all the love and fellowship he has missed in a life devoted to accumulation. Scrooge sees the error of his ways and becomes a better man: a generous boss, a kindly second father to Cratchit’s disabled son, and a philanthropic pillar of the community. And he ends his personal war on Christmas, becoming an enthusiastic celebrant.
It’s an enchanting story, literally; Dickens was smart enough about class relations under capitalism to know that Scrooge’s transformation wouldn’t have been realistic without an extraordinary plot twist. Scrooge needs an intervention — by ghosts. Dickens knew that getting capitalists to behave humanely, at Christmas or at any time of year, would require a departure from the realism he employs in many of his other novels.
Unfortunately, we can’t count on spirits to fix present-day Scrooges like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. There’s only one other option: waging class war from below, as the Amazon workers are doing. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a happy class war to all!
Striking Amazon Workers Aim to Crack an Anti-Union Behemoth
The Amazon workers who walked off the job at warehouses across the country at peak season are trying to establish a union beachhead against one of the most important — and most anti-union — employers in the world.
Amazon workers picketed their employer over the weekend through blisteringly frigid weather and, in New York, a flooded sidewalk as part of an escalating series of strikes by a minority of workers across the logistics behemoth’s supply chain. These strikes, waged from coast to coast at nine warehouses, are part of a nationwide movement to consolidate organizing at the logistics giant in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).
In 2022, the Teamsters launched a division to support organizing at Amazon. The union now represents 5,500 workers at the hulking JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island that formed the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU) over two years ago. The ALU voted in June to affiliate with the Teamsters, creating ALU-IBT Local 1. Amazon has refused to recognize the union and bargain a contract.
As the strikes wrap up as peak season ends on Christmas Eve, it’s difficult to know how disruptive the limited-duration walkouts were to Amazon’s operations. Amazon has claimed the strikes have had no effect. Several workers at different facilities, however, have said that the number of packages they moved per day dropped by a third or more.
But just as crucial is whether the strikes help build momentum for a national movement to organize Amazon. The Teamsters say the union represents ten thousand workers across ten facilities. Workers participated in strikes in nine cities. Teamsters also extended picket lines to dozens of Amazon fulfillment centers across the country, leafleting drivers and warehouse workers. In Monroe, Ohio, a group of Amazon workers who were already organizing with the Teamsters saw the picket lines and spontaneously joined the strike.
The independent union Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) went public with its petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on December 23 — synchronizing their timing with peak holiday shopping season and the national mobilization by the Teamsters.
The election filing is the result of nearly three years of organizing at the two-million-square-foot fulfillment center RDU1 in Garner, North Carolina. Those three years have seen multiple arrests and firings of key organizers, the union says.
CAUSE president Reverend Ryan Brown, who was recently fired by the company, said the union went public with the campaign once workers determined they had reached a majority of their coworkers and to ensure it keyed in on the end of peak on Christmas Eve, when Amazon lays off its seasonal employees.
“There’s a lot of eyes now on Amazon thanks to the good work that so many organizations — the Teamsters, Amazonians United, our comrades at JFK8 and ourselves — have been doing,” said Brown. “This election filing, it puts it on the conscience of the American people.”
Amazon Sets the Standard
At midnight on Saturday, Amazon warehouse workers at JFK8 walked off the job, thronged by their cheering off-duty coworkers, into a gusty and snowy night. One of these off-duty workers joining in the strike was Angela Daly, who has worked at Amazon for four years: “My father was a Teamster, so he would turn in his grave if I didn’t join.”
Hauntings from beyond the grave aside, Daly wants longer and more frequent breaks to prevent injuries. The grueling twelve-hour shifts have taken a toll on her body, she says, and the ten-second breaks Amazon allots workers every half hour to do stretches is not enough when “physically carrying stuff up and down ladders.” She has sustained two injuries on her hands.
JFK8 warehouse worker Ken Coates, also from a family of Teamsters, walked out at midnight. “Amazon hasn’t come to the table in a little over two years to negotiate this contract, and it’s illegal,” he said. “Amazon is a huge company, and they will be setting the standard for how the working class is treated in the future. If we allow them to treat us any way, that’s saying any working-class person can get treated any way a company deems fit.”
Workers at Amazon’s San Bernardino air hub in Southern California, who demanded union recognition December 11, walked off the job at noon the same day. “It’s a nationwide movement,” said Anna Ortega, a warehouse worker at the KSBD air hub. “We are supposed to be processing up to 200,000 packages a day. These last couple days, they sliced it in half. For them to say that there is no impact — I think it’s very clear to us here today that absolutely there is.”
Amazon did not respond by publication time to requests for comment on production impacts and other worker allegations in this story.
The Teamsters have made inroads into organizing Amazon drivers in the company’s 4,400 delivery service partners (DSPs) program, who are nominally employed by contractors while Amazon retains full control of their operations. Two big air hubs — KSBD in Southern California and KCVG in northern Kentucky, both previously part of independent union organizing efforts — have now affiliated with the Teamsters. Amazon says 390,000 drivers work at its DSPs. That’s 60,000 more drivers than the Teamsters represent at the United Parcel Service (UPS).
The escalating strike pickets boomeranged on Sunday, December 21, back to Queens, New York, where two dozen delivery station warehouse workers joined more than a hundred drivers who kicked off the strike at 6 a.m. on December 19.
Ira Pollock, a DBK4 warehouse worker, said he and his coworkers similarly walked out last year around the same time. But this was the first time warehouse workers and drivers had struck together. “We were met by a whole lot of drivers who are also picketing,” said Pollock. “The drivers have been leading this struggle. One thing we learned is that it’s a lot more impactful when you include drivers and warehouse workers together. We’re seeing it impact Amazon’s operations.”
Even while Amazon has adapted to pickets outside the facility and has brought in new drivers, Pollock said, “we hit them with a walkout on the inside of the warehouse. Because of the lower head count inside the warehouse, less packages are getting loaded into vans. That’s more money they’re paying on this building to process less volume.”
Before the strike, warehouse worker Dylan Maraj was riled up about Amazon hiring union-busting consultants to dissuade him and his coworkers from building a union. Maraj has participated in walkouts previously and organized petition drives. But he was impressed with the solidarity he saw on the picket line between warehouse workers and drivers across classifications and other divisions.
“The strike has helped people get hyped up about the overall direction of what the organizing is,” said Maraj. “People at the warehouse are really skeptical about whether it’s growing or not. Once they saw the picket and the strike, and they saw that the strike was becoming a national event, it has been growing in support ever since.”
Speaking on the picket line after walking out, Amazon warehouse worker Sean Dennis said managers felt exasperated: “‘Here we go again,’” he characterized their mood. “This is the third day in a row. They’re just fed up.”
Warehouse worker Maria Carnrike has worked at Amazon for four and half years after transferring from Tampa, Florida, to the Queens facility. She said striking was “really empowering, especially when you’re walking out and you see the look on the managers’ faces, like, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To go fight for our rights.’”
Carnrike said one manager alternated from resignation to joviality. “When we went to go clock out, he just had his head down. He looked really upset.” He then tried a different tack. “‘He was like, ‘Hey guys!’ And I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m walking out.’”
The response from management was a small victory. While Carnrike wants her topped-out $24.40 an hour wage to increase to $30 an hour to compensate for the physical toll on her body, the main sticking points are safer working conditions and management accountability. She said that managers routinely penalize workers with secret write-ups and disregard the accommodations she was granted after sustaining an injury on the job.
A Worldwide Strike
Even in the cold weather, the picket lines have grown. On Saturday afternoon, water gushed from the DBK4 delivery station’s fire suppression system, flooding the picket line, damaging union paraphernalia, and soaking the shoes of picketers. Workers waded through water to salvage boxes of T-shirts and hats, their feet drenched as water swooshed out for thirteen minutes, according to time stamps from video reviewed by us. The Teamsters blamed Amazon for flooding the picket. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment. Police onsite dismissed any suggestion that the flood was intentional, according to the Teamsters.
“We were all out here picketing, and we just noticed a wild stream of water hit the pavement,” said Danny Batista, a DBK4 Amazon driver. “It had to be at least two to three gallons a second. The only way I could describe it to you is, like at a water park, when they’re like spraying water down the slide. It’s a disgusting display of aggression.”
The flooding comes after the New York Police Department arrested and released a worker and a Teamsters organizer on the first day of the strike. For all the talk of the strike’s insignificance, the response from police in the New York metro area has been repressive.
From the Warehouse to the World: Sultana Hossain on Organizing Amazon From the Left
On midnight on Saturday December 21st, members of Amazon Labor Union Local 1 began their strike at the JFK-8 warehouse in Staten Island. They joined eight other striking Amazon warehouses across the country in Georgia, Illinois, New York, and California. In 2022, ALU-1 made history as the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country and their movement has not been deterred by Amazon’s years long court battles attempting to delegitimize their election. Sultana Hossein is one of the many leaders of this movement. Sultana is a socialist, something which had been increasingly rare in the labor movement, despite labor’s roots in radicalism.
In this interview with Emma Lucía Llano, Sultana discusses what it means to “meet people where they’re at”, how Amazon workers’ struggles are connected to anti-war movements, and the future of the labor movement under Donald Trump.
Emma Lucía Llano is a Peruvian-American writer and activist. She is currently completing her Master’s degree in Journalism at New York University. She earned her undergraduate degree in Anthropology from Wesleyan University, where she authored a thesis about the role of janitors at residential colleges. She is a former union organizer for SEIU and has worked as a paralegal assisting with immigration and civil rights matters.
AFGHANISTAN
Now It Can Be Told . . . After All the Harm Has Been Done
WBUR Boston's NPR News Station WBUR - AFGHANISTAN-US-UNREST-MARINES. Flickr.
This week, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”
Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”
Now they tell us.
The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:
* * * * *
Timing is crucial in media and politics — and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told — years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.
What American policymakers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment — not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression — is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.
When the warfare in Afghanistan finally ended, major U.S. media — after avidly supporting the invasion and then the occupation — were awash in accounts of how the war had been badly run with ineptitude or deception from the White House and the Pentagon. Some of the media analysis and commentaries might have seemed a bit sheepish, but news outlets preferred not to recall their prior support for the same war in Afghanistan that they were now calling folly.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign-policy leadership or major news media, let alone its political economy. On the contrary: the forces that have dragged the United States into an array of wars in numerous countries still retain enormous sway over foreign and military affairs. For those forces, over time, shape-shifting is essential, while the warfare state continues to rule.
The fact that strategies and forms of intervention are evolving, most conspicuously in the direction of further reliance on airpower rather than ground troops, makes the victims of the USA’s firepower even less visible to American eyes. This presents a challenge to take a fresh look at ongoing militarism and insist that the actual consequences for people at the other end of U.S. weaponry be exposed to the light of day — and taken seriously in human terms.
Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.
That we live in one interdependent world is no longer debatable. Illusions about American exceptionalism have been conclusively refuted by the global climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the ever-present and worsening dangers of thermonuclear war. On a planet so circular in so many ways, what goes around comes around.
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Norman Solomon an American journalist, author, media critic and activist. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. Solomon's weekly column "Media Beat" was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of thirteen books including "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” (The New Press, 2023).
The West Bank’s Men of the CIA – Why is the PA Killing Palestinians in Jenin?
Following a ten-day siege, the Palestinian Authority began, on December 14, a violent raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.
The PA security forces used similar tactics as used by the Israeli occupation forces in their routine attacks on the area.
The camp, which is a mere half a square kilometer in size, hosts an ever-growing population of 24 thousand refugees, mostly the descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the great catastrophe, or Nakba, of 1948.
The raid began with a tight siege, followed by an attack from multiple directions that resulted in the killing of an unarmed youth, Rebhi al-Shalabi, 19, then a 13-year-old child, Muhammad al-Amer.
The PA forces also killed Yazid Ja’ayseh, the commander of the Jenin Brigades, who had evaded Israeli assassination attempts for his leadership role in unifying all Palestinian Resistance fighters under the umbrella of a single group.
Expectedly, Israel is largely pleased with the PA’s action against the Palestinian Resistance, though it expects more. “The Palestinian Authority has been acting resolutely against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters over the past several weeks, army and Shin Bet sources said, but the Israeli officials expressed the hope that their effectiveness could be enhanced,” Haaretz reported.
Indeed, Israel had attempted to subdue Jenin 80 times in the last year alone, killing more than 220 people, Al Jazeera reported, citing Palestinian Ministry of Health sources.
By attacking Jenin, the PA is helping the Israeli army in more than one way: it is killing and detaining anti-Israeli occupation Resistance fighters, consuming the energy and resources of the Resistance, allowing Israel to spare thousands of soldiers so that they may carry on with the genocide in Gaza, and more.
For many, especially supporters of Palestine around the world, the PA’s action is confusing, to say the least. Those surprised by the anti-Resistance policies of Mahmoud Abbas and his Authority, however, are driven by the erroneous assumption that the PA is a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that it behaves in ways consistent with the collective aspirations of all Palestinians.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years, the PA has ceased playing any role that deviates from the interests of a small clique of pro-US and pro-Israeli wealthy elite who have enriched themselves, while millions of Palestinians continue to suffer an Israeli genocide in Gaza, and a violent system of apartheid and military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The most telling and recent example is that, a short distance away from Jenin, illegal and violent Israeli Jewish settlers have burned the Bir Al-Walidin Mosque in the town of Murda, near Salfit – less than 70 kilometers from Jenin. Neither in this case, nor in any of the hundreds of settlers’ pogroms carried out against Palestinians in the West Bank in the last year – or before – did the PA security carry out any action to confront the armed Jewish militias, nor, of course, the occupation army.
But how did the PA turn from a supposed national project – at least in theory – to another branch of the Israeli occupation?
It could be argued that the PA was structured since its establishment in 1994 as a body whose existence catered to benefit the Israeli occupation. There is much evidence that substantiates this claim, including the arrests, torture and killing of dissenting Palestinians soon after the creation of the PA.
The CIA became directly involved in supporting the PA from the very start, expanding its role as early as 1996 following a series of Palestinian retaliatory attacks on Israeli targets in major cities. It was then that CIA director George Tenet became an important player in shaping the policies of the PA security forces, preparing it for massive crackdowns on Palestinian Resistance groups.
This involvement was a direct condition for US financial support under the Bill Clinton Administration – the kind of support that sowed the seeds of the Fatah-Hamas conflict, which reached its zenith in the summer of 2007.
The involvement of the US – and other armed forces of US client regimes in the region – became even more apparent under the leadership of US Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who helped train, prepare and equip the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (NSF), producing several battalions of young recruits (between 20 and 22 years old) to fight fellow Palestinians in the name of restoring law and order.
That supposed restoration of the law began in earnest as early as 2005 and continues until this day. Interestingly, this is the same language that the PA is currently using to justify its war on the Jenin refugee camp.
A spokesman for the PA security forces, Anwar Rajab recently told Al Jazeera that the objective of the raid on Jenin is to “pursue criminals” and lawbreakers, and to “prevent the camp from becoming a battleground like Gaza.”
Equating Resistance fighters with criminals and linking that supposed criminality to the Gaza Resistance is the typical PA discourse on resistance, a discourse that took the US and Israel years to craft and perfect – making the PA arguably the greatest achievement of Israel and the US in recent decades.
This behavior and language can be traced to a famous statement by General Dayton himself, who in a 2009 speech celebrated the US’s greatest creation in Palestine:
“And what we have created – and I say this in humility – what we have created are new men … upon the return of these new men of Palestine, they have shown motivation, discipline and professionalism, and they have made such a difference.”
Indeed, the ‘new men of Palestine’ are making all the difference required by the US and Israel: they are fighting the very Palestinian Resistance that is defending Jenin against the Israeli onslaught, Nablus against the pogroms of armed settlers and Gaza against genocide.
None of these ‘new men’ – whose numbers are counted in the tens of thousands – have lifted a finger to help their brethren as they continue to starve to death in the Gaza Strip, tortured and raped en masse, burned alive in Jabaliya and Khan Yunis, and yet continue to fight and die in their thousands – alone.
To say that the PA has betrayed Palestinians, however, is an inaccurate statement. The PA was never set up, financed and armed by the US and Israel as a force of liberation, but as an obstacle to Palestinian freedom. We are witnessing the final proof of this claim. It is taking place in Jenin now; in fact, throughout the West Bank.
Of course, the PA will not be able to crush the Palestinian Resistance, which the supposedly mighty Israeli army has failed to subdue over the course of years. But the question remains: how long will the PA be allowed to serve the role of the enforcers of the Israeli occupation and the protector of settlers, while still promoting itself as the guardian of Palestinian rights, freedom and statehood?
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
