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The mistrust of the Canadian authorities in the face of these disturbances surprised the Americans. Also surprising, though not really surprising, has been the embrace of economic vandalism and bullying by much of the American right – especially by people who have spoken out against the racial justice protests. What we get here is an object lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about “law and order.”
Let’s talk about what happened in Canada and why I call it vandalism.
The “Freedom Convoy” has been marketed as a backlash by truckers angry at Covid-19 vaccination mandates. In reality, there did not appear to have been many truckers among the protesters at the bridge (about 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated). Last week, a Bloomberg reporter saw just three tractor-trailers among the vehicles blocking the Ambassador Bridge, which were mostly pickup trucks and private cars; photos taken on Saturday also show very few commercial trucks.
The Teamsters union, which represents many truckers on both sides of the border, denounced the blockade.
It is therefore not a popular uprising of truckers. It’s more like a slow-motion January 6, a disruption caused by a relatively small number of activists, many of whom are right-wing extremists. At their peak, the protests in Ottawa were said to have involved only around 8,000 people, while numbers in other places were much lower.
Despite their lack of numbers, however, the protesters have inflicted a remarkable amount of economic damage. The American and Canadian economies are very closely integrated. In particular, North American manufacturing, especially but not only in the automotive industry, relies on a constant flow of parts between factories on both sides of the border. As a result, disruption of this flow has hampered the industry, forcing production cuts and even plant closures.
The closure of the Ambassador Bridge also imposed significant overhead costs, as trucks were diverted to roundabout roads and forced to wait in long lines at alternate bridges.
Any attempt to quantify the economic costs of the blockade is delicate and speculative. However, it’s not hard to come up with numbers like $300 million or more per day; combine that with the disruption in Ottawa, and the “trucker” protests may have already inflicted a few billion dollars in economic damage.
It’s an interesting figure, as it’s roughly comparable to insurance industry estimates of total losses associated with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd – protests that appear to have involved more than 15 million people. people.
This comparison will no doubt surprise those who inquire about the right-wing media, which portrays BLM as an orgy of arson and looting. I still get mail from people who believe that much of New York has been reduced to smoking rubble. In fact, the protests were remarkably non-violent; vandalism occurred in a few cases, but it was relatively rare and damage was minimal considering the scale of the protests.
By contrast, causing economic damage was and is the goal of the Canadian protests — because blocking essential flows of goods, threatening people’s livelihoods, is just as destructive as smashing a store window. And unlike, say, a company-specific strike, that damage fell indiscriminately on anyone who had the misfortune to rely on unimpeded trade.
And to what end? The BLM protests were a reaction to police killings of innocent people; what is happening in Canada is, on its face, a rejection of public health measures intended to save lives. Of course, even that is just an excuse: it is actually an attempt to exploit pandemic fatigue to spur the usual culture war agenda.
As you’d expect, the American right loves it. People who have described peaceful protests against police killings as an existential threat are thrilled by the sight of right-wing activists breaking the law and destroying wealth. TBEN News has devoted many hours to flattering coverage of the lockdowns and occupations. Senator Rand Paul, who called BLM activists a ‘crazy mob’, called for Canadian-style protests to ‘clog cities’ across the US, specifically saying he hoped to see truckers disrupt the Super Bowl (They did not do it).
I guess the reopening of the Ambassador Bridge is the start of a broader crackdown on destructive protests. But I hope we won’t forget this moment – and especially remember it the next time a politician or media personality talks about “law and order”.
Recent events have confirmed what many suspected: the right is all for, even enthusiastic about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing goals.
The article When ‘Freedom’ Means the Right to Destroy appeared first on the New York Times.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right, and Democratic Congressional candidate Jessica Cisneros speak to the media before a rally, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022, in San Antonio. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
"What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn't," Ocasio-Cortez told the New Yorker editor David Remnick.
While the New York congresswoman said the situation is "not beyond hope," she argued the US is seeing "the opening salvos" of the end of democracy with a "targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics" combined with "white-nationalist, reactionary politics."
"What we have is the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like," she added.
Ocasio-Cortez specifically predicted that the US would return to the Jim Crow area of disenfranchisement and oppression of Black Americans and other minority groups. She pointed to "Jim Crow-style" laws restricting voting access that have been proposed and passed in states like Texas, Florida's state legislature watering down a ballot initiative rolling back the state's formerly draconian felon disenfranchisement law, and efforts "to replace teaching history with institutionalized propaganda from white-nationalist perspectives in our schools."
"This is what the scaffolding of Jim Crow was," she said.
"There are many impulses to compare this to somewhere else," she said. "There are certainly plenty of comparisons to make...But you really don't have to look much further than our own history, because what we have, I think, is a uniquely complex path that we have walked."
The most pertinent question facing the United States now, Ocasio-Cortez said, is "was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power?"
Ocasio-Cortez added that she's not interested in "navel-gazing" or trying to parse which Republicans are similarly worried about the fate of democracy "because, at the end of the day, they all make the same decisions."
"At the end of the day, you know, who cares if they're true believers or if they're just complicit? They're still voting to overturn the results of our election," she said.
Remington rifle cartridges. (photo: Julie Jacobson/AP)
On Tuesday, the victims’ families marked a victory in their effort with the announcement of a $73 million settlement with Remington Arms, which manufactures the Bushmaster. The settlement, which comes after a protracted court battle, marks the first instance in the United States of a gun manufacturer facing liability for a mass shooting.
“They had the motivation to do whatever they could … so that other families — whether they are in a suburb or township or city — would not have to go through the kind of pain and the loss that they had,” Joshua Koskoff, an attorney for the families, said during a Tuesday news conference.
Koskoff said the settlement sends a signal to gunmakers that they cannot act with impunity and clearly “have skin in the game.” The lawsuit contended, among other things, that Bushmaster was a “combat weapon” improperly marketed to civilians.
“A linchpin of the settlement is that it allows these families the rights to share what they learned with the public,” Koskoff said of documents obtained during the lengthy court battle.
Tearful family members of the victims gathered in a Connecticut hotel room Tuesday as Koskoff discussed the culmination of their eight-year-long battle that began two years after shooter Adam Lanza was armed with the high-powered rifle during his rampage in Newtown, Conn., that killed 28 people, including 20 young children.
Remington, which has filed for bankruptcy, offered to pay nearly $33 million to the nine families last July.
Koskoff noted that the families of the victims “would pay it all back just for one minute” with their loved ones lost in the mass shooting.
“That would be true justice,” he said.
Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower in 1966. (photo: AP)
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Let me do something unusual. In a note like this above a TD piece, I always ask for much-needed funds. And indeed, if you’re in the mood, do visit our donation page where a number of signed books are still available for a contribution of $100 ($150 if you live outside the U.S.). There, I did sneak that in! But what I really wanted to do, in the context of William Astore’s piece about American wars from Vietnam on, was recommend a new book to you. TomDispatch author Beverly Gologorsky, whose novel Every Body Has a Story Dispatch Books put out in 2018, has just published a new work of fiction with Seven Stories Press. Can You See the Wind? is about a working-class family, activism, war, and love in the Vietnam years and I found it a spellbinder. For any of you who, like me, were involved in the antiwar movement then (or since, for that matter), it’s a must-read. Do check it out. Sooner or later, Gologorsky will write a new piece for this site, but I didn’t want to wait until then to recommend her latest book! Tom]
Thought about a certain way, most of my adult life has been spent at war. No, I’ve never been to war myself, although I was swept away by the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. My country, on the other hand, has been more or less eternally at war. In fact, TomDispatch itself began as a reaction to the launching of America’s global war on terror, to the very idea that it was faintly reasonable to invade first Afghanistan and then (after this site was up and rolling) Iraq. Both acts seemed like madness to me then — and seem even more so after, like every American taxpayer, for 20 years, I’ve been funding those very disasters and a Pentagon that only gobbled up ever more of our dollars to do so.
I think this site may have been the first “progressive” one to regularly feature military veterans like Andrew Bacevich and William Astore, or even soldiers still on active duty like Danny Sjursen, who had become critical of our wars. I felt then (and still feel now) that few could have a better sense of those disastrous wars and the Pentagon that pursued them than those who actually fought in them and emerged as their critics.
It was an impulse I’ve never regretted. Take retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore, who first sent an email to TomDispatch in 2007 describing our bemedaled generals as looking ever more like those of the former Soviet Union. He’s been writing for the site ever since. It always seemed logical to me that someone like Astore would grasp the essence of our ongoing disaster in a deeply personal way. If only the mainstream media and Washington had been paying attention to the articles he and the others wrote over all these years, we might not be in this desperate situation. After all, those wars of ours have indeed come home, bringing with them the possibility of unbuilding democracy and creating a Trumpian-style autocracy in our own backyard. It couldn’t be sadder, as you’ll see when you read Astore’s latest piece. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
America’s Disastrous 60-Year War
Three Generations of Conspicuous Destruction by the Military-Industrial Complex
America’s war in Vietnam was waged during the Cold War in the context of what was then known as the domino theory and the idea of “containing” communism. Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the Global War on Terror, a post-Cold War event in which “radical Islamic terrorism” became the substitute for communism. Even so, those wars should be treated as a single strand of history, a 60-year war, if you will, for one reason alone: the explanatory power of such a concept.
For me, because of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in January 1961, that year is the obvious starting point for what retired Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich recently termed America’s Very Long War (VLW). In that televised speech, Ike warned of the emergence of a military-industrial complex of immense strength that could someday threaten American democracy itself. I’ve chosen 2021 as the VLW’s terminus point because of the disastrous end of this country’s Afghan War, which even in its last years cost $45 billion annually to prosecute, and because of one curious reality that goes with it. In the wake of the crashing and burning of that 20-year war effort, the Pentagon budget leaped even higher with the support of almost every congressional representative of both parties as Washington’s armed attention turned to China and Russia.
At the end of two decades of globally disastrous war-making, that funding increase should tell us just how right Eisenhower was about the perils of the military-industrial complex. By failing to heed him all these years, democracy may indeed be in the process of meeting its demise.
The Prosperity of Losing Wars
Several things define America’s disastrous 60-year war. These would include profligacy and ferocity in the use of weaponry against peoples who could not respond in kind; enormous profiteering by the military-industrial complex; incessant lying by the U.S. government (the evidence in the Pentagon Papers for Vietnam, the missing WMD for the invasion of Iraq, and the recent Afghan War papers); accountability-free defeats, with prominent government or military officials essentially never held responsible; and the consistent practice of a militarized Keynesianism that provided jobs and wealth to a relative few at the expense of a great many. In sum, America’s 60-year war has featured conspicuous destruction globally, even as wartime production in the U.S. failed to better the lives of the working and middle classes as a whole.
Let’s take a closer look. Militarily speaking, throwing almost everything the U.S. military had (nuclear arms excepted) at opponents who had next to nothing should be considered the defining feature of the VLW. During those six decades of war-making, the U.S. military raged with white hot anger against enemies who refused to submit to its ever more powerful, technologically advanced, and destructive toys.
I’ve studied and written about the Vietnam War and yet I continue to be astounded by the sheer range of weaponry dropped on the peoples of Southeast Asia in those years — from conventional bombs and napalm to defoliants like Agent Orange that still cause deaths almost half a century after our troops finally bugged out of there. Along with all that ordnance left behind, Vietnam was a testing ground for technologies of every sort, including the infamous electronic barrier that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sought to establish to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail.
When it came to my old service, the Air Force, Vietnam became a proving ground for the notion that airpower, using megatons of bombs, could win a war. Just about every aircraft in the inventory then was thrown at America’s alleged enemies, including bombers built for strategic nuclear attacks like the B-52 Stratofortress. The result, of course, was staggeringly widespread devastation and loss of life at considerable cost to economic fairness and social equity in this country (not to mention our humanity). Still, the companies producing all the bombs, napalm, defoliants, sensors, airplanes, and other killer products did well indeed in those years.
In terms of sheer bomb tonnage and the like, America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were more restrained, mainly thanks to the post-Vietnam development of so-called smart weapons. Nonetheless, the sort of destruction that rained down on Southeast Asia was largely repeated in the war on terror, similarly targeting lightly armed guerrilla groups and helpless civilian populations. And once again, expensive strategic bombers like the B-1, developed at a staggering cost to penetrate sophisticated Soviet air defenses in a nuclear war, were dispatched against bands of guerrillas operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Depleted uranium shells, white phosphorus, cluster munitions, as well as other toxic munitions, were used repeatedly. Again, short of nuclear weapons, just about every weapon that could be thrown at Iraqi soldiers, al-Qaeda or ISIS insurgents, or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, would be used, including those venerable B-52s and, in one case, what was known as the MOAB, or mother of all bombs. And again, despite all the death and destruction, the U.S. military would lose both wars (one functionally in Iraq and the other all too publicly in Afghanistan), even as so many in and out of that military would profit and prosper from the effort.
What kind of prosperity are we talking about? The Vietnam War cycled through an estimated $1 trillion in American wealth, the Afghan and Iraq Wars possibly more than $8 trillion (when all the bills come due from the War on Terror). Yet, despite such costly defeats, or perhaps because of them, Pentagon spending is expected to exceed $7.3 trillion over the next decade. Never in the field of human conflict has so much money been gobbled up by so few at the expense of so many.
Throughout those 60 years of the VLW, the military-industrial complex has conspicuously consumed trillions of taxpayer dollars, while the U.S. military has rained destruction around the globe. Worse yet, those wars were generally waged with strong bipartisan support in Congress and at least not actively resisted by a significant “silent majority” of Americans. In the process, they have given rise to new forms of authoritarianism and militarism, the very opposite of representative democracy.
Paradoxically, even as “the world’s greatest military” lost those wars, its influence continued to grow in this country, except for a brief dip in the aftermath of Vietnam. It’s as if a gambler had gone on a 60-year losing binge, only to find himself applauded as a winner.
Constant war-making and a militarized Keynesianism created certain kinds of high-paying jobs (though not faintly as many as peaceful economic endeavors would have). Wars and constant preparations for the same also drove deficit spending since few in Congress wanted to pay for them via tax hikes. As a result, in all those years, as bombs and missiles rained down, wealth continued to flow up to ever more gigantic corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, places all too ready to hire retired generals to fill their boards.
And here’s another reality: very little of that wealth ever actually trickled down to workers unless they happened to be employed by those weapons makers, which — to steal the names of two of this country’s Hellfire missile-armed drones — have become this society’s predators and reapers. If a pithy slogan were needed here, you might call these the Build Back Better by Bombing years, which, of course, moves us squarely into Orwellian territory.
Learning from Orwell and Ike
Speaking of George Orwell, America’s 60-Year War, a losing proposition for the many, proved a distinctly winning one for the few and that wasn’t an accident either. In his book within a book in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote all-too-accurately of permanent war as a calculated way of consuming the products of modern capitalism without generating a higher standard of living for its workers. That, of course, is the definition of a win-win situation for the owners. In his words:
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed [by the workers].”
War, as Orwell saw it, was a way of making huge sums of money for a few at the expense of the many, who would be left in a state where they simply couldn’t fight back or take power. Ever. Think of such war production and war-making as a legalized form of theft, as Ike recognized in 1953 in his “cross of iron” speech against militarism. The production of weaponry, he declared eight years before he named “the military-industrial complex,” constituted theft from those seeking a better education, affordable health care, safer roads, or indeed any of the fruits of a healthy democracy attuned to the needs of its workers. The problem, as Orwell recognized, was that smarter, healthier workers with greater freedom of choice would be less likely to endure such oppression and exploitation.
And war, as he knew, was also a way to stimulate the economy without stimulating hopes and dreams, a way to create wealth for the few while destroying it for the many. Domestically, the Vietnam War crippled Lyndon Johnson’s plans for the Great Society. The high cost of the failed war on terror and of Pentagon budgets that continue to rise today regardless of results are now cited as arguments against Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal arguably would have never been funded if today’s vast military-industrial complex, or even the one in Ike’s day, had existed in the 1930s.
As political theorist Crane Brinton noted in The Anatomy of Revolution, a healthy and growing middle class, equal parts optimistic and opportunistic, is likely to be open to progressive, even revolutionary ideas. But a stagnant, shrinking, or slipping middle class is likely to prove politically reactionary as pessimism replaces optimism and protectionism replaces opportunity. In this sense, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House was anything but a mystery and the possibility of an autocratic future no less so.
All those trillions of dollars consumed in wasteful wars have helped foster a creeping pessimism in Americans. A sign of it is the near-total absence of the very idea of peace as a shared possibility for our country. Most Americans simply take it for granted that war or threats of war, having defined our immediate past, will define our future as well. As a result, soaring military budgets are seen not as aberrations, nor even as burdensome, but as unavoidable, even desirable — a sign of national seriousness and global martial superiority.
You’re Going to Have It Tough at the End
It should be mind-blowing that, despite the wealth being created (and often destroyed) by the United States and impressive gains in worker productivity, the standard of living for workers hasn’t increased significantly since the early 1970s. One thing is certain: it hasn’t happened by accident.
For those who profit most from it, America’s 60-Year War has indeed been a resounding success, even if also a colossal failure when it comes to worker prosperity or democracy. This really shouldn’t surprise us. As former President James Madison warned Americans so long ago, no nation can protect its freedoms amid constant warfare. Democracies don’t die in darkness; they die in and from war. In case you hadn’t noticed (and I know you have), evidence of the approaching death of American democracy is all around us. It’s why so many of us are profoundly uneasy. We are, after all, living in a strange new world, worse than that of our parents and grandparents, one whose horizons continue to contract while hope contracts with them.
I’m amazed when I realize that, before his death in 2003, my father predicted this. He was born in 1917, survived the Great Depression by joining Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked in factories at night for low pay before being drafted into the Army in World War II. After the war, he would live a modest middle-class life as a firefighter, a union job with decent pay and benefits. Here was the way my dad put it to me: he’d had it tough at the beginning of his life, but easy at the end, while I’d had it easy at the beginning, but I’d have it tough at the end.
He sensed, I think, that the American dream was being betrayed, not by workers like himself, but by corporate elites increasingly consumed by an ever more destructive form of greed. Events have proven him all too on target, as America has come to be defined by a greed-war for which no armistice, let alone an end, is promised. In twenty-first-century America, war and the endless preparations for it simply go on and on. Consider it beyond irony that, as this country’s corporate, political, and military champions claim they wage war to spread democracy, it withers at home.
And here’s what worries me most of all: America’s very long war of destruction against relatively weak countries and peoples may be over, or at least reduced to the odd moment of hostilities, but America’s leaders, no matter the party, now seem to favor a new cold war against China and now Russia. Incredibly, the old Cold War produced a win that was so sweet, yet so fleeting, that it seems to require a massive do-over.
Promoting war may have worked well for the military-industrial complex when the enemy was thousands of miles away with no capacity for hitting “the homeland,” but China and Russia do have that capacity. If a war with China or Russia (or both) comes to pass, it won’t be a long one. And count on one thing: America’s leaders, corporate, military, and political, won’t be able to shrug off the losses by looking at positive balance sheets and profit margins at weapons factories.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
For Afghan women, economic challenges engulfing the country since the takeover have been compounded by further restrictions on their freedoms, employment, education and even movement. (photo: Mohsin Khan Momand/Al Jazeera)
President Biden is facing mounting criticism for seizing $7 billion of Afghanistan’s federal reserves frozen in the United States. Biden is giving half of the money to families of September 11 victims while Afghanistan faces a humanitarian catastrophe. We speak to two of the founders of a new campaign called Unfreeze Afghanistan, a women-led initiative to lift sanctions and other economic restrictions on Afghanistan, and a woman who lost her son in the World Trade Center attack, who says the money should stay in Afghanistan. “The suffering of the Afghan people at the hands of the United States and its allies is reprehensible. This is adding insult to injury,” says Phyllis Rodriguez, a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, whose son Greg was killed in the World Trade Center attack and who says 9/11 families want “information, not remuneration.” Afghan American activist Masuda Sultan says continued lack of access to money and basic services in Afghanistan will inspire a new wave of underground terrorism in the country, “endangering the entire world.” Biden’s order is gravely hypocritical, adds Medea Benjamin, critiquing the administration for “putting themselves forward as these great saviors of Afghanistan” for releasing Afghan-owned assets as “aid” while taking no punitive action against Saudi Arabia, whose citizens led the 9/11 attack.
Afghanistan’s central bank is condemning President Biden’s decision to seize $7 billion of Afghan assets frozen in U.S. banks. On Friday, Biden signed an executive order to split the money between the families of 9/11 victims and humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan. The United States froze the money after the Taliban seized power six months ago today. The United Nations and many aid groups had been calling on the Biden administration, as well as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to unfreeze all Afghan funds in order to stem Afghanistan’s growing economic and humanitarian catastrophe.
Congressmember Ilhan Omar blasted Biden’s decision. She tweeted, “There wasn’t a single Afghan among the hijackers. Meanwhile, we are giving BILLIONS of dollars to the governments of Saudi Arabia & Egypt who have direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists. Even if this weren’t the case, punishing millions of starving ppl for these crimes is unconscionable,” she said.
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai also criticized Biden’s decision.
HAMID KARZAI: The Afghan people are as much victims as those families who lost their loved ones are, and that withholding money or seizing money from the people of Afghanistan in that name is — is unjust and unfair and an atrocity against the Afghan people. … This money does not belong to any government. This is the property of the Afghan people, and the Afghan people are the rightful owners of this property. I request President Joe Biden to reconsider his decision and to return the totality of Afghan assets reserves back to the people of Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, spoke about the connection between U.S. sanctions and the crisis in Afghanistan.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: After our withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. sanctions on the Taliban have impacted the broader functioning of the entire Afghan government, including schools and hospitals, which cannot buy food for the patients or gas to heat their buildings. The New York Times reports that, according to aid organizations, starvation could kill 1 million children this winter. These fatalities could far exceed civilian deaths resulting from 20 years of war. The United States has frozen $9.4 billion of the Afghan central bank’s foreign reserves, making it impossible for the country’s financial system to function and threatening to collapse the entire economy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by three guests. Phyllis Rodriguez is a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Her son Greg was killed in the World Trade Center attack. Masuda Sultan is with us, an Afghan American activist who has helped start a new group called Unfreeze Afghanistan along with Medea Benjamin of CodePink, who’s still with us. They co-wrote a new article headlined “Biden’s $7 billion Afghan heist.” It was published on the Responsible Statecraft blog.
Masuda Sultan, let’s begin with you. It’s great to have you back with us. In a moment, we’re going to play a clip of you back in our studios two decades ago, after you had been to see your family — or who remained — after they were bombed by the U.S. military when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Now you’re starting this group called Unfreeze Afghanistan. Can you talk about what your demands are?
MASUDA SULTAN: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be back with you after 20 years.
Unfreeze Afghanistan was founded by a group of women activists, Afghan and American activists, to address the challenge Afghanistan was going through with the U.S. troop withdrawal. While we welcomed President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, what we were worried about and what we were hearing is that teachers, healthcare workers and others had not been paid for months, even under the Ghani administration. And as women who care about girls’ education and healthcare in Afghanistan and helping that country get back on its feet, we decided to try and do something about it.
Now, we were also concerned that 75% of the government’s budget also left with the donors, as well as all of the externally funded donor projects. This has been devastating for Afghanistan. Afghanistan is set to see its worst recorded year in history. This is one of the worst famines in history. In addition to taking away all the money that they were relying on — we built that economy on aid — we also froze their central bank assets, as well as personal assets of individuals who had their money in the banks. NGOs, corporations, everything has come to a standstill. And millions and millions of people are starving right now through the winter, and a million children are expected to die this winter as a result of our policies. So we came together to address that and to see what we could do to help.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Masuda, could you talk about why so much of the reserves of the central bank of Afghanistan were in the United States or in Europe? Now, it’s known that the central bank, when the United States was still involved in Afghanistan, had lots of corruption problems. There were some big scandals that developed over how bank officials were using the money. But that’s an extraordinary amount of money to be basically in foreign hands, to begin with.
MASUDA SULTAN: Well, you know, that’s a good point. The central bank reserves of Afghanistan were kept in the United States for safety reasons. Typically, a lot of developing countries, a lot of countries keep their money in the United States. As, let’s say, teachers, individuals, businesswomen, they put their money in the local banks, and the local banks then kept a portion of their reserves in the central bank, just like you would have in a normal country. The central bank then would keep those reserves in other countries for safety and interest-earning purposes. It was just normal practice to keep the money secure. Had the money not been in the United States, it would not have been seized. The irony of this is that Afghanistan has lost out on this money by keeping it in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s bring in —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like —
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in Phyllis Rodriguez. Your reaction to what is happening, what the Biden administration is doing, partially in the name of the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks?
PHYLLIS RODRIGUEZ: It’s outrageous, and it’s so saddening to me, because about 20 years ago, a little more, soon after the attacks, my husband and I published a letter called “Not in Our Son’s Name,” calling on the administration not to retaliate against the people of Afghanistan for the attacks of 9/11. It’s beyond my imagination that it should have come to this. We wish no harm to anybody. We have gotten the whole — the whole story about what it is to lose a son and to be with people who have lost family members cannot — let me put it this way: The suffering of the Afghan people at the hands of the United States and its allies is reprehensible. This is adding insult to injury. The fact that there are 9/11 families who are lobbying for some of these funds is — it’s shocking, because why don’t they have — why don’t we Americans have a clear idea of the privilege that we have in this country? I cannot imagine living in a war-torn country where there’s constant devastation and loss of life.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, years ago, 20 years ago, in December of 2001, Masuda, we spoke to you on Democracy Now! when you were in Afghanistan about a U.S. air raid that killed 19 members of your family. We want to play the clip.
MASUDA SULTAN: They described this scene where they were running with their kids in their arms, dodging bullets left and right, while they saw balls of fire falling down to the earth. … There were women and children running for their lives, being shot at by a helicopter hovering over their homes. And these people were not Taliban supporters. They weren’t al-Qaeda fighters. They were simple Afghans trying to stay safe in their own country.
AMY GOODMAN: After Masuda Sultan came back to New York — we’re talking now about 2002 — she came on Democracy Now! with Rita Lasar, a colleague of Phyllis Rodriguez. Rita, who has since died, lost her brother Abe Zelmanowitz at the World Trade Center. It was a remarkable moment in the firehouse studio down at Downtown Community Television when Rita and Masuda Sultan met for the first time.
RITA LASAR: I live on the 15th floor and ran to my neighbor’s house, and she has a clear view of downtown Manhattan. And I looked out her window and saw the second plane hit the second building. And it dawned on me: My brother works there. … I went down to the hospitals to see if his name was on a list. And then I realized he had died. And because he had stayed behind to stay with his quadriplegic brother — I’m sorry, friend, who couldn’t get out, although he was on the 27th floor and he could have saved himself, he died. … And then President Bush mentioned him in the National Cathedral speech and cited him as being a hero. And I realized that my government was going to use my brother as justification for killing other people, and that had a tremendous impact on me. I didn’t want that to happen, not in my brother’s name.
MASUDA SULTAN: First of all, I want to express my condolences to Rita. I did before, but I think your brother is a hero, and you’re a hero for continuing his legacy. And it’s amazing to me that someone who’s lost so much isn’t as revenge-hungry as some of the other people that seem to want to, you know, go start bombing whoever, wherever.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Masuda Sultan 20 years ago in our studios with Rita Lasar. Rita and Phyllis then formed, along with other people, 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. You lost, Masuda, 19 members of your family 20 years ago. It is now two decades later, and we see this suffering intensify throughout Afghanistan. You and as well as Medea Benjamin have formed Unfreeze Afghanistan. Have you been able to speak to members of the Biden administration? A number of progressive Democrats in Congress have supported this call to get the money to the people of Afghanistan.
MASUDA SULTAN: Amy, yes, after that show 20 years ago, Medea, Rita and the rest of Peaceful Tomorrows group went to Congress and worked to get aid appropriated to civilian victims of the war. And as you may know, as a result of 20 years of war, one of the drivers of the Taliban coming back to power were these civilian casualties. People were harmed. Innocent people were harmed and decided to fight against United States. To a lot of people, you know, Amy, this war is not over. In Afghanistan, the innocent people who are suffering now from these economic sanctions feel that the United States is out to hurt Afghanistan, and more so than the 20 years of bombs and bullets and attacks they have endured.
And the reason why this is so important to return these reserves back to Afghanistan to their rightful owners, which is the Afghan people — and there been many proposals about this from economists and experts, and we’ve been in touch with many of them — yes, we are in touch with the administration. We have put forth proposals, as have others. Human Rights Watch agrees with us. The head of the U.N. agrees with us. The head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, agrees with us. You talk to just about every humanitarian organization, any economist, they will tell you that a central bank’s reserves belong in the central bank. There’s the same audit committee that was there before. You know, using the excuse of corruption, it’s just an excuse, because the systems in place inside the central bank are such that transactions can be monitored. They’re electronic, these currency transactions, and they can’t be manipulated. So we could release a tranche of reserves. We haven’t even released $5 million, $10 million, to see what happens. And if anything was misused, we could stop that. But instead, we have just decided that Afghanistan cannot have its central bank reserves, that that economy will now be crippled. We just knocked the legs out of it. And the humanitarian crisis will just grow and grow. Afghanistan will be an aid-dependent country.
And worse, what I’m really worried about is the growth of terrorism. We are laying the foundation for Afghanistan to become a truly failed state, to collapse. These policies are going to endanger Americans. It is going to endanger the world to have an unstable Afghanistan with no economy. Everything goes underground when there’s no transparent banking. It will be back to the '90s, where there will be terrorist camps popping up everywhere, because what do — what do men do, young men, who were not even born on 9/11 and are now suffering extreme poverty, watching their brothers and sisters starve, their skin fall off their face, lose their voices? This is what they're witnessing, and it is directly because of the United States. We spent 20 years talking about how to win hearts and minds. This is the opposite of that. We are endangering the entire world with this policy. Please, President Biden, change this policy. It is wrong.
And to the 9/11 family members who say — there are many who say that this is a wrong policy. We invite you to come to Afghanistan, come with us, come see what’s going on, watch what the people are going through. We’ll take you around. Please contact us. Find us on Twitter. My handle is @MasudaSultan on Twitter. You can find us at UnfreezeAfghanistan.org. We will work with you to see the conditions on the ground, especially the conditions for women and children.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to ask Medea Benjamin, the hypocrisy of the Biden administration saying that it’s going to use some of the Afghan central bank moneys to compensate the 9/11 families, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and Saudi Arabia has not yet been in any way held responsible for the many ties that some of its own royal family had with some of the hijackers.
MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, that’s right, Juan. You have the country with the richest sovereign wealth fund in the world — that’s Saudi Arabia — and the U.S. has not helped the 9/11 families to get all the FBI information about the connection between the 15 of the 19 hijackers who were Saudi and the royal family. And yet, in the meantime, they’re allowing billions of dollars to be taken from one of the poorest countries in the world. And I think it’s important to recognize that not only were there no Afghans involved in the 9/11 attack, but the majority of Afghans were not even born at that time.
The other thing that, Juan, is important is not only the section of money, the $3.5 billion, that the Biden administration is reserving for those lawsuits, but there’s the other $3.5 billion. And instead of it going to the central bank, what they’re saying is this will go for humanitarian aid. And they’re putting themselves forward as these great saviors of Afghanistan. But that aid will most likely go to international organizations that have huge overheads, so the majority of the money doesn’t even get to the people on the ground. It also means that those humanitarian organizations, they need a central bank. They need a place to transfer funds to use to pay their staff, to make purchases. So, aid organizations are crippled by the lack of a functioning central banks.
So, what we’re saying is that all of that money should be returned to Afghanistan. We’re asking the aid organizations to refuse to take that money. We’re asking lawyers — and we invite anybody listening to this who has expertise to join us in trying to find different ways to legally block the executive order of the Biden administration. And we’re calling on the American people to express their outrage, in saying, “This is morally bankrupt. We will not let this stand.” We know that if there’s enough pressure on the Biden administration, he can rescind this order.
And the backlash is something I don’t think that they expected. It’s coming from not only Afghans, who are united for the first time, all kinds of Afghans, inside Afghanistan and in the diaspora, all saying this is thievery, this is wrong. And it has to unite us in the United States to say we will not do this to the Afghan people.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me end with Phyllis Rodriguez. Have you spoken with the Biden administration? They’re talking about giving you some of that money for the loss of your son Greg.
PHYLLIS RODRIGUEZ: No, I have not. And I am not a party to any of the lawsuits that have been mentioned. There are people who I know, through Peaceful Tomorrows and not, who are party to one or more of the lawsuits that are still going on. They are opposed to the money coming to anyone in the United States whose family was victimized by the attacks. The purpose of these suits is to get information, not to get remuneration. And I’m very grateful to Masuda and Medea for what they’re doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much, all, for being with us. Phyllis Rodriguez of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows lost her son Greg Rodriguez on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. And Masuda Sultan and Medea Benjamin, who have just formed the group Unfreeze Afghanistan. Masuda Sultan, Afghan American, lost 19 members of her family when the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan and bombed a farmhouse they had taken refuge in outside of Kandahar. Of course, Medea Benjamin with CodePink.
Coming up, we go to Texas, where early voting has begun in the state’s closely watched March 1st primary. It’s the first election since Texas passed a highly restrictive voting law. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “This Is It!” by Betty Davis. The funk pioneer died last week at the age of 77.
Former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Honduras. (photo: Twitter/@TRTWorldNow)
U.S. prosecutors pointed Juan Orlando Hernandez as a co-conspirator in the trial of his brother Antonio, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for drug and weapon trafficking.
The National Police and soldiers surrounded Hernandez’s home, and the Supreme Court called an emergency session to be held on Tuesday to appoint a judge who analyzes the request.
Hernandez’s lawyer Hermes Ramirez accused the authorities of being unfair to his client, who he claimed has immunity as a current member of the Central American Parliament.
"The National Security Ministry is violating the rule of law by wanting to execute an arrest warrant that violates the procedure established by law," Ramirez stated and insisted that his representative has the right to the innocence presumption.
Although the Honduran Constitution does not allow presidential re-election, a ruling by the pro-government-majority Supreme Court authorized Hernandez to run for a second term in 2017.
Washington recognized his re-election, but U.S. prosecutors later pointed him out as a co-conspirator in the trial of his brother Antonio Hernandez, an ex-congressman who was sentenced to life imprisonment for drug and weapon trafficking in March 2021.
"We made clear the outrage to which I am being subjected," the former president alleged, stressing that the charges against him are part of a revenge complot of drug traffickers who his government captured and extradited to the United States.
KFC and Beyond Meat are betting on plant-based chicken nuggets as the next big fast food menu item. (photo: Aryenish Birdie)
Despite the highs and lows of the pandemic, the future of the plant-based sector still looks bright.
In 2019, the plant-based protein startup Beyond Meat celebrated the most successful IPO in over a decade and a few months later Burger King put an Impossible Whopper on every menu.
When the pandemic hit and Americans panic-bought groceries, conventional meat sales rose by around 40 percent compared to the prior year and stayed there for months, while sales of plant-based meat surged 65 percent.
Two years later, though, pandemic-fatigued consumers are sending mixed signals. Research market firm IRI found that the sector’s growth has begun to decelerate, with refrigerated plant-based meat sales down 6.6 percent in November 2021 from the year before, though sales were nearly 30 percent higher than November 2019.
Kellogg’s Morningstar Farms, Beyond Meat, and Maple Leaf Foods (owner of vegetarian brands Lightlife and Field Roast) — three of the largest plant-based food producers — all reported earnings shortfalls for Q3 of 2021, and several high-profile trials of plant-based meats in fast-food chains have flopped.
In recent months, a flurry of headlines cast doubt on the future of the once red-hot sector. The Financial Times asked, “Has the appetite for plant-based meat already peaked?”, DW declared “Demand for plant-based food products declines amid pandemic,” and the Food Institute, a food industry news outlet, said the slowing growth signaled a “niche future” for the category.
Taken together, the news doesn’t sound great for meatless startups, and feeds a narrative that the early burst of growth had more to do with novelty than sustainability. But a few companies having a bad quarter doesn’t define a whole industry, the graveyard of failed fast-food items is large (pour one out for Taco Bell’s underperforming cult-favorite Bell Beefer, which was essentially a sloppy Joe), and slowdown from a pandemic-induced high may not tell us too much about the long-term prospects of an industry that is still in its infancy.
For one thing, fast food giants have made it clear that they still believe plant-based meat is a worthwhile bet. In the first two weeks of 2022, KFC launched a meatless chicken product made by Beyond Meat, Chipotle introduced an in-house pea-based chorizo, and McDonald’s McPlant burger — made by Beyond Meat — arrived in 600 locations yesterday.
“Every one of our pieces of research suggests plant-based diets will continue to grow and grow,” Kevin Hochman, president of KFC US, told me. “Will there be blips when there’s an onset of a pandemic? Of course. We view this as a long-term trend.”
Jennifer Bartashus, a senior analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, agrees. “Because it’s a young industry and because there’s a lot of volatility, you’re going to have times that go up and down. But when you look at the long-term, I think there’s been a fundamental shift in how people think about their health.” She predicts plant-based meat and dairy alternatives will compose 5 percent of the global market by 2030, up from about 0.5 percent in 2021.
That would be far from dethroning animal meat from the center of the dinner plate. And even as plant-based protein has been growing, albeit slower, Americans are still eating more (and more expensive) animal meat than ever — an estimated record-high 224.63 pounds of red meat and poultry per capita in 2020, 0.2 percent more than in 2019.
The future of plant-based meat and dairy matters beyond the bottom line of startups and fast-food franchises. Alternative protein is poised to play an important role in reducing the suffering of animals on factory farms and cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the food system — something humanity must do to reach Paris Climate Agreement targets.
The pandemic highs and lows for the plant-based food industry
In the spring of 2020, Covid-19 ripped through America’s slaughterhouses, where a disproportionately Black and brown workforce toiled shoulder to shoulder in already-dangerous conditions. With too many employees out sick to manage some production lines, farmers brutally killed a backlog of millions of pigs and chickens, then tossed them into landfills or sent them to rendering plants to be turned into pet food and other products, which helped contribute to meat shortages.
Those shortages, combined with slaughterhouse and factory farm conditions making front page news, could help explain some of the rapid growth in plant-based meat sales in the early months of the pandemic. The sector grew by 148 percent in the week of March 22, 2020 — just after the first Covid lockdowns began — and notched around 65 percent growth in the months after.
Over one-third of Americans also reported that the pandemic made them more conscientious and open to new experiences, including new ways to eat — a promising change for plant-based meat advocates.
“I think the pandemic was net positive on plant-based growth since consumers have been made hyper-aware of issues within meat supply chains and meat itself, and they’ve gotten the opportunity to cook and try new plant-based products,” says Kimberlie Le, CEO and co-founder of Prime Roots, a plant-based meat company that harnesses koji — a fungus used in Japanese cuisine — as its main ingredient.
The eye-popping retail growth can also be explained by the steep drop in restaurant dining as lockdowns shuttered eateries. “A lot of the food service demand moved to retail for a substantial part of the year,” Anne-Marie Roerink, president of market research and consulting firm 210 Analytics, told me. And retail responded, she added: “More stores started carrying refrigerated plant-based alternatives and/or added more items to the case.”
But as restaurants reopened, consumption patterns began to return to normal and plant-based meat growth fell back to Earth. And while it was unrealistic to expect the sector to maintain the sky-high growth of 2020 and early 2021, the supply chain problems felt throughout the economy eventually came for the meatless meat industry too, putting further downward pressure on growth.
In summer 2021, the price of yellow peas rose when a drought in Canada cut pea production in the country by 45 percent. Sixteen percent of US plant-based meat products are pea-based, including Beyond Meat’s, and many plant milks are too, like Ripple and Sproud.
“These players are small,” Bartashus said. “They don’t have the scale that the big CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies have. They get hit harder when raw material prices rise.” And because many players in the space use third-party manufacturers, “supply chain issues had a big impact on them. Ultimately that means if the product’s not in stores, [consumers] won’t buy it because they can’t buy it.”
That has happened, to some extent, with Beyond Meat. According to DecaData, a customer transaction data provider, Beyond Meat has had difficulty filling some of its orders, which could explain some of its revenue shortfall. (When asked for comment, a Beyond Meat spokesperson cited its introduction of more than a dozen new products over the past two years and said: “We can’t comment on specific fill rates, but variability in Q3 was a result of multiple factors, including severe weather and related water damage to inventory.”)
The company is also facing much more competition. For awhile, much of the market share was eaten up by early entrants like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Gardein, Boca, Morningstar Farms, and Lightlife. Now most grocery chains have their own private line of vegetarian products, major meat producers like Tyson and Smithfield offer plant-based meats, and they’re all competing with dozens of new startups for limited shelf and menu space.
Many plant-based startups find early sales through small and mid-sized restaurant chains, or university and corporate cafeterias, but many of these opportunities dried up during the pandemic. The customers either went out of business, went through bouts of temporary closures, or were forced to simplify their menus.
Some startups have seen success through bypassing retail and food service altogether. Deborah Torres, CEO of Atlas Monroe, a vegan chicken company based in San Diego, told me they were already selling directly to consumers before the pandemic, which put them in a good position in early 2020 when people wanted groceries and food delivered.
Sales doubled during the pandemic for the company, in part because they made it onto the VC reality show Shark Tank a few months before the first wave of lockdowns, but they were also able to purchase and renovate a manufacturing facility faster because the pandemic meant they had less competition for contractors. Expanded manufacturing capacity enabled them to go from producing 1,000 pieces of their chicken product per week to over 20,000 pieces.
But the direct-to-consumer approach was met with challenges unique to the pandemic — US Postal Service delays in the summer of 2020 hit California hard, leading to spoiled food. “Where orders were previously arriving within two days priority with no complaints, now orders were arriving within 4-7 days on average,” Torres said. This resulted in some orders arriving spoiled or wet — orders they had to refund. They also had to decline business opportunities in Canada due to closed borders.
Where the plant-based food industry goes from here
One model often used to assess the development of a new technology is Gartner’s hype cycle, which was developed by the consultancy firm in the 1990s and follows products from initial innovation, to the “peak of inflated expectations,” to the “trough of disillusionment,” and finally to steady, productive growth.
Henry Gordon-Smith, founder of food consultancy Agritecture, told the Financial Times that the hype around plant-based meat has peaked and is now in the “trough of disillusionment,” but Bloomberg Intelligence’s Bartashus sees things a little differently.
“If you look at individual products, like alternative-meat burgers, maybe the Gartner hype cycle applies, given that trial was accelerated by highly publicized campaigns like the Impossible Whopper at Burger King,” she said. “But it could be argued that plant-based chicken, bacon, lamb, eggs, etc. are all at different stages of the hype cycle than burgers.”
I think she’s right, and that we might see more hype around plant-based products that have yet to really impress consumers — or barely even exist.
For decades, the plant-based industry largely focused on alternatives to milk, ground beef, sausage, and breaded chicken. But the human diet is much more expansive than that. Now we’re seeing plant-based seafood and bacon, more kinds of chicken, and more varieties of dairy products like cheese and yogurt. And there’s only one good vegan egg product on the market. Eventually, some of these companies may produce products that rise to the level of popularity the Beyond and Impossible burgers have experienced, further bolstering the entire market.
And Gordon-Smith of Agritecture doesn’t necessarily think the “trough of disillusionment” phase is all negative for the industry — it may cause some startups to fail or get acquired by bigger players, which can in turn lead to improved efficiency and better products, leading to more growth down the road.
But longer-term obstacles to scaling up remain: according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins like plant- and cell-based meats, the industry will remain vulnerable to ingredient shortages unless it invests more in ingredient sourcing, research for alternative ingredients so it isn’t so dependent on peas, wheat, soy, and coconut oil, and better relationships with ingredient manufacturers.
But the pandemic itself may yet prove an inflection point for the plant-based protein sector. With standard food consumption patterns suddenly disrupted, millions of Americans were introduced for the first time to a new and ultimately more sustainable way of eating.
“People went through phases during the pandemic — people retreated to comfort foods,” Bartashus says. “But on the tail-end of that, and as Covid becomes endemic, peoples’ consciousness of their health and their health choices, things that they do to feel better about themselves, are things that are enduring.”
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