In the Wake of Abu Akleh’s Murder, Media Continued to Obscure Israeli Violence

https://fair.org/home/in-the-wake-of-abu-aklehs-murder-media-continued-to-obscure-israeli-violence/



Robin Andersen



On May 13, two days after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli Occupation Forces, as her loss still dominated international news cycles, thousands of Palestinian mourners gathered to pay tribute to the woman who had given them voice for so long. They came to lay her body to rest.


Twitter (5/13/22)

Immediately, as the funeral procession was just starting, images emerged of Israeli forces attacking the pallbearers as they attempted to carry her coffin across the courtyard from the French hospital in East Jerusalem. One of the first reports came from British-Egyptian correspondent Emir Nader with BBC News investigations, who posted footage and said on Twitter (5/13/22): “Horrible scenes as Israeli security forces beat the funeral procession for slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the crowd momentarily lose control of her casket.”

Al Jazeera carried the funeral live on air, and the footage showing the attack was widely shared over social media. One Twitter user (5/13/22) described the video, referring to the IOF, or Israeli Occupation Force:


Everyone switch on to Al Jazeera right now. This is one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen. IOF is attacking mourners carrying Shireen’s body from the hospital right now. They’re using stun grenades and tear gas and charging at them with horses and batons.

The Intercept (5/13/22) noted the footage that unfolded on live television, stunned viewers and only “intensified the outrage over her death.” Video was quickly remixed and shared, and the article linked a 45-second video on Twitter (5/13/22) posted by Rushdi Abualouf, a Palestinian journalist working for the BBC. Described as “the closest video” of the attack, it mixed Arab instrumental music over a slowed version that show helmeted, uniformed riot police singling out pallbearers and smashing bare arms with batons as mourners struggled to keep the casket upright.
The language of obfuscation

Mirroring the euphemism-dominated coverage of Abu Akleh’s killing (FAIR.org, 5/20/22), many of the first corporate press reports employed language that mystified what was happening at the funeral.

MintPressNews editor Alan MacLeod recognized the language of obfuscation, posting a series of news headlines on Twitter (5/13/22) that transformed black-clad Israeli riot squads wantonly beating pallbearers into “clashes.” Referring to an article he wrote for FAIR (12/13/19), MacLeod (5/14/22) observed that the word “clash” is used by media “when they have to report on violence, but desperately want to obscure who the perpetrators are.”

Violence comes from nowhere, it simply erupts: CBS‘s headline (5/13/22) was, “Shireen Abu Akleh Funeral Sees Clashes Between Israeli Forces and Palestinian,” updated later that day to report that “Violence Erupts” at the funeral as Israeli forces “Confront” mourners. The Times of Israel (5/13/22) had “Violence Erupts as Journalist’s Casket Emerges From Jerusalem Hospital.” And the BBC (5/13/22) went with “Shireen Abu Akleh: Violence at Al Jazeera Reporter’s Funeral in Jerusalem.”


CBS News (5/13/22)

CBS‘s language prompted one Twitter user (5/13/22) to wonder about


the best term for lies by omission, untruths couched in deliberately obfuscating language. Perhaps “willfully misleading”? Denial of facts, even gaslighting, given the footage circulating of attacks on pallbearers….

An exception was a report from Jerusalem by Atika Shubert for CNN (5/13/22) headlined, “Video Shows Israeli Police Beating Mourners at Palestinian-American Journalist’s Funeral Procession.” It opened:


Israeli police used batons to beat mourners carrying the coffin of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh…. Tear gas was fired by Israeli forces and at least one flash bomb was used.

Mondoweiss (5/13/22) pointed out that the “White House says it ‘regrets the intrusion’ into Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral, but it doesn’t condemn Israeli police actions.”
Repression as retaliatory

Reporting went from bad to worse when the Israeli government issued an official statement claiming that police had to respond to Palestinian violence. Many Western news outlets repeated the claims.

Under an early BBC video (5/13/22), after “clashes broke out” and “violence erupted,” the text read, “Projectiles are seen flying towards the police, who also fired tear gas,” and then, “Israeli police said officers at the scene were pelted with stones and ‘were forced to use riot dispersal means.’”


Intercept (5/13/22)

In a later, longer version, the BBC text (5/13/22) opened with, “Police said they acted after being pelted with stones,” and repeated, “Police said officers ‘were forced to use riot dispersal means.’” The body of the text included on-the-ground reporting that accurately described what happened, only to be followed with more back-and-forth accusations.

The descriptive reporting on the funeral attack and Israeli brutality, followed with patched, confused “balance” between Palestinian and Israeli statements–contention often going back decades–began to characterize coverage. This style of journalism presents repression surrounded in a fog of inevitability, rendering even eyewitness accounts inexplicable, without context or solution.

As many reports repeated Israeli justifications for the attacks, presenting Israeli state repression as retaliatory, the Intercept (5/13/22) refuted the official Israeli version, showing how it fabricated Palestinian violence.

On Twitter (5/13/22), activist Rafael Shimunov explained how the Israeli police account used drone video to “prove” that two of the mourners had thrown rocks at police:


But a comparison of that video to ground-level news footage showed that the police video had been edited to remove the initial police charge and slowed down to make it seem as if a man who just waved his arms in frustration had thrown something at the officers.

Shimunov concluded that the mourner had no stone, his “action was putting his body between them and Shireen Abu Akleh’s casket.” He added: “To be clear, no stone justifies attacking mourners at a funeral of a journalist assassinated by your military.”
‘This isn’t a tussle’

All the media techniques come together on a CBS video posted on Twitter (5/13/22), with overlaid text saying police “clashed” with mourners, and that the “tussling” was so bad they almost dropped the coffin. “Projectiles could be seen flying through the air as Palestinians chanted anti-Israeli slogans,” the network declared.

The response on Twitter was outrage. One user (5/13/22) replied:


This isn’t a tussle or push back. This is an occupying force abusing its power. The sooner @CBSNews calls it how it is, the sooner we can pressure change. Do better.

Another “fixed” the headline, changing “clashes” to “attacking,” and switching Abu Akleh being “killed” to “assassinated.” Another Twitter used said, “These are violent occupiers (who killed journalists prior #ShireenAbuAkleh) invading a funeral… not a ‘tussle.'” Yet another asked:


Oh clashing was it? Clashing? Very interesting choice of words for being attacked by armored thugs during a peaceful memorial for a journalist those armored thugs also murdered.

Another tweeter was “imagining the headline ‘Ukrainians left dead in Bucha after clashes with Russian forces.’”

Posting an unedited video in response to CBS, a user asked: “Why was this clip cut?… to falsify the facts of course.”


Al Jazeera (5/12/22)

In fact, the actual footage was stunning for its clear view of one-sided violence—beginning unmistakably when helmeted Israeli forces stormed the crowd and began to beat pallbearers with batons. The pallbearers stumble and are sometimes ripped from their positions, but they never retaliate. One tries to shield his head with his arm. A man wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a sleeveless shirt kicks at the helmeted, uniformed police, trying to stop them from hitting the pallbearers. Those carrying the coffin do all they can to prevent it from falling, ignoring the blows.

Al Jazeera (5/12/22) interviewed Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, who said that Israel has a track record of creating ambiguity over social media as a strategy to “muddy the waters,” knowing that many press accounts will repeat their claims.
‘Incitement’ or expression?

Explaining the funeral attacks, the Intercept (5/13/22) reported, Israeli police “said they attacked the procession because mourners waved Palestinian flags and chanted nationalist slogans.”

NPR (5/13/22) also reported, “Police said the crowd at the hospital was chanting ‘nationalist incitement,’ ignored calls to stop and threw stones at police.” It added, citing police, that “the policemen were forced to act.” NPR went on to explain why police raided Shireen’s family home, saying they “went” there “the day she was killed and have shown up at other mourning events in the city to remove Palestinian flags.”

The CBS video (5/13/22) posted on Twitter overlaid with text also read, “Al Jazeera said Israel had warned her brother to limit the size of the funeral and told him no Palestinian flags should be displayed and no slogans chanted.” They followed with, “The network said he neglected to take that guidance given the outpouring of grief and anger over the reporter’s killing.”


Slate (5/22/21)

No comment is made about Israeli repression of Palestinian freedom of expression. “Neglected” and “guidance” are unlikely choices of words from Al Jazeera, given that the network published a scathing piece (5/12/22) slamming Western media coverage for obscuring and denying Israel’s murder of its journalist, calling it a “whitewash.” Al Jazeera has assigned a legal team to refer the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces to the International Criminal Court (Al Jazeera, 5/27/22).

Though CNN journalist Atika Shubert (5/13/22), reporting from the funeral, acknowledged Israeli attacks, she ended by saying that the family was “told not to display the Palestinian flag, that was a special request, but as you can imagine, it’s very difficult to control these crowds,” and the flags were flying. The “request” was a raid on Abu Akleh’s family home, where flags were forcibly removed. Restrictions on flying the Palestinian flag are normalized within these stories, not exposed as violations of human rights and freedom of expression.

When US media routinely repeat without comment Israeli “reasons” for “clamping down” on any display of support for Palestinian statehood, or that Palestinians were “chanting nationalistic slogans,” amounting to “incitement,” they condone the repression of Palestinian rights, which would cause other countries to be called dictatorships, or at least authoritarian regimes. Yet Israel is still listed as a democracy. As Nolan Higdon (5/28/22) pointed out, “You Can Kill and Censor Journalists or You Can have Democracy—You Can’t Have Both!” Such attitudes toward Israeli repression of Palestinian expression are a major contradiction by US media institutions, which themselves enjoy press freedoms and should be able to recognize when those freedoms are being violated.

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian American and Columbia University professor, told FAIR that US media are “terrified of being attacked if they don’t repeat the Israeli versions of events. They live in constant fear. This happens on the ground, and during editing.” These practices were confirmed in an article published in Slate (5/22/21) last year, when a journalist admitted having trouble “reporting the truth” from Gaza.
‘System of domination’

There are rules for occupying forces articulated by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Occupation and International Humanitarian Law (4/8/04); these prohibit the collective punishment of occupied peoples. Violent repression of nationalist slogans and the Palestinian flag violates the International Declaration of Human Rights, rights which are established for those living under occupation.


Twitter (5/13/22)

Writing for Common Dreams (5/23/22), the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis and Princeton’s Richard Falk noted that Israeli forces “threw Palestinian flags to the ground and violently beat mourners—including the pallbearers.” They placed the attacks into a context of “the structural nature of Israeli violence against Palestinians,” citing an Amnesty International report on Israeli violence in the Occupied Territories characterizing it as a “Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.”

The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and the supposedly defensive attacks on mourners are part of a “pattern of repression…far more pervasive,” and in fact codified in the country’s Law of 2018, which grants only Jewish citizens the right of self-determination. Along with Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and B’tselem, Bennis and Falk concluded that this “constitutes the crime of apartheid.”

This point was made visually online by Tony Karon (Twitter, 5/13/22) , a lead editorial writer at Al Jazeera, who set pictures of South African apartheid next to Israeli attacks on the funeral with the text:


African police in ‘87 attacking the coffin of Ashley Kriel to seize the ANC flag that draped it: Israeli police attacked the coffin of #ShireenAbuAkleh today, trying to seize Palestinian flags. Apartheid regimes waging war on their victims, even after death.
US responsibility

For decades, the United States has unconditionally provided Israel with “political, diplomatic, economic and military support,” Bennis and Falk wrote. Military subsidies alone amount to about $3.8 billion every year, “most of it used to purchase US-made weapons systems, ammunition and more. This makes the US complicit in Israel’s criminal wrongdoing.”

With 20% of Israeli’s military budget supplied by the US, “the bullet or the gun used to kill Shireen could have even been purchased from US weapons manufacturers with our own money.” The use of US military aid for repression is a violation of US law:


CNN (5/26/22)


The Leahy Law’s restriction on military aid is unequivocal: “No assistance shall be furnished,” it says, “to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”

To date, there have been six investigations into the killing of Abu Akleh, all that find conclusive evidence that the journalist was killed by Israeli Forces. “A reconstruction by the Associated Press lends support to assertions” from both the Palestinian Authority and Abu Akleh’s colleagues, the news service (5/24/22) reported, “that the bullet that cut her down came from an Israeli gun.” CNN (5/26/22) explained, “There were no armed clashes in the vicinity,” and the text over a map reads, “Footage from the scene showed a direct line of sight towards the Israeli convoy.”
Demanding the fatal bullet

Much has been made of the bullet that killed Abu Akleh, and the Israeli demands that it must be turned over to them (New York Times, 5/12/22). This offers a last talking point for Israeli’s claim that Palestinian fighters are responsible for shooting her.


Committee to Protect Journalists (5/26/22)

For example, when Reuters (5/26/22) reported on the investigations into her killing, it added Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s response on Twitter (5/26/22): “Any claim that the IDF intentionally harms journalists or uninvolved civilians is a blatant lie.” Reuters also included his demand that the Palestinian Authority hand over the bullet for ballistic tests to see if it matched an Israeli military gun.

Palestinian tests, noted by Reuters (5/27/22), have determined that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh “was a 5.56 mm round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, which is used by the Israeli military.” But Reuters followed that with the Defense minister’s claim that the “same 5.56 caliber can also be fired from M-16 rifles that are carried by many Palestinian militants,” adding: “Al-Khatib did not say how he was sure it had come from an Israeli rifle.”

As Khalidi pointed out, “Anything the Israelis say, even about an investigation, will be repeated, you will still get the Israeli version—that in the name of balance.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (5/26/22) cited the numerous reports, including the findings of the Dutch-based Bellingcat Investigative Team, confirming Israeli culpability, and joined 33 other press freedom and human rights groups calling for an independent investigation into Abu Akleh’s killing.
‘The world knows very little’

Yet on June 3, 2022, the New York Times’ editorial board wrote, “The world still knows very little about who is responsible for her death.” The wordy piece repeated every Israeli talking point, including the justification of the funeral attack, saying Israeli police “appeared to want to prevent” the funeral from becoming a “nationalist rally,” and said the officers had acted against a mob “in violation of a previously approved plan.” In other words, pallbearers and mourners were attacked for expressing political opinions and allowing Palestinian society to participate in the burial of Abu Akleh.

The Middle East Eye (6/8/22) reported that when Abby Martin, host of the Empire Files, confronted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, she asked why there has been “absolutely no repercussions” for Israel over Abu Akleh’s killing. Blinken responded that the facts had “not been established” in the killing of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist, yet no independent investigation has been started.


Twitter (6/7/22)

Washington Post reporters (6/12/22) reviewed the audio, video, social media and witness testimony of Abu Akleh’s killing, and confirmed that an Israeli soldier likely shot and killed her. Mondoweiss (6/12/22) reported the findings, expressing hope that the report would “add pressure on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to actually demand an independent investigation and accountability.”

Yet even though the Post’s editorial board (6/13/22) referred its its own reporter’s investigation as “impressive,” it still called on the Palestinian Authority to agree to a joint investigation with Israel, with US participation. In what amounts to an attempt to control the narrative about Abu Akleh’s killing, the Post editorial cited “emotional” reasons for refusing to back calls for an international investigation, saying, “We’re skeptical such an impartial inquiry is possible given the high emotions, and low trust, that permeate global discussion of the Middle East.”

On June 14, 2022, journalist Dalia Hatuqa, who covers Israeli/Palestinian affairs, told Slate’s Mary Harris (6/14/22) that Blinken had promised Shireen’s famliy that there would be a full investigation, then she continued: “But honestly, nothing’s happened. It’s been a month. It’s not that hard: There’s footage, eyewitnesses, all kinds of stuff. This isn’t a mystery.”

Valedictorian Rips Into Erosion Of Public Education In Graduation Speech

 



https://popularresistance.org/lausd-high-school-valedictorian-rips-into-the-erosion-of-public-education-in-graduation-speech-sparking-mass-support/



By Renae Cassimeda and Kimie Saito, WSWS. July 2, 2022

 

Los Angeles, CA – On June 6, Axel Brito, Hollywood High School Class of 2022 valedictorian, gave a powerful speech during his senior graduation ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. His speech is an indictment of the entrenched corruption within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) at the expense of quality education and services for students and the working conditions of teachers and school workers.

Video footage of Axel’s speech has gone viral on social media, having been viewed over 2.6 million times on TikTok, over 24,000 times on YouTube and over 11,000 times on Instagram. Social media posts have been flooded with statements of support for Axel and the content of his remarks, showcasing the overall discontent among students, teachers and parents to not only LAUSD but the present dire state of K-12 public education.

During the speech, the school administration cut Axel’s mic. Immediately the crowd chanted, “Let him speak! Let him speak!” Axel waited on stage, took the microphone off the stand and moved away from the administrator who had come onto the stage. Fearing the opposition brewing in the crowd, the sound to Brito’s mic was switched back on, allowing him to finish.

Reporters with the World Socialist Web Site spoke with Axel about his speech and the conditions in the district, including the negative impacts of privatization and charter schools, the pandemic, racial politics, lowering standards for graduation, overworked teachers, and low quality education.

Axel began the interview by laying out the impact of school privatization efforts in the district: “Corruption is just rampant. Either by LAUSD inflating graduation rates to keep schools open and get better funding; or in the school board of education, where we have people like Nick Melvoin and others such as Monica Garcia, who are elected by having super PACs that centrally funnel millions of dollars into their campaigns.

“There is no way that a teacher or even a parent who actually cares about the kids can win against them in running for school board member, because they are always going to be out-funded by multimillion-dollar entities. And in some instances, it is multi-billion, like Eli Broad…

“We have very few entities that are manipulating our school system. Broad has passed away, but his foundation still lives on, and it’s still funding and churning out superintendents and principals who are ready to have a pro-charter stance. It’s more of the problem of the illusion of free choice because they are funneling money and taking the cream of the crop of the student population and transferring them to other schools.”
District Half Composed Of Charters

During his speech, Axel also criticized former superintendents John Deasy and Austin Beutner, who “were put into power by the late billionaire Eli Broad and his heavily charter-centered foundation. … Both of these men were put there with no experience in education and left amid controversy and successfully paved the way towards privatizing LAUSD. Broad disrupted our education to achieve a district half-composed of charters. He, alongside the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, wormed their way through this district to privatize our human right to an education.”

The recently-elected LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho will continue this process. As former superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, he oversaw $2 billion in school cuts in 2008-09. Now, Carvalho will divert even more money to charters and other school privatization schemes in LAUSD.

For his part, Superintendent Carvalho rakes in $440,000 per year. Showcasing the level of corruption in the district, LAUSD board members make the highest salaries of any school board in the US, with each board member taking in over $125,000 annually. Significantly, LAUSD school board member Nick Melvoin, who was present during Axel’s speech, walked off the stage.

Speaking with the WSWS, Axel detailed the impact of school closures on students and families. Regarding a middle school closing in his neighborhood to be replaced by a new charter school, he said, “They say the school is ‘underperforming,’ but now they are replacing all the students with people that don’t even live in this community. They are not serving the community. Parents who used to walk a block to take their kids to school now have to go two or three miles or more. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Education Is A Human Right

“Why are we burdening parents and students to get an education? Education is a human right, isn’t it? They are privatizing education, making it more difficult for parents and students to get a quality education. We [students] are treated as commodities; we are just data points so that schools can remain open. They don’t care about us. We are being taught to take standardized tests and Advanced Placement tests. At the end of the day, it’s not about us, it’s not about an education.”

Axel also spoke about the hypocrisy of the school district when it came to keeping students and staff safe from contracting COVID-19 as well as the overall impacts of the pandemic on teachers and students. “The district was heavily hyping the fact that our classes would be smaller, and we would be six feet apart. But then you walk in the first day, there’s no COVID protocols, nothing. It’s just 32 students crammed into a room, sometimes 40. That’s not right, that’s not COVID safety.

“My girlfriend had a lot of health issues after she contracted COVID, and she still had to go to school because it wasn’t an excused absence. She no longer had COVID, but she still felt sick like she had some of the underlying conditions, and she had to go to school or else she wouldn’t be able to graduate. That’s not fair at all!

“There are a lot of students still coping with the pandemic. They don’t have access to counselors, therapists, psychologists. [The district] should have thought everything out, but they didn’t. Every aspect of LAUSD was so poorly planned out. We also were not given any heads-up or support—either emotional or academic.”

Axel has been researching charter schools and following conditions in the district for years as he saw the quality of education in the district changing. On the 2019 LAUSD teacher strike, he noted that teachers’ demands for better wages, lower class sizes, more nurses and psychologists, etc., were not met under the new terms of their contract and that the pandemic only exacerbated these issues.

“It was a lie. Yeah, it was all a lie. … From my experience from what I’ve seen is class sizes went down by maybe one or two students. That’s still ridiculous. But when you compare it to a private school, which is like one teacher for 12 or 20 students, that’s what education should be. We shouldn’t be like all huddled into a room and have one teacher catering to 32 students, sometimes even more; like sometimes they go against the new set regulations. Like that shouldn’t be the case.

“In my senior year of high school, I had a teacher—an amazing teacher—who was teaching 14 classes at the same time because there weren’t enough math teachers. The average teacher was teaching six classes. He was teaching two classes simultaneously, where he would be teaching a specific class and then he’d run across the hall and teach a different class. That’s what our education became. Teachers are just not paid enough…”
The UTLA Accomplished Nothing

“The [United Teachers of Los Angeles union] accomplished nothing. It was a sham. Class sizes didn’t go down significantly. Teachers got paid such a small fragment of what they should be paid. And even with nurses and psychiatrists, there are only enough in the district to have on site two times a week, at best.

“The teacher shortage is still an ongoing thing. We had three counselors in the span of one year: Our first counselor retired. The second was anti-vax, so she just left when vaccines became mandatory for staff.

“And then we had a third counselor step in. She was amazing! She was an intern, working a job that was not meant for an intern. She was overworked, chewed up, and spit out by our school system. She was an amazing person who helped me get into Brown University and helped other people get into prestigious universities. She wasn’t supposed to be a college counselor, but she worked as a college counselor and sometimes became a therapist, and she was amazing. It’s people like that, that keep our schools open, and yet they chew them up, spit them out, and that’s not right. It’s not right at all.

“We need more funding. The district does fund but they do it in the form of virtue signaling. For example, during the pandemic, we had the BLM movement in the summer of 2020. There was a movement calling for defunding school police. Okay, I’m fine with that. But where did that money go to? It went to black students, only black students. Yes, who cares about Hispanics, or you know, Middle Easterners that are coming who don’t know how to speak English. It’s always about virtue signaling.

“At Hollywood High School, we had $1 million for Title I funding, the general funding for the school, and then there was $833,000 that was used just for 11.6 percent of the school, which was black. That was how it was arranged because it’s always about virtue signaling. They don’t care about us.”
Programs Should Be For All Races, Not Just One Race

“So white students are always held up as the metric, like everyone wants to use that metric. … Before, the disparity between Hispanics and blacks was minuscule. It was like a 5 percent difference. Then black students were performing 17 percent worse than white students, I believe on average. And then Hispanic students were performing 12 percent worse, but Hispanic students aren’t given any additional support at LAUSD. They’re just ignored, sidelined. I think the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP), the program that funds all this, is a great idea. It is a great idea! Honestly, I love it. But I feel it should be implemented across the board to all races, not just to one race because of virtue signaling.

“Black students at my school, only black students, were given access to a full-time psychiatrist, a full-time counselor—we didn’t have one, most of our school didn’t have one. They had a special coordinator. They had a school climate advocate, they had tutors, they had all this extra stuff.

“And we didn’t. It’s like, why aren’t we given any of this?

“I’ve been labeled racist by a lot of students at my school because I wrote an article about this, how no one else is getting funding, how this is not fair at all. This is just virtue signaling because they did this immediately after the BLM movement. They could have done this at any other moment. They could have helped the black community; they could have helped the Hispanic community at any other moment in time. But they chose to do it right after the BLM movement. They don’t care about us. They were just virtue signaling. They were like, ‘Oh, students have always had a problem with school police. Oh, man, there’s a protest about police being violent. I guess we have to defund the police now. Oh, okay. Now we’ll do it.’”

A WSWS reporter ended the interview by asking, “What if the working class, if the teachers and students could run society and run the schools, what do you think it would be like?” Axel responded, “It definitely would not be like what we have now—it would be ideal. It would be ideal to have students and teachers leading. … And I really hope that someday we do accomplish that.

“Whenever I push towards anything like this happening, no one really cares in my community. No one really notices it. And that’s why I had to use my, you know, my right as the valedictorian of Hollywood High School. … I needed to use this to make at least one final stance against the system we have in place, and hopefully at the very least, inspire someone to lead a revolution against what we have now.

“You’re right. It is capitalism that is deeply entrenched in our system, and it is affecting us. It does have its benefits, right? We have all this amazing technology and whatnot, but at the end of day it doesn’t really matter if we have all these issues from health care all the way down to education.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recent Wins Inspire Organizing At Trader Joe’s, REI, Target, And Apple

https://popularresistance.org/a-new-sense-of-possibility-starbucks-and-amazon-wins-inspire-organizing-at-trader-joes-rei-target-and-apple/



By Dan Dimaggio and Angela Bunay, Labor Notes. July 2, 2022


A New Sense of Possibility.

“Seven months ago if you asked me about a union I would’ve said, ‘I don’t know, cops have them?’” says Sarah Pappin, a shift supervisor at a Seattle Starbucks. But on June 6, she and her co-workers voted unanimously to join Starbucks Workers United, part of an upsurge of organizing by younger workers with little union experience that is breathing new life into the labor movement.

Now they’re dreaming even bigger. “We want to not just open the door for the rest of the food service industry, we want to kick it down,” said Pappin, who’s worked full-time at Starbucks for eight years. “Eventually you get tired of jumping to the next job and praying it’s gonna be better. You realize you should just take a stand where you have some good ground.”

The union wave at Starbucks and the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) victory on Staten Island have sparked a new sense of possibility among workers at some of the country’s biggest nonunion employers, where unions have struggled for decades to establish any sort of foothold.

Since their April win, ALU organizers say they’ve heard from workers at another 100 Amazon facilities across the country who want to unionize. And in recent months workers have filed for union elections at Trader Joe’s stores in Massachusetts and Minneapolis, an REI in Manhattan, a Target in Virginia, and Apple stores in Atlanta and Towson, Maryland.

Workers in other largely non-union sectors are also organizing, with workers at an Activision Blizzard subsidiary forming the first union at a major video game company in May and tech workers at The New York Times becoming the largest bargaining unit in tech in March.
A Cascading Effect

The organizing wave is turning the labor movement’s prevailing wisdom on its head. Until now unions have mostly avoided filing for election at single workplaces that are part of big chains, like fast food restaurants or Amazon warehouses, not seeing a viable route to a first contract.

But the worker-organizers behind the current upsurge have relied on grassroots organizing to produce a cascading effect.

“The most beautiful thing about this whole movement is that we only have to win one to show what’s possible,” says Casey Moore, a barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo, the city that was home to the union’s first victory last year.

After the December vote count, Moore said, “we just started getting flooded with emails and direct messages on social media saying ‘We’re so inspired, how can we do it here?’”

Boston barista Kylah Clay was among those inspired. “We started talking about our working conditions in this new light—that we can actually change them,” she said. Clay is now helping Starbucks workers throughout New England to organize.

As we went to press, the upstart union had won elections at 177 Starbucks stores in 30 states, and lost just 30; 98 more stores had filed for elections. Workers have also struck over issues ranging from leaky ceilings and malfunctioning grease traps to cuts in hours and retaliatory firings.

Starbucks baristas have a tight workplace culture that helps explain their success. Many of the workers are younger, queer, and work there in part for the gender-affirming health benefits. “We work shoulder to shoulder in very frustrating conditions,” says Pappin. “We already know what the power of working together is.”
Directed From Below

The level of self-direction is a novel aspect of these recent campaigns. While Starbucks Workers United is getting advice and legal help from the SEIU affiliate Workers United, most of the organizing is being done by Starbucks workers. ALU is independent.

“What strikes me about what’s going on now is that it’s not being done by professional organizers,” says Labor Notes co-founder Kim Moody. “A lot of these campaigns are being initiated by the workers themselves, much as auto workers did in the 1930s.”

“It’s different from anything I’ve seen in the worker arena,” said Stephanie Luce, a professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. “It feels like elements of what we saw around other upsurges of protest—the globalization moment, the Occupy moment, the George Floyd moment. What those had in common was that they were not directed from above.”

When ALU filed at the Staten Island warehouse with signatures from just 30 percent of the workforce—the bare minimum to get a union election—most labor organizers scoffed at their chances. The general rule is that you have to file with at least 60 percent support (and preferably more) to withstand management’s anti-union campaign.

But ALU shocked the world and won. “It caused me to rethink the old rules of organizing,” said Peter Olney, former organizing director for the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). “You start to think: what about the churn at Amazon? You’re never gonna get to 70 or 80 percent with the churn [the high rate of turnover –Eds]. If you have the organization to get to 30 percent, then you may have the organization to win an election.”

Olney said he’s now encouraging unions to take more seriously the idea of filing for election sooner: “Shouldn’t we be viewing this as a moment to engage in mass filings to stress management and their union-busters? Say you’ve been building out a committee, done actions, marched on the boss—couldn’t you win an election? And wouldn’t winning an election put you on the map?

“Yes, we’ll lose some, but if we were to win at an Amazon facility in Southern California, imagine the media and public reverberations of such a victory.”
Why Now?

Why is this uptick in organizing happening now, instead of 10 or 20 years ago? “It’s like Murder on the Orient Express—you can find at least 10 good suspects,” says Elaine Bernard of the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program.

The tight labor market is one. Another is the flat-out indignation of a generation that grew up in the Great Recession and has just watched its employers rack up record profits during a brutal pandemic.

Another factor is the recent movements that young people have participated in, from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ rights to climate justice to the push for stricter gun laws in the wake of school shootings.

“Any of the rights campaigns have taught a lesson—that you have to stand up for yourself and you need your coworkers to stand with you, that nobody’s coming to rescue us, that the system is not just,” says Bernard.

“So many people who work at Starbucks were out on the streets for the Black Lives Matter uprising,” says Moore. “I think so many people have seen collective action happening outside the workplace and are saying, ‘Hey, we can do that inside the workplace too.”

“We grew up in this world that is literally on fire and there’s so many things that you can’t do anything about,” says Pappin, who just turned 31. “For me this was the first time in my life that I felt there was something wrong and I could actually take steps that would right them.”

Those sections of the labor movement that have kept the organizing flame alive also deserve credit, says Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations; she named SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the Communications Workers in particular.

“We don’t have this moment because of politics,” she said. “It’s because of the Kellogg’s workers, the Mineworkers, all the workers that went out on strike. And frankly because U.S. employers were so outrageous during Covid and before.”
Still A Challenge

Moody urges workers to organize now, before an eventual recession makes things harder: “you’re not gonna get a much better time to do it.”

But even with comparatively favorable conditions, wins are far from guaranteed. At a second Staten Island Amazon facility, for instance, workers lost their vote in April.

The outcome of the March rerun election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, is still hanging on hundreds of challenged ballots—though in the initial count, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union did much better than the vote last year, winning 875 yes votes against 993 no. That shows that even if you lose or make mistakes, “you can come back and do better,” says Bronfenbrenner. “You just have to do the work.”

RWDSU is asking the Labor Board to once again set the election aside for employer misconduct.

Workers at a Target store in Christiansburg, Virginia, recently pulled their election petition after the Labor Board said they hadn’t met the 30 percent threshold. As Target Workers Unite, an independent union, they’ve been organizing for years for Covid-19 safety protocols and against a racist, sexist manager.

The group is keeping at it despite the setback. “If we could just get one win at one store, I think that will be the catalyst for other stores,” said Adam Ryan, who has worked there for five years. “A lot of people are just waiting for a breakthrough.”

At an Apple store in Atlanta, workers who had filed with 70 percent support withdrew their petition, too, in the face of an anti-union campaign.

New York City Apple store workers say the company ramped up its anti-union campaign against their own organizing after the Atlanta store filed. Their advice: Don’t rush things. “When you’re in that stage of talking to your co-workers, make sure you take as much time as you need,” said a worker at the Grand Central Terminal store who asked to remain anonymous. “Everybody needs to be involved, and have everybody heard.”

On June 18, Apple workers in Towson, Maryland, became the first to successfully form a union at the company, voting 65 to 33 to join the Machinists. Kevin Gallagher, one of the Towson workers involved in the campaign, said that since their win he’s gotten direct messages on social media from dozens of other Apple employees interested in unionizing around the country.
Path To A Contract

None of these upstart unions has won a contract yet. So we don’t know yet whether their gamble will pay off.

Workers at the outdoor equipment and clothing store REI in New York City are facing threats and retaliation from management since they voted 88 to 14 to unionize in March. “I’m anticipating REI will fight us every step of the way,” said Graham Gale, a technical specialist at the store.

Since ALU’s election win, Amazon has filed 25 challenges to the outcome and fired two of the organizers and several managers at the Staten Island warehouse. Similarly, Starbucks Workers United has accused the coffee chain of retaliating against organizing efforts by firing union leaders and cutting hours at numerous stores.

“I don’t think any of us is under the illusion that it’s going to be easy,” says Moore.

One challenge for Starbucks workers, Bronfenbrenner points out, is that they’ll have to negotiate with the company’s founder, Howard Schultz, who returned as CEO in April. In the 1930s auto workers organizing drives, Ford was a tougher nut to crack than General Motors because it was still run by Henry Ford. “It’s hard for Starbucks to settle because it’s [Schultz] giving up control over his baby,” Bronfenbrenner said. “It’s much more of a control issue.”

Still, “I sense that Starbucks is vulnerable—it’s hurting because of the organizing campaign, its investors are uncomfortable,” says Bronfenbrenner. “As long as the number of Starbucks stores keeps growing, then the union has power.

“There’s a tipping point where a certain number of stores are organized. The question is: what is that tipping point? At some point they’re going to have to bargain, is my feeling.”
Summer Of Solidarity

Starbucks Workers United is ramping up for a summer of solidarity that includes spreading the organizing to more stores as well as deepening the community and labor support for the campaign.

“It’s gonna be all hands on deck,” said Moore. “We’re gonna need the whole labor movement to come out.”

Workers United announced it has created a $1 million strike fund.

“A lot of us are ready to do whatever it takes to put the pressure on,” Clay said. “I hope we’ve organized at least 1,000 stores by Labor Day.”

US Supreme Court May Take Aim At Whistleblower Protection Law

https://popularresistance.org/us-supreme-court-may-take-aim-at-whistleblower-protection-law/



By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. July 2, 2022



The False Claims Act in the United States allows individuals with evidence of fraud against government agencies to bring lawsuits as qui tam whistleblowers. They can bring a case even if the US Justice Department has no interest in fighting the alleged corruption.

But on June 21, Courthouse News Reported that the US Supreme Court will determine whether the government has the authority to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act when the government has declined to intervene in the case.

In other words, the Supreme Court could help corporations shut down independent whistleblower lawsuits that the Justice Department does not want to pursue.

Health care and pharmaceutical corporations, along with their lobbying networks, have ramped up pressure in recent years to stifle the effectiveness of the False Claims Act in holding their industry accountable and prevent the law’s expansion.

Under President Donald Trump, the National Whistleblower Center reported in 2018 that US government recoveries under the law hit a “ten-year low.” Nearly $2.9 billion was recovered, but only $767 million of that money was a result of lawsuits by the government. Whistleblower lawsuits, however, yielded over $2.1 billion.

A network of dark money has transformed the Supreme Court into an illegitimate and partisan institution. The same court that overturned Roe v. Wade—ending nearly 50 years of abortion rights—could gut one of the few laws available to private citizens to challenge corporate corruption.
Pushing Complicit Government Agencies To Act

President Abraham Lincoln signed the first False Claims Act in 1863 during the US Civil War. It became known as the “Lincoln law.”

According to Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing In An Age of Fraud, the law was intended to “stop army and navy contractors from stealing taxpayer dollars but also to push complacent or complicit government agencies to act.”

The US did not have a Justice Department, Mueller noted. What the “Lincoln law” did was empower individuals to “prosecute fraud with or without the government’s participation.” Offending contractors could be fined $2,000 for each misrepresentation or false claims they made when requesting payment from the government.

The law was gutted by Congress in 1943 because the Justice Department claimed it did not need the assistance of whistleblowers when prosecutors already knew about the fraud. As Republican Senator Chuck Grassley recalled, this led to “absurd results that only hurt the taxpayer.”

Grassley, an advocate for the law, said it “basically meant that all whistleblower cases were blocked, even cases where the government only knew about the fraud because of the whistleblower.”

In 1986, Grassley helped to ensure that amendments to the False Claims Act were passed to restore power to private citizens to bring whistleblower lawsuits. It ensured that whistleblowers would receive a reward in return for risking their career or legal jeopardy. However, in order to convince President Ronald Reagan to sign the amendments into law, Grassley and other senators had to overcome institutional opposition within the Justice Department.

Jay Stephens and Stuart Schiffer, two senior DOJ officials, opposed restoring the False Claims Act. Stephens contended the Justice Department was doing a good enough job against defense contractor fraud and a stronger law would hamper their work, according to Mueller.

“The law,” Stephens said, “was an anachronism from a time when the United States had no central investigative force; now that the DOJ and the FBI existed, most qui tam whistleblowers were parasitic ‘bounty hunters’ who interfered with legitimate law enforcers and ultimately provided little useful evidence of wrongdoing.”

The counter to Justice Department officials was that the restoration of the False Claims Act was necessary to protect whistleblowers from retaliation. The amendments were needed to prevent a complacent and complicit Justice Department from entering into “sweetheart deals with powerful contractors.”
‘Devastating Threat To The Executive’s Constitutional Authority’

Justice Department officials remained opposed, even though Reagan declined to veto the amendments. In 1989, they argued to the US Supreme Court that the law was unconstitutional.

Bill Barr, who later became attorney general under Trump, was the assistant attorney general. He contended the False Claims Act represented a “devastating threat to the executive’s constitutional authority and to the doctrine of separation of powers.” He objected to how Congress empowered citizens to help stimulate government action against fraud.

“There has been a massive upsurge in qui tam actions—over 150 suits have been filed,” Barr cried. “These actions have disrupted the civil and criminal enforcement activities of the Department.”

“They have also undermined the executive’s ability to administer complex procurement contracts and, in some cases, have caused serious national security concerns. The 1986 Amendments have also spawned the formation of full-time ‘bounty hunting’ groups—ersatz departments of justice—that go about prosecuting civil fraud actions in the name of the United States.”

Barr was worried about groups representing whistleblowers, who could collect up to thirty percent of any recovery, because their effectiveness put the Justice Department to shame. He was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the Supreme Court to neuter the False Claims Act.

However, three decades later, Barr was at it again in his position as Trump’s attorney general. The Justice Department dismissed an increased number of false claims cases for reasons that Grassley believed had nothing to do with the merits of the cases. It seemed prosecutors were intent to discourage whistleblowers and undermine efforts to root out serious fraud.

Bloomberg Law Reported that the Justice Department moved to dismiss “at least 14 cases involving pharmaceuticals.” Eleven of the cases were brought by the National HealthCare Analysis Group, which alleged “violations of anti-kickback laws that prohibit improper marketing of drugs to medical professionals.” They were viewed as a “bounty hunting” group.

The National Whistleblower Center called attention to the fact that the Justice Department was attempting to dismiss a case against the pharmaceutical corporation known as Gilead Sciences. A whistleblower accused the corporation of “manufacturing drugs with contaminated ingredients from China” and unusually the Justice Department maintained it would be too costly to pursue the lawsuit.

Grassley and a bipartisan group of senators tried in 2021 to correct the issue of dismissals by the Justice Department by creating a test. Prosecutors would be required to “identify a valid government purpose and a rational relation between dismissal and accomplishment of that purpose.”

A whistleblower would then have the ability to challenge dismissal by “demonstrating that the dismissal is fraudulent, arbitrary and capricious, or illegal.” But Big Pharma succeeded in blocking the amendments from inclusion in the 2021 infrastructure bill that passed. It was a major loss for whistleblowers.

“By raising false flags about these amendments and locking progress through complex and endless court cases,” the National Whistleblower Center warned, an “anti-whistleblower victory—which could open the floodgates for future attacks on these highly successful whistleblower protections”—was secured by lobbyists.
Record Settlements And Rewards Under The False Claims Act

During the past five years, lawsuits against the False Claims Act that are backed by corporate interests have sought to amplify uncertainty around the Supreme Court and lower courts’ interpretation of provisions in the law. Each million spent on these efforts is intended to stall the progress of whistleblowers courageous enough to take a stand against corporate influence and power.

GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical corporation, was hit with a record $3 billion fine in 2012 after marketing their drugs for “unauthorized uses” and cheating the US government’s Medicaid program. The result was a whistleblower reward of $250 million, which four individuals split.

Faced with “allegations it sold toxic mortgage-backed securities and other financial products” in the run-up to the 2008 economic crash, Bank of America agreed to a record settlement with the US government of $16.65 billion in 2014. Three whistleblowers and one firm shared a $170 million reward.

Pharmaceutical corporation Johnson & Johnson entered into a $2.2 billion settlement with the US government in 2012 to end a lawsuit involving allegations related to fraud and kickback schemes perpetrated to sell three drugs: Risperdal, Natrecor, and Invega. A whistleblower received a $167 million reward.

These are just three examples of how private individuals with evidence and knowledge of fraud can pursue a modest level of accountability against corporations, whether Justice Department officials have the political appetite for such action or not.

The Justice Department’s history of opposition to the False Claims Act does not exactly inspire confidence that the corporate-captured Supreme Court will leave the law alone. If the Supreme Court yet again prioritizes corporations and upends a settled law, their ruling may greatly diminish a tool that whistleblowers have wielded for decades.

Brutal Attacks On Africans In Morocco Highlights Crisis In Africa

https://popularresistance.org/statement-issued-by-new-world-mathaba-brutal-attacks-on-africans-in-morocco-highlights-crisis-in-africa/






By Gerald A. Perreira, Black Agenda Report.

July 2, 2022
Educate!

Statement Issued by New World Mathaba.

Protest the deaths of African migrants at the hands of Moroccan security forces while attempting to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla.

On June 24th, approximately 2000 African migrants made a desperate attempt at a mass border crossing, climbing the iron fence separating Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Footage of African bodies piled up at the foot of the fence, many lifeless, while others were being savagely beaten by Moroccan Security Forces, went viral. To date, the number of African migrants who lost their lives has climbed to 37.

We join with those all over the world, to condemn, in the strongest possible terms, this horrific attack by Moroccan security forces. However, we know that in a matter of weeks, the statements of condemnation and outrage will be buried, and the incident will simply be added to the mountain of crimes against African humanity. The question is, what is to be done?

This brutal attack on Africans, on African soil, highlights the crisis that Africa is facing. The fundamental problem is that Imperialist forces have been able to install and sustain neo-colonial regimes throughout the continent, while rolling back and destroying all attempts by the African masses to rid themselves of the Imperialist’s stranglehold, from Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe to Libya.

One of the most serious setbacks for Africa was the destruction of the Libyan Jamahirya, and the assassination of revolutionary Pan-Africanist, Muammar Qaddafi. Utilizing the situation that had arisen in neighboring African countries, Egypt and Tunisia, the imperialists seized the moment to invade and destroy Libya, and murder Qaddafi. In so doing, they were able to neutralize what was a very real challenge to their continued plunder of African resources, and their continued exploitation and genocide of African peoples.

In addition, the destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriya dramatically changed the situation with regard to African migration. The Libyan Jamahiriya was the most prosperous country in all of Africa. Border restriction for Africans were relaxed which meant that Africans from all over the continent were free to live and work in Libya. From there, they were able to send money home to their families.

When people risk their lives and the lives of their families to flee their countries, it is because of the desperate and unbearable conditions they face at home. The crisis facing Africa is worsening by the day. Numerous African countries are experiencing a surge in attacks and sabotage by heretical, Islamic terrorist groups, aided and abetted by foreign powers from Qatar to the Western Imperial nations, with the aim of destabilizing and balkanizing the continent. The US and their allies are notorious for using these groups as foot soldiers, and as a justification for the imposition of USAFRICOM, which has relations and/or military bases in almost every African country.

Africa is experiencing climate shocks resulting in some of the worst droughts in East Africa in recent history. Food and fertilizer shortages, coupled with rising prices, caused by NATO’s proxy war against Russia, are exacerbating the already dire conditions. Poverty and hunger are on the rise, and the potential risk of famine across the continent looms large. Lack of access to potable drinking water is threatening the lives of millions of Africans.

There is only one way to overcome these problems, and that is to rid the continent of foreign military, economic and political interference and domination, and the neo-colonial governments installed to manage African nation-states on behalf of these foreign entities.

We, revolutionary Pan-Africanists, must intensify our efforts to come together with revolutionary and progressive forces worldwide, to accelerate the collapse of the US Empire and its West European, Canadian and Australasian surrogates. Their decline is without doubt underway, and the world is now at a critical tipping point. Despite the overwhelming challenges that confront us, both organizationally and personally, we must organize and mobilize as never before, to hasten the inevitable implosion and destruction of all those countries that built their economies on the backs of captured Africans and the plunder of Mother Africa.

There is nothing that White Power fears more than our united efforts and a united Africa, free from foreign domination. It is the reason why they target every African leader and movement advocating this vision. They know that a united Africa would completely change the balance of power globally. A well-documented fact is that if Africa stopped the flow of all resources and raw materials to the Western nations for just one week, the United States and Europe would grind to a halt.

Almost every known natural resource needed to run contemporary industrial economies, uranium, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan (for cell phones, computers etc.), platinum, diamonds, bauxite, and especially large reserves of oil are located in Africa. Azania (South Africa) alone contains half the world’s gold reserves. Democratic Republic of Congo contains half of the world’s cobalt and 80% of the world’s known coltan reserves. One quarter of the world’s aluminum ore is found in the coastal belt of West Africa and the continent is awash in petroleum reserves. These resources must be liberated and placed in the hands of the people, so that they can live decent and dignified lives in the land of their birth.

We cannot look to or expect anything from current African regimes with few exceptions, or to the impotent African Union, most aptly described by Zimbabwean writer, Reason Wafawarova, as “a bunch of cowardly bucolic boofheads, totally mesmerized by Western donor funding…What an unthinking lot of hopeless traitors!”

Gone are the days when that fiery club, formerly known as the Organization of African Unity, was graced by great freedom-fighters, including Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Jamal Abdel Nasser, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Sam Nujoma, Nelson Mandela and so many other African heroes.

We must now look to ourselves in this defining moment for Africa and indeed, for all of humanity. We must, no matter what the obstacles, work tirelessly to confront the core issues at stake. We must heed the words of Muammar Qaddafi, in an address to a large gathering in Niamey, Niger in 1997: “This is a sacred battle, concerning our moral values… We cannot accept any undermining of these values. All barriers created by the colonialist armies must be demolished…we are stronger than them in terms of our moral values and material power… the wealth of Africa must be in the hands of the African masses. To achieve this, Imperialism and Neo-colonialism must be destroyed.”

And in the timeless words of Marcus Mosiah Garvey “Arise Ye Mighty Race – Accomplish what you will.”

How Bezos And His Company Wrap Themselves In The Flag

https://popularresistance.org/how-bezos-and-his-company-wrap-themselves-in-the-flag/



By Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early and Jasper Craven, Popular Resistance. July 2, 2022


Warriors@Amazon.

Corporate America loves to proclaim its love and support for “our veterans.” The persistent problem of veteran suicide has provided big firms with an opportunity to demonstrate their concern about the health and well-being of former military personnel, including those they employ. Unfortunately, at companies like Amazon, this performative patriotism does not involve improving working conditions or changing any management practices that might actually make them better employers, even while they pledge to hire more employees with military backgrounds.

A recent report by Brown University’s Cost of War Project found “that four times as many men and women who have served in the U.S. military have died by suicide than were killed in post 9/11 wars.” Cost of War researchers estimate that the total suicide toll among veterans and service members during the past two decades is more than thirty thousand. According to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), veterans are 1.5 times more likely to die by suicide than nonveterans, while female veterans are 2.2 times more likely to die by suicide than civilian women.

When soldiers leave active duty, their employment status and job conditions—pay, benefits, and treatment by supervisors—can have a major impact on their emotional and financial stability. With this in mind, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation joined forces with the Trump Administration two years ago to promote a suicide reduction initiative called “Prevents.” Its objective was building “a public/private partnership to strengthen emotional well-being in the workplace.”

Major corporations were solicited to sign a “Hiring Our Heroes Challenge Pledge” and make a related commitment to “best practices for strengthening mental wellness and preventing suicide.” The latter pledge notes that their “employee populations,” including veterans, may have certain risk factors, such as “financial stress, emotional stress, and substance use and abuse.” To reduce these risk factors, the signatory firms agreed to “promote a safe, inclusive work environment and leverage employee resource groups” to “create communities of support.”

Among the first twenty-five “forward looking employers” to sign up was Amazon, along with equally anti-union firms like Walmart, Starbucks, Comcast, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The company founded by Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest man, pledged to hire twenty-five thousand more veterans and military spouses by 2021. (Last year that goal, became 100,000 by 2024) These new hires would then be encouraged to join the company’s officially approved workplace-based “affinity group,” known as “Warriors@Amazon.” (Among this influx of veterans is retired General Keith Alexander, a multi-millionaire former director of the National Security Agency, who has become a well-compensated “warrior” on the Amazon board of directors!)

As coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders generated a huge increase in Amazon’s online order flow, shareholder value increased by nearly $500 billion, to more than $1.4 trillion. By mid-2020 Bezos’s personal net worth rose to nearly $190 billion. This enabled the Amazon founder to become an even bigger patron of a Super pac called the With Honor Fund. Its wealthy donors seek out centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans who served in the military and promise, if elected to Congress, to join “a cross partisan veterans caucus.” During the 2018 election cycle, Bezos gave $10 million to With Honor during the same week that Super pac critic Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate called the “Stop Bezos Act. “
Workplace Wellness?

The goal of Sanders legislation was to force Amazon to reimburse the federal government for the cost of public benefits, like Medicaid or food stamps, that thousands of its workers are eligible to collect because their pay is so low. Sanders’s attempt to hold the company accountable was not successful, in part because Congress already has too many members like the ones Bezos helps finance via With Honor. At a town hall meeting hosted by Sanders, Navy veteran Seth King, who quit Amazon after three months on the job, publicly questioned his former employer’s commitment to providing fair wages and “workplace wellness.”

He described Amazon’s employment model as “a revolving door of just bodies that they’re throwing at the floor.” Telling a now-familiar warehouse worker story, he recalled working long hours under the pressure of demanding productivity standards, with few chances to sit down or take a bathroom break. As King drove to work every day, it “was exhausting just thinking about having to come in and start another ten-hour shift, being on my feet the whole time.” At a company supposedly sensitive to risk factors for suicide, King felt like he “didn’t want to be alive anymore if that was the future that I had to look forward to. I was in the Navy for eight years, and there wasn’t a single day that I felt as miserable or isolated as I did at Amazon.”

Even other veterans hired to be warehouse managers have made similar unfavorable comparisons. One, an officer still active in the reserves, reported that his warehouse was understaffed and overheated due to insufficient air-conditioning. When mistakes occurred, he said, he’d usually get chewed out by one of his bosses. “I didn’t get treated as bad in the [military] in basic training,” he said. “You screw up—it’s a screaming, cussing, yelling tirade on the floor.” Like several other warehouse supervisors interviewed by cnet, this veteran faced pressure to leave the military because, he was told, a “manager wouldn’t be able to advance at the company if he continued to serve both the military and Amazon.” When queried about these alleged violations of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (serra)–which protects service members from job discrimination or denial of promotions due to their absence from work for military commitments–Amazon proclaimed its commitment “to supporting our military and veteran employees and providing opportunities for their long-term career growth and success.”

An expose in the New York Times documented the degree to which Amazon actually “intentionally limits upward mobility for hourly workers.” One top executive torpedoed a proposal from Human Resources to “create more leadership roles for hourly employees, similar to non-commissioned officers in the military.” Instead, “guaranteed wage increases stopped after three years and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave.” Such policies reflected Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s belief that hourly workers who stayed too long at the company would become lazy, disgruntled, and entrenched, putting Amazon on what he called “a march to mediocrity.”
Pandemic Related Changes?

In response to mounting public criticism in 2020, Amazon highlighted its hiring of veterans who lost their jobs, at other firms, due to the pandemic. It also made some covid-19 related workplace changes. Management announced what proved to be a temporary wage hike for warehouse workers, whose starting pay is $15 per hour. The company also modified its leave policy to permit employees with virus symptoms to stay home for up to two weeks with pay. Workers later contended that this policy was not fairly or consistently implemented.

By the 2020 holiday season, Amazon was acting like the pandemic was over, according to Courtenay Brown, an employee in New Jersey. Bezos, she noted, had “made $70 billion since March when the pandemic started,” but the company still “canceled the measly $2 bonus back in June.” Meanwhile, “Amazon calls us heroes in their commercials, they call us essential, but it feels like we are expendable.” Brown was among the Amazon workers who joined forces with Walmart employees in a national campaign called “Five to Survive.” As she explained, its five demands included “$5 per hour in essential pay, safety on the job, and real protections from retaliation if they speak out about working conditions or health hazards.”

Unfortunately, as former Amazon vice president Tim Bray pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece, the company’s “productivity targets” continued to make the “already stressful work of those who sort, package, and deliver Amazon goods even worse.” According to Bray, only unionization will ensure better treatment of the company’s hourly workers, including the 40,00 veterans, military spouses, and part-time military personnel currently among them. One function of any labor organization with bargaining rights at Amazon, now or in the future, will be negotiating contract language and deploying workplace health and safety committees. Both are needed to help reduce the company’s high job injury rate, which is twice that of any warehousing rival. According to the labor-backed Strategic Organizing Center, about 40,000 Amazon employees were injured on the job just last year, a 20% increase over 2020. That amounts to 6.8 serious injuries for very 100 warehouse workers on its payroll.

But, as Amazon workers from Bessemer, Alabama to Staten Island, New York, have discovered, one deterrent to joining an unapproved “affinity group”—like a union or its safety committee– is Amazon’s pervasive workplace surveillance. As the Open Markets Research Institute reported, the company “uses navigation software, item scanners, wristbands, thermal cameras, security cameras and recorded footage to surveil its workforce in warehouses and stores.” These tools are designed both to boost output and to closely monitor employee involvement in any workplace organizing activity.
Vet-on-Vet Surveillance

Ironically, but not surprisingly, Amazon’s world-wide in-house spying operation has now deployed military veterans against other veterans, when the latter are part of the hourly workforce being closely monitored in the U.S.. The recent inspiring spike in Amazon organizing activity has led to an increase in its hiring of past employees of the Department of Defense, other national security agencies, and local law enforcement. In job postings for positions in Amazon’s Global Security Operations (GSO) and Global Intelligence Program (GIP), the company solicited applications from veterans able to keep its union-busting lawyers well informed about “sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company.” If hired, their role would be to “track funding and activities connected to corporate campaigns (internal and external) against Amazon, and provide sophisticated analysis on these topics.”

It’s not clear whether informing on fellow “Warriors@Amazon,” who work on the shop-floor, will also require some actual heavy lifting (while undercover) or just operating surveillance equipment and writing voluminous Stasi-style reports. Either way, these newly hired “heroes” will be adding little luster to whatever past military laurels they might have earned during U.S. government mis-adventures, at home or abroad.





This article is adapted from Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Copyright Duke University Press, August, 2022). For more information about pre-ordering the book, see https://www.dukeupress.edu/our-veterans The authors can be contacted at Lsupport@aol.com.

Palestinians ‘Are Not Animals In A Zoo’

https://popularresistance.org/palestinians-are-not-animals-in-a-zoo-redefining-the-role-of-the-victim-intellectual/





By Ramzy Baroud, Mintpress News. July 2, 2022


Redefining the Role of the ‘Victim Intellectual.’

Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, U.S. media introduced many new characters, promoting them as “experts” who helped ratchet up propaganda, ultimately allowing the U.S. government to secure enough popular support for the war.

Though enthusiasm for war began dwindling in later years, the invasion began with a relatively strong popular mandate that allowed President George W. Bush to claim the role of liberator of Iraq, the fighter of “terrorism” and the champion of U.S. global interests. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll published on March 24, 2003 – just a few days after the invasion – 72% of Americans were in favor of the war.

Only now are we beginning to fully appreciate the massive edifice of lies, deceit, and forgery involved in shaping the war narrative, and the sinister role played by mainstream media in demonizing Iraq and its people. Future historians will continue with the task of unpacking the war conspiracy for years to come.

Consequently, it is also important to acknowledge the role played by Iraq’s own “native informants”, a group that the late professor Edward Said labeled as “willing servant[s] of imperialism”.

Thanks to the various American invasions and military interventions, these “informants” have grown in number and usefulness to the extent that, in various Western intellectual and media circles, they define what is erroneously viewed as “facts” concerning most Arab and Muslim countries. From Afghanistan to Iran, Syria, Palestine, Libya, and, of course, Iraq, these “experts” are constantly parroting messages that are tailored to fit Western agendas.

These native informants are often depicted as political dissidents. They are recruited – whether officially via government-funded think tanks or otherwise – to provide a convenient depiction of the “realities” in the Middle East and elsewhere as a rational, political or moral justification for war and various other forms of intervention.
Victim Intellectuals

Though this phenomenon is widely understood – especially as its dangerous consequences became too apparent in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan – another phenomenon rarely receives the necessary attention. In the second scenario, the “intellectual” is not necessarily an “informant”, but a victim, whose message is entirely shaped by his sense of self-pity and victimhood. In the process of communicating that collective victimhood, this intellectual does their people a disfavor by presenting them as hapless and having no human agency whatsoever.

Palestine is a case in point. The Palestine “victim intellectual” is not an intellectual in any classic definition. Said refers to the intellectual as “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion”. Gramsci argued that intellectuals are those who “sustain, modify and alter modes of thinking and behavior of the masses. They are purveyors of consciousness”. The “victim intellectual” is none of these.

In the case of Palestine, this phenomenon was not accidental. Due to the limited spaces available to Palestinian thinkers to speak openly and truly about Israeli crimes and about Palestinian resistance to military occupation and Apartheid, some have strategically chosen to use whatever available margins to communicate any kind of messaging that could be nominally accepted by Western media and audiences.

In other words, in order for Palestinian intellectuals to be able to operate within the margins of mainstream western society, or even within the space allocated by certain pro-Palestinian groups, they can only be “allowed to narrate” as “purveyors” of victimhood. Nothing more.

Those familiar with the Palestinian intellectual discourse, in general, especially following the first major Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-9, must have noticed how accepted Palestinian narratives regarding the war rarely deviate from the decontextualized and depoliticized Palestinian victim discourse. While understanding the depravity of Israel and the horrondousness of its war crimes is critical, Palestinian voices that are given a stage to address these crimes are frequently denied the chance to present their narratives in the form of strong political or geopolitical analyses, let alone denounce Israel’s Zionist ideology or proudly defend Palestinian resistance.

Much has been written about the hypocrisy of the West in handling the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war, especially when compared to the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine or the genocidal Israeli wars in Gaza. But little has been said about the nature of the Ukrainian messaging as compared to those of Palestinians: the former is demanding and entitled, while the latter mostly passive and bashful.

While top Ukrainian officials often tweet statements instructing Western officials to “go f**k yourselves” or similar, their Palestinian equivalents are constantly begging and pleading. The irony is that Ukrainian officials are attacking the very nations that have supplied them with billions of dollars of arms, while Palestinian officials are careful not to offend the same nations that support Israel with the very weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians.

One may argue that Palestinians are tailoring their language to accommodate whichever political and media spaces that are available to them. This, however, hardly explains why many Palestinians, even within “friendly” political and academic environments, can only see their people as victims and nothing else.
Not Just Victims

This is hardly a new phenomenon. It goes back to the early years of the Israeli war on the Palestinian people. Leftist Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani, like others, was aware of this dichotomy. Kanafani contributed to the intellectual awareness among various revolutionary societies in the Global South during a critical era for national liberation struggles worldwide. He was the posthumous recipient of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences Lotus Prize for Literature in 1975, three years after he was assassinated by Israel in Beirut, in July 1972.

Like others in his generation, Kanafani was adamant in presenting Palestinian victimization as part and parcel of a complex political reality of Israeli military occupation, Western colonialism and U.S.-led imperialism. A famous story is often told about how he met his wife, Anni in South Lebanon. When Anni, a Danish journalist, arrived in Lebanon in 1961, she asked Kanafani if she could visit the Palestinian refugee camps. “My people are not animals in a zoo,” Kanafani replied, adding, “You must have a good background about them before you go and visit.” The same logic can be applied to Gaza, to Sheikh Jarrah and Jenin.

The Palestinian struggle cannot be reduced to a conversation about poverty or the horrors of war, but must be expanded to include wider political contexts that led to the current tragedies in the first place. The role of the Palestinian intellectual cannot stop at conveying the victimization of the people of Palestine, leaving the much more consequential and intellectually demanding role of unpacking historical, political and geopolitical facts to others, some of whom often speak on behalf of Palestinians.

It is quite uplifting and rewarding to finally see more Palestinian voices included in the discussion about Palestine. In some cases, Palestinians are even taking center stage in these conversations. However, for the Palestinian narrative to be truly relevant, Palestinians must assume the role of the Gramscian intellectual, as “purveyors of consciousness” and abandon the role of the “victim intellectual” altogether. The Palestinian people are indeed not animals in a zoo, but a nation with political agency, capable of articulating, resisting, and, ultimately, winning their freedom, as part of a much greater fight for justice and liberation throughout the world.