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08 September 20
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Robert Reich | Labor Day 2020: The Power Shift
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "On Labor Day, just eight weeks before one of the most consequential elections in American history, it's useful to consider the economic reality that fueled Donald Trump's victory four years ago."
No other developed nation has nearly the inequalities of income and wealth found in the U.S., even though all have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change. The three richest people in America have as much wealth as the bottom half of all Americans combined, even as 30 million Americans reported their households didn’t have enough food.
American capitalism is off the rails.
The main reason is that large corporations, Wall Street banks and a relative handful of exceedingly rich individuals have gained enough political power to game the system.
Chief executives have done everything possible to prevent the wages of most workers rising in tandem with productivity gains, so most gains go instead into the pockets of top executives and major investors.
They’ve outsourced abroad, installed labor-replacing technologies and switched to part-time and contract work. They’ve busted unions, whose membership shrank from 35% of the private-sector workforce 40 years ago to 6.2% today. They’ve defanged antitrust enforcement, allowing their monopolies free rein.
The so-called free market has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts and corporate welfare.
This massive power shift laid the groundwork for Trump. In 1964, almost two thirds of Americans believed government was run for the benefit of all the people. By 2013 almost 80% believed government was run by a few big interests.
Much of the political establishment wants to attribute Trump’s rise solely to racism. Racism did play a part, to be sure, but racism’s sordid history in American politics long predates Trump.
What has given Trump’s racism – as well as his hateful xenophobia and misogyny – particular virulence has been his capacity to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class. It is hardly the first time a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of its distress.
Trump speaks the language of authoritarian populism but acts in the interests of America’s emerging oligarchy. His deal with the moneyed interests was simple: he’d stoke divisiveness so Americans wouldn’t see how the oligarchy has taken over the reins, twisted government to its benefit, and siphoned off the economic rewards.
He’d make Americans so angry at each other that they wouldn’t pay attention to CEOs getting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, won’t notice the giant tax cut that went to big corporations and the wealthy, and won’t be outraged by a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.
This way, the moneyed interests can rig the system while Trump complains that the system is rigged by a “deep state.”
Notwithstanding all this, Trump’s inexcusable failure to contain the coronavirus is having a larger impact on swing voters than the divisiveness he foments. Death has a way of concentrating the mind.
But if Joe Biden is elected, he would be well advised to remember the forces Trump exploited to gain power, and begin the task of remedying them. The solution is not found in mere redistribution of income. It is found in redistributing power.
If wealth continues to concentrate at the top, no one will be able to contain the corrupting influence of big money on the American system and the anger it unleashes. As Justice Louis D Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Brad Parscale. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The Trump Campaign Has Reportedly Squandered Most of the $1.1 Billion It Raised
Tom Porter, Business Insider
Porter writes: "President Donald Trump's reelection campaign has squandered its significant cash advantage over Joe Biden's rival presidential campaign, a New York Times investigation has found."
According to The Times, which spoke with dozens of current and former campaign aides and reviewed thousands of financial documents, the Trump campaign spent $800 million of its $1.1 billion war chest between the beginning of the year and July.
That's nearly three-quarters of its total funds spent with months of the campaign left.
After he won the Democratic primaries at a significant financial disadvantage to Trump, Biden is winning back ground, with a record-breaking $365 million fundraising haul in August.
According to the report, Biden has held a series of highly lucrative Zoom fundraisers during lockdown, which Trump has eschewed, aides said, because he doesn't like them.
The report detailed a series of massive spends by the campaign, which seem to be more about pleasing the president than winning over supporters. They include:
- $11 million on ads during the February 7 Super Bowl to match spending by billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, who later dropped out of the race.
- $1 million on TV ads in Washington, DC, which is solidly Democratic. (But Trump is known to watch hours of TV a day in the White House, venting on Twitter about negative coverage on news networks and advertisements by political opponents attacking him.)
- $110,000 spent on magnet-lined pouches in which campaign officials meeting Trump can store their cellphones so their conversations with the president cannot be recorded.
- Lavish campaign headquarters in Virginia, where the campaign assembled a "large and well-paid staff."
According to the report, many of the spending decisions can be traced to Brad Parscale, who was demoted as the 2020 campaign chief after the president's June rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Parscale had billed the event as sold out, but the president spoke in a stadium that had rows of empty seats, with fears of the coronavirus likely depressing turnout. And a campaign by teenagers likely inflated expectations of how many people would show up.
Since campaign manager Bill Stepien replaced Parscale, he "has imposed a series of belt-tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget," The Times reported.
While Parscale had a chauffeur-driven car while he was in the role, Stepien has taken a pay cut, according to The Times.
In a break with precedent, Trump launched his reelection campaign the day after he moved into the White House and has held campaign rallies throughout his time in office.
Supporters react as U.S. president Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
Tom Engelhardt | Fourth World: Or American Carnage From a Pandemic President
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe's lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left - alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world."
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Well, I’m back for another fall, miraculously enough, my 18th doing TomDispatch. My thanks to all of you who offered this site a donation during my two weeks off. It does matter to me and to your fellow readers. It's truly how this site has kept going all these years. And although I know that I’m the proverbial broken record on the subject, if any of you have the sudden urge to offer TD a hand, please do check out our donation page. In Donald Trump’s America (see below), your contributions are the difference between my continuing as long as I can and the bottom of the deep blue sea. Tom]
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Fourth World
Or American Carnage From a Pandemic President
he year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left -- alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.
Who could have asked for more? Or better? It had been a Cold War fantasy of the first order -- until that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. In fact, even that doesn’t catch the true shock of the moment, since Washington's leaders simply hadn’t imagined a world in which the Cold War could ever truly end.
Now, go ahead, blame me. In this pandemic moment that should perhaps be considered a sign of a burning, sickening future to come, I’m stoking your nostalgia for better times. Admittedly, even that past was, in truth, a fantasy of the first (or perhaps last) order. After all, in retrospect, that mighty, resplendent, lone superpower, victorious beyond the wildest dreams of its political elite, was already about to embark on its own path of decline. Enwreathed in triumph, it, too, would be heading for the exits, even if so much more slowly than the Soviet Union.
It’s clear enough now that, in 1991, with Ronald Reagan’s former vice president George H.W. Bush in the White House and his son, George W., waiting in the wings of history (while Iraqi autocrat and former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein was still perched in his palace in Baghdad, Iraq), the United States was already launching itself on the path to Donald Trump’s America. No, he didn’t know it. How could he? Who could have possibly imagined him as the president of the United States? He was still a tabloid phenomenon then (masquerading that year as his own publicist “John Miller” in phone interviews with reporters to laud the attractions and sexual conquests of one “Donald Trump”). He was also on the road to bankruptcy court since his five Atlantic City casinos would soon go down in flames. Him as a future candidate to head an America where life for so many would be in decline and its very greatness in need of being “made” great again... well, who coulda dreamt it? Not me, that’s for sure.
Welcome to American Carnage
Let me apologize one more time. Yes, I was playing on your sense of nostalgia in this besieged American moment of ours. Mission accomplished, I assume.
So much, I’m afraid, for such Auld Lang Syne moments, since that one took place in a previous century, even if, remarkably enough, that wasn’t actually so long ago. Only 29 years passed from that singular moment of triumph in Washington (a period that would then be fancied as “the end of history”) to Donald Trump’s America-not-First-but-Last world -- to, that is, genuine “American carnage” (and I’m not just thinking about the almost 190,000 Americans who have already died from Covid-19 with no end in sight). Less than a quarter of a century took us from the president who asked God to continue to “bless the United States of America” in the wake of a historic victory to the man who campaigned for president on the declinist slogan of making America great again.
And don’t think Donald Trump was wrong in that 2017 inaugural address of his. A certain level of American carnage (particularly in the form of staggering economic inequality, not to speak of the “forever wars” still being fought so brainlessly by a military on which this country was spending its money rather than on health, education, and infrastructure) had helped bring him to power and he knew it. He even promised to solve just such problems, including ending those forever wars, as he essentially did again in his recent White House acceptance speech, even as he promised to keep “rebuilding” that very military.
Here was the key passage from that long-gone inaugural address of his:
“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Of course, more than 3½ years later, in that seemingly eternal “now” of his, the carnage seemed eternal -- whether in the form of those wars he swore he would get us out of; the spending on the military and the rest of what’s still known as the national security state, which only increased; the economic inequality, which just grew, thanks in part to a humongous 2017 tax cut, a bonanza for the wealthiest Americans (and no one else), leaving the government and so the rest of us owing far more money than previously imaginable; and above all, the urge of his administration, from top to bottom, not just to deny that climate change exists but to burn this planet down by “unleashing” a program of “American energy dominance” and taking every imaginable restraint off the exploitation of fossil-fuels and opening up yet more areas for those industries to exploit. In other words, Donald J. Trump has given American carnage new meaning and, in his singular way, lent a remarkable hand to the transformation of this country.
A Simple Math Problem
When The Donald descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to declare himself a candidate for president, he made a promise to the disgruntled citizens of the American heartland. He would build what he hailed as a “great wall” (that the Mexican government would pay for) to seal us off from the lesser breeds on this planet (Mexican rapists!). Until that moment, of course, there had been just one “great” wall on planet Earth and it had been constructed by various Chinese dynasties over untold centuries to keep out nomadic invaders, the armed “caravans” of that moment.
As Americans would soon learn, however, being second best to or only as good as just about anything wasn’t, to put it mildly, Donald Trump’s signature style. So in that first speech of his, he instantly doubled the “greats” in his wall. He would create nothing less than a “great, great” one.
In the years that followed, it’s also become clear that neither spelling, nor pronouncing words is among his special skills or, put another way, that he’s a great, great misspeller and mispronouncer. Given that he managed to produce only 300 miles of wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in almost four years in office, almost all of it replacing already existing barriers (at the expense of the American taxpayer and a set of private donors-cum-suckers), we have to assume that the candidate of that first day either misspelled or mispronounced one word in that phrase of his.
Given what’s happened to this country since, it’s hard not to imagine that what he meant was not a great, great wall, but a great, great fall. And in this pandemic hell of a country, with its economy in the kind of tatters that no one has yet faintly come to grips with, its health (and mental health) in crisis mode, parts of it burnt to a crisp and others flooded and clobbered by intensifying storms, if that’s what he meant to say, his leadership of what remains the world’s lone superpower (despite a rising China) has indeed been a great, great success. For such a triumph, however, this country needs some new term, something to replace that old “indispensable nation” (and, for my money, “dispensable nation” doesn’t quite do the trick).
And I have a suggestion. Once upon a time when I was much, much younger, we spoke of three worlds on planet Earth. There was the first world (also known as “the free world”), which included the developed countries of North America, Europe, and Japan (and you could throw in South Korea and Australia, if you wanted); there was the second world, also known as the communist bloc, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China; and, of course, there was the third world, which included all the other poor and underdeveloped countries, many former European colonies, scattered around the globe’s south and often in terrible shape.
So many years later, with the first billionaire in the Oval Office presiding over an era of American carnage at home rather than in distant lands like Vietnam, I suspect we need a new “world” to capture the nature and state of this country at this moment. So how about fourth world? After all, the U.S. remains the richest, most powerful nation on the planet (first world!), but is also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military, and police carnage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.
So, it’s really just a simple math problem: What’s 1 plus 3? Four, of course, making this country once again a leader on this ever less equal planet of ours; the United States, that is, is the first official fourth-world country in history. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Or if you prefer, you could simply think of us as potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.
A Hell on Earth?
Humanity has so far (and I use that phrase advisedly) managed to create just two ways of destroying human life on this planet. In doing so, it has, of course, taken over tasks that it once left to the gods (Armageddon! Apocalypse!). On both counts, Donald Trump is proving himself a master of destruction.
The first way, of course, would be by nuclear weapons, so far, despite close calls, used only twice, 75 years ago. However, the president and his crew have focused with striking intensity on tearing up nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal, pumping up the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and threatening other countries with the actual use of such weaponry. (Who could forget, for instance, The Donald’s threat to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea?)
In the process, the Trump administration has loosed what increasingly looks like a new global nuclear arms race, even as tensions grow, especially between China and the United States. In other words, while promising to end America’s “forever wars” (he didn’t), President Trump has actually pumped up the relatively dim possibility since the Cold War ended of using nuclear weapons, which obviously threatens a flash-bang end to human life as we know it.
And keep in mind that, when it comes to world-ending possibilities, that’s the lesser of his two apocalyptic efforts in these years.
While we’re still on the first of those ways of destroying this planet, however, let’s not forget to include not just the increased funding devoted to “modernizing” those nukes, but more generally the ever greater funding of the Pentagon and what’s still called “the national security state.” It hardly matters how little of that money goes to true national security in a twenty-first-century moment when we’re experiencing a pandemic that could be but the beginning of a new Black Plague-style era and the heating up of the atmosphere, oceans, and seas of this world in ways that are already making life increasingly unbearable via ever fiercer storms, ever more frequent wildfires, the ever greater melting of ice sheets, ever more violent flooding, ever greater drought -- I mean, you name it, and if it’s somewhere between deeply unpleasant and life (and property) endangering, it’s getting worse in the Trumpian moment.
In that second category when it comes to destroying human life as we’ve known it via the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the president and his men (and they are basically men) have shown a particular flair. I’m still alone in doing so, but I continue to refer to the whole lot of them as pyromaniacs, because their simple denial of the reality of global warming is the least of it. Trump and crew are clearly determined to burn, burn, burn.
And lest you think any of this will ever bother the president or his top officials, think again. After all, having had an essentially mask-less, cheek-by-jowl election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which spread the coronavirus and may have killed one of the president’s well-known supporters, he then doubled down in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination. He gave it in front of the White House before the kind of crowd he glories in: 1,500 enthusiastic followers, almost all mask-less, untested for Covid-19, and jammed together cheering him for an hour. That should tell you all you need to know about his concern for the lives of others (even those who adore him) or anyone’s future other than his own.
Perhaps we need a new chant for this election season, something like: “Four more years and this planet will be a hell on earth!”
It was the worst of times, it was... no, wait, in Trumpian terms, it was the worstest of times since no one should ever be able to outdo him. And as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would have said in my youth, you (and I and the rest of humanity) were there. We truly were and are. For shame.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Linden Cameron, 13, was shot repeatedly by police after his mother called 911 to ask for help with the autistic boy, his family says. (photo: KUTV)
Officer Shoots 13-Year-Old Boy With Autism After Mom Calls 911 for Help, Utah Cops Say
Caitlin O'Kane, CBS News
O'Kane writes: "A 13-year-old boy with autism is recovering after being shot by police in Glendale, Utah on Friday night, according to reports."
The boy, Linden Cameron, is still in the hospital after suffering injuries to his shoulder, both ankles, intestine, and bladder, his mother told KUTV in an interview Sunday.
Golda Barton said she called police and asked for a crisis intervention team because her son was having a mental breakdown.
The mother said she told officers that her son, who has Asperger's, needed to be transported to the hospital for treatment. "This is how to deal with people with mental health issues. So, you call them, and they're supposed to come out and be able to deescalate a situation using the most minimal force possible," Barton told KUTV.
"I said, 'He's unarmed, he doesn't have anything, he just gets mad and he starts yelling and screaming. He's a kid, he's trying to get attention, he doesn't know how to regulate,'" Barton said.
Less than five minutes after the officers arrived, Barton, who waited outside, heard "get down on the ground" and several gunshots were heard, she told KUTV. Barton said she thought her son was dead. The officers didn't immediately say if he was dead or not, she said.
Her son was then handcuffed, Barton told KUTV.
The Salt Lake City Police Department is investigating the shooting, according to Barton. She told KUTV the incident occurred on the first day she had returned to work in a year. She can't be away from her son because he has bad separation anxiety.
In a statement to KUTV, SLCPD Sgt. Keith Horrocks said police were called to the area for a report of a "violent psych issue" involving a juvenile "having a mental episode" and "making threats to some folks with a weapon." Horrocks said the shooting happened shortly after 10 p.m. and left the boy in serious condition.
Sgt. Horrocks said he knew of no indication that there was a weapon found but didn't know for sure.
In statement to KUTV, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said: "While the full details of this incident are yet to be released as an investigation takes place, I will say that I am thankful this young boy is alive and no one else was injured. No matter the circumstances, what happened on Friday night is a tragedy and I expect this investigation to be handled swiftly and transparently for the sake of everyone involved."
In the KUTV interview, Barton said her son is "a small child."
"Why didn't you just tackle him? He's a baby. He has mental issues," she said.
CBS News has reached out to SLCPD and Mayor Mendenhall for more information and is awaiting response.
Detainees in the yard during a media tour of the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, Sept. 26, 2019. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
The ICE Detainees on Hunger Strike to Press for COVID-19 Protections
Farida Jhabvala Romero, The World
Romero writes: "As the coronavirus has spread through immigration detention centers across the country, thousands of people locked up in several of those facilities have stopped eating - often for several days - to call attention to conditions they say make them more vulnerable to the virus."
READ MORE
Protest against persecution of the Romani. (photo: Brussel Times)
Historical Report Calls for an EU-Romani Inclusion Law
Marius Tudor, The Brussels Times
Tudor writes: "MEP Romeo Franz is a Sinto from Germany, the son of a Holocaust survivor. I am a Roma from Romania. We are Romani people and together we are a strong team, sharing a common purpose: to make a better world for our people."
READ MORE
Local 78 union members offer abatement workers free cloth mask during the COVID-19 pandemic. (photo: Grist/LIUNA Local 78)
Asbestos Abatement Is One of America's Deadliest Jobs. Does It Have to Be?
Sofia Quaglia, Grist
Quaglia writes: "It was just before dawn as seven bulky men in T-shirts and sweatpants gathered in front of a towering glass building on Lexington Avenue in New York City. Marcelo Crespo, a 41-year-old with gleaming green eyes and a goatee, beckoned the group over to a white company van, handing each man a pile of protective gear: face mask and respirators, full-body coveralls, shoe covers, hard hats, masking tape."
Clutching their bundles, the men entered through the back door of the building, taking the utility elevator up 32 floors to the roof. The day before, they had sealed up the workspace like an enormous Ziploc bag, covering a large section of the roof with protective plastic structures to shield it from the open air. Before passing through the clear sheeting, Crespo rattled the scaffolding, checking its stability. He traced a sign of the cross on his chest and whispered a prayer that God keep them all safe. Warning signs plastered the makeshift walls, boxes, and equipment. Caution. Danger. Authorized personnel only.
It could have been a scene from the movie Outbreak, but the job took place several months before the COVID-19 pandemic gripped Manhattan. With every breath, the men were still risking serious health problems – even death – as a result of the microscopic particles of asbestos swirling in the air.
Asbestos abatement workers were deemed essential long before the pandemic. Property owners are legally required to call abatement teams in to remove asbestos any time there’s construction, renovation, or retrofitting. Across the United States, during the coronavirus pandemic, some asbestos jobs have even accelerated as several cities are taking advantage of the closures of public spaces to schedule renovations. And there’s a lot more of that on the post-coronavirus horizon: New York City’s Climate Mobilization Act, which was passed last spring, includes a mandate that the city’s biggest buildings reduce their overall emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050 by installing new windows, insulation, and other retrofits to become more energy efficient.
But while the timing makes sense for cities, it’s not so great for abatement workers, whose occupational risks make them especially vulnerable to serious complications of COVID-19.
Judging from its physical properties alone, asbestos is useful stuff: The naturally occurring mineral’s long, fibrous crystals absorb sound and resist fire, heat, and electricity. In ancient Greek, the word for “asbestos” means “inextinguishable.” By the late 19th century, businesses in Europe and North America were competing for rights to mine it. Asbestos turned up everywhere: concrete, bricks, pipes, flooring, roofing, and couches. It was used as insulation in schools, hospitals, and theaters. Asbestos was used as snow on movie sets in the 1930s, blanketing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
As it grew in popularity, doctors noticed that relatively young asbestos miners were short of breath, suffering from a condition called pulmonary fibrosis. When asbestos fibers become airborne, the small needle-like filaments can enter the body through the lungs and skin, accumulating in internal organs and building up scar tissue over decades. By the time symptoms show up, people might already have permanent lung disease, genetic damage, or cancerous growths.
In the U.S., around 39,000 workers die every year from asbestos-related diseases. About 3,000 of these deaths are from mesothelioma, a malignant form of cancer linked to asbestos exposure. And it doesn’t take much: “Mesothelioma can occur at relatively low levels of exposure,” said Victor Roggli, a professor of pathology at Duke University.
The COVID-19 pandemic makes these workers even more vulnerable. In the past few weeks, Crespo’s Facebook feed has been plastered with pictures of dead colleagues. When the virus was spreading through the city in mid-April, he said his friends were sharing the news of an asbestos abatement worker’s death from COVID-19 nearly every single day: sometimes a single post for several workers, sometimes including links to fundraisers to pay for a funeral.
“Lamentamos ser los portadores de noticias tristes, pero nuestra querida miembro y #Local78 Shopstward Elizabeth Transito Quinde murió debido a complicaciones de #COVID19” read one recent post. We are sorry to be the bearers of sad news, but our dear member and Local78 shop steward Elizabeth Transito Quinde has died from complications of COVID19.
So how do you end up stuck in a job that might kill you?
Crespo, a native of Ecuador, started doing asbestos abatement work in 2000, not long after settling in Queens. One day, his landlord suggested he try asbestos removal to pay the rent. He took the first job offered and stuck with it. Crespo said that kind of start is typical for abatement workers, many of whom are persuaded to take a job in the field by a close contact before they truly understand the consequences.
Like Crespo, the majority of workers in the asbestos abatement industry are immigrants, mainly from Latin America or Eastern Europe. The risky nature of the job incentivizes abatement companies to hire undocumented immigrants, people unlikely to sue when something goes wrong.
“We invented mesothelioma, we invented this crisis,” said David Rosner, a historian at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. And the workers fixing the crisis, he said, “are the people with the least amount of power.”
Crespo, who was naturalized 12 years ago, looked around at his group of Latino comrades and agreed: “Americans wouldn’t want to do this job.”
Whatever gets you in the door for abatement work, money tends to be what keeps you there. In New York City today, abatement workers earn around $30 to $80 an hour. As an operation supervisor, Crespo now gets paid at the higher end of that range. But after 20 years of seeing his colleagues die of asbestos-related diseases, he thinks it’s no longer enough to offset the health risks.
“This job is killing us,” he said.
In October 2018, Crespo helped found a support group for New York City asbestos abatement handlers, Amigos x Siempre Club. Their main goal: to help workers in New York City get out of the business alive. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the group would gather in person every other Sunday in a member’s home or in the back room of a restaurant. They would sometimes bring in instructors to help workers develop skills in leadership, English, economics — anything they think will help workers take up something new.
Since COVID-19, the meetings have moved online. I attended one of the group’s very first meetings, which included around 20 men and women. The members took turns introducing themselves, while a couple of toddlers sat at the back of the hall playing games on their parents’ iPhones sans headphones.
“Bienvenido compañeros a nuestra familia de trabajadores,” said Jorge Roldan, a 46-year-old man in a cancer survivor T-shirt adorned with pink ribbons. Roldan, the president of the group, came to the U.S. from Mexico without papers when he was a child. As an adult, he has survived two bouts of peritoneal mesothelioma. He said doctors saved his life by carving out the contaminated parts of his gut, similar to how he used to carve asbestos-contaminated tiles out of roofs.
At the meeting, Roldan encouraged others to stay positive about their lives: “Today it’s raining,” he said, pointing outside, “and you could stand here and be complaining, coño la lluvia.” Screw the rain. “Or you could think, ‘Finally the plants get a little water.’”
Roldan and Crespo see bringing abatement workers together as an act of resistance and community. Even before the pandemic, the group raised funds through Facebook and GoFundMe for workers who got sick or died. Now Crespo expects that work will double, or even triple, as they try to attend to all the families who have lost their breadwinners to COVID-19.
“Even more people passed away,” he said. “We need to help their families, their kids, help them find a new job.”
Crespo said the threat of contracting coronavirus doesn’t scare him that much, because he’s used to worrying about his health from asbestos exposure. But it’s an added incentive to help others leave the industry, although the current high unemployment rate turns it into a Catch-22: This line of work may be deadly, but it comes with the near-guarantee of a steady paycheck.
Still, the pandemic hasn’t changed Crespo’s own plans to escape. After 20 years on the job, he is trying to get a diploma in financial analysis, taking evening classes while working full time. He’d like to be a stockbroker on Wall Street, but his main goal is to stop doing abatement work.
“Before it’s too late,” he said.
In 1902, the British Inspector of Factories listed asbestos as a harmful industrial substance. And yet over the next several decades, the international asbestos industry continued to boom. In the 1930s, the U.S. asbestos industry successfully lobbied against government regulatory efforts, despite being aware of the health risks. Asbestos was just too profitable to give up, wrote Gerald Markowitz, a historian and professor of occupational safety and health at John Jay College. By 1973, the United States was still using more than 804,000 tons of asbestos per year.
Although asbestos use remained robust in the U.S., in the 1970s the Environmental Protection Agency started taking some measures to limit its use. In recognition of the dangers it poses to human health, the EPA banned asbestos from being used in a handful of products such as insulation spray — something the U.K. had already done back in 1931. Finally, in 1986, the government passed the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act that declared that in places where asbestos fibers could become friable — easily crushed into powder and dispersed into the air — such as building sites, crumbling infrastructure, old constructions, pop-corn ceilings, or places where asbestos insulation had been flocked onto a surface, the material needed to be removed by a team of specialists: abatement workers.
It was the start of a risky business. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, some of the riskiest industries for occupational health in the United States are ones that involve exposure to asbestos. Abatement workers who die as a result of their exposure to asbestos fall under what experts call the “third wave” of asbestos deaths — the first two waves affect the miners who dig up the minerals used to make asbestos and the workers who insulated buildings, homes, and schools in the first place. Although abatement work is dangerous, it may also help to prevent a fourth wave of asbestos deaths.
Not every worker wants to get out of the business, either. Some simply want safer conditions: better equipment, better workers protection, and tougher safety regulations at removal sites. That’s the official position of Laborer’s Local 78, New York’s union for Asbestos, Lead and Hazardous Waste Laborers. The group, which also goes by LIUNA Local 78 (a reference to their affiliation with the Laborers’ International Union of North America) has been lobbying the city, state, and federal government for decades to strengthen rules meant to protect workers from asbestos fibers.
In 2018, I met up with Johann Garcia, the then-business manager of LIUNA Local 78, to ask about working conditions. When I walked into his office, he immediately told me it was a bad day: He had just gotten a call from a fellow colleague in the hospital with mesothelioma.
Garcia then reached under his desk and took out a box of porous polypropylene suits. He looked me dead in the eyes. “Wear it,” he said, gesturing to a stack.
At first, I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. He waited as I put on three suits, one on top of the other — the same kind of layering technique used by abatement workers. Then he had me run — notebook and pen in hand — three laps around the room. It was sweaty work. I giggled mostly out of embarrassment, but I soon understood this was a very serious matter to him.
“Imagine working in that, all day, in whatever weather,” Garcia said. Next, he instructed me to try to rip at the fabric. The papery material came apart easily. “Imagine what that looks like when you’re lifting things and working in building sites.”
It’s not just the suits that pose a problem. Respiratory masks, the key elements of the whole protection package, can be a health hazard of their own. Respirators come in three types: half-mask, full-face mask, or powered air-purifying respirator. Workers are supposed to wear the type corresponding with a job’s level of contamination. The more protective the mask, the harder it gets to breathe. In fact, researchers from the University of Eastern Finland found that the use of this equipment can cause cardio-respiratory strain, increasing the heartbeat rate to the point at which it could lead to a heart attack.
In other words, following regulations doesn’t mean workers are necessarily safe. Plus, Garcia said many contractors tend to turn a blind eye to habits that end up increasing worker risks in favor of getting the job done quickly. Workers say sometimes entire rooms undergo abatement without having sealed any windows or openings, letting the debris spread out into the adjacent streets and into the air. Speeding through jobs keeps costs down. The practice of skirting regulations to get out early with a full day’s pay has its own name: “rip and slip.”
“Sometimes you’ll see workers going around with those little white medical masks,” said Regina Santella, a medical expert in occupational carcinogens from Columbia University, “but those don’t do absolutely anything.”
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection said it regularly inspects worksites. “The DEP inspects active asbestos abatement projects and responds to complaints 24 hours a day in order to ensure workplace safety,” said Edward Timbers, the director of communications. Some workers, however, dispute that.“Wherever construction and abatement companies can cut corners, they will, to save money,” Garcia said.
For his part, Crespo told me that amid the coronavirus pandemic, he’s been going to work in small teams of skilled workers, knowing that his colleagues don’t see anybody outside of their trusted circles. He said he knows many people who haven’t accepted jobs since the virus started. It almost feels like there’s more work, he said, but it’s really just a lack of workers: Some are refusing to take jobs out of fear.
From a societal level, many jobs are both dangerous and necessary: doctors, nurses, and farmworkers to name a few. But asbestos removal work may not fall into that intersection. Some experts say that the legal mandate to abate isn’t backed up by science — and can even backfire, putting more people at risk.
It comes back to the notion of exposure. The danger associated with living or working in an asbestos-insulated building with intact walls (no water damage, no friable roof) is “almost nil,” said Roggli, the Duke professor. But insurance companies don’t like to insure buildings containing asbestos, and banks don’t like to finance the purchase of buildings containing it because of the potential liability (if a resident alleges they got cancer from asbestos in the roof, for example). As a result of those pressures, building owners tend to want to over-abate rather than under-abate.
“At least if you’re abating, it shows that you’re trying – even if it’s the wrong thing to do,” said Rachel Maines, author of Asbestos and Fire. “That’s not necessarily a good reason to do something, but who can blame them. They’re getting sued, so they have to abate.”
Although asbestos is banned in more than 60 countries, in the U.S., asbestos can still be used in many everyday products such as automotive brake pads and gaskets, roofing products, and fireproof clothing. President Donald Trump has, on several occasions, said asbestos has been unfairly maligned, and that it’s “100 percent safe.” Under his administration, the EPA has continued to ignore warning signs provided by government scientists and refused to ban asbestos.
“The failure of the United States to ban asbestos reflects the enormous power of the asbestos industry and its political allies,” writes Richard A. Lemen from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, in a 2017 research paper. “To act against the best interests of public health and to place short-term profits ahead of human well-being.”
And it is business: In the United States, the costs of removing asbestos runs into the billions each year. Big buildings can become multimillion-dollar projects: The asbestos abatement of the original World Trade Center was estimated to cost $1 million for every one of their 110 floors.
As New York City works to cut emissions as part of the city’s $14-billion Green New Deal, approximately 50,000 buildings will undergo retrofitting by 2024. Elizabeth Beardsley, a senior policy counsel for the U.S. Green Building Council, said that the effort will translate into more than 20,000 jobs for engineers, construction workers, and abatement specialists like Crespo.
Back at the abatement site, the workers had finished scraping the small portion of skyscraper roofing they had been assigned between the sky and the roof.
They started cleaning up, shoving scraped asbestos and roofing insulation layers into black plastic bags, which were then put into other plastic bags, and wrapped with masking tape. Crespo watched as his crew marked all the bags “toxic” and carted them down the utility elevator — hours of work. The men loaded the boxes into big trucks before changing back into their normal clothes. The five-day job was finished.
Crespo and his men walked outside and for a few moments, they stood still, filling their lungs with city air.
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