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Rev. William Barber | The Fight for a $15 Minimum Wage Is a Fight for Racial Justice
Rev. William Barber, In These Times
Barber writes: "Sixty-two million people in the United States make less than $15 an hour. And here's the truth: the fight to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 is as important as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965."
Democrats need to stop playing games and use their majorities to pass a $15 minimum wage right now—we can’t wait any longer.
For Black people, it’s taken us 400 years to get to $7.25 an hour. We can’t wait any longer. People in Appalachia can’t wait any longer. Poor white people, brown people, we cannot wait any longer. And we won’t be silent anymore.
The low-wage workers, tipped workers, people making less than $15 were already in a kind of depression before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. This is deadly. Hundreds of people are dying a day from poverty. Many of them are low-wage workers, tipped workers, people getting sick unnecessarily. Meanwhile, tens of millions of people still lack healthcare.
When it comes to the $15 minimum wage, some politicians say they’re worried about small businesses. But we have to ask them, have they voted for universal healthcare for everybody? Because if they were really worried about small businesses and their costs, they would pass universal healthcare so that small businesses didn’t have to pay that money to cover their workers. If they were really worried about these businesses, they would pay people a living wage. Because guess what? The people with living wages are going to spend that money, and guess where they’re going to spend it? Back in the businesses.
We cannot get this close and then fall back. We say to President Biden, to Democrats, to Republicans, to senators, to all of them: don’t turn your back on the $15 an hour minimum wage. Listen: 55% of poor, low-wealth people voted for this current ticket. That’s the mandate. The mandate is in the people who voted, not in the back slapping of senators and congresspeople. It’s the people who voted. And if we turn our backs now, it will hurt 62 million poor, low-wealth people who have literally kept this economy alive, who were the first to have to go to jobs, first to get infected, first to get sick, first to die. We cannot be the last to get relief and the last to get treated and paid properly. Protect us, respect us, and pay us.
The truth of the matter is, there can be no domestic tranquility without the establishment of justice. That’s not what Rev. William Barber says — it’s what the Constitution says. The establishment of justice precedes domestic tranquility. And you can only hold domestic tranquility when you promote the general welfare of all people.
Now, some argue that a $15 wage can’t pass through budget reconciliation. That’s nothing but an excuse. The fact of the matter is, when Republicans wanted to pass tax cuts and cut welfare, they used reconciliation. One time, when the parliamentarian gave them the wrong answer, they fired the parliamentarian, and got another parliamentarian to give them the right answer. So there’s one set of rules that apply for corporations, and there’s another set of rules when it comes to poor and low-wealth people. And that’s why we’re saying to Democrats: Don’t play the reconciliation game. It only takes a simple majority of 51 votes to overturn what the parliamentarian says. Let’s be real about this. People turned out to vote and it’s time for this to happen.
Back during the New Deal, people said to President Roosevelt that the minimum wage was going to break to the country. You know what Roosevelt said to them? He said any business that doesn’t want to pay people the minimum wage does not belong in America. He said you don’t have a right to exist in this country if you don’t want to pay people a basic minimum wage.
Fifty-seven years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a $2 an hour minimum wage, which would be over $15 today. A few weeks ago, all the politicians were saying, let’s follow Dr. King. Let’s hear Dr. King’s message of love. Well you can’t hear the message of love without hearing the love and the justice connected together. To go backwards on this would be morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent and economically insane.
We cannot address racial equity if we do not address the minimum wage of $15. There’s no such thing as racial equity when you just address police reform and prisons but you don’t address the issue of economic justice. And if you address economic justice, guess what? It helps Black people, and white people, and brown people, and Latino people. It helps everybody. Everybody in, nobody out.
When people regardless of their race, their color, their creed, their sexuality, their disability, come together to fight to change the narrative, to demand, and to vote — this is the coalition that the aristocracy and the greedy always fear. My grandmama used to say, “Work while it is day, because the night comes.” She got that out of the Bible. And Isaiah 10 says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights, who make women and children their prey.”
We have to act like we have one shot on this. Tomorrow is not promised. It’s time to push, through every non-violent tool we have. We know that in every battle, if we fight, we win — and if we don’t fight, we can’t win.
Let’s go forward together, not one step back.
Proud Boys and other protesters in Washington, D.C. (photo: Getty Images)
The Real Reason Trump's Impeachment Defense Was So Bad
Zack Beauchamp, Vox
Beauchamp writes: "During their Friday afternoon impeachment arguments, former President Donald Trump's attorneys accused Democrats of doing 'constitutional cancel culture.' They suggested that antifa was partly responsible for the January 6 attack on the Capitol."
Trump’s impeachment defense failed because what Trump did was indefensible.
uring their Friday afternoon impeachment arguments, former President Donald Trump’s attorneys accused Democrats of doing “constitutional cancel culture.” They suggested that antifa was partly responsible for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. They quibbled about a photograph in the New York Times and the meaning of a tweet using the word “calvary.” They made a risible argument that Trump’s impeachment somehow violated the First Amendment.
To combat the House impeachment managers’ striking use of footage from the day of the attack, Trump’s lawyers put together their own short films. One consisted in large part of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) saying the word “fight.” Another featured an extended (and ostensibly less damning) cut of Trump’s infamous “very fine people” comment about the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally of white supremacists. Yet another featured Democrats and celebrities, including Madonna and Johnny Depp, saying nasty and violent-sounding things about Trump. They played that one three separate times.
This sort of nonsense took up most of the team’s short three-hour presentation defending their client against the charge of incitement of an insurrection. Only in the last 40 minutes — the section argued by lead defense attorney Bruce Castor — did Trump’s team make a serious and sustained attempt to rebut the core of the House’s case: that Trump is directly responsible for the violence that took place on January 6.
The attempt didn’t go very well.
Castor ignored key facts, like Trump’s hours-long delay calling in the National Guard during the attack. His logic was at times incoherent, arguing (for example) that Trump’s disdain for Black Lives Matter protesters meant that he disapproved of violence committed by his own supporters as well. And he seemed to completely misunderstand key parts of the House’s case, like the role of Trump’s behavior in the months prior to the January 6 rally.
There really is only one reasonable conclusion to draw after watching the defense’s weak presentation: If this is the best his attorneys can do, Trump’s conduct truly is indefensible.
The many ways Trump’s defense failed
Over the last two days, the House impeachment managers made a very straightforward case for impeaching Trump.
For months, the president spread false and dangerous beliefs suggesting the election was stolen, including specifically calling for his supporters to rally in his defense on January 6 (the day that Congress would certify the election results). Once those supporters arrived, he encouraged them to act on those beliefs during his rally speech — intending to cause violence or, at very least, acting with willful negligence.
And once the mob acted — breaking into the Capitol and threatening elected officials’ lives — for hours he did nothing to stop them, and seemed at times to even encourage the mob. This makes him morally responsible for the insurrection and thus someone who should be convicted and barred from holding public office ever again.
What’s striking about Castor’s arguments is that, for the most part, they didn’t really rebut the core of the House’s case. They either danced around it or outright misinterpreted some of the core issues.
For example, Castor argued that Trump couldn’t have intended for a mob to attack the Capitol because the president hates mobs.
“We know that the president would never have wanted such a riot to occur because his longstanding hatred for violent protesters and his love for law and order is on display, worn on his sleeve every single day that he served in the White House,” Castor said.
But, as House impeachment managers pointed out, Trump has a very long history of encouraging violence by his supporters. At a 2016 rally, for example, he encouraged his supporters to “knock the hell” out of counterprotesters who were throwing tomatoes, adding that “I will pay for the legal fees” if they do.
And when he condemns “violent protesters,” he’s almost always talking about his political enemies — most notably, Black Lives Matter activists and antifa. There is no evidence that Trump has a principled abhorrence of violence, and lots of evidence that he revels in it when committed by his allies against his enemies.
Similarly, Castor argued that because some of the January 6 attackers were prepared for violence beforehand, there’s no way the president’s speech — which encouraged them to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” — could have caused the violence.
“This was a pre-planned assault, make no mistake,” Castor said. “The president did not cause the riots.”
Except the fact that some rallygoers were prepared for violence prior to the speech doesn’t mean that all of them were. Violent militia members from groups like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers only make up a fraction of the arrests from the insurrection. It’s possible that a hardcore minority were prepared to try to attack Congress, but a much larger percentage of the pro-Trump crowd decided to join them after the president’s heated rhetoric inspired them to.
But Castor’s argument also misses something more fundamental: that if Trump hadn’t been falsely calling the election “stolen” for months, and calling on his supporters to try and help him overturn it, there would have been no pre-planned violence in the first place. This entire series of events only became thinkable because Trump had engaged in a sustained and successful campaign to convince millions of Americans that there was a nefarious plot to destroy American democracy. They planned to do violence before the rally because they believed the lies Trump had been telling them; indeed, the House managers showed video in which people storming the Capitol say they were acting on Trump’s orders.
Castor made a similar error in his discussion of Trump’s infamous January 2 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He argued that Trump did not attempt to incite insurrection during this private phone call — in which Trump asks Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s Georgia victory — and therefore that it was irrelevant.
But this was not the purpose of the House manager’s discussion of that call.
Their point was that the call was an inappropriate and arguably unlawful effort to overturn the results of a legitimate election, proving that Trump had intent to subvert the electoral and legal system in order to get himself installed as president. This is clear enough if you read the article of impeachment, which describes the call as part of Trump’s “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election” — not a direct effort to incite the attack on the Capitol itself.
Perhaps the strongest argument Castor made is that Trump’s January 6 rally speech, the one the House alleges helped incite the rally, specifically called on protesters to act in a peaceful manner.
“The president’s remarks explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully and patriotically,” Castor said. “The entire premise of his remarks was that the democratic process would and should play out according to the letter of the law.”
It’s right to say that the text of Trump’s speech gives him some cover, and that he never outright tells his supporters “go do violence now.” It might even lead to his acquittal in an actual criminal trial, where the standard required for conviction is different and justifiably higher than in an impeachment trial that carries no jail time as punishment.
But the line Castor cited was just that — one line — in a speech full of inflammatory rhetoric, including a direct call to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” You don’t need to nakedly endorse violence to create a situation in which it’s foreseeable that it could occur.
This is also why Trump’s inaction in the face of the violence — which he was watching unfold live on TV — is crucial: His refusal to call in the National Guard says much more about what he wanted than a pro forma line about peaceful protest. You can’t set up a situation where violence is likely, allow that violence to unfold, and then get off the hook for what amounts to a fine print disclaimer in the speech.
What Trump’s lawyers didn’t say mattered as much as what they did
Trump’s response after the attack happened was not incidental to the House managers’ case. In fact, it was at the center of it.
In Rep. Jamie Raskin’s closing arguments, he posed four questions to Trump’s defense that he believed they would need to address if they were to “answer the overwhelming, detailed, specific, factual and documentary evidence we’ve introduced.” All of them centered on the president’s actions during the attack, which Raskin and the Democrats felt were damning proof of his intent to allow the violence to unfold:
One, why did President Trump not tell his supporters to stop the attack on the Capitol as soon as he learned of it?
Why did President Trump do nothing to stop the attack for at least two hours after the attack began?
As our constitutional commander-in-chief, why did he do nothing to send help to our overwhelmed and besieged law-enforcement officers for at least two hours on January 6 after the attack began?
On January 6, why did President Trump not, at any point that day, condemn the violent insurrection and insurrectionists?
At no point in Castor’s presentation did he even attempt to answer any of Raskin’s questions. During the subsequent Q&A, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) posed a version of these questions directly to Trump’s team. “Exactly when did President Trump learn of the breach of the Capitol, and what specific actions did he take to bring the rioting to an end and when did he take them?”
Here’s what the Trump team said in response:
There’s a lot of interaction between the authorities and getting folks to have security beforehand on the day; we have a tweet at 2:38 pm, it was certainly sometime before then. With the rush to bring this impeachment, there’s been no investigation into that and that is the problem with the entire proceeding. The House managers [did] zero investigation, and the American people deserve a lot better than coming in here with no evidence — hearsay on top of hearsay on top of reports that are of hearsay. Due process is required here, and that was denied.
This, of course, is not an answer — it is a dodge, much like all of Castor’s presentation beforehand. Trump’s team did not have good answers to Raskin’s questions because no such answers exist.
Trump’s conduct on January 6, and before it, really was indefensible. It was inevitable that the attempt to defend it would fail.
Judas and the Black Messiah tells the story of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), who was killed by the police in a 1969 raid. (photo: Warner Bros.)
'Judas and the Black Messiah' Is a Tense Thriller About the Black Panther Party
Justin Chang, NPR
Chang writes: "There have been many strong documentaries over the years about the history of the Black Panther Party, but Judas and the Black Messiah is the first major Hollywood drama I've seen that puts the organization and its activism front and center."
That speaks to the timidity of the American film industry, which often prefers simpler, more reassuring stories about racial justice, and which is seldom comfortable with Black Panthers unless they're of the Marvel comic-book variety. For this reason alone, Judas and the Black Messiah, directed by Shaka King from a script he wrote with Will Berson, already feels like something of a cinematic breakthrough. That it's smart, powerful and well acted almost feels like a bonus.
The movie focuses on the last year or so in the life of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Panthers' Illinois chapter. He was only 21 when he was killed in 1969 by Chicago police during a raid on his apartment that was planned with the FBI.
One of the virtues of Judas and the Black Messiah is that it gives us such a captivating sense of who Hampton was. He's played here by an electrifying Daniel Kaluuya, who captures the young man's gift for inspiring other activists and his ferocious critique of the nation's white power structure.
Early on in the film, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, played by a scowling Martin Sheen, identifies Hampton as a dangerous threat — a potential "Black Messiah" who will incite violence and empower other left-leaning political groups. And so the FBI enlists a young petty crook named William O'Neal, played by LaKeith Stanfield, to infiltrate the Black Panthers in Chicago and help bring Hampton down.
O'Neal is thus the Judas of the title, and having the story unfold primarily from his perspective turns out to be a shrewd decision. As an outsider, O'Neal provides a natural point of entry: It's through his eyes that we witness the Panthers' work in their Black communities, through free medical clinics and kids' breakfast programs.
The more O'Neal learns about the organization, the more conflicted he feels about his mission. He knows better when his FBI contact — a very good Jesse Plemons — insists that the Panthers are as bad as the Ku Klux Klan.
At the same time, the movie doesn't shy away from the Panthers' militancy, as they march about wearing berets and openly carrying firearms. They're certainly capable of swift, merciless violence, as we see during an intense shootout with police. And when O'Neal hears about the torture and murder of a suspected mole in the Party, he becomes even more fearful that he might suffer the same fate if his cover is blown. Stanfield's performance is remarkable: O'Neal starts off as an intriguing blank slate and by the end is all but drowning in guilt, sorrow and moral confusion.
For roughly two hours Judas and the Black Messiah sustains the pulse of a thriller, with an atmosphere that harks back to Sidney Lumet's gritty city crime pictures of the '70s and '80s. King, the director, has talked about the challenges of getting a Hollywood studio to greenlight a film about the Black Panthers, and framing the movie as a tense genre piece can only have helped.
Some of the story beats can feel a little rote as a result, and many of the real-life Black Panthers we meet — like Mark Clark, who will die alongside Hampton in the 1969 raid — flash by too quickly to make an impression. But that narrative rush is also what gives the movie such momentum.
Things do slow down for a bit of romance between Hampton and another Panther, Deborah Johnson, who's played with aching delicacy by Dominique Fishback. In one of the most moving scenes, Johnson reads Hampton a poem she's written, expressing both fear and acceptance of the fact that their life of protest will almost certainly end in tragedy.
Like some other movies that have emerged this season, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and One Night in Miami ... Judas and the Black Messiah is an ensemble drama in which Black characters continually ask themselves and each other what form their liberation should take. You could call these movies timely, except that the issues they confront, from the exploitation of Black American culture to white supremacy in law enforcement, have never not been been timely. As Hampton notes in a speech that seems to describe this fractious nation at any given moment: "America's on fire right now, and until that fire is extinguished, don't nothing else mean a damn thing."
Adam Schiff at a news conference on Capitol Hill. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)
Adam Schiff's Tough-on-Crime Background Complicates His Push to Be California AG
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "As California Gov. Gavin Newsom considers who to appoint as attorney general, criminal and racial justice groups are pushing back against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff's pitch for the job, citing his record of being 'not only supportive of, but deeply invested in, creating our current system of incarceration.'"
Dozens of racial and criminal justice groups wrote an open letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom opposing a possible Schiff appointment.
Schiff is lobbying Newsom to be appointed as the state’s next attorney general, with help from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as first reported by Axios. The House Intelligence Committee chair rose to national stardom for his role leading former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Early this month, as rumors swirled that Schiff was being considered for the role, 36 criminal and social justice groups wrote an open letter to Newsom expressing their “strong opposition” to Schiff’s appointment. The letter cited Schiff’s record authoring and supporting legislation that would have grown the system of mass incarceration and increased the criminalization of poverty, both as a California state senator from 1996 to 2001 and as a U.S. representative since 2001. Signatories include the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and Long Beach chapters, the Anti Police-Terror Project, the California Public Defenders Association, the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area chapter, and Sunrise Movement Los Angeles.
“We are standing at a crossroads of either advancing progressive justice reform or really entrenching systemic and institutional racism, classism, and oppression,” Melinah Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, a professor and former chair of the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and one of the signatories, told The Intercept. “And we believe that Adam Schiff represents the latter.”
Jockeying for the seat began after President Joe Biden nominated California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on December 6. The Senate Finance Committee is expected to hold Becerra’s confirmation hearing in the coming weeks, though a date has not yet been set. He is expected to be confirmed, after which Newsom will announce his pick for attorney general.
The letter focuses on Schiff, whose record trends toward being more tough on crime than most of the other top contenders, but the signatories ask that readers “do not take this as an acceptance of all other potential appointees” and ask Newsom to appoint “someone who has an understanding of the impact of policing and incarceration on people’s lives and on our communities.” Schiff’s office and campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Other contenders for the position include state Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, state Sen. Anna Caballero, state Assembly Member Rob Bonta, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, and Rick Zbur, director of Equality California, a nonprofit civil rights group focused on LGBTQ+ advocacy.
After nationwide protests against police brutality last summer, voters in California sent a clear message that they want a new approach to criminal justice and systemic racism, said Jody Armour, a signatory on the letter and the Roy P. Crocker professor of law at the University of Southern California. “Many voters heard that message, that we needed serious criminal justice reform, we needed to hold police more accountable than we had been, we needed to be less draconian in our punishment practice.”
In Los Angeles, Armour noted, reformer George Gascón was elected as district attorney over old-school prosecutor Jackie Lacey in November, and the Los Angeles City Council voted in July to cut the budget of the Los Angeles Police Department by $150 million, largely in response to demands from protesters. That followed Chesa Boudin’s 2019 election as San Francisco district attorney on a decarceral platform.
Over the last decade, California has been a national leader in efforts to reduce mass incarceration, after the Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce its prison population. The state’s criminal justice system was a focal point of last year’s Democratic presidential primary, with Vice President Kamala Harris, who was attorney general from 2011 to 2017, facing criticism for policies that failed to hold police officers accountable for misconduct and overcriminalized poor communities and Black and brown people.
As a state senator, Schiff authored legislation to create the Department of Juvenile Justice to administer prisons for kids; establish “boot camps” for kids who committed certain offenses during school time; make it easier to terminate parental rights for children who were wards of the court; and allow kids age 14 years and up who are “truant or disobedient” and wards of the court to be punished by being held in a secure facility when they aren’t in school.
Schiff also authored bills that would have made it easier to try as adults kids age 14 years or older accused of serious crimes and for the Los Angeles district attorney to prosecute minors. Other measures Schiff introduced would have allowed the fingerprints of minors who had been arrested to be entered into a federal database and would have increased funding for the federal Community Oriented Policing Services program to fund construction of jails and expand funding for law enforcement agencies and district attorneys. The COPS program has long been criticized for funneling billions of dollars to police departments and flooding communities with cops under the banner of promoting community engagement in policing. He also authored a bill that would have made it a felony to hire an undocumented immigrant.
Some of the bills died in committee, but others were vetoed by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, including bills creating the Department of Juvenile Justice and giving courts more power to terminate parental rights.
“In his single term of four years,” the letter reads, “Adam Schiff made increased incarceration and punishment for poor parents the focus of his legislative agenda. He was not merely a ‘yes’ vote on bad legislation; he was the author of so many bills that were aimed directly at poor people, Black people, and people of color.”
Schiff served as a state legislator at a time when the Democratic Party as a whole was pushing a tough-on-crime platform. “People can change,” Armour said, but Schiff continued to support similar policies even after many in the party, most notably President Joe Biden, apologized in early 2019 for the damage those policies wrought on Black and brown communities.
As a member of the House of Representatives, Schiff voted for tough-on-crime measures unpopular even among some Democrats aimed at increasing protections for law enforcement agencies and cracking down on certain forms of protest. Schiff was one of only 48 House Democrats who voted for the Thin Blue Line Act of 2017, which would add killing or targeting a law enforcement officer, firefighter, or other first responder to the list of offenses under consideration for the federal death penalty. Criminal and racial justice groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Education Fund and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights opposed the bill, noting that law enforcement officers already have protection at the federal and state level against such crimes.
Schiff also voted for the Protect and Serve Act of 2019, introduced by former Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. John Rutherford, R-Fla., which would have created new penalties for crimes that target law enforcement. The bill passed the House with support from 162 Democrats and 220 Republicans and did not advance from the Senate. The same year, Schiff introduced a broad anti-terror bill. The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill and said that it would give the attorney general discretion to treat property damage seen during protests last summer as terrorism, The Intercept previously reported. The bill has nine Democratic co-sponsors and has not moved out of committee.
Last year during negotiations over reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, Schiff lobbied to exclude Dreamers and undocumented people from an amendment shielding U.S. Citizens who aren’t suspected of having committed a crime from having their web histories surveilled without a warrant. Civil liberties groups accused Schiff of pushing the exception to impede efforts by other members of Congress to strengthen protections against online surveillance.
Schiff’s recent support for the Thin Blue Line and Protect and Serve acts helped to feed a right-wing narrative that Black Lives Matter and police accountability movements are “somehow lawless and police-hating,” Armour said. “It’s, in other words, a dog whistle that he was contributing to. To put someone like that in this position at this time would be surprising to me. It would be surprisingly politically tone-deaf.”
The attorney general position is particularly important for Los Angeles, said Abdullah of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, especially because the city had, until recently, a tough-on-crime district attorney in Lacey. The group, working with other advocates, has succeeded in bringing the attorney general’s attention to policing issues in their community. In January, Becerra launched a civil rights investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for reports of excessive force, misconduct, and retaliation for whistleblowing. “We don’t think that we would have been able to get Adam Schiff to do that.”
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Amazon Hired Koch-Backed Anti-Union Consultant to Fight Alabama Warehouse Organizing
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "Amazon is bringing on a set of well-trained union suppression consultants in its high-profile fight to keep its massive warehouse workforce free of organized labor."
The head of the Center for Independent Employees is paid $3,200 per day to thwart what could become Amazon’s first unionized facility in the U.S.
The Seattle-based conglomerate recently retained a consultant named Russell Brown to help thwart the union election that began recently at its fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, new disclosures show.
Brown was brought on by Amazon on January 25 for a contract to help persuade Amazon’s Alabama employees not to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, a union that is affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers, also known as the UFCW. He is paid $3,200 per day, plus expenses, for the work.
Brown is the head of RWP Labor, which touts itself as a specialty firm that assists companies in “maintaining a union free workplace.” The company features a team of consultants that includes a former International Brotherhood of Teamsters trainer who now assists corporations with defeating union campaigns. The firm brags that it has won many previous anti-union drives and specializes in training company leaders, persuading employees, and developing corporate social responsibility plans devised to prevent union interference.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brown also serves as the president of the Center for Independent Employees, a think tank that has received funding from the billionaire Koch network that routinely lobbies to weaken the political power of labor unions.
The vote at the Bessemer warehouse could be pivotal. If a majority of votes cast of the 5,800 workers at the facility, located in the suburbs outside Birmingham, favor the union, they will form Amazon’s first unionized facility in the U.S.
Amazon has worked furiously to derail the effort. In recent weeks, the company has sent mass texts to workers warning them against voting to join the union, set up an anti-union website, and sponsored Facebook ads urging workers to vote “no.”
The RWDSU has said that Amazon has also enrolled workers into “classes” in which instructors have attempted to scare workers about the supposed dangers of unionization, with false claims that unionization may decrease wages. According to a report from Wired, when workers challenged these claims, some were “called to the front of the room where their badges were photographed,” in an apparent attempt at intimidation.
The company also lost a bid to compel the union election to be held in person, a demand viewed widely as an attempt to hold last-minute coercive meetings to discourage union support. Election ballots were mailed to workers last Monday for a process that will continue over the next several weeks.
Brown, records show, has engaged in anti-union consulting work for decades. He has served similar roles in persuading employees not to join a union on behalf of UPS, General Electric, Krispy Kreme, Kumho Tire, ProPacific Fresh, and the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center hospitals, among other clients.
Through the Center for Independent Employees, Brown is also active in high-profile labor policy debates. Brown participated in lobby events to oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the keystone labor rights bill advanced by labor advocates in Congress to help gig industry workers better obtain health care and minimum-wage rights. In recent years, he has routinely appeared on coalition letters supporting Republican priorities, including the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
The labor movement has fallen short in many of its recent high-profile attempts to organize major employers in the South. A contentious fight in 2014 at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant ended in defeat for the United Auto Workers. Three years later, Boeing workers roundly rejected a labor organizing drive at a 787 aircraft assembly factory in North Charleston, South Carolina.
But shifting public opinion around the importance of basic rights at work, shaped in part by the coronavirus pandemic and the shift to more online organizing tactics, has created a unique opportunity for Bessemer workers. Organizers have countered Amazon’s anti-union messages on social media and mobilized testimonials from workers attesting to the unfair working conditions at the fulfillment center. Many workers have complained bitterly about Amazon’s alleged refusal to take concerns around health and safety seriously and have said that the company has pressed them to the breaking point with constant surveillance and productivity demands.
When Mubarak resigned, protesters celebrated their victory. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Egypt's Decade of Revolution and Counterrevolution
Brecht De Smet, Jacobin
De Smet writes: "The fall of the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, ten years ago today, was a triumph for popular mobilization."
But the revolutionary forces lacked the political organization and vision needed to head off a counterrevolutionary backlash that restored the authoritarian state’s power.
n October 17, 2010, I was sitting with a man I will call S.O., a prominent Egyptian labor organizer, on the banks of the Suez Canal. A massive oil tanker slowly made its way through the water while we sipped from our teas.
We were talking about labor struggles past and present in the Canal zone for higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to establish independent trade union committees. Already before the 2011 uprising, a vibrant and combative labor movement had started reintroducing ideas and practices of resistance to the wider Egyptian population, especially in marginalized spaces that lay outside the field of middle-class political activism in Cairo and its environs.
The 2006–8 strikes in the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company of Mahalla el-Kubra, a provincial town in the Nile Delta, engulfed the whole Egyptian labor movement, also inspiring workers in the Canal zone to strike, from the cement sector to steel and food processing. Progressive human rights activists, journalists, and lawyers offered their support and solidarity to these often-isolated struggles that received little or no media coverage.
Egypt’s opposition parties, on the other hand, remained largely absent, or played at most a minor role in organizing resistance. They showed little interest in the social plight of workers and peasants, mainly focusing on purely “political” issues such as freedom of the press and restrictions on presidential power. Conversely, workers often distrusted political parties, even left-wing ones, and accused them of trying to hijack their social struggles for dangerous political goals.
Even so, revolutionary groups and individual leftist activists such as S.O. played a key role in organizing struggles, connecting different workplaces with one another, and bringing these fights “at the margins” of Egyptian society to its political center through demonstrations and sit-ins — for example, at Parliament or the Ministry of Manpower in Cairo.
When does a revolution begin? Before the crucial, explicit breakthrough of a mass uprising, there is always a long buildup of small-scale protests, experiences, and networks of resistance. Political scientists who were “surprised” by Egypt’s January 25 insurrection probably never went to the factories of provincial towns, rural areas, or even poor neighborhoods in metropolitan Cairo, which had seen protests long before 2011.
In the fall of 2010, Egypt was simmering with indignation about increasing poverty, police violence, and corruption. At the same time, the boiling point that would lead to demonstrations in defiance of state power — let alone a full-scale uprising — still seemed to be far off, especially to the activists themselves.
The security state left no room for street politics. The Central Security Forces (CSF) quickly crushed a spontaneous uprising in Mahalla el-Kubra on April 6, 2008 through a massive deployment of the paramilitary police force, numbering some four hundred thousand troops.
With the advantage of hindsight, we can say that the Mahalla revolt constituted one of the many seeds of the revolutionary process. It called into being the April 6 youth movement, which would play an important role in the 2011 uprising.
In November 2010, just a few weeks after my meeting with S.O., people in Suez revolted against the rigged parliamentary elections. Around fifteen thousand citizens demonstrated in the streets of the Canal city, calling for an end to the regime — two months before the January 25 revolt. State security forces shot three people.
The next time I talked with S.O. was on March 18, 2011. Little more than a month had passed since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but it seemed almost a decade. Egypt’s political convulsions brought to mind some old lessons about the nature of revolution, supposedly buried with the end of the Cold War. Recall the words of Lenin more than a century ago:
Every revolution means a sharp turn in the lives of a vast number of people. Unless the time is ripe for such a turn, no real revolution can take place. And just as any turn in the life of an individual teaches him a great deal and brings rich experience and great emotional stress, so a revolution teaches an entire people very rich and valuable lessons in a short space of time.
Seeing hundreds of thousands of hopeful protesters in streets and squares all over Egypt, demanding freedom, bread, social justice, and dignity in a country that had been characterized for so long by ruthless oppression and political passivity, breathed fresh life into the stale Leninist formulas that Western leftists have often repeated intellectually without experiencing them sensuously.
History was in the making in Tahrir Square. Moreover, it was ordinary people who were making it. Before January 25, Egyptians seldom spoke spontaneously about politics to me or only in a typical cynical, humorous way. Now the random passerby, the taxi driver, the waiter, the street vendor enthusiastically asked me what I thought about “their revolution.” They owned it and knew that every oppressed group in the world was looking at them with hope and expectation.
The occupation of Tahrir Square had become a symbol, not only of resistance, but also of the potential of the masses to start creatively building a new society. To quote Lenin again:
Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution.
Midan Tahrir had been slowly transformed into a “city of tents.” Activists defended, cleaned, and governed their “Republic of Tahrir.” Famous artists and actors joined the protests, and amateur musicians and singers tried their luck on improvised stages.
By liberating Tahrir from state power, people began to liberate and transform themselves. Beyond the region, activists tried to emulate the successes of Tunisia and Egypt, turning “square occupation” into a general strategy for confronting state power.
A revolution, however, is not only a carnival, prefiguring and celebrating new ways to live, work, and love. It is also a popular confrontation with organized state power that will find it difficult to remain peaceful, regardless of the intentions of the revolutionaries. In Suez, the eighteen days of the uprising that started on January 25 and ended in the removal of President Hosni Mubarak from office were especially violent.
The first protester killed was Mostafa Ragab, a twenty-one-year-old resident of Suez. As S.O. recalled to me:
On January 25, three youths were killed; on January 26, two; on January 28, there were eighteen youths killed. On the Friday of Anger, there were eighty thousand people on the streets . . . in a city like Suez! Half a million people are living in Suez, so almost twenty percent were in the streets. The police aimed to kill the protesting youth in Suez, especially during the Friday of Anger, using bullets and snipers. Ten percent of all the people killed during the revolution were from Suez. But each time someone was killed, it was a new provocation for us to protest and come to the streets. There are five police stations in Suez: we burned three of them. We burned a lot of police trucks. We burned the fire station because they were using the fire brigade trucks to transport weapons and kill protesters.
While Egyptians shouted “salmeyya, salmeyya!” (“peaceful, peaceful!”) during their mass demonstrations, they had to defend themselves against the police attacking them with batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and even live ammunition. In order to create the basic conditions for protest, demonstrators had to physically overwhelm and defeat the CSF in street battles that raged in every Egyptian town.
Once the police force had been defeated and humiliated, they withdrew to barracks and remained there until long after Mubarak’s fall. On January 28, policemen threw away their uniforms in Suez, fleeing the streets in civilian clothes.
The Egyptian revolt brought back another old theme from the Marxist classics, forgotten by many: the question of dual power. As Lenin observed, “the basic question of every revolution is that of state power.” In Egypt, the uprising disrupted and disorganized the established structures of state power, but it did not dismantle the authoritarian state apparatus, let alone replace it with a form of popular governance. During the eighteen days of revolt, we saw the embryonic development of “dual power” — a situation whereby a new center of political power is emerging while the old still exists.
Building on Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune, Lenin characterized this new opposing power as one stemming from “the direct initiative of the people from below,” leading to “the replacement of the police and the army . . . by the armed people themselves,” with the state bureaucracy also replaced in the same fashion “or at least placed under special control.” The revolt witnessed precisely this tendency to replace oppressive state structures with popular initiatives from below, not only in Tahrir, but in neighborhoods throughout the whole country.
Although the effective impact and level of organization of these committees should not be exaggerated, they did represent a development of popular power, with Tahrir functioning as the central laboratory. Along with Cairene citizens, the occupants of the Square included people from provincial districts and even remote rural areas. Farmers who were not able to return home when the regime closed the roads joined in the protests. Representatives of four independent trade unions established the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) at the Square.
If the uprising had continued, Tahrir would have been the logical, organic space in which to organize a revolutionary constitutional assembly, or some other creative form of “parliament of the nation” to which the local popular committees could have answered. This would have set up popular power in direct, formal opposition to the authoritarian state.
However, the military coup of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) cut short this development toward dual power on February 11. In a laconic speech, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Hosni Mubarak had resigned and that the SCAF had taken over executive and legislative power. The first demonstrations on January 25 had opened up a complex and often confusing period of struggle between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces that was arguably closed by the Rabaa massacre in August 2013.
During the eighteen days of the uprising, the Mubarak regime attempted to quell the protests by using every trick at its disposal: intimidation and killing of protesters; propaganda channeled through state-controlled media; internet and mobile phone blackouts; a capital strike; curfews; the release of criminals from prison and the withdrawal of the police to sow chaos in neighborhoods; superficial concessions such as cabinet reshuffles; vague promises of economic and political reform. Nothing could stop the revolutionary tide.
Once the police had been defeated, the regime sent in the army to restore order. When tanks and armored personnel carriers moved into the center of Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez, protesters often welcomed them with chants that proclaimed the army and the people to be “one hand,” hoping that the soldiers would side with the people. Unlike the CSF, the Armed Forces were still a respected institution in Egyptian society, a legacy of the Nasserist era of the 1950s and ’60s.
Moreover, the protesters realized that while they could not defeat tanks and machine guns, they could hope to win over the soldiers that operated those weapons. On the one hand, the absence of an organized revolutionary center made it possible for the generals to step in as caretakers of the revolutionary process; on the other hand, they clearly felt pressured to act because the rank-and-file soldiers and even middle-ranking officers were often sympathetic to the cause of the protesters. In this climate, the SCAF could not simply order the army to shoot protesters.
The generals preferred a literal war of position, digging “urban trenches” around important sites of state power such as the Presidential Palace, Parliament, the Stock Exchange, and the Maspero radio and television building. In the final days of the uprising, protesters had begun to rally toward these sites and also toward army barracks, so the SCAF had to take the initiative in removing Mubarak before a confrontation that might split the army itself.
The best option for the survival of the collapsing Egyptian state was to have the SCAF place itself at the head of the revolution and lead the process in order to ultimately defeat it. Because of the revolutionary momentum that had built up, this was primarily a defensive counterrevolution cloaked in the language of elections, constitution-making, and “democratic transition” — a counterrevolution in democratic form.
When Mubarak resigned, the revolutionary movement was euphoric, and thousands of protesters stayed overnight in Tahrir Square to celebrate their victory. The following morning, however, revolutionaries were divided over their goals and strategies.
The hard core of Square occupiers argued that they should remain in Tahrir to pressure the SCAF to carry out real reforms. Other protesters wanted to give the SCAF the opportunity to prove itself, claiming that they could and would return to the streets when necessary to keep the “democratic transition” on track.
Indeed, mobilizations in Tahrir still had an impact over the months that followed Mubarak’s fall. For example, protesters successfully applied pressure on the SCAF to fire the prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, on March 3 and replace him with Essam Sharaf.
Nevertheless, the real challenge for the revolution at this point was not to continue occupying the Square, but to turn Tahrir inside out, to bring the experience of popular decision-making and the “festival of the oppressed” into urban neighborhoods, rural villages, and industrial workplaces all over Egypt. However, the revolutionaries were struggling to unite and organize themselves and to agree on their strategy and priorities.
The vague demands of “bread, freedom, social justice, and dignity” could mobilize hundreds of thousands of demonstrators precisely because they articulated a wide range of frustrations and desires. This heterogeneous “popular will” now had to be translated into a program of social transformation, which created cleavages between those socialist, liberal, nationalist, and Islamist groups that had been leading the protests against Mubarak.
The 2011 uprising was “spontaneous” in the limited sense that the massive scale and radicalization of the movement had neither been planned nor foreseen. However, a diverse coalition of forces had organized the first protests on January 25: social media activists, left-wingers, youth organizations, members of the political opposition, human rights campaigners, Islamists, and the Ultras — hardcore football fans.
The demands of the organizers were quite moderate, as Jack Shenker explained in the Guardian on the day before the protest:
Demonstrators are calling for the sacking of the country’s interior minister, the cancelling of Egypt’s perpetual emergency law, which suspends basic civil liberties, and a new term limit on the presidency that would bring to an end the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
It wasn’t the activists who were the first to realize that this was an opportunity to take down Mubarak and “the system” — it was politically unorganized people, swarming the streets and occupying the squares. To the dismay of activists who at first tried to rein them in, they began to chant revolutionary slogans. Many of those activists saw the masses in the streets as a tool with which to obtain democracy, rather than as a developing political subject in their own right.
Unsurprisingly, most opposition groups developed a “democratic” strategy aimed at participating in elections and rewriting the Egyptian constitution. They mainly perceived the Mubarak state in terms of its outer shell: the presidency, the parliament, and the constitution, which could be changed through negotiations with the military. They shared a “democracy first” policy: first Egypt had to become democratic, only then could economic issues be addressed.
What’s more, these groups often framed such issues in technocratic and neoliberal terms — speaking in favor of “market efficiency” and against “cronyism” and “corruption.” This alienated social groups such as workers and peasants who had joined the protests mainly because of their social grievances.
Other, more militant, left-wing groups such as the Revolutionary Socialists and the Socialist Popular Alliance Party had a clear understanding of the class nature of Egypt’s state and economy, the crucial position of the Ministry of Interior and the Armed Forces, and the need to demolish these authoritarian structures through popular power from below. Yet the organized, revolutionary left only amounted to a marginal force in a population of around 85 million.
In addition to developing popular power, the Egyptian left had to develop itself, in a mutually reinforcing process. The left can only organize and build itself through supporting and being active in protest movements. On the other hand, the Egyptian masses could only develop a strategy to defeat state power and transform their society by combining the intuitive slogan “al-shab yurid isqat al-nizam” (“the people want the fall of the system”) with a scientific analysis of exactly what that “system” was.
Between March and September 2011, more than a million workers went on strike. Demands that included a national minimum wage and investment in the public sector showed their heightened level of class consciousness. Workers were also struggling against the “little Mubaraks” in and out of their workplaces, trying to get rid of corrupt and authoritarian managers and state officials.
The SCAF and its allies denounced these strikes and social protests as fi’awi (“factional”) and contrary to the national interest. The main rationale of the counterrevolution at this stage was to demobilize, depoliticize, and atomize the revolutionary movement through a combination of violence against activists and a top-down process of “democratization” that would pacify the wider population.
Military-supervised elections, plebiscites, and constitution-making emphasized procedures and representation within the narrow realm of the state, excluding the kind of direct, popular democracy that could be found in embryonic form in the ongoing street and workplace protests. By setting the pace and scope of elections and referenda, the SCAF was able to create cleavages within the broad revolutionary alliance.
The constitutional referendum on March 19, 2011 was a decisive moment that divided the revolutionary movement into the sectarian camps of “secularists” and “Islamists.” Over the next two years, revolutionary groups and parties were unable to establish a revolutionary “third current” that could stand between the military and the Islamist camp (the latter being represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist parties).
The “triangular conflict” between popular revolutionary forces and the rival counter-revolutionary camps of regime elites and their Islamist challengers came to define the uprisings across the whole Middle East and North Africa region. The failure of revolutionary forces to organize themselves and gain traction among the masses brought the conflict between the two counter-revolutionary wings, regime and Islamist, to the center of the political stage.
The states that have long played an imperialist role in the region, before and after decolonization, reinforced this dynamic with their support — diplomatic, financial, and military — for authoritarian regimes or Islamist militias, depending on their interests. This even took the form of direct intervention in Libya and Syria.
Indeed, long before the Arab uprisings began, the main counter-revolutionary force in the region had been Western imperialism. Not only did those states act against popular rebellions, they also sought to prevent revolutionaries from gaining power in the first place by shoring up loyal dictators and reactionary states such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
After the fall of Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), Egypt’s oldest and best-organized political force, played a pivotal role in stabilizing the “counter-revolution in democratic form.” While Muslim Brotherhood youth had been at the forefront of the uprising, the MB leadership cautiously supported the military’s “soft coup” on February 11, calling upon protesters to leave Tahrir Square and start negotiations with the SCAF.
The Brotherhood saw the SCAF’s “democratic transition” as an opportunity to become a legitimate political actor by functioning as a power broker between the generals and the people. Its leaders spoke out against demonstrations and strikes. In return, the SCAF released Brotherhood activists from prison, and recognized the movement’s political apparatus, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).
November 2011 was a turning point in the revolutionary process. In the preceding months, the SCAF had discredited itself by its use of violence, its unwillingness to transform authoritarian state institutions such as the Ministry of Interior and its dreaded State Security Investigation Service (SSI), and its inability to solve urgent social issues. This led to a new wave of protests, culminating in the Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street near the popular Abdeen neighborhood and close to Tahrir Square.
The protests had begun on November 18 after the Brotherhood called for a “million-man march” to demand civilian supervision of the constitutional process. The CSF dispersed a symbolic sit-in at Tahrir to commemorate those who had been killed during the February uprising. Protesters responded by coming to the aid of the occupiers and clashed with state security forces for more than a week.
The battle soon targeted the Ministry of Interior, the heart and symbol of the enduring Egyptian police state. The state forces killed more than forty protesters, shooting many young people purposefully in their eyes to maim them for life. Protesters demanded a transitional, civilian government headed by such prominent opposition figures as Mohamed ElBaradei, Abdel Moniem Aboul Fotouh, and Hamdeen Sabahi — representing, respectively, the liberal-democratic, liberal-Islamist, and socialist-Nasserist wings of the revolution.
However, unlike the January 25 protests, these confrontations did not ignite a wider revolt. The Brotherhood’s FJP and other opposition parties withdrew from the protests. Fearful of putting the imminent parliamentary elections — and their seats — in jeopardy, they sided with the SCAF’s call to restore order.
While the Brotherhood and the Salafists won a landslide in the elections, held between late November 2011 and early January 2012, revolutionary parties and coalitions suffered a humiliating defeat. The “counter-revolution in democratic form” had won an important victory.
This set the scene for a power struggle between the SCAF, which still monopolized the executive branch, and the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament. This battle dragged into the presidential elections of spring 2012. In the first round of these elections, the “revolutionary” candidates Hamdeen Sabahi and Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh placed third and fourth respectively, losing out by slim margins to the Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi and SCAF figurehead Ahmed Shafiq.
Morsi won a little under 25 percent of the vote, Shafik less than 24 percent — just 3 percent ahead of Sabahi. This meant that in the second-round run-off, Egyptians had to choose between the two counter-revolutionary camps represented by Morsi and Shafiq. While Morsi arguably represented the lesser evil, both camps remained faithful to the neoliberal economic recipes and authoritarian state structures that had been the prime causes of the discontent that led to the January 25 revolution.
For a brief moment, Morsi appeared to be willing to challenge the military state. The President’s constitutional declaration of August 12, 2012 retired prominent SCAF generals such as Hussein Tantawi and Sami Anan. The new president elevated General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to the position of Defence Minister and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces.
Nevertheless, the shift from a military to a civilian executive simply drew a veil over the continuity of authoritarian state power through the Ministry of Interior, the elite networks, the military, the governors, and other bureaucratic centers of decision-making. The constitution promulgated on December 26, 2012 shielded the military’s budget from parliamentary oversight and ensured that the Minister of Defence would hail from the ranks of the military.
Instead of dismantling the structures of dictatorship, the Brotherhood added a new civilian layer on this foundation, manned with its own personnel. So far as the revolutionary demands of “bread and social justice” were concerned, Morsi continued to cooperate with businessmen from the Mubarak era, enacting neoliberal reforms that further aggravated unemployment, purchasing power, and unfair taxation. The President also accepted a new IMF loan, but backed down in the face of popular protests.
Morsi’s constitutional declaration on November 22, 2012 granted him absolute executive and legislative powers, confirming the worst fears among secular opposition forces about an ongoing “Brotherhoodization” of Egypt’s state and society. The opposition to the presidency crystallized around the National Salvation Front (NSF).
The NSF united right-wing politicians like Amr Moussa, liberal democrats like Muhammed al-Baradei, and Nasserists like Hamdeen Sabahi with the Mubarakist old guard in a common front against the Brotherhood. Both the Brotherhood and the NSF claimed to possess revolutionary legitimacy. However, both camps contained a mix of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in which the counter-revolutionary leadership proved dominant.
At the end of April 2013, Morsi’s opponents launched the massive petition campaign Tamarod (Rebel), going door to door to collect signatures calling on the president to step down. Tamarod represented a new wave of popular initiative and activism “from below.” Yet in contrast with the 2011 uprising, agents of the Ministry of Interior infiltrated this popular movement from its inception, and it received sponsorship from Mubarakist and opposition businessmen.
The military and state security apparatuses had also grown tired of Morsi’s inability to stabilize the country politically and economically and smash the revolution for good. In the previous two years, the state apparatus had tried to repress, demobilize, and divide revolutionary activists, but now it sought to co-opt and lead them in street protests against the Brotherhood. The heart of this mass movement came from Egypt’s better-off, secular middle class, which saturated the protests with its reactionary slogans, urging the military leadership to liberate Egypt from Brotherhood rule.
Massive protests and strikes erupted on June 30, the day that marked Morsi’s first year as President, with protesters demanding his resignation. Morsi stressed his legitimacy as the democratically elected president and refused to step down. On July 1, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, as head of the Armed Forces, issued an ultimatum to both camps to solve the crisis within forty-eight hours. After two more days of deadly clashes, the 30 June Front met with military leaders.
Once again, the inability of revolutionary forces to create a “third current” between the Islamist and military wings of the counter-revolution ensured their downfall. Shortly after the meeting, Sisi declared that Morsi had been removed from his position, and that chief Justice Adli Mansour would head a transitional government as interim president. The army placed Morsi under arrest and occupied key political and economic sites in the country.
This aggressive “counterrevolution from below,” followed by a second military coup, succeeded where two years of “counterrevolution in democratic form” had failed. It reforged the state that had broken down during the insurrection of 2011 and reunited the ruling elites that were comprised of warring factions within the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Interior, the Mubarakist oligarchs, and anti-regime businessmen. Its leaders also managed to rally large parts of the Egyptian population and opposition forces behind their project.
At first, even independent trade unions supported the military coup, hoping that Sisi would reverse Morsi’s neoliberal policies, having been led astray by Sisi’s pseudo-Nasserist aura. Kamal Abu Eita, founder of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, actually became Minister of Manpower and Immigration in July 2013.
Unlike the mass revolt of 2011, the driving force behind the June 30 movement was not a collective desire for liberation from oppression, but rather a panoply of fears, uncertainties, and regime-fuelled conspiracy theories about “hidden hands” that had disrupted the lives and livelihoods of Egypt’s citizens. The opposition between “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” forces gave way to a hysterical, hyper-nationalist polarization between what was considered “Egyptian” or “un-Egyptian,” with official propaganda singling out the Brotherhood as the “enemy within.”
The Brotherhood’s subsequent “anti-coup” movement was no match for the full weight of the security apparatus and its crazed civilian supporters. The violence reached its zenith on August 14, 2013, when the state forces dispersed anti-coup occupiers from al-Nahda and Rabaa al-Adawiya Squares with bulldozers and live ammunition.
A Human Rights Watch report claimed that at least 817 civilians were massacred in Rabaa and 87 in al-Nahda Square. The absence of solidarity among secular opposition forces made them complicit in this counter-revolutionary violence.
Sisi’s election as president in 2014, with 97 percent of the vote, merely formalized a victory that the counter-revolution had already won. Western states were quick to accept and support the new dictator, even when the abysmal human rights track record of his regime could no longer be denied.
With an estimated sixty thousand activists incarcerated in appalling conditions, French President Emmanuel Macron awarded Sisi the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor during his state visit in December 2020.
By 2014, the momentum of the Arab uprisings appeared to have gone, smothered in blood. Saudi–UAE military intervention had already crushed the Bahraini uprising on March 14, 2011. In Libya, a civil war, aggravated by NATO bombing, tore the country to pieces. In Syria, a genuine popular uprising against the Assad dictatorship became not only a civil conflict between armed militias, but also a regional and geopolitical proxy war.
Only in Tunisia has the outcome been less bloody and reactionary — ironically through a “counterrevolution in democratic form” that was more successful than Egypt’s, with Islamist and old regime forces reaching accommodation.
Yet the tide of revolt swept through the region once again in a second wave. From December 2018 onward, street protests in Sudan gave rise to a sustained mass mobilization that forced the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir to step down on April 11, 2019. In Algeria, the Hirak (movement) led to the resignation of president Abdelaziz Bouteflika on April 2, 2019.
Toward the end of 2019, small protests in the Lebanese capital Beirut against new taxes developed into a mass movement. Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s resignation was not enough to defuse the unrest, which persisted throughout 2020 and 2021.
The revolts that were defeated in the first wave of the Arab uprisings have not been completely eradicated, either. None of the original grievances that motivated people in 2011 — bread, freedom, dignity, and social justice — have been adequately addressed.
In Tunisia, unemployment, corruption, and police brutality have brought thousands of protesters, mostly young people, back onto the streets. Even in Egypt, beneath the triumphant counterrevolution, the revolutionary spirit still lives on in a tangle of labor strikes and local, small-scale protests, both urban and rural.
In January 2014, a strike paralyzed the Suez Steel Company’s factories, followed by labor actions in the Nile Delta, Cairo, and Alexandria. In 2015, more than a thousand labor protests were documented, despite state intimidation and violence against workers. Villagers and marginalized groups in rural areas have demonstrated against poverty, corruption, and the demolition of illegally built houses.
In Suez, a small group of youth protesters even marched in September 2019 with an explicit call for Sisi’s resignation. Hundreds of people spontaneously joined their protest — mostly families from popular neighborhoods. Women and children threw rocks at armored personnel carriers (APCs). When factory managers at the Ceramica Cleopatra factory gathered their workers for a display in support of Sisi, they refused to go along with the show, chanting “leave” and “down with military rule.”
There is no question that people in Suez and Egypt in general will start protesting again, despite all the setbacks of the last decade — indeed, resistance is already taking place in popular neighborhoods, villages, and industrial workplaces. Threatened by violence and incarceration, Egyptian leftists such as S.O. are still doing important political work, helping people to organize, to protest, and to defend their rights.
The January 25 Revolution forces us to be humble and to draw key strategic lessons from its experience. Firstly, the Left does not make revolutions: people do, even when they least expect it. Yet the Left is still needed and has a crucial role to play. Its political interventions can mean the difference between success and failure. Hence the priority of the Left should be to support and help build popular power from below, showing the masses in practice that they cannot trust any liberating force except their own — and they don’t need to, either.
Secondly, the idea of dual power is not a strategy imposed from the outside by doctrinaire ultra-leftists, but an empirical reality of revolution: at some point, popular power will come into confrontation with the existing structures. This standoff cannot last forever: it will end with either the restoration or the destruction of established state power.
Thirdly, counterrevolution assumes many different forms, some of which can appear deceptively “democratic” or “popular.” Moreover, counterrevolutionary forces are not homogeneous: they can represent different ruling class fractions, ideologies, and social bases.
Left-wingers can forge tactical and temporary alliances with other democratic opposition forces, but they should organize themselves independently and never enter coalitions dominated by counterrevolutionary leaderships. Rather than confine themselves to posing demands that seem reasonable, they should put forward the ones that are necessary.
In this sense, despite its ultimately grim outcome, the Egyptian revolution still encouraged the world to dream far beyond all kinds of “lesser-evil” politics and the limits of Western-style democracy and capitalism.
Protesters in Mary River. (photo: Shelly Funston Eleverum)
Inuit Hunters Braved -30 C Weather to Block an Iron Mine
Anya Zoledziowski, VICE
Zoledziowski writes: "Braving temperatures as low as -36 C, a group of Inuit hunters spent a full week blockading an iron ore mine in Nunavut in northern Canada, in an attempt to protect animals from further harm."
Hunters say the mine's expansion will further push away already scarce wildlife. Baffinland Iron Mines said on Thursday that the blockades came down and conversations are pending.
Baffinland Iron Mines has proposed an expansion to its Mary River open pit project in the Qikiqtani region, or Baffin Island, that will allow the site to produce 12 million tonnes of ore per year—double its current capacity. The expansion, currently under review, will include a new railway for transporting ore to its shipping port.
The hunters say increased production and traffic will further drive away already scarce wildlife, including caribou and narwhal, that people depend on for food.
The situation has also further convinced Qikiqtani Inuit communities to form their own independent governing body after those representing them failed, said Jerry Natanine, the mayor of Clyde River, a Baffin Island hamlet.
“We would like to see actual negotiations with the most impacted communities and have us involved right away,” Naymen Inuarak, one of the hunters, told Nunatsiaq News. Nearby communities have “been ignored way too long,” he said.
Late last Thursday, after travelling on snowmobiles for two days, seven hunters from Arctic Bay, Igloolik, and Pond Inlet arrived at the mine and set up blockades using their vehicles and sleds. More hunters joined in the following days, with 12 occupying the sites in total.
On Thursday afternoon, Baffinland Iron Mines said the blockades were removed. “We welcome the move to a constructive dialogue and hope to work in collaboration with our community partners to find mutually agreeable solutions to the issues that have been raised,” Baffinland CEO Brian Penney said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the hunters, Marie Naqitarvik, confirmed the disbanding with Nunatsiaq News, saying they’re now gearing up to engage in face-to-face conversations with Inuit groups and community leaders.
The fly-in site’s tote road and air strip were still blocked today, and more than 700 workers were stuck at the mine, according to a Baffinland statement. “Many of the people working at Mary River have been on site for 21 days now and they are not being allowed to leave, nor are food and supply flights being allowed to land,” Tuesday’s statement says.
Nunavut MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq has been in talks with land defenders, Baffinland, and the Minister of Northern Affairs to find a sustainable solution that works for everyone.
“Land guardians are willing to allow planes to land for medical evacuations, and to let employees go home after their shifts are done.” she added.
The mining company has repeatedly said it respects the right to peaceful protest, but on Wednesday, it requested a court injunction from the Nunavut Court of Justice in Iqaluit to force the hunters off the site. A hearing will be held on Saturday, according to the Globe and Mail. Pond Inlet Mayor Joshua Arreak sent a letter on Wednesday asking representatives to meet as soon as possible, so that the hunters' concerns can be heard.
“There is urgency in dealing with this,” the letter says. “Once an injunction is granted, the RCMP are likely to move quickly to end the blockade.” (Indigenous land defenders across the country have repeatedly experienced violence at the hands of the RCMP.)
The hunters, having garnered support from residents across Nunavut, say they won’t leave until their demands are heard.
“I don't think this is extreme, this is our land—our home—being destroyed and we have to think about our future—our children. It is for them," Inuarak told CBC News in Inuktitut.
Throughout hearings for the expansion, locals repeatedly offered solutions to make the mine expansion safer for wildlife, but they were “completely ignored,” Natanine said.
One concern is that the new railway will disrupt a route used by caribou and will sit too close to waterways that house Arctic char, Natanine said. Residents have suggested alternate paths for the railway, to no avail, he said.
Baffinland did not respond to VICE World News requests for comment, but has previously said it promised to protect animals.
Ever since the blockades forced the mine halt operations, Natanine said hunters and their supporters have noticed more ptarmigans than usual over the past week. Ptarmigans are basically an Arctic “chicken,” Natanine said.
When the animals disappear, so does Inuit identity and culture, Natanine said.
“We hunt them all, and we are who we are because of them, we are the way we are because of them,” he said. “Colonialism really wants to further destroy us.”
These aren’t new problems either. He said the mine has caused problems since it first opened in 2014. “It’s unbelievable how much animal catches have come down these last few years,” Natanine said.
Nunavut’s founding legislation requires companies to enter impact benefit agreements with surrounding Inuit communities when proposing projects. But Natanine said the organization representing the affected communities—Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA)—is disconnected from the people it’s meant to serve.
QIA declined VICE World News’ request for comment, but will be releasing a public statement soon, said spokesperson Will Hopkins.
Communities in Baffin Island are now hoping to form a new, independent representative association to cover northern Baffin Inuit communities in Nunavut—one that will work with Baffinland directly, Natanine said. North Baffin Association, which represents Grise Fiord, Resolute Bay, Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River, Igloolik, and Sanirajak, was established in January, according to the CBC.
Baffinland has said it doesn’t have the authority to treat the organization like it would the QIA.
“For a long time now we’ve been wanting to start our own Inuit association, so that we can control our own affairs and run our own government and do things the way we want to do them,” Natanine said.
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