Wednesday, May 26, 2021
DUPING A WHISTLEBLOWER
By John Kiriakou, Consortium News.
May 23, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/duping-a-whistleblower/
What Just Happened To Daniel Hale Is Yet Another Injustice.
What has happened to whistleblower Daniel Hale is very troubling. A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, he was arrested on May 4 in advance of his July 13 sentencing for blowing the whistle on the U.S. government’s deadly and illegal drone program.
Justice Department prosecutors maintain that Hale had “violated the terms of his bail.” In court, his attorneys maintained “there were no violations committed by the defendant as alleged.” They’re right. The government is lying. Daniel explained what happened to me in a phone call from jail. And what happened is yet another injustice against this hero. For the record, Daniel is permitting me to make these details public.
Like any whistleblower facing years, or possibly decades, in prison, he is depressed. He had casually told his therapist a few days before his arrest that he was depressed and did not want to go to prison. This is, of course, an utterly logical emotion.
I was depressed when I was awaiting sentencing after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, and I didn’t want to go to prison either. The therapist took it upon himself to report Hale to prosecutors as “suicidal” and “a danger to himself.”
He said he wasn’t suicidal and posed no danger to himself or to anybody else. But he had no idea that the therapist had ratted him out to prosecutors. A court officer then called Hale and told him to go to the courthouse for a routine urinalysis. He dutifully went in as ordered, with a full bladder, and was promptly arrested. He was told that it was “for his own safety.”
Risky Move
Hale is already is facing an uphill battle as he approaches sentencing. He agreed last month to plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act for passing classified documents to a reporter, without a sentencing recommendation from prosecutors. It was a risky strategic move, but one urged by his attorneys.
He would plead guilty, hope that prosecutors would drop the remaining four charges and hope further that the judge would issue a lenient sentence. Prosecutors have bandied about the idea of five years in prison. That’s a long time. And with a national security crime, Daniel would be ineligible to spend his sentence in a minimum-security work camp. This isn’t “justice.”
Hale is facing several challenges with which most national security whistleblowers are confronted. The Justice Department wants to make an example of him to frighten other would-be whistleblowers from going public. The prosecutors want to get him the longest possible sentence to improve their own chances of promotion or of going on to a lucrative career in the private sector.
The judge has a reputation for being tough in sentencing national-security cases and is unlikely to take pity on him. And he is represented by public defenders who, although they have great reputations, are overworked and underpaid. In addition, one of Hale’s attorneys had a recent death in the family and has been out of touch for three weeks.
The prospects for a fair hearing are not good. How can Daniel Hale, or any defendant, adequately defend himself from solitary confinement or without ready access to his attorneys? How can any defendant without available cash afford to defend himself in the first place?
The entire system must be changed, and this can only be done legislatively. Hoping for the best won’t work. After all, as they say in business school, hope is not a strategy.
Please write to Daniel Hale. He told me he is desperate for news articles and asks if he can be sent printouts of articles on politics and international affairs. He is NOT PERMITTED to receive articles with photos in them, and he is NOT PERMITTED to receive books. He can be reached at Daniel E. Hale, William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center, 2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, VA 22314.
MORE OF THE SAME: BIDEN’S HYBRID WAR AGAINST CHINA
By Madison Tang and Jodie Evans, Asia Times.
May 23, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/more-of-the-same-bidens-hybrid-war-against-china/
The Policy Of Singling Out A Rising China For ‘Containment’ To Maintain US Dominance Abroad Has Been Long In The Making.
US President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year was recently announced, and it requests $715 billion for his first Pentagon budget, 1.6% more than the $704 billion enacted under Donald Trump’s administration. The outline states that the primary justification for this increase in military spending is to counter the threat of China, and identifies China as the United States’ “top challenge.”
Within the proposal is an endorsement of US Indo-Pacific Command head Admiral Philip Davidson’s request for $4.7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative,” which will increase US military capabilities in Guam and the surrounding region. The Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in additional spending between 2022 and 2027 to build a network of precision-strike missiles along the islands surrounding Beijing.
The United States’ unilateral aggression toward China – in the hybrid form of economic, legal, information, and military warfare – is particularly dangerous because there is bipartisan consensus in Washington on these policies.
And while the anti-China stance may seem like a recent phenomenon to some, the consolidation of a US national-security policy that singles out a rising China as a target for “containment” in order to maintain US dominance abroad has been long in the making.
After the fall of the USSR in 1989, the US had no further political need to cooperate or engage with China to counterbalance the Soviet Union. Led by Andrew Marshall, a member of RAND and the top adviser to 12 secretaries of defense, the Pentagon’s military supremacy policy (or “full-spectrum dominance,” as the Department of Defense calls it) since then has gradually shifted focus to containing an emerging China.
In 1992, neoconservatives drafted the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) document, or the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” which announced the US role as the world’s only remaining superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union and proclaimed the prevention of “the re-emergence of a new rival” as its main objective.
While this document was dismissed for its hubris when it was leaked, scholar and journalist K J Noh explains that its ideas were not discarded and were later converted into the 2000 “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” document by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Along with its focus on stated enemy nations like Russia, North Korea, Iran and Iraq, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” explicitly stated that “with Europe now generally at peace, the new strategic center of concern appears to be shifting to East Asia. The missions for America’s armed forces have not diminished so much as shifted,” and that “raising US military strength in East Asia is the key to coping with the rise of China to great-power status.”
So when secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced the United States’ “pivot to Asia” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2011, although she emphasized the positive rebalance and opportunity the Asia-Pacific region presented for the US economy, behind the scenes she was adhering to PNAC’s defense strategy as the intellectual justification for the transference of 60% of US naval capacity to the Asia-Pacific region, including the encircling of China with 400 US military bases with invasive radar and missile systems.
Defensive Or Pre-Emptive?
Now the US is launching a full-scale multi-pronged new cold war on China and is relying on the same threat-inflation strategies that foreign-policy architect Andrew Marshall and his hawkish neoconservative protégés began nearly three decades ago.
From this progression, it is clear that the Joe Biden administration’s stated reasons for escalating war and hostility with China – that the Chinese government is a dangerous aggressor and that the US must maintain a robust defensive posture in response – belie the United States’ historical and ongoing imperialist motivations in its involvement in the Asia-Pacific region.
Just as the 1992 “Wolfowitz Doctrine” explicitly defined itself as a “blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence,” President Biden vowed in his first formal press conference on March 25 that he would not let China surpass the US as a global leader.
“China has an overall goal … to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world,” he told reporters at the White House. “That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States is going to continue to grow.”
Upon closer examination, the notion that China is the aggressor and the US is maintaining a purely defensive military posture does not align with the facts.
For example, the US spends about three times as much on its military as China does. The US has more than 800 overseas bases compared with China’s three; 400 of these 800 US military bases are encircling China’s borders.
The US Indo-Pacific Command has been conducting extensive military exercises, including missile test flights, with regularity. As Fareed Zakaria recently described for The Washington Post, the US has nearly 20 times the number of nuclear warheads as China, has twice the tonnage of warships at sea, and has more than 130,000 troops stationed in the Indo-Pacific.
The People’s Liberation Army of China has also not waged a full-scale war outside its borders in more than 40 years since the Vietnam War, while the US has engaged in combat in more than 66 other nations since 1979.
Importantly, China maintains a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, and has even publicly called on nuclear-weapon states to create and join a multilateral Treaty on Mutual No First Use of Nuclear Weapons; the US does not maintain a no-first-use policy.
In fact, since the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the US has explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China, threatening “intolerable damage” in response to “non-nuclear or nuclear aggression.”
The US is continuing its attempts to maintain its status as a global power at all costs, rather than accepting the development of other nations as a positive form of progress for the international community.
Instead of provoking a new cold war, the US should be cooperating with China, whose administration has reiterated its willingness to maintain bilateral respect and non-confrontational relations, on pressing crises and humanitarian concerns like climate-change mitigation, global poverty, and equitable worldwide vaccine distribution during the Covid-19 pandemic.
CHILE IS REBORN: A (POLITICAL) EARTHQUAKE EMERGED FROM THE STREETS
By Patricio Zamorano, Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
May 23, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/chile-is-reborn-by-a-political-earthquake-that-emerged-from-the-streets/
What happened in Chile this past weekend seems to be one of those historic events that cannot but follow its inexorable course. It is like an enormous, powerful tsunami wave whose size cannot be appreciated on the high seas, until it comes crashing into the coast, stunning everyone with its massive strength. This happens with processes of change from the left and the right, in times of democracy and times of dictatorship.
Could any human force have stopped the inexorable onslaught of that immoral showman Donald Trump on his path to the U.S. presidency? Who would have believed that someone so dysfunctional on so many levels could have governed the most powerful country on the planet for four years? He got more than 70 million U.S. votes, making him the Republican to win the most votes in history, legitimizing his political and pseudo-ideological platform, whether we like it or not. His rise to power was unstoppable.
Fidel had the same telluric force of history behind him when 12 disciples of José Martí, decimated by the disastrous landing of the Granma, carried out an impossible revolution from the Sierra Maestra in just three years. This feat has stirred the passions of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike for some 60 years now.
Some political processes are simply unstoppable.
What just happened on May 15 and 16, 2021 in Chile has the same air of the refounding of an entire nation. It means the end of traditional party politics and the establishment of collectives with diverse origins. These collectives are focused on contemporary issues such as the environment, gender equality, local issues against capital centralism (Santiago), and the demands of other emerging sectors.
An Historic Constitutional Assembly
First, the numbers. Intense social unrest that raised demands in the streets was met by bloody repression by the security forces which deployed tear gas and rubber bullets, destroying the eyes of dozens of Chileans. The path was opened to something people had thought impossible within formal government institutions: 155 delegates have been elected to draft a new constitution for Chile. These are people from the political class, social movements, grass roots organizations, and many independents. Out of those 155, according to data from the Electoral Service of Chile (SERVEL), 77% identify with left-leaning values, are against Pinochet’s legacy, and reject the neoliberal model founded in the military repression of September 11, 1973.
The right-wing parties banding together in “Vamos Chile” needed 54 delegates to the constituent assembly to break the two-thirds majority and wield veto power. They only obtained 37 seats, which in practice means that they will only have limited power from the political margins.
These results are completely logical. The right-wing parties in Congress, in Sebastián Piñera’s Executive Branch, and in the media have spent all these years systematically blocking all efforts by the country’s majority to reform the healthcare system and make it more just; to reform the education system and make it more accessible to the entire population; and to reform the tax system to make it more equitable. The actual truth is that with an agenda so disconnected from the despair of the overwhelming majority of the Chilean people, the great leaders of the right and of Chilean capital cannot escape their own responsibility for the defeat that befell them last weekend.
The neoliberal ideology pretended to champion markets that would be free from state intervention. Yet as the Chilean experiment demonstrates, it took massive social control by the state with no check and balances (no Congress, no political parties, no social movements), and a harsh reign of terror, to enforce the structural adjustment packages that imposed austerity to facilitate the economic exploitation of human and natural resources. In fact, corporate interests have politically captured the state, putting its institutions at the service of capital, for all governments after Pinochet, both center-left and center-right ones. Furthermore, the promises of “accumulation of capital” for all Chileans that would be created by “trickle-down economics” was a complete failure, except for a minority of those with the highest incomes.
Today’s Chile is advocating with the language of “sexual diversity,” “gender parity,” “equal rights and opportunities,” “inclusion,” “tolerance,” and “social dignity.” Some of the most conservative right-wing Chileans appear disconnected, reactive, and very uncomfortable with this new reality that they have yet to comprehend.
Mayor Of Santiago From The Communist Party
The historic gestures are impressive for a conservative country such as Chile. Along with representatives to the constituent assembly, mayors and city council members were also elected.
Santiago, the capital, will now be led by Iraci Hassler as mayor. She is an economist from the University of Chile and notably a member of the Communist Party (CP). Fifty years after the policy of extermination and torture imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship on the Communist Party of Chile (the party of Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great singer-songwriter Víctor Jara), there is no doubt that this electoral victory is a hard symbolic blow to the most conservative, militaristic, and anti-communist sectors of the country. Social media has revealed their ideological anxiety: dozens of memes painting the electoral districts with the symbol of the CP (the hammer and sickle) and words in Russian. This is a reminder of the irrational politics that still run strong among this radical minority in a country undergoing a profound transformation.
There was also an explicit effort to inject gender and cultural parity into the election for the Constitutional Convention, ensuring that at least 45% of the seats went to women and reserving 17 seats for indigenous communities. This is vital to reflect the wishes of the Chilean people when 80% of them voted for a new constitution in the plebiscite of October 2020. The objective of this popular outpouring is to eliminate all anti-democratic provisions inherited from the 1980 militaristic constitution inspired by the Chicago Boys.
Delegates have an opportunity to remove capitalist equations from areas such as health, education, and pensions, returning those key aspects of Chilean life to the category of fundamental social rights. Broadly speaking, delegates can now establish a more just constitutional framework in order to better distribute wealth and income among the whole population and neutralize the country’s tremendous inequality—one of the worst on the planet.
The Numbers Reflect A Seismic Shift
In electoral terms, it is a scenario of major change. Valparaíso, the second largest city in the country, was kept by independent leftist Mayor Jorge Sharpo. Viña del Mar, another major urban center near Valparaíso, was carried by Macarena Ripamonti, a member of the new leftist collective Frente Amplio. Frente Amplio is not one of the traditional parties, and has wrested from the right wing a city that normally votes conservative. And in Concepción, independent leftist Camilo Rifo came in second place, leaving the right wing in third.
In Santiago, the right lost large municipalities, including Maipú, Ñuñoa, Estación Central, and San Bernardo, to name a few.
In sum, the entire region around greater Santiago, home to one third of the population (about 6 out of 19 million people), according to SERVEL reports as of today, gave the center-left 27 mayoral offices, while the right only won 14 (of course, including many of the wealthy neighborhoods of eastern Santiago). Add to that total 11 independents.
What’s Next
The next steps include the launching of the new Constitutional Convention between June and July of this year. It will have nine to 12 months to draft the new Charter. Approximately 60 days after this task is completed, a new and final plebiscite will be held to approve or reject the new constitution. That is, 2022 should usher in a new constitution for Chile.
Beyond the numbers and electoral engineering, what happened last weekend lends immense legitimacy to what the people have been demanding in the streets, from the grass roots of society. It has left no doubt of the need for the country’s business and financial sectors to take a hard look at the imperious need to support a process of reconstruction, which at the end of the day, their own representative at La Moneda, Sebastián Piñera, was unable to do. Six points of negative growth in 2020, amplified by the pandemic, the social explosion, and chronic inequality in the country have left no room for ideological protectionism among Conservatives.
Either they join the process of change, trying to influence it as much as they can with the seats they have won at the polls, or they remain alienated from millions of families’ longing for recovery—expectations that cannot be held back. The other path is the strategy of failure that they have been implementing throughout Chile’s history: launch a plan to boycott the country’s political and social development, using their de facto power to keep hindering the reforms the country needs. The obstructionist path would hurt their own pocket books, keep the streets in flames, and betray the essential value of “homeland” that supposedly is their most cherished value.
For Chile’s right wing, the popular vote has made it brutally clear: it is time to get on the right side of history.
DRAFT LEGISLATION WOULD PUT GIG WORKERS INTO TOOTHLESS ‘UNIONS’
By Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes.
May 23, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/breaking-draft-legislation-in-new-york-would-put-gig-workers-into-toothless-unions/
New York – An effort backed by the New York State AFL-CIO would create a new bargaining scheme for app-based workers without addressing the question of whether or not these workers are legally “employees.”
Labor Notes obtained a draft version of the legislation that is being negotiated by unions and app employers.
Workers for apps like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash are currently considered independent contractors; most in the labor movement consider them misclassified, a tactic the companies use to avoid paying the full cost of benefits. These workers are blocked from unionizing by antitrust laws, and don’t have the protection of the National Labor Relations Board (or many other protections).
To sidestep this, the draft legislation would enact a new process to recognize unions and bargain agreements—relying on the state government to enact the negotiated “recommendations” as regulations.
But the draft bill includes much to give labor activists pause, and marks a departure from the national push against misclassification.
“It’s about creating a distraction and a real carve-out from the PRO Act,” said Bhairavi Desai, director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
The federal PRO Act, which much of the labor movement is pushing for, would sidestep the question of misclassification but allow independent contractors to unionize under certain conditions using the National Labor Relations Act.
New York State Senator Jessica Ramos, chair of the Labor Committee, has just released a statement that she will not be backing the draft bill because “We will not legitimize any company union. We will not undermine the PRO Act.”
The Big Uglies
We don’t know what would end up in the final legislation. But the biggest immediate concerns fall into two major categories: departures from existing labor law, and lessening local regulatory power over gig companies.
This legislation says that workers would be put into a union that they likely never voted for, and which would not be funded by workers, and barred from putting up any serious fight for an agreement—no strikes, no boycotts, no picketing. It would create a new type of legally recognized union which is not financially accountable to its members. This should be deeply concerning to those who care about building powerful, democratic unions.
This draft legislation would also take away local governments’ power to rein in gig employers—New York localities could no longer create specific minimum wages for app workers or rules about their working conditions. What’s more, cities would lose the ability to legislate about these companies at all. Local governments couldn’t create taxes or surcharges on the services, or rules for how they must operate. NYC already has a cap on the number of rideshare drivers; this would be thrown out. If a local government wanted to put a surcharge on rides or deliveries to fund infrastructure, or green jobs, or schools—it couldn’t. This power would rest solely with the state.
This type of legislation is not entirely new, but this may be the furthest it’s gotten. Two years ago, as California legislators were preparing Assembly Bill 5 to rein in misclassification, Uber and Lyft were approaching major unions, including SEIU and the Teamsters, in an attempt to preempt the legislation with a compromise. When that didn’t work, the companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on last fall’s ballot measure, Proposition 22, to carve themselves out. They won, and they’ve made no secret of their intention to get the same deal in other states.
Now, up against the might of these incredibly powerful companies, some labor leaders are looking for compromise legislation of their own. What’s in it for the apps? Legislation like this could help siphon off labor organizing energy and undermine campaigns for tougher legislation.
Two Massive Units, One Union Each
The legislation covers app-based workers in two groups: rideshare drivers, who perform on-call taxi service for companies like Uber and Lyft; and delivery workers, who deliver packages, groceries, and restaurant orders for companies like Instacart, Amazon, DoorDash, and Seamless. Each of these two groups would become a massive, statewide unit. The draft bill sets up a process (detailed below) for one union to cover each group.
Rideshare companies employ around 80,000 drivers in New York City alone, a figure that is currently capped by local legislation. The number of delivery workers is less clear, but would include between 50,000 and 80,000 food delivery workers as well as Amazon “Flex” drivers and probably others.
The likely unions—based on who’s been pushing this legislation—would be the Machinists’ Independent Drivers Guild for the rideshare drivers, and the Transport Workers Union for delivery workers. The IDG already claims to represent the 80,000 app-based drivers in New York City, but this would formalize its role. The Machinists’ project has come under scrutiny for receiving money from Uber.
Recognition
The recognition process relies in part on labor peace agreements—familiar in places like construction and the burgeoning cannabis industry. Here, the agreement requires companies to sign a peace deal with a union that meets certain requirements; the union is then restricted from encouraging any “picketing, strikes, slow downs, or boycotts” until a finalized deal has been ratified by the state.
The unions only have to show signed cards of support from 10 percent of the workers in the unit—there’s no election. (What if more than one union shows interest? It reads as an afterthought; the labor commissioner is supposed to come up with a process in that case.) Contrast that with the union authorization process run by the National Labor Relations Board, where 30 percent of workers must sign union cards to trigger an election, which can even include competing unions on the same ballot.
Under the draft law, the state ultimately gets to decide if the union should be recognized—because, in addition to the 10 percent show of support, the union must have “demonstrated experience in representing network workers or other related workers in reaching agreements with companies for at least five years.” (“Network” is being used here as a synonym for “app.”)
This puts significant power in the hands of the commissioner of the state’s Department of Labor, appointed by the governor, to determine whether or not a union is eligible to represent workers. This could lead to competing worker organizations being disqualified. The Taxi Workers Alliance, for example, is not a formal union in the legal sense, though it has members and strikes; it’s unclear whether it would meet the standard of “reaching agreements.”
“We read that as they want to make sure TWA is locked out,” Desai said. “It’s meant to favor—that’s not even strong enough—IDG and it’s meant to get rid of us.”
Service Employees Local 32BJ has been supporting the Worker’s Justice Project, a worker center, in its campaign to organize app-based delivery drivers—but will the state say that WJP or even SEIU has the requisite experience representing “network” workers?
Getting rid of or changing the union would require a much more significant lift, and an election. Thirty percent of workers would have to say they wanted a decertification election, and a majority of all workers (not just those voting) would have to vote to decertify. If they wanted a different union, workers would have to go through the process of showing 10 percent support again (after decertifying the existing union), and have the state “certify” their organization.
What’s The Deal?
Once a union was certified, the rideshare companies would bargain together for one agreement, and the delivery companies would bargain a separate one, each across the table from the chosen union. The draft legislation demands that the negotiators bring state representatives a deal covering a handful of topics, including union access to workers and a minimum five-year agreement.
The two most remarkable topics they would negotiate are a “portable benefits fund” and the minimum wage for drivers. Portable benefits is a vague term that can mean a lot of different things that aren’t tied to a specific job—anything from Social Security to privatized unemployment insurance for misclassified workers. Here, the union and the employers are told to set up a nonprofit and negotiate how much money to send its way, though the legislation doesn’t say anything about what benefits this should cover. Unemployment? Workers compensation? Family leave? It would be up to them to figure that out. Many of these things are mandated for W-2 employees by laws that don’t cover independent contractors.
The wage negotiations are supposed to have a “floor,” consisting of a local minimum wage plus a mileage rate. The kicker, though, is that these only cover active time—that is, time the workers spend performing the job. App workers have long complained about unpaid idle time while they’re waiting for dispatch—this was a big push for California’s Assembly Bill 5, and NYC passed a driver minimum wage that covered inactive time (more on this later).
No Dues, But Lots Of Cash
The draft legislation provides a direct line of funding for the unions involved, in the form of surcharges. Each ride in an Uber or food delivery by an Instacart worker would have a 10-cent surcharge, paid by the customer, which companies would collect and then hand over to the unions.
This doesn’t necessarily preclude unions from setting up dues and membership structures, but it does provide them a huge pot of money without having to do that. Right before the pandemic, rideshare companies were hitting 750,000 rides a day in New York City. So the rideshare union would get $75,000 per day—almost $27.5 million per year—just from NYC, even before you figure in all the drivers in the rest of the state.
Prognosis
The New York legislature is only in session for a little less than two weeks, leaving a small window for this to pass this year. The IDG has tried to pass similar legislation over the past several years, but this time it is opening the door to the support of another union by including a separate unit of delivery workers.
Similar legislation was floated recently in Connecticut, before it was allegedly shut down by the national AFL-CIO—in part because of its contradictions with the federal PRO Act, which would provide many misclassified “independent contractors” the right to organize and bargain under the National Labor Relations Act.
As app-based employers continue to grow in size and power, they will keep looking for creative new ways to undermine labor law. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for them to find allies in labor who are willing to gamble away workers’ rights for the promise of quick, massive membership increases.
Half of US States Report 50 Percent of Adults Are Fully Vaccinated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr_Fxnz_9Q4
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