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Juan Cole | America Now Has Its Own Green Zone, as Trumpian Fascism Erects Racist Red Zone
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "America now has its own Green Zone in downtown Washington, D.C., where the Mall is closed, the city is locked down, and protective fencing has gone up around the Capitol. You only need a Green Zone, a safe small space completely under the control of the government, if the rest of the country is a Red Zone."
Donald Trump worked his white supremacist and conspiracy nut networks throughout the United States to turn it into a Red Zone, i.e. a lawless realm of improvised explosive devices and violent vigilantes and traitorous self-styled ‘patriots.’ Joe Biden won’t be able to have a normal inauguration not only because of the pandemic but because he will have to be carefully kept in the Green Zone.
A Red Zone is a sign of profound failure, perhaps even a failed state. In Iraq, it announced the failure of the Bush invasion and occupation. The US military never controlled anything but the ground its soldiers actually stood on.
I warned about this kind of thing in November, 2016, after Trump was elected, at a talk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York:
As I blogged the Iraq War in the zeroes, many of my headlines read like this:
Car Bomber Penetrates Green Zone . (The Bush administration tried to deny that this story was true, but an American in Baghdad sent me a local US government memo acknowledging that it happened.)
20 Rockets Mortar Shells Hit Green Zone
Plot To Bomb Iraqi Govt In Green Zone . (The subtitle is “Plan to declare Emirate in Diyala,” an early manifestation of the ISIL phony caliphate.)
In September, 2004, I asked, If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? . It went viral and was widely reprinted by newspapers. Dude, it was a rhetorical question. I wasn’t expecting Trump actually to answer it.
In 2013, I visited Iraq’s Green Zone. I wrote in the aftermath, “When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 he established blast walls around central government offices, establishing a four square mile Green Zone (i.e. one that was safe and which the US controlled, with the rest of the country being a Red Zone; more or less, that situation never changed). The parliament building and Western embassies were in the Green Zone. I visited it in 2013. You enter through a narrow entranceway and can only really go in by foot (this measure stops car bombs from getting in). The security people who checked us in were international– Ghana and Peru or something. I doubt they would die for the cause. There were Iraqi troops on the outside of the blast walls.”
Once inside, you took mini-buses to reach your destination in the 4 square mile zone. I and some other visiting academics went to see the cultural attache at the US Embassy. That building has attracted rocket fire for the past nearly 17 years, and had been put behind the blast walls of the Green Zone in a bid to protect it from being car-bombed. I don’t know how much cultural exchange could have been done at that time.
Our conference hotel there in 2013 was not in the Green Zone, because the conference (on “Translation”) was hosted by the Ministry of Culture and aimed at advertising that Baghdad was again open for business. We did have a big tank sitting outside on the grounds. I met one young man who said he thought he was the only American living regularly in an apartment in ordinary Baghdad (i.e. the Red Zone) as opposed to staying behind the blast walls of the Green Zone.
Mark LeVine, Nabil Al-Takriti a few other visiting academics and I did some excursions. We talked to the History Department at Baghdad University. Our Iraqi colleagues asked me to explain, in Arabic, the influence of postmodernism and the notion of multiple narratives in history as opposed to a grand master narrative. When I finished, one said, this is something we need in Iraq. We also visited a film center where young Iraqis were taught how to make films.It was near the Tigris and a couple of the young film makers showed us around.
Juan and friends in the Red Zone, 2013.
Our Iraqi government handlers were not happy with their guests wandering about the Red Zone unescorted, but we got away with it.
Actually by 2019, Iraq authorities had removed 16 miles of blast walls from downtown Baghdad, so there really isn’t a Green Zone any more.
It has moved to Washington, D.C.
Supporters of Donald Trump. (photo: Guardian UK)
How All 50 State Capitals Are Preparing for Possible Insurrections of Their Own
Alex Ward, Vox
Ward writes: "State capitals across the US are preparing for possible attacks on their legislatures in the coming days similar to the insurrection at the US Capitol last week, hoping a larger law enforcement presence and extra security measures will stave off the worst."
“We’re definitely planning for more [activity] than normal,” one police officer told Vox.
The FBI sent an internal memo on Sunday warning all 50 states that “armed protests” at their capitals are being planned by far-right extremists, potentially leading to a repeat of what happened January 6 in Washington, DC. As a result, state capitol buildings are on “high alert,” with local law enforcement and, in some cases, state National Guard troops mobilizing into action.
It’s an alarming situation, but every one of the 26 state law enforcement agencies I called — some of them the city’s police, others the state capitol’s security team — said they were prepared, though most wouldn’t divulge their plans.
“We’re definitely planning for more [activity] than normal,” Lt. Krag Campbell of the Juneau Police Department in Alaska told me.
“We are prepared to respond in the appropriate manner as we have always done in the past,” said Lt. Mark Riley of the Georgia State Patrol. “Our primary concern will always be the safety of everyone who works at or visits the Capitol grounds.”
Each state is responding in its own way with little federal support, partly because the threat is thought to be greater for some states than others. For example, there’s intelligence that Minnesota’s and Michigan’s capitols face a credible threat of violence, while the FBI doesn’t believe Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island will experience a major riot.
However, all states are preparing for the possibility of violence.
All states say they’re ready, but some states are in more danger than others
Just like at the US Capitol, all 50 states have increased the police presence surrounding their legislatures.
In Connecticut, State Capitol Police Department spokesperson Scott Driscoll told me that K9 teams are conducting extra security sweeps around government buildings and have augmented the number of visible forces inside and outside those campuses. Further, bike rails have been placed on the north and south sides of the Capitol building, creating a barrier between potential rioters and law enforcement.
Meanwhile, Michigan State Police spokesperson Shanon Banner said that while the force usually doesn’t comment on its pre-riot planning, “I can confirm that out of an abundance of caution, we have already increased visible [police] presence at the Capitol, and these resources will remain in place for at least the next couple of weeks.” On Tuesday, the Michigan State Capitol Commission banned the open carrying of weapons in the building.
And Arizona has put up fences around the Capitol complex, Kameron Lee, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Public Safety, told me. That move, along with an enhanced law enforcement presence, was also done “out of an abundance of caution.”
Minnesota is one state that may be facing the greatest threat. In response, Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, activated the state’s National Guard on Tuesday. That force plans to be on duty assisting local law enforcement in protecting the Capitol this weekend.
“We will always support Minnesotans’ First Amendment rights to peacefully protest, but anyone involved in violent, illegal activity will be held accountable,” Walz said at the time. “We are tracking reports and monitoring the situation closely to enhance our response and change tactics as needed.”
The hope is that all this preparation actually works. If rioters with violent designs do descend on state capitals, there should be enough law enforcement agents in place to stop them from causing harm. If these preparations fail, though, the nation could see similar scenes to the ones that played out in Washington, DC, last week.
Attendees sign up at the National Rifle Association booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2020. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
NRA Declares Bankruptcy, Says It Will Reincorporate in Texas
Axios
Excerpt: "The National Rifle Association said Friday it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will seek to reincorporate in Texas, calling New York, where it is currently registered, a 'toxic political environment.'"
The big picture: The move comes just months after New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA, alleging the group committed fraud by diverting roughly $64 million in charitable donations over three years to support reckless spending by its executives.
- The NRA then sued James in federal court, accusing her of violating its right to free speech.
- Karl Racine, attorney general for Washington, D.C., filed a separate lawsuit in August against the gun lobby and its foundation "for misusing charitable funds to support wasteful spending by the NRA and its executives."
What they're saying: "Today, the NRA announced a restructuring plan that positions us for the long-term and ensures our continued success as the nation’s leading advocate for constitutional freedom – free from the toxic political environment of New York," the NRA's Wayne LaPierre said in letter to members and supporters Friday.
- "The plan can be summed up quite simply: We are DUMPING New York, and we are pursuing plans to reincorporate the NRA in Texas," LaPierre added.
- "Under the plan, the NRA will continue what we’ve always done – confronting anti-gun, anti-self-defense and anti-hunting activities and promoting constitutional advocacy that helps law-abiding Americans."
- "Our work will continue as it always has. No major changes are expected to the NRA’s operations or workforce. "
LaPierre also claimed Friday that the NRA is "as financially strong as we have been in years," despite the organization laying off or furloughing dozens of employees, canceling its national convention and cutting salaries last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, per AP.
- A spokesperson for the NRA said in May that like "every other business and nonprofit, we are forced to make tough choices in this new economic environment," per AP.
- In its bankruptcy petition filed in Texas, the NRA listed assets and liabilities of as much as $500 million each, Bloomberg reported.
The U.S.-Mexico border wall. (photo: Getty Images)
'My Neighborhood Is Being Destroyed to Pacify His Supporters': The Race to Complete Trump's Wall
Samuel Gilbert, Guardian UK
Gilbert writes: "At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter."
In his final months in office, Donald Trump has ramped up construction on his promised physical border between the US and Mexico – devastating wildlife habitats and increasing the migrant death toll
McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but it’s clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. “We will have no fun at all,” he deadpans.
McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started “barrelling down the two-lane state road”, says Owen.
Once work on President Donald Trump’s border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. “I don’t think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall,” Owen says.
The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couple’s house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over – stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.
“That was already a pretty good barrier,” McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trump’s wall creeps up over the mountain’s west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.
In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.
Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.
In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.
For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.
“They started working nights six weeks ago,” says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. “It’s been nonstop ever since.”
Verlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono O’odham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. “We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. It’s not about protecting America. It’s about protecting his own interests.”
When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. “They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end,” says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip – a patch of dirt just off the road – whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.
After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration and his purported “America First” ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, “bad hombres”, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for “the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border”.
Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trump’s barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.
According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes – many enacted specifically to protect the nation’s most treasured cultural and ecological sites – in order to expedite construction.
Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. “It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands,” says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.
Nicol believes the wall’s charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because that’s where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. “Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands,” says Nicol.
According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal – even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.
On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.
“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he said. “We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.”
Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. “The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact,” says Donatti. “In a race to construct, the administration is building where it’s easier as opposed to where most people cross.”
And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. “You can always go over,” he says.
You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with “yellow, handheld angle grinders” cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. “They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards,” says Kurc. “Then they just go in and out.”
Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: “There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you don’t need any barrier at all.” In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. “It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure that’s the wrong solution.”
That’s not to say Trump’s wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife – mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. “There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that,” says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began “pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground” in order to mix concrete for the border wall’s foundations.
Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. “That’s our water – that’s what we depend on,” says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.
Myles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trump’s wall the “single most damaging project” to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home – especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.
“We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadn’t happened since the 1930s,” says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the world’s 38 wild cat species.
“If this border wall hadn’t started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again,” adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalyst’s executive director.
The jaguar is one of numerous species – such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf – found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, “93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off”.
Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.
Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous “El Jefe” jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. “We haven’t seen signs of any jaguars since construction began,” he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yo’oko, once roamed.
Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: “Border Patrol always welcome”. Owen’s two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses – “the best”, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. “I don’t want it to go back to then,” she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. “No one wants a secure border more than I,” she says. “But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. It’s a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.”
During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. It’s estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.
Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. “Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all,” said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.
Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. “During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall,” he says.
Donatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. “The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration,” he says.
One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizona’s rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. “As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas,” says Donatti.
“It’s a humanitarian disaster,” agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. “We do what we can,” Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. “But people keep dying.” The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.
“It’s hard for people to understand what this means to us, as O’odham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land,” says Verlon Jose.
When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono O’odham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. “It was like, ‘Tell me where your grandparents live, and I’ll put a wall through there,’” says Jose.
“In certain areas, we won’t be able to continue our traditional practices,” says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. “We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why don’t we invest it in our border cities and towns?”
According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the wall’s $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the county’s most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.
“We had more deaths in the region than the entire state,” says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. “To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, it’s senseless.”
According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies – such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. “It’s this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either you’re inside, or you’re out,” he says.
That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Juárez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.
Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.
Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham has a “sliver of hope” that some of the walls will come down. “I believe Biden will not build another inch,” he adds.
Others are not so sure. “Optimism? No,” says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. “He hasn’t committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.”
John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. “The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments,” he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. “We have a lot of work to do.”
A worker collects a package from a conveyor at an Amazon fulfillment center. (photo: Thorsten Wagner/Bloomberg)
Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Company's 1st US Union
Alina Selyukh, NPR
Selyukh writes: "Some 6,000 workers at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., will begin voting next month on a groundbreaking possibility: the first union in the company's U.S. history."
The National Labor Relations Board on Friday scheduled the vote by mail because of coronavirus concerns. It will begin Feb. 8 and continue through March 29. Workers at one of Amazon's newest facilities are deciding whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
Friday's ruling came after the agency facilitated a hearing in which Amazon and the retail workers union hashed out who should be included in the bargaining unit and how the vote should take place. Both parties agreed that hundreds of seasonal workers should be eligible to cast ballots. The NLRB rejected Amazon's calls for a traditional in-person vote in favor of balloting by mail.
"The biggest thing is Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the United States, and they're heavily, heavily anti-union," said Arthur Wheaton of the Worker Institute at Cornell University. "So if you can start to get some of their U.S.-based (workers) successfully organized with the union, then that could lead to other cities also doing that."
Unions are a prominent presence at Amazon in Europe, but for years, the company successfully fought off labor organizing efforts in the United States. The last vote on unionization at the company happened in 2014, when a small group of maintenance and repair techs at a Delaware warehouse voted against joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
In a statement on Friday, Amazon spokesperson Heather Knox said the company maintained that "a valid, fair and successful" unionization election was one conducted in person.
"The onsite voting proposal, which is in the best interest of all parties — associate convenience, vote fidelity, and timeliness of vote count — was not accepted," Knox said. "We will continue to insist on measures for a fair election, and we want everyone to vote, so our focus is ensuring that's possible."
A Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union representative declined comment.
Amazon has said that between March and mid-September, it employed almost 1.4 million front-line workers across Amazon and Whole Foods in the United States. The company earlier argued the petitioners did not represent "the majority of our employees' views" and touted the warehouse facility's pay and benefits.
Hundreds of Bessemer workers in November signed cards to petition federal labor authorities for a unionization vote, quickly gaining support of longtime Amazon critic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The workers' union-backed website calls for changes to procedures in disciplining, dismissals and safety.
An employee inspects tablets as they move along the production line of a pharmaceutical plant. (photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
Big Pharma Is Fighting to Deny Canadians Access to Treatment
Joel Lexchin, Jacobin
Lexchin writes: "The vast majority of Canadians want a national pharmacare program, but right-wing think tanks and corporate lobbyists are battling to obstruct it."
It’s time to stand up to their bullying and implement universal pharmacare so everyone can get the treatment they need.
n the Speech from the Throne this September, the Trudeau government said it “remains committed to a national, universal pharmacare program and will accelerate steps to achieve this system.” That is an improvement over the Liberals’ pledge, during the 2019 federal election, to provide $6 billion over four years as a “down payment” on pharmacare. How much of an improvement remains to be seen.
Behind the pharmacare plan is a simple idea: no one in Canada should be denied access to necessary prescription drugs because of cost. Currently, despite spending over $1,000 per person per year on prescriptions, millions of Canadians have trouble getting the drugs they need. The average cost of prescriptions across the twenty-nine countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which mostly have pharmacare plans, is $700 per person per year.
A report prepared in 2018 for the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions estimated that seventy thousand Canadians aged fifty-five and older suffer avoidable deterioration in their health status every year, and as many as twelve thousand Canadians over forty with cardiovascular disease require overnight hospitalization. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians go without food, heat, and other health care expenses so they can afford the drugs they need.
Pharmacare is overwhelmingly supported by Canadians. An Angus Reid poll published at the end of October found that 86 percent of Canadians moderately or strongly support establishing such a plan. A large majority of people in every province and in every income group, along with 55 percent of people who identified as Conservative voters, were in favor of pharmacare.
Canada — Pharmacare’s Also-Ran
In every country that has a universal program for accessing doctors and hospitals, access to prescription drugs is part of the health care mix. Every country except Canada. Here, government covers about 42 percent of the cost of medicines, private insurance another 36 percent, and the rest comes out of people’s pockets. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
When Justice Emmett Hall released his iconic 1964 report paving the way for medicare, he envisaged that after universal coverage for doctors, the next step would be prescription drugs. But that next step has still not come.
Over the years, a variety of reports have repeated calls for national pharmacare: the 1997 National Forum on Health, the Kirby Senate report, the Romanow Commission, and in April 2018, a parliamentary standing committee on health. In June 2019, the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare led by Eric Hoskins, the former Ontario health minister, laid out the broad outlines of how to achieve this goal.
Not surprisingly, some groups have mobilized against universal pharmacare. Notably they include Innovative Medicines Canada (IMC), the lobby group for the multinational drug companies, and right-wing think tanks such as the Fraser Institute. These groups argue that the system we have works well for most Canadians and that we should just fill in the gaps in coverage.
A universal pharmacare plan, by lowering drug prices, will make companies reluctant to introduce new “life-saving” drugs or otherwise invest in Canada, claim corporate opponents. They also suggest that pharmacare won’t cover all of the drugs currently covered by private insurance plans and therefore patients will suffer.
None of these arguments hold up to scrutiny. Even people in the medium-to-high income groups who have drug insurance still report not adhering to medications because of cost.
Quebec’s Flawed Model
The Quebec model is frequently touted as the solution for people who don’t have drug coverage. In that province, all employers who offer health benefits must also offer drug coverage. For everyone else, the government steps in. Yanick Labrie, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, authored a report advocating the Quebec system for the rest of Canada.
On some measures, such as cost-related nonadherence, Quebec does relatively better than the Canadian average. But given the poor drug coverage in other provinces that is not the right comparison. For example, Quebec lags behind Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — which all offer universal drug coverage — on nonadherence.
Similarly, a greater percentage of people in Quebec report spending more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on drugs, and total per capita spending on drugs in Quebec ($1,087) is substantially higher than the average in the rest of Canada ($912) and in countries with universal coverage ($826).
With respect to investment, drug companies have been threatening to withdraw it from Canada for almost fifty years. When the New Democratic Party government in Manitoba passed a law in 1972 making it mandatory for pharmacists to substitute cheaper generic drugs for those named on prescriptions, the forerunner of IMC said: “It will remain to be seen how much value would be put on the Manitoba market by research-oriented companies … if they can’t meet the prices they could be forced out of business.”
The threat not to introduce new “life-saving” drugs into Canada is also hollow. Most new drugs are not lifesaving or even moderate advances over what is already available. According to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), a federal agency charged with setting a maximum price for new patented drugs, only 2.2 percent of all new drugs introduced into Canada between 2010 and 2017 were breakthroughs; another 4.3 percent were substantial improvements, but a whopping 72.5 percent were of slight or no improvement.
Big Pharma Bullying and Blackmail
In a positive step, the federal government has finalized new guidelines for how the PMPRB operates, including how it sets drug prices. Under current guidelines, the board compares Canadian prices to those in seven other high-income countries including the United States and Switzerland — the first and third most expensive places in the world for prescription drugs. As a result of this calculation, Canada ranks fourth in prices.
The new guidelines will remove these two high-cost countries from the list and expand it to include countries, such as Australia, with more reasonable prices. Along with a number of other measures, the PMPRB is projecting these changes will lead to savings for Canada of $8.8 billion over a ten-year period. But given that Canada now spends $33.7 billion a year on prescription drugs, these savings will not dramatically lower our drug bill.
The same groups that have been active in opposing pharmacare are also crying wolf over the PMPRB changes. IMC warns that “the threats of negative impact of the PMPRB changes are real and significant, not only for the life sciences sector in Canada, but more importantly for millions of Canadian patients that depend on new medicines and vaccines.” Life Sciences Ontario, whose membership includes drug giants Amgen, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, and GlaxoSmithKline, repeats the claim that drug companies will stop launching new drugs in Canada.
In the middle of October, Nigel Rawson and John Adams published an opinion piece bemoaning the future of drug access in Canada if the PMPRB reforms go ahead. Rawson is affiliated with the Fraser Institute and Adams is the president of the Canadian PKU and Allied Disorders Inc., a patient group that grants gold donors, like the drug company BioMarin, one direct-marketing e-mail per year to its membership.
According to Rawson and Adams, drug prices will be so low that they will be unsustainable, and new breakthrough therapies that can treat disorders that cause premature death and/or life-limiting disabilities will not be marketed in Canada. The authors single out the drug Trikafta, a breakthrough treatment for cystic fibrosis that allegedly has not been submitted for approval to Health Canada by the company because it may not get the price that it wants.
In the United States, Vertex is charging USD $311,000 per year ($411,000) for a Trikafta treatment. But the independent Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which assesses value for money, estimates the drug is only worth USD $67,900 to USD $85,500 per year (a 73 percent to 78 percent discount) based on the real health improvements it offers patients.
Vertex has cut a deal with the National Health Service in the United Kingdom to market Trikafta at a lower (but undisclosed) price and did the same thing in Switzerland for two of its other cystic fibrosis drugs. The ability of other countries to get reduced prices suggests that Vertex might have been using Trikafta to blackmail the PMPRB into backing down on some of its planned changes.
On November 9, Vertex unexpectedly announced it will be submitting Trikafta for approval in Canada. However, in a statement that indicates that the company has not given up its fight against the new regulations, it said: “We remain genuinely concerned that the PMPRB guidelines may impact access for Canadians to new innovative medicines in the future.” As far as Trikafta is concerned, the fight will soon switch to how much Canadian patients will have to pay.
“The arguments for pharmacare have never been stronger and these moments to act don’t come up all that often,” said Hoskins in the lead-up to the last Speech from the Throne. “It is achievable; we have a road map; we know the benefits; we know the government can get it across the finish line.”
At the last moment, the government caved into demands from IMC and delayed implementing the new PMPRB guidelines from January 1 to July 1, 2021. Accompanying the industry demands was the implicit threat that if the industry was not listened to that the roll out of COVID-19 vaccines in Canada could be delayed.
When asked about this possibility, IMC said:
If the amended regulations come into force, there is no question that companies will be required to evaluate their impact on all new medicines and vaccines, which could in turn lead to more drugs not launching, or delaying their launch in Canada.
Whether or not the government can take action to lower drug prices is not in question. Whether the government will take action is still to be determined.
Deb Haaland at a 2018 rally in Washington, D.C., to oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (photo: Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)
How the Divestment Movement Sunk Trump's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Oil Lease Sale
Isak Kvam, Backpacker
Kvam writes: "Last Wednesday, the Trump administration held the nation’s first oil-lease sale for northern Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a parting gift to lawmakers and fossil fuel industry executives that have sought to develop the region for decades."
After years of demonstrations and congressional battles, the sale of oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge finally went ahead on January 6—and almost no one bit.
The surprise? The sale completely flopped, raising only $14.4 million of the expected $1.8 billion—0.8% of what it expected to garner—and leasing just 11 of the 22 tracts of land.
Not one major oil company submitted an offer to purchase the leases. Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation AIDEA bought 9 of them, and two small companies each grabbed another parcel each. Half of the parcels didn’t draw a single bidder. In total, about 550,000 acres were bought of the one million acres for sale.
In short: the sale was a massive failure thanks to the divestment movement (more on that below) and a poor year for the industry. If you didn’t hear about it, you’re not alone: the auction took place on the same day that a mob of rioters stormed the Capitol.
ANWR is along the northern Alaskan coast and is the nation’s largest wildlife refuge, with over 19.6 million acres of habitat (roughly the size of South Carolina). It’s the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, the dens for the Beaufort Sea population of polar bears (with fewer than 900 individuals left), and provides habitat for wolves, musk oxen, and migratory birds. It’s also the food source for Gwich’in and Iñupiat communities that depend on caribou and consider the area sacred, though their opinions on drilling in the reserve have been divided.
Oil-friendly conservatives have pushed to drill ANWR for roughly 40 years, and Republicans successfully passed a mandate to drill the area with a rider in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act written by Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski. President Trump referred to developing ANWR as one of his greatest accomplishments in office, but last Wednesday’s auction failed to live up to its promise. In fact, the sale failed to come close to the revenue that lawmakers anticipated would offset their massive tax cuts.
The sale’s poor performance was mainly due to large banks divesting from the project as well as low oil and gas prices from the pandemic-driven global recession.
The divestment movement seeks to pressure organizations to remove investments in the coal, oil and gas industries not just because they contribute to climate change, but because they are poor investments. In this case, cutting off the business of climate destruction at the source worked: When 5 major banks announced they would not finance extraction in ANWR, anticipation around the sale cooled significantly.
“Donald Trump is closing out his final days in office just as he spent the last four years: selling our communities and public lands to his corporate friends,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, in a statement. “Drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge would do irreversible harm to the hardworking communities that depend on it. President-Elect Biden must act immediately to reverse the damage done by this nefarious administration and enact permanent protections for the Arctic Refuge.”
Another contributor to ANWR’s failed lease sale was slowing demand and collapsing oil prices due in part to the pandemic, despite Trump’s pledge of billions of dollars in Covid relief to the fossil fuel industry. With low oil prices, low demand, and the massive expense inherent in developing extraction operations on the remote Alaskan coast, it just didn’t make financial sense for major oil companies to bid on the ANWR leases.
AIDEA could sell its ANWR leases to oil companies, but with Democrats taking control of the House, Senate, and White House next week, the future of those leases is uncertain. Environmental groups hope the ANWR leases will be slowed or reversed by the Biden Administration, who pledged to protect the refuge on the campaign trail, but it remains unclear exactly how the Biden Administration plans to address the leases. It could decline to issue permits or ask courts to delay the leases while they are reviewed.
Congress could protect ANWR by upending the drilling provision that was passed in the 2017 tax cut package, but it may be tough. In the Senate, Democrats only have a one-vote majority, and the new Chairman of the influential Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), is the only Democrat to have voted (twice) in support of ANWR development. Things look different in the House of Representatives, however. Last year, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) sponsored and passed the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, which would restore protections to ANWR. Rep. Huffman believes the legislation now has the votes to clear Congress after last week’s special election in Georgia.
While it remains unclear exactly how the incoming Biden administration and 117th Congress plan to address drilling in ANWR, if last Wednesday’s sale is a sign of times to come, we may not see much fossil fuel development in the refuge in the following years or decades.
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