After enduring ‘complete hell’ during pandemic, food workers face obstacles getting COVID-19 vaccinations

“Vaccinating our essential farmworkers will ensure the safety of their workplaces, their homes, their families, our food supply, and the vital services that they perform.”

By

 Leah Douglas

 -

February 1, 2021Common Dreams

The thousands of workers who pick, pack, and process our food have become eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine in many states. But they still face obstacles to actually getting the vaccine, as companies sort out their vaccination policies and advocates struggle to secure enough doses for a workforce that ranks among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

Labor organizations and the food industry spent months pushing for agricultural and food processing workers to be in early distribution phases of the Covid-19 vaccine. In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that agricultural workers be vaccinated in Phase 1b, and many states have followed suit.

Yet with the vaccine rollout moving slowly because of continued shortages and with some states shuffling around their priority populations, there are still unanswered questions about how and whether the vaccines will actually get to workers and about what role food manufacturers will play in getting shots into arms.

Florida is now requiring vaccine recipients to show state driver’s licenses or proof of residence, potentially excluding the state’s 200,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers

Meanwhile, food system workers are still contracting the virus at workplaces across the country. More than 85,500 food and farmworkers have contracted Covid-19 and at least 368 have died as of Jan. 27, according to FERN’s tracker. Nearly 7,000 cases have been added to the database since the beginning of January, even with just a few states regularly reporting data.

Kristy Tijerina, a worker at a JBS meatpacking plant in Plainwell, Michigan, says it’s essential that the vaccine be allocated to the industry’s workers as quickly as possible. At her plant, at least 88 workers have contracted the virus and one has died. Tijerina herself contracted Covid-19 in the spring, and her father died of the virus in August.

“It’s just getting really bad right now,” she says of the case rates in her community. “The more everybody gets vaccinated, it’s a lot better for everybody working here together.”

One obstacle to expediently vaccinating food workers is the still-changing prioritization of essential workers in states’ vaccination phases. Amy Liebman, director of environmental and occupational health at the Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN), which has been supporting local health systems in vaccinating farmworkers, says it’s “been a disappointment” seeing food and farmworkers still unable to access vaccines in many states, given their high risk of contracting Covid-19.

“First and foremost, we need the doses,” Liebman says.

In California, home to as many as 800,000 farmworkers, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently shifted the state’s vaccine distribution structure to be age-based, leading to concerns that many essential workers would need to wait longer for their shots. Florida, another major agricultural producer, is now requiring vaccine recipients to show state driver’s licenses or proof of residence, potentially excluding the state’s 200,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers from being vaccinated at all.

“Farmworkers are among the most vulnerable populations, because they work in close proximity to each other [and] they go home, often to multigenerational households,” said Fresno County supervisor Brian Pacheco at a vaccination site on Wednesday. Fresno County became one of the first counties in the country to begin vaccinating farmworkers this week and plans to vaccinate more than 3,000 agricultural workers in the coming days at vaccination sites around the county.

“Vaccinating our essential farmworkers will ensure the safety of their workplaces, their homes, their families, our food supply, and the vital services that they perform,” Pacheco said.

One of the logistical questions facing employers and health departments is where, exactly, workers should get inoculated. Particularly for migrant farmworkers, who may relocate between shots, vaccine distribution must happen at easily accessible locations, says Leibman. MCN is aiding in that effort with a virtual case management program that can help workers figure out how to get a second vaccine dose if they move after their first shot.

“We need to make sure that the vaccine is available to workers rather than the workers being available to the vaccine,” she says.

For meatpacking workers, the best option is to get vaccinated at work, says Mark Lauritsen, vice president of meatpacking at the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Many large meatpacking plants have their own health clinics, where workers already receive medical care. Workers may be less nervous getting vaccinated in a familiar setting, he says.

“We’re going to work to make sure that it’s an efficient process and a safe process, and that there’s no barriers to accessing [the vaccine],” he says. “The power of having it right there at the plant means we get to these people with very few obstacles.”

Yet there’s also an essential role for public health departments, especially in cases where workers may not trust their employer or report to work on a regular schedule. Advocates who represent subcontracted workers in food processing recommended recently that local health departments be “heavily involved” in vaccine distribution to ensure that temporary workers are reached.

In some states, meatpacking and other agricultural workers can already receive the vaccine or will qualify imminently. Iowa’s meatpacking workers are expected to be able to set up vaccine appointments by Feb. 1, and in Kansas, they began to qualify for vaccine appointments on Jan. 26.

Meatpackers are still figuring out some of the details of how they will vaccinate workers. Nikki Richardson, director of communications for JBS, says vaccination logistics are still being determined at each plant, and that in some cases, public health departments, pharmacies, or local health clinics will carry out worker vaccinations. But the company is “prepared for our phase of vaccine allocation whenever it may occur,” Richardson says.

Tyson Foods plans to “offer vaccinations on-site at our facilities, at no cost, while our team members are on the job,” said the company’s public relations manager, Derek Burleson. Tyson has contracted with Matrix Medical Network to coordinate its worker testing and vaccination, so the timing of vaccinations will depend on when states make vaccines available to Matrix, Burleson says.

Meatpacker JBS says it will pay workers $100 to get vaccinated. A critic called the incentive program an “attempt to distract from the company’s failure to protect its workers.”

Smithfield did not respond to questions about the specifics of its vaccination program.

Employers are also still sorting out whether to incentivize or compensate workers for getting vaccinated. In the grocery sector, where at least 109 union workers have died of Covid-19 and more than 17,000 have contracted the virus, some retailers are introducing incentives to encourage workers to get the vaccine, though they’re not requiring it. For instance, Instacart will pay $25 to employees who take time off to the get vaccinated. Trader Joe’s will give its workers two hours of pay per vaccine dose.

So far, JBS is the only meatpacker that has said it will pay workers to get the vaccine—$100 for employees of the Brazilian-owned meatpacker and its subsidiary Pilgrim’s Pride. But that approach isn’t uniformly popular.

Kim Cordova, the president of UFCW Local 7, said in a statement that JBS’s incentive program is an “attempt to distract from the company’s failure to protect its workers.” Local 7 represents workers at a JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, where six workers have died of Covid-19 and nearly 450 have been sickened by the virus. The company should quickly restore hazard pay for its workers and implement daily testing, among other precautions, Cordova said.

Meatpackers are also mixed on whether the vaccine should be mandatory for their workers. JBS is “currently focused on achieving the highest voluntary participation rate possible,” says Richardson. Tyson is “strongly encouraging team members to take the vaccine but are not mandating it,” says Burleson.

Lauritsen says the UFCW is opposed to making the vaccine mandatory and that receiving the vaccine should not be a condition of employment. Besides, he says, workers are ready to get the vaccine without it being made compulsory.

“Given the work that’s been done, the complete hell that these folks have went through during this pandemic,” he says, “our members are ready to get the vaccination, and the sooner the better.”

Leah Douglas  is an associate editor and staff writer at FERN. Prior to joining the team, she worked for three years as a reporter and policy analyst with the Open Markets Institute, where she researched economic consolidation and monopolization in the food and agriculture industry. She founded and wrote Food & Power, a first-of-its kind resource on food sector consolidation.

 

The decline and fall of the American Empire

Will our leaders squander America's only hope for a successful transformation from a decadent and declining empire to a dynamic and prosperous post-imperial future?

By

 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

 -

February 3, 2021NationofChange

In 2004, journalist Ron Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” He dismissed Susskind’s assumption that public policy must be rooted in “the reality-based community.” “We’re history’s actors,” the advisor told him, “…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America’s international power and authority. Back in the imperial heartland, the political marketing industry that Rove and his colleagues were part of has had more success dividing and ruling the hearts and minds of Americans than of Iraqis, Russians or Chinese.

The irony of the Bush administration’s imperial pretensions was that America has been an empire from its very founding, and that a White House staffer’s political use of the term “empire” in 2004 was not emblematic of a new and rising empire as he claimed, but of a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an agonizing death spiral.

Americans were not always so ignorant of the imperial nature of their country’s ambitions. George Washington described New York as “the seat of an empire,” and his military campaign against British forces there as the “pathway to empire.” New Yorkers eagerly embraced their state’s identity as the Empire State, which is still enshrined in the Empire State Building and on New York State license plates. The expansion of America’s territorial sovereignty over Native American lands, the Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War built an empire that far outstripped the one that George Washington built. But that imperial expansion was more controversial than most Americans realize. Fourteen out of fifty-two U.S. senators voted against the 1848 treaty to annex most of Mexico, without which Americans might still be visiting California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah and most of Colorado as exotic Mexican travel spots.

In the full flowering of the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going to welcome imperial invaders from America. So America’s leaders developed a system of neocolonialism through which they exercised overarching imperial sovereignty over much of the world, while scrupulously avoiding terms like “empire” or “imperialism” that would undermine their post-colonial credentials. 

It was left to critics like President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to seriously examine the imperial control that wealthy countries still exercised over nominally independent post-colonial countries like his. In his book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism, Nkrumah condemned neocolonialism as “the worst form of imperialism.” “For those who practice it,” he wrote, “it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.”  

So post-World War Two Americans grew up in carefully crafted ignorance of the very fact of American empire, and the myths woven to disguise it provide fertile soil for today’s political divisions and disintegration. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Biden’s promise to “restore American leadership” are both appeals to nostalgia for the fruits of American empire. 

Past blame games over who lost China or Vietnam or Cuba have come home to roost in an argument over who lost America and who can somehow restore its mythical former greatness or leadership. Even as America leads the world in allowing a pandemic to ravage its people and economy, neither party’s leaders are ready for a more realistic debate over how to redefine and rebuild America as a post-imperial nation in today’s multipolar world.

Every successful empire has expanded, ruled and exploited its far-flung territories through a combination of economic and military power. Even in the American empire’s neocolonial phase, the role of the U.S. military and the CIA was to kick open doors through which American businessmen could “follow the flag” to set up shop and develop new markets. 

But now U.S. militarism and America’s economic interests have diverged. Apart from a few military contractors, American businesses have not followed the flag into the ruins of Iraq or America’s other current war-zones in any lasting way. Eighteen years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq’s largest trading partner is China, while Afghanistan’s is Pakistan, Somalia’s is the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Libya’s is the European Union (EU).
Instead of opening doors for American big business or supporting America’s diplomatic position in the world, the U.S. war machine has become a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power to destabilize countries and wreck their economies, closing doors to economic opportunity instead of opening them, diverting resources from real needs at home, and damaging America’s international standing instead of enhancing it.

When President Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of America’s military-industrial complex, he was predicting precisely this kind of dangerous dichotomy between the real economic and social needs of the American people and a war machine that costs more than the next ten militaries in the world put together but cannot win a war or vanquish a virus, let alone reconquer a lost empire.

China and the EU have become the major trading partners of most countries in the world. The United States is still a regional economic power, but even in South America, most countries now trade more with China. America’s militarism has accelerated these trends by squandering our resources on weapons and wars, while China and the EU have invested in peaceful economic development and 21st century infrastructure.
For example, China has built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in just 10 years (2008-2018), and Europe has been building and expanding its high-speed network since the 1990s, but high-speed rail is still only on the drawing board in America.   China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, while America’s poverty rate has barely budged in 50 years and child poverty has increased. America still has the weakest social safety net of any developed country and no universal healthcare system, and the inequalities of wealth and power caused by extreme neoliberalism have left half of Americans with little or no savings to live on in retirement or to weather any disruption in their lives. Our leaders’ insistence on siphoning off 66% of U.S. federal discretionary spending to preserve and expand a war machine that has long outlived any useful role in America’s declining economic empire is a debilitating waste of resources that jeopardizes our future. 

Decades ago Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As our government debates whether we can “afford” COVID relief, a Green New Deal and universal healthcare, we would be wise to recognize that our only hope of transforming this decadent, declining empire into a dynamic and prosperous post-imperial nation is to rapidly and profoundly shift our national priorities from irrelevant, destructive militarism to the programs of social uplift that Dr. King called for.

Americans were not always so ignorant of the imperial nature of their country’s ambitions. George Washington described New York as “the seat of an empire,” and his military campaign against British forces there as the “pathway to empire.” New Yorkers eagerly embraced their state’s identity as the Empire State, which is still enshrined in the Empire State Building and on New York State license plates.

The expansion of America’s territorial sovereignty over Native American lands, the Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War built an empire that far outstripped the one that George Washington built. But that imperial expansion was more controversial than most Americans realize. Fourteen out of fifty-two U.S. senators voted against the 1848 treaty to annex most of Mexico, without which Americans might still be visiting California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah and most of Colorado as exotic Mexican travel spots.

In the full flowering of the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going to welcome imperial invaders from America. So America’s leaders developed a system of neocolonialism through which they exercised overarching imperial sovereignty over much of the world, while scrupulously avoiding terms like “empire” or “imperialism” that would undermine their post-colonial credentials. 

It was left to critics like President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to seriously examine the imperial control that wealthy countries still exercised over nominally independent post-colonial countries like his. In his book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism, Nkrumah condemned neocolonialism as “the worst form of imperialism.” “For those who practice it,” he wrote, “it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.”  

So post-World War Two Americans grew up in carefully crafted ignorance of the very fact of American empire, and the myths woven to disguise it provide fertile soil for today’s political divisions and disintegration. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Biden’s promise to “restore American leadership” are both appeals to nostalgia for the fruits of American empire. 

Past blame games over who lost China or Vietnam or Cuba have come home to roost in an argument over who lost America and who can somehow restore its mythical former greatness or leadership. Even as America leads the world in allowing a pandemic to ravage its people and economy, neither party’s leaders are ready for a more realistic debate over how to redefine and rebuild America as a post-imperial nation in today’s multipolar world.

Every successful empire has expanded, ruled and exploited its far-flung territories through a combination of economic and military power. Even in the American empire’s neocolonial phase, the role of the U.S. military and the CIA was to kick open doors through which American businessmen could “follow the flag” to set up shop and develop new markets. 

But now U.S. militarism and America’s economic interests have diverged. Apart from a few military contractors, American businesses have not followed the flag into the ruins of Iraq or America’s other current war-zones in any lasting way. Eighteen years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq’s largest trading partner is China, while Afghanistan’s is Pakistan, Somalia’s is the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Libya’s is the European Union (EU).

Instead of opening doors for American big business or supporting America’s diplomatic position in the world, the U.S. war machine has become a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power to destabilize countries and wreck their economies, closing doors to economic opportunity instead of opening them, diverting resources from real needs at home, and damaging America’s international standing instead of enhancing it.

When President Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of America’s military-industrial complex, he was predicting precisely this kind of dangerous dichotomy between the real economic and social needs of the American people and a war machine that costs more than the next ten militaries in the world put together but cannot win a war or vanquish a virus, let alone reconquer a lost empire.

China and the EU have become the major trading partners of most countries in the world. The United States is still a regional economic power, but even in South America, most countries now trade more with China. America’s militarism has accelerated these trends by squandering our resources on weapons and wars, while China and the EU have invested in peaceful economic development and 21st century infrastructure.

For example, China has built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in just 10 years (2008-2018), and Europe has been building and expanding its high-speed network since the 1990s, but high-speed rail is still only on the drawing board in America.   China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, while America’s poverty rate has barely budged in 50 years and child poverty has increased. America still has the weakest social safety net of any developed country and no universal healthcare system, and the inequalities of wealth and power caused by extreme neoliberalism have left half of Americans with little or no savings to live on in retirement or to weather any disruption in their lives. Our leaders’ insistence on siphoning off 66% of U.S. federal discretionary spending to preserve and expand a war machine that has long outlived any useful role in America’s declining economic empire is a debilitating waste of resources that jeopardizes our future. 

Decades ago Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As our government debates whether we can “afford” COVID relief, a Green New Deal and universal healthcare, we would be wise to recognize that our only hope of transforming this decadent, declining empire into a dynamic and prosperous post-imperial nation is to rapidly and profoundly shift our national priorities from irrelevant, destructive militarism to the programs of social uplift that Dr. King called for.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism Kwame Nkrumah 1965

The mechanisms of neo-colonialism

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/ch01.htm

Foremost among the neo-colonialists is the United States, which has long exercised its power in Latin America. Fumblingly at first she turned towards Europe, and then with more certainty after world war two when most countries of that continent were indebted to her. Since then, with methodical thoroughness and touching attention to detail, the Pentagon set about consolidating its ascendancy, evidence of which can be seen all around the world.

Who really rules in such places as Great Britain, West Germany, Japan, Spain, Portugal or Italy? If General de Gaulle is ‘defecting’ from U.S. monopoly control, what interpretation can be placed on his ‘experiments’ in the Sahara desert, his paratroopers in Gabon, or his trips to Cambodia and Latin America?

 Lurking behind such questions are the extended tentacles of the Wall Street octopus. And its suction cups and muscular strength are provided by a phenomenon dubbed ‘The Invisible Government’, arising from Wall Street’s connection with the Pentagon and various intelligence services. I quote:

‘The Invisible Government ... is a loose amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government. It is not limited to the Central Intelligence Agency, although the CIA is at its heart. Nor is it confined to the nine other agencies which comprise what is known as the intelligence community: the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence and Research, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

‘The Invisible Government includes also many other units and agencies, as well as individuals, that appear outwardly to be a normal part of the conventional government. It even encompasses business firms and institutions that are seemingly private.

‘To an extent that is only beginning to be perceived, this shadow government is shaping the lives of 190,000,000 Americans. An informed citizen might come to suspect that the foreign policy of the United States often works publicly in one direction and secretly through the Invisible Government in just the opposite direction.

‘This Invisible Government is a relatively new institution. It came into being as a result of two related factors: the rise of the United States after World War II to a position of pre-eminent world power, and the challenge to that power by Soviet Communism...

‘By 1964 the intelligence network had grown into a massive hidden apparatus, secretly employing about 200,000 persons and spending billions of dollars a year. [The Invisible Government, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, Random House, New York, 1964.]

Here, from the very citadel of neo-colonialism, is a description of the apparatus which now directs all other Western intelligence set-ups either by persuasion or by force. Results were achieved in Algeria during the April 1961 plot of anti-de Gaulle generals; as also in Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, Suez and the famous U-2 spy intrusion of Soviet air space which wrecked the approaching Summit, then in West Germany and again in East Germany in the riots of 1953, in Hungary’s abortive crisis of 1959, Poland’s of September 1956, and in Korea, Burma, Formosa, Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam; they are evident in the trouble in Congo (Leopoldville) which began with Lumumba’s murder, and continues till now; in events in Cuba, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, and in other places too numerous to catalogue completely.

 

Biden must inspect America’s embrittled reactors

Biden must act to prevent what would constitute nuclear suicide in the United States.

By

 Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman

 -

February 3, 2021NationofChange

Become a powerful force for change

Of all the daunting tasks Joe Biden faces, especially vital is the inspection of dangerously embrittled atomic reactors still operating in the United States.

A meltdown at any one of them would threaten the health and safety of millions of people while causing major impact to an already struggling economy. The COVID-19 pandemic would complicate and add to the disaster. A nuclear power plant catastrophe would severely threaten accomplishments Biden is hoping to achieve in his presidency.

The problem of embrittlement is on the top of the list of nuclear power concerns. The “average age”—length of operation—of nuclear power plants in the U.S., the federal government’s Energy information Agency, reported in 2019 was 38 years. 

 https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-industry.php#:~:text=At%20the%20end%20of%20December,commercial%20operation%20in%20December%201969 

Now, in 2021, the “average age” of nuclear power plants in the U.S. is 40 years—the length of time originally seen when nuclear power began in the U.S. for how long plants could operate before embrittlement set in. 

That’s why the operating licenses originally issued for the plants were limited to 40 years.

Here’s how Arnold “Arnie” Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with more than 44 years of experience in the nuclear industry, who became a whistleblower and is now chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates, explains embrittlement: “When exposed to radiation, metal becomes embrittled and eventually can crack like glass. The longer the radiation exposure, the worse the embrittlement becomes.”  

“A nuclear reactor is just like a pressure cooker and is a pot designed to hold the radioactive contents of the atomic chain reaction in the nuclear core,” continues Gundersen, whose experience includes being a licensed Critical Facility Reactor Operator. “And metals in reactors are exposed to radiation every day a plant operates”

“If the reactor is embrittled and cracks,” says Gundersen, “it’s ‘game over’ as all the radiation can spew out into the atmosphere. Diablo Canyon [a twin-reactor facility in California] is the worst, the most embrittled nuclear power facility in the U.S., but there are plenty of others that also could crack. Starting with Diablo, every reactor in the U.S. should be checked to determine they are too embrittled to continue to safely operate.” 

Metals inside a nuclear power plant are bombarded with radiation, notes Gundersen. The steel used in reactor pressure vessels—which contain the super-hot nuclear cores—is not immune. 

Every U.S. reactor has an Emergency Core Cooling System and a Core Spray System to flood the super-hot core in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident. 

Embrittled metal would shatter when hit with that cold water. 

The ensuing explosion could then blow apart the containment structure—as happened at the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants—morphing into a radioactive plume moving into the atmosphere and be carried by the winds, dropping deadly fall-out wherever it goes.

This apocalyptic outcome was barely missed in Pennsylvania where, starting at 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, fuel inside the Three Mile Island Unit Two nuclear power plant began to melt. 

Its Emergency Core Cooling System was activated. But only the year before—in 1978—did the plant receive a license to operate and begin operating.

Had TMI, like so many of U.S. nuclear power plants now, been decades old and its metal pressure vessel embrittled and had shattered—a far greater disaster would have occurred. The entire northeastern U.S. could have been blanketed with deadly radioactivity

The “fleet” of old, decrepit nuclear power plants in the U.S.—with embrittled metal components—must be inspected. And with embrittlement they must be shut down.

Biden must jump into the situation—for the sake of American lives, for the sake of the nation’s future. 

Nuclear power in the U.S. is under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. That acronym NRC should really stand for Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission.  Whatever the nuclear industry wants, the NRC says yes to.

As the result of the series of globally infamous catastrophic nuclear power plant accidents—at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima—and the availability of safe, green, cost-effective, clean renewable energy, led by solar and wind, coupled with increasing energy efficiency, the nuclear industry is in its death throes. 

Only two nuclear power plants are being built now in the U.S., Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia.  At nearly $30 billion for the pair, they’re hugely over budget—and their construction costs are still rising.  In fact, virtually all operating atomic reactors are producing electricity at much higher base costs than solar and wind.   

The NRC is currently seeking to try to bail out the nuclear industry—to keep it going—by allowing nuclear power plants to operate for 100 years.

In recent years it agreed to let nuclear power plants to run for 60 years and then it upped that to 80 years.

On January 21 the Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission held a “public meeting” on its plan to now extend operating licenses for U.S. nuclear power plants and allow them to run for 100 years. Speaker after speaker protested this scheme.

“It’s time to stop this whole nuke con job,” testified Erica Gray nuclear issues chair of the Virginia Sierra Club, at the meeting. There is “no solution” to dealing with nuclear waste, she said. It is “unethical to continue to make the most toxic waste known to mankind.” And renewable energy” with solar and wind “can power the world.” 

“Our position… is a resounding no,” declared Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project of the national organization Beyond Nuclear, for letting nuclear power plants run for 100 years.

Speakers cited the greatly increased likelihood of accidents if nuclear plants were allowed to run for a century. 

Biden must step in and order the inspection for embrittlement of U.S. nuclear power plants.  

The “fleet” of old, decrepit nuclear power plants in the U.S.—with embrittled metal components—must be inspected. And with embrittlement and other likely age-induced problems, they must be shut down.  

Biden must act to prevent what would constitute nuclear suicide in the United States.

On January 27, Biden announced a climate change agenda transitioning the U.S. towards renewable energy. But taking action against fossil fuel is not enough. Nuclear power plants are also engines of global warming. The “nuclear fuel chain” which includes uranium mining, milling and fuel enrichment is carbon intensive. Nuclear plants themselves emit Carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. 

Biden must take the lead. NOW! 

Harvey Wasserman wrote the books Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and The Peoples Spiral of US History. He helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.” He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org  Karl Grossman is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He is the host of the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman (www.envirovideo.com)

Guns, memes and dreams of civil war: The background of the Boogaloo

“Go to the riots and support our own cause. Show them the real targets. Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.”

By

 Derek Royden

 -

January 29, 2021NationofChange

On May 28th of last year, in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests touched off by the police killing of George Floyd in the city, Minneapolis’ 3rd Police Precinct was burned to the ground. Many commentators, including the former U.S. president and the governor of Minnesota, blamed ‘far left’ protesters or ‘antifa’ for the blaze.

As we learned much later, the arson is alleged to have been the work of at least 4 people, one of whom, Ivan Harrison Hunter, is a self-proclaimed member of a loosely affiliated far right group, the Boogaloo Bois. The 26 year old is accused of driving 1200 miles from his home in south Texas to Minnesota with the seeming aim of creating chaos.

According to a press release from the U.S. Justice Department, Hunter, 26, was arrested on October 21st in San Antonio and charged with, among other things, travelling across state lines to participate in a riot. Cited as evidence in the release was a video of a person alleged to be Hunter firing thirteen rounds into the 3rd precinct while what were described as looters were still inside the burning building. Shell casings found at the scene from a rifle like the one he owns were also said by authorities to corroborate the charges.

This wasn’t the only arrest of a person claiming to represent the Boogaloos during the summer protests, let alone the most disturbing one. The group, or at least some of those who claim to be part of it, has evolved from its origins as a meme, ‘Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo’ (itself a play on the title of the sequel to the 1984 movie “Breakin”) on 4Chan’s /k/ board, an already strange and often racist place devoted to discussions of firearms, military history and other weapons like combat knives.

Although numerous people who post to online Boogaloo groups and boards, which also change the name to similar sounding ones like ‘Big Luau’ and ‘Big Igloo’ to aid in the creation of new memes and stay ahead of purges by internet service providers and social media giants like Facebook, have ties to white supremacy, and at least some in the movement are open Neo-Nazis, those that seek to represent them in the real world, like Magnus Panvidya, are now presenting themselves as anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ libertarians.

In a nutshell, Michigan based Panvidya, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, claims the Boogaloo’s main similarity to the far right militias that came before them and who they have associated with is their hatred of government, most visible in day to day life in the form of law enforcement. There seems to be an effort underway by those who want to speak for the still mostly online movement to walk back the open calls for war that are part of its origin story and likely motivated people accused of crimes like Harrison Hunter.

Hunter texted another self-proclaimed Boogaloo, Steven Carillo, after leaving the burning 3rd Precinct in late May, advising him to target buildings used by police.

Carillo, 32, who had made his way from Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, California and was already engaged in his own violent rampage in Oakland that Thursday reportedly replied, “I did better lol.”

The air force Sergeant was later charged with murdering two people, one a security guard at The Oakland Federal Building and the other a policeman he is said to have ambushed in his car, with Carrillo allegedly shooting at sheriff’s deputies and throwing explosives during the attack. Another man, Robert Alvin Justus Jr, known to share Boogaloo memes online, also faces federal charges; he is accused of driving the vehicle during the Federal Building attack, which also injured another guard.

Both incidents were also unfairly associated by many in media with BLM protests that were presumably used by these men as cover for their alleged crimes.

One of the most alarming things about the case is the fact that Carrilo was a military policeman employed by the air force and was a team leader of the Phoenix Ravens, an elite unit “charged with providing security to airlift and tanker aircraft traveling through highly dangerous areas.”

The age of people like Hunter and Carrillo and the online in-joke meme culture of the Boogaloo movement, in general, makes it more perplexing and in many ways more threatening than the provocations of more middle aged groups influenced by gang culture like the Proud Boys.

Although many of those who claim to speak for the Boogaloo movement say that they support BLM, it does seem that those who acted at the time saw the summer protests as an opportunity to work toward their wider ‘accelerationalist’ goal of creating widespread civil unrest, as Carillo reportedly wrote before his violent spree, “Go to the riots and support our own cause. Show them the real targets. Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.”

The idea of accelerationism is also usually associated with white supremacists, including the attacker who killed 11 at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October of 2018 and is said to be central to the manifesto of the Australian man who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in March the following year.

There was also a t-shirt for sale online with a photograph of the man who killed 1 person and injured 3 others in the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in California with the word ‘Boogaloo’ underneath it.

One major aspect of the Boogaloo movement that has manifested in real life but has been overshadowed by the actions of Hunter and Carillo, is the involvement of members in earlier (and still ongoing) protests around public health mandates throughout the United States. Unless you knew how to spot them, which isn’t hard considering that they also wear uniforms usually consisting of body armor, helmets or balaclavas (the latter to represent ‘Big Igloo’) and Hawaiian shirts, which I don’t think I did at the time, you might have marveled at the strange level of cosplaying at work on the far right.

Not only were Boogaloo Bois among those who showed up for some of the earliest protests of this kind, including a widely covered one at the Michigan Capitol on April 30th of last year. A number of Boogaloos present at the protest, which ended with heavily armed protesters entering the building in a scene that mirrors the later attack on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6th, were later arrested and accused of being part of a plot to kidnap the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

Despite everything we now know about this group, all of it on the public record, one Youtube commentator with over 800,000 subscribers gave a boost to the group by first uncritically reporting on a recent speech made by Magnus Panvidya at the Michigan State Capitol calling on BLM and antifa to join with the Boogaloos and rightwing militias to fight government overreach, including pandemic related lockdowns and then having him on his stream for a long interview.

This isn’t just about a few commentators growing their audiences by appealing to elements of the right, it’s about larger efforts to reframe the far right through populism as ideologically on the side of working people. It also allows the Boogaloo movement to draw new recruits from the left where they are desperately needed in this time of crisis.

Rather than relying on talk of a second American revolution or a civil war to deal with the very real struggles facing working people, the American left should look to workers like those at the Hunt’s Point Produce Market who won the largest concessions from ownership in decades through a week long labor action and those inspiring progressive politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who raised their voices in support of them.

This kind of action is how a united left brings change.

Germany: 1,200 right-wing extremists licensed to own weapons

Germany's domestic intelligence agency has revealed that more than 1,200 far-right extremists have a firearms licence. Authorities also reported that extremists attended shooting practices, mostly outside Germany.


Hundreds of Reichsbürger are among the known weapons owners in Germany

While monitoring known and presumed far-right extremists, Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency discovered last December that 1,203 of them were licensed to possess firearms.

And, according to December 2019 data also released by the Interior Ministry, 528 license-holders were the so-called Reichsbürger — members of a right-wing organization which rejects Germany's democratic order.

Furthermore, 17 cases of single or multiple-series shooting practices attended by far-right extremists between early 2019 and late 2020 had "become known" to the BfV, three-quarters of them taking place in other parts of Europe.

Shooting range usage was in itself is "not a criminal offense," the ministry added, citing Germany's federal police.

Replying to a set of questions in parliament submitted by the opposition Left party, the ministry said a conclusive BfV count of rightist extremists with gun licenses in 2019 was not yet available. 

'Growing threat posed by neo-Nazis and racists'

During gun law debate in the Bundestag parliament in December 2019, the Left's interior affairs specialist Martina Renner gave an estimate that over 700 "neo-Nazis" still had weapons.

Speaking in the Bundestag in December 2019, Martina Renner urged changes to Germany's gun laws

In a special report last September, the BfV agency estimated that 13,000 violence-prone right-wing extremists were living in Germany. The agency also cited a "pronounced affinity" for weapons among the so-called "New Right."

Germany has two forms of licensing: one for hunters and sports shooters, and another one for people like bodyguards who need to be specially licensed to carry weapons in public. Recent law changes were intended to tighten ownership control for the previous group.

Renner, who has also been a Left appointee at past parliamentary commissions of inquiry into acts of terrorism, said Tuesday the latest data "proves the growing threat posed by neo-Nazis and racists."

"As expected, the involvement of the [BfV] intelligence service has not proven to be an effective measure against the arming of the right-wing scene," said Renner, who has personally faced far-right threats.
Far-right murders

In their parliamentary question submitted in December, Renner and other Left members had also asked for information on the use of weapons, both legal and illegal, in 2019 and 2020.

Germany's federal police recorded 176 acts of violence in 2019, replied the ministry, noting foremost the murder in 2019 of Kassel district administrator Walter Lübcke. The case resulted in the lifelong prison sentence for neo-Nazi Stephan Ernst — and a far shorter sentence for Markus H.*, for illegally possessing a handgun.

Both men had trained with handguns and long-barreled arms on shooting ranges of two clubs near Kassel, the ministry noted in its reply to parliament.

The perpetrator of last year's racist shooting in Hanau, Tobias R.*, had on three occasions in 2019 visited shooting ranges in Slovakia, the ministry added.

Twice he was refused admittance. On the third occasion he trained on his own, it said.

The 43-year-old German went on to murder nine people in Hanau last February, before killing his mother and himself.

A street mural in Frankfurt remembers three of the Hanau victims with the phrase 'Never forget'

Danger to asylum-seekers?

The authorities also replied to a question regarding the use of weapons in the proximity of hostels for asylum-seekers. The Interior Ministry listed 24 incidents of far-right "politically motivated crime" in 2019 — largely involving the use of air and gas-propelled guns and warning pistols.

Last year, seven such incidents were recorded, it said, in the nationwide LAPOS registry in which the affected category of "asylum-seekers/refugees" was added in 2019.

"A distinction between 'legal' and 'illegal' weapons is not possible on the basis of LAPOS," conceded thr ministry.

*DW has refrained from publishing certain last names in accordance with Germany's privacy laws.

ipj/dj (dpa, epd)