https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGpdm0r8JMc
Saturday, June 4, 2022
These Baristas Have Been On Strike For Over Three Months
https://popularresistance.org/these-baristas-have-been-on-strike-for-over-3-months-to-get-their-union-recognized/
By Hannah Faris , In These Times. June 2, 2022
To Get Their Union Recognized.
At Great Lakes Coffee, Workers Are On The Picket Line Demanding Their Rights—Part Of A Growing National Movement To Organize The Cafe Industry.
Detroit, Illinois – At Great Lakes Coffee Roasters, a cafe in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood, 20 baristas have been on strike since February 16, demanding recognition of their union and a first contact. Calling themselves “Comrades in Coffee,” these workers have launched one of the first recognition strikes — a labor action forcing an employer to acknowledge a collective bargaining representative — that the city has seen in years. Their demands include higher wages and improved workplace safety and benefits. The baristas also say they want to set a new standard for cafes across Detroit, while joining a national movement of cafe organizing.
The small chain employs about 24 baristas and cooks across the metro area, in the flagship cafe in Midtown and four satellite locations in local grocery stores. Workers are organizing with Unite Here Local 24, Detroit Metro’s hospitality union representing over 7,000 workers in the hotel, food service and airport industries. Over three months into the strike, management has closed down its largest store while still refusing to meet workers at the bargaining table.
Annabelle Aquino, who began working as a barista at the company’s Midtown location last year, tells In These Times that she loved making coffee and deepening connections with those in her community. Aquino, who also works as a special education teacher, describes the cafe as a hotspot in a busy neighborhood, and a place where workers hosted their own community events.
“But things started going downhill,” Aquino says, as conditions all too common in the coffee industry — including low pay and poor scheduling — soon added undue stress to the job. Great Lakes baristas say they make an average of about $10 to 11 an hour base pay, which could rise to $15 an hour with tips. Without a living wage, many baristas, including Aquino, worked multiple jobs. “As hardworking people who were doing our jobs and work outside of what we were trained or asked to do initially, we were not getting what we deserved.”
Max Capasso, a Great Lakes barista at a satellite location, says that on top of low wages, many workers living paycheck-to-paycheck were often scheduled with significant cuts to their hours. Capasso, who depended on getting scheduled at least 30 hours a week, said at times their hours have been cut to less than 10 a week with little notice. “At the end of the day it’s a huge industry that makes a lot of money,” says Capasso. “We are part of the process generating that money, and we’re not getting our fair share of it.”
For Lex Blom, a four-year barista at Great Lakes’ Midtown location, workplace safety is a pressing concern. “I worked in welding and I’ve gotten more injuries from this job,” Blom says. She adds that the pandemic only exacerbated safety concerns, as Great Lakes baristas’ calls for PPE and stronger Covid-19 protocols were largely ignored by management.
When an Omicron outbreak tore through the store in early January, nine out of 15 workers were out sick the same week, leaving only a handful to run the store. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Blom, who had contracted the virus at the end of December. Though Blom alerted management, she says other Great Lakes workers were not informed of the exposure, and instead found out via Blom’s social media.
On January 10, workers sent an email to management demanding the store remain closed until the remaining workers receive negative PCR tests, as well as hazard backpay for those who worked through the outbreak. In response, management said they would “assume resignations” for all employees who did not report to their scheduled shift. The union has since filed an Unfair Labor Practice Petition (ULP), alleging that management was threatening to fire employees for abstaining from work for their safety.
The following day the store was closed “temporarily” for employee safety and has yet to reopen as of early June. Employees who were left out of work were told by management that they could pick up shifts from two satellite stores in the Metro area, though workers allege that management at these locations were told not to contact Midtown workers. Most workers were forced to get new jobs to pay the bills.
“As I watched my savings account drain I frantically paid for my rent, utilities, car payment and student loans,” says Aquino. “I had to cancel medical appointments and struggled to pay for groceries.”
Coffee solidarity
Out of work and fed up, workers began to organize. They contacted Michigan’s AFL-CIO, who connected them with Unite Here in mid-January. On February 16, after over a month without pay, 20 of the chain’s 24 workers launched the recognition strike, demanding recognition of their union and a first contract.
Nia Winston, Unite Here Local 24 President, has regularly joined Great Lakes baristas on the picket line and describes the workers as fearless. “These workers were extremely fed up with their employer and were ready to organize in a way that I have never seen before in my history in the labor movement,” says Winston. “[Workers said] ‘we have the majority, we’re not going back to work until our demands are met, we want respect on the job and we want proper health and safety protocols.’”
The strike has garnered support from members of the Detroit City Council, state representatives and congresspeople such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.). Workers have held several large rallies throughout the strike, giving speeches from the beds of pick-up trucks and leading hundreds of supporters on the picket line. Local businesses and institutions, like the Detroit Institute of Arts, have even agreed to stop selling Great Lakes coffee. Winston attributes this show of support to the relationships Great Lakes workers have spent years building with the surrounding community.
“Seven o’clock in the morning they’re on the picket line, cars are stopping, the regulars are pulling up and getting out of the car, hugging them, [asking] ‘what’s going on, what can I do? What do you mean [management] hasn’t reached out yet?” recounts Winston.
On May 24, workers learned that Great Lakes Coffee plans to permanently close their flagship Midtown cafe. The news was revealed to Unite Here during management testimony in a 10-day NLRB hearing, but employees and the public had not been notified until the union made the announcement. According to the owners’ attorney, Frank Mamat, management maintains the closure is due to an inability to “find people that felt comfortable working there because of omicron, and the customers felt the same way.”
“It is disappointing, to say the least, that the Miracles and company have opted to go this direction against the very same group of people who played a crucial role in that cafe and the Great Lakes Coffee brand as a whole,” wrote Comrades in Coffee in a statement. “We have held the line strong since February 16, 2022, and are committed to hold it down until we win.”
Owners of Great Lakes Coffee did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite the closure, which laid off the majority of the striking workers, the baristas continue to strike for recognition at the remaining satellite locations.
As of June 1, management still has not recognized the union. When addressing the campaign, Great Lakes owners Greg and Lisa Miracle attribute workers’ frustrations to poor in-store management, and say they cannot afford workers’ demands. The couple opened Great Lakes 10 years ago and describe the operation as a family business hit hard by the pandemic. In spite of this, the company opened three new cafes in the last two years, including one in Key West, Florida.
“We’re not asking for that much. We’re not,” says Aquino. “We’re just asking for livable wages and safe places to work.”
In late-February, Unite Here filed a ULP against the company for “failure to recognize and engage in good faith collective bargaining” with the union, alleging that the company is breaking the law. The union is asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to reinstate a doctrine known as “Joy Silk” — a policy that made it unlawful for employers to refuse to bargain with a union if there was a clear majority support among workers. The policy was abandoned by a conservative NLRB council in 1972, though current NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has expressed interest in resurrecting it.
A national movement
Great Lakes workers are not alone in their effort to organize and use collective action to win demands.
The food service industry has traditionally seen one of the lowest unionization rates in the country: the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only around three percent of food service workers were union members in 2021.
But cafe unions are on the rise. In 2019, 130 SPoT Coffee baristas in Buffalo, New York voted to join Workers United. In April 2021, about 400 baristas with Colectivo Coffee across Wisconsin and Illinois joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). In June 2021, another 90 baristas with Pavement Coffee — a cafe chain in Boston — voted to affiliate with Unite Here. As of early-June, more than 270 Starbucks cafes have petitioned to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, a campaign of Workers United, representing thousands of baristas in 37 states. 102 cafes have successfully voted to unionize with Starbucks Workers United in the midst of an intense corporate union-busting campaign, with more filing for elections each day.
Great Lakes baristas say that seeing the continued success of the Starbucks Workers United campaign has helped inspire their ongoing strike. But beyond these wins, “so many of us have been in this industry so long, everyone’s just getting so fed up,” Capasso says.
Capasso, who pickets daily outside the Meijer grocery store that a Great Lakes kiosk is located in, describes having conversations about the union with grocery employees every day as they arrive to work. “Unfortunately people are really used to being let down by progressive politics, or the idea that you can change anything… That’s why we’re really giving our all’s to make this work, because we just really want to have something to show that you can make a difference, you can stand up to things,” Capasso says.
Blom, who has worked in the coffee industry for over nine years, says workers’ demands go beyond just improving conditions at their café — they’re trying to raise the floor and set standards throughout the city.
Diana Hussein, Communications Lead for Unite Here International, says the union has seen an increased interest in organizing in recent years, and that the pandemic drove many workers’ frustrations to a tipping point.
She notes that throughout 2021, almost seven percent of food service and hospitality workers quit their jobs or even left the industry entirely, which is the highest rate of any sector. “It’s something really meaningful in this moment, where you’re seeing so much of the general population quitting their jobs and getting new careers, especially in this industry, but these folks are opting [for] a different way,” Hussein says.
“You can roast the best coffee in the world and it’s still only going to be as good as the barista that’s serving it to you at the counter,” says Blom. “It’s time that the baristas not only of Great Lakes Coffee but also of Detroit and the coffee industry at large be treated with the respect and dignity that it actually requires to be able to perform this job on a daily basis.”
Los Angeles Police Obstructs Democratic Right To Protest
https://popularresistance.org/los-angeles-police-obstructs-democratic-right-to-protest/
By People's Dispatch. June 2, 2022
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has refused to grant a permit for a march on the 9th annual Summit of the Americas, denying the organizers and supporters of the People’s Summit their democratic right to protest, organizers announced in a press statement. The People’s Summit organizers applied for a permit as early as February 25 for their march on June 10. They say that the LAPD has stalled for months and claimed that the Secret Service and Federal Government were contributing to the delay.
The right to free speech and protest is protected under the US constitution. People’s Summit organizers are still fighting for a permit, but plan to march regardless of the outcome.
“We view this as an undemocratic violation of our constitutionally protected free speech activity.” said Estevan Hernández of the Answer Coalition during a May 31 press conference hosted by the People’s Summit. “Regardless of what happens with the permit…we will march next week.”
The People’s Summit is being organized to counter the US-dominated Summit of the Americas. The Summit of the Americas claims to convene leadership across the Americas to discuss “building a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future”. This is the second time that this summit will be hosted in the US since its founding Summit held in Miami in 1994. The stakes are high for US President Biden to ensure that it is a success, but Biden has already encountered enormous difficulties.
The Summit of the Americas is heavily US-influenced and has already decided to exclude two countries the US is hostile towards: Venezuela and Nicaragua and has yet to decide about the participation of Cuba. Leaders across the hemisphere have responded to these exclusions with threats to boycott the summit altogether. “How can a summit be ‘of America’ without all the countries of America?” said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who has opted to boycott if the US does not reverse its decision to exclude the countries.
During the People’s Summit press conference, Manolo De Los Santos of the International Peoples’ Assembly stated, “Biden’s summit has already failed because they refused to practice actual democracy…We are not voiceless, we have voices and we are going to raise them in our People’s Summit.”
The Peoples Summit will counter the pre-existing agenda of US domination in the Americas. As Angelica Salas, Executive Director of CHIRLA, stated,
“The People’s Summit will lift up all those issues important to our people but left out of that other presidential summit across town: the rights of immigrants, women and workers, the rebuilding and protection of democratic norms, the security of families. We will present a different vision of the Western Hemisphere as a place of peace, freedom and prosperity for all that excludes no country, no faith, no race, and no gender.”
The US has also denied visas to a 23-person Cuban civil society delegation slated to participate in the People’s Summit. Of this exclusion, Manolo de los Santos stated, “The US government’s policy towards is cruel towards the Cuban people, but also towards the people of the United States who are being denied the right to not only relate with the people on the Island, but also to be able to speak and dialogue directly with them.”
Biden’s Taiwan Talk
https://popularresistance.org/bidens-taiwan-talk/
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. June 2, 2022
We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of strategic ambiguity in favor of the clarity urged by Trump’s belligerent secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
Watching President Joe Biden’s stunningly clumsy performance in Tokyo last week, during which he committed the U.S. to defending Taiwan militarily, my mind went to the old adage, “All politics is local.” I am sure it is, but we are called upon to extend the thought: “All foreign policy is local” is our late-imperial reality.
The rest of the world is mere proscenium for our purported leaders, to put this point another way. No one with a hand in American foreign policy, so far as I can make out, is the slightest bit interested in the one thing, above all others, that the 21st century requires of competent statecraft. This is the desire and ability to understand the perspectives of others.
Have you ever heard anyone in the Washington policy cliques state, or even wonder, what China’s legitimate interests are in East Asia, first of all on the question of sovereignty over Taiwan? I haven’t either.
You can run a foreign policy in this manner, but any successes it achieves will be sheer happenstance. In the Taiwan case, these people can’t even count on a fluke.
What we saw during Biden’s appearance in Tokyo was the latest installment of a Taiwan policy, and by extension a trans–Pacific policy, fashioned to satisfy various constituencies at home. The voiceless American public does not count among them. Like all policies of this kind, this one is poorly conceived, miscalculated, out of touch — in other words, doomed to failure as our new century unfolds.
“You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” This was the question a broadcast correspondent posed as Biden stood with the prime ministers of Japan, India, and Australia at the conclusion of a security summit last Monday.
“Yes,” our addled president replied without elaboration.
“You are?” the correspondent persisted.
“That’s the commitment we made,” Biden said, again with no further comment.
Parse the exchange carefully. The president of the United States told Taiwan, China and the rest of Asia that America would commit troops and matériel — its own, not the weaponry it sells Taiwan in quantity — to a defense of the island in the event of a conflict with the People’s Republic. Given the reference to Ukraine, there is simply no other way to interpret Biden’s remarks.
Provocative Departure
This was a significant, openly provocative departure from the longstanding policy known as “strategic ambiguity,” a flimsy (as it has always seemed) concept whereby Washington does not say what it will do should China attempt to reassert sovereignty over its breakaway province.
Instantly, Biden’s many minders, who serve as nursing-home attendants more than department secretaries and advisers in these cases, began explaining to a very disturbed world that what their president said was not what their president said. “As the president said, our policy has not changed,” the White House explained in a rushed statement to the press.
A day later, even Biden was mouthing the approved language: “The policy has not changed at all,” saith Joe last Tuesday and on several occasions since.
Come again, please? Yes, I announced a dramatic change in our Taiwan policy, but no, we’re not changing our Taiwan policy?
We cannot mark down what happened in the Japanese capital a week ago to the grim reality that our 46th president suffers a creeping senility. He does, but this will not do as an explanation of what amounts to a bad-cop, good-cop routine wherein the bad cop suddenly becomes one of the good cops after being bad.
The government-supervised New York Times went for the “gaffe-prone pol” theory, and who is not familiar with the … let us say simplicity of our president’s intellect? But neither will Biden’s evident dimness get us to clarity.
I see design in these weird events.
What is it, then, we appear to have witnessed? Given Taiwan is the eastern front in our new, two-front Cold War — the one we’re nicely on the way to losing — we had better understand what we are in for.
Here I will speculate briefly.
The journalist posing the fateful question was Nancy Cordes, a longtime television correspondent who now covers the White House for CBS News. Given CBS’s long, many-decades-long record of collaborating with the national-security state, could her exchange with Biden have been prearranged to allow the response she precipitated?
We will never have an answer to this, but I must say I found the staginess of the occasion odd from the first, and I will take this thought no further.
Third Time
As many news reports noted last week, the Tokyo presser was the third time Biden, as president, has sailed the American ship of state near these rocks. Last summer he equated Taiwan with Japan and South Korea, two nations with which the U.S. has security alliances providing for mutual defense. Taiwan is not a nation, however many times The New York Times errs in calling it one, and has no such treaty with Washington.
A couple of months later a CNN correspondent asked Biden if the U.S. is committed to defending Taiwan against an attack from the mainland. “Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” he replied.
I must remind readers here that, in consequence to Biden’s diminished mental capacities, it has been a matter of record since his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva last year that the time he spends in front of journalists is strictly controlled, the journalists are carefully chosen and what will be said during their exchanges is vetted beforehand. You know, Soviet-style.
Some context is in order here.
It has been clear since the Biden regime’s earliest months that it has no idea how to address China or what a sound China policy would look like. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s calamitous encounter with Chinese counterparts in Alaska in March 2021 was the first indication of this, though hardly the last.
By default, I would say, Biden and his national security people inherited the policy shaped by Mike Pompeo because they didn’t know what else to do. Remember the McCarthyesque speech the Trump administration’s secretary of state gave at the Nixon Library two summers ago? Fifty years of engagement with China have failed, so it is time to confront the evil Chinese Communist Party, good must destroy evil, etc.?
That one.
One prominent feature of the Pompeo policy was its vigorous determination to refute the One China policy, which acknowledges Taiwan as part of China, and scrub strategic ambiguity in favor of “strategic clarity,” as in, We’re on for a war, body bags and all, and will wage it to defend Taiwan when the time comes.
The Biden regime has done nothing more than slow down this policy while altering it in style and tone. Having nothing to say for itself, it has no choice but to mollify the warmongering hawks whose position Pompeo articulated. These factions extend from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the defense-industry lobbies to the think tanks, some conservative, others “liberal.”
What happened in Tokyo last week is called “salami-slicing,” incremental moves such that a major policy shift is executed little by little by little. It follows naturally that Washington commonly accuses China of salami-slicing, given it is exactly what the U.S. is doing in the Taiwan case. Hence the contradictions noted above: We aren’t changing policy except that we are changing it.
It was obvious within days of the Tokyo press conference that the discourse on Taiwan has taken a decisive turn of the kind Biden appears to have intended to prompt. We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of strategic ambiguity in favor of strategic clarity just as the dangerously belligerent Pompeo urged.
One day after Biden’s remarks *The New York Times* quoted none other than Harry Harris urging this shift. Harris, some readers may recall, was commander of the Pacific fleet during the Obama years and liked nothing better than grandstanding on the decks of his aircraft carriers while huffing and puffing about America’s naval superiority in the Pacific.
China, the retired admiral asserted, “isn’t holding back its preparations for whatever it decides it wants to do simply because we’re ambiguous about our position.” This appeared in a piece explaining how the Biden regime is all of a sudden “trying to walk a fine line between deterrence and provocation.”
Nice. Nuanced. This is what I call subtle statecraft, diplomacy at its most evolved. Let’s come as close as we can to starting a conflict with China while avoiding the appearance of starting one.
A day later Bret Stephens, the Times columnist who is admittedly not to be taken seriously, urged “a more open military relationship with Taiwan.” Biden needs to forget his FDR fantasies, our Bret thinks, and “find his inner Truman,” referencing the first Cold War’s premier Cold Warrior.
We read regularly now of the policy cliques war-gaming a military conflict with China over the Taiwan question. NBC recently broadcast “War Games: The Battle for Taiwan,” a 27–minute Meet the Press segment. Such a program, lest readers lose track of the time, would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. But a salami slice at a time, Washington and its clerks in the media prepare us for Cold War II’s second front.
NBC, I remind readers, has a history as long as CBS’s of collaborating with the State and Defense departments — very, very directly — in the production of broadcast propaganda.
There is one great, big saving grace in all of this. At the horizon, it is nonsense — America preening before its mirrors of self-regard.
Anyone with a head on his or her shoulders — and I have it from confidential sources there are a few such people in Washington — knows that a hot war with China over Taiwan is utterly out of the question. There is absolutely no way the U.S. could win one against the people’s Liberation Army, the P.L.A. Navy and the P.L.A. Air Force.
The Times had the good sense to run an opinion piece in Sunday’s editions precisely to this effect. “Defending Taiwan Would Be a Mistake,” is the headline and a good summary of Oriana Skylar Mastro’s argument. She writes:
“Simply put, the United States is outgunned. At the very least a confrontation with China would be an enormous drain on the U.S. military without any assured outcome that America could repel all of China’s forces.”
Mastro is a fellow in Chinese security studies at Stanford and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This is what we’re seeing these days on the Taiwan question: What grounded thinking there is to be found is as often as not coming from conservatives as against the liberal “antiwar” warmongers who crowd our national discourse.
The Skylar Mastro column was an implicit defense of strategic ambiguity, which is the question on which the policy debate now turns. I have always considered it a weak policy, a sophisticated name for either indecision and paralysis or for an unstated knowledge that the U.S. cannot win this one and can do no more than put off the inevitable on the Taiwan issue. The island is Chinese real estate and sooner or later this will be the reality.
But ambiguity is better than clarity in the way the hawks use the term.
China reacted predictably to the Biden statements. “On issues that bear on China’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and other core interests,” Wang Wenbin, a foreign ministry spokesman, said, “no one shall expect China to make any compromise or trade-offs.”
There is no salami-slicing here. Anyone who knows Chinese history understands that questions of territorial integrity and sovereignty are the hottest buttons on Beijing’s console.
But Wang’s statement — the statement of a spokesman, not a senior official — seemed to me notably low-key. And since this official reaction, Beijing appears to have let the incident fade.
It seems to me the Chinese understand: Biden’s Taiwan policy is all posture in the service of several purposes. It mollifies the hawkish factions mentioned above and will keep the weapons manufacturers in contracts more or less indefinitely. As previously argued in this space, Washington doesn’t need a hot war across the Pacific: An open-ended cold one will do.
A third purpose is to me the most interesting. Escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, given there is no real intention of engaging the Chinese militarily, is the doing of a nervous, declining power profoundly unsure of itself in a changing world order it can do nothing to stop. In this the preening and pretending is all about reassuring you and me that our leaders are not completely, abjectly blowing the 21st century.
An astute Financial Times writer published a piece over the weekend noting that Biden’s performance — good word for it — in Tokyo coincided with the opening of Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to the triumphalist Tom Cruise film of 1986. “Curiously, James Crabtree writes, ‘it turns out that Top Gun: Maverick is actually a rather anxious kind of blockbuster, filled with doubts about the durability of U.S. power, and functioning in many ways as an elegy for relative American decline.’”
The head on Crabtree’s piece is “Still Top Gun? What Tom Cruise’s New Movie Tells Us about American Power.” It tells us a lot. It tells us it is starting to come down to theater now, spectacle without substance.
What we are going to see in Taiwan is likely to prove exactly what we already see in Ukraine. We will salami-slice increasing support for the independence-minded government in Taipei, arm the island to its very teeth, provoke China as we have Russia, and hope the mess escalates.
Then we will watch, as true heroes do.
On Observing The 2022 Presidential Elections In Colombia
https://popularresistance.org/witnessing-and-making-history-on-observing-the-2022-presidential-elections-in-colombia/
By Jemima Pierre, Black Agenda Report. June 2, 2022
Witnessing and Making History.
“From May 26 to May 31, I was in Cali, Colombia serving as an election observer with an international delegation of mostly Black women. This is a preliminary report.”
On May 26th, in my capacity as the co-coordinator of the Haiti/Americas Team for the Black Alliance for Peace, I traveled with a delegation to Colombia to serve as an official observer of its presidential elections. The elections were historic: not only was a leftist presidential ticket leading in the polls, but the vice presidential candidate on that ticket was Francia Márquez, a popular and well known Afro-Colombian feminist activist. As observers, our roles were to bear witness to history by ensuring there was no impropriety or fraud at the voting booth or in the democratic process.
The impetus for the delegation came after the results of the March 13, 2022 primary elections in Colombia clearly indicated that the two leading candidates of the leftist “Pacto Historico” party were Gustavo Petro (a former guerilla activist turned mayor of Bogota) and Francia Márquez. After Petro won the Pacto Historico’s presidential nomination, the party chose Márquez as his running mate. But as they led in the polls, the candidates began receiving death threats . In a country with a long history of right-wing racist and paramilitary violence against Black and indigenous communities – and especially against Black and indigenous leftist activists – there was growing concern about the integrity of the elections, especially in terms of electoral fraud and voter intimidation.
My delegation was composed primarily of Black women activists and scholars. It was organized by AfroResistance and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJA). Afro-Resistance is a “Black Latinx Womxn-led” group that organizes and educates around human rights, democracy, and racial justice throughout the Americas. GGJA is an alliance of over 60 grassroots groups of working and poor and communities of color working for gender justice, climate change, and an end to war. In coordination with the Misión de Observación Electoral (Electoral Observation Mission organization), AfroResistance and GGJA brought 29 election observers to Colombia. It was the largest group of observers in the history of elections in Colombia, and one which was over 95% Black women.
As a delegation, our mission was to learn more about the electoral landscape of Colombia, observe the elections in an official capacity, and to help ensure free and safe participation in the democratic process. We also hoped to build relationships and solidarity with Black/Women led groups and social justice organizations in the country. To that end, our five days in Colombia were packed with meetings, workshops, and events meant to foster transnational Black solidarity. This was in addition to a number of pre-departure orientation programs.
Our group was focused on Cali, Colombia. We arrived in Cali on May 26th, 2022, three days before the presidential elections. On Friday, May 27th, we spent the day engaged with regional grassroots organizations. We learned from Black women organizing around and against militarized state violence, genocide, and femicide; we learned about the history of Black Colombian organizing, about Márquez’s decades-long activism, about the invisibilization of Black Trans folk and Black prisoners in Colombia. Most significantly, we learned that, though the Black activists support the candidates of the Pacto Historico, they are clear eyed about both the right wing nature of Colombian society and politics and the limits of a singular focus on one particular politician, and on electoral politics in general. It was also not lost upon us that a shift in political power towards the left in Colombia would have wide-ranging domestic and international impact on the balance of forces in the region – especially since Colombia has served as U.S. imperialism’s vassal over many decades. Recently, Colombia has accepted a role as Latin America and the Caribbean’s first and only NATO partner .
On Saturday, May 28th, our delegation continued learning and building by making a visit to Cali’s Asociación Casa Cultural del Chontaduro . “El Chontaduro” is a community center located in one of the most vulnerable areas of the city. We were warned that it was a very dangerous neighborhood and that we needed to be extremely careful. The center, open to all members of the community, “promotes the construction of a just and equitable society based on the principles of eco-feminism, non-violence and gender equity.” Being in “El Chonatuduro” brought into clear relief the ways that Black Trans people are at the forefront of grassroots organizations.
Sunday, May 29th was election day. Our group was sent to two key cities with large AfroColombian populations: Cali and Buenaventura. While both have large Black populations, Buenaventura has a Black super-majority. It also has a higher percentage of poverty and suffers constant militarized state violence.
Within each city, each observation group was further split into two groups. In Cali each of the two groups were assigned six different voting locations, with the two groups meeting for joint observation of the last polling place, for a total of 11 sites. The Buenaventura groups also visited around 11 locations, including five in rural areas.
Significantly, in both cities, we all made a similar set of observations. In Cali, the stark segregation of the cities was reflected in the differences in voting locations and access to electronic biometric machines (which seem to only be located in more affluent places) for identification verification. Polling locations where the population was Blacker and Browner had a larger military presence and a greater presence of national police forces. Our colleagues in Buenaventura reported more heavily armed military forces outside and inside the voting locations. In the Blacker and Browner neighborhoods, the populations had longer waiting lines, were searched and patted down by local police to enter the polling places, and had relatively fewer voting booths. In contrast, in the polling locations in whiter and wealthier neighborhoods, people were often not searched by police, and there were hardly any waiting lines.
At the last polling site, our two Cali groups came together to observe the last few minutes of voting (which ended at 4pm), and the counting of the votes. For this, each person was assigned a voting table. At my assigned table, I, alongside another outside witness, closely observed the deliberations of the electoral workers, and the official counting of the votes – an especially intensive process. In this voting location, the clear winners were the Pacto Historico candidates. Each table in the polling location had an average of a few hundred votes. Petro and Marquéz received the vast majority of those votes, with the other candidates coming far behind. We all remained until the last votes were counted, and by the time we were leaving the site, we received news that more than 70% of the results had already been counted and reported. In the end, Pacto Historico was said to have received 40.9% of the votes, with the runner-ups of the two right-wing parties (Rodolfo Hernández, the long time ally of far-right ex-president Alvaro Uribe, of the Liga; and Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, the conservative candidate representing the establishment and also linked to Uribe), receiving 28.1% and 23.9%, respectively.
The Petro/Márquez Pacto Historico received around 8.5 million votes. While this was a clear victory, they did not receive the more than 50% that would have allowed them to claim an outright win. And, at this point, there is no guarantee that this will lead to a win during the runoff elections on June 29th. Already, the right wing candidate who came in third place, Ferdando Gutierrez, vowed to unite with second place winner, Rodolfo Hernández – a clear consolidation of the right wing elite forces against the popular leftist Pacto Historico.
More importantly, there is a fear that those working class and poor nonwhite communities who supported Pacto Historico will be subject to violence and intimidation. Analysts remarked, for example, on the relatively low voter turnout (anywhere between 47% and 55%), with the understanding that most in the militarized areas have been intimidated away from the polls. In fact many of us in the delegation worried that right-wing violence would ensue if the Pacto had won in the first round. At the same time western newspapers, especially those in the mainstream US, have made ominous predictions of a military backlash if the leftist ticket wins.
On a personal level, the experience of serving as an official election observer in Colombia has had three major impacts. First, it reminded me, as a person born and raised in Haiti, of the fact that the white western world, led by the U.S., France, and Canada, have stripped Haiti and its people of its sovereignty. As a result of direct U.S. and Core Group actions, Haiti does not have the privilege of holding elections or having its people choose its president. No elections, no president, and no sovereignty. Second, the significance of an international group of Black women serving as election observers and working to help guarantee marginalized people’s right to self-determination needs to be appreciated. Finally, our solidarity meetings with local grassroots Black organizations provide a road map for us to reclaim Black transnational solidarity – with Black women, always, at the forefront.
A 3400-year-old city emerges from the Tigris River
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220601200021.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
June 1, 2022
Source:
University of Freiburg
Summary:
Archaeologists have uncovered a 3400-year-old Mittani Empire-era city once located on the Tigris River. The settlement emerged from the waters of the Mosul reservoir early this year as water levels fell rapidly due to extreme drought in Iraq. The extensive city with a palace and several large buildings could be ancient Zakhiku -- believed to have been an important center in the Mittani Empire (ca. 1550-1350 BC).
FULL STORY
A team of German and Kurdish archaeologists have uncovered a 3400-year-old Mittani Empire-era city once located on the Tigris River. The settlement emerged from the waters of the Mosul reservoir early this year as water levels fell rapidly due to extreme drought in Iraq. The extensive city with a palace and several large buildings could be ancient Zakhiku -- believed to have been an important center in the Mittani Empire (ca. 1550-1350 BC).
Bronze Age city resurfaced due to drought
Iraq is one of the countries in the world most affected by climate change. The south of the country in particular has been suffering from extreme drought for months. To prevent crops from drying out, large amounts of water have been drawn down from the Mosul reservoir -- Iraq's most important water storage -- since December. This led to the reappearance of a Bronze Age city that had been submerged decades ago without any prior archaeological investigations. It is located at Kemune in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
This unforeseen event put archaeologists under sudden pressure to excavate and document at least parts of this large, important city as quickly as possible before it was resubmerged. The Kurdish archaeologist Dr. Hasan Ahmed Qasim, chairman of the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization, and the German archaeologists Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ivana Puljiz, University of Freiburg, and Prof. Dr. Peter Pfälzner, University of Tübingen, spontaneously decided to undertake joint rescue excavations at Kemune. These took place in January and February 2022 in collaboration with the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage in Duhok (Kurdistan Region of Iraq).
Fritz Thyssen Foundation supported excavations
A team for the rescue excavations was put together within days. Funding for the work was obtained at short notice from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation through the University of Freiburg. The German-Kurdish archaeological team was under immense time pressure because it was not clear when the water in the reservoir would rise again.
Massive fortification, multi-storey storage building, industrial complex
Within a short time, the researchers succeeded in largely mapping the city. In addition to a palace, which had already been documented during a short campaign in 2018, several other large buildings were uncovered -- a massive fortification with wall and towers, a monumental, multi-storey storage building and an industrial complex. The extensive urban complex dates to the time of the Empire of Mittani (approx. 1550-1350 BC), which controlled large parts of northern Mesopotamia and Syria.
"The huge magazine building is of particular importance because enormous quantities of goods must have been stored in it, probably brought from all over the region," says Puljiz. Qasim concludes, "The excavation results show that the site was an important center in the Mittani Empire."
The research team was stunned by the well-preserved state of the walls -- sometimes to a height of several meters -- despite the fact that the walls are made of sun-dried mud bricks and were under water for more than 40 years. This good preservation is due to the fact that the city was destroyed in an earthquake around 1350 BC, during which the collapsing upper parts of the walls buried the buildings.
Ceramic vessels with over 100 cuneiform tablets
Of particular interest is the discovery of five ceramic vessels that contained an archive of over 100 cuneiform tablets. They date to the Middle Assyrian period, shortly after the earthquake disaster struck the city. Some clay tablets, which may be letters, are even still in their clay envelopes. The researchers hope this discovery will provide important information about the end of the Mittani-period city and the beginning of Assyrian rule in the region. "It is close to a miracle that cuneiform tablets made of unfired clay survived so many decades under water," Pfälzner says.
Conservation project to prevent damage by rising water
To avert further damage to the important site by the rising water, the excavated buildings were completely covered with tight-fitting plastic sheeting and covered with gravel fill as part of an extensive conservation project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. This is intended to protect the walls of unbaked clay and any other finds still hidden in the ruins during times of flooding. The site is now once more completely submerged.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Freiburg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Related Multimedia: Images of archaeological site of Kemune at bottom of page
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University of Freiburg. "A 3400-year-old city emerges from the Tigris River." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 1 June 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220601200021.htm>.
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